There are many different ways to launch a book, and in this episode we talk about some different kinds of launches you can have, some tools you can use, how to mobilize your Advance Readers / Review Crew. We discuss places to connect with readers, and options for how you can set yourself up for future success on the technical side of things by attracting the right readers. We also talk about how you decide which elements to include in your launch strategy.

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Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 006: Strategic Book Launches

Crystal: Hey there, strategic authorpreneurs! I’m Crystal Hunt

Michele: And I’m Michele Amirtani. We are here to help you save time, money, and energy as you level up your writing career

Crystal: Welcome to episode number six of the strategic authorpreneur podcast. On today’s show, we’re going to talk about launching books, and this is an area a lot of people find quite challenging, but it’s also really exciting and a bit scary, and there are so many ways to handle it.

So we’re going to dive into some of the various ways you can approach book launching. Different strategies, different tools, different timelines, and also talk a bit about what we found works for us or didn’t work for us, and why, so that you can maybe take some of what we have learned the hard way and apply it to your own situation so you do not have to do all of the same experimentation that we did.

So, Michele. What has been your experience with book launching? Talk about this first sec.

Our experiences with book launching

Michele: Yeah, let’s roll this. So one thing that I think you are going to find very interesting is my approach and Crystal’s approach are different because of the different moments in the publishing career we are at.

But also because we publish in genres that are completely different. I’m on the fantasy science fiction side, she’s more on the romance. She published a book for kids. So it’s different kind of things, different kind of styles. But I believe you will find the common friend in the, probably the planning part.

And what we actually do when comes time to launch the book. And as Crystal, as you were saying like there are different ways to do this. And I think it depends a lot on the moment in your career and whatever books you are published them. Because every single time you publish a book, you learn something new and this is something that I’m learning as I’m publishing.

There are things that the first time you publish a book you will simply not implement because you will not know them. But it’s like writing a book the first time. There are so many things you have to keep track of: tension, dialogues, pacing. That’s why most of the time the first book takes when you’re a new author, like three to five years.

But then as you do that, as you write some of the things like tension and stuff almost naturally to you. If you do that, of course, on a daily basis. Same thing with the book launch. I found, again, this is my 5 cents, but I did a bunch of book launches, a half a dozen book launches in two different market, the Italian one and an English one.

And I do find that there are things that I already, now, when I have to do a book launch, I do it by default. I know that is something that it’s going to be useful. I trouble shoot stuff that I saw didn’t quite work and I adopted something that we sometimes, I spoke about the 80 present 20% approach.

So you try to put most of your resources, time, energy, money on things that you saw before, worked. So what is my book launch going to look like? Basically, everything starts for me months before I published it. There is a process of planning the book launching that is something that most people that are maybe starting out don’t know.

So they believe maybe launching a book is something that you do maybe after you finished writing that book, or even after like publishing the book. But I think like it is important to understand that when you are writing a book, you can also start in planning the book launch.

It might be difficult, especially if you are doing this for not a long time because it’s a lot of things to process. But again, when you think of the words book launch, you have to realize you have a plethora of different things and resources you can use to your advantage. You do not have to master them all the first time.

Absolutely not. What I usually do is I pick one new thing. Every single book launch, and I try it. So real example, with my last book that I launched, Lord of Time, five months ago. I completely and utterly didn’t know anything about BookFunnel, which is basically a website that you can use to make a reader’s life more easy.

So I decided, okay, this is something I’ve never done before. I’m going to try to use and try to use this platform. And see how it goes. Now that I know how to use BookFunnel, it is something that I implement every single time and I will implement every single time because I saw it is useful for me and for the way I publish books.

You got the feedback, you get the subscribers. It’s one thing that I did different from the rest of the times. It’s not two or three or four, it’s just one. So this is basically how I plan the book launch. Thinking of one thing I didn’t do before. Applying it, seeing how the data relate to the book lunch and see does this work or it doesn’t work.

If it doesn’t work, toolbox, take the tool away. I don’t use it anymore. I try something new. And I don’t know, Crystal, if this is something that applies only to me or also to you. I do know that you have more instruments in the tool box because you have been in the game for more time than I did. My approach is very simple.

It’s again, very chilled down. I concentrate 80% of my resources on the writing stage because I’m very, very weak on that. I do know though, that you have way more things to say about that kind of process. Way more tips. And I actually want to know a bit so I can maybe steal stuff from you.

Crystal: Steal like an artist, right? That’s the idea. First, maybe let’s talk about a couple of different approaches to book launching in general. Because I think when we talk about book launch in the old days, when it was all straight through bookstores, the idea of a book launch was, you know, we get this picture of ourselves sitting in a room at a bookstore with a whole bunch of people in the same room buying copies of the book that we then signed. So that is a kind of book launch. And I have had that kind of book launch before, which is, especially if it’s your first book, I do think it’s really important to actually have that event and celebrate that milestone.

