2026-06-18 17:03:00
[A long riff on book publishing with (perhaps) wide applicability to your work as well.]
Publishing is different from writing—it’s the hard work of creating the conditions to help people get in sync, move forward, and get to where they’re headed.
The best reason to publish a non-fiction business or how-to book in 2026 is to change lives. Transformation is possible.
Transformation can happen, but only if the book ends up in the right hands for the right reasons.
Today, it’s harder than ever to pull that off. Tim Ferriss shares the numbers. We have a glut of information, but not nearly enough action. I’ve been at this for forty years, but the change this time is significant.
The number of books in this category continues to expand, but their total impact has not. At the same time, more books are being purchased by more people—the long tail is real. Publishing a book is super easy now, but publishing one that works is harder than ever.
Authors and publishers get stuck on the gap between interest and action. Too often, we don’t act until it’s too late in the process.
The author’s job in publishing begins long before pub day.
There are three pillars:
The first one gets way too much discussion, energy, and noise. Promotion gets the word out. Promotion can easily become all-consuming, and it can also become selfish. The promotion part of the equation asks, “have you seen my new book?” Promotion is everywhere, so we come to believe that it matters.
Activation creates the tension that answers the promotion question with, “I’ll go grab a copy.”
And conversation is the unsung part of every single hit book in this genre: “I need my friends to read this.”
Successful publishing, then, looks like this: Generate awareness. Create tension that leads to engagement with the work. Deliver an idea that works better for the reader when it’s shared and discussed. Reader traction leads to the network effect. The transformations compound, and the book becomes a foundation of culture and alignment.
That’s the work of publishing. Each component matters, not just the first one.
I’d break promotion into a few components:
Permission: When you can deliver anticipated, personal, and relevant messages to the people who want to get them, you’ve earned attention, not stolen it. Letting people who read your blog or listen to your podcast know about your new book is mutually beneficial. This is a trust that’s not to be taken lightly.
Shared permission: When you appear on someone else’s podcast or in the media, you’re bringing the message of your book to people who trust the host. The paradox is that the more trusted the media channel, the more difficult it is for you to appear when it suits you.
Buzz: This is a side effect of a good story and a medium that wants to carry it. In the hyper-parallel world of social media, there are an infinite number of tiny media outlets, and when they start to vibrate at the same frequency, buzz occurs. This is 5% preparation and 95% luck.
Hustle and Hype: Burning bridges and crossing lines just because it’s important to you. Please don’t. No one ever ends up glad they did this. It might not feel like hustle to the hustler, but if the person you’re targeting with your hype feels hustled, then that’s what’s happening.
But promotion is not worth much if it doesn’t translate into people actually purchasing and reading your book. Activation overcomes inertia, fear, and inconvenience. Activation energy leads to someone not only buying a book, but reading it.
Most publishers have someone who does publicity and promotion. Most marketers think about their job in the same way. Where are the teams that focus on activation?
In two recent book launches, I worked to create awareness with a record-breaking podcast tour. Each time I appeared on more than fifty podcasts on launch day. It took months of recording sessions and the kind support of some of the best podcasters in the world to pull this off.
Together we reached millions of people in just a few days. And yet, very few of these listeners bought a book as a result of a podcast. The math might be 1,000,000 YouTube interview views equals a hundred books sold.
The common-sense math is simple: Over the last two decades, hours spent listening to podcasts, blog posts and videos about non-fiction topics is exponentially higher than it was, but sales in the category are flat or down.
Podcast appearances often solve the problem of what’s in the book (“oh, I heard it, I get it”) as opposed to creating useful and generous tension that leads to a read.
[Let me pause for a second here and clarify: If you can effectively give your idea away without writing and publishing a book, please do! Most of my blog posts reach more people than my books do, and I keep them as posts because that’s the best way to get my point across. But if it’s worth publishing a book around a set of ideas, it’s probably not easily translated into a thirty-minute podcast. Buying, reading, holding, shelving, sharing–these are opportunities the book has to amplify its impact.]
Now, consider the idea of a knock-knock book. This is a book with a secret. The world asks about it (knock knock) and the answer is, “buy the book.” This was a big part of publishing for a long time—if you want to know, you needed to read the book. But now that the answer is free, online, there’s not a lot of reason left to buy this sort of book… If all a book has is a secret, it won’t have the secret for long. TLDR.
Instead, the most resilient books in this category serve a different purpose. They’re shareable. They amplify a network. They serve as an instigator and a totem, a device that allows one reader to share insights with another, all in service of getting in sync. Books are souvenirs for some purchasers, but tools for most of us.
The step after activation is the one with the highest leverage: Conversation.
Successful books in this category don’t sell by the copy; they sell by the carton.
How will my organization, my team or my relationships improve if we all read this book? Can we talk about these ideas and put them to work together?
This is why Purple Cow and The Dip were two of my bestselling books.
When David and Brian wrote The Dip into Billions, they were using it as a shorthand. The judge was saying, “we need to talk about this nuanced idea, here’s an anchor.” The book becomes the foundation for a conversation that needed to happen.
