March Deep Dive: The Value of Presale

Sam. Hello, guys. Happy Saturday. I hope everyone's march is off to a great start. We've got several people already in the chat saying hello, but I'm gonna bring Sarah Bean, who is our marketing manager, onto the stage with me. We're gonna do some intros. Say hello to you guys. Good morning, everyone.

Hi everybody. Thanks for joining. I am just connecting over here so that I can make some comments in the chat as well. Nice to see everybody. I hope you're having a great Saturday. Really happy to have you here. There we go. Now I can chat. Hello everyone.

I know when I was busy I hadn't heard any sound and I was.

Like, oh, my sound is really quiet.

So. Alrighty guys.

Well, it's so nice to see everyone here.

We've got Emily Romero from Colorado, Bill Miller from Connecticut, Kevin hall, of course, Emily in New York, Reva from Oregon. Lots of people all across the U.S. california, Seattle, Georgia, Ontario. Awesome. So great to see everyone here, everybody.

I see Dan. I see Reba. Oh, Stone's here. Hi Stone. Nice.

Oh, the Seattle. Fantastic. Awesome.

Well, welcome.

All right, sorry, go ahead, Sarah.

I was just gonna welcome everybody. Go ahead and keep things going in the chat. We do use that chat to give out prizes and Angela has got some great ones today. Today we are going to be diving into the importance of pre sale. Why you want to have one, what it's all about, what's happening during pre sale and how you can make the most of yours. So if you do have any questions about pre sale, go ahead and throw those in the chat. Angela does a fantastic job of getting those all together so that answer them throughout. Got a little bit of a presentation. But before we get started, do we want to start with some early bird prizes?

Yeah, absolutely. So I grabbed, I was a little late because I got a box of books from Julie's. She had an event and oh, I need to, to show some of these books because I have a few different books to go over. So I've got four different books and if people are interested in these, we're going to give these away. Today we've got, let's see. By Janet Elliott, the Alien Savant. This one is my autistic brother's journey through a neurological universe.

And I mean fantastic book. I can tell you guys that book is so fascinating, particularly if you've ever experienced any kind of family support. This is a really heart wrenching memoir about a. A woman whose family grew up in Canada in the 1960s and her brother was autistic sick. However, at that Time they didn't have that diagnosis. And so throughout the years they kind of worked with him so that he could exist within their family and not be sent away to a facility which was. Was the practice back then. So he communicated through his artwork. And so this is really a look at what it was like to be autistic and live in those kind of families back in the 60s in Canada. And it's fascinating if you know any special ed teachers, if you know people that work with neurodiversity. This is a great one.

That's awesome. And see, this is why Sarah is so good at her job, because she can remember. I just pull up a cover. I didn't tell her what books I have in my hand. And she knows exactly.

I can, I can give a little rundown on each of them. So as we're doing our prizes, you guys can tell us which one you want. Oh, I see Shannon here. Hi, Shannon. Liz is here. Hi, Dr. Liz. I love it. Diana's here. Hello. And I love all of our non clients as well, but it always makes me happy when our clients come through. So thanks guys for showing up today.

Okay, so I'll go through these other ones fairly quickly. We've got Scott Yamamura's book Financial Epiphany. Discover your ability to multiply money and reimagine your financial life.

Finance. This is a great one if you're interested in how to invest, goes all into your financial superpower, which is multiplying. So you. This is a great one especially for beginners in that personal finance space that just aren't sure how to get into the stock market. What it's all about, what are the things that you can do to be able to start for that financial freedom. So love this book. Definitely a good one.

And we have Mike Beedenbau's reviving our republic 95 theses for the future of America.

Oh, this is great. For those of you that are really interested in political history, this is a really great look at basically re envisioning our republic based on Martin Luther's 95 thesis. But it also goes quite a bit into Washington's farewell address and what some of our founders actually intended for our, our country. So really interesting one that talks about reform and, and what we can do as a society to basically help the United States. So this is a really, I really love Michael's book. It's a. It's a really, really great look at our country, where we started and how we got here and what we can do in the future.

And then I might have more. I might need to go dig into the box again just to make sure.

I grabbed them all. But I've got a whole. We can ship them out of your.

Out of your space. Sarah. The last one I have that I had pulled at least was Kelly Tuttle's.

Book After the Crash.

Keep your job, stay in school and live life after a brain injury.

Oh, Kelly's book is so wonderful. Kelly is a. She is a nurse practitioner who suffered a TBI traumatic brain injury. This is her memoir on how you recover after a traumatic brain injury and keep your life going. How to adapt. If you've ever read like the stroke of insight, this is right up that field and really, really powerful for anyone is going through a tbi. So definitely recommend that. And I will say if there are books that you're interested in, they're topics you know you really want to read about and you win a prize. You can maybe just drop some keywords in the chat and I've got lots back here that I can ship out too. So I've got Stone's book. Actually Stone who is here in our chat we've got Garage Shop Income that's coming out in April. So nice little one here. I've got a few others. I don't remember who else. Everyone else I think is in the chat hasn't had their book come out yet. But in any case, so we've got these. So why don't we do the fifth person.

I was just pulling up the giveaway tool if you want me to do that.

Yeah, do the fifth person who commented this today when we got started.

Let's see, let's do number five. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Reaper. Wait, did I count it right? 1, 2, 3, 4.

Bill's Guide. Sorry, there were two bills.

So my eyes were Bill's Guide to Buying and selling used Cars. I don't know that I recognize that handle. You might be a first time winner. That's exciting. You are welcome to choose from any of these books. We also have Julie's books if you're interested in that. We've got Self Publish and Succeed, Self Promote and Succeed. And for those of you who have won a bunch of prizes, there's another one of Julie's books that I have.

More than Cash Flow.

It's a few years older. I don't remember when exactly it came out. But that one is also very popular as well. So Bill, please email me at Team T E A M book launchers.com let me know your prize of Choice which book you would like. And then I'll also need your mailing address as well, but yay. That's awesome, Bill. I'm so glad a new person won this morning.

Congrats, Bill. All right, well, so we are. Oh, Dr. Luffman's here too. Hi, Joseph. Okay, so we are going to dive into pre sale today. This is a very interesting topic. There's a lot of thoughts around presale. We're going to get into why presale happens, what. What's happening during this time, what are some things that you need to be aware of during pre sale and how to maximize this time for sales. So let me go ahead and bring up my presentation. Just give me. There we go. Sorry, it's now making me upload it and I apologize. I should have had that ready in advance. But give me two seconds and I'm going to say, no, I've got it now. Okay, I've got it here. It's just going to upload my slides real quick. I'm not as familiar with Streamyard as I am like zoom like just YouTube's interface. So I apologize. There's. And I apologize for those of you.

Guys who are like, oh, she's getting stuff ready. I was diving into the books this morning. I was like, I gotta grab this one. This one. They already know about self publishing succeed. So I was running around with books.

So. Yeah, well. And we do have a lot of really great books that are going to be available for prizes throughout. We'll do some, you know, kind of based on a couple of different things. I don't know. Angela. What. While this is processing, which should just take two seconds, what are some of the other ways that we give prizes? Especially for those of you that are new and have not been here before for prizes?

Yeah. So participation is one of the best ways to get it. One of the fun things that Sarah, you might want to have us do is for the past couple deep dives, there is a way for us to specify if someone comments a certain thing like hashtag, Sarah's awesome. And I can search that hashtag and it will randomly select a winner from someone who put that into the chat. So that's a fun way to do it. We will do random prizes as well at times, but we love to see participation. You're more than welcome to chat with.

Each other in the.

In the chat and you can post questions. I've already got one starred for us to answer later. So feel free to chat with each other to send your questions Our way because we do like to answer as many questions as we can at the end. But as far as prizes go, that is also a really great way to. To have your name entered multiple times, possibly for. For prizes. So participation is awesome. Oh, and we have one of our amazing team members here. Kate, I always love to see you pop in on these deep dives. You're the best. So.

Hello, Kate.

It's great to.

Great thing on one second. It's just not letting me.

I think I have to add it to the stage. Here you go.

Okay, go ahead. There we go. Huh. Interesting. It's not showing the full picture. Hopefully this will, you know, we can do it another way. I think I can just share my screen. Why don't we do it that way? Okay, so let me get this up. Yeah. Because for some reason it wasn't showing the whole thing. So let me see if I can do it this way.

KJ's already commented. Sarah's awesome.

Yeah, thank you. All right, are you guys able to see that?

Let me add it. There you go. Now we can see all of. All of the.

How's that?

Yeah, perfect.

All right, great. Well, I'm not going to able to see you guys anymore, so you're going to have to flag me down if there's something I need to hop in on. I'll take breaks throughout so that we can go through it.

But.

