The day I picked up my books from printer, big bald news broke

Of course the day I picked up my books from the printer, big bald news broke.

I worked on my memoir, “Headscape: how a bald guy replanted his hair and restarted his life,” and happily sent it to the printer at BookLogix in Alpharetta, GA. It was all about being bald, transplanting my hair and not being bald again.

Less than a week later, I was excited when the printer called and said my books would be ready for pickup on Friday. Before I drove to pick them up – on Friday the 13th of May, 2022 – I brewed my coffee early and turned on the TV news. I was four hours north of Alpharetta at Lake James, NC.

Jonathan Lemire, host of MSNBC’s “Way Too Early” TV news show was just hitting stride on his show at 5:30 a.m., interviewing Juliana Tatelbaum, a CNBC financial correspondent in London, about inflation, the stock market and then ended with this question:

“Where you are, in the U.K., they have sometimes strange customs and cultures and one of them appears to be a new word in the workplace that’s now banned,” Jonathan said.

“According to a judge in the U.K., tell us what this word is, and we’re waiting with baited breath … the world in ‘bald‘ and this story is getting a lot of attention here,” Juliana began.

What was that?

I quickly set my coffee down, rewound my YouTubeTV and turned up the volume. “Did they just say …”

“Effectively, and I don’t know how I feel about this one so I’m going to give it to you straight and you can decide for yourself, essentially a tribunal, calling a man bald is sexual harassment,” Juliana reported. “They said that using the word could be related to sex, because hair loss is more prevalent among men than women, so using [that word] amounts to a form of discrimination. The ruling was made by a panel of three men, and just making its way through the news wires. We will see what the fallout is and how people are reacting. It is early days.”

My first thought was, “This is great. A cool news story to hang my book release on.” My second thought was, “If I had only waited another week to send my book to the printer, I could have included this amazingly relevant story at the end of my book on being bald (and then not bald again).” My third thought was, “Oh no, my book is too late to catch this news wave.”

It was big news in England, of course, and I hoped it would take off here in America. I called Margaret Willard, our Editorial and Production manager at The 100 Companies, who had nicely offered to help me with PR for the upcoming book release. We thought we’d have a few weeks to plan and pitch the book, but here was a breaking story right before its release. If only I could somehow get the paperback in the hands of U.K. radio hosts or reporters, I thought. My Kindle eBook version wasn’t going to be ready for another four or five days to send overseas.

Margaret and I sent the links of the developing news stories to a few reporters in the U.S., but we couldn’t seem to catch the wave of reporting. We were too late to catch of the story wave and too late to include the story in my book.

Yet it taught me an age-old PR lesson, now adapted to my new career as a book marketer: you can never start your planning too early. One always be ready for the unexpected, so get the campaign details squared away early and be ready to jump — or to pivot.

Also, in book PR and marketing, I learned from reading countless author blogs, one can’t take advantage of everything. Rather than market everywhere, focus on the outreach channels in what you can control. If we had a solid rollout plan, stick with it. News breaks every moment and one big story replaces another all too quickly

Still, I wondered why this happened on the very day my bald book was going to be in my hands. I don’t know the answer to that question yet, but maybe there were bigger forces at work here and I just needed to let the universe go to work as it inevitably will.