#3 How a consultant massively scaled her business with a self-published, self-marketed book

April Dunford had a problem.

An expert marketer with 25 years of experience, she’d started a new career as a consultant helping B2B businesses find better ways to position their products in the market. Her services were priced at a premium, and she was also selective about the kinds of clients she’d take on. As such, she’d host an exploratory call with every new prospect to make sure they were a fit for her services.

Unfortunately, these first-level calls tended to cover the same kind of questions each time, often needing follow-ups to get to the real issues. So, rather than actually working on problems, April found she was wasting time and energy in introductions.

So she decided to write a book.?

It was called Obviously Awesome, and was intended to be a step-by-step guide full of practical advice, frameworks and answers to the market positioning-related questions she had personally experienced in her career and those her clients would usually ask her.

She hoped it would help answer all the basic questions her clients had upfront, while also serving to bolster credibility with her prospects. In addition, it might serve as a DIY resource for those who couldn’t afford her services.

Traditional publishers didn't see the value

Having poured her heart and soul into the book, she reached out to a few publishers. Given her industry expertise and decades of experience, she thought it would be a slam dunk to find one.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t.

• Many publishers were sceptical about the need for such a book, even though many of the current ones in the market, even the best-sellers, had been written decades ago.
• Others wanted to know whether she had a large social media following that might be induced to buy it. She didn’t.
• Yet others wanted to hold the rights to all the IP in it, including her frameworks and processes, which didn’t exactly align with her future as a consultant!
• And nobody would offer her substantial royalties, the industry standard being just a few percent of the cover price.

In short, the publishers she approached wanted to put in minimal effort, while simultaneously taking the lion’s share of the sales and also requiring assurances of success.

[As a side note, I have observed this first-hand as well]

Self-publishing was expensive, but the book was a raging success

Realising that traditional publishers would not work out, April gave up on them and went the self-published route, paying a publishing agency around USD 20,000 to edit, design, publish and distribute her book.

Knowing it was a niche topic for a very targeted audience, and perhaps given her experience with publishers, she thought she’d sell just maybe a couple of thousand copies.

But, in fact, the book blew up, selling tens of thousands of copies in the first year and well over 60,000 over the first three years, netting her hundreds of thousands of dollars in earnings. Had the book had been published the traditional way, it would likely have made it to best-seller lists.

The book sold tens of thousands of copies in one year

Better yet, it cemented her name and reputation in her space and generated more business than she could possibly have imagined when she first started down the path to self-publishing.

How did she orchestrate a self-published best-seller?

Being first and foremost a tech marketer, April treated the entire process the same way she handled tech product launches, with a well-planned release followed by periodic, milestone-driven promotions and a focus on word-of-mouth.?

This is how she did it:

Pre-Launch

• Teasers: April’s book was distributed primarily online, so weeks before the actual launch date, she started creating anticipation through teasers and announcements on social media and other platforms before the official launch. Though she didn’t have a large following of her own, she did have professional contacts who were willing to amplify her message.
• Pre-Orders: These teasers were focused on getting people to pre-order the book, as a way to build pent-up demand that would send a strong signal to the algorithms at Amazon and other online platforms to promote the book on release.

Post-Launch

• Social Proof: The initial few months can make or break a new book launch. So she filled the time with positive reviews and endorsements as they came in
• Social Media: Though she hadn’t focused much on social media earlier, she made an effort to post regularly on X and LinkedIn

Momentum Building

• Milestone Celebrations: She celebrated wins big and small, for example hitting a specific number of reviews on Amazon, which not only added to the drumbeat of communication, it also created FOMO and reinforced the impression of high quality content
• Audiobook Release: Rather than releasing the audiobook simultaneously, April delayed its release till a few months later to create a secondary launch event, and another excuse for audience engagement
• Meme-able Giveaways: During the holiday season, she offered giveaways like stickers and bookmarks with meme-able content that recipients loved sharing online

Promotions

• BookBub Promotion: She used BookBub, a platform with a large audience, to run a promotion alongside other promotional activities, amplifying the book's reach
• 1-Year Sale: Reasoning that anyone who really wanted to buy the book would have already bought it, she offered a promotional sale at the one-year mark, pricing the ebook at 99￠ for a limited time to bring in new audiences. And thanks to the promotional material she released at the time, people continued to find and buy the book well after the sale was over

Supplementary Content

• Supplemental Material: In addition to the book, April provided templates and other supplemental materials that people could use to actually put their learnings into practice. She updated these resources periodically, providing additional value to readers and keeping the content fresh
• Newsletter Launch: A couple of years after the book release, April launched a newsletter on Substack, using it as a platform to share insights, updates, and exclusive content related to her business, while also continuing to promote her book. This newsletter now has 19,000 subscribers, serving as another source of publicity, leads and revenue

Takeaway: Most people write a book, then push out a few messages on social media around the time of the launch. April took responsibility for making sure it was a success and was smart in how she promoted the book, not just with social posts (which, in fact, was her weak point) but in the way she looked for reasons to talk about it - and to get others to talk about it too. This is a good lesson for content creators, not just wannabe authors.

Source: Episode 176 of the Creator Science podcast

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Hi there, I’m Amit Ray , the founder of CrazyTok , a podcast agency. We help industry experts, marketers and business owners launch and grow their own branded podcast, Youtube channel or newsletter.

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