Hi ;

It's been a month since my last email to you and I'm trying this newsletter to be monthly, so here we are! It's actually good timing, as I'm finding that even in a pandemic there's enough big things happening month to month to share widely.

And in that sense, at lot has happened. My family wrapped up our time in upstate (near Ithaca) New York, as my parents have been waiting for a year to have their new kitchen remodeled there... and the cabinets have finally come through the supply chain.

So we had to go, understandably (and let's acknowledge we're incredibly privileged to have had this space for us to be here at all in the first place) and so we packed up my parent's two cars full of everything we had and they all drove back to their main residence west of Philadelphia PA.

act one

Something's happening here.

Buffalo Springfield, For What It's Worth

Meanwhile I drove back to my place in Brooklyn which I set up to host the first ever Book Highlight retreat. I put the A/C units in the windows then drove to pick up the man behind the curtain, my boss and partner, Mat Miller - who had flown in on a near empty plane from the West Coast. We stayed masked and distant, but were finally able to crack the big picture priorities that eluded us when we were simply virtual.

The next three days, we covered the walls of my apartment in blank paper and whiteboarded out the plan for our agency. We ran through the customer journey, the communication touchpoints, and honed in on the services we can and should offer that would bring clients towards their goals. What was in our proposals, how should we outline our approach, and everything that we'd been talking about doing, now let's actually do it (and how do we talk about it).

This was important because while Mat and I have known each other for years, he had yet to meet our newest hire, Brian who I had worked with at Wiley for a decade. He was the missing piece.

He's the pro-designer, video editor, creative strategist, and ad director that has worked on hundreds of book campaigns. We needed him for our logo design and our website build and thankfully we got him to come on board to Book Highlight full-time, so that he could also be designing this work for himself too.

And we've done it. Now three months to the day after I officially joined Book Highlight on March 16th, we launched our new brand identity and website, showcasing our expanded services: BookHighlight.com

Then we put together what I'm calling our 'hype deck' showcasing what we're about, here.

Because I'm pretty proud of what we've done and what we're doing, I'm going to give you the pitch here as if I were emailing it to you directly...

act two

I'm still trying to find an outlet for my dad-humor, but my original announcement copy for the new Book Highlight got nixed: 

Fewer cooks in the kitchen, serving better launches.

However it gets to the core of what we're trying to do here for authors (and publishers/agents). The more agencies and teams that authors think they have to hire, the less focus and budget they have for spending on books and advertising. 

Then none of those teams are actually communicating together and end up either duplicating the work or leaving huge gaps thinking someone else was handling it. The messaging and brand looks messy and all over the place. It's incredibly ineffective. Yet we all see it happen again and again.

We want to do more for authors so they can do more for themselves and their book. So that means getting involved earlier, so that we can be part of building an author's website and social and email strategy.

It's planning ahead to be able to offer tiered incentives that we've built and tested and know people want, then collecting those orders so we make them count.

It's running a launch team so the book has reviews and social buzz on release week. And it's updating the publisher/agent so they know what's going on with the book and have enough printed.

You get it. We've all seen launches go both ways. Slow, bloated, and miss the mark. Or fast, streamlined, and hitting the target. We've got project management and support.

We can do websites, video, book packages, launch teams, outreach, event support (virtual + IRL), creative + advertising campaigns on social and search and display, and that crucial third party billing sales processing.

There's a fully functional website: http://bookhighlight.com 

And attached hype deck.

Check them out and let me know if you have any questions or authors we should talk to in the meantime. Hope you're hanging in there. I miss reading on my commute. But mostly I miss childcare.

act three

And so now you've felt what it's like to be on the receiving end of my emails this week, but only because I believe in what we're doing and incapable of being quiet about it. Every in-progress campaign that I'm on right now, before we could've made this case to the author for us first, involves so many different teams and agencies that only makes the case for what we're trying to do for our authors in trying to save them that onboarding time and overall budget, so a bigger impact across a larger audience can be reached.

Already it has struck a nerve. We've seen the direct site traffic come in through our links to the site. Follow up calls are telling us that we're on to something. And it's clear that this is what we've all been seeing around books and book launches for years! It's time to streamline things and keep a focus on the book.

So, I'm sorry for taking a mostly personal newsletter and making it all about my agency's site launch, but beyond the day to day keeping-the-family-alive part of my life, everything else has been about the work and for the first time in awhile, I'm excited about doing that work.

Being on a call with a massive global publicity agency today and hearing that the timeline document that I conceived of with my small team and sent to them ahead of the call designed just earlier that day... actually landed and made them acknowledge our approach has merit and will work for their client and they're excited to be a part of... is really cool. That wasn't something that I've been a part of before. It's that entrepreneurial/startup juice that tastes sweeter because you've squeezed it yourself.

I've been drinking that juice and seeing it being worth the squeeze. Thank you for joining me in this journey and seeing us through to this point... essentially, our launch. From here forward, it's about the work for the clients.

And that's what I'm already excited about doing. Stay tuned for that. And take care of yourself.

Today we drive back to Brooklyn for the day, so that our nine month old can get his shots and our almost 4 year old can remember what her real bed actually feels like. We're still taking everything day by day as a family, but as a company it feels so good to be looking many months ahead finally. I'm so proud of what we've already built for ourselves, now I can't wait to build it for authors.

Keep reading.

Staying Socially Distant - Peter

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Of course to be sending this self-promotional email, on Juneteenth no less!, can come across tone-deaf. There are many problems plaguing our world beyond the current plague. And we know and support those causes... Book Highlight has donated substantial amounts to various BLM causes during this month and will continue to do so. I worked with an author to produce a virtual launch event ON JUNE 2, which could've gone wrong if we didn't work to live up to the message of the book to be inclusive and diverse. You can see that incredible video event here, where all of the guests contributed to the moment asked of them. We will continue to listen, respond, and do our part aiding progress today.