THE BOOK IS HERE! Behind the Scenes of “Are We Friends Yet?”

My book is finally out in the world.

This week, I'm taking you behind the scenes of the 6-year journey that became Are We Friends Yet? — from a food blog and a 40-page e-book idea, to a 120-page Word document, a friendship framework obsession, a major health crisis, an unexpected book deal, and more moments of crying on the floor than I'd like to admit.

This is the story of how this book came to be, the twists and turns I never saw coming, and why following my gut (even when it didn't make sense) ultimately got this book into your hands.

In this episode you’ll hear about:

• Why I turned down a traditional publishing deal after years of trying to get this book into the world
• How a trio of chronic illnesses delayed this project by nearly 2 years and forced me to put everything on hold
• What recording the audiobook taught me after more than 180 podcast episodes behind a microphone
• The unconventional launch strategy I'm using instead of jumping straight into a big press tour

Resources & Links

Episode 19: The One For Little Alex

Episode 109: How To Rebuild Your Life When Your Capacity Changes

This episode is sponsored by Are We Friends Yet?, Alex’s book on building the support system you’ve been wanting.

Buy the book and submit your receipt before July 16th to get The Connector’s Toolkit free: a private pep talk podcast for the moments that feel hardest, a full year in The Less Lonely Club, and more. Grab your bonuses at alexalexander.com/are-we-friends-yet

This episode is sponsored by Slowly, a digital pen pal app used by over 10 million people worldwide. If you’ve been looking for a low-pressure way to connect with someone completely outside your normal friendship circle, this is it. Exchange letters at your own pace, no small talk panic required.

Download Slowly free and get 30% off Slowly Plus using my link: https://open.slowly.app/miXL/l8ei5iw6

WANT MORE?

My book, Are We Friends Yet? is here. Order your copy today!

Dive into The Connection Reset. A 10-day private podcast to help you see the abundance of connection that already exists in your day-to-day (Yes. Really. I promise you have more than you realize). Start today. 

Transcript

Podcast Intro/Outro: 0:53

All right, gang. Here's to nights that turn into mornings and friends that turn into family. Cheers. Hello, hello, and welcome to the Friendship IRL podcast. I'm your host, Alex Alexander. Each week we talk about what is working(and what is not) in our friendships, community and connections. Have you ever wished you could sit down and have a conversation about what is really going on in your friendships? Well, you found your people. Join us as we dive into real life stories and explore new ways to approach these connections. Together, we're reimagining the rules of friendship

