Most Authors Will Never Sell 1,000 Copies. The Ones Who Do Run the Same 5 Phases

Seven years, every kind of book campaign you can imagine, and one pattern that never breaks.

In 2018, my cousin, a seasoned venture capitalist and serial entrepreneur, called me and pitched an idea. "Help me brand my new cannabis company. It's become legal in Maryland and I'm applying for a license."

When I start to tell this story, most people reply, "Wow, what did you tell him?" To which I smile and say, "Her. And not only is my cousin a woman, but when she started this venture, she was a suburban mom with two grown children."

Next question: "Like the show Weeds?"

Me: Pretty much.

As you can tell from that brief exchange, the reality pretty much reads like fiction. Here she was, with her business partner, who was also a 50-something-year-old retired OBGYN, entering the wild west of weed. One night, while we were sitting around a table laughing after successfully launching one of the highest-producing cannabis dispensaries in the state and smashing sales records, we looked at each other and said, "This story is as strange as fiction! So why don't we write it?"

About 6 months later, the manuscript was published, and my cousin and her co-founder were on the Today Show.

About 3 months after that, my publicity partner said, "So do you do this for other people?"

Me: "Do what?"

Them: Turn founders into best-sellers on LinkedIn?

I smiled and said, as any good entrepreneur would when they see a market opportunity, "You bet I do." And I was off to the races.

Seven years later, I've run an agency turning authors into influencers and Top Voices on LinkedIn and have been part of every book campaign you can imagine. From consultants self-publishing a niche book to ex-athletes going with a huge legacy publisher. Every book and author is like a snowflake; no two are the same. Every book launch is as well, depending on the budget and cachet of the author.

However, inarguably, there are 5 phases you can't miss if you want to overcome the all-too unfortunate reality:

And I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to pour my heart, soul, and credibility into a manuscript that effectively my friends and family will buy out of pity (sorry, cold world, no blankets on that truth).

So let's get into it…

Awareness

Everybody wants to start at the launch. The big day, the countdown graphic, the little confetti animation. But the authors who actually sell start at least 6 months before any of that, and they start by answering a question that sounds almost insultingly simple: what is this book even for?

When my cousin called me, the honest answer was never "to sell a lot of books." It was to plant her and her co-founder as the faces of a brand-new and slightly scandalous industry — to become the people you call when you want to understand legal cannabis in Maryland and to put women squarely on the map as leaders of the industry. It was also to make the whole package (the dispensary, product lines, and their brand) have an even higher valuation when it came time to exit, which it did. Take a look at the press release snippet:

While the book was the vehicle, the overall authority was the destination. We knew that before we wrote a single post or repositioned their LinkedIn profile, and it determined everything we did, and just as importantly, everything we didn't bother wasting time on.

That's the entire job of the Awareness phase: get honest about the one outcome the book is really there to drive, and then go become visible to the specific people who can hand you that outcome — which is usually a much smaller and more particular group than "everyone who reads books." You do not need a million followers for this. My cousin had a perfectly normal network and a deeply abnormal story, and the story is what did the work.

Action step: Write down in one sentence what your book is actually supposed to buy you. If the only answer you can come up with is "sell books," we have a problem.

Some examples here:

• Increase keynote fees and speak more
• Sell 4 corporate book bundles and parlay that into contracts

Launch Crew Build

The most common way I watch a launch die is so ordinary it's almost sad. The author announces the book on pub day. Surprise, it's here! And then they sit there refreshing while the fourteen people who happened to be online that particular Tuesday (book launches are always a Tuesday, btw) drop a "congrats!" in the comments.

The authors who clear 1,000 do the opposite of a surprise. They spend the months before launch recruiting the people who are going to carry it for them — a launch crew, ambassadors, your people, whatever you want to call them.

Why? Because book pre-sales and reviews on publication day have an outsized impact on your book’s sales and category rankings and on future sales. Real story:

The other week, I was on Amazon shopping for books on speed reading (I have to read a lot for my job, as you can imagine, and I want to have faster comprehension). One book had over 4k 4.4 star reviews. Another only 1.2k 4-star reviews. I think you know which one I bought. But reviews beget reviews, and sales beget sales. You need live reviewers at the ready, and activating your close network to do this and share on social are two of the biggest levers you can pull for this.

Every launch team I’ve been a part of spends an unnaturally large amount of time on making, collecting early reader reviews, and incentivizing ones come pub day.

My favorite proof that this has nothing to do with how famous you are: Sahil Bloom went into his launch with millions of followers and pulled 20,000 pre-orders, which, sure. But a coach named Gabriele Casineanu went in with around 5,000 followers and moved 2,700 copies in 36 hours. The follower counts weren't in the same galaxy! What they had in common was a crew that was warmed up, handed everything they needed, and ready to move the second the doors opened.

By the time launch day arrives, the people in your corner aren't buying out of obligation. They've watched you build this thing for weeks, and they're invested in seeing it land. None of that is luck. You manufacture it on purpose, and you start now.

