Successful Fiction Writing = Creating + Organizing + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Marketing. The question for today is how do you launch your novel without having a panic attack? Even if you are years away from launching a book, there are things you can do now to prepare for that happy day. 

Why Most Authors Feel Massive Anxiety in a Book Launch

We authors put a lot of pressure on ourselves. It’s easy to think launching a novel is a huge, gigantic task that’s going to be expensive and risky and force us to act salesy. And it’s easy to believe that if we don’t run a good launch, then our book is going to die. That’s just not reality. 

You can massively lower your anxiety level in a book launch by remembering one thing. In a book launch, you are not trying to sell your book to the whole world. You are not even trying to sell your book to your entire Target Audience. The ONLY people you are trying to sell it to are the people who meet all three of these criteria:

1. They already know you exist. 
2. They already know they like your fiction. 
3. They already have given you permission to let them know when your book is available.

That may be a very small set of people. It might include only your family and your close friends. 

But your circle of influence is probably broader than that. If you have followers on social media who know you’re writing a novel, then some of those people may be in that set. If you have an email newsletter about your fiction, that’s ideal. 

If you remember my recent blog post  on The Three Pillars of Marketing, you are launching your book ONLY to people you have already Attracted and Engaged. Attraction and Engagement are the first two pillars of marketing. In your book launch, you’ll execute the third pillar—Conversion. This simply means that you’re going to give them a good reason to buy your book RIGHT NOW.

And this step is stress-free. If people already know you and know they like your fiction, then they’ll be happy to buy your book. So the task of launching your book is just a matter of contacting them with an incentive to buy it right away. And how do you do that? That depends on what road you chose for publishing your novel. So let’s review those roads…

The Two Roads to Publishing a Novel

There are two methods authors commonly use to publish their novel:

• Traditional publishing—you sell the rights to your book to a publishing company that manages the editing and production of the book and pays you an advance and then later pays you royalties.
• Self-publishing (also called indie authoring)—you manage the editing and production of the book yourself. You don’t get an advance, and you have to pay the up-front expenses, but then you get all the the money the book earns.

Both of these are valid routes to publishing a novel. Both of them can be extremely successful, and both can be extremely frustrating. Neither of these is “the right way” for all authors. Some authors like working with a publisher that handles all the production and editing hassle, so they can focus on writing. Some authors like doing it all themselves because they feel like they can do a better job. 

I’ve published both fiction and nonfiction books by both of these routes. I started out my writing career working with traditional publishers. I later transitioned to indie authoring, and that’s worked out better for me. (Translation—I have earned more money as an indie author than I did as a traditionally published author. And being indie has caused me a lot less stress.) 

Choose the method that works best for you. I can’t go into all the ins and outs of how you make that decision in this blog post. That’s a topic for another day. The reason I mention these two options is that your approach to launching your book will depend somewhat on which route you take. So let’s look at how you run a book launch for each case.  

Launching a Traditionally Published Novel

When you work with a traditional publisher, they will set the publication date far in advance. They’ll work with you on the editing. They’ll hire a cover designer and proofreaders. They’ll ask you to keep to a schedule that they set, and if you fail, they have legal recourse, because you signed a binding contract. 

Your publisher will expect you to help out a lot with the launch. They may give you a long list of tasks they think you should do. Most of these will be impossible to do in the window of time you have available. So don’t feel obligated to do everything they ask. But you should definitely do something. Let them know what you’re doing, because they may be able to help you a bit, and they’ll be grateful that you did anything at all. 

There are two main things you can do:

1. Send free copies of your book to “influencers”—people who read widely in your category and who have some sort of platform for promoting books.
2. Email all the people you have Attracted and Engaged and give them a reason to buy the book now. 

Let’s talk about those two tasks.

Free Copies For Influencers

Publishers will often give you free copies of the paper edition of your book to send to influencers. Maybe these influencers have a blog. Maybe they moderate a Facebook group or a Goodreads group. Maybe they have a large following on TikTok or Instagram or whatever. Publishers know that this can be very cost-effective, because paper copies probably cost them around a dollar apiece. 

When I launched my book Writing Fiction For Dummies, I was part of a large online group of novelists. I offered a free autographed copy of the book to anyone in the group who wanted it. 60 authors sent me their mailing addresses. Almost all of them were friends of mine, and I knew that most of them taught at writing conferences and would be good influencers for years to come. My publisher sent me three cases of books, and I did all the work—signing the books, packaging them, adding mailing labels, and taking them to the post office. The publisher offered to pay the postage, so my only cost was a few hours of boring labor. This worked out massively well. 

