So what? How to market a book launch

Happy Thursday, folks. It is uh the marketing analytics insights show so so what uh from Trust Insights. Uh John and I are holding down the fourth this week as Katie is uh I think being chased through the woods by I don't know what what mythical creature do we want to go after this week? Unicorns are always a favorite, so we can exactly unicorns are good. So this week on the show, we're gonna talk about book launch stuff.

So John and I have both uh published multiple books, uh and we have a long list of uh errors that we made uh and in book launches. But John, you want to uh start off by sort of what your philosophy around book launches are? Yeah, well, and of course, a disclaimer too is that neither of us are the coveted New York Times best-selling authors. So yeah, it is funny. This is more like you know, you're setting off on a Raiders of the Lost Arc kind of thing, and we're at the bar telling you all the places you're probably gonna die.

And so you're gonna be way better off because you don't have to make the mistakes that we've made. And the good news is we have, you know, I've talked with David Merriman Scott a bunch of times about getting his books out, and he is on the eighth edition of his book. So we you know do know how to get where we want to go with this. But yeah, it's a ton of work, and I think the big one to start with too is really, you know, why are you writing the book? Like what do you want to accomplish?

And so I think that that would be one place to start. I mean, when you've sat down to write, like where did you ultimately want to go? Because not everybody, you know, not everybody knows that they're not going to sell 20 million copies and retire as JK Rowling. Like there's other reasons to do this. Exactly.

Yeah, so uh I would assume table stakes are uh that you've written a book and or you're you're in the process of writing a book and it doesn't suck. Um one of the things that I I take from uh my our friend Jay Baer is his method of developing a book, which is uh you build a talk uh some kind and you deliver that talk for about a year and you see if it lands with audiences, right? You you tune it up, you get a ton of QA, you get a ton of feedback, and then at the end of that year, if you know people just aren't reacting to the talk, there's you know, it's just there'sn't a there there, you're like, you know what? It's probably good that I didn't waste six months of my life writing a book about this because nobody cares. Uh on the other hand, if you're like mobbed at the end of every talk with people, you know, got questions like, oh, do you do this sort of thing?

Then you know you're on the right track for a book. Um, the only challenge uh you would have with that is if you're on a topic that just doesn't exist yet, right? So people wouldn't you know might not necessarily have uh as much to to ask you about. For example, like if it's say it was 2005 and you're uh Darmes Shah talking about uh inbound marketing, and people are like, What's that? Yeah, yeah, especially if you're gonna be a trailblazer, if you're doing something totally brand new and unique and different, then that gives you an easy platform.

Um exactly. So go ahead. No, no, go ahead. Uh so let's let's start off with some of the the the nuts and bolts, uh the architectural stuff that you would need for a book lunch, because there's a whole bunch of things that you should have in place prior to launch. Um, and it some of these things are super basic, and then some of these things are a little more advanced, but uh they're all uh important, or I think are are somewhat necessary.

First and foremost, you as an author probably should have a website, right? Uh, ideally, yeah, and and John, what's your take on this? But ideally, the launch of your book begins several years before the book exists, right? In terms of building an audience, building a brand, etc. Yeah, absolutely.

And you're kind of nailing like a critical point with this. So many people get so wrapped up in writing the book and finishing the book. And it was Gabriel Weinberg who wrote Traction that gave me this great quote. He said, The problem with writing a book is when you think you're 90% done, that last 10%, that's actually 90% of the work. You know, it's it's getting the book written is one thing.

And and David Memuscot felt the same thing. He said the the biggest thing to getting and selling a book is making the launch date an event. Like you have to have everything going on all fronts and all your promotions kind of all magically synchronized to drop on when that book hits. And so, yeah, like you said, years in advance, because and we've seen this over and over and over again, is that usually if you're not already established, the number one marketing activity you can do is just emailing your house list. So, yeah, we've been, you know, working on lists for over a decade, and yeah, and sure enough, it that is still our best performing one as we drop.

So, yeah, website, mailing list, you know, having that architecture, yeah, even long before you pick the topic. Exactly. So on the website, things you should have some way of doing redirects. This is important because ideally you're doing outreach to you know dozens of different outlets later on, and you want some way of tracking all that. So you could have, for example, trust insights.ai/slash marketing over coffee, trust insights.ai slash uh social pros podcast, etc.

And having that capability on your own website will save you a huge amount of time and reduce your headaches. Um, your website should probably have some sort of uh template that allows for what are called short codes, particularly if you're running on WordPress. This allows you to uh change out the calls to action across your site uh with just a few clicks is a super important thing to do and relatively easy to do if you've got the right architecture so that um when it's uh time to get things ready for the book, uh you're able to swap out promotions as needed. You definitely want a website that has the ability to put to put up you know one or more landing pages and of course have thank you pages on it and stuff. So I mean, there are some platforms that are a little less flexible this way.

Um so make sure that you're using a platform that's good. For publishing, uh, there's a we can get into the whole debate about self-publish or uh go with the publisher, but either way, you're probably gonna want to have an Amazon account of some kind, um, ideally an Amazon Associates count account so that you can earn some revenue from referring people to your own book. Um, and then if you're going to self-publish, um, you probably should put something up on Amazon Kindle Direct, uh the Kindle Direct program. Uh Create Space is their program for printed uh books. Uh the margins on those are are not great, but there are some people who would prefer to have the paper book and you want them to have it as uh as much as possible.

For uh tracking uh external redirects, uh, obviously use your own site. A bit.ly account is helpful, and then if you're gonna uh sort of do it yourself, uh, self-publish and you want to earn uh and your focus is money and not publicity, you'll want to have an account with a service like Gum Road or something because that uh the commissions uh for that are much cheaper for Amazon. The if you're in the KDB KDP select, you Amazon gets a 30% commission. If uh you're in the regular program, you get like a third Amazon gets like a 65% commission. Uh so they they take a good chunk of the money.

Uh if you're on Gum Road, it's a five percent commission. So again, if your your focus is money and not fame, um, that is uh where to go. And I think that's actually an interesting point. Um, you you do want to have some idea of what outcome you want. Like, are you publishing the book as a launch platform to become more well known?

Is it going to be uh as David Mearman Scott says, uh the world's largest, least portable, least convenient, most effective business card. Uh, then you're you want the fame and not necessarily make money. Other people, they just want to make the money on the book. So you've got to be clear about that. Yeah, you know, one thing with that too with the Amazon Associates, especially the affiliate account, that's one trick because in the affiliate tracking, you don't get a lot of metrics.

So you can set up multiple accounts so that you can use different links in different places to get a better feel for what's looking. And yeah, yeah, they take a massive cut. Um, yeah, I don't know. Now I've always viewed it too as there's kind of there's three tiers, right? You just kind of go the self-publish route where you, you know, you can still go on create space and you put it out on Gum Road or similar thing.

Um, there's the top tier of you just you go with a publisher and now they're gonna do a ride along and you know, you get maybe even get an advance, and there's gonna be a home marketing campaign built around that. But then there's also this weird middle tier. Uh, there's some publishers where kind of like if you show up with 10 or 15 grand, they will publish it for you and you get some of the advantages of that. Um, but you know, you can also completely crash and burn on that side. And uh any other thoughts about like which one of those three are right for what kinds of situations?

It depends. So if you've all book publishing relies on you, the author doing your own marketing, right? Even the big houses put minimal effort behind uh anything unless you're already well established as one of their proven sellers, right? Like Stephen King doesn't have to work particularly hard uh to get uh attention on one of his books. Um, you know, Malcolm Gladwell doesn't have to work particularly hard, although there uh the the publishing houses will will throw some weight around that.

But for the most part, most authors uh and especially uh newer ones, yeah, you're gonna have to market a lot of the stuff yourself and and get essentially no help from the publisher. Um publishers are not in the marketing business anymore. They are in the the you know, selling dead trees. So I would say if if you've got the backing of a really good organization, um then yeah, you could go the the publishing route, or if you you think you absolutely need the logo because um there are some publishers who do um you know airport book placements and stuff and and and buys like that. Um, but I would say for most people, especially for if you're doing like your first couple of books, I would say self-publish is the way to go.

That way you get a feel for the process, you know what's involved, um, you can see the the results pretty easily. You could track your own data and get a sense of because since you're promoting it yourself anyway, um, you can see what really does and does not work. Where and then later on, once you've got an established audience and you've got a good track record, then you can approach a publisher and possibly get better terms on your contract from them to say, like, yeah, I I'm bringing this list of you know 20,000 people on my mailing list and my social media following, and I got all the stuff that I can do to move the book. Um, and there's you're likely to get a better contract that way. Sounds good.

