This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey friends, hey listeners, hey community. Thank you so much for joining today. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This program is called Side Hustle School. It is all about helping people in whatever situation they are in life, often very busy people with jobs, families, responsibilities, maybe some other stuff on the side, on the side on the side, try to find a way to create more personal freedom through the form of an income generating project.
Okay, it's about making money and not just making money, but what does that symbolize? What symbolizes freedom? It symbolizes choice. It symbolizes the ability for you to determine your own future, right? Lots of different ways to look at that topic, which is why we've been going for, well, I don't know, more than 1500 days so far.
1500 days, all thanks to you and our amazing community. All right, so today's question, it's about launching a book. Okay, so I personally am out of book launch mode for the moment, usually every 18 months or so. It depends, but usually about that range. I gear up to publish a book that I've been working on for the previous year and a half.
So I have this cycle of like writing books, preparing to launch them, you know, going out to market, et cetera. Well, today's listener from Boston is self-publishing a book on personal finance. He's kind of facing this calendar, this timetable. He's wondering about the launch process. Should he make the book available for pre-order or should he just put it up for sale?
And there really are pros and cons to both. Okay, so I try to give you all the information. I'll also make a recommendation, like specifically for him, but I want to make sure that you leave each episode feeling a bit more informed than you were before. And even if you don't want to launch a book, if you're not into that world, like everything that you learn here, at least my goal is that it can be relevant, you know, for something else. All right, so should you create a pre-order campaign for your book launch?
That's the question. We'll hear more from our listener and my answer in just 30 seconds. [Music]
Hi, Chris. I'm Dilson from Boston and I've been listening to your podcast for three months. Most people struggle with the money, so I've started an online personal finance community that helps people make real progress with their money.
Right now, I'm working on self-publishing a personal finance book that helps people change their money mindset so they can save more money, get out of debt, and live a happy financial life. What are your thoughts, Chris? Should I make the book available for pre-order or should I just pick a date and release the book? I recently read an article online that said most people avoid pre-ordering books because there's no sense of urgency to purchase a book that they cannot read yet. Thank you and I'm looking forward to hearing your response, Chris.
[Music]
Dilson, great to have you out there. Congratulations on the new book, almost launched. Personal finance, huge topic. Lots of interest in it, of course, and lots of different ways to approach it, of course. So there's room for a lot of books in that space.
Now, listen, Dilson is not wrong when he says most people don't want to pre-order books these days or most people just avoid doing that. I think most people don't want to pre-order much of anything. And I think we're in this world of instant gratification. And I also think, at least my observations, like what I've seen, even though pre-orders will always be important to traditional authors, or at least authors being published by traditional publishers, the timeframe has been condensed quite a bit. And now many authors are only announcing their new books like a couple of weeks or a few weeks in advance of publication instead of several months.
Like the longer in advance you announce the book and try to build pre-order hype, the more risk you kind of run of wearying your audience or people just don't care. Whereas it's like, hey, there's a new book, it's coming out next week. Oh, that's interesting. So in general, if you're gonna do a pre-order thing, I think the condensed pre-order phase is desirable. But let's look at the pros and cons overall.
So if you can do it right, like a big pre-order campaign, which is no small thing, foreshadowing the con, if you can do it right, it will make a big difference, especially if you're trying to get stocked in bookstores. So again, this might apply more to traditionally published authors. Or if you can sell a lot of copies, by a lot I mean thousands and thousands of copies, then pre-orders increase your odds of getting on the best seller lists because any book that is pre-ordered in the weeks or months or however long before publication, that sale is added to the week one numbers. So you wanna have a really big week, well, pre-orders help a lot. Now, as mentioned, it's hard to do it, right?
This is not an easy thing to say, well, all you need to do is sell thousands of copies, right? It's a lot that goes into that. And you have to really have a great book, you have to have platform, you need a lot of people talking about it. So to me, it kind of comes down to like how much you want to invest in the process or where you're at right now. And generally speaking, for a self-published book like "Dilson's" and really for a lot of books, I think let the book speak for itself, okay?
So announce it a week or two in advance, like definitely do everything you can once that timeframe approaches. Try to get some early support on board, anybody who can help you get the actual word out about the actual book that is now available for purchase. But don't try to invest a lot in a pre-order campaign. Like my advice is save your energy and attention for selling the book, pitching it far and wide, shouting it from the rooftops when it's available for people to read it because of that instant gratification factor. So a little bit of pre-order is good, but I wouldn't put a whole lot into it unless you are really trying to do something big and you have really prepared well for that.
That's my suggestion. Listeners, if you have a question, if there's something you're trying to figure out, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. We'll continue to feature them throughout the year. I love this ongoing dialogue of people who are all out there working towards things in different ways, but with similar goals. So thank you for being part of that.
Do come back tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
