A Pathless Guide To Book Marketing: How To Accidentally Sell Books Without A Massive Launch

This is not a guide that will help you think about how to sell the most books. If that is your goal, you should seek out other people who are more narrowly obsessed with such a goal. Instead, this is a guide to how I, Paul Millerd, think about sharing and spreading my books. 

Over the past few years, I have constantly been asked by people writing and launching books how they should market and sell their books. In almost all cases, they think there is some sort of secret strategy behind the impressive sales of my first book, The Pathless Path. As of July 2025, I’ve sold about 65,000 copies, have landed several translation deals, and made over $300,000 in royalties. So, I, uh, I must know something, right?

Honestly, I’m not sure. But I’m writing this all out to see if I might have some nuggets of wisdom and book-selling magic that are worth copying. 

Looking back, after 3.5 years of having my book in the world, the biggest insight is both simple and hard to stomach: you have to write a book that people want to read and want to share. 

Can you generate sales via marketing tactics? Yes. 

Are there games you can play to juice sales? Yes. 

Can you take advantage of a launch to generate buzz about your book and increase the odds that it spreads? Yes.

Can you do the podcast circuit and get boosts from other authors supporting your work? Yes.

Are there endless amounts of tactics you can follow?

Yes, yes, yes. You can do so many things, and many authors, especially first-time authors, do exactly that. But I suspect that unless you have a banger book that people buy, finish, and then strongly recommend, it’s just going to be hard to “market” your book over the long term.

You Must Understand Who You Are: I am very principled on how I approach my work and live my life. You should not copy me, of course.

I am, by default, skeptical of most marketing playbooks and launch strategies deployed for books. This isn’t because they don’t work, it’s just that I’ve found becoming the person I need to be to deploy such tactics makes me grumpy. And when I’m in this mode, I’m not having fun and become a bit more cynical. This undermines the thing I care about most: the energy and curiosity to keep exploring in my work, as well as the enthusiasm to keep going on my path. Long game or nothing.

I approach my entire path as a sort of creative act and practice in itself. The goal is to stay connected to what matters and continue doing work that I care about. These are what my books are about and what I actually attempt to live out in my life. In this way, the contents of my book, how I write the books, and how I live my life are all quite similar.

You should not try to be me. I am very comfortable leaving a lot of potential on the table that might make others feel absolutely terrible about. But I’ve run the experiments, grappled with tradeoffs, and feel good about most of the decisions I’ve made.

Here are some quick facts we must establish about The Pathless Path before we move on:

• I spent less than an hour on any sort of launch strategy
• My first week was my lowest sales week
• My first month was my lowest sales month

This was all fine, and when I launched the book, I didn’t expect or aim to sell that many copies. I started writing my book when I had about 3,000 subscribers on my newsletter and had similar-sized social followings on other platforms. I only decided to write the book because I thought it would be fun and challenging. I assumed (wrongly) that my level of following was not enough to seed initial copies and then sell many more books. 

But nonetheless, the book did eventually take off. And you can see the breakdown here:

We’ll get to everything that happened and my hypotheses on why they happened, but first, we must talk about the crazy world that is book writing and book authors.

#1 You will get sucked into silly games regardless, because you are insane, like me and the other authors

I’ve come to learn that authors are a bunch of maniacs, myself included. We all have strong opinions on what works, doesn’t work, and what you should be doing.

After my own book launched and gained some traction, I found myself in the strange position of being sought after by fellow authors. It was a bit disorienting, mainly because I never took the “author” title too seriously. It became clear, however, that this label, this identity as an AUTHOR, was something others identified with strongly.

My theory? I think most people unconsciously get sucked into seeing books as a big competition. At its core, a book is simply text on a page, and they are all just sitting there right next to each other, in bookstores and on bookshelves. It is nearly impossible to publish a book and not think that you are in a direct ideas war with other people who publish books. And part of that’s true. If someone is going to read one book on the topic of work, I want it to be my book, not Simon Sinek’s. But this is silly, as I think this isn’t the real competition. It’s Netflix, endless scrolling, podcasts, and every other distraction vying for people’s attention.

But to be an author in the modern era is to be perpetually anxious about your book’s status. Do people care about it? Are they still buying it? Has it started its inevitable decline to zero? Will my publisher lose interest in me if my book doesn’t sell enough? Is my book tanking because of bad reviews from harsh Goodreads reviewers? Will my book do better if I run Amazon ads? 

Pathless Path seems to keep selling despite my constant proclamations that it’s finally over. It’s just so hard to predict. I have a friend whose book sold for five years and then, as if it had aged out of Amazon’s preferences, stopped selling.  The response authors seem to have for this anxiety is to befriend other authors who are equally anxious. And then everyone shares tactics, cross-promotes, copies each other’s playbooks, and endorses each other’s books.  Does any of this help? I honestly have no idea. Most authors don’t even have data on book sales or royalties, and even if they do, even fewer ever share it. Books are a perfect storm of status anxiety, bad data, and mimetic rivalry.  Understanding this and integrating it into how you think about everything is important.

