The 6 Pillars of Our Book Promotion Strategy

There’s something book publishers don’t tell you when you sign their offer on the dotted line: almost all the responsibility for promoting your book will fall on your shoulders. 

A lot of authors complain about this fact as if it represents publishers shirking their duty or being lazy. I see it quite differently: authors are responsible for selling their books because they are by far the best positioned to do so. 

No one else has the direct relationship with potential readers, an abundance of behind-the-scenes and “making of” material, the voice and point of view that the book embodies, and of course, the motivation to give it everything they got.

Expecting any publisher to simply forget these facts and valiantly sell your book on your behalf is a denial of reality. No one is going to put in a fraction of the time, effort, and care into promoting your book as you.

Keeping that in mind, our promotion strategy for Building a Second Brain rested on six pillars, each one representing a powerful leverage point in its trajectory:

1. The proposal
2. The brand identity design and media kit
3. The pre-order campaign
4. The email list
5. The YouTube channel
6. Sharing regular updates on my journey

Pillar #1: The Proposal

Launching a book into mainstream awareness is like starting a business from scratch. 

You will eventually need to recruit an entire ecosystem of people, companies, communities, funding sources, distribution channels, wholesale and retail outlets, online platforms, promotional partners, and digital and physical supply chains, and then coordinate them all to gracefully deliver an impactful message on a global scale.

Sounds easy right?

Most of the advice out there says to make your proposal as good as it can be, but I don’t think most aspiring authors put nearly enough emphasis on it. Your proposal is everything – a step-by-step business plan that lays out everything you will make happen over a period of years. 

It’s impossible to invest too much time and attention on the proposal, not only because it determines whether your book gets sold in the first place, and for how much, but because the decisions you make there will bias every subsequent decision made by everyone connected to the book.

This is why it took me 9 months to finish my proposal (which you can read in its 61-page entirety). It was some of the best time I spent. I hired a highly experienced developmental editor Janet Goldstein to help me with it, and it was a major project within itself. (If you’re looking for an expert opinion on your book idea, I suggest booking one of her Laser Intensives).

Many authors don’t work with a developmental editor, but I think that’s a big mistake. No agent or friend can give you anywhere close to the level of attention and experience you’ll receive from someone who has worked on multiple successful book proposals in the past. I went on to hire the same editor to work with me on the manuscript itself, which gave me a long-term thought partner who provided continuity through this long process.

In the proposal we tried to make as many important decisions as possible, including:

• The main problems we were proposing to solve
• The main historical analogy we would use to frame our solution
• The dysfunctional approach we would compare our solution with most directly
• Which tangible benefits of building a Second Brain to highlight
• How to tell my origin story and why it led me to want to write this book
• Which main audiences we thought would be interested in the book
• Which competing and complementary titles to use as models
• A selection of marketing and promotion opportunities we envisioned
• The topics of each chapter

For me, the most important outcome from this entire proposal-writing process was the decision to pivot the BASB message to a much more mainstream, “beginner” audience. 

It was necessary and important to appeal to hardcore PKM nerds in the early days, as they were at the forefront of this emerging field and had the motivation to wade through the messy details. But now that the core ideas and method had been established, I didn’t want to remain limited to that niche. I didn’t want to write a book preaching to the same choir: I wanted this idea to spread to wider circles of people who hadn’t previously even heard of the concept of a second brain, and if it wasn’t for this book, might never be exposed to it.

In retrospect, this seems like the obviously right decision, but it wasn’t an easy one. I had to endure a lot of dissatisfaction and outright criticism from the audience I had built up to that point. Many people felt like I’d “dumbed down” the ideas and diluted their power. Some even felt like I’d abandoned or betrayed them. 

What kept me going was the thought of the many new kinds of people we’d be able to reach with a broader, more accessible voice, including:

• The Creator Economy and content creators in general
• Freelancers and entrepreneurs of all kinds
• Gig workers who need a way to take information from one job to another
• Millennials, who are quickly rising into positions of leadership across the economy
• Remote workers needing better self-management skills (which exploded in numbers during the pandemic)
• Notion users (Notion raised major funding the same week as my proposal was sold, with a featured article in the New York Times, which I believe positively impacted our prospects)
• Fans of organizing and decluttering (such as Marie Kondo)
• People who like to take online courses and need a way to take notes on them
• People with ADHD and other neurodivergent conditions, looking for a way to alleviate their symptoms

The early decision to “go mainstream” gave me the clarity and courage to break away from the insider language of the “PKM clique” that predominates online, and to instead seek language that anyone – older and younger generations, people in non-digital professions, people without formal education, people living in other countries, and the non-tech savvy – could not only understand but put to use in their own lives.

The proposal was extremely well-received, attracting four imprints from three publishers in a two-round auction that ended with a multi-six-figure deal. Once we had that in hand, it was off to the races.

Pillar #2: The Brand Identity Design and Media Kit

I decided early on to create a full-fledged visual brand identity for my book. I already had a BASB ecosystem with multiple products and services and knew that in the future we’d likely have multiple books, other titles like journals or workbooks, physical products, and eventually, even other media like films, TV shows, board games, and apparel.

To make sure all of these elements fit together as a cohesive brand, I hired an experienced designer to deeply research our content and audience and develop a comprehensive BASB brand identity made up of:

• Core brand attributes
• A beautiful logo that works across platforms and different media types
• Usage guidelines for ourselves and external parties
• An official typeface and typography samples
• Color palette and how colors should be used
• Accessibility improvements
• An entire graphic language we call “circuits”
• Photography examples and guidelines
• A creative gallery envisioning what future touchpoints could look like

Those brand guidelines became part of a broader BASB media kit, which was unbelievably helpful to share with anyone who wanted to talk about or promote the book, providing everything they might possibly need with just a link. The media kit additionally includes:

• Important links
• Key messages
• High-quality book photos
• Press kit materials
• My bio and headshots
• Downloadable brand assets
• Logos in various shapes, colors, and sizes
• Fair use guide encouraging people to share the BASB message within certain limits
• Contact info in case they needed something else

Pillar #3: The Pre-Order Campaign

I didn’t have a large audience back in 2019 when I wrote the proposal – only 6,000 email subscribers and 10,000 Twitter followers. I knew the pre-order campaign was going to be our single best chance of breaking through the media noise, and I needed to do everything possible to create a groundswell of support on release day.

Our publisher set a very early date for opening pre-orders so we had as much time as possible to collect them: November 16, 2021. There would be 210 days, or 7 months, of pre-orders before the official release date on June 14, 2022. I set a goal of reaching 10,000 pre-orders in that time (based on reports from other authors of reaching bestseller lists with similar numbers), which would require about 1,400 pre-orders per month, 357 per week, or 50 per day.

We ended up with 12,875 pre-orders, exceeding my goal and putting the book on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list the week of its release. Comparing that number to the size of my email list by the time the book was released, it was about 20% the size of our subscriber base. Using this as a rule of thumb, if you want to reach 10,000 pre-orders, you should have at least 50,000 email subscribers to give yourself a fair shot.

We thought of the absolute best bonuses we could offer, in five tiers from 5 to 500 books. They drove 1,870 of those pre-orders or about 15% of them. Here’s the distribution of how many people ordered at each tier: