Taylor Swift Just Made an Announcement and It's Sheer Genius

Taylor Swift’s legendary Eras tour is finally ending, after more than a year and a half. She’ll give her final Eras performance December 8 in Vancouver, B.C.. But Swift, the newest pop star billionaire and one of the smartest marketers on earth, announced one more offering for her fans this week. She’s launching a new book, The Official Eras Tour Book commemorating the tour with her thoughts and recollections, as well as many photographs. The book goes on sale at Target on Black Friday, November 29. The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology will go on sale on vinyl and CD that same day. Up till now, the album plus bonus tracks that make up the Anthology have only been available to stream.

It’s a brilliant, brilliant move. Like everything Swift does, it’s thoroughly thought through, perfectly timed, and designed to give her fans exactly what they want. And it’s something you should probably consider doing to celebrate your own company’s milestone or project.

Taylor Swift is likely the most hard-working and prolific pop star in history. In the middle of the grueling Eras tour, she managed to record and release The Tortured Poets Department, and then the bonus Anthology tracks that turned it into a double album. Not only that, at the same time, she also continued her project to re-record her first six albums in “Taylor’s Version”, after she lost ownership of their master recordings. With her usual impeccable timing, she released the Taylor’s Version of 1989, her most popular album before TTPD (as The Tortured Poets Department is affectionately known) in the middle of the Eras Tour.

Obviously, Swift loves to write songs, to work hard, and to express herself. So it’s a bit surprising that, unlike many other celebrities, she has never published a book. Especially since many books (and one college course) have been written about her. Now that she is coming out with a book, it’s not the usual celebrity autobiography. Instead of chronicling her life from childhood on and relating the triumphs and disappointments of her career thus far, it focuses only on the Eras tour. According to Swift’s Instagram announcement, there are more than 500 photos from the tour in The Official Eras Tour Book, many of them never published before. Indeed, if the animation of flipping its pages is an accurate representation, this book contains a lot more photos than it does text.

Consider for a moment how smart all of this is. If Swift wants to publish another book in the future, she won’t have to worry about having already told all the good stories because this book is only about her current tour. Future tours could inspire future books with no concern about duplication. Filling the book with her own reflections about the tour, as she describes it, makes it much easier to write than if she had to follow a narrative structure.

At the same time, she’s giving fans precisely what they crave, an intimate look into her thoughts and feelings, and something they can pick up and leaf through for years to come if they want to relive their Eras tour memories. It’s an incredibly clever idea, even if Swift isn’t the only one to have it. A few days ago, the Icelandic pop icon Bjork also announced that a book commemorating her five-year Cornucopia tour would come out on November 15.

Which was conceived first, The Official Eras Tour Book or Cornucopia? It’s difficult to know and it doesn’t really matter. A good idea is a good idea, whoever had it first. In fact, it’s an idea that any business leader or entrepreneur could consider copying.

Did your company started out as an idle conversation between friends, that has now grown into a real business with employees and products on the market? If so, a book that takes readers from those early days to your present success might appeal to employees, investors, customers, and other constituents. Or, if you’ve launched a new product and it’s gone on to make an impact in the marketplace, a book relating how that product was created might be a great way to celebrate that journey. Your customers and fans might love it too.

Whether it’s filled with images or just words, and whether you publish it yourself or sell it to a traditional publishing house, coming out with a book is a powerful way to establish yourself as a thought leader. It lets people into your thought process, and can deepen your connection with anyone who cares about your company.

Publishing my book, Career Self-Care: Find Your Happiness, Success, and Fulfillment at Work (New World Library, 2022), brought me many speaking engagements and podcast appearances, and other professional opportunities. It also gave me a chance to dig deep into the question of how to fulfill your own needs and happiness at the same time as work that you love, and find some powerful ways to make that balance work. What could publishing a book do for you?