Book Launch

When planning your book promotion and marketing, remember this equation: more book reviews equals more sales.

What are the basics of book publicity? What do you do on a day-to-day basis? Generally, I tell my clients I prefer to start working on a book five months before publication. There are many media outlets that not only require working that far ahead – mainly magazines and venues that have authors as speakers – but sometimes it just takes a long time to work with some media outlets and convince them that this is a book and an author that they should pay attention to.

WARNING – This blog post contains math. I promise you it won’t include algebra or those blasted hard story problems from all our middle school nightmares. Let’s start with three numbers. 66. That’s the percentage of readers who prefer print books to digital eBooks. 635 million. That’s how many print books sold in the U.S. in 2014, an increase of over 3% from 2013 sales. 100. As in the number of print books that BookBaby publishing specialists recommend for first time authors. Why 100? You’re going to need them – and probably more.

Build your author platform before your next book launch, so you can harness the power of potential buyers, industry contacts, and your entire web community.

Galleys, or advanced reader copies, are important to your book promotion, and so is your galley letter. You want to put your best foot forward with reviewers and by following these tips, you'll be off to a good start.

The longer your book is available for pre-order, the more time you have to send readers to Amazon and the other stores to accumulate orders. All these orders count as sales on your release date, giving you a good chance at cracking some top-100 best seller sub genre lists in sites like Barnes & Noble and Powell’s. Note: this is not the case with Amazon’s best selling list. They count pre-sales orders on the day it’s actually ordered, not all combined on the eventual release date.

If you’re finishing up your next book, stop writing and consider these points to increase your chances for a successful eBook launch – because a delayed book launch is better than a bad book launch.