My backlist launch strategy 🚀

(what does that mean?)  ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­

Hey, I’m helping out with the launch of the latest installment in a (very) long running series this week and it got me thinking about how to keep things fresh over an extended period of time. I started working with this author back in 2020 – so it’s a regular, ongoing relationship – and I think I was brought for the launch of maybe Book 5 or 6 in the series. He’s extremely prolific and aside from all sorts of other side projects and interests, he has put out three or four in that main series every year since then, so we are up to Book… well you can do the math. I don’t want to give the game away completely. But I’m not breaking any confidences to reveal that the series sales total is now in the millions. I’m not touting for business here, in case that crosses anyone’s mind, I haven’t taken on a client in a very long time. And I like to be discreet about this kind of work so you’ll have to forgive some generalizations. But what you do get in return is the insights I glean from managing the ad campaigns for all these high-level launches, which happen so regularly and where you are going back to the same audience, with the same covers and so forth. How do you keep things fresh? I’m not taking about in a creative sense – that’s the author’s job. And by far the harder one, if you ask me, as someone who works on both sides of this fence and wrestles with each set of challenges regularly. I’m far from the first writer to curse himself after setting his protagonist off on a voyage across the seven seas, only to realize that all that meticulous historical research now has to be commenced anew (or how smart Steven King was to set most of his stories in the same small, fictional town). And if you had your hero save his village in the first book, the world in the second book, and the galaxy in the third, well then you have run into something even trickier to solve: the classic series escalation problem. How do you raise the stakes in each episode? Will your character remain the same compelling, flawed individual if they have to bloody well change all the time? What way will you handle the pivotal sex scene for your next book, because I’m not sure you’ll get away with another serendipitous storm? These can all be fun or fiendish challenges - just the tip of the iceberg, as you well know. And once you have conquered them (and their endless brethren), you then have to sell the blasted thing. cover refresh? I see some authors regularly changing the covers of a long-running series but I often wonder if readers have bored of the packaging or if the author simply got tired of looking at it. It’s important to remember that readers are generally encountering your book and its cover for the first time; it likely remains fresh to them. If it was a killer cover a few years ago, it’s probably still a killer cover – unless the trends in your niche genuinely have moved on (a solid case for a refresh). In the case of the above-mentioned long-running series, we started having the first conversations about when it might be a good idea to wrap things up around Book 10, I think it was – closely analyzing launch sales and comparing them across releases to see if things were dipping or worth continuing. We stopped having those conversations around Book 20 as the series just kept selling and selling (and the author kept doing a remarkable job of keeping things fresh creatively, with no dip at all in the incredible reader response he was getting to each book). He was hitting the top of the charts with every launch, and we always had a strong focus on bringing in new readers with each launch – dedicating a significant portion of the launch budget to pushing the early books in the series each time – so it was a real test of the theory of whether regular and repeated exposure to a book cover would eventually act as a drag on performance. To put it more plainly, would readers not get tired of a cover if they see it in the charts all the time? What if it is not “new to them” after all? This is where I must move away from data and towards guesswork. Is it that we overestimate what readers remember, and all they see when I’m pushing it with ads is that it’s a really nailed on cover for the niche (with significant social proof like tens of thousands of amazing reviews, bestseller sashes, tasty quotes etc.)? Or are we overplaying the danger of that, and that it’s not that they “tire” of a cover, but it’s more of a familiar remembrance? I really can’t say, but I do know that every time I put that same cover in front of the target audience, they clicked on it. And I really don’t think any ad text was doing the heavy lifting here – it almost felt like I could have paired it with anything and that cover would have generated clicks all on its own. So perhaps remember that you might be sick of seeing something – whether that’s a cover or a blurb or a tagline – but it might still be the most effective honeytrap for your ideal reader. Maybe don’t change a winning formula, unless you have a strong reason to do so. Do keep in mind something like covers can have really strong genre variance so I wouldn’t be surprised at all if someone working in, say, contemporary romance strongly disagrees and advocates for regular cover changes. But I’d file that under the previously caveated “strong reason to do so” and sidestep the criticism like the snake-hipped chap that I am. feeding the funnel Obviously, sell through is what will make or break a long series. Everyone knows by now that making things as frictionless as possible will really help sell through, so a strong push to the next book in the series right after The End is essential, along with a mailing list sign-up obvs. But equally important is constantly seeking out new blood for that workhorse Book 1. Even with the highest sell through rates in the business, you will always see some drop off. And that drop-off will compound into an issue over a longer series if you aren’t constantly feeding new readers in at the top of the funnel. Some of this will happen naturally through word of mouth and its robot cousin: the algorithmic pushes from Amazon – both of which you can stimulate through your own marketing, of course. And authors will tend to drop the price of that series opener over time. It’s a normal progression for it to start off at full price, and then as the series grows, to drop it to a discount, and then maybe 99¢ when the series gets longer again. There’s no hard rule here, this is very genre dependent and very situation dependent, but the pattern is typical enough and will naturally goose the numbers entering the series. However, there are much more proactive ways to help this along launch strategies There are many roads to the top of the mountain but I always like the approach of devoting a lot of the launch budget to bringing in new readers – during launch week itself. And the best way to do that, in my opinion, is to run discounts on the earlier books in the series at the exact same time – usually alternating between a free-focused promotion and a discount-focused promotion as the circumstances require. For a number of reasons: There will be considerable buzz around the author/series as the mailing list and ad spend drives the new release to the top of the charts. Putting the initial books in the series in the charts at the same time acts as considerable social proof, drawing in curious new readers. Pointing ads for the earlier books at your existing audience – who are jazzed by the new release – can hoover up lots of positive comments under the ads, making them incredibly effective when pointed out newer, colder, or broader audiences. The number of synergies that can be achieved goes far beyond this – even something as simple as being impossible to miss when a reader scans the genre charts for their next read, or reminding readers who picked up a free Book 1 last time to rescue you from their TBR pile. But if they passed you over completely last time, all this noise acts as a solid push to check you out this time. The logic underpinning all this is very simple. Readers are much more likely to take a chance on a new author if the book is discounted (or free). And that goes double if the book has lots of social proof, which might be reviews, quotes, chart position, bestseller status, or simply lots and lots of positive comments from fellow readers. And if you can bottle all of that and pair it with a bunch of discounts across several books at the same time you are launching a new one, you have something very powerful – something which isn’t just very effective at bringing in new readers regularly, but something which can also sell them multiple books at the same time. Turning every new release into a relaunch of your backlist. meta muckup I was planning to talk about Meta’s new plan to charge everyone who wants to put links on Facebook, but the entire idea is so dumb that it makes my face hurt. Perhaps I’ll try next week. Or maybe you can read Jon Loomer instead. My hot take is that it’s the stupidest thing Facebook has done in a very long time. And this from a company that spent tens of billions of dollars trying to get people to wear phones on their faces and live in a world where everyone has no legs. Dave P.S. Writing music this week is L'Impératrice with Le départ. Interesting Paths, Apartado 108, Loja CTT, Lagos, Faro 8601-902 ​Unsubscribe | Update your profile​