Building on the successful 2019 release of my first book in a decade, Changing the World Without Losing Your Mind, my publisher and I decided to come out with When in Doubt, Ask for More: And 213 Other Life and Career Lessons for the Mission-Driven Leader this year. Suffice it to say that publishing a book in March 2020 was problematic, and that many of my best marketing methods were off limits.
I have spent the last five months trying to come up with new ways of breaking through the morass of the pandemic and all the pain and uncertainty it has caused. A lot of things haven’t worked well, but some have. For example, I adapted some of the lessons in the book to the realities of running a nonprofit or social enterprise in a pandemic, and NextBillion published them. Other ideas that are proving fruitful:
1. Experimenting with several approaches to online author talks, and ultimately deciding that doing it with almost no PowerPoint slides was the best option.
2. Agreeing with my publisher to do a re-launch in September, and planning as many marketing activities as possible for that month.
3. Convening some friends, professional colleagues, and fans of one or both of my books to brainstorm with me over Zoom about how to make the relaunch (and marketing of the book generally) successful. I got so many good ideas – whoa! A few participants got caught up in the excitement and went on to make bulk purchases or encourage others to do so.
4. Being fearless/shameless in asking people to review my book online (especially on Amazon). (This short 5-star review published just a few days ago was a real morale boost.)
5. Hiring an online book marketing expert to give us a couple dozen tips about how to improve sales (and implementing almost all of them). (I wrote about that experience here.)
6. Assisting in the marketing of other books I have enjoyed reading this summer, such as Phil Buchanan’s excellent Giving Done Right, and encouraging those authors to help market mine.
7. Making it a point to reconnect with a few friends and former colleagues each week and, among other things, ensuring that they knew I had a new book out.
8. Being encouraged by small signs of progress, and taking setbacks and dead ends in stride.
One of the most actionable ideas from the two brainstorming sessions was to change how I titled my blog posts so that they represented an answer to a question that people might be using to undertake a Google search. Thanks, Katrina Sanyal, for this tip. You can see I applied that practical wisdom in this very blog post!