Alex Alexander: 1:50

Friends a little nervous today, I I recorded 182 episodes of the Friendship IRL podcast, and it's been a while since I've had nerves, but today is, I guess, a big day, because the book is out in the world. It came out in the world on Tuesday, June 16, 2026 and I can't believe I'm saying that, because, oh my goodness, when you hear this story today, you're gonna understand what a journey it has been to get here, and a journey that, honestly, so many of you have been on in some way, shape, or form. If I look back, I was talking about this book, I think in episode one. Now, at that time, it was named something different, and it looked very different than what it does now, but it was still there. I've been working on it ever since, and honestly, even before that, so today I could get on here and I could walk you through the book, chapter by chapter, what's in it, what you'll learn, why you should read it, and honestly, I will be doing plenty of that on my social media, maybe in a future episode, in interviews, in all the marketing stuff that comes with releasing a book, but today I don't want to do that. You've been here for a long time. I want to tell you the story of how this book came to be, because, quite frankly, I wrote this book by accident. I truly never meant to write a book, being an author, like, yeah, that's fun, and you know, like, maybe I'll run a marathon someday, like, maybe I'll write a book. It really was never on my vision board. I ended up here pretty much completely by accident, just by following my gut, like doing the next thing that didn't make sense, so many things that didn't make sense, so many times where I was crying because I felt like I needed to make one decision, but it didn't feel, I don't know, like the normal journey, or the like societally accepted journey, or what most people would do, but I'm definitely somebody who walks the beat of my own drum, so I'm grateful that I kept listening to my own intuition, and I guess we'll see where it takes us from here, because the book is out, it is available, one of those things that I am doing very differently, that I'm following my gut, is that the book is out. You're going to see me talking about it, if you are on the newsletter, if you are part of the Substack, which, by the way, if you are not part of the Substack, you should go join, because we're going to spend 12 weeks just like really diving into the book over there, and I don't really care if I end up with 40 people or 100 people or 1000 people more, I don't know however many end up in there. I just want to talk to some people about the book. I've been writing about this book for a long time. I would love to hear people's journeys. What's working for you? What's not? What's coming up? So that's what we're going to be doing on this Substack, but I am not going to do this big initial press tour, because I want to give all my attention to you, to the people who have been here since whatever episode you joined at. As you read the book, I want to be available for your DMs, your emails, your voice memos. I want to be available on Substack. I want to talk about it with you so badly, so, so badly. And that led me to choose to not really start doing a bunch of press for this book and. They'll probably late summer, early fall, because if I do all the press, then I'm so focused on like new people and new markets, and push, push, push, push, and I don't want to do that. I just want to slow down for a second, and I want to enjoy this book for you. I'm going to be talking about this book forever, so I will push it later, but right now, if you're like, "Oh, she's so busy, I'm not well, I am, but hopefully it's talking to you. So, reach out when you read it. So, now, shall I tell you about how I accidentally wrote a book? In order to tell you about it, we have to go all the way back to 2019 2019 so in 2019 if you didn't know, I used to be a luxury wedding planner. I did that for gosh, like a decade, and in 2019 I had decided that it was my last wedding season. I was so burnt out, I was so over it, I really wanted to do something different at the time. I was like, I'm going to start a food blog, so I did. It was called the Eternal Hostess, and if I had to describe it, really, it was like the anti Martha Stewart. I wanted to talk about how to just get people together, how to spend time with your friends, how to make it as easy and simple and casual as possible. I spent a lot of time talking about how to take things I don't know out of, like the back of your freezer and turn them into a last minute dinner for 10 people, or how to make the simplest, cheapest last minute party food I could possibly think of. You know, how to serve things out of mixing bowls, and this was about the time, like the rise of Instagram stories. So, the food blog was going well, it was growing, people were reading it. I would get messages where people would say, hey, it's really great that you can tell me how to cook dinner for 10 people at the last minute, appreciate it. But what I really want to know is, how do you have 10 friends? Because with Instagram stories, suddenly people were in my living room, I was showing, you know, our friends sitting around on the living room floor, or like the trips we were taking, or the hangouts we were having, sweatpants parties. So, I get it. People were seeing, like, hey, I really had a bunch of friends that I was spending time with, and how do you have 10 friends? But I had never considered that other people didn't have friendships like mine. If you are new here, friendship is very central to me. It's one of my main values, because I don't have a great family of origin situation, and you can go back and listen to episode 19, where I really dive into that story. But I do think that my past and my upbringing made me approach friendship differently wasn't optional, wasn't just a nice to have. I depended on it for survival, and I