Behind the Scenes of a WSJ Bestseller Campaign with Boni Wagner-Stafford & Nancy Cavillones

Join us as we delve into the anatomy of a Wall Street Journal bestseller campaign with publisher Boni Wagner-Stafford and publishing manager Nancy Cavillones. Discover the strategy and hard work involved in achieving this prestigious milestone for authors.

In this episode, you will:

• Learn the insider secrets to becoming a Wall Street Journal Bestselling Author and an indie author powerhouse. 
• Create an outstanding book launch team and develop a result-oriented content strategy. 
• Understand the importance of book reviews in establishing credibility and driving sales. 
• Uncover the key to finding your target audience and the book they crave. 
• Maximize your book sales with potent PR tactics and targeted email blasts. 

Why Authors Want to Achieve Bestseller Status

Reaching bestseller status is a prized achievement for many authors, providing visibility in the literary world, recognition in their respective fields, and potential invitations for speaking engagements. Becoming a Wall Street Journal bestseller carries additional prestige, as the list is based on sales rather than editorial decisions. This sought-after accomplishment offers a sense of validation and pride for authors, as well as the possibility of increased book sales. However, not all books have the potential to reach bestseller status. Therefore, authors must target specific readers, assess their subject matter, and develop a compelling content strategy to achieve this goal. Boni Wagner-Stafford and Nancy Cavillones discuss the importance of bestseller status for indie authors, including the validation it provides and the potential benefits of increased recognition and book sales. Drawing on their experience running successful WSJ campaigns, they emphasize the need for authors to understand their audience, focus on relevant topics, and create a solid content strategy, which are key factors in successfully reaching Wall Street Journal bestseller status.

The key moments in this episode are:
 00:00:06 - Introduction
 00:02:02 - Why Authors Want to Achieve Bestseller Status
 00:05:38 - Starting a Wall Street Journal Bestseller Campaign
 00:12:38 - Content Strategy
 00:19:02 - PR vs Social Media
 00:20:13 - Book Reviews
 00:26:05 - Email Blasts
 00:29:27 - Conclusion and Farewell.
 
 "Achieving a spot on a bestseller list or a bestseller status is more of a social thing than a material thing." - Boni Wagner-Stafford

Are you an Indie author with dreams of hitting the Wall Street Journal bestseller list? Well, before you start planning your victory dance, have you heard these three common myths that may be holding you back? Don't worry, we're here to bust these misconceptions and share the truth about achieving bestseller status as an Indie author.

Transcript

00:00:38 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Welcome, welcome. So excited about this episode. We are talking about the anatomy of a Wall Street Journal bestseller campaign. There are all kinds of bestseller campaigns. There's Amazon, there's Barnes and Noble, there's who knows, a Billion Gazillion. And of course, the New York Times Bestseller List. But we're not going to talk about The New York Times. We're going to dig into the Wall Street Journal bestseller campaign because we've done a couple of them here at Ingenium Books. We've had some success. And joining me is my wonderful teammate and compatriot, Nancy Cavillones, who has worked with us on both of these campaigns. And Nancy has a wealth of experience in the publishing industry. She's worked for a couple of different publishers. She's worked for authors, and she's a former teacher. What else should I say about you, Nancy?

00:01:35 - Nancy Cavillones
I think you pretty much covered it. And thanks for having me, Boni.

00:01:39 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah, no problem at all. And we'll talk a little bit more about what's coming up next for you at the end of the episode. But first, I want to talk about The Wall Street Journal campaign, not just what it is, but how an author might go about achieving that little status symbol, if that is in fact one of their goals. So first of all, Nancy, let's talk a little bit about why do authors always want to achieve a bestseller status regardless of where it is?

00:02:15 - Nancy Cavillones
I think the biggest reason would probably be visibility. Visibility is a great way to bump up those book sales, which for most people, that is their goal, to sell some books. But visibility can also lead to invitations for speaking engagement and establishing credibility in whatever industry or field that they're in.

