The Complete Guide to Pre-Selling Your Book on LinkedIn

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Author note: I will be using the terms “pre-sale” and “pre-order” interchangeably throughout this article. They both reference selling advance copies of your book before publication day.

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The average book published today sells fewer than 300 print copies over its lifetime in U.S. retail channels, according to BookScan data reported by Publishers Weekly — and a recent analysis found that close to 90% of titles from the Big Five publishers never reach 2,000 copies sold.

Read that again if you're writing a book right now.

Now consider this: with strong relationships at a handful of companies and associations, you can pre-sell 500 copies of your book before it even exists in physical form — which means your pre-sale campaign alone can outperform the entire lifetime of most published books.

I've launched books with all kinds of authors over the past decade, and the pattern I see over and over is that authors treat the pre-sale window as an afterthought — a couple of "my book is available for pre-order!" posts in the final six weeks before launch. Then they're confused when the needle doesn't move.

So today I'm giving you the complete playbook: what to do before your pre-sale window opens, what infrastructure to build, how to turn your LinkedIn presence into a pre-sale machine, and the one move that separates authors who pre-sell hundreds (or thousands) of copies from everyone else.

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Why pre-sales matter more than almost anything else you'll do

A quick primer on the mechanics, since most first-time authors don't know this: pre-orders count toward your first-week sales numbers, and first-week sales are what determine whether you hit bestseller lists like The New York Times or USA Today (both are compiled from roughly a seven-day sales window).

Strong pre-orders also influence how many copies your publisher prints, whether retailers stock your book, and how aggressively Amazon's algorithm recommends it to new readers.

One insider nuance worth knowing: Amazon records pre-orders on the day of purchase for its own internal rankings, while list-tracking outlets count them toward launch week. Translation — pre-orders help you everywhere; they just help you differently depending on the channel.

In other words: the pre-sale window is where your book's fate gets decided. Everything below is designed to help you win it.

Talk about the book way earlier than feels comfortable

You need to start talking about your book while you're writing it. While you're outlining it. While you're still arguing with yourself about the subtitle.

Here's why: people need to be made aware of something a minimum of 7 to 10 times — usually more — before they even start to recognize it. Marketers have known a version of this for decades (the old "rule of seven" dates back to the studio era of Hollywood), and it has only gotten harder to reach people since then. With today's unreliable algorithms deciding who sees which posts on any given day, you can effectively double or triple that number to make sure your audience actually knows a book is coming.

Which means if the first time your network hears about your book is the day pre-orders open, you've already lost. By the time you get to the pre-sale window, "I'm writing a book about X" should be old news to your audience. The behind-the-scenes posts, the "here's a framework from chapter 4" posts, the "I just finished my second draft and here's what I cut" posts — that's all awareness-building, and it compounds.

Start now. Whenever "now" is for you, it's the right time.

Build a pre-sale bonus people actually want (hint: it's not your first chapter)

Too many authors default to a first-chapter giveaway or a sample of the audiobook as their pre-order incentive. The problem with that approach is the assumption baked into it — that people want your book so badly a teaser will tip them into buying.

I'm here to pop that Pollyanna bubble: people do not want your book. People want to solve problems in their lives, their careers, and their businesses. Your book happens to be one vehicle for that. So your pre-sale bonus needs to sweeten the deal by helping them solve the problem faster or more completely — which is a very different design brief than "give them a taste of the book."

When I work with authors on pre-sale bonuses, we build things like:

• Companion video courses that prime readers to implement the book's biggest takeaways and tactics before the book even arrives
• PDF guides, templates, and worksheets that turn the book's frameworks into tools they can use this week
• Custom AI builds — and this is the one I'm most excited about right now — a GPT or Claude project trained on your book's methodology that helps readers apply its tactics to their own specific situation. It's the difference between handing someone a manual and handing them a coach.

The strategy behind your pre-sale bonus will be one of the single biggest drivers of your pre-sale numbers. (I go much deeper on this in my forthcoming program, Sell Your First 1,000 Books on LinkedIn — we have an entire section of the course devoted to bonus architecture — but the principle above will get you 80% of the way there.)

Set up your bulk purchase infrastructure

This is the part of the guide most authors skip entirely, and it's where the biggest money is.

Individual pre-orders trickle in one at a time. Bulk purchases arrive 50, 100, 500 copies at once — and as I said up top, pre-selling 500 copies through a few companies and associations is entirely achievable if you have strong relationships and you make buying easy for them.

