I’m so thankful for the people who pre-ordered BIG ENOUGH. The book made a splash on launch day and was the #1 New Release in the category of home based-businesses.
I ran a pre-order campaign for the book to generate early interest and sales. And it worked. We sold over 450 copies before the book’s official launch. I count it as a success and learned a lot.
To encourage pre-orders, I offered a few tiers of incentives that included stickers and socks. Last week, I wrote a personal note to each person who pre-ordered and included their gift. It was a big project and one I enjoyed because writing a personal note of gratitude, by hand, feels right. It made me want to write more personal notes and hopefully improve my handwriting along the way.
I recently got to see the Big Enough socks in action and it was glorious:
Going into this phase of the book launch, a created a spreadsheet that includes names and email addresses of nearly everyone I know. Over the last two weeks, I emailed them all, one at a time. This ended up being quite a project. I sent hundreds of individual emails, all personalized, and focused on one thing: pre-orders for Big Enough.
As I’ve written before, pre-orders are a powerful way to generate buzz when the book launches and it’s up to me, the author, to make it happen. Once the book launches, there are options like advertising to achieve a similar effect.
Thankfully, I’m starting to some fruits of the effort. I don’t have direct access to pre-order sales numbers, but I watch the Amazon bestseller rank as an indication of how the book is doing relative to all books on Amazon.
You see in the graph above when the pre-order campaign started. That’s what I call the campaign bounce. By contacting people in my network, the book can rank in the top 35k before it’s ever released.
This project was a great opportunity to check-in with people I hadn’t seen in a long time. I now feel like many relationships have been rekindled. I’m so thankful to have the help of friends and family!
I write books and run a company called Common Craft. I recently moved from Seattle to a rural island. Here, I write about online business, book publishing, modern home construction, and occasionally, dumb jokes.
I write books and run a company called Common Craft. I recently moved from Seattle to a rural island. Here, I write about online business, book publishing, modern home construction, and occasionally, dumb jokes. 
