Well, that's a long title for a
blog post. That bodes ill for the length of the post itself. But let's dive
into my experience with my latest novel, Flickers.
About this
time last year I signed up for Tim Grahl's Launch A Bestseller course. Grahl is a book marketing
expert, he's an authentic & trustworthy voice on the internet because
he tells it like it is and he has a good background in the publishing industry
and in getting books of a variety of types onto various bestseller
charts. His website is here.
Flickers, my middle grade suspense novel, was
going to be out in just about a year and since his course suggested a
nine-month program to prepare for launch day it was perfect timing for me to
get me some "bestselling" learning. I ante'd up the money and dove
in. All I'd every really done in terms of a national launch was
to post on Facebook or Twitter when the cover was released then post again
on the actual day the book came out. I, too, would dutifully inform my email
newsletter subscribers. And I'd do an in person launch in my local
bookstore. But this course forced me to have a plan.
I won't go
into great detail about the contents of the course other than the focus was to
reach out to influencers (people you know or would like to know in the
industry), to build your email "following" and then really aim at
promoting the book for the final month before it was released. The idea is that
you want people to pre-order the book and therefore those sales, which have
been accumulating for a few weeks, will all count on book release day and that
will place your book higher in a variety of in-store lists across the country
and launch you onto the national bestseller lists (charts, of course, work
differently in different stores, from Amazon to Indigo to independent stores and
quite differently in different countries). Because this was the Canadian
release I was only concentrating on selling the book in Canada (it is not yet
available in any other countries)
I gave away
free "goodies" to anyone who pre-ordered (my goodies included a PDF
about the creation of the book, a director's cut chapter, audio of the
first chapter & a thank you video). My email list was 1300 at the time,
Facebook friends was at around 5000, and Twitter at 15,000. Of those people
only 42 signed up for the pre-order goodies. That was much lower than I
expected but you do have to remember that those 42 are my superfans and many of
them were purchasing multiple copies. They went into a variety of stores across
the country (or online) and ordered the book which meant that the stores
would order more copies. I also did find out that many (I didn't have an
adequate way to poll this) ordered the books but didn't bother with the
freebies (some said they didn't want any aspect of the story spoiled by
spoilers that might be in the giveaway).
As I said, my normal launch modus operandi was to mention the
book once in awhile online then a few times on the actual day it was
released. What all of this pre-sales "talk" did was allowed me
to stretch out that promo and create more buzz than usual. I was also going to
be launching the "real" book at a theatre in front of about 500
students (that deserves another post) and had set up a website so that parents
could pre-order the book (this also added to pre-sales, of course).
The book debuted at #4 on the
juvenile bestseller lists for Independent Bookstores. It did get momentum
because two weeks later it was the #10 book overall on that same list (overall
means that it was competing against all the books in the bookstore). I couldn't
track sales in Chapters but on Amazon.ca it went as low as 500 overall (Amazon
doesn't add up the pre-sales on launch day, it just keeps track of them as they
are bought, so it's harder to go up the charts). And I won't get the
actual number of copies sold until my publisher sends me my royalty statements.
So I'm left
with a bit of a jumbled study. And there's no way to measure this against past
success because, well, I wasn't so good at measuring past success. Plus, I
would have to launch the exactly same book without the promo. I am mostly
certain that none of my novels had made the top ten overall list before. So I'm
very happy with that. I also have the support of HarperCollins Canada and their
mighty sales team, so my sense is that their "sales" heft along with
my own launch program gave the book its best chance possible to succeed.
Things I
learned in no particular order:
1).
Launching a book is work. From writing emails, to contacting bookstores, to
building my subscriber base for my newsletter. It was very time consuming. But
all that work paid dividends now and will continue to do so in the future.
2) Put on
your "sales" hat in a clever way. There's nothing more boring than an
author shouting "buy my book." So I was often looking for new ways to
get that information across. And, at the same time, trying to be genuinely
helpful to people.
3) Your fans
don't mind hearing from you more than once. My newsletter usually
comes out once a month but I sent eight emails in the six weeks leading up to
launch day (first teasing the "goodie" pre-sale, then promoting it,
and finally sending out a launch day email). I did lose subscribers (which is
normal), but generally readers were excited by my excitement, so to speak, and
understood that the emails would slow down once the book was out.
4) Launch
Teams are a great help. I formed a launch team by asking for
"joiners" on social media and my email list. Their only duties
were to post about the book two days before it came out and again on launch
day. I made a "share" page so that
they didn't even have to write the posts (in other words I wanted to make it as
easy as possible for them to share). And I sent them reminders on those days,
so they didn't have to put it in their calendars. 46 people signed up and those
posts were instrumental in getting the word out and building buzz.
5) I now
have a great template for my next book launch. Ummm...I better start writing
that book. Now!
Overall, I'm
pleased with what I learned from the course and how I was able to apply it specifically
to my book launch. I'll continue to use the method that
I learned, tweaking it here and there.
Thanks for
tuning in. As I said I can't be entirely sure about my sales numbers until I
get my royalty statement from HarperCollins. And I'll be waiting with
baited (or is it booked?) breath until that day.
No comments:
Post a Comment