Plan a Successful Book Launch – Book Release Template // Planning to publish a book this year? If you’ve ever wanted guidance on how to plan a book release, then The Book Launch Planner will be your new favorite tool! This planner was designed for authors, by authors to help you plan your book release. It’s basically a book launch blueprint. It has everything from timelines, contact lists, to-do lists, EVERYTHING! Use it if you’re traditionally published or self-published. The Book Launch Planner is a writer’s dream planner and it’s available for preorder now! What the video for all the details!
Pre-Order The Book Launch Planner:
Want to learn more about book marketing? Check out the Marketing for Authors series!
- How Your Book Sells Itself: https://amzn.to/2NRwufz
- Grow Your Author Platform: https://amzn.to/38vELxB
- Book Sales That Multiply: https://amzn.to/2sNdqb1
PATRON OF THE WEEK: Elena Trevithick: https://twitter.com/TreElena123
Video Transcript:
What is the easiest way to plan in a book launch with getting the best results? Today we’re going to be going through all the steps I use when I release one of my novels and I’ll also be talking about the perfect planner that is designed for authors to help them during the book launch process that has everything from templates, checklists, contact lists and all of that. So if that sounds interesting, be sure to stay tuned.
Hello everyone. My name is Mandi Lynn. I’m an author, book cover designer and the creator of The Book Launch Planner. I post videos here on YouTube once a week all about writing, book publishing, and book marketing. So if that sounds interesting, be sure to hit that subscribe button as well as the notification bell. Whether you’re an indie author or a traditionally published author, either way you’re going to find, you’re going to have to do a bit of planning. When you’re traditionally published, your publisher will handle a lot of things, but you might still need to step in and do some marketing for your book as well to get the best results. Today I also wanted to announce that it is the official launch of the preorder for The Book Launch Planner. So this here is The Book Launch Planner it is up for preorder today.
All the links will be down below. I will let you know that in the footage that I show you today of The Book Launch Planner, some things that will be slightly different then what you get in your finished planner. I’m doing some tweaking. For example, the cover will not be glossy because I personally can’t stay in glossy. But this little planner packs a punch. It will help you plan everything. It’s got a lot of templates, all that jazz, and it also has calendars in the back and just a weekly planner as well. So I’ll be talking about how you can use this to plan your book launch. If you stay tuned to the end, I will also let you know there are a ton of preorder benefits when you do actually go ahead and preorder, so make sure you stick around. So once again today we’re going to be talking about the book launch process.
I want to let you know, there is a lot that goes on when you are releasing the book. It’s too much to talk about in just one video. I hope to eventually cover the whole process across a bunch of videos. But today we’re kind of looking at the overarching topic. So there are things that I won’t mention in this video, but they’re still mentioned in The Book Launch Planner. There’s still things that need to go on when you publish a book, but this is just kind of a broad overview to give you an idea of what you can kind of look forward to when you’re launching your book. And I will also note that the order of the steps you take to launch your book may vary. So the following steps are not in any specific order. They’re just in an order that makes sense to me, but they may not make sense to you, if that makes sense.
So step number one, big decisions. So for this, I’m turning to page 14 of The Book Launch Planner and that is the publishing to do list because there are a lot of things that you have to decide when you are deciding to publish your book. So there’s things like choose a release date, create a budget, print receipts and track all expenses. That of course happens throughout the entire process. You want to choose where the book will be printed, whether that be a Kindle Direct Publishing, IngramSpark or Barnes and Noble Press. You want to decide if you want to use a free ISBN or a paid ISBN. This also goes hand in hand with whether you want to start your own publishing house. There’s a lot of decisions that happen, but really the big decisions are things like creating a timeline. Which brings us into step two, choose a publication date.
So I personally enjoy working backwards. I usually tend to have an ideal publication date for my book and then I kind of work backwards from there to see what goals I have to meet in order to publish on time. So we have the timeline where there’s a whole section for editing, a whole section for the cover, the interior, the details like writing the book blurb, finalizing the book blurb, writing the book tagline, and there’s just a lot of pages to this timeline so you can really visualize everything. In the planner it also says how long each test tends to take. Again, this will vary from author to author, but just having a broad idea will kind of get you started. And just to let you guys know, the timeline in The Book Launch Planner starts with self edit and actually ends with the publication date of your book, but do you know that marketing needs to continue even after you publish your book.
