When publication day has passed...
Why your launch is only one part of your author marketing campaign
This is my final newsletter of 2023. I’m looking forward to coming back into your inbox in mid-January 2024, with more marketing ideas and stories from self-employed life. Have a wonderful Christmas if you celebrate, and see you next year!
When I worked in house, for most books, most of the time, our marketing model was built around the pre-release and launch periods. A lot of the work is focused on building pre-orders and early reviews, and then immediately post release, driving sales, making the most of any publicity that’s going on etc.
This happens for at least 3 reasons.
It’s how bookshops work. If a bookshop takes a book and it doesn’t sell through (ie, to the customer), it will get returned (and usually, pulped), so publishers are set up around trying to make sure that the books sell in the first few weeks and are therefore kept in stock for longer.
It’s how Nielsen Bookscan (which the Sunday Times bestseller charts are based on) works. Any books that are pre-ordered are counted toward the first week’s sales. So, if you sell 1000 copies in the months pre-release, and then another 1000 in publication week, you have a good chance of making it onto the bestseller list, which then fosters further support from bookshops and generates more sales.
Even if you discount points 1/ and 2/ (many many many books are no longer stocked in traditional bookshops, just online, and most books are not aiming for bestseller status), this point is valid for every title: Marketing teams in house work on multiple books per month, months in advance. If they have one ‘lead’ title per month, and 3-4 smaller titles, that means that at any one time, your marketer might be working on more than 20 books. If they were to carrying working on every book after publication, that workload would increase exponentially.
This doesn’t mean that you only ever get promotion at launch. For example, publishers will often do price promotions across the year, putting the book forward for Kindle Daily and Monthly Deals after publication has passed, and promoting that deal in a Bookbub newsletter, their own email marketing and on social media. Sometimes publishers will build a campaign around the first book in a series in advance of the new book coming out, to help build new readers for that subsequent book. Etc.
So there are definitely reasons that books get pulled out and promoted as backlist, or on an ongoing basis, but generally, the model is focused on pre-orders and when the book is on shelves / in the public eye.
If you are traditionally published, you might find the flurry of activity around your launch really exciting, and hopefully your book will get some good results off the back of this. But you might also feel that the drop off between the publication week and the weeks and months after are disheartening, because suddenly things go very quiet, and your publisher has moved on to other books, whereas you very much haven’t.
If the book launch didn’t go brilliantly, or the publisher didn’t put much time or money into it, that is incredibly hard for the person marketing the book (who I truly believe wants to make all of their campaigns a success), but they have a lot going on, and they likely won’t dwell on it for too long. But it is particularly hard for the author, who can feel as if the publisher has given up, and that’s it for them and their book.
If you are indie published, you might have this publishing model of ‘all the activity up front’ in your head, and again, if things don’t go brilliantly immediately, it can feel as though you might as well shut up shop.
Ultimately you, as the author, are the person who is most invested in your book’s success and in your career as an author, and there is a lot you can do beyond the book launch that can help build your profile and encourage sales.
If a book has had a brilliant start, great - build from there. If a book hasn’t got off to a great start (whether you are traditionally or self-published), take a minute to mourn the results you thought you would have, and then get planning.
Here are a few ideas to keep the conversation about your book going all year long:
Reflect on the activity you or your publisher has run
Whether your launch was successful or didn’t meet your expectations, take a minute to reflect on what they / you did, how it performed (as far as you could tell), and what you would like to do more of / less of / do differently as you move forward. You can do this immediately after the launch, and you can also do it throughout the year to help you build on and improve your marketing. Sam Missingham and I actually have a great workbook (with a corresponding video and worksheet to help you plan out your activity), which you can find here. Doing this kind of reflection is really useful - it can help you find the holes in the campaign and focus on doing more of the things that worked (and less of the things that didn’t).