Today we’re doing something a little different at Financial Feminist. Tori recently appeared on an episode of the Creator Science podcast to talk about the process of writing her New York Times bestselling book, “Financial Feminist.” From writing the proposal and finding an agent to marketing and selling the book — she breaks it all down in this transparent interview.
The writing process
Tori provides a behind-the-scenes look at her writing process, revealing that it took about a year from landing the book deal to completing the final draft. She emphasizes the importance of giving yourself ample time for writing and cautions against underestimating the process. Tori shares her experience of feeling both the length and brevity of the writing timeline, highlighting the intensity of the final months leading up to the deadline.
In reflecting on how much time it took to write, Tori candidly shares one of the challenges authors face in managing their time and staying motivated throughout the writing process, stating, “You’ll get the vast majority of it done in the last three months…other shit will happen. You won’t be motivated by a deadline.”
Preparing for launch
With the manuscript completed, Tori details the preparations made for the book launch. She discusses the significance of pre-order campaigns in generating early sales momentum and shares strategies for incentivizing purchases from independent bookstores. Her approach of offering signed copies through select independent bookstores proved highly successful, driving significant pre-order sales and fostering meaningful partnerships.
Tori explains, “We announced the pre-order campaign… late July, early August… That gave us about six months to promote.” This proactive approach to pre-launch promotion enabled Tori to engage her audience effectively and build anticipation for the book’s release.
Leveraging audience engagement
Recognizing the importance of audience engagement, Tori emphasizes the value of cultivating a dedicated group of fans to support the book’s promotion. She discusses the concept of a launch group, composed of enthusiastic supporters who receive exclusive benefits in exchange for promoting the book. “Some sort of launch group of dedicated fans who are just excited about the book and are willing to promote it… It makes a huge impact and helps you… in terms of your numbers.”
This approach stresses the power of leveraging audience enthusiasm to drive book sales and create buzz around the launch.
Evaluating marketing strategies
In hindsight, Tori evaluates the effectiveness of various marketing strategies employed during the book’s promotion. She candidly discusses her experience hiring a publicist and PR agency, acknowledging both their contributions and limitations. She admits, “I hired a publicist in a PR agency…It was not worth the money…I am my best hype woman.” Driving home the importance of understanding one’s unique strengths and leveraging them effectively in the marketing process.
Thanks to our friends at the Creator Science podcast for this interview. Listen to the full episode above!
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Transcript:
Tori Dunlap:
Hi Financial Feminists. I’m really excited for today’s special exclusive episode. This is from our friends over at Creator Science. My friend Jay does an incredible podcast all about how to be a creator, how to be an online entrepreneur. And it’s really, really in-depth episodes and a look at how to create an online business, how to stand out on social media. I have been lucky enough to be a guest on his show twice. He’s one of the smartest people around entrepreneurship and online businesses and the life of a creator.
The first time we talked about just how to build an online business in general. So go check that out. But today’s episode is actually an episode we did when my book Financial Feminist came out, about how I got a book deal, about what the book marketing process looks like, about what actually writing a book can look like.
So if you’ve ever wanted to be an author, if you’ve ever wanted to get a book deal, if you’ve ever wanted to be a New York Times bestseller or at least take on the really daunting task of writing a book, then this episode is for you today. So without further ado, let’s go ahead and get into it. But first a word from our sponsors.
Jay Clouse:
Hello my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. I am so excited to share today’s episode. It’s with a friend of mine, Tori Dunlap, who has been on the show before. Tori was originally on episode number 88 of this show back in January of 2022, and a lot has changed for Tori.
Now, Tori is the founder of Her First $100K. This is something that she built after saving $100,000 herself by age 25. She quit her corporate job in marketing and founded this company to fight financial inequality by giving women actionable resources to better their money.
Now, Tori started on TikTok, or at least that’s where she first had her breakthrough. She has two and a half million followers on TikTok. She has almost a million followers on Instagram, but here’s why Tori is back here today. Not only has Tori launched a podcast called Financial Feminist since being on the show and is one of the top business shows out there, but she has also launched a book by the same name, Financial Feminist, and that is a New York Times bestseller.
Tori Dunlap:
We ended up being number four on the New York Times bestseller list. I think on a normal week we could have been at number two, maybe number one.
Jay Clouse:
So I reconnected with Tori because I saw her writing on LinkedIn about the process of writing this New York Times bestseller. Not only will we talk about why she thinks she could have been number one on a normal week, but she’s very, very honest about the timeline, the process, the things that met her expectations, the things that were outside of her expectations. Here’s a preview.
Tori Dunlap:
I personally thought I could get this book done in nine months, and that was the most naive bullshit ever. The hardest thing I’ve ever done professionally is trying to write and market this book, period, second sentence, while also trying to run a business. Awful.
Jay Clouse:
We get really, really specific in this episode. We talk about her entire process from writing the proposal, finding a literary agent, selling the book, writing the book, marketing the book, including the timeline for all the things I just mentioned.
Tori Dunlap:
Not including the book proposal, I started writing when I landed the book deal officially in April, May of 2021. We got a final, final draft probably late summer of 2022.
Jay Clouse:
This is one of the longer episodes that have aired here on the show, but I had a really hard time cutting it down because literally up until the last minutes of the show, Tori is saying things like this:
Tori Dunlap:
If you are for whatever reason tuning me out and half listening to this episode and you want to write a book, I need you to pull your car over and I need you to stop and I need you to listen to this because this is single-handedly I think one of the smartest things we did.
Jay Clouse:
Really, really excited for you to listen to this. Tori was super generous and transparent in everything she shares here. So if you are writing a book or considering writing a book, I think this is a must listen to episode. It really goes in depth into the entire process from proposal to publish and even marketing post-publish. So let’s get into it. Let’s talk with Tori Dunlap from Her First $100K.
