Pre-launch Plan for Your Book

K
Hello, my beautiful cinnabar moths or any kind of moth you’d like to be. Welcome to the Writers Triangle, a podcast about publishing and all things books. And today I’m going to be talking about what we do for pre launch how much our pre launch packages that we do for books cost, what you can do for free or low cost, and what cost us the big bucks and let you decide and really give you what we think is most value added for money returned. I think it’s something to keep in mind when you think about a process. And what a press does, versus what an indie author who’s self publishing does, is that a presser is not thinking about any book on its own. So for example, if we have a book series, and we’re publishing just book one of that series, it has a different promotional track than if we’re publishing book three of a series. So I’m not going to go into the nitty gritty of the differences of those kinds of things like launching a series and all of that, I’m just gonna talk about what we basically do for for any book that we launch, that can be applied to single standalone books, or books that are part of a series. And I might get out at the starting at like the 16. week mark, I’m going to be talking about weeks instead of months. And I’m sorry if that’s annoying. But I found that there were just some that just didn’t, doesn’t translate into months, it really is for our calendar, we really do look at things versus at at the week mark rather than the month mark. So that’s something that is built into our calendar, as that’s something I created. So I don’t know, I’m thinking about I’m like, Huh, I wonder why it’s done at the week mark? I think because we have a lot of different people in different parts of the workflow. And so we are studying like the weekly tasks for a team. And I guess it would have made it kind of awkward. Now I think about it, because we don’t have one person working on it. And that’s also something to keep in mind is what is the time cost of each of these things? I think we can dedicate about 10 hours, I want to say about 10 hours a week to all of our books.

K
And so we’re always working on multiple books, I’m not quite sure what the actual time cost is for an individual book. And I apologize for that. But I do have some numbers that I’ll share with you and other things that I don’t know the actual like number caught to it. And I’ll be sure to include that. So the first thing after at the six week mark, is you want to get your book ready to be launched. And that begins with selecting a platform like are you doing an Amazon book? Are you using Ingram sparks? How are you using to get your book out there into the world. And that means selecting your genre and the age range and making sure that all of your metadata for your book is correct. And your metadata is basically anything that describes your books, or anything that a reader could put into a search engine and find your book, and a bunch of other little minor things basically like the title, the description, the genre, and all of that, I was looking online to see if there was a great description of metadata and Ingram Spark actually had like a really great article on it. So I’ll put that link down in the description. And you can check that out and go into more fine tuned explanation of what metadata is. And then you have to basically make sure your book is ready to buy at the 16 week mark. Because if it’s not ready to buy, it makes it really difficult to market the book fully and completely. Because everybody wants to know, like, you have to get your sell sheet together. And you have to get your press release together. And you have to send it off to reviewers and in your sell sheet, you do need to include the price of your book. And that’s something that depending on what you’re using to set your book up the various platforms that the print books and distribute books will often help authors with deciding on pricing. And at the 16 week mark, it takes about if you’re uploading everything, it takes about one to two weeks before everything is ready. And so you’re really looking at the 1514 week mark, where you’re able to at this ethnicity, we might be concerned your style sheets and all of that, but to be able to send out physical books and all of that. You’re looking at the 1415 week mark where you’re sending out all of your books to industry reviewers, and a lot of those industry reviewers require cell sheets as a mandatory thing I think a forward thinker, Kirkus and all of them, and the American Library Association requires style sheets. I don’t send those out. So I don’t know what each one of those require. And we have an episode on Mark You can check that out. For more details and specifics on that. Also at the 1514. week mark is when you want to start setting up your get your giveaways.

