As a nonfiction author, your goal is to build your business using your book as an elegant, even extravagant, $5 business card to give to prospects.
Selling books is an outcome, if it happens at all.
If you’re a business person, it may not matter if you ever sell a book, as long as your book draws quality prospects. Don’t aim at book sales, aim at drawing great potential clients to yourself.
As folks like Seth Godin and Steven Pressfield have shown over and over again, the shortest path to massive sales is massive generosity.
The more you give away, the closer you come to selling all those copies you hope to sell.
But don’t aim at the sales. Aim at the generosity.
If you think the world looks one way but it actually looks another, you’ll spend all your time stumbling around lost.
Knowing where you’re going (it’s not selling books) is the only way to get there.