You’ll find mostly for book launches that you do in person, it’s really hard to get people to come out. If it’s your first book, you’ll have your friends, your family, your writer’s groups. Everybody’s really excited when it’s like your 10th book, everybody’s like, yeah, no, been there, done that. Like, good luck.

So. Yeah, I think we get a little bit more jaded about those in person events as we have sort of had a lot of books. And if your book launch, the purpose of it is to celebrate with people you love and who love you around a common topic. And to celebrate your book baby, as we often call it in the industry, then that’s great.

You want to have that party, you want to plan it in whatever way is going to be the most fun for you. You can invest as much or little in terms of time, energy, and money as you want to plan that party. The very first book launch I had, we had a party. We were actually launching our publishing company effectively at the same time.

And I had, from a weird twist of fate two picture books that actually came out at the same time. So we rented a room at Steamworks, which is a brew pub that’s a not too far from where we live. I used to work there, so they were kind enough to as part of supporting us they actually helped us out with the party, which was very sweet.

And so we launched that and the illustrator flew over from Spain. We had like so many friends and family there. I have a big family, so that helped. And it was an awesome party and it was a great way to kick off sort of this dream that I had had for so long. So we were launching Gumboot Books and kind of our first couple of books as well.

So that was a really, really special event for me and my history. And it just, it marked a really big milestone, so I would not undo that at all. Did we sell a lot of books? Well, we sold a handful of books to a lot of people who came there, but, if book sales is your target for launching your books, then that in-person party is probably not the way to go about it.

As most authors will tell you, you know, you plan a launch at a local bookstore, you’ll often get, you know, 10 to 20 people. And maybe you sell a dozen books. It’s not usually like the lineups around the block that you might’ve seen in a movie somewhere until you’re eally well known. Like I think the in-person book launch is something we do at the very beginning of a career, and then once you’re really well established and you have a big audience who are beyond your friends and family, but the random strangers who absolutely love your books and your characters who will come out to stuff, I think we revisit that type of launch at two different stages in our career in a very different way.

Just this past week I was at a speaking event with William Gibson, who is a, an author you may be familiar with, but he was launching his new book and had done a multi-city tour, and there’s an auditorium that’s rented out for this book launch party, and the audience all buys tickets to come and watch him have a conversation with a journalist.

And so we were in the audience. And you know, he’s one of my husband’s favorite authors, and so we wanted to be part of that. It was a fun event and an interesting peek into the mind of the author and a good look at behind the scenes. So that’s another kind of in-person book launch where you are the show basically.

And so that’s not something you’re going to be able to pull off really early in your career necessarily. That’s something you have to build up to. I am not yet there, but one day I would love to be. So anyway, for now, we are in the in between stage, which means you’re probably past the point of throwing a party each time a book comes out, but you still want to capitalize on the momentum and you need people to be aware that your book exists so they can buy it. And so the in between kind of launches is mostly what we’re going to talk about today, which is how do you connect with your readers? How do you set your book up for success? And then how does that work?

So I think, again, within this vertical  world of book launching, there are very different approaches depending on what point in your career and what point in a series you are at. So for example, I take an approach that is pretty chill for launch week. I don’t invest thousands of dollars in ads for launch week.

I don’t kind of go all out in the way that some authors do. If your approach is to kind of hit the top 100 and Amazon on launch week, you’re going to already need to be at a certain stage of your career for that to pay off. I am not quite there yet, so I am in the: I want to get the right people buying my book so that my Also Boughts are set up to support the future sales of my books. I want to make sure that my ARC team, my advanced readers, and my review crew, I call them, I want to make sure that we get the most reviews possible posted in that first week, so that when I do start my AMS ads and things like that, start running in the background, they have a better chance at success.

I also want to make sure that my dedicated readers, the people on my mailing list get access to the book right away. I usually do a bit of a price break as a thank you for their support along the way, and I let my mailing list know, okay, it’s going to be on for, you know, 99 cents the first couple of days, so grab your copy now, which also helps my reviewers to be able to have verified reviews if they’re mostly in my sort of inner circle of readers, and they get a notice that says, Hey everybody, it’s up for a limited time for  99 cents or even free sometimes so that they can grab a copy and then be verified.

So for me, I really look at launch week as a hundred percent a week to focus on connecting with my readers. You know, I may organize a promo or two, but I usually don’t do those until after that initial period.

So I do really treat it, I think as a personal kind of experience, even though it’s happening digitally and it’s a fairly large scale. I mean, I have about 6,000 people on my mailing list now, but, but my inner circle is a couple hundred of people who are kind of on the launch team and, and help out with that as readers.

