Stop Chasing the Perfect Book Launch

If you’ve been told your book must explode on day one or Amazon will bury it forever, we’re here to take that weight off your shoulders. Joel Pitney and Sayde Walker dig into the launch myths we hear constantly from first-time authors and why they create so much anxiety: the belief that you only get one shot, that perfect keywords and categories will “hack” the Amazon algorithm, and that Amazon will somehow promote your book if you do everything just right.

We get practical about how discovery actually works on Amazon KDP, including why new titles sometimes don’t even appear in search at first, what “Sponsored” placements really mean, and why customer reviews and sales momentum matter more as a steady pattern than as a single spike. We also talk about launch timing obsessions like Tuesdays, January releases, and holiday windows, and why those factors usually matter far less than your readiness, your audience, and the realities of self-publishing systems.

From there, we shift to what to do instead: treat book marketing like a marathon, not a sprint. We explain why a soft launch can save you from glitches, why you should test tactics before going all-in, and how to build a long-term plan through outreach campaigns, authentic author platform building (TikTok, Substack, newsletters, offline community, whatever fits you), and the underrated power move of writing more books. We wrap it all in our Swiss cheese approach: no single tactic is perfect, but stacked over time, they become solid.

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Transcript

Why Launch Myths Create Panic

Joel 0:11

Hey everybody, you are listening to If I'm Being Honest, Straight Talk about Book Publishing and Promotion. My name is Joel Pitney. And I'm Sayde Walker. Today we are going to be talking about an issue we encounter all the time, which is getting obsessed with doing your launch just right and a bunch of the myths and exaggerations that are out there about that. So it's going to be a great conversation. And uh before we dive into that, I just want to remind everybody if you're enjoying this podcast and you want to help us reach more people like you, you can subscribe to us on any platform or and you can also rate us. Uh, it's a big help. So, all right. So let's dive in. Sayde, this is something what we see all the time when we work with people, right?

Sayde 0:52

Oh, absolutely. We see it all the time, particularly because we tend to work with first-time authors who are, you know, they're launching a book for the first time. They've never done this before. And so they are reading a lot of stuff out on the internet and they're talking to friends who have published books, maybe self-published, maybe traditionally published, and they're listening to podcasts. And some of that information that they're getting is it's not that it's inaccurate, but it might not be reflective of their particular situation. And so we tend to find as we get closer and closer to having a finished product, people get a lot of presumptuous ideas about what makes a successful book launch.

Joel 1:39

And it's only natural, right? I mean, you know, for when you write a book, it's a huge effort. Uh, you've often spent years and thousands and thousands of dollars and the sweat equity and all the things to get your book ready to go. And you want to make sure you do it right. You know, and so you want to do everything in your power to make sure that you're putting your best foot forward and you're doing all the right things. So it it makes sense that people are going to Google and take courses and even buy books on the topic to make sure that they're doing all the best practices.

Sayde 2:08

Absolutely. But what happens is sometimes they think if they're not doing these specific things, that the book will not be successful. And that's kind of what we wanted to dive into today is what are some of the common things we hear from authors as they're getting ready for launch week that that they're they have a lot of fear and anxiety around if I don't do this, then my book won't be successful. Amazon won't promote it, people won't find it. You know, that that kind of they're living in that space. And so that's kind of what we wanted to break down today.

Joel 2:43

That's fabulous. And so Sayde and I spent a little time kind of thinking about some of the most common things that we hear and some of the cut most common things that we encounter. And so we're gonna go through them point by point. People are gonna be able to engage with this uh on our website as well. We'll have a transcript so you'll be able to kind of sort through the points and skip around if you want. Um, so yeah, let's dive

Sales Do Not Need Day One

Joel 3:05

in. Uh the first one, this is kind of a funny one, and maybe the most common one, is if your book doesn't sell well the first week or the first day or even that first hour, you're gonna miss your opportunity to hack Amazon, Amazon's mysterious algorithms. Yes. And Amazon will forget about your book and essentially put you in the archives for no one to ever discover your book ever again.

Sayde 3:35

So let me ask you, Joel, why do you think this exists? Why do people have it in their head that launch week is really important? It's important to get sales, it's important to get customer reviews, it's important to like hack the algorithm. Like, where is this coming from?

Joel 3:52

I think a lot of this comes from traditional publishing. Traditional publishers do think a little bit this way. So if your book is being published with a big five publisher or or another independent house that's you know reasonably sized, people are trying to stack their wins early. And there's a lot of reasons for this. So part of that has to do with district distribution. If you're able to get a lot of sales momentum early, you can go get more orders from bookstores and other institutional buyers. You can also get yourself onto the bestseller list if you sell a lot that first week. And having a bestseller opens a lot of doors for you and gets you in front of more people. In terms of Amazon, it is true that Amazon will promote books that are selling well and it get a lot of customer reviews. And so all of these things are true, but the context is really important.

