How To Plan A Book Launch: Step-by-Step Guide

Your book is the ship, and then the marketing that you apply to that book or that ship is how that ship moves forward. So, you know, you might do podcasts and that's blowing wind in a sale, you might do paid marketing and that's strapping rockets to the side of your ship. So there's different marketing activities that you can do that are going to push that book forward.

I think you already know that. I love books. I love using books as a marketing strategy for businesses. I think they're an excellent way to gain attention, build authority. I think they're perfect for launching a business. The last couple of businesses that I've been involved in and set up, it always starts with a book. When I think of Melbourne SEO services, I had authority content. As we've launched Systemology, there was the Systemology book. I just think it's a great way to really kind of bring a lot of your ideas together, present it to the world, offer some value, and then it becomes a great business card for people considering doing work with you to get a flavor and a taste for the type of work that you do. And you can deliver some value early. And then it's a chance, excellent positioning, and then it's a chance for them to want to do ongoing work with you. So I'm often thinking about my next book and what that's going to look like, and I thought, hey, this is probably a perfect time to chat with a man who's behind the scenes with many great authors, business authors in the space. Alex Strathy. He's the founder of Advanced Amazon Ads and I've worked with him for a good amount of time. And as I said, he's worked with some of the biggest names in the industry. He's very much a lover of systems and he deeply understands what it takes to make a book work and get traction. A lot of people write books, but then they don't get the exposure and it's a lot of hard work for nothing. But really just getting it written is part of the process. The next process is the marketing process. So I as we were kind of talking a little bit about this interview, we said, oh, well, what are we going to dive into? And I said, well, I know you're working on your book or the book is done and you're working on the launch strategy and it'd be great to actually pull apart what's your system for launching a book. So maybe first thing things first. Just like to welcome you to the call. Alex.

David, such a pleasure to be here. I Appreciate you having me on.

Yeah. Awesome. Well, maybe if we just start. When you think about the idea of launching a book specifically to help promote a business, so a business owner is writing this book. Who do you think would be the ideal person or that this system would be ideal for?

Yeah. And you did a perfect explanation of kind of the problem that we're addressing here at the beginning. There it is. Anyone who is writing a nonfiction book. So this is wide to nonfiction and where it kind of taps into the product marketing world where like a sunglasses company or a beverage company will. You'll oftentimes see a Jeep with two young good looking individuals handing out free samples. Right. And so it's applying kind of baseline product marketing to books and realizing that it really can be a scientific approach where right now, where, you know, the reason why I'm in this space is we can talk a little bit about my own journey to, to experience the issue that I now write about is book marketing can be an endless time and money pit. So how do you turn it into something scientific? You know, for a lot of us who are goal driven, system driven, which if you're listening to this podcast, that's obviously something you're interested. And so, you know, it's really trying to break it down into a scientific formula versus something abstract. So really for any nonfiction author who wants to approach their book kind of like a product.

Yeah, perfect. And I think there's quite a few phases of getting a book out there and promoting one of the first being. And if we narrow in, what I'd love to really focus on for this session is around the book launch itself because getting that right gets you some really great traction. It's. It's like you meet this escape velocity where you start to get a number of reviews. Amazon starts to notice. It starts to then share you around to different parts of their audience. It's a great way to, to really just hit the ground running with a big splash. So with that in mind.

Yeah. I don't know if you want to kind of maybe just give us a little bit of context. I know you're working on your book at the moment, so you're thinking, right, how can I. What can I borrow from the best of. The best of what you've seen to build a system to launch a book. So maybe you can tell us a little bit about where you start thinking about this.

