What if selling books isn’t actually the most important thing your book can do?
That idea stopped me in my tracks during this conversation with Julie Broad, founder of Book Launchers.
Julie told me that over the past year, she and her team have deliberately shifted away from making book sales the primary goal for their nonfiction authors.
Not because sales don’t matter.
They do.
But because a great nonfiction book can do something much bigger.
?? It can establish your authority.
?? It can become your keynote.
?? It can become a course, workshop, workbook, or program.
?? It can get you onto stages and into the media.
?? It can introduce your ideas to the one person who could completely change your business.
Julie shared a remarkable example of an author whose book had been out for more than a year. One person eventually read it—and that connection led to a multimillion-dollar opportunity built around the author’s work.
Not 100,000 readers.
One right reader.
That completely changes the question from:
“How many books did I sell?”
to:
“What can this book make possible?”
We also get into something I’m thinking about constantly these days: AI.
Julie believes AI has actually raised the bar for nonfiction authors.
AI can give us the seven steps.
It can give us the generic how-to.
What it can’t give us is your life. Your stories. Your perspective. Your weird little collection of experiences that caused you to see the world the way you do.
Julie illustrates this beautifully with the story of growing up in a 20-room roadside motel in rural Alberta—and essentially running the front desk when she was ten years old.
You can’t prompt ChatGPT into having lived that.
We also talk about writing with collaborators, why a genuinely good book probably shouldn’t be written in a weekend, marketing before the manuscript is finished, why Julie expects her employees to use AI every day, and why the best authors—and the best professional speakers—may be better off developing one great idea for years instead of constantly chasing the next one.
And somewhere in there, naturally, I resurrect my old Worst Book Ever idea. ?
This conversation changed the way I think about what a nonfiction book is actually for.
Maybe the goal isn’t to write another book.
Maybe it’s to create the book—the one you can live with, speak about, teach from, and build upon for the next three to five years.
Now that is a book worth writing.
— Bradley
Julie Broad / Book Launchers:
?Book Launchers
Question for you:
If you could create one book that you would happily talk about for the next five years, what would it be?
[ https://youtu.be/vStb8Mpl3go ]