sneaky review idea & list of seeding events: 3 secrets, 2 links, 1 quote

Reader,

I tried writing a book about procrastination…

…but I’m waiting for the right time to launch it.

3 Secrets:

1. What’s on your mind & what was useful here?

Two essential questions to add to your daily team meetings.

I thought this was a book marketing newsletter?

I promise it is!

Professional authors have teams.

Don’t have one yet? Hire a virtual assistant on a platform like onlinejobs.ph just to start getting experience. Starting is the hardest part of growing a team, and most authors don’t realize you CAN afford to hire a team member.

Even if you’re not sure you need one yet, it’s an important skill set to start building early. This is a low-risk way to get started. Just one virtual assistant doing one small task a week. It’s a muscle you’ll begin to build and it’ll begin to open your mind to how else you could benefit from adding team-members.

Growing your team already?
Awesome.

Ask, “What’s on your mind?” to kick off 1:1 meetings.

Instead of jumping in with your ideas and thoughts at the start of a meeting, open it up to your team to surface the real issues faster.

Then…
End team meetings by asking, “What did you find useful here?”

It creates a moment of reflection, which is how we actually learn from our experiences.
It also forces your team to walk away feeling like the meeting was useful and accomplished something.

These are two of seven fantastic questions Michael Bungay Stanier lays out in The Coaching Habit.

2. Get more reviews with a “What would you rate your experience?” email

Instead of asking readers to go to Amazon to leave a review in your email…

make it feel like they’re leaving the review right there in the email:

What would you give this book?

Then link that image directly to your review page (example here)

While you’re there feel free to submit a rating 🙂

It gets readers to click through to the ratings page. Since they’ve already done half the work just getting to the right place on Amazon, they might as well finish the job.

Thank you to the author who shared this with me this past week.

3. How do you find event planners to offer copies of your book for their next event?

Eventex Directory – international list of event professionals.
10Times.com – searchable directory of event organizers by region & industry.
Eventbrite Organizer Directory – scrape or search events and reverse-engineer organizers.
Meetup.com – many Meetup group organizers run events locally and nationally.
BizBash – top resource for finding large-scale corporate and cultural event planners.
Social Tables / Cvent – software platforms used by event planners; some have public directories.

2 Links

BEFORE THE BESTSELLER IS BACK!!! 2026 BTB launches this week with 2 Million+ copies sold author of The Coaching Habit, Michael Bungay Stanier. This week we run through the handful of questions that you can use right now to improve every relationship in your life along with the psychology of why they work. Next week he’s back to walk us through exactly how he’s sold over 2,000,000 books. Listen in here.
Rephonic.com for podcast research: https://rephonic.com

1 Quote

Content marketing behaves in the same way as TV programming, in that it must be inherently entertaining and or informative in order to successfully engage its target audience. That means focusing on an ‘editorial idea’, not an ‘advertising idea’.
–Simon Michaelides, Chief Commercial Officer at UKTV
with love and sincere appreciation,

Alex
BeforeTheBestseller | ShelfLife
alex@getshelflife.com

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