Why My Times Square Billboard Didn’t Drive Sales | Income Tips & Side Hustles
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Key Takeaways
Putting my ebook on a Times Square billboard generated consideration, press and congratulations — however it didn’t promote the books.
The billboard only drove sales after the press turned it into a story. The ecosystem round selling the ebook made the billboard an event, and that event boosted ebook sales.
The greatest advertising mistake entrepreneurs make is believing the second is the advertising. The second is the catalyst. Marketing is every little thing you build before, round and after it.
Ask your self: What story are you creating round what you’ve made? Sales observe a story, not the other means round.
The comments began flooding in: “Congratulations!” “OMG! That’s amazing,” as they noticed my 8-year-old son and me beaming with pleasure as our second ebook debuted, 40 ft tall on a New York Times Square billboard. Little did they know, I used to be testing a query most authors never assume to ask: Does the billboard truly promote the ebook, or does one thing else?
After my ebook, Make Every Podcast Want You, was featured on a Times Square billboard as one of the “Top Books to Change Your Life in 2024,” authors began reaching out to me. Fiction writers and youngsters’s ebook authors had been asking how they might obtain the same success and how to better place their books after they weren’t immediately contributing to business growth. They needed to grasp the mechanics of the billboard.
I had already seen how podcasts and PR may promote a nonfiction ebook and skyrocket it to an Amazon bestseller. But I needed to know one thing more particular: How many sales may truly are available immediately from the billboard itself, separate from every little thing else?
So I made a decision to check it.
For our next ebook, I picked one thing vastly different — a kids’s ebook I had written eight years in the past, when my son was a child, called It’s Just a Fart. It’s fully uncorrelated to any other business entity I run. No course to upsell past the ebook buy. No elaborate funnel, just a simple e-mail opt-in on the ebook’s web site. I made it alongside two other mothers — illustrator Amanda Swift and formatter Arlene Soto. My two boys served as consultants on the project, weighing in on which drawings had been funniest.
I put the ebook up in Times Square. The messages got here flooding in. The press picked it up. Then I waited to see what would truly occur to sales.
The billboard didn’t promote the ebook. The story did.
Here’s what I realized: The billboard only drove sales after the press turned it into a story. The ecosystem round selling the ebook made the billboard an event, and that event boosted ebook sales.
The billboard alone didn’t convert. The story round it did.
Most people strolling by way of Times Square on any given day aren’t anticipating to purchase a kids’s ebook about farts. And they didn’t. The billboard generated consideration, photographs and congratulations — however not an quick spike in pre-order sales. The momentum got here later, as soon as the billboard grew to become half of a bigger story shared across social media.
That’s the place people realized why the ebook existed: a solo journey I took with my son, who served as one of its most enthusiastic consultants. He weighed in on which illustrations had been funniest, how to make the infants look even sillier, and who, in the end, impressed the ebook in the first place. People weren’t shopping for because they’d seen a billboard. They had been shopping for because they linked with the story behind it.
The greatest advertising mistake entrepreneurs make is believing the second is the advertising.
The second is the catalyst. Marketing is every little thing you build before, round and after it. Without that ecosystem, even the most spectacular visibility play turns into a fleeting picture alternative instead of a significant business asset.
A billboard is a positioning tool. It tells the world: this exists, this issues enough to be right here. But positioning isn’t the same as connection, and connection is what truly strikes a stranger to tug out their pockets for a ebook they’ve never heard of, written by somebody they don’t know, about a matter that’s objectively foolish.
What truly constructed the sales
A billboard says, “Look at this.” An experience says, “Here’s something to be a part of.” One is ego. The other turns consideration into participation. Belonging creates resonance, and resonance creates sales.
If you’re an writer or founder contemplating a high-visibility positioning play like this, right here’s what I’d inform you, having now run this check twice with two very different books:
A New York Times Square billboard is a phenomenal positioning tool. It will not be, on its own, a sales tool. Treat it as one beat in a bigger story, not the complete story. Before you ebook the billboard, build the experience that will live round it. What may very well be the particular, private, barely inconvenient element that makes a stranger really feel like they’re half of one thing greater?
What story are you creating round the story of your ebook?
I noticed the same precept play out with one of my purchasers, memoirist Whitney Joy, writer of Seven Blank Pages. Rather than build her launch round merely asserting that her ebook was out there, we constructed it round a visibility second that mirrored the coronary heart of her story. On launch day, seven copies of her memoir had been deliberately let loose to journey from reader to reader, each with a trackable QR code, mirroring her ebook’s themes of connection, therapeutic and shared humanity woven throughout.
Readers weren’t just shopping for a memoir. They had been turning into half of the story.
The visibility second gave people one thing significant to take part in, and participation is way more highly effective than plain previous PR promotion. Ask your self: What story are you creating round what you’ve made? Sales observe a story, not the other means round.
Don’t mistake the congratulations for conversion. Too many founders invest in the seen second while neglecting the story, distribution and follow-up that truly create momentum. Visibility is the spark. The ecosystem you build round it’s what catches fireplace. And the story is its gasoline.
Key Takeaways
Putting my ebook on a Times Square billboard generated consideration, press and congratulations — however it didn’t promote the books.
The billboard only drove sales after the press turned it into a story. The ecosystem round selling the ebook made the billboard an event, and that event boosted ebook sales.
The greatest advertising mistake entrepreneurs make is believing the second is the advertising. The second is the catalyst. Marketing is every little thing you build before, round and after it.
Ask your self: What story are you creating round what you’ve made? Sales observe a story, not the other means round.
The comments began flooding in: “Congratulations!” “OMG! That’s amazing,” as they noticed my 8-year-old son and me beaming with pleasure as our second ebook debuted, 40 ft tall on a New York Times Square billboard. Little did they know, I used to be testing a query most authors never assume to ask: Does the billboard truly promote the ebook, or does one thing else?
After my ebook, Make Every Podcast Want You, was featured on a Times Square billboard as one of the “Top Books to Change Your Life in 2024,” authors began reaching out to me. Fiction writers and youngsters’s ebook authors had been asking how they might obtain the same success and how to better place their books after they weren’t immediately contributing to business growth. They needed to grasp the mechanics of the billboard.
I had already seen how podcasts and PR may promote a nonfiction ebook and skyrocket it to an Amazon bestseller. But I needed to know one thing more particular: How many sales may truly are available immediately from the billboard itself, separate from every little thing else?
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