Sayde 4:49

Right. Exactly. I think that's exactly because Amazon's algorithm is going to respond to any spike in activity. Whether or not that's happening, you know, on day one, on launch day, on launch week, or even several weeks, or even several months later. If there is activity on your page, if there are sales, if there are customer reviews coming in recently and coming in from all over, you know, from different uh areas of the country or even the world, that is going to alert the algorithm that people are paying attention to and interested in this particular product. And it happens at any time that there's any kind of spike in activity.

Joel 5:29

That's a hundred percent true. So if you don't sell a lot that first week, but let's say you get a big spike in sales in week 17, Amazon's not gonna promote your book any less than they would have had that happened up front.

Sayde 5:43

Exactly. Which is why we're always telling authors, you know, your book launch is a marathon, not a sprint. It's not launch week, it's launch year. And it's what are you gonna be doing consistently over the next however long you want to sell books? Because, you know, you're gonna need to work at this, you're gonna need to keep, you know, finding new avenues to sell books, new ways to find readers, new ways to get customer reviews. And it all, it all matters. And so if you were to, if you were to put a lot of energy into launch week, which is fine, that's great. It's an exciting time. Your book is out in the world, people can finally purchase it. It's, you know, we're excited for you too. If you were to put a lot of energy into launch week and you were to get, you know, let's just say you get 50 customer reviews, that's amazing. Good job. You know, well done. Um, that's definitely gonna help spike the algorithm. But then if you don't get you don't get another customer review for 12 months, and then you know, over the course of the next year, yes, you have those 50 reviews, but they're all a year old, that's that's also not necessarily gonna work in your favor. It's more about consistency over quantity.

Joel 6:53

Right. It's like a good old-fashioned index fund compounding interest year over year, month over month, and it grows slowly. You're not you're not swinging for the fences.

Sayde 7:03

Yes, exactly.

Joel 7:04

And that's

What The Amazon Algorithm Actually Does

Joel 7:05

that's the approach we always preach. Now, the next myth or misconception or exaggeration is related to the first, and it's basically the assumption that Amazon will promote your book. The key to your book success is figuring out how to hack that algorithm.

Sayde 7:24

Yeah, absolutely. And I and this one, again, I'm curious to hear from you where do you think this comes from? I have some thoughts around this, and and I guess my biggest my biggest thought is if you as an author are thinking, I just need to get to a spot where Amazon starts promoting my book and Amazon starts doing all the work, that is never gonna happen. It's just not gonna happen. This, like it's your responsibility and it's your job to promote your book, not Amazon's, because Amazon is interested in what the buyer wants. They want to sell things, and so they are coming at it from a buyer-centric perspective. And so that's that's where their that's where their motivation is for what they show to people, how their search engine engines work is what is the buyer looking for, and how can I show them the most relevant thing that they that they want. And if your book is not selling, then the Amazon's not going to show your book to potential buyers.

Joel 8:24

Yep. So I I think that that's fabulous. I totally agree with that. And I think the way you have to go about this is you have to break down what all this actually means. And I think what a lot of people hear is, oh, we need to get the right keywords and categories and get the sales and the customer reviews so that Amazon will magically promote the book and it'll take off. And through no extra effort, the book will just soar to success. And they don't actually break down, well, what would it look like for Amazon to promote their book? What is the Amazon algorithm? What are the factors? So I thought it'd be useful to talk through a few of those things. Let's do it. So, in terms of Amazon's algorithm, no one knows for sure what it is, and no one and they're changing it all the time and they're tweaking it. And like you said, Amazon, their job is to make sure that they get people what they want. It's not to promote you, it's not to help, you know, the small first-time author succeed in the world. They are trying to get their customer base to be able to find exactly what they want. Okay. They also have a money-making model. So the things that we know about Amazon's algorithm is that if you have a lot of customer reviews, and some people say 50 is the magic number, um, it's hard to know for sure if that's true, but if you have at least 50 customer reviews, and if you're starting to get sales. Now, how many sales? It depends. It depends on your category because you're always relative to other books, right? But no one knows for sure how many sales it's gonna take for Amazon to take your book and start promoting it. Okay. So we know those things are true. But the next question is what does it look like for Amazon to promote your book? Does it mean that they're gonna send an email out to everybody who has an Amazon account who ever bought a book that was in a similar genre to you and promote your book? No, no, they're not going to. And what I encourage anybody who's heard this to do is go to an Amazon book page. Go to any old book page. If you have a book out there, go to your page. If you want, if if there's a book you just read from a famous author that you really loved, go to that book page and scroll down and look at how Amazon promotes books, right? So on that page, you are gonna see lots of ads for other books. I've got one pulled up in front of me right now. So on that page, you're gonna scroll down, you're gonna see towards the top of that page, you're gonna see an ad that says products related to this item. But then what you're also gonna see is a very small gray font that says the word sponsored. And if you keep scrolling down, you're gonna see more sections like this. And in most of those sections, you're gonna see this little word called sponsored. So what does that mean? That those are ads. Yes. Those books, either the author or the publisher paid to have ads for that book show up. And Amazon is not selecting which ads. They're going, it's literally a highest bidder's market. So an ad is when you go into Amazon ads, you can you can spend money and you can put a bid in to say, I want my ad to appear in relationship to a search for this term or in relationship to books that are similar to mine. And even name the specific book. So people are literally paying to have their books shown there. So if you hack your algorithm just right, will your book show up here? No, they're not going to show your book there. They're going to show the books from the authors and publishers who are paying them to show those books. And I will tell you, it is very, very, very expensive. Amazon ads are very expensive. Most people and most publishers lose money on a single ad. They do it because they know they need to get sales, they know they need to get visibility. They know that if they have multiple books, so if someone buys their book, they will then buy other books, and that's how they realize their profit. They know that if they advertise their nonfiction book and they have a related business service or subscription or workshop, that the that that ad will lead to something else. But very few people will make money on those ads. So it is a very competitive game. And you, if you want to get into that game, it's very difficult, and we're not going to go into too much detail on this conversation because that's not the point, but you should listen to our interview with Steve Sarner if you want to know about Amazon ads. He's an expert in this. If you want to get into that game, it's a big budget affair. And so it's very difficult for you to get your ads featured.