00:02:44 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah, that makes sense. I have written a little bit in the forthcoming second edition of One Million Readers, which is my book, about how to create your own book marketing strategy, that achieving a bestseller list is also more of a social thing than a material thing. So in addition to all those things that you just talked about, Nancy, there is a, I won't say a status component of it, but there's a pride element. And so it can be a very motivating emotional achievement for an author, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be able to quit your day job and retire on the laurels of all of the money that's going to roll in. So more social than material. That's what I mean by that. But that's great. So when we are starting to work on a Wall Street Journal bestseller campaign... Oh, first I need to talk about obviously The Wall Street Journal is one of the premier United States publications. I would say you can have all kinds of arguments. I don't mean to be contentious in any way, shape or form here, but I would say that in pecking order, it's kind of second in profile to The New York Times in the United States. And even we're Canadian publisher, we represent a number of Canadian authors. It still is something that Canadian authors aspire to. And our first Wall Street Journal bestseller in April of 2022 was a Canadian author with a Canadian book. So we'll talk about that in a moment. But so that's what The Wall Street Journal is. 

And The Wall Street Journal Bestseller List is somewhat different from the New York Times Bestseller List. The New York Times bestseller list is curated, meaning that there is a group of people at The New York Times who sit down and review information and subjectively decide. The Wall Street Journal bestseller list is based on book sales. So that's a key difference between the two. And from that respect you can see that it is in many ways easier to make your way onto The Wall Street Journal bestseller list because it really is all about driving book sales in a particular period of time. In this case, one week. So Nancy, where would we start? Where do we start when we have we're working with an author and they say, oh, I'm dreaming big, I want to be a Wall Street journalist seller, where do we start?

00:05:48 - Nancy Cavillones
Well, we start by getting some people behind the book in terms of endorsing it, having recognizable names. And when I say recognizable means, it doesn't necessarily mean like some big splashy celebrity, especially if you're a nonfiction author. A recognizable name might be somebody that is very well known in your field, whether it's psychiatry or parenting or whatever it is. But we usually start there at Ingenium Books Books is we have a conversation about whose name would lend credibility to this book. Whose name, if their name was on the back cover of the book, with blow being the book, would attract the right kind of reader and sales and, quite frankly, impress people because people look for it's almost like social proof in a way. When people have lots of books to choose from, they are looking for somebody that they trust and if somebody that they trust says, hey, this book is the real deal, you should buy it, that helps a lot. So that's a really good place to start thinking about who you could get to endorse your book.

00:07:13 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah, exactly. And of course, in order to do that, what Nancy is talking about, we obviously do the front end work, too, which is tied to what we start working on with the book, which is making sure we're identifying a very specific reader, that we have the right reader, that we know what the readers are looking for and where to find them. So that kind of goes without saying, except I realized I didn't want to go without saying it.

00:07:45 - Nancy Cavillones
I mean, a lot of people, to be fair, a lot of people do overlook that. And I guess really you're right, Boni, we should back way up and say, and we could say that the process really starts with how you are positioning your book, what your book cover looks like, who are you trying to reach with your book and have you done the work to make sure that you're reaching those people?

00:08:12 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah, exactly. And I would say there's another couple of factors, too,. which are around, I think not. While you could say that every book has the potential, I think you could also there's an argument to be made that says not every book has the potential to reach that kind of a bestseller list. And what I mean by that is a hypothetical example, and no offense to authors who write about tie dye T shirts, but I think it might be more difficult for a book that is a how to guide on tie dyeing your T shirt for that book to reach The Wall Street Journal. Not an unheard of, of course, but as opposed to something that is very topical, that is being covered in a number of ways in the media that is going to foster debate where people on both sides of an argument have strong opinions. I think books that fit into either one of those, and sometimes it's the same thing, I think have a better chance at hitting a Wall Street Journal bestseller list.

00:09:41 - Nancy Cavillones
And Dr. Peter Silvertone is a really good example of that exactly. His book was on psychedelics, which continues to be a hot topic. Yes, hot topic. There's a lot of research going on. It's very current.

