What to Do After You Click Publish
Hint: Don’t Just Write Another Book
Whether it’s the first book or the twelfth, most authors feel a degree of trepidation when they publish a book. After months or years of work and sometimes a lot of money spent, the moment has finally arrived when you can finally start to see returns on that investment.
But especially for first-time authors who don’t have an established fanbase,the moment can be anticlimactic. Sure, you book is on Amazon, BN, Apple, or on the shelf, where it can be found by incredible volumes of people, but most likely you’ll have to expend some time and energy to get anyone to notice it.
This short post is meant to be a crash course in ebook marketing, a 30-day plan to best take advantage of the key “new-release” window after a book is first-published.
Assuming your book is already fully decked out with links to your email list, Facebook page, or website, putting you in position to begin accumulating fans, the task at hand is to start finding readers and getting your work read. It’s often said that the thing to do after finishing one book is immediately write another, which isn’t a bad idea, but simply releasing more work won’t help you overcome the primary obstacle authors face: obscurity.
And the clock is ticking. One way of looking at the new-release window on retailer sites is that they’re evaluating your book during that time to determine its viability. If you can quickly establish a strong sales record and a number of supportive reviews, effectively locking in its appeal for customers even if some negative reviews follow, you may benefit by being promoted within Amazon’s algorithms or elsewhere. The sooner you can demonstrate this kind of appeal and create steady sales, the better the book will do even when you’re primarily focused on writing or marketing other material.
Task #1 after you click publish is to work on getting reviews for your product pages. Give yourself a goal, say ten or a dozen (often the minimum for submissions to ebook sites), and then work at reaching people who will review by any means necessary. Running giveaways through Goodreads and LibraryThing is one way. Getting onto NetGalley is another. Send tweets or messages to readers you know who might be interested. If this kind of promotion makes you uncomfortable, think about what the Big 5 publishers do: they send out untold copies of new books to an established group of blogger/reviewers. If those reviewers keep being supportive, they continue to get copies. If they prove unhelpful, the review copies stop coming. You need to pursue reviews with the same ruthlessness and dedication that it took to write your book.
At the same time, kicking off your release with a sale for a low price can help induce your first sales. If you’re going for maximum exposure and want to get your book into as many hands as possible, making your book free with KDP Select can be an option, especially if you want to hook fans onto a series. But getting paid sales during the new-release window is ultimately the goal, so having your book sell for $0.99 is low enough for impulse buys to count.
While you’re getting reviews and hoping for organic sales, you’ll want to think about your marketing budget. The biggest development in the world of ebook promotion over the past year is the increasing dominance of the pay-to-play system of promoting. Showing up at forums, blasting tweets, or spamming Facebook pages was never likely to result in much traction, but now effective opportunities for that kind of self-promotion are virtually non-existent.
Establish a budget for promoting your book during this first 30 days. While we all have financial constraints, the money you spent getting your book edited and decked out with a cover needs to be followed up with some marketing money. You don’t need a six-figure budget for a book to give it the opportunity to reach readers, but you do need to experiment, track your results, and talk to other authors about what’s effective and what isn’t. Even playing around with Goodreads or Facebook ads to the tune of $5-10 for a few days can be a worthwhile test.
After having your book at a sale price for a few days, raise it back to what you plan for its normal price, and then once you have those reviews you can begin submitting to the various ebook promotional sites and plan another sale. The cost here can depend on your genre and the size of the site’s audience, with some ads costing only a few dollars and some north of four figures. Planning as far ahead as possible can be key when dealing with popular sites and competitive lists.
Additional options: play to your strengths. If you have an established blog, tap into it to promote your work. If you’ve got a great voice or a telegenic personality, maybe a Youtube channel could get you much-needed attention. Just like the creativity you put into your book, if you can display some of that in your marketing, it’s bound to get a response.
One more tactic that’s been popular recently is to team up with other authors in your genre to promote a box-set with 4-6 books and to offer them all at an extremely low price. Often these sets can race to the top of the charts and become a great focal point for you as an author, maybe even garnering accolades or highly-prized space on bestsellers lists.
At the end of the month, you should be able to identify at least a few areas that gave you results you’ll want to continue to pursue. Being an author means continuing to carry the enthusiasm for a story you got when you first thought of it all the way through to perspective buyers years after it’s been released.