The next thing…

#2 You are not James Clear. Admitting this is the first step to figuring out the unique ways in which only you can promote your own book

I think a lot of the book author world went a bit mad chasing the success of James Clear’s Atomic Habits. Ever since his blitzkrieg podcast tour of nearly 200 podcasts in six months, almost everyone has been following similar strategies to mixed results. 

The problem is that no one can ever fully explain why his book, let alone any book, is “working.” His initial podcast tour surely helped him sell 500k books in the first six months, but I’ve never heard a good explanation of how his book came to cover every last inch of the planet. I mean, I’ve literally seen his book in a communist bookstore in Spain, a run-down gas station in rural Mexico, and in a children’s bookstore in southern Taiwan.

I never attempted to do anything close to Clear’s podcast tour and probably won’t ever attempt such a thing. It would break me. But when I see people like Clear, I immediately think, “Oh, I am not wired like these people.” Just like the framing of not having “launch energy” above, you really do need to figure out what ways of sharing your book make sense for you. 

This is important because the truth is that no authors really know what they are doing. And the easiest thing to do when you don’t know what you are doing is to copy what others are doing. Many authors publicly admit that the effectiveness of blurbs and author endorsements is suspect, and then pursue them anyway.

This surprised me at first, but for people who grew up in an achievement culture like the US, not following proven strategies and “best practices” can be easier than doing nothing. And I’ve seen over and over through the past couple of years, new authors basically copy-pasting all these tactics for launching books and then reporting at the end, “yeah, I don’t know if most ofthese things had much of an impact.”

Instead, I think a much more important thing to be doing is spending time thinking about who the hell YOU are as an author. What weird motivations do you have? What weird advantages do you have? What is something you can do effortlessly that others can’t?

Since you are an author and you will think about James Clear at some point, I would offer the following sequence of questions as a start:

• Are you James Clear?
• Do these playbooks work? How do you know? If they did work at one point, did they stop working? 
• What advantages did James maybe have that you didn’t?
• Again, are you James Clear? And if not, who are you?
• Given who you are, what unique advantages do you have?
• How can you deploy those skills in ways that feel fun and make the book-sharing journey more sustainable?

Personally, I am open to trying almost anything, but I try to focus on ways of sharing my book that feel good, feel sustainable, and feel fun.  

For me, this means:

• Avoiding long pre-sales cycles
• No pressure tactics to purchase or review for readers
• Continuing to write and post about the ideas in my books because I am genuinely just as interested in them as when I started writing about them
• Sharing the book with readers from around the world
• Playful social media posting of sales, reviews, and other relevant information 
• Responding to every single person who emails me or sends me a message about my books
• Gifting my books to people, leaving books on benches around the world, and gifting them to coworking centers in digital nomad hotspots (more on this below)

Two other principles and rules I’ve adopted that are a bit weird:

1. I don’t ask people for endorsements, blurbs, or public reviews. I know these things are often a big game, and it makes me lose a little interest in the books that play these games. I want 100% of the information people see in public to be genuine sharing of the book, and so this is what I focus on sharing. 
2. I don’t pay book influencers to promote my book. They share way too many books, and most seem willing to promote any book. I would rather spend money on gifting books that might more easily end up in the hands of ideal readers (see below for more)

You’ll probably find many other counterintuitive things I do below, too.

Mostly think it’s important to have strong opinions on what you like and want to do, as any kind of creativity. For me, the most important thing is the actual creative process itself.

On Writing The Book: I want to produce a book I love, care about, that feels true, and is effortless to promote

The most important thing you can do is to write a great book. Without that, it seems nearly impossible to consistently sell a lot of books over a long period of time. I’ve seen some snoozers sell lots of copies and even hit best-seller lists, but even these don’t seem to keep selling, and rarely, if ever, do I hear them mentioned by my friends who read books.

I think people should take the contents and craft of a book much more seriously, and while I won’t riff on the lack of originality of books in this post, I think there is far more room for experimentation than people think.  

From what I’ve seen, the biggest blunders people make that make it harder to sell and market after publishing are simple: Making too many compromises on the contents, title, and cover, and then simply not understanding or targeting a specific readership. 

The two things I thought about while writing both of my books:

#3 Create something you won’t make any compromises on

A couple of months before I finalized The Pathless Path, my editor said she thought I should spend six more months on it. “You could really turn this into a more structured how-to self-improvement kind of book. I think it would help it reach more people.” It would have involved following the formulas of other successful books. I decided against it. “I like it as it is now, even if it’s a bit weird. Let’s just finalize this version.”

Don’t compromise on creativity. The publisher thinks a different title would appeal to a broader audience that you don’t like? You think the cover is good enough? You are persuaded to add filler content you don’t care about to be more useful? Avoid making these trade-offs. They are costly because they zap your most important resource: your continued excitement about the work you created.

I wrote The Pathless Path because I thought it would be delightfully fun to write a book. Throughout the process, I poured my soul into it and made something that felt genuinely aligned with what I cared about and wanted to say. It was hard to do, but it was also my top priority for more than a year. I obsessed over certain paragraphs for weeks, and restructured the book 25 different times. Every word was something I read over dozens of times. I read through the book at least ten times in the last two weeks. When I finished it, it felt like exactly the thing I wanted to ship into the world. 