00:10:00 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
That's right. So that was Dr. Peter Silverstone, his book The Promise of Psychedelics, which was our first Wall Street Journal bestseller at Ingenium Books and we reached number four on the nonfiction list of that Wall Street Journal list the last week of April of 2022. So the other thing I was going to say is, why is it more likely to be that kind of book that is going to hit the Wall Street Journal bestseller list? And one thing to think about is there's no hard and fast threshold in terms of the number of sales that you would need, because it's going to depend on the week and the books that are competing or that have published or that are being sold that week for which the Wall Street Journal is looking at the data. But you probably want to be thinking about whether or not you can move somewhere in the neighborhood of 5000 copies in a single week. So when you juxtapose that against the average number of books that the average author sells in their lifetime, which is 200, you can see that that's quite a big leap. We start back at the beginning and target the reader and assess the topic. And do we think that it is going to be worth it? Because it is a major piece of heavy lifting, let me tell you.

00:11:35 - Nancy Cavillones
It is. You don't have to tell me.

00:11:38 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah, no, I don't have to tell you. Well, if we talk about Dr. Silverstones and we have a second campaign underway right now for Dr. Jack Rocco's memoir, which is Recycled, which is an adoption experience book, different than most, I would say. But both of these campaigns began months in advance of Publish Day and involved a team in place and a plan and a strategy and a rollout calendar, including those places that Nancy started to talk about, which is who do we want to attract to feature on the COVID So let's move to the next little she says in air quotes category of the content strategy. Let's talk about that. Nancy?

00:12:38 - Nancy Cavillones
Well, the content strategy starts with, I think, working with what we have, which is the author's own writing. So there are a number of different kinds of content that we could put out there. The first kind of content is quotables from the book, social content, and really getting people to take notice, getting people starting to share the content and kind of create a ripple of visibility out there by leveraging audience, which is another discussion that we should probably have, building that audience and building that platform. And then we also, especially for a Wall Street Journal campaign and especially when we're talking about nonfiction and people who are considered experts in the field, we also put out their thought pieces. And these are pieces of content that are drawn from the book, but may include information that didn't make it into the book and has the author's perspective or insight into issues surrounding their topic that help to establish them as an expert. And these thought pieces can be placed on they could be written as LinkedIn articles. They could be placed in media, whether that's local media or national media. They could be placed on websites like Psychology Today or Medium and other long form content type kind of websites as appropriate for the type of book that it is. So we have social content, we have thought pieces, we have blog posts that can be drawn from the book as well. And then we also have content surrounding and I don't know if we're ready to get into this, but content surrounding our launch team because what our launch team is putting out there is also very important. And we do provide that content for them, mostly because we want to make sure that the messaging around the book is consistent and that we're not spreading any kind of misinformation about the book and that we're really getting everybody to rally around a specific goal that we have, which is to sell books and get reviews on the book. Right.

00:15:26 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
And that launch team piece is a key way that we work to engage and leverage the author's own network. So it's part of that audience thing that you alluded to earlier. Nancy where if we take the circle of people closest to the author who are most likely to willingly read the book, share information about the book with their own networks. Engage in the launch team and be prepared to write a review in the first day or few days after the book is published. We want to be leveraging those people to help spread the word. It's like a ripple effect. You drop a pebble in a stream and you've got the little ripples of water carrying out and out and out and out. And that's the concept there we also need to touch on. I'm going to come back to the reviews in a minute, but back when we're starting to develop the content strategy, though, we're also developing the PR strategy. And the PR component can be important as well because we want to try to and there's no guarantee with PR efforts, but we want to try to initiate media conversations about the topic and about the author so that people see that there's a conversation happening about this author and the content of their book. We don't even care if they talk about the book, really. It's about what the story is and what the author's position is at this point, so that we're having spreading those conversations around and trying to make the exposure to as many people as possible. So that's a big part of what's going on in the background as well.

