How I Launch A Book
Recently, a new-ish author asked me how I launch a new book, and a reader asked why I announced a new book on Facebook and sent out the new-release newsletter on different days.
Excellent questions! But I have a good reason for my new book launch procedure.
Before I explain, it is important to keep two points in mind.
POINT ONE: Different readers have different communication preferences. Some people love Facebook, and some people hate it. Some people have signed up for my new-release newsletter, and some people hate email. Some people visit my website frequently, and some people don’t even know I have a website. Some people hate Twitter, and some people seem to spend all day on it.
St. Paul wrote that he became all things to all men in order to reach some. That’s a good approach to take to communication channels.
POINT TWO: Amazon also has this thing called “velocity ranking”. To calculate a book’s sales rank, Amazon uses the book’s sales from within the current day, along with half of the sales from the previous day. That means it’s better to have book sales spread out rather than a single massive spike on one day.
For example, let’s say a book sells 200 copies over a three-day period. If a book sells 190 copies the first day, 5 copies the second day, and 5 copies the third day, it will have a lower Amazon sales rank on the fourth day than if it sold 65 copies on each of the three days. The rank would be higher on the first day, but it would drop quickly after that. But if it it sold 65 copies on each of those three days, the rank would be higher (and more stable) on the fourth day.
With those two points in mind, here is my three-phase procedure for announcing a new book.
PHASE ONE: As soon as the book goes live, I put up the link to it on my website in the “My Latest Book” section at the top of the right-hand column. My website typically gets two hundred to three hundred visitors a day, so that means there are a lot of eyeballs on the site, and some people click on the link to buy the books.
PHASE TWO: 24 hours after that, I post a link on my Facebook page. My Facebook page has about 1300 followers, so that means there are even more people on Facebook than on my website.
PHASE THREE: 24 hours after that, I send our my email newsletter. That gets more views than my website and Facebook combined, and that builds off the sales of the last two days.
It works pretty well, as you can see from this sales chart from the first three days of SEVENFOLD SWORD: NECROMANCER:
It reached a sales rank of #1600 and top 20 of the Military Fantasy category on Amazon US. That’s really hard to do without Kindle Unlimited, since all the other books in that category were either in Kindle Unlimited or by Brandon Sanderson.
Thanks everyone! I hope you enjoy SEVENFOLD SWORD: NECROMANCER, and I’m looking forward to starting SEVENFOLD SWORD: SHADOW in a few weeks.
-JM
Oh.
I subscribe to your web page newsfeed (for example, why I saw this post), but it doesn’t tell me when you update “Get my latest book.” So, since I’m not a frequent facebook user, I don’t get notification until the news letter comes out.
As a result, when I’m expecting a release of yours I want to read, about a week before you say it’ll come out (you tend to be pessimistic on the release day), I start refreshing an Amazon search for it every few hours until it appears. It’s kinda a pain in the ass. I keep planning on writing a Perl script to do it, hitting amazon every ten minutes with the search, and perhaps I’ll get to that someday.
In the meantime, any ideas on a better way to do it?
I usually do the blog post the day after the newsletter – I should have mentioned that in the original blog post.
Why don’t you do a blog post when you update “Get my latest book”?
But why not do the blog post when you update “Get my latest book”?
I might try that with CLOAK GAMES: BLOOD CAST next month and see what happens.