From Charlie Hoehn
A founder I’ve been working with for the past year has pre-sold more than 2,000 copies of his book, and he doesn’t have a million followers or a PR campaign.
What he has is a community he built over years of doing the kind of work people remember. Past clients, former students, organizations he’s keynoted for, friends who experienced his work firsthand and stayed in touch about it. When his book was ready, he started reaching out to those people one at a time, by personal DM and email, with no mass blast at any point in the process.
His name is Craig Gauthier. The book is Rules: Optional, launching June 9, and his story is the cleanest demonstration of what I want to write about in this first edition.
You don’t need an audience before you launch a book. You need a community that already knows, likes, and trusts you, and you need to give them a reason to be part of what you’re building.
I’ll come back to Craig in a minute.
By the time launch day arrives, the real launch has already happened.
The mistake I see smart, accomplished people make again and again is treating launch week like the moment that determines whether the book worked. The book comes out, you send an email, you post on LinkedIn, you watch Amazon rank for 72 hours, and whatever happens that week is the number you measure yourself against.
But that’s not when the launch happens. The launch happens in the 8 to 12 weeks before, and what you see on the actual launch day is the consequence of what you did during that earlier window.
If you’ve done the work, launch day looks like a victory lap. If you haven’t, launch day looks like the email everyone has received at least once. Hey, it’s been six years, I wrote a book, please buy it and review it today. Nobody knew it was coming, nobody feels involved, and the ask lands cold.
My philosophy on launch week, which I repeat to every author I work with until they’re sick of hearing it, is that it should be the most fun week of your life rather than the most stressful one. You should be celebrating with people you love, focused on reviews, enjoying a milestone that a lot of authors never actually get to enjoy.
If you’re frantic during launch week, something went wrong months earlier. What goes right months earlier is co-creation.
Co-creation is what I call the phase where you invite your audience into the book before the book exists in any finished form.
It means surveying them on the title and the subtitle, showing them two cover concepts and asking which one they’d pick up off a table, sending them your table of contents and asking which chapter they’d read first, running a poll on two taglines and sharing the results with everyone who voted, telling them the top five problems they sent you and saying I’m addressing these in the book.
None of this is polling in the corporate research sense. It’s much smaller and more personal than that, a series of micro-commitments that together produce readers who feel a sense of ownership in a book they didn’t write.
It’s a lot easier to make people feel like winners than it is to persuade them to be buyers.
The data on this is wild. Eric, the guy who runs manuscripts.com, shared the numbers with me. When an author does this co-creation work in the months before launch, the average reader tells six other people about the book. When the author skips it and announces the book for the first time on launch week, the average reader tells zero.
That’s the gap, and it’s the entire game, because word of mouth is the only reliable engine of long-term book sales and word of mouth requires people who feel like they had a hand in something.
When someone votes on your subtitle, they have a tiny stake in whether your book does well, and they’ll talk about it accordingly. When someone gets an email out of nowhere asking them to buy a book they’ve never heard of, written by someone they haven’t heard from in a year, they won’t do it, and they won’t lose any sleep over ignoring the ask.
The version of co-creation that works isn’t manipulative, and it isn’t pretending you don’t know what you want to write. The book is yours and the vision is yours. What you’re giving readers is a set of small decisions where their input actually matters: which version of the subtitle lands harder, which of two covers feels more like the book they want to read, which of five problems you’ve heard them describe deserves a whole chapter.
What you’re doing in those weeks is building a relationship with the people who will carry it into the world when it’s done.
He wrote his book three times before it was the book it needed to be. The first draft was bad enough that brutally honest friends ripped it apart, the second became an academic doctrine stuffed with case studies and research that nobody wanted to read, and the third time he came to us, and we restructured the manuscript into a real narrative.
While he was writing that third draft, he ran the kind of co-creation work I’ve been describing. More than 300 people read, commented on, or helped shape the manuscript. When he later shared the first chapter as both a PDF and an audio file, 71% chose to listen, which is the kind of detail that tells you something about the audience and the form before launch day arrives.
He cleaned his old contact list down from 100,000 names to 30,000, and then to 4,835 active readers, then started reaching out to those people one at a time: personal DMs and emails to prior clients, university connections from five years of teaching, organizations he’d keynoted for. No mass blasts at any point.
The response surprised him. As he put it on a recent call, “It’s crazy. I couldn’t believe how many people actually opened the email.” His open rate hit 84%, and those opens turned into more than 2,000 pre-sales. Bulk orders started coming in from corporate clients, universities, and schools. The book began moving months before its launch date.
He’s now in foreign rights conversations with publishers in Saudi Arabia, France, and Germany, and the book made the rounds at the London Book Fair.
What matters more to me than the pre-sales count is that Craig isn’t chasing a bestseller list.
