Aug. 5, 2024
How did 4,000 Creators Become Best Selling Authors and Get Thousands of Book Sales?
After spending 6-12 months writing a book how do authors sell tens of thousands of copies and get on best seller lists? This episode promises to reveal the secrets behind Tyler Wagner’s phenomenal success in helping authors do that with his companies - Authors Unite and Partner Profits.
As a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, marketer, and entrepreneur, Tyler Wagner shares how he built his company by focusing on creating powerful referral relationships instead of pouring money into Facebook ads and SEO. Discover the importance of building a vast network of referral partners and how this innovative approach can transform your business.
We also dig deep into the strategies Tyler used to leverage bestseller status to cultivate a dedicated reader base and attract significant media attention. Learn about the realistic expectations of reader engagement and the critical role loyal fans play in word-of-mouth marketing. Tyler provides actionable tips on using bestseller accolades to land media appearances, aiming for that tipping point where your book sales soar organically.
Tyler's web site Authors Unite
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Chapters
00:00 - Scaling Your Business Through Referral Relationships
12:44 - Building a Successful Author Platform
Transcript
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Welcome to today's episode.
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Our guest today is Tyler Wagner.
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He is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author and a marketer and an entrepreneur.
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Welcome to the show.
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Thanks, man.
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Thanks for having me.
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So why don't we start out by you just sharing a minute or two with people about who you are and what you do?
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So I want the name's Tyler Wagner.
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I run, I'd say, two main things.
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I do, at least business wise.
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I run two companies One's called Authors Unite, the other is called Partner Profits.
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Authors Unite, we help people write, edit, publish and then market their books.
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And then Partner Profits we help companies scale by increasing their referral relationships.
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I'd say me, as, like a person, I live between Miami and Columbia, and right now I'm actually down in Medellin and Columbia right now, so that's where I'm doing this interview from.
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Very nice, very nice.
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We're ready to be inspired.
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So why don't you tell us a story about some of the best marketing you've done, the marketing you're the most proud of?
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Yeah.
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So I think first I'll just mention we've worked on over 4,000 books now with Authors Unite.
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So I think just making as many people bestselling authors on various lists Amazon, barnes, noble, new York Times, wall Street Journal and USA Today that has been so fulfilling and that business is awesome.
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But I think for your audience, what might be at least most beneficial as far as something that they can take with them and take action on and anybody listening, if you are interested bestseller lists, just reach out or whatever I'm happy to help if I can.
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But ultimately each list kind of functions in a different way and you just you need to get a lot of book sales to hit these lists and then there's some other criteria, but that can be for another episode or people can reach out.
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But to me, what I'm most proud of on the marketing that I've done is actually how I've scaled Authors Unite to be an eight-figure company and the way that I've done it is through it's basically just referral relationships.
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So my and this is a very shortened version of my story but when I was younger, I started the company Authors Unite when I was 19.
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So I'm 32 now, so it's 13 years and in the beginning, just as, like most people, I think, a lot of ups and downs and I tried so many different marketing methods Facebook ads, seo funnels, you name it Google ads, youtube ads.
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I tried all these things For me.
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I don't know why.
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Maybe I was doing it wrong or the vendors I was hiring were doing it wrong.
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Whatever, it was probably a combination of both.
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It just was not working Either way.
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At some point I want to say it was probably three years into the business it just hit me.
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I was like I have a couple referral partners and they are the majority of my revenue.
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I just noticed it.
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Like it wasn't something that I was like hyper aware of, but once I noticed it, then I realized I was like, oh my God, I don't need to be doing like Facebook ads, funnels, like all these very, I would say, difficult marketing activities.
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And again, they can.
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They work for people.
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I'm not talking bad about them, like they can totally work for people, but for me they weren't working.
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Essentially, for years I used to do a hundred calls a week and what I would do, and I still do it.
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But now I have a team of 20 people and they do most of the calls and I only do calls one day a week now, so thank God.
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But I put in the work.
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Literally for years I did a hundred calls a week, 20 a day, monday through Friday.
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And what these calls were reaching out to people that were in the same industry as me, so they had the same clientele and I would just reach out to them.
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And again, we still I still do this today and we do this for other companies, just at a way larger scale, and we simply reach out and we say, hey, name, I think there might be ways we can collaborate and that's all the message says.
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Right, we do it through LinkedIn and we do it through website contact us, like the forms on websites.
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And let me step back real quick, just to make sure I'm not losing anybody, so just to I'll use my own company as an example.
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So for authors, unite again.
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We do a book, ghostwriting, editing, publishing and then book marketing.
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So basically anything an author could want, we do so.
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For us, our best targets for partnerships or referral partnerships are other book publishers.
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Ghostwriters, editors, pr agencies are really good, and then we have a list of hundreds of other ones, but those are our top four.
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Example of them book publishers.
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We have literally reached out to every book publisher that is like English speaking, based in the world that we can that we could find, to book a call with and form a referral relationship with them.
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So we are partnered with like tens of thousands of book publishers alone.
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Right, and this is like any company can use this method to scale.
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And what I have discovered in my life thus far is most people, when you ask them about like referrals and stuff, they say, oh yeah, I got a couple of referral partners, they're great, and they refer me a few people a year.
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And my question is okay, that's great, but what have you had 10,000 referral partners?
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What have you had a hundred thousand?
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What if you had 10,000 referral partners?
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What if you had 100,000?
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Like, how much would your business grow?
