Episode 077 - Behind the Scenes of My Book Launch with Matty Dalrymple
May 4, 2021
In this week’s episode of The Indy Author Podcast, I share a behind-the-scenes look at the recent launch of my fourth Ann Kinnear Suspense Novel, A FURNACE FOR YOUR FOE. I talk about what I did and didn't do (and what I didn't do because I didn't think it would be useful versus what I didn't do because I didn't know how), what worked and didn't work, and what I'd do differently for future launches.
Matty Dalrymple podcasts, writes, speaks, and consults on the writing craft and the publishing voyage as The Indy Author. She is the host of THE INDY AUTHOR PODCAST and the author of THE INDY AUTHOR’S GUIDE TO PODCASTING FOR AUTHORS. She is also the co-author, along with Mark Leslie Lefebvre, of TAKING THE SHORT TACK: CREATING INCOME AND CONNECTING WITH READERS USING SHORT FICTION. Matty is a member of the Alliance of Independent Authors. Matty is also the author of the Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels and Suspense Shorts and the Lizzy Ballard Thrillers, and is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and the Brandywine Valley Writers Group.
"I'd like to follow the example of technology companies that set aside a certain amount of time for their employees to work on projects completely unassociated with their assigned work. For each book launch, I’d like to try out an approach that I haven’t used before, or that I used before but that didn’t work out for me then but give it a different spin." —Matty Dalrymple
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I just launched my seventh book and fourth Ann Kinnear Suspense Novel, A FURNACE FOR YOUR FOE, on April 26, 2021, and I thought it might be interesting for you to hear what my launch plan was. You got a bit of a preview of my launch approach back in October 2020, in Episode 049 - Ruminations on Book Launches with James McCrone. Jamie was launching his third Imogen Trager thriller EMERGENCY POWERS and I was launching the third Ann Kinnear Suspense Novel, THE FALCON AND THE OWL, and we discussed in general how we approach book launches. It was an interesting conversation, because we were each prioritizing somewhat different aspects, with Jamie being more focused on physical bookstores and me being more focused on online. I thought it might be useful for you to hear how I my launch for Book 4 panned out.
I initially thought about putting the spreadsheets that I use to track my launch activities out on theindyauthor.com as a resource but I decided against that. When I was launching my earlier books, I downloaded templates from other authors and tried to follow their plans, but I found that I ended up investing time in tasks that may have worked great for them but that just weren’t for me—like press releases. And I probably missed approaches that would have been perfect for me but that I overlooked because they weren’t included in the source plan I was using. So I’m not recommending that you try to copy my plan exactly as I executed it. Instead, I’m hoping you consider my plan and then adopt and personalize the parts that make sense for you.
So let’s launch into my recap of the launch of Ann Kinnear Book 4: A FURNACE FOR YOUR FOE. ...
I initially thought about putting the spreadsheets that I use to track my launch activities out on theindyauthor.com as a resource but I decided against that. When I was launching my earlier books, I downloaded templates from other authors and tried to follow their plans, but I found that I ended up investing time in tasks that may have worked great for them but that just weren’t for me—like press releases. And I probably missed approaches that would have been perfect for me but that I overlooked because they weren’t included in the source plan I was using. So I’m not recommending that you try to copy my plan exactly as I executed it. Instead, I’m hoping you consider my plan and then adopt and personalize the parts that make sense for you.
So let’s launch into my recap of the launch of Ann Kinnear Book 4: A FURNACE FOR YOUR FOE. ...
click here to read more
Pre-order
One consideration for a launch is if you want to put up a pre-order and, if you do, how far in advance do you want to do it. You can hear lots more about this topic in Episode 057 - The Pros and Cons of Pre-orders with Joe Lallo.
I decided to put up my preorder a month in advance. One consideration was that I would never feel comfortable putting up a pre-order unless the book was almost completely finalized. A month out, I did have some minor element placement changes that needed to be made to the cover and was still doing some minor wording tweaking—I also had the final proofread pending—but if something had gone wrong and readers got the initially uploaded version, it wouldn’t have been disastrous.
