The $44,000 Book Launch That Only Sold Three Copies with Amy Chan

If you're thinking about writing an authority building book, and I really hope you are, and you don't want to be counting pennies or checking your book sales all the time, you actually want a book that's going to change your life, I can tell you how. Just go to sevenfigurebooks.com. I'm not trying to capture your email or anything. You can just download this PDF that's going to tell you exactly how to turn an authority building book into revenue, speaking, authority, and no exaggeration, a whole new life.

I've had guests who sold thousands of books with no marketing budget and guests who spent a fortune and watched it vanish. Amy Chan has lived both versions, with two different books, a few years apart.

She's the author of Breakup Bootcamp: The Science of Rewiring Your Heart, a book that landed her in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and on Good Morning America. The Observer once called her "the scientific Carrie Bradshaw." Her follow-up, Unsingle: How to Date Smarter and Create Love That Lasts, should have been the easy part. She'd already done this once. She had the credibility, the press list and the audience.

Instead, she hired a consulting agency for $10,000 that got her zero speaking gigs and a spreadsheet of "outreach" that turned out to be mass cold emails. She paid a TikTok agency another $10,000 to run an influencer campaign tied to TikTok Shop. It launched three weeks late and sold three books. She spent $24,000 on a publicist and calls it the only line item she doesn't regret. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, she wrote a Substack article about the whole thing. It resulted in more book sales than everything else she'd done that year in the first 48 hours, beating even her appearance on Tamron Hall.

We get into all of it: what actually moved copies, what she'd never pay for again and why she still hasn't spoken to her publisher since the book came out.

In this episode:

The exact breakdown of where $44,000 in book marketing money went, and which parts she'd light on fire again without hesitationWhy a Substack post she almost didn't publish became one of her best sales days ever, beating a national television appearanceThe agency that quoted her $65,000 to get her on the USA Today bestseller list, and why she now doubts the list matters at allWhy she hasn't spoken to her publisher since her book launched, and what that says about the relationship between authors and the houses that sign themWhat it's like to have a book op