Mastering Market Preparation: Boost Your Book Launch Success with These Key Strategies

Mastering Market Preparation: Boost Your Book Launch Success with These Key Strategies

One of the biggest mistakes indie authors make is to think marketing only starts a couple of weeks before publication date. Focusing on the book first and marketing afterwards is a recipe for the kind of launch that lifts a few feet in the air and then falls over with a plop. For real book launch success, your marketing campaign should start no later than on completion of your first draft. It should run alongside the publication process, which takes around 18 months from first draft to publication date.

Here are nine key strategies to help you run a successful book launch and marketing campaign.   

1.    Know your “why” and your target reader.

Before you even think about a marketing campaign, you need to know who you’ll be marketing to and why you want them to buy your book. So, the very first thing you need to be clear on is your “why”: the reason why you wrote the book and why you want people to read it. It could be that you simply want to make a living from writing bestsellers. It could also be that you have a specific insight to share with the world. Or maybe you want to help people. Or maybe the book is mainly a way to build your professional reputation and boost your primary career or business.

Whatever your “why”, this informs everything else. Most importantly, it helps you identify your target reader. You need to know who you want to buy your book so that you can tailor not only your marketing campaign but the book itself to them.

2.    Get a good support team.

Anyone who’s ever successfully self-published a book will tell you that it’s hard work. Much harder than you expected. If you can’t devote all your time and attention to your book for the next year or two – and even if you can – what you need is a good support team. This is why indie authors are increasingly looking for hybrid publishers who have the right industry knowledge, know the best editors and designers and proofreaders and marketing professionals, and can share the burden of creating and marketing the book. A good support team uses their expertise to guide you through the process and will bring insights you may never have thought of.

3.    Do a competitive analysis.

When you do a competitive analysis, you research where your book will fit into the marketplace. In other words, you look at what genre – or genres – your book would fall under, what similar titles are available, which ones are doing well and why, which ones aren’t doing well and why, what kind of cover designs are popular, what sizes and formats are most popular in the genre, and how much the books are selling for. The findings of your competitive analysis will help guide every decision you’ll be making about your book, going forward, and help you identify what it is that will make your book stand out in a crowded field.  

4.    Become active on social media.

While your manuscript is with an editor, you have about four to six weeks to start building your brand as an author. This is a great time to start becoming active on social media. So, if you don’t have them already, create social media profiles under your pen name. If you find the idea of being active on four or five different platforms overwhelming, focus on one or two that you feel more comfortable with but that your target readers also use. For a business book, for example, you’ll definitely need a profile on LinkedIn. For a book about food or travel, you might want to focus on a more visual platform like Instagram.

Whichever platform you choose, don’t simply create a profile and then never post anything. You don’t need to post every day but you should try to post at least once a week. What should you post about? That’s up to you, really, but it needs to feel authentic. If every post is about your book, your target readers will quickly see that your profile is really just a marketing gimmick and you’ll lose them. So, instead of always posting about your book, post with your book in mind. There might be an interesting article that relates to a theme in your book and that you’d like to share. Or maybe you come across an old photograph from the time period your book is set in. Be creative and keep things varied. Also comment on other posts to build up a social media presence. However, always be mindful of the brand you’re trying to build: You don’t want a single ill-conceived post or comment to ruin your reputation.     

5.    Plan a cover design.

When your manuscript comes back from the editor, you need to do rewrites as necessary. At the same time, though, you need to start thinking about what you want your book to look like. Having an expert on your support team who can read your manuscript and draft a cover design brief will save you time and help you find the design that’s most like to appeal to your target market.

It takes about four to six weeks for a cover designer to create some cover design concepts. During this time, you can brief the interior design and layout of your book too. [Check out this recent blog article where we review Jessica Bell's latest book on cover design.]

6.    Get the right people to review and endorse your book.

While you wait for the layout of your book and the cover design to be completed, you should start thinking of who you’d like to review and endorse your book. Ideally, they should be people who are respected in the field that your book is about or among your target readers, so that an endorsement from them will lend credibility to your work. Once your book comes back from the designer, you can then arrange for advance copies to be sent to these reviewers and endorsers. You may find it useful to send them a questionnaire to find out what they liked and disliked about the book, and why. This will make it easier to find concise quotes that you can use on the cover and in your marketing materials.

7.    Get together good marketing materials.

While your book is being proofread and the final touches added, you need to increase your marketing activities. For this, you’ll need excellent marketing materials. These include a synopsis and sales copy for distribution to vendors, as well as professionally taken photographs of you as the author as well as of the book itself – or a mock-up of it. You also need graphics you can use for social media posts, for instance for the cover reveal. These graphics can include images of the book cover, along with quotes from the book and endorsements. And you need to update your website and your author profile on sites like Amazon and Goodreads, adding the title of the book and the publication date.

8.    Increase the buzz as launch day approaches.

The closer you’re getting to launch day, the more intense the buzz should be around your book. One way to create a sense of anticipation is to do a countdown on social media, always making sure you include an image of the cover design so that your target readers will immediately recognize the book once it’s out. Another way to increase the buzz is to reach out to the media, podcasters, influencers and the like and to try to get them to give you coverage. Be aware of their lead times, though: For magazines, lead times are usually months in advance, so the interview you do with them today might only appear in three months’ time.

9.    Keep the momentum after launch day.

Everything you did for the past year or two was leading up to this: your book launch. However, the work doesn’t stop after launch day. You need to keep the momentum going in order to boost sales.

You can start by, the day after the launch, posting on social media, preferably with a picture or two of the launch itself and information on where to find the book. You can also offer special discounts to encourage more people to buy the book and leave those all-important reviews on sites like Amazon.

10. Keep revising your marketing strategy.

Throughout the time leading up to your book launch as well as during the post-launch period, it’s important to remember that a marketing campaign should never be set in stone. Your strategy should be adaptable, and you should frequently revisit it to see what’s working and what isn’t.

A great marketing strategy is to keep up with current events and look for opportunities to link what’s happening in the news with your book. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the resulting protests in 2020, for instance, books about race shot up the bestseller lists. If you can find ways to leverage current affairs in your book marketing efforts, for instance with a well-timed social media post or podcast interview, your book just might become the sleeper hit of the season.

Interested in hearing more about this topic? Listen to Boni and John Wagner-Stafford of Ingenium Books discuss the Power of Preparation in Publishing in this episode of The Ingenium Books Podcast.