200 Authors Gathered to Learn About How a Niche Book Became a Breakout Seller (Full Playbook)

Every few months, I get on a call with an author who says some version of the same thing: I finished the book. Now what?

I understand the instinct behind the question. You just spent a year, maybe two, doing the single hardest creative thing you’ve ever done. There is a reasonable expectation that the hard part is behind you, and the rest is a matter of the book existing in the world where people can find it.

But sadly, I have to tell these authors…

The rest is not that.

So instead of writing another article where I tell you the rest is not that, I hosted a LinkedIn live with someone who has lived every stage of it in the last eighteen months — and who did it in a category that (respectfully) has no business producing a breakout book.

Zach Lewis is a CIO and CISO, a board member, a St. Louis 40 Under 40, and the author of Locked Up, published by Wiley in January of this year. The book is about a ransomware attack in higher education. An actual ransomware incident, written for practitioners, in one of the narrowest professional niches you can pick.

To date, he has crossed 1,500 copies sold and expects to hit 2,000 by year’s end. He has done somewhere between twenty and thirty paid talks this year alone (he gets paid to do a dinner talk series!). He has been on most of his local news stations, in Fortune, Inc., on ABC News, and on more cybersecurity podcasts than either of us could count on the call.

He is also a former client and a current friend, which means he was willing to say the unflattering parts out loud. (He hates writing. We’ll get to that.)

Here’s what came out of the hour…

1. Decide What the Book Is Supposed to Do Before You Decide How to Publish It.

I begin every author engagement with the question:

What are you hoping to achieve with your book?

Book Sales/Bestseller? Speaking? More Consulting? PICK ONE.

Now, of course, the trifecta is the goal, but depending on which priority you pick, your path to publishing will be different.

Zach was clear from the beginning that the book was never the money-making instrument. He wanted his name on a published work, in a category where credibility is the currency, and he wanted the visibility to compound into speaking and positioning. That clarity is what made a traditional publisher the right call for him — and it's also why the absence of an advance was a non-event rather than a disappointment.

Compare that to the author who wants a six-figure advance. That path looks nothing alike. Traditional houses paying that kind of money are looking for something closer to general-audience self-help, and they want to see the follower counts to match — usually on Instagram, which they treat as the most culturally mainstream platform available. They also want to know whether you have standing media relationships, because a landmark podcast booking is a book-selling machine and they know it. Tell ‘em you can get on Rogan and watch your check double. Podcast listeners and book buyers are a Venn diagram that is very nearly a circle.

For the rest of us writing business books, leadership books, industry books, that bar is irrelevant. Zach pitched Wiley with somewhere just under two to three thousand LinkedIn followers.

His path there was less romantic than people expect. He worked with a writing coach through the first three chapters. When it came time to pitch, the coach asked who he wanted to target, and Zach walked over to his own bookshelf and wrote down the publishers whose spines showed up most often. Wiley was the clear winner. They have a submission form on their site. He filled it out around Christmas, on the theory that editors would come back from the holidays and work the stack from the top.

An editor came back in two or three days.

(And yes, he also retained his IP, since three of you asked in the comments before I could get the question out.)

2. Your Publisher Handles Distribution. YOU Handle Marketing.

The single most common misaligned expectation in the publishing industry is assuming your publisher will roll out the red carpet, PR machine, and ad budget for you.

THEY DON’T.

Here is what Wiley did for Zach: cover design options, the Amazon page, the Goodreads linkage, the description copy for Target and Walmart and Barnes & Noble. They used their own retail relationships to get Locked Up into roughly 200 of the 600-plus Barnes & Noble locations at launch, which he freely admits he would not have known how to do on his own. They sent copies to a cybersecurity Hall of Fame review panel and a handful of other people.

Every item on it is pretty much distribution and conversion. Cover, ISBN, retailer plumbing, cart setup. That is a publisher’s job…to PUBLISH. All of it lives at the bottom of the funnel, waiting for demand that someone else (i.e. you, the author) has to create.

I blame the show Younger for a lot of this misconception, personally. There is a glamourized version of publishing in Hollywood where you sign the deal and the publisher’s PR department opens its pockets and books you on the Today Show. That doesn’t even exist for Prince Harry. He got his 7-figure advance because he had his own PR team and a huge following.

