How James Clear Manufactured Word Of Mouth To Create A NYT’s #1 Best Seller
To make a book a best seller, nothing beats word-of-mouth. Because reading choice is more personal, people tend to put significantly more weight on recommendations from trusted sources, friends, family, and influencers.
James Clear, the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Atomic Habits, is a master at engineering word of mouth.
The book content is remarkable for sure, but as James admitted in a recent Tim Ferris podcast episode, word-of-mouth is monumental to the book’s success - one copy every 15 seconds since it was published.
Let’s deconstruct his tactics.
James started to prep for his book launch 15 months before the launch.
Because even though he did the standard book promo playbook (podcast, advance copies to influencers) like every other author would do, he did everything at a larger scale.
He reached out to 300 podcast hosts that could be relevant to the book.
He recorded 75-100 podcast episodes.
All the podcasts were released within 2 weeks to 1 month of the book launch, along with influencer copies, email blasts, etc.
He calls this strategy: a concentrated strike in a tight window.
This makes your product seem bigger than it is; people feel like it’s being talked about and mentioned everywhere, so more people are likely to talk about your product.
James “infiltrated” communities with built-in word-of-mouth about a topic. Like the vegan, bullet-journalling community that has already come together around something they cannot stop talking about.
He compiled a list of 15 categories and analyzed which communities the book is a good fit for, like cross-fitters, mommy bloggers, and VCs.
Then leveraged these communities to get his book in front of potential readers and generated organic word of mouth.
A smart content marketing tactic that’s easy to implement to engineer word-of-mouth content.
James embedded the click-to-twee button of snippets of his book quotes across his site and newsletter.
Making it easy for current readers to continuously spread the content to their community at a click of a button.
If you search for any quotes with the “share this on Twitter” button, you will see tons of these tweets, organically generating impressions for James Clear and his content.
