Why My Times Square Billboard Didn’t Drive Sales

The comments started flooding in: “Congratulations!” “OMG! That’s amazing,” as they saw my 8-year-old son and me beaming with pride as our second book debuted, 40 feet tall on a New York Times Square billboard. Little did they know, I was testing a question most authors never think to ask: Does the billboard actually sell the book, or does something else?

After my book, Make Every Podcast Want You, was featured on a Times Square billboard as one of the “Top Books to Change Your Life in 2024,” authors started reaching out to me. Fiction writers and children’s book authors were asking how they could achieve the same success and how to better position their books when they weren’t directly contributing to business growth. They wanted to understand the mechanics of the billboard.

I had already seen how podcasts and PR could sell a nonfiction book and skyrocket it to an Amazon bestseller. But I wanted to know something more specific: How many sales could actually come in directly from the billboard itself, separate from everything else?

So I decided to test it.

For our next book, I picked something vastly different — a children’s book I had written eight years ago, when my son was a baby, called It’s Just a Fart. It’s completely uncorrelated to any other business entity I run. No course to upsell beyond the book purchase. No elaborate funnel, just a simple email opt-in on the book’s website. I made it alongside two other moms — illustrator Amanda Swift and formatter Arlene Soto. My two boys served as consultants on the project, weighing in on which drawings were funniest.

I put the book up in Times Square. The messages came flooding in. The press picked it up. Then I waited to see what would actually happen to sales.

The billboard didn’t sell the book. The story did.

Here’s what I learned: The billboard only drove sales after the press turned it into a story. The ecosystem around promoting the book made the billboard an event, and that event boosted book sales.

The billboard alone didn’t convert. The story around it did.

Most people walking through Times Square on any given day aren’t expecting to buy a children’s book about farts. And they didn’t. The billboard generated attention, photos and congratulations — but not an immediate spike in pre-order sales. The momentum came later, once the billboard became part of a larger story shared across social media.

That’s where people learned why the book existed: a solo trip I took with my son, who served as one of its most enthusiastic consultants. He weighed in on which illustrations were funniest, how to make the babies look even sillier, and who, ultimately, inspired the book in the first place. People weren’t buying because they’d seen a billboard. They were buying because they connected with the story behind it.

The biggest marketing mistake entrepreneurs make is believing the moment is the marketing.

The moment is the catalyst. Marketing is everything you build before, around and after it. Without that ecosystem, even the most impressive visibility play becomes a fleeting photo opportunity instead of a meaningful business asset.

A billboard is a positioning tool. It tells the world: this exists, this matters enough to be here. But positioning isn’t the same as connection, and connection is what actually moves a stranger to pull out their wallet for a book they’ve never heard of, written by someone they don’t know, about a topic that’s objectively silly.

What actually built the sales

A billboard says, “Look at this.” An experience says, “Here’s something to be a part of.” One is ego. The other turns attention into participation. Belonging creates resonance, and resonance creates sales.

If you’re an author or founder considering a high-visibility positioning play like this, here’s what I’d tell you, having now run this test twice with two very different books:

A New York Times Square billboard is a phenomenal positioning tool. It is not, on its own, a sales tool. Treat it as one beat in a larger story, not the whole story. Before you book the billboard, build the experience that will live around it. What could be the specific, personal, slightly inconvenient detail that makes a stranger feel like they’re part of something bigger?

What story are you creating around the story of your book?

I saw the same principle play out with one of my clients, memoirist Whitney Joy, author of Seven Blank Pages. Rather than build her launch around simply announcing that her book was available, we built it around a visibility moment that reflected the heart of her story. On launch day, seven copies of her memoir were intentionally set free to travel from reader to reader, each with a trackable QR code, mirroring her book’s themes of connection, healing and shared humanity woven throughout.

Readers weren’t just buying a memoir. They were becoming part of the story.

The visibility moment gave people something meaningful to participate in, and participation is far more powerful than plain old PR promotion. Ask yourself: What story are you creating around what you’ve made? Sales follow a story, not the other way around.

Don’t mistake the congratulations for conversion. Too many founders invest in the visible moment while neglecting the story, distribution and follow-up that actually create momentum. Visibility is the spark. The ecosystem you build around it is what catches fire. And the story is its gas.

The comments started flooding in: “Congratulations!” “OMG! That’s amazing,” as they saw my 8-year-old son and me beaming with pride as our second book debuted, 40 feet tall on a New York Times Square billboard. Little did they know, I was testing a question most authors never think to ask: Does the billboard actually sell the book, or does something else?

After my book, Make Every Podcast Want You, was featured on a Times Square billboard as one of the “Top Books to Change Your Life in 2024,” authors started reaching out to me. Fiction writers and children’s book authors were asking how they could achieve the same success and how to better position their books when they weren’t directly contributing to business growth. They wanted to understand the mechanics of the billboard.

I had already seen how podcasts and PR could sell a nonfiction book and skyrocket it to an Amazon bestseller. But I wanted to know something more specific: How many sales could actually come in directly from the billboard itself, separate from everything else?