Creativity For Sale.
I sold every page before I wrote a single word.
At the start of 2013, I had $9 in my bank account and was $99,991 in debt. Over lunch, my friend Dave asked why I hadn't written a book about the whole IWearYourShirt mess. I told him I felt like a failure. He said, "not every book needs a happy ending." On the drive home, I came up with the idea.
I'd sell a 140-character sponsor message on every single page of a book I hadn't written yet. 200 pages. Page one priced at $600, each page $3 cheaper than the last, down to $3 on page 200. Front cover, back cover, and both inside flaps sold separately. I called the project SponsorMyBook, because subtlety has never been my thing.
Day one: over 100 page sponsorships sold and more than $10,000 in the Shopify account by afternoon. Five months and roughly 2,000 emails later, I'd locked in 204 sponsors and $75,000 for a book that didn't technically exist. My trust circle talked me out of traditional publishers, so I self-published it.
Creativity For Sale has gone on to sell over 20,000 copies. It didn't top any lists. But I still get emails from readers saying my little sponsored book changed how they think about their own creativity, which beats a bestseller list any day.