As Brooke and Zach shared, traditional publishing still gives you a real credibility edge, and hybrid and traditional both extend your distribution reach in ways that are genuinely hard to replicate alone. Go in wanting those things. Do not go in expecting a marketing department.

Your job is to write the book, sell the book, and market the book.

3. Pre-Orders Are A Leading Indicator. Almost Nobody Treats Them Like One.

Zach pulled up his notes on the call: roughly 300 pre-orders in December 2025, the month before drop. Another 300 in January, the first month on shelves. Those are US numbers, with a couple hundred more internationally scattered through. The first quarter after launch was, by a wide margin, the biggest window — and everything after that has come in batches tied to conferences and bulk orders.

To recap…His pre-launch month roughly matched his launch month.

Here’s the mechanical reason this matters, and I’ll use the dream scenario to make the math obvious before bringing it back to earth. When someone hits the New York Times or USA Today or WSJ list, it is almost always on the back of a monster pre-order campaign. Those lists measure copies sold in a Sunday-to-Sunday window. Every pre-order you bank clocks as a sale during launch week.

Which means a Times run — five to ten thousand copies in seven days, depending on genre — is a question of whether you had six months to convince those people or seven days. If you skip the pre-order strategy, you have to convince thousands of strangers to buy inside a single week. If you run it, you get half a year to do the same work.

Most of you are not chasing the Times, and that’s fine. But the mechanic of demand is identical at any scale. Nail. your. pre-order. 👏

Now the part that actually determines whether your pre-orders convert: your bonus cannot be the first chapter of your book.

I’m going to be blunt about this. Unless you are John Grisham or Colleen Hoover and there is a population of people who cannot wait for your next release, a sample chapter moves nothing. You are asking someone who is not yet aware of your book to want more of a thing they have no relationship with.

Zach’s pre-order vault was built the other direction entirely:

• A 30/60/90/120-day roadmap for CISOs building a program or stepping into a new role.
• A tools-of-the-trade list covering what belongs in a strong security program and why.
• A checklist of the preventative measures that should already be in place before an incident.

Every one of those solves a problem for his reader on its own, with the book removed from the equation. Your pre-order reward should be a standalone asset that a stranger would want even if your book did not exist.

Behind it, we built a five-part drip that delivered the assets and then asked for reviews, because those first-week reviews carry disproportionate weight.

And a note on ambassadors, since this is where launches can flail: Zach messaged fifteen to twenty people for early endorsements and landed six on the back cover. We built him a six-touch follow-up series, and I warned him that he was going to feel like a pest sending it.

Send it anyway. Your ambassadors have jobs and kids and lives. When authors ask me to support a launch, I tell them to bombard me — tell me the exact day, the exact time, the exact link. I am not blowing you off. You are simply not my first priority that week, and neither of us should pretend otherwise.

4. The Feed Went Interest-Based, So Who You Connect With Is Now a Distribution Decision.

Zach mentioned, almost as an aside, that in his first month he was maxing out his weekly LinkedIn connection limit — first with security practitioners and other CISOs, then deliberately pivoting to news anchors, magazine editors, conference organizers, and event programmers. He wasn’t only after one-off readers, but the people who buy in bulk.

Then he questioned whether any of it still matters, given how the LinkedIn algorithm has changed.

To which I replied…

It matters more.

LinkedIn has moved to an interest-based feed. You can no longer count on your followers and connections to reliably see your content — some will, but the days of connection-first distribution are behind us. What the platform is doing instead is building a picture of what you’re interested in and serving accordingly.

If you have ever watched one video about toddlers on Instagram and then found your entire feed rearranged around it, you already understand the mechanism. (My feed is now roughly forty percent Office bloopers because of one click. Harmless. Instructive.)

This cuts both directions, and the second direction is the useful one. When I shifted my own content from general personal branding toward book launches specifically, I connected deliberately with authors, publishers, and media people. I engaged with their posts. I saved their content. Inside about three weeks my feed had reorganized itself around publishing — and, more to the point, my content started surfacing inside that same pool.

Three things have to line up for this to work: your connections, your engagement behavior, and the keywords in your profile and your posts. When all three point the same direction, the platform starts placing you in front of the people most likely to want your book.

When they don’t, you are asking the algorithm to guess.

