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This is Scott Becker with the Becker Business, the Becker Private Equity Podcast. Today's discussion is six lessons learned from a book launch. So here's the deal. You know, I'd been on a podcast yesterday, a LinkedIn Live show on a podcast with Marion Spears Carr, and thank God for Marion for inviting me to all this stuff and putting me on. Just a really supportive person. But his question, what he wanted to talk about was lessons learned from the book launch. So I had to prepare notes for that. I thought I'd share them with you all today. And here are some of those lessons that we learned, you know, and they'll go through this sort of gamut of issues and items and emotions and all that stuff. So the first thing I learned is, you know, the goal was we had a strategy, we had a plan, worked with a strategist and so forth to try and make the New York Times bestseller list. And so the first thing I learned is it is much harder to do that than I expected. You get the numbers to where they're supposed to be. You do all these different things. But if you're not actually working closely with the New York Times and really sort of working with them, it is really hard to do unless you're sort of a first time big celebrity or as a first time big author, unless you're, you know, I've written other books, this is the first note we made a major play on. But unless you're a major celebrity like David Portnoy or something like that, you're really hard to do. So that was lesson number one, very hard to make during a New York Times. The consolation prize is we made the USA Today list, which is a much more objective list, so thrilled to make that it is what it is. So that's, that's number one lesson, much harder than anticipated. And I should have known this. I should have studied up front to us how difficult it would be and maybe that would have changed our effort a little bit. But the good news is we did become a USA Today bestseller. So that's great. Second lesson is when you do a project like this, what you find is incredibly supportive. People show up that sort of like you ask for the most minimal of help or they jump in to offer help without, without really necessarily anything in them in exchange for it. Just really supportive people that are really helpful that show up almost unexpectedly, how well they show up. And I am so thankful for those people. The third thing is that I am so thankful to everybody that bought the book. And that is really nice. Some of those Bought it for their own accord. Some of them we offered a gift to buy for, but so many did. So we're so thankful for that. We are thankful at sort of a different level to all those people. And this is another lesson. They actually made the effort to read the book. The book's a two to four hour read and you know, I realized that in today's world the single biggest shortage of anything is one's own at time. So I am incredibly thankful to those people. I don't know how many there are, but there's a lot that actually made the effort to read the book. I'm thankful if you bought it. We're super thankful you read it. Thank you so much. That's another lesson learned. It's really valuing people's time because that is the most precious commodity that we have today. The fourth thing again, and this was said to us by the strategists and the publishers that really becoming a best selling book is a team effort, not an individual effort. And my God, is that true. Tremendous teammates in Cosette Benjamin, Warren Eskenazi and Jessica Joliffe in helping me to sort of get to where we got to and you know, really does require a team effort. Obviously a lot of thanks to Molly Gamble, our co author as well. But, but really an incredible learning experience of how much of a team effort releasing a book is. The other thing I'll, I'll note, and this is maybe a fit for all these authors that are really in the game of keeping their book alive and in part of the public, you know, threat and discussion. It's a full time job to keep that book active. You know, we're a big believer that things don't go viral, somebody makes them go viral. But, but. And you have to dig a lot of ditches, do a lot of boosting to move things in the right direction. And I sort of am getting the sense of like if you have a book, it comes out, it does. Well, I see why these serial authors have to release another one in another year or two on a regular schedule and so forth to keep themselves in the public dialogue, in the public discussion. And it's a real learning experience how that actually works out. And so for the fifth or sixth note, I'm not sure where we're at so far. Is that in anything you do, the phrase I come out of this with is bear with me. This is never perfect, always trying and it's okay. So what happens is in any project like this there's doubtless going to be errors, some of them are bigger than others. Here we had an error with the publisher where they inadvertently left out a letter on the spine of the book. That, of course, is disheartening. You know, you panic, you get irritated about it. You put a lot of money and effort in this project, it'll get fixed. The next edition will have the next sort of release or publication printing run will have the right cover, the right front spine, the front of. It's great, but, you know, never perfect. Always trying and it's okay. The sixth thing I guess I'll talk about is if you don't make your sort of your goals in something, you know, do you view as a failure or how do you view it? And I'd say the reality is somewhere in between. I'm certainly absolutely thrilled to be one of these people that's constantly putting myself in the arena versus a critic versus a secondary person who's out there from the sidelines just shouting at everything and complaining and whining. So I guess at the end of the day, thrilled with the project, thrilled with the work effort. Me actually sitting down and writing for 90 days straight is something I was very pleased to do, to bring myself back to doing some deep work versus constantly just being, doing this speech, that speech, this thing, this, that, that, the other, actually having to focus and contract. I think that's really helpful. Those kinds of purposes, those kinds of efforts. So thrilled about that. The other thing I'll add, so am I happy that we did the project 100%, even though we didn't exactly meet the goal we wanted to meet, but thrilled about it overall. The last thing I'd say is that the book and the writing, like myself and all of us, is at the end of the day, a work in process. So, so, so many lessons, so much to be learned from it. You know, we come away, myself a little bit more motivated, need to take a little bit of a break, but, but back at it, quite frankly, and viewing it like all things, is always a work in process. So thrilled overall with the effort. Imperfect, always trying. It is what it is. Thank you for listening to the Becker Business and the Becker Private Equity podcast. We hope you enjoy this episode and thank you so much for listening.