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Ryan Levesque

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The Digital Contrarianâ„¢

Ryan Levesque

Issue #100

| The Digital Contrarianâ„¢

Behind the Scenes of a Bestseller Book Launch…

Behind the Scenes of a Bestseller Book Launch...

Ryan Levesque

11 min read

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There’s a new study out this week from Harvard and Stanford.
 
They tracked READING scores across school districts in the United States from 2015 to 2025.
 
The findings are sobering.
 
83% of school districts across the US have lost ground on reading over the last ten years.
 
In fact, 1 in 3 school districts now read a full grade level lower than they did in 2015.
 
Check it out:
The researchers are calling it a learning recession.
 
Thomas Kane at Harvard, who helped lead the study, framed it this way:
 
“The pandemic was the mudslide that had followed seven years of steady erosion in achievement.”
 
With what’s at stake…
 
I believe there has never been a more important moment for books.
 
Real books.
 
Human-written books.
 
This is why I wrote Return to Real.
 
And I’m going to take you behind the scenes of its launch in real time, so you can learn from what I’m doing.
 
Welcome to Behind a Bestseller Book Launch.
 
aka…
 
“Operation BBL”
 
(And no, not the Brazilian kind.)

1 | Welcome to "Operation BBL"

In this email mini-series…
 
I’m going to take you behind the scenes of what I believe will be a very eye-opening look that I hope you can learn from.
 
I’m going to share my entire book launch marketing plan…
 
I’ll share what’s working in real time…
 
I’ll share my mistakes and lessons learned along the way.
 
And over the next few weeks, I’ll take you inside…
 
  • My crazy pursuit of two dream book endorsements (more on that in a minute…)
  • A contrarian podcast strategy that might completely crush it, or completely fail…
  • A wild op-ed strategy that has me gunning for the New York Times (I have no idea if this is going to work…)
  • AND the actual economics of my book. Including my real hard cost, and in case you’re curious, how much money I make on every hard cover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook sold…
 
(PLUS: An opportunity to share what YOU would love me to write about in this mini-series…)
 
But first…
 
In today’s issue, I want to start by setting the stage…

2 | RTR Launch Timeline: A Tale of Two Towering Dates of Significance...

There are TWO dates that “book-end” the launch of this book.
 
The first is June 30th.
 
My 20th wedding anniversary…
 
That’s when pre-orders will open.*
 
*My original goal was to hit this as my publication date. Alas, I’m going to miss that target. Hitting it as our pre-order launch date is the next best thing.
 
The second date is the week of August 10th.
 
The week of my birthday…
 
That’s when I’m aiming to get the actual physical book into readers’ hands.
 
AND that same week in August…
 
I’m ALSO hosting a special gathering on our farm that you may be interested in.
 
This is a one-of-a-kind experience tied to the book launch, which includes an opportunity to visit the actual farm where the book was written and where much of the book actually takes place:
 
The Return to Real Vermont Farm Mastermind.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing MORE about this opportunity and how to be part of it. In the meantime, if you’re interested in learning more, you can get onto the priority waitlist here…
 
The farm plays such a central role in the thesis of this book that as you may remember from last week’s issue, early cover designs even featured scenes from the farm:
Speaking of which, this brings us to….

3 | The ACTUAL Book Cover

In many ways, this book launch is a melting pot of two big themes:
 
Ask Method flavored science.
 
Return to Real flavored art.
 
Let me show you an example of what I mean:
 
Last week in [Issue #099], I asked for your help picking between four final cover variants.
Here’s what’s played out in the last week…
 
Hundreds of votes came in. Over 400+ comments on the Facebook post alone. Dozens more by email and private message, including many personal stories and very detailed suggestions.
 
It was WAY more feedback than I expected to receive.
 
So to help make sense of it all…
 
We created a custom AI agent to review the Facebook comments, analyze the open-ended feedback, and help review everything that came through.
 
I personally read every comment, every email and every private message, but the agent surfaced patterns that would’ve been impossible for me to identify.
 
In the process it produced a refined “Cover E” recommendation based on the summary feedback of the “A, B, C, D” cover options in the original FB post.
This is an example of the Ask Method “science” side of the equation.
 
Along the way, I also made an editorial decision to override a key piece of data in the report.
Recently, when we put the “red sign” cover against the “pine cone” cover side-by-side in front of a PickFu.com cold audience as an A/B split-test… the red sign actually won.
 
Here’s why I decided to hold the line on the pine cone cover.
 
There’s a scene late in Return to Real that depicts the pine cone. It’s a moment of deep significance in the story.
 
And when I shared this week with a group of readers what the pine cone means and what it represents…
 
Multiple readers told me it gave them goosebumps.
 
A few even cried.
 
It was all I needed to confirm my artistic instincts.
 
It’s a special moment I want to deliver for every reader who reaches that point in the book.
 
That’s the “art” side of the equation.
 
In fact, this “melting pot of art and science” shows up across virtually every element of this book launch.
 
For example…

4 | The Interior Diagrams

Return to Real contains nearly a dozen diagrams to help explain some of the most important concepts in the book.
Here’s the science:
 
This past week, I ran live Zoom workshops with 25 beta readers.
 
I pulled up an iPad. Sketched diagrams in real time. Showed multiple variants side-by-side. And listened to which versions landed and which ones missed.
 
Every concept was tested across four rounds of feedback. Every variant was compared.
 
Here’s the ART:
 
Every diagram is drawn by hand. And the final images in the book are all drawn with real pen and ink, on real paper, by a real human being.
 
(In this case, drawn by the author.)
 
