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I learned a lot from Monica over the years we worked together, but there’s one thing I keep coming back to over and over.
“If you want to make a million dollars as an author, the best way to do that is to give away a million copies of your book." - Monica Leonelle
There are three main ways authors market books successfully:
- Being in Kindle Unlimited, where subscribers can read for free and authors get paid on page reads.
- Free first in series, where authors make the first book in their series free so people buy the later books.
- As a freebie loss-leader, where authors give the book away to sell their coaching or other services.
Even big publishers will drop the price on the first book in a series when the newest book releases. Across every axis industry-wide, it seems the best way to sell books is to make them free.
On top of that, most humans I’ve ever met fell in love with reading at either the library (where they can borrow books for free) or school (where they get books for free as part of the curriculum).
People fall in love with an author by reading their work, and the easiest way to get somebody to read is to give them the book for free.
Whether they want to use this language or not, almost all authors want to scale their readership so that more people resonate with their work, and any company will tell you the best way to scale is to remove friction points.
And what is the biggest friction point? Money.
Manuscript report
Last week we ran a piece on how, in a market of 4 million new titles a year, finishing your book is the easy part, and why the marketing layer is what separates the authors who actually earn from everyone who doesn't.
This is the tool for that marketing layer.
You hand ManuscriptReport.com your manuscript, it reads the whole book and builds the part most of us dread doing by hand. It hands back the comps, keywords, quote extraction, visuals, categories, blurb, marketing plan, and more. Try it today and I got you 20% off.
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Removing money as a friction point is why companies take on billions in venture capital. They use that money to subsidize giving their product away for free to get users in the door, hoping that they’ll try it, love it, and some percentage will buy it.
Last I checked, it can cost upwards of $150+ to get somebody into a free trial of a SaaS product, which is orders of magnitude higher than it costs to sell somebody a book. If they can make the math work, I'm confident you can, too.
You might say "Russell, that's great but I'm not interested in growing a business," to which I say...
...then why did you release the book? You could have kept it on the shelf, or just given it to your friends, or distributed it only as a Dropbox link...
...but you didn't. Either you released it yourself or you worked with a publisher, and now it's up...on a marketplace...where you are charging money for it...and expecting people to buy it.
More than just buying, you expect people read it, love it, share it with their friends, and become a fan of your work, gobbling up everything you release for the rest of their lives.
None of that screams "I don't care about building a business." So, can we stop lying to ourselves now?
All authors work in a product-led growth industry, where using a product, in this case the book, precipitates its own growth. The more people who read your book, the more people talk about it, which causes more people to...
...well, you get the point.
Think about Slack, Dropbox, or Canva. Those companies didn't have to spend a fortune on advertising. Their products grew because people naturally disseminated it to other people until adoption spread like a contagion. This is exactly how an Evangelist grows in our SCALE paths system.
SCALE paths: (E)vangelists
You grow through people who believe in you. You rally superfans, brand advocates, influencers, customers, and ambassadors who spread your message faster than ads ever could.
Russell Nohelty
It's the same way with all books that scale. The more people who read a great book, the more people share that book, which makes more people want to read that book.
So, that being true, the best thing we can do is get our book into people’s hands as quickly and often as possible.
In The Science of Scaling, Mark Roberge explains that to grow 10x, you need to build different pathways, not just expend more effort.
Maybe you can hand-sell 100 books through hustle, and you might get to 1,000 with email swaps and promos, but if you want to hit 10,000, 100,000, or a million readers? You can’t do this with the systems you already know.
You need new infrastructure:
- Systems to attract readers without your constant involvement.
- A content flywheel that compounds trust over time.
- Assets that scale with attention, not effort.
Giving away your book at scale is not just a marketing trick. It’s a thought experiment that helps conceive new pathways to system-level reach.
The moment you set the goal of giving away a million books, you start building for scale, instead of hustling for scraps.
You might be the best writer this side of Shakespeare…but nobody knows it yet.
People buy from people they know, like, and trust, or at least on the recommendation of somebody who fits that bill...
...which means you need to be known, liked, and trusted by as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, to create a virtuous sales cycle that compounds as quickly as possible.
Yes, it might cost you money in the short term, but marketing isn't about making money on your current books. It's about lowering the customer acquisition cost on your next launch.
If you can find 1,000 people who love your book, then they'll buy the next book, and the one after that, and the one after that ad infinitum. The more people you find with this book, the easier everything becomes for the rest of your career.
