I recently announced my next major book project: a book on how to complete a year-end life review as a ritual for self-reflection and growth.
I’ve had an annual review practice in some form since 2008, and I can’t think of anything else that has more dramatically impacted my life in that time. I can’t wait to bring this practice, which has existed for a long time among CEOs, executives, heads of state, and creatives, to the wider world.
The first question I’m asking myself as I embark on this years-long journey is, “What do I want to do differently from last time?”
I’ve documented the process of writing and publishing my previous book, Building a Second Brain (BASB), in great detail, partly so that I can now look back and take stock of what worked and what didn’t.
Here are the 7 strategic decisions I’m making differently this time and why.
1. Think on a 5-year time horizon
The sheer timescale at which traditionally published books operate continues to astound me. As of now, it’s been 5.5 years since I started working on the proposal for BASB, and 2 years since its release in the US – nothing else in my life operates on this timescale.
We recently crossed an incredible milestone – 200,000 copies sold – and yet I still feel that the journey of the book is in its early stages. It’s tempting when embarking on an endeavor like this to focus only on the initial launch, but I’ve learned that it’s critical to think on at least a 5-year timescale.
What kind of book do I want to still be talking about and promoting 5 years from now? What do I want to spend my time thinking about and working on throughout that time? Given that I only have so many 5-year stretches in my career, how do I want to use them?
These are the kinds of questions I asked myself when deciding which book to write next, and vanishingly few topics made the cut. But now that I’ve chosen the most promising one, I’m going to make all subsequent decisions from the perspective of what makes sense on a 5-10-year time horizon.
2. Move toward more intuitive right-brain thinking
For BASB, I made a strong effort to move away from language and concepts that were overly technical, abstract, or rooted in the tech world. I had developed a lot of my thinking while immersed in Silicon Valley, and I knew I needed to broaden my language to appeal to a much more mainstream audience.
Yet even with that effort, the book is still quite skewed toward readers who are relatively tech-savvy. The idea of creating an external repository of personal information in digital form still appeals mainly to people who already think about how to use their technology more effectively.
With my new topic of year-end reviews, I want to continue this shift from a primarily left-brain, analytical lens to a more right-brain, holistic, intuitive, and emotional lens. I want to continue expanding my niche from a small hardcore group of productivity nerds to wider audiences centered around existing habits like journaling, mindfulness, goal-setting, and planning.
This shift will need to be reflected in everything from the words I use to the colors and design of the book’s branding, to the marketing materials we create, to the way I talk about the subject in podcast interviews.
3. Sprints, not marathons
Looking back on the whole experience of writing my first book, one of the most stressful aspects was the ever-present feeling that I had to be making progress on the book at all times.
Logically I knew that’s impossible – a lot of time is needed for rest and recovery, for family and friends, and for other projects at work. Yet that feeling remained, at the back of my mind, like a subtle pressure against my brain, constantly questioning why I wasn’t advancing on at least one front. Writing a book might feel like a marathon, but even a marathon takes place in a series of shorter sprints!
Something else has changed since last time as well: I have far more responsibilities. 2020 and 2021 were ideal times to write a book in many ways, with the pandemic shutting down the world and our new baby sleeping the days away. Now I have two young kids, a household to manage, and a larger, more complex business with a lot of projects happening in parallel. Oh, we’re also moving to Mexico in a few months!
For all these reasons, I plan on concentrating my writing time in a series of month-long sprints, with the in-between months dedicated to research, gathering feedback, and recovery. For example, my first sprint will be the entire month of June 2024, followed by two months off, and then again in September, with another two months off, and finally in December as work slows down for the holidays.
I’m hoping this schedule will serve as a forcing function to allow me to completely set aside all my other work duties during the “on” months, leaning on the team to manage the business while I’m away, and then decisively turning off that part of my brain during the “off” months.
4. Recruit beta readers for feedback
My last two books were directly based on a cohort-based course I taught for 6 years, starting in 2016. Several thousand people completed it, and I therefore had a treasure trove of feedback, examples, case studies, and intelligence about what worked and what didn’t.
