I recently found out I’d sold over 3,000 copies of Creative Doing in under two years. My goal is to promote the book until I sell 10,000 copies, a number which represents the point where people are discussing it via word of mouth. I am well on my way towards it.

I have been putting off publishing this post—I actually have another full, more polished, draft that I’d written at the 1,000 sales milestone, and I’d planned on rewriting it at 2,000—and I plan to write a more elaborate intro in a future post. For now, I wanted to get this post out there and I figured the most useful thing would be to share the channels that were most impactful to me:

Amazon as sales channel: At first, my publisher only sold the digital edition of Holloway at its own platform, and print on Amazon. That’s because we believed in the experience in the Holloway reader, the margins were better, and we could build direct relationships with the customer.

Eventually, we expanded to sell a Kindle version of Creative Doing as well. Expanding to Amazon was a significant factor in increasing book sales, as the vast majority of my book sales came through it. I’ve gotten some feedback that people also trust Amazon—whereas it was the first time that they heard about Holloway.

BookBub flash sale campaign: Many readers subscribe to services like BookBub to buy discounted digital books, so if you discount your book significantly for a short amount of time ($0.99–$1.99), then BookBub may promote your book in front of their readers. Selling the digital book at Amazon opened up an opportunity for us to run a BookBub campaign (we did in the regions of UK, Canada, and Australia), which drove 700+ sales. 

The tradeoff is it might take a few submissions for BookBub to accept your work, and after acceptance you’ll still need to pay for this promotion (USD ~$220).

While the book royalties are lower than usual, because of the discounted price, we earned enough to cover the cost. Breaking even is probably a good goal here though. More importantly, BookBub is a good channel for getting your book to more people on Amazon, driving Amazon sales and sending a positive signal to the algorithm. For me, BookBub got us onto multiple Amazon charts, which was a cool moment I could share on social media and sparked more word of mouth.

Other people’s influential newsletters: Newsletters with 50,000+ subscribers are often good channels as well, as long as their audiences are interested in creativity. My approach was very organic, I signed up to newsletters I liked and replied to their emails. I usually found these people via Twitter. Once I felt like we had built rapport I would write a pitch email showing why Creative Doing was relevant to their audience, and offering:

• To do a workshop for their community (e.g., Ness Labs)
• Free copies giveaway or a discount code (e.g., Gapingvoid)
• A guest post or an excerpt (e.g., The 100 Day Project)
• Cross promotion with my publisher Holloway’s mailing list (e.g., Every)
• To do a sponsorship

The ideal outcome would be for me to share the book with their audience. By my guess, 200-300 sales came from these efforts in total, with maybe 10-30 people buying each time. The newsletters elevated Creative Doing’s brand and provided an opportunity to connect directly with their readers. 

I found this process fun and energizing. However, also very difficult to scale. Newsletters have earned their subscribers’ trust, so they are usually more motivated to buy the book, paying full price (or near it). In my situation, they also bought directly from my publisher Holloway, so the royalties and customer data were much better than if they’d bought directly from Amazon.

Giving away print copies: I also give away print copies of my books to people who sound like they might be interested in the book. I have heard about friends of friends buying books because of this effort, and it helps build buzz. If I’m attending an event, I will probably bring a dozen books with me in a backpack. 

As I write this, I realize I’ve been too precious about who I give the books away to. If I want to be more effective, I could probably just drop a pile of five books somewhere and write a sign saying, “Please take one,” and get on with my day.

The ideal goal is to partner up with conferences and events and sell books in bulk, for them to give away books to their attendees. 

Other things that haven’t worked out (yet): I have tried some other things as well, such as getting Creative Doing into brick and mortar bookstores, appearing on podcasts, and sharing the book via social media and my Best of Books newsletter.

I find those channels great for branding and awareness, however not necessarily as effective for selling books directly. They are important though for elevating my profile and my book’s brand, for building relationships, and getting people interested in the book. Sometimes these channels remind existing customers to read the book, which is just as helpful. Hopefully they get some value out of it, and it makes their lives richer or easier in some way. (That’s the reason I wrote Creative Doing in the first place!)