I recently joined Matt and Lauren on Lulu's Publish and Prosper podcast as their first-ever outside guest. We talked about what happened between copy 1,000 and copy 10,000 of my book, and what all of it actually did for the business. This is that story.

"I just hit 10,000 copies sold of the book."

I hadn't announced it anywhere. Not on LinkedIn. Not in the newsletter. I was saving it, and being on Publish and Prosper felt like the right moment.

Matt didn't miss a beat.

"You're gonna have to slow down there, Justin."

"Why?"

"Because the last 30 were us. So technically, you sold 9,970. I'm gonna need you to go sell 30 more."

He was kidding. I'd gifted him those copies, and he hauled them home in a suitcase from San Antonio.

But here's why that number matters. Matt pointed out that most New York Times bestsellers barely crack 10,000 copies. Most traditionally published books are lucky to sell 5,000.

The last time I showed up on their show, the episode was about how I sold my first 1,000. A little over a year later, it's 10x that.

And the book was never supposed to make me rich. That was never the point.

So let me tell you what actually happened between 1,000 and 10,000. Including the part where it put a serious squeeze on my cash flow.

Refuse the Three-Month Cliff

A few years ago, I sat in a session Matt ran at CEX. He put a chart on the screen showing sales over time for the average author.

Big spike on launch day. Then a slow slide to zero over a couple of months.

His explanation stuck with me. The author has birthed this baby. They're creatively spent. So they put it out into the universe, let whatever happens happen, and move on to the next thing.

I hadn't even written my book yet. But I filed that chart away and made myself a promise.

That's not going to be me.

So what changed between 1,000 and 10,000 copies? Honestly? Nothing fancy.

I just never stopped talking about it.

It's been close to two years since Sponsor Magnet came out, and it's still the main call to action everywhere. Every event. Every newsletter. Every podcast and YouTube video. Every interview where someone else is asking the questions.

Matt says the number one thing self-published authors get wrong is that they don't market the book at all. It feels icky. So after about three months, they quietly pull it out of their bio, stop mentioning it in their newsletter, and move on.

And what do you think everyone else does when you stop talking about your book?

They stop too.

Nobody's seeing it as often as you think

Here's the thing about feeling like you're talking about your book too much. Or your offer. Or your sponsor.

Most people aren't seeing it.

If I post about my book ten times, the average follower might see one of those posts. That's not pessimism. Go pull up your organic reach compared to your follower count. The platforms decide who sees what.

So that voice in your head saying "you've mentioned this way too many times"? It's measuring your output. Not their exposure.

And if someone does see it a few times and complains?

Who cares.

I said this on the show, and Matt immediately wanted it as a sound clip: if you're going to get mad at me for promoting my work, I don't need you as a reader or a follower. I poured everything into this book. It costs less than lunch. Go eat Cheetos in the basement.

If you're a creator who gets nervous mentioning a sponsor one more time, the exact same math applies to you.

Get a little unhinged

Lauren brought up an emo reel I did in a black wig. (Yes, she watched the bloopers where it fell off.)

I was in a metal band in high school. That's part of who I am.

I wasn't always like this, though. When my wife and I first started on YouTube years ago, I thought I had to be buttoned up. Talk a certain way. Hair perfect.

Over the years, I've gotten more and more unhinged. Because there's so much meh content on the internet that I just keep swiping past. Why not have fun? Why not be yourself?

Screw what's normal. Strive to be abnormal.

Write a Book People Can't Help Recommending

Promotion only gets you so far, though. Getting from 1,000 to 10,000 required other people doing the evangelizing for me.

I think about it like a K-factor. How many people are out there recommending this book on my behalf, without me in the room?

Lauren told a story about being at a conference I didn't even attend. Someone asked how to get sponsors for their brand, and before she could say a word, three other people jumped in. "Have you looked up Justin Moore? Have you read his book?"

There it is. That's the whole game.

But for that to happen, two things have to be true. First, the book has to actually solve a problem, so that when someone's friend has that exact problem in real life, your book is the obvious recommendation. Second, people have to get far enough into it to feel confident recommending it.

You have to do the hard work of writing a good book. There's no shortcut around that part.

Write it to last

I also wrote the book to be deliberately evergreen. No dates. No social platform names. Because we all know those come and go.

I kept asking myself: if someone picks this up in ten years, will it still be relevant?

I was a beta reader for Matt's book, and one of the first things I flagged was that he'd named a bunch of social platforms in his marketing section. It was going to date the whole thing. A book that feels dated on the back cover is a book someone puts back on the shelf.

Put more books in the wild

On top of the 10,000 I've sold, I've given away probably three or four thousand copies out of my own pocket.

Five hundred copies donated to a conference. Thirty copies to a little creator meetup in Rhode Island. Anytime I sniff out a gathering of creators, I ask if I can send books.

So there are close to 15,000 copies in circulation right now.

More books in the wild means more evangelists. More people advocating for the concepts and frameworks I believe in. That only helps the business downstream.

Meanwhile, my traditionally published friends tell me they can't give their own books away. That's insane to me.

