084: Sprinkling the First 1,000 Serendipity Seeds of a Launch

Hi, this is Charles Michael Davis. Toyotathon is on so stop by your local Toyota dealer for incredible year end deals on the cars, trucks and SUVs known for their legendary reliability like the stylish and efficient Camry, the Ready for anything RAV4 or check out a rough and rugged Tacoma or Tundra, all with great financing and lease options available to qualified customers. Visit buyatoyota.com to find out more. Toyota let's go places.

This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Hello. Hello my friends. I'm recording today. It is April 6th, so a week before this goes live and two weeks after freetime went live, it launched. I cannot thank you all enough for helping create the launch momentum that we did at the time of this recording. Freetime is sweeping the top of the number one new releases chart in the time management category. All three formats. These things are dynamic. They're changing all the time. So it may or may not be the case when you actually listen to this, but I could not have done this without you. I've talked a lot on this show and in the book about launching with ease and joy and trying to create magic and serendipity, not muscling through book marketing. And in spite of all of that, I still hit moments of post launch fatigue and just merging with the couch. I talked about that even after I launched Pivot. I'll link to this episode in the show Notes where I talked about the need for rest and the furry rest monster I called it. That was a friendly monster, but sort of pulling me into this deep rest mode after launching. There's so much energy and attention that swirls around during a launch and ooh, it's exciting. I talked about in a previous episode sprinting through the finish. That part of the launch stress comes from wanting to give it every last drop and almost not wanting to cross the launch finish line with more room to spare in some ways now in others. We know that launching a project like this is all about the long term, nurturing over time, that it's not going to happen overnight most likely other than some miracle moment. It's the long game. It is planting seeds, it's letting them grow it's seeing what the book wants to become on its own in the world today. I'm going to share how I think about what comes next, specifically my strategy that I feel it's my responsibility as the author to plant the first thousand serendipity seeds, but that after that it's not that I stop working on it altogether, but I see my job in month one, even week one, if possible, planting a thousand seeds. I'm going to come back to explain that a little more. But first I also want to give a special shout out to Dee from Australia who left a review for this podcast. Thank you Dee. She said so good. I'm loving this podcast. Just found it and so excited to hear more. I'm learning about new and interesting people I didn't know about. Yay. Each with a meaningful message. I love the concept of the show. It's exactly where I'm at figuring out how to free up my time to do more meaningful work and take care of myself in the process. Thank you Dee. I'm so happy to have you here listening and if any of you want to leave a rating or review, I would be ever so grateful. It's really helpful. And thank you. For those of you who have already left reviews on the book, we have 65 so far, so we're halfway through month one, we're two weeks out from launch. I'm thrilled every single one of your comments has meant so much. And if you haven't left one yet and you want to help us tip over that hundred review milestone and keep seeding free time into the Amazon algo, I'll be super grateful. Okay, let's talk about these first thousand seeds now. One of my quirks, one of my many quirks, and I'm sure you could add a whole bunch of things to this list that aren't even on my radar, is that I mix metaphors all the time. I can't help it. I think metaphors are so helpful for thinking and conceptualizing. And when I talk about Serendipity Seeds, sometimes I think about it like planting seeds in a garden, and then other times I think about popcorn seeds or popcorn kernels, and then I'm throwing these kernels out into the universe and seeing what pops and when. Now my dad pointed out when he was editing Free Time. Very astute observation that technically popcorn seeds popping, it's not simply chain reaction or serendipity, because when you turn up the heat, they inevitably are all going to pop around the same time. But together we reached a compromise that the popcorn, Serendipity popcorn, or as he shortens it to Spopcorn, that actually, as the creator, we can still help generate the heat that will lead to more kernels popping. So it's not true randomness and serendipity because there is this underlying causal factor of the entire bag of popcorn popping at once, which is turning up the heat. But that's really how I'm thinking about this today and how I think about it for something like a book launch. How can I turn up the heat or create the conditions so that movement happens? I'm sure you're all familiar with this classic concept of your thousand true fans, first popularized by Kevin Kelly, cited by many people since the first thousand serendipity seeds are a little different. I think of it a little differently because the first thousand seeds, that's kind of hard to say. The first thousand, I need to shorten it like 1kss, 1k serendipity seeds. It's not necessarily your true fans yet, because the goal is actually seeding these 1k seeds among people who don't know about you yet or among your early adopters who are going to help spread the word. There are also two great books that I want to just pause and recommend right now. One of them is called you'd First Thousand Copies by Tim Grohl, and the other one is the