And they are the people who are so excited about the next one in the series. And they know the characters better than I do. And you know, all of that, that stuff. So for me, it is still that personal party to celebrate the book coming out. And I like to sort of blog about some of the experiences of the behind the scenes stuff.

I like to say, you know, what were the inspirations behind the characters? I love making promo images and stuff. I use BookBrush for that primarily. And I like Photoshop so I also play around with that. Making like the videoed trailers for me is so fun. So for me, it’s my chance to play after I’ve been, you know, spending weeks or months depending on the length of the book and how long that idea has been floating around.

It’s really my chance to have some fun with other people who are having fun with the book. And so while I do apply a lot of specific strategy, because I want to make sure that I’m setting my algorithm info and my AlsoBought information is all correct in that it’s the right kind of people buying the book.

I also really want to make sure that it is a celebration because it’s hard freaking work to make books, and it’s a great opportunity to let yourself have some fun and just revel in that accomplishment for a little while. So, yeah, does that make sense? It’s kind of that blend of personal and professional?

Starting out

Michele: There is something that comes out from what you said and what I mentioned. Which is something that I think is very important. Whatever kind of things you are doing or resources you’re using, you’re basically marshaling your resources for you know, the first, week or a couple of weeks, and Crystal said like, she’s not going to go all in still. She does her homework. So she makes sure that she connects with her community.

Now, for example, my community is far smaller than hers, but I do understand fundamentally there is an importance with connecting with the people that are already following you. So this is something that she said that I think is super, super important for any kind of author. Either you’re starting out so that you have like thousands of people in your mailing list.

And there is one other thing that you mentioned that that I think is valuable. To process just a bit better. And this is probably something that I do a bit more than you because I’m in a different stage in you. I look around myself a lot. I try to see what other authors are doing in their book launch. I try to get inspired and to use maybe some of the instruments they are using.

And the way I do it is very genre specific. So I will go and see what the colleague from, for example, Epic dark fantasy does. For example, I follow Bengali, which is an author from the UK that writes similar things that I write; longer and probably way better than I do, but it’s a source of inspiration.

And I see every single time it comes up with something that is interesting. And some of the resources that I’m using have been harnessed thanks to this. So, this is a suggestion that I think might be trivial, but at the same time can be very powerful. Look around yourself, subscribe to a newsletter of authors that are similar to you. Maybe you’ve read some of their books and you found value in them.

I will never forget one discussion that I had with an author that is a very, very successful, and the she reached the top 100 sales on Amazon. I think she went on top 20 or top 10, something very, very massive. And she told me, when you’re starting out, you don’t really know what you’re doing. And even if you’re in the game for more than a year or two, there are still stuff that you can learn from other people. So, she suggested me to do this, subscribe to any newsletter of authors that are similar to you and that you respect. Read all the reviews of their works.

Understand what works and what doesn’t. Book covers, for example, it is a thing you can use in your book launch because when you are faced by the choice, for example, with your designer, which one is the book cover that will resonate more with them my audience and the people interested in the genre I’m writing.

The first thing you do is google romance novels, and you see the top 20, you see the top 15 you see what kind of cover, what kind of description is pulling readers in, and immediately after that, maybe you open the Kindle book and you read the first few pages. You have to be a kind of a chameleon. So you have to be very good in adapting yourself. You don’t have to copy. But you have to scan and see what kind of things work. So I think just for completing what you were saying, especially for writers that are starting out or there are in a middle kind of way, look around you. See what other people and other authors in your same genre are doing for their books, what they’re doing for the launch.

Crystal: I think that’s a great thing to highlight and I think to highlight that that doesn’t change no matter where you’re at in your career. So I still subscribe to at least a dozen romance authors writing sort of similar categories to me.

And I try to pick a couple people, at least who are at the level that I am at now. And I try to pick a handful of people who are where I want to go because I think it’s really easy- well, you know, we often default to who are the most successful three people in our genre or whatever, and we follow them and we want to do everything like them.

But you’re comparing your beginning or your middle to someone else’s, like ending or you know, you’re at the start and they are in the high middle. It’s not the same thing. So you want to know where you want to get to. I think that’s very valuable. And some things you can set yourself up to do them that way from the beginning.

Like it’s not a major financial investment, it’s just being smart and building a system that will grow with you. So I think anytime you’re trying to choose a tool or a method or follow someone else’s example is important to look at how will this grow with me as I grow as an author? Is this sustainable?

You know, can I do this for each of my books? So that’s one of the criteria that I look at whenever I’m choosing, okay, well, so-and-so did this, and it looked like it worked really well for them. How close are their products and their audience to mine before I decide, will I adopt that thing or not?

