Your Indie Author Launch Week Survival Guide | 10 Things Every Author Needs to Know

Everyone dreams about launch week.

The book is finally out. Readers are excited. Reviews start rolling in. Maybe you even imagine yourself relaxing with a cup of coffee while you watch the sales come in.

Reality?

You're refreshing dashboards. Opening support tickets. Chasing approvals. Answering emails. Wondering why one format is live while another has vanished into the publishing void.

Sound familiar?

I share the lessons I learned during the launch of Simply Dag—and why a chaotic launch week doesn't mean your book is doomed.

Whether you're preparing to publish your first book or you're already an experienced indie author, this practical survival guide will help you navigate the emotional roller coaster that almost nobody talks about.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why something almost always goes wrong during launch week—and why that's normal.
• How to keep logistics from crushing your confidence.
• The hidden customer-service side of self-publishing.
• Why readers notice far less than you think they do.
• How to protect your creativity when you're buried in emails, approvals, and technical issues.
• Why launch week is only the beginning—not the finish line.

Publishing independently is one of the most rewarding things you'll ever do—but it can also test your patience in ways you never expected.

If you're an indie author, this is the episode I wish someone had made for me before my own launch week.

Subscribe for more conversations about writing, creativity, introversion, and building a meaningful creative life—one book at a time.

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For insider information & spilled tea, please subscribe to my weekly newsletter, The Unicorn Dispatch, here: https://sara-causey.kit.com/2d8b7742dd

Sara's award-winning biography of Dag, Decoding the Unicorn, can be found on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Decoding-Unicorn-New-Look-Hammarskj%C3%B6ld-ebook/dp/B0DSCS5PZT

Simply Dag: The Private Man in a Public—and Dangerous—Office is now available in ebook and print anywhere Amazon books are sold: https://a.co/d/06kuNST9

The exclusive audiobook experience is available here: https://sara-ija-shop.fourthwall.com/products/simply-dag-audiobook

Transcript

 Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

Sara Causey discusses the challenges indie authors face during launch week, emphasizing that something will always go wrong. She shares her personal experience with Amazon's delayed paperback release and her decision to self-publish her audiobook. Sara advises authors to expect delays, manage customer service, and organize contacts. She stresses the importance of not letting stress affect major decisions and suggests celebrating milestones. Sara also highlights that readers are unaware of behind-the-scenes issues and encourages authors to protect their creative energy. She concludes by urging authors to focus on the long-term legacy of their book rather than the chaos of launch week.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Indie authors, launch week, Murphy's law, book launch, customer service, delays, emotional energy, support system, creative energy, launch problems, survival tips, book legacy, publishing challenges, launch rituals, technical gremlins.

Welcome to the Causey Consulting podcast. You can find us online anytime at CauseyConsultingLLC.com, and now here's your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In today's episode, I will be talking about 10 things you need to know before you publish. This will be especially for indie authors, but honestly, because traditional publishing does not give authors anywhere near the amount of support and infrastructure that they dream of. Trad published authors can also find some value here too. I would add to that that almost any kind of launch week is going to be besieged with problems. Whether you are launching a product, a new business, etc. you may find some principles that are applicable in this episode, but for my fellow indie authors, if you have a launch month or a launch week coming up, or you're thinking about it, you want to write the great American novel or some other type of book, but you just don't feel like you know what you're getting yourself into yet, stay tuned. This episode is for you.

Sara's award-winning biography, Decoding the Unicorn: A New Look at Dag Hammarskjold, and her latest release, Simply Dag: The Public Man in a Private-- and Dangerous-- Office, are available on Amazon. The Simply Dag audiobook can be found along with other cool merch on her storefront at SaraCausey.Shop, and now back to the show.