Yeah, this is the most meta episode ever and something that, you know, I smile about all the time. It's like, you know, writing a book about writing A book, right. It's a little abstract, but. And that's a great call out too. You know, everything I'm writing about here is. And I've got the first draft pulled up over here and some, some, some of the main points that I want to talk about just, you know, because I've learned these things working with the authors that we've learned, you know, we've worked with, you know, like Michael Mungay Stineer and Kim Scott and Joseph Nguyen and yourself too, David. So, you know, first of all, I want to say, you know, I like to give a shout out, you know, none of this is new. None of this is new coming out of my head. It's just learning, taking what other people's people are doing and kind of putting it into, into one holistic guide for people. So I think that where most authors go wrong when they start to think about a book launch and, you know, probably not you, David, at this point, just because, you know, you've got system. System ology out. You know, you can understand how the book marketing world works, but you start by thinking about, oh, well, what list do I want to hit? Do I want to hit the New York Times? Do I want to hit the, you know, they used now debunked or now go on Wall Street Journal? Do I want to hit USA Today? And that's not where you should start because you're, you're not thinking about what you actually want to accomplish. You're thinking about the, the trying to hit a list is something that doesn't, most of the time won't actually give you what you want, which is, you know, when any nonfiction author who's written a book wants it to be read, it's not going to do anything for you if it's not actually read. And a lot of those lists are gamed. You know, you can pay someone 100k and, you know, become a New York Times bestselling author or whatever New York Times is, is one of the more editorial ones. But, you know, there's still programs out there that offer, that know, trying to shift authors from realizing what success really is. And, you know, what I realized is the starting point is, you know, again, taking from the, the great people who have come before me, you know, the late Bill Gladstone, who's the literary agent, to people like Eckhart Tolle, Marie Kondo, Jack Canfield, you know, his whole thing is that if you want a book to be commercially successful, you need to seed 20,000 copies into the wild. Right now. Don't get me wrong, there's going to be people out there who are with very niche books that you need to think about their book a little bit differently. You know, you might hear 20,000 copies and be like, I don't even think there's 20,000 people in my niche. Right. So I'm not saying everyone needs their number, needs to be 20,000. But what bill brings up there, that, that's the core point is that you need to start with a number. You don't want to start with a list. You know, you need to start with how many copies am I committing to moving into the wild? You know, and I like to think of a seated copy as a book that's in the hand of someone who's actually going to be, you know, opening up that book and reading it. Doesn't matter if they got for free, doesn't matter if they paid, you know, paid for it. What matters is that they're actually, you're actually solving their problem and that they actually are taking the time to look into the book. Right. So that's how you need to start thinking about your marketing is what is your number? Bill Gladstone, like I said, he says that number is 20,000 versus, you know, someone. Another great book marketing person is that I like to follow is Rob Fitzpatrick, author of Right Useful Books. And he says he only seeds works to seed a thousand copies of his book into the Wild. And so from that thousand he focuses on micro commuting communities which we can talk about as a tool where you can make sure that the amount of copies you're seeding is going to more effective places. But essentially you need to come up with a number between 1,000 and 20,000 of the amount of copies that you commit to seeding into the Wild. And we can talk a little bit about which, where you might fall, but that's where you should start with your.

Marketing now is that prior to the actual launch. So if we say, right, we're going to be releasing the book on Amazon on this date, when we're talking about seed, it's basically before that to basically get that planted.

This can be over the course of two, three years after your book is launched. It doesn't have to be all for the launch. You know, there is a lot of emphasis that authors place on, you know, the 12 day launch. But if you start to look at some of the top authors out there, they don't focus on, they focus on hitting lists organically because they seed copies over time. So, you know, for example, Michael Bungay, Stanier of the coaching habit. You know, he focuses on a two, three year launch plan. You know, he doesn't look for, you know, a week of launching. He's thinking, what are the systems that I can put in week over week that are going to get move copies, you know, over time?

Yeah, perfect. So once you start off with that number and you set that goal, where do you go from there?

Yeah. So once you have your number, which can be very daunting, and the first thing is, you know, just familiarizing yourself. You know, most first time authors don't know how many copies most books move, Right. You know, they think of, okay, you know, atomic habits moves a few million copies. You know, so what should I shoot for like a million copies? And you know, to, to start to think about, to give another frame framework to think about. This I'll take from another person that I like to follow is Ricardo Fayette, founder of Reedsy. He has a great ship book analogy where your, your book is essentially a ship and how good that book is, is what that ship is made of. So your book might be made of. You know, if it's a bad book and you know, someone reads it and it doesn't really help them accomplish what they're trying to accomplish, then that means that that book is made or that ship is made of lead, right? If you have a book that is really, really helpful to someone and it spreads like wildfire, then that book is, you know, maybe made of really light wood, right. And so that your, your book is the ship. And then the marketing that you apply to that book or that ship is how that ship moves forward. So if, you know, you might do podcasts and that's blowing wind in a sale, you might do paid marketing and that's strapping rockets to the side of your ship. So there's different marketing activities that you can do that are going to push that book forward or that ship forward. Now you can strap rockets to a piece of lead and it's going to move forward. You're going to move copies, right? So the quality of the book is how you know what that ship is made of. And then your marketing activities is, you know, can you blow wind in a sailor? And even after that wind is stopped, if the ship is aerodynamic enough or light enough, it's going to continue to move even without any marketing activities flowing into it. So that's where you need to think about. You're trying to see what kind of organic traffic can flow in to figure out, okay, what kind of a book is this is this book more made of lead. And depending on the purpose of your book, if you're using your book for lead generation.