All right, so today we are covering the importance of pre sale. So we're going to cover what it is and how it works and we're going to talk a little bit how it impacts your sales a little bit around the bestseller list, not a whole lot. Some of the things that you should be doing and then some of those strategies that are going to drive pre sales. So, you know, and I love to hear throughout, what I would really love to hear throughout the chat, this may or may not be attached to a prize, is what are some of the strategies you've used? If you have run a pre sale for your own books, what are some of the things you did to drive some of those sales? Because we want this to be collaborative. We want people to learn from you. So we'll get into that a little bit. So first up, what is presale? Why does it even happen? Presale is the period of time in which your book is loaded for distribution. You've got your product listings, but it's not yet available to ship to the public. It means that your book has been loaded to your distributor and you'll see perhaps an Amazon product page or product pages on other retailers, but it's not yet available to the public. This period of time is where you are literally doing exactly what it says you are pre selling. During this time, retailers are populating their own catalogs with your book. So they're pulling data from your distributor like IngramSpark. If you use IngramSpark, they're taking that information from IngramSpark and they're putting it into their catalog so they can create product pages. This is a time period where you can make money before the book even comes out. You're able to start selling your book before it's finished and it's available to the general public. So this can be a really great time for authors. I like to think of it like movie tickets or concert tickets when a show is coming up. Let's say I got Dave Matthews coming here through Michigan here this summer, right? I'm going to buy my tickets now for that show that's in July so that I guarantee my spot before it's available. Same thing with books. Before a book is available you can buy it in advance. Just see what happened with Fourth Wing and Onyx Storm. And I'm sure when they announce book four, it's going to sell out immediately during presale. Pre sales vary in length. For traditional publishers you'll even see 6 to 12 month pre sales. They're putting those product listings up over a year in advance in some cases. For self published authors you can get away with a shorter pre sale. We tend to recommend six to eight weeks just so you make sure you have everything done. But you know, some authors can get away with four weeks. Some authors prefer to have 16 weeks. It's really going to come down to what your goals are and what you're doing during that period. So it does vary in length, but our usual measurements about six to eight weeks. So this time period I cannot understate this enough that, or I should say overstated enough that pre sale period is very important. It's crucial to the success of your book. There's a couple of reasons for this. Number one, retailers are going to populate their catalogs on different schedules. So Amazon may pull data daily, whereas in Barnes and Noble may pull it once a week, whereas in Bookshop might pull it once a month. Stores are different, they have their own schedules and we cannot impact those schedules. So by having a pre sale period that's 60 to eight weeks, you are giving all of the retailers enough time to populate your listing before you start driving a lot of traffic to Buy it. And it's important to realize that if you are in an international market, but you're loading to somewhere like ingramspark in the United States, it can take up to eight weeks for some of these listings to show up at international retailers. So including Chapters Indigo, that is one that takes a little bit extra time. So by the time you load your book for distribution and if you need it to be on sale in Canada, you want to give eight weeks before that launch date to ensure that those retail channels have all of the correct information about your book. Sometimes it can be shorter, but it can, they do say it can be up to eight weeks. So you want to give yourself a cushion in between loading your book and actually selling your book or excuse me, launching your book to make sure that all of the retailers have the info that they need. So I mean, if you don't give them this cushion, imagine sending people to a retailer like Chapters Indigo, but there's no cover there. Maybe the book description is incorrect, it's not yet available, it's showing that it can take months to ship that is really going to dissuade your customer from actually purchasing it. So what's happening during this pre sale period as you are driving people to go buy the book during pre sale is it's teaching the retailers how popular your book might be. Without that pre sale data. Print on demand books are going to go live, but they may have one to two week to one to two month shipping times for retailers. So what these pre sales are doing is teaching the algorithms and the retailers, hey, this book is popular. People want it before it's even available. We should go stock this in our warehouse so it's available for fast shipment. So in order to make sure that you're teaching the retailers and the algorithms the right thing, that's why you want to be driving traffic to your product pages during that pre sale period, getting people to buy it so that the retailers have the right information. Pre sales of your book help you have a really strong launch which is going to keep your book from falling down the bottomless pit of Amazon sales data. And so I can kind of put it this way, once Amazon likes to give a little bit of a push to new books that are out there, they like to show it to as many people as possible to kind of test, hey, is this going to be popular or not? And if you are not driving traffic to your product pages during this time, what's going to happen is that week that the book's out, Amazon's going to Go well, nobody's really interested. It's going to tank in those bestseller rankings. And once you fall in those rankings, it's really hard to climb your way back up. So what we're going to talk about today is some ways to keep the traffic going to those product pages so that you don't fall down to that bottom pit. So I love that Stone's here because I actually pulled his pre sale earlier. His product pages are up and then we've got. I just wanted to show you what it would look like on the Amazon page. It says not been released yet, but you can still pre order it. So how it works is, and I get a lot of questions about this because this directly relates to the bestseller list. And a lot of people want to understand how pre sales work for the bestseller list. So for sales that are coming in during your pre sale period, all of those sales are counted when the book is fulfilled and shipped. Meaning if you get 400 pre sales, all of those sales aggregate. And so that the week one of your launch you have 400 sales. Right. That's a lot easier to take the two to three month of pre sale and you know, kind of pull it all together. And that counts towards your week one sales on something called Circana Bookscan. It used to be Nielsen Bookscan, it is now Circana since I think 2023. And Circana is accounts for about 85% of book sales data. I think globally. Circana is where bookstores are reported reporting their sales numbers and bestseller lists are pulling their data for Circana from Circana they want to see. Okay, on Circana, this book sold 400 books in week one. Well, it wasn't actually week one. It was the pre sale period all leading to week one. But that can help you jump in those bestseller lists. Lots of sales means higher rankings. However, the exception to this rule is of course Amazon because Amazon always has to go off and do its own thing. For Amazon, Amazon pre sales are recorded the day the book is purchased, not release day. So Amazon pre orders actually don't count towards your ranking on publication day. It ranks as those sales are coming in. But what that means is that on Amazon you can actually be a number one best seller, seller or number one new release on Amazon before your book even comes out. So it's a little bit different. It depends. And if this bestsellers are a major factor for you, that's a whole other presentation on how bestseller works. But if you're looking at how do bestseller lists come up with their numbers, the answer is Circana Bookscan and Circana Book Scam is pulling all of the data from how books are selling about 85% of the market. They are looking at all of the retailers and seeing the sales that come in on a week to week basis. So if you have a 12 week pre sale, all of that, all of those sales that are coming in during those 12 weeks count towards week one, which can help you raise in the bestseller list. So because I can't see anything else besides my presentation. Angela, can you just let me know real quick if I should pause for any questions?

No, you answered. KJ had one about like before you got to it about Amazon allowing presale.

Which you just covered.

No, the other ones I think we can like because we got a couple others, but I think they can wait until a little bit later because you might actually be covering that topic.

I might cover it a little bit, yeah. I just want to make sure I take breaks throughout. So.

Yeah, yeah, you're all good.

Okay, cool. Well, let's dive into why you want a pre sale. And this is simply from the production point of view. Okay, so this is not even talking about marketing yet. We are just talking about the logistics of getting a book out there. So part of the reason you want a pre sale during the, during this period from a production point of view is that you want to ensure that your product listings are correct. Correct retailers can pull the wrong info, not through any fault of their own. But you've got data systems talking to data systems and they don't always match. Right. And so what you want is that buffer of time so you can make sure that your product listing is correct. You've got the right title and subtitle, the right cover, right book description, you know all of the metadata is correct. So giving a pre sale period gives you a time, gives the retailer time to pull the data and then you time to cross check that data. Pre sale also enables you to order a print proof and see your book before it launches to the general public. You want to be able to review the physical book, not just the ebook and not just the PDF of the book. You want to ensure that the printer did the job correctly. And we have seen this happen where we submit the right files, everything's loaded appropriately, but something happens with the printer and maybe the spine is off, maybe some of the formatting didn't do on the right, didn't go right on the right page. Being able to get a print proof enables you to print out a copy of the book, look through it, make sure, everything looks really solid. If you have to make any corrections, pre sale gives you time to make corrections before those books are shipped to the public. Print proofs are not available until you've loaded your book and then it's usually about three to six days later, once your distributor has finished processing those files that you'll be able to actually get that print proof shipped to you. So it takes three to six days to even order it. It could take another week for it to print and then maybe another five to six days to ship to you. Kate, who's here, she might actually be able to put some of those processing times in the chat because I don't remember exactly, but I know it's always like a two to three week period that it takes. So if you load to launch, which means you load your book and you do no presale, you're not going to get a chance to look at the physical copy of the book before it goes out to the public. Giving that pre sale period gives you that time to look through it, make sure it looks as good as it can be, and make any final corrections that you need. So we talk, the next point is talking about final corrections. If something is off with your listing or off with your book, pre sale period is going to give you that time to make those corrections before the general public see Season. Without it, you could be shipping out books that are incorrect. They could have the wrong info. You could spot a typo that like changes the tables. Meaning, I mean we have seen this happen. So from a production point of view, pre sale period is very important just to make sure what the public is getting is the best possible version of the book. Okay. The other thing to account for is that we are in the age of AI, right? We're in AI era, which means every retailer, every distributor has different checks that they have now set up to ensure that the market isn't getting flooded with fraudulent product, which is what we saw happen about a year or two ago. We started to see books show showing up and places like kdp sometimes people were loading hundreds of books a day and these were AI generated books and then trying to sell them. Well, the problem with that is that it and well, there's a hole we can get into a laundry list of things that are the problem with that. But to prevent it, what has now happened is that KDP and Ingroup, Spark and a lot of the other retailers have put bots in place that are quite quality, checking different manuscripts, whatever is being uploaded, they are now checking for quality and to ensure that it's not a fraudulent product. Well, as happens with any kind of bot that's doing the work, sometimes it can capture books that are perfectly legitimate and they get caught up in their sweep and it can take weeks to get it unclogged. We are seeing accounts be being canceled for reasons that we're not aware of. We're seeing that ingramspark and KDP are not always playing nice. They're not always talking nice to each other. Or I should, sorry, I should say IngramSpark and Amazon, not IngramSpark and KDP. IngramSpark and Amazon are not always talking nice to each other. They need time to process. So the pre sale period is going to give you a much needed buffer to deal with any of these issues before launch day. Because otherwise, what will happen? You'll tell everybody, hey, April 1st, go buy my book. But on April 1st, the bots are still arguing over whether or not your book should even be up there. So you want to make sure that you give yourself plenty of time for any of these unforeseen issues. You know, we're not able to always predict why they may flag your content. And actually I'm sure there's probably people here that have dealt with some of these issues. Put them in the chat so your fellow authors can understand what happens. As time goes on, we're learning more and more about what may flag something or what may cause a problem. But the pre sale period is crucial for solving any of these issues before you even try to start selling the book. So just a couple of the behind the scenes about what happens there, want to make sure that you are well prepared. And if you're not a book launchers author, you won't have our fantastic team like Kate and Alyssa and Roy to help solve any of these issues. It can take some time, trust me. So why do you want a pre sale from a marketing point of view? You know what, actually before I dive into this section of the presentation, I think I am going to take a quick pause here and I'm going to get back to my. Stop sharing. There we go. Okay, so I want to, I would love to answer a couple of questions and maybe we can even do a quick prize as well. I'm trying to like my, my presentation is not super, super long, so I want to take some time and go.

Through everything that's perfect because we actually did have a couple questions come in that to Amazon, so let me just scroll through them specifically. So strong Tower, I am trying to set up pre sale on Amazon. But it says my site won't go live until the date my book is published. How do I set up my Amazon for presale?

That's a great question. Okay, so kdp, to my knowledge, they don't allow for pre sale of paper books like paperback books or hardcover books. They do enable for ebook sales or for ebook format. So you can set up a pre sale through KDP for your eBook. However, the way workaround for this is why we work with Ingram Spark. If you load your book to Ingram Spark, you are able to set up a pre sale with IngramSpark, which will then show on Amazon. So that's something that we do with our clients. We will load their book to ingramspark. During the pre sale period there will be product listings that show up on Amazon. Then the night before the book launches, we then load the files also to kdp. So during the pre sale period it's Ingram that fulfills those orders. But on when we load the book for kdp, then Amazon takes over fulfilling their own orders once the book has launched. So that tends to be the workaround that we do. But this is where I'm talking about where IngramSpark and Amazon don't always play nice together. They're supposed to, but basically what ends up happening is sometimes Amazon doesn't want to populate the right thing. Sometimes they say Ingram has an issue. Sometimes Ingram says Amazon has an issue, you never know which one it actually is. So our team spends hours sometimes trying to untangle this. That's why it's really important to have a pre sale.

We also have from Healthy Eating Adventure. How does pre sale timing relate to publication date?

That's a great question. So your publication date is the drop dead date in which your book is going to be available to the public. That means if someone places the order for the book, it's going to ship out to them, ideally that day or you know you're going to get it immediately. Pre sale period is more flexible. It can be short or long. It's the time in which you load your book for distribution and the product pages show up, but it's not yet available to ship to the public. And during that time period is when we're doing all of those things. I just talked about the quality checks. You're ordering your print proof to ensure that the book looks the best, that it's possible, that everything's accurate. You're giving time for Ingram and Amazon to play nice. You're giving time for all of the retailers to populate appropriately. Your Publication date, once you set that is really hard to change. It's really hard to change. So you don't want to set a publication date and then have a bunch of problems pop up and then have to move your publication date because some retailers won't even let you do that. Once you save the book is launching on, you know, April 1st. I'm just going to choose that date. Once you say, this is the date that I want the book to be available to the public, they're going to stick to that regardless of any other issues that pop up. So what can happen is if you say, hey, I'm publishing on April 1st, but then all of these production issues happen, then your public is not able to actually buy it on April 1, which causes confusion, causes, you know, all sorts of things that happen. Yeah. So your pre sale period can be longer or shorter. We tend to recommend eight weeks to give you time to do all of the marketing things, which is what I'm going to dive into next. All of the marketing things that you can be doing during this period. But like I said, those time periods can be flexible. You can have a 4 week pre sale period. You can have 6 weeks, 12 weeks, 16 weeks. I don't recommend anything shorter than 4 weeks simply because you will not have time to get your print proof and make any corrections before your launch date. So I don't recommend anything shorter than that. You know, we've had people that have been load to launch, which is when you load your book for distribution and then you launch at the same time. But what ends up happening is it's not going to be actually available on that date that you're promoting to your public. So it gets a little tricky. You lose some of the Amazon juice that comes when Amazon launches a new book because nobody's actually buying it because it, you know, there could be issues. So it's any shorter than four weeks, I get into very nervous territory. Yeah.

So which that actually goes really well into the next question about corrections.

Okay.

From Dan Riley. Will corrections during pre sales delay the launch date?

That is a great question. The answer is sometimes, sometimes there is what we call our drop dead date. There is a date and I don't know exactly. Kate might know and can probably put it in the chat. There is a date, a certain number of weeks before your launch date where you don't want to be messing with your files. You do not want to be making any changes and having to load new files because that can delay your launch date. I don't remember exactly how Far in advance. It is, I want to say, four weeks, but I could be wrong. Now if you give yourself a long pre sale period and you've given yourself, let's say eight weeks and then you spot corrections that need to be made, you'll still have time to load the files for distribution and have them process in enough time that whoever orders your book during pre sale will get the right version. But we've had this happen where we have clients, you know, sometimes where a correction needs to be made. But it's after that drop dead date, which then what we recommend is let the pre orders that have already come in get the copy of the book that has been loaded and then we make corrections after the launch date. So anyone new buying it will get a corrected version. This is going to 100% depend on how vital those changes are. Right? Like how important are those changes? Are we wordsmithing or are we fixing things that are in fact, you know, like not factual and need to actually be corrected? So, Dan, I would very much recommend, when you are looking at the print proofs, you're going through line edit and doing all of those things with our team, that you be aware that after a certain point you can't make any more changes or what will be shipped out is, you know, going to be the incorrect version. So, yeah. Oh, Angela, I think you're muted.

Okay. I want to say Joy put this in the chat a minute ago and just like all the points that you're making. Sarah.

Oh, Joy. Yeah.

That was so sweet of you to share, Joy. I just had to put that up here.

Thank you, Joy. We've really enjoyed it. Enjoyed working on your book. I know we just did your, your brain, your title, brainstorm. And I thought your book was just so interesting coming from a family of educators. Joy's book is on inclusive education and neurodiversity. And I just thought you just made some really fabulous points. So yeah, welcome, Joy, I'm glad you're here.

Yeah.

Do you want to go over more.

Or do you want to hop back into your presentation?

Why don't I take a few more? Oh, how many more questions do we have?

Let me see. We've got.

Let me take a look at these questions because I can.

There was one from earlier that I was going to show that talks about pre sale. I'll put it on the screen. This is from Finley saying, if you want to sell direct, is pre sale still possible?

So it's a little bit different when you're selling direct. And then Angela, just FYI the rest of these I will answer a little bit later because some of these I'm going to cover for selling direct. It depends on if you are also selling through a retailer, which a lot of authors do, they'll load their book to ingramspark, have it be available through all retailers, but then they'll also sell it through their website. There are terms and conditions when you're selling through a retailer that, for example, you're not selling it, you know, on your own before it's available to them. If you are selling direct, part of this is going to come down to how your fulfillment works. So, yeah, I'm trying to think if you're just selling direct, you probably don't need a pre sale because you would just launch it when it's ready. And it depends on how you're fulfilling it. If you're fulfilling it because you have a thousand books in your garage and then when orders come in, you fulfill them by yourself. Or if you're working through a service that's more of like a printer that fulfills orders, you're not doing as much with needing a pre sale because you'll already have all the files. If you are also selling through retailers so that the book is on Amazon and it's available widely, then you have to sort of match what they're selling there. Like, for example, you can't sell a book for 9.99 on Amazon, but then sell it for 6.99 on your website. That's against terms and conditions for selling through those retailers. So I. I don't know for sure, but I would bet that there is some sort of terms or conditions around availability through your site versus availability through a retailer's site. It's a good question. I'm sorry, I don't have like full answers there. I would probably need you. And we can maybe do this towards the end. Finley, if you're still here is you can drop a little bit in the chat about how your setup is and I might be able to give you a little bit of a better answer.

Yeah, it was a unique question. I was like, oh, we definitely need to get.

Yeah, it's a good one.

Okay. Okay, back to you then.

Okay, so I will dive back in here. Let me see if I can actually get this. Let's see if we can do it this way. Whoops.

That was me. That was me. I was putting the wrong one on the stage again.

That's the old one. No, I was going to try and use that one again.

Oh, you want to use that one. Okay.

Yeah, let me see. Yeah, thank you. Because I can see better here.

Oh, perfect.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah. Okay, so now getting a little bit about what you want out of pre sale from a marketing point of view. You know, we've talked a lot about the production standpoint and that's the logistics of getting a book out. But from a marketing standpoint, the great thing about presale is you are then able to give your undivided attention just to marketing the book. It can be very tricky trying to market your book while you're also doing final corrections, while you're also, you know, putting together your metadata and creating your pricing strategy and loading to all of your distributors. You don't want to also have to be focusing on marketing, which really marketing deserves your undivided attention. So pre sale is that heavy promotion time of your book. And during this period there are three or four things that should be your main objectives. Number one is driving traffic to those product pages for purchases. As we've already talked about, this is how you were teaching Amazon and other retailers how popular you're gonna, your book is gonna be. So if you're driving traffic on a consistent basis, it's not enough just to send it one day and then have an eight week pre sale and there's only one day of activity. You want consistent traffic going to those product pages throughout the whole presale. This is the time also where you are starting to lay the groundwork for book success by mobilizing what I like to call your book army. Your book army, and you've probably heard myself and Julie talk about this. Your book army are the list of people that you have the ability to reach through email or social media that are going to be your book advocates. They are supporting you. This is your email marketing list. It is your social media subscribers, it is your friends, your family, your colleagues, your network, anyone that you are going to be promoting that book to that you're going to want to know that the book is coming out. That's your book army. So during this time period is when you're recruiting people from that book army to prepare early reviews of the book. This is a strategy that a lot of people overlook, but it cannot be overstated enough, and that's my term for the day, apparently overstated enough that reviews are the lifeblood of your book. And one of the best ways to set it up for success is to have strong reviews happening during your launch week on retailers. Amazon pays attention when you have a flood of reviews that start coming in and you're able to get those numbers up. If you have one review coming in, it's not really going to register. You want to see consistent reviews coming in throughout the whole first week of your book launch. So during the pre sale period you want to be recruiting people to read the book in advance and prepare those reviews and then go leave those reviews during launch and we'll talk a little bit more about this. During the pre sale period is the perfect time to also be reaching out to influencers with either within your network or maybe just ones that are in front of your target reader that might share news of the book. They can share news through social media posts during the week or it could be maybe they bring you on their own social media for YouTube lives. Maybe they leave an endorsement for the book. But the point is that during the pre sale period is a great time to be lining up these endorsements and lining up these partnerships. Because if you're trying to do it too far in advance, influencers forget, right? They have their own stuff going on. You want to make it as easy as possible and it is very easy when your book's already on pre sale for them to see what's upcoming and why it's a good fit for their audience as well. Also throughout this time, your book army is not just there to leave reviews. They are there to be your brand ambassadors. They are there to share the good word of your book that is out. And so you want them to be encouraging their own networks to go out and check out this book. So there are some things that you want happening during this pre sale period. Driving traffic to product pages, getting early reviews and sharing news of the book. So all of that's also going to help.

We had a question come in. Someone was asking about, can you explain what product pages are?

Oh yeah, of course. So your product page is exactly what it sounds like it is. Your page on Amazon. And if I can, what I can do real quick, I'm going to stop sharing, I think. Did I stop sharing? No, but I can make it stop sharing. Yeah.

Thank you.

Make it stop sharing because what I'm going to do is I'm going to pull up a product page and cinch. Since we've got Stone here. Stone, I hope you don't mind. You are going to be my guinea pig. So share screen and let's go to. Sorry, I am really not used to this. It's very different. Yeah. Okay, are you guys able to see this product page right now? Stone's book. Here is the ebook. It says Pre order now with one click and then you're going to see. You're going to have the COVID you're going to have your title, your book description. Now this is a perfect example. Stone's book has been loaded for distribution. But you notice right here it says the paperback price is there. It's not yet available. It's because it's still pulling information from IngramSpark. They haven't started talking to each other the right way yet. It's currently unavailable. This will be corrected in the coming weeks.

So.

But Stone's book comes out April 15, so we've got a month now to get all of this. Make sure right here, see hardcover. Sorry, Stone. Sounds like great. The cover's not there yet. It has not populated from ingramspark yet. So there's a couple reasons for this. I know. Number one, that we just loaded the hardcover for distribution, so the going to take a couple of days. The paperback is probably taking a few days. It's got the COVID which is great. It's got the book description. It's not showing the price yet. So all of these things are what's going to end up happening. Now what we'll be adding to Stone's page during this time are going to be endorsements, a plus content, other elements that will make this product page really pop. But this is exactly it. It's a product page. Now if I went to Barnes and Noble, if I went to any other retailer, ideally, you know, product pages are going to exist for every different retailer.

Perfect. Yeah, thank you. That was the only. I mean, we've got some more questions pouring in, but I just wanted to address that one since that was on your slide that you were talking about.

Yeah, no problem. That makes sense. Yeah, let's go ahead and go back to. Yeah, there we go. Thank you. All right, so your real goal during this whole pre sale time, as the catalogs are doing their thing on the back end, your goal is to be driving sales and awareness around the book. Okay. Now if you have not spent a lot of time before your book comes out or while you were working on the book, doing audience building, that's a huge piece of what you'll be doing during your pre sale period as well. Finding people to market that new book to. So what should you be doing? Number one, you should be getting your platforms ready. Is your website up to date and ready to sell the book? Have you added a book page? Have you added links to buy? You need those product pages before you can add those links. So another reason pre Sale is important. You want to make sure your social media is update. Do you have your banner set with that book? Do you have your links updated? Are you putting out regular content that is attracting your target reader? Update your bios, does it have information about the book? Are you including details about what you're working on? Make sure your bios are all set and this is the time when you're putting together your marketing materials. So some of the things that we put together for our clients, social media graphics so they can be promoting the book. We're doing media kits for media outreach. Pardon me, we're doing speaker sheets so that we can be submitting them for speaking engagements. And we're creating sell sheets so that our authors can go out to retailers in their area or to libraries in their area and start getting them to carry the book in advance. So the presale period is a great time to be getting all of these assets prepared. The other things that you want to be doing, number one, is directing people to buy your book. You're reaching out to that book army. You're getting in touch with them through email and social media marketing to your professional network, your social media followers, your email subscribers, your friends and family. You want them all to be aware that the book is available and going out and doing those advanced purchases. This is the time also to be asking for reviews from your book. Army reviews help can skyrocket your book's performance on retailers like Amazon. This is when you want to start to put together those fun book launch teams, those groups of maybe 20 to 25 people that you trust that you can provide early copies of the book to so that they can start preparing those reviews. A lot of times people ask me like, how, how far in advance should I let them have the. The early copies? I would say if your product pages are up, it's enough time, you can start providing them with those ARC copies or even the epub files, because those are usually done in advance. I would say a month is a good amount of time. Depends on how long it takes people to read. You know, if you're working with a group of 20 to 30 people, you can ask them like, how, how long do you need to read it? But keep in mind that if you do it too far in advance, people forget it's something that's easy to put off. So, you know, you kind of want to hit that sweet spot so that they actually do the action you're asking them to do. If part of your strategy is to go after editorial reviews of the book, so this are, these are reviews that are from third party trusted sources. Normally it's going to be book review outlets. Could be newspapers, could be magazines, could be certain blogs. If you're doing anything that is within the publishing industry. So book list, Kirkus Forward Reviews, Library Journal. Oh gosh, I know I'm forgetting a bunch of them. Midwest Book Review, City Books, readers views, they take a long time. Could take 12 to 16 weeks to get some of those reviews back. So if you want to have those reviews in time for your book launch, that means you need to be sending the book 12 to 16 weeks in advance. The bigger the outlet, the longer they require. A lot of outlets will not even consider a book that has been sent to them after the 12 to 16 week mark. So before you send out for any editorial reviews, ensure that you go, you check out what their submission process is and when they ask for for those, ask for the book to be in in advance of the review. Editorial reviews are an incredibly fun and very helpful marketing tool. They operate as endorsements. You can put them on your product page like I showed you. You can put them in your media kit, you can use them when pitching, put them on social media, put them on your website. They are social proof that your book is worth checking out. So it is very helpful to have those editorial reviews. But you have to account for their lead time. Could be 12 to 16 weeks. There's a couple that will do it after the fact and we, you know, we know those ones. Midwest Book Review for example won't look at books that haven't published yet. They'll only look at post launch ones. But that's kind of, that's not the norm. It's, it's a definitely an exception to the rule. This is the time period where you're recruiting others to share your book through social media, through email newsletters, through blogs, videos. You will if you start to watch some of the bookstagrammers tiktokers, right they are talking about books that are just about to launch. Usually that two week period before a book launches or right within that first week of launch. But guess what, they've had those books for weeks and they are just releasing the content very close to the launch date. There is no book talker or bookstagram out there bookstagrammer that is out there that got the book yesterday and is now talking about it today. They get these weeks in advance and they plan the content for when the book launches. So keep that in mind with any of your outreach. Start media outreach. So aside from just getting Book reviews. Some of the other ways to really gain your audience is by doing interviews with the author, having them talk to you in features. This could be print, this could be blogs, it could be online media broadcasts, tv, radio, podcasts. Again, this is the same kind of thing. The bigger the outlet, the longer the lead time. Usually 12 to 16, 16 weeks in advance. If I am going to be pinching, pitching a print magazine for a book, I am doing that four months in advance of when I want that interview to come out. Blogs have a little bit shorter. Those can be usually a month or two. Broadcast media is anywhere from two to four weeks, sometimes six weeks. It depends on the show and the, the content that's around it. But all of this to say use the pre sale period and the start of it to get that media outreach done so that when your book does release, the media is all coming out about the same time. During that pre sale period is where you want that feeling of being everywhere that there is buzz. You know, there's that old marketing speak that says that a customer needs to see you seven to ten times before they consider buying your product. Well, ideally what you're going for during this pre sale period is that feeling that you are everywhere, that you are on multiple media outlets, that they are seeing your social media come through, that they are seeing you pop up on other people's feeds. So all of that takes some coordination. During this time as well, is when you are lining up those influencers to help promote. Those are when and when we're talking about influencers, we're not necessarily talking about Kim Kardashian. Right. We are talking about influencers that are relevant to your target reader. May not be the most famous name out there, it's going to be the one that is most famous to your target reader because they're an expert in your topic, because they share part of your mission. So when you're looking at influencers, you want to make a list of the people who are going to be most relevant to your target reader and then create a strategic plan. Do you want to be doing that plan when you're also trying to do print proof corrections and ensure that your, your cover has shown up on your product pages? No, you want to be able to focus on it. So some of the things you can do with influencers would be like coordinating a social media live that's gonna run the week that your book comes out. Maybe there are cross promotions you can do. If you know someone who is really relevant in your field, maybe you can be doing Newsletter swaps. Maybe they will plug your book in their newsletters or on their own social media, but they need time to plan that. So you want to kind of start your pre sale period by with that outreach, then narrow it down to the ones who have agreed to help, then work with those ones who have agreed to help on the best content for their feed. They will be able to tell you, yes, I would love to have a plug. Please provide me with a copy for it or I'd love to have you on my social media. Let's set it up for this week. You need time to get all of that organized, so don't cut your knees off by, you know, having a really short pre sale period and asking for those endorsements for marketing. If you're asking an influencer for an endorsement for marketing, they need time to read the book in advance as well. So you actually want to start that process two to three months before the book comes out. So you have those endorsements in hand by the time the book is ready to release. And then the last part of it is live event setup. If part of your launch strategy is to do live events, particularly in your area, you have to keep in mind that libraries and bookstores are doing things two to three months in advance. So right now we're in March. That means that the bookstores, libraries in my area are planning June events. So you want to be able to have that outreach to them. And it's really helpful if you have your sell sheet and the product page to show them that this is a viable product. This is something that they want to have in their store. So setting up those book launch events can take a couple of months and you want to give yourself plenty of time for that. All right, so since we are at the top of the hour, what I think we can do. Sorry, I'm gonna. Yep. Where's Angela?

There.

She's at. Sorry. It's weird because I can't control my own. I can't get there. I can't control my own.

Yeah, yeah. We'll have to figure out that. That whole guest in. In Streamyard for you.

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you.

So what were you gonna say?

Were you going? I was gonna say it's a great time to do a giveaway.

Perfect. Okay, awesome. So I think we should do a hashtag. Let's see who's still here watching live. Sarah, what is the hashtag you want people to put in the chat? And then we will do a random draw from those who have put that in the chat.

How about hashtag presale success.

All right, I will put this in the chat so that you know exactly what she said. Pre sales success capitalization does not matter, but spaces do, I believe. So don't.

Yeah, it won't be. It won't be a hashtag if it's spaced out.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

All right, perfect, perfect. We'll give people a chance to put that in there. Do you want to answer a question while people are typing that in? Sure.

Be happy to.

Okay, awesome. So. So let's see. So Henning asked a question. How much difference does the pre sale period do for an unknown author?

That is a good question. And is going to tie directly back to the platform you have built. So, you know, Julie likes to say that anytime before the book comes out is audience building time. Right. There's pre launch and there's pre sale. Pre launch means that your book just hasn't launched yet. Pre sale means you have product pages and the book's actually going to be launching. But if you have zero audience, meaning you don't have an email marketing list, you haven't been building up social media followers, you don't really have anyone you're going to market to. Yeah, maybe pre sales not as important. Maybe you can just launch the book and then start to build your audience afterwards. But what you're going to need to fight against then is the Amazon just making your book tank. And then you're going to have to climb back up as you drive traffic to those product pages. So I think you can get away with a shorter one, but you're still going to want that logistical buffer of time to deal with all those production things that I talked about, making sure that the retail listing is right, making sure that the files are correct, making sure you have a print proof that you can look through. So I do think that at least four weeks so that you could do all of those things is important. But I would say if you haven't spent that time before your book launches really building up the audience and you don't have one, then your strategy needs to shift to the first year of your book and it needs to be looking at on a quarterly basis what are the promotions and things I could be doing, could be doing to be driving traffic to my product pages. So yeah, perfect.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Okay, well, let me share screen. I will pull up this giveaway tool and then we are going to do. I've already got the hashtag put in there. Hashtag pre sale success. Thanks for everyone who put that in there. We had pre Sale success. Okay, I was gonna say it's not showing the entries. There we go. 14. Let's see who our winner is. And so we have a plethora of books. Guys.

Today is your day. I love it.

Oh, gosh, that's so funny. I love it.

Okay, well, Stone, if you would like.

Any of those books that I mentioned, let me know. I'll happily send mine to you. Yay. Stone is very happy. Okay, not that comment. This one. Yay. Love it. Love it. Yeah, let us know. You can email me directly T E A M Book launchers dot com. Let me know which of the books you would like. And we do have some of Julie's. You should already have both of her.

Books, but if you want some of.

Those or any of the others, I'll happily send one to you.

Oh, okay.

Awesome. You are claiming Janet Elliott. Love it. Awesome. I'm gonna put a sticky on it.

So I've got it saved for you.

Awesome. That's exciting. Do you want to do more questions, Sarah?

Yeah, let's do a couple more.

Okay, let me see. Okay, so we answered Hennings. Okay, this one is from kj. I was wondering, once I published my book, how long would it take to order 100 books and get my order delivered from Amazon?

That is a good question. I guess my question back to you would be why would you want to order your book retail if your book. If you can get your book wholesale. So, yeah, so it depends on the distributor you're using. If you're just going through KDP or if you are also loading your book to a distributor like IngramSpark, let's assume that you are. You do have your book available for all retailers, meaning you're using IngramSpark. Then as soon as you load your book for distribution and wait that three to six days to get your print proof, then you should be able to start ordering copies of your book right away. How long does it take to get 100 books? Generally, they're going to print in five to seven days and they're going to ship in another five, three to five days from there. It's really varies. I'm not as familiar with KDP's processing times as I am IngramSpark. Generally we're going to order through IngramSpark because it's going to be cheaper. But that's the back end if you want to order your book, like, retail, as soon as the book's available and launches, you can order 100 copies. So. KJ, KJ AJ I have a bookstore. I want to sell my books in. So there's two ways to go about that. I want to just be clear real quick and you can put your comments in the chat. Are you looking to set up a consignment deal with a local bookstore or are you looking for the local bookstore just to carry your book? Meaning they order it themselves and they stock it themselves. Consignment is when you provide the stock, otherwise the store will order the book from, you know, their, their distributors and just pay for it themselves. So I want to understand the setup that you're looking to do. It's a non profit bookstore, so more than likely they're going to have some kind of consignment deal, which means that you can go into the store and if they agree to carry the book in their store, you would set up a consignment deal where you're providing the stock and then they do some kind of stuff split with you of the profits. So let's say you bring in 20 books and they sell 10 of them. They'll split the profits on those with you and then they might return the other 10. So in that case, what you would want to be doing is ordering your book wholesale from a printer. So you're only paying, you know, three to four bucks per book as opposed to, if you do it retail, you're paying 10 to 15 bucks a book. So you want to order, get your books, those hundred books wholesale and then sell them back to the stores in your area through consignment deals. So that would be the best strategy there. Okay, we have a couple more on.

Reviews and like Book army specifically. So this is from Henning. Amazon has a labeling on reviews for of course, verified purchases. How does reviews made without a purchase rate with Amazon?

Okay, that's a great question. And so we're going to get into a couple things here. Number one, it should be aware that on Amazon you are not able to. No one's able to leave reviews on a product that has not yet launched yet. So for example, we use Stones, which is launching on April 15. April 15 is the date in which people will be able to go and leave reviews. That's for Amazon and I think most retailers follow that as well like Barnes and Noble and a couple of others. The exception is Goodreads. Goodreads enables you to leave reviews as soon as the book shows up on Goodreads, which as soon as you have pre sale product pages, it'll show up. You can set it up on Goodreads. You can leave reviews in advance on Goodreads. As soon as the book is there, people can start leaving reviews. So little, just background info there for Amazon. Anybody can leave a review on a product whether or not you have purchased it on Amazon. They will ask you when people are leaving reviews, they'll say, did you purchase this on Amazon? If you click yes, they're going to go back and they're going to look at your purchase history and they're going to see whether or not you actually did. That's where the verified purchase comes in. That's where they start labeling that review as verified, meaning that person bought the book on Amazon and they are now leaving a review there. Both types of reviews show up on Amazon. However, the verified purchases are higher on the product page. So when you look at reviews, you'll see the kind of top ones all say verified purchase. However the non verified ones will show up right underneath it. So there is a big debate. You have to have everybody leave verified reviews. Yeah, it does help. But once you start getting reviews that are up in the like 20 to 50 to 75 range, not everybody, people are not looking to see if it's verified or not verified. When you only have a couple reviews, like five, then it makes a little bit more of a difference because it shows up more strikingly. But once you get more reviews up there, it's not, as you know, not as important. The I had another point that I was going to make about that. Oh that while Amazon's verified purchases will show up higher on the page, the count at the top of the page where it shows how many reviews you have and the overall star rating that is verified and non verified. So if you have five reviews, two being verified and three being not verified, it'll only show five up at the top. It's not going to cut, it's not going to, you know, divvy those out. So it'll show that you have five total and let's say you got five with five stars each, you'll have five of five stars. So the verified reviews are very helpful. What you do tend to find is that Amazon will process verified reviews faster. Amazon will. We had a client deal with this just a couple weeks ago. His book came out and he had a lot of people that were coming in to leave reviews right away, which was phenomenal. He had high, high goals of trying to get, I think his main goal is a hundred, one hundred reviews within the first month. So he had people ready to go after a day or two. When Amazon saw the incoming reviews, they started to slow. How Fast those reviews would show show up because they're doing quality checks. They're making sure that all of those reviews are legit. So they're going through the verified ones. Those tend to get through faster. And then the ones that are not verified, they just take time to look at who's leaving the review. Are they spamming reviews in other places? Is this a legitimate review? So, you know, it can take a little bit longer for the unverified reviews to get through, but usually it's just a couple of days.

And then don't forget to not tell your mom.

Like, oh, and I love my son's.

Book or my daughter's book. Like, no, no, no.

We had a client a couple years ago, this is a few years ago, but it was like he had told everybody to go leave reviews, which is great. But the people were like, oh, I love so and so. I was his third grade teacher and I'm just so proud of what he was. I was like, go tell them to take that down. That's not helping. You take that down right away. Amazon does not like that either. Not like that. They are looking for critical reviews. They are looking for legitimate, honest reviews of your work. And so they don't want people review stacking. Which is why, and this is a whole other topic, why it's not always helpful to go ask your friends and family to leave reviews. You want your target reader leaving reviews. So there's a whole algorithm game that goes in there. And KJ AJ also made the point that Amazon will not let you leave a review unless you have purchased $50 from Amazon within the last 12 months. That is true. If someone is going to Amazon to leave a review on your behalf, they have to have an Amazon account in good standing that has spent $50 on Amazon within 12 months. So just a little helpful tidbit, but on Goodreads, anybody can leave a review on Goodreads.

Absolutely. About reviews from Dan Riley says, should the book army leave reviews during pre sale or after the launch date?

Well, I did go into all of that already. They are not able to leave reviews before the launch date on Amazon. They can on Goodreads, but not on Amazon. What I tend to like is to ask my reviewers or tend to instruct people to do this is to leave it the first week that the book launches. If Your book launches April 1st. April 1st through 7th is that time period in which Amazon is really looking at how your book's going to perform. So you really want to see those reviews coming in over that first week.

Awesome. Okay, we do have a couple more.

But let me dive back into some of it because I might. Yeah, yeah, I might have some, I might answer a couple of things and what we've got left. So. Okay, so diving back in here, let's talk about some of the pre sale strategies. Some of the way, some of the things that you can be doing during pre sale to be driving that traffic to your product pages, driving those sales. One of the most popular is pre sale incentives. This is the idea of offering a bonus in exchange for a pre ordered book. So I put up an image here. I'm sorry, it's kind of hard to say, but this was something that Julie did during. She actually did this during launch week, not during pre sale. But you can do the same kind of thing where, you know, you buy one book, you get some downloadable resources. You buy three books, you also get invited to hour long private coaching. Buy 10 books, you're going to get a one on one call with Julie and a personalized timeline and you know, explainer video. So incentives are the act of basically offering your readers a bonus in exchange for that order. It can take the form of a lot of different things. It could be if you have other books out, you can offer two for one deals, downloadable resources, always hugely popular discounts or coupons. For example, if you have a course and you want someone to buy the the book, maybe you offer them a discount on your course. Swag. Okay, so that could be, you know, T shirts, pens, hats, stickers, bookmarks. The only thing I would say with physical things is you've got to make sure you have a fulfillment process in place. Could be video courses, Q and A's. I mean we had authors that, you know, set up, okay, buy the, order the book on pre sale and you're going to get, you know, access to this 1 hour long Q and A with me. In order to determine what's going to be the best bonus, you really need to look at your target reader. What are the things they're going to find the most valuable? What are the things they ordinarily would have to pay for that they're going to get for free? What are things that are really in line with your brand? Like for example, if you run like a leadership cohort, probably not going to benefit you too much to give away T shirts. So you want to make sure it's in line with what your brand is and you want to make sure you have a way to fulfill it. As you can see from this example here, Julie had individual email Addresses set up. So what you do kind of here is someone buys the book, they go to your website, there is a location where they can either email in a screenshot or a copy of the receipt to verify that they bought the book on pre sale. Or maybe they can upload it to a field box, they click a button, it sends it to you, and then there is an automatic email that goes back to them so that they can claim their gift. Okay, so this just, it doesn't take that much to set this up on a website, but it can really impact not only your reader, but it can impact your sales, you know, and this is a great chance for readers to get a little behind the scenes, make that extra step connection with you. So pre sale incentives are a great way to go. Other pre sale strategies might include partnering with local organizations to promote the launch. So for example, there was an author that we knew that during her pre sale she partnered, so her book was on, I think it was like feeding your kids. And she partnered with a local like hunger nonprofit that promoted her book during pre sale because she was going to donate part of the proceeds back to that organization. So they sent that out to their whole network and anyone that purchased the book on pre sale was then going to get this extra bonus from the author. So there's lots of ways that you can do it. We had another author whose book came out in September that she set up pre sale events locally, partnering with local non profits that helped animal shelters because the animals that were in those shelters directly related to her book content. So don't be afraid to reach out to organizations that are in your area that might be a great fit because they share your target reader. They're going to be happy if it's going to help bring eyeballs to their organization. And if you can factor in a fundraising, even better. Some of the strategies that we employ quite a bit is that we want to help you get in front of new readers who potentially have never heard of you before. With promotions, you want to build exposure. So we use things like Goodreads giveaways. Goodreads already has a built in network of avid readers. People who love reading. They are there just because they want to get more book recommendations. So doing giveaways on sites like this can really help you gain new readers. One of the strategies that we employ regularly is an ebook sale. This is something that you do after your launch, not during the pre sale period, but maybe the first week of your launch. But running an ebook sale and then partnering with promotional sites will help Readers who've never heard of you discover your book and because it's on sale, they're going to take a chance. It's a lot easier to dive into a 99 cent book than it is maybe a 1599 book less commitment for them. But at the end of it, you could be gaining new readers and be driving new people to your email newsletter and your social media because of it. So do recommend you run some promotions during pre sale that are going to attract readers that you don't have access to otherwise. We've talked about this a little bit with some of the influencer outreach already. But I also encourage you to look at other authors that are in your space to help promote your book on pre order because what they can do is newsletter swaps where maybe they're plugging your book to their newsletter and you're plugging their book to your newsletter. Doing those social media lives, doing social media posts, sharing it even till 2 for 1 deals. Buy my book on pre order and you're going to get the second book free from this other author. It's a great opportunity for other authors to be able to get their books out there as well. They want to leverage your audience, you want to leverage their audience. So some of these pre sell strategies are all looking at how can I get in front of new readers. But you also want to look at what is going to make someone take action now. Right. It's very easy. I'm sure everybody's done this. You look at a product that's kind of cool, I think I'll buy it next week.

Week.

You want to create that sense of urgency, that sense of I don't want to miss out. So doing things like pre order incentives where it's only offered for maybe a couple of weeks during pre sale or if you're doing a giveaway, it ends on a certain date. Ebook sales, we usually recommend five to seven days for those not longer partnering with other authors for a limited time deal, that is what makes people take action. They don't want to miss out on what those extra bonuses could be. And so that can help drive sales ahead of time. Let's see. All right. During this time period is when you were getting loud. I have had this conversation a number of times with authors. I don't want to bug my network, I don't want to bug my contacts. I don't want to be a nuisance. You know what? No, sorry, we're gonna cut that noise right now because if there is ever a time in your life to Call in favors. It is when you are launching your book, when you're launching any product really. But since we're talking about books here, it is the time when you want to be talking constantly. You are recruiting your readers to get those early copies of the book. You want to distribute arcs during this time period and get that early feedback on how the book is and start preparing those reviews. Talk about your book during this period. You can be doing social media campaigns, you're prepping your email marketing, you're doing videos talking about your book. Some of the things that you can be doing are cover reveals. Reveal what the COVID of your book looks like. Do an unboxing video where you're holding your book for the first time. I cannot tell you how happy I get every time I see an unboxing video because the author is so engaged in what they've created and now they're seeing it in real life. I mean, that is an incredibly emotional moment and I love sharing those. So unboxing videos are great. Take subjects from your book, start to preview it, break down chapters. Talk about what people are going to learn from your book. One of the best sales tools is really benefit. You are selling a benefit benefit. So be able. You can sell that during your pre sale period. You can use sites like Kickstarter that's going to help offer special editions or offer exclusive offers during pre sale. Hint, we do have a client only training. If you're a book launchers author, we do have a client only training on Kickstarter. But for those of you that are not familiar with Kickstarter, it's a crowdfunding source. While you're not going to use it to sell your book year round, it is perfect to use during pre sale because you can offer copies of the book, you can offer bundles that you wouldn't be able to offer on regular retailers. You can offer special editions, you can offer extra bonuses, you can offer things like, you know, somebody buys 10 copies, they're gonna get some of those bonuses. They get invites to special things. I highly encourage Kickstarter, especially if you're working with multiple formats of the book. Not just say ebook and paperback, but you have hardcover, you have special edition hardcovers, you have art books, you have sprayed edges, you know, like you're creating all these different things that you can do. Kickstarter is a great place to offer those with exclusivity. Again, going back to that feeling of don't want to miss out. This is my only opportunity to get this deal. So Kickstarter is Very helpful with that and the way that they work. You can be earning a lot of money that's going to help fund. So we have had authors who have run Kickstarters with copies of their book during pre sale and that's how they end up paying for doing an audiobook or that's how they end up paying to, you know, create some other aspect of their reader journey. So Kickstarter is a great tool. There is a really fantastic director of publishing there that did a training with us. Orianna Leckhart did a great training with us. And we just learned so much about how Kickstarter can really be useful to authors during this time period. But above all else, I want you to look at the tools that you have in your arsenal, to look at how that can drive traffic. Everybody's got different strengths. If you don't have a strong email marketing list, you don't have a strong social media following, then you have to figure out how to meet your readers where they exist in the real world. I deal with this with authors all the time that are like, I don't have a big social media and I don't know that I'm going to invest in creating one. Well, then you have to meet your readers while they exist in the real world. Where is that? Is that in stores? Is it in libraries? Is it in by, you know, getting in front of them and farmers markets and, you know, different events? A lot of times this could be conferences, this could be expos. It could be lots of things where you're going to sit down and actually be able to talk to those readers face to face. So during the pre sale period, you need to work out, if I'm not going to have a digital strategy, then I have to have a real world strategy. Well, we've already talked about that. It takes two to three months for bookstores to set up events. So the pre sale period is a great time to be lining up events where you could talk to those people face to face. And we've had other people who are like, yeah, I don't have a big email list, but I've got 10,000 people on my substack. Well, how can you use your substack to start driving sales? It all comes down to leveraging what you already have in your arsenal and then going from there. I only have one more slide and I'll spend a little bit of time on this one and then we'll probably spend the rest of the time on questions. But this is sort of a sample pre sell calendar. This is some of the things that you could be doing. This is going to be customized for. I mean, I'm sorry to say this is just a template. You will want to customize your own based on those tools we just talked about, based on what you already have in your arsenal. But I'll take you through some of the things that you could be doing during pre sale. So starting about two months before launch, we're looking about eight weeks before the book actually is available to your public. That's when your book should be loaded for distribution with those pre sale product pages, right? You want to have those up, right? That's the official ticking clock on your pre sale period. From there, you want to make sure that your platform is all arranged with your website and social media fully up to date with links to buy. Right. You want your blogs updated, contact info's right. Your LinkedIn has been optimized. Your website has all of the content around the book. Your book page is live. Make sure all that's done a couple months before the book is available. About eight weeks before is when you're going to start your media outreach. For us, we start media outreach as soon as we have product pages, book cover, title and we have your media kit. So we, we tend to try and get the media kit done before the pre sale period so that when the pre sale period hits, we can be off to the races. So you want to have your media outreach can start about two months ahead of time, keeping in mind those lead times that I already talked to you about for book review sites or for certain types of press. But start your media outreach about two months in advance and I know this is going to get asked, you want those interviews coming out right around your launch week. So if you have the ability to, when you're talking to hosts, when you're talking to podcasts or any kind of newsroom or anything like that, you want it to run around your launch period. So try for like the week before your launch and the week after your launch. We call those the golden weeks with your launch right in the middle. You want a lot of press coming out during that time you're submitting for those book reviews. You start teasing the book to your book army. This is when you can reveal your cover, this is when you can promote your presale and this is when you'll start your outreach to influencers for endorsements so that they have time to get those endorsements back to you for you to still use for marketing. So that's all about eight weeks before the book comes out. Obviously you're not doing these all in one day. It can take, it can take several weeks to get through a lot of this. So you know, you want to give yourself a little bit of grace. About a month before is when you start running promotions like giveaways. What I like to do is set up the Goodreads giveaway when the book is still in pre sale so that it ends on or around the launch date and then run an ebook sale after that so anybody who didn't win a copy can then get the ebook at a lower price. That's what I like to do. You know, everyone has their own schedule for these, but I do like to run those giveaways so that they end on or around your launch date so that anyone who didn't win can go check out your product page. Well, now they can buy it. This is when you want to start mobilizing your book army with early copies so they can prepare those reviews. So about the 30 days before the book comes out, when you want to start distributing those copies so that they can read the book in advance and prepare those reviews. If you're running pre sale incentives, you want to have your system set up about a month ahead of time. That's the automations we were talking about where you know, they can either upload a copy of the receipt or they can email a copy in and you have your automations on the back end set up. You know, we use systems like keep for doing things like that, but you're also able to use Mailchimp, you're able to use ConvertKit. I mean, I know people that have hired a VA just to run these things. So you want to have all that set up ahead of time. You want to release your unboxing video. I've already talked about how much I love unboxing videos. I just find them so helpful and just heartwarming. It makes me so glad I do what I do. So releasing those unboxing videos about a month ahead of time is a good idea. And then you can start your plan for any launch events that are specific to the book. So I'm not talking about whether or not you set up a bookstore signing or going to the library. We've already talked. That takes two to three months in advance. But if you're going to have a local party, set something up at a local restaurant or you know, we had a client who did it at an art studio and it was more just for their network and their family and friends, start planning those things and you want to keep the email and social media content going on a regular basis. So you want to have consistent content. Doesn't all have to be about the book. In fact, you probably don't want it to. You want it to involve other things as well. But this is when you're going to start seeding the book content in as well. About two weeks before the launch. This is when you want to start getting down to the nitty gritty. You want to start nudging your book or hey, have you read the book yet? Are you prepared for your review? Because I'm going to tell you on the day that you need to go launch it. So it's in two weeks. Go get those ready. You want to start launching your pre sale incentives. For the presale incentives, I get asked a lot. How long should they run? I don't like them to run longer than two to three weeks because then you lose that sense of urgency. It's very easy for someone to go, oh, I've got a month to do that. I'm going to do it later. I like to run it about two weeks before the launch, just for maximum impact. You want to send out those invites for launch events. And then about now, if you started your work eight weeks ago, usually right around when the book's launching is when you're going to start getting those endorsements and those editorial reviews coming in. So you want to start posting those because that creates a real sense of excitement and anticipation for the book launch. So you can start posting those endorsements, get them on your product pages, put those out on social media, keep that content going. All right, You've made it all the way to launch week. All right? This is when your big email and social media pushes. Sorry, I misspelled that. It's supposed to say push. That push is happening. That is when you are mobilizing your book army. The book is live. Go post your reviews, Try and get all of those reviews up, up. You know, once the launch happens and throughout that week, start releasing any media interviews. Do those social media lives do all of the things this is. Once the launch week happens, that's when you start really releasing all that content. If you're running an ebook sale around your launch, do it that first week that that book launches because again, that's when you're going to get the most traffic, launch your party events and then celebrate. Man, you have had a long journey and your book is out. Congratulations. Take a day before you start plotting out the next three months to promote that book. So Take a day to celebrate. Celebrate your achievements. And ideally, because you have put in the due diligence, you have checked your files, you have made your corrections, you have coordinated with your distributor and your printer and everything is running smoothly, celebrate that launch because that is a huge achievement that most people will never achieve. So make sure you take that time for yourself. After that pre sale period, new launch happens. So that is about it that I have to cover on pre sale. But I know that we have a lot of comments and questions, so I'm happy to spend this time answering some more questions. Hopefully I have hit the highlights really, on why it's important to have a good pre sale. Let's dive into a couple of questions and maybe how many more prizes do we want to do?

Angela, we could do another one or two for sure. And something that Sarah said that I think is so important and Alvin put it in the chat. I can hardly wait to celebrate my day. And I think that is so important what Sarah.

Yeah.

Said take that day and celebrate it like you're gonna have all these months ahead, ahead to plan what you're going to do for the future with your book. But take that day and enjoy it and you know, you can celebrate with your friends or family, do virtual celebrations, virtual launch parties, but enjoy that day.

Yeah, enjoy that day.

Because it's been a lot of work to get to that day and you deserve to take that time to celebrate. So.

Absolutely, absolutely. You know, and we have a lot of authors that talk about this that are just like, oh yeah, my launch day. Like they kind of have it built up in their mind and then they wake up and it's like any other day, it's like, it's like waking up on your birthday and having nobody wish you happy birthday. Right. The launch day is going to be as big as you make it. So, you know, ideally, because you have planned out your social media, you have laid all the dominoes well in advance that the launch day is really just watching it all come together, you know. So, you know, I really encourage you to take that day and celebrate as much as you can.

Yeah, absolutely. Let's do.

I'll tell you what, why don't we do one prize now and then we'll do one more at the end. For anyone who want to do a.

Question or what would you like?

I would like I had said this earlier and I'm gonna. And I don't know if anybody put it in the chat, but I'm gonna ask you to put in the chat again. What is A pre sale strategy that you have either used or want to employ for your upcoming book launch. Pre sales strategy. I talked about a few of them. Partnering with influencers, pre sale incentives, running giveaways. What are some of the strategies that you either have used and would like to share or are interested in using for your upcoming book launch?

Awesome.

It's a thing.

Any coming in yet? People are probably typing them out. Do you want to answer a question while they're.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay. So we have answered a few of these. So Healthy Eating Adventure says how do you get on, how do we get on to other distributors product pages?

So I think the difference, the important thing to recognize Here is distributor versus retailer. Amazon is a retailer, Barnes & Noble retailer, bookshop.org retailer. Those retailers get their listings from IngramSpark Spark. Ingram Spark is your distributor and your printer. So think about it this way. When you go to a bookstore and you wonder where are they getting their inventory? Where do they get their stock? They're getting it from Ingram. So the distributor, like IngramSpark, for example, they are the ones that are handling getting your product like making your book available to retailers. So you don't need to worry about getting on other distributor product pages. If you were loaded to something like Ingram Spark, which we do for all of our clients, your book will be available automatically online at Barnes and noble and bookshop.org and chapters indigo and Kobo. And you know, we use distributors like Draft 2 Digital, which does the ebook distribution, makes it available on Google Books, Apple Books, Nook. There are, I, I don't know the number of distributor of the retailers that IngramSpark makes your book available to, it's could be hundreds. If there is a particular retailer that you're like, I really want to have my book on that site and it's not automatically there from ingramspark. Then you just need to determine where does that site or that store, where do they get their inventory? There's a couple of other distributors that are out there. Baker and Taylor is one, there's bookazine, there's a handful of others. And each one has a little bit of a different process. So really it comes down to if there's a particular retailer you want your book on and it's not there automatically from ingramspark. Then we just need to determine who does distribute to them and then get your book.

There. Awesome. Yes. And like she said, the three that we really use the most here are of course, KDP, IngramSpark and Draft2Digital. Okay, let's see KJ and I think KJ had to run, but she did say she's gonna watch the replay. You said that you cannot sell your book for less than it's listed on Amazon. Could you sell it for more and offer free.

Shipping? Yeah, I think you could. I mean it's really only gonna be helpful if your book is not available through Amazon Prime. You have to figure most people are buying through Amazon prime, which means free shipping anyway. But yeah, you, I think you could do that. I think you could offer it for a few dollars more and then just offer free shipping. I don't see why not. If anybody can contradict that in the comments, please do. But to my knowledge, I think that should be.

Fine. I will say depending on where you're shipping, shipping costs can vary and if you're shipping outside of the US then.

It'Ll.

It. You may want to. Yep. Like customs and just the, the.

Timing, the further away shipping even to Canada is gonna cost you more than the cost of the book itself. I mean we have books that are, you know, like 15, 16 bucks and it'll cost 35 bucks to ship it, you know, so, so keep that in mind when you are shipping, especially if you're selling direct. Factor those costs in and determine who you're going to make your book available to. You know, if it's only us only or if it's going to be available.

Worldwide. Okay, this is one. And then Strong Tower does actually have a follow up question to this, but is there any number of reviews that Amazon needs before their algorithms kick.

In? Amazon doesn't share that knowledge with us. They do not tell us how their algorithms work. But what I can tell you is what we've seen. I have seen after 25 reviews that you start getting more impressions on the book. After 50, even more than that. Once you get up into the 75 and 100 range, then Amazon really starts selling it themselves. So I like to have those markers of 25, 50, 75 and 100. And once you have more than 100, you know, Amazon's really doing the bulk of the. Getting your book in front of the new readers and attaching it to other products so people see it. But it's, it's really hard to say because they don't share those numbers with us. So that's just what we've witnessed over the years.

Yeah. Before we get to that, I want to give you a chance to read the comments, Sarah, so you can pick your favorite of the, of the people who had put in what their favorite. Yes, piece was and I can put them on the screen if you want me to as.

Well. No, I can go through this here. So since a pre sell incentives and Kickstarter influencer partnering partner with other authors. Kickstarter influencer partnering. Okay, so there's only a few people who have put in comments. So I see. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 responses here. Angela, you want to do a randomizer on those five. Oh, you're muted. There we.

Go. Yeah, my computer does not like stream yard sometimes. Yeah, I can do. I can't do it. The fancy randomizer like the other one. But I will put their names in and then I'll. I'll.

Draw. So we've got Alvin Dawkins, we've got Dance into college. Hello. We've got Kevin hall. We've got Joy Young and Cynthia Aldrich. And Henning has a very nice comment here. Thing to remember, you'll be in an exclusive club by publishing a book. So don't let a slow start kill the proud feeling of getting your book out there. 100%. Absolutely. I 100% agree with that. Thank you, Henning. Yeah. All.

Right. Okay. And while I. It's weird. That's not taking up while I'm putting those names into the random name picker. This is the second part of Strong Tower's question. Do I need to unpublish my listing with KDP before setting things up on.

IngramSpark? Oh, I don't think so. If you've done KDP first and then you do IngramSpark, I think. Oh, that's a really good question. And I wish my production team was here to answer because they're the ones that handle this most. But I don't think you would need to. No, I think it depends on what stage you're doing this in. As I mentioned earlier, KDP will only do ebook pre orders. They pre sales. They don't do print book. So even if you have a KDP ebook sale pre order sale going on, you would still want IngramSpark to showcase the print book during pre sale. What I, what I don't want to do is tell you to do something and then have Ingram and Katie P. Not play nice together and have your book get flagged for something. So if Kate's still here. Kate, I don't know if she is still here, but if she is still here, maybe she should put something into the chat about.

It. You can also always reach out to Ingram Spark directly. Like if he's not here to answer, I mean. Oh, looky.

There. Oh, and Hennig said you have to remove extended distribution on kdp. Okay. So that makes.

Sense.

Yeah. Kate's still here. She would need more info. Yeah, Strong Tower, if you're still here, feel free to add in a few more details like if we're talking pre order or if we're talking after launch. And hopefully we can get an answer for you from Kate, who's part of our production squad.

Here. Cool. All right, well, Strong Tower, while you are putting those extra details in there, I have have the wheel of names and this is very fancy, guys. So let me share screen and then we will see who that winner.

Was. Oh.

Okay. There we go. I wasn't sharing it first. Let us see. Because they were also good.

Yay. All right.

Join. You probably still have my email address, but please email me at teamteamooklaunchers.com let me know which of the books you would like. And if I. If someone has already picked one of the books that I talked about, I bet you Sarah has it and I'm sure she would like. Yes.

Yeah. If you want Alien Savant, because I know that's in the same. Yeah.

Genre. I've.

Got. Do I.

Not. I might have a copy.

Of. I do. I have four copies of the Alien Savant here.

Yeah. Yeah. So let me know in the email, Joy, which one you would would like. That's.

Awesome. And if. And like she said, if Angela doesn't have it, I probably do.

Yes. Because Sarah has a lot of books behind.

Her. All 200 and something that we've published. 200 and more, I think.

Yeah. That's awesome. Okay, so this one, I, I, Paula, I believe you joined late. Sarah did touch on this. So if you go back and watch the replays here, I don't know if you want to give like I.

Can touch on it again. Basically, KDP doesn't offer pre orders. It does with ebooks. It doesn't with print books. To get around that, we load books to IngramSpark. IngramSpark does allow for pre orders on both print hardcover and ebooks. Once it's available on IngramSpark, Amazon will pull the listing from IngramSpark and so it'll show on Amazon as a pre order. Then what we do is the night before we'll go and load the book to KDP so that Amazon starts fulfilling its own orders from there. But that's the.

Workaround. Yeah. Okay, thanks. And. And Strong Tower did provide a little bit additional information. I have set up my hardcover on KDP for release of April 29th. They've approved my book. April 8th is when I'm wanting to start my pre sale and make the announcement to the world. I have an Ingram Spark account set up, but my book is not on IngramSpark.

Yet. So it sounds like even though your book's loaded, I mean you wouldn't have pre order pages unless it's just for the ebook. For the hardcover, I'm assuming you don't have pre order pages yet and then if you're looking, you want to order. So on April 8th is when you want to announce that people can go buy the book book. But it launches on April 29th. Okay. So to my knowledge, you could still go to IngramSpark, load the hardcover and have it show up on Amazon as a, as a pre order, I think. Ooh, do you need to cancel on KDP the April 29 launch? That question? I don't know. Kate might be able to give you some information, but I would check KDP's terms and conditions there and yes, you probably want to chat with IngramSpark and ask them that question. I think you should be able to do it. But they are really picky these days. So I'm not sure. I'm sorry I don't have a stronger answer for you there. Just I focus on the, on the fun marketing side. I don't do as much on the distribution.

Side. There are nuances to this. There are absolutely nuances to the entire process. Someone it might have been KJ commented on that earlier and so that's why we have so many, so much content online, because there are so many details. This is an absolute labyrinth of a process. So yeah, if, if we can't get you a solid answer today, you know, highly recommend, you know, checking up on those terms and conditions and you could always just as well reach out directly to, to them for an answer. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh yeah. And Kate pointed out the ISBNs would need to match. So when you load it to IngramSpark, make sure you're using the same ISBNs that you would have used.

Before. Yeah. And then she just added she thinks IngramSpark chat would be helpful to get you the concrete info you're looking.