K
So for us and we set up a giveaway, I’m always thinking about reviews. And I absolutely love of all the giveaways, different platforms that we use for giveaways, library things is my absolute favorite. And I’ll put a link to library things down in the description. They are so so awesome and so easy and free. I love free stuff. And they have the best return. When we look at the giveaways that we do on library things, however many books we give away, we almost have like an 80% review, return on the number of books that we give away on library things. And we’re able to give away ePubs and PDFs, so we’re not having to mail out physical copies, we do send them the book cover. And with library things we really like to set you can when you go in and set up library things go away, you can look at our video on marketing. And we’ll go into more detail how to do that, you can select the month that you do it. And what I like to do for example, if we have a book coming out in September, that I want the readers to be finished reading the book and in August, Midway August, early September, that means that the giveaway has to run in July. So that because the giveaway is decided at the end of July, so at the beginning of August, I will be giving them their books. And in a perfect world, they would read it immediately and then start posting those reviews so that they will be ready in time for the launch of the book to increase buzz, increased search engine optimization, because all of your reviews, improve your search engine optimization and, and so does your giveaway. The more places that the title of your book shows up in the pre launch phase, the better and the higher the discoverability is of your book. And Google loves out links and end links. So as soon as you set up those giveaways, you can put a link to those giveaways right on your your author page. And at the 15 week mark, you should also be focusing on making sure that your author pages together, making sure you have a good reason author page, making sure that you have an Amazon author’s page, Barnes and Noble author page, any place that will let you sign up and put your name out there as the author of a book. That’s the time to do it at the 1514 week mark. It’s the perfect time to do it. Because you’ve got all your giveaways, you’ve got your cover, you’ve got all of your metadata together, it’s the perfect time, just make sure that you have a professional looking website and I’ll put a link down to our episode on being professional author, because I just think that the I can’t emphasize enough the need to present professionally.

K
And that goes into a lot of great details on exactly how to do that. By putting your giveaways on to their author pages, and your social media, make sure that your social media is together. And in being a professional author, I talked about making sure your social media presentation is together, we’re what’s known as an we fall into the heading of activist press. We’re an activist, mini press. And the reason that we’re an activist, many presses because I do tweet on political topics. And I do talk about hot button things. And our books do cover political topics and talk about hot button things. And we do have middle grade authors as well. And when I’m promoting middle grade content, I try to make sure that a few tweaks before and a few tweaks after that those are safe for a middle grade audience. I will say that the majority of our middle grade audience are adults, because our social media is very adult. And in those adults, when you’re looking at the middle grade space that includes teachers and librarians. And so talking about something like book banning, while that is a political statement, and you do take a political position on that. That’s a safe political position to have when it comes to the middle grade space. And for us, we welcome LGBTQI plus content in the middle grade space. So for us promoting things during pride that doesn’t impact us. So really thinking about what who is your audience if you have clean content, and you’re wanting to have a clean content audience, or if you’re wanting to have a specific faith, feel safe with your with your books and your writing, then you need to make sure that you’re cleaning up your content. And it does mean going through all of your social media posts and deleting anything that doesn’t represent who you are as an author. I really think authors should have it Dedicated author pages, we have had authors who have built up amazing followings on social media.

K
And because of their political views, they’ve completely lost those accounts, where if they had had an author account and a private account, and on their private account said and did whatever they wanted, and then on their author social media accounts, made sure that they were creating a protected space to promote their book, they wouldn’t have lost that following. And they wouldn’t have lost that ability to pre market their book. And of course, posts market their book, and reach out and make connections. That’s something to really be thinking about at the 15 mark, because it gives you a lot of time to tidy things up and just really tighten it up. And make sure that it’s that you’re presenting and public the way that you want to present in a way that connects and sensical way to your book, and really look at a critical eye. And for me, I think about what would the worst version of myself, think about this? I look at everything that we do. And I think about the worst version, most critical version of my style. And what would the worst version of myself have to say about it? Sometimes I agree that maybe I should accommodate. And other times, I’m like, wow, I can do really mean, I don’t feel like it really matters. And I think having that understanding for yourself, what is the level of loss that you are willing to sustain in terms of potential readers. And that’s how you decide how much of your critical voice Do you listen to, there are certain things I just don’t agree with. And my most critical moments that I, because the press isn’t just me, that I’m looking at all of the books and all of the authors and finding compromise in that space to where we all come together. And I think being your own. If you’re being an indie author, you can do that for yourself. But if you’re being an indie press, that’s one of the things that sets us aside from vanity presses is that it’s not in ourselves. And plus, we don’t charge, that’s the main thing a vanity press does is they charge authors to publish. So looking at that, and making sure you’re looking at the full landscape. And we don’t curate our books in terms of we don’t curate launch dates, and that compatible books all launched around the same time. I don’t do that. And I just don’t because we’re not a genre specific press. But if you have several different genres that you’re writing, and think about that launch date, and does it line up well with the rest of your books, because I know a lot of indie authors and I no longer have any presses. Do you have a lot of different genres like we do. And that is something that you can have a more give your readers a more curated experience. It is an area that I kind of go back and forth on but we have, that’s something that we’re looking at in 2027, whether or not we’re going to redo the way that we do our lineup, but I don’t feel like it’s a big thing.