Emailing Your Followers

In the launch week for your book, it’s way too late to try to put together an email list. Building an email list is one of your lifelong projects as a writer. You will never stop building your list and cultivating it. And the sooner you start, the better. List-building is a giant project, and I can’t cover it here. I’ve blogged about it in the past. If you want to know how it fits into your overall marketing strategy, I can recommend my post A Virtuous Cycle for Marketing Your Books. For the nuts and bolts of how to build a list, I can recommend the book Newsletter Ninja, by Tammi Labrecque. 

Assuming you have an email list, when you launch your book, you will probably send out a series of emails beginning a few weeks in advance to let your people know that your next book is coming. You can do a cover reveal when your cover is designed. You can send an email weekly in which you talk about your story. If you want to include any part of your novel in your emails, you’ll need to get permission from your publisher, because you sold them the publishing rights. Usually, they’re happy to give you permission, so ask. Then on Launch Day, send your fans an email announcing the book. Add links to the usual online retailers. Add any incentives you can think of to buy the book right now. 

What do I mean by “incentives?” There are a couple of types of incentives. You might be able to convince your publisher to lower the price during the first week of sales, especially for the e-book version. But don’t count on it. Few publishers will do this. I have seen it happen, and once it had absolutely spectacular results. But one cost of working with a publisher is that they set the price of your book, and you don’t. 

There’s a second kind of incentive, and you have complete control over this. You can offer your true fans in your email list some sort of free electronic download if they buy your book during Launch Week. I did this with my book Writing Fiction For Dummies. I asked my publisher to put me in contact with similar authors who might provide electronic freebies. We put together a list of 8 free goodies that I put on my website for anyone who bought my book during Launch Week. And I added a 50% coupon code for all the products that I had on my website. I didn’t ask for any proof that they bought my book. That would have been a nightmare to check. I trusted people to be honest. When you treat people as trustworthy, they live up to your trust. The launch went extremely well, and I had a nice sales bump on my website from the coupon code. 

But what if you’re self-published? In that case, you have more control…

Launching a Self-Published Novel

When you self-publish your novel, you control everything. You set the deadline, and if you miss it, nobody will take you to court. You will know your publication date at least a month in advance. Which means you can start actively promoting your book to your email list weeks before the book is available. And you have the same general methods of promoting your book. But there are some differences from the traditional-publishing case.

Free Copies to Influencers

You can still send copies to influencers, but now you have to pay for them yourself—you don’t have a publisher to give them to you for free. If you use Amazon’s Print-on-Demand for your paper copies, you can make individual orders for the book at a reduced cost and send them directly to each influencer. You won’t get any royalties on these copies, but it’s nice to let Amazon deal with the shipping. 

Emailing Your Followers

You can also promote your book in advance to your email list, and now you have a bit more latitude as a self-publisher. Here are some of the advantages you have that your traditionally published author lacks.

• You can email your followers for weeks in advance with any amount of excerpts from the forthcoming book, and you don’t have to ask your publisher for permission. Because you’re the publisher. 
• You can set up preorders on Amazon up to a year before publication and notify your followers so they can buy it in advance. 
• You have complete control of the price and you can change it at any time, and use this to create an incentive to “buy now”. As an example, suppose you want the regular price of your e-book to be $4.99. You can tell your followers that during Launch Week, the price will be set to $2.99. And you might even offer a low-ball price for preorders of $1.99 or even $0.99. At that price, any of your followers who cares about your book will order. It’s a no-brainer. Note that you can’t go that low with the print version of your book, because paper costs money. 

The Common Thread—Your Email List

A major part of your book launch is your email newsletter. If you don’t have an email list when you launch your book, you can still use social media, but don’t expect great results. Successful authors know that social media converts a lot worse than email. Please note that it can take years to build a good list, so it’s way too late to think about building your email list when your book is weeks away from launch. If your launch is coming up and you have no email list, then focus on the things you can do and keep your expectations low. 

Your book launch should not be stressful. Stress comes from trying to sell to people who never heard of you and don’t know anything about your fiction. There are ways to reach these people, but Launch Week is not the time to try. Launch Week is for your true fans. And there’s no anxiety when promoting your work to your true fans. They want you to let them know when your book is coming out. They’d be angry with you if you didn’t tell them.

Homework:

• When is the approximate date of your next book launch? This might be more than a year out, and if that’s the case, you don’t really have a date, you have a range of dates. This might be years away, and that’s OK, because it gives you time to build an email list. 
• Do you have influencers in mind for your book? It’s OK if you don’t, but it’s nice if you do.
• Do you have an email list for your true fans? If not, then now is a good time to start thinking about building one. It’s never too soon.