00:17:25 - Nancy Cavillones
I think it's worth reminding people that social media marketing is not the same thing as PR exactly. And that public relations, it's a very specific type of marketing, I guess we could say, and that is really about mainstream media placement, whereas social media is about tapping into those smaller networks of acquaintances, friends, family and things like that. And I think that a lot of people forget that, understand that, and why you might need both.

00:18:08 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Exactly. If you're aiming for one of these bigger bestseller lists. That's a really good point, Nancy. And so I think of PR being short for public relations. I think of it as being one to many. So we are taking one intersection point, if you like, one interview, one conversation, and we're making it available on a platform that many people are seeing. Now, you might think, well, that's the same as social media, but social media is a little bit different in that we are all using it as individuals. So even the way we think about and put together social media content is about one person to one person, and really it's one at a time. So PR is one to many and social media is one to one. Although we want it to multiply. We want a social media post to be seen by as many people as possible.

00:19:12 - Nancy Cavillones
Of course, it's also important to remember that when it comes to PR versus social media, that with PR, they're really not so much interested in the book as they are in the story exactly. And the person behind that story. Whereas with social media, you might focus more on the book as well as getting to know the person behind the book.

00:19:40 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah, we have less time with social media. I think we've got in the case of Twitter, we got 180 characters, and that includes all the characters with your links and people, only they're spending shorter and shorter periods of time scrolling by. So it has to be very to the point, very brief. It's quite different than a lengthy interview in The Wall Street Journal, let's say. Yeah, let's say we can always hope so. Now to reviews. And, you know, I'm just checking, doing a time check. Okay, we're good talking about book reviews. They are really still important. So you mentioned it in association with the launch team. And we have a metric that we use when we're working on our campaigns that within the first couple of days after the book's publish date, we want just on one platform alone on Amazon, that we want to have 15 reviews published from people we don't know. These are not planted. We do not advocate planting at all. But these are there are people that we don't know. People that aren't blood relatives of the author. Not that it's a whole other conversation, but blood relatives of an author can't write a review. But that's not the kind of reviews we're talking about. And that's not always an easy feat, is it, Nancy, getting 15 reviews in the first few days?

00:21:13 - Nancy Cavillones
No, 15 doesn't seem like a lot, but it's really like a numbered game. I've worked on launch campaigns and influencer campaigns where we might have 100 people, will have a copy of the advanced review copy of the book, and maybe five of them will go and leave a review on launch day. It's really a numbers game, and so it's harder than you would think it is. And this is one of the reasons why I think at Ingenium Books, we invest a lot of time and effort into the launch group, because a launch group that is nurtured and that feels empowered to talk about the books, to leave reviews, will be much more effective and will go to work for you. I don't know if you get into the whole process of.

00:22:25 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
The time, what else do we have to talk about? We'll see.

00:22:29 - Nancy Cavillones
Exactly. I will say that getting those you really have to be unafraid to bug people. Yeah. I happened to be a person that had no problem bugging people, nudging people, giving them gentle reminders.

00:22:48 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
That's why you're on our team.

00:22:51 - Nancy Cavillones
But really, it's all about the nurturing. And I think that one of the things that we do that sets us apart is that we really think critically about how to write a review, and not just physically how to write a review like go on Amazon and type in your review. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about how to write the type of review that will let readers know whether or not the book is right for them. Because one of the ways that a book can fail to meet expectations is that there's a distance between what the reader expects from the book and what they actually get. And reviews are really helpful in setting expectation for the reader.

00:23:55 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah, that's an excellent point, and it's the reason that we encourage anybody that we talk to about reviews in particular in those launch teams, we tell people that we are asking them to read an advanced copy and write a review. Yes, but we are not asking them to write a five star review. We are asking them to write an authentic review. Every book cannot be for every person, so you're bang on there. We want to make sure that we are helping future readers find the right book for them. And we don't want the wrong readers to pick if they're expecting a book on tie dying T shirts and they're getting a book about psychedelic mental health therapy. Probably not going to result in a happy marriage, if you know what I'm saying.