A month also has the benefit of giving me time to get those final tasks done without dragging the suspense out too long for fans and followers.
I was able to upload the ebook to all the distribution platforms—KDP, D2D, Google Play, and Kobo—and set it to publish automatically on the launch date. The only book I had to wait until the launch date to upload was PayHip, where I sell my ebooks direct.
On Amazon KDP, print pre-orders are not available. The result is very awkward because you can order pre-launch print proofs from KDP, but they show up with a big “Not for Resale” banner across them. You also have to time when you hit Publish on KDP for print so that the print book becomes available on Amazon as close to the ebook launch date and time as possible. (I hit Publish the day before and that seemed to work out fine.)
For print on Ingram Spark, uploading the book in pre-order status meant that it was available for pre-order on platforms like Barnes & Noble. You can order pre-launch print copies from Ingram that would be appropriate to sell—without a “Not for Resale” banner across the cover—but as with everything Ingram-related, it always seems harder than in needs to be. In the case of the launch of AFFYF, I thought I had placed an order for some print copies but the day before the launch, when they still hadn’t arrived, I checked the IngramSpark website and found that I must have never actually submitted the order. At that point I just waited a day and ordered from Amazon.
In my case, this wasn’t a big issue because I had a clean proof copy from Ingram that I could hold up for the camera during on my online launch event—more on that later—and since I wasn’t selling print copies myself—more on that later as well—I really only needed the additional copies to give as thank you gifts to the people in the Acknowledgments. However, this obviously would have been a huge issue if I had an in-person launch party or book fair activities planned.
For any bookstore that wanted to stock the books, they were available via Ingram—as long as they knew which button to push. : )
PromotionI’m focusing most of my promotional activities on social media, and I did a series of reveals on social media—mainly Facebook—to whet readers’ appetites. First I shared the epigraph; I always have an epigraph from a Shakespeare work from which the title is taken, and I invited readers to take a guess as to what the title is. The epigraph of Book 4 is:
Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot
That it do singe yourself.
— William Shakespeare, "Henry VIII"
Then I did a reveal of part of the cover using one of those images where it looks like the paper is being removed from a print book. I created this image using BookBrush. The image showed just a little bit of the title, so this gave my fans and followers a little more information for them to guess the title.
Then I did a full cover reveal, which obviously meant a title reveal as well—in this case A FURNACE FOR YOUR FOE.
After the various reveals and until the launch date, I posted every day a very brief excerpt (just a sentence or two) from the book. I used Canva to create an image that showed the book cover on the right with an image of a ring of fire on the left, and then just copied that each day and put that day’s excerpt inside the ring. I used Canva’s Twitter template because Twitter post-sized images seem to work well on Facebook whereas Facebook post-sized images don’t seem to work well on Twitter. Using the same image each day not only made my life easier, but it also provided nice branding consistency.
First in Series PromosPromoting the first book in the Ann Kinnear Series, THE SENSE OF DEATH, was really the centerpiece of my promotion efforts—and I suspect that will be true no matter how many Ann Kinnear books I publish.
I was thrilled to get a BookBub Featured Deal for TSOD, which ran on April 18, about a week before the launch of Book 4, and was very pleased with the results. You can hear about them in the personal update segment of Episode 075 - Key Book Publishing Paths with Jane Friedman, and also in a blog post on theindyauthor.com. I’ll include a link in the show notes. https://www.theindyauthor.com/blog/results-of-2021-04-18-bookbub-featured-deal
When I applied for the Featured Deal, I let BookBub know I was flexible on my days but having the Featured Deal for TSOD run about a week before the launch of AFFYF worked out pretty much perfectly, because except for the very fastest readers, Book 4 would be available by the time they had read through Books 1, 2, and 3.