I write short novellas for the most part. And so the things that work on a full length book or the places it makes sense to invest in additional advertising might not make sense for my books, right? I don’t make that much off Kindle unlimited page reads, and so some of the strategies that other authors in my genre are you using only makes sense for a longer book where you make a lot more money off page reads.

So I wouldn’t choose to adopt those things, but they might have something fantastic about the way they interact with their ARC team or the way that they notify their newsletter list about their new releases. Or maybe they have really cool social media images. And I’m like, how did you make- and I actually reached out on Instagram the other day to ask one of my friends, love the magical swirls you have in your video promos for your book launch.

Like, what tool did you use to make those? And I’m not shy about asking people that. And so I think, you know, watching what other people are doing and reaching out to say, this was awesome. How did you do this? And people love to share their own resources. And I probably 95% of the tools that I’ve ever adopted or tried out have come from another author, either using them and I was following what they were doing and couldn’t figure out exactly how they did it. Or I listened to a podcast where somebody sort of tossed off earlier, like you mentioned, BookFunnel, and we didn’t really go into detail of what that is or what it does, but I would immediately Google anytime somebody mentions a tool name that I don’t recognize, I will Google it.

And find out what it does and how it works, and if they have a free trial, and then I will test it out. So I think if we go back to sort of the launch process, I think  there’s a few key pieces that any launch at any scale needs to have, and the first piece is being able to get those first hundred or so purchases on Amazon really want to be the right readers.

So I think it’s really tempting to use your closest connections first to get those first downloads. It’s going to be launch day, you really just want everybody to buy your book. You want to put it on Facebook, so all your friends and family know that your book is out. But your friends and family are not necessarily the right readers. Let’s say I don’t normally read as much scifi fantasy as my husband, for example.

So it’s easy for Michele to reach out to all of his close connections and say, Oh, buy my book. And of course I will be supportive and I will go there as soon as I get that email and I will buy the book. I actually made myself wait on this one because I didn’t want to skew your AlsoBoughts, but I did buy it, I bought it.

But I did wait a few days because you really want those first people to be as in line with your ultimate audience as you can be. So if you were writing a nonfiction book for authors, you would want to reach out first to your author friends who, you know, buy lots of craft books that you want your book to be associated with and you would want them to buy first because you want Amazon to know that people like this, buy books like this, and then they know who to send out marketing emails too.

Sometimes they will send out emails on your behalf that you didn’t have to pay for because they know people like this buy books like this. So here’s another book you might like, and that is an amazing boost to your sales potential. But that doesn’t happen unless they know what kind of person buys your book.

It’s just like look alike audiences on Facebook. You need a certain amount of data before they can make sense out of that data. And for books that seems to be roughly a hundred purchases before you start to see like you’re AlsoBoughts be pretty irrelevant. And before Amazon algorithms can really figure out what kind of person is the best kind of person to purchase your books.

So I think start with your most relevant audiences possible when you start telling people about your book. So we often talk about a soft launch in the industry, and that’s when you make your book live, but you don’t throw all your promotional weight at it those first few days. You want to give yourself a little bit of time to actually get your review crew or any of your personal connections to be posting the reviews so that when you do go live and you start pushing out for your hard launch or your actual launch-

You know, there’s a bit of social proof there already that says other people bought and liked this book. It gives you a chance to actually make sure there’s no mistakes, because sometimes a book will go live and maybe your book description has a glitch in it, or maybe the price is weird and it’s not what you wanted.

And so you really need to give yourself a little bit of room to maneuver and make sure that everything is perfect before you start throwing lots of people into that space. You want to give yourself the best possible chance of the most possible people purchasing that book when they get to it.

Attracting the an audience and the Amazon algorithm

Michele: And there is one thing that you actually said. You touched on the Amazon algorithm, a subject which is like an enormous kind of thing that I think will deserve seven episodes of this podcast by itself.

But long story short, as you were mentioning, Crystal, like you want to attract attention in a very productive way. And there is not a single person that knows exactly how the algorithm works, but there are a couple of things that are sure. And things that you can leverage in your launch a week or couple of weeks. Now on some like volume and velocity, and by these two things, I mean if you can attract the right kind of traffic in the first, let’s say seven to 14 days and you can make a spike that is slowly going up with the right people that enjoy your book, Amazon is going to love you. By velocity means how fast you can do that kind of thing. And by volume I mean how many people you can attract with these kind of thing. Now, there are people that knows about this kind of stuff way better than I do. I’ll just quote a quote, one of them:

It’s Nicholas Erik, which talks a lot about these kind of metrics that are very important. Again, long story short is you can use resources and websites to attract the right audience. And I’m just willing to underline this because you, Crystal, have said that it’s important.

