How to double your business in 12 months with book sales 🚀
Tips from best-selling author and marketing expert, Renee Puvvada
Whether you’re hoping to market your own self-published book or guide your ghostwriting clients in selling theirs, deciding how to go about it can be overwhelming. The other day, I sat down with
to discuss her self-publishing experience with Amazon. As a #1 Amazon Bestselling Author, Renee is a fantastic marketing and sales coach. Her self-published book on rainwater collection, “Harvesting Rainwater for Your Homestead in Nine Days or Less,” has attracted podcasting invitations, PR opportunities, and speaking invitations on autopilot. Today, Renee shares what she learned with other entrepreneurs looking to grow their businesses with book sales.
I asked Renee to share some of her top tips for selling more books with us.
What she had to say was pure gold.
You can grow your business with book sales - without a large social media following. 📈
What if your business didn’t just sell products?
What if your business transformed your customers so much it changed the trajectory of their family, their community, and their customers for the next 3 generations?
What if your business had just 1 tool that shared yo
ur message like a laser beam to the people who needed to hear it?
You know this tool.
It’s called a book.
But what if I told you that 96% of books sell no more than 1,000 copies per year, and that the average lifetime copies a self-published book sells is only 250?
Not only is this a missed opportunity for impact, but when it comes to ROI, you are not reaping nearly enough of the life-changing benefits of potentially doubling your business within the next 12 months from book sales alone (as it occurred with 7-figure personal branding agency SimplyBe. in 2023).
Not to mention the hours spent on the keyboard, pouring your heart onto the blank page.
Experts say that when you sell between 5,000 and 10,000 copies of your book, you will see a natural uplift in your business from what are called network effects.
Network effects are the natural phenomenon that occur when enough people out in the universe have read your book such that they begin to talk about you, Google you, fall in love with you, and see your company as the perfect solution to their problems.
This model is not new. Just ask Russell Brunson, Robert Kiyosaki, or Alex Hormozi why they spent years developing, writing, and marketing their books.
(Or even Jesus, or Mohammad…)
Books create movements.
But you can’t just write a book.
You must also sell books.
Move books.
Get people to read your books.
In my experience, selling enough books can altogether change your life. In 2020, I started publishing books on Amazon as a way to make money online. I failed many times over, quickly learning that there is a distinct order of operations necessary to create books that sell. My most popular book to date has sold over 15,000 copies (top 1% of book sales) and has attracted podcast opportunities, PR opportunities, guest masterclass opportunities, and even a trip to Hawai’i on autopilot.
And this all happened with no website, no product, and only 183 Instagram followers.
You don’t need a huge social media following or even a platform to sell books and build a movement. What I do know is that there are 2 strategies that the most successful author entrepreneurs in 2025 use to sell their books, create a movement, and create customers and fans for life.
And I’m about to show them to you right now.
Sales Strategy #1: Amazon 📚
Amazon is not only an eCommerce platform.
Amazon supports the biggest indie publishing platform in the world, Kindle Direct Publishing. Thus, Amazon boasts a host of marketing features that plug straight into the biggest readership on the planet.
What people aren’t aware of is that, when they publish their book on Amazon, they are immediately thrown into a pool of millions of other books just like theirs. They realize only afterwards that they need to collect tons more reviews and that their readers hate their cover.
To avoid this trap, pay attention to these 3 things:
Know your market before you start writing.
Your book is a product. Products are bought because they create a particular outcome for a particular market.
Underneath every well-executed book, book tour, and promotional campaign is the customer research, targeting, messaging, and laser-focused product creation that speaks to the private wants of a particular audience craving a particular outcome.
If you release your book and find out your intended audience wanted a different book entirely… It's too late.
I was once on a book marketing strategy call with Patty Aubery, who was President of the Chicken Soup for the Soul company when they launched their books. She told us that their process didn’t start with writing; it first started with sketching the customer avatar, going deep into their pain points, desires, and objections. Only when they understood the customer more than the customer understood themselves did they start writing.
Marketing informs everything, from the chapters, to the words, to the cover and fonts, to the title, description, and the marketing campaigns.
So start with marketing!
Create an Amazon listing that speaks directly to your ideal reader.
Your book’s listing on Amazon is your public profile of authority on the Internet.
Because your book is the ultimate symbol of authority in your niche, not only does your Amazon “profile” demonstrate your knowledge, expertise, and commitment to your customer, it can hold more branding value than your Instagram or LinkedIn profile.
Too many entrepreneurs have only 25 reviews on their book or their book description looks lazy and poorly planned.
Many entrepreneurs don’t have any Editorial Reviews on their Amazon listing or they don’t have a solid author biography that demonstrates their authenticity and credibility.
Your Amazon listing should act like the Bat Signal to your ideal customer. There are 5 main aspects of an Amazon listing to demonstrate your authority and marketing precision:
Your Book Cover (branded, professional, eye-catching)
Your Book Title (and Subtitle) (SEO-optimized, with a hook)
Your Reviews (if you are looking to demonstrate authority, you need at least 100)
Your Book Description (targeted to your reader and sells your book)
Your Supplemental Content (Graphics, Editorial Reviews, Videos, etc.)
Leverage each of these aspects to create an enticing sales page for your reader. When traffic from your social media, podcast, or email list find your Amazon listing, they won’t click away, but be entranced enough to click “Add to Cart.”
Leverage Amazon’s 30-day period and Amazon ads to promote your book on the biggest bookstore in the world.
When you first publish your book on Amazon, Amazon tracks how many
Reviews
Sales
your book is getting in the first 30 days.
If you achieve ~100 reviews and ~500 sales in 30 days, Amazon will automatically push your book up its charts for browsing customers, to the tune of an extra 2,000 downloads (depending on your initial traction). It will share your book to its customers who have bought similar books to yours in the past, as well as favor your book in its pay-per-click advertising system.
