Post more. Get on podcasts. Build your list. All true, all useless — because none of it tells you what to do first, what to skip, or where your particular book is going to break.
A launch isn't a checklist. It's seven decisions that depend on each other. Get Purpose wrong and every choice after it is a guess. Get Pace wrong and a good plan dies of exhaustion in month four. The elements are the order of operations.
Every engagement runs on these seven.
Why the book exists, and what it's meant to unlock.
Every author can tell you what their book is about. Far fewer can tell you what it's for — the practice it opens, the company it anchors, the movement it starts, the room it gets you into. Purpose is the business case underneath the manuscript. Settle it first, because every decision downstream is a guess until you do.
The reach you already have and haven't counted.
Your follower count isn't your problem. Platform is the inventory of where your voice already lives — the contact list you've never audited, the Slack groups you're in, the podcast hosts who'd say yes, the colleagues with newsletters of their own. You are not behind. You are under-leveraged. Those are two different problems, and only one of them is fixable in 90 days.
The deal — and exactly where your publisher's help ends.
Traditional, hybrid, or your own imprint: the choice sets your timeline, your budget, and your leverage before you've done anything else. This element is about knowing what your publisher will actually do, what they'll say they'll do, and where the line falls. Everything past that line is yours, and most authors find it far earlier than they expected.
Media, and the vendor decisions around it.
Who to hire, when to hire them, and what they'll genuinely deliver. A publicist is not a strategy — and the wrong one is an expensive way to find that out. This element is about buying media help intelligently, briefing it properly, or deciding clearly that you don't need it. More launch budgets die here than anywhere else.
The campaign before the campaign.
Launch week is decided months before launch week. Preorders are where the math happens — incentives, bulk buys, partner activations, the mechanics that turn diffuse interest into a date-stamped number. It's the highest-leverage window in the whole calendar, and it's the one authors most reliably start too late to use.
Sequence, timing, and not running out.
A list of good tactics is not a campaign. Pace is the order and the timing — what happens nine months out, ninety days out, launch week, and the month after. It's also the honest conversation about what you can sustain. Launches rarely fail from bad ideas. They fail because the author ran out of energy in month four and nobody planned for that.
A book's life is longer than its launch window.
Launch week is a moment. The book is an asset. Perennial is what it keeps doing at one year, three years, ten — the speaking, the clients, the authority, the next book it makes possible. Most launch advice stops at week two. Week two is where the compounding starts.
Every plan has a point where it stalls. Not because it was wrong — because somewhere in it there's an ask you don't want to make, an email you've rewritten four times, a name you keep not reaching out to.
Friction is a real element of every launch, and naming it is part of the work. For each move on your plan, we map where the stall is, the story you're likely to tell yourself about it, and the smallest first action that gets past the freeze. It's the difference between a plan that lives on your desk and a plan that ships.
All seven, your book, one day. You leave with a written roadmap — what to do, when, and in what order.
The framework applied month over month, with my judgment on every decision — while your team does the executing.
The complete engagement: I build and run your launch end to end, bringing in my hand-picked specialists where your launch needs them. For authors who want a true partner.