New York Times bestselling author, Tori Dunlap, back on the show. How does it feel for me to introduce you that way?
Tori Dunlap:
I was just going to say, I never will get sick and tired of hearing of it. It’s lovely. It’s the thing I wanted professionally probably more than anything, especially in the last year or two. So the fact that it happened, I love hearing it. I’m like, “Yeah, bring it on. Let’s do it again. Let’s run it again.”
Jay Clouse:
Yes. Amazing. Well, I want to talk all about the process today. I want to talk about the timeline and everything. So let’s start with when did writing a book even come on your radar? Is this something that you always wanted to do?
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. So if you follow me, you probably know this because it became kind of the part of the marketing. But, I mean, I’m recording this in front of my bookshelf, I was a voracious reader growing up. That was what I loved to do. I wouldn’t go anywhere without a book. There’s so many times that my parents remember driving. My mom would drive to the grocery store with me in the backseat and it was a 10-minute drive and I would still have a book in the back.
And so I actually wrote down, because I was this kind of kid when I was seven or eight years old, one of my bucket list items, I will write a book. Now, did I think it was going to be a personal finance book? Fuck no. That was not part of the plan, but I had known for a really long time that I wanted to do this.
Then as Her First $100K started growing, and of course we have part one of the podcast talking about that growth, it became clear that this would be another avenue and a natural way to reach more people to grow the brand. And I actually got reached out to by my first publisher in 2019. I had this big splashy piece in MarketWatch that was our first press hit that we ever got. It went viral, it got a million views in a couple days.
This publisher at this huge publishing house reached out and was like, “Have you ever thought about writing a book?” And I was still working a 9:00 to 5:00 job. Her First $100K was a side hustle. It was gaining momentum, but I was like, I remember … This is of course my naivete at that time too. I was 24 and I was like, “I will never get this opportunity again. I have to say yes.” But I knew I also couldn’t.
I did not have the bandwidth. I did not have the experience and it overwhelmed me. And I had a conversation with her and she was really great, and we went back and forth. And then finally I emailed and I was like, “I know I don’t have the bandwidth to do this, but I would love to keep in touch with you.” And she’s like, “Yeah, of course.” And I was like, “Okay, thank God.”
And so then late 2019, early 2020 when I was a full-time entrepreneur, it was like, “Okay, it’s time to start actually thinking seriously about this.” And we can talk about that whole process if you want to. But then it was like, okay, we’re actually going to start pursuing this, start thinking about what does it actually look like to have this book out into the world.
Jay Clouse:
Now in the beginning when you first got that outreach in 2019, one, I want to know how direct that was. Did it seem like this is the beginning of a very long conversation or was it like, “Hey, if you say yes, I’ll send you a contract. You can sign it. We’ll start writing a book tomorrow”?
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, it’s never like that. No. And it’s like, we’re now starting to pitch TV shows and it feels very similar where it’s like, “Oh yeah, we really like you and we like what you do, and we’d love to have an intro conversation with you.” And then this is a multi-year process. TV, even more intense I think.
I think part of a publisher or part of an editor’s job is to get the new book to edit. What is going to be the book that hopefully sells well, but at the very least is a good thing to add to their repertoire, their resume? So I think this editor saw me someplace, was like, “Oh, she would probably write a pretty cool book. Have you ever thought about writing a book?”
Then it’s like you have a contact. You have someone that you can … I met with her in New York in early 2020. I had coffee with her. And then it was actually really funny when I actually sent my book proposal to her. She turned it down and she said very kindly, she was just like, “Hey, I think you’re great. I think this is great.”
But publishing in 2020 was having a meltdown because of COVID, and this was before Booktalk really took off. She was like, “We just don’t have the bandwidth to publish it.” And then I got an email after the book came out where she was like, “Hey, great book. Really sorry we weren’t able to work together.” So it was this really interesting arc of a relationship … As I hit my microphone. I’m sorry.
But it was definitely not a, “I’ll send the contract over to you.” I’m sure that happens with celebrities maybe, but it depends on who you are. And again, we can talk about this. If you are already some sort of public person, you are typically putting your book proposal out there and people are like … It goes into an auction.
I was less of a public person when I was writing this book proposal in mid-2020. And so it was, okay, get a book proposal together, get a lit agent, make contact with some people that would be interested in talking with us and see what goes from there. It was less sexy, I think, than some other things. Now of course if I write a second book, that’s probably how it’s going to go, but that first book was more like, “Hello, I’m writing a book, look at me,” than editors scrambling to publish it.
Jay Clouse:
So in the beginning, it sounds like they reached out to you and/or your team directly and you handled that conversation initially.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Jay Clouse:
You said in 2020 when you did the proposal, you did get a lit agent. How do you feel about the timeline and process of that? Do you wish you would’ve gotten a lit agent sooner or waited a little bit longer?
Tori Dunlap:
I think having a good lit agent is absolutely critical to this whole process because they have the connections, and also, especially one that is very well-versed and has worked with authors before, they have standing relationships with publishers already and they have a reputation.
And so I think when you’re thinking about, if you’re out there listening and you’re like, “I want to write a book,” the thing that you want to do first is figure out what that book looks like, and you can do this with a potential lit agent. It’s kind of like chicken or the egg. Sometimes you need to find the lit agent first and then write the book proposal. Other times the book proposal is what helps you get a lit agent, especially if you’re lesser known.
But the book proposal, it’s pretty intense. It’s basically a marketing document and this is what people don’t realize. It’s about your writing, yes, you submit a sample chapter, but the rest of the book proposal is like, what is the book about? Who does it appeal to? Why should you write this book? How are you going to market the book? It’s much more about the marketing strength that you’re going to bring.
Jay Clouse:
It’s like a business plan for the book.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, exactly. That’s a great way of saying that. Yeah, it’s how you’re going to sell the book with a little bit of what the book’s actually going to look like and the writing of it. And so a lot easier to pitch a book with the outline of it. So that was what my lit agent had recommended to me.
