How Glenn Beck Turned My Self-Published Book Into A #1 Bestseller
By Srinivas Rao
Yesterday was one of the strangest days of my life. I woke up in the morning and wrote a post here on medium which I titled a resume of my failures. It went into my somewhat sordid past of getting fired from many jobs and all my failures. It was a fairly standard day of writing, editing podcasts, and the usual things I do.
A friend sent me a message on Facebook saying he’d read the book, loved it, and wrote a review. So I decided to check the latest reviews only to find this:
I didn’t make much of it because the book had been wavering back and forth in the entrepreneurship category. I thought it was just a slight bump in sales. So I sent out a tweet saying my book just hit #1 in the entrepreneurship category.
That’s when the day started to get weird. In response to my tweet I got this.
I had heard of Glenn Beck, but I really didn’t know much about him. So I Googled him, read his bio, and realized how ironic it was that I’m a Berkeley graduate, and this guy had caused my book to catapult in the rankings on Amazon. One of my friends told me to go look at my sales numbers and it turned out that in the span of a few hours I had sold almost 800 copies of the book.
At the time of writing this, roughly 8pm PST, the rankings are as follows:
- #1 in entrepreneurship
- #1 in entrepreneurship/Kindle books
- #1 in creativity
- #59 in all paid Non-Fiction
- 1388 Copies total sold (more than 1000 yesterday)
- The truth is there are a lot of people who I couldn’t have done this with out.
My editor Carolyn Messere has constantly kept an eye on me and pushed me to the edges with my work. She took what seemed like madness and turned into art.
My friend Mars Dorian is an incredible cover artist and is the definition of unmistakable.
There was also a small army of early readers and supporters who got it to the point where it ended up on Glenn’s radar.
I also have to give credit to Ryan Holiday, who knows everything about the right way to market a book and encouraged me to write this post.
As my friend Meg Worden said, nothing great happens without the help of other people.
Oh yeah… and Glenn Beck.