How to Relaunch Your Self-Published Book

In my last blog post, we looked at why you might decide to relaunch your self-publishing book and how it could benefit you to do so. There are many situations that might call for a second attempt at launching a book, even if it was at least partially successful the first time. We will be quickly reviewing some of these at the start of this blog post to refresh your memory (or bring you up to speed if you didn’t read the first blog post). However, this blog post will mainly focus on how to relaunch your book once you have decided to, thinking about where to start and how to create a plan to achieve your goals.

So, why would you want to relaunch your book? There are several possible reasons that would make a relaunch a beneficial option for your book. Firstly, you may well have grown as an author since you originally published your book and now be able to make various improvements to it. For example, while you can make simple edits such as correcting spelling and grammar (or hire a professional editor to do it for you), you can also go further by making more substantial edits. You might decide to rewrite whole sections of your book, remove some parts that you don’t think work and add others that help the overall plot. It can help to break your book down into sections to see what needs work, what can go and what could be added.

Another reason to relaunch your book might be to take advantage of current events. If you have a self-help book, it might tie in well with current events, leading to a boost in sales. A novel can be relaunched when a particular genre is popular. You can also relaunch your book with a new cover that you feel better reflects current buying trends and the genre or is just more attractive to potential buyers. Another possibility is you have just got the rights back for your book. If your book was originally taken on by a traditional publisher, they may have only had the rights for a limited period of time. When this expires, you might want to relaunch your book by self-publishing it.

Explain to Readers

One of the most important things to bear in mind when relaunching your book is to explain to your readers that this copy is a revised version of your old book and why you are releasing it. Make sure your readers know that it is a relaunch of a previous book, as you don’t want to risk them buying the same book twice without knowing – this could get you negative reviews and cause your existing readership to move away from your work. This is also a good reason to keep the title the same, or at least similar enough that people will recognise it. However, readers may decide to buy it anyway, if you have a reason for the relaunch that would justify this and you have explained this reasoning in the introduction.

In your new introduction, you will want to explain the reason for the revision. Obviously, what you put in here will very much depend on why you have relaunched and revised your book, but you should make your readers want to buy your book. Make it clear what the earlier version was missing, why you think it needs including or updating, and how you have done this. If it is a nonfiction book, there are often very clear reasons to relaunch it. For example, research is constantly moving on and giving new results, which it makes sense to include. Even for fiction books, you can point out that your writing has improved since you first started out and you have revised your book accordingly.

Plan

The other thing to have prepared before you relaunch your self-published book is a plan of how you will do this. To start with, you will need to actually have whatever you need done for the relaunch, which might be editing, a new cover design, or a complete rewrite. Once you have this, it’s time to focus on starting some marketing before you actually release the book. This ensures that some people should be ready to buy it on launch day, giving you an instant sales boost and making sure your book rises in the search results.

You will also want to make sure that you have your logistics planned out. For example, you do not want to get to the stage where you have revised your book and realise you have no way to get it to readers. If you are only having an ebook, make sure it is formatted correctly for the selling platform you are using and uploaded ready to go. If you are also having a print book, you will need to organise printing and distribution.

Wrapping Up

I hope that this helps you to relaunch your self-published book, as this is often a great way to boost your sales and refresh your author image. In my next blog post, we will be looking at why you need multiple editors for your book, so come back in two weeks for that!

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