🚀 How To Launch A Book 3: the main event

It's all about the prep. View in browser Hey, Last week's email on email generated a lot of… emails. Most of them were asking the same question, so I might do a cheeky "Reply All" next Friday – so you can look forward to a missive on how to get those email sign-ups next time. Today we are tying up a different loose end: my walkthrough on launching a book. But before we get to that main course, I have a king's banquet of appetizers for you. First up, I dusted off the old YouTube machine and cranked out another video-shaped knowledge bomb for ya on the topic of Amazon categories. I share my screen here in this one, so you'll get to see the exact process behind identifying target categories for your book, how to estimate the competitiveness of each category (i.e. the sales needed to hit the Top 100), and then the way in which you can add up to ten categories for each Kindle book, ten more for each paperback edition, and the extra steps you must take to ensure similar coverage in all the international stores as well. And I open up by showing how the biggest publishers screw this stuff up for their biggest releases of the year – which means it's a big opportunity for you to gain an edge. I am back doing YouTube videos regularly (producing my course led to video burnout!) so definitely make sure to subscribe to my channel… and hit that Notification bell too, which is the really important part. This doesn't just let you know when new videos drop, it also helps me get monetized on YouTube, which in turn compels me to produce lots and lots more videos by dangling the sexiest thing in the world: cash money. Oh and while you are over there at YouTube, you should also check out this podcast I did with Joanna Penn – a really wide-ranging discussion on how self-publishing has changed in the last ten years, why BookBub Ads are such a boon for wide authors, and some of the changes been wrought by the pandemic. Speaking of spondoolicks, one of the best ways of generating author income is releasing new books, of course. But that means they can be stressful affairs also.  Aside from the authorial head-gunk that typically accompanies the birth of book baby, the stakes can get higher and higher as your career progresses – either through adding more elements to the launch or simply spending more money with an eye on making a bigger splash. This week we are looking at launch week itself – the bit where the rocket goes boom, as I said in Part 1 of this trilogy of emails. (Part 2 is here if you also missed that). It's Showtime! After all the careful preparation (see Parts 1 and 2 above!), launch week is finally here. Let's take a look at how that might play out, looking at the two different launch plans we had in that opening episode – one for Amazon-exclusive authors, and one for my wide brethren. My hypothetical KU writer had this pricing structure to launch their Book 4: Book 1 – 99c countdown Book 2 - $1.99 countdown Book 3 - $2.99 countdown Book 4 - $2.99 launch week discount, rising to regular price of $4.99 And my imaginary wide author was launching a Book 5 as follows: Book 1 – free (+ staying there afterwards to become a permafree) Book 2 – 99c manual discount Book 3 – $2.99 manual discount Book 4 – $4.99 regular price Book 5 – $4.99 regular price Those pricing decisions are tailored to the respective circumstances of the authors. KU peeps can be more price aggressive and avail of Countdowns, but my wider friends have some extra flexibility around pricing and can do things like piggyback on this launch to essentially re-launch their Book 1 as a permafree – a decision which makes more sense as a series gets longer. Note: launch plans like this are never, ever meant to be proscriptive. You should adapt them to your own circumstances. For example, you could be a lot more price aggressive for the KU launch, and a lot more conservative for the wide launch. You could use free with the KU plan. You could avoid it with the wide plan. You could tweak some of the prices on later books in the series too. You will need to weigh up the options yourself because it's always a trade-off: i.e. deeper discounts = higher traffic and stronger conversion… but lower revenue per sale. People might have different goals around launches. You might be launching a new series and more concerned with building audience. Or you might be wrapping up a long series and cashing out. In our examples here, our goal is my default one with any marketing plan: I want Amazon to take over and do the selling for me. Which means I'm aiming to string together several days of consistent sales – rising, if anything – which I hope will trigger Amazon's recommendation engine to the point where it starts emailing readers and recommending it on-site too. With any luck, this should make the book sticky in the charts. At some level. For a bit, at least.  