Hi !

Hmm not the best start – I said I'd aim to send these on a Friday, and now you're getting this on the following Monday!

Never mind – let's crack on with the update! Here's what I've been doing...

(As a reminder: I'm planning on sending these behind-the-scenes book updates weekly-ish. If you get sick of them, you can hit "unsubscribe" at the bottom and it won't affect your access to the other freebies I've promised you.)

1: Appreciating my team

This may be the first update you see because the team has grown by a lot this past week, but I sent the actual first one last week. Here's a screenshot from my email platform:

That 94% is the percentage of people who opened it. Open rates aren't a totally accurate measure these days, but that is high. Marketers would torture a kitten for that kind of engagement. Actually, I hope they wouldn't, but they'd be tempted I'm sure.

Anyway: point being, you're awesome!

I'm declaring the launch team "closed" on 9 October, because the following week I'll be going public and opening it up for general pre-order.

So if you know anyone who'd like to join the launch team and get updates like this before I close it, you can send them here.

2: Footnoting (urgh)

I wasn't planning to have footnotes in this book, then one day someone at Penguin casually said "btw can you just quickly go through and prove every statement you've made?"

So I spent one of the less enjoyable weekends of my year ending up with this:

(I don't know how well this will show up in email, but the point is it's A LOT OF CITATIONS.)

It was the right decision, because there are some big claims and scary numbers in the book, and it makes sense for readers to be able to verify them for themselves. But yeah... won't be doing this again any time soon.

3: Thinking about bonuses

As I mentioned last time, pre-orders are critical for chart positions because they all "land" in the first week. So I'm putting a lot of thought into how to encourage people to pre-order by offering various bonuses.

Some are off-limits because they're exclusively for you lovely people (such as anything signed), and others where I want to save them for people who've actually read the book (like a complementary online course and workbook).

My current idea is a live masterclass where I teach some of the concepts from the book, and do a Q&A. (Obviously there'd be a recording too for people who can't make it.)

The Penguin team has also suggested a lottery, where everyone who pre-orders has a chance of winning something like:

• A hamper with my favourite personal finance books and some other goodies, or
• A certain number of one-to-one sessions with me

Personally, things like this wouldn't motivate me to order because I just assume that I won't win! But I know they can be effective, so I'm in two minds.

What do you think? What would be a bonus that would prompt you to pre-order rather than just wait for it to come out?

(Any bonuses I do come up with, you'll automatically be included in as well for being on the launch team.)

And that's it!

I hope you've enjoyed this insight into what's on my mind regarding "the book that can't be named" (publicly, yet, for a couple of weeks).

Will I get back on track by sending another update on Friday, or am I locked into Mondays now?

Will the 94% open rate be maintained (no, almost certainly not).

Stay tuned to find out!

Any questions or anything I can help with in the meantime, you know where I am.

Thanks!

Rob