00:24:50 - Nancy Cavillones
Yes. And that brings us back to how do we work with the launch team in leaving those reviews and really making sure that the review focuses on the book itself and not the author, but the book itself, why everybody should read it, what is important about this book, what is exceptional about this book, what we learn from this book, et cetera.

00:25:22 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Exactly. So then that brings us to Publish Day. We've got the launch team has been reading advanced copies. We're asking them to write and publish a review as close to Published Day as possible. We've had the PR campaign underway. We've had the content strategy. The author should have profiles in some media publications and have some pieces published elsewhere. Then we kick into what I would say is a really critical part of our Wall Street Journal bestseller campaign, which is there is a massive, massive email blast. And I mean massive billions. 5 billion people. I'm a publisher, not a mathematician. Maybe it's 5 million, I don't know. But it's a lot. It's a big number. And coupled with that big series of email blasts that goes out usually about a week after publish is some paid advertising campaigns. So we're leveraging everything that we've built up leading to Publish Day. And then we still have a high level of activity for a few weeks after that published Day. But that email blast, there's another association. There is the price. We make sure we keep the ebook priced at $0.99. So that's the preorder price of our ebooks. At Ingenium Books Books, most books once published day hits, we increase the price right away to whatever the market standard is for books in that genre and size. But when we're running a Wall Street Journal bestseller campaign, we keep the price at $0.99 until that week of massive email blasts has gone out. And that seems to work. We have sales traffic, Barnes and Noble, and we're not talking about Amazon only the sales can be wherever you buy your book. So for a Wall Street Journal bestseller campaign, we do want to be generating sales at Barnes and Noble, whatever the indie bookstores are, including Amazon. But anywhere, specifically those booksellers that send their sales data into the places like Nielsen Book Scan, the places that do the reporting of book sales. Which is where the Wall Street Journal gets their numbers from. It's kind of funny, Nancy. We're coming up to 28 minutes, and I feel like we've just scratched the surface.

00:28:08 - Nancy Cavillones
Yeah, I think you could probably write a home book about this.

00:28:17 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
If I had nothing else to do, maybe that would be what I would do next.

00:28:24 - Nancy Cavillones
Yeah. And I will say that the nurturing of the people who have read the advanced review copies continues all the way up to Publish Day and after. And all of this activity, I think, goes back to what I was saying in the beginning, that it increases visibility for the book, whether that visibility translates to sales reviews, media appearances, et cetera, et cetera, or getting on the bestseller list.

00:29:01 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Right, exactly. Well, Nancy, I want to thank you very much. I would love to hear from you, listeners, viewers. If you're seeing this on YouTube or you're listening to a podcast, we'd love to hear any questions that you have. What didn't we answer for you? Let us know, and we'll be happy to answer and give you our best information. I do have one other small thing, which is to thank Nancy very much for being here today and helping guide us in this conversation about Wall Street Journal bestseller lists. But Nancy is the publishing manager here at Ingenium Books Books. We've been working with her for almost two years, I think. I think so, anyway, Nancy has decided to move on, and she's got a wonderful new phase of her life that has nothing to do with working for publishers. I'm not going to say any more than that, except it has been an absolute pleasure having you on our team. And I can only hope that somewhere around in the back of the machine, you won't be a stranger, that you know that we're here and you can come back anytime. And thank you very much for everything you've done for us in Ingenium Books Books. It's been an absolute treasure.

00:30:25 - Nancy Cavillones
Same, Boni. Thank you. It's been wonderful to work at Ingenium Books. Great team.

00:30:31 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
We're going to miss you.

00:30:33 - Nancy Cavillones
I'll miss you guys, too. But I'll be around. Don't worry.

00:30:36 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Exactly.

00:30:36 - Nancy Cavillones
I'll be part of your launch team.

00:30:40 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Awesome. All right. And with that, I am going to sign off this episode of Ingenium Books Books podcast. Thank you again for joining us, and see you next time.

00:30:51 - Nancy Cavillones
Bye.

00:30:53 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
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