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And that's what we do for companies now is we go into companies that's what Partner Profits is and we discover who could be their top partnership opportunities like other people or companies that work with the same type of clientele, sometimes competitors as well, and sometimes it's just complimentary services and essentially you just want to partner with as many of them as possible.
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And now we're in a position with Authors Unite where every week we get hundreds of referrals because we've put in the time to build those relationships.
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So I know that was a longer answer than you probably normally get on that one, but I just wanted to make sure it was completely understood.
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And any company can use this method.
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It's just referral scale your referrals and stop focusing so much on the clients or potential client and focus more on partnering with people, because then you have a system of one to many instead of one to one and it's a way better.
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It's just.
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It's better in every way, shape or form that you can look at it.
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So that would be my answer.
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I love it, I love it.
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That's great and power of referrals is strong and it seems like you've put a great process behind that.
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Is that sort of the secret to how you've been able to publish with authors 4,000 books?
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I haven't heard many people say they've helped authors publish that many books.
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Is that how you've gotten the scale on the Authors Unite is through referral searching.
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That's the exact math.
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That it just to be clear.
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So we haven't published 4,000 plus books, but we've worked on 4,000 plus books.
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That's like a combination of, I would actually say, most of our clients.
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It's only the marketing in the industry.
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That's our main differentiators.
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We're the best at marketing books.
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So a lot of publishers technically were like competitors on the publishing side.
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But most publishers in fact I can't really even think of a publisher that offers there's a few, but it's not at the scale that we do.
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But so let's just say 99.9% of publishers do not offer marketing for their authors.
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So even though we're competitors on the publishing side, we are not competitors on the book marketing side.
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So publishers refer to us just for that one aspect, and then the ghostwriting, publishing and editing.
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That's probably 25, 30% of our business.
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Yeah, that makes sense.
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I think a lot of publishers would outsource their marketing because they're not really great marketers.
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One of the things I wanted to ask you is yeah, I think it's really hard for authors to get a lot of people to buy their book.
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I've seen some stats that a huge percentage of people sell less than a thousand copies of their book after they spend six or 12 months writing it.
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So how do you get, how do you get people to buy books with marketing Like, what are the most successful things?
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you've helped authors do so the way and I actually I always tell potential clients this is I can actually guarantee any book like short-term success.
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But I can't.
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You can't guarantee any book long-term success because ultimately the market decides that right, like you need a good product or service to have long-term success for anything, right.
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But I can tell you how I do it, at least in the short term and in the long term.
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But again, that's dependent on if the product or service is good.
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In this essence we're talking about a book.
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How I've done it is this If you go to, I'll give you the origin story.
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If you go to Google, you can type in ebook promotion sites.
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There are thousands of these websites where they have email lists, or at least they say they do.
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Some of them, I think, they're scams and other of them are actually legit, but regardless of that, they are.
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Let's just say, for sake of explanation, they're all legitimate.
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They say they have a email list of readers, right, and these readers have opted into their email lists to be notified when books or eBooks are discounted.
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So what I did when I was younger is I would try, like I tried out, like as many as I could find.
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So at least hundreds, probably over a thousand, of these eBook promotion sites.
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So you like, pay them anywhere from somewhere as low as like 20 bucks, somewhere as high as a few thousand dollars, and you pay them a fee to promote your book to their list.
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And through trial and error, I found out that most of them do not work.
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So I wasted a bunch of money and they didn't work.
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And then for the few that did work and they would consistently work what ended up happening is I reached out to all of them separately and I was like hey, guys, you might be aware of each other, but you probably view each other as competitors.
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What I would invite you guys to do is all join me at Authors Unite and we become one big team.
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And now what I did is I essentially combined all of these I'll call them email list partners together and now we have a list of 5 million plus people combined that are people that have opted in to be notified when eBooks are discounted.
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So what happens is when we do a launch, we discount the eBook for one week, and normally 99 cents, but it doesn't have to be that low.
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It could be 299, 499, but 99 cents is just converts, the highest and ultimately, the goal for any author should just to be, just be to get it in as many hands as possible.
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Even if it's free, it doesn't matter, you just want people to read your book, that's the goal.
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So, regardless, we discount it, we email it doesn't matter, you just want people to read your book, that's the goal.
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So, regardless we discount it, we email it to all these people.
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Normally that results in 10 to 20,000 sales in the first week of release, and then that is like more than enough to hit most of all the major bestseller lists.
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And then, after you hit those bestseller lists and you have that strong reader base of, let's say, if 20,000 people buy the book, half of them actually read it, just realistically.
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So then you got 10,000 true readers and then 5,000 of them actually love it.
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So now you got 5,000 loyal fans that are like word of mouth talking about it.
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And then you move to phase two, which is basically leveraging the bestseller accolades for media attention.
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So once you're a bestselling author on all these mainstream outlets, it's a lot easier to get on podcasts, a lot easier to get featured in outlets, and you do that continuously.
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And then I guess I'll end it on saying the hope is that after maybe six to 12 months after that launch and the continued marketing efforts, you're at about 50 to a hundred thousand copies sold and then at that point I would call it as, like Malcolm Gladwell calls it like, the tipping point, where it's in enough hands that if it is something the market likes, it's going to take off or take on a life of its own by word of mouth, and then it can just spread from there.
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So that's awesome man, that's great.
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Thanks for sharing these inspiring stories.
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Really appreciate it.
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These inspiring stories, Really appreciate it, and I'm going to link to both of your websites in the in the show notes so people can easily get there and reach out if they'd like to learn more on either of these fronts.
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Sounds good, man, thank you.
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