I might be able to give some resources of what kind of resources they can use. So for example, let’s say that you are publishing science fiction. Now, I would encourage you to see what kind of groups are you partying? They might be Facebook groups, and I’m part of Facebook groups that are interesting, dark fantasy science fiction, fantasy.

I’m part of groups that are more closed. Not very many people know. And there are on a platform, like Discord for example. I will encourage you to reach out to these companions and friends. This is one of the most powerful resources that you have because you have spent some time offline or online with them.

And those are your ideal leaders. This is one of the things you can do. Attract people that are not your friends necessarily but are interested in your genera and community you are part of, and I did that with Lord of Time. The other thing is, you can invest an amount of money  using other people newsletter for example, to attract the right kind of read.

Again, I did the same for Lord of Time. When I was in the research part, I needed to understand a promo site is. I didn’t know what the promo site was. So promo sites are basically a part of the web where there is a curator that as a small, medium or very big newsletter. And basically this website is divided into genres.

So this curator can have maybe on this day where we’re going to share a newsletter on this kind of book that has been published now at this price. There are several dozens of these websites, and I’m not going to share any of those names, but there are a lot of them that works on the science fiction, for example, genre.

I use them to the strategy of the volume and velocity, and I saw some results. So social media, promo sites, Amazon ads. If this sounds a lot to you. It is. And it’s stuff that I’m still trying to wrap my hand around. The basic fundamental is that there are several sources and you just have to figure out if they fit your budget in time, energy, and money, and which one are you going to use in your book crunch.

Following this, I wanted to ask you, Crystal. When you have to take a decision of your book launch, for example, how do you decide that? Because like we all have 24 hours and we all have limited budget, right? How do you decide for yourself, this is okay, this is not good. What are the parameters that you use it and do you think some of these can be applied to a broader audience? Like all of the people out there are listening to us can use it.

Crystal: That’s an excellent question. So the parameters I apply depend on what my goal is for a specific launch, because not all books launches have the same goal, right? I have launched books with the specific goal of building my mailing list, and so everything about the way I did that launch was to try and get the most possible people to sign up for my book club for my ongoing list so that I could then reach out to them for the next launch. So for something like that, I’m looking for maximum exposure to new people who don’t know me already. I’m always going to send out to my own list because that’s basically free marketing.

If you’ve taken the energy to build that up, then that’s just, that’s your bonus content, right? But if I’m looking for maximum number of new people that are relevant and most likely to sign up for my list, then I would be choosing, okay. I would put more energy into maybe newsletter swaps and into a really relevant promo site.

So if one of the promo sites is one that is specifically focused on contemporary hometown romance, then I would focus on the ones that are as good of a match as I can possibly find and that have the biggest audiences that I can afford access to, basically because I want the most possible new readers to be coming into my list from that.

And so if that is my goal, then I would also launch probably at a cheaper price because most of those promo sites work really well. They work best for free and decently for 99 cents. But if maximum exposure is your goal, you want to eliminate all the barriers of what’s going to stand between you and that read or signing up for your mailing list.

And so, you know, generally the lower price points have less barriers. There’s always that trade off. I know that there’s lots of discussion in the industry about, if people get a book for free, they often don’t read it, so then they’re not signing up for your list because they didn’t even read the content.

And are you just attracting readers who don’t want to pay for stuff? Because that’s also a challenge. But I think there’s a sort of a middle ground there where if you are starting from a position of not really having a lot of people on your list, what you need is to build your audience more than you need hone down your audience, right?

So I think you start with a big pool and then you see what kind of actions people take. If they get your book for free and they read it and they like it and they sign up for your mailing list, they’ve been through a few filters already. So I think, you know, giving them a chance. And giving yourself a chance to get them on your list and then convert them over to being a fan, then that’s a great way to go.

I think before anyone’s making decisions about this stuff, there’s a couple of resources that are really, really helpful and personally, I found David Gaughran to be an excellent source of information when it comes to stuff you can apply to your book launches. So aiming at Amazon is a really good technical resource from David Gaughran.

And that talks about how, how do the algorithms work? And you know, why does it matter if they’re the right kind of readers or not, and all of that stuff. There’s also a book he has called Strangers to SuperFans, which talks about basically what we were just talking about, which is how do you get people to download your book, read your book, and then convert them to somebody who is part of your launch team or your inner circle, or your review crew, or whatever you call it, and how do you get those readers to buy more of your books and to make your conversion process a really good one.

In our next episode, we are going to talk about connecting with readers specifically. So we’re going to dive down some of these rabbit holes and talk a bit more about, you know, social media and how that fits in and mailing lists and how that works. And actually reaching out through your ARC teams and whatever.

