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[Life After College Book Project] Superbowl, Super book! Sent Sunday, February 6, 2011

(Such a cheesy subject line, huh? Couldn't help myself! Consider this the Nachos of updates - lots of random little bits of goodness all thrown onto one pile.)

Hi Everyone,

Happy Superbowl Sunday! This is officially one of my favorite holidays of the year. Yes, I have just officially declared it a national holiday. And don't worry, this newsletter is on scheduled delivery -- I'm off watching the game somewhere, as hopefully you are too!

Our official countdown to launch is: 1 month, 3 weeks, and 1 day. As David of Launch 52 recently said to me in an interview, "So, I see your book comes out next month." Next month?! NEXT MONTH!! It has been a distant speck on the horizon for so long that I almost didn't register what he said. When I wrote the first draft of the book in 2008, I thought for sure I would self-publish and have it out by graduation season in 2009. That came and went, as did graduation season of 2010. Those were real rough patches, ones I spent KICKING myself for letting yet another year pass by. But here we are, February 2011, and my book comes out NEXT MONTH. What a ride...

There are two questions almost everyone asks when I tell them I have a book coming out: "Is your publisher sending you on a book tour?" and "How are you going to market your book?" For the former: no, but I am sending myself. Holla!

For the latter: for fear that I scare you away with my to-do list of hundreds and hundreds of spreadsheet rows, let me summarize as follows: it's like buying lottery tickets (with various marketing efforts as tickets). Instead of buying one ticket, sitting on it and hoping for the best, I'm buying as many as I possibly can until the launch. Online promo, offline outreach, networking, speaking, you name it - I'm working on it. I may not finish everything I want to get done, but I'll have built myself a fort of tickets that will hopefully pay-off! The book Guerrilla Marketing for Writers covers this concept brilliantly.

Oh! And in case you missed it on the blog, be sure to check-out the video of me opening the box with my book for the very first time. Such a fun moment, and it was so great to feel like I could experience with all of you by capturing it on camera.

Mad love!
Jenny

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PERSONAL UPDATES

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I'd love your input on two things:

Book Trailer Videos! I have a blog post going up tomorrow with the backstory of how my "failed" online date from December turned into a great friendship. Although we weren't a romantic match (and I've since signed-off for good), he just so happened to be a four-time Emmy award winning film producer, and generously offered to film and edit my book trailer. Amazing, right?! We worked on this thing for 40+ hours over the last few weeks, and I'm really happy with the result. Now the question is: which version to post on the Amazon page for the book? Version One is ~3 minutes (with more narrative from me and more quotes from college grads), and Version Two is ~2 minutes. Which one do you like better? Fill out this form and let me know (it will tally the results on the confirmation page).
Search inside this book - Alright, I need your feedback again. I requested that my publisher ask Amazon to enable the "Search Inside this Book" feature. The good news is that it's now available. The not-so-sure news is that they've scanned almost the entire book! I don't want to be a digital curmudgeon, but I'm not sure if it makes sense for sales to leave almost the entire book up for perusal. I would LOVE your feedback. Please vote here and tell me what you think.

Author Central - Snapshot of my pre-order ranking. Publishers are notoriously slow about sharing sales statistics -- some authors I've talked to only got updates twice a year. HUH?! Coming from an environment as metrics-driven as Google, I would expect some kind of sales dashboard where you could see updated sales figures every day, then match those statistics to various marketing efforts. If publishers want to sell books, wouldn't the best way be to give authors frequent feedback and information as motivation? Thankfully Amazon recently launched a solution -- it's not perfect, but light years ahead of where things were before.

Author Central provides statistics from BookScan by geography and by week. From Amazon: "Figures are provided by Nielsen BookScan and include approximately 75% of all retail print book sales in the U.S., including most of Amazon print sales." Because the book isn't in stores yet and BookScan doesn't track pre-orders, I can't see much yet. However, Author Central does provide "Amazon Bestsellers Rank History" which is an interesting graph. It shows what number I'm ranked (over time) out of 8 million+ books. Click here to see my stats for January - notice the spike on January 22? That was the day after I posted my video opening the box of books. Cool, huh? On that day my book was ranked 42,974 -- it's no bestseller status, but hey! We're still in the pre-order phase.

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