If you’ve been keeping up with this series, you know that as of the last post, the book had been refined to a great place, audiobook recorded, and that landed us in the pre-publication stage of the publishing process.

If you have romantic visions of brilliant books being written, published, and avidly consumed, you have not paid enough attention to how different the book landscape is today than it was even 20 years ago. Numerous factors have driven up the number of new titles published each year in the US. The main driver here has been the boom in self-publishing. Using some easy tools like print-on-demand through Amazon and the burgeoning industry of ghostwriters, freelance editors, and book coaches, self-publishing is a patent channel for distribution. I’ve shared that Kaley Klemp and I self-published our book Leader Coach in 2024. I’ve also shared that it was far harder than I ever imagined. In any event, most statistics suggest that there were fewer than 300,000 new titles published in the US in the early 2000s. There has been a ten-fold increase in that number, with nearly 3 million titles coming to market each year.

This means the competition for attention for a new book is beyond intense. Sales of adult nonfiction, the category for Never Ask for the Sale, have remained largely flat over the last few years. Moreover, memoirs by celebrities are booming, making the landscape even more difficult for new authors. I explained in my book proposal post that selling my book to publishers required a significant emphasis in my proposal on marketing. How could I leverage my not insubstantial network, relationships, social media following, and more to generate early and consistent attention for a new title?

The pre-publication phase was the time to put some meat around the commitments I’d made, and I felt compelled to do as much as I could reasonably do to give this book a shot at real traction.

Of all the steps outlined in this series of writing, selling, and publishing a book, this was (is) the most challenging, complex, and time-consuming phase of all. More than that, it has required a crazy amount of self-inquiry about how much I should do, how many favors I could ask, and how much risk I was willing to take to put myself out there with requests for folks in my network. This phase is a no-hands-down-the-big-hill-on-a-roller-coaster ride.

I ultimately committed to work as hard as I could here. To be vulnerable everywhere I could think of. To keep trying to imagine new and accretive ways to share the value of this book with the audience in hopes of making the book more successful (and being a decent person). I wrote the book because I thought it would help people who want to be more successful, sell more, grow more, reach the highest version of their potential. And I decided that since that was my “why,” I would hold nothing back in getting the word out at this critical juncture.

I want to outline for you things I have and have not done in case it would be of service to you.

First, these people are helping me with this effort:

• I have a fantastic executive business partner in Liz Nelson, and we had long conversations about how we would collaborate during this intense four to six months of pre-launch activity.
• I interviewed a few excellent book marketing agencies. Pricing to hire an agency mainly for social media marketing ranged from $60,000 to $80,000 for an engagement. I had seen a few agencies do great work with friends’ books, but I ultimately decided on a more DIY path, working with people I felt really “got” me in work style and personality.
• I needed a pure digital marketing mind to help drive activity, a marketing plan, an editorial calendar, and more, and I reached out to Molly Israel, someone I worked with 20 years ago at a digital marketing firm. Molly is actually featured in the book. Since working with me in her first job out of college, she has honed her digital marketing prowess at two universities and one professional services firm. She’s brilliant, fun, direct, and fast. She thinks like an entrepreneur. Shockingly, when I asked if she would do some work on the book launch as a side project, she said YES. I pay Molly hourly. She is working 20-25 hours a month on this project.
• I hired soona to do a photo shoot of me and the book. They also built out some social media templates, a little user-generated content, and a basic style guide for the book brand that comports with the cover design done by the publisher.
• I have a web designer who built out a book page and supports us in tweaking my business site for the book launch. I registered the domain NeverAskForTheSale.com, which is where you’ll find a Free Giveaway graphic on what Passionate Ambivalence looks like at each step of the sales funnel.
• I hired a podcast outreach person to book some sales, entrepreneurship, and business growth podcasts for me around the book launch. I pay my consultant monthly. I’d say this effort has been delivering above average, but not great. In fairness, I likely would have had (and would have) more success reaching out myself, but I continue to use this resource as a time-management strategy.
• I have a freelance audio and video editor working on my podcast episodes and picking out snips for social sharing.
• The marketing and PR team at Hachette have committed to some social and PR support around the launch. They are assisting in the logistics of garnering some influencer sharing around the launch, and they are responsible for all online assets on the book pages on bookseller sites.

