- prelaunch, 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 prelaunch period, then this video is for you.
(upbeat music)
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 prelaunch or a presale period,
you might be wondering?
Well prelaunch 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 6 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 presale period.
But, and this is a big but, my personal recommendation
is that during the presale period, despite its name,
you're not actually focused on selling your book.
Not everyone has to have presales.
You can upload and launch your book
within a very short window of time.
And I'm gonna give you three situations
where you don't need
a long presale period at all in a minute.
But for now, let's talk about why I recommend
the majority of our nonfiction authors have
a six to eight week presale 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's only one thing you do
during a presale or prelaunch period
and it's get 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 presale
is make sure that all the metadata and catalogs
for the distribution channels for your book
are populating correctly.
I wish, oh, 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 client's book cover was wrong.
It wasn't their cover.
So it takes time to fix these things.
And sometimes your book might be available in Kindle
but not in print version.
And if you're an international author
or an author with international clients
that are gonna 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 presale 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.
Four, 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 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 presales on Amazon
does help minimize the likelihood this will happen.
If it does, try to celebrate,
'cause you've had a kick-butt launch (laughs).
The thing to note though
is I wouldn't push super hard in prelaunch to get 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.
Five, 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 presale 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 presale 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 100 people,
that can go a long way to creating book success.
So that's what to do in a presale period.
Now who doesn't need a presale 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 presale 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 gonna 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.
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 (laughs).
Rarely are you gonna be writing a book
that people will just find and share like that.
If you know you have a subject
that's gonna be consumed like that,
you may not need a presale period to build buzz.
Category two, 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 gonna 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 drive traffic to the offer page,
get the email signup 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 ghost writer,
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 & Succeed,
it's a comprehensive guide to write a book
with our #noboringbooks process.
That book has a presale period, a launch team,
and is a book I'm using as a tool to grow book launchers
and our audience right here on booklaunchers.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 prelaunch?
Do you have a presale period?
Let's chat about it in the comments below.
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smash that thumbs up button.
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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 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.
(upbeat music)