proven path from blank page to 10,000 copies sold. That's by Chandler Bolt. These two fellas are so strategic. They have tons of great ideas. I have leveraged their ideas. I've known Tim for many years. I love them both as people. Chandler Bolt has a great podcast. So does Tim, for that matter. We'll put it all in the show. Notes. What I'm talking about is even a little different than the strategic plan that gets your first thousand books sold or your first 10,000 copies. Here is what I mean when I'm thinking as an author about what I'm willing to spend, especially in the very beginning, the weeks leading up to the launch and during the launch itself, I think about actually, can I give away a thousand copies for free if I do that? And, you know, I don't know. You can't really know the life of a book. Are people going to like it? Are they going to like it enough to want to tell another person about it? And that's the thing. That's why books take on a personality and a life of their own, because the author can only do so much with their pure raw marketing muscle and planting the book places. I mean, yes, you can advertise, you can get on social media. The bigger your platform, the better your chance of hitting a breakthrough moment. But for anyone who has a more mid size or smaller platform like me, it's not just going to be one blast to my email list that goes out to 100,000 people that then sells 10,000 copies. Week one. That's usually hasn't been my style or hasn't been something that I have yet because I don't have a platform of that size. So for this launch I was really focused on how can I give away a thousand copies so that let's say of a thousand people who read the book, let's just go with Pareto's principle, 80, 20, maybe 20% are going to absolutely love it and they're going to tell five friends, well great, that just got me my next thousand readers. Who knows, maybe of a thousand people. If I give the book away to a thousand people, what's your guess? How many would recommend it to one friend? I don't know, could it be 500? Maybe that's too many. 250 recommended to one or two friends. You can start to see that if you can just get it into enough people's hands at the outset, the momentum snowball can start. Newton's first law of motion states that an object that is at rest will stay at rest, or an object that's at motion will stay at motion unless it is acted upon by an outside force. So what you don't want during a launch is that your new baby project is at rest. People don't know about it yet. And I know I'm talking to many of you who don't see yourselves as natural marketers or salespeople. It's probably not your favorite part of the creative process. And yet we cannot let our little object at rest pre launch stay at rest or it won't go anywhere. So I do think it's our responsibility as creators to help get the word out. This is why I'm talking about the first thousand seeds that you fling into the world as serendipity popcorn to see what can spark after that. I'm going to share the five strategies that I decided to go with for this launch. This round. It's always an in the moment thing. And I did have some wonderful help from Courtney Kenney, who's a book launch consultant, and Stephanie and Haley Houston, who helped on the social media side. They basically took over my accounts. But some of these strategies didn't have anything to do with social or ads. Strategy number one was the Buy one, get one, give one campaign. That was the pre order campaign and I'm still running it through the end of April. So if you want to get one of these, you want to give a copy to a friend of the audiobook and get the audiobook for free, go to itsfreetime.com Bogogo Buy one, get one, give one. This was fun because it launched in December. The book came out March 22nd of 2022. I wanted to have three months of people maybe hearing me on podcasts. The kickoff was with Cal Newport. And so many of you are here because of that. And then not just getting instant access to the audiobook, but giving a copy to a friend. This was joyful for me because it honors my value of generosity, giving the gift of free time. I love the idea of just reaching people. And at first I had a tiny little thought of, should I be giving this away? Am I going to affect my audiobook sales? Give me a break. This is one of those things where I think you got to tell that little voice, I should be so lucky to give this book away to people who heard me on a podcast and are interested and resonate. And thankfully, Cal and I have so much overlap and we had a great conversation that many people started joining. I think at least over a hundred joined in those first two weeks of the Bogogo campaign, which was so joyful. And now at two weeks post launch, and it's about, let's say, three solid months of running that, if not four, I have about 550 people who have access to the private podcast feed that has the audiobook. And again, this isn't going to be there forever, but it was really a joyful way to start seeding, planting those serendipity seeds, promoting this and not just giving the audiobook away to one person, but then inviting them to share it with a friend. And you can see that that word of mouth is where some of the viral growth can happen. Because then it's not just my actions creating an impact, but those of you who resonate, being able to invite a friend and then maybe they get interested and they invite a friend. And so I love planting seeds that can lead to future word of mouth. I also focused on sending out ARCs, advanced reader copies. Sometimes in the biz, they're called galleys. My goal for that, with every launch that I've done, this is my third. I like to send out a couple hundred. I remember when I got the book deal for Pivot, at some point in the process, I asked can we send out 500 