A few years ago I drafted a tweet about one of my books. I don't remember which one. I remember reading it back and feeling a specific kind of low-grade revulsion — like I'd watched myself do something performative in public and couldn't unsee it. The tweet wasn't dishonest. It wasn't even aggressive by the standards of book promotion. It was fine. And it still made me want to close the laptop and go for a walk.
If you've published a book, or you're getting close, you probably know this feeling. It comes up in almost every conversation I have with authors.
The issue isn't promotion itself. It's a specific kind of promotion that performs instead of communicates. Once you see the difference, you can't unsee it — but in a more useful direction.
This piece is about what comes after you've written the book — when you have to go out into the world and say something about it. The full framework for what the book is and who it's for is in Books That Sell.
What actually feels gross (and why)
The promotion that made me want to close the laptop was built around optics. It was calibrated to look like what a successful book launch looks like, not to say something true about the book. That's the pattern — you're performing success, or performing excitement, or performing confidence, rather than talking about the thing you actually made.
Algorithm-native promotion is the worst version of this. You post because the algorithm rewards cadence. You write threads because threads get engagement. You film videos because video is the format that's winning this quarter. The book isn't the point anymore — the platform is. And readers can tell, even if they can't name it. The signal that comes through is: this person needs me to buy, not this person thinks I should read this.
The opposite extreme — "I don't promote at all, it feels too salesy" — is its own problem. It dresses up fear as virtue. It tells itself a story about integrity while leaving readers who would have genuinely benefited from the book without any way to find it.
Enthusiasm with accountability
The frame I keep coming back to is what I call enthusiasm with accountability. You promote the book because you genuinely believe it's worth reading. And you take responsibility for getting it in front of readers — you don't wait for word of mouth to do all the work, and you don't pretend that marketing is beneath you.
That sounds simple. The hard part is that it requires you to have something real to say. You either believe the book is worth reading or you don't. If you do believe it, enthusiasm with accountability gives you a way to promote that doesn't make you want to walk away from your own tweet.
Tactics that don't feel gross
Here's what enthusiasm with accountability looks like in practice.
Write about what's in the book — not "my new book is out," which is a notification, not communication. Tell me one specific thing the book contains. A chapter that surprised you when you wrote it. A finding that changed how you think about something. A case study that didn't go where you expected. When you write about the contents, the book does the selling. You're showing people what's inside.
When I launched The Art of Non-Conformity — self-published, no marketing budget, no team — I wrote about the ideas in the book obsessively. The blog became the promotion. People found the ideas, and the ideas pointed them to the book. I wasn't selling; I was thinking out loud. That's a sustainable version of promotion.
Every nonfiction book has research moments that didn't make it onto the page — a conversation that shaped a chapter, something you found that contradicted what you expected, a draft you threw out and why. Share one of those. That material is interesting, and it's true, and it signals to readers that the book was built on something real.
Better than a launch campaign: find one person you know, right now, who has the specific problem your book addresses. Send them a note. Tell them why you thought of them. This doesn't scale, and that's the point. Enthusiasm with accountability works at the individual level, and if you do it with enough individuals, something compounds.
If you have a list, one email — written plainly, not templated — is enough to launch something. Say what the book is for and why you think it matters. The authors who send fourteen emails in ten days have usually stopped believing that a single clear email will work. Sometimes they're right. Often they've lost the thread of what they wanted to say.
Promotion is easier when the book already knows who it's for.
Books That Sell covers the positioning work that makes promotion feel like your work instead of a performance.
Get Books That Sell →Why this connects to how the book is built
The authors who struggle most with promotion are usually authors whose books don't have a clear point of view. When the book is trying to be useful to everyone, you can't say who it's for — and if you can't say that, there's nothing to promote that doesn't feel like noise.
The work of writing a book that markets itself — covered in the piece on books that market themselves — comes before promotion. Promotion is easier when the book already knows who it's for. If the book has a clear reader and a specific problem to solve, you're not making a case for a vague good thing. You're pointing a specific person toward something that will help them.
There's also a related trap — the handoff myth — the belief that once you hand the book off to the publisher or the distributor or the market, the promotion part is someone else's job. It's almost never someone else's job, and the authors who wait for the handoff to work usually end up wondering why nothing happened.
One thing to do this week
Try this. Write five people this week — each one specific, each one a real reason you thought of them. The message is simple: I wrote a book about X, I thought of you because Y, it's available here. No ask beyond sharing. No urgency. No countdown.
See how it feels compared to the tweet that makes you want to close the laptop. Notice whether it feels like promotion or conversation.
Enthusiasm with accountability isn't a campaign. It's a practice. You do it because you believe the book is worth reading, and you take responsibility for saying so to the people who need to hear it. That's the whole thing.
If you want to think more carefully about what the book is, who it's for, and how to set it up to sell before you even start promoting, the full framework is in Books That Sell.