

Behind the scenes of a book launch - byosko
http://leananalyticsbook.com/behind-the-scenes-of-a-book-launch/

======
patio11
That's actually fairly sophisticated (bordering on overkill, but then again it
is overkill with a marketing purpose given that they're analytics folks...)

If I were going to do it:

1) Is my book about sadomasochism? If "no", I would reconsider "Submit" as
button copy. People like "Get My Free X" a lot more, which leads into...

2) "Join the conversation" sounds like something that only a marketing person
would love. If you want to offer something to convince people to join your
list -- and you do! -- promise them immediate value from it. There _has_ to be
an early chapter you can give away for free. If your publishers are too 19th
century to cotton to that, a) they should be fired but b) you can produce
something short & actionable which is spiritually aligned with the book and
then give _that_ away.

3) Microcopy to the general effect of "We won't spam you" pretty much
invariably works. It's also a good idea to set expectations as to what kind of
email they'll be getting and how frequently.

~~~
danso
Took me a few beats to get #1, but point well expressed :)

------
acroll
Yeah, it's overkill because the book is about this stuff. Normally this much
analysis is narcissism. We even left some stuff out (like the Facebook page
traffic and ramp-up.)

Agree completely about getting the button wording right. We'll try some
different buttons; the 37Signals example (where they changed from "buy" to
"see plans and pricing" and doubled conversions) shows this is something to
spend a lot of time on. Candidly, we had only a few days to get things live,
so they're still rough around the edges.

Our publishers are O'Reilly, so they're delightfully open (encouraging, even)
about sharing all kinds of content. And there's simply too much for the book
to hold. Great point that we should make some content just for list
subscribers.

We're in the middle of interviews with a bunch of big tech companies about the
metrics they watched in the early days, and we should probably put some of
that aside just for subscribers.

Thanks for the feedback.

