Hello,
Hi, friend.
In 2013, I published my third book The In-Between, which was a memoir about the importance of being present in the little moments in life. It was a good book—my best work yet—but ended up being my worst-selling book.
Let’s back up a bit.
In 2012, I’d published two books within six months of each other. The first was a self-published booked called You Are a Writer which sold over 10,000 copies in the first month. The second was a trade book that had sold 20,000 copies in the first six months. After that, I decided to write something serious, something that would establish me as an important literary figure: a memoir.
Why memoir? Who knows. I enjoyed reading memoirs at the time, so it seemed like the thing to do. I hired an editor to help me with the book and commissioned an artist friend named Mandy Thompson to illustrate each chapter. The book, if I do say so myself, was a work of art.
When it was released, it sold 750 copies in the first month. It was a dismal failure, at least in terms of what I expected the book to do in terms of sales—and the worst part was I had no idea why.
I thought I’d done everything I could do to make this book a success, and it wasn’t. My platform had only grown since my last release, and yet here we were. The whole experience confused me. Was this how the world rewards important work? Had I already peaked—in the second year of my career? Maybe my greatest work was behind me. Was I never again going to have a best-selling book?
I didn’t know, and that feeling of helplessness frustrated me.
When I get frustrated, I become even more driven, more ambitious. In light of my recent failure, I became determined to write the best book I could, investing every dollar the publisher gave me back into the book itself.
My fourth book, The Art of Work, sold 15,000 pre-orders before it even came out and debuted on the Washington Post, Publisher’s Weekly, and USATODAY bestsellers lists. The book went on to sell over 50,000 copies in its first year.
It never hit the New York Times Bestsellers list—the big list everyone cares about but nobody understands. I felt like a failure. No matter how much I chased this elusive title of being a bestselling author, it seemed to evade me.
Spurred on by my frustration, I did a little research, and it turns out that the term “bestseller” has a more complicated history than I knew. Being a bestselling author, I thought, meant endless accolades and one chart-topping success after another. I had no idea how wrong I was.
Redefining the term “bestseller”
Today, the term bestseller means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, depending on who you ask, and not all of these terms are helpful. For example, you could sell 10,000 copies of your book in the first week of its publication and never sell another copy, and you would likely become a New York Times bestseller, a title that would belong to you forever.
On the other hand, you could sell 100,000 copies of your book by selling a couple hundred copies per week over the course of a decade and never be considered an official “bestseller.”
That seems wrong. Most book marketing experts believe this way of thinking about best-selling books is at best outdated and at worst, misleading. And I agree with them.
So what should it mean to be a bestseller? Let’s talk about it tomorrow at 11:00 AM Central Time during the How to Write a Bestseller webinar. While we’re together we will unpack:
See you Monday!
Jeff Goins
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