What I learned from studying a book launch (with the author's permission)

Terry Szuplat is coming London. He wrote speeches for Barack Obama for eight years, and he put all that experience into a book, Say It Well.

I’m looking forward to seeing him – I met Terry when he was writing the book, at a conference for speechwriters – and thought this would be a good moment to write up something that I did around the time of his book launch.

It’s something I did because I’m an author myself, and I work with a lot of authors, and many of us hate the idea of self-promotion. Watching Terry, I thought: this is the antidote, an elegant case-study in how to keep “talking about the book” in an interesting and pleasant way, for an extended time. We can all learn something from it.

So I started to make a careful study of what Terry was doing.

I should say straight away: I did ask Terry if this was all right. It would feel creepy to do an assessment of his launch campaign without telling him. He said yes, very happily, and asked me to send him what I came up with.

So here we are, Terry.

That’s Terry on the right.

First: how I collected the data

Before I get to what Terry did, I want to say something about how I gathered it – because the method itself turned out to be useful, and I think it might be useful to you too.

I used the Notes app on my phone and computer (it’s Apple, but I’m sure there are equivalents). What I did was go through Terry’s LinkedIn posts, month by month – and if you’ve ever tried to scroll back through someone’s LinkedIn history, you’ll know how long that takes.

For each post I thought was worth noting, I copied the link, wrote a brief description to remind myself what it was, and added a rough note of how many likes it had at the time – single figures, double figures, triple figures, and so on. Thumbs-up symbols. Nothing fancy.

What struck me, doing it this way rather than just scrolling, was that I could see patterns. Things that are invisible when you’re in the feed become visible when you’re looking at a list. And because it was all in my Notes app – offline, no pings, no algorithm pulling me somewhere else – I could actually think.

I’ve since started doing the same thing with my own posts. More on that elsewhere – but the short version is: it’s a relief to have your own content somewhere you can actually find it again.

What Terry did – and what the numbers show

I’m going to group what Terry posted into rough categories, because that’s what became clear when I looked at the list as a whole rather than post by post.

The posts that got the most traction
The personal post that did “best” (if numbers are a true measure) was one where Terry admitted that, despite being a professional speechwriter – Obama’s speechwriter – he was a nervous speaker himself. That got over 1,500 likes. And a story from the book about Obama, got nearly 1,800 (perhaps more, by the time you read this).

I find that really interesting. Not the Obama connection, as such: that’s Terry’s specific situation, and most of us don’t have that. What interests me is the structure of those posts. The nervous speaker post works because it resolves a tension: here is an expert, confessing to the very difficulty his expertise is supposed to cure. Obviously (?) that’s not a device available only to people who worked at the White House. It’s available to anyone who has expertise in something and has also, at some point, struggled with it. That is: everyone.

Genuinely useful content
Terry shared a colourful graphic of useful words for speeches – 334 likes. He wrote about what it was like to have his speeches edited at the White House – 319 likes. Neither of those are promotional, exactly. They’re just… helpful. And people responded to them.

There’s something here about not always trying to sell the book directly. Sometimes you just share something that’s useful to the people who might one day want to read it.

Community posts
Some of Terry’s most-liked posts had almost nothing to do with the book in a narrow sense. He shared a job opportunity for a speechwriter at the Obama Foundation – over 1,000 likes. He wrote about a brave librarian – over 1,000 likes. He posted about Americans talking to each other better in polarised times – strong engagement and warm comments, even if the like count didn’t always reflect it.

What he was doing, I think, was building a community of people who cared about communication and public life – the same people who might want to read his book, but who were worth connecting with regardless. That seems worth remembering.

The human texture
Father’s Day post, showing young Terry with his dad – nothing to do with the book, just: here I am, I’m a person. An “unboxing” video when the books arrived from the publisher, with a slightly self-conscious note that his kids had made him do it – 447 likes. Selfies with bookshop teams, again and again, each one modest in likes but collectively building a strong sense of Terry on an adventure, going somewhere, doing something real.

