A 30-Contact Challenge: A One-Week Author Business Experiment

I'll be sharing a new type of article here from time to time—business-building challenges drawn directly from my work with coaching clients. Real situations and real experiments that generate real data. Here’s the first one.

Here’s a challenge I gave a client last week and I share with you: Pick three types of retail customers that could be a good fit for your book. Make a list of ten businesses in each of those categories. Then make those 30 phone calls over the course of one week.

You do not need to have anything figured out in advance other than that they’re a good fit for your book. Pick up the phone and start a conversation with each person who picks up. At the end of the week, evaluate your results and what you learned.

For this experiment, the three customer types should be retail outlets—businesses that buy books to resell or include with other products or experiences whose customers overlap naturally with your readers.

Here are some examples to get you thinking:

• A romance novel set in Paris. Independent romance bookstores, French import gift shops, travel boutiques

• A cookbook focused on plant-based Mexican cooking. Kitchen supply stores, cooking schools and culinary institutes, specialty spice and ingredient shops

• A children’s book about a child in a hospital. Hospital gift shops, children’s bookstores, children’s toystores

• A memoir about surviving addiction and rebuilding. Wellness and recovery-focused bookstores, yoga and meditation studios with retail sections, hospital and treatment center gift shops

• A local history of Chicago neighborhoods. Museum gift shops, neighborhood boutiques and general stores, architecture and history-focused retailers

In each case, the retail outlet’s existing customers are already predisposed toward the book’s subject matter. You’re not convincing anyone to care about something new—you’re showing up and making an offer where the interest already exists. If you need help thinking about options for your book, drop the title and a brief description in the comments and let us help you.

For each of your three customer types, identify ten specific stores, schools, venues, boutiques, or outlets to contact. Then contact them by phone (emails and after hours phone calls don’t count)—one by one, personally, this week. That’s 6 calls a day for one 5-day workweek.

For every contact you make, note:

• Who you contacted

• What they said (yes, no, not yet, tell me more)

• What objections came up

• What felt natural in the conversation and what felt clumsy

• Any follow-up required

Thirty contacts generates a meaningful amount of information. Which customer type responded best? Which pitch language worked? Which stores seemed most open to your offer? Which objections keep coming up? You can’t get this material from theorizing and ruminating…only from doing.

This challenge isn’t just about making sales—though it’s highly likely sales will happen (and the primary goal!). It’s also about building four capabilities simultaneously:

• Collecting no’s. The ocean of opportunities does not run dry. Every no gets you closer to a yes and more comfortable with the ask. Ten contacts per customer type gives you enough no’s to stop fearing them and understand they are part of the larger, natural numbers game.

• Having the conversation. Pitching your book off the cuff and to a stranger is a skill. It gets easier, more instinctive, and more effective with repetition. This week gives you thirty solid repetitions towards comfort and mastery. It also (I hope) will cure you of the idea that these calls and conversations are acts, that you have to perform. The doing is enough.

• Practicing closing techniques. Use what works—options, recommendations, next steps, mini case studies, silence. This week is a low-stakes laboratory for finding out which approaches feel most genuine for you and produce the best results.

• Building a data practice. Tracking what happens and evaluating it honestly is how author businesses improve over time. This challenge can your first foray into data-driven decisions.

At the end of the week, look at your thirty contacts and ask:

• Which customer type produced the most positive responses?

• How much did you sell? Of what?

• Which group felt easiest for you to approach?

• What language seemed to get the best results?

• Which has the most potential volume—enough outlets to sustain an ongoing outreach effort?

• What would you do differently in a future batch of phone calls?

You’re looking for the signal within the noise—the early indication of where your highest-leverage retail opportunities actually are. From there, you can double down on what worked and adjust for what didn’t.

Thirty contacts in one week is manageable for almost any author with almost any schedule. It’s also enough to learn something real, practice something uncomfortable, and build the outreach habit that separates authors who generate consistent income from those who talk about wanting to get started on that..

This week is your version 1.0. Run it, assess it, refine it, and run it again next month with what you learned.

Tell Us in the Comments

What three customer types are you targeting this week?

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Thirty contacts in one week generates data. Knowing what to do with that data—which customer types to double down on, how to turn early conversations into ongoing retail relationships, how to layer retail outreach into a complete author business model alongside your other income streams—that’s where strategy comes in. My Author’s Business Accelerator is designed for published authors ready to move from one-week experiments to deliberate, sustainable business building. In 8 sessions (with a flexible schedule to work around your life), we'll identify your highest-leverage retail and volume sales opportunities, build the outreach systems that make them repeatable, and integrate them into a complete author business model that generates income from multiple directions simultaneously. Not group coaching or generic advice—it’s a strategic partnership built around your specific books, your specific readers, and your specific opportunities. Learn more about the Business Accelerator.