In this short article, what tools do I use to organise my pre-release book tour without a PR guy?

In summary

The short answer:

• Notion for project management

• Calendly for scheduling

• Zoom for the meeting and recording

• Descript for the video editing

• Podia for the publishing

Project management

It all starts with a good Notion board. This one helped me to make a list of potential guests.

As I'm recruiting guests, it helps me remember where each discussion with a Service Design nerd who could be a potential guest is.

Scheduling

Then, I use Calendly to schedule a call with each guest once they say they want to be part of the adventure.

What's lovely with Calendly is that it then automatically sends a Zoom invite to the guest.

Recording

What happens then during the conversation with the guest?

We have a short 30-minute conversation where we discuss one of the chapters together. The three questions I use as a starting point are:

1. The good: What's something that resonates with you in this chapter?

2. The bad: What's something you disagree with in this chapter?

3. Next: What would you recommend to readers to go further (book, movie, TED talk, article, etc.)?

That's the starting point; then, we'll see where the conversation leads us.

Editing

This is all recorded via Zoom, and then I'll use Descript to edit the conversation quickly. The two features that help me a lot are:

• The automatic removal of word gaps (basically, it removes all the blank moments when we search our words)

• The automatic removal of filler words (especially useful for people like me who are not pro-interviewers and who tend to say "hmmm" and "like" a lot).

Publishing

Then this gets all published as text and video on the Swiss Innovation Academy via Podia and also shared on Linkedin.

That's basically what I'm doing in the next weeks to prepare for the launch of my next book called "Service Design Principles 301-400".

Written on Sunday, September 3, 2023, by Daniele Catalanotto