Otherwise you’ll see a lot of sales within the first month and then almost no sales afterwards. The next step is to identify your audience. This is a super important step that I feel like a lot of authors kind of skim over, like they do it, but they don’t fully put their heart into it. In one of my previous jobs, we always created a profile for our ideal customer and in this case, this is our ideal reader. So what does your ideal reader look like. In case you were wondering what they look like, in The Book Launch Planner, there’s actually an ideal reader profile where you get to decide what their age would be, their gender, education profession, and then there’s a bunch of questions that you would ask yourself. What genres do they read, what genres do they dislike? Who are their favorite authors?
And then some of them are questions you may have never thought of asking, like how do they normally discover books when they’re going to read? And that question is important because that gives you an idea of where you need to invest your time marketing. If your ideal reader discovers their next read on Goodreads, then you need to make sure you’re present on Goodreads, posting there. Or if your ideal reader is on Instagram, make sure you’re present on Instagram. Either way, the ideal reader profile will give you a very clear image of who you are marketing to. There’s also other things to consider like your comp titles. There’s a whole page in the planner to figure out who your comp titles are. There’s a whole nother page to figure out how to pitch your book. Cause if you can figure out how to successfully pitch your book, you can basically sell it to anyone.
And sometimes depending on a different reader, you’re going to be pitching your book a different way. For example, when I sell books at ComicCons, I have a different way of pitching my books then when I’m at a convention like BookCon. At BookCon, everyone is readers. I kind of know how to talk their language to get the books to sound like what they would read. And then at ComicCons, not everyone there are readers, but I know that they are there because they like things like high fantasy. So I will try to pitch my fantasy books more than say my thriller book because that’s just the audience that is there. So you kind of have a few different pitches for your books depending on who you’re talking to. This next step is a big step in that is plan the marketing events and the marketing events are huge.
I actually have a whole list of different marketing methods here in The Book Launch Planner. On page 15, we have things like the cover reveal, the street team, the blog tour, any social media influencer outreach that you want to do, where you give your book to a social media influencer so they can read it, maybe feature it on their Instagram or write a review of it. There’s also the preorder campaign, which is huge. Things like newsletters, your social media platform, all of that jazz. Not only are they listed out in the planner, but there’s also other pages later on where if you decide, Hey, I want to do a cover reveal, there’s a checklist of things you need to do to do a cover reveal. There’s an example of a signup form if you want to go ahead and get people to sign up to do your cover reveal.
And same goes with your street team. There’s an example of a form. There’s an example of how to reach out to people. There’s a little template you can use so you can decide on little tasks for your street team. All of that is in there. Let me know in the comments down below what type of marketing you plan on doing for your book. Personally, my favorite thing to do for my book launches is a preorder campaign. That is when you add little incentives to get people to preorder your book. That way you have sales even before it goes ahead and releases. The next thing you’re going to want to do is hire freelancers. Now there’s a whole bunch of different people you can hire on to help you release your book. There’s a whole outsourcing page in the planner and that includes, editors, cover designers, interior designers, a PR company, or even a virtual assistant.
So the whole point of this page is basically you can write down and compare people. So you can compare editors, you can write down what experiences, what their prices are, and compare and contrast before you make your final decision. Next thing is goal setting. So this is actually something I’ve never done with my previous books. I don’t know why, but I never set goals for myself when I was selling my book. And I think that’s super important. When you have a goal, especially a goal that’s written down, you are more likely to accomplish it because you know what you’re reaching for. So there is a goal-setter page in the planner where you can decide on your sales goals for your preorder, your release day, one week, one month, three months, six months and so on. And then there’s also a spot where you can write down the actual sales so you can kind of see how close you got or even if you exceeded your expectation.
And then you can also track your expenses. We have the expenses page here. I’ve talked a lot about tracking my expenses in my past few videos. So as you guys know, I track my expenses monthly, but I will also track my expenses specifically to a book, because I want to know at the end of the day how much I spent to publish one book. So you can put what it was right here. You can put the estimated costs and then the actual costs. That way you can see if you’re within your budget or not. This next step is another big one and that is to market your book. This is something people forget all the time and people also forget marketing your book starts long before the book is even published. So if you don’t know what the heck I’m talking about, that means I might invite you to read a book called Grow Your Author Alatform.
It’s book two in the Marketing for Authors series. I recommend you eventually read the entire series, but this one is super important even before you publish your book, because it will teach you how to create a platform for yourself as an author. And that means that platform can be anywhere, whether that be on social media, pages like Twitter or Instagram or here on YouTube, a blog, anything. And also super important is your newsletter. You want to start building followers on your newsletter as soon as possible. That way on release day you actually have people you can email and tell them that your book is out and they need to go order it. And in case you’re wondering what the other books in this series were about, book one is How Your Book Sells Itself. This is also a super important book to read before your book is published.