The advantage of this?

I don’t have to hedge when promoting the book. I liked the title, the cover, and the contents. I liked the structure I came up with. Everything I referenced in the book really inspired me at some point in the journey. I didn’t add much after the fact to fill out a book. And I still want to talk about the ideas, years later. I just gifted copies to people last week and talked to new readers of the book in multiple countries. I am pretty sure I can keep going for years.

I’ve seen many different versions of people who lost motivation or connection to a book that they wrote:

• Authors who made compromises on the title and subtitle, and feel like they have to explain it every time they share it with people
• People who made a little too many compromises to attempt to appeal to a mass audience rather than the readers they were actually writing to before
• People who put enormous amounts of energy into pre-sales and launch, have a disappointing first month, and then lose interest
• People who didn’t “earn out” their advance and thus will never make money on the book, so they stop promoting it
• People who wrote books as a lead magnet for something else, and lose interest in the book as their goals shift 

It can be easy to make trade-offs that might make sense in the present, either to attract a new kind of reader, or jump on a recent trend, or appeal to a committee thinking about mass appeal. But don’t make these decisions lightly. At every step along the way, if you feel doubt, trust that instinct. The book and you are intertwined. If you are 99% engaged, that 1% disinterest can compound much faster than you think. 

When I set out to write a book, I had spent three years protecting my writing from money-making pressures, trying to practice it as something I wanted to do for the sake of it. So when I wrote my book, it was easy to continue to write for myself.

A good rule of thumb I’ve now embraced in future books as I write and create them: How can I make choices that I am likely to still be interested in sharing my work ten years from now?

Self-publishing makes this easier because you can make changes over time (but in reality, most people don’t end up doing so).  For traditional publishing, the happiest authors I’ve met are ones who had to fight the publisher to either make additional cover designs or accept additions that mattered to them, like inclusion of personal stories, illustrations, or other interesting choices that made them more excited about the book. 

#4 Be clear on who you are writing for and what you like as a reader yourself

I have a very clear idea of the people I’m writing for.  Even before I wrote my book, I thought a lot about this. While I didn’t have a massive online audience before starting the book, I did have a lot of high-quality interaction with the people who did follow my work. I knew that how I wrote and what I was writing about was something that definitely appealed to a certain kind of reader. 

The people I want to reach are smart, read a lot, and don’t want to be treated as such. They can be trusted to make their own counter-arguments. They can look stuff up online. They don’t want to read another backward-compatible story that is pushed into the text to make a point. 

It’s me! I’m this reader too. I’m someone that’s read hundreds of books, has strong opinions on what I like, and thus, I decided to continue to write for people like me and the readers I was already serving. I think The Pathless Path worked because it was in the same spirit of my previous writing just at a much higher quality level. 

It has shocked me how many of my favorite writers don’t do this. I love their writing on their blogs or newsletters and then their book seems to be targeting a completely different reader. Part of it is they are probably writing a book to reach different or bigger audiences but another part of it is likely not having strong opinions on what they care about in books. So anyone who’s writing a book should have strong stances.  What do you love in books? And more importantly, what pisses you off? 

I suggest everyone who is embarking on writing a book to list out things you like and don’t like about books. Some examples of things I dislike:

• Intros that detail what’s in the book
• Takeaways at the end of chapters (I always skip them)
• Lengthy third-person historical stories and academic studies that take up 2-3 pages, which feel like they are added late in the writing process
• Overly dependent on appeals to traditional authority (only PhD or Academic Studies) for all ideas
• When people hedge their own thoughts with opposing views
• Frameworks that feel forced, like they were created for the book itself

And so even though many of these things are “best practices,” I didn’t do them. Simply because I don’t like them.

The other side of your dislikes are your likes, and these can be hard to know in book form until you are in the process of writing a book. But it’s something you should think a lot about. I dislike end-of-chapter takeaways, but still felt like there should be some sort of next step for readers. So in the last month, I wrote out a final section of ten things someone could do after reading the book. It wasn’t super prescriptive or tactical, but it was a little more useful than some of my more vague philosophical contemplations. 

I had a ton of fun figuring out what my style could be in book form. A few of the things I sprinkle throughout my books: leaving open questions for the reader, dropping interesting points and moving on without overly explaining things, making obscure references that only a small number of readers may get, quoting friends or random people who inspired me as “authorities,” and generally trying to optimize for my fun in writing above almost everything else.

I think these small things add up and contribute to a feeling people have when reading a book. When people read my books, I want the reader to think, “Okay I trust Paul is channeling his creativity here. He’s not ‘trying’ to create a book that ‘works.’ He is following his raw, genuine curiosity and trying to go deep into his own story in a way that ends up feeling true. And fun.”

And it’s true. I didn’t sell out any of my words or pages to a formula or strategy. It was an emergent product of my silly brain.

Launching & Promoting The Book

The entire book publishing industry is oriented around launches, a model dictated by the constraints of traditional publishers and their relationship with retailers. Publishers work on seasonal schedules, curating a selection of books to release throughout the year, and need to convince bookstores to take a chance on any specific book. For the retailers, however, the primary driver isn’t a passion for any specific book, but profit. They need assurance that a book will sell before dedicating shelf space to it. The best way to get their attention? Pre-sales. And so almost every author in the traditional publishing world spends relentless energy promoting their books for months, trying to win this game.

There’s nothing wrong with this game, but I think it is far riskier for authors than they realize. Why? Because it depletes them of their most precious resource: excitement about their book over the long term, especially in the time in which readers can actually buy, read, and share their work.

My simple take: Launches are probably useful for seeding books to your most important readers early on, but probably not as important as people think. Many books do take off slowly and build audiences over the years. Even Atomic Habits took years to cement itself at the top of book rankings. Being able to stay excited about a book over the long term, especially if it starts to take off later, is still wildly underrated. If you suspect you only have a fixed number of months you can stay excited about your book, you may want to re-assess if those months should only be focused on before the book can actually be purchased.

#5 So first, figure out if you have launch energy or long-game energy. Play to your strengths. 

I had coffee with Ramit Sethi a couple of years ago, and I was inspired to find that he was still genuinely excited about I Will Teach You To Be Rich, published in 2009. I found this inspiring compared to other authors I had met who weren’t even excited about their books they put out six months earlier. It convinced me that I should just keep promoting The Pathless Path as long as it’s working. 

Ramit has long game energy and I’ve come to see that there are really two kinds of authors: Ones with launch energy and others with long game energy.

I have long-game energy and almost no launch energy. This is something that I know about myself and is inseparable from how I approach almost everything I do. 

I wrote a book because I was genuinely curious about the ideas, not because I had some master plan to hit the bestseller list or use it as a lead magnet for other upsells. I love conversations with readers who connect with my work, and from continue to follow my curiosity. I’ve been writing about these topics for years now, and I plan to keep going for many more. I don’t care about optimizing the number of copies sold; I care about sustaining this journey.

So another way to think about this is that I don’t separate “creation” from “promotion” because they’re the same thing for me. When I write about something I actually care about, talking about it isn’t a strategy, it’s just continuing to do something I enjoy. It’s an extension of the creative process. I only write stuff I genuinely want to discuss because I know that’s the only way I’ll have the energy to keep the conversation going.

I’m lucky I’m wired this way, too, because it’s the only way I could have realistically pulled off what I did with my book. I am so unmotivated by pre-sales that I canceled a theoretical two-week pre-sale for The Pathless Path after accidentally launching my paperback on Amazon, and ended up with only 53 pre-sales of the Kindle version when it went live. For Good Work, despite having a 5x bigger audience, I only pre-sold about 100 books. This is mostly because I didn’t prioritize it. I had the link at the bottom of my newsletter for months, but didn’t go out of my way to promote it.

For self-published books, I suspect this is fine too. As much of people follow Amazon’s rankings, research on their algorithm has shown that they prioritize a few things:

• Average sales over always moving 180-day periods
• % of people finishing books
• And of those finishing, who is rating and buying other similar books

With this in mind, there isn’t much difference between selling a bunch of books three months before launch and one month after launch, especially given that I have almost no shot at being in bookstores at launch. 

So I’ve purposely leaned away from worrying about launch for one simple reason: it is way more fun for me to promote my book when it’s already available in public. This is because readers can buy it, talk about it, engage with me, and most importantly, start reading it as soon as they want. 

If you love this ongoing engagement, lean into the long game.  If you love the metrics and want to see your book in bookstores, play the launch game. 

It doesn’t matter what you do. You can do both. Just figure out what you are really trying to do on your path and then do it on purpose. 

#6 You do need to solve the cold start problem, but the real “problem” to solve is getting your book into your ideal readers’ hands

One of the original co-founders of Scribe Media, who helped thousands of authors publish books, told me that the north star metric for a launch was 1,000 sales in 100 days. The reasoning? As they write, “at that number of sales, a book has the momentum it needs to keep spreading by word of mouth.”  

This felt directionally right to me, and it’s the only number I worried about in the first few months.  I ended up hitting it around day 78:

For self-published authors, I think this is a great goal. Since you are mostly selling and promoting your book through digital channels and existing channels, your initial sales are likely to have a high overlap with your ideal readers. I’d guess that for traditional publishing, you want to aim a lot higher because you’re pushing your books through other channels like bookstores, which may only be selling books to a much smaller percentage of your ideal readers.

I think finding your ideal reader is much more important than selling your book to someone. There is a huge difference between someone who buys your book and puts it on a shelf and someone who buys it and continues to talk about it for years to anyone who will listen. I suspect my book kept selling consistently because my book was read by many ideal readers in the initial 100 days. 

If you are like me and don’t have launch energy, you should put almost all your energy into finding these readers. When thinking about a reader, you should think about: 

1. How likely is someone to buy it
2. If they buy it, will they open it and start it?
3. If they start it, will they finish it?
4. When they finish it, will they recommend it?

