A client of mine is promoting his book on LinkedIn, on his website, and on YouTube. He writes articles about the ideas as we shape them. He posts videos. His circles have started asking when the book comes out. We’re still writing it.
I told him to start now, and he did. I tell all my authors to start promoting the day we sign the contract. Writing the book can take six to eight months, and those months are wasted if nobody’s talking about it. A book is only as successful as you promote it. Otherwise it sits there collecting dust and makes a great coffee table thing.
It’s interesting to watch, because it runs opposite to the way books usually die. A book sells into a relationship that already exists, and he’s building the relationship while the manuscript is still in interviews. Think of it as opening the restaurant’s reservation book six months before the kitchen is finished. By the time the doors open, every table is taken, and nobody had to be persuaded on opening night.
This one matters to me personally. When I wrote my own books, I found out that selling them is a whole job of its own, and I’m not a marketer. Watching a client build his readership while we’re still in interviews is exactly what I wish more authors did, and it frustrates me how few of them start before the book is printed.
Why do most books launch to silence?
Because the author waited. The book is good, the cover is good, the author posts about it, and forty people react. Six months of writing meets an audience of forty, and the author concludes books don’t sell. What happened is that the relationship the book needed to sell into was never built, so the launch had nothing to land on.
The author did the hard part. Months of interviews, drafts and revisions went into that book, and it reached forty people because the launch plan consisted of hoping.
A book sells to people who already read you, trust you, and were told the book was coming. That relationship takes months. It can’t start on launch day, and you can’t buy it on launch day either. You have to build it while the book is in progress, the one period when most authors are too busy writing to think about it.
How did the book promotion plan come up during ghostwriting?
In a break. A ghostwriting project runs on interview sessions, many of them, over months, and every so often I stop the chapter and ask three questions. Are we still meeting the goal? How are we going to promote this at the end? What does the client need to be doing now? Those breaks run fifteen minutes, sometimes a whole session, and this plan came out of one of them.
He had a clear goal and a network. The obvious move was to use both before the manuscript existed, and the only reason it wasn’t already happening was that nobody had said it out loud.
I said it. He started the next week. That’s the value of a writer who asks about the book instead of only about the chapter.
Why does the marketing conversation belong at the start?
Because the ghostwriter is normally gone at manuscript delivery. The book is handed over, the engagement ends, and whether it works from there is on the author. So the marketing conversation has to happen while the writer is still in the room, at the start and again during the project, while there’s time to build what the launch needs. That includes PR and media agencies. Go to them once you have an outline to put in front of them, and the outline plus the first three chapters is enough to send. Lead with an executive summary, because I learned a long time ago that they only read the first couple of pages.
That produces an uncomfortable duty. When the goal requires an audience and the client has none and no intention of building one, someone has to say so before the money moves. A content mill won’t. An AI cannot. A hybrid shop is paid on the print run and has no reason to. The honest ghostwriter asks whether the book can do the job, and says no when the answer is no. I’ve written about that conversation in the guide to ghostwriting.
If the goal needs an audience you have no plan to build, you’ll hear it from me before you sign, and I expect the same bluntness back.
What does promoting an unfinished book look like?
It looks like the client talking about what he’s learning.
He’s not selling a book. He’s writing articles about the ideas we’re shaping in the interviews, posting short videos on the same themes, and mentioning in passing that a book is coming. His network hears the argument in pieces over months, and by the time the book exists they know what it says and want the full version.
That’s the reservation book. Each article is a table booked. Each video is another. The launch is the night the doors open to a room that’s already full, and the launch post informs people who have already decided instead of trying to persuade people who haven’t.
The other version, the one I have seen
A good book, a proud author, and then nothing. No audience, no plan, no readers. The book was fine. It was the same book it would have been with a launch behind it. The variable was whether anyone planned for the day after it printed, and nobody had, because the plan was to write the book and see what happened. What happens is nothing.
The accountant in an earlier story is that version. He loved his book and it didn’t sell, because selling requires an audience that was never built. The client in this story won’t have that problem, and the only difference between them is a fifteen-minute conversation that happened in one project and not the other.
Hard deadlines are common in my work: a birthday, a conference, a startup launch. A date on the calendar does nothing for a book if nobody is waiting on the other side of it, and this client will have a crowd waiting.
What the client posts, and what he does not
He doesn’t post excerpts. A book that leaks its chapters before publication gives away the reason to buy it. He posts the questions the book answers and the short version of his answers, and leaves the long version for the book.
He posts the stories behind the ideas, his to tell in any format. And he mentions that a book is coming, without a date, so the anticipation doesn’t expire.
Get a cover out there too. Post two candidate covers and ask your network, do you like A or B? You don’t care what they think. People react to it, they tell you they like A better, and your LinkedIn connections get more engaged. I’ve seen people post up to four covers and ask which one wins. I’d stick with two, because making good covers is a pain in the butt.
The wrong kind of promotion trains the audience to expect the book for free. The right kind trains them to expect a fuller answer than the posts give, and to want it. He’s doing the right kind, and it’s working because the posts are good on their own and better as a trailer.
Audience first, argument second, book third
That’s the order that works. Find the problem your readers keep raising. Answer it in public until they start quoting you. Then write the book that answers it at length. By launch day the readers are waiting and the title is familiar. Most authors run it in reverse, and then wonder why a good book did nothing.
The posts themselves should open with the reader’s problem. Your story comes later. The first post says you’re writing a book and why the reader should care. The next one restates the problem people are facing, with some empathy for it. Then you mention you’ve been living the solution for years. The reader is the hero, and you’re the guide leading them through it.
A ghostwriting project is the ideal time to run it in the right order, because the interviews generate the material for the public argument as a byproduct. Every session produces ideas the client can post about that week. The book and the audience grow together, and they arrive together.
The session summaries help here. After each interview I turn the transcript into a summary document, with AI’s help, and send it to the client. He gets his own ideas back in writing and organized, and that’s raw material for the week’s posts. For clients who are open about having a ghostwriter, I suggest a short post after a session: I just sat down with my ghostwriter, we talked about the book, and here’s what I learned. I’ll write it for them if they want, because six months until publication is a lot of time to be promoting.
Plan the promotion in the first conversation, with the writer, and check it again in the middle. If your book needs an audience, start building it before the manuscript exists, and use the writing itself as the material. The Book Discovery Intensive settles the goal, the reader, and the plan for the day after the book prints, before a word is written. If you want a second opinion on yours, send me a direct message on LinkedIn. Part of The Publishing and Marketing Hub.
Authors who wait until the book is printed to look for readers are throwing away the best months they’ll ever have for building an audience, and a ghostwriter who never raises the question is letting them do it. Start talking about the ideas now, while the manuscript is still in interviews, and let the book arrive to people who asked for it.
