Michael Drew – Why Self-Published Authors Can't Hit Major Bestseller Lists (And What to Do Instead)

Michael Drew is the founder of PromoteABook.com (established 25 years ago) and BookRetreat.com, with a track record of helping 132 consecutive books hit major bestseller lists including The New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and Success Magazine. Starting his career at age 18 as the #3 salesperson at Executive Excellence (a division of Covey Leadership Center), Michael impressed industry leaders and landed at Bard Press by age 19, where he was tasked with understanding how bestseller lists actually work. His first campaign launched "Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads" by Roy H. Williams to #3 on The New York Times and #1 on Wall Street Journal. Today, 85% of his work focuses on building thought leadership platforms, with 110 clients permanently increasing their gross revenue by $1 million+ per year, 10 clients increasing revenue by $50 million+ per year, and 7 clients increasing revenue by $100 million+ per year through strategic book campaigns.

In this episode:

• Bestseller lists as sophisticated polls, not real sales rankings
• Only 7 of 132 bestselling clients made money from book sales
• 110 clients permanently increased revenue by $1M+ per year using their book strategically
• Brick-and-mortar stores represent 75% of book sales
• The three major lists: New York Times, USA Today, Success Magazine
• Self-publishers cannot hit major bestseller lists (distribution requirements)
• IngramSpark distribution won't work for bestseller campaigns
• Co-op fees: $1-5 per unit for retail shelf placement
• New York Times requirements: 20K print, 10K ebook, 10K through Amazon
• Online media: 350 blogs, 90 podcasts, 90 vlogs, 50K+ social engagement per platform
• Traditional media: 100 TV markets, 100 radio markets, 100 print markets
• Amazon bestseller lists have no real value
• The uncovering: two-day meeting defining outcome, measurement, strategy, tactics
• Book Retreat in Guatemala: write your book in 30 days using 64 blog posts method
• Content repurposing system: blog posts become videos, podcasts, social media, and book

Resources mentioned:

• Promote A Book: https://promoteabook.com/
• Book Retreat in Guatemala: https://bookretreat.com/
• "Secrets of the Millionaire Mind" by T. Harv Eker
• "Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads" by Roy H. Williams (Michael's first campaign)
• "Pendulum: How Past Generations Shape Our Present and Predict Our Future" (co-authored with Roy Williams)
• "Nuts: Southwest Airlines Crazy Recipe for Success" published by Bard Press
• KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing)
• IngramSpark

Connect with Michael Drew:

• Email: michael@promotabook.com

Connect with Teddy Smith:

• @teddyagsmith
• Website: https://publishingperformance.com/?ref=ywm3mtc
• Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/publishingperformance/
• Pinterest - https://nz.pinterest.com/publishingperformance/
• Instagram - https://instagram.com/publishingperformanceinsta
• Youtube -https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHV6ltaUB4SULkU6JEMhFSw
• Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/company/publishing-performance/

Transcript

Teddy Smith (00:00.354)
Hi everyone and welcome to the Publishing Informant Show. Today I'm really happy to be joined by Michael Drew, who is the founder of Promoter Book and Book Retreats. Sorry, start again. Hang on, I got that wrong. Promoter Book Joke, sorry. Hi everyone and welcome to the Publishing Informant Show. I'm really happy today to be joined by Michael Drew.

Michael Drew (00:19.87)
You

Teddy Smith (00:21.55)
This is why we record it. Hi everyone and welcome to Publishing Informant Show. Today I'm really happy to be joined by Michael Drew, who is the founder of Proostabook.com and also BookRetreat.com. So thanks for joining the show, Michael.

Michael Drew (00:22.332)
Nasty Drew where I drew a picture.

Michael Drew (00:36.286)
Yep, Promotabook.com is something that I've had for about 25 years, so it's pretty great. And thank you for having me on. I'm grateful to be here.

Teddy Smith (00:45.006)
Yeah, no problem. mean, so you've actually helped over 100 books and 100 authors onto the best sellers list. What actually got you into doing that in the first place?

Michael Drew (00:54.918)
You know what, it's a really good question. life, things are usually about a little bit of luck, a little bit of timing, and a bit of work, right? I started at a company called Executive Excellence selling a magazine back 28 years ago. And that magazine was a division of the Covey Leadership Center before it merged with Franklin and became Franklin Covey.

And I became the number three sales person in that organization in three months at the ripe old age of 18. And that's only significant because the then one, two, four and five salespeople had all been there for five plus years. And we're just really renewing existing subscriptions that they'd already sold. So I came in and was bringing in new revenue and impressing some folks. then the merger between Franklin and Covey occurred and it became Franklin Covey.

And at the time, the executive editor of the magazine, Ken Shelton, was gifted the magazine by Stephen R. Covey for ghostwriting and editing seven habits of highly effective people. And so Ken came to me and he said, hey, Mike, we publish all of these great authors in our magazine. Why don't we start publishing their books? And as a young, naive 18-year-old, I'm like, yeah, let's do that. And so I set out to figure out how the publishing industry works. And so I...