One person who was in a Zoom session I ran about all this made a good observation: what she remembered most from following Terry’s posts wasn’t any single piece of content, but the sense of geographical spread – Boston one day, Philadelphia the next, somewhere else after that. The accumulation told a story even if no individual post did.

The relentless drumbeat
Terry reposted his webinar announcement a lot. Each individual repost got modest numbers. That wasn’t the point. Nearly 300 people turned up to the webinar, and he gave away a copy of the book to every attendee. The drumbeat built something that any single post couldn’t.

I say this partly for my own benefit, because I have a strong instinct not to repeat myself. I worry that people will be annoyed. But the algorithms mean that most people don’t see most posts – so repeating something isn’t annoying, it’s just the only way to make sure anyone sees it at all.

Being photographed with people
Terry had a picture of himself with Obama. He had a screenshot from a Zoom with Alan Alda. He posted a selfie with a former White House colleague. I remember, when I was starting out in journalism, noticing that Piers Morgan – whatever one thinks of him – always had his photograph taken with famous people. Nobody else was really doing that at the time, but he did it relentlessly, and you couldn’t miss it. “Here he is with Princess Diana. Here he is with Paul McCartney.” Fame rubs off, a little. Or at least, credibility does.

You don’t need Obama. You need whoever is important and relevant in your world. And if you don’t have a photograph with them – well, I once created a photo-montage for a friend to illustrate a clip from when he’d been on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. I stuck together two separate pictures: my friend, smiling, and John Humphreys in the studio with his headphones on. They weren’t actually together in the same room. But they did talk together and the composite photo worked. I don’t think that’s cheating.

The awkward bit: does any of this apply to you?

When I showed all this to a group of writers, the responses I got were recognisable ones. Someone said: I get it professionally, but personally I find the whole thing excruciating. Someone else said: the stories I’m writing about involve real people who need to remain anonymous – I can’t put any of that online. Someone said: I tried this before and someone told me it was too much.

All of those are fair. A few thoughts, for what they’re worth.

On the privacy question: you don’t have to post the content of what you’re working on. You can post about the process – what it’s like to research something, what surprised you, what you found difficult. Terry never had to reveal what was in the book to build an audience for it.

On the “too much” worry: things have changed since most of us formed our anxieties about this. The algorithms mean that even people who follow you won’t see most of what you post. Once a week isn’t too much. Once a day probably isn’t either.

On the general awkwardness: I think it’s mostly just unfamiliarity. And publishers, I’m sorry to say, do seem to take it into account. Not posting can quietly be a reason a book doesn’t get taken on – or doesn’t get the support it needs once it is. I hate that, and I wish it weren’t so. But I did want to say it.

One practical thing that someone mentioned which I thought was genuinely useful: she uses a scheduling tool to write posts separately from publishing them. She writes them when she’s feeling like a writer; the tool publishes them later. That distance removes a specific kind of self-consciousness – the feeling of being watched while you type.

What I did with all of this

Studying Terry’s launch made me think about my own. Not in a competitive way – he’s got Obama, and I haven’t, and that’s fine. But it made me realise that I’d been doing roughly what he was doing, just without ever looking at it clearly. So I turned the same method on myself: went back through my own LinkedIn posts, saved the links and numbers, and had a look at what the data actually said.

The results were interesting and a bit humbling. The posts that did best weren’t always the ones I’d expected. And the exercise made me think about what I want to do differently – which is partly why I’m now posting on my own website rather than handing everything to LinkedIn.

If you want to see what I found, it’s here.

Terry’s visit

Terry will be in London in March¹. If you’re interested in public speaking, communication, or just in what it’s like to write words that the President of the United States says out loud in front of millions of people – do look out for details of where he’ll be. I’ll share them when I have them.

And if you want to read the book before he arrives, it’s called Say It Well. Based on what I saw of the launch, I think he’d say the best way to find out what’s in it is just to start reading.

¹ London in March. And in Cambridge, Edinburgh and Glasgow. (Click link for details of Terry’s UK tour which he posted on, obviously, LinkedIn.)