📚 Quick mid-article gift: I'm giving authors a specific book launch marketing plan for LinkedIn with coaching and oversight from me in my upcoming course. I only announced it 2 days ago, and already we have 65 people on the waitlist!! If you're writing a book and want expert support launching, join the waitlist here and I'll reach out with more info.​

Audience + Authority Build

A book is not a kingmaker. A king sells a bestselling book. Some of you have experienced this firsthand...

They are counting on YOU to sell your book. Which is why no one short of Prince Harry is inking sizeable advances. Because that is a sure bet for them.

So, your best move here is to build the audience before you even get to the publishing stage. But your second-best move is to build it, and build it quickly before launch day, so you have an audience reading, willing, and excited to drop it into their Amazon cart.

Two things carry this phase on LinkedIn. The first is your profile, which I promise is being read more than you think and is almost certainly underperforming. Your profile is a 24/7 media kit, and most authors run theirs like a résumé they last touched the day they changed jobs. The headline, the About, the featured links — all of it should be pulling different weight in your positioning months than it does the week the book drops. It evolves.

The second is your content, and here is where you can save yourself some overwhelm. You don't need to conjure a dozen original posts a week out of thin air. You write one good newsletter tied to a topic in your book, break it into a handful of posts, edit it until it sounds like a human instead of a press release or robot, and end everything you publish by pointing at the same next step. It's a rhythm, not a grind. And it works here in a way it doesn't anywhere else, since the people reading long-form on LinkedIn are a. Book readers and b. decision makers with the budget to purchase bulk copies of your book.

This is also the phase where the book starts paying you before it's even out. I had a client whose keynote fee went from $5,000 to $15,000 the moment she could put "author" in front of her name, for the same talk she'd been giving for years. John Ruhlin went from $7,500 a keynote to north of $20,000 within a year of his book, and it was never a bestseller. The book didn't have to be huge. It had to exist, sitting right next to an authority that the right people could see.

Launch Week

Most people treat launch day like a birthday party for the book. They post the cover, they write "it's finally here!!", they tag everyone they've ever emailed, and they hope the algorithm woke up generous. Now, this isn’t wrong, it’s just short-sighted.

Enter: The LinkedIn Live

The centerpiece of my authors’ launch week is a LinkedIn Live, but framed as a genuine discussion about the topic — a panel, a fireside, you and a couple of sharp guests getting into the real problem your book solves — where the book just happens to be the reason you're all in the room. People will give you 30 minutes for that. They will not give you 30 minutes to watch you celebrate yourself, and I say that with love (unless it’s your mom or spouse).

The Live moves through a simple arc: you hook them, teach something real, bring the proof, make the offer, and close. And the real weapon is the proof happening live in front of everyone — reviews dropping into the comments in real time, reactions stacking up, the FOMO building as the stream runs, turning watchers into buyers before they've even closed the tab.

I've watched an author sell 300 books out of a single DM thread leading up to their LinkedIn Live during a launch like this. I've watched one question from an event planner — "do you offer bulk pricing for 250 copies?" — turn into a $12,500 afternoon.

Launch week doesn't create the sale so much as collect it. Everything you built across the first three phases finally cashes in, all at once.

The Flywheel

Hitting 1,000 copies feels like a finish line, when really it's the starting gun.

The authors who turn a book into an actual career treat the weeks after launch as the most valuable real estate in the whole runway. The reviews keep trickling in, the reader wins become the next round of content, and all that momentum gets pointed at the things a book was always meant to open up.

Look at how Justin Moore 🧲 is doing this in a master class way, even a year and a half after launching his book, Sponsor Magnet:

This is where it compounds. Kevin Kruse made $170,000 in speaking fees the year after his book — more than double what the book itself earned that year. Bulk orders start showing up at the events you speak at, since a speaker who sends every attendee home with a copy is a planner's dream and, conveniently, a completely different line in their budget than your fee. The book becomes a business card that pays you: feeding speaking, then workshops, then consulting, then the next, bigger book, each rung making the one after it less of a gamble.

Most authors never get here, and it has less to do with talent than with timing. They treated the book as the destination and stopped pushing the day it came out. Run the flywheel instead, and a single launch keeps handing you opportunities for years.

So why am I so militant about the order?

Because every phase is standing on the one before it. Anticipation falls flat if you skipped the audience you were supposed to build in Awareness. Launch week converts no one if you never earned the Authority. The Flywheel won't spin if the launch itself never caught. When a genuinely good book stalls at 250 copies — and I have watched it happen to brilliant books — it is not the writing. It's an author who ran the phases out of order, or skipped the boring early ones to get to the fun launch-day part, and then asked launch day to carry weight it was never built to hold.

The relief in all of this is that a sequence is a learnable thing. You don't need a bigger platform, a legacy publisher, or a marketing budget with a comma in it. You need the right moves in the right order, with someone who's done it thirty-plus times standing next to you so you're not guessing in the dark.

I’ll be sharing more about this in the coming weeks as I gear up for my most exciting launch to date: an entire program about how to sell 1,000 books on LinkedIn.

Two things on that:

• 👉 Join the waitlist here so you don’t miss tips, strategies, and tools to sell your book on LinkedIn.
• Let me know what questions you have so I can cover them.

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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