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