So we’ll, we’ll break all that stuff down in the other episode. But all of the same principles apply no matter which arena you’re going to apply them in. So when you are filtering your matching  own specific goals for a launch with what the opportunity could do. And so. I think for me, just deciding what is my goal, and then being able to filter through that information is how you make those decisions.

So yeah, if I know that my goal for launching book three in the series is actually, partly to upscale sales on all of the books in that series came before it. Right? Then I can approach that differently. Or if my goal is for book three to hit the highest rank on Amazon that I’ve been able to hit to date, then I will make choices about discounting and promoting books one and two in this series to support the launch of book three.

So there’s very different filter, cry material depending on where you’re at in your expectations. I always set very specific launch week goals for myself, so I know that I want to have, let’s say it’s, you know, 500 downloads the first week, or I want 50 reviews in the first 24 hours or whatever.

Right? So I will set those goals for my books, and then I will just filter everything through the decision of will adding this thing help me make that goal. And if I know, and I always set my budget. So if I know that I’m willing to budget $200 on this book launch over and above what I paid for the books to be produced and everything else, then I can filter my choices and I will actually sometimes even make index cards of like, these are the  10 things I could do to launch a book.

And I have dollar figures attached to each of them. And if I know that my budget is 200 I can pick cards until I have the right amount of money. You can do this with sticky notes on your wall as well. Like there’s lots of ways to do this. You can use digital tools, but it’s really helpful to put your goal of your budget and your goal of what are you trying to accomplish with  this launch. And then choose pieces that support those two things and fit within your limitations. And then just like Michele said earlier is each time I launched a book, I try one new thing into the mix of what I kept from last time.

But in order to choose the one new thing, you get rid of something else that wasn’t working the way you wanted it to. So I’ve talked before, I think about this careful author philosophy, which is K. A. R. E. so it’s for knowledge, action, reflection and evolution. And I actually keep really detailed notes as I’m launching and I take snapshots of my dashboards for my sales and my author rank and things like that.

And then after a launch is over I can and go back and look at what I did and what happened, and I can make knowledgeable choices about what worked or didn’t work. And the only way to do that is to collect the data. And especially when you’re writing, like maybe you’re writing full length novels, then it takes you like a year in between books.

You may think you’re going to remember what you did during launch, but it’s such a crazy time and there’s so much going on that you will not. So I actually have a checklist that is my, I have it for the whole publication  process, and it’s about 150 steps that have to happen to get the book from editing to finished.

And there’s a section for book launching, and it includes all the little things like, you know, add this book to my BookBub profile. Make sure the good reads listing is accurate. Usually good reads, pulls from the Amazon database, and sometimes it’s accurate, sometimes it’s not. If you have initials in your name that have periods or no periods, then good reads has very, very strict rules about having to use the punctuation in a certain way.

So you know, it doesn’t always do automatically what it’s supposed to do. So because there’s so much going on, the only way you can really remember all the things and you can know what you did or didn’t do is by making a checklist for yourself. So I have that, and each time I’m going to launch, I review the checklist from the previous time.

I look at what I did, I look at my notes that I’ve been keeping about what else I could try, and then I decide what has to come out and what can go in its place, so that I’m sticking within my budget for time and money because you could just expand. Like I know people who’ve spent thousands of dollars on launching a book when they didn’t really have a platform.

You’re maybe not ready to do that with your first or second book, especially in fiction. It’s one thing. Nonfiction is quite a different approach. But often, nonfiction authors already have a platform, but for fiction, you know, until you have several books to work with, throwing thousands of dollars into the mix isn’t going to just guarantee you success.

So I think it is just really important to hammer down. You need to decide on your budget and treat it as you would going to the casino. With cash in your pocket because you don’t know what returns you’re going to get on that money. So it’s easy to justify it as an investment, but you always need to translate it back into how many books does this need to sell for that profit margin to cover the expense of doing it.

So that’s the other way that I do that math of should I do this or should I not? It is what does this cost me and how many books does it have to sell? And as long as my gambling marketing budget includes enough money to cover that and I want to try it as an experiment, then I will do it. I’ve tried lots of things that I was pretty sure wouldn’t work, but people said it might, so I wanted to know for sure if it did or didn’t, but because I was going into it with, this is money I can afford to invest to know the answer to this question as opposed to, I can only afford to do this if I sell X amount of books because of it. And I think that’s a really important difference for people to keep in mind.

Only gamble with what you are willing to walk away from, and then if it works, great, and if it doesn’t, you can scratch that off your list of possibilities to try in the future.