I applied for several other email promo sites and was just not that impressed with the results. I’d love to find out how many readers you reach with these newsletters that aren’t already subscribed to BookBub. I think that I would apply for placement in those other promotion sites in the future if I didn’t get a BB FD slot, but if I did, I might not bother.
If promo sites is something you want to look into for your own launch, you can find lists of the best sites—and which are bests for various genres--on Reedsy and on the websites of Nicholas Erik, The Alliance of Independent Authors, and David Gaughran, and I’ll include links to those in the show notes.
https://blog.reedsy.com/book-promotion-services/
https://nicholaserik.com/promo-sites/
https://selfpublishingadvice.org/best-self-publishing-services/
https://davidgaughran.com/best-promo-sites-books/
Deprioritizing Bookstore Sales
I have pretty much completely deprioritized bookstore sales in my business plan. The COVID restrictions made this path even more a no-brainer for me, but I believe I would have pursued this even without that consideration.
For one thing, consignment arrangements carry a huge administrative overhead for the store—I just recently got this notice from one of the stores that used to carry my books on consignment:
Due to the large number of requests we have received from local authors in the past few years, we have been overwhelmed with the administrative work this program requires. In addition, Ingram Publishing has become an easy way for customers to order these self-published books. In 2020, we have been forced to really examine the way we do business and have changed our staffing, store hours, events and inventory. As a result, with sadness, we have decided to discontinue our consignment program.
As they point out, any bookstore can order your books as long as you have them on Ingram—no store is going to order from Amazon—so deprioritizing bookstore-related activities doesn’t mean you’re giving up those sales. I do periodically remind my social media followers that this is an option for them. I also point them to Bookshop.org, which not only makes my print books available on a platform that benefits indy bookstores, but also means I get an affiliate commission if people buy books from my Bookshop store. (You don’t have to be an author to set up a store on Bookshop and earn affiliate commissions.)
However, for me, that’s a tiny percentage of my sales, and I don’t feel it’s worth my time trying to pester busy bookstore buyers into stocking my books … and it’s an even worse cost-to-earnings ratio to try to arrange in-person bookstore events. It’s not that I wouldn’t do these if invited, but I see them as more of a community outreach than sales-focused effort.
For a countering viewpoint, check out Episode 020 - Working with Libraries & Bookstores with Mark Leslie Lefebvre
However, for the second time I used a launch approach to involve indy bookstores that has worked out well: I contacted bookstores with whom I had an established relationship and told them that if they were interested in stocking my book—which they could order through Ingram—I would mention them in my Facebook Live event. I got four stores that expressed interest.
LibrariesAlthough I have, at least for now, deemed the benefit of placement in bookstores not to be commensurate with the effort involved, I do actively pursue placement in libraries. All my ebooks are available to libraries via Overdrive and other library platforms, which I use D2D to reach, and they can order my print books via Ingram.
In what is probably my longest-running experiment on promotion approaches, every weekday I send emails to about 35 libraries—that’s one screen’s worth of rows in Excel—letting them know about my latest book. I would never prioritize this if I had to research the library contacts myself, but I purchased a database of over 6000 library contacts from Eric Simmons—I’ll include a link in the show notes. (https://www.eseinc1.com/post/library-contacts-database-helps-author-close-20-libraries) I’ve created a template in Gmail, and I send an individual email to each person, meaning I just need to copy in the email address and name from the spreadsheet. I’m not using my email service, MailChimp, because I haven’t gotten permission from the library contacts to email them and so I would be violating the MailChimp terms of service.
The content of the email is basically:
One of the reasons I feel this is worth my time is that I’m charging $29.99 for my ebook novels. This is more than most indies charge, but way less than most trad publishers charge, and I think there’s no reason that indies can move their prices to be more in line with those prices, assuming you have a high-quality product. I’ve made about $325 from sales from Overdrive this year—Overdrive being one of the primary library systems. If I divide $325 by the time I’ve spent sending the emails, it’s probably not yet a very profitable time investment yet, but I figure that there are still lots of librarians who may not heed my first or second email but who will take notice when they receive the third or fourth email, and that my profit from the library sales will continue to build over time.