In my experience, it usually takes potential customer 1-2 years after learning who you are to buy something. There are lots of ways to cut that time down, but not until they find you. The sooner they enter your ecosystem, the sooner they hit that tipping point.
This is a math game. It’s volume × conversion × lifetime value...
...but to play, you have to get the volume first. That means mass distribution and frictionless entry, and that means giving people an easy way into your ecosystem.
And how do you do that? You make it easy to say yes.
Giving away books isn’t about devaluing your work. In fact, if you’re book isn’t a banger, don’t even consider giving it away. Free things only carry when they are amazing. Once something has traction, making it free gives it more traction, but you can't create traction out of thin air by making something free.
Besides, the last thing you want to do is have somebody’s first introduction to you be a meh book with a tepid cover and an average plot.
No, this isn’t about giving away your meh. It’s about short-circuiting hesitation and building the trust that will eventually get someone to spend $500 on a signed hardback box set or $10,000 on a coaching program.
They won’t do that if they aren’t blown away with what they read. They'll never get there if they don’t read, and they won’t read if it’s hard to access.
You’re not just an author. You’re not just a content creator. You are the CEO of an attention economy business that trades in emotional resonance, world-building, and community.
Stop hoarding your best work and stop acting like your words are a finite resource.
If you want your book to matter, let it be read a million times. That’s how movements start.
Author careers scale by putting your stories into as many hands as humanly possible. Let them fall in love. Then, build the system that gives them somewhere to land when they do.
And honestly? This is a way more fun game to play.
You know what’s not fun? Freaking out every launch day wondering if your algorithm overlords will smile upon you...
...or stressing over ad ROI because you’re shoveling cash into the void just to maybe convert cold traffic on a $2.99 ebook...
...or screaming into the abyss like your next 10 sales depend on how spicy your hot take is today.
The “million books given away” game flips the power dynamic by saying: “You want the book? Take it. If it’s for you, you’ll come back. And when you do, I’ll be ready.”
That level of confidence is contagious and that level of scale is undeniable.
It’s how I’ve run my business for years. I don’t think about sales volume. I think about free people finding my work, knowing that if enough of them see what I do, then some of them will make a decision that I’m awesome.
And that’s the real secret. The goal here isn’t to get somebody to buy…it’s to get somebody to make a decision. Once they make that decision, they will either buy or they won't.
They need to decide whether you are worth their time, so you need to give them enough information to make that decision. If you give away a million books and even 1/1000 of them make a decision that you’re worth their time, that’s 1,000 new fans right there.
I have 40,000 people on my combined email lists, but closer to 300,000 have gone through my ecosystem over the years. That means almost 90% of people who came into my orbit eventually unsubscribed, which is fine because of the 10% of them that didn't.
From that, I get about 1,000-2,000 unique buyers a year, which adds up to about 15,000 unique buyers in the past decade who've passed through my list.
And you know what? Only 7,500 of them remained on my list after buying. Almost half of the buyers who made it onto my list unsubscribed over the years...
...and I'm really happy with that number...
...but do you see how those numbers only work at scale? Most author businesses don't work because they aren't thinking big enough.
I've had about 15,000 buyers out of 300,000 subscribers, or about 5% of my total list size, and half of those unsubscribed after buying. I'm not everyone's cup of tea and that's okay...
...because I have scale. If I only had 3,000 subscribers, I would have made 15 sales in that same time.
I only have a solid fanbase now because I've run a lot of people through my funnel in the past decade, and frankly I've been thinking pretty small. I know people who've run 10x more through their system and their list is 10x bigger now.
That’s the kind of volume you need for success. Once people are inside your ecosystem, you can optimize that number over time, but so many of you are struggling because you simply don’t have enough movement through your system in the first place.
You literally can't succeed because you don't have enough traffic.
If only 2-5% of people in your audience ever buy from you, and it takes $100,000/yr to sustain your career, that's a math problem you can solve...
...It's not going to be solved by optimizing the numerator, though, but in massively expanding the denominator.
The Denominator Strategy
Why growing your audience beats optimizing conversions (almost) every time
Russell Nohelty
How do you do this, though? I know giving away a million books sounds huge, and it is, but it’s also not something you need to solve tomorrow. It’s about building infrastructure that chips away at it consistently.
Here are 12 real, tactical, scalable ways to do that:
