30 Mar How To Become A Wall Street Journal Best Seller WITHOUT Writing a Book
ANNOUNCEMENT: On November 7th, 2023, an announcement was made that the Wall Street Journal bestseller list had been dropped.
I also wrote an article about this here: Wall Street Journal list stopping the bestseller list.
Original article below before the announcement was made:
Hacks are pretty popular these days, wouldn’t you agree? It seems like you can hack everything from time management and productivity to traveling to exotic places on a budget to organizing your clutter to building a business on a shoestring and everything in between.
I love “hacks” because the goal of a good hack is to save yourself time, energy, and also stress.
I have a “hack” for becoming a published author WITHOUT having to write an entire book yourself that will absolutely save you time, money and yes…stress.
I’ve been working with clients in my Bestselling Author Done-For-You Program and many of them tell me they’ve been working on their “one book” for 3 years, 5 years or sometimes 10 years! And guess, what, the book still is not done! That’s why they are coming to me.
These clients have invested a great deal of “time” without a return on that time. I want to point out that just because something takes more time, it doesn’t make it better (the book, the course, the program, etc.).
In fact, Seth Godin who has published dozens of books on business, marketing and sales, said:
“One of my books took more than a year to write, ten hours a day. Another took three weeks. Both sell for the same price. The quicker one outsold the other 20 to 1…The cost of something is largely irrelevant, people are paying attention to its value. Your customers don’t care what it took for you to make something. They care about what it does for them.”
Let that sink in… “They care about what it does for them.”
People don’t care if you spend 3 years, 5 years or 10 years working on your book. That doesn’t mean they are going to buy it and it definitely doesn’t mean because you invested so much time on it, that it will necessarily be more successful. Like Seth Godin says, it has to do with the value the book brings.
So let’s talk about how to become a published author without writing a book. You do that by hiring a ghostwriter to take your ideas, thoughts and experiences and put them into your own book.
Many of my clients have done this and gone on to hit top tier lists like Wall Street Journal, USA Today, etc.
My hack is to save yourself time by allowing an experienced ghostwriter write your book.
This is a great hack!
My team and I have been launching books to these top tier lists since 2019 and here are some of the books that have hit these prestigious lists:
- Brand Hacks, Emmanuel Probst
- Big Things Have Small Beginnings, Wes Berry
- The Younger Self Letters, Michelle Kulp
- From Doctor to Patient, Dr. Diva Nagula
- Mentor to Millions, Kevin Harrington
- Non Obvious Mega Trends, Rohit Bhargava
- The Dropout Multi-Millionaire, Brian Will
Some of these books were self-published and some were published by traditional publishing houses.
Some hit one list and some hit both lists, some hit #1 and some didn’t, but they all hit the list because once you have a system and the right marketing team to get the sales in a one week time frame, then you can repeat that for each book.
Is there a secret to hitting these lists? No.
Typically what you need to hit these lists and become a Wall Street Journal bestseller is sales (5,000+) in a 7 day period and those sales need to be on multiple platforms. It is assumed that you will have a high quality book, with a great hook, an attractive cover and amazing content. There’s no secret per se, but most authors will never hit these lists because they can’t get the sales, visibility or right platforms.