It’s possible to earn royalties not only from libraries purchasing a copy of your ebook or print book, but there are also per checkout models. I’m signed up for these where possible, but I have to admit that this is something I need to investigate further to fully understand what benefit I’m getting from those.
Launch Day
Pre-COVID, I used to hold launch parties at Kildare’s Irish Pub in West Chester, PA, but in view of social distancing considerations, I moved the October 2020 launch of Ann Kinnear Book 3: THE FALCON AND THE OWL to Facebook Live, and I don’t know if I’ll be going back. The in-person party was fun—definitely more a socializing event than a sales event, although I did make a fair number of sales—but the logistics were difficult. Just getting the books to the venue was a huge pain.
The online event was much easier logistically—in fact, as I mentioned earlier, I didn’t have *any* books to wrangle. And it’s not only easier for me—it’s easier for fans, too. It’s a lot easier—although admittedly not quite as exciting—for a fan or follower to set aside half an hour to join the event from the comfort of their own home than to set aside the time to get to and from an in-person event. And I can involve people who live far away and would never be able to attend an in-person event.
However, as easy as an online event is, be sure to budget plenty of time for it. I spent a *lot* of time planning and scripting out the event.
You should also be sure you set aside time—and energy—on the day of the event. I had accidentally booked a podcast interview recording on my launch day, and I was so glad when the guest discovered he was double booked and asked to move the interview. I also had to contend with the fact that I usually allocate a good chunk of my Mondays to finalizing the podcast episodes, which go out early on Tuesdays, so a Monday launch wasn’t ideal. However, I was using one of my monthly Full Moon Giveaway Facebook Live events as the launch celebration, and the full moon wasn’t going to conveniently move to another day.
I actually recorded a version of this episode the day after the launch, when I was still scrambling to take care of the post-even tasks, and when I listened to it, I realized that it was so lacking in energy that I really needed to re-record it.
Back to the event itself … here are some tips:
If you want to check out the Facebook Live launch event, I’ll include a link in the show notes.
https://www.facebook.com/510214485754858/videos/175742877742212
Other Details
Things I Didn’t Do
What I Did Instead
I’m not entirely comfortable with this approach because I am putting a lot of my promotional and reader outreach eggs in the Facebook basket, so I’m continually reassessing other platforms I can use to provide a safety net.
For book marketing in general, I’d like to follow the example of technology companies that set aside a certain amount of time for their employees to work on projects completely unassociated with their assigned work. For each book launch, I’d like to try out an approach that I haven’t used before, or that I used before but that didn’t work out for me then but give it a different spin. For example, I don’t see myself ever doing a traditional press release, but I’m sure that someone is going to come up with a less onerous manual process to let interested media platforms know about a new book, and I’d certainly be willing to give that a try. If you know of such a platform, please let me know!
One consideration for a launch is if you want to put up a pre-order and, if you do, how far in advance do you want to do it. You can hear lots more about this topic in Episode 057 - The Pros and Cons of Pre-orders with Joe Lallo.
I decided to put up my preorder a month in advance. One consideration was that I would never feel comfortable putting up a pre-order unless the book was almost completely finalized. A month out, I did have some minor element placement changes that needed to be made to the cover and was still doing some minor wording tweaking—I also had the final proofread pending—but if something had gone wrong and readers got the initially uploaded version, it wouldn’t have been disastrous.
A month also has the benefit of giving me time to get those final tasks done without dragging the suspense out too long for fans and followers.
I was able to upload the ebook to all the distribution platforms—KDP, D2D, Google Play, and Kobo—and set it to publish automatically on the launch date. The only book I had to wait until the launch date to upload was PayHip, where I sell my ebooks direct.
