80 seats. 80,000 books. Here's my plan for the next three weeks.

Two days ago, I announced my most ambitious project yet…

An entire rip-and-stick book launch calendar and course to help business and leadership authors sell 1,000 or more books on LinkedIn.

Now, 1,000 books sounds like a starter goal. It isn't.

Two out of three books from the best publishers in the world never hit four figures!!!

So when I say "your first 1,000 books," what I'm actually saying is: the top third of traditional publishing.

For me, this project was the culmination of a few things…

1. Running an agency built on launching bestselling books and putting authors on the map as the leading voices of their industry.

Traditional publishers would hire my team and me to take a brilliant mind with a less-than-ideal online following and quickly grow their audience to support a successful book launch. We were kind of like book mercenaries, swooping in to quickly turn professors, CEOs, and speakers into industry influencers.

In doing so, I was able to work alongside the biggest thinkers I have ever met; people really shaping the future of work, industries, and human society. It was exhilarating. Because that's what books do that short-form content can't. They let you sit with, research, study, and percolate on an idea for years, and then translate it into paradigm shifts.

2. I am personally dismayed at where a book's place in society is headed.

A few weeks ago, I read The Atlantic's August cover story by Rose Horowitch, "The End of Reading Is Here."

To say the prognosis is bleak is to put it mildly.

The number that stopped me cold didn't come from the article's rhetoric — it came from the OECD's Survey of Adult Skills. 58.9 million American adults now struggle to compare information, paraphrase, or draw a basic inference from a multipage text.

…Seven years ago that number was 48 million.

That's not a percentage sliding around on a chart. That's the population of California and Texas, combined, losing the ability to follow an argument! ZOIKS

A former client of mine underscored it when she recounted an exchange with a student while guest lecturing at a business school. It roughly went like this:

Ok, it wasn't an exchange, actually, because she admitted to me that the question quite literally rendered her speechless.

Lack of long-form writing begets a lack of long-form thinking. Lack of long-form thinking begets a lack of long-form, nuanced conversation, and so on and so forth until we are all just walking around tweet-talking and not actually listening to each other.

And this troubles me.

So I'm going to assume my place in this fight by focusing on my expertise…marketing. The premise for my part is this:

When a book has a successful launch, it garners more sales. And when more people buy it, more people read it. And when more people read it, they discuss and recommend it more. Said more cliche-y…

A rising tide of book launches raises all literacy.

Because if a book is published in the forest and no one hears it, did you even publish a book?

Here's every decision I've made putting "Sell Your First 1,000 Books on LinkedIn" together, including the ones I'm not sure about.

The first step was deciding on the delivery mechanism. As AI is to the slow decline of books, so too is AI to the sales of self-guided courses. I mean, who is buying a complete DIY course when you can try to figure it out with ChatGPT?

But the deeper problem with self-paced isn't sales. It's that nobody finishes them.

One platform published completion data across 32,000 courses: cohort-based programs finished at 64.2%, self-paced at 48.2%, and the big open marketplaces — your Courseras, your Udemys — sit around 12.6%.

A launch calendar you don't execute is worth exactly nothing. A book launch has a date on it. If you fall three weeks behind, you don't get the launch back.

So, I'm running this program as a live cohort.

Five weeks, starting 8/31, with our final session on 10/2. Materials available forever.

The average book campaign I work on with big publishers involves an average of 3 teams (social, PR, publisher). Sometimes less; many times, more — speaking agents, book specialty teams, email teams, paid social teams, etc., etc. But in doing this for 7 years, the average out-of-pocket spend on these campaigns is $15k/month. (Yeah, I know…)

So my team and I decided that for our beta cohort, we wanted to make it so value-packed for such an affordable amount that saying yes is a no-brainer.

The program is a customizable, proven campaign that auto-updates based on your book launch date and encompasses all the best practices from all the teams I mentioned above. We landed on $500 as the "holy shit, I can't believe I can access this for that little" number.

Here's what that actually looks like (sneaky peek into the course):

Now, many people have told me $500 is too low. And I agree. But this is beta, and for beta launches I want two things:

One. A huge sample size of people that I can create case studies on, because I'm that confident my program works.

Two. A group that is going to give me their feedback so we can make it even better.

Once it's out of beta, we'll raise the price to at least double. Market research indicates even triple would be low. To be litigated further after I get cohort feedback.

In 3 weeks' time, we had 200 people sign up for the course waitlist, which is an incredible indicator. What's even more, the response rate of these soon-to-be authors has been incredible.