really acted differently than most people. I was willing to take more risks and put myself out there and try things, but I didn't know that at the time. I really just thought every single person had friendships like mine. Now this was also, my gosh, like my mid 20s, so well, 2019 my late 20s. This was my late 20s, so this was also the time where societally it's no longer as acceptable to just be spending a bunch of time with your friends, right? You start getting messages or people saying, like, well, shouldn't you be focusing on finding a romantic partner or a family or your career or your finances or this goal or that goal? Seems like you're just off partying with your friends all the time. It's like, okay, okay, we're just hanging out, we're all still going after our goals, but I think it's fine, Marcia. Anyways, all this stuff was happening at one time. Now, at this very same time, I met with a group of business friends. We met in a BNI group, Business Network International, and a bunch of us, like five women, decided that our time would be better spent if we met every week and we were kind of a board of advisors for each other, and so everybody really knew the insides and outs of everybody's business. Now I was in this group at the time that I was transitioning, like when I started, I was in the group as a wedding planner, and by the time, like 2019 rolled around, I had started this food blog, and they were all super supportive of my pivot, just really cheering me on, but I remember them telling me, like, "Hey, Alex, I have actually learned a lot about friendship from you, the things that you do, I've started thinking about or implementing in my friendships. I was like. Yeah, okay, and then they started telling me, you know, like, hey, I know you can talk about food and entertaining, but what it seems like you really want to talk about is friendship. I was like, girls, I love this, but who am I? Who am I to talk about friendship on the internet? What do I know that's any different than anybody else? I'm not certified, I don't have a degree in this. I didn't go get a master's in public health. I'm not a therapist. I don't do research on this. Like, who am I to talk about this? And they were like, "Listen, the things you're saying are changing our lives, so you have things to say, whether you believe it or not. Why don't you see if you can write a 40 page ebook? Can you write 40 continuous pages about friendship? Because if you can, then you probably have something to say. I was like, huh, okay, now all of this is happening about the time that the world shut down in spring of 2020 so that is not a good time. Fun fact, to have an entertaining blog, and I think that was kind of the final push. Would I have gotten here eventually, probably, but not a good time to have an entertaining blog. And everybody else was like baking sourdough and trying to find ways to fill their time. My husband and I were stuck at home working from the same dining room table, and I was just like, okay, 30 page ebook. I remember how I said at the beginning, there's been all these moments where I just followed my gut, even though it didn't really make sense. This is one of them, like, who would decide to sit down and write like a 3040, page ebook just for funsies, just to see if they could, and I really thought it wasn't going to be this big monstrous thing, so I started creating it in Canva, early Canva. If you've ever used Canva, especially back when it very first started, it was not that intuitive. It was kind of hard to maneuver, so I would write little things in there, and I had all these reflection questions, and then I started thinking about my various frameworks, and it kind of just got unruly, like by the time I hit the 30 pages, I was like, it is so hard to even just manage this in Canva, so I ended up pulling it out and putting it in a Word doc, and that's where things just kind of exploded, because now I wasn't limited by the design factors of Canva. It's probably summer by this point of 2020 like we're three, four months in, and I just start writing. I just start writing and writing and writing and writing and writing. I'm spending all this time thinking about the different friendships in my life. How you know, I put more emphasis on friendship, but for a lot of people, they have their families, they have their communities, they have all these different connections, and really, the first thing I created, besides some reflection questions, was the Wheel of Connection at this point I would guess I'm at like 60-70 pages of written single spaced content in a Word document, but I also feel like there are some holes in the product, like it's not quite ready to go out, because I'm kind of jumping around now. This is maybe a good time to note if you know another author, or if you are an author, and you are listening to this, you're probably like, "Wow, what a chaotic start, because most people sit down and they have a general thesis, and they write an outline, and they write points within their outline, and they very much know the sections that go in their book. That is not at all how I created this book. I just started dumping my thoughts on paper, so at this point I have some reflection questions about kind of like where somebody is at, and I have the beginnings of the wheel of connection. Now, in October of 2020 a group of friends and I decided that we were going to go move into a house together in Palm Springs. We all drove from Seattle down the West Coast to Palm Springs, and we moved into this house together for a month. We're all just co-working in this house. I have all these photos and videos of me standing on the edge of the pool with an umbrella over my laptop, I'm just writing away, and really that is where I wrote a bunch of the stuff about time and boundaries, kind of the initial, like first section of the book was there, written in a pool in Palm Springs. About this time, a bunch of friends, a lot of friends in Seattle, all decide to move within a six month period. I'm talking like five couples, 10 of my friends are moving away in a very short period of time. I completely lose it. I have actual panic attacks, because my friends, like, we had Sunday dinners, we had trips, we had all these things, and I'm just like, wow, my support system is about to change. Oh my gosh, How do I keep these friendships alive? I'm so panicked about it that I proceed to just spend hours and hours and hours and hours and hours, so many walks, so much, just like staring at a wall, staring at the computer, thinking about what is holding our friendships together. Now, maybe this is a good time to mention, if you have not listened to a previous episode about this, that I am a late diagnosed woman with ADHD, and I truly think that is a superpower when it comes to my work, because I am so good at synthesizing patterns that I see out in the world. At this point, I'm talking to all sorts of people on the internet about their friendships, I'm getting emails, DMs, like I'm talking to people when I'm at the coffee shop, you know, like, oh, what are you working on, a book about friendship, and everybody has stories about friendship they want to talk about, but they never have, everybody truly, so I'm just hearing endless stories about friendships. I'm talking to my own friends about their friendships. I am like analyzing everything, trying to understand what is holding our friendships together. And at that point, I'm starting to put together my Roots of Friendship framework, and as I'm doing that, I'm realizing, like, wow, actually I think this is connected to my Wheel of Connection framework. I think that the roots inform the Wheel of Connection, and vice versa, and like, people can move around the wheel by building different roots. I'm writing all this, but in the book, I'm just writing and writing and writing, I am writing from friends' kitchens, guest rooms, airplanes on the way to see people I love. Like, so much of this book about friendship was literally written in the moments between hanging out with my friends, where I would take things and try and put them in the book. Now, as you have guessed, at this point the book is no longer a 40 page ebook. I think it ended up being around 125 pages, single spaced, by the time I kind of felt like I had some feeling of completion, like I really had flushed out my ideas, except that now it is, I think, middle of 2021 I am staring at 120 pages of writing. I'm just like, what do I do with this? Because most people that write a book, they write a proposal, and they submit their proposal, I had a book, and I was so deep in the book that I was very, very, very passionate about the message I was sharing, and that's important, because at this point I was like, okay, well, do I try and get this book published? What do I do with it? So I went down like a two-week rabbit hole, where I looked up the whole process of what it would even take to get a book published. I learned that there are things like lit agents and query letters and book proposals. I truly didn't know any of this when I started writing the book. I just had this feeling, was so caught up in it, was so obsessed with the topic personally that I kept writing, I start looking up like the pros and cons of getting a book deal versus self-publishing. What does it take to self-publish? How long does a book deal take? What kind of platform do I need for a book deal? How much do I get paid for a book deal? I go down this long rabbit hole. At the end of the two weeks, I think to myself, you know, I could start querying the book, but some of what I had read, true or false, like these are some people's experiences, so I know this happens to some people. Your book gets purchased, and number one, it may get lost in the process and never actually be released. That would be a bummer, because I'm passionate about this message. The second thing is that somebody in a publishing house can buy your book, and then once we have signed all the contracts and they have read what I have, they could look at me and they could say, "Hey, this is great, love it, but we really think that the most marketable book right now. Is a book about how women can find more support from other women, and when I did start talking to people, that was kind of the inkling I could get, because I did send out some feelers. I am so passionate about this message that I was like, if you came back and told me to write a book just for women about befriending other women, we need those books. Don't get me wrong, we need those books, but that's not my book. My book is about how we can all connect with each other in small ways and really try and bring everybody back together. I would be truly heartbroken if I was told to change the premise of my book, because this whole book is built on, like, my lived experiences. I should not have the support system I have. I have truly beaten the odds. Go listen to Episode 19. I know there are other people struggling and lonely. I am so passionate about other people beating the odds, and you don't have to be at rock bottom, like I was at. You could just be really lonely after a big life change, whether that's a move or a divorce, or becoming a new parent, or getting a new diagnosis. You could have just been working really hard for the last 5-10, years of your life and kind of let your friendships lapse and feel like it's impossible to rebuild as an adult. That can be your rock bottom. I want to help you beat the odds in a world that tells you, like, oh, well, you just kind of got what you got. You do not. I want to help you realize that you have so much more control over this area of your life than you ever realized. So that's all to say, I decide I'm going to self-publish the book, except that I have no clue how to self-publish a book. I started doing research. I find an amazing team, Sarah and