K
And so looking at at the at the 15 week mark, another thing I like about library things when you’re looking at giveaways. For me, Goodreads is great because it gives you the numbers of how many people wanted to to participate, and it does get the copies away. But I have not really seen a return on investment with the Goodreads giveaways. And for me the return on investment, specifically, our reviews. If I do a Goodreads giveaway, I want Goodreads reviews or Amazon reviews. And with library they have just found that they’re the most consistent. And library things will retweet your posts. If you make graphic graphics that are focused, and library things focus where you’re promoting your library things giveaway, they will promote you on their social media. And they have quite a large following on Twitter, and a pretty decent following on Instagram. And they will interact with your content if you interact with them, which I really appreciate. And they’re free to join. And it’s free, free to set up. So it’s free for people to join your giveaway and be part of that community. And they’ve just been so respectful. And you know, not every review is like, like every book that they’ve won, but I just the experience for me has just been 100% positive with them. So for me giveaways you have to look at at value added and how much they’re going to cost for us to do a giveaway on our end you have to figure in shipping and all of that. And that’s why I prefer using a platform that handles giveaways for us. And I don’t really enjoy managing those ourselves and I don’t think it’s good use of of our team’s time. And so we don’t really do those except for one we’re doing a box like the Fallen Hong Chronicles recently that series wrapped. So we had all three of the books. And we put all three of the books in a box and ship them out as a box set to our PR list, and they cost about $150 A box to do that, plus about $20 for shipping and handling. And then you multiply that by however many people that you’re going to be sending that to, and you might be able to create the box more cheaply for yourself. For us, for any given book that we’re going to ship out, we know that we’re going to be shipping out anywhere between 50 to 300 copies of that book. And so when looking at costs, look at your PR list, look what you have going on and see, okay, do the math first, before you reach out to people make the commitment when you’re when you do your reach out, assume 100% Yes, when you’re reaching out for to create your PR list, assume that everybody’s going to say yes, and then wait and see how much of your budget, once everybody comes back, wait and see how much of your budget is left before you do that second way of reach out.

K
And I like to send everything out at that 15 to 14 week mark Islam, I’d like to get everything sent out. And then at the 12, the 14 to 12 week mark, I want to 12 weeks before the book comes out. I think it’s a really great time for actors to connect with podcasters, that that podcast about the type of books that they write, reach out and connect with blogs and interact with them, and then make your pitch for yourself as a guest. Trust me as he does a podcast. If you’re an author, if you’re an indie author, or an indie press, please reach out to us, we would love to interview you, we would love to have that content and when so just appreciate it. Because it is a lot to think about when if you have just an interview based podcast, we’re very lucky that ours is a blend, right, we do some interviews, and then we do some industry information. But for those that are just doing interviews, they have to come up with a guest 52 guests a year and some are doing multiple times a week. So there really is a high threshold. And I find that whatever level of engagement you have, people in that same bracket tend to really want to interact, or people that are in a bracket just right below or right above. So whatever your following is on any given platform, if you reach out to content creators at the same level that you’re at, you’re more likely to get a positive response. And then I say take a few big swings, because we’ve been very fortunate enough that we have content creators that have hundreds of 1000s of followers that are on our PR list. And they said yes. So for me, I feel like a closed mouth doesn’t get fed and I’m hungry. And it doesn’t hurt to ask. I don’t really care a lot about hearing No, or hearing no response. I feel like no response is a response. And it’s interesting, because everybody on my team, I’m the one least impacted.

