In this blog post, I’m going to share my 3 reasons why you should plan your book launch.
1. It lets people know you are publishing a book.
Knowing you have a book for sale won’t guarantee sales, but if people don’t know you have a book for sale, then I can guarantee that it won’t sell. Amazon is a massive marketplace with several million books for sale at any given time, and if that is the only place that your book is published, then if you don’t make an effort to promote your book, Amazon won’t either.
There are alternatives to publishing on Amazon, but this is the biggest marketplace and easiest to use.
2. It lets people know when your book is live.
As with any product on Amazon, it keeps track of how many people have bought a specific product and keeps charts of what sells. You can see the top sellers in any given range when you search and this influences what people buy. There’s a certain amount of risk buying online but when you see that a lot of people are buying a specific product (and have given it good reviews) then people trust that it’s a product worth buying.
The same applies to books.
Every hour, Amazon updates its bookselling charts to show what the current bestsellers are. This means that if, when your book goes live and a lot of people buy it, then there’s a good chance your book will get into the bestseller charts. Once you do this, then Amazon takes an interest.
The problem is, even when you upload your print book, you won’t know when it goes live. Amazon says it can take up to 72 hours before a print book goes live, however, with the lockdown, it’s taking more like a week, and that’s if there are no problems with the book or the book cover.
Your book is only live when Amazon says it is.
For this reason, you can only send out links for people to buy your book when it’s live, so when you plan your launch, you need to take this into account.
3. It lets people know where they can buy your book.
When you self publish, you don’t have as many options to distribute your book as traditional book publishers, but you still have options.
You can order a print run and have books delivered to you to distribute and sell or you can use print on demand websites like Amazon and LuLu.
You also have a choice of where you sell your book, for example: via a Kickstarter launch, via Amazon, via your website, at conferences and networking events and via book signings.
So when you launch your book, you need to let people know how they can get hold of a copy of your book.
So, why do you need to launch your book? Because you want it to sell.