Many Kindle authorities claim that launching a book for free no longer works (I’ve definitely said this recently.) Fortunately people like Nick Loper (the Chief Side Hustler at SideHustleNation.com) are proving me wrong.
With the right amount of effort and smart work, you can parlay a free book launch into a profitable stream of income. In today’s guest post, Nick details that exact strategies he used to get over 20,000 free downloads and create a lifelong asset.
Update: Nick has recently launched a course that digs deeper into each of the concepts he covers in this post. If you buy the product through my affiliate link, you will get a 75% discount off the regular price.
Last month, I released my latest book project, Work Smarter, into the world.
The book actually started out as a blog post idea, but as the text grew past 10,000 words (eventually totaling 20,000), I figured it would be better suited for book format.
The project is all about the online tools and resources today’s entrepreneurs are using to get their work done. I’m always excited to learn about new tools, and I know other people feel the same way.
There’s a joy in discovering something that can make your life easier or make your work more efficient — and that’s what Work Smarter intended to do.
(And based on the feedback, it did. If you missed it, I guarantee you’ll find something new, novel, and useful among the 350+ resources — or your money back.)
Here are some of the hard numbers from the launch:
- 20,215 free downloads
- 559 contributors
- 1247 paid downloads (so far)
- $427.83 in royalties the first week, and over $1400 in the first month
- 413 individual emails sent to contributors (183 responses, 44% response rate)
- 378 resources shared
- 334 new email subscribers (out of 580 visitors – 57% conversion)
- 246 emails to featured companies sent (64 responses, 26% response rate)
- $208.23 in “production costs”
- 200+ retweets and a social reach in the hundreds of thousands
- 156 borrowed copies (Borrows on Kindle earn about $2 each)
- $108.43 in affiliate commission (explanation below)
- 79 Fancy Hands requests (more on this below)
- 70 5-star reviews
- 3 guest post opportunities, including one on EntrepreneurOnFire.com
- 2 podcast guest appearances on shows much bigger than mine
- 2 free t-shirts, including this one from Buffer.
In this post I’ll share the step-by-step process and methodology I went through to create and market the book, including which tools I used most from it to get it done, what worked best, and what mistakes I made along the way.
(Including why I changed the title mid-launch, what I could have done better on social media, and how the first 17,000 readers got a hard-to-navigate version of the book.)
Ready? Let’s do this.
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