3 lessons from Amy Chan's book launch

Amy Chan has a bigger platform than I do. She has 125,000 Instagram followers and 112,000 TikTok followers. She is pretty, charismatic, smart, and telegenic. She has found her niche in the self-help market, offering singles “research-backed tools to rewire old patterns, date smarter, and build healthy, lasting relationships.” Her first self-help book, Breakup Bootcamp, sold 33,000 copies. If I were an agent, I’d want to represent Amy, and if I were a book editor, I’d want to bid on her second book Unsingle.

Several of you have DM’d me a link to Amy’s post, about spending $44,000—the equivalent of an entry level publishing salary—on her book launch campaign, with suboptimal results.

I spent far less money on my own launch campaign¹ for If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You, and I hit the USA Today bestseller list for the first time in my career (it’s my sixth book), at spot #27. Sonia Feldman, my former Hype House student, hit the list with her debut novel. Sanibel is another incredible success story of a debut novelist who hit the list by posting content.

In her post, Amy says that if she’d have wanted to hit that list, she would have had to spend an additional $25,000, but that simply isn’t true. I hit the list by using a pre-order incentive strategy that I learned from self-help authors just like Amy.

One could argue it isn’t fair to compare my book sales to Amy’s, since we’re working in two different categories. But self-help is one of the top-performing categories in publishing right now; anyone who looked at Amy’s platform, and looked at mine, would expect her to sell many more books than me.

To sell books, you don’t just need a platform—you need a content strategy that converts your followers into book buyers.

The comments on Amy’s post depress me so much—writers are so demoralized, and believe nothing—not even $$$$$—works to sell books. They believe all publicists are “scammers” (not true!) They believe BookTok “is just empty hype.”

I want writers to feel more empowered in their careers and I share evidence of what does work to sell books with my clients, students, and subscribers, because I think we have enough content about what doesn’t work.

Here are 3 lessons I want my audience to take away from Amy’s expensive launch:

You have to convert your own fans first

Before you even think about spending money on a TikTok campaign, so creators will promote your book to their audiences, or hire PR to get you on podcasts and TV, do you know how to persuade your own fans to buy your new book?

One strategy I’ve used with my clients is to build a bridge between fans of your previous work and your new book.

In her post, Amy doesn’t share links to the kind of content she was posting during the pre-order window. The engagement on these posts is surprisingly low, for someone who is skilled at creating content (compared to most authors). When I read the comments on her content, I see fans rooting for her, and cheering on her successes, but I don’t see evidence that she’s helping her audience solve problems in their dating lives and feel better. To sell this kind of book, her job is to persuade her audience that the book will transform their life.

If she was tracking her pre-order numbers (either by asking her publisher for updates, or tracking link clicks), she would have gotten early signals that her pre-order incentive wasn’t working. She could have pivoted.

If I were Amy’s content strategist, I also would have worked with her on starting a signature series.

Sponsored content is going to perform worse than organic

Ted doesn’t understand TikTok and he shouldn’t opine on it. BookTok sells millions of books every year. At a time when everyone is panicking about young adults not being able to read, BookTok has turned many former readers, and non-readers, into readers. Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt told Bloomberg last year that the bookstore’s “mid-single digits” growth is a result of its embrace of BookTok twenty-something readers.

I’m grateful to BookTok creators for doing so much to support authors, and for making reading, and cultivating a life of the mind, look cool.

Here are some books I’ve bought because of recommendations on BookTok: Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, Private Rites by Julia Armfeld, I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, The Wall by Marlen Haushofer, and Universality by Natasha Brown.

The reason Amy’s book only sold 3 copies because of influencer campaign is not because the “BookTok literary revival is just empty hype.”

It’s because sponsored posts always perform worse than organic content.

It’s more time consuming to actually make friends on the internet, as I have done, so that those friends share your work with their audience, but it is so much more effective (and less expensive!) than paying for ads that no one wants to watch.

Here’s the video that Amy says was the best one in the paid campaign; it has 813 likes, 15 comments, and 130 saves. Any sponsored post MUST, according to FCC rules, declare itself as sponsored. The algorithm downgrades sponsored content, which makes it less effective.

Compare the engagement on that one to this one my friend Josh made (142,000 likes; 1751 comments; 27,000 saves) after I sent him a copy of my client Jillian Turecki’s self-help book. Josh wasn’t paid by me, Jillian, or Jillian’s publisher. I just knew him well enough to think her book would interest him. A genuine mention, or recommendation, is going to outperform a paid ad, which is good news for all of us who can’t afford the PR investment that Amy made in her own launch.

It just isn’t true that BookTok is “empty hype.” I hit the USA Today list because I spent three years making friends with a community of readers on BookTok who I genuinely believed would love my new novel.

@wickedtongue.substack#booktok @Leigh Stein

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If you have money to invest in your book launch, spend it on learning new skills, not on publicity

When writers come to me for advice about whether to hire an independent publicist, because they’re worried their publisher won’t do anything for their book, I tell them not to spend the money on publicity. An independent publicist can cost $25,000 - $60,000 and do you know who those book publicists are pitching?

They’re pitching content creators—like me.

I get more book pitches than ever before in my career; it tells me a lot about the state of the media industry. Last week, I received a third “just checking in” email from a book publicist representing a literary book by an author who joined in a Twitter pile-on of me on Twitter in 2023, after I wrote a piece arguing that writers should pay more attention to BookTok. This isn’t the publicist’s fault! Surely she has no idea her author publicly shamed me. But I remember.

If you can afford to set aside a portion of your advance, to invest in promoting your own book, because you want to know you did everything you possibly could to set yourself up for success, I think that money is better spent learning skills that you can carry forward into the rest of your writing career. I did this in 2019, when I hired a marketing consultant (shout out Dan Blank!) for Self Care; I learned so much about marketing from Dan. I did it again in 2025, when I worked with Lexi Merritt on my pre-order incentives for If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You. I learned TikTok in 2022 by hiring a Gen Z assistant to teach me.

I understand why outside publicity is so appealing to the authors who can afford it. They believe publicity absolves them of self-promotion. They don’t have to create content, and feel embarrassed in front of their friends and family. It makes you feel powerful to write “copying my publicist” in an email.

But publicity only happens once: at launch. A few weeks later, the window closes. And then what do you do? Post content about your disappointment?

Creating content is how I stay in conversation with my readers; it’s also how I market my backlist.

If you want to learn content strategy from me, this is your sign to sign up for Hype House.

1. In the final class of Hype House, I share everything I did to launch my book and hit the bestseller list, including how much I spent on book promotion.