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Key Takeaways Putting my book on a Times Square billboard generated attention, press and congratulations — but it didn’t sell the books.
The billboard only drove sales after the press turned it into a story. The ecosystem around promoting the book made the billboard an event, and that event boosted book sales.
The biggest marketing mistake entrepreneurs make is believing the moment is the marketing. The moment is the catalyst. Marketing is everything you build before, around and after it.
Ask yourself: What story are you creating around what you’ve made? Sales follow a story, not the other way around.
The comments started flooding in: “Congratulations!” “OMG! That’s amazing,” as they saw my 8-year-old son and me beaming with pride as our second book debuted, 40 feet tall on a New York Times Square billboard. Little did they know, I was testing a question most authors never think to ask: Does the billboard actually sell the book, or does something else?
After my book, Make Every Podcast Want You, was featured on a Times Square billboard as one of the “Top Books to Change Your Life in 2024,” authors started reaching out to me. Fiction writers and children’s book authors were asking how they could achieve the same success and how to better position their books when they weren’t directly contributing to business growth. They wanted to understand the mechanics of the billboard.
I had already seen how podcasts and PR could sell a nonfiction book and skyrocket it to an Amazon bestseller. But I wanted to know something more specific: How many sales could actually come in directly from the billboard itself, separate from everything else?
So I decided to test it.
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