Britt at Spoon Bridge Press. Cannot thank them enough, because basically to self-publish a book, you need about 10 subcontractors. The person who does developmental edits does not do copy edits. The person who designs the inside does not design the outside. The person who lays out the book, you need like 10 people. How do I find those people? What am I hiring them for? What order does it come in? I don't know. So I go and I find basically my book shepherds and they're very excited about this friendship book. About this same time, my friend Sheena and I also partner up because I realized that I probably need an illustrator for my brand, and although I had Googled professional illustrators and people who illustrate children's books, whatnot. One day, I just sent my friend Sheena a message. I was like, 'Hey, I know you don't illustrate professionally, so I'm not necessarily asking you to illustrate for me, but is there anybody that you draw inspiration from, or like a similar style to you that you've seen, because I do need to hire someone, and she's like, why don't we set up a call, so we hop on a call, I tell her about this book I'm writing, I tell her about my vision for my work, we were both wedding planners at the same time, at this point we have known each other for gosh like eight years, probably, but we've always kind of been like work friends, not very close friends, right. We're definitely not talking every day, we just see each other at work events, things like that. But she instantly gets my book, like she's behind it. She's like, you know what, I don't really do this for anybody else, and honestly, I'm not a professional, so I don't really know what I'm doing, but I'll illustrate for you guys. It just kind of all falls together. It's really a wild story when I tell it out loud. Okay, so now I have a book team and I have an illustrator. I proceed to send this first draft of my book, this like 120 page document, to the Book Shepherd team, and I warn them up front. I'm like, listen, I didn't write this with an outline. I actually don't think that this is written in a way that it should be read, like it is written in the way that my brain conceptualized these concepts, but I don't know how to untangle my concepts and restructure this book in a way that makes sense. So they spend their time, they do their edits, they send it back to me, and they are like, Alex, we do in fact need to restructure the entire book. Your book should be kind of in the journey someone makes a friend, right? How do I make a friend? How do I end a friendship? How do I maintain a friendship? That is not how I wrote the book. So one of the first, like, most painstaking. And parts of this, so many tiers was restructuring the book. They basically took, like, here's two sections out of chapter eight, they're moving to chapter four. Here's one paragraph from chapter 12 that is going into chapter 14, like we might as well have just cut up the book and pasted it back together, and my brain was panicked, because it was like, this is not how I conceptualize this, I have thought about this for 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of hours at this point in a very set way, and now you want me to think about it differently, I think we went through maybe four or five rounds of developmental edits again, done on planes, trains, friends, dining room counters, couches, friends, guest rooms, like while I'm living my life and enjoying my friends, so many of them watch me write or edit chunks of this book, so by the time we get to the proof reading, I am practically like weeping with relief, because I do not want to tear apart this book and reorganize it anymore. It was such a painstaking process. It was really awful. Now at this point, we are, gosh, probably end of 2022 early 2023 and I think, like, okay, I'm just gonna release this book, except the entire time I had been writing this book, I had been so sick it was only getting worse, like it was getting worse and worse and worse, but I didn't even realize how sick I was. So we are in 2023 I think I'm about to release this book, and I have been fighting to even write the book, because turns out I have a trio of chronic illnesses, and I had gone from like one day a week where I was stuck in bed feeling either just like insane brain fog or migraines that medicines wouldn't even touch or nausea or headaches or shakiness or fatigue, I was so sick all the time, so now we're in 2023 and I am basically bed bound, like four days a week. I was so sick, so sick, and I had no clue what was going on with me, and I kind of got to this point where I was just like, I can't do this anymore. So I thought I was going to release the book, I think in October of 2023 sounds right, except that that is about the same time that I realized how bad my health had gotten, and I kind of had to drop everything. I spent about a year testing, doing elimination diets, going to different doctors, trying different things, just like desperate to find an answer for my health journey. I kept some things moving forward, but like very slowly, other than releasing the podcast, I really wasn't doing much of anything in like end of 2023 early 2024 work wise, like everything I had built, I kind of put on pause because I was just so sick and I was so desperate. It took me about a year to get the diagnosis, so end of 2024 I got diagnosed. Except that, guys, during this time my health is getting worse and worse and worse, like in 2023 I am losing more and more days every week to headaches, migraines, nausea, brain fog, fatigue, like crippling fatigue, where I would wake up at 9am because of insomnia, like I really would just was not sleeping four plus days a week. I talked more about this in episode 109 but my health was getting worse and worse and worse, so that just delayed the progress of the book moving forward at any speed. I also was trying to get the podcast out every week, like I was