This is the second post in the [How a first-time author sells 1,000 books] series. Having laid out the constraints on selling the book, I want to talk about what selling 1,000 books actually means.
Selling 1,000 books is actually simple
There’s a very simple way for an unknown, first-time author to sell out 1,000 copies.
Buy them yourself.
My book sells for about NTD 332 (NTD 420 at a 21% launch discount). The unit price is low, so I only need NTD 332,000 to buy all 1,000 copies on launch day and trigger a second printing.
Over ten thousand US dollars is no small sum. But if I really forced myself to do it, it doesn’t seem impossible.
Everyone’s happy. Mission complete.
—[How a first-time author sells 1,000 books] THE END—
But… would that mean anything?
Aside from spending NTD 300,000-plus and ending up with 1,000 books in my house and the title of “sold out the first run,” it wouldn’t mean much of anything.
My mom recently asked whether she and her friends should buy a few extra copies to support me.
My answer was: “Absolutely not.”
Of course I’m grateful that people want to support me. But if someone isn’t the audience for this book, has no interest in it at all, and buys several copies just because they know me, then I’d honestly rather they didn’t.
I’m not a big-name foreign author self-funding a run at the New York Times Best Seller list, and I’m not a Japanese or Korean idol whose fans buy multiple copies of the same album to show support.
Books are printed to be read.
So when I say I want to sell 1,000 books, what I actually want isn’t 1,000 sales. That would be much easier, but it would also be meaningless.
What I want is 1,000 readers.
What is a “seed reader”
In Write Useful Books, Rob Fitz mentions an idea I absolutely love: seed readers.
The idea is simple.
If a book is genuinely useful, readers recommend it. Find the first batch of people the book truly fits, and those people will promote it for you. It’s like planting seeds and waiting for them to sprout.
Rob Fitz argues that for an independent author’s book, 1,000 seed readers is already enough.
It’s a bit like Kevin Kelly’s “1,000 true fans,” but the bar for seed readers is much lower.
To live off 1,000 true fans, you need a subscription, and each fan might spend hundreds of dollars a year to support you.
Seed readers don’t have to give nearly that much. I just need to find 1,000 people willing to buy the book and give it a chance.
Ideally each of them is exactly the person I pictured while writing it: brave inside games, but full of things they want to do in life that they keep putting off. Afraid of failure. Held back by perfectionism, unable to start.
They finish the book and find it useful. Then one day, they see a friend with a similar problem and think, “Hey, I think you should read this book.”
That’s my ideal reader.
Of course, finding 1,000 readers doesn’t mean I’ve succeeded.
For example, my book might just not be as good as I imagine. Someone who buys it won’t necessarily read it, someone who reads it won’t necessarily finish it, someone who finishes it won’t necessarily like it, and even then they won’t necessarily recommend it.
If so, the seeds won’t sprout, and the book still fails.
But that’s exactly what I love about the idea of seed readers.
To find out whether my book is useful, all I need to do is get it into the hands of 1,000 of the right people, and see what happens.
Getting off the marketing hamster wheel
There’s another reason the idea of seed readers appeals to me this much.
I hate marketing.
The usual marketing advice tells you to keep getting exposure, keep posting, keep building a community, keep building in public.
I believe those methods work, and the internet is full of success stories.
But it’s a lot like a hamster wheel: as long as you keep running, the exposure keeps coming. The moment you stop, you can’t keep the traffic up.
If I had to run like this for the rest of my life, and I didn’t even enjoy it, that would be miserable.
I don’t want to spend my whole life selling books.
I don’t build products so I can then spend every day on social platforms telling people to come buy my product. I didn’t write a book so I could spend the next three years reminding everyone daily, “Hey, I published a book.”
What I long for is exactly what “1,000 seed readers” describes: work hard to find the first 1,000 people, and then I get to stop.
Watch it grow slowly while I go write the next book, build the next app, dig the next rabbit hole.
And if there’s a bit of passive income too, even better.
Write a book worth recommending
Of course, this whole idea rests on one big premise:
What you make has to be worth recommending in the first place.
This reminds me of my Japanese-learning app, MARU: Learn Japanese Kana.
Almost none of MARU’s users came from my “marketing.”
For a long stretch I did no marketing at all. Only in the last two years did I start running some Apple Search Ads and building my own blog.
Nearly all the users accumulated slowly through App Store search and word of mouth.
I don’t know how many of them heard about MARU from a friend. But at least when it comes to learning kana, for the past ten years I’ve believed I made the most usable, most generous app on iOS, no qualifier needed.
This is my favorite way for a product to grow.
Make something worth recommending, then find a way to get it into the hands of the first right people.
Throughout writing the book, every decision I made came down to three things: is it interesting, is it useful, and can people finish it.
The book is done. I can’t go back and turn it into a more recommendable book.
What I can do next is find my 1,000 seed readers, and see whether those seeds actually sprout.
That’s what this series is going to be about:
Finding those 1,000 people.
