book launch

Quick Link: 7 Essentials for Your Book Launch

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Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

Today’s offering is about that most wonderful of things, getting ready to launch your book!  Hooray for you! But before you break open the champagne, check out the post by Keely Brooke Keith at Helping Writers Become Authors to make sure you have the basics down!

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7 Essentials for Your Book Launch

by Keely Brooke Keith

Congratulations, it’s a book! You accomplished something rare and impressive just by completing your masterpiece, not to mention surviving blood-boiling revisions and the agony of the publishing process. Now, the book launch date has been set and—surprise!—you have more work to do!

Orchestrating a book launch sounds daunting, but people need your book. Take a long slow breath and relax into the creative process of promoting your release. While there is no one-size-fits-all promotion plan, there are certain essential tasks that both traditionally published authors and independent authors should do to ensure a fulfilling book launch.

How to Prepare for Your Book Launch in 7 Steps

Following, are a few basics to get you started.

Book Launch Step #1: Ready Your Website

Your author website is the online version of your professional office or storefront. It could also be your catalog, your bulletin board, or your yearbook. It should not be a cobweb-covered single page you set up years ago and haven’t touched since.

Unless you’re an avid blogger, the author website won’t be how readers discover you. Instead, it’s where they will come to learn more about you. Your web address should be the simplest form of your author name as possible and should be the link you share more than any other.

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If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

Quick Link: I Lost $6,500 on My Last Book Launch: Details, final tally, lessons learned

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Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

Poor Linda Formichelli! She had a horrible experience launching her last book, but was gracious enough to share her experiences at Renegade Writer Press. Be careful out there!

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I Lost $6,500 on My Last Book Launch: Details, final tally, lessons learned

Linda Formichelli

Be careful out there!
Be careful out there!

Hello, Renegades! You may remember that I started a series of posts on the work and expenses that have gone into writing and publishing my new book, How to Do It All: The Revolutionary Plan to Create a Full, Meaningful Life — While Only Occasionally Wanting to Poke Your Eyes Out With a Sharpie.

I promised to follow up with a final accounting and to let you know if all the work and expense was worth it. That’s what you’re reading now.

In short, I’ll tell you that the book cover designer, interior layout designer, and proofreader were all 100% worth the cost. They all delivered on what they promised in their contracts.

The launch team that constituted the bulk of my expenses ($6,500 of the $10,000 spent)? That’s another story. I learned a lot of hard lessons from this, and hope you will, too, as I’m passionate about helping writers and want to make sure no other self-publisher has to go through what I experienced.

Some key information to remember as you read this: How to Do It All is a nonfiction self-help title aimed at a female audience between the ages of 20-60.

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If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

Authors Vs The Marketing Rabbit Hole

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This post by Deborah Riley-Magnus originally appeared on SavvyAuthors on 4/21/15.

Authors are as innocent as Alice when it comes to marketing, but nowhere near as fearless to take the plunge. What’s really down that rabbit hole? It’s called the MARKETING rabbit hole so it must be dark, terrifying, and worse yet, ineffective. After all, everyone knows that marketing is hard to do, takes way too much time, and just plain doesn’t work. You’ve already tried everything, jumped on all those cool promotional ideas your author friends are doing. You’ve tweeted like crazy, held Facebook launch parties, and guest blogged on all your best author friend’s blogs. You’ve purchased book markers and some really cool swag, and participated every time your author friends pulled together for a live or online event. Still not happy with your bottom line results? No? So that’s proof positive that marketing doesn’t work, right?

Nope. Not really.

See, the problem isn’t that you’re not trying hard to market; the problem is that you’re not marketing SPECIFICALLY for your book alone. Really taking that leap down the Marketing Rabbit Hole isn’t about just doing what everyone else is doing, and it certainly isn’t about doing it with other authors—your competition. A true trip down the Marketing Rabbit Hole is a personal adventure that focuses on your book and nothing else. It’s a different way of looking at marketing, and a clearer way of understanding what makes marketing really work for you.

 

Read the full post on SavvyAuthors.

 

Setting Up A Book Tour

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This post by Trish Nicholson originally appeared on The Writer’s ABC Checklist on 4/16/15.

A book tour is an excellent way for you to increase the exposure of your book, to meet potential readers, and to make many useful contacts for the future. It can also be fun. Even if you have a publisher, they rarely offer their authors book tours these days, so here are some tips from my own recent experience to help you create your own book tour whether you write fiction or non-fiction.

Where to tour: it’s not necessary to jet around the world – with a little imagination a successful tour can be arranged within your own region. It’s a good idea to boost your confidence by beginning the tour locally where you are already known, and then extend your reach to new opportunities beyond your comfort zone.

When to start: a book tour is not something you can do entirely alone. You need co-operation from others to host events, or provide venues and local publicity. So begin planning well in advance: eight to twelve months beforehand is not too soon to start looking for potential hosts and ‘partners’. Many bookshops, festivals and interest groups set their programmes a year ahead.

 

Read the full post on The Writer’s ABC Checklist.

 

The 10 Commandments Of Authorial Self-Promotion

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This post by Chuck Wendig originally appeared on his terribleminds site on 4/15/15. Note that it contains strong language.

