Launching a New Book

I published a novel yesterday. New pen name so new website, etc. And it got me thinking about launches and indie wisdom around book launches.

There’s this almost fanatical belief in indie circles that books start where you launch them and then fall from there. Lots of people are familiar with the idea of the 30 day and 90 day cliffs on Amazon. (The way that works is that basically after 30 days many authors see a sudden and significant drop in sales which gets even worse at 90 days.) A lot of people build their careers around this concept.

This is where the rapid release idea comes from. The reasoning behind it is that you always want to have a book in the 90 day window, if not the 30 day window, because your sales will just crash and burn after that.

If you follow this model you launch at 99 cents, throw as much advertising money as you can at the book early on, and try to get it as high in the rankings as possible and hold there as long as you can. You then switch over to a higher price when the book’s rank starts to drop and hope to make up for all that early ad spend while the book is plummeting back to earth. If you’re lucky, the book gets sticky somewhere up there but never near as high as your highest high.

This model is a bit like a hamster wheel. You have to stay in motion because you have to keep producing books so you’re always in that 90-day window.

It’s a model I don’t do well with. And one I don’t follow. Now, granted, I am not a six-figure author, so keep that in mind. But I am making a living wage at this at this point.

So what model do I follow?

I publish, let people know it’s out there, turn on AMS ads, and see if the book sinks or swims. And by sink or swim I mean, does it earn more from sales than I’m spending on ads? If so, I try to scale those ads. Some books can scale, some can’t.

The books that can scale are the “winners”, the ones that don’t make more than ad spend are the “losers”, and the ones in between are the “forgettable ones”.

Taking this approach means that for a lot of my books I don’t see them hit peak sales for months after release. For example, I published Excel for Beginners and Intermediate Excel last September. They didn’t peak until March of this year, so six months after release. And, actually, in September of this year they returned to that March level, so they may not have peaked yet. It’s quite possible I will see my best sales income from those titles in a year or two as word of mouth and reputation spread.

And I’m okay with that. Because I’m trying to write “evergreen” books. If I do this right, my fantasy novels should be as readable and appealing to readers five years from today as they are today. Same with my Excel guides.

(You’d think with a guide that’s related to something like Excel that continues to evolve that this wouldn’t be the case, but honestly the basics of Excel have been pretty consistent for twenty years except for the complete change in interface that came with Excel 2007. And even that didn’t change the Ctrl shortcuts or terms that were in use.)

With evergreen books that can still be read years later, you can slowly have word of mouth spread throughout a reading community and bring in sales for you for months or years. Or, like with the Excel guides, if you’re hitting a need you can continue to hit that need for years to come as long as you’re taking steps to make sure new readers know those books exist, like AMS ads.

Now, I will say that one way my approach makes me vulnerable is that, because I don’t seek out reviews early on, if a book does start to do well and doesn’t have a lot of reviews there are people out there who will hit it with a bad review to stop that momentum. I had that happen with one of my romances a few years back. (It was obvious because the review said something that romance readers hate that wasn’t part of the book and it came at a time when that book was climbing the charts.)

So maybe a hybrid launch version is best. Get some early reviews to protect against that sort of thing but then let the book ride on its own momentum.

All I know is that for me doing big launches, which I have tried once or twice, never comes out well. So I far prefer the slow build approach. This is why all of my novels have made more in later years than the year they were launched.

But as with everything, YMMV. Just wanted to share that there can be a different approach and a different sales trajectory.

Author: M.L. Humphrey

M.L. Humphrey is a former securities regulator, registered stockbroker (although only briefly), and consultant on regulatory and risk-related matters for large financial institutions with expertise in the areas of anti-money laundering regulation, mutual funds, and credit rating agencies. Since 2013 M.L. has also been a published author under a variety of pen names and across a variety of subjects and genres. You can contact M.L. at mlhumphreywriter [at] gmail.com. View all posts by M.L. Humphrey