galleys? And I just wanted to see if the publisher would say yes. And they did. This is one of the ways that if you have a publisher they can be so helpful because they have the budget to print. Usually it's not the formal finished version of the book, it's printed in a different way, paperback binding. Even if the book's gonna be a hardcover and it's not even finished with editing yet because you wanna print em early. I submitted free time in September thinking that I would get the books back mid October and because of supply chain issues and printer backups, all kinds of things going on, paper price spikes, the books did not ship to me until January, which meant that I couldn't get them out to my media and podcaster friends and early community supporters until end of January for a March 22 launch. That was not nearly as much time as I would have liked, but if I hadn't precrastinated by getting the book done in September, thinking I would have six months to send them out early for media and so on, maybe we wouldn't have been able to hit the March date at all. So I'll link to my previous episode on precrastination in the show notes, but I'm really glad that I did that and the arcs. The total now two weeks post launch I've sent about 300 and just to give you an idea, sending the hardcover. The book itself costs $10.50 per unit. That's quite high. Like I said, we're going through crazy times of paper price spikes because of supply chain issues and the pandemic and I did not hold back. As I've shared here many times, I put every bell and whistle that my little heart desired because I wanted to go all in on the creative vision. I shared that more in the episodes the launch episodes with Tony Neves 77 and 79. So yes, there is gold foil on the COVID I wanted to convey a sense of luxury and abundance. Free time. It's a celebration. I like the little sparkle when you hold it up in the light. The ribbon, the case wrap, the spot gloss, the two color printing on the inside. I didn't hold myself back so I know I'm sort of over justifying and explaining, but the unit cost 1050 is quite high and then the shipping cost to send each of those books is another $10 at least at minimum. If I'm sending stateside now, I'm having to cover that cost because I'm doing an independent publishing route this time around. I'VE shared a lot more of the pros and cons behind the scenes with the BFF community and the Launch team. So if you want access to the real nitty gritty behind the scenes content, you got to join BFF for that. That's it. It's FreeTime BFF.

We'll be right back just after this.

This holiday season, there's no better place to get cozy holiday gifts for all your people than Aerie. From soft sweaters to everyday intimates and activewear, Aerie has the comfiest pieces made for the real you. And don't forget to treat yourself too while you're at it. You've earned it. Find your nearest Aerie store or shop online@aerie.com Give Love Real.

When the holidays start to feel a bit repetitive, reach for a Sprite Winter Spiced Cranberry and put your twist on tradition. A bold cranberry and Winter Spice Flavor Fusion Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry is a refreshing way to shake things up this sipping season and only for a limited time. Sprite obey your thirst.

Okay, so let's talk about this 30k spend. Yes, it stings to hear it, but this is one of those projects where there was so much outlay of investment upfront that at some point it's all a blur and I just want to give it the best chance. If you work with a publisher, this is one of the big costs that they will cover is sending out galleys, covering the printing costs and the shipping costs and the warehouse storage, storage, rental costs, and then they'll send out finished copies to whoever you want that's on your list. The reason ultimately that I went for it is that these 300 people are the people who are the most interested. They're the tightest knit part of my community or media, podcasters, anyone who writes for publication. It's a group that I want to seed the book with. It's worth spending some money upfront so the book can live a long, fruitful life for years into the future. Then I did two in person events where I brought a bunch of books, shipped them to my hotel and gave them away. So the first conference that I've been to in two years that had more than a hundred people was south by Southwest. That was in March of 2022 and oh my goodness, there were highlights. It was awesome to be back at a conference that I love. I've been going for 11 years since 2011 when my first book came out and I definitely got more people overwhelmed than I might have in the past where I needed these long breaks to recharge in my hotel room. And I don't know, sometimes I'm the first one to leave different social events and go to bed early. I sent 150 books to my hotel room at south by. And I decided once again, you know the numbers. So 150 times 1050 a book is about $1,500. And there's the cost of the hotel and the flights, all that jazz. But this was really good to dust the rust off. It was the very first in person free time keynote or workshop that I gave in full glorious awkwardness shout out to my friend Vanessa Van Edwards, who co hosted the Fireside Chat with me. But I decided my goal before I leave Austin, Texas is to give away 150 books. And I'm telling you, as a real relatively shy person, it was nerve wracking. I would put five books in my bag and go sit at a session, whether it was Mark Cuban or Guy Ross. And I would try to make friends with the people sitting next to me. And then I would try to awkwardly say, well, yeah, I wrote a book, do you want one? And sometimes I would go attend a workshop and if I thought that the speaker was really relevant one, I even wrote on a post it note how she could schedule an