5. The Speaking Career Came From the Posting, Instead of the Book Itself.

I asked Zach what moved the needle most on LinkedIn, and his answer was more precise than I expected: for book sales specifically, he’d struggle to point to one thing. For everything the book was supposed to unlock, it was consistent content plus a newsletter.

He started a LinkedIn newsletter from zero and is at roughly 1,300 subscribers — one cybersecurity story from the news, once a week, with a pitch for the book worked in. That newsletter, plus steady posting about the book and the topics around it, is what put him in front of vendors, cybersecurity companies, startups, and conference organizers. Those are the people who reached out asking him to keynote, to do a paid dinner, to come speak at a company retreat.

The rest he went and got himself:

• Podcasts, from the bottom. He searched his niche, found the hosts, messaged them on LinkedIn. Exactly one person said no. Early episodes pulled ten or twenty views on YouTube and amounted to nothing on their own — except as content he could post about, which the host also shared, which fed the next booking. He’s now doing shows in the fifty-to-seventy-thousand range.
• A speaker sheet with real price points. We built his with tiers across in-person keynotes, workshops, and different event formats, so he could work inside whatever budget a conference had.
• The fee-versus-books trade. When an organizer says there’s no speaker budget, Zach offers to reduce his fee against a bulk book order. He has done gigs where the speaking fee was zero and he moved two or three hundred copies in the room. Companies allocate money strangely — the speaker line may be empty while the training or materials line is not.
• Asking at the event. He has walked up to organizers at conferences he was merely attending and offered to fill a slot. Some of these organizations run sixty to a hundred events a year. They need speakers constantly.
• A sizzle reel and a full recorded keynote. The reel goes public. The full talk stays private, for organizers who want to see him end to end before committing.

His framing on all of it: give them everything they need to make an easy decision. You don’t have to be the best speaker in your category. You have to be easier to say yes to than the other options on the desk.

6. The Copperhead Post.

One more, because it's the thing most authors resist hardest.

Zach's dog got bitten by a copperhead. He wrote about it. The post did very well — and he made no attempt to tie it back to data protection, or resilience, or lessons for CISOs, or any of the contortions people perform when they think every post has to earn its place.

He told me the hardest part early on was writing for what he imagined LinkedIn wanted: professional, business-sounding, personality sanded off. Once he let the humor in — the bathtub photo, the dog, the travel — the whole thing loosened up and started working better.

There is a ratio to this, and I'd rather you err toward more personality than less. Your author brand is the thing people follow between books. Nobody subscribes to a press release.

Finishing the book is the start of the job.

Every single thing Zach did that worked — the pre-order vault, the six-touch ambassador follow-up, the connection strategy, the newsletter, the podcast cold outreach, the speaker sheet, the walking up to organizers at events — happened after the manuscript was done. He thought his writing was finished and discovered he now had to write forever. (He said, on a live, with a straight face: he did not enjoy writing the book. He may do it again anyway.)

The last question of the session came from Claudio, and it was the right one to end on: isn't a book usually a loss leader for the higher-paying work — the consulting, the training, the speaking?

Often, yes. And it does not have to stay that way.

Statistically, most books never sell a thousand copies in their lifetime. That number is exactly why I named the program what I did. Clear a thousand, and you're in something like the top three percent of authors — and everything downstream of that threshold, every speaking fee and consulting inquiry and training contract, starts compounding off a strong book base.

The floor is the whole point. Get to a thousand, and the rest amplifies.

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Next Steps…

If you read all of this and thought, okay, I want this, that’s exactly what Sell Your First 1,000 Books on LinkedIn is for.

It’s the full launch system I built for Zach, customized to YOUR book.

We start August 31 and run through October 2 — training videos you keep forever, plus live coaching with me across September where I’ll look at your actual pages and edit your actual copy.

This is the first cohort, so it’s $500. That is a beta number, and it will never be that again. Candidly, for this first class, I want the feedback and I want the case studies, so I’m taking a haircut on the price. I want it to be the most accessible to the most authors.

Best fit: nonfiction — business, leadership, self-help — with a book still ahead of you. If you’re writing fiction, I will buy your copy and read it, though this program is built around LinkedIn and the speaking circuit that follows. If you’ve already published, reach out and I’ll point you toward better-suited help, since so much of this depends on sequencing the stages of a launch in order.

Cart closes August 30.

Grab your seat here

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