This list is not necessarily put in any particular order of best to worst or most likely to least likely, but I will say this: if I did rank the list in some way, this number one would be number one across the board, and that is something will go wrong. I guarantee it. Murphy's law will be in full effect. It does not matter whether or not Mercury is in retrograde, whether or not it's a full moon or a new moon. You could get out the almanac. You know how they have the best day for planting, best day for harvesting, best day for cutting your hair or baling hay. You could pick whatever was the best astrological day out of the whole entire year to do your book launch, and I can guarantee you that something would still go wrong. There would still be a foul up, or an unexpected delay, or a snare of some kind. I'll use myself as an example. I had loaded my final files into Amazon long before I knew that they were needed to be there, long before it was necessary that they be there, and also before the launch date, which for me was July 29th, Dag's birthday, I made sure that I hit the submit button. The ebook went live pretty quickly. Four hours later, the hardcover went live, and I'm thinking, oh, this is great. So the paperback will be live anytime now. Crickets, tumbleweeds, and me having a giant panic attack because some people will still buy hardcovers, but not a lot. There are a lot of people that want to find the cheaper options, so they're going to gravitate towards the ebook and the paperback as opposed to the hardback version, which is totally fine. But I'm like, come on, come on. There used to be an old commercial around here for the store Mervins, and it was a lady with her face and her hands pressed against the glass, going open, open, open. That's how I was. Like, come on, come on, come on! Finally, at like five or six a.m. the morning of launch day, the paperback finally went live, and I was like, oh, I just like collapsed back onto the bed, and I was like, "Oh, thank you, God, finally. I had some decisions to make also about the audio book, and I I can't go into all the reasons why I walked away from Audible on this broadcast, but I walked away from Audible, and I decided, like, you know, I would actually rather sell this myself. I lose some of the pizzazz and convenience of having it listed on Audible, but I also get to keep more of my own money, and I get to sell it and promote it on my own terms as well. So the audio book, Shameless Plug, is available at my storefront, Sara Causey Shop, but it also inspired in me some really cool desires to do more things like that. I was sort of like you know I could do my own audio books, the way that I want them to. I'm not saying that I narrate them. I'm saying that I hire who does the narration and I coordinate all of it, and I get to be my own little version of F. W. Murnau. He was working. With silent films, but he was so picky, and that's one of the reasons why the films are so good. My God, why they can be 100 years old and still stand the test of time. They are such good films, and I'm like, you could do that with audio. You could make your own audio plays and your own kind of old school radio dramas, not like Frasier Crane on ham radio with Nightmare In, but you can do some really cool stuff. But something's going to go wrong. You know, you're you're going to get into it with your vendor. You're going to get into it with a supplier. You're going to have a freelancer who drops the ball. I also had a big snafu on my press release. I was so pissed. Oh my God, Becky, I was so pissed because I had this specific day and time. Like you're supposed to go out Thursday morning right after the book launch, and it didn't. And I got into it with the company. I'm like, this is just unacceptable.

Your pre-orders could hit a snag. I'm telling you, something will misbehave, and I want to be very clear about something. It does not mean that you did anything wrong. It does not mean that you fouled up in some way. It also doesn't mean that you're cursed. It may feel like it when everything is going wrong, and you're like, can't anything else go wrong in your situation, you know, and you're talking through gritted teeth, and you want to just rip somebody's face off. But it's not just you. I swear to God, it's not just you. So one thing that we can do to try to survive is, and I know this is easier said than done, believe me. Try not to waste too much emotional energy on being shocked. Assume that there will be at least one hiccup and build some kind of extra time. Make yourself some extra pockets into the launch schedule. Whenever I was launching decoding the unicorn, I was moving really fast, and I also had fewer moving parts. And part of that is because I didn't know what I was doing. I'd never done anything like that before, but with Simply Dag, I was like, I am going to give myself a nice long runway because I know that there will be hiccups and foolishness, and that made a huge difference. It didn't take away the stress of launch day, to be honest, because that's going to be stressful no matter what. And I always celebrate launch day, even though I'm not a drinker and I have heart arrhythmias and so forth, and I'm limited on what I'm supposed to be drinking. I will always have a glass of champagne on launch day, and part of that ritual not only does it calm you down, but it's also like I am doing this. I'm taking this time out of the day to say I'm going to have a glass of champagne and celebrate because it's worth celebrating. Number two, your book is not the only thing that you're launching. It's not just the one thing. You're actually launching, quite possibly, depending on your situation, an ebook, a paperback, a hardback, an audio book, and then all the other stuff-the inner workings that the public doesn't even think about: the website, a newsletter, a social media campaign, advertising campaigns, press coverage, interviews, podcast appearances, and so forth, and it's like every component of that has its own moving parts. One of the things that I said to a friend over this last week is, everything goes from being a single task to being about 25 microtasks. Like in your mind, you're thinking, "I'm just going to do this one thing, and it's probably going to take 15 to 20 minutes. And then three hours later, you're like, "Oh my god, oh my god, what is happening? You just have to understand that that's part of how the game is played. A survival tip for this would be to treat launch week and/or launch month as though you're managing several small projects rather than one big event, it's like the cliche, "How do you eat the elephant one bite at a time? If you try to do it all at once, you're going to burn out and you're going to freak out. But if you say, "All right, right now I'm just focused on putting the newsletter together, and that's it. Okay, right now I'm only focused on taking a look at the ebook. Okay, right now I'm only focused on getting the audio book the way that I want it, or getting it into a zip file and making sure that it fits the requirements of my storefront, and that's it. I'm not going to try to to get ADHD and do 15 other things, I'm just going to get singularly focused on this one component. That really does help. It can help to soothe you in a way that bouncing from here and there and being like a hyper squirrel will not. Number three, customer service and/or. Back of house operations will become your full time job, and this is something that nobody tells you outright. So I want to tell you, you may spend more time emailing customer support at various vendors and entities than talking to your actual readers.