It’s basically teaching you how to set up your book to sell itself. And by that I mean the title, the book cover, the description, the keywords, all of that. These are all things you want to keep in mind before you publish the book. You can always change these elements afterwards, but you’re going to have the best results if you do it right the first time around. And then of course, book three in the Marketing for Authors series, Book Sales That Multiply. This teaches you how to sell more books using your newsletter ads, giveaways and basically everything in between. It’s a much more technical book, but it’s a very important book to read anyway. And of course what I talked about today is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to planning a book launch. I like to think I wrapped up almost everything into the planner itself.
Everything that you might want to keep in mind that you need to keep track of. I have a ton of lists. This is a planner I wish I had when I was planning my book launch, because there’s just so much to keep track of and this I, I spent months gathering all the information kind of really thinking about like what is every possible way I can market my book and I will note you don’t have to do everything that is in this planner, but if you use it as a guide, you’ll find your life will be much easier. And this is also a planner that you can use whether you’re self published or traditionally published, if you’re traditionally published, there are some pages you won’t need to use like finding an editor or a book cover designer because that is things your publisher will handle. But you will notice that you’ll love some of the marketing pages because you will just find your process streamlined.
This planner was actually designed by authors for authors and when I say designed by authors, I mean it was designed by more people than just me. The entire process of creating this planner, I was putting out polls, asking everyone what they wanted to see, what content they thought was important versus what wasn’t important. And you guys were even the ones that decided you wanted this to be a hardcover book, wire-bound. There’s a pocket here in the back, there are stickers included, which is awesome. The calendar in here is like a fillable calendar, so you can start using it anytime a year you want and there will also be little tabs that you can add on so you can easily find the month you’re looking for. This is as customized as it gets. When you order The Book Launch Planner. It not only has the fillable months and weekly spreads, but it also comes with stickers so you can label things and that includes stickers to add in tabs, as well as what I call the big moments sticker packet.
So you can label the days in your calendar like your book release a book, signing your cover, reveal all of that. I’ve worked extremely hard to make this as customized as possible and as usable to you guys as possible so you can use this any time of year. If you are interested in pre-ordering, you can go to www.thebooklaunchplanner.com and go ahead and preorder. But I’m going to let you know what some of the benefits of pre-ordering are right now. So benefit number one is a free paperback book. With your order, you will be given a free paperback copy of either Grow Your Author Platform or Book Sales That Multiply. You can choose whichever one and it will be included in your order. But I will let you know that this is as long as supplies last. I will say I have a decent supply of each book, but once they’re gone, that will no longer be a preorder benefit.
So order it while you still can. The next benefit of pre-ordering is a bonus sticker pack and by bonus sticker pack, I mean the social media sticker pack. So in the weekly spreads there is a spot where you can plan your social media posts. In the social media sticker pack there are the little social media icons so you can go ahead and make planning a little bit more fun with stickers and also make it a little bit more colorful. The last pre-order benefit is $5 off. So the planner is normally $34.99, but when you preorder it, you’ll get it for $29.99 plus shipping. The planner doesn’t have an exact date right now because I’m working with my printer to make sure everything’s perfect before we send it off to officially get printed. Once it’s sent to print officially, I will have a more concrete idea of what the release date is, but right now we’re looking at April or May.
But if you preorder, you will get your order as soon as the copies come available, even if that’s before the actual release date. So I guess you could say that’s another benefit is that you might get your copy before it is officially released. I’ve spent the past few months perfecting these pages for you guys, so if this sounds amazing in your super excited like I am, because if you follow the book launch plan on Instagram, you might’ve seen the live unboxing where I was basically freaking out as I saw The Book Launch Planner for the first time. So again, if you are interested, please go ahead and preorder the book. If you want to stay up to date with everything that goes on with The Book Launch Planner, do you know it has a separate newsletter from my own author newsletter, so that will be linked down below.
And you can also follow The Book Launch Planner on Instagram and if you follow through the newsletter and Instagram you are sure to never miss an update in anything exciting that happens with the planner. I also want to give a huge shout out to make Patron of the Week. Elena Trevithick. I am sorry if I said your name wrong. I’m really bad at that. But I will make up for it by telling everyone about what you are doing. So Elena has written a couple of unpublished children’s books and is currently working on a fiction story written through letters. You can find her on Twitter, she will be linked down below and you can also see her user name here. If you enjoyed this video, please let me know by giving it a big thumbs up, commenting down below. If you are excited for The Book Launch Planner as I am, and of course hit that subscribe button. If you’d like more videos from me, be sure to check out my book marketing playlists, which you can see right here. I talk about a lot of the marketing aspects there, so just go ahead and click and keep on learning.