Swipe Files - 📂 The 6-figure book launch formula

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Steph Smith’s first book, Doing Content Right, sold $100k+ in copies in less than a year across over 3000 sales. Her new course, Doing Time Right, did $20k+ in its first 3 weeks of presales.

One key — aside from simply making great content — can be found in the 3-step launch process she’s using for both products.

1. Idea Validation and Presales

As makers and product people, it's all too easy to lock yourself in your room and spends months, even years, building something before you tell anyone about it. Steph did the exact opposite.

Before writing her first book, Steph sent a quick tweet to her Twitter followers:

Steph Smith @stephsmithio Sooo I stumbled upon a 4000-word *outline* of a guide that I was working on last year. It tackles everything I know about writing, creating, and growing a blog to 400k pageviews in its first year. If I finish it, is this something you would pay $10 for? July 28th 2020 6 Retweets 178 Likes

At that time, Steph had a small audience of ~6k followers.

After positive feedback, she quickly moved to the next validation test: presales.

That same day, she spent a few hours building a Gumroad page that described the intended product and allowed people to preorder, then shared it on Twitter.

“It was like, ‘OK, if you’re saying you’re going to buy it, let me make sure that’s actually true,’” she revealed.

Steph Smith @stephsmithio Wow, what a wonderful response. I'm committing to making this the best guide out there, and you can pre-order here! 🥳 gumroad.com/l/doing-conten… Thanks to a few ppl for nudging me to have confidence to charge more... pricing is $10 for the first 30 orders, but increases after! pic.twitter.com/skJs58NXMD twitter.com/stephsmithio/s… Steph Smith @stephsmithio Sooo I stumbled upon a 4000-word *outline* of a guide that I was working on last year. It tackles everything I know about writing, creating, and growing a blog to 400k pageviews in its first year. If I finish it, is this something you would pay $10 for? July 28th 2020 3 Retweets 81 Likes

She created a tiered pricing model, which increased the price every time a certain number of orders came in, that offered a few key benefits:

• It created urgency, leading people to buy sooner to take advantage of lower pricing.
• It showed how much people were willing to pay, and removed the burden of setting a price or deciding when to raise it.
• It offered early supporters the lowest prices, creating a pool of eager customers who might later support the official launch.

For her most recent course, she used a similar process, brainstorming the idea with her audience, then quickly moving to a presale after confirming initial interest.

Steph Smith @stephsmithio I'm building a short course on setting up the right systems 𝙩𝙤𝙙𝙖𝙮, to get more sh** done 𝙩𝙤𝙢𝙤𝙧𝙧𝙤𝙬. It's not 🚀 science, but it'll cover how to better use your most scarce asset: time. I'm stuck on names. Any ideas? If I choose yours, I'll give you $100 + access. July 1st 2021 6 Retweets 327 Likes

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Steph Smith @stephsmithio Nothing better than someone taking your ideas and visualizing them better than you ever could dream of 🙌🙌🙌 48 hours until this thing ships! twitter.com/stephsmithio/s… Steph Smith @stephsmithio Update: So happy with the final illustrations! 😍 These four, plus one more costed $55. Turned around in 36 hours! pic.twitter.com/qnxLE2zWkV July 20th 2021 1 Retweets 4 Likes

Now a favorite tactic, here’s how the tiered pricing looks on Steph’s new course.

She begins building only after confirming people will pay for her idea. As she’s making the product, she adds regular updates to these initial tweet threads. These updates cause Twitter to recirculate the threads among her audience, building more hype — and driving more presales.

Steph Smith @stephsmithio Not bad for day 1. Now... time to get to work 👩🏻‍💻 pic.twitter.com/EvyxcgAC3c Steph Smith @stephsmithio Already onto the second tier! 🚀 pic.twitter.com/EEt8o6tmxC July 3rd 2021 0 Retweets 16 Likes

Sometimes the updates build social proof by showing presale figures. Other times they’re jokes or straight-forward check-ins. Through it all, she responds to everyone, creating an important sense of connection with early supporters.

2. Soft Launch and Updates

The second stage comes when the product is finished and ready to deliver to pre-purchasers.

This is where founders often go wrong by embracing a “ship-it-then-forget-it” mindset, or by running straight into their main launch.

“When you launch right away, you are hoping that the launch makes your product successful,” Steph said. Instead, try to have a successful product make your eventual launch successful.

Steph uses this time to learn from early clients, adapting and improving the product along the way, and collecting testimonials that will be useful when she launches.

3. Final Launch

After 6 months of quietly selling and updating her first book, Steph decided it was time for an official launch.

Her distribution strategy focused on 3 key things:

• Posting on Product Hunt.
• Offering a 20% commission to affiliates who helped sell the book.
• Appearing on podcasts and other media to share helpful info from the book.

The new course just entered phase 2 of this process last week, and will follow the same launch path as the book, with one addition — Steph’s now got a list of 3k+ people who’ve bought from her once before, a powerful asset for marketing all future products.

Steph is a prime example of how marketing is not rocket science.

Whether you're selling an ebook or SaaS, building in public is a mainstay strategy to building traction. Marketing concurrently to building the product, and even before building the product, allows you to build momentum that launches your product into a positive trajectory.

—Corey

p.s. did you see that I launched my new course, Marketing Like A Media Company? Would love for you to check it out →​

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