Teddy Smith (02:13.122)
Ha

Michael Drew (02:17.318)
figured out client acquisition and retail distribution and book marketing and PR. And I impressed some fairly important people in the industry. because of that, I actually got a job offer out of a company from Austin, Texas called Bard Press, B-A-R-D Press. And they had just come off of a huge success from a book titled Nuts, Southwest Airlines Crazy Recipe for Success. Huge, huge millennium seller. And Ray Bard, the owner of Bard Press,

He wanted to expand the company and bring in more books like that. so Ray interviewed me at the rightful age of 19, hired me. And the first thing on the job, asked, Roy told me, he said, Michael, we publish business authors. What our authors want more than anything else in the world is to be a New York Times bestseller. What I want you to do is figure out how the New York Times bestseller works. And as a naive 19 year old, I'm like, sure.

What I did is I literally called John Wright at the New York Times, the guy who compiles the Washington and all best sellers list and said, Hey, I'm new at bar press. And, my, my boss asked me to give you a call because we'd like to have a better understanding of what it would take to be able to make your list. So we can work with, with clients to do that. And John, he laughed and said, Hey kid, I appreciate your call and not gonna tell you, but keep calling back. I called Jackie blaze over at USA today. Same, same thing called.

Bob Hughes over at Wall Street Journal, same thing. And so what I did is I just started building relationships with those folks and trying to figure out and gauge information and data. And the first book I worked on for Ray Bard was by a gentleman by the name of Roy H. Williams. Roy H. Williams is known as the Wizard of Ads. He owns the fourth largest ad agency in North America for buying radio advertisements and he is a living legend.

in marketing and advertising. And so when I worked with Roy, we devised a strategy whereby we mailed an advance copy of the book, Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads, to the general manager of every radio station in North America in advance of its release. Over 4,000 books were sent out. And we sent out an offer. This is back in 99, so it's been a number of years. But what we did is...

Michael Drew (04:43.774)
We had an offer that said if the radio station bought 20 copies of the book and ran 200 radio ads promoting the book during the during the month the book was launched we would give the radio station a 12 tape training library from Roy on VHS mind you um, that's what we had back in in 99 um that would teach the the sales reps on how to use the book to go acquire more clients because what the book advocated was that

Teddy Smith (05:01.635)
Thank

Michael Drew (05:13.234)
for a smaller medium sized retail business that radio is the best form of advertising available. And so the training then would give the sales reps the ammunition plus they would give the book to potential clients and the book would sell them on the value of radio. And so we did that and we pre-sold a bunch of books, got a bunch of ads ran and we launched the book to number three on the New York Times and number one on the Wall Street Journal.

bestsellers list and that was the first of now 132 consecutive success Washington US today New York Times best-selling books that I've worked on so I'm reminded with your question Roy Williams, who's my friend and mentor first best-selling author He said to me we were work actually we co-authored a book together as well pendulum how past generations shape our president predict our future

But he said to me a number of years ago, probably like 20 years ago now, we were in New York City in May, late May, after Book Expo America. And we were walking the streets of New York and he said to me, Michael, the winners and losers in life are determined when the teams are picked. There are two teams that are essential for your success. The first are those who select to be, select you to be on their team. The second are those you select to be on your team.

And I would say that I have been fortunate and blessed to have been picked by some of the most brilliant men and women in the world to be on their team, to be able to learn from them. And conversely, I'm grateful for the team that I've been able to surround myself with as well.

Teddy Smith (07:00.044)
Yeah, that's amazing. It sounds like you've had so many inputs and different things you've experimented to try and understand exactly how that bestseller thing works. I mean, was there anything that you learned really early on that most authors maybe don't realize about becoming a bestseller?

Michael Drew (07:15.474)
Well, so when we think about bestseller, what we think about is seeing something that's ranked on a list, right? So the first thing that you have to know is that none of the bestseller lists are real bestsellers lists. They don't count real sales in real time. They're just not real. They're more like sophisticated polls. Every retailer has their own standards and criteria for how they will

sales and in turn each Bestseller list has their own algorithm for how they wait and count sales Not every book that is sold is reported not every book that is reported is counted Not every book that is counted is counted equally. There's and it varies from one bestseller list to the next so there's different standards that have to be met so on one hand you have the

kind of the rule set, the science of what it takes. And on the other hand, you have, how do you do that? How do you make that happen? And so that's kind of the art side. And what that means then is that I have to work with the author to figure out how to leverage their, what we call marketing platform, in a way that grows their business, but then also hits those standards at the same time. And I think that's one of the important things to note.

In today's marketplace, publishers don't promote books. It's the author's responsibility solely to promote their books. At best, if you work with the publisher properly, they will give you access to the retail market distribution of your book. But that's at very best. You know, it used to be from 1880 to 1980 that the average number of books published every year was around 40,000 units or new titles.

Of the average retail bookstore, then and now carries on average about 100,000 unique titles in a store. Sometimes more, sometimes less, on average about 100,000. Of those 100,000 titles, between 70 to 80 % are what we call backlist titles, which are your perennials, your classics, and last year's best sellers. What that means is they have room, these stores for...

Michael Drew (09:36.222)
new titles at a 20 to 30 percent ratio or 20 to 30,000 per store. So what that means is that it's a limited number of books. I mentioned that there's 40,000 books published between 1888 to 1980 per year. Last year, not including self-published books, there were 1,076,000 books published in the United States alone.

Teddy Smith (09:59.854)
I bet it's five times that self-published as well.

Michael Drew (10:04.654)
Right. so now then only 20 or 30,000 of those folks make it onto the retail books or shelves. And while it's true, Amazon as a marketplace certainly is a place to sell a book. You can sell a book online. What folks don't understand is that while Amazon is the biggest retailer, they represented about 16.6 % as the biggest retailer of book sales last year.