There is no stock illustration. And no AI-generated art.
 
And the way the diagrams are presented in the book is important, because it represents the argument the book is making.
 
(In fact, I’ll take you deeper inside my illustration process in a future issue of this mini-series…)

5 | The Endorsements I'm Pursuing

Endorsement strategy in publishing is often a numbers game.
 
A typical plan involves sending fifty emails to fifty friends and asking for blurbs.
 
I’m considering going in a radically different direction.
 
Here’s the science:
 
One of my book mentors, someone who has launched more bestselling books than I’ll ever write, sat me down recently.
 
When it comes to blurbs, here’s what he told me:
 
“I think it’s better to have one really aligned, strong, home-run endorsement than it is to have the typical Halloween candy bag of 20 random names.”
 
Then he asked me a question that changed how I thought about all of it:
 
“Would you pay $1,000 for the right person’s ringing endorsement on your book? Yes? Then pay to get on an airplane and ask them in person.”
 
Here’s the ART:
 
I’ve narrowed my “dream” list to two names.
 
Two writers whose work has shaped the way I think.
 
They probably get a hundred emails every month from authors asking to endorse their book.
 
So if I’m to even have a chance I’m going to need to do something far more creative.
 
I’ve got a few crazy ideas…
 
Both might say yes. Both might say no.
 
0-2 is a real possibility.

6 | My WILD Op-Ed Strategy

Most authors don’t run an op-ed campaign alongside a book launch.
 
The conventional wisdom is this:
 
Op-eds are for academics and policy wonks. Business authors should focus on podcast tours and trade press.
 
I’m attempting to run one anyway.
 
Of the four paths I’m showing you today (cover, diagrams, endorsements, & op-ed) … this is the one I’m most uncertain about.
 
Here’s the science:
 
I’m aiming for three placements over the next ninety days.
 
For at least one of them, I’m gunning for top-tier mainstream media. Think NYT, WSJ, HBR, The Atlantic. That class of outlet.
 
Here’s the ART.
 
The strategy is being shaped in real-time with a writer who also just happens to live in Vermont.
 
He has hundreds of op-eds under his belt…
 
He’s placed op-eds for the likes of the World Bank as well as CEOs of multi-billion-dollar publicly traded companies.
 
He was a beta reader for Return to Real…
 
And he loved it.
 
He thinks that with what’s covered inside the book and the way it’s written, we have a real shot at getting into the most competitive media in the country.
 
My first pitch goes out next month. Wish me luck :-)

7 | The Maps

As I write this… I’m on a bus.
 
Heading from our farm in Vermont down to a hotel at Boston Logan Airport.
 
Tonight I sleep at the airport hotel. Tomorrow morning I’m on a flight to Denver.
 
Where I’ll meet up with my Front Row Dads band… six of my closest friends for a few days of hiking at altitude in Breckenridge, Colorado.
 
In Chapter 2 of the book, I describe a night around a campfire with these same six men in the Ozark Mountains.
 
Here’s what I wrote:
 
Not long ago, I found myself deep in the Ozark Mountains on a backcountry retreat with six other fathers through a group called Front Row Dads. These are men I’ve spent years going deep with, supporting each other through the hard questions of fatherhood, family, and work. In the backcountry, there’s no Wi-Fi. There’s no cell service. Just the kind of stripped-down conversations that only happen when you’ve removed everything else.
 
One night, after a long day on the trail, we gathered around the fire. The stars were sharp, the sky was clear. The world had gone quiet, and the conversation turned to something deeper.
 
“What the hell is happening in the world right now?”
 
We didn’t mean the headlines. We meant the undercurrent. The unease so many of us are carrying about the economy and the geopolitical order. About the environment. About technology and artificial intelligence displacing our lives and livelihoods. And the uncertain future we’re preparing our kids for.
 
That night around the fire is part of what this book is built around.
 
That campfire was last year. 2025. The Ozarks.
 
The year before, in 2024, the Great Smoky Mountains.
 
This year, 2026, Breckenridge.
 
Two years ago, I wrote about David Brooks’s book The Second Mountain way back in [Issue #006] of this newsletter…
 
The idea that the climb defining the back half of a life is different from the climb that defines the first half.
 
That issue went out right around the time we hiked the Smokies.
 
A year later, the Ozarks. That campfire.
 
This year, Breckenridge.
 
My boys were 9 and 12 when I wrote that Second Mountain issue…
 
They’re 11 and 14 now.
 
In some ways, the “mountain” of writing Return to Real has been the start of my own personal second mountain.
 
Those topographic maps at the top of this issue?
 
They aren’t metaphors.
 
They’re the actual ones. From the actual hikes.
 
It’s one thing to write a book about returning to what’s real.
 
It’s another thing to live it.
 
That’s where I’m headed tomorrow morning…
* * *
One last thing before we wrap for today…
 
In this BBL series…
 
Going behind the scenes of a bestseller book launch…
 
What would you like me to cover??
 
Of course, I’m going to write about everything I mentioned above:
 
  • Book Endorsements…
  • Podcast Strategy…
  • Op-Ed Campaign…
  • AND the actual economics of my self-published book…
 
But what ELSE would you love me to talk about??
 
Please SHOOT ME AN EMAIL to let me know.
 
I’d love to know what you’re most curious about so I can prioritize what to write about these next few issues :-)
* * *
Okay, I’ll leave you with that for now…
 
Have a great rest of your weekend.
 
Remember to hug the ones you love.
 
And until next week,
 
Ryan :-)

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The Great Sea Change

The Great Sea Change diagram from Return to Real