How Does John Lee Dumas Launch a Book?

John Lee Dumas, or JLD, is one of the kings of the marketing world and that showed in the way he launched The Common Path To Uncommon Success: A Roadmap to Financial Freedom and Fulfillment.

If you don’t know about JLD, he is absolutely brilliant and part of his brilliance is that he is arguably more open about his methods and income than anyone else out there.

He created his podcast Entrepreneurs on Fire or EonFire with the kind of fervor and passion I’ve never seen and that’s why had millions of downloads and has featured such guests as Tony Robbins and Barbara Corcoran, among everyone else. It’s a daily interview podcast. He knew no one so he hired a mentor and ended up launching into the stratosphere. I joined his group, Podcasters Paradise, and I highly recommend it for anyone launching or hosting a podcast. 

So it’s not surprising both that his book was successful and that he was very open about the methods he used to make it successful. 

He Leaned on His Friends—Intentionally

This comes straight from the man himself. As is documented on Chet Holmes’ site, JLD said, “When I sat down and was getting ready, going into book launch mode, I said “Who are my Dream 100?” 

And I said ‘Who are these hundred people?’ and the list was done so quickly. I’m like ‘There’s still a ton of people I want on this list so I’m like, let’s bump into 200. Okay now, there’s 200. Let’s bump into 300.’ And by 300, I’m like ‘Okay I’ve just carved out a lot of work for myself.’

Because all of my Dream 300 had been a guest on my show, I knew I had built up a lot of reciprocity bringing them on my platform, sharing their voice, their message, their mission with the world. Now, I was like ‘It was so great having you on my show. To share your message with the fire nation, now I have spent 480 hours writing this book 71 000 words 273 pages. I spent almost all of 2020, my quarantine time writing this book, and it is such a passion project of mine. Will you help me share this message with the world? Because by the way, you are part of it.’ I’m saying this in the video and I’m like ‘Pat Flynn, Amy Porterfield, you guys were a part of this because it’s the 3000 people I interviewed that are the knowledge of this book. This doesn’t come from my brain and my story. This is your story, your brains that I learned over the years as a mentee to your mentorship during these interviews, and all these things that make this book up. So I would love to ask you these three specific asks.’ 

Then I got really specific on this and these are during the four-minute videos. I said, ‘Number one, will you go onto Amazon and buy three hardcover copies?’ I was really specific, I wasn’t like ‘Buy one or buy a few.’ I said, ‘Will you buy three hardcover copies? Then I told them why: ‘Amazon will base their bulk orders based on how many pre-orders that we have. So I would love to really jack that up to have as high numbers as possible, so Amazon has their bulk order as high as possible.’ So I asked them specifically what I wanted them to do but then I gave them the why. I didn’t just want them to do it, like ‘Give me three dollars because I get about a dollar per book.’ I wanted them to do it because it was going to help the book sales with Amazon buying their bulk order.

Then I said, ‘Number two, I made all these great bulk buy options where you can start at 12 books and go up to 1200 books. Will you check out the bulk buy options? And if it makes sense, will you buy one of those bulk orders for your team or for your audience?’ 

‘Number three, you have an amazing platform. Would you consider having me on your platform to talk about The Common Path to Uncommon Success? This is your knowledge that I would love to share condensed into this 17-step road map that I’ve created to financial freedom and fulfillment. Will you let me do that via a podcast? Or a show you know or Instagram live, Facebook live. Whatever platform you feel best serves your audience, I’d love to do it. Here’s my booking link to book me right now. Or if you want to reply with your booking link, I’ll find a time that works best for you.’

A great example is when Rory Vaden sent it to all his clients. Rory has baller clients, and so all of them were like ‘Hey, I have big platforms. I’d love to promote the book as well. Let’s make this happen.’

So I did a lot of research on what the best video platform would be to actually share these videos. And I settled upon this tool called Bomb Bomb. It’s just really cool because you can record the video and like hi-def really easily and quickly. Then you have a little button to click that’s just going to click the email Html code that you need to then paste it into the email, and it gives this cool three-second preview of you actually talking.

So instead of just a screenshot since you know you can’t have a video in the email, it actually gives you this three-second gif of you talking.’”

He Created a Website

He didn’t just make a site that gave a book summary and showed a cover. On uncommonsuccessbook.com, he created a one-minute video of him talking about the book. He drops names of people his readers will have heard of, like Jeff Walker, Amy Porterfield and Pat Flynn. And just like Pat Flynn, he makes that video all about the reader.

His site breaks down his bulk buy offers (these days it just says that the bonuses have expired but you can email him for information on discounts). 

On his site, he also gave away the first chapter. 

Now About Those Bulk Order Bonuses

He gave anyone who pre-ordered the $17 Kindle version or the $28 hardcover three of his bestselling books: The Podcast Journal, The Freedom Journal and The Mastery Journal. That’s a $150 value that he had shipped to everyone who pre-ordered. But he’s open about the fact that he got a $350k advance so that was surely worth the investment (if not in terms of financial rewards now, it does in terms of getting another book deal should he want it).

For a certain amount of pre-orders, he even flew the person and a partner to spend a weekend with him and his girlfriend in Puerto Rico.

He also did a live Ask Me Anything for just the people who pre-ordered.

What Can We Learn?

He spent money on the bonuses. He knew his goal, he knew that a dollar in might be two dollars back. 

He was open about his process all the way through. 

He leaned on his friends with big audiences.

He focused on his medium: podcasting. He’s very open about the fact that he’ll go on podcasts, even small ones, but he gives a time limit for how long he’ll be on and schedules one after another on podcast interview days.

You may not have that budget or those friends with big audiences but you have your own version of that. Like everyone who’s successful, he focused on a few small things and double downed.  

CLICK ON ANY OF THE LINKS BELOW TO HEAR THIS EPISODE!

QUOTE OF THE POD:

“I said, ‘Number one, will you go onto Amazon and buy three hardcover copies?’ I was really specific, I wasn’t like ‘Buy one or buy a few.’ I said, ‘Will you buy three hardcover copies? Then I told them why: ‘Amazon will base their bulk orders based on how many pre-orders that we have. So I would love to really jack that up to have as high numbers as possible, so Amazon has their bulk order as high as possible.’"