Too many people focus on the first part. I don’t focus much energy on moving the most books. Instead, I try to focus all my attention on the kinds of readers that love my book because I suspect, over the long ter,m this will be more fun and help keep sales going. I always engage with these people when they email me. I reply to them, ask them questions, and if they say they’ve recommended or gifted my book to people already, I ask them if I can send them more books to give away.

I knew before launching my book that many of my newsletter readers would love my book. I wrote it with these readers in mind. But I also didn’t expect how strongly people would react to the book. Early on, I started receiving long, thoughtful emails, and have consistently received multiple messages every week since 2022. I suspect part of this is due to the following passage I included in the book:

These messages were the first signal I had that gave me any indication that this book might be more than something that would “break even.”  And so I paid attention to what these enthusiastic readers were telling me. Most were between 20-40, had some career success, had already attempted to carve their own path, were open to ideas, read a lot, and liked meeting other people curious about similar ideas. I used this information to send books to places, especially coworking areas around the world, where these people might hang out. In addition, I shared their reviews, used their language to describe the book, and offered to gift them free copies of the book.

One challenge with only promoting a book at launch is that it’s not enough time for someone to read a book. Sometimes people only read my book a year or two after buying it. Often, they mention that my continued sharing of the book reminded them they wanted to read it.  It’s much more sustainable for me to orient myself in a way that helps sell 200-300 books a month for years than it would have been to try pushing 10,000 at launch.

My big advantage is that I like my readers. They are cool people. And when they email me and tell me that my book was “life-changing,” it gives me confidence to keep sharing it. 

So find your ideal reader. They may help you understand what it’s all about.

My Long-Term Mindset With My Books

Despite my unconventional approaches, I have a book that consistently sells. I also have a second book with more modest, but steady, sales, too. Maybe it will take off at some point. Who knows.

I think an interesting question you can ask yourself when starting to share your book: What does a 10-year approach to sharing this book like like? How can I stay excited about this over a long period of time? Is it possible? If not, what might prevent me? If it is, what can I consistently do? 

I’ve found that I love writing books, and so my biggest aim is to continue to write and publish books. While The Pathless Path may be the only book that ever sells many copies, writing more books is one of the most interesting ways I can do what I enjoy and indirectly potentially sell more copies of my earlier books.

I feel incredibly lucky to be doing this and remain shocked that my first book took off. From the beginning, I saw this work and the book as a gift.

I didn’t write it for anything. Not for sales or achievements. I wrote it because I thought it would be cool to attempt.  Because of this, I also didn’t get bummed out by any concept of a “failed” launch or low first-month sales. Or a dip in sales in year 2. Or never having won any book awards or made any lists.

Every sale and attempt at reading my book is a win. And so its very easy for me to remain excited about this endeavor. It’s crazy that people still read my stuff. I love every email I get. It’s amazing. I still can’t believe it.

And so in this spirit, I’ve remained quite consistent in seeing my book as a gift to the world.

#7 I see my book as a gift, and it delights me to share it.

If you want my book and can’t afford it, it’s yours. Just tell me what format you want and I’ll send it to you. Really. I gifted my book to someone I met at a conference, and she responded, “Oh, I don’t give away my books, but you can buy it.” I did not buy her book and soon forgot about it, but the story stuck with me. 

I think it should be incredibly easy to access my book. This is the only way it will reach more people, especially early on. This will help you find those initial ideal readers. 

I really think people get this wrong about books and its why I’ve leaned into gifting so much. People overestimate how much effort people will go into to buy books. Even your closest friends will end up not buying your book unless you hand it to them!

I have been experimenting with the gift economy and gifting my work since I started working on my own. Almost everything I’ve created, I’ve offered it on a gift basis or reduced price if people don’t have the means. It genuinely feels wonderful to be spending so much time in my adult human life creating things I genuinely care about, and it feels silly that everything should need to turn into a business.

One thing I realized early on was that I could purchase my own physical books or send them to almost anyone in the world for about $4-6. This is much cheaper than most authors who use a traditional publisher. They can only purchase their own books for 50% off the list price.  So if they are selling a $30 hardcover, they need to pay three times as much for their own book and jump through hoops to order it from the publisher and then ship it to people after they receive it.

This is probably the only tactic I’ve consistently committed to and probably the only one I’ve done at scale. I love it so much because:

1. It feels genuine. I’ve literally been writing about practicing generosity since 2017, when the idea first dawned on me
2. It’s a strategic advantage as a self-published author. It’s easy for me to ship my books anywhere in the world from Amazon for less than $10 a book (typically $4.50 a cop,y including shipping for most of my gifts). Traditionally published authors can only buy their books for 50% off the list price, and it’s not as easy to do it. Most just don’t ever use this strategy because of that.
3. Gifting is high leverage. I often will send a bunch of books to readers who reach out and tell me that they’ve already gifted my books to others. If they are already sharing it, why not make it easier? I see these people as far more important over the long term than going for a top-down influencer strategy. So I lean into these people. 

I’ve mostly done this in a few ways.

