In January, I received an email from Claire Suellentrop asking if I wanted to manage the launch of her and business partner’s, Georgiana (Gia) Laudi, now-released book, Forget The Funnel: A Customer-Led Approach For Driving Predictable, Recurring Revenue.

Forget The Funnel and their Customer-Led Growth framework is big-time in the marketing landscape; not only had I applied to manage various projects for them in 2022 and ended up finishing 2nd in that pursuit, I worked with FTF’s brilliant team in a previous role when our company hired them for high-level marketing direction.

In other words, this was a no-brainer opportunity. 

We signed the agreement in February, and the book launched May 9, 2023.

In this piece, I’m going to cover:

1. How we wrote & built the book
2. How we launched & marketed the book
3. How the book did on launch day/week, and how it’s been doing post-launch
4. Five takeaways from this launch I’m carrying with me

How Did We Write & Build the Book?

Our book is in paperback and ebook form,  with an audiobook recorded (by the authors) and ~2 months away.

Before I was hired, Claire and Gia had written the book and put it in front of a beta reader community. So, I wasn’t as involved in the book writing process, but I had a front-row seat and learned quite a bit.

I know there are hot debates around self-publishing vs. publisher house, amongst other common forks in the road as you’re building a book, and I’ll link a fantastic resources at the end of this article if you want to delve into that topic.

With that said, we opted to self-publish, but we still surrounded ourselves with a team of book experts.

If my experience is indicative of any patterns (my research tells me it is), the book industry is confusing as hell, and there’s a relatively steep learning curve for navigating the process from start to finish completely on your own.  

While we didn’t work directly with a traditional publishing house, we did hire a team of experts who owned the following areas:

• Editing
• Copy editing
• Cover design
• Interior layout
• Audiobook production and management
• ISBN retrieval and other book ‘housekeeping’ matters
• Building the appropriate print files for submission to Amazon and other distributors

Internally, we owned our own marketing asset creation (copywriting, design), customer support, and internal admin & operations required to pull off the launch. And then there was me, the person overseeing all the moving pieces.

We didn’t hire outside help for marketing because marketing is our strength as a team, but if it’s not yours I’d recommend getting guidance from somebody who has marketed at least one book –- at a minimum — because there are some product-specific nuances that will likely play into your marketing approach.

(my door is open; ask me things)

How Did We Launch the Book?

Our launch plan consisted of a variety of levers: 

• Produce content for others to publish during launch week. We partnered with 11 different individuals/companies who had an audience similar enough to ours (B2B SaaS Founders +  practitioners) to give a fuck about the book, and different enough to not be direct competition, and reached out to them with a couple ideas on how we could provide value to them/their audience through a unique piece of content we create for them. Luckily, Claire and Gia’s reputation made this venture easier than if we had to create relationships from scratch. Most of these campaigns came to life in the form of guest newsletter/blogs + a giveaway attached to them on our dime. But, we heavily individualized each campaign to each company. You can see a couple examples below:

Example #1: A guest post + giveaway in Kevan Lee’s newsletter

Example #2:  A guest  post + giveaway in Marketing Powerups newsletter

• Guest appearances. Leading up to launch, we prioritized getting Claire & Gia on podcasts and other shows, both by putting out a PSA to their existing networks (where the majority came from), as well as contacting shows with this proposition. While of course we were intentional about getting on shows with audiences the book would be of value to, we erred on the side of saying yes to all as opposed to being a little more picky. With that being said, when we did reach out to shows, we were hyper-focused on personalizing the outreach. Sending 10 (genuinely) personalized pitches will likely yield better outcomes than 100 copy-and-pasted ones.

• A well-thought-out pre-launch campaign. By the time we made an official announcement around the launch of the book publicly, hundreds of people in our community knew about the book, and potentially played a part in its creation. We built a community of beta readers (this was already built by the time I came on) to help Claire and Gia finish the manuscript. In addition, FTF ran a pre-sale campaign ~6 months prior to launch that granted early access to the book as well as other perks wrapped in three different packages you can see below. (Claire and Gia credit Rob Fitzpatrick’s book Write Useful Books for much of the inspiration for their pre-launch activities.) Then, as we were approaching launch, we encouraged this group to  leave an honest review on launch day since they were a part of the small group that’s read the book before it reached the public.

• Advance Reader Copies. Going hand-in-hand with the pre-launch campaign, we also aimed to send out 100 early copies of the book to those closest to us ~ a week before launch. While of course we were hoping some public awareness would stem from this, our far-and-away top priority here was to let close peers and colleagues know how much they mean to us, and that we wouldn’t have been able to bring this to the finish line without them. However, we also encouraged this group to leave a honest review on our launch day (if they had thoughts) since they were amongst the group of people who had access to the book before launch.

• Emails, social posts, and website communications from us. Considering we had been talking about the book for many months leading up to launch, and our focus on co-marketing campaigns during launch, the pressure on our own emails and social posts to do all the heavy lifting had dwindled. We still planned a variety of emails and posts communicating the launch, and we had a book page built on our website during our pre-launch campaigns. 

• A supplemental workbook. We know that theory without action yields little results. And while we aimed to educate with our book, a higher-priority goal for us was to help people actual use the book to spark measurable changes. To help facilitate this, Gia and Claire created a monstrous 100-page workbook with all the templates, scripts, frameworks, and tools they reference in the book. It’s given readers that extra nudge to cross that line from complete inaction to doing something. Plus, you can download it from our site in exchange for only an email.

