What To Do In Your Book Pre-launch Period - 5 Strategies

Pre launch. It's a time of anticipation and anxiety for authors. If you have a book launch coming up and you're planning to push hard during that pre launch period, then this video is for you. Hey there, I'm Julie the book broad from Book Launchers. We're your professional self publishing team helping you write, publish and promote a nonfiction book that will help you have a huge impact on your readers and done right will help you grow your brand, build your business and make you money. The best part? You keep all rights and royalties. So first, what is a pre launch or a pre sale period? You might be wondering. Well, pre launch is obviously anything that happens before launch. Presale is that period of time when your book is available to be purchased, but when someone purchases your book, they don't get to read it until it launches. For many traditionally published authors, this period can be six to 10 months to even a year long. For self publishing authors, some skip this period completely, which I believe is a mistake, while others will spend a week, a month or what we recommend to our clients is to have a six to eight week pre sale period. But and this is a big but, my personal recommendation is that during the pre sale period, despite its name, you're not actually focused on selling your book. Not everyone has to have pre sales. You can upload and launch your book within a very short window of time and I'm going to give you three situations where you don't need a long pre sale period at all in a minute. But for now I'm going to let's talk about why I recommend the majority of our nonfiction authors have a six to eight week pre sale period and what they should be doing during that time. Number one, lining up book reviews. This is the time to get your book army activated and excited about your upcoming launch. Not sure what a book army is? I'll put that video link in the description below for you. But if there is only one thing you do during a pre sale or pre launch period and it's get the book reviews ready, get them excited and have them ready to write book reviews on launch day. This is the most important thing. The number two thing to do during pre sale is make sure that all the metadata and catalogs for the distribution channels for your book are populating correctly. I wish. I so wish this was not an issue. But we've seen so many things go wrong, they just go wonky. Including one of our clients book cover was wrong. It wasn't their cover. So it takes time to fix these things and sometimes you're book might be available in Kindle but not in print version and if you're an international author or an author with international clients, they're going to buy your book. It's going to take at least six weeks for chapters and international Amazons to populate with your book metadata and cover and all the details. Number three Lining up media, live appearances, podcasts and other promotional opportunities to generate buzz in launch week and beyond. These things take time to get set up and doing that in pre sale on allows the folks to check out your book online and evaluate its quality while also giving you time to set up some coverage and exposure. Plus, if you do have live appearances, your book being done allows you to ship the book out in advance of your event even if the rest of the world can't get copies yet. 4. Sell some books on Amazon so they know to stock your book for launch. Print on demand in theory means the books are printed as ordered, but Amazon likes to do crazy things like same day shipping or next day delivery and a sale killing thing happens. If you sell a ton of books on launch and Amazon's not ready for you, they show this horrible note that the book is out of stock and will be available in four to six weeks. Amazon doesn't share the data, but I promise you it's not a good thing. It happened to me and to some of our clients and people will email you and complain that they can't buy your book and you'll know that for everyone trying hard to buy your book, there are certainly others that just give up. So generating some pre sales on Amazon does help minimize the likelihood this will happen. If it does, try to celebrate because you've had a kick butt launch. The thing to note though is I wouldn't push super hard in pre launch to get sales sales because it is harder to sell books when it's not available yet. There's value in having some sales, but I would recommend pushing hard for sales the week of launch and beyond. 5. Your book is done so you have nothing to focus on but launch during this period. So use this time to get everything lined up for an exciting event filled launch week. To me the number one goal of a pre sale period isn't selling your book, it's generating buzz and preparing for an awesome launch. How do you do that? Well I'll do another video on this specifically so make sure you're subscribed to the channel so you catch that. But you do need to engage your following. Don't have a following. Use a pre sale period to build an email list and get people excited for the launch. Maybe you only add 100 people to your email list in a six week period, but if you engage that hundred people, that can go a long way to creating book success. So that's what to do in a pre sale period. Now who doesn't need a pre sale period? Well, I always recommend you have one, but if you fall into one of these following three categories, you'll be fine without much of a pre sale period at all. Category number one Authors who do not have an audience don't want to tell their network they wrote a book and don't want to do a lot of marketing. If you're not going to do anything to build buzz for your book before launch, with the resources that you have on hand, you might as well put it for sale. You're not likely to sell a ton of books doing this, but it can happen. One of our best selling books was a true crime book that the author didn't want to do a lot of marketing for. It's a story he doesn't want to relive over and over again. So we put together a book trailer, did keyword research to make the book discoverable by people interested in that particular crime, and let some key media know the book was coming. Someone posted the book trailer on Reddit and things went crazy from there. The majority of books though, are going to need a lot of strategic, consistent marketing to find their audience. But I did want to note it because sometimes you have a subject matter that's genuinely just going to sell itself. But let me tell you, that's not something that happens very often. His story was one with national interest, and true crime fans are a passionate bunch. Rarely are you going to be writing a book that people will just find and share like that. If you know you have a subject that's going to be consumed like that, you may not need a pre sale period to build buzz. Category 2. You're only launching your book on Kindle or Amazon.com and a lot of the catalog issues that take time to resolve are as a result of using Ingram to sell on Amazon to sell to other platforms. Sometimes Ingram and Amazon just don't play well together, and every retailer has a different catalog system with different updating schedules. So if you don't care about selling your book anywhere but Amazon in the US your launch date can be within days of uploading your book and you're probably going to be just fine. Although I still recommend you build buzz number three, the book is simply a lead magnet. It's not a real book. Generally speaking, if you've put together a booklet or an ebook that you intend to give away for free just to generate email newsletter subscribers, then you don't really need to build buzz. You can use standard online marketing techniques to traffic to the offer page, get the email sign up, and voila. Goal achieved. There's plenty of authors that write simple books for lead generation. Heck, I have three or four of them myself, like this one on Hiring a ghostwriter and this one on the seven Steps to Write and Publish a Nonfiction Book that Sells. These are downloadable for free and I'll put the links in the description below in case you want them. I don't do launches for those kinds of books, but this book self publish and succeed. It's a comprehensive guide to write a book with our noboringbooks process. That book has a pre sale period, a launch team, and is a book I'm using as a tool to grow book launchers and our audience. Right here on Book Launchers tv. To me that's a real book where the other books are ebooks or little booklets. So what do you think? What do you do in pre launch? Do you have a pre sale period? Let's chat about it in the comments below. And right before you do that, on your way down, smash that thumbs up button. Go ahead, try it. It feels so good. And when you comment the day a video is least, you'll be entered to win some sweet noboringbook swag like our fantastic mug or our oh so upside down journal. New videos every Tuesday and Friday. Make sure you catch everyone by subscribing to the channel and turning those notifications on. Well, would you like to keep hanging out? Me too. There's lots of video links down below to help you with the details of the many things we covered today. But specifically, this video right here is is about your book army. And this one over here is about NetGalley, one of the services we use for getting book reviews. Both are pretty much guaranteed to be useful and maybe a little fun. So click on over. I'm putting on the coffee and I will see you there.