Um, so that's the basic architecture. Uh, in terms of foundational services, there's a bunch of services I recommend you have in place. Obviously, Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics for your website. You want to know, you know, you want to be able to track stuff. You want to be able to track what's going on.

If people are buying uh your book off of your site or if uh a service like uh Amazon or even a gum road, yeah, you want to be able to track clicks out and just get a sense of like are people interested, right? Do you get people to your book's landing page and then they leave and they don't even click the you know go to Amazon button? You know uh there's something on that's gone wrong there. You want Google Search Console uh set in place and turned on again. You know, if if people are searching for um B2B marketing confessions and they and they're finding John's site, you want to know that that you're showing up.

You want a system like uh Google Optimize to do some A-B testing again. If this is actually really useful if um you want to see if different prospective book covers work for people. You can when you in your promotional images on your site, you can run different tests to see what's going on. You should have some sort of social posting mechanism. Um, I'm a fan of Agora Pulse, they're a partner of ours.

Um, you should have some kind of social media monitoring system to listen for you, your name, your book name, etc. Um, we're partial to our friends over at TalkWalker and our friends at Brand 24. Both of those are good systems. You should have a calendaring system, like you were saying, John. Uh, that that all-important launch schedule, you want to make sure that there's there's a system in place for that.

And uh you want to have uh ideally some way of tracking all of the activity that you're gonna be doing, pitching your book. And the free tier of HubSpot's uh sales CRM is actually really well designed for that. You could put in you basically you treat um things like podcasts or interviews or whatever as you know sales opportunities. Uh and you track your sale to them, uh saying, like, did I get myself as a guest on the Marketing Over Coffee podcast. Yeah, that's great to manage that.

Because not only do you have records, but you can also set up your calendar to actually ping you with tasks so you never miss anything, which is critical. Exactly. And the meeting links, you know, setting up meeting links and stuff so that people can book time with you. Uh, because as an author, um, you know, working the circuit, you're gonna be juggling a lot. Uh, hopefully, you're gonna be juggling a lot of interviews and a lot of uh press opportunities.

Yeah, and it's something with I don't know if you've seen the same thing, but with live events have just been brutal. I've talked to many authors that have just said, yeah, you don't want to launch a book during a pandemic, it's just a bad idea because so many books depend on you know all the normal trade events to get in front of the crowd and to generate buzz, and it just makes it a brutal task. Exactly. So speaking of that, let's take a look at some of the different channels that we might want to be thinking about. Um email, of course, number one uh is on the list uh by far.

If you have your own email list, um is gonna it it hands down be the best way to promote your book. Um if you have the opportunity to do promos or swaps with other authors who are non-competitive, that is a smart thing to do, right? So if you've if you've got a list of say 10,000 people and you get you know another author in a uh in a similar space uh has a list of about the same size, do a promo swap. Say, hey, uh I want to do a direct send to your list, you do a direct send to my list. Let's see if we can get some heat going for both of our books.

Um, your your newsletter, you should absolutely have some sort of newsletter. Um, even if you want to do on a platform like Substack or something free, uh again, these are essentials to have that list in place. And uh it's one of those things you got to be building that, you know, months, if not years in advance. So the email uh number one uh top source. Second, referrals.

So this is what we could would normally consider like public relations. This is pitching your book. So pitching it uh interviews with you on podcasts, pitching yourself to other YouTube channels. If you if you do the the whole YouTube thing, um getting referrals from your network. Who can I talk to that you know would be interested in hearing about my book?

Looking at niche groups, uh like you were saying, John, conferences, events, and trade shows, and of course, traditional media, even stuff like you know, uh the the whole thing, and I think uh Gabriel Weinberg mentioned this as well with with traction. The whole thing is creating the appearance for you know a relatively short period of time that you are everywhere, right? Yeah, yeah. That was it, they clearly said that there was a big deal of you know, landing a bunch of interviews in all their social feeds on all channels. And then the other one too, uh to jump back a step is uh you don't want to overlook galleys.

Like you should be doing galleys, these cut versions of the book that are not the final print, but you actually do a run of a couple hundred copies or however many you can afford to do that you send out to influencers and to interview people so that you can have articles and interviews in the can for actually on drop date, you know. So having early copies. Um, and then another tie-in to that is having blurbs too. You know, having folks give you a quote about your book. If you can maybe you don't give them the whole book, you give them just a chapter to give you some feedback on and then get a quote from them.

