Tim Grahl | Writing Coach

This is a text I just sent to someone who asked about my marketing plan for books, specifically why I’m focused on giving away as many copies as possible as fast as possible: I haven’t found many resources on this approach because, as far as I can tell, almost nobody is thinking this way. Here’s the logic I’m using: 1. Do I believe this particular book is good enough that, if people actually read it, they will tell other people about it? 2. Is my goal for this book to still be selling well ten years from now? 3. Do I have the money to invest in publishing and marketing this book without needing to earn it back in the first one to two years? If the answer to all three of those questions is yes, then the marketing strategy that makes the most sense to me is to give away as many copies as possible to people who might realistically read at least the first page. In the past, we didn’t have the revenue to do this. We could really only promote new books to our own email list and hope for the best. That’s no longer the case, and we have a book coming out next week. Here’s how we’re approaching it. First, we have an existing email list on the training side of our company. That list alone allows us to give away roughly 1,600 copies before the book is even officially released. From there, we’re planning to run Meta and YouTube ads that send people to a page where they can get a free copy of the book. Once someone gets the book, they drop into an email sequence that nudges them to actually read it and, if they do, to leave a review within the first month. The goal is that when we release our next book in January, we’ll be able to give away 10,000 copies just through our list alone. I’m optimizing for readers, not short-term sales velocity.