So at 16.6%, that's big, the number two retailer, Barnes & Noble, was at about 11.1%. You're talking about 30 % difference between Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Well, Amazon and BarnesNobel.com and BooksOfMillion.com and all of the online retailers, including ebook sales, represent just less than 25 % of all books sold. What that means is then,

that a little more than 75 % of all books are still sold through brick and mortar stores. So while an individual store doesn't sell as many as Amazon, the collective individual stores will outsell Amazon as an individual retailer. And so if you want commercial success for your book, you have to be at that retail level. Your book has to be available on the shelves.

Otherwise you limit, you know, if you're only on Amazon as an example or all on retailers and now the Brigham Ward stores you're cutting off 75 % of the potential buying opportunities for your book and so If only 20 to 30,000 books make it onto a retail bookstore shelf every year How do you differentiate yourself as an author? from To be one of those 20 to 30,000 books

versus the other million fifty six thousand books that don't make it on the shelf. And the answer is, bit and through marketing, you can imagine the buyer of Barnes & When I say buyer, mean the person who makes the decision on how many copies of your book they're going to carry at their store. Well, they don't have the time to read a million seventy six thousand books. They have the time to read none.

Michael Drew (12:21.35)
So what do they look at? They have a standard that they apply against a book and the book gets a grade of A, B, C, D or F. And then the marketing of a book can increase the grade by one grade level, F to D, D to C, C to B, B to A. And so for some authors or authors that have had minimal success in the past, their objective is to go in with their publisher

to maximize the retail shelf space of the book. So then what this goes back to you with your original question, what don't authors know what do they need to do? If you're in the world of nonfiction, you need to have, you either be independently wealthy where you can spend money, you don't care about ROI, because there's no money in books. We can go there if you want, but there's literally, from a revenue standpoint, there's no money in books.

as a nonfiction author, then you have to be able to determine how are you going to leverage the book to be able to monetize the expense. The book shouldn't be written as a marketing tool, it's going to be promoted as though it were a marketing tool for something larger, grander than the words in text itself. And so you have to be able to go in knowing what is the objective that you're trying to, this is a,

at a general businessism, but when you do anything in life, you have a plan. You start out with defining the outcome. What is the outcome? Then how do we measure that we've accomplished that outcome? And then the strategy has to be developed because the strategy then dictates all of the tactics. And the tactics are the individual things. Well, writing a book is not an outcome. It's not a measurement of an outcome. It's not even a strategy.

It's a tactic, right? And so what you have to recognize is if you want your voice to be heard, if you want your book to get into people's hands, that you have to be able to be able to put a lot of time, effort, energy, and money behind the promotion of the book. And you have to be able to do so in a way that is going to generate enough revenue to cover that expense.

Michael Drew (14:46.96)
in ways that don't come directly from the book itself. I have 132 New York Times bestselling authors. Seven of them made more money from the sale of their book than they spend on marketing. And all of them sold over a million copies to get to that point. There's just not enough money in there. So what I can say though is that 110 of my clients permanently

Teddy Smith (14:50.766)
Yeah.

Michael Drew (15:14.398)
using the book permanently increase their gross revenue by a billion dollars or more per year. I have 10 clients that permanently increase their gross revenue by $50 million or more per year. And I have seven that permanently increase their gross revenue by a hundred million dollars or more per year from the successful use of the book. So those clients made their money from what the book did for their business, not from the book as a commodity.

Teddy Smith (15:40.876)
Right. So is there any value in being on the best of the lists anymore?

Michael Drew (15:45.498)
Absolutely. So what we have to remember is that, well, we'll be asking you this. Who is a bestseller to list for?

Teddy Smith (15:57.166)
Well, I guess it's like, you know, so you can show people that your book is selling well.

Michael Drew (16:01.992)
But who is it for? Is the list right? It's not for the author. A bestseller list is not, does not exist for you, the author or for the publisher. The bestseller list exists for the reader of the publication. Right. And it might be used by some retailers to help determine if they want to increase stock of a book, maybe, but the list does not exist for the author. Now,

Teddy Smith (16:04.376)
For readers? Yeah.

Michael Drew (16:31.528)
Does that mean that the author doesn't benefit from it? Of course not. Of course they do. the adjustment that I would make is that the purpose of a bestseller list should be for the publication to help their readers aggregate and eliminate books that they could read for books that are selling well as an illustration of books that they should read. Right? And so...

the the author's benefit from it, but if you go in thinking about it from exclusively the author's perspective, you're missing the point of what it is. So if to the reader, if the bestseller list makes a difference, then of course it still has value because the reader assigns the value to that list. It's up at it. And what it does is it separates you if you are a bestseller from other people.

who are writing about the same subject matter. makes it, says more people are interested in buying this book over other books. And so definitionally then, if you have a competitor in the same space and you're a bestselling author and they're not, that communicates to your collective audience that you are considered a bigger expert in that space than they are, which gives you more credibility. So yeah.

It's very obvious for people who are speakers, people who make money speaking, right? Because their speaking fees increase. Their conversion rate to booking increases when they become a bestseller because they're now in a very elite group. Same thing with those who do consulting or coaching, right? Their fees increase, their demand increases, their efficacy towards converting clients increases, right? All of those things increase.

