The Book Launch Experience (a.k.a. My Second White Hair)

I grew my second white hair (that I know of) in the run-up to launch day for the first book in the Realm Riders Series. By the time it was of length to notice, it stuck straight out from my head, in the unruly way that coarse hair does, to glow in the light of a restroom sconce while at a dinner with two other couples. Naturally. And while the first one had come around my 30th birthday (an unexpected gift that I promptly plucked), I left this one, like a badge of honor, allowing it to fall out on its own, with countless others, sometime around launch.

Now, this graying and hair loss was by no means a result of the actual launch day. The day my book officially dropped was perhaps one of the headiest of my 35 years. The outpouring of love and support caught me genuinely off-guard—not because I think the people in my life are anything shy of wonderful, generous human beings, but because I simply didn’t expect such an astonishing deluge to be directed at little ol’ me. I must say, I was quite indescribably awed and humbled. (And thank you again—you know who you are.)

No, I attribute the white hair to the learning curve that immediately preceded launch day. And unless you texted me in those days prior, you probably don’t know how much trouble I experienced. Despite my publishing adviser’s herculean efforts to help me prepare, there are some things you must simply stumble over yourself. Still, my hope here is that I can further mitigate some of those tripping hazards for anyone planning a launch (or simply enlighten anyone with interest).

And so, I pick up from my last blog, the Book Launch and Marketing Checklist. It has some great planning tips that I amassed from various sources (and my own trial and error), and I add to the list of how-tos (and how-not-tos) here to better prepare for next time.

I chose to publish independently for several reasons: better royalties, more creative freedom, and complete control over this and any resulting projects. You’ve heard or read me describe myself before: I’m a Virgo and a control-freak. And this was my 10-year-old baby. No way in any realm was I going to hand it over to someone else to rear.

I published directly through Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I had hoped to go wide by adding D2D Print to my repertoire, but they, like every other wholesaler I’ve researched, are an all-or-nothing platform, and I couldn’t have avoided duplicate listings with Amazon and B&N if I’d published with them, as well. I had no interest in violating the platform rules of the “big two” and risk all listings of my book being taken down. So, I decided to sell additional copies through my website instead, using a PayPal widget. (I’m not endorsing PayPal per se, but they have been easy to work with so far, and I have heard many vendors at art fairs say they’re moving away from Square, mostly for customer service-related reasons. So, something to consider if you’re shopping for such a service yourself.) I may not have the reach through my site that I’d get with a wholesaler, but for the launch, when I needed my Amazon stats to drive up the visibility of my book, it worked out just fine.

Except when it didn’t.

If you’re not aware of how Amazon—or Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)—works when it comes to book stats, your education must start there, for it informs some of my thought processes. Perhaps you’ll remember my mention of keywords and categories in the pre-pub checklist. Keywords are search terms that direct buyers to your books, and categories are like the shelves of a bookstore or library—they provide a sort of shorthand for the book’s more specific genre characteristics. But that’s not all they do.

Categories also figure into how a book ranks (in sales), compared to other books in the same category. And there’s a program out there by Dave Chesson called Publisher Rocket (which I don’t get paid to endorse but highly recommend all the same) that helps authors find categories in which to position their books. And I say “position” because it’s all a numbers game. Publisher Rocket gives authors an idea of how many books must be sold to reach the top 10 bestseller rank and the number 1 bestseller rank at Amazon. This means, if you can sell enough books in a single day in a listed category, your title will feature among the top 10 bestselling books in that category. And you want this because the chances of a potential buyer scrolling below the top 10 decreases exponentially with each roll of the mouse wheel or swipe of the thumb. Plus, you get that “bestseller” sticker over the image of your cover—and realm knows, you want that.

But there’s a process to all this. When a book is published through KDP, the author must assign two primary categories to start. These are rather less specific than those one might research with Publisher Rocket, and the broadness of these first two only widens the competitive pool. So, before you publish, you can spend some time researching the categories you want your book to feature in—preferably with as low a sales number as you can find to get you in that number-one spot. And this must be done for every version of the book you release—eBook, paperback, hardcover, and audiobook—because the stats and categories are different for each. (Not to mention, they’re different in each country, too.)

I’d researched my keywords and categories so far in advance that they required updating right before launch. It wasn’t much extra work, and I do recommend doing the bulk of your research and selection in advance so that you need only double-check your choices at the last minute to see if anything needs altering. When I originally performed my research, my #1 bestseller rank number for single-day sales for the paperback was 14. When I was finally ready to publish, it had jumped to 22.

I knew the limits of my reach. I’d been advertising for a while, but it was my generous family-and-friend base that was going to buy the first copies (I was not making assumptions here—they all told me so). So, I knew day one of the launch—August 16—was going to be the most important.