I mean, the days of that selling a copy at the airport are the odds of that applying to you are pretty slim. But the reality is if somebody's got their quote in your book, when the book drops, they are gonna give you a hand to promote it to their their crowd and say, hey, look, I'm in this book and I I approve this, and that'll give you some more momentum. Very political. I'm John Wall, and I approve this message. Um, but yeah, so those two channels are the channels that are I would say I would classify them as the hardest work, but probably the the lowest cost in terms of being able to get in front of a lot of people.

Again, it's just a ton of outreach. And a ton of outreach that requires a human touch. Um, because we, you know, we both get an absurd number of pitches every single day for marketing over coffee, for in-air insights for you know the different newsletters. And some of these pitches are just wildly, wildly off topic. Yeah, I'm trying to remember what the worst one I got.

I got one just yesterday on um like a trucking company or something. It was something about how these trucks have GPS on them. I'm like, this has nothing to do with anything that we cover whatsoever. But yeah, that's just nature of the beast. The stuff just pours in.

I got one from uh an interview request for someone whose book is coming out. Uh, she is apparently a cleaning products kingpin of some kind. She manufactures all sorts of you know cleaning products and she wants to get in front of my high net worth female audience. I'm like, I I don't know who's doing a PR, but you need to sharpen the saw a little bit. Yeah, right, right.

You get a better better selects, please. Exactly. All right. So moving down into our good friend social media. So there's two classes of social media.

And within that, of course, there's you know, there's there's multiple subdivisions. There's public and semi-public social media. Public social media are the channels everybody knows and doesn't love. Um, so Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, uh, and so on and so forth. Uh, one that I think people do overlook uh or uh or don't look at enough is product hunt.

I think there's there's some hugely successful, yes. Uh, I've talked to a number of people that have had tremendous results. Like if they had to choose one on that list, it would just be product hunt. Mm-hmm. Um, and again, that's one where you need to be there a couple of years in advance.

Um, I've been on product hunt since like 2018 and just slowly go growing a following and stuff. I think of that like 7,000 followers there now. Uh you know, participate in discussions and things like that. Just follow people who are relevant because the next time something comes around, I want that network in place to say, like, hey, my new book is out. Please, please vote it up.

Yeah, and I think that's one where it just even if you don't have the network, it's worth ponying up the cash for, you know, just pay to get on the front page and go. Exactly. Um, for all these things, you want to have both where it's applicable, like a business account or a business profile or in a personal profile as well. So LinkedIn, uh uh uh your uh Instagram, Facebook, etc. You want to have all these accounts.

Um, you'll have advertising turned on and enabled on these accounts. Um, you want access to uh the advertiser tools on LinkedIn on your personal account, you want to turn on creator mode. Uh make sure that uh you've got uh all that set up. You ideally have a a newsletter uh already that you if if you're doing the email regular email newsletter, you're cross-posting it using LinkedIn's newsletters. Um that is a hugely successful, underrated, overlooked feature that uh drives a lot of performance.

Uh and you want to have the ability to create content. We'll talk about creative in a in a bit, but you want to have access to all these different channels and be ready to go. Is there any social channels uh here that were missing that are public? Um, well, you know, oh fully public. No, I was gonna say Discord, but I imagine you've got that in Twitch on the semi-public ones.

Um Pinterest would be the only one if you're doing like a home improvement, you know, book or whatever. Oh, you reminded me of another one, Twitch. Um again, it's especially if you've got video influencers, gaming influencers. Um, definitely have that in there. Okay.

And then Sebli Public Gator, you have Discord, Slack, and Reddit. Um, so Discord and Slack self-explanatory. You again should be joining servers uh or instances uh or communities where it would be relevant. So, for example, uh, if I'm gonna be launching a book that's about content marketing, I should be joining the content marketing institute Slack. Uh, I should be joining the marketing AI uh Institute Slack.

I should be joining the content strategy collective and so on and so on and so forth. If I'm doing data, I should be in uh the Trust Insights Analytics for Marketers, the Measure uh Slack, etc. Um, all these things. Um Steve uh just commented that is there gonna be replaying the answer is yes. If you go to trustinsights.ai/slash YouTube, you will see this uh show uh in its entirety when it's on.

Um the to find those instances, a lot of time it's word of mouth. Uh for Slack, there really isn't a great Slack directory. For Discord, there's a site uh play a service called Disboard, which is a silly name. Um, but it is a public index of people where they uh if you run a public Discord server, you can submit your server to it and and stuff, which reminds me, and I think I think I would put this under um I think I'm gonna add this in under foundational services. I think it's a missed opportunity if you don't have your own community of some kind.

And the reality is today, when you look at feature by feature, it's gotta be Discord. Discord is such a powerful uh community management tool that it's silly not to have one. Yeah, no, I agree. And it's it just seems to be really picking up speed. It's become the form of choice.

Exactly. So those would be um the social channels, and again, you want to have uh uh billing turned on, you want to have everything set up so that you can run advertising. Um display advertising, you'll want to have access to some display ad systems. Um, for example, uh Stack Adapt, our friends over at Stack Adapt, uh being able to do set up tracking pixels to retarget people who go to your website and go to your book page, and maybe don't buy a book. Uh don't click on anything, uh, levels of campaigns.

And then, of course, um, they've got some really good segments to target in in Stack Adapt, especially if you're gonna be doing stuff like OTT or connected TV. Uh, again, easy promotional stuff. Uh, one service that for books specifically that a lot of people overlook is called BookBub. They are a promotional service. You pay uh a chunk of money to have a book promoted on there, and it goes out to a couple hundred thousand people.

Typically, what people have said is to be successful with it, um you want to um give away a promotional piece that's gated so that you acquire a list, you build your list very quickly from it, you know, so you get like 10,000 new signups on your mailing list, and then you can email those people in in perpetuity. Yeah, that's a great game. That's a nice easy pickup. Exactly. And then the last one I would say on here for display native ads is an internal ad system.

If you've got um friends or you've got a network of websites that you can work with, um, you can run your own advertising system, certainly on your own website as well, so that you have house inventory, um, banner ads and things. And that way when it comes time to publish your book, uh, you know, you swap all the ads out for whatever other things you're you're marketing and you you switch entirely to your book. Um so that would be display ads. And of course, um the the giant uh on the playground is uh Google Ads, making sure that you have a Google Ads account set up that is you know configured, uh and that you have all the different uh campaign options set up. The three that I recommend uh is RLSA, which is um retargeting lists for search ads.

Um this for both regular search and for YouTube is incredibly powerful. Again, if somebody's Googling your name uh or your book's name, you want ads showing up for that uh and following them around the web wherever they go. If somebody goes to the book landing page, you want ads showing up. And then the newest form of advertising is Google's performance max. So you load up all your assets, um, you provide your headlines, you know, links to your book's landing page or whatever.

And then it looks across the entire spectrum of Google, like YouTube, search, Gmail, whatever, and says, I'm gonna put ads wherever I think it's gonna go work best. And then it makes all the decisions and optimizes to wherever people are buying your book. Yeah, I don't know. And everything I've seen is that kind of stuff just completely beats the pants off of trying to manually do that on multiple channels with multiple creative. Like you just it's come to the point now where that automated pretty much beats everything else out there.

Exactly. So in order to leverage these networks, you do need to have creative. And this is where you're probably gonna want to uh again. If you know you've got a book coming out, um, do not wait till you know a month before launch before starting in on your creative. You should be ideally building content and creative banking stuff uh as much as possible.

Uh, I forgot to put uh here audio interviews, stuff like that. So let's put that for both audio and video. Um, but this is the kind of stuff you want to have banked. You want to have your ad copy pre-written for your book, uh blog posts, blog content, newsletter uh issues, uh, direct emails, sales pitches. Uh you want to have sample chapters ready to go.

Um, and John, this is where you're saying we need to put galleys, right? Yeah, and then I don't know, do you want to put for audio too? Audiobook version. Oh, yeah, audiobook version. Um, which by the way, um, as long as you're writing your book in a format that is a fairly open, like you know, HTML or text or even Microsoft Word, you can convert it and then send it to a service like um Google Text to Speech and get a reasonable audio book.

I just did this with our friend Brooke Cellis's book, um, because I was about to drive to Cleveland and I had 10 hours in the car. So I took um uh the EPUB version of her book and fed it to Google Text to Speech, and it was it was listenable. It was, it was, it was it was interpretable. So um it's a good thing to have, you know, that audiobook does make a difference. Yeah, no, because there's just there's a market of people that they're just not gonna buy paper or Kindle if if they're gonna get into it, it's gonna be the audio.