On Amazon KDP, print pre-orders are not available. The result is very awkward because you can order pre-launch print proofs from KDP, but they show up with a big “Not for Resale” banner across them. You also have to time when you hit Publish on KDP for print so that the print book becomes available on Amazon as close to the ebook launch date and time as possible. (I hit Publish the day before and that seemed to work out fine.)
For print on Ingram Spark, uploading the book in pre-order status meant that it was available for pre-order on platforms like Barnes & Noble. You can order pre-launch print copies from Ingram that would be appropriate to sell—without a “Not for Resale” banner across the cover—but as with everything Ingram-related, it always seems harder than in needs to be. In the case of the launch of AFFYF, I thought I had placed an order for some print copies but the day before the launch, when they still hadn’t arrived, I checked the IngramSpark website and found that I must have never actually submitted the order. At that point I just waited a day and ordered from Amazon.
In my case, this wasn’t a big issue because I had a clean proof copy from Ingram that I could hold up for the camera during on my online launch event—more on that later—and since I wasn’t selling print copies myself—more on that later as well—I really only needed the additional copies to give as thank you gifts to the people in the Acknowledgments. However, this obviously would have been a huge issue if I had an in-person launch party or book fair activities planned.
For any bookstore that wanted to stock the books, they were available via Ingram—as long as they knew which button to push. : )
PromotionI’m focusing most of my promotional activities on social media, and I did a series of reveals on social media—mainly Facebook—to whet readers’ appetites. First I shared the epigraph; I always have an epigraph from a Shakespeare work from which the title is taken, and I invited readers to take a guess as to what the title is. The epigraph of Book 4 is:
Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot
That it do singe yourself.
— William Shakespeare, "Henry VIII"
Then I did a reveal of part of the cover using one of those images where it looks like the paper is being removed from a print book. I created this image using BookBrush. The image showed just a little bit of the title, so this gave my fans and followers a little more information for them to guess the title.
Then I did a full cover reveal, which obviously meant a title reveal as well—in this case A FURNACE FOR YOUR FOE.
After the various reveals and until the launch date, I posted every day a very brief excerpt (just a sentence or two) from the book. I used Canva to create an image that showed the book cover on the right with an image of a ring of fire on the left, and then just copied that each day and put that day’s excerpt inside the ring. I used Canva’s Twitter template because Twitter post-sized images seem to work well on Facebook whereas Facebook post-sized images don’t seem to work well on Twitter. Using the same image each day not only made my life easier, but it also provided nice branding consistency.
First in Series PromosPromoting the first book in the Ann Kinnear Series, THE SENSE OF DEATH, was really the centerpiece of my promotion efforts—and I suspect that will be true no matter how many Ann Kinnear books I publish.
I was thrilled to get a BookBub Featured Deal for TSOD, which ran on April 18, about a week before the launch of Book 4, and was very pleased with the results. You can hear about them in the personal update segment of Episode 075 - Key Book Publishing Paths with Jane Friedman, and also in a blog post on theindyauthor.com. I’ll include a link in the show notes. https://www.theindyauthor.com/blog/results-of-2021-04-18-bookbub-featured-deal
When I applied for the Featured Deal, I let BookBub know I was flexible on my days but having the Featured Deal for TSOD run about a week before the launch of AFFYF worked out pretty much perfectly, because except for the very fastest readers, Book 4 would be available by the time they had read through Books 1, 2, and 3.
I applied for several other email promo sites and was just not that impressed with the results. I’d love to find out how many readers you reach with these newsletters that aren’t already subscribed to BookBub. I think that I would apply for placement in those other promotion sites in the future if I didn’t get a BB FD slot, but if I did, I might not bother.
If promo sites is something you want to look into for your own launch, you can find lists of the best sites—and which are bests for various genres--on Reedsy and on the websites of Nicholas Erik, The Alliance of Independent Authors, and David Gaughran, and I’ll include links to those in the show notes.
https://blog.reedsy.com/book-promotion-services/
https://nicholaserik.com/promo-sites/
https://selfpublishingadvice.org/best-self-publishing-services/
https://davidgaughran.com/best-promo-sites-books/
Deprioritizing Bookstore Sales
I have pretty much completely deprioritized bookstore sales in my business plan. The COVID restrictions made this path even more a no-brainer for me, but I believe I would have pursued this even without that consideration.
For one thing, consignment arrangements carry a huge administrative overhead for the store—I just recently got this notice from one of the stores that used to carry my books on consignment:
Due to the large number of requests we have received from local authors in the past few years, we have been overwhelmed with the administrative work this program requires. In addition, Ingram Publishing has become an easy way for customers to order these self-published books. In 2020, we have been forced to really examine the way we do business and have changed our staffing, store hours, events and inventory. As a result, with sadness, we have decided to discontinue our consignment program.
As they point out, any bookstore can order your books as long as you have them on Ingram—no store is going to order from Amazon—so deprioritizing bookstore-related activities doesn’t mean you’re giving up those sales. I do periodically remind my social media followers that this is an option for them. I also point them to Bookshop.org, which not only makes my print books available on a platform that benefits indy bookstores, but also means I get an affiliate commission if people buy books from my Bookshop store. (You don’t have to be an author to set up a store on Bookshop and earn affiliate commissions.)
However, for me, that’s a tiny percentage of my sales, and I don’t feel it’s worth my time trying to pester busy bookstore buyers into stocking my books … and it’s an even worse cost-to-earnings ratio to try to arrange in-person bookstore events. It’s not that I wouldn’t do these if invited, but I see them as more of a community outreach than sales-focused effort.
For a countering viewpoint, check out Episode 020 - Working with Libraries & Bookstores with Mark Leslie Lefebvre
However, for the second time I used a launch approach to involve indy bookstores that has worked out well: I contacted bookstores with whom I had an established relationship and told them that if they were interested in stocking my book—which they could order through Ingram—I would mention them in my Facebook Live event. I got four stores that expressed interest.
LibrariesAlthough I have, at least for now, deemed the benefit of placement in bookstores not to be commensurate with the effort involved, I do actively pursue placement in libraries. All my ebooks are available to libraries via Overdrive and other library platforms, which I use D2D to reach, and they can order my print books via Ingram.
In what is probably my longest-running experiment on promotion approaches, every weekday I send emails to about 35 libraries—that’s one screen’s worth of rows in Excel—letting them know about my latest book. I would never prioritize this if I had to research the library contacts myself, but I purchased a database of over 6000 library contacts from Eric Simmons—I’ll include a link in the show notes. (https://www.eseinc1.com/post/library-contacts-database-helps-author-close-20-libraries) I’ve created a template in Gmail, and I send an individual email to each person, meaning I just need to copy in the email address and name from the spreadsheet. I’m not using my email service, MailChimp, because I haven’t gotten permission from the library contacts to email them and so I would be violating the MailChimp terms of service.
The content of the email is basically:
- A personalized greeting and the announcement of the latest book
- A link to a page on my website that provides them with the information, such as ISBNs, for all my books
- One image showing all the books in the series I’m promoting, with the latest book larger than the others
- A note that “William Kingsfield Publishers believes in making its books available to libraries, and if you run into any problems accessing my books via your acquisition system, please let me know so I can follow up with the appropriate distributor.”
- A list of books in the series I’m promoting with reviewer quotes. I understand that libraries value quotes from established review platforms over author blurbs and reader reviews, so where I have a Kirkus quote, I use that. Since at the moment I don’t have any reviews for AFFYF, I’m using the book description for that one.