That second part is the operative phrase: make it easy. A VP of HR who wants to buy 200 copies for her leadership team does not want to add 200 units to an Amazon cart. She wants an invoice, a discount, and someone who handles shipping.

For this, I recommend Porchlight Book Company across every book campaign I work on — it's the industry standard for business and nonfiction authors setting up bulk sales. They offer competitive bulk discounts that scale with quantity, they handle multi-location shipping and custom packaging (imagine your book arriving at a client's office with the company's logo on a bookmark or a branded band around every copy), they build dedicated pre-order landing pages, and — this matters enormously — they report sales through their platform to The New York Times and BookScan, so your bulk pre-sales count where it counts.

You can get creative here too: bundle discounts, signed bookplates, a free virtual Q&A with you for orders over a certain quantity. Give corporate buyers a reason to go bigger.

Turn your LinkedIn profile into a pre-sale machine

Once the bonus and the bulk infrastructure exist, every surface of your LinkedIn presence should point to them. Here's the checklist:

Your cover image. The banner at the top of your profile is prime real estate that most people waste. Yours should feature the book cover, the pre-order availability, and where to go.

Your featured section. Pin links to both the individual pre-order page and the bulk purchase page. Two separate links, clearly labeled — the buyer who wants one copy and the buyer who wants 300 are different people on different missions.

Your custom button. If you have a Premium Business account, you can set a custom call-to-action button on your profile. Point it at the book purchase page for the duration of your campaign.

Your away message. This one requires a Premium subscription, but it's the lowest-hanging fruit on the platform: set your away message to mention the book and link to pre-orders. Every person who DMs you during your campaign gets a friction-free reminder, automatically, without you lifting a finger.

Write your newsletter about the problems your book solves

Your LinkedIn newsletter is where awareness converts to intent — but only if you write it correctly.

The move here is to write articles about the problems your book solves and the specific outcomes it creates, so the book ties in seamlessly rather than reading as an ad. If your book is about leading hybrid teams, your newsletter covers the hybrid meeting mistakes managers make, the retention data on flexible work, the frameworks for asynchronous decision-making — and the book appears as the natural deeper dive.

Then, in the footer of every single article, you run a standing call to action with three options: pre-order the book, pre-book a workshop, and inquire about bulk purchases. This structure gives corporate buyers a full-solution path — they can give their employees the book as a field guide, then bring you in to run the workshop that brings it to life. One newsletter footer, three revenue streams.

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The overperformer move: host a LinkedIn Live

If you want to run up the score, here's the play: host a LinkedIn Live in the heart of your pre-sale window.

LinkedIn Events let you invite up to 1,000 of your connections per week — and here's the multiplier: attendees can also invite up to 1,000 of their own connections per week. Which means if you rally even a handful of friends, clients, and colleagues to invite their networks, your event reach compounds well beyond your own list.

Structure the Live around educating people on a problem your book solves — teach generously for the bulk of the session, the same way you would a paid workshop. Then, at the end, make a natural, unforced pitch: pre-order the book, and if you're live on this event when you do, you'll receive an extra, exclusive bonus available only to attendees. Scarcity plus a live audience plus 45 minutes of demonstrated value is the single highest-converting pre-sale moment you can engineer on this platform.

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Putting it all together

The sequence matters, so here it is in order:

1. Now: Start talking about the book — 7 to 10 touches is the floor, and the algorithm means you'll need more
2. Before pre-orders open: Build a problem-solving bonus (not a chapter teaser) and set up bulk purchasing through Porchlight
3. When the window opens: Convert your profile — cover image, featured section, custom button, away message
4. Throughout: Publish newsletter articles on the problems the book solves, with the three-option CTA in every footer
5. Mid-campaign: Host a LinkedIn Live with a live-only pre-sale bonus

Most books sell fewer than 300 print copies, ever. You're reading this guide, which tells me you have no intention of being most books — and if you run this playbook, you won't be. The authors I work with routinely pre-sell more copies than the average book sells in its lifetime, and they do it with an audience they built one post, one article, one relationship at a time.

Your book deserves a launch, not a listing. Go build it.

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On August 11th , I sat down with Author Zach Lewis. We covered all the nuts and bolts for how he sold over 1,300 copies of his book in a niche industry in under 6 months, and how he booked up big conferences in his industry as a speaker because of it.

​Catch the replay here​

Grab the free accompanying workbook here​

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