just barely surviving, and I think because it was such a slow progression of my illness, I didn't realize how much it was impacting me. Now I get to the end of October 2023 and I kind of feel like I've had enough. I cannot keep going on this way. I am losing like four days a week every week to being in bed. What is wrong with me? Other people are not living this way, and I proceed to spend the next year trying to seek out a diagnosis, trying to figure out what is wrong with me. I'm doing. In elimination diets, I am seeing different specialists, I am trying all sorts of protocols and PT and things, and like tracking everything, trying to figure out what is wrong with me. All of this just makes the book move really slowly, and I think I'm going to release it multiple times in here, but every time I go to release it, it's like I don't even know how I can release this thing, because I can't show up online, I can't do a podcast interview dependably, I can't get in front of a camera, like I might have a migraine tomorrow, more days than not I have a migraine, or I feel terrible, and so that really like stretched out the process in October of 2024 I finally got diagnosed with a trio of chronic illnesses, which I talk more about in episode 109 and at that point I realized, like, really how bad things are, how much focus I'm gonna have to put on my health to feel better, and I honestly kind of just stop working on anything that's not absolutely necessary for about nine months. I'm very grateful that I can do that. I'm very grateful for the privilege that I have to focus on my health. I was so sick, and at this point, I mean, I'm taking like 12 rounds of meds a day. I have all these doctor's appointments. I am following every PT protocol, like I know what the answers are, but it's kind of a full-time job to get back to some sort of baseline. And it wasn't until really summer of 2025 that I actually felt like I could wake up most days and dependably show up on camera, be on a podcast interview, not cancel everything, not do one task, and then have to go back to bed because I feel so nauseous and sick and have a migraine, and I am shaking, and I feel terrible. If you want to hear more about that, you can go listen to Episode 109 But when I come out of this in middle of 2025 I have basically now spent like a year and a half kind of just on hold with this book that is mostly done, minus like the interior design and the cover design. Thank goodness for my book team, they were so kind to kind of just like let this project drag on and on, but I am so grateful that I could spend the time to get back to some sort of baseline. I can't imagine trying to launch this book and doing it while stuck in bed all the time, so that delayed everything. Now I'm like, okay, I've got this book sitting here, let's move forward with the cover design, the interior design, the audio book, the all the things, the marketing plan. I'm like, I'm gonna release it in the fall, so I'm giving myself like a three month window to kind of jump start my business again to get everything going, because the only thing I really kept going was the podcast. So, at this point I am trying to find somebody to record the audiobook, because you all listen to me here all the time, and I feel like having my voice for the book is very important to a lot of you, are going to want to listen to the audiobook. I find a great studio. I feel like so high on life. I'm excited to launch the book. I'm like, we got to do this really fast, because I'm going to get it out soon. The way I was humbled in that audiobook studio, I'm here on the microphone all the time, when I tell you, recording an audiobook is an entirely different beast. You have to be so precise, you have to read at certain cadences and with certain intonations. It was so hard the first session. I think it took me five sessions to record the audiobook. The first session literally left. I was like, I don't know if I can do this. It was so bad, but session two got better, and session three was better than that. And, honestly, by session four and session five, I was feeling really good. We get to the end, and I tell Derek, my audiobook producer, because I had to go back, and the other terrible part is you have to listen to your audiobook at 1x speed the whole thing to catch errors, and where you got to go do like drop in and re-record things, so that was awful. Listening to your own voice for like 13 hours was terrible, but I get to the end, and I'm like,"Hey, Derek, I think session one was trash. I sound so monotone, so scared. My nerves are so apparent. I think we have to go back and record the entire first day. And so we did. We recorded the entire first day. Now. This is happening. Sheena and I are figuring out the cover of the book, finishing illustrations, getting that over to the book team. I'm still like, I don't even know how I'm really like marketing this book. I'm still trying to get my health back. I decide I'm releasing this book. I think it was November, might have been November 18 of 2025 and 18 days before I'm about to release the book, I get an email from an editor at an imprint for a Big Five publisher, and I'm like, is this real? I'm about to release this book that I have been holding on to forever. People are waiting for this book. Am I really thinking about, like, switching out to traditional publishing? I decided I wasn't gonna do this, but it also feels wrong to not consider it at that point. I honestly hadn't really even told a release date to the public. It was just like to you guys, it was just me that knew the release date, and my team, so I decided I was going to submit a proposal, and I sat down, and I wrote an entire book proposal, which normally takes people months. I wrote an entire book proposal in one day. I submit it. My book is formally offered acquisition. I have a book deal sitting in front of me. I have an advance, I have copies, I have a full