The Good Work "Post-Launch Launch" Strategy | #274

September 7th, 2024: Greetings from Austin! I’ve been putting the finishing touches on my book this week. I thought I’d share a bit more about what that will look like.

My Post-Launch Strategy

Traditional publishers finalize books up to a year before launching them. This makes sense mostly because they print them using batch production, printing a single order, usually in China, and stocking them in warehouses worldwide. They do this because they have strong connections with major book retailers and want to be able to stock the books in those stores.

Proof of potential sales is the best way to convince the stores to stock a lot of these books and because of this, an emergent playbook has developed among authors and publishers: the big launch.

You spend months before launch getting as many people to pre-order the book as possible. You align all of your efforts on launch week, lining up podcasts, media, TV appearances, radio shows, op-eds, and more. The more potential sales and media interest you can show, the more likely a purchasing manager at Barnes & Noble is going to increase the order per store from 2 to 10.

But with self-publishing, the game is completely different:

• Retailers are unlikely to stock your book unless you are famous

• You can’t pre-sell a physical paperback without some creative backend efforts

• Books are printed one at a time, on-demand, as they are ordered, around the world at Ingram or Amazon printers. So you don’t need to worry about carrying costs, or mistakes as much. ¹

Despite this, I thought I would put a little more effort into some sort of pre-launch. I was optimistic about my timeline in June, thinking I’d finish the book by the end of the month. In my head, I was “95% done.” But just like the last book, the last 5% mysteriously expanded to take up about 30% of the entire process.

So here we are. I’m one week away. Then the book will be live.

Instead of a pre-launch, I’m doing a post-launch. Which is better for me anyway. I am always amazed at how people stop promoting their books after the first week of it being in the world. My plan is different. I’ll be sharing the book at my own pace over the next 3-6 months. 'I’ll optimize for fun and what feels right.

By the way, here’s the cover. We finalized it two days ago:

And here is an illustration from the book (I have a bunch of them):

The illustrations will be in the digital edition but will look best in the physical one. You can’t pre-order that but I’ll be sharing the link next week.

The book will also have some other cool stuff, like a quotes section, a fictional epilogue, and more.

I think you’ll like it. You can pre-order now or wait, either works for me!

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Want To Help?

I’ve spent approximately 15 minutes asking people for help promoting the book.

I’m not great at asking for help but getting better at it.

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1. As someone who is a trained industrial engineer and spent parts of my twenties working on factory floors as part of lean transformations, I am naturally opposed to batch production