You don't necessarily need the light a ship. You just need a ship. Right. So we, obviously what we're talking about here is the marketing portion of it. We're not talking about how to make a ship that's made of light wood or, you know, or lead or whatever. You know, I'd recommend a book like write useful books or even talking to David here about how to write a good book. But the marketing aspect of it is, you know, once you've got your number, you think about, okay, how committed am I to actually getting this book out into the wild? And if you're kind of just like a hobbyist writer or, you know, you're, you're someone who's just writing, you know, and you kind of want to see it do well, you know, obviously most of the people listening to this are business authors. So, you know, we'll speak to that or it would be business authors, so we'll speak to that audience a little bit. But you could just pick a thousand if you just want to get your book out there and move on to the next project. There's no niche that you can seed anything less than 1000 copies and not have given marketing a real try for your book. And so where I think most people will fall will be around the 10,000 copy mark. And then let's say that this book is your passion. It's going to be everything you care about for the rest of your life. And you want to make sure that you really know if it was successful or not. Then you should commit to moving 20,000 copies into the wild. Right. And so those are the kind of three different main levels, but you can fall with that. So the first step is to figure out, okay, what is my big number? And then, then you can cut down into, okay, now you take inventory. So does that all make sense, David? I know I'm, I'm monologuing a little bit here, so.

And then I quite like the reason I like working towards a book launch, an actual date. It's like a positive constraint. You know, that sure book is going to launch on this date. So if we use that as the anchor point and we say, all right, well, we know what our seed copies are, and maybe that is over a longer period of time. But if we're working towards an actual launch date, what's the thinking there?

Yeah, so this comes down to how quickly do you want to seed your copies? Right? So if you're working towards a launch date, then there's a couple different ways to think, to frame this, right? So where you're starting is where you are, right? Let's say you're listening to this and you're six months out from, you know, releasing your book. Let's say you're three months out from releasing the book. That's the time you have, right? So what you need to first do is take inventory of your relationships, all of your assets, you know, your marketing assets. Do you have a Twitter following? And this is a key step that I find most authors will skip over is actually realizing what. What can you. What do you already have to market this book? Do you. You know, are you. Are you pals with David here who has a great podcast, you know, or do you have an email list of a couple thousand people, you know, so thinking about, okay, what are you starting from? Then once you're starting that' once you know what you have, you can begin to break down, okay, those are the first tools that I have access to. And then you can start to think about some of the other tools, you know, that you might use, which might be, you know, building. You might still have time, you know, if you're six months out to build an email list, you might have time to reach out to Instagram influencers, you might have time to, you know, reach out to a bunch of podcasts. And so that's where, you know, you want to start with, what do you want? Let's, you know, you said the date, David. You know, let's skip forward to the date week. We call that week zero. What are the. What do you want to happen during week zero? How many copies do you want moved that week? And what are the tools that you're going to want to utilize during that week? And then you work backwards. If you're three months from there, then you have 12 weeks. So then you start to go, okay, you know, negative week one, you know, towards me. What do I need to do during that week? Is it finalizing podcast release dates? Then you go to week negative two. Okay, am I still booking podcasts at that point? Right. And so you work all the way back to the week that you're at, which is, you know, negative 24 or negative 25, you know, depending on how many weeks you have. You know, we recommend, you know, the best book launch. You know, I've been. I've got this book coming out in February, and I've been writing it for six years, right? So, I mean, I've been marketing it for six years. Right. You know, building our email list for six years. And so, you know, the, the longest. There's a Chinese proverb that is, you know, the.

