How I'd Launch A Non-Fiction Book

A pre-order strategy for first week sales

Hello, and welcome to the new and improved Observations & Inferences. This is the 70th edition of this newsletter, if you can believe it. I’ve been sending out these small creative life & marketing experiments since September of 2023. (Now that we’re all on Substack, I’m very excited to finally have a comment section we can use to brainstorm and chat in!)

In today’s edition, we have a meta deep dive into a strategy for launching a non-fiction book. Specifically, I’ll tell you what I would do to build hype, generate pre-orders, and build on momentum ahead of your publication date.

No strategy is one-sized-fits-all, so as always my focus is on the principles — the thinking behind the choice to offer a pre-order incentive or design a companion quiz or do a podcast tour or whatever it is you decide to do.

For the record, this is what I do all day, every day. It’s the thing I’m most nerdy about in the world and the thing I will talk your ear off about at a party.

In other words, I care a lot and I always want to help. If you’re launching a book in Fall ‘25 or Spring ‘26, I’d love to lend a hand. Let’s brainstorm?

In your corner,

P.S. I made another silly little thought exercise! This one is designed to help you parse out a framework and can also be a really useful essay/content idea generator. It’s called Method Your Magic and is free here.

Today’s experiment is focused on non-fiction books that directly share your knowledge or experience. (This is not to say you couldn’t use similar strategies to launch a fiction book — my client

Leigh Stein

is currently running an incredible pre-order campaign for her novel If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You.)

Non-fiction launch campaigns lend themselves very easily to the same kind of sales funnel-y marketing strategy and design that you probably associate with selling a course or a consulting call. That’s because, at the end of the day, a non-fiction book is a knowledge product. It’s an exchange of information for money.

One benefit of this is that in launching a non-fiction book, your job is simply to amplify the same messages, problems, and solutions you hyper-fixated on while writing it (and advocated for when selling it to your publisher).

You’re talking to the same person you’ve been writing to all along about the same questions you’ve been obsessed with for years. The only difference is that now you have a call to action.

To get the most bang for our buck, this experiment also focuses specifically on pre-orders. Not just because I want you to hit a bestseller list (I do), but also because to me, a pre-order is by far one of the most validating forms of commerce there is.

A pre-order says “I trust you enough to buy this before it exists.” It’s an adrenaline shot for any artist who is trying really hard to be seen and heard. A pre-order also happens to be one of the best things you can do for the momentum of your book, so it’s really a win-win.

HYPOTHESIS

If you incentivize pre-orders in the months leading up to publication, then you will increase your first week sales.

PROCESS

A non-fiction book launch campaign starts early. A few months out from your publication date, I’d start by figuring out what you might be able to offer as an incentive. What can you give people in exchange for their pre-order?

You’ll need to ensure that you have systems in place for growing your email list. If you’re hosting here on Substack, you can embed a free download or a code to unlock some bonus resource into your welcome email. If you use a more robust email marketing platform, you can grow your list with a lead magnet and automate a sequence promoting your book. Again, we’re thinking in incentives here: What’s in it for me if I subscribe?

This is when you can also start thinking about press and platform. If you don’t have a publicist helping with your book launch, this might mean pitching yourself to podcasters, influencers, book stores, radio stations, schools, speaking engagements, and any other stakeholders who count your ideal reader among their audiences.

In the 8-12 weeks before publication, I’d recommend creating a pre-order incentive campaign (or several). This can truly be remarkably simple: All you need is a form builder and something to offer up in exchange. There might be a little manual labor (screenshot your pre-order and upload it here, we’ll send you XYZ!) but it’s nothing we can’t handle and/or automate.

One caveat here is that whatever you give someone in exchange for pre-ordering should absolutely be scaleable, meaning an increase in sales shouldn’t dramatically increase demands on your time. Imagine the best case scenario and plan for it: Can you really afford to give 1,000 people a free 30-minute call? Probably not.

If it helps, you can use the price of the book itself as an anchor in your ideation process. What else would you sell for $25? $125? $250?

A hundred people pre-ordering ten copies of your book is 1,000 first week sales. Depending on your industry, that might be a rocket launch straight to the top of a list, so needless to say it’s worth at least thinking about it.

Offering up a workshop, digital download, bonus chapter, course, quiz, private podcast, workbook, etc. gives people a reason to buy now — as opposed to later when the book comes out and everyone’s already raving about it. In other words, design for the hipsters that like to be first to know. Incentives help you thank your ride-or-dies, giving them something back in exchange for their early support.

Incorporating a pre-order incentive also gives you something to talk about other than the book. This is surprisingly key. In my experience, authors are usually pretty desperate to not yell “Buy my book!” into the void 1,000 times a day, so having something else to promote in the weeks leading up to publication helps.

Whatever it is you decide to offer, you might decide to make it limited or you might say fork it and generate as many pre-orders as you possibly can. Either way, you can ride that promotional wave right up until the book hits the shelves — at which point you’ll have plenty of podcast episodes, tour stops, reviews, reader photos, speaking gigs, and screenshots of bestseller lists to share, too, extending the hype train as far out as it’ll go.

OBSERVATIONS & INFERENCES

All in all, launching a non-fiction book isn’t that different than launching any other knowledge-based product. The key principles are the same.

You have to:

1. Deeply understand and emphasize with a specific problem experienced by your reader

2. Demonstrate that your book is a resource they can trust to help them solve that problem

3. Create a simple sales system that incentivizes action (buying the book) now, instead of later

4. Make it easy for people to pay you, support you, and hype you up

The tech can be confusing and it’s a lot to handle on your own, which is where I come in. But at the end of the day, even if you’re DIYing it, you can at least take some comfort in the fact that you’ve already done all of the hard parts.

You already wrote the book. Sold the book. Edited the book. You already spent months hunched over a keyboard making the book appear out of thin air. No one else on Earth is better primed to launch this book than you — after all, you’re the one with all of the good ideas.

Keep it simple, let it be easy and fun, and ask for help when you need it. These are the principles that sustain a creative life, so they’re worth practicing either way.

The latest from members of The Study:

• My books are open again for 1:1 clients! Book a 1:1 Strategic Breakthrough session with me here. Bring your biggest marketing headache and we’ll find a way through.

• Bonnie is offering writing consults, editorial feedback, and Substack check-ins.

• Elyse just debuted the Bold Vision Breakthrough. Receive soul-centered support to move beyond fear and resistance into confident, aligned action.

• KP just launched a new offer, Content Constellation, that is a done-with-you content plan for your 9-grid on IG.

• The future is calling…Sara’s Not Yet Lab is starting this Saturday.

Some recent links from my Desktop Organizer Second Brain database:

• Engineers Need Art, a collection of musings and projects and, if you ask me, a bonafide virtual museum!

• For those of us wondering who popped up all of those pop up shops in SoHo: How Frankies Bikinis opened 6 retail stores in 2 years with Leap

• Kind of obsessed with the concept of an “Abstract Random Learning Style”

• The Women Who Refused to Choose Between Mothering and Artmaking from The MIT Press Reader