Michele: Without bleeding to death. We always repeat, don’t bleed, don’t bleed, just resist. It’s a long game.

Crystal: It is a long game. And there is a really, I was listening to a whole bunch of podcasts over the weekend as I did my laundry and cleaned my house and one of the things that came up multiple time was the fact that we here all about, you know, these six figure authors with this incredible income, but they don’t often talk about the fact that they’re spending $50,000 a month on ads. Right?

You only scale to that point when the stuff coming back is higher than this stuff going out, and you only get to that point by testing and making small adjustments in the beginning until you know that you have your product nailed down and you can get all the reviews and you’ve got a really strong review crew or straight team who’s going to help you get reviews on your books.

If I look back at the dozen or so launches I’ve done for my books in the last three years, I have really experimented with stuff and I did maybe six of them inside a three month period at one point so that I could try a whole bunch of things and see what worked and didn’t work.

Because my books are short, I could afford to gamble like that. And it was really interesting to see kind of the things that did or didn’t work with my market and in what ways. And so I am kind of processing some of that and I’m going to see if I can replicate some of those experiments this fall with a similar seasonal launch plan.

But it was interesting that the biggest impact on sales of anything across the board was the size of my mailing list and the level of engagement I had with that mailing list. It made a massive difference in reviews. It made huge sales spikes. You can see in my sales dashboard the days that I sent out my own newsletter because sales were about a hundred times higher than any of the other ones.

And so the days when I did promo, like, you know, if I did a, a promotion, you talked about where you pay your $30 and somebody else sends you out to their list. There was a bump on those days, but there were spikes on the days of my mailing list, which brings me to something that you mentioned earlier, which was Amazon supports the upward growth, but it also supports the downward direction. So the algorithm basically amplifies whatever’s going on. And so it can be really tempting to throw every bit of marketing muscle you have at launch week to try and, you know, hit that top spot or whatever. But if you think about the longevity of your book over time, what Amazon really likes is actually an organic upward trend over time and it will support that.

So I think it’s smart to look at it from a sustainability perspective, and you want to, you don’t want to throw everything at it from the start and then have it be a downward slope. You want to be layering in things that keep it going in an upward direction.

Michele: Yeah. Basically to summarize what we said, maybe the wrap up, what we said. Like there are many things that you can do. Choose only the one that you think works best for you. Do your homework. Look around yourself. Use your newsletter if you need help on that timeframe or whatever it is.

Make sure though that your growth is organic. As Crystal was saying, more than artificial forces, if we want to call them like that. Newsletter engagement is huge. You can have 10,000 people, but if only 15 opens the email you’re sending, that’s not going to be significantly useful. So you can have like 200 people in your subscriber list, but they are like zealots

So like they are like people that really want to help you. And that’s gonna make a huge difference. If you have like 200 people and 50 or 55% open rate or engagement, that’s huge. That’s great. That’s gold.

Crystal: Yeah.

Michele: So we said that we also said don’t bleed out please. This is something that we repeat every single time.

You have your budget. Play fairly in the sense that that’s what you can afford. Don’t go into debt, remember this is a long game. You can’t behave like a person that has been doing this for years successfully, so don’t compare yourself to the other, necessarily. Learn from them, understand that the only person you have to compare to is you yesterday.

And if you’re doing better than your yesterday, that’s huge. That’s amazing. Even a notch, it’s going to make it great difference in the months to come. Is there anything else that you want to add in this? Like a final thing that you wanted to say?

Crystal: I am done, but the curious star has questions.

Michele: Was it red last time?

Crystal: The colour? Oh no, no. This is the same. The jar has the same label I thought you meant was the question different.

Michele: It’s looks different

Crystal: The label is always the same. Yeah.

Michele: Okay. Open the damn thing.

If you could change the ending of any story, what would it be?

Crystal: Okay. So the curious jar is filled with questions sent in by people who wanted to know stuff. You’re going to tell me when to stop.

Michele: Three, two, one, stop.

Crystal: It is a red one. Yep. You manifested that, my friend. Okay, so the curious jar wants to know. Oh, okay. If you could change the ending of any story, what would it be?

Michele: If you could change the ending of any story, what would that be? Like? Our stories?

Crystal: It doesn’t say.

Michele: Okay.

Crystal: I mean, yeah, it can be one of yours. It could be one of someone else’s.

Michele: So that’s kind of simple. I wouldn’t change any of my endings. I’m quite happy with them. What about. That’s difficult. Either way, you’re going to piss off somebody right? That’s the ending of a story.

Crystal: You can pick a classic where somebody is dead or, yeah, maybe it’s a movie. It doesn’t have to be a book. We’re talking storytelling. It can be any format. Do you want me to go first cause I could answer this in a heartbeat. So it’s not someone else’s book. It’s one of mine actually that I would change. And I will change. I am in process of changing. It is Maybe, which is in fact this little book right here.