Best time to plant a tree is yesterday. Right. The second best time is today. And so depending on how much time you have is going to dictate. Okay, how much time, you know, what, what are my marketing activities going to be between now and then? Let's say your book is already out and you're listening to this. Obviously a launch isn't even be a date for you. And so that's where you start looking at, okay, what systems do I want to start having employed in the next three to four weeks? And then, okay, what are the activities that need to start happening? Happening Week one, week two, week three, week four. So it's kind of coming up with this, you know, weeks till launch and then weeks post launch. But, you know, like I said, I want to move away from focusing on the book launch date and moving towards like a two, three year launch time frame and how you think about it.

Yeah. For working towards the launch date, is there a minimum amount of time that you would be thinking about or were you kind of getting too close to the time where you're like, hey, you're not going to be as effective because you just don't have enough time to run?

Yeah. I think that any business or any busy business person who is releasing a book, I think three months is kind of the golden rule of thumb for you. I think if you want to be a lot more thoughtful about your book launch, then you start thinking about the marketing activities six months out. And that's just going to give you more time to do things like get your streak team excited. You know, if you want to get your whole street team on for, you know, a call together to meet each other. Right. You can do those little things that are going to help, you know, sort of push the excitement for it. You're also going to be able to, you know, see, okay, well, I want to launch with an email list of 2,000 people. Okay, well, do I need to be running Facebook ads to build that email list, you know, in order for that, that period of time? So I think six months, if you have it. But I mean, to be honest, most of us are very, very busy. You know, most people listening to this are going to be running businesses on top of wanting to write a book or have that book. And so I think three months is kind of the minimum amount of time that you can get away with. To have really strong launch plan.

Yeah, perfect. So we think about how many copies do we want to seed? We think about when is the book going live. We walk back and we think, how long have we actually got? And then we take inventory of what assets do we have, which then helps us start to structure a little bit of a plan, thinking, well, which things are going to take the longest or which things do I need to get done first? And you mentioned probably one of the first, first things being the Street Team. Can you tell us a little bit about, you know, the Street Team is. Is. Yeah. Getting those initial people who are going to really be the fans and read the pre release copies and be ready to post reviews and spread the word. Yeah. How do you think about the Street Team? And then what are some of the in. In the logical order that you'd approach it with? What sort of activities would you look to stack next?