First, sending people one-off free copies when they ask about the book online or show interest. If people have already read the book and are already gifting it, I immediately ask if I can send them more to gift. Here’s a sample text I got and then me immediately shipping this person 7 books:

Second, I’ll sometimes post online that I want to gift stacks of 25 books to people who could give away that many. I’ve sent books to people in Taiwan, Spain, Indonesia, India, and the U.S. in this manner.

Third, I’ve sent books to interesting coworking places around the world and also to conferences like my friend Diania’s EconoMe conference and some remote worker conferences. This is the picture from 2025 (I sent these all as a gift, it cost me about $1000 to send 150 copies of Good Work and 75 copies of The Pathless Path

Fourth, I’ve done a couple “free book” promotions, including an announcement two years after launch that led to about 3,000 downloads

I eventually turned this into a Gumroad link, had about 3,000-4,000 downloads of the book, about 600 of those people opting into my email list, and even some people donating more than $0 for the book (though it wasn’t much). I did get some nice notes from the people who got this version (I added a custom note at the beginning), but generally, I suspect most people didn’t read it or even open it after grabbing it. It also didn’t seem to impact sales that month either, with things continuing as if it were normal. Stil,l it was a fun experiment and I plan to do it again!

Finally, I simply leave books out in public and leave little cards telling people to accept it as a gift. I like to call this “guerrilla gifting.” People seem to get a kick out of it.

What’s the return on this? Beyond 5-10 people stumbling into my books, I have no idea.

But for me, it doesn’t matter. It’s not that expensive to do, it’s fun and cracks me up.

They key though? You really need to do this from a place of abundance. People can feel the energy you are injecting into things. Cole grabbed one of my ebooks in 2024

#8 Different formats have different purposes (and I’m moving toward selling direct)

Self-publishing and traditional publishing are like two different planets. In self-publishing, you are much more likely to be moving with the market and the incentives. But in traditional publishing, they still build their entire business around the fancy hardcover edition. I think this is a bad situation for most authors, but it persists because of legacy historical reasons, which I wrote about here.

They think first about squeezing as much margin out of the hardcover as possible and are willing to not offer a paperback and to price ebooks and audiobooks too high to do that. Maybe this makes sense? Maybe they make so much more than the authors on this version, or value retailer opinions more? I am not quite sure. But it is clear that they are running a business in a stagnant industry with low growth rates, and so this sort of scarcity approach can make sense at scale.

But you are a single author with one or maybe more books. You do not want to think like this! You want to think probabilistically. What are the ways to increase the odds you sell more books?

So for me, the ebook is a nice, cheap way to seed books into the world, hoping that they spread. Remember, I’m trying to find readers who buy, read, finish, AND recommend the book. You need a lot of people to buy the book for that to happen.

One of the most epic charts that brings this alive is from Todd Sattersten, which he calls 10k books the “Magic Number.”

From this chart, you see that if you sell 10k books in the first year, you have a 4 out of 10 chance of hitting over 25k!

First Year Sales	Number of Titles	>10K Lifetime Sales	>25K Lifetime Sales	>50K Lifetime Sales	>100K Lifetime Sales
<10K	6037	11%	2%	0.3%	0.1%
10K-25K	504	N/A	42%	13%	2.4%
25K-50K	140	N/A	N/A	47%	19%
50K-100K	94	N/A	N/A	N/A	50%

I barely scraped by 10k in my first year and am likely headed for 100k over the next five years. This is a pretty crazy result, but given how little I invested in selling and marketing early, it sort of makes sense.

If you have that launch energy, you can think much more about that first year.

Other Experiments I’ve Done  and Things That Have Worked

Kindle Deals

On the Kindle Amazon marketing tab, you can automatically nominate your books for “Kindle Deals.” These are offered in various regions and usually involve a discount on your Kindle version down to $0.99-$2.99. Based on my experience, they are almost always worth it. At a minimum, they almost always break even.

I’m not quite sure what leads them to select books other than some analytics from their own backend. But it seems they at least pump it on their sites and occasionally send an email too. Here is an example where my book was discounted from 4.99 GBP to 0.99 GBP for an entire month:

In February and March of that year, I sold 164 Kindles and earned total royalties of £574 or £287 per month. At the discounted rate, I sold more than 5x as many, 426, and even ended up earning a little more, £298.

Most of the deals I’ve gotten have been for the US, Australia, and the UK, with occasional Canadian and Indian deals as well. They arrive via email and look like this

These e-mails can be easy to miss, and you also have to go through and enter the code they give you in a form. You won’t receive a confirmation email, so just confirm you’ve hit submit (though I think you can resubmit).

Here are the terms they share in those emails, too.

1. Promotion start and end dates remain at our discretion. Due to system latencies, the exact start and end times of the Kindle Deal are approximate.
2. The list price of your title(s) selected for the Kindle Deal must remain the same for 30 days before, during, and for at least 7 days after the Kindle Deal.
3. Royalties will be calculated based on the promotional price (not your list price).
4. Title(s) included in Kindle Countdown Deals or Free Promotions 30 days before the start of the Kindle Deal will be ineligible. You will not be able to schedule a new Kindle Countdown Deal until 30 days after the end of this Kindle Deal. Amazon will cancel any Kindle Countdown Deals scheduled during the Deal’s period or 30 days following the end of the Kindle Deal. We might not notify you of the cancellation.
5. The Kindle Deal is subject to change.
6. If you represent another author, by agreeing to participate you also confirm that you are authorized to agree on behalf of the author.

