Evan Carmichael breaks down book promotion into three steps: shift your mindset to believe audiences want your story, distill your book into one powerful word that captures its core value, and build a targeted outreach list including New York Times, Forbes, and relevant YouTubers and bloggers. Generic pitches get ignored; alignment with an outlet's tone is what gets you featured.
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How to promote a book. So I got a great question from one of my newsletter readers, love you guys, Olga, who wrote in to say, "Since the release of my first book, God for the Modern Woman, I am constantly seeking out ways to promote this book, which I believe is very valuable. Perhaps you can show me ways to promote a book when most of today's talk shows just want laughter, jokes, and discussion of movies. They're not eager to discuss why history repeats itself and why no matter how hard some people try, the world is filled with violence and despair? This is a fantastic question, Olga. Thank you so much for asking it. And there are so many people who create books, right? I'm in the process of writing my own now too, right? It seems like everybody has a book these days. That the difference is going to be, you know, obviously one, what you put into the book, but then two, in the promotion and the marketing and letting people know about it and spreading your message. And it almost sounds like you've kind of given up on that and you face a lot of rejection and people saying no, that you're in a hole. And this happens to a lot of entrepreneurs, right? You get a lot of nos and you start to give up, you start to lose faith, you start to lose your motivation, you stop believing, right? And the number one tip I have for you is you have to change your mindset. So yes, a lot of people in the news industry want to cover violence and wars and all the things that's wrong with the world, right? You turn on the nightly news and that's what you're going to see. In your face all the time. You look at the newspaper, the front page, that's what you're gonna see a lot of times. But you have to change your mindset and know that there are people who want to say yes. There are people who love your message. There are people who want to talk about this. You just have to find them. And there's a big difference in shifting your thinking from saying, "I'm the only one in the world and nobody cares about this," to, "There are some people who want to say yes." I've gotten interviews and featured in New York Times and Wall Street Journal and Forbes magazine and all of the big press that covers entrepreneurship in some format, and my message has always been positive. It's always been uplifting people, believing in people, and there are reporters, there are people in the media who want to hear that message. So before you even start, you have to approach it with that mindset. Approach it knowing that there are people who believe in what you're doing, who want to say yes, who want to cover you, because if you go in thinking this isn't going to work, you're not really going to do it. You're not really going to believe in it. It's not going to be great, whatever you reach out with. So first, change your mindset. Number 2 is have a powerful message. What am I going to learn from this book? What is it that you stand for? How am I going to be uplifted by it? What are you going to teach me? Quick, short, simple, powerful. Tell me what I'm going to learn. All of my stuff is about belief. That's obvious, right? It oozes out of every video I make, it comes in every newsletter, every social media tweet, every YouTube video. It pours out. I want to feel that from you, right? What am I going to learn from this book? You wrote me a lot more in that email, but I'm not getting something powerful from it, right? You gotta shorten down that message, make it ideally one word, find your one word, make it powerful, hit me with it so I'm curious to want to learn more. So now that you've changed your mindset, now we're crafting a powerful pitch that has meaning, deep meaning that will move people. That's how you need to start. And number 3 is reach out. So now that we've changed our mindset, we have our powerful message, it's making a list of targeted people to reach out to. So you wanna connect with offline media and online media, old media and new media. You can reach out to all the people who are at the big publications, who are at the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, or whoever covers your industry. right? People who have an uplifting message, people who wanna build people up, those people exist. Why do you think Oprah became so successful? It's a powerful, positive, uplifting message. So you wanna make that list, right? And also look at the online guys, look at YouTubers, look at bloggers, look at people who have Twitter followings and connect with them, right? If somebody wrote to me and said, Evan, I've got this new book, it's about believing in entrepreneurs, I'm all ears. I want to read that book. I want to learn about it. I might profile that person. That person might be on my next YouTube video, right? Because they have an uplifting message. They believe they could find someone like me who has an audience who can help them, right? They changed their mindset. Two, they have that powerful message that connects with me, that is clear to articulate. And three, they reached out. And I get pitched— I can't tell you how many times I get pitched by people who are just trying to promote their product. That has no feeling behind it, that isn't even catered towards entrepreneurs. They're just trying to reach out to anybody who has a big audience. And they always get rejected. Most of the time I don't even write back to them. Because it's obvious that they did zero work in targeting the right person. But if people have entrepreneur-related products and they have a powerful uplifting message, I'm interested. Now it's not a guarantee that they're going to be on my channel, that I'm going to profile them, that I'm going to talk about them, but you got in the door. I'm at least interested. Then it's up to your book to actually do the work, right? If you say you have a great book about believing in entrepreneurs and you send me a book and I don't like it, well, the quality wasn't there. But that's your foot in the door. So number 1, change your mindset. Number 2, have a powerful message. And number 3, reach out and believe. For those of you watching the video, you like it, you wanna see more, you can subscribe to the channel. Thank you so much for watching. I'll see you soon. Don't forget to click here to subscribe to my newsletter to get actionable, inspiring, motivational, believe advice every single week to your inbox.
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