Now, what I will say is that the biggest benefit to an author and being a bestseller is in the activity it takes to become a bestseller. Right? If the reason that all of my clients businesses have grown as much as they have is based upon the effort it took to meet the standards to become a bestseller. The bestseller has intrinsic value, but

Teddy Smith (18:40.236)
Yep.

Michael Drew (18:55.44)
It was in that motion and activity that actually grew their company with the byproduct being the bestseller status itself, if that makes sense.

Teddy Smith (19:06.05)
Yeah, definitely. So, I mean, if a lot of people were thinking about writing these books in order to become bestsellers, in order to grow the position of their business or to grow their own reputation, does that idea of wanting to become a bestseller affect the type of book you're going to write? You know, things like your camp, your category strategy, your launch strategy, that sort of thing.

Michael Drew (19:25.714)
Well, so this is, unless you're writing it for cathartic experiences, unless you're Emily Dickinson and you don't care if anybody reads it, what in nonfiction, I'll go back to what I said before, what's your outcome? Define the outcome first before worrying about what book it is. Define the measurement, then define the strategy and let the strategy dictate what you're writing. Because if you write a book that doesn't help the strategy and doesn't help the outcome,

then why are you doing it? Why would you put your time and resources and money into something that isn't accomplishing the outcome that you set out to accomplish? And so, yeah, absolutely. Look, a bestseller campaign is a strategy. It takes all of these tactical elements and puts it together. But if you're doing it right, that strategy is aimed at that outcome, right? That's why my clients have all grown in the way that they did, because we define the outcome first.

and the measurement of that, and then the strategy, and then all the tactics, right? Instead of what most people do is they start off at that tactical level and then try to make it fit towards their outcome. Now you should be doing it in the inverse.

Teddy Smith (20:41.134)
Yeah. So if you've got a strategy to become bestseller because you want to grow a speaking business or something like that, what are the steps that people usually take in order to get their books to that level?

Michael Drew (20:53.31)
So there are today three major bestseller lists that matter. New York Times, USA Today, and Success. Washington Journal used to have a list. They've gone away. Businessweek used to have a list. They've gone away. Those are the three major lists in the market today. Each of them have a different set of standards to qualify.

Again, they're all kind of like sophisticated polls, but they're different. The success magazine's bestseller list is based on the number of reporting channels and sales. They are a business list. They have actually seven lists that are based on business. So they note that the books that make their list have corporations and associations buying books in bulk often, and they allow those sales to count.

The other two lists, USA Today and New York Times do not because they have broader lists. So if you're a business and personal development author, the simpler list to make is on the success front. And so what you look at is how do we leverage your existing relationships to be able to generate enough sales to make the success list by putting enough sales, both or individual through enough reporting channels. USA Today.

Is similar to success except that they're not business. They're a top 150 list They're the top 150 and so you're competing competing with fiction authors. You're competing against children's books You're competing against every book. It's just the top 150 and so the barrier to entry is is higher because You're not dealing with just books in your category

And so the volume is higher. The other is they do have reporting channel requirements like success, except that they require that Amazon be one of the reporting channels. And Amazon has a different set of standards than say, books a million or Barnes Noble for reporting. Amazon reports based on the number of addresses shipped to, not the number of sales.

Michael Drew (23:13.374)
So the example I would give is if you had a book and I bought 50 copies for my family for Christmas and I had it sent to my house, Amazon will report that as one. If instead I bought 50 copies and sent it out to 50 individual addresses to the people that I'm gifting the book to, Amazon would count that as 50. And so even though it's the same person buying it, it's actually based on the number of addresses shipped to you. And so...

The main difference with USA Today is that they require Amazon, whereas Success does not. And so you have to have a large enough audience to be able to generate about a third of your sales through Amazon in order to qualify. Success doesn't take bulk orders, they do, but if you don't have the individual orders from Amazon, they will exclude you from the list.

And so, and again, like I said, it's harder to make because it's not a category-based list, it's a total list. Now we move over to the New York Times. Now, they are the most convoluted of all of the list because they try to justify the inclusion and exclusion of titles from their list. And what's important to note is if you go to,

get a copy of the New York Times or go online and look at their criteria, the New York Times literally states that they're an editorial list. And so what that means is that they have the editorial discretion to include or exclude books as they like. Now, one of the things that happened in the 2000 teens was that there were a number of conservative politicians and

Pundits that were being kept off of the New York Times list and there was a big hollow balloon about that within the conservative media ranks and they were giving the New York Times a pretty Bad time about it. So what the New York Times did is they instituted a system where if you hit those standards They won't exclude you from the list and so that doesn't mean that you'll get your position that you belong on the list, but they want to exclude you there was a

Michael Drew (25:35.326)
a book a couple of years ago by a big conservative pundit that should have hit number one and sold 1.2 million copies in a week more than all of the other books on all of the sub New York Times categories combined. And they put it at number 10 because they couldn't, but they didn't exclude it. In the past, they would have excluded that title. But what they're looking at is that in their estimation that the sales are valid. And what they say about

politicians and pundits is that they're doing things that are untowdry and that don't represent actual sales. And so that's why they want to exclude them beyond the difference in politics of publication versus those authors. But what they're looking at now is, and this goes back to the beginning of our conversation, what they're looking at is, number one, distribution. How many books do you have on the shelf?

versus the number of sales being reported, right? Because if you have too large of a percentage of the sales of books being reported against books on the shelf, that's not right. That's not how like how does that happen? Right? And so they want to balance it out. So going back to being a bestseller, distribution is a requirement that you have to have in order to even qualify to begin with. The next is sales and

Teddy Smith (26:47.726)
Yeah.