Yeah, so a couple, you know, let's, let's. I like to get really into details, right. So people can kind of see, you know, visually from listening to this. Okay, what are they actually talking about with seeding 10,000 copies? So let's give an example of what that might look like. That might mean your street team, you seed 100 copies. That might mean, you know, you do podcast guesting with the goal of seeding 500 copies from doing podcasts. Let's say, you know, you add paid promotions as a tool and, you know, the book itself covers all the different tools that you have at your disposal. Paid promotions. You know, this is looking at who has newsletter lists in your space where they write about where you can get in their newsletters in your niche. Right. Let's say your goal for that is 500 copies. You know, organic, earn friends and partners. You know, who in your space are you connected with, who have their own lists and connections? Okay, let's make our goal for that 2000, you know, email list, you know, based on, you know, let's say we have an email list of 5, 10,000 people. Our goal is to get at least a thousand people of those thousand on that list to buy, you know, bulk corporate buy, you know, sending out to organizational leaders and saying, hey, do you want to buy this for your whole team? Right. Go for no authors Andrea Waltz and Richard Fenton. You that method to sell over half a million copies of their books. It's a very effective way to move copies. You know, Amazon ads. Of course, I've got to mention Amazon ads. Let's say your goal is to move 2,000 copies there. Facebook ads, another 400 copies, working with Instagram paid influencers, another thousand copies, and events, 500. So, like, that adds up to 10,000 copies. That's what I mean by really breaking it down to, okay, here are the different marketing tools that I'm going to utilize. And then what needs to happen? You know, do I need to put together a box that I'm going to send out? You know, let's use the bulk buy, you know, bulk corporate buy. Let's then break down corporate buy. What needs to happen over the next 10 weeks? That I have boxes going out in 10 weeks. I need to collect an address. You know, one of the things we're going to do is we're going to send this book to publishing, every single publishing company in the country. And so we're going to start putting together boxes. Okay, what needs to go into that box? You know, do we put a nice bookmark in there? Do we put a couple copies in there? What letter do I want to put in that box? Right? So you start thinking about. And this is how you can get really granular. And, you know, the goal is to reduce the anxiety because a lot of authors are like, oh, my goodness, I need to move. You know, I need this book to be successful. But how do you actually make that actionable? And so you start with seeding, then you break down, you know, the what tools you're going to use to actually seed that. And then you break down the steps to actually then make each of those sub tools successful. So that's to kind of get granular there. You know, I wanted to talk a little bit about, you know, you mentioned street teams. So, you know, we'll get specific into street teams. One of the best ways that I've seen this done was actually by an author named Nir Eyal. I believe he's actually in Australia right now. Over. Over in your neck of the woods, David. He is the author of Half Million Copies Sold. Hook and Indistractable. What he did, it's one of the best things. You know, he had a list of around 4 or 5,000 when he launched the book Hooked. And so what he did is he reached out to that list and he said, hey, I would actually love to put your name in the back of my book. I would like to add you as a contributor to this book if you're willing to receive and read an arc copy. People just love it. People absolutely love being. And you can actually look, I have his book book on my shelf here behind me somewhere. These are some of our Authors, But I actually have yours right here. David. This is all the books that have actually helped our business. So I've got yours listed up there, yours in that, on that shelf. But basically near, you know, he, he played into human emotion of, you know, this is a book that's going to sell well. Do you want your name in it? Well, if you want your name in it, then all you have to do is be an arc reader. And so he emailed out and was able to get, I think there's like five or six hundred lists. If you have the book, you know, hooked or indistractable at home, take a look in the back of that book and you're going to see there's a list of five to six hundred contributors in the back of that. And so that's one of the best ways I've seen using human psychology to get people involved in the project is actually putting their names in the book itself, which I think is really. And I actually copied that for this, for this book and was able to get 100 people on my arc team just from saying, hey, you know, you get your name in the back of the book. I also, on top of that, I'm doing a free 20, 30 minute consulting session, book marketing consulting session, to actually, you know, as a, as a way to say thank you and also just to be able to walk through the content of the book with them, you know, and kind of hold their hand as they go through the content. It really has helped me kind of figure out what's, you know, what resonates people with people, what doesn't. So when it comes to a street team, I definitely recommend trying something like nero did. He did it. It works so well. He then did it for indistractable too. But, you know, the street team is, you're going to get as much out of it as you put into it. Right? It's kind of like anything. And so if all you do is tell your street team, hey, my book's live, go buy it. You know, you might get 20, 30% of the people who have said, hey, I want to be on your street team to actually do it as if you actually engage with them, bring them along for the journey, get them to vote on different, you know, copies or different title or cover ideas, spend time with them, getting to know how they work through the content, including them in the actual book itself. Your arc street team is going to be much more successful.

Hey, I know you're tuned in right now, so I'll keep this super quick. But you like awesome YouTube videos, don't you? Well, there's not really that many YouTube channels that create great content and about how to systemize your small business. So I want to make sure that you catch every video that I publish. So if you haven't already, firstly give this video the thumbs up and then go ahead and subscribe to my channel. You can even hit the bell notification to make sure that you're the first to know when I publish anything. So go ahead, do it right now. I'll wait a sec and then I'll transfer you back to the video.

Yeah, perfect. And we kind of dived in just on the Street Team example. You went high level on quite a few of the other steps. But I mean, it's very clear that it really is just a system. And you figure out, well, how much time do we have to work with here? Here are the different strategies that I have at my disposal. Which of these strategies might I already have a leg in? Based on something that you did inventory on and you're like, oh, well, I already have connections with these five podcasters. Well, I'm going to lean in and start there first and then building a little bit of a timeline when we think like the order in which you gave things there. I mean, Street Team's probably one of the early things that you want to tackle. Is there any other things that you think the earlier you hit these in this process, the better?