Sayde 12:37

Right. But it's an important distinction to make because the average buyer or a first-time self-published author might not realize how much of that content appearing on that book page is paying to be there. Is paying hoping that you click on it, hoping that you buy, because conversion rates matter too, right? Like how often someone types something into the search engine on Amazon, finds a book that might be answering the question that they have, clicks on that book, and then clicks buy now or add to cart. Those conversion rates matter too. But if you're thinking that if I just get in the right mix of categories and if I just use the perfect mixture of the seven keywords, that all of a sudden, you know, everything is going to start working out in your favor, that is just not how the system works. And that does not mean that it's not worth it to think about your categories and to think about what are the keywords, what are the search terms that might help Amazon understand what your book is about. You know, those are relevant fields within the system that are important to put some thought into, make sure you have them in there, but they're much more about uh findability, not visibility. So you are helping Amazon understand the contents of your book so that when you start selling your book, Amazon can understand it better and potentially help other people find it. But, you know, I think even it's important to note that even if you had the most perfect keyword phrases and your book is not selling, if someone were to type that keyword into the search engine, your book is not gonna show up. We even have this. Not necessarily. All the time, well, because it depends on, you know, they Amazon's Amazon's algorithm, their search engine, they want to show buyers what they want to purchase. And so if you have, if you're looking for a book or you're looking for an answer to a question and you type in even verbatim a keyword that my book has used that keyword, um, but my book has not sold a single copy, Amazon's not gonna show that book at the top of the listing because they're in there, all they know is that no one wants this book, nobody's buying it.

Joel 14:57

Well, and even if you sell 50 or 100 copies the first week, right? Yeah. You aren't necessarily gonna show up. And by the way, we have moved into our third point, which is if you get just the right keywords and just the right categories and just the right copy, your Amazon's gonna miraculously promote your book. So we're in this, but what we're talking about is that you are you are in a competitive environment. Right. And again, Amazon's job is not to help you, Amazon's job is to help its customers. Yes, yes, and so you are competing. If you have a memoir about trans a personal transformation memoir that has themes of uh middle-age spiritual renewal, something you're going up against, you know, Cheryl Strade and Eat Pray Love, and you are going against the heavy hitters. And when people search for those keywords, Amazon's gonna promote them before they promote you.

Sayde 15:50

Well, and there's this funny thing that happens uh to every author we've ever worked with, and there's always a bit of a panic mode where your book goes live on Amazon. So it's live, it's out there. The 72 hours of technical review have passed and it's it's available to purchase in their system. And authors will type in the title of their book and it won't show up in the search results.

Joel 16:13

It's true, it happens every time.

Sayde 16:15

It happens every time. And so there's this moment of like, I can't find my book. And even searching the title of your book when it is brand new and there are no sales and you are a first-time author, Amazon is very likely not going to show you your book. And so we're like, well, search your title and your name, and you know, you'll get that page to show up. And that, and then you and then people are like, but how are how are people gonna find it? How are we gonna, how are they gonna know? And and I always tell authors in the beginning, you're gonna need to send them the link. You know, send that link out to your friends, your family, your colleagues, uh, people on social media, people in your newsletter list. You are gonna need to direct them to Amazon because the search engine portion is not going to work when there are no sales on a brand new product and a first-time author. They're just not gonna work.