Now, just to give you a sense of how much I’ve put into this effort in partnership with this team, I want to share every effort and activity that I can remember associated with the pre-launch support phase:

• We built a marketing plan, outlining the expected audience for the book and the various tools we wanted to use to try to reach them. This included outlining needs for visual assets, marketing copy, selection of social media platforms on which we would focus, and messaging elements. 
• We did a photoshoot so we had visual assets of the book for use online as well as photos of me with and without the book for social sharing. We also recorded a tongue-in-cheek unboxing video, which was later supplemented by another quite sincere unboxing video.
• We built a mini style guide for the book marketing effort, including fonts, colors, design elements (largely taken from the book cover) as well as templates employing these elements for use in social media pre- and post-publication.
• We created an editorial calendar outlining topics to cover in my blog and how to share core elements of the book. The calendar covers three months surrounding the launch to ensure we are aligned in our topical focus and content efforts.
• We decided to do a launch series of 60-second videos starting 30 days before launch. These are designed for distribution as Linkedin shorts, Instagram reels, and YouTube shorts.
• I decided to write this series about writing a book because even if it wasn’t directly targeting the audience for the book itself, people seemed interested in hearing an authentic recounting of how one book found its way through the creation and publication process.
• I turned the attention of the HeySue podcast to focus on sellers I felt exhibited elements of passionate ambivalence (the core theme of the book) in their selling efforts. I recorded and released these podcasts in the pre-publication months.
• We worked with partners and people I knew to generate events to amplify excitement around the book launch. These include a book signing at a local bookstore, perhaps the first ever “Break the Fast” book talk, a crash course talk at the University of Colorado, and multiple client offices for private book launch parties. Each of these events included a pre-order of books as giveaways.
• We designed, wrote, and launched a book page on our site to complement the publishers’ sales page.
• We created a “Launch Team” structure to recruit close friends and associates to support the book launch through pre-orders and social media sharing or book reviews after publication. This outreach produced strong results and commitments. People liked how it felt to be asked to do this, which was a great relief. I invested in stickers and high-end custom notecards so I can appropriately thank these folks (and many others).
• I worked through every contact I’d ever known, refining a list of thousands with updated email addresses. I used this list for outreach for the Launch Team.
• I reached out to influential people I trusted and whom I thought would enjoy the book to secure advance blurbs for the manuscript. These landed on the book jacket, of course, and on the book selling pages online. I later contacted other influential people to offer them an advance copy of the book so they could promote it with their own audiences.
• We identified two book giveaway ideas. The first is a giveaway of a resource I created to outline how passionate ambivalence works at every stage in the sales funnel. You can get your copy of this bonus book content here. The second is coming soon to a website near you—stay tuned.
• I ran a beta cohort of a Never Ask workshop. People joining this cohort paid a small entry fee and committed to buying 8 copies of the book in preorder. Before I even wrote the manuscript, I also ran a workshop on the premise of the book.
• I extended a free offer online to do reviews of people’s bios, since the two-minute bio is an important element in building out the “you” at the center of the sale in Never Ask. People shared their bios. I reviewed them. I asked each person who thought the input was useful to buy a copy of the book.

This is a reasonably complete list, but it actually excludes countless tiny steps in the marketing process. My intent is to give you a flavor of this experience, to share some examples in case they’re useful in your efforts, and to simply be transparent about the amount of work that went into this aspect of launching a new book. I hope it’s helpful.

Up next: Launch Day is Here.

Any thoughts, feelings, or blurts? Share them here.