interview if she wanted to be on the free time podcast. And that's what I did. Sometimes I would stack the book on little tables and I would put a little card that says free take me. And I would creepily watch from around the corner as people would pick it up, turn it around. I've never really seen somebody interact with my books in that way. So as creepy as I was being, it was kind of special to just see, oh, does it stop them from walking down the hall? And then how long do they look at it? They flip it over. They might flip through the pages and then it was so gratifying the moment that they would decide, yes, it's worth carrying around with me all day. They throw it in their bag and keep moving. Usually when I would stack five books on a shelf like that or on a table in the hallways, they did not last more than five minutes. They were gone. So that was really fun. That was one of my strategies. I did a book signing. Rohit and Idea Press organized a book flash mob at 10:30. It's way past my bedtime on one night where people could just come to the lobby of the hotel we were staying in and get books signed by all these different authors. So lots of fun strategies I'm thankful to say I did in fact give away every single one because I didn't want to pack anything with me to go back to New York City. The second in person event that I gave books away at was the launch party. I've done a big launch party in New York City for all three books. This one, I was kind of nervous. I didn't know if it was going to come together. I didn't know, you know, with COVID everything's been so strange. But I was super grateful that Padgett at soho Works, she agreed to co host at their location and meatpacking district. I invited a whole bunch of people and I sent another 150 books down for this event. And most authors, you know, when you're going to do a launch party, it's this kind of debate of should people buy the book and support you and you want to start generating your first sales, or do you want to give the books away? It's not always an easy decision with Pivot. I asked the publisher, can you supply 200 books? And we give them away because I will invite the coolest people in New York and we'll be good people that we seed the book with with free time. I decided the same thing. If people were going to get out of their sweats, leave the house, it was a freezing cold night in New York City and come downtown or across the bridge on the subway if they're coming from Brooklyn or they're coming from. Some people flew in from out of town, out of the state, from across the country. From out of the country. I'm going to give you the book. I am going to give the book away. And in fact, we had a lot more people RSVP from the Soho House side. Then I ended up coming. That's how New York is. That's how it goes. Like you probably get a fourth of people who actually show up because the weather or something comes up and people go do something else. So we had all these extra books and in my head I'm thinking, should I take them all home with me? I just decided to say as we were starting to wrap up the night, listen, I should be so lucky to give you all copies of Free Time. Please take extras if you have people in your life who you know would want to copy. And I was happy to see people take handfuls of books and know that they are going to now curate where those next serendipity seeds should be sprinkled. That's a favor to me. Although there is a cost involved I see it as an investment. I see it as part of these first thousand books that I'm giving away. And yes, I'm covering the cost of that, but that I actually don't want the project to die of starvation, quote, unquote, because this is adapted from a Bill Hewlett quote than indigestion. He says more companies die of indigestion than starvation. But I think new creative projects are probably more likely to die of momentum starvation than too many people interested. Okay, so that was the launch party. I even left 35 books with Soho Works to give those away. And I still took two boxes back home. But I was happy to give away to that group again, who comes out to an event, shows their interest, shows they're excited, living in New York. Great. Take these books and sprinkle them out into the world. Another serendipity popcorn strategy that we tried was thanks to Courtney Kenney, who was working with me through on this launch. She suggested doing a Goodreads giveaway. So I set up, end of February through launch day, March 22, a Goodreads giveaway of 10 signed hardcover copies of the book. And I did pay extra through Goodreads. It was under $600, but I think I paid, I want to say close to 500 to be able to send a custom message to anyone who enters this contest. Because others have explained that it can be frustrating if thousands of people enter the contest and they don't win. You have no way to contact them. You have no way to tell them, well, here's what I can give you instead. And Goodreads is super strict about, you're not allowed to put any links, even if you pay extra to send them a follow up message. You can't promote anything, you can't send links, nothing. But we did this giveaway. I paid extra so I could at least send a note to the people who didn't win. And in the span of a month, it ended right on launch day, 4,100 people added free time to their to read list. I think we had 3,800 contest entries. Ten people won, of course. And then in the note, I think the one thing I was able to get away with was to say, check out the free time podcast. It doesn't appear that 4,000 people have come rushing over in terms of the download numbers, but I think that's really exciting that it got, you know, we can't call them official seeds planted, but 4,000 people know about the book that didn't before. So that seems like a Pretty worthwhile investment.

