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Speaking of spondoolicks, one of the best ways of generating author income is releasing new books, of course. But that means they can be stressful affairs also.
Aside from the authorial head-gunk that typically accompanies the birth of book baby, the stakes can get higher and higher as your career progresses – either through adding more elements to the launch or simply spending more money with an eye on making a bigger splash.
This week we are looking at launch week itself – the bit where the rocket goes boom, as I said in Part 1 of this trilogy of emails. (Part 2 is here if you also missed that).
It’s Showtime!
After all the careful preparation (see Parts 1 and 2 above!), launch week is finally here. Let’s take a look at how that might play out, looking at the two different launch plans we had in that opening episode – one for Amazon-exclusive authors, and one for my wide brethren.
My hypothetical KU writer had this pricing structure to launch their Book 4:
- Book 1 – 99c countdown
- Book 2 - $1.99 countdown
- Book 3 - $2.99 countdown
- Book 4 - $2.99 launch week discount, rising to regular price of $4.99
And my imaginary wide author was launching a Book 5 as follows:
- Book 1 – free (+ staying there afterwards to become a permafree)
- Book 2 – 99c manual discount
- Book 3 – $2.99 manual discount
- Book 4 – $4.99 regular price
- Book 5 – $4.99 regular price
Those pricing decisions are tailored to the respective circumstances of the authors. KU peeps can be more price aggressive and avail of Countdowns, but my wider friends have some extra flexibility around pricing and can do things like piggyback on this launch to essentially re-launch their Book 1 as a permafree – a decision which makes more sense as a series gets longer.
Note: launch plans like this are never, ever meant to be proscriptive. You should adapt them to your own circumstances. For example, you could be a lot more price aggressive for the KU launch, and a lot more conservative for the wide launch. You could use free with the KU plan. You could avoid it with the wide plan. You could tweak some of the prices on later books in the series too. You will need to weigh up the options yourself because it’s always a trade-off: i.e. deeper discounts = higher traffic and stronger conversion… but lower revenue per sale.
People might have different goals around launches. You might be launching a new series and more concerned with building audience. Or you might be wrapping up a long series and cashing out. In our examples here, our goal is my default one with any marketing plan: I want Amazon to take over and do the selling for me.
Which means I’m aiming to string together several days of consistent sales – rising, if anything – which I hope will trigger Amazon’s recommendation engine to the point where it starts emailing readers and recommending it on-site too. With any luck, this should make the book sticky in the charts. At some level. For a bit, at least.
I never expect launch week ranks to be maintained, but I would like the book(s) to bed in somewhere nice and hang around for a while – because that’s when you make the real money.
To achieve that goal, I will be divvying up my launch budget accordingly – which we 100% arbitrarily decided last time was $1500, which might (also arbitrarily) break down as $200 on promo sites, $500 on BookBub Ads and $800 on Facebook Ads.
More important than that particular split is how it is spread over the launch week itself. Just taking our wide plan for a moment as an example, there are a couple of ways you can spread your juice.
One simple way might be as follows:
Day 1: First part of mailing list.
Day 2: Second part of mailing list.
Day 3: BookBub Ads.
Day 4: Facebook Ads.
Day 5: Facebook Ads.
I’ve done plenty of launches in this manner, but I personally prefer doing a little bit of everything on each day – I just find it’s easier to achieve some level of consistent sales, and to plug any holes that can pop up.
For example, you might have a problem with one of your sends (or one of your list swaps might go dark). Or maybe your Facebook Ads get caught in review. Or perhaps your BookBub Ads don’t get the results you are expected.
The specifics aren’t so important here, just know that something like this will often crop up in a launch, and the more money you are spending, the more books you are pushing, the more elements you have in your launch plan will greatly increase the chances of something going wrong.
Which means I plan for something to go wrong and will have a couple of things up my sleeve to address any imbalance. (Usually something like $100 of BookBub spend kept in reserve, or a re-send to my list that I can drop any time.)
Launch plans can get complex with this approach! If you have taken my course Starting From Zero you would have seen these two launch plans before (along with a lot more detail on how they are built and executed), but let me wheel them out here again, as they are good examples and I’m feeling quite lazy today.
This is a basic enough launch plan for a Book 3 – showing where you might drop in things like BookBub or Facebook Ads.
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