K
So I’m the one that does the outreach, because I don’t really care if people tell me now I feel like right on. And I don’t know if that has anything to do with me, or what I’m offering, I feel like maybe I’m not a good fit for them. Or maybe it’s not the right time for them. Or maybe they’ve already created all of their content for the year. There’s a lot of things that go into content creation, and I don’t presume to know all of them. So I think if you’re feeling a little bit like you don’t want to hear a lot of nose, then using that bracket of people that are have about as many followers as you or a little bit above or a little bit below, I find that you’ll get a lot more responses. And I also think that this is the time to like try and schedule some live readings, or doing your own live readings. Our winner of the poetry and excellence Cassondra Windwalker, does a live reading of she’s our author in residence as well as being the winner of our poetry and and our excellent poetry award. And for every month when the our easing comes out, and her poem is published, she then does live reading and post that on social media and that gets a lot of likes. So doing a live reading for social media and also reaching out to coffee houses and and libraries and public schools and those things. Can you come in and be a guest author for the day? I think at the 11 to 10 week mark that that’s a great sort of like the 12 to 10 week I guess is a great time to spend some energy and effort towards that. And it’s also around the 10 week mark is a great time To start making sure that you’re promoting your giveaways that you’ve set up, and to really start sharing all of that bonus material, right, the 10 love and 10, nine weeks out start peppering your, your social media with like, cover reveals and maps and character art and different things.

K
And I would say post about your book three to five times a week when you’re this far out, and make sure that your timeline doesn’t become spammy. I feel really sad for authors when I see their timelines turn into just pure spam. And also, I feel kind of bummed out for authors when I see their advertising and promotion for their books being a single image. And, you know, check out our episode on marketing about how to create bonus material and, and all of that, because you really do need to make sure that you’re creating variety, and interacting with with other authors and interacting with poets and commenting and building a community of people who interact with your content and interact with you and retweet people’s pin tweets, or pen content. If you know if your whatever plan if you’re on Tik Tok, make sure that you’re watching other people, and commenting on them the same on YouTube and Instagram or Facebook, make sure that you’re interacting with the community, and really ramp up that interaction at the 11 to 10 weeks. And, you know, at the nine to eight weeks, when you’re starting to do those three posts, make sure that you’re retweeting other people’s content or resharing or reposting other people’s content. And then after seven to six weeks, I would say is a great time to start researching, you know, rev up, I’d say you’re up to three, you know, doing three to five times a rev up to five times a week, but also start researching any awards that you would like your book to be entered and to, and start courting that award, follow the awards, retweet, previous award winners, congratulate award winners and start getting known. And that award circle by that that cross communication and it really will help you not be a stranger to the judges and help you not be a stranger to the award itself and have you kind of be known. And I do think that helps. And I think it’s beneficial. And I I also feel like it doesn’t hurt to have a variety of of content. And it never hurts to tell someone congratulations. And be just a positive place in the in the writing community on whatever social media platform you’re on.

K
At the five to three weeks, you need to promote yourself as an author and engage with authors. and promote the stuff that you’re doing. Besides the book that’s coming out. Anything that you’ve done in your past, anything that you have going on in your life, any podcasts that you’re coming on through any guest blogs that you’re coming on to, and all of that because at the the two weeks before and also look at hashtags that you might want to use for your book, like if you’re gonna use kidlat. Or if you’re going to use grit lead, or you’re going to be transgressive started getting to know other people in those hashtags and other content in that hashtags and increase your own visibility. And at the 10 week mark, also 10 weeks before your book, just to backtrack a little bit is when you shouldn’t be booking any virtual tours. Because after two weeks before your your book comes out, that’s when you want to start the daily promotion of your book. And my rule of thumb is I do one book promotion, tweet. And then I do two other tweets that are not about the book that I’m promoting or not about a different book that I’m promoting. So that there’s I like to do what I think of as waking up my timeline. So if I’m on Instagram, I wake up my Instagram by first going and liking things in my feed. If it’s on Facebook, I go and like things and just really sort of announced myself kind of that, hey, I’m here and getting people that finding out who’s around at that time that I usually interact with. And then I’ll start promoting and I’ll make sure to do tweets and between books. On any given day I can be promoting one to 30 bucks depending on my stamina and what I’m doing and my energy and my focus. I don’t do the the Instagram, I am the only one still doing the Twitter, because I love Twitter. It’s fun for me.