The totals over the last three years:

• Deals nominated: 32
  • .in 16
  • co.uk 9
  • .com.au 4
  • .com 2
  • .ca 1
• Deals confirmed: 14

Summary of those deals:

The Pathless Path:

• Amazon.co.uk:
  • July 1, 2022 – July 31, 2022: GBP 0.99
  • September 1, 2023 – September 30, 2023: GBP 0.99
  • March 1, 2023 – March 31, 2024: GBP 0.99
  • January 6, 2025: GBP 0.99
  • April 1, 2024 – April 30, 2024: GBP 0.99
  • July 1, 2025 – July 31, 2025: GBP 0.99
• Amazon.ca
  • September 18, 2023: CDN$2.49
• Amazon.com:
  • October 13, 2022: $4.99
  • September 18, 2023: $2.49
• Amazon.com.au:
  • March 1, 2023 – March 31, 2023: AUD 1.49
  • September 1, 2024 – September 30, 2024: AUD 1.49
  • November 1, 2023 – November 30, 2023: AUD 1.49
• Amazon.in:
  • July 1, 2024 – July 31, 2024: INR 49.00

Good Work

• Amazon.in:
  • June 1, 2025 – June 30, 2025: INR 199.00

Adjusting my own prices

In the 2010s there was quite a bit of experimentation and open sharing in the self-publishing world on the best pricing strategies for selling books.

The verdict? $4.99 was a sweet spot for sales AND royalties. Here’s a post based on a data analysis that Hugh Howey, a great resource for self-published writers, shared on his blog:

The Top 10 bestselling ebooks at $12.99 and $14.99 generate fewer gross DOLLARS (as well as selling fewer units) than the Top 10 at $9.99 and $10.99.

But… $4.99 beats $9.99 across the board. $4.99 sells more units AND brings in more gross DOLLARS than any other price point. This is true even for the Top 10 Best Selling outliers at each price point.

Here’s the two graphs showing this more clearly

After seeing this, I immediately had to try it. I lowered my price to $4.99 and immediately saw a jump in sales (and overall royalties for at least the next week):

I’m not quite sure why this happens but I think part of it is Amazon does react to real supply and demand data and starts to push the book more because the odds of selling a copy are higher. It also adds this “Best Price in 30 Days” sticker which is nice to nudge people to purchase.

Over the last 3.5 years, I’ve played around with pricing, moving back and forth between $2.99, $4.99, and $9.99. A higher price can be good if you know people are going to purchase the book no matter what. For example, during launch and your biggest supporters will do it no matter what.

So why doesn’t everyone price aggressively at $4.99?! One reason is that the Traditional Publishers in the US have been in a weird standoff with Amazon since about 2014, where publishers fought to implement “agency pricing” that lets them set retail prices rather than letting Amazon discount their books to loss-leader levels, and they’re deliberately keeping ebook prices high to protect their profitable print business from being cannibalized by what they see as “cheap” digital alternatives.

I think this is pretty silly, and ultimately a pretty terrible situation for authors, especially those who don’t have books that have hit escape velocity yet. First, my most enthusiastic readers want multiple versions of my book. I’ve lost track of how many people told me they gave the Kindle a shot and then bought a paper version to keep. Second, this is just price discrimination 101. You want to give different customers different on-ramps to your product. My enthusiastic readers? They WANT to pay more. But people who don’t know me? I want to let them read for a much lower price, if not free.

Ali Abdaal (and so many others) Being Generous Sharing My Stuff

I accidentally met Ali Abdaal through his brother. One of the first podcasts I did was in 2020 on The Not Overthinking Podcast. Taimur and his brother Ali simply talk about life, and are generally curious humans.

At the time, Ali had a much smaller audience, but he started following and engaging with my writing.

During the writing of The Pathless Path, Ali purchased it via my Gumroad sale and generously paid $50 for it at the time.

When it launched, I asked him if I could send him some copies.

Given that he paid $50, I wanted to send him more than $50 worth of books, so I sent him 10 paperbacks and 10 hardcovers.

I didn’t think much of it at the time and never expected him to promote the book. It was also no different than how I was treating anyone who went out of their way to share my work.

Later that year, he asked me to come on his podcast. When it launched, it didn’t drive that many book sales. But two weeks later, he dropped this video in December 2023 and had my book as the first one in a video of 12 books (now 1.3M views).

That video immediately spiked sales, and for the next three months, I sold more books than I did in the first 11 months!

Then, about a month after my daughter was born, I’m not even working, and then he drops a standalone video about the book.

The book went bananas for another few months:

This seemed to also permanently jump my book in Amazon’s algorithm

Even though others have shared my book, nothing moved books like Ali’s shoutouts.

I think it worked well for several reasons:

1. He read my stuff before I put the book out
2. He went through his own career crisis and thus was literally an ideal reader
3. Spoke about the book in a way that communicated to those other ideal readers, and most importantly,
4. His audience is full of nerds who read!