So a whole part of this book is about working smart instead of hard. And so what I recommend is one of the first things. And I think anyone listening to this, even if you're not writing a book, you know, if you don't already have a team around, you need to do this. You know, if you look at, go look at like $100 million offers by Alex Hormozi, you know, that book has sold over a million copies, has like 30,000Amazon ratings already. It came out like two years ago. You know, you look at a book like that and you're like, oh wow, why can't I get his results? And it's because he has a full time staff that he is paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to to make that happen. And so, you know, any al who plans on engaging or releasing a book, realize that you need a team specific to your book marketing. I highly, you know, I know you're a big fan of this as well, David. I highly recommend a platform we use online jobs ph to hire, you know, virtual assistants internationally. And then we actually now recruit mainly from word of mouth. So we'll have team members recruit to other team members. And that's how we bring in a lot of our team members now. But, I mean, we as a team have over 10 virtual assistants working out of the Philippines. These are people who are working on, pitching us on podcasts. These are people who are working on a variety of different tasks for us, putting together a list of all of the publications within our industry that distributes out to people who are authors, putting together a list of all of the potential Instagram influencer accounts that we might want to reach out to. So don't think that. And I have a sneaking suspicion, David, that there are some people that are listening to this who are already, like, so overwhelmed because of how much they've already heard. They're like, all this work, Are you kidding me? Like, I'm running a business. I have to do this too. Well, if you don't hire a team and start building your team for this, then you are setting yourself up to fail. You're going to need some team members who can start to handle some of those admin tasks, like pulling together a list of. I mean, I literally have someone who is pulling together a list of addresses of all the publishing companies across the country for us to send boxes to right through doing a bulk buy, you know, using the bulk buy tool that we talked about. And so I think that the number one thing you need to do is actually look at building your team that's done either through hiring virtual assistants to do work for you. Hiring. And even Sarah Blakely, the founder of Spanx, will tell you that she only gets hiring right 50% of the time. And so, and we find that too, that the best candidates will come from referrals. But you need to expect that you might get through one or two virtual assistants that aren't effective before you get to someone who is really, really fantastic. And you need someone who's fantastic to help you market your book. So that's why you need to get started on that. Like yesterday is building your. Your actual book marketing team. And, you know, we can also talk about AI I like to think about. About as another team member. I like to think about, you know, obviously there you can hire people like PR agencies, although we've oftentimes heard that's one of the worst ways to spend your. Your book marketing dollars and, you know, a couple other, you know, hiring experts. And then the other. Another tool I like to employ is your author twin. So literally, you know, think about your. And I think I might have either learned this from you Or Alan Dibb David. So it was either one of the, one of the two. And that's where I say, you know, a lot of this stuff I've learned from others, you know, come up, you know, some people call it your author cousins, some people call your older twin whatever it is, you know, you want to go and figure out, well, how did this other person who's slightly more successful than me, you know, like I wouldn't go target James Clear because you know, like he launched his book with a million email list. You want to pick someone who's just slightly more successful than you look at. Okay, how did they launch? What podcasts were they on? What media did they do? And so that's kind of working backwards. And I think of them as a team member, not necessarily because you talk with them, but because they're someone who's already done what you're trying to do. So I think spending time learning from someone who's done what you're trying to do is also a huge part of starting to prep for your marketing.

Yeah, perfect. Of the different strategies that you mentioned and I know each can be effective if you were to apply that 8020 rule and, and, and cherry pick if you had to back against the wall strategies, are there any that are standout for you?

Yeah, a lot of this is going to come down to if you have more time or money. Right. So there's a lot of business authors who are like, I have a budget that I can put towards this. And there's also going to be a lot of people who are like, I don't have budget but I have, you know, I, I. So that means I got to put some time. Right. So your strategy is going to depend on where you are with your budget and your time as constraints. But there are a couple that we find are working really, really, really, really, really well right now across the board. One of those and we'll see if Tick Tock gets banned here in the U.S. you know, by, by our new president. But the TikTok Shop is just, you know, we found like Joseph Diane of Don't believe everything you think. TikTok Shop has just been huge. He moves thousands of copies a month from TikTok Shop. And, and the reason why that works so well is because, you know, as, and he again, he's self published. Right. So you know, this is also a strategy, you know, for the self published authors or authors with a bigger royalties is basically he can get people to promote his book on TikTok who then are sharing, you know, they get a little bit of profit for every copy they sell. Right. So it's kind of affiliate marketing, you know, the new way of affiliate marketing. Now there might be someone out there who does crawl space repair and they have a crawl space repair book. Obviously, maybe TikTok isn't, you know, going to be where, you know, you go. We've also found that, you know, giving away copies, I mean, even if. So, you know, that's one that can be, you know, if you have sort of. Right. Economics for it.

It.