One of the reasons I feel this is worth my time is that I’m charging $29.99 for my ebook novels. This is more than most indies charge, but way less than most trad publishers charge, and I think there’s no reason that indies can move their prices to be more in line with those prices, assuming you have a high-quality product. I’ve made about $325 from sales from Overdrive this year—Overdrive being one of the primary library systems. If I divide $325 by the time I’ve spent sending the emails, it’s probably not yet a very profitable time investment yet, but I figure that there are still lots of librarians who may not heed my first or second email but who will take notice when they receive the third or fourth email, and that my profit from the library sales will continue to build over time.
It’s possible to earn royalties not only from libraries purchasing a copy of your ebook or print book, but there are also per checkout models. I’m signed up for these where possible, but I have to admit that this is something I need to investigate further to fully understand what benefit I’m getting from those.
Launch Day
Pre-COVID, I used to hold launch parties at Kildare’s Irish Pub in West Chester, PA, but in view of social distancing considerations, I moved the October 2020 launch of Ann Kinnear Book 3: THE FALCON AND THE OWL to Facebook Live, and I don’t know if I’ll be going back. The in-person party was fun—definitely more a socializing event than a sales event, although I did make a fair number of sales—but the logistics were difficult. Just getting the books to the venue was a huge pain.
The online event was much easier logistically—in fact, as I mentioned earlier, I didn’t have *any* books to wrangle. And it’s not only easier for me—it’s easier for fans, too. It’s a lot easier—although admittedly not quite as exciting—for a fan or follower to set aside half an hour to join the event from the comfort of their own home than to set aside the time to get to and from an in-person event. And I can involve people who live far away and would never be able to attend an in-person event.
However, as easy as an online event is, be sure to budget plenty of time for it. I spent a *lot* of time planning and scripting out the event.
You should also be sure you set aside time—and energy—on the day of the event. I had accidentally booked a podcast interview recording on my launch day, and I was so glad when the guest discovered he was double booked and asked to move the interview. I also had to contend with the fact that I usually allocate a good chunk of my Mondays to finalizing the podcast episodes, which go out early on Tuesdays, so a Monday launch wasn’t ideal. However, I was using one of my monthly Full Moon Giveaway Facebook Live events as the launch celebration, and the full moon wasn’t going to conveniently move to another day.
I actually recorded a version of this episode the day after the launch, when I was still scrambling to take care of the post-even tasks, and when I listened to it, I realized that it was so lacking in energy that I really needed to re-record it.
Back to the event itself … here are some tips:
- I fully scripted out the event, not only because I didn’t want to ramble, but also because I wanted to make sure it came in under 30 minutes. I have a goal to work toward doing these types of event with just notes, not a full script, but it will be an evolution. One trick I used to at least make it a little less obvious that I was reading was that I made the right and left margins of my document very wide—2 ½ inches—so that my eyes just had to move back and forth across a narrow strip of text as I scrolled using my mouse wheel. I also highlighted key phrases to, ideally, enable me to just glance at the phrase and know what I needed to say in that section.
- I enlist my husband as the co-host so that he can pop appropriate information and links into the comments during the event. We also have a shared Google Doc open so that he can type message or convey questions to me without me having to click around in the Facebook Live window.
- I used the standard intro that I’ve developed for my monthly Full Moon giveaway events: identifying me and my work, mentioning the giveaway and that winners will be announced at the end.
- Mentioned where attendees can get the book. The purchase options that I emphasized during the Facebook Live event were:
- The four indy bookstores who had agreed to carry the book
- Buy the ebook direct via PayHip – This was a good option because most of the people who were attending the event were already fans and followers, and I think they are the ones who are most willing to buy direct—check out Episode 076 - BookFunnel with Damon Courtney for more on that.
- Ebook, regular print, and large print on “all the usual retail platforms”
- Book2Read link that would take readers to all the major online retailers
- Affiliate links to the two print editions on Amazon
- Bookshop.org for print (because I sent them to my Bookshop store, I would also earn affiliate income from these sales)
- Mentioned the various platforms where readers can contact or interact with me.
- Gave some background on the settings of my books.
- Discussed the setting of AFFYF.
