A full breakdown of my Book Launch (numbers inside)

One week in

Hey all - as promised I wanted to do a breakdown of the launch of my book Conscious Accomplishment: How to use Personal Achievement for Spiritual Growth.

Before we get into it, let me just say this has been a humbling and illuminating process. Launching and distributing a book is distinctly different from other things I have marketed such as software, services businesses, and courses.

TLDR it feels much more like a slow build, long game because someone has to actually read the book in order to share it.

Let’s start with the numbers 1 week post launch.

Results

• 210 sold books the first week

• 18 reviews (4.9 rating)

• #1 new best seller for a week in personal success and spirituality

• Reached #2 overall best selling book in personal success and spirituality

Launch Activities

Emails were sent to c. 34,000-37,000 people across my mailing lists featuring the book.

• Consciousness Substack (29,900 subscribers) 24% open rate, 10k views

• Conscious Talent Work In Progress Newsletter (2,500 subscribers) 40% open rate

• Creator Experiments (5,200 subscribers) 27% open rate, 2100 views

Announcements were done across my social media accounts.

• X post - 216,000+ views

• LinkedIn announcement - 6,000+ views

• Instagram - 120 likes

The X post was probably most successful thanks to some reshares by bigger accounts like Joe Hudson and Jonny Miller.

Podcasts

I’ve had 5 podcasts go live so far that have talked about the book.

• EvolutionFM (personal episode)

• What’s the big idea w/ Andrew Horn

• Aligned Life w/ Justin Castelli

• Practically on Purpose w/ Ali Canton

• Behind the Human w/ Marc Champagne

• The UNITE Show Podcast w/ Shine & Kristall

I have an additional 8 or so podcasts that were booked that have not come out yet.

Newsletter inclusions

• Danny Miranda

• Hello Monday w/ Jessi Hempel

What Worked Well

For the launch, I created a list of everyone I was tight or friendly with who cares about the book’s topic and I sent them an email on launch day to let them know about the book launch and how they could support on social media.

I broke this list down between emails I wanted to customize and ones that were more generic. A lot of these emails resulted in social amplification which was really appreciated.

Here’s a version of email I sent without customization:

Podcasts

I made a list of everyone I knew that had a podcast or frequently goes on them.

In advance of the launch, I sent emails to the podcast hosts if they’d be up for a conversation.

For the people who’ve been on a lot of shows, I used podchaser to find aligned shows friends had been on and asked whether they’d be open to forwarding an intro request on my behalf to do an interview.

I tried to get on 51 shows via personal intro’s and was able to get on 4. Here’s my tracker:

Online Communities

I’m a part of a few communities that are into consciousness and spirituality. I reached out to the community leaders there to see if they’d be down for me sharing it, or just shared the book announcement if that was the social norm. Each text was custom and relevant to that community.

Here’s an example of one I sent:

Book Launch Party

I rented out an event space and hosted an intimate book launch in Austin. I had 50 RSVPs and about 30 people showed up.

The first hour was people hanging out and then my friend

Andrew Horn

interviewed me for 20-30 minutes for a fireside chat. Andrew was a kind host encouraging people to buy and review the book!

What Didn’t Work

I reached out to around 60 podcasts cold using my best attempt at custom messaging on why I’d be relevant and didn’t book a single show!

I also think the conversion rate on the intro requests was pretty low at around 2%.

To explain this performance, I have a few hypothesis:

• My messaging wasn’t very good

• My topic of balancing achievement and spirituality is too niche

• Booking decent sized podcasts pre-launch if you’re not Brene Brown is just hard

It’s probably all of the above.

Takeaways From All This

Selling books is harder than I thought.

I assumed given the size of my aggregate email lists (37,000), the number of book sales would be higher on initial lauch.

On the flip side, I totally get it. Taking the time to read a book is a major investment, and there’s also the question of timing. Maybe people bookmarked it for later and will come back to it because they’re reading something else etc. I do this all the time.

Selling books seems to be all about WOM, which really means selling books is all about writing a great book.

Writing mine took a long time, but at the end of the day, I feel great because I know the product is good.

I’ve gotten a lot of amazing feedback and for the right person, Conscious Accomplishment really knocks it out of the park. Some early feedback:

My Plan Going Forward

The main thing I plan on doing is continuing to talk about the book.

Thankfully, I love the topic I wrote about so this is easy. I’m going to try to mix in breakdowns of specific topics as well as publicly share how it’s impacting readers in a way that doesn’t feel douchey.

In order to get the WOM going, you need to have people read it. So I’ll likely give away a lot of books to people who really enjoyed it or people who I believe their community would benefit from (i.e. conference leaders, co-working spaces, investors, coaches etc.)

I’m going to continue to go on podcasts as the opportunities present themselves and want to take another crack at some point at trying to get on aligned shows via cold outreach. As a former B2B SaaS sales bro, putting up a 0 there is crazy to me! I think I can improve the messaging and perhaps this will be easier now that the book is actually in the wild.

One thing I really loved was speaking at my launch party to an in person crowd. I’d love to do more of this and might reach out to some conferences to see if I can make this happen.

Thanks for reading this!

If you have any ideas, thoughts, or potential opportunities to support the book, I’d love to hear them. I also fully welcome you checking it out on Amazon : )

<3 Scott