*wheezes while stumbling down a mountain carrying ten stone tablets*

*dumps stone tablets on the ground and most of them break*

*coughs for like, 40 minutes*

OH FOR FUCK’S SAKE. WHY DO PEOPLE WRITE COMMANDMENTS ON STONE TABLETS. IF GOD’S SUPPOSED TO BE ALL POWERFUL WHY DIDN’T HE JUST HAND ME AN IPAD. DOES HE HAVE A THING AGAINST APPLE? GOD’S ONE OF THOSE STRIDENT ANTI-MAC PEOPLE ISN’T HE. SO HEAVY. IT HURTS. IT HURTS SO BAD.

Ahem. Okay. Yeah. Yes. Hi!

It is time to speak about the sticky subject of self-promotion. You’re a writer. You’ve written a book and somebody — you, a big publisher, a small publisher, some spider-eating alley hobo — has published it. And now you want to know how you promote the book so that the world can fling money at your face in order to greedily consume your unrefined genius. But it’s not easy. You don’t know what works. What makes sense. You don’t want to just stand on a street corner barking at passersby and hitting children with your book. But you also recognize that you’re just one little person, not some massive beast of marketing and advertising, hissing gouts of pixelated steam and vacuuming up potential buyers into the hypno-chamber that is your belly.

What do you do? How far can you go? What should you say?

Thus, I bring you these ten tablets.

Ten commandments about self-promotion for authors. In a later post I’ll get into the larger practicalities of self-promotion — what seems to work for me, what seems to do poop-squat for me — but for now, we’re going to cover the overall basics.

Let us begin.

 

Thou Shalt Throw Pebbles

The self-promotional reach of a single author is not very far.

Big publishers and companies have giant cannons.

You, however, have a satchel of pebbles.

A publisher will ideally dp outreach that puts your book in front of various folks within the distribution process — book buyers, librarians, the secret tastemaker cabal that operates out of a warehouse in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood. You, as lone author, do not have that effect.

The best you can do is pick up one of your pebbles and throw it.

 

Read the full post on terribleminds.

 

How to Have a Successful Book Launch

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This post originally appeared on ChatEbooks on 4/7/15.

Finishing your book, from writing to editing, is not the end of your journey.  Holding a book launch is one great way to promote your book. Here are some tips on how to organize a successful book launch.

After spending countless hours writing, editing, and creating a book, it can be a rewarding experience for an author to celebrate their hard work, and can also be beneficial to have a book launch event to market and promote their book. As an author, this event gives you an opportunity to celebrate all the weeks, months, or even years that led to the publication of your book. If not organized and managed properly, however, book launch events can end up being extremely expensive and a waste of time. If done right, these events can provide crucial momentum. There are many tips for you to take into consideration to ensure a successful book launch.

One tip for you to take into consideration to ensure a successful book event is to research potential venues. It can be beneficial to actually visit these venues in person. Potential venues should be based on who you wish to invite to the event and what goals you desire to accomplish by hosting the event. It can be helpful to host a book event at a retail location. Bookstores and other retailers will be content if you can bring in a lot of people to their store, and they are also usually willing to handle the sales. Another beneficial strategy is to locate a retailer that has connections to the book. For instance, if your book is about outdoor activities, a local recreational equipment store is an excellent venue to host the event.

 

Read the full post on ChatEbooks.

 

Deadly Proof–Anatomy of a Book Launch

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This post by M. Lousia Locke originally appeared on her blog on 2/21/15.

I am proud to announce that Deadly Proof, the fourth book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery Series, is now available for sale (see links below).

As with the other three novels in this series, Deadly Proof finds Annie Fuller and her beau, Nate Dawson, investigating a crime that will lead them (and the reader) into an exploration of the lives of working women in the late 19th century—in this case women who held jobs in the printing industry.

If you read my last two posts on my marketing strategy for 2015, you will know that I decided to take all my full-length books out of KDP Select and upload them everywhere and make the first book perma-free. My hope was that this strategy would provide a fertile field for this newly published book. So far, my hopes have been realized.

First of all, Maids of Misfortune, the perma-free book, is still being downloaded at a nice pace, making it highly visible in the popularity lists on Amazon and on the free lists in the iBook and Barnes and Noble stores, and I can see sell-through going on. The sales of the second book in the series, Uneasy Spirits, and now the third, Bloody Lessons, have been increasing each week. And now, some of these new fans of the series should be just about ready to  try this new book.

Second, while more complicated than back in the day when I only had to upload my books on Amazon, the process of uploading Deadly Proof for publication in multiple online stores was quite easy since I had recently gone through the process for my other novels and my short story collection.

 

Read the full post on M. Louisa Locke’s blog.

 

Build Relationships With Reviewers Well Before Your Book Launch

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This post by Jennifer Mattern originally appeared on AllIndieWriters on 10/21/14.

When you try to land reviews for your new book, the last thing you want is to be just another random new author reviewers have never heard of. Yet it’s not uncommon for authors, and especially indie authors, to wait until the last minute to think about book reviews.

So for this week’s quick tip, let’s make sure you don’t fall into that group. Rather than waiting until your book is about to launch (or already has), build relationships with key book reviewers early. Put yourself in a position where, when you do contact them to request a book review, they already know your name and are already at least somewhat familiar with you.

Here are three ways you can start building relationships with potential reviewers even before your book is released.

1. Comment on their existing reviews.

 

Read the full post on AllIndieWriters.