Book launches are incredibly important. You’re putting your baby out
into the wild for the first time and you want people to find it.
But you don’t want to be in people’s faces about it.
And you don’t want to make people tired of you.
You want to just be as authentic as you can be.
And make it extremely easy for the reader to click.
It’s great to set your book up for pre-order. It’s very important.
You build momentum.
You can increase your chances of potentially landing
on a best-seller list on the day it’s released.
I believe in pre-orders because that way, I can market a book up until launch.
And I can include links.
And people can be buying this book before launch,
so that once the pub date hits,
I’m starting off ahead of the gate with a bunch of pre-sales.
They have various codes that they use to give away books to your early readers.
Maybe you want to get some early reviews, so you send them out to,
you know, close readers.
Reviews early will really make a book launch successful.
Three months is ideal. And get it out to bloggers,
readers… getting not just reviews, but good reviews.
Creating a free sample of your book is a really good way to generate interest
in pre-orders for your book.
Or even if it is out already, keeping that free sample up is
a really good idea.
Because people like to test the waters a little bit with the book
and see if they do want to spend money on it.
The other reason that we like to use pre-orders is,
a second book in a series, a third book in a series…
because when they get to the end of the first,
there’s a lot of distracted attention these days,
and somebody just finished a book and they love it,
we want them to be able to buy the next one right away.
So I think the best thing that you can do to prepare for launch
is to connect with your readers book-to-book.
And carry over a little bit each time.
Build your list and communicate with your list.
And really design a reader path and a reader experience
that makes you one of the people that they have to talk about.
They have to tell their friends about this book.
They have to tell their friends about this author.