Michael Drew (27:02.43)
They have a interesting weighted system for those sales that do come in. They have a minimal requirement for online sale, retailer reporting channels of brick and mortar stores, a minimum number of independent stores, which they rotate from week to week, so it's never the same independence. And that's just from, if you don't have enough of those stores.

Then no matter what the volume is that they'll exclude you. as an example, if you had a million sales through Amazon, they're going to exclude you from the list. Amazon's absolutely a retailer, but if the majority of your sales came through Amazon, that's not normal, right? Normally they're at that 16.6 % of total volume. And so you've got all of those reporting channels or enough of the reporting channels with the right balance based on

Teddy Smith (27:36.043)
Now. you

Michael Drew (27:58.528)
against what they normally see.

Teddy Smith (28:01.836)
That's really interesting that they've got all those different types of ways of reporting on the different bestseller lists. Is there any value in appearing on the Amazon bestseller list for particular categories?

Michael Drew (28:12.35)
Not really. I have a hard time when people are promoting Amazon bestsellers. Why aren't we promoting Barnes & bestsellers or Books of Billion bestsellers or they're just a retailer. And in fact, I'll tell you a quick story. Your audience can go onto YouTube and look this up, but look up gaming the Amazon bestseller list. There's a guy a few years ago who

Teddy Smith (28:24.11)
Yeah, I'm just done.

Michael Drew (28:40.688)
went into KDP, Kendall Direct Publishing, and set up a book that he put into KDP. And what he did is he had a book that was 200 pages of spaces. So it had a character called a space all the way through the entire book so that the electronic system in KDP saw a character. It doesn't define what the character is, just that it was a character.

And so he uploaded it within 24 hours. The book was being sold online. He categorized it in KDP in obscure categories. He asked his mom, his dad and his siblings to go buy a copy. They went and bought a copy, hit number one on those obscure lists. Now he was the number one Amazon bestseller with like five sales with a book that said absolutely nothing. Right. So, I mean, that's, that's, that's a little extreme, but

Teddy Smith (29:22.382)
Yeah. Okay.

Michael Drew (29:34.726)
That literally is the illustration of the value of an Amazon bestseller. Now, let's just say that there is a value in that, but I don't promote it. My clients have hit number one on thousands, probably tens of thousands of Amazon lists. I don't promote that because it doesn't have any long-term intrinsic value. But if you're on an Amazon list now, consumers...

Teddy Smith (29:53.889)
Yeah. .

Michael Drew (29:59.878)
might care about you being on that list right now. Why? Because if you're on an Amazon list, you're a bestseller on a list, you're probably getting a discount on the book. So what they really care about is the status, but it's that they can buy the book for less. And so that's the, a consumer standpoint, again, lists are about the audience, not about the author, but about the audience. Why do they care about Amazon or any other retailer? Because it means that they're going to get the book at a discounted.

That's why they care and the only time they've grabbed on the study several times and Consumers just don't care so It's not that there's not value with Amazon but to me it's one of many reporting channels that are part of the overarching system so then you go from The print orders going through all those retailers making its balance right to ebooks now it used to be that Amazon Had an ebook list. They no longer have an ebook list

But they use ebooks as a standard to qualify. What we know directionally is that the top 250 books sold each week in print sell about the same at about a 50 % ratio. So if you sell 100 books in print, you're going to sell at least 50 copies in ebook. And usually, you're not selling more ebooks than you are print books. That's not normal. And so while there's no...

ebook list, the New York Times does use it as a standard. So if you don't have enough ebook sales, then they'll exclude you from the list. So you have to have a portion of your campaign going towards generating about 50 % sales against your print sales in ebook format. Now, one thing really quick on the print sales, half of those sales for the New York Times have to go through Amazon.

And the sales volume that we're aiming for for a full campaign is 20,000 sales. And so that means we need about 10,000 sales for Amazon. That means individual names and addresses where the books are being shipped to. The other 10,000 can either be individual sales or can be bought. There are retailers like Barnes & and Books A Million that simply report sales volume. don't report like Amazon does based on addresses shipped to.

Michael Drew (32:24.902)
So for some of my clients where they're doing business books, personal development books, books that lend themselves to getting corporate orders, they will make sure that we hit those 10,000 book orders through retailers like Barnes & Books a million that will report the sales. But half of them, a minimum of half of them,

need to be individual names and addresses for Amazon. Now all of them could be individual. There's not a problem with that. Typically speaking though, for most of our clients, we aim to get those 10,000 more. So then you've got around, if we're aiming for 20,000 print sales, we're aiming for 10,000 ebook sales. And then we move over into the media portion of the standards where the New York Times is trying to justify, validate why they're seeing the sales.

And so what they're looking for in the fourth standard is what we call online social proof. They're looking for the amount of online discussion about your book. So they're looking for like 350 blogs talking about your book, 90 podcasts and interviews, 90 vlog interviews, 50,000 consumer engagement on Facebook X and LinkedIn each, at 50,000 engagement between Pinterest and Instagram, right? That, then...

indicates to the New York Times, oh, this is how we're generating the 10,000 sales that are going through Amazon, because look at all of that movement and motion and discussion going on around the book. And the final standard that is legacy or traditional media, and this is how, coupled with the online media, but this is how the New York Times validates and believes why books are selling off of the brick and mortar shelves. And so what they're looking for, and all of this, by the way,

has to be in the United States. The lists are US based, and so we're talking about media and sales in the US. So that in terms of traditional media, they're looking at the author being in 100 markets in TV, 100 markets in radio, and 100 markets in print, right? So if you're wanting to become a New York Times bestseller, you need to be able to build your platform

Teddy Smith (34:21.542)
Yeah.