I never expect launch week ranks to be maintained, but I would like the book(s) to bed in somewhere nice and hang around for a while – because that's when you make the real money. To achieve that goal, I will be divvying up my launch budget accordingly – which we 100% arbitrarily decided last time was $1500, which might (also arbitrarily) break down as $200 on promo sites, $500 on BookBub Ads and $800 on Facebook Ads. More important than that particular split is how it is spread over the launch week itself. Just taking our wide plan for a moment as an example, there are a couple of ways you can spread your juice. One simple way might be as follows: Day 1: First part of mailing list. Day 2: Second part of mailing list. Day 3: BookBub Ads. Day 4: Facebook Ads. Day 5: Facebook Ads. I've done plenty of launches in this manner, but I personally prefer doing a little bit of everything on each day – I just find it's easier to achieve some level of consistent sales, and to plug any holes that can pop up. For example, you might have a problem with one of your sends (or one of your list swaps might go dark). Or maybe your Facebook Ads get caught in review. Or perhaps your BookBub Ads don't get the results you are expected. The specifics aren't so important here, just know that something like this will often crop up in a launch, and the more money you are spending, the more books you are pushing, the more elements you have in your launch plan will greatly increase the chances of something going wrong. Which means I plan for something to go wrong and will have a couple of things up my sleeve to address any imbalance. (Usually something like $100 of BookBub spend kept in reserve, or a re-send to my list that I can drop any time.) Launch plans can get complex with this approach! If you have taken my course Starting From Zero you would have seen these two launch plans before (along with a lot more detail on how they are built and executed), but let me wheel them out here again, as they are good examples and I'm feeling quite lazy today. This is a basic enough launch plan for a Book 3 – showing where you might drop in things like BookBub or Facebook Ads. And then this is a much more complex launch plan for a Book 5 – one which really leans heavy on more complex ads like Carousel Ads and series page ads and all sorts of things like that. Some people might be running for the hills looking at that second slide, but let me quickly note there is a fair bit of repetition there. However, it's also more complex than it looks in other ways because this will then be split up day-by-day. For example, let's pretend I'm that KU author above and I have $800 allotted for Facebook Ads. Because I'm using Countdowns, I have a seven-day period to cover, so I'll probably aim for around $100 a day and keep that extra $100 so that I can finish strong on the last day. Alternatively, if I was the wide author above, I'm probably doing a five-day push. I might take my $500 BookBub budget and spend just $75 a day on each of my five-days, keep some in reserve for a strong final day, and some for emergencies. I don't actually get too exact with the numbers when planning, as the situation can be quite fluid – especially with the kind of complex launch shown above – I just like to have a general sense of what my spending limits are with each ad platform, so I don't do something like spend half my budget on Day 1 and then have to watch as ranks worsen as the launch progresses – which is not something you want, and not something which will help you seduce Amazon's algorithms either. I won't get into the nuts and bolts of how to run those ads here, as that's a whole topic in itself. But you can explore all my preferred resources in this blog post: How To Sell Books in 2020. And if you want to dive into the algorithm side of things and learn more about how to trigger Amazon's powerful recommendations for your books, then Amazon Decoded is yer man. Oh and even if you are an experienced author who didn't think you needed to check out my free course Starting From Zero, I do recommend jumping in and checking out Lesson 4.5 – which will be a more visual guide on how to build a launch plan. And then definitely check out Lesson 5.4 – which gets deeper into how to push a series and will walk you through that complex launch plan above in a lot of detail! I hope this was useful. Just remember that while planning and preparation are definitely the keys to a successful launch, you should also account for glitches and wobblers and mishaps – and then they won't throw you for such a loop and you might even *gasp* enjoy the launch! Dave P.S. Writing music this week is the birthday boy himself with Watching the Wheels. Ah, what a bittersweet video… DavidGaughran.com Broomfield Business Park, Malahide, Co. Dublin, Ireland You received this email because you signed up at DavidGaughran.com. Unsubscribe