A Self-Published Book Broke 'All the Rules' to Become a Best Seller

From Publisher’s Marketplace:

[Earlier this year, Shaheen reached a five-book, 50/50 profit-share deal with S&S, accompanied by a seven-figure advance, represented by Rebecca Gradinger and Albert Lee at UTA. The expanded S&S trade paperback has sold a little under 22,000 copies since publication on April 23.

A good deal of the book’s TikTok success is attributed to one commission-driven influencer — Kohn Glay, whose videos drove sales of over 40,000 copies on TikTok (earning him over $150,000). He found the book through a TikTok ad. As the Atlantic wrote last year, “The rise of The Shadow Work Journal is another reminder of TikTok’s power—to generate conversation, to sell a ton of books, to keep people in an algorithmic loop indefinitely.”]