One book, three years

The lead time

The audience has to exist before the book does

A launch announced to nobody converts at close to zero, however good the book is. The year before publication is the actual marketing work, and it is spent on the subject rather than on the book: the ideas, the research, the arguments. Anyone who follows for those is somebody who will buy when the thing arrives.

The supply

A book is eighty videos you already wrote

Every chapter contains at least one claim that stands on its own, and a non-fiction book routinely contains fifty. That is more short-form material than most accounts generate in a year, and it has the rare property of being fully researched already.

• One claim per video, not one chapter per video.
• Lead with the counterintuitive ones. A surprising claim is a hook that writes itself.
• Do not summarise the book. A summary is a reason not to buy it.
• Space them out. Fifty claims over a year is a channel, over a month it is a burst.

After launch

The long tail is where most sales actually are

The launch spike is the visible part and usually the smaller one. A book stays on sale, and evergreen short-form keeps sending people to it for years through search on social, which behaves much more like traditional search than the recommendation feed does. Content built around the ideas rather than the launch date keeps working long after the campaign is over.

The practical bit

You do not have to be on camera

Plenty of authors would rather write than perform, and the format does not require them to. The ideas are the draw here, which makes this one of the situations where faceless content works best rather than being a compromise.