He told me on the same call that the goal was never to hit number one in week one, check a box, and disappear. He wanted to build the best book possible and let it compound. The pre-sales are a side effect of doing the work the right way and trusting the math to follow.
“I’m super proud of what we’ve done,” he said on that call, and the work he’s most proud of is the book itself, and the way the people who shaped it are now the people carrying it forward.
His Founder’s Edition, limited to 500 copies, launched April 28. The global launch follows June 9, and the paperback goes worldwide September 2.
By the time launch week arrives, his book will already have outsold most of the books on his shelf, and he won’t have done a single thing that looks like marketing in the conventional sense. That’s what the 8 to 12 weeks before a launch is supposed to look like.
Here’s what makes this particular week a good week to write about all of this.
Four more of our authors at Author.Inc are launching books between now and mid-June, and all four are running a version of the same approach Craig is. Michele Hammann, Chris Jennings, Jason Connell, and Chris Perkin.
She’s a CPA who’s spent years guiding business owners through the process of taking their companies public, and the book turns that expertise into a framework any business owner can use. She’s also built an AI-powered consulting product drawn from the book itself.
After thirty years in sales consulting and two business books, this third one is a personal one for his 31-year-old daughter, a book about how to spend the 168 hours in your week so that the life you want is the life you end up with.
A licensed psychotherapist with a decade of stage time and a blog that reaches a large monthly readership, writing for high-functioning people who have done the things they’re supposed to do and still aren’t well.
He spent 50 years in pharmaceutical services and recently stepped into the role of Executive Chairman at Altasciences after 15 years as CEO. The book is for people ready to take ownership of their careers, written by someone who built his by going off-script.
What’s striking is how different these four look on the surface and how similar they act in the weeks before their launch dates.
Michele has been quietly seeding interest among the business owners in her existing client base, inviting them into conversations about the framework before the book arrives.
Chris Jennings is running early drafts past his daughter and her peers, the exact group the book was written for.
Jason has spent 20 to 30 hours on his table of contents alone, running it through bullseye readers until he was getting consistent yeses instead of the mixture of maybes and nos he started with, which is its own argument about how the table of contents functions more like marketing than like structure. I’ll write about that in a later edition.
Chris Perkin is writing into a career transition, and the people who’ve been in his orbit for decades are the same people the book is for.
None of them are waiting for launch week to tell their audience about the book, and by the time each book comes out, the people in their orbit will have been watching it get built for months. That’s the work.
One reason I want to write about all of this now is that Craig and the four authors I’ve just told you about are doing the opposite of what I see most often.
Outside Author.Inc, I’ve watched too many accomplished people lose a year of preparation time because they thought the only thing that mattered was launch week. They finish the manuscript, send it to the printer, wait until the book is in their hands, and only then start thinking about how to tell the world. By that point the window is mostly closed, the book launches to silence, and they wonder what went wrong.
Nothing went wrong in the writing, which is almost never the problem. The decisions that determine whether a book actually works for a business get made in the months before and after launch, not during the week of.
This is what Books That Scale is about. Not launches specifically, and not marketing tactics, but the set of decisions that separate books that compound into real business outcomes from books that quietly sit on a shelf.
Some editions will be about pre-launch, some will be about covers, some will be about what happens six months after a book comes out and nobody talks about, some will be about specific authors, and some will be about patterns I’m watching across the whole field.
I’ve spent 17 years doing this. 4 New York Times bestsellers edited, more than 500 authors worked with, books that changed their author’s life, and books that didn’t. The pattern separating the two is the thing I keep writing about, from whatever angle feels most useful.
If you’re thinking about writing a book, or you’re in the middle of one, I want to ask you something. Have you started inviting your readers in yet? Not with a big announcement, not with a landing page, but with one small question.
It could be something as simple as which of these two subtitles feels more like the book you’d want to read? The wording barely matters, as long as the question makes the person on the other end feel like their answer affects what gets built.
If you haven’t, you have time. Starting sooner is better than starting later, because the work compounds the longer it runs, and if you wait until launch week, you’re hoping one week alone will carry something that was never going to be carried that way.
And if your book is already out there, the same principle still applies in a different form. A lot of published authors I know are sitting on a launched book they treat as a finished project rather than a working asset. The launch ended, the email list went quiet, and the book settled into whatever shelf it landed on.
The mistake there is measuring the book by the wrong number. Copies sold is the most visible metric and the least useful one for the kind of author this newsletter is for.
The real return on a business book is everything that happens because the book exists: the keynote you get invited to give because someone in the audience read it, the advisory role that materializes because a founder handed your book to their board, the partnership conversation that opens with “I read your chapter on this,” the client who self-qualifies before you ever meet because they already know how you think.
Those returns don’t arrive on launch week. They arrive over the years that follow, and they only arrive if the book is positioned to produce them. The asset is already in your hands. The question is whether you’ve stopped working it.
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