Joel 17:06

I recently sat on a panel. It was actually at last year's 2025 San Francisco Writers Conference. I sat on a panel with a woman named Kristalyn Sanders Diggs, who we've also interviewed. You can go check out that interview on our YouTube channel or our blog or on the podcast. And she's a very successful self-published uh children's book author. And we someone asked a question about this: how can I get the right keywords in the searching, all that kind of stuff? And I gave my spiel, which was a little bit long-winded and probably overly complicated. And she, after I was done, she grabbed the mic and she goes, I agree with Joel. And then she coined it perfectly. She said, You have to earn your discoverability.

Sayde 17:47

I love that.

Joel 17:48

Discoverability is not going to happen naturally. You have to earn it. There's no shortcut, there's no way around it. You have to earn your discoverability.

Sayde 17:57

That's perfect. That's absolutely true. Yeah.

Joel 18:00

And what I like about this, and I think this is a theme running through all of these points, and I think why you and I are so passionate about this, Sayde, is that it's a mindset issue. And if you're expecting these things to work without earning them, you're not going to be doing the things that you need to do to earn them, which we'll talk a little bit more at the end of the podcast. But it's very critical. This is why it's so pat we're passionate about this. None of the things that we're taught that we're sort of uh deconstructing right now are bad things to do. Do them. All the things, keywords, customer reviews, all that kind of stuff. Do it. Absolutely. Put your best foot forward. Just don't expect it to make everything work and don't do it at the expense of all the real things you really need to do.

Sayde 18:43

Yeah.

Joel 18:44

And that's why we care about this so much.

Sayde 18:45

And, you know, we work with authors literally every day. And the ones that are the most successful are the ones who are willing to put the work in, who are not just going to sit back and hope that the Amazon algorithm discovers them and their book, you know, catapults it.

Joel 19:01

Earn their discoverability.

Sayde 19:02

Right. Right.

Joel 19:03

So that's really you have to send people to Amazon. You can't hope that Amazon is going to send people to you.

Sayde 19:08

Yes.

Joel 19:10

Then Amazon will start to reward you eventually. But it will not work the other way around.

Sayde 19:15

Mm-hmm.

Timing Myths About Launch Dates

Joel 19:17

So our next point, I think, I think we've talked a lot about this. Our next point, and this is an interesting one, the timing of your launch matters. So we hear all the time, oh, Tuesdays are a great day for a book launch. For some reason, everybody in the book world I've I've been hearing that for 15 years. Tuesdays are a great day for a book launch. Or, hey, this is a personal development book, so I've got to make sure I launch it in January because that's when everybody's looking for personal development work because of New Year's resolutions. Or this is a great gift book, so I got to start promoting it in early November so I can tap into that holiday market. That kind of thing.

Sayde 19:53

Yeah.

Joel 19:54

And people get really obsessed with the timing of it, the seasonality, the time of the week. Even the time of the day sometimes we'll hear the day that it goes out. And like everything else, it's not a bad thing. If you have a great we're working with a children's book author right now who has uh who has a book about uh who has a book about Christian Christianity and Judaism. How to talk to kids about that. And getting it done in time for the holidays could be really good for that because there's a seasonality to it. But we often find that that gets overplayed.

Sayde 20:28

Yeah.

Joel 20:29

Over exaggerated. The timing. Similar to, you know, getting those sales in the first week matters. The timing of your book launch matters less. And why would you say that is, Sayde?

Sayde 20:39

Well, I think, first of all, you know, I think the reason that, or one of the reasons we wanted to bring this up is again, there's a lot of anxiety, especially in first-time authors, around uh if I don't launch in the right way or in the right time or the right time of the week, is it going to be successful? And some of this plays into some of our previous points. There is some myths out there that there are better days of the week to launch your book, that Amazon will pay attention to it. And um, and that, you know, so much of that, if it matters, it matters so little that it it shouldn't be the focus of your decision making around launching your book. And so, you know, what what I tell authors when I'm working them is working with them is what matters is when you are available physically and mentally to launch your book when your audience is available because that might differ a little bit, right? Like, you know, um uh a nonfiction book, the audience for a nonfiction book might be have a different availability than you know, a thriller or a romance or some genre heavy, heavy fiction book, right? Like we can launch fiction books in the summertime and they can do really, really Well. You know, and so there's some of that at play. Like who is your audience and and when are they available? But all of that should, all of that should be secondary, I think, to when are you reasonably ready to launch your book? When do you have all of your bases covered and you as the author are excited and ready to do this? Because even if it is a seasonal book, even if it is a book about Christmas or Hanukkah or graduation, and you want to get, you know, you want to really tap into parents and grandparents who are