Sarah and I have worked through the first 27 days of Fiverr’s challenge to publish a book in 90 days. Now, we have to
plan a book launch. Just to recap, so far we’ve done:
- Keywords
- Descriptions
- Covers
- A fairly deep edit on her upcoming release
If you’re new around here, you can catch up with these links:
Plan a Book Launch
Naturally, after all the work we’ve done to this point, the next logical step is to plan a solid book marketing strategy to precede a successful book launch.
We are nearly halfway through the 90 days and we still haven’t set a launch date, so first things first, I need to get with Sarah and hash that out.
This is Sarah’s to-do list:
- Build an ARC team – hit your email list, social following, and if you do any videos, include a call-to-action
- Arrange newsletter swaps and group promos for your ARC team – if this doesn’t work out, that’s fine. We need those newsletter swaps and group promos for the launch
- Set a launch date
She settled on the beginning of June 2022.
Meeting with Jonny Andrews
If you’re a Book Rescue veteran, you’ve seen Jonny in action before. I brought him back to collaborate with Sarah.
Jonny is an online business strategist who has helped over 18,000 authors since 2011 to grow their reader bases and expand their author businesses to the tune of five, six, even seven figures.
Jonny: The big rule of everything is that you always need to be growing your subscriber base, always growing your social media fanbase, and then at the same time, always engaging with both.
What’s fun about this is you can use your email to promote your social and you can use your social to promote your email. It’s a symbiotic relationship.
So, we need to talk about a strategy that can be deployed consistently. There’s going to be times where that strategy is going to be deployed just to grow your stuff so you’re growing every single day.
At the same time, you’re also engaging. What you’re going to do is take your calendar and probably plan it…I would suggest a month out and plan it two weeks ahead of time. Look for holidays or mainstream reasons that could be fun for your followers. Maybe there’s a theme or something that makes sense.
Here’s the one question you need to answer again and again:What must I demonstrate to be true in order for people to want to buy my stuff?
Meeting with Jason Jones
Jason Jones is a publicist with over 20 ears experience in public relations. He’s worked with athletes and best-selling authors from all walks of life. He’s led over 11 different campaigns for New York Times best-selling titles. He’s giving Sarah the Publicist Starter Kit which includes his book Landing Local Media A 365-Day Forecast for Contacting Local Media, a list of contacts, and a 1-hour consult.
Jason: This is not a sprint. I know it sounds cliche to say that it’s a marathon, but it just is.
It just takes time. There’s so many books in the marketplace and you just have to stick it out.
We’ll get into talking about media and how to book some media and so some publicity. There’s a difference between that for fiction author and non-fiction authors, but the one thing that’s similar for each genre is it’s really about relationships.
It’s not rocket science. It’s relationships. It’s what I say all the time because it’s true. In relationships, they take investment; they take time. You’ve got to build trust and show up for people. That’s not something that happens overnight.
You write books and you invest in a fiction community of writers. You review other people’s books and you encourage them along the way. You take part in their journey and then all of a sudden, it’s much easier to call upon them to do that for you when the times comes.
The thing is, you have to dispatch yourself of the mindset that you’re trying to move a product, that this about selling books.
Instead, take hold of the mindset that you have something useful and valuable. You know information that is going to inform and entertain other people and there are people who will be interested, but not everyone.
Your audience isn’t everybody, so the idea is to find your audience and become an encouraging citizen of that community.
What to Do Without Jonny and Jason
You’re probably saying, “That’s all well and good, Dale, but I don’t have your contacts, so what do I do without a Jonny and a Jason?”
You don’t need a bunch of contacts to market and promote your book effectively. A network helps, but it’s not everything.
In the last post, I told Sarah about the 4 sites I go to for free and paid promotion opportunities.
We’re leveraging her email and social media.
On top of that, Fiverr has a wide array of marketing and promotion gigs. I don’t just tell you this because they sponsor Book Rescue. They really are an affordable solution for independent authors.
For example, SexyChallenges will promote your book across 4 different book blog sites.
Melrock, IsabelsBooks, and JoelBooks will share your publication across a range of sites and services, or you can get interviewed by Jasveena and leverage the exposure.
Get the full list of our fully vetted Fiverr professionals at https://dalelinks.com/list
Surprising Sarah is So Much Fun
Rather than pile this stuff on when I told Sarah about Jonny and Jason, I decided to wait and not ruin the moment.
First up, she’s getting access to another marketing tool, and that’s book awards. With a book award, she can lean on 3rd party credibility for getting more exposure and potentially more sales.
Of course, the next step was to introduce her to Hannah Jacobson from Book Award Pro.
Hannah: Today, I’d like to set you on the path to become an award-winning author, maybe even before publication. We’d like to really kick things off with a professional award nomination.
What this looks like from the perspective of Book Award Pro is we’ll complete a Submit Boost for your book. You’ll join the system, tell us a little bit about you and your book, and our system will match, target, and submit a professional award submission on your behalf.
At that point, you’ll actually have special news to share with your audience. We’ve got to get this going now because you could still submit an unpublished book.
We recommend doing so when your book feels 90 to 95% complete. When it starts to feel like a book, that’s the point we recommend that it’s ready to be presented to judges.
At the time your books feels complete and ready to share with an award judge, it’s ready to go into our system.
So, while we were feeling the positive vibes and good cheer, I figured it would be a good time to spring another surprise on Sarah.
She’s also getting a year of StoryOrigin which will allow her access to review copies. It has beta readers. You can distribute audiobook codes. Then, of course, there are newsletter swaps aplenty. StoryOrigin packs a ton of value in book marketing and is only $100 per year!
That’s not all!
Evan is planning to give Sarah a full consult on how to best leverage StoryOrigin and provide deeper insights into book marketing.
Would you like to eavesdrop a bit? I’ll see you for that next week!
Now It’s Time to Do Your Part
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