Michael Drew (34:48.262)
large enough to be able to hit three or four or five of those standards based on the platform that you've built. So those are the standards that you would want to try to build towards for a platform summit. Now again, with the success of the USA Today list, it's much easier. It's sales volume only.

Teddy Smith (35:04.522)
Okay.

Michael Drew (35:16.988)
with business and personal development books, success is necessarily the easiest list to make.

Teddy Smith (35:25.262)
So it sounds like that launch process and making sure you follow the right steps is really important because all of the lists have these different requirements. So it's all about following that kind of step-by-step process. What does that step-by-step process look like for launching your book? Especially with the process that you follow with your business.

Michael Drew (35:38.247)
What so?

So the first thing, look, it's a big investment on any of the campaigns. So this is why the first thing is to define why are you doing this?

Teddy Smith (35:49.134)
When you say campaigns, you mean like advertising or?

Michael Drew (35:52.286)
campaign meeting if you want to be a best seller, you ask for the step-by-step. so before I even talk about the book, again, outcome, measurement, strategy, tactic. You have to start there because unless you're...

Teddy Smith (35:59.278)
When you said the word campaign, I you didn't mean advertising campaign. You meant something different. The whole best seller campaign, right? Yeah.

Michael Drew (36:11.006)
the best seller campaign.

Yeah, we call it a campaign, right? An advertising campaign typically is tactical, meaning you're running an ad somewhere or series of ads. That's part of a tactic and not strategy. So for me, when I say campaign, I'm talking about the strategy, right? This is all of the tactics fall underneath that in meeting the strategic objectives, which then meet the overall objectives.

Teddy Smith (36:24.195)
Yeah.

Teddy Smith (36:28.75)
Yeah.

Teddy Smith (36:42.542)
I just want to clarify that because I talk about advertising campaigns quite a on this podcast. yeah, anyway, carry on.

Michael Drew (36:48.766)
Yeah, totally. So, so, um, we, we define that because if your outcome isn't big enough, you're not going to spend the time, effort, money, and resources to run a bestseller campaign of any kind. Right. And so being able to define that outcome will help you feather realistically what you can and cannot expect from your book.

If you can't run a bestseller campaign, that's okay. That doesn't mean that the book is going to be a failure. It simply means that that outcome is not within your reach. And so you have to redefine what you're out, what, what you can reasonably accomplish and let the strategy dictate that. If you decide that you're able and willing to invest the resources into a bestseller campaign of any size, then we look at.

What is the measurement metric for the business of the book being a bestseller? If the book's a bestseller, how are we measuring that that outcome is going to impact the outcome for the business? That then dictates all the rules that go into the strategy that's being developed. That then dictates what are the tactics that have to be done.

in order to be able to accomplish that strategic outcome. So from there, then, once you've got the strategy in place and you know what the tactics are and you're committed to doing that, once that's all in place, the next thing to do is to go and determine what publishing model is ideal for you. And that is predicated upon whether it's a bestseller or not, and then what kind of bestseller. So if you...

want to be a bestseller, you can't self-publish. You have to have either what's called a hybrid publisher or a traditional publisher. Why? Because how are you self-publishing? How are you getting access to the market? The books to be bestseller have to be sold through retailers, and if you're self-publishing, you're not going to get that access to the market. If you do KDP, you've got access to a retailer. Well, all of the bestseller lists require that you go through multiple different retailers

Teddy Smith (38:51.234)
What is that?

Michael Drew (39:13.982)
with your sales in order to qualify. and necessarily I work with publishers who are distributed through IngramSpark to get off of IngramSpark into traditional distribution because the retailers, Amazon, Barnes & Books of Million, they don't like reporting sales from publishers who are distributed through IngramSpark. IngramSpark is a division of a wholesaler and it was set up just for people to be able to go in and do their own thing.

If they see a bunch of sales coming from a book distributed by IngramSpark, that's not believable to the retailers. They think something's up and they don't report them. So you have to work with a hybrid publisher with distribution somewhere other than IngramSpark or bigger to be able to qualify for the bestseller list. But if you don't care about the book being bestseller, if that doesn't meet the outcome,

then there's no problem doing an Enorm Spark or a KDP because that need for distribution no longer exists. So you have to define your publishing model first. If you decide you want to be a bestseller, then yeah, you have to go with either a hybrid publisher or a traditional publisher because they have access to the market, at least good hybrid publishers do. Basically, the only thing a publisher can do is give you access to the market.

Teddy Smith (40:25.934)
Yeah.

Michael Drew (40:42.046)
For your audience that are unaware, traditional publishers, they acquire and own your book. You get paid what's called a royalty when books are sold. And it's usually in the 15 to 20 % of net range, usually $2 to $3 on most titles today. They own it, but you're still required to do the marketing and the PR.

