These days every author plays an integral part in the marketing of their book. Publishers have come to rely on it and readers expect it. It took a full two years for “The Sniper Mind” to dominate Google search and readers’ awareness horizon and I documented part of that journey here.
Intentional: How to Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully has just gone past the one-year mark and, as the image below makes clear, it has already reached the saturation stage where Google search is concerned.
In that time it has appeared in a number of blogs as yours truly has done the interview rounds. It has produced the inevitable “Intentional” snippets and quotes. It has won two Book Authority awards for best new book on Confidence and best new book on Happiness. And the audiobook version of it has been released. We also shot a trailer which was a first for me in this personal format (and I found it ridiculously difficult).
Despite it being a highly topical book that better helps us understand how to behave and what drives us in our actions and choices I found it harder to market. This had nothing to do with the subject matter that is, as I mentioned, highly topical and a lot with what was happening in the world.
As the book came out we were still in the grips of a global pandemic (and indeed, we are still). And just as we thought things were beginning to look up Russia invaded Ukraine and started an unjustified war that is affecting us all in many different ways.
These are just the global stressors we all experience. Depending on where you are in the world you also have to contend with political instability, social polarization, harsher weather conditions, a weaker local economy with all that this implies and the post-Covid effects on social behavior and perception that are experienced everywhere, as either withdrawal from social interactions or overreactions to social stimuli.
Against such a backdrop pushing content to sell books, no matter how useful they may be, seemed to me as an irrelevance. I opted, instead, to put my money where my mouth is and use this time to try out a social experiment where I give away some of my most popular books. And, I spent quite a lot of time teasing out my thoughts on the world, global change and responsibility in my Medium account.
So, now, I am back. Kind of. Every reader of “Intentional” I have spoken to has told me how much the book changed their life. For me, also, writing it was three-year-long process that took me deep inside myself. I emerged changed, also. This, then, is partially an introspective post rather than a showcase of how well “Intentional” is doing across the web.
Obviously I will be putting a lot more content out over the next few months and a lot of it will relate directly or indirectly to “Intentional: How to Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully”. This is inescapable not because I want you all to buy a copy though obviously I’d love it if you did, but because I see no other viable way out of the overall global and local mess we all experience apart from our ability to understand who we are, what we are doing and where we are going.
If we’re not intentional in the way we make our choices, carry out our decisions and live our lives we will end up in the kind of mess we are experiencing at the moment magnified several fold.
So, that is a solution; at least as far as I am concerned. I am also working on a new book (I can’t say more than that at the moment). And I am also thinking of a potential change in direction in my writing (again, that’s all I can say about that). Those of you who follow me closely know that I write about writing on Goodreads and I have a LinkedIn Newsletter on business tips and a Twitter Newsletter on ... Twitter, where I share every Sunday five links loosely based around a topic - all designed to get those neural connections behind your eyes to light up.
I haven’t been sat on my hands all this time. But I am on that path where in order for things to make sense for me I feel what I do has to directly help as many people as possible. I don’t play music, can’t sing, I am not an inventor and I sure as heck don’t run any countries (though given how badly some career politicians are at that job I bet as a part-time novice I could do better). What I do is write which means I have the ability to push some of my ideas, thoughts and insights directly in your brain and I intend to use that as much as possible to help you see more, understand more, think better, work easier and live happier.
Sounds like a lot of work when I put it like this but, at the same time, it’s what I feel I need to do to keep myself happy. So, this is where we’re at. You’re all caught up (if you weren’t already).
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