Exactly. Uh, and that's where having you know, for example, like a service like Gum Road really does come in handy because when I sell on on Gum Road, I include a Kindle formatted file, an EPUB formatted file for uh Apple Books, a PDF version, uh, and then the audiobook version. And so when you get one download, it's it's with all four different formats in it. So whatever format works best for you, uh, which is much harder to do with like Amazon. So uh though there is a lot to be said for those independent providers.

Um, you will probably want to have, you know, spend some time learning Canva, right? So that you can create uh your 16 by 9, your 9×16 story format, your four by threes, animated gifts uh and and short animations, anything you can do that will create um content that you can put on for social media, uh video, you know, tons and tons of video. So you'll probably want to do, you know, if you if you have a chance to do interviews um in advance, that is a terrific way to then be able to slice them up and create little you know, shorts and reels and stuff. Uh, YouTube shorts are outperforming other forms of video right now. Um they because they are they're close enough in format to be functional like TikTok.

But the one thing that YouTube has that TikTok and Instagram do not is that YouTube is a fully functional search engine backed by Google. So properly formatted shorts will let you take advantage of that as well. Very cool. So those are all the types of creative that you'd want to have in advance. So all this stuff together are sort of the pieces, the toolkit for launching a book.

The one thing that isn't documented in here really is sort of that process or timeline. And the timeline is, you know, several years out, build a personal brand, build your newsletter list, build your audience, build a social following, but try to get them onto a newsletter. Um, because uh as everyone knows, um social media algorithms can change overnight. Uh write your book, obviously, but as you're writing the book, be thinking about uh promotional stuff. Even if uh if you were to go chapter by chapter, like if you if I pull out um one of mine here, I've got in a lot of the different chapters, there's individual graphics and and stuff like that.

So be thinking about blurbs that you can pull right from your book, uh different diagrams, um quotes, stories. If you do interviews, like if you're writing a book and you're interviewing people, remember to ask permission, but record the interviews. All that B-roll footage is going to be instrumental for being able to roll that out. And you know, that's something you probably do in the writing process, and then you can go back to those people ideally uh when it's promotion time saying, hey, remember the interview you did for my book, uh my book's coming out. Would you would you please share it?

Yeah, that sounds good. And I think that's what just a quick um urban legend about you know copies and getting things out. I think over and over I've heard with business books is you have to get over the hurdle of the first thousand copies out. Like it's it won't take off until you get a thousand copies in hands. And then I've also heard that if you actually get to a point where you get to ten thousand and it hasn't taken off, you pretty much have to accept that it's not going to fly on its own.

Um, but so you know, I've seen many authors make a real hard push to get that first thousand out the door, you know, if you can in the first week or even pre-order, because that kind of can make or break how it goes in the future. Exactly. Uh so that's your timeline, you know, the six months before. Um after you finish the book, depending on whether you're self-publishing uh or whether you're working at the publishing house, you know, the editing cycle can be weeks, months, years. Um, but while editing is going on, that is the time to be looking at generating all that creative, all those assets and stuff because um, you know what you're gonna say, B, um you can be sending out you know uncorrected galleys, you know, pre-edited and stuff, as long as you know, as long as it's not like your face rolling on the keyboard, um your your second or third draft should be readable, and that's when you can start doing the galleys and start doing the interviews.

Yeah, absolutely. Because it and you just think about the runtime, you know, for more popular podcasts, you know, you're gonna have to get booked six months out because they're gonna say, okay, yeah, we can record two months from now, and then it'll sit in their bin for another two months before it hits uh, you know, before it goes live. And so, yeah, really do all you can to get stuff to drop on lunch date. And yeah, unfortunately, that takes a ton of pre-planning. Exactly.

Um about a depending on how much money you have to spend, you may need to get ads running one to two weeks ahead of time because particularly for systems like Google ads, because they need time to train. The algorithms powering them need time to tune in and train. So ideally, uh you know, one to two weeks out, you launched maybe like a pre-launch campaign uh for your book. Give this software a time to dial in to your audience and and optimize. You don't want to be launching an ad campaign on launch day because at that point though there will not be enough of a trained audience for the ad system to reliably show your ads.

