How to Properly Launch Your Book

Need an overview of the steps involved in marketing your new release? Launching your novel can be a confusing process - here I take ten minutes and give you a quick summary of the different steps you should cover when you release a book.

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Full Transcript:

I am ask all the time how do I promote my book? How do I launch a book properly? What are the steps and how do I do them? So I'm just going to give you a giant bird's-eye view of everything you need to do, and hopefully, it will help a new author somewhere or a current author who is struggling with a book release. So, first of all, you have your book baby, and let's talk about different things. Let's talk about the product; this actual book. Your book can sell itself if it is great enough. If you have a great enough product, you do not have to do all this stuff; you should, you should. But every once in a while, you'll see a foot come from out of nowhere, blow everyone away, and it's because it was done the right way. So how do you make your book the best that it can be?

What is the product? Cover! Your cover is so huge. We recently surveyed 2000 people, 2000 avid readers and ask them what caused them to purchase a book. Number one thing was the author name. If they had read the author before, chances are that's not you, chances are you were like me when I was a new author, nobody knew who I was. My name was brand new. It didn't mean anything. So let's move on to the second thing. The second thing was the blurb. That one or two paragraphs, don't make them too long, they describes your book. That is really for a brand new author. The only thing that will cause... that's your opportunity to convince that reader, to go from looking at your books, purchase page on Knuck or Ibooks or Amazon, and actually reach in there and clicking that buy it now button.

So your blurb is very important, but the third thing that caused them to purchase a book, to purchase a book, not just look at it, but purchase it was cover. If it had a cover that they really loved, or that caught their attention or the appeal to them as a reader. And for me, the cover is even more important than the blurb because when people are scrolling through their Facebook feed or scrolling through Amazon looking at the top 100, they can't see the blurb typically, what they typically see is the cover first. The cover convinces them to click on it, to read the blurb. So you want, if you're going to invest money in anything, invest in editing and cover. Editing, because editing is what's going to cause them... no one's going to share your book if they don't love it. So the editing is really important. The cover; covers design well worth spending money on, so it's very important to so that's your product.

Cover, blurb, your author name will eventually be part of your product, but your author name is built by turning out great book after great book after great book, so really important. So make sure your product is great. In a couple of weeks, reviews will be part of this product. Reviews will be a huge thing to selling your book. So reviews are very important. That's the second arm of this, reviews. You want to prior to launch, get as many reviews lined up as possible. I send out over 200 copies of my book prior to launch. Those are either copies that don't cost me anything; free copies of my book prior to launch so that when it releases people can be talking about it, it can be getting reviews on these ebook retailers and word of mouth can be spreading.

Nobody's going to talk about your book if they haven't read it, so do not be afraid early on to give your book out to anybody who shows any interest. Don't worry about like, Oh, that's a lost sale. Yes, it might be a lost sale, but what are the chances of that person would have bought your book anyways? Right now in this market, people can get books very easily, especially reviewers and blogs. You are porting them, you are begging them to read your book, do not be afraid to give it out. So reviews, you can get one great source of early reviews is Net Galley. It's like $50 for you to sign up. I'll have a link attached to this. $50 to sign up and you should be able to get at least 30 reviews from that and 30 reviews for $50; that's a pretty good deal, so Net Galley is a great place to get reviews.

Another great places to go to Goodreads. Reach out to them there. I have a whole other video about that on my website, alessandratorreink. I'll include a link to that. Goodreads is a great place to get reviews also. So, reviews are very key and reviews make a successful book launch happen; very important. Do not be afraid to give out advance review copies, they're called arcs, advance review copies, prior to release. And if you don't know anyone to give it to; create an account on Net Galley, spend the $50 there, or take the time, reach out to people on Goodreads or just scream out loud from Facebook, "Does anybody want a copy of my book in exchange for a fair and honest review, please email me or message me."

All right, publicity is obviously big. If you had a great product and you have great reviews lined up, now you just have to spread the word about it. A lot of this could cost money, some of it doesn't, so I'm going to talk about both. First of all blogs. You do not have to spend money to reach out to blogs. You can reach out to blogs directly. It's going to be a long process. So, I recently talked to a debut author who's launch was very successful. She reached out to like 30 or 40 blogs. Might've had two or three respond to her, so do not be afraid to pound the pavement. Either do that yourself, make a list of a hundred blogs, email each of them directly, attach a copy of the first couple of chapters so they can get a sense of it along with the blurb and cover, or hire a company that does that for you. They're called the book publicity companies. There are not a ton of money considering what they provide. You reaching out to a hundred blogs is going to take you hours and hours and days and days in time. Or let them do it; there are some inexpensive options available, I'll put links to that below also. That's blogs. Blogs will also help with reviews.