I have a cute little pocket book size one. It’s this book because I was experimenting with happily for now ending and people hate those, apparently. What I wanted to do it is part of, it’s part of a duet, basically the other half of this book and I was doing an experiment where there’s actually four novellas that work together and the first one and the fourth one are the same characters, and that rounds out the story arc and then there’s two in the middle that are like siblings of one of the main characters. And so the story, because they happen over time, it’s kind of like a TV series season where you get these little episodes that are all interwoven. So that’s what I was experimenting with and I did it with Silver Bells. It doesn’t work until all the books are ready, is basically what that boils down to.

That’s, I guess how I would change the ending is they need their happily ever after contained within this in some fashion. So I think if I were to be doing it again, I would just release them all in a very short period of time as part of the same story arc. But I wouldn’t put out the first one till I had written the last one.

So that’s two ways to fix it basically, that I’m looking at. So I would change the way that this book ends and I would do it either by releasing all of them as a set so that it is one book containing four stories. Or I would just rapid release all of them in one go. And like warn people upfront that, you know, don’t read this until book four is out. If you’re the kind of person who can’t wait to know how it ends. So yes, that is what I would change.

Michele: Okay. That’s interesting.

Crystal: What about you? Did I buy you enough time?

Michele: Thank you for giving me some time. I don’t know if I’m going to upset somebody here. But I’m just gonna follow my heart in this case and just say whatever I think.

Of course there is a spoiler alert and it’s about Harry Potter. So if you don’t want to know about the end, stop! Go away, hahaha. So I really enjoyed the Harry Potter series and it was one of the things that really kept me reading and stuff.

And I think JK Rowling is a great writer in the sense that she can really create- world building the world we want to live in. But I didn’t necessarily like the ending. Maybe it’s because of the way I’m framed. I like darkness, I like lost. And I like a decision in time, the consequences that are huge for people.

And so the happily kind of ever after that Harry Potter represents, especially in the epilogue. I don’t know. I was expecting something more of a sacrifice from Harry. So I guess I really wanted a Harry to deserve to be remembered more, maybe with a sacrifice. And the ending just sounded a bit flat.

Again, I respect JK Rowling a lot. Yeah. And if she writes another fantasy, I would definitely be one the first in line to read it. I dunno, that was such a big and an amazing universe and the characters felt so real to me that I just wanted to maybe to give them, and especially to Harry a dimension so big that he would be remembered as a Frodo. And Frodo lost so much in Lord of the Rings. If you see the last pages of that book, you can see, you can feel Frodo has been tested by the Ring and has been changed.

Had a heavy burden. He’s completely different and Harry is the same way as a different person. But the happily ever after that you find in Harry Potter is not something you’d necessarily find in the Lord of the Rings. Where I felt that there was more of that demand. They triumphed against evil, but they lost part of them in the process.

So I will probably say I’ll change that in a, in a way that Harry- something bad happens to Harry, but Harry’s name is remembered for a very long time in the wizarding world and in our world.

Crystal: All right. Okay. There you go. Well, if you have a story that you think you would change the ending to, whether it’s yours or someone else’s, and I’m now expecting like 500 comments about Game of Thrones, but I didn’t even want to open up that can of worms for myself because I would not stop ranting, then you can answer those in the comments at strategicauthorpreneur.com if you have a curious jar question that you want to send us.

You can send an email to ideas@strategicauthorpreneur.com and we will add your question into the messy little mix of papers here, and you can see what comes out. We would like to send you to the show notes if you’ve got anything that you were wondering, what was that resource they talked about, or where’s the link to David Gaughran’s book or whatever, they are in the show notes. So check those out and that’s it, really.

Michele: One last thing if I may. Just because we are a super shiny- I know it’s like the sixth episode in, but you really will get the huge big, gold star in the realm of things if you can review this podcast in any platform you’re using to listen or watching it if you’re watching it somewhere else. So please, please, please, if you can leave us a maybe five star review or something like that. You will really win a million points in the game of life if you do that. Thank you.

Crystal: Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy life to get to know us. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode where we’re going to take a deep dive into connecting with your readers. So we’re going to elaborate on some of the stuff we talked about today. And we do also have a mailing list.

Of course we do, because how could we tell you to do it and not do it ourselves? And if you sign up to our list at strategicauthorpreneur.com each week we will send you just one thing that we think will help you along your author journey. So we have things like coupons for our favorite tools and special resources. There’s webinars and courses and all kinds of stuff that we will make available to you. So please do sign up there, and we will see you on the next episode.

Michele:  Bye bye.