Shaan Patel's Prep Expert Digital SAT Playbook Doubled His Company's Revenue and Pays Him $13 a Copy vs $0.30 on His McGraw Hill Bestseller

★ Scribe Media · Author Case Study

Shaan Patel

Author of Prep Expert Digital SAT Playbook

A Scribe-published author success story

Shaan Patel is a Shark Tank veteran, Mark Cuban portfolio company founder, board-certified dermatologist, and the CEO of Prep Expert, the SAT and ACT prep company he has run for 15 years. Scribe's Prep Expert Digital SAT Playbook doubled Prep Expert's annual revenue year-over-year, returned at least 10 to 20 times the project investment, pays Shaan $13 per copy (26 to 43 times the royalty he earned on his McGraw Hill bestseller), and is the centerpiece of a seven-figure lead-generation funnel.

From 100 Publisher Rejections to a McGraw Hill Bestseller to Scribe

Shaan's first attempt at publishing started 15 years ago. He pitched 100 literary agents and publishers (Penguin, Random House, every name in the test-prep business). He got 100 rejections. The reason every time: "SAT prep market's too competitive. You don't have a platform."

So he took the content he had written and turned it into a prep course. The course produced an average 376-point SAT score improvement in his first six-week cohort — the difference between the 50th and 90th percentile. Prep Expert was born. Then one of the publishers that had rejected him came back. McGraw Hill, the largest education publisher in the world, gave him the deal he had originally asked for.

SAT 2400 in Just Seven Steps went to #1 on Amazon for SAT prep and sold more than 50,000 copies. Shaan made 30 to 50 cents a copy.

"I ended up self-publishing a bunch of other test prep books, entrepreneurship books. But it was very DIY... it was not nearly to the level that my first book through McGraw Hill was, highly professional, highly worked with great editors, worked with great typesetters. And so I always wanted to get back to that original level but without having to take the kind of pay cut that you do through a major publisher. And so that's when I found Scribe."

— Shaan Patel

"A Book Is One of the Most Powerful Lead Generators for Businesses Out There"

Shaan does not talk about his book as a side project or a credibility piece. He talks about it as the most efficient lead generator in his business. The mechanics are simple but the math is unfair to anyone who is not doing this.

Shaan runs Meta ads offering the book free if parents pay $5 to $7 shipping. The shipping payment plus the post-checkout order bumps and upsells liquidate the ad cost. The lead is then worth three to five times more than a free PDF download, because the parent paid real money and the book ends up on the desk for a month, reminding them to buy the course.

"Being able to actually fulfill a free book, even though I'm losing money on that book, I usually make it back in upsells and order bumps. So if you can make it work, it's one of the most powerful, I would say, lead generators for businesses out there."

— Shaan Patel

The landing page that runs this funnel (prepexpert.com/free-book) is a seven-figure earner for Prep Expert on its own. And because the book is in their inbox, on their desk, and in their hands, every other channel performs better — Meta ad ROAS sits at 3 to 4 times consistently, and Shaan can run webinars, Black Friday campaigns, and SMS sequences to a list that already trusts him.

The Launch Week That Reset Prep Expert's Trajectory

Shaan and his Scribe team timed the book launch to the week before the SAT went fully digital — the single biggest format change in the test in a decade. He hosted a free live online event titled "Seven Strategies to Improve Your Test Scores and Get Scholarships," with previews of the book's content as the takeaways. Roughly 10,000 parents and students registered. Over 1,000 of them bought the book during the event (a 10% conversion). The book hit #1 on Amazon in SAT test guides, ACT test guides, and education and learning, plus top-three in several other categories.

"We had our highest one-day revenue ever since we aired on Shark Tank in 2016. We had our highest one-week revenue in company history. We did more revenue during the book launch week than we did all of the previous month."

— Shaan Patel

Doubled Annual Revenue, Pinpointed to a Single Date

Before the launch, Prep Expert's revenue had been decreasing for years as the test-optional college environment hit demand. After the launch, the line never went back down.

"We doubled revenue compared to 2024 in 2025. To do that at our scale has been incredible. And I can actually pinpoint from the day that we did the book launch to ever since, our revenue has never been down... I can pinpoint literally my book launch event date from that."

— Shaan Patel

$13 a Book vs the $0.30 He Earned on McGraw Hill

Scribe's self-publishing model swapped Shaan's royalty from cents to dollars. Test-prep books retail at $35 to $39. After his McGraw Hill experience of 30 to 50 cents per copy, the new economics felt absurd to him.

"I was getting, you know, 50 cents a book before. Now I'm getting, I think it's kind of crazy. Amazon gives, because the retail price on test prep books is pretty high, like $35, $39, I'm getting like $13 a book in royalty profit. So, it's a really nice profit generator just from the book without even adding on everything else."

— Shaan Patel

At 20,000 to 30,000 copies sold in under two years, the book itself generates tens of thousands of dollars in royalty profit every year. That's separate from everything the book does for the rest of Prep Expert's business.

Competing With Princeton Review and Kaplan, Without Surrendering the Margin

"Your team made it happen. So I want to thank you and your team for putting the book together in such a short time frame and then making all of that come to life in such an amazing and professional way, that we can compete with the Princeton Reviews and the Kaplans and the juggernauts in our space without having to go through a major publisher and still keep all that ROI for ourselves."

— Shaan Patel

What He Tells Authors Who Are Still on the Fence

"You really have to think about authorship in a decade's game, not a year's game. When you write a really good human book, people notice. People can tell that this is something different here. And people are going to crave that human touch more and more. The more you can personalize and humanize things, it's actually a great differentiator in increasingly AI-competitive markets."

— Shaan Patel