Someone in Oklahoma City hijacked my book launch to sell wart cream
Happy Fourth of July!
This is the day. Everything I built for this book pointed right here, to today. A novel about the fight for independence, launching the week of the Fourth. Months (years!) of planning, all aimed at this week.
Here's the ask up front, plain, because you deserve it that way. (But I hope you'll stick around to hear about my disastrous morning!) Rising Sons is out July 7, and you can pre-order it right now for $.99.
Now let me tell you about my morning.
I woke up today to find that a guy in Oklahoma City had hacked into my Meta account. He was running ads with it. Not for my book. For wart cream. Two thousand dollars a day of wart cream ads, charged to me.
My credit cards shut it down. Then Facebook shut it down because I hadn't paid. And Facebook, a company worth more than some countries, doesn't have one human being you can reach to fix it. No phone. No person. Just an AI chatbot pointing me to forms that lead to more chatbots.
So on the biggest day of my launch, the day I spent months building toward, I can't run a single ad for my own book. The book I spent years writing. The one I walked 230 miles from Boston to New York to live. Gone before breakfast, so a stranger could sell wart cream on my dime.
My marketing plan didn't stumble this morning. It burned to the ground.
So here's where I stand. That whole machine is ash. Which means my entire launch now comes down to one thing. YOU.
The people on this list. The ones who took a quiz online, who raised a hand, who wanted this book before it existed.
And there's a bitter poetry in it. I wrote a book about ordinary men who got fed up with a giant empire that didn't care whether they lived or died, and wouldn't answer when they knocked. This week I got a small, modern taste of my own subject matter. They had the Crown. I got a guy in Oklahoma City and a tech company that won't pick up the phone. Similar energy.
So I'm asking you to do what the Sons did. Stand up. Two things:
Pre-order Rising Sons for $.99 (button below).
Forward this to one person who'd like to read about 1765 Boston.
99¢ and one forward. That's how a man whose marketing plan burned down this morning still gets his book off the ground. Not with an ad budget. With his people.
Boston, 1765. Redcoats on King Street. A city one spark from war, and the ordinary men who lit the fuse. That's the book. $.99 through Independence week.
Thank you for being the plan!
Talk soon,