• Launch week Kindle promotion + book promotion sites. We dropped the price of our Kindle to $1 during launch week with one simple goal: visibility. We wanted to lower the barrier as much as possible for somebody to take the leap and start reading, and add even more fuel to the launch week fire. While this promotion did get mentioned in our co-marketing and internal campaigns, where we really blasted it out there was book promotion sites, and specifically sites that highlight heavily discounted ebooks. We tested BookBub, Bargain Booksy, and OHFB. For the price (most are under $100), I’d do them again. 

Fun side note: Amazon hurled a wrench into our entire launch 3 days before our launch date. We frantically worked around it and it worked out ok. However, we’re STILL dealing with issues 7 weeks post launch, and the paperback still isn’t available anywhere outside the U.S. due to Amazon’s internal reviews of our ownership of our own book. You can read more about that, and how we were processing it in real time, here. 

• A ‘Momentum Launch’. Now, 7 weeks post launch, we are fully into what we call our ‘Momentum Launch’, which spans the remainder of the year (but never truly ends). Its purpose is simple: continue, and build off, the momentum we generated from the launch. How? By doing much of the same launch activities; we’re continuing to build out an editorial calendar with a variety of ways to share the book and workbook, we’re still prioritizing guest appearances, and our eyes are still open to sensible paid advertising opportunities. The primary difference now is we’re not building up to a peak but rather for the long-haul.

How’s the Book Been Doing?

Part of the reason I wanted to document my learnings from this launch is because we were (mostly) quite pleased with how it went and the results it produced.

In short, the book landed in thirteen #1 bestseller categories in Amazon across US, Canada and UK, and remained at the top spot in all of them for one week. And a few remained for close to a month post launch.

In all honesty, I have no clue what’s considered good, great, or excellent in this regard, but hitting one #1 bestseller status was a goal of ours coming in.

We maintained three bestseller positions for 3 weeks post-launch. As of writing this on June 26, 2023, the book has dropped out of #1 in all categories except one on amazon.ca, which it had previously dropped out of and recently came back to.

And, yes, this also converted to sales; we hit our 2023 “number of books sold” goal one month post launch.

Project Takeaways

• The purpose of your book (hell, any product) should fuel key decisions. As with many things in life, the “why” behind it is what should nudge you down a certain path when you’re faced with countless forks throughout the journey. For us?  The book’s purpose  was to spread awareness of Customer-Led Growth as wide as possible. If our goal was to maximize revenue that came from the book, we would have made different decisions at various junctures. Ensure everybody working on the project knows its purpose; it’s not absolutely critical that everybody agree on the purpose, but it’s critical that everybody knows.

• Strategic guest appearances reign supreme for awareness-building. This didn’t necessarily surprise me, but the pattern was strong and strengthened my perspective on this. And logically, it makes sense right? You put yourself in front of an existing and relevant community, and do so with the stamp of approval of the person or company that the community is built around. I’d prioritize them for a wide variety of launches/campaigns.

• There’s significant upside to building in public. I mentioned we recruited a team of beta readers during the writing process, but our search for community feedback and involvement along the way didn’t stop there; we asked feedback on multiple cover design options, on our title and subtitle, as well as shared important milestones throughout the building process. Not only did this give us signal markers along the trek from our target audience, it allowed us to share news of the book many months before launch and build interest through collaboration. While this will manifest differently depending on the project and audience, I’d wager some degree of building in public is advantageous.

• Don’t rely on Amazon to give any fucks. And if you do rely on Amazon for your distribution, do your best to remove any urgency or time constraints from activities they are dependent on. We focused our launch efforts on Amazon. The upside here is that Amazon dominates the (e)book market and handles printing, fulfillment, and everything else required to process book orders, and they give you certain benefits for making your book exclusive with them (we didn’t do this). One downside is that Amazon does not give nearly as many fucks as you do about your book, and if there is a timely issue (like your book being blocked 2 days before launch), you’re reliant on their team to solve it with minimal back up plans. We did not go exclusive with Amazon, but we did push the majority of people there on launch day. If I were to do it again, I’d still push most people to Amazon in the short term, but I’d work through all the approvals and hoops to jump through 6 weeks prior to launch. Because Amazon dominates the market, focusing review efforts there in the short term is often a smart long-term play. 

• True personalization & customization are worth it, and difficult to automate. Part of the reason our 10+ partnerships delivered positive results is because we built 10+ unique pieces of content specific for each entity, not 1 unique piece of content that we syndicated strategically for 10+ entities. When we reached out to propose a collaboration, we came to the table with specific ideas that demonstrated an understanding of their audience and goals. I’ve found, and this project was no different, that even in the rapidly-advancing world, true personalization is difficult to automate. There are ways to move along the stepping stones faster, but in the end, the strongest human connections form when two humans are present. And, I think this rapidly-advancing world is increasing demand for that.

I hope you took away something useful from these reflections. If you’re writing a book  (or thinking about it) and could use a sounding board, please don’t hesitate to reach out at alex@alexcartmill.com and I’m happy to provide guidance where I can.

If you’re interested in comparing and contrasting self-publishing vs. traditional publishing, here’s a great piece that outlines the tradeoffs.

Lastly, here’s Rob Fitzpatrick’s Write Useful  Books again, a fantastic resource and huge inspiration for all of our pre-launch activities.