I might say if it's your first time out, maybe even go a month. Like and if you don't have like a ton of money to to you know hit up fast, maybe you do like a $500 spend over a month just to get dialed in on your ad on your ad audiences. Yeah, no, the last thing you'd want to do is you know, pull the trigger on lunch day and then have your account get tonight on day two and now be stuck for a week and a half trying to figure out how to get turned back on. Exactly. And then for how do you handle it with the podcast, right?

Because like you said, there's a lot of book, there's a lot of lead time on those. So there's a lot of lead time on any any major publication. Yeah, it's you really you just can't start too early. I mean, that's it. You talk about creative stuff.

I mean, you should have a sample chapter or some kind of PDF of a page and a page of book, you know, and especially for podcasts, it should go as far as saying, okay, this author had this the book out. He is more than willing to come on and talk about and even have the questions and the answers right there. Because unfortunately, I mean, you I we've both been through this where you get on a podcast and they have maybe read the cover and the back, you know, the back cover, like they know nothing about the book really. And so having those questions like, okay, here's the five you ask, and you're gonna get a great answer on these. Um, that'll get you in the in the works.

But yeah, you just you can't start too early on it. Exactly. Um depends on the genre of the book. Um, that's been selectively successful, seeing authors doing collaborations of some kind. Um not just interviews, but like co-created content.

There may be opportunities, uh, particularly with YouTube influencers uh to do stuff like that. Um you see that more with musicians and things, but you uh uh there definitely are uh co-created, co-collaborative pieces of content. Um Gary Bandichuk does a ton of that stuff, and it does very, very well for him. You know, it just he's actually interviewing other people to build shows around their audiences, and then when it's time for his next thing to launch, of course, he's got a you know an audience of 10 million people that he's managed to create over time. Uh it's a terrific strategy.

Yeah, and you totally see this in business books too. There's this kind of whole business mafia of you know Tom Peters, the Stephen Covey people, and you know, Al Reese and all these folks that just you know, they're blurring each other's books and even go as far as you notice that you know they're not dropping at the same time, they go out of their way to make sure that their schedules are are lined up so that the folks doing the business stuff have a steady stream of books all in endorsed by everybody else. Exactly. One thing you may want to look into uh is do some competitive uh intelligence on authors that are in your space and see you know who's following them. Uh, one thing that I I like enjoy doing a lot is taking like Twitter accounts or Instagram accounts if you can get the data um of a cohort, like you know, uh who people who follow Seth Gold Godin and David Meerman Scott and Tim Ferris and Gary Vanishak and see who's in common across those accounts, right?

You know, who uh keep showing up in that those are people who I'd almost say is like looking at them as as potential secondary influencers because if they're sort of in that tribe, but they're not the main personality, they may be someone that the main personality looks to as a source of paying attention to what's new. So, again, it that's research you can do well in advance. Um, Brian had a question here. How do you recommend probing books during presentations at conferences before the book comes out? Oh, that's a good well, you know, the pre-order trying to get pre-orders um and still giving away free chapter.

You know, you should have a polished chapter that you can drop. Those are great ways to do it. And then I for early buyers, you usually uh a lot of folks do all kinds of free-for-alls. And it's funny too, I don't see as many of those as I used to. There used to be these deals where you know you'd pay a hundred bucks and get 10 different books from 10 different authors, you know, they would take these all as pre-orders and all go and bank.

Um, but yeah, you can definitely do and this is one of the benefits if you own all the assets. You can say, hey, pre-order the book, I'll send you the audiobook for free right now, or you know, you get the audiobook for free when it comes out. And yeah, you pretty much can't um can't fail by throwing more stuff on the pile for folks that order early. Exactly. Uh one thing that's we've seen a lot of people do is send out influencer kits.

So it's a kit kind of like this, some kind of box. This is actually for the uh an agency summit, but it's all the stuff that you normally expect. You get a copy of the book, you get some kind of swag, you know, pens, coffee mugs, things like that. Um people have done all sorts of crazy stuff. Um, Mark Schaefer once sent me a pack of bacon, uh, which was was um uh very needy.