You may be talking to your printer, your agent if you have one, your distributor, the press release company, podcast hosts, IT people, audio engineers, the book's formatter, etc. If you can keep these people organized, however that looks for you, we don't have the modern day or the, or I should say, the old-fashioned Rolodex anymore, where you just have like cards on the table. Do you have a document or a spreadsheet? Do you have something like Evernote where you can keep these things organized to help save your sanity? Case numbers, telephone numbers, email addresses, URLs, the last person that you talked to, etc. That way, you're leaving a paper trail. And in case you know somebody really doesn't do what they said they were going to do, and you have to dispute it with your credit card company or start start pressuring somebody for a refund, you have all the evidence that you need. Number four, delays are normal, not personal. It will feel. I signed. I got tongue-tied there. It will feel very personal, hella personal, while it's going on. It's not. It's just like the world doing its thing. It's problems that are basically destined to happen, and that is one of the hardest lessons. Quite frankly, your paperback is not delayed because the universe hates you personally. Your audio book has not been rejected because your sound engineer accidentally didn't do half a second of floor noise, and he's the worst person in the world, or whatever, it can feel like that in the moment. But some of these vendors are like nitpicky beyond, and I don't even understand why some of them do that. Because I have listened to some audio books that were available through major platforms that sounded like dog poop. I don't know. I really don't know why they keep some and reject others, but it's not personal. It doesn't mean you're a terrible writer or that your sound guy did something wrong. Sometimes systems break. Sometimes people make mistakes. Sometimes approval queries are just slow. Sometimes you have to go through 15 AI bots to get to an actual human. But a survival tip here is to separate the logistics and the stuff from your identity as an author, and even from your identity as a human being on the planet. Number five, your emotions will be all over the place. I think it's been double for me because I'm a woman in perimenopause, and there's no reason to hide that. I'm a Gen Xer. A lot of people of my generation are going through the change. It feels like emotional whiplash to be going through that anyway-the so-called adult puberty. But then you add to it launch week. You know, for a passion project for the person I love more than anything in this whole world. I get the world is too limiting. More than anything in the multiverse, whatever, it's super important. So it's like, my God, the stakes feel so high, and everything has to go right, and then it doesn't. You know, you're you're gonna feel like a pinball in the pinball machine going hither and yon. You know, and it can be a morning where it's like, yay, my hardcover is live. Two hours later, oh crap! My paperback still isn't. Yay! I got invited to be a guest on a podcast. It looks really cool. Oh, I'm having trouble with Audible, and we're not agreeing. A survival tip for this can be: don't make big sweeping decisions, whether that is career decisions, life decisions, business decisions, book decisions, don't make ginormous decisions based on how you feel in one stressful moment or one stressful day. We might say something that we regret or do something that we regret if we're just shooting from the hip in anger or frustration or hurt. I would also suggest that you have somebody that you can talk to, a trusted friend, a spouse, a business partner, somebody who, even if they don't get what it's like to be involved in publishing, they get that you're stressed, and and they're the kind of friend or spouse or mate that will say, "What do you need from me? How can I best support you right now? What what can I do to make life better? Number six, refreshing the dashboard won't make anything happen faster, and we've all done it. I've done it.