We worked on it together and she would send her thoughts or her revisions. And then when we felt like we had a good solid outline of it, then we started sending it to either the relationships we had already cultivated with publishers that were interested, or trying to get it out to other people.
And then you start having conversations that you realize sometimes they aren’t right. We had one publisher who was interested, who really wanted to publish our book but didn’t want to publish the kind of book I wanted to write. And then you have a really interesting choice where you’re like, “Okay, do I write the kind of book that they want me to write or do I write the kind of book I want to write?” And I would always say, pick the one that you want to write.
So yeah, we ended up turning that down. It never got to the offer stage. We just had a conversation. It’s kind of like dating, right? You get to a certain point where you’re like, “Oh, I want kids, and you don’t. Okay.” So you have to decide what does that look like and it is going to be a relationship that you have for years.
So again, I think when you are lesser known, it’s like, “Oh my gosh, somebody’s talking to me. That’s great.” But really make sure that is a person that you want to work with or an organization you want to work with.
Jay Clouse:
I would assume that finding a literary agent is a little bit like dating too, depending on how well you already know somebody. So did you talk to several potential literary agents or did you have a strong referral that you just went with?
Tori Dunlap:
I probably should have. I ended up working with one of my friends who, she is a financial blogger on the side and then she works in publishing. So she had this really unique understanding of what I was trying to do because she was in the space, and I think that that was where her strength lied for me. But my book was the first book she had ever sold, and even she would tell you that the negotiation was probably less intense than it should have been.
So I ended up walking away with a smaller deal than I think I would have if we were more strategic about that. And so we ended up parting ways about six months ago, very amicably. But it was one of those things where it was a perfect collaboration for where I was at the time of, okay, I don’t understand this industry very well. I need somebody who I know I can trust.
And I’m trying to flesh out what this book looks like in my head, and she has a very unique understanding of this industry in a way that another lit agent won’t. So she can not only help the book get sold, but also literally help birth whatever the book actually looks like. So I think we had a relationship that is pretty unique and that isn’t normal.
My current lit agent works at United Talent, she works at UTA, sold probably at this point 100 plus books, knows the industry in and out, is literally calling me, and I love her, but calling me being like, “Okay, when’s book number two coming?” And so it’s much more a traditional lit agent relationship.
But yeah, I think I really needed the kind of support that wasn’t just negotiating the deal and navigating publishing, but specifically, how do I write a book that checks the boxes that I want to check for what this book actually looks like?
Jay Clouse:
For folks who haven’t gone through this process at all but have maybe heard of a creator manager, can you help us understand the model behind a lit agent and a publisher? What are we talking about in terms of numbers to whatever degree you’re comfortable sharing?
Tori Dunlap:
Always willing to be transparent, especially with you. This is a larger conversation about just creators or authors in general and agencies. So there’s a couple different kind of agencies. There is the big players, CAA, UTA, that will basically take on a client, let’s say it’s Beyonce. They take on Beyonce and they are Beyonce’s agent for everything. They’re her agent for if she wants to write a book. They’re her agent if Oprah calls and wants to do a TV deal with her. They’re her agent if she is touring and is trying to figure out booking venues and that sort of thing.
So those agencies are the all-encompassing agencies that cover everything that you do. Then there’s agencies that do just pieces of that. There’s just brand development agencies that are just doing influencer or brand partnerships. There’s speaking agencies that are just getting you to conferences or colleges. There’s just touring agencies. And just like with book publishing, there’s just a lit agent. That’s their specialty is they’re just getting you a book deal.
So you can go in one of two ways or really, I guess it’s three. You can get one agency that covers you for everything and typically you have to be some sort of name. I’m repped by UTA for our podcast, for TV, oh, and book obviously, and then we handle the rest of that in house. So that’s option one is you get somebody who covers everything.
Option two is you just get agencies for every single thing. So you might have six agencies that handle different parts of your business. And then you can do what we’ve now done, which is kind of like a hybrid where you have the big agency for some things and then you have either a smaller agency or you do in house for others. It’s kind of like a Venn diagram hybrid.
In terms of what percentage you’re going to pay them, it’s anywhere from about 10 to 20%. Typically, with lit agents, you are just paying them, let’s say 15% of your advance. Your advance is the amount of money that a publisher is giving you, is basically your salary to go write a book.
And this is going to sound maybe obvious to people, but I did not know it at the time, this is an advance on your royalties. So if you get $100,000 advance, that means that you won’t see money, additional money, until you sell a $100,001 of your book. So they’re typically taking the 10 to 20% of that advance number. And that’s what you want, you don’t want them taking money beyond that.
Jay Clouse:
Oh, I was under the impression that literary agents also took part of the royalty ongoing. I’m sure that’s negotiable depending on the agent.
Tori Dunlap:
Mine didn’t. And I might be misspeaking, from my understanding, I think it’s just the percentage of the advance, but I could be wrong. That was how we structured my deal was 15. I think it was 15% of my advance.
Jay Clouse:
Yeah, it’s probably different agent to agent, relationship to relationship. I’m sure it’s one of those things that’s more negotiable than people realize. So it’s good to hear that.
Tori Dunlap:
And I haven’t had a conversation with my new lit agent because I haven’t sold another book with her. So that might be a conversation where actually she’s taking, or UTA really is taking a percentage of royalties. But the first deal that I had, I think it was 15% of my advance went to my agent.
Jay Clouse:
After a quick break, Tori and I dive deep into the proposal process, everything that’s involved in a proposal. And later, we talk about everything Tori did right, and what she would change if she was launching a book today. So stick around, we’ll be right back.
Welcome back to my conversation with Tori Dunlap of Her First $100K. Now that we’ve gotten a high level view of how the entire process went from a numbers perspective, I wanted to dive in deeper into the book proposal process itself. So I asked Tori if she went into the typical auction process that we had just spoken about.