For. Yeah, perfect. Yeah.

Thanks. Okay. Few other questions. Dance into college says is there a way to have a business that is partnering with you have an affiliate link for.

Sales? Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Depends on where, what site they're going to drive to. So for example, if they are going to have an affiliate link, more than likely they are going to need to set up affiliate accounts with retailers. So Amazon being one of them, they would have to go set up their own affiliate link and then use that link on their website or what have you. There are some rules around how you can use affiliate links. Like for example, I think you can use it on your website, but for some reason you can't use it in email marketing. I don't remember the exact reasoning behind that, but you're not able to do it that way. But yeah, a business could absolutely set up a affiliate account on Amazon or any other retailer and then use those links on their own website or in their however they're promoting it. But you, they would just have to follow the terms and conditions of any other affiliate.

Program. Awesome. Thank you. And Bill, I found out because Bill emailed in. This is actually Bill.

Rosen. Oh.

God. I didn't recognize that handle. So Bill asked, should both the print version and ebook version be available on launch.

Day? I like to have them both available on launch day. I like to have as many formats as you can available on launch day because you don't want to alienate a person particular buying audience. So some people only buy their books on ebooks, some only do print, some prefer audiobook. I, I think that it's great to have as many formats as you can, all available at the same time. That being said, you are not going to kill your launch if they're not available all at the same time. Because what you do then have, if, let's say your ebook's available first and then the print book's available three weeks later, you have a new marketing tool, you have something new to promote to your audience. This happens often with audiobooks because audiobooks do not line up. You can't set the date the same way you can with ebooks and print books. It tends to go through quality and then they just put it out. So this happens a lot where we'll have authors that'll be like, oh, my ebook and my print book are available, but I can't have my audiobook for another three weeks. Well, then you have new stuff to talk about to your audience now available in audio. So, you know, if it's not going to work out to have them all available on the same day. Use it to your advantage. Turn it into a marketing tool to have new messaging going out to your.

Audience. That's an excellent point because snags happen.

Sometimes. So happens. Yeah, you gotta roll with it. Turn it to your.

Advantage. Absolutely. Okay. And I think this is the last question that I've seen from. How long does it take for Ingramsparks to get your book to.

Retailers. It used to be very short. It used to be we would load an ebook and it would take like a day or two to show up. Maybe the print book was three to four days later. Now we're seeing much longer processing times. We're seeing evubs are still relatively short, but we're seeing print ones go through a lot more checks. And this goes back to what I was talking about earlier about battle of the box. We never know what makes someone fly through processing in two to three days versus two to three weeks. We don't know why we submit perfectly good files. And oh, and Kate pointed out it's typically longer processing times for new accounts. So if you're setting up your Ingred Spark account for the first time, they're going to go through and make sure that you're a real person, that you're a real person who is doing a legit thing, that you have legit accounts. So it does take a little bit of time for that to go on. So this is again why I would recommend giving yourself a minimum of four weeks to go through all of the processing and making sure that everything is running smoothly. But six to eight weeks is what I prefer. So just so you know. Yeah, we don't. We don't always know, but I think it's. If it's going smoothly, your ebook's up within 48 hours and your print books up within three to five days. If it's not going smoothly, it might be a couple weeks.

Yeah.

Awesome. All right, guys, you've got about eight more minutes. Yeah. Is there any other questions? Anything else that you want me to touch on? Regards pre sale bestseller lists, promotions to run any of those.

Questions. I don't think we missed anything, but we can give people a second to put in another question in the chat. But I was thinking we should reward the people who are here now and stayed all the way till the end for a chance to win a prize. So, yeah, please, let's think of a new hashtag for people to put in there and we'll do that search. So, Sarah, what do.

You. How about book launchers? Bestie. All right, what does Julie call it? Is it YouTube.

Bestie? YouTube.

Besties. YouTube bestie. Let's do YouTube.

Bestie. I will type it into the chat so you can see exactly how to spell it. Hashtag YouTube bestie. Because we so appreciate you guys sticking around. I mean, clearly Sarah provided heaps of value in what she was sharing with you guys. And so we want to Give you a chance to win a prize.

Hopefully. Hopefully I have given you the context to make some decisions about your own book launch and how you want that launch to run and what you want that launch to look like. I mean that's really the goal is to give you the context about why pre sale can be detrimental to how your book launches. And we want to make sure that you have the info you need to be able to put together those launches with relatively low no hiccups if.

Possible. And Ann just asked, how can I get a copy of this video? So our deep dives for several months now, probably eight months or so. They all live on our YouTube channel now. So this is obviously live. It might take a little bit of time to process, like maybe a few minutes, maybe an hour. But I'm pretty sure once we end the stream, it will pop up on our YouTube channel immediately. With that though, you will need to. If you want to come back a different day and watch this, you'll want to go to the Live tab because this was originally a live stream and not just a pre recorded video that was uploaded. That's how you'll be able to find it. Unless you were to do a manual search. That's how you can find it in there. So.

Let'S. Oh, go ahead while you're finished. Okay, get your last ones in now because she's gonna pull these in a second. But what I was gonna say is also I'm gonna preview the YouTube live that we're doing on TikTok Tuesday. I am actually going to be doing the YouTube live. I'm not Julie. I know, I'm sorry. But on Tuesday we have a special guest. We are going to have Evan from Story Origin, who is a. Story Origin is a fantastic marketing tool for authors, enables you to meet up with other authors, do swaps, do they have all sorts of really cool marketing tools. And he is going to be doing a kind of rundown of how they work, how they help authors, particularly those authors that are looking to build their audiences. So I highly encourage you to join us on Tuesday. It is at 5pm Eastern, 2pm Pacific and it'll be me and Evan just going through Story Origin and hopefully it'll be a great tool you'll be able to use. So please do join us.

Then. Yeah, you won't be able to escape me and Sarah will, will be there again on.

Tuesday. No, I'm all over the place this week. I'm in our ABA community this week. I'm speaking on Thursday or with written word Media. I mean, I am. We're doing a client only training this week. Guys are gonna be sick of.

Me. I doubt it. I doubt it. It's been, what, five and a half years? Sarah, I'm not sick of you.

Yet. Yeah. Oh, thanks, Angela. Susanna Ward, if I understand correctly, it's beneficial to immediately order 100 retail copies of my book, as opposed to author copies when it comes out. Diana. Oh, congrats.

Diana.

Yay.

Awesome. Diana, let me know which of the books you would like. I'd love to send you one. Like I said earlier, if I don't have it, I bet you Sarah.

Doesn'T. I'm sure she would love to.

Share. So, Diana, just let me know@teamoklaunchers.com which one you want. And obviously, we already have your mailing address, so we can get it sent your. Sent your way. And. Yes, let me put that question on the screen.

Yeah. Susanna, could you put a little bit more context. Context in with your question? Because I'm not sure I fully understand why it would be beneficial to order 100 copies of your book, like, when it comes out. I'm not really. I'm not really understanding why you'd want to order at retail. Are you referring to whether or not it would, like, help it in the sales rankings or what? So I want to understand your question before I answer it, so feel free to put any context in the chat.

There. And, Joy, thank you so much. So. What an excellent use of time. Thank you for sharing logical and practical action steps to get books out into the world. That's very.

Kind. Hope it's helpful.

Joy.

Yeah. I'm really glad you were able to join us today. It was so great to see so many of our clients, so many of our YouTube besties as well. I mean, I just. I love.

It. I know. We.

Had. Makes me feel.

Better. Yeah. I mean, honestly, I was just thinking earlier, I was like, man, I'm not sure we ever. I. I think the majority of the crowd was actually clients and YouTube besties, and that was. I don't know that there were as.

Many. First time. We've got a bunch of people. I mean, so Elizabeth's book's coming out in May. Liz, I don't know if you're still here, but her book's coming out in May. Shannon's is coming out in May. Stones is coming out next month. I know Alvin is, you know, writing his right now. Diana, I think you're going through editing right now. I mean.

We'Re. It's.

Just. Just Chock. Full of clients. I love.

It. I know, it's.

Awesome. Susanna has not in fact added any more context to her question. Could you throw her question back up there real quick? I want to make sure that I touch on.

It. Yes.

Here. It is beneficial to immediately order 100 retail copies my book as opposed to author copies when it comes out. I think because there was a.

Comment earlier about it it shipping more quickly. I don't know if that's what she was referring to, but someone in the the chat I.

Think.

Yeah.

Okay. Okay. So this is kind of two different things. Number one, if you order wholesale copies of your book from Ingram versus KDP, KDP's wholesale shipping is shorter, is longer than if someone goes to the front end of Amazon and buys a book retail. You buy the book retail, it's going to ship immediately. You buy wholesale copies, it's going to take longer to ship to you. Now when we talk about beneficial, I assume you're saying is it going to help my book if I personally order 100 copies of it? And the answer is no, that will not help your book in sales rankings or otherwise. Number one, kdp, Amazon or anyone else they are paying attention to who is purchasing, they will look and see, oh the author name, author credit card. Particularly if you're set up as a self published author, your credit card information informational match. It is not beneficial as the author to buy 100 retail copies in order to do anything like help the sales rankings or anything like that. No, if you are looking to have a hundred copies of your book in stock, you are far better off to buy it wholesale. The other thing is that if anybody buys your book in bulk 100 copies, Amazon counts those as one order. It does not count it as 100 individual orders. It counts it as one order. Now it's one order of a hundred. But it is not going to help your sales rankings in that regard.

Either. So I haven't seen any other context come into the.

Chat. So I haven't.

Either. Yep, you not be here. I would like to take a second though if you guys are still watching. You still got 27 people watching. Please take a quick second to thank Sarah for all of the time and effort and knowledge that she's shared today. She had to be putting together a lot of presentations but I mean you guys were witness to just how awesome and filled with knowledge this was. So please take a quick second to thank Sarah on her.

Saturday. No, thank you guys for being here. Honestly, like otherwise it'd just be me and Angela chatting about this stuff and I can I geek out on this stuff. So yeah. So I would have. No I appreciate you all being here. Thank you. I know some of this is more applicable to some than others but I am just happy to be any kind of help that we can. So yeah. All right. Well I'm gonna go ahead and call it. We are right on three o' clock and kids are waiting for me to go make leprechaun traps actually so that's what I'm going to be doing the rest of my afternoon. But hopefully it was helpful. Feel free to send in any questions or or anything that you have. Otherwise I hope I see you on Tuesday for our chat with Evan was from Story origin. Very excited to get talk with him and and learn more about that. So all right. See you guys on Tuesday. Bye.

Everyone. Thanks for being.

Here. Thanks.