book deal, and I panic because it doesn't feel right. Everybody who has never had a book deal before is telling me to take the book deal, and I am like, I just don't think it feels right. I am too far into the process. I want the flexibility. I have chosen to self-publish this book. I really believe in myself. There's also just like an entire component that comes down to intellectual property when you're traditionally published, and all of my core concepts are in this book. I'm a newer author, obviously a debut author, so they'd be taking a risk on me, so my advanced numbers, like, aren't anything crazy, especially to be selling my core IP. They were so sweet. I loved this publisher. I would absolutely consider publishing with them again, but the entire time my stomach is just screaming at me that, like, it doesn't feel right for this book. So I turned down right or wrong, we'll find out, I don't know, but I turned it down, and I'm back to picking a release date. At this point, we've passed the new year, like we're in the beginning of 2026 It might have even been February by this point, I think it was, because I was on a trip when I turned it down, because it took them a while to get me the offer. Then I'm like, I gotta pick a date again. And here's the craziest part. How do you pick a date to release this thing you've been working on for almost six years of your life, you just like pick a random day, just like yeah, I'm gonna press publish on this day. And then, how do you market this book? Marketing this book is an entirely different conversation. I think that the way that we release books, is really wild, right? There's all this pressure on the first week or the first month of sales, and I get why. It's because, really, when you're traditionally published, they use those initial metrics to determine things like a second book deal, or whether your book gets an audio book, things like that. I don't like all that pressure. I want to do things a little creatively, like a little more guerilla with this book, so the marketing plan is a whole different conversation. Like, the fact that I haven't been posting on social every week, in my head I'm like, "Wow, you're really messing this up, Alex, but in my gut, I also feel like I have a plan that is really going to work for me. I hope that is the case, but we'll find out. We'll find out, and so now here we are with the book out in the world, from accidentally writing it and coming up with these frameworks, dealing with my health stuff, having to decide multiple times whether I'm going to self or traditionally publish, navigating a book deal. It is finally, finally, finally out in the world. I can't believe it. What a journey it has been. Very briefly, let me tell you what is in this book. So, this book is 15 chapters plus a bonus chapter that you are meant to come back to a few months after you read the book. It is 312 pages. It is nine hours, 55 minutes, and 51 seconds of audiobook. Yes, I do know that number. I am obviously not a licensed psychiatrist, I. Don't have a professional degree in what I'm talking about. This is just me presenting to you basically my thesis on how I have approached friendship and what I have seen and talking to at this point 1000s of people about their friendships and trying to put it out there. My hope is that it gives us a starting place to have more conversations about our friendships and a better understanding of how they are working. How, like, what actual actions and conversations and details and things are you doing that are moving the needle towards what you want? How are you doing that? That is the entire point of this book, and I hope you have an understanding of that. I also hope that it leads to more conversations, and quite frankly, my best outcome would be that in, I don't know, 510, years, I need to write a second edition of this book, because I have had so much feedback, so many conversations with people, that some of this changes, but that would be a win, because it means we are all talking about our friendships so much more than we ever have, and that is what I want. Now, the book is called "Are We Friends Yet?", because really, I think societally we have this really black and white definition of what a friend is, and a lot of us are walking around feeling like we don't have enough when actually we are surrounded by small pockets of connection that really do add up to something we never could have expected, and that's where my Wheel of Connection framework comes in. This idea that although society wants us to silo off family, friends, community as separate parts of our life, really, they're all part of one ecosystem, and we need to be looking at them holistically, that everybody's is going to look different, but all that matters is that it looks how you want it to look. Now that connects into my Roots of Connection framework, where I really am thinking about, like, what is holding our friendships together, and I'm giving you language and a framework to understand truly, like, these smallest things that are happening in your friendships, how they are connecting you or disconnecting you. You will be able to look at a friendship that is ending and actually understand what changed in your friendship that made it end versus you being like, well, I don't know, it just ended. The structure of the book is three parts. The first part is really kind of like, where are you now, how are you showing up, and what do you wish was different. The middle two parts are the frameworks, and then the final part is a portion for you to reimagine what you do want, not a like big dramatic overhaul, but what are a couple small shifts you could take in your everyday life. How do we create an action plan around those, so that in a few months' time you will feel a difference. It may not be like the full overhaul vision that you have and want, we can't expect that to happen in a three month period, just like we