4 Strategies for Launching a Book

If you want to learn the four core book launch strategies and find out what approach might work the best, given your goals, book and resources, then this video is absolutely for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the Book Broad, founder of Book Launchers and author of Self Publish and Succeed, the no Boring Books way to write a book that sells. Let's be real for a minute, okay? There are people who paint a pretty vision of what it's like to launch a book. It gives you the impression that you'll suddenly have the red carpet rolled for you wherever you go. VIP lines only, the cash is rolling in and the paparazzi is stalking you and you can't handle all the calls you're getting. What reality actually looks like is you're begging everyone you know for reviews of your book. You call in favors from your connected friends to help you get attention for your book. And you refresh your Amazon page a hundred times, wondering if anybody has bought your book. Today, it's hard work to market a book, even when you do everything you should to set your book up for success. It's. It's really not about launch at all. But a lot of pressure is put on authors to have a huge launch. And if your book launch isn't amazing, you're told your book is gonna fail or it's not important, which is not true at all. Traditional publishers have often focused on launch because they use it to determine what resources to put behind what authors. But if you're self publishing, you can control your momentum. So given that, what launch strategy makes the most sense sense for you? Let me just cover the four strategies and then we'll go into detail on each of them. Launch strategy 1. The Amazon 99 cent ebook launch. 2, the maximum momentum launch. 3, the traditional media bestseller launch and 4, the phased momentum launch. All right, let's break these down. The Amazon 99 cent ebook launch. This option is right for you. If you have some sort of an audience on social media or newsletter subscribers, you're probably looking at having at least 200 highly engaged folks. A little bit more. Really, you want to feel confident that you can sell 100 to 200 copies of your book at 99 cents in less than a week. In order to feel confident you can do that, you probably need to have at least 10 times that in newsletter subscribers or 50 times that in social media followers. So what I'm saying, to sell 200 ebooks in a week, you want to have about 2,000 newsletter subscribers or 10,000 or more engaged social media followers. By engaged I mean you have open rates on your emails and your posts get comments. What this involves is category research to place your book in a high quality as in highly relevant but not super competitive category. And then you set your launch or pre launch week, whatever you want to do to 99 cents and promote that to your audience. Promote the heck out of it to your audience. And you can also run corresponding ebook promotions like through bargain booksies and drive as much traffic to your promotion as possible. If you want, you can also offer incentives for folks to grab your book at 99 cents, like including some additional downloadable resources but but usually having your book at 99 cents is going to be enough to get them going after the promotion. Make sure you follow up to get reviews. That's one of the main reasons to do this is to get more books out there so more people write reviews and then follow up to keep momentum going. It's a great time to then try to get on podcasts or media or speaking engagements. Use this to get the fire going and now just keep putting wood and Kindle on it to keep it burning. The cool thing about these promotions is that there are always people who want your book in print so they'll buy it in print or audio even though they heard it through the 99 cent ebook promotion. And of course this likely will lead to you getting that Amazon bestseller flag. And it should. More importantly, teach Amazon your book will convert and if you haven't watched the video I did with Dale Roberts on creating relevancy for Amazon, then I highly recommend you check that out. I'll link to it in the description below. Ultimately, if you have a small to medium sized audience of engaged followers, this strategy can get your book off to a strong start. The second strategy is the maximum momentum launch. This is going to work if you have a great network of social media campaigns, connections, email, newsletter, readers and colleagues with your reader in their ideal audience who will promote your book. In other words, within your platform you can reach thousands of potential readers. What you're going to do is create an incentive package for anyone who buys one or three copies of your print book. To do this you'll need a website incentives, email copy, a network, social media, graphics, and someone to manage the incoming receipts or proof of purchase to then distribute the incentives. You'll also need to start setting up this promo at least eight weeks before you launch. And in many cases you'll need a final version of your book to circulate to your network so they have a copy for their promotions or even to preview it before they agree to promote your book. Now, how this works logistically is for your launch week, you're trying to drive as many people as possible to buy one to three copies of your book in exchange for the incentive package. What's that look like? Well, here's mine from the launch of Self Publish and Succeed so you can see what an option looks like. The key with incentives is they need to be valuable enough that your ideal reader would potentially, potentially pay for them if you weren't giving them free, and they must relate to your book. This strategy menu, for example, is something that I included as part of the incentive for buying one copy of the book. It's valuable and yet costs me nothing to include it. The trick here is to know your ideal reader well enough and to have some things of value to include. And really to make this as easy as possible for your network to share by giving them email copies, social media images, and whatever else you think will help them spread the word about your book launch and the launch week incentives. This takes a lot of coordination. By the way, if you want to drive Amazon sales. In particular for rankings purposes, you can make it only valid for Amazon print or ebook sales. I generally don't recommend that because you really want to drive sales everywhere and your launch incentives are a great way to do that, but it depends on your goals. Launch strategy 3 the traditional media launch I'm talking Wall Street Journal, USA Today or Washington Toast. The traditional media launch I'm talking Wall Street Journal, USA Today or the Washington Post Bestseller List. To achieve this, you have to feel very confident you can sell a minimum of 5,000 books, print books through retail outlets in a week, and quite likely it could require more than 8,000 in a week, depending on what other books you're competing with. If you can sell some books in bulk deals, there are ways to funnel those deals through channels that will track for Nielsen Bookscan, but this is a coordinated launch strategy to get the sales you need to reach Vendors aren't just Amazon. Amazon sales will count, but you need a lot of retail sales to be successful. To succeed, you'll likely need a list of buyers like corporate vendors who will buy the book during pre sale period. You also might layer on the maximum momentum launch strategy of incentives to go with this. If you don't have a massive following of folks anxious for your content, like at least 100,000 people on social media and a newsletter list of at least 50,000 and a strong network with similar sized audiences or that strong list of corporate buyers, this strategy is probably not going to work and it takes a lot of coordinated effort to get the sales routed in the right way for launch. So unless there's a really good reason and you feel very strongly that you want to pursue this and put resources into it, it's not a strategy that we recommend for the majority of authors. Finally, the phased momentum launch. This is right for the author starting from scratch with a slight small or no audience at all and they're looking to use their book to build their audience. What you need to do most, if this is your strategy, is to manage your expectations around launch. You're going to keep things grassroots and focus on building momentum into and after launch. First focus on getting book reviews, then media attention and then try to get your book into a wider audience through partnerships, speaking conferences and more. Here's what you need. You need a great author website with an opt in incentive to start building your audience. You need a great attitude to get as many book reviews as possible. You need networking, networking, networking. Meet other authors, meet people with your readers in their audience and connect with everyone you possibly can. Use book giveaways and ebook deals to find new readers. This strategy starts six weeks before launch and continues for the year, post launch and beyond until you write your next book and you're ready for maximum momentum or 99 cent ebook launch. Want to know what else to do to promote your book? Make sure you've subscribed to the channel and turn the notifications on so you catch every video because I have some Amazon launch and book marketing content coming out real soon now. There are many launch approaches that mix these strategies all together, but what's been your core strategy or what will you use? Let's chat about it in the comments below. And when you comment the day a video is released, you'll get entered to win some sweet book launcher swag. We have new videos every Tuesday and Friday. You're fun and I'm really excited to see spend more time with you. Check out this video on Book Prelaunch strategies to set yourself up for any launch strategy or if you're good there, this one is on author websites. A must for every strategy we talked about today. Go ahead, click on it. I've got the coffee on the.