Books that matter over time almost always fit this description: Atomic Habits, In Search of Excellence, Grit, The War of Art, The Let Them Theory, Mindset, and Big Magic… practical books that stand for something and offer a foundation for shared exploration and possibility.
You can do all the promotion and activation you want, but if your book doesn’t support conversation, it will soon fade away.
Have you seen my book? →
I’ll grab a copy →
I need my friends to read this →
My circle is using this as a tool.
Don’t tell me about your promotional strategy. Talk to me about activation and build conversation into your work from the start.
“On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.” Stewart Brand, 1984.
The two ideas don’t have to fight with each other. Information isn’t enough. It’s transformation and conversation that fuel our future.
2026-06-17 17:03:00
It’s pretty astonishing how far people will go to announce various forms of status:
The list has little to do with money spent or money in the bank.
Humans care about status and affiliation. We’ve spent our lives being very good at noticing both.
2026-06-16 17:03:00
There are more than a million podcasts. The good news is that it’s easy to start one.
The top 1% of all podcasts account for 99% of all downloads.
That means that if your goal is reach, the long tail isn’t going to help much. The short head, even in a medium as wide open as this, dominates consumption. Lots of podcasts to choose from, but most people don’t choose.
Chris Anderson didn’t call the theory the ‘short head’, even though it’s the viral hits that everyone focuses on. The long tail is where most of the content (books, videos, small businesses, political ideas) land.
The long tail may be exactly where you want to be. But don’t hang out there if you need to reach the masses. The goal of reaching the masses is rarely compatible with the math of the long tail.
Someone is going to win that lottery, but it probably won’t be us.
2026-06-15 17:03:00
When tech shows up, it offers a shortcut and convenience.
You can use Google Maps to direct you somewhere without paying much attention to the surroundings.
You can use Claude to write your marketing copy and get a better-than-mediocre result the first try.
You can look for a gift on Amazon, pick the first match, and be pretty sure it’ll do the job.
Tech adoption often focuses on making things easier, simpler, and pre-decided.
And yet… we can also decide to use tech to do more work, insert more humanity, and amplify flexibility. We don’t try to get our time back, we try to figure out how to leverage the time we’ve got.
When a film director uses AI to create storyboards, it’s a chance to generate multiple approaches to a scene, not just one. When we sit with all the data Google Maps offers us for a trip, we might plan a less direct route, with more stops and detours, simply because we now know what our options are. And once we know what the mediocre and average marketing copy looks like, we put in the time (and take the risks) to go to edges we never would have had the resources to explore in the old days.
The best tech gives us a chance to work harder on the parts that matter to our customers and to us.
Here’s the simple fork in the road:
Professionals and organizations that use AI to save time, cut costs, and lay people off are taking a lazy road to failure and irrelevance.
Those who use it to do harder, braver, and more powerful work, who figure out how to create more value and charge more for it, and who end up hiring more people to do so, will be defining our future.
2026-06-14 17:03:00
No one cares about it as much as the person who’s planning it.
Some folks waited in line for the first iPhone, but not many.
It’s tempting to try to bend the curve and put the ‘grand’ into ‘grand’ opening. But that usually creates disappointment. In any population, only a few folks get satisfaction out of going first.
The focused work of launch day, then, isn’t to maximize turnout. It’s to get the right people to come.
Not just people who like to go first, but folks who are eager to give you the benefit of the doubt, and those that are focused on spreading the word. Not because it’s good for you, but because it’s good for them.
People like you.
The Newton had a huge launch day, one of the most successful consumer electronic devices of its time. But no one ended up recommending it, so it faded away.
Launch day matters when distribution is scarce. If a movie opens poorly, the theatre puts a different film in next week. But most of the time, planting the right seeds in the right place is more important than hustling for noise.
2026-06-13 17:03:00
There have always been trolls. Hecklers, jesters, and class clowns. The troll lives under the bridge and invents nonsense grievances in order to get attention.
But, until recently, there wasn’t much of a business model to support this career choice. It’s said that William Randolph Hearst started a war to sell newspapers, but few people owned newspapers…
Social media changes this. Algorithms can be gamed for attention. People who are willing to tear down others for fame and short-term gain can leverage their selfish actions, create clicks, and get paid for it. They stage a car crash and turn our rubbernecking attention into cash.
To make it worse, it compounds. Trolls have to outtroll each other to keep the attention coming.
Professional wrestling is a choice, but no one insisted we all watch it.
The solution is right in front of us, and won’t require many people to implement. Give us a troll button and set the default to opt-out. Deplatform the trolls, except for those who want to engage with them.
It’s not obvious how to rank and rate what qualifies as trolling, but I’m sure the algorithm wizards can figure that out. If the companies push back, they ought to be willing to acknowledge that trolling is a profit center for them, and they’re willing to trade our peace of mind and cohesion for a few bucks.
Your social media scroll might get a bit less amusing, but the upside is that the world we live in will get better. And so will your day.
When we change the incentives for people seeking attention, their actions will change as well.
You can’t go into a bank with a mask on and expect to be treated as a valued customer. We get the culture we reward.