Tori Dunlap:
Mine actually didn’t go into auction because I was not as big as a name as I am now. It was the relationships we had already built. So I spent a couple months putting the proposal together. I think we had a final draft by July of 2020. And the irony, again from our first episode if you know a bit about my work, we started on TikTok in July of 2020. So we had 30,000 followers on Instagram. We didn’t have a podcast yet. We were pretty tiny.
Jay Clouse:
Wow.
Tori Dunlap:
So it’s really funny to think about that actually that the book proposal was getting sent when Her First $100K was little itty bitty. So we started sending the proposal to the contacts we had already made and that was typically from these cold reach outs by publishers the, “Have you ever thought about writing a book?”
So we started sending those emails to, I think we had two or three people that were on our contact list of people who had been interested before. Like I said, the first person I ever talked to turned us down very politely, but was like, “We’re not doing a lot of new books right now.” It’s hard to remember what that felt like in 2020, but literally supply chain concerns, some books were not getting published because they literally didn’t have the paper to print them on. It was a rough time.
So throughout the end of summer we were starting to have those conversations with people. So yeah, one turned us down, we turned another one down. I think there was another person that was in the mix and I don’t remember what happened either. It just didn’t work out.
It’s a funny, ironic thing, I’m on LinkedIn in December of 2020, I see randomly a post from someone at Dey Street, which is an imprint of HarperCollins. And my mind is flagged because I am the most massive fan of The Try Guys and Dey Street did their book and I’m like, “Oh, okay. I know that imprint. I know what they’re about.” I literally go to my bookshelf and I start looking and, “Oh, they’ve done Amy Poehler’s book and they’ve done a couple others. Let me just slide into her LinkedIn DMs.”
I message her, I’m like, “Hey, I am currently pitching my first book. I have this amount of followers. Here’s my book proposal.” I get the outline of a deal 10 days later from Dey Street. When it happened, it happened incredibly fast, but it took probably a year and then of course years of building the business to be able to support this. And I’m blowing up on TikTok, we’re growing actively during that time and so we had a deal cemented. I could actually, I think tell you the date. I think it was January 20th or something like that.
And so that was when the deal … we were meeting with Rosie, who was the person who was going to be my editor at HarperCollins. We were starting to actually, that was taking shape at that time. So when the dominoes did fall, they fell remarkably quickly. But it was literally just pitching somebody already having the book proposal together, already seeing the kind of traction that we were with everything. And then we actually signed the deal in April. So it was interesting, we had settled on the terms of the deal in January and then signed it in April 2021.
Jay Clouse:
You mentioned how big this proposal was. Can you tell us, do you know how many pages this proposal was to give people a picture of how big of a document it is?
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. I mean it depends on what kind of book you want to write because you have to include a sample chapter and a sample chapter is going to look different. Some people who are writing short stories or something like that, it’s not going to be a very big chapter. Some people who are writing, I don’t know, the history of World War II, that’s going to be a huge sample chapter.
I would say, I could probably look, that Google Doc was around maybe 40 pages. I would say probably 10 pages to 12 pages of the other stuff, the how am I going to market the book, my bio, the customer persona of who’s buying this book, the competing titles, other books that are similar to mine, and then the vast majority of it is a sample chapter.
I wrote the chapter about debt that is in my book was the sample chapter. A lot of things changed, a lot of things were different, and they expect that. They’re looking for tone. They’re looking for, how does this book feel when you read it? Is it very academic or is it tongue in cheek, very fun? How is it formatted?
For us, we are very intentional and we wanted to bring in other people’s stories and almost do sidebars. And if you have my book, Financial Feminist, you know that that’s how it looks is it’s like, you have me talking about something and then you have either another expert or somebody coming in to talk about a different part of that. So my chapter about debt had someone from our community who worked at Victoria’s Secret and talked about having to dish out those credit cards to people of, “Would you like to use your Angel Card today?” And we have a whole segment with her. My sections or my chapters have homework, and so we give them homework at the end.
So they’re really looking for how good of a writer are you, what is the tone, the experience of reading the book, how does it feel? And then what is the format? Is it just straight text, if you also want graphics in there? I had a place where I was like, “I’m going to put a chart here.” And I didn’t even need to make that chart sexy, it was just like, “There’s going to be a chart.” So they want more to get a feel for it and an understanding that you are qualified and that you are actually going to not renege on the contracts that we give you.
Jay Clouse:
So as far as going from signed contract to published, because I believe you published the very beginning of 2023, correct?
Tori Dunlap:
It was December 27th of 2022 was our release date.
Jay Clouse:
Okay.
Tori Dunlap:
So just tail end, like last couple days of 2022.
Jay Clouse:
Is that the timeline that you expected and believed would happen from the point of signing the contract or did that change at all?
Tori Dunlap:
I personally thought I could get this book done in nine months and that was the most naive bullshit ever. Here’s the thing is most people get a ghostwriter. Most people have a ghostwriter. I am very proud of the fact I wrote this book. It was me. While I was speaking, while I was creating three TikTok videos a day, while I was on podcasts, while I was doing our own podcasts, I wrote this book. Would I recommend it? No, definitely not. It was so much work.
Now I will write my book. Most likely, I will be the person writing my book in the future because just my ego honestly can’t take it. I’m like, “If I’m going to have my name on it, I need to write it.” But I will not also run the business at the same time. That was the hardest thing I’ve ever done professionally is trying to write and market this book, period, second sentence, while also trying to run a business. Awful.
In terms of the actual timeline, typically it’s about a year. The contract gives you a year to write the book. It really took about a year and a half until we got a final, final, final draft. I can’t tell you the amount of times you could probably go on my computer and see final. No, this is the real final. Nope, I’m just kidding. The final, final draft. Literally you can see Financial Feminist, final. Financial Feminist, final one. Financial Feminist, the real final fucking thing.