Ads. Ads can be very powerful. They can be very expensive. They can be very time-consuming. If you have an unlimited budget, if you have serious budget, by all means, invest in ads. Amazon ads, Facebook ads, Twitter ads, do them. Goodreads ads didn't really work out for me, but might work out for you. Ads can be very strong, ads can be the difference between a bestseller and not a bestseller. They can be the difference between getting your book out there and not getting your book out there, but not everyone has the money to invest in ads. My last two or three releases, I might've spent like, I really didn't spend any money on ads. I might've spent $200 on ads, which I used to spend 20 or $30,000 on ads. So you can easily spend, and that was per released, you could easily spend a ton of money on ads, so it could be a black hole you can fall into, but it can also create some amazing sales.

So I always say if you're going to spend my own ads, hope to earn back what you are investing in those ads. Don't expect to necessarily make any money off your ads. If you do pour more money into them, if you're making money off your ads, go for it. So those are ads; they can be very important, they can be very helpful in launching a book. So if you have the money, great, if you don't have the money, don't stress about it. It's okay. Social media; you need to create author profiles if you don't have them already and use them to promote your books. If you already have a social media presence... I see a lot of authors, they scream about the books the first one to two weeks, and they stopped talking about those books and they don't promote it anymore. Keep promoting your books at least once or twice a week. Talk about your latest release. Do not let it just die off after the first week or two.

And the whole time leading up to this book launch, you want to be talking about that book. "Oh, I just picked out the cover image from my book. I'm so excited to share it with you guys." Or "I had a great day of writing book XYZ. I'm so excited to share it with you all." Lead up to that release, talk about it all the time three, six months leading up to it. This is really exciting, and this book has come in and here's a quick excerpt or here's a paragraph, here's a line that I wrote today. Here's a photo that I've been using for inspiration. Or I was listening to this song and provide a link to the song, and it made me think about characters, Joe and Jessica or whatever, you know.

So social media is a huge tool and don't just spin on your book. I mean, everything I just listed are interesting things that aren't too salesy, but every time you say one of those interesting things, include a link to that book's Goodreads profile if you don't have a pre-order link or if you don't have a sales link. Or include a link to the book's launch page, which is just as powerful, if not more powerful. And I have a video about how to create a launch page. If you haven't watched it already, it will be in the comment section. Goodreads, oh my gosh, Goodreads is such a huge tool that no authors seem to enjoy using. I don't understand it. If you asked 90% of authors, they like Goodreads. It can be a little overwhelming, but I have a video talking about how to promote your book all for free on Goodreads and how to promote it properly. So watch that video. It is an awesome, awesome source of great avid readers, reviews and free book promotion, so definitely use good rates as part of your launch strategy.

Wattpad, also free; create an account on Wattpad, post chapters of the book that prior to release, go ahead and post like the first two chapters. I don't know how long your chapters are, but couple paragraphs a day leading up to the release, not a day, like maybe twice a week, post a couple of paragraphs, let them start to read that and then let them know when it's live. So you can use Wattpad, it's free. It's a fanfiction site, but it has a lot of really avid readers and maybe some of them will reach out. Maybe some of them will be great review sources for you. And then if you already have an established follower base, reach out to them, newsletter, social media; don't forget them. Even if you just post on your personal page, if writing isn't a secret and you're letting people know in your life, post on your regular fit Facebook page and say, "Hey, I just published my first book or just published my fifth book. If you know anyone who likes to read murder mysteries, please tag them in this post. I will choose one winner to receive a free copy," something like that. Give them some incentive to tag their friends, or just say, please tell anyone who you think might be interested. I'm really excited about this book and I would love to share it with others.

So that is how to launch a book in a succinct fashion, as I can imagine, and hopefully this was helpful. Again, most important thing is product. And after you launch your book, don't give up on the promote. Keep promoting it. Plan a sale for six months after release or a year after release. Keep pushing your book. Don't just write it and forget about it. Keep promoting that book constantly. Do subtle things to keep it out there in the public's mind. So this is how to launch your book, I hope it was helpful.