Once you have written and prepared your book for sale, you will need to start thinking about how you will launch it. Naturally, this is a very important part of being a self-published author, as you will need to be marketing your book as well and as much as possible. A good launch is an excellent marketing opportunity to help your book sales get started and increase its visibility to any other potential readers. Treat self-publishing your book as a business and make sure you invest as much time and money as you can allow to maximise sales in the long run.
This blog post will be looking at some ways you can make your launch as successful as possible. To do this, you will need to have a long-term plan in place to make sales don’t just peak on launch day and disappear after that. This requires a bit of planning, so you will need to work on some pre-launch tactics as well as having a strategy in place for after launch date.
We will start at the start – with pre-launch tactics. The majority of your pre-launch tasks should be about building interest and growing a community that will buy your book when it is released. There are a number of ways that you can do this, most of which will require you to have or create an online presence. We will take a look at some of these below.
Preparing Information
Before launching your book, it is a good idea to make sure you have all the information prepared. This will include the basic things such as the book title, description and genre. As well as this, you will need to select a couple of categories that your book fits into and then subcategorise further. The point of this is to ensure that your book is as visible on the selling platform as possible.
How does this work? Well, if you go to any online bookseller and look at how many titles they have in each category, you will see that it is often in the hundreds of thousands. Your book will most likely end up being lost in the crowd. However, if you keep narrowing your search down by using the subcategories, you will see that there aren’t as many results, giving your book a better chance of standing out.
Keywords
Similarly, make sure you have your keywords picked out. These are an important part of your book’s metadata and again allow it to be found by readers. The more easily your book can be found, the more people will view it and the more people will buy it. A keyword is not necessarily a single word relating to your book; instead, it may be a phrase describing it.
Keywords are based on what terms people might use to search for books like yours, whether this relates to the genre or the fact that it is self-published. Research what terms your target audience would use – these may not be the same as how you would write something. Start by looking in categories you will be listing your book in and see what keywords commonly come up in the sub-categories or on other books.
Another method is to start typing one part of a keyword you would like to use and seeing what is suggested. For example, typing in “mystery” may then give you suggestions in the drop-down list such as “murder mystery”, “crime thrillers and mystery” and “mystery books for kids”. You can then decide which of these apply to your book and add the best ones. If you are doing this from a website such as Amazon, which sells a lot of things other than books, remember to browse the appropriate category; otherwise, you might end up with a lot of irrelevant suggestions!
Keywords don’t have to be as vague as a genre – you can include places that appear in your novel, as well as the themes running through it. Always be as specific as possible – there are a lot of books set in France, so why not narrow it down to Paris? As with categories, the narrower your keywords are, the more chance there is of your book standing out.
Once you have gathered all your keywords, insert them wherever you can! This may just be in the metadata that sites use to categorise and list your book, but you might also be able to get some into your book description or use a review containing them if possible.
Landing Page
Another thing to think about is building a great landing page for your book. This may be an entire website devoted to your book or your author website in general. Either way, include links to this landing page in any marketing you can, such as on your social media or in any interviews or guest posts you do on other blogs. If you have a newsletter, send out the link here as well.
Your landing page should include a blurb or book description so that visitors can decide whether they would be interested. Try to really sell your book here, using the landing page to pitch your book to potential readers. Make sure you include links to buy the book from a number of different places, if available. If it is not on sale yet, include links to pre-order or be notified when the book is released. The more convenient you make things, the more likely you are to get sales.
Upload
The final step is to upload your book to all the online selling platforms you will be using, ready to go live on launch day. How far in advance you can do this will depend on the platforms you have chosen, so do check each one. Having your book ready to go makes your life much easier on launch day!
Wrapping Up
I hope that this has helped you with some pre-launch tactics for your book. We will be continuing this series in my next self-publishing blog post in two weeks, so come back then!
Want help proofreading your work? Contact Carmine Proofreading for a friendly, professional service from a qualified proofreader.
Email: CarmineProofreading@gmail.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CarmineProofed
Carmine Proofreading 
2 thoughts on “How To Launch Your Self-Published Book – Pre-Launch”