- Discussed the development of the cover, and the evolution of the series covers over time.
- Shared the book’s sales description.
- Set an expectation about the length of the event, and the fact that, in service of keeping it to half an hour, I wouldn’t be addressing all the questions during the event (just the ones that my husband typed into the shared Google doc), but that I would reply to all of them after the event wrapped up.
- Read two excerpts. I had color coded the dialogue so I could instantly tell which character was speaking even if the dialogue tag wasn’t until the end of the sentence.
- Did a shorter version of the information I shared at the beginning of the event, and let attendees know that I’m open to participating in virtual book clubs.
- Announced the giveaway winners.
- Reminded them of the date of the next Full Moon event.
If you want to check out the Facebook Live launch event, I’ll include a link in the show notes.
https://www.facebook.com/510214485754858/videos/175742877742212
Other Details
- Set up a Google Alert for the book’s title.
- Update your bio as appropriate. (I keep a list of all the places my bio appears so that I don’t miss any.)
Things I Didn’t Do
- Press releases – These are a huge time suck, and although I’ve done them for a few past launches, I don’t know that I ever got any results that made the time worthwhile. In fact, I’ve pretty much discarded the whole media kit idea, of which press releases are usually a part. I do maintain a Press Kit page on mattydalrymple.com and theindyauthor.com where I provide my bio, author photos, social media links, and topics on which I can give talks or presentations.
- Submit to reviewers – Jamie McCrone and I had a really good discussion about this in Episode 049 - Ruminations on Book Launches with James McCrone. Jamie spent quite a bit of time researching reviewers and soliciting reviews—and he got some great ones—but I reluctantly decided not to invest the time. My primary reason is that I have great reviews for the early books in the series, and I’m mainly focused on driving readers to Book 1 in the hope that they will read through the whole series, so I’m not convinced that a great review for Book 4 will be as valuable to me. And those reviews like Kirkus not only take time but also cost money to get so that’s another consideration. However, this is something I’m going to rethink for every launch.
- Solicit guest post opportunities – Again, I judged that the time I would spend tracking down these opportunities, not to mention writing the posts, could better be spent elsewhere, although I did get a few guest post invitations along the way. If guest posting is something you want to pursue, be sure to check out Episode 027 - Why to Stop Blogging ... and What to Do Instead with Pauline Wiles.
- Book trailer – I’ve actually gotten pretty proficient at creating book trailers using (believe it or not) PowerPoint, and I really enjoy doing them, but I just couldn’t justify the time investment.
- Distribution of promo codes – I’m still struggling with the logistics of how to do this—if I had a process in place, I would totally have spent time on using promo codes to try to get readers to some of my more underutilized platforms, like Apple and Google Play.
What I Did Instead
- Continued my focus on Facebook Ads for the first book in the series
- Continued building up my social media presence and followers, especially through my relatively new private Facebook Group, Matty Dalrymple Readers Group. To hear the conversation that inspired me to set up the group, check out Episode 066 - From Indy to Traditional with Jason Kasper
I’m not entirely comfortable with this approach because I am putting a lot of my promotional and reader outreach eggs in the Facebook basket, so I’m continually reassessing other platforms I can use to provide a safety net.
For book marketing in general, I’d like to follow the example of technology companies that set aside a certain amount of time for their employees to work on projects completely unassociated with their assigned work. For each book launch, I’d like to try out an approach that I haven’t used before, or that I used before but that didn’t work out for me then but give it a different spin. For example, I don’t see myself ever doing a traditional press release, but I’m sure that someone is going to come up with a less onerous manual process to let interested media platforms know about a new book, and I’d certainly be willing to give that a try. If you know of such a platform, please let me know!
Links
See the transcript above for the links I referenced during the podcast (you may need to expand Click Here to Read More to see them all.
For more on my fiction works, click here: https://www.mattydalrymple.com/
For more on my fiction works, click here: https://www.mattydalrymple.com/
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