07 Aug 56. Promote This Book Before You Write Your Next Book

As you write your book, you’re almost guaranteed to find more ideas for future books.

Your creative juices are flowing, and you start to see new book ideas everywhere.

But I need you to pump the brakes.

Before you write your next book, let’s take a minute to reflect on what you’re doing with your current or most recent writing project.

In this episode, I share why you might want to avoid leaping into that next book too soon.

Mentioned in This Episode

Jump-Start: A free guide to help you jump-start your nonfiction book.

Complete Author Coaching (1:1 Coaching)

Episode Transcript

Hey there and welcome to Nothing but the Words. I’m your author coach, Candice L Davis.

I hope your week and your writing are going well.

If you’ve written your first book already, then you know it can be an intense process.

You spend weeks, months, or sometimes even years, immersed in the world of your book.

Once you’ve written the manuscript, you read it over and over.

You read it to make your own revisions.

You read it after your beta readers give you feedback.

You read over it before it goes to your editor.

You read over it after it comes back from the editor.

Honestly, if you’re not kind of tired of reading your own book before you publish it, you probably have more work to do.

But there’s an interesting phenomenon I notice in many of my clients.

Somewhere along the line—usually just about when they’re finishing the first draft of their manuscript—sometimes sooner, sometimes later, they start talking about writing their next book.

In fact, they want to renew for coaching so they can jump right into the next project.

It’s perfectly natural.

For a lot of us, writing a book ignites our creative process. 

You start to see new book ideas everywhere.

You get in the habit of processing events through the lens of an author.

You make new connections and develop new philosophies. 

You realize you have more to say than you can possibly fit in one book.

Here’s the thing though.

Your first book, or the book you’re currently writing, hasn’t gotten started in the world yet.

Writing your book will make you better at telling your story.

It will help you glean new insights from your experiences.

And revise or refine your strategies and philosophies.

Writing a great book will transform you—and there’s tremendous value in that.

But unless you’re writing just for yourself, much of your book’s value comes from landing in the hands of the right readers.

Just like the process of writing your book is transformative for you, reading it can and often should be transformative for your readers.

The best person to tell readers about your book is you.

Even if you hire a marketing team . . .

Even if you have a social media manager . . . 

Even if you have a great PR rep . . . 

The person who has to show up on a podcast, radio show, or TV program to talk about your book is you, the author.

The one who needs to step onstage and share about your book is you.

The person who has to write and submit articles related to your book is—you guessed it—you and only you.

Don’t get me wrong. 

That means you need to commit to telling the world about your book.

Commit to a promotion period of many months.

While your promotion, in most cases, will start before you launch your book, it can’t end after you hit #1 in some sub-sub-category on Amazon, throw a launch party, and go live on IG a few times.

Those of you who are parents of adult children know you can’t just raise them to eighteen, kick them out, and say have a nice life.

They still need your support and your guidance and your cheerleading.

The same goes for your book.

You’ve raised it from idea to published book and sent it out into the world.

But it doesn’t stop needing you once you’ve released it.

If you have time to continue to promote your today book and get started writing your tomorrow book, that’s fantastic.

However, most authors don’t.

Most of my clients have full-time jobs, businesses to run, or both.

Many of them have families that require their time and attention.

When my clients have their next book idea before they’ve even finished the first, I encourage them to create a document or get a notebook for that second idea.

Keep all the notes for tomorrow’s book in one place.

But stay focused on today’s book.

Give it the time and attention it deserves.

Maximize your book’s potential by promoting it long after the confetti has been swept up from your launch party.

Your book is more than an event.

It’s an asset for your business.

It’s a representation of you, your knowledge, and your experience.

And it’s the solution to someone else’s problem or a tool they can use to achieve their goals—even if that goal is to just escape everyday life for a few hours.

I don’t want to discourage anyone from writing the next book.

I just want to encourage you to really give enough love and attention to each book as you release it into the world.

Notice how big publishing houses rarely release more than one book per year from an author.

Trust me. Many of those authors can and do write more than one book a year.

But they give each book time to find its audience and get some momentum before they release the next one.

There are some exceptions to this rule, but those exceptions are for the kinds of authors, many of whom are self-published, who publish a series of books.

Many of them put out multiple books every year.

And most of them write full-time.

If that’s your situation, great. Go for it.

But if you have a job or a business to run, use your time wisely.

If you create a specific marketing strategy for your book, you can always outsource some of the work.

But at the end of the day, no one can represent your book the way you do.

Invest the time upfront so today’s book can get momentum with the readers who are waiting for it.

Plant to market and promote your book full out for at least six months, maybe longer.

In the process, you’ll build an audience that wants to hear more from you.

Tomorrow’s book—the one you feel inspired to write right away—will still be there for you to write.

I promise.

That’s all for this week, my friends. If you enjoyed this episode, follow me on Instagram @candiceldavis for more writing tips and inspiration.

Thanks for listening to Nothing but the Words. I’m Your Author Coach Candice L Davis. And I’ll see you next time.