I Killed a $15K–$20K a Month Revenue Stream on Purpose

Lauren asked whether giving all this away was high risk.

A huge amount of risk. I can actually put a dollar value on it.

Before the book came out, my course was doing $15K to $20K a month in revenue. After the book? It went to basically zero.

The book killed it. And I did that intentionally.

I saw the writing on the wall. Courses were on the decline. Everyone is about to have an infinitely patient, infinitely knowledgeable assistant in their pocket. Over the next five, ten, fifteen years, sitting through a four-hour on-demand course just isn't going to be how most people learn.

So I open-sourced everything. I put it all in the book.

The bet was on coaching. If people already have the knowledge, the thing they'll need is help with implementation. That's what Wizard's Guild was built for, and it's where I was shifting the entire model of the business.

But I'll be honest about something I haven't really talked about publicly.

It was a bumpy transition. There was a six-to-nine-month stretch where things were tight financially. Having the vision of where you're going and actually living through the gap are two very different experiences.

What would you do? Keep milking a declining $20K a month? Or blow it up and bet on what's next?

The people who will never watch your content

Here's what it really boiled down to.

I already had plenty of people on my newsletter and watching my YouTube videos. But the people I really wanted to reach were never going to do either of those things.

I recently did a guest session for a community of content creators in the supply chain industry. The marketing person at a logistics company is never going to watch my YouTube videos.

But they might read a book.

A book is a universal knowledge transfer format. I don't think that's ever going to change.

The Rooms a Book Gets You Into

Matt asked me point blank: can you definitively name clients you landed because of the book that bring in more than the course ever did?

Yes. Definitively.

I work directly with three private clients. One of them is doing close to eight figures a year in sponsorship revenue.

That one client pays me more per month than my old corporate job in medical devices. And at the scale they operate, my fee is a rounding error compared to the deal sizes I'm helping them negotiate.

They came from the book. They read it, bought copies for their whole team, and then reached out with this:

"We're not really creators or influencers. But we read your book because there's no other book about this. We're doing a huge amount of sponsorships and we need help. Can you help people like us?"

That's just private clients. I'm not even counting the coaching program or the event.

Writing the book, and consciously killing off other revenue streams because of it, was the best thing I've ever done professionally.

Your audience is bigger than your vocabulary

That client changed how I talk about my work.

Early on, I said "influencers" a lot. Then I shifted to "creators," which more professionals are comfortable calling themselves. But even that word has limits. Someone organizing a B2B healthcare SaaS conference is never going to call themselves a creator.

And here's what's wild. Some of the most lucrative sponsorship opportunities out there live in those weird corners. Niche industry meetups and communities where the supply of people is tiny and they are starving for support, because nobody is helping them.

Coaches are another great example. Fitness coaches, life coaches, health coaches with a roster of ten clients. They'd never think they could get sponsored. But they can form alliances with local brands: "I've got ten clients already paying for my services. If I recommend your store, they're going to go."

The book has opened doors I never expected. Bigger business podcasts, not just the creator podcast circuit. Stages outside the creator economy entirely.

Control Is the Whole Point

When people ask Matt for the one reason to indie publish, his answer is a single word.

Control.

Here's what that looks like in practice for me.

One of the major calls to action in the book is a QR code. Scan it, enter your email, and you get bonus resources. You're basically joining my newsletter. That's very intentional. If you bought the book somewhere other than my website, I still want a way to reach you.

But my business has changed since the book came out. The course I mentioned in the book? Discontinued. Meanwhile, my team now runs free strategy calls with creators and business owners who need help with their sponsorship strategy. That didn't exist when the book launched, and it's a huge lead generation lever.

So I revised the book. Pulled out the course mentions. Replaced them with an invitation to get on a call with my team.

Within about 48 hours, every copy printed from that point forward had the new call to action.

I've made one significant revision already, and I'm about to make a second. Try doing that with a traditional publisher's second edition process.

The audiobook that came late

I didn't launch the audiobook alongside the book. Honestly, I was so overwhelmed by the launch itself that I couldn't even think about recording it.

It turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

By the time I recorded it, about five months later, a ton of people had read the book and gotten real results. So I thought: why not interview some of them?

At the end of each chapter, which maps to each step of my eight-step Sponsorship Wheel, I added a five-to-fifteen-minute bonus interview. I hand-picked readers who told me that specific chapter helped them land a deal or negotiate more money.

I also filmed myself recording the whole thing, figuring I'd use the footage someday. I just released it as a four-and-a-half-hour video on YouTube.

I'm not beholden to any rules about what an author is supposed to do. I just ask: what would be cool? What would serve my readers most?

Stagger Every Release

I launched by selling direct from my own site first. Physical copies only. Then I went wide with the ebook and retailers like Amazon. Then the audiobook.

Every new format and every new place to buy is a marketable event.

If you release every format everywhere at once, you lose your excuse to talk about it again. Hello, cliff.

Stagger it, and you've got a legitimate reason to bring the book up again. It feels way less salesy, because it's real news. "It's now available as an audiobook" is a reason to post.