can't expect, you know, our entire financial future to change in three months, or an entire like body recomp journey to happen in three months. It takes time, but just like in both of those, there are small things you can do that start to move the needle and honestly entice you to spend more time focused on this to invest more energy, so you can buy Are We Friends Yet? anywhere you buy books online, you can also request it at your local library, which brings me to my final section of this episode. There is really no societal script for a book launch, and honestly, half my friends don't even really like know what I do for a living on the day to day, and that's okay, because honestly, I don't know what they do on the day to day, but I do know they want to support me, and I know that a lot of you here want to support me as well. So I actually created a very specific list of things my friends can do to support me on this journey, and I'm sending it to them, like in a text message. I'm like, here are eight ways you can help me with my book launch. You know, I want.. I know you want to support me, but you're like, what do I do? Here's what you do. So, I'm going to tell you what those are. You don't have to do any of these, but if you want to do any of them, thank you in advance. I really appreciate it. First one is to buy a copy and leave a review. Leave a review, even two to three sentences on Amazon makes a difference. Sure, the stars, the numbers, like those are great. Having written reviews makes a huge difference. The next thing I asked my friends was to gift. Copy to someone strategic, somebody who is really connected in their community, a librarian, someone in HR, an event planner who would hire me to speak in an event, therapists, counselors, community leaders. Just give them a copy of my book. The next one was to make a warm intro. If you know someone that I should connect with, send them my way. Next is to request your book at local libraries or bookstores, because part of being an indie author, a self-published author, is that they won't automatically carry my book. I have to honestly just like get them to know that it exists, and what I'm hearing from most librarians is this is an easy automatic ad to their catalog, and they will buy the book, but I have to get them to know that it exists, and a really easy way for that to happen is for somebody to just request it at their local library, even if you buy a copy, if you submit a book request, super helpful, if you don't want to buy a copy and you prefer the library, submit that request, because that's how we're going to get the book in your library. Same with bookstores, a lot of local bookstores will carry books like mine, but they just have to know that it exists first, and then it is available on the platform where they do all their ordering, like it's already there, it's ready to go. The next one is to nominate me for a podcast newsletter brand you love, so if you have ever thought, while listening to one of your favorite podcasts, like, wow, Alex would be a really great guest on here. Something that's helpful is to comment my name in their social media, to send them an email, to nominate me on their website, to send them a DM, and just be like, hey, you should check out Alex Alexander, super helpful. Another one is just to reshare, comment, engage on my socials. I am going to be pushing out a ton of book-related content on all the platforms, so any engagement, super helpful. And finally, suggest my book to a book club that you are part of, and if you head to my website, depending on how recently you are listening to this book, I am going to make an appearance, either in person if you're local to the Seattle area, or virtually anywhere in the world. I will zoom into your book club, head to my website to check out that option. One last thing, if you are listening today, and you don't plan to buy a copy of the book, or maybe you do, doesn't matter. One other thing you could do that would be super helpful to me. All of my work is really connected, right? Podcast reviews impact my book, impact my speaking, impact corporate things I do and brands I work with. It's all connected. So, if you have been listening to the podcast, could you leave me a written review? Again, a star ranking is great, but the written reviews, they are something I can send to speaking clients, put on my website, use for press kits, like they really, really, really matter. If you don't want to leave a written review, you can DM them to me, comment on them, email them to me. All of that is usable in one way, shape, or form. You know, if it's something that needs to be like kept anonymous, I promise it'll be kept anonymous. I really try to err on the side of anonymity, so if you DM it to me, like, I will just take the part that says, like, you made a big impact in my life, and I don't even necessarily need to share the full story, but that is all super helpful. So, with that, I hope that I see you in the comments, in the DMs, on my email, in the less lonely club sub stack. I hope you pick up a copy of the book, and I see you somewhere, so we can chat about it in your book club. I want to come hang out with that. I'll see you next week.

Podcast Intro/Outro: 51:05

Thank you for listening to this episode of Friendship IRL. I am so honored to have these conversations with you, but don't let the chat die here. Send me a voice message — I created a special website just to chat with you. You can find it at alexalex.chat. You can also find me on Instagram; my handle is @itsalexalexander. Or go ahead and leave a review wherever you prefer to listen to podcasts. Now, if you want to take this conversation a step further, send this episode to a friend. Tell them you found it interesting, and use what we just talked about as a conversation starter the next time you and your friend hang out. No need for a teary goodbye— I'll be back with a new episode next week.