I’ve been teaching a workshop called The Annual Review since 2019, and over 600 people have taken it, but I have significantly less research this time around. I’ve also not really communicated my ideas about year-end reviews in written form before, except through publishing my own personal reviews.
This time around I’d like to try an approach I’ve seen many successful authors take: recruiting a group of “beta” readers to review the early manuscript and give me direct, specific feedback about which parts resonate and which need to be changed or removed.
5. Only our core platforms matter
Looking back at the numerous marketing efforts we made leading up to and following the last book’s release, I’m left with a sobering conclusion: it is really only our core platforms (which for us are the email newsletter, YouTube, and X) that truly make a difference in the scale of a book’s success.
By this, I mean both their size (the number of followers or subscribers) and just as if not more importantly, the quality of my relationship with those people. Do they like what I have to say? Do they trust me? Are they hungry for more from me?
I recently sat down to analyze Forte Labs’ audience growth since my last book was acquired in March 2020: in 4 years we’ve grown our audience an astounding 28x, from about 20,000 followers to 550,000 across all platforms:
Most of this growth is due to the two books I’ve published in that time, as well as the strong growth of our YouTube channel, both of which have also fueled growth in our email list (the vertical line below represents the date my BASB book was released, creating a clear inflection point in the long-term growth rate of our email list that has persisted to this day):
Last time, we didn’t really have the option of relying solely on my own audience. It just wasn’t big enough. We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to bootstrap an audience almost from scratch but looking back, the return-on-investment for those efforts was pretty marginal.
This time around, I’m going to invest all our time, energy, and money into simply growing our audience, which ultimately means more and better blog posts, YouTube videos, social posts, and newsletter content. This offers an additional benefit: once the release is all over, we’re left with the greatest prize of all – a larger and more engaged audience ready to receive whatever we do next.
6. Create tighter integration with courses
Over the past year, we made a tremendous effort to diversify our sources of revenue away from cohort-based courses. A year ago we made 95%+ of our revenue from cohorts alone, and today none of it comes from cohorts since we’ve stopped offering them altogether.
It was a longer and more difficult transition than I expected, but we now have a much more balanced business based on 5 main sources of revenue: self-paced courses, books, ads and sponsorships, affiliate commissions, and our new flagship, the Second Brain Membership.
For BASB, despite the fact that the book was based on a course, we didn’t do a good job of integrating the book with our courses. This was partly because the live, cohort-based version only took place at certain times of the year, and was about 66x as expensive as the book (or $999), which made it difficult to seamlessly bring book readers into it unless they happened to subscribe to our newsletter.
Even when we came out with a pre-recorded, self-paced version of the BASB course about a year after the book’s release, it too closely reflected the book’s contents, making it seem like a mere rehashing of the same material except in video form (and still at about 33x the price, or $499).
I plan on avoiding both of these errors this time, by having both a live and self-paced version of the Annual Review course (at accessible price points) ready to go by the time the book comes out, and by creating a seamless path from book to course starting right within the book itself.
7. Go for the New York Times bestseller list
For the last book, I didn’t purposefully try to reach the NYT bestseller list, mostly because I didn’t think it was possible with my small audience and niche topic. We did reach the Wall Street Journal list, which allowed us to add the moniker “best-seller.”
This time, however, I plan on making a serious run at the crown jewel of the publishing world: the “Advice/How-To” category within the NYT list, sometimes called the “Mt. Everest” of bestseller lists because it is so difficult to land on. I’m told this requires a specific strategy of maximizing the sale of certain formats (ebook sales don’t count for this list, for example) at specific retail locations (only some of which are included in the official count).
Contrary to a lot of online discourse, I believe bestseller lists (and other forms of demonstrating authority and credibility) absolutely do matter. Part of the “war for attention” that we all fight every day as content creators is a parallel “war for credibility.” The Internet has flooded our world with information of every level of quality, and if anything, people are more dependent than ever on signals of credibility to determine what to pay attention to and believe.
And if nothing else, this goal gives us a new, exciting mountain to climb. People do climb Mt. Everest just for the fun of it, after all.
If you’d like to stay in the know about the progress of my annual review book, sign up for our newsletter below. And if you come across any interesting ideas, material, or people related to the subject, please send it to me at hello@fortelabs.com.
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