What they do is they use and leverage their sales team to go, taking your marketing plan as the author, to go to the retailers, make the sales presentation, and get the retailers to carry the book. And so they own it. And technically speaking, they're picking up the printing cost and the distribution cost. And I do that in air quotes because one of the things to note in distribution is that

All front-list titles that are on the shelf are paid for by the publisher. It's called co-op. In any other retail industry, it's merchandising. Like if you go to a grocery store and you find your Campbell Soup at hip level, it's because Campbell Soup paid to have it at that level because it has the higher probability of being purchased than other shelves at the store. Book publishing works in the same way.

but they call it co-op and so the publisher has to pay for that and it basically works this way. It's a fee that's per unit. So if it's spine out, so you just see the spine, it's a dollar per unit. If it's face out in category, it's $2 per unit. If it's at the end cap, at the end of the aisle, it's $3 per unit. If it's on a table at the front of the store, it's $4 per unit. If it's a point of purchase or in a special display, it's $5 per unit.

What I just described is true for normal stores. If you go into airports and see airport distribution, those numbers all double. Right? So every book that's on the shelf is paid for. The other thing to note is that books that don't sell are 100 % returnable by the retailer to the publisher. And so what you end up with with a traditional publisher is that they follow a risk mitigation model. They

Michael Drew (43:09.342)
don't want to put too many books on the shelves because it's going to cost them money on co-op, and they're going to have to print a bunch of extra books that could be returned. So they play a risk mitigation model to wait and see how well the book sells before pushing harder. And that's a difficult position for someone who's trying to be a bestseller, especially New York Times bestseller, where the amount of books on retail shelves has a direct

Teddy Smith (43:37.573)
you you

Michael Drew (43:38.554)
impact on whether you qualify or not. And so I only go, if I have a choice with a client, if I'm, I'm agenting the book, I only take clients to traditional publishers if they can't afford to do the publishing cost and the marketing cost. Cause the authors always have the marketing cost no matter what. But if they can afford to also be the publisher under a hybrid model,

then we get more distribution. And when I go and negotiate with a publisher when running a New York Times campaign, I'm not negotiating for advance. And advance is an advance against sales. It's money that they're to pay you based on how many books they think you're going to sell. And as of December of 2016, publishers started requiring authors to pay back their advance if they don't earn it out.

Teddy Smith (44:33.198)
Yeah.

Michael Drew (44:35.678)
So that means if you don't sell enough books, you may be paying your publisher back for that, against that inventory. And so it's not really, you're not really being paid for it. You're being paid money that you would have been paid eventually at some point in the future. And so what I do when I run your Times campaign is I don't negotiate for big advances. I go in and negotiate for co-op budget and for guaranteed distribution support, because that does not go against

Teddy Smith (45:01.23)
you

Michael Drew (45:05.106)
the amount of money that the author makes. does not go against royalties. The author is going to make what they're going to make. It becomes a cash flow issue. But the number one thing a publisher can do is put books on shelves and maximize distribution. So this is also why when we go in and run your Times campaign, we guarantee hitting all of those standards to the publisher except for the first, which we're engaging with them on because

If we're guaranteeing 20,000 print sales, 10,000 ebook sales, all of the online media, all of the traditional media, now we're mitigating the publisher's risk. But even then we often have to offer to pay a third to half of the co-op expense to the publisher to be able to buy that shelf space. Because again, that eats into their profitability at a very high clip. Right, so.

Teddy Smith (45:51.406)
There's so many different aspects to getting onto these bestseller lists. If someone was really wanting to become that bestseller list, so to improve their business and do all of those things you've talked about before, what does it look like working with you? What does that process look like?

Michael Drew (46:12.52)
So when we run New York Times campaigns, the first thing we do is sit down and do what I call an uncovering. It's a two-day in-person meeting. And here's the reality. I don't call it a discovery because I'm not discovering anything new. What we do is we push away all of the garbage and dirt and weeds and everything to get to defining the outcome and then defining the measurement and then defining the strategy and then defining the tactics. Because at the end of the day,

Those are the things that matters. The book itself is the vehicle or tool that we're using to accomplish that outcome. And so we sit down and we figure all of those things out, including the tactics, and we evaluate what exists in the platform against the standards and what does not exist in the platform against those standards, determine what it's going to cost to pay to hit those things that are outside of the standard, and then we determine

And what that final plan is going to be. And then we go and execute, we go find the publisher. We don't have one. We start executing how we're going to meet all of those different, uh, New York time standards and doing so in a way that meets the ultimate outcome. So we always start there. And what I can tell you is that every campaign that I run is unique, even one coach to another, the audience that they built, how they've built it, the subject matter, their values, all of the, all of those things.

And oftentimes they'll have different forms of audience or traffic, meaning they'll have, some might have an email list, others might do have a webinar series, others might have a great podcast, other, there's just different forms of platform. And so how we leverage that platform varies from one, or audience, varies from one client to the next. But it starts with that uncovering to be able to define and figure out all of those things.

Teddy Smith (48:09.856)
And does it matter what sort of non-fiction book people are writing or do you have particular types of people you prefer to work with?

Michael Drew (48:15.454)
Well, so I gave you the standards, right? So really the question is, how many of those standards do you feel comfortable hitting, right? If you had all of them, then that's easy. The subject matter doesn't matter. The New York Times rules are what the New York Times rules are, what the New York Times rules are. That's not going to change. The question isn't the times. The question is the author's platform and what they're able to bring to the table.

Teddy Smith (48:26.286)
Yeah.