And to readily facilitate sales, I had to have accurate links for my newsletter, ads, the Buy Now page of my website, and my social media accounts, or I wouldn’t be able to direct people to the places the book was available.

So, with these two thoughts in mind, I decided to launch in advance of August 16. I attempted to publish my book to Amazon and B&N on the 13th so I could get my buying links and categories updated in advance. After Amazon processes a category request (which lately has been within 24 hours), it can take up to 72 hours for them to display, and I wanted to make sure I had the time for them to hit before the majority of my book sales might take place.

Of course, what I didn’t realize is that it can take up to 72 hours for Amazon to approve and release the book after you hit “publish.”

The—thankfully mere—24 hours it took Amazon to release both versions of my book were admittedly somewhat tense. The 13thwas a Saturday, and I had a long list of post-launch tasks planned that I could only tackle once the book was out (i.e. – setting up my Author Central and Goodreads pages, establishing affiliate accounts (I used Amazon Associates to start), updating my purchase links, etc.). Instead, I went to an art fair.

After the book dropped on the 14th, I requested the update to my categories, and within 24 hours, I received confirmation from an Amazon representative that they had been added. Of course, they wouldn’t be visible for up to 72 hours, so I had no choice but to believe the representative who told me that it had been done.

It hadn’t.

My book is technically young-adult fantasy because it’s clean but its characters face adult situations that may be better understood at (a conservative?) 14 and up. I mention this because when I could finally verify that my categories had been added correctly (and check to see if I’d gotten my bestseller sticker), I discovered that only a small fraction of my categories had been added, none of which included that magically low 22 category. Let’s summarize this way: I didn’t get my sticker.

It turns out, if your book is in the YA category, you must select at least one “juvenile” category among those two broad categories that you input at the time of publication. Of course, no one told me that when they said they’d added the categories, and I sadly never saw that disclaimer among the pages of category information in the KDP FAQ. Not until I inquired about why some categories were missing did an Amazon representative give me an education. I swapped out a juvenile equivalent of a primary category, resubmitted my request, and proceeded to have random, wrong categories added to my books over and over again, request after request. And although I followed their procedure for requesting updates to the letter, it has been a nightmare of endless ineptitude. As of today, when I post this, they’re finally up to date. Launch was over three weeks ago.

Thankfully, I had no idea this was even an issue until after the launch frenzy had died down, but in the end, it didn’t really matter anyway. Sales are only counted when the book is shipped, which means regardless of when the purchase is submitted, sales stats are at the mercy of how quickly and uniformly Amazon fulfills the orders.

To add to the inconclusive fun, I believe the number that counts toward the bestseller rank is the number of discrete orders, which is almost impossible to discern from the KDP dashboard because it only counts units sold. Therefore, it fails to distinguish multi-copy orders from single-copy orders, essentially rendering the bestseller sticker application nothing more predictable than a complete surprise for a small-time seller like me.

But for once, my ignorance benefitted me. I am grateful to have spent launch day basking in the love and support of my family and friends—with only a modicum of anxiety over the Barnes & Noble $#!%-show splashed in for good measure.

Barnes & Noble doesn’t make it easy. The process of creating the book isn’t terribly different from Amazon, and having done Amazon first, I had a pretty good idea of what to expect from other platforms. Still, B&N has a few idiosyncrasies that I didn’t face with Amazon.

Because of the bestseller game I was playing at Amazon, I decided against doing a pre-order with them. The theory here is based on your number of preexisting followers. Those that pre-order will have their books shipped to them by or on the day of release. Those that order on the day of launch will receive them a few days later. So, if you have a small number of potential buyers, and some pre-order while others buy on or after launch, their shipping times will be more varied. And since sales are predicated on shipment, the subsequent dilution of “sales” (read: shipments) in a single day would decrease your potential to snag that bestseller sticker.

Since I had none of those concerns at B&N, I registered for presale with a release date of August 16 when I set up the book. Their system seems to force you to register for presale if you wish to set a future release date (rather than the day you’re setting up the book). But it allows you to release the book for presale at any point before that set release date. When I decided to release early (rather than releasing into presale mode), I was forced to take the book off presale to move up the release date. Registering for presale was not the mistake. Taking it off presale to release early was.

B&N’s processing times are outrageous. Their customer support response time has consistently exceeded a week from submission, and their book approval for release took even longer. Had I left the realmed thing on presale and simply pre-released it on the 13th (which I had accidentally done once before but was struggling to do again when I wanted to), it might have released itself on the 16th, but it’s hard to know for sure. Instead, it sat in pending mode for over a week while B&N approved it. And when they finally published it, they failed to notify me. One day, I simply found its status had transitioned from “pending” to “published.”

At least I could finally update the purchase link on my website.

