Marketing My Book
Now that Peacebuilding Starts at Home is in production, it’s time to (re)turn my attention to the truly challenging part of writing a book—marketing it.
These days, all authors have to market their own books.
In my case, marketing is particularly important because of the reasons that led me to write it. Sure, I want to sell lots of copies, but my real goal is to get as many Americans as possible to change the way they think and act when it comes to the conflicts roiling our country.
The Book Is An Invitation
That I have to get the marketing right is clear in the books first few lines. My copy editor or publisher may change them a bit, but, it will begin more or less like this:
Peacebuilding Starts at Home is an invitation masquerading as a book.
I will not be inviting you to come over to my house for a gourmet dinner or to be a plus one on a trip to some exotic and exciting vacation spot. Instead, I will be asking you to join me and the people you will meet in these pages in turning this country around.
By deciding what we want our country to be like.
By turning peace into peacebuilding which will make it a powerful tool that we all can use to begin changing life here at home.
By helping you find your own personal on-ramp onto our journey together.
By creating a movement that pulls the United States out of the rut it is in.
So, my challenge is to get my reader to accept my invitation. But to do so, they have to know about it in the first place. And, as you are about to see, many—perhaps most—of the people I want to reach would not normally pick up a book on peacebuilding let alone see themselves as peacebuilders.
In short, how do I get the invitation out there so that as many people as possible send me back an RSVP?
Book Marketing 101
Peacebuilding Starts at Home is by far the most ambitious book I’ve ever written and the first I’ve done with a general audience in mind. Nonetheless, it is my nineteenth book, so I didn’t get much of a buzz from hitting save for the last time and sending it off to my publisher.
Marketing it is a different story.
While I have enjoyed more than my share of commercial success with textbooks in both comparative politics and peace studies, I wrote for clearly defined audiences. What’s more my publishers had sales forces that knew how to market to the professors who assigned my books.
Now, like most authors, I have to take the lead in marketing my own book. As I’ve been somewhat surprised to learn, that’s the case for most authors these days in two key ways which I will focus on in the rest of this post.
First, no publisher is going to spend a lot of money promoting the work of an unproven trade book author, which is what I am. Given the marketplace, they shouldn’t be expected to.
Second, given what we want to accomplish with Peacebuilding Starts at Home, we will have to create a large part of its market from scratch, because most of the people we want to reach have little or no clue that they should read a book like mine.
We Aren’t Playing Softball
So, let me start with our (frankly) audacious goals which do not focus first and foremost on selling copies of my book, although we obviously want to do so.
As I point out in the first few pages, the book is part of a larger campaign in which we are inviting Americans to change the way we deal with problems. The Alliance for Pecebuilding (AfP) and its partners will be using the book and other tools to offer Americans what I earlier called on ramps for millions of Americans who want to do something constructive about all of those issues that have left so many of us feeling “politically, clinically depressed.”
We will only have succeed if the book and everything else we do convinced enough Americans that together we can create a country in which most people solve most of their problems without the use of force or violence most of the time—a line that finds its way into the book in one form or another in every chapter.
In a sense, AfP’s audience includes just about everyone. Mine is a bit smaller, since publishers will be the first to tell you that the number of people who read serious nonfiction books keeps getting smaller.
Still, we have set ourselves an ambitious, albeit arbitrary goal of selling at least 10,000 copies of Peacebuilding Starts at Home over the next year or so.
We do start with some markets that we should be able to reach pretty easily. That starts with AfP’s own membership and the thousands of people who already get our newsletter. Add to that the people who already read my work on Substack and Linkedin. We are assuming that the forty or so organizations that I profile in the book will do their part in getting the word about it out in their networks. Some, like Rotary, are big enough for us to reach that 10,000 plateau.
But these aren’t the audiences.
Our challenge in that respect is to get potential readers to see that reading my book—or others like it—is worth the time and effort. And that starts with getting the fact that books like mine and other tools that we will be creating onto their media radar screen.
I want to reach people like my sister or my therapist or my new neighbors or the people we see each week at the farmer’s market or others who do not now see themselves as peacebuilders but who will be needed as part of what will amount to a paradigm shift in the way Americans deal with their differences.
We have already begun identifying real world and on line venues where people who might be interested in what my book has to say tend to congregate. I started doing that in writing the book by talking about the ways we peacebuilders have begun to pivot and reach out to activists who prioritize climate change or economic inequality or immigration or racial justice or some issue other than conventional peacebuilding. We have begun identifying places where people who read books like mine tend to congregate, ranging from existing networks like the Next Big Idea Club to creating new ones by convening potential partners in the broader social change community (which, by the way, is a theme of the book itself).
To be honest, while all authors these days have to create their own markets, mine may be particularly hard to define especially if, as is my tendency, you want to find the equivalent of a magic wand that you can wave and immediately define your audience.
Instead, we will have to build it gradually, one small network at a time.
In the terminology used by Jane Friedman in her stunning writings on how authors can sell their own writing, I will spend the ten weeks before Peacebuilding Starts at Home comes out building its platform both about the book and about Peacebuilding Starts at Home, the movement.
What I Ask of You
That is also how you can help. Because you are reading these lines, you have a double role to play here. First, you share at least some of the goals we are talking about either in the book or the larger movement. Second, you have your own network of people who might benefit from reading the book.
Think about people you know who are frustrated with the current social and political paralysis and might be open to reading about and acting on alternatives to the status quo. The book won’t provide a road map of specific things its readers can do that will solve all of our country’s problems. No author can do that. But, if you know people who are looking for what the rock legend David Byrne calls reasons to be cheerful, they might find the book—or at least the organizations and individuals it profiles—worth their while.
As we get closer to what people in the industry call the “pub(lication) date,” you can expect to get information about pricing (it will be competitive), availability (everywhere on line), and opportunities to join in the larger Peacebuilding Starts at Home network.
In the meantime, I will be totally repurposing my own web site so that it revolves around the book and the broader initiative. Both the site and the book will have a study guide for book clubs. I have been experimenting with NetworkLM, an AI tool that has turned each chapter into remarkably insightful and occasionally funny podcasts which will end up on the web site. I will use my Substack, The Dot Connecters, the larger Substack community, and my Linkedin network to get the word out.
I will also start out in my own real life backyard. Gretchen and I have just moved into a new condo community whose residents will largely fit the profile of the kind of reader I want to reach. As people begin to move in and they ask me what I do ….
For now, all I ask of you is to think about how you can help get the word out about the book and the movement in your own network.
Of course, if you come up with ideas you think I should consider, let me know.
Don’t worry, more specific requests from me will be coming.
But there’s no need to hold your breath while you wait. I’d rather you went out and did some peacebuilding near your home.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Alliance for Peacebuilding or its members.