By Jonathan Goodman, as told to Kit. Read our previous case study on Jonathan and how he built his email list
Most authors launch a book the same way: book 50 podcast interviews, show up on someone else’s schedule for three months straight, and hope listeners remember to buy the book after the dishes are done.
I’ve done it that way. It burned me out, introduced the only real bout of depression I’ve ever had, took me away from my kids, and made me seriously question whether I ever wanted to write another book. When it was over, I made a promise to myself: I would never launch that way again.
So when it came time to launch Unhinged Habits, I went all-in on newsletters as my primary book promotion channel—not my own newsletter, but other people’s. I spent a year building the relationships and systems to pull it off. By launch week, more than 100 newsletters had promoted my book to a combined audience of 4+ million subscribers.
Here’s how I thought about it, and what I’d tell any author willing to think differently about their launch.
Why newsletters beat podcasts as a book promotion channel
I’m a writer. Writing gives me energy. Podcasts take it away.
Beyond temperament, the conversion math is different. Newsletters include a direct link to buy the book—one click and someone can act on it immediately. Podcast listeners are usually doing something else: walking the dog, folding laundry. Even if they’re interested, they have to remember the book later. That’s friction. More friction means fewer sales.
I saw this play out directly during launch week. People commented on LinkedIn saying they’d seen my book in someone’s newsletter and immediately bought it. After 70 podcasts for my previous book launch, I don’t recall a single comment like that.
My many years of personal training taught me that change is hard. People who work out, work out a lot. Same with people who read. They read a lot. Newsletter readers read. That sounds obvious, but it changes everything.
Start your target list a year before you need it
The biggest mistake authors make with newsletter-based book promotion is starting too late. I didn’t sit down four months before launch and build a spreadsheet from scratch. I built it over a year.
Every time I came across a newsletter or person I thought might be a good fit for my work, I added them—even if I didn’t know them yet. That list served multiple purposes: it told me whose emails to respond to, which people to publicly share on social media to get their attention, gave me a target list for whom to invite to meals I was hosting, and meant that when it came time for structured outreach, I already had the foundation.
If you’re planning a launch twelve months out, start your list now.
Tier your targets: gold, silver, bronze
Not all newsletters are worth the same effort. I ranked every newsletter into one of three tiers.
Gold: Personal brand newsletters with 50,000+ subscribers, owned by an individual—not a brand. Beyond size, I was looking for trust. Does this person make recommendations their readers actually act on? Or are they recommending something every week until the recommendations stop meaning anything?
Silver and bronze: Smaller newsletters, or brand-owned newsletters where I had less confidence in the writer-reader relationship.
Gold tier got custom, ghostwritten content. Silver and bronze got swipe copy they could adapt. The effort was deliberately asymmetric.
Pre-write content for your top-tier partners
For each gold tier partner, I worked with a ghostwriter who subscribed to that person’s newsletter, read their back catalogue, and got a feel for their voice, their format, and the topics their audience cared about. Then we figured out which idea from my book mapped to what that writer talks about.
Very few people ran the pre-written newsletter as-is—but almost all of them invited some kind of promotion and were genuinely appreciative of the effort. It’s costly signaling: It tells them you thought of them specifically, not just blasted out a “hey, can you promote this?” request.
That goodwill matters more than any perfectly crafted pitch.
Get the timing of your cross-promotion offers right
I made a mistake early: I offered newsletter trades four months before my book came out. People took me up on it, I promoted them, and then following back up months later felt awkward. Some had moved on.
What worked far better was posting across social channels— LinkedIn especially—seven days before launch, asking who was interested in a trade. People could promote me almost immediately, and I’d promote them in the months that followed. The timing made everything cleaner.
When someone said yes, I sent a pre-written email with talking points, a book cover PNG, and a folder of additional assets. I asked them to send me 50 words about what they wanted to promote in return, and logged it all on a spreadsheet with a link to the email thread.
Simple. Scalable. No one had to chase anything down.
Focus is a strategy in itself
One thing I didn’t expect: choosing a single channel made everything else easier.
Because newsletters were my only focus, it was obvious who to network with, what events to host, what talent to hire, and what asks to make of people when they said “let me know how I can help”.
If I’d been splitting my attention across podcasts, newsletters, interviews, and social campaigns simultaneously, I never could have built a clear, high-quality team or gone deep on any of it. Constraints force clarity.
Even if another channel might be marginally better for someone else’s book launch, consider what single-channel focus does for your energy, your team, and your ability to actually execute.
The content bank you don’t see coming
Here’s what I didn’t anticipate: the newsletter-first strategy built a content bank I’m still using today.
When you do 50 podcasts, you largely repeat yourself in slightly different ways. The gold tier newsletter strategy forced us to think about my book’s framework through fifteen or twenty completely different lenses—entrepreneurship, finance, fitness, parenting, creative work. What we ended up with was fifteen or twenty distinct approaches to the same core ideas.
Now, when anyone reaches out about a collaboration, I have something ready to go. What used to take me a few days to write takes me 45 minutes to two hours. That’s the real return on the upfront investment—and it’s one that keeps compounding long after launch week is over.
What launch week actually felt like
During launch week, I got tagged with the usual notifications, but it felt quiet. It felt manageable and dare I say, enjoyable, simply because I didn’t commit to a bunch of live promotions all at once. I worked with my energy, not against it. I watched the book rank well and people started buying — and I realized: the superficial stuff that makes us feel good online is often a distraction from what’s actually working behind the scenes.
And personally? During launch week, I worked out every day, had lunch with my wife every day, and never missed drop-off or pick-up for my kids. That was the whole point. A launch that requires you to put your life on hold isn’t worth it, regardless of the results.
Think in years, not launch weeks
My friend Charlie told me to measure the success of any book launch at the two-year mark.
Books are marathons, not sprints. It’s remarkable how much stress authors take on during launch week—when, let’s be honest, nobody’s read the book yet. What actually matters is getting your book into the hands of a critical mass of people over the first six to twelve months.
Design a launch strategy that fits your life. Work within your energy, not against it. If you do that, you’ll have the energy and excitement to write the next one.
Jonathan Goodman is the author of Unhinged Habits and two other books, including The Obvious Choice and Ignite the Fire. He founded the PTDC, one of the largest communities for fitness professionals, and writes the weekly newsletter 5 Reps Friday to 70,000+ subscribers. He lives in Toronto with his wife and three kids and spends four to six months of every year living abroad. He’d love it if you sent him a connection request on LinkedIn, where he talks about books and promoting books often.