We've asked them questions like:

1. Where are you in your book-writing journey?
2. What is your book about?
3. What feels most confusing about publishing at the moment?

When I tell you that within 2 hours of sending emails like that, response rates were almost 50%, I am not kidding.

Here's what they told us:

I'm already using this insight to rebuild parts of the program. Which is the entire argument for doing this in public.

As you may be able to tell by reading this very article, most of the interest in this program is built on a two-part LinkedIn strategy:

1. Publishing a lot of content about how to sell your first 1k books on the platform
2. Talking aloud about actually building the program (like this article)

This works for a few reasons:

One. Over-communication is the key.

So many times when I work with clients who are launching a new product or service, I ask them how many times they've mentioned it to their audience.

The number I give clients is 45. You need to talk about something around 45 times if you want it to actually reach a person 7 times.

Two. Talking about building is another way to talk about the thing without exhausting yourself or your audience.

I hear my clients when they say, "Well, I can't just say 'Buy the thing' every day!" Yeah, for sure. But what you can talk about is building the thing. So you're still talking about the thing, from a behind-the-scenes lens.

Three. It leads to a higher buy-in rate.

If you build out loud with your audience and allow them to weigh in, they have skin in the game. Instead of buying into something you produced, they're joining a journey they've already been part of.

Take, for example, this lovely email I got from someone on my waitlist:

She sent this because I not only pivoted my brand, but I was very loud about the fact that I was pivoting and all my fears and strategies around it.

My goal for this first cohort is $37.5k.

Here is the entire math, which I don't think most people publish, so let's fix that:

$500 × 75 seats = $37,500.

75 people.

Where do 75 people come from?

• 200 on the waitlist. A strong waitlist converts somewhere between 15 and 25%. Call it 30–50 seats.

• 7,600 on my email list. A healthy launch to a warm list converts at 0.5–1%. Call it 38–76 seats.

• Meaningful overlap between those two, so I can't just add them together and call it 126.

Which means the real number I'm chasing is this: I need about 1% of my email list to say yes.

One percent. When I write it that way, it sounds almost boring, and that's the point — it's a benchmark, not a moonshot. But benchmarks assume a lot of things go right.

Now, why $37.5k and not $100k? It's a great question you probably didn't ask, but I am, because I feel like every great banner launch has a goal of $100k.

I just watched my friends Alicia Teltz and Jay Clouse do this in masterclass format with their two most recent cohorts.

Ummm, freakin’ incredible!

Here's my thinking… I pivoted to triple down on using LinkedIn to sell books a month ago. This is a very niche offering; it's for authors that are writing/just finished writing a book. That's a very specific person. My bet is that I use this beta to make a lot of noise around the first launch, then use the success to run it longer the second time, backed by out-of-this-world case studies.

Maybe that's playing small. Maybe that's playing not to lose. We'll see. What I know for sure is that people in this cohort are going to sell the crap out of their books and start speaking a lot more because of it, and at the end of the day, building a killer program and delivering on that is my core focus.

One promise before I go.

Publishing a revenue goal to 57,000 people means I'm now on the hook for it. So here's the deal: I will publish the real number on August 31st, whether it's $52,000 or $18,000 (it's already more than $18k, though!). The whole premise of building out loud falls apart if I only report the wins.

And one thing to do right now.

Doors are open for the beta cohort. Five weeks, starting August 31. (45 of 80 seats remaining.)

$500 is a beta price, and it exists once. When this cohort ends, the price at minimum doubles, and everyone who comes after pays it.

​Get more details and grab your founders' seat​

If you missed the live session with Zach Lewis on selling your first 1,000 copies, the replay is here: How to Sell 1,000 Books On LinkedIn (and Get Paid to Speak While Doing it!)​

About the Author Kait LeDonne is a New York-based personal branding strategist and LinkedIn coach who helps thought leaders, executives, and corporate teams turn expertise into visible authority, influence, and qualified deal flow. She is a featured instructor for CNBC Make It's "How to Build a Standout Personal Brand," bringing practical executive-grade playbooks to a broad audience. Her LinkedIn audience and "Build a Brand" newsletter community exceeds 80,000 professionals. She has delivered training for organizations, including the United States Air Force and Kia. Listed by Favikon among the Top Personal Branding Influencers in the U.S., Kait is frequently cited in the media for clear, results-driven personal brand strategies professionals can sustain. ​ ​

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