During the early days, people publicly bugged me about it. When's it coming to Amazon? When's the ebook out?

My answer: be patient, young Padawan.

That direct connection with readers was worth the friction. And to be fair, I had a tailwind. There was no other book squarely about this topic, so people were hungry enough to put up with buying from my site. Topic selection matters.

Everything That Spun Out of One Book

The book launched in January. The first Sponsor Games happened in March.

The event is literally the eight-step Sponsorship Wheel translated into games you play in person. You roll up your sleeves, role play pitches and negotiations, and compete for a $5,000 grand prize. This year we even gave away real brand deals.

At the very first one, someone told me: "I read the book, but it didn't click until I came to this."

That reminded me that some people need repetition. They need to actually do the thing, out loud, with other people, before it sticks. My North Star is that I really want people to learn this stuff, because I think it can change their life and their business. So I keep building new formats.

Which brings me to Sponsor Mole.

My audience is shaped kind of like a barbell. On one end, you've got sophisticated creators doing lots of deals who need a lot of support, and coaching is perfect for them. But roughly 85 to 90 percent of my audience is earlier in the journey. Other than the book, I didn't have anything for them.

And even two years after the book came out, I keep getting the same three questions. Who do I reach out to at the brand? What do I say so they actually respond instead of ignoring me like the rest of the AI slop pitches? And which brands would even want to sponsor me?

So I built software to answer those three questions.

I partnered with Apollo, a sales intelligence platform, and became an official data vendor. I literally had to register in a bunch of states to do it. Then I layered my entire pitching chapter on top of their data, including my chart of which job titles to target, and spent months tuning the search criteria.

Now you type in any brand, and within about three seconds it pulls up the decision maker.

It also automates the pitch research I lay out in the book. Instead of manually digging through a brand's blog and social posts to notice they ran a Black Friday deal last year, you get eight different pitch angles in about 25 seconds. And I just sent out invites to the MCP, which means you can use it right inside ChatGPT or Claude.

Matt admitted that when I first told him I was launching software, he thought I'd finally lost it.

Fair. But I went to school for computer science. I'm an engineer. I built the entire thing myself over about a year.

And here's why I think it's taking off only two weeks in. People trust me from the book. I built up so much goodwill by helping people land brand deals from an inexpensive paperback that even if they're not 100 percent sure about the software, they figure: Justin's helped me so much already. I'll give it a shot.

That's another downstream consequence of writing a great book.

Do I Regret Pricing It So Low?

Matt asked the question I get a lot. When someone tells me they landed a $20,000 deal from a book that cost them less than twenty bucks, is there any part of me that wishes I'd charged more?

This is going to sound woo-woo. But I truly believe it all comes back around. Help people without expecting anything in return, and you'll be rewarded. I've been rewarded in so many ways, professionally and with my family.

Would commission checks on some of my bigger clients be nice? Sure. But not really.

My wife and I have been incredibly blessed. I look at this as passing the baton.

And here's my hot take. The representation and broker model is a bad deal for creators. You can do this yourself and keep it all. Have your cake and eat it too.

Because I'm not motivated by a cut, I can be objective. I can look at a deal and tell you, "Don't take that. It's a bad deal."

That alignment is worth more to me than any commission.

A Book Is Different

The last time I was on the show, I said the book was my legacy. Lauren asked if I still feel that way.

Absolutely.

I recently went to a mixer and got dropped into a breakout room with six strangers. Three of them had read my book.

It's not an ego thing. I'm just so tickled that the book has found its way into all these pockets of people I've never met.

I'll never feel like a YouTube video or a podcast episode or a newsletter is my legacy. A book is different. It's hallowed. Even with AI, I don't think anything will displace it as the most respected way of saying "this is everything I know."

Matt made a great point too. Your legacy can't be a YouTube channel or a LinkedIn feed, because you have zero control over whether those platforms exist tomorrow. A book sits on a shelf. It's tangible.

Speaking of tangible, I'm wearing a new bright red shirt to events now. It's got a picture of my book and says "I wrote this. Talk to me."

What's next

People keep asking about a second book.

I've bought the URL for the title. I'm not telling you what it is.

The number one piece of feedback I get from readers outside the creator economy is that the book is about way more than sponsorships. It's really about sales and relationships, and what it takes to sell anything successfully. So I've been thinking about a book that's one or two concentric circles out from this topic.

But there's a bigger question underneath it.

My kids are nine and twelve. I love hanging out with them, and I've slowed down on travel because of it. I know this window where they still want to hang out with me and my wife is closing. I'm going to blink and we'll be empty nesters.

So maybe a new book arrives right around then. Maybe my wife and I travel the world with it.

I'm not trying to be overly calculated with my life. But I'm definitely thinking about it.

So let me ask you.

What's the thing you built, launched, or pitched that you stopped talking about after three months, just because it started to feel awkward?

Go bring it back. Most people never saw it the first time.

Grab my book, Sponsor Magnet, to learn how to transform your influence into income.

Want one-on-one sponsorship coaching? Join Wizard's Guild.