Let's talk about an author really quick who basically spent almost zero dollars on his marketing besides just handing copies out one by one. And so this is John Strelaki. He wrote a book called Cafe on the Edge of the World and he went to chamber of commerce meetings and handed books out one by one until he was able to literally physically hand 10,000 copies out to people. Now that author has sold over 8 million copies of his book. And so that is also, that in and of itself can be an effective way. And he counted, he knew, okay, I need to hand out 10,000, 10,000 copies of my book. Right. But it's going back to this, you know, realizing that you're not just going to put a book out and, you know, and readers are going to run to you. You do have to have a number in your mind of all of copies that you're committed to moving. And if John got to 10,000 copies that were distributed and he wasn't seeing any additional organic sales, he could pretty confidently say, okay, it's the book that's the problem. You know, I've moved a lot of copies, there's no additional traffic. I need to work on a better book. Right. So this all just gives you a framework, you know, so that you can actually stop marketing your book book, you know, at the end of the day instead of spending endless amounts of time and energy on it.

So, yeah, love it. I think someone, as they kind of listen to this, they can start to build their own strategy. With your permission. I'd love to take even just a high level outline of what one of these launches looks like so someone can start to put that together and then maybe you can tell us a little bit more. Like your book, I think is scheduled, depending on when someone's listening to this, for February 20, 20, 25. That would be another great place for them to go a little bit deeper. Can you tell us a little bit? Obviously there's the launch component, but I know you've got a few other components covered in the Book.

Yeah. So the, you know, there's, there's the, the first part of the book is all about why you lose a book. Marketing. So, you know, this is things like, you know, expecting you to be able to do everything that Alex Hermosi does. Right. This, you know, the second part of the book is all about the, you know, the how to work effectively. Right. So how can you actually things like time blocking, things like, you know, having a team. And then the third part is your different tools. Right. So these are going to be, you know, what we all, we cover in depth podcast guesting. And like, you know, every podcast you're on, you should ask the podcast host, hey, do you happen to know two additional hosts that you can introduce me to? Right. Ways that you can maximize your ROI and how to truly use that tool the most effectively. And then third, and then the last part is all about implementations. That's where we talk about, okay, hey, let's go week, you know, first of all, let's take inventory. Then let's, you know, based on your number, let's break down your number into what are the different, you know, tools that you're going to use and how many copies are you assigning to each of those tools. And then, you know, then you actually create your timeline. Your timeline by starting at week zero, going, you know, week negative one, negative two, negative three, however much time you have, and then working forward from there. So that's kind of a breakdown. Not sure if that was what you're asking for, David, but that's kind of the breakdown of what the book looks like.

So, yeah, best place for people to keep an eye on your work is that over at Advanced Amazon Ads or go straight to Amazon. Where's the best place to see the book?

Yeah, so those who are listening to this, we are already shelf life here. The David and alex back in 2024, the company is still called Advanced Amazon Ads, but we, in the new year, we're actually rebranding as Shelf Life because, you know, essentially where all this is coming from. And what I've learned from the authors that we worked with is, you know, we've been the Amazon ads people people and we have a really effective Amazon ad strategy to, you know, to move more books. And the trying to just launch a book with Amazon Ads is like trying to build a house with just a wrench. Right. Or just a hammer. You need your whole tool belt to build a whole house. And so, you know, with authors coming to us and saying, hey, you know, the Amazon ads are. Yeah, they're effective, but it's just not enough, you know, for me to be working close, you know, towards that number that I want distributed. It's like, oh, you're right. Okay, well, we need to be able to provide all these other tools to our authors that they can come to us and we can build that house for them. So that's what Shelf Life is. And so for those that are interested and want to learn a little bit more about that, you can go to getshelflife.com we also have a blog. Because digital marketing is an ever changing landscape, I wasn't able to talk about some of the specific digital marketing tactics in the book per se, because it would be out of date by the time we launched. If you want to go read about what's working with LinkedIn ads, what's working with Facebook ads, then you can go to our blog, which would be get shelf life.com blog. And then if you want to check out the book, then I would highly encourage you checking out before the bestseller on Amazon.