By favoring this initial 30-day period, my clients have enjoyed positive long-term results, such as selling 1,000 books in 6 months, selling bulk orders to the UK, and getting accepted on Good Morning Pennsylvania as a result of their increased brand awareness from book sales.
Amazon is the tailwind in your sails if you leverage it correctly.
Use Amazon ads to then increase your traffic from customers already in the mood to purchase a book like yours.
Amazon ads, like any advertising platform, is a gift that must be used wisely.
Books are a low-ticket item that require purchasing momentum from prospects because they require a time commitment. Casual lurkers on Facebook or Instagram are not likely to purchase a book, but Amazon is already filled with customers looking to purchase books - and it’s already connected to millions of customers’ credit cards.
My clients are finding dozens of keywords on Amazon that have led to 100% clickthrough rates (i.e. a customer sees the ad once, clicks the ad once, and immediately buys), and they are constantly adding more of these keywords to their personal databases the longer they run their ads.
These are practically unheard of in the Meta-and-Google advertising world, but not uncommon with Amazon.
Sales Strategy #2: Podcast Touring 🎙️
Amazon will help you convert the people already interested in purchasing your book.
But what about the people who have never heard your message, nor considered consuming your message through a book?
In the 1990s, Robert Kiyosaki self-published a book that would become the #1 bestselling personal finance book of all time. But at one point, his books were stuffed in cardboard boxes in his garage, selling zero copies. How did he go from a no-name author to one of the most recognized entrepreneurs in the world?
He did it by guesting on personal finance radio shows and podcasts. This is also known as podcast touring.
This is a pattern seen across many successful authorpreneur book marketing tours. Jack Canfield, co-creator of the billion-dollar book brand Chicken Soup for the Soul, guested on 1 podcast every day for years to promote his books. James Clear guested on 100 podcasts for 12 months before Atomic Habits went live, and both Amy Porterfield and Jessica Zweig toured on podcasts for 12 months after their books went live. By doing so, Jessica Zweig doubled her personal branding agency in just 12 months by selling her book from podcast touring, and her company hit the INC. 5000 list in 2023.
Podcast touring works, but you must do it strategically.
Here are 3 top tips for designing a brand-exploding podcast tour for your book.
Start with the end in mind: define your CTA
This strategy is credited to Kelly Mosser, who developed the Hell Yes Guest method of strategic podcast guesting. She noticed that entrepreneurs often pick podcasts to guest on, wing the episodes, then fumble the CTA, leading to poor conversions.
Instead, she recommends reverse-engineering the outcome.
Your desired outcome is to sell books and grow your brand (collect contact information). This is where you want podcast listeners to end up.
Therefore, during the call-to-action portion of your podcast episode, instead of telling people to just find you on Instagram or visit your website, intentionally instruct people to purchase a copy of your book, and if they do so, they can unlock an enticing bonus in exchange for their address (you just need to share the link to purchase the book in the show notes with your host).
This requires building out a small funnel or delivery system to do so, but with modern funnel technology, this no longer has to be difficult.
Amy Porterfield’s CTA directs podcast listeners to her book’s site, where it includes links to purchase the book and enter their book order receipt number and email address in exchange for one of Amy’s enticing bonuses.
Books sold. Emails collected.
Win-win!
Craft an authentic author story that shares your message and your methods
Next, we want to tell your story on your podcast episode in a way that leads naturally to your CTA.
The best way to tell an authentic author story that delivers on your message and your methods is to tell the story of how your business’ signature method came to be.
What I’m betting is that your message and your method are intertwined. You likely had to experience a lot of life that culminated in a unique solution that is now your business’s signature method.
Tell that story. Tell it with emotion, detail, and passion.
And tell it strategically.
Start with how you were cruising along in life, unaware of your problem. Then, something(s) bad happened that caused you to sink to a low point in your life: you got a divorce, you went through bankruptcy, you lost your job, etc. In that season, your awareness blasted open, and you started picking up the pieces of your life, developing a new way of operating and living that became unique to you. You started implementing it in your own life, and you then began sharing this with others, especially in your business.
This is the exact story that generates authentic affinity to you as a human being, while also informing the audience of your business’s unique method and how it specifically helps people’s problems.
This leads naturally into your CTA, where you say, “Thank you for having me on today’s episode. If you enjoyed this story, I have a new book coming out. Just click the link in the show notes, where you can purchase the book and grab a bonus - typically a $500 value - free when you purchase your copy of the book. Thanks for having me on today, it’s been a pleasure!”
Tour on 50-100 aligned podcasts in the 6-12 months before/after your book launch
Now that you have complete clarity on your message and your methods, as well as complete clarity on your audience and your unique angle (completed when performing market research for your book), you know exactly which podcasts are most aligned for you.
With podcasts, start by guesting on mid-tier podcasts that are at least in the Top 10% Globally, then work your way up to bigger and bigger podcasts. My client started on Top 10% podcasts, and only after 5 podcasts she was able to guest on a Top 2% podcast.
As standard practice, guesting on 50-100 podcasts before your book goes live can help give you a solid launch, but you can also do this after your book goes live to maintain marketing momentum. James Clear did the former, Amy Porterfield and Jessica Zweig the latter - and all had more than solid book sales as a result.
Stack podcasting with your Amazon efforts and you will have the tools to replicate impressive book launches such as those from Atomic Habits and Two Weeks Notice.
Thank you for reading today’s post - I’m so grateful to Renee for her awesome collaboration! Check out her newsletter, Smokin’ Hot Books, for more tips on how to grow your business with book sales.
And as always, don’t forget to subscribe to The Ghost Post for more awesome content on how to freelance/ghostwrite for a living.
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