If you haven’t seen it yet, Becky Mollenkamp talked about her book launch with me and a panel of friends:
She joined us a gain to talk about book journey, launch, and all the lessons she learned.
What if the hardest part of writing your book wasn’t the writing?
Becky Mollenkamp spent three decades avoiding the book she knew she needed to write. Not because she lacked the words. She had hundreds of thousands of them. But because the rules she’d absorbed about what a book was supposed to be kept getting in the way of the book she actually wanted to make.
Becky joined us on her publication day to talk about what it took to finally finish it, why she chose to self-publish, and what nobody tells you about the emotional weight of standing up and saying: I made this. Please read it.
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Highlights
The book took three months. And thirty years.
Becky is a journalist by training. Two degrees. Two decades of writing for publications, magazines, corporate clients. She knows how to write. That was never the problem.
The problem was the blank page and the belief that a book had to be 80,000 words of long-form narrative before it counted as real.
“A thousand words feels like a long post to me. You want me to write 80k?”
Two things finally broke the logjam. She used AI — not to write for her, but to help her ADHD brain make sense of a decade’s worth of content she’d already created. And she gave herself permission to write the book she actually wanted to read.
Skimmable, visual, and built in Canva.
Once she stopped writing the book she thought she was supposed to write, the whole thing came together in under three months.
The lesson isn’t about Canva. It’s about what happens when you stop letting imaginary rules run the show.
Self-publishing isn’t second best. It might just be better.
For a long time, Becky held a quiet belief that traditional publishing was the only path that really counted. Watching a friend navigate both routes changed that completely.
“I own my IP. I own my book. I get to bet on myself, believe in myself. I get to retain the money that I earn. I don’t have to earn back some advance to prove that it was worthwhile.”
Unless you have the platform that commands a serious advance, self-publishing gives you something traditional publishing rarely offers — full ownership, full control, and the freedom to make every decision yourself.
The rules were always pretend. You just have to decide to stop following them.
Promotion is the part nobody warns you about.
The writing was hard. The backend setup was complicated. But nothing prepared Becky for the emotional labor of the launch — weeks of talking about herself and her book, constantly, to anyone willing to listen.
“For an introvert, for someone who is conditioned as a woman to be small, to not be a burden, to not brag — it is amazing how challenging this period has been.”
This is the part Becky knows well. The part where you’ve made something real and meaningful and then have to stand up and ask people to care about it. It feels like too much. It feels like bragging. It feels like you’re bothering people.
Becky kept going anyway because she believes in the book. And that belief is the only fuel that actually works when the discomfort gets loud.
You have to talk about your thing until you’re sick of it. Then keep going.
People in Becky’s life were still saying “I didn’t know you were writing a book,” after a month of nonstop promotion.
That wasn’t because of a lack of effort. That’s just how noise works now.
“We are the center of our own worlds, but no one else is. Everyone else has got their own stuff going on.”
The old rule was seven touchpoints before someone takes action. In today’s world, it’s probably closer to five hundred. The goal isn’t to stop when it feels like enough. The goal is to keep going until it actually lands with the people who need it.
Talk about it like your best friend made it. With that same ease. That same pride. Because if you believe in what you built, staying quiet isn’t humility — it’s doing your reader a disservice.
Gamify the process or it will drain you.
Becky built herself a custom interactive dashboard that tracks every podcast pitched, every sale made, every milestone crossed. Check something off and you get confetti. Sell a book and it makes a cha-ching sound.
“I really need some gamification. I need some fun or I will get depleted — because this is a long and hard process.”
For someone with ADHD and executive dysfunction, this is the difference between showing up and shutting down. And it’s a living example of what the book itself is about: building systems that actually work for your brain instead of forcing yourself into ones that never did.
You don’t have to do it the way everyone else does it. You just have to find the way that keeps you moving.
Promotion gets people to your work. Quality gets them to stay.
Becky is clear that the quality of what you write matters. But she’s equally clear that quality alone is not a marketing strategy.
“How many amazing books are out there that no one’s read? Not because they weren’t amazing — but because the author wasn’t willing to get out there and be proud of what they did and proud enough to get up on a soapbox and actually shout about it.”
She frames it as a triangle. Quality is one side. Promotion is another. When those two things come together, the third side becomes possible — the word of mouth, the wildfire, the thing that takes on a life of its own beyond your effort. You can’t control that third side. But you can control the first two.
Do the work. Then show up for it.
Closing Reflection
Becky’s book is about liberating your business from the rules and systems that were never built for you. And her entire launch was a live demonstration of exactly that.
She broke the format rules. She chose self-publishing. She built her own tools. She pushed through the discomfort of self-promotion and did all of it in a way that actually worked for her brain, her values, and her vision.
“I believe in my book. I wouldn’t have written it if I didn’t. This is part of my legacy. My dream is — what if this book is on library shelves long after I’m dead?”
That’s the kind of purpose that outlasts any launch window.
You can find Becky and grab the book at beckymollenkamp.com/book. And if your library doesn’t carry it yet, ask them to order it in. That one would genuinely make her day.
If you’re an author with a story worth sharing, leave a comment and tell us about your work. You deserve the spotlight too.
Thank you Miguel A Castillo Jr., Author Gold, Tomesha Campbell, Steena Hernandez, Norma Cardenas, and many others for tuning into my live video with Becky Mollenkamp!