The last category of Serendipity Popcorn seeds or Serendipity Seeds that I threw out for this launch that I hadn't done for a previous one was paid ads. We didn't spend much. I gave Courtney, I think $1,000 to run Amazon ads for a week or two. And then Stephanie, same thing via her friend Randy, $1,000 to run ads on LinkedIn. And I don't know how many books, I don't think they sold too many. Sometimes with these platforms it's actually harder to get impressions than you would think and it's actually hard to spend up to that budget. I also don't really want to run ads forever. It's not quite my style unless it really shows that it's working. Because unit cost of the hardcover book is high, it doesn't quite make sense to pay for ads. At least not yet. Till I get my, you know, the whole flow more optimized, I guess. I mean, there's always a numbers game to this. I say in the book where you can get to a point where you put in the proverbial dollar and get the proverbial two in return. It's usually not a 200% ROI, but it's possible to get it to be this well oiled generation machine. But anyway, we did it, we tried it. I didn't want the Amazon ads to show when somebody was already searching for free time or my name. Some of them slipped through the cracks in that regard. Like I didn't want to just pay for the clicks I was already going to receive, but we paid. We probably sold a couple dozen copies of the book during a week or two. And who knows, maybe it's one of these things of raising brand awareness. You can see that I'm not so obsessed with these numbers or the data. I don't know, maybe more people saw. What we can say is that as I started this episode, Freetime was the number one new release in the time management category. That's a big category and a big win. And that no matter what all sources it's coming from. The fun thing about something like that happening and I don't know if it's like the sparks of the fire are there, I don't know if it will catch, but one of the things that makes books so successful over the long term is if you make some sort of list and then people see it on the list, so then more people buy it, so then it stays on the list, then more people see it on the list, then you have books like Atomic Habits by James Clear that are completely propelled out of the stratosphere because they've made the list and stayed on the list. And then the momentum snowball is completely unstoppable and incredible. That's it. Those are the strategies of what I gave away from the Bogogo pre order campaign, advanced reader copies or arcs south by and the launch party. That alone was 1100 books that I physically or I guess half of them were audiobook, but you know, one by one sent out into the world. And then if you want to count Goodreads, I think that counts as maybe like a fourth. When people add it to their list, who knows if they'll remember that it's there. But that's another effort. At the time of this recording, I feel that I can exhale. I feel that I can take a pause. I don't have to push so hard. I'm going to let these books breathe and let everyone who does have a copy, including all of you, read it, sit with it, experience the material, see if you like it, see if you want to share it with friends, and maybe do another podcast tour in the fall, but not obsess anymore. I got my thousand seeds planted. It's not that I'm stopping marketing in any sense of the word, but I feel that a launch has been successful if I can plant those first thousand serendipity seeds. So I'll leave you with that today. I hope you found this helpful or interesting in some way. You can always leave me a voice memo and ask follow up questions@itsfreetime.com ask thank you so much for being here. Listening everybody. I'm so grateful for you. Have a beautiful rest of your day.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star. Thank you. Word of mouth is the most joyful way we can grow this show and it helps us land interviews with the luminaries and insightful guests that you would most love to hear from. Please send this episode to a friend who might find it helpful and for show notes and related links from this episode, visit itsfreetime.com while you're there, make sure you're subscribed to the Time well Spent newsletter. You'll get instant access to my tech Toolkit, a continually updated list of all the software I use, along with the total monthly spend to run my business where no one works full time, even me. Visit itsfreetime.com join remember, you are running the show. It's time for radical reimagining and everything is up for grabs. Let it be easy. Let it be fun and build with love.

Hey, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. You know, one of the perks about having four kids that you know about is actually getting a direct line to the big man up north. And this year he wants you to to know the best gift that you can give someone is the gift of Mint Mobile's Unlimited Wireless for $15 a month. Now you don't even need to wrap it. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes if network's busy, taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com.