It’s time for a book update!
The Story So Far
I spent a lot of 2025 writing a book, bringing together my nearly 20 years of experience as a professional writer and more than 16 years of experience as a professional marketer, exploring and discussing the current state of the marketing discipline.
Manuscript in hand, I did what you do: query. The end of 2025 and the first half of 2026 was spent pitching the book to various publishers and literary agents, following the individualized guidelines for each, and getting back rejections from nearly all of them (including for some ultimately understandable but still kinda weird reasons).
I did have two publishers who actually asked for the manuscript, and one with which I had some genuine back and forth, but those didn’t pan out.
The Story Now
Given all of that, the new plan is to self-publish this upcoming September (which has a significance I will unveil alongside the launch). In the meantime, here are some ways you can help me get the book across the finish line, if you’d like:
First and foremost, you can forgive me in advance for the fact that I’m probably going to be turning into one of those annoying “check out my new book” people on LinkedIn.
Second, you can volunteer to be a beta reader of my manuscript. I’ll send you a Google doc that’s all your own, and you can have at it with any thoughts, edits, feedback, criticism and/or praise you’d like. One piece of feedback I received which I loved was, “It’s an outsider’s skepticism applied from the inside.” But you can say mean things too.
Third, you can help me finalize the book’s title. I’ve waffled among:
Uncreative Services: The value of embracing boring, reliable marketing
Marketing Isn't Special: Get more out of marketing by treating it like everything else
Marketing, Disciplined: Why marketing currently lacks credibility and how we earn it back
And because of said waffling, I’m also open to other title ideas.
The Story to Come
Come September, whether you currently owe me a favor or would like me to owe you a favor, you’ll have the chance to buy my book at what should be a steep discount (once I figure out how to do coupon codes and all that).
But we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.
I'll keep you posted as September gets closer. If you've read this far, you're already more committed than several literary agents. So thank you.
If you do want to be a reader, I think you should be able to just reply to this email. If not, reach out on LinkedIn.