I still do it sometimes. I'm like open, open, open. The lady in the Mervin's commercial. It doesn't even matter what the. Barnes and Noble, Amazon, whatever, KDP, ACX, Audible, your sales report dashboard, your email list, the website for launch, refresh, refresh, refresh. It can help if you find that you're going down that rabbit hole and you're just like over and over and over again hitting the button, and you don't move from the computer or the tablet, you're just over and over again. Refresh, refresh, refresh. Why aren't the sales higher yet? Why is this delay? A survival tip here can be to schedule times. I will check the dashboards at X times or at X intervals, but I'm not going to live inside them. Go outside, get some fresh air, some sunshine. Ride your bike. Take a walk. Play with the dog. Pet the kitten. Do something other than refresh, refresh, refresh, like a zombie. Number seven, you may very well during launch week spend more time solving problems than celebrating, and that's one of the reasons for me why it's so important to have that ritual glass of champagne. Nobody posts Instagram photos of themselves opening support tickets. Okay, this is the part that the public doesn't get to see, and frankly, they shouldn't. This is the inside back of house operations stuff. This is not front of house smiles. Like yay! Look, look at what I did. This isn't the pretty picture. It's not the curated set for the gram or the Facebook. Nobody posts the the the photograph of them sitting there with a red face breaking pencils because they're like if they don't answer my flipping cluster I'm gonna go, no nobody posts that, but that is often what launch week actually looks like it is surprisingly unglamorous, so my survival tip is to celebrate intentionally whatever that looks like for you if it's that once a year glass of champagne, or not necessarily once a year, depending on how often you're publishing, if it's that whenever you're publishing glass of champagne, if it's going out to dinner or having your favorite meal, buying yourself a bouquet of flowers, taking an afternoon off, create moments that remind you this is still a certified hellified milestone. This is not something that everybody does. It's not something that everybody does every day. It's still a big effing deal, especially if it is a passion project. If it's just you know, pardon my snobbery here, but if it's just some crap that you slung out as a lead magnet, maybe you don't care that much. But if you are living in accordance with your true will, and you're like this is the thing that I was put on the earth to do, celebrate that. Go on and get a king or queen. Don't let that moment pass you by just because some silly tech gremlins are trying to ruin the day. You still need to have that time to say I did a thing and it matters. Number eight, and this is a big one: readers, the end users, your readers, don't notice most of the things that you're panicking about, and they're never going to see them anyway. And that's a big relief. The readers don't know that the paperback was delayed. They don't know that the press release went out late. They don't know that the metadata took three extra days. They don't know that a verified purchase got removed for no reason, and you're trying to figure out why. They just go, "Oh, look, it's a new book. Don't broadcast. Here's here's an important survival tip: Don't broadcast or live stream every behind-the-scenes problem. The readers generally just want to enjoy the finished book. You don't need to live tweet or every every hour you're giving status updates on Instagram about oh here's the fresh disaster. Some people might try to be supportive of you or almost give you likes out of pity, but most people don't want to see that. That's something for your friends, your family, your spouse, the business partner, somebody who's in the trenches with you. That's like, hey, look, I'm part of your support system, and you can come here and talk to me about these things. But you don't necessarily want to broadcast that and put a bunch of negative energy out into the atmosphere about the book release. Number nine, protect your creative energy.

Launch week and launch day especially can consume every waking hour. The danger of that is that you stop creating. You stop being a writer. You stop being an illustrator. Whatever it is that you're doing in this business, you stop doing that, and then you become an administrator. During launch week, you're going to have to be an administrator. There's no two ways around it, unless you have a team, unless somebody else is handling it for you. But even then, they're going to come to you. If there's a foul up. What are they going to do? They're going to come to you. So at some point during launch week, you're going to have to be an administrator. My survival tip for that is even if it's just for 20 minutes, create something. Write in your journal, brainstorm, draw, paint, draft your next project. Think about what happens next. Protect the part of you that made the book in the first place. Last but not least, number 10, launch week ends. Ah, this too shall pass. But your book doesn't, and that's the coolest thing. That may be the most important thing, and flat out the coolest thing out of the whole ball of wax. You may have spent months, years, maybe even a decade or more researching and writing the book. The launch week lasts a few days, but the book is what readers remember, and the book can be available in perpetuity. They're not going to care. The end user is not going to care or remember that your press release got delayed. They're not going to remember that the Amazon paperback didn't show up when you wanted it to. They're going to remember how the book made them feel. So the survival tip here is to think in years, not days. Hour by hour, yes. When you're in the thick of it and you're managing a problem, you may very well want to narrow your perspective down to hour by hour. What needs to be done this hour? But when we think about the legacy of the book, think in years. A successful author builds a body of work, not one single perfect launch week. Because hello, there is no such thing. We're imperfect humans living in an imperfect world. There is no such thing as a perfect launch week. And so, if there's one thing that I hope you take away from this episode, it's this: please don't confuse launch week with your legacy. Launch week is noisy. It's messy. It's full of emails and approvals and delays and support tickets. Your legacy is part of the book itself, and the book itself is part of your legacy. Years from now, nobody is going to remember if your paperback was delayed by a few hours or a few days. They'll remember whether the story mattered. So yes, expect chaos. Expect technical gremlins. Solve the problems you can solve. Get help for the ones you can't. Have a good support system that you can lean on, and keep your eyes on the reason why you wrote the book in the first place. Take good care of yourself. Stay safe. Stay sane. And I'll see you in the next episode.

Thanks for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a quick second to subscribe to this podcast and share it with your friends. We'll see you next time.