This is a follow-up to My Content Strategy for Selling a Book and Applying My Book Selling Content Strategy on Sites I Control. In this post, I will tell you how I market my book in communities that I am a part of on Discord, Slack, Meetup, and IRL with friends, clients, or mentees.

I don’t.

For sites that I control, there’s an expectation that I would talk about my projects. The posts on this site are meant to be useful, but they are based on my experience—they would make no sense if I didn’t explain what I was working on.

But, in communities, we’re having conversations. We’re building relationships. Having fun. It’s just not the place. This doesn’t mean I never talk about my work—sometimes that’s what we’re talking about (our work). And when the book is finally launched, I will ask my software developer friends to read it (because I think it would help them). But, even though I don’t have a strategy to market to them, the conversations we have drive my marketing strategy.

Fairly often, our conversations lead to me writing something. In fact the past three posts (including this one and the next one) are based on a conversation I had in my writing group about my plans for marketing my book. The post, Network with Alums Just Ahead of You, was based on a conversation I had with a mentee. PM-led vs. Engineering-led Time and If code reviews take too long, do this first are based on conversations I have had with clients. Those are just the recent ones.

A lot of my posts over the past 20 years started out as conversations. It’s more of a product development (content generation) strategy than a marketing one, but I believe that these conversations are evidence that the market has these problems too, so it’s marketing in the research sense.