Yeah, love it. I think having done a few book launches now, each time I do this, it's like I've got a system and then I'm improve. Improving upon it each time I run it. I mean, the first one, yeah. Many moons ago, I had a book called the Metastock Programming Study Guide. That was actually the very first book. And we, we. We wrote it. We put all the hard work in. And then that was early days YouTube. And we did a lot where we were running seminars, taking the content, chopping it up into pieces, loading it on YouTube. And that was pretty much our marketing strategy. Then the Authority content was the next book. That one. I thought more about the launch date, and we started to think about different partners. Podcasting was always, always pretty consistent. I did the early street team. That was quite effective for us. We set up a little Facebook group and got people advanced copies, knowing the best thing that we could do is tried to get reviews posted on Amazon as early as possible. And then as I was sort of starting to build up this momentum here after Authority Content and much of what you talked about, like, we had a very similar approach in the way that we did that launch. That was the book book that caught the attention of Luz Delia Gerber, which is Michael Gerber's wife, and she said, oh, I like what you've done here, and can you now come and do this for Michael? Because the last book in the series, beyond the E. Myth, they thought, well, we don't want to go through HarperCollins we want to maintain the rights and we would like someone to do their book launch. She saw what I had done and said, can you do this for my Michael? I didn't even do book launches. That was not my thing. I was a marketer.

Michael Gerber asks you to do something, you do it.

So that was amazing how. Because you never know when you do these book launches where they're going to go or what doors they're going to open up. Then I got to work on his book launch and as you talked about, around the amount of time. Time it takes. Like, I only had the three months, which is probably on the shorter side of what. Oh, yeah, feel really comfortable. So it was hectic. Like, we had some of his team, my team, all working full time round the clock. Probably. Again, one of the big standout strategies was the podcasts. Partly that was his reputation, which meant we could very quickly open doors, book him on some big shows that moved some good books. And then the last book launch off the back of that has rolled into Systemology. And then I again took what I learned from each of these and had the benefit as well of getting Michael to write the forward and endorse Systemology and then come together with a solid six months planning the Systemology launch quite meticulously. Very similar to what you had just ran through there, thinking about, about Street Team and who we could get early copies out to Podcasting. How can we maximize the number of reviews early on with the launch? How do we get corporate buys early on? We introduced Amazon ads. I know we did some work with you on that to kind of really help move that up and the blog and so outreach to some other partners on their website. Right. Like, all of that sort of starts. And I remember it almost feels like an orchestra towards the end. And you're the conductor and you're like, fire the ads, do the podcasts, do this. And it all crescendos on that moment. And you get this escape velocity. For Systemology, it was great. We started to obviously get the attention of the Amazon algorithms because they started mailing sub segments in their database to say, hey, you've read this book. You will also like this book. And initially, and I suppose chatting with Alan Dibb and some others, some other things that you said, there was this. It's very much a marathon. Like, I mean, there's no real point in just pushing hard for two days, getting your Amazon bestseller in a very obscure category and then quickly fading away to be forgotten about. It's. It's another thing to write something that's, you know, not a lead weight. Firstly, you want to, if you want lasting power, you do need to write a good book to take analogy. And then you need to be constantly putting things that move that sale forward. But if, if you get it right, I look back now, it's hands down the best marketing strategy that we have done to launch Systemology. It's extraordinary. The reach, the feedback, the positivity, the quality of the lead. The person who reads the book and then reaches out to us is 10 times as good as a cold lead that we may have generated off.

A YouTube ad or, or something like that. Because they're just pre qualified. They've already had exposure to the work. You know, for lack of a better word, it's like they've drunk the Kool Aid and now they're ready to do some work about it. So I mean, that's why I'm a big fan of, of book marketing and yeah, love the work that you do and want to shine a little bit of a light on that and say, hey, having done this firsthand, I can tell you it's worth the effort. It is a truckload of work. But like anything in business, anything worth doing, it does take work. But the ROI and the yield that you get on that is well worth it if you follow a system and a plan like we covered today.

And that's what I wanted to provide was you could have written this book, Alan Dibb could have written this book, any of you guys. And so it was, you know, like, okay, when I came into book marketing, it was like I had to learn from you guys firsthand, you know, how you launched and systematized, you know, your books. And so it was like, you know, this. My goal was to put, you know, the 10,000 hours of experience that, you know, people like you and Alan and Michael and everyone have into a blueprint that people can actually follow along and understand. Here's what people at the highest level, how they're actually launching books. So that was my goal with this book, is to make it accessible, accessible to people who are coming into it and also to save them money. There's a lot of people who sign up for like $30,000 PR packages and like, you know, a 10K Amazon bestseller package and they expect that that's going to make them the best selling author and it just doesn't. So it's also to kind of, kind of clean up the industry a little bit as well.

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for your shares today, Alex. And we'll pop a link through so everybody can grab a copy of the book.

Appreciate your time, David.