K
But it caught me a little bit more inconsistent than we are on Instagram, because it’s not somebody coming in clocking into their workday and putting themselves out that for me, I have insomnia. And I generally only sleep about four hours on any given night. So sometimes, if I’m up in the wee hours, it’s really fun to get on Twitter, and hang out and promote books and, and talk with people that I know and socialize. So find a platform that you enjoy that you’ll have those bursts of energy. And also, I think when signing up for a book tour, I love virtual tours, you can check out our episode on book tours, I do think, go ahead and do a book blast with with one of them just because they will package they’ll create a different package for your content than what you would create. And I really liked that different package. And I love the fact that I can quote tweet it on Twitter specifically. And I love the fact that it’s on Facebook. And it just gets out there because it does help create content. And for me, I’m just looking at always, where can I get more content? There’s so many platforms out there now and be active across all of these platforms. It really is that I think of it as the content hustle. So that’s basically what we do. I don’t think I went inside rate details and the nitty gritty, if you want like a specific, if you’re like, Hey, can you pick a book and like really walk us through what you did for a specific book. Or if you want to know, like what we do specifically for a series, we do something different for first, second, and third. So this is just kind of a boilerplate, what I think everyone can do, and most of the stuff is free, except for the giveaways, I think Goodreads cost about 100 bucks library thing is free. The PR list, you have to think about shipping and handling if you’re not doing ePubs if you’re doing physical books and for us when we ship out to our peer list, and that add about 20 to $30 for each shipment because we do have to track them. But the reason that we track our books is that we send our books out in batches. So we’re usually shipping, three to four books, and we ship three or four times a year. And so that, you know not wanting to lose those books, and we have a professional relationship. I do think it, it does add a level of polish when you have a tracking number. And then it also allows us to do a gentle poke. Because we get that delivery. Notice that when we track you don’t, you don’t get delivery notices when you don’t have tracking for some places that ship. And when we have that delivery notice it gives us a really nice post to say, hi, the books have arrived. And that’s a gentle way to ask for a book milepost. And that will usually get us two or three posts for for every book from one single person on the PR list.

K
That’s basically what we do. And I hope that you are doing things that are sparking joy, and that you find to be fun. For me personally, the the PR list is a lot of work. And I’m really happy that I have a team member, team members that does that. But I love Twitter, Twitter’s a lot of fun to me. And I talked with a lot of people on Twitter that aren’t in the book community that are on different, doing different things. And there are other things that I’m passionate about. I’m past, and I’m able to communicate with people about those things. And I don’t mind having my personal political views out there. And that’s another reason why I have it. Why I’m the one who does our Twitter because I do express political views. And I don’t want there to be any blowback on any of our authors or anybody on the team. So if there are questions about something I post and someone asked about, I do have a respectful conversation about it. And that’s something to consider too, when if you’re going to have a political voice out there. And leading up to your books and talking about your books is how are you going to handle when people are interacting with you about it, so that you’re putting your most strongest uncomfortable version of yourself out there in the world and that you’re having as much control and as much joy as possible because, first of all, celebrate that you wrote a book. That’s huge. That’s something to be celebrated. And celebrate that you got your book from idea to words on the page to finish and now you’re launching. Bravo like seriously be proud of yourself. I’m celebrate yourself and I want to thank all of our beautiful moths for listening and you don’t have to be cinnabar moth you can be any kind of moth you’d like to be or you could be a butterfly but I’m not Mariah Carey and I’m not trying to bite her rhyme. Bye.