This may seem crazy, but I didn’t expect him to ever share the book. I honestly didn’t even think to ask him.  And for the most part, I haven’t really asked for much help with The Pathless Path.  I’ve tried to work on that and did go through a stretch of reaching out to a bunch of big influencers in 2024, but most of that was ignored.

I think there is something weird about The Pathless Path. It seems to find people when they need it. It seems to be shared in ways that are organic and beyond what I could have designed for or predicted.

Ali’s sharing really touched me, though. He did it on his own and did it in a way that really “got” my writing.  The book sales from his two videos made a huge difference in my life and helped bump the book in Amazon’s algorithm.  It also helped fund some of my own paternity leave after the birth of my daughter. For that, I’ll always be grateful.  

Other Creators Sharing My Stuff

I’ve been lucky that many people have shouted out my book over the years. Ali is by far the biggest influence on book sales, followed by Lenny, and then, with almost every other shoutout, it was a boost of about 100 books sold.

Mark Manson recently shared my book in a video and short-form reels.  Interestingly, unlike Ali’s video, only his shortform boosted sales (likely because my book was buried as book 18 of 22).

But Mark found the book because one of the readers I had gifted several copies to handed him the book while doing a short work stint for him. Pretty cool confirmation that the gifting strategy works!

Podcasts

I said yes to almost every podcast that invited me in the first couple of years of the books. If someone sends me a thoughtful message and is a reader, I still usually say yes. I decided I’m only going to do podcasts after my books launch, too, as I have more fun sharing once I know people can read them. Aligned with my own long-game energy, too, there has probably been some benefit to doing these slowly because people know I’m going to be genuinely sharing what’s on my mind in a way that’s changing over time, not just a pre-packaged sales pitch.

Overall, I’m not sure podcasts have moved many books, but I think over time they still have an impact. I went on Chris Williamson’s Modern Wisdom podcast pretty early on in April 2022, and the video got about 13k views and many more listens on his audio feed. But at that time, he didn’t have as big an audience as he does now (about 10% of what it is now). 

But I think this appearance was good to give other top hosts confidence that they could book me (they could see we had an interesting conversation), and also probably found some great readers that are part of his audience.

Over the following two years, I went on podcasts as they invited me, which happened slowly and were pretty evently dispersed over time. Because I didn’t do a lunch and because the takeoff of my book was slow, this was probably a good thing. First, because I didn’t burn out doing any sort of crazy podcast tour, and also each time I did a podcast, I had new and interesting things to share. I probably went on 30 shows over two years saying yes to most who asked me, especially people who read my book, even if they didn’t have an audience.

The biggest impact from the podcast, directly, was probably Lenny’s podcast

Both of these seemed to lead to a big pop in sales as I think both had very aligned audiences with many of my ideal readers. 

Here are some of the appearances I did

I do want to continue to do podcasts and have a lot of fun talking with people, so it’s a very easy thing to keep doing.

Instagram Ads

If you put a book out, Book Influencers will reach out all the time to offer to “share” your book after you pay them.  Their posts often look like this and include snapshots from inside the book

This snapshot is from Alex and Books, the only person I paid to do this kind of promotion. I saw no boost in sales from the one ad I did with him and decided that it didn’t feel good anyway. 

While Alex does seem to be one of the best, I think almost everyone knows these books are paying for promotion.  I made a decision early on that I wanted reviews of my book to be 100% organic from the start. I don’t know if this is a smart decision, but it feels good to me.

Amazon Ads: 

I still don’t quite know what I’m doing here, and I didn’t do any ads until about six months after launch. I hired a guy to tweak my ads for $300 a month, and did seem to get some good results. 

I still spend about $200 a month on UK ads and $300 a month on US ads. I suspect Amazon does give you a little boost if you have ads running in their system. But I can’t validate that.

I don’t know enough about ads to give good advice here.

BookBub Featured Deals

This is probably one of the best opportunities if you can get chosen. David Kadavy (who has a great resource called How To Sell a Book) introduced these to me (detailed instructions here on his site).  

Basically, you can apply every 30 days and need to manually do it. 

If they select you, you pay for it (usually costs about $500 to $1,500), and they’ll blast your book to their massive mailing list:

I didn’t analyze it too closely, but it did lead to a huge boost in sales.  I ended up being the #2 book behind Mel Robbins for about a day or two, and sold about ~1,500 incremental books.

One downside is that royalties go down to 35% per book at the lower price point, so it’s really a breakeven endeavor. 

What are the limits of this? Will it keep selling for years? 

I still don’t quite know what I’m doing.

I want to write more books and keep talking about my existing books. Will they keep selling? I have no idea. 

The core thing I focus on is maintaining energy and curiosity. If I can keep that alive, I can keep creating, keep writing, and keep connecting with interesting people.

Writing a book changed my life.

I hope it can change yours, too.

I hope this has helped!

Series Navigation

<< From Blog to Book: How I Self-Published The Pathless Path On My Own Terms Over 14 MonthsMy Self-Publishing Journey & Lessons Learned (73 Page Slide Deck) >>