How to Plan a Book Launch that Stands Out from the Crowd

Welcome to the Author Audience show, the podcast that helps you reach more people with your message. Create a book, connect with your audience, change lives. Here's your host, Shelly Hitz.

One of the best times to grab attention and to be able to promote your book is during your book launch. So my question to you today is how can you make your book launch so stand out? Hi, my name is Shelly Hitz. I'm the author of over 40 best selling books. I'm the creator of authoraudienceacademy.com and I'm on a mission to help you reach more people with your message. It's your time to shine. Today I want to talk about how you can be creative in planning a book launch. Now I have an entire training within authoraudienceacademy.com about planning a book launch. There's so many little details that you want to think about and you want to take into consideration. But in this short training, I just want to talk to you about how you can make your book launch stand out online. The biggest thing someone can give you is their attention. And there's so much noise. There's so many people out there. There's so many new books every day. What can you do to stand out? What can you do to be a little bit different? I'm getting ready to plan a book launch. I just gave birth to this new book Baby.

9 Strategies to Build and Grow youw Author Platform. It's a short book, but I've had it in Kindle for a couple years and I just released it in print. The push that I got was from our Kindle to print challenge in authoraudienceacademy.com it just went live on Amazon yesterday. And I've been thinking about this for a while because I knew I was going to be publishing this book. How can I make this book stand stand out? So I've been brainstorming and I love doing brain dumps and I'll just put out a whole bunch of ideas. And you know what, there's a lot of people doing similar things for book launches these days. You see kind of similar themes, similar things. You know, you get bonuses and different things, but you know, you see a lot of the same things. So what I'm going to do, you know, I've been thinking about it for a while, but today I just decided I'm going to do it. I spent the morning planning it out, really writing it out, and I'm just like, let's do it. Let's see how it goes. A lot of marketing is trial and error. You're going to try things, see how it works and then adjust. What I am doing to kind of make this book launch different is I'm launching the print version of this book through a five day author platform challenge. It's going to be a five day challenge that I'm going to do live on video here on Facebook Live. Each day of the five days I will do a live video and then you can get access, lifetime access to the videos to my checklist to the challenge when you sign up. So you can sign up@shellyhits.com platformchallenge. I just set it up this morning so there's nothing in the members area yet. But what I'm doing, I'm doing something different. I don't know if I've ever seen anyone use live video to launch a book yet. I mean, maybe just hop on and say, hey, I have my book, or whatever. This is going to be a live five day video challenge and I'm going to be building my list because you can sign up@shellyhits.com platformchallenge to get access to the videos, my checklist, some additional stuff. So I'll be building my list. I will be connecting with my audience. So selling books. My whole purpose is to try to sell more books during my book launch, right? And I'll have a special bonus. So if you buy the print book and you post a picture of my book, you know, it can be a selfie, it doesn't have to be. It can be my book sitting on a shelf or on your couch or at the beach or wherever. If you post a picture of my book with, you know, the hashtag and everything, I'm working out all the details. You'll get this extra bonus training from me. It's going to be really exciting to see how it works. I'm going to be documenting everything. I've written out, all the steps of what I'm doing. I'm going to be sharing with you guys later exactly how you can do this. If you want to do it for your book as well. One of the ways that you can stand out is just thinking, what can I do a little different? What is the twist that I can add to this? Is there something that I can do that might just grab someone's attention a little bit differently? And so this is something that I'm working on, I'm planning it out and I would love for you to join me. You'll learn more about building your platform as an author. You'll see Me kind of how I'm doing it behind the scenes. And you can sign up@shellyhits.com Platform challenge. What kind of ideas might you have to to just put a different twist on your book launch? Do something a little bit different. Think outside the box. Don't just do the same thing everyone else is doing. That's boring.

You don't want to be boring. You want to do something different. You want to do something that will capture people's attention. You want to do something that's fun. Maybe you can do a fun contest. Maybe you could like what I'm doing, do some sort of challenge. And it doesn't have to be on live video. But what can you do? I encourage you to set a timer. If you have a book launch coming up, set a timer and just brainstorm a bunch of ideas or start a document, maybe in Google Docs or in your notebook. And start just when you're out and about. Just start thinking about things and capturing ideas as you go. That's what I do too. Actually, the idea for this came when I was helping my husband on one of his recent workouts. Start some sort of brainstorming list. And you know, the best ideas come at the most inopportune times, like when you're in the shower or when you're driving or when you're out and about. So make sure you just have a way to capture those ideas and just start letting it flow. Don't pressure yourself, but just start thinking, okay, what could I do different? The thought for today. The take action tip for today is if you have a book launch coming up, what can you do to stand out? What can you do to capture someone's attention? To do something a little differently, to not just fall in line and just blend in with everyone else. I don't want you to blend in. I want you to stand out so that you can be seen. And that doesn't mean you have to do live video. That's something that I do and it is. Video is the number one way to connect with your audience. It's the fastest way to build, know, like and trust. Because when you're doing video, people can look in your eyes, they can see your expressions. But if that's not your thing, there's tons of other ways to do it. But I just want you to think, what kind of little twists can you do? What kind of things can you add? Start brainstorming. Create a brainstorming list, then just let the ideas flow. See, over the next week or so, what ideas come capture them, write them down, brainstorm, set a timer, write down some ideas and make sure to sign up so you get notifications and you get access to and you can see behind the scenes what I'm doing for my launch this week@shellyhits.com Platform Challenge. It's for this book, my print book, and it's kind of fun. It just went live yesterday and I'm not a mother. I've not been able to have children, but I just think it was God's timing that I was to birth this book really close to Mother's Day weekend. And although I'm not a mother of children, I do have my little book baby this year. So that's fun. But be looking for my videos Coming soon. I'll be training Every day. I'll be doing a training on how to grow your author platform without being pushy and self promotional. Those are the trainings I'm going to be giving you during this five day challenge. I will see you next time.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Author Audience Show. Connect with us online@authoraudience.com where you'll find all the resources mentioned in today's episode. While you're there, grab Shelley's free video training on how to write and publish your book using her six Step Ascent method. Join us again next week to learn how to reach your audience with your message.