Uh so but those those kinds of things do work. Conferences are a great place to do that because if you know you've got a bunch of influences all in the same place, uh you don't have to spend a gazillion dollars on on FedEx to get to them. So if there's a big event like Dream Force or Inbound or whatever, having like a uh an influencer dinner, um, if you've got the budget for particularly if your book is sponsored by a company, um, having an influencer dinner and just get everybody in the same room having something like that, uh, a short presentation, uh, all those things would be things that that you could leverage the power of a conference um in order to capture all the people at once. Yeah, I mean, uh even at Sales Machine a few years back, Gary Vanderchuk actually did that. I mean, they were just giving away his latest hardcover at the door.

I mean, they must have shelled out thousands of copies just that day, and that's the kind of thing that'll go towards the book numbers, you know, when they're talking about how well the book does. Exactly. I mean, back in the day, um, uh if I recall correctly, the the Church of Scientology would literally just buy out shelves of of their own books and pulp them, but you know, it counted for the sales numbers. It that that was how they hit the New York Times bestselling list. Yeah, right.

You get on the big list and then that can jump ahead. Yeah, I don't know. You know, it's funny though, I've seen a lot of authors say that you know, making that list did not change anything for them. You know, the book did fine on its own, and they were getting the speaking gigs and all that, but the actual list didn't change it. And then I see similar stuff with Amazon lists, you know, people making, you know, trying to drop a certain day so that they make all these different lists on Amazon.

And I've seen mixed results on that. Some people say it makes a difference, and other people say no, it doesn't actually affect the sales at all. Yeah. Um, for the few Amazon lists I've made, I did not see you know any any impact in that. Most of the impact comes, at least for my books, the impact comes from email on the mailing list.

So that's by far like if I had to get rid of every tactic extent of one, it would be email and and nothing else. Yeah, no, you're much better just going to your fans. That's the the way it works, unfortunately. Exactly. So that is um in essence, sort of the framework and the launch toolkit for uh for getting a book out the door.

And you know, one of the things that I will point out is this is not stuff to again, this is not something you want to wait for launch day. You want all these pieces in place long beforehand, um, so that they're running, that you know how to use them, especially if you're flying solo, right? If you don't have a team, um, you don't have a VA, you don't have any of that stuff. You want to get these pieces up and running today, even if your book is five years away, uh just so that you know how they all work. Um, and some of them you'll have to cross off based on you know what resources you have.

Like if you don't have ad budget, you don't have ad budget, and so you're gonna focus on the things that don't cost money. Yeah, unfortunately, we're you know, the bearers of horrible news. It's that you know, writing a book is just this unbelievable Herculean task that's gonna eat your whole life. And if you want to do it well, you should probably jump on this pile of Herculean tasks that will eat the rest of your life. But that's just how it all works.

Exactly. Um if you would like a copy of that uh flow chart, we're gonna put it in the analytics for marketers Slack group. So uh it'll be available as just a straight PDF. You know, once you're in the the Slack group, uh you don't need to do anything else. We'll just post to the main channel.

But any um any final parting thoughts, John, on how we can all be more successful marketing books. Do you get feedback early and often? That's one mistake I see people doing is just going in a corner and writing uh 600 pages. Do not do that, you know, road test some of your stuff and get some early feedback. And like you said, even if you can run it as bog blog posts or speaking engagements or whatever, put stuff out there to get feedback quick because yeah, there's nothing worse than trying to edit a you know 200-page book and or having to like cut it into chunks and rescramble it to get it to work.

That's not a place you want to be. That's a really good point. Even if you just have something like uh a customer advisory board, right? You know, is it get five friends um who who know your space who work in your industry? Um drinking buddies or anything, but so like, hey, I want to run some stuff uh for my book uh buy you guys.

Can I buy us all dinner or something and then just go go over it and tell them to just poke holes in it? Um, you know, I I recently read a friend's book and I was like, okay, this didn't work, this didn't work, this didn't work. You know, this is long list. Now, unfortunately, their book is already in market, so there's not much they could do. Um, but had they been getting feedback sooner, they might have been able to patch some of those holes.

Yes, yes, lessons learned. The our theme for today. Exactly. Lessons learned. Uh, the the road to uh success is paved with your previous books.

All right. Well, we will catch you all next week. So uh thanks for tuning in and stay safe. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you're watching it.

For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights Podcast at Trustinsights.ai slash TI podcast. And our weekly email newsletter at TrustInsights.ai slash newsletter. Got questions about what you saw in today's episode? Join our free Analytics for Marketers Slack group at TrustInsights.ai slash analytics for marketers. See ya next time.