Because I wanted most of my sales to funnel through Amazon anyway, I wasn’t too broken up about B&N’s lag on the day of launch. I had worked hard to stack the categorical deck in my favor at Amazon, and the single lane of buying traffic had the potential to increase my chances at getting that bestseller sticker, right?

Or not.

These were not the only punctures in my launch parachute. On August 14, I ordered a bunch of author copies from Amazon to fulfill direct sales from my website and gift a few copies to family and libraries. (If you order copies from Amazon before you release, you can only order proofs, which come with a not-for-sale watermark on them. In other words, you can’t order saleable copies from Amazon prior to release. B&N had no watermark, so their proofs could technically be saleable if you put no stock in the idea that they could one day be valuable….)

Author copies don’t contribute to the sales rank, but they are priced at wholesale rates, which is nice. Due to the paper shortage (Did you know there was one? Go talk to your local print shop; they’ll tell you all about it.), my author copies weren’t scheduled to arrive until the end of August. So, while my readers could order their copies through Amazon Prime and receive them in two days, I had multiple direct sales pending through my website on August 16 and no books to send to my customers. I, too, resorted to ordering full-priced copies to fulfill the orders and have since heard lead times on author copies are approaching one month. Thankfully, my—now second—set of books finally showed up on August 31st, as promised.

Due to a mix of complications, like the late breakup with my wholesaler and some cover art issues resulting from non-standardized templates across multiple platforms, my printed advertising materials were still in the works and unavailable for pickup until the day of launch. Any plans I’d had to get printed ads out in advance entirely evaporated. I consoled myself with the idea that I couldn’t make sales if the books weren’t out, and if prospective buyers misplaced the postcard or bookmark prior to launch, they couldn’t be depended upon to buy a copy. Still, despite my efforts to begin that process months in advance of launch, it, too, became another last-minute task.

I also had the hairbrained idea that I wanted to commission the E-Stamp from my book as an actual, working stamp that I could use during book signings. As I had orders for signed copies through my website, I really needed to have had that brainstorm a few days earlier than I did! Thankfully, the StampedWithLoveXOXO shop I used on Etsy moved extraordinarily fast, and I got the books out to my customers with only relatively short delay. (Those are the sweetest people on Etsy, by the way—I’m convinced of it.)

I wasn’t entirely prepared when it came to packaging either, though. I not only needed to generate a packing slip and tracking spreadsheet and learn the postage ad-on for PayPal, but I also had to devise a protective (and stylish—come on) way of shipping the books to prevent damage. (If only Amazon had taken such care!) B&N had sent me an author proof in a cardboard mailer (as is their way—and they deserve credit for it), and I was able to use it as a sort of template for securely wrapping my books. But the plague of last-minute inspiration sparked all kinds of fun ideas about the stylish part of that packaging, and I was ill-prepared to implement them all. What resulted was lovely, indeed, but it could have been even better. It’s not a total loss: I’ll be ready for book two.

In the two weeks prior to the formal release, I was almost sitting on my hands. Sure, I was working with my printer, updating categories, tweaking my website, buying and assigning ISBNs, ironing things out with my wholesaler (or not), updating my LLC logo to get a bug on my back cover (rather than the spine), prewriting newsletters, setting up the store on my website and configuring PayPal, taking classes on Amazon Ads, connecting with my Launch Teams, generating book images for social media ads I was posting, and my crisscrossed to-do list doesn’t even chronicle what else I did on the fly.

But my books—remember those?—were just sitting in their platforms, waiting for me to push the “publish” button. And I wish I had.

The decision to buy ISBNs and publish under my LLC admittedly slowed some things down, and that’s entirely on me. And the print materials will be extraordinarily similar for book two, which will save a lot of time (and design cost). But those hitches won’t hinder book two’s launch because they’re already decided. So, when I do this next time, my timeline is going to look considerably different.

My “secret” launch, as Dave Chesson calls it, is going to, at minimum, triple from his recommended length (and I’m sure it’s sacrilege to share such trade secrets, but I’m more inclined to help my indie author friends than worry about that realmed Amazon bestseller sticker).

I will also order author copies the moment the book “secretly” releases. This may not get them to me in time to fulfill website orders, and I may very well have to order additional Prime copies again anyway, but at least I can try. I may also be able to get libraries advance copies, as they must be vetted (which can often take a month or so) before being shelved.

And for my loyal ARC readers who refuse to post until their purchases have been verified (bless them), they’ll be given the opportunity to purchase copies and post reviews ahead of release.

If I don’t go wide (a.k.a – use my wholesaler instead of publishing directly with specific platforms), I will figure out how to prerelease with B&N properly and do so at least two weeks before the launch day.

And if I do decide to go wide… well… I’ll post an update about my third gray hair after book two’s launch.

-HA

Do you have any tips of the indie publishing trade? Please share here, and help your fellow authors avoid the pitfalls that you may have experienced. It’s only neighborly.