Michael Drew (48:43.644)
And so are you able to bring enough to the table to be able to swing that hammer and run that campaign? Or do you have enough plus money to make up for the things that you don't have in the platform to be able to do that? So for me, like my contract after the recovery is that the author's guaranteeing to hit all of those standards. What that means is if you don't have the platform to hit a standard, we're to go hire a third party vendor who's going to go hit those standards and that can get very expensive. And so it's really the commitment.

to hitting the standards that is necessary. The Uncovery helps to level set where we're at to see what's realistic and what's not, but to run the campaign, all of those standards have to be hit. Therefore, we have to have those things in place. And the way I charge is I charge an upfront fee that includes the Uncovery, but really covers the data entry costs for the Amazon orders, the 10,000 Amazon orders. And then...

because I got to enter those orders in. I make my money on bonuses on the back end. So I make 60,000 bonus when we make the New York Times and other lists on the back end. So I'm not going to work with a client that won't guarantee that they're going to hit those standards because if we go through all of that work, I only make my money on the back end when I deliver the success. So that is my requirement is that the basic standard is will you contractually obligate yourself to hit these standards or not?

Teddy Smith (50:11.219)
Yeah. Yeah. So it's for serious people, of course. Now, one of the other businesses you run is the book retreat. So when you're running the book retreat, is that to help people to meet these standards or is it to get this book out there? How does that work compared to...

Michael Drew (50:11.912)
But that's really at the end of the day what it is.

Michael Drew (50:26.718)
It's a writing retreat. So one of my clients, his name is T. Harvecker, and 20 years ago we worked on a book together titled Secrets of the Millionaire Mind. We launched it to number one on the New York Times. And actually we spent a couple of years pre-selling 120,000 copies of the book. And so a few years later, Harve I are friends, and a few years later he...

He and I were talking and he said to me, Hey, Mike, you do really great work with authors like myself, the big platforms that can, do this kind of work. And that's great and amazing. And it's making a difference. But he said, there's a lot of folks out there that have a story, have a voice and can make a difference in the world that simply can't work at this level to be able to work with you. And you're doing all of those folks of disservice by not finding a way to be able to work.

Teddy Smith (51:11.886)
Okay. Okay.

Michael Drew (51:25.146)
And so one of the things that at that point I'd been working into was not just running best seller campaigns, but moving into the broader construct of platform building. today about 85 % of what we do is build thought leadership platforms. That's really what the agency does. The book is the vehicle or tool again, to break through that proverbial glass ceiling and get to the next level. And so one of the things that was true then and is true now is that

In today's market, you need to be seen and heard all over the internet, all at the same time. So there's a need for quantity while keeping the content quality. And so I was working on trying to figure out how to create content in a way that allowed for mass efficiency and mass repurposing all at the same time. And so...

Teddy Smith (52:17.526)
you Okay.

Michael Drew (52:22.854)
I developed a book outlining process whereby at the end of the outlining process, you get to write your book by writing 64 blog posts based on the outline that we've created. And in fact, within those blog posts, we've chunked it down into small bite-sized pieces where there's four different parts, big ideas, story, nuts and bolts, and hope to make it really easy for those of us that are non-writers to be able to

Teddy Smith (52:43.69)
you

Michael Drew (52:50.704)
to write. And so we created that process. We've been doing that with our clients for a number of years. A few years ago, I decided to expand that and to be able to offer it as a retreat in Guatemala where the promise was or is if you come down for one month to this process at the end of the month, your book will be written. And our team, my team will edit the book, do internal design, do

cover design, and we've got a couple of publishers lined up to be able to publish the book. And so, yeah, the point of that retreat is to be able to expand my ability to support clients and potential clients who don't have the ability to run even the smallest success bestseller campaign and be able to help them get their voice out there. And the fun thing about it is when you go through the process,

Yeah, we have you write a 64 blog post. Well, you can turn that into 64 video scripts. And what we advocate for those folks that go to the retreat, and we also offer this as a service, is we'll take those 64 blog posts, convert them into 64 video scripts, throw the client into Studio. And within throwing them into Studio, we film 64 videos that we then strip out the audio and create 64 podcast segments with.

And then we create the 64 blog posts, and then we pull out two social media posts and a meme from that. And then we take the blog posts and edit that together into a book. And actually we take each chapter and turn them into reports or white papers. And in doing that, we're able to create multiple pieces of content that can be used in multiple different mediums all at the same time so that we can actually create that engagement with the client.

Teddy Smith (54:37.136)
I love that process because I often work with people who have already written a book and want to do the opposite. They want to kind of work out how to build out their website and their brand online. And I tell them to take the content of their book and break it down into blog posts because then you're repurposing the content from the book exactly the same way you're doing it. So it's really interesting that you see that you do it from that point.

well, it's been great chatting. I've loved hearing about all the different ways to reach on different bests lists and the trips and the retreats. If people want to get in contact, where's the best place to do that?

Michael Drew (55:14.056)
So if you're ready to run a bestseller campaign, Promotabook.com, P-R-O-M-O-T-E-A-B-O-O-K.com is the place to go. If you just want your voice to get out there, you're looking to write your book, BookRetreat.com, B-O-O-K-R-E-T-R-E-A-T.com, BookRetreat.com. And of course, folks are always welcome to email me at michael at PromoteABook.com.

and I'd be happy to help and support.

Teddy Smith (55:47.792)
Great. Well, thanks so much for coming on and speak again soon.

Michael Drew (55:51.634)
Perfect, thanks so much for following me.