That happened multiple times where you think you’re done and then it’s like, “Oh, nope, we got more edits. Oh, we think we’re done. Oh, actually we need to move this.” I think we finally got a final draft July of 2022. So not including the book proposal, I started writing when I landed the book deal officially in April, May of 2021. We got a final, final draft probably late summer of 2022. So it was actually about a year, but it didn’t feel like it. It felt somehow much longer and also somehow much shorter.
If you are writing a book, I don’t mean to say that my experience will be your experience, but I did so much reading about writing during that time. You will get the vast majority of it done in the last three months because other shit will happen. You won’t be motivated by a deadline.
I think my editor, my conspiracy theory is she did this on purpose. She gave me a final deadline of February 1st, and then she’s like, “Actually, the final deadline is in middle of March.” I got so much done the last two weeks of January. Literally, I was like, I didn’t leave my house, I got so much done. And then it was a couple days before February 1st and I’m panicking and she’s like, “Oh yeah, we have more time.” And I’m like, “Damn it, Rosie, but also, thank you.”
Jay Clouse:
Yeah, it’s so good.
Tori Dunlap:
There was a lot of like, it got done, it got written in these weeks before what I thought was the final deadline. Had another final deadline mid-April that wasn’t really the final deadline but thought it was, and so I was in a house in LA just finishing it.
Yeah, it’s typically a year is how long they give you. It depends. You can negotiate that. You can say, “Nope, I want more time,” or, “Oh, nope. I think I can do it in less time.” But I would not advise you to say less time. Give yourself more time because I thought I could get it done in nine months and really I think if I had cracked down maybe, but just wasn’t worth it in terms of my own bandwidth.
Jay Clouse:
If you don’t hit the deadline, what are they going to do, Publish an unfinished book, take away the advance and say it’s all dead? No.
Tori Dunlap:
Yes.
Jay Clouse:
Really?
Tori Dunlap:
Yes. Sometimes.
Jay Clouse:
You believe that to be true?
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, but I don’t know if they would’ve done that. They need to see that you’ve done something. If it’s a year later and you’ve done nothing, yeah, you might get that contract revoked. But it’s like, they have to see that you’re doing something.
It was actually really funny, the first three pages, I literally have my contract in my closet, I could pull it for you if you wanted. The first three pages are the actual information of percentage of royalties and the stuff that’s actually useful. I’m not kidding, it’s probably a 20-page contract. The last 17 pages are just variations of, “If you don’t turn this in, if you’ve done nothing, here’s what happens.” I felt like a high-achieving A plus student. I’m like, “Do people just not turn this in?” And apparently the answer is yes.
So yeah, if you have nothing done, they’re probably going to revoke your contract. I would say if it’s basically there, yeah, no, you’re right, nothing’s going to happen. And I am weirdly kind of bummed that I now know that the final deadline is not the final deadline because I’m going to have that in the back of my head as I’m writing this second book being like, “Yeah, but I have more time.”
Jay Clouse:
So you get the final manuscript done in July and then this goes live at the tail end of December 2022. So you had about five months after the manuscript is done to prepare for the launch of this. Did that feel like the right amount of time? Do you wish there was less? Do you wish there was more?
Tori Dunlap:
I think we announced the pre-order campaign before the final manuscript was even turned in. We announced the pre-order campaign, and I know this because it was right after my birthday, I think it was the 13th of July. And then I think late July, early August was when we had a final, final draft. That gave us about six months to promote.
Here’s the thing, if you are an author, you’re like, “Cool, I just ran a fucking marathon writing this book.” Your marathon is not done. It is just starting. It is just starting.
Jay Clouse:
It’s a second marathon. It’s a pre-marathon and then the marathon.
Tori Dunlap:
It is a second marathon. It’s literally like, “I ran 26 miles, I’m exhausted. Cool, I’m done.” No, actually this is the fun part. So most publishers work with authors who just want to write, they don’t want to market, they don’t want to do press. I’m the exact opposite. I am like, “Writing was painful. I enjoy writing normally. Writing my own book was fucking painful and now I get to razzle dazzle it and that’s what I’m good at.”
So I was actually looking forward to this time. However, this whole process, especially this last six months is the time that burned me out. It wasn’t even the bandwidth issue, wasn’t even the amount of interviews I was doing. It was the pressure I was putting on myself. I wanted New York Times, I wanted that. I wanted this book to make a huge splash. I wanted it to make a big impact.
And I’m going to be honest, this isn’t healthy, I’ll work through it in therapy at some point, but I literally thought to myself, “If I don’t meet the New York Times list, I will be profoundly disappointed.” Which of course is not why you should do this and it ultimately isn’t why I did it. But I was like, I wanted this thing so badly. Don’t do that.
A book is valuable to people and a valuable process regardless of whether you hit a bestseller list or not, and I think that that’s the thing that exhausted me more than anything else is I was just chasing this one thing. Truly, this book was about making an impact and meeting people where they were and being able to have this legacy of this thing.
It was also, especially for the motivation to get me through this six months of really intense promotion, where I’m not getting to meet people who have read it, I’m just having to run the race, it was just like, “I want the New York Times sticker.”
In terms of that timeline, I think three to six months is what you want for a pre-order campaign. The reason we reconnected was I’m doing a series on LinkedIn about how to promote a book, how to get the bestseller lists, and pre-orders are the biggest thing because of many reasons.
But one, any pre-orders that happen count as sales at 12:01 on release day. So if you sell 10,000 copies before the book actually comes out by 12:01 on release day, before the book has actually hit shelves, you’ve already sold 10,000 copies, which is huge, right? It takes the weight off a little bit from having to do so much heavy lifting in that first week or two.
Jay Clouse:
You’re using a specific number, 10,000 copies there. That’s the number I hear oftentimes in book circles. Is that a specific number for a benchmark of some kind?
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, great question. So the thing about bestseller lists, I’m going to be weaving in and out between selling campaigns versus bestseller lists, but for some people they’re kind of the same thing. It’s like almost SEO in Google. We have a general best practice of what Google likes, but Google does not give us a form of if you do this, you will rank at this.
The New York Times bestseller list is a hackable thing, but they have never published if you do this, we will guarantee this. There’s a general idea that if you sell 10 to 15 and I’ve heard sometimes as high as 20,000 books in that first week, you will most likely be on the bestseller list.
Now here’s the thing about my launch date, December 27th, weird time to launch a book. One, I went on Good Morning America, which was great. Everybody else in New York was home asleep in their beds because it was right after Christmas and right before New Year’s. I booked a week in New York to do press the couple months before. I can get press like nobody’s business, it’s usually not a big deal. It was because there was nobody in the office.
So I literally did GMA. I went and signed a couple books, not at any official book signing, but just went into Barnes & Noble to get some content for us, and then I went home. Normally when you release a book, especially if you’re high profile, in New York or in LA, you’re doing a day or two at least of press. I could not do that.
The second thing is the pro is you’re getting New Year, New You energy with December 27th, and you’re getting this time where people are just sitting and doing nothing, which is great, that in-between time of Christmas and New Year’s where no time exists at all. The con is that you hopefully do a pre-order campaign that’s like, “Buy this for Christmas, buy this for a Christmas gift, but it’s not going to be under the tree at Christmas or Hanukkah.” So it’s almost like, Hey … We did a gift certificate. We were like, “Hey, you can print this out and give this to your loved one as this book is coming, I bought it for you.”
The other huge con, normally we would be competing against some of the mainstays on the New York Times bestseller list, but really a bunch of new books. Most books that hit the list leave after a week. They have a big splashy week release and then they leave. When it’s December 27th, you’re competing against any book that has New Year, New You energy that has been out forever.
Now, it would be hard for me to compete against Atomic Habits on a good day, impossible to compete against a book with the word habits in it, and of course written as well as it is December 27th.
Jay Clouse:
So did you choose this date-
Tori Dunlap:
Impossible.
Jay Clouse:
… or was this dictated to you?
Tori Dunlap:
My publisher chose this date because again, part of me is like, “That was really smart, New Year, New You energy.” But the other part of me is like, “I had to compete against a bunch of people.” So we ended up being number four on the New York Times bestseller list. I think on a normal week we could have been at number two, maybe number one, but I can’t think that way. I can’t do alternate universe stuff.
Jay Clouse:
Well, I know at month four you had 70,000 copies sold. How many copies did you have at launch?
Tori Dunlap:
That first week was 19,700. So that included all of the pre-order books and then all of the books that were sold during that first week.
Jay Clouse:
After one more short break, Tori and I talk about the role that independent bookstores play in the New York Times bestselling list, the things that she did well and the things that she would change if she was writing another book. So stick around, we’ll be right back.
Welcome back to my conversation with Tori Dunlap of Her First $100K. We had just started talking about the process for which New York Times chooses their bestsellers, and Tori told me that there’s an interesting insight when it comes to independent bookstores, and so I wanted to dive deep into that.
Tori Dunlap:
Okay, we can talk for three hours about this. The other thing that New York Times and other booksellers, or excuse me, other bestseller lists look into is it’s not just how many books you have sold. I wish it was that easy, but it’s also the diversity of sales.
So if you sell 10,000 books on Amazon and in Washington State, you probably won’t get on the list. They’re looking for are you not just in one state, are you not just selling on the coasts, are you a universally applicable book? And are you selling in bookstores that aren’t just Amazon, but especially independent bookstores?
So a lot of the marketing that we did, or a lot of the collaborations we did were with independent bookstores. One, because it’s the right fucking moral thing to do. We wanted to be able to support these independent bookstores. But two, we were working specifically with bookstores that we know were reported on time.
Some bookstores do not report their sales to bestseller lists at all, or they report them weeks late. And if you want to be on that list for the first week, which is the best chance you have, you need to make sure that all of the sales you possibly can are being reported. So that was part of the strategy as well.
Jay Clouse:
Man, this introduces a new wrinkle because I had heard that before, but I hadn’t thought about it in this way, which is from a marketing perspective, creators like you and I, seem like we would have a real leg up on writing and publishing a book because we have a built-in audience, we say, “Go buy it.” But from a user experience perspective, we’re probably pointing them towards Amazon or whatever the easy purchasing destination is. So how did you direct your fans, your community to go and support the book on presale in a diversified way?
Tori Dunlap:
I’m literally, Jay, going to pull for you the last time we got numbers because this is going to shock you. Okay, so these were my numbers as of the end of April. So this was when I knew I hit 70,000. That was in four months. Book came out late December, let’s even call it almost January. So basically January to end of April, I sold 70,000 copies, and that’s every kind of copy. That’s hardcover, that’s E-book, that’s audiobook.
Of the hard covers, I sold about 50,000 hard covers. So roughly 20,000 are coming from other mediums. Of those 50,000, 25,000 were Amazon, so half. The other half is Barnes & Noble. I am lucky enough to be sold in Target stores, Target, Walmart, every independent bookstore that exists in the United States that stocks my book, Books-A-Million, which is a thing in some places. I’ve never been to a Books-A-Million. So every other source made up half, Amazon was the other half.
So yeah, you’re dealing with this kind of, I live in Seattle, I’m not a fan of Amazon. Do I have a Prime subscription? I do. The majority of sales are happening from an add to cart and a quick buy on Amazon. And Amazon typically has the cheapest price. Independent bookstores are either selling at a slight discount or they’re selling at the number on the back of the book. Amazon’s cutting that by at least probably 25 to 30%.
So the way you incentivize people to buy from independent bookstores, one, we have an audience that is very, very committed to bettering the world and to supporting local businesses, especially women and BIPOC-owned businesses. And so that was an easier sell than I think for the average person to just be like, “Hi, support your local independent bookstore that especially right now is struggling.”
The second thing we did, if you are for whatever reason tuning me out and half listening to this episode and you want to write a book, I need you to pull your car over and I need you to stop and I need you to listen to this because this is single-handedly, I think one of the smartest things we did.
Our publisher sourced four independent bookstores that we knew were reporting numbers on time, and we did signed copies for those four independent bookstores. They also were four independent bookstores who shipped nationwide. So we had one in Seattle, we had one in Colorado, we had one in Chicago, and I think one in Utah, but they shipped nationwide.
And what we did is I literally, HarperCollins sent me 3,000 book plates. Book plates, they’re like a square. And then for me, they had Financial Feminist in the corner and they’re card stock. They’re fancier paper. I signed 3,000 books before the book even went on sale.
Jay Clouse:
Wow. And so, what do you mean? Was it signing the book or was it signing something that goes in the book? I don’t understand.
Tori Dunlap:
It goes in the book. It’s considered a signed copy.
Jay Clouse:
I see. I see.
Tori Dunlap:
There’s the signed copies that are actually literally my signature on a page. For many reasons, I think COVID, just shipping, it’s a lot easier now to sign a book plate and have that inserted. It’s also more flexible. The person can do something else with that book plate if they want. It’s not in the book. So those signed copies went to those independent bookstores.
And then on our book page, on our website, we said, “Hey, here are all the links you can get the book, including Amazon. Here’s a separate section that says, ‘If you want a signed copy, buy from one of these four places that ship nationwide while supplies last.'”
We were told, especially by the one in Seattle, because I literally now have a personal relationship with them, I stop in every couple months just to check in and say hi. They were like, “We’ve never seen a more successful pre-order campaign.” They have sold hundreds of copies of Financial Feminist and they literally have told me this has made a huge impact on our business, which is so fucking cool.
Jay Clouse:
That’s awesome.
Tori Dunlap:
New York Times aside, I get a little teary talking about it. That was one of the coolest parts is going into Paper Boat Books in Seattle, meeting the husband and wife team who opened their bookstore mid-pandemic and literally playing numbers games with them and being like, “Hey, how many have you sold?” And they’re like, “180 before the book’s even out.” It was just crazy. It was so cool.
So one, it makes a huge impact, and two, it helps you as an author sell more books, but also be more appealing to New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today bestseller lists.
Jay Clouse:
That’s awesome. For some reason, I just assumed that local bookstores, real bookstores that weren’t Amazon did not do pre-sales.
Tori Dunlap:
No, they hundred percent do. Some of them do. And it’s a matter of also figuring out … Like I said, local bookstores are great, but specifically with pre-order campaigns, especially if you have an audience, you want to make sure they’re shipping nationwide. Because if you live in Seattle and you want to a copy that’s signed, you’re like, “Oh, okay, yeah, I’ll order from this place in Seattle.” But if I live in, I don’t know, Omaha, Nebraska and we didn’t work with a bookstore in Omaha, Nebraska, you’re probably going to whatever is closest. So I imagine they’re going to the Chicago one or the Utah one.
And that’s the other thing is it’s like, this bookstore is getting sales from all over the country, not just normally where they’re located, and that was really cool.
Jay Clouse:
You were just looking at something that was telling you your historic book sales over time. Is that something that is available to you in real time, or do you have to get fed that information-
Tori Dunlap:
No.
Jay Clouse:
… from the publisher?
Tori Dunlap:
My biggest pet peeve. Some publishers, because I have talked with other friends, have a portal where they can go in and they can see that. I do not have that portal. I would kill for that portal.
Jay Clouse:
Oh my gosh, that would drive me nuts.
Tori Dunlap:
I annoyed my publisher so much because especially the first couple of weeks, every day I was like, “I want numbers, I want numbers, I want numbers,” because I wanted to know. And I think in a way that, again, other authors are just like, “I wrote the book and I don’t care how it sells.” I was like, “I wrote the book and that was the hard part, and now I get to sell it. That’s the thing I’m good at.”
So yeah, I have been obsessively still now tracking numbers. They’ve literally told me, they’re like, “Tori, we will send it to you once a month at the beginning of the month.” And I’m like, “Okay. Okay, fine. Okay.”
Jay Clouse:
Enough.
Tori Dunlap:
I just sit and wait with popcorn.
Jay Clouse:
You’ve got the bestseller.
Tori Dunlap:
Right. Right. They’re like, “Why do you care?” And I’m like, “I still care.” But it’s because, weirdly, I am motivated by that. I check the ranking on Amazon for Financial Feminists daily still, because that’s the number I do have is where is it at in the charts?
Sometimes I check it twice a day. When it was book season, that was like a 10 time … That was probably my most opened app, was just like, that was the number that was publicly available to me. And I know you’re cut from the same cloth in that way where it’s just like, it becomes a game and it’s really fun.
Jay Clouse:
Oh, totally, yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
It’s like, “Oh, cool. How many can we sell? What can we do?”
The other hack for pre-orders is get compensated with book buys. So normally I might charge $20,000 for a keynote speech somewhere, but I will trade it. I will say, “Oh, pay me half of that, and then the other half in a book buy.” Or for a limited amount of time, especially if you’re an author who doesn’t command a $20,000 speaking fee, is just say, “I’ll speak for free if you pay for 100 books or 50 books.” And that way you can actually control where those books are ordered from too.
So when we did a speaking engagement at Morningstar in Chicago, who did I call? The independent bookstore we already had a relationship with in Chicago. And your publisher should help set this up of saying, “They will get a book buy discount. They will be able to order from this independent store.” Again, supports the indie store, but also helps you in terms of your numbers.
You can book these out in advance too. My friend, Tiffany Aliche who wrote Get Good with Money, her moniker is The Budgetnista, she has another episode on her podcast where she breaks all of this down. She was the most helpful, sat down with me and had very transparent conversations kind of like this of, “Here’s how to do this. Here’s pre-order campaigns.” She was so great.
And one of the things she said to me was, “You don’t have to book these speaking engagements for two weeks after you release the book. It can be a virtual speaking engagement three months in advance.” Typically, these things get scheduled like that because your bandwidth is going to be so tight. But book it now, do it later.
Get the book buy now and say, “Okay, I’ll accept that as payment, period, or I’ll accept that as payment and then the other half of it, I’ll get upon completion.” But being able to do that so you can increase your pre-orders, but also have a good understanding of your bandwidth and your schedule.
Jay Clouse:
So helpful. Well, with a little bit of time that we have left, I just want to give any more space for anything where you feel like this is something we definitely did well or this is something that I would not do a second time.
Tori Dunlap:
I hired a publicist and a PR agency for the first time. I will not do that again. It was not worth the money. I would say, if you’re not great at getting PR, it’s probably worth the money. I am my best hype woman. I have gone on Good Morning America, the Today Show, Forbes, CNN, CNBC, BBC, New York Times. You name it, I have done it without a publicist.
And we thought, “Okay, we need a publicist because this is sexy and fun.” And they got us a couple big things. I think they were really instrumental in getting me on Forbes 30 under 30. I think they had some contacts there. I had submitted an application. It was obviously very strong and I think they nudged it a little bit. Other than that and a couple other minor things, I don’t think it was worth it for us.
Jay Clouse:
Okay.
Tori Dunlap:
It was like 7K a month, which is pretty cheap honestly, as far as publicists or PR agencies go. We got on GMA. That was actually through HarperCollins. A lot of the other press we did was just our own hustle. So with my business and with our capability to get PR, I would not do that again.
The thing I would spend more time doing, which is something again I want to acknowledge that Tiffany and I had many conversations about, and she was so good at doing is some sort of launch group of dedicated fans who are just excited about the book and are willing to promote it in exchange for exclusive access to you, merch, a exclusive E-book copy of the book a month before anybody else.
I’m trying to remember what we called it and of course I can’t remember off the top of my head, but getting a couple hundred people from your audience together who are going to be excited, who are going to talk about it. Tiffany actually told me that she, I think she had, I’m trying to remember her number, a couple hundred. She goes, “They didn’t just buy one copy, on average they bought five.”
Jay Clouse:
Wow.
Tori Dunlap:
The individuals bought five copies themselves.
Jay Clouse:
To give them as gifts and things.
Tori Dunlap:
Right. Right. And so you can do the math on that of just that dedicated group of people. So we did that too late. We started and launched that I want to say, was it two months or six weeks before? Wasn’t enough time. The actual launch of that is probably the time was right, but we planned it for probably a week before and then launched it. You need way more logistical planning. I would start that process three to four months out, launch it about six weeks to eight weeks out.
Thank you so much to Jay Clouse for having me on his podcast, Creator Science. If you want more episodes like this, we have an entire Spotify playlist of all of the times I’ve been on other people’s podcasts. So if you are a Financial Feminist super fan and you’ve listened to every episode we have maybe more than once, and you’re like, “I want more content,” well, we will link down below in the description all of the times that I have been a guest on other shows, so you can get even more good content. But we appreciate Jay and this interview and you could subscribe to Creator Science wherever you’re listening right now.
And after all of this conversation about me talking about how hard it was writing a book, if you want to support me and other authors, financialfeministbook.com is where you go to purchase my book. You can get it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, your local independent bookstore. We also have signed copies at that link, financialfeministbook.com. Would love to see your reactions to the book, get your feedback. It’s available as a hardcover, E-book, and also audiobook.
And a reminder that if you like someone who’s about to come out with a book, the best thing you can do is buy that book on pre-order, support your favorite authors and want-to-be authors. And also, buy it from an independent bookstore because they could really use your business.
Thank you as always, Financial Feminists, for being here. If you liked these kind of episodes, we would love to hear from you. And I hope you have a kick-ass week. We’ll talk to you later.
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminist, a Her First $100K podcast. Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap. Produced by Kristen Fields. Associate producer, Tamisha Grant. Research by Ariel Johnson. Audio and video engineering by Alyssa Medcalf. Marketing and operations by Karina Patel, Amanda Leffew, Elizabeth McCumber, Masha Bachmetyeva, Taylor Cho, Kailyn Sprinkle, Sasha Bonnar, Claire Coronan, Daryl Ann Inman, and Janelle Reasoner. Promotional graphics by Mary Stratton. Photography by Sarah Wolf, and theme music by Jonah Cohen Sound.
A huge thanks to the entire Her First $100K team and community for supporting this show. For more information about Financial Feminist, Her First $100K, our guests and episode show notes, visit financialfeministpodcast.com.
Tori Dunlap
Tori Dunlap is an internationally-recognized money and career expert. After saving $100,000 at age 25, Tori quit her corporate job in marketing and founded Her First $100K to fight financial inequality by giving women actionable resources to better their money. She has helped over one million women negotiate salary, pay off debt, build savings, and invest.
Tori’s work has been featured on Good Morning America, the New York Times, BBC, TIME, PEOPLE, CNN, New York Magazine, Forbes, CNBC, BuzzFeed, and more.
With a dedicated following of almost 250,000 on Instagram and more than 1.6 million on TikTok —and multiple instances of her story going viral—Tori’s unique take on financial advice has made her the go-to voice for ambitious millennial women. CNBC called Tori “the voice of financial confidence for women.”
An honors graduate of the University of Portland, Tori currently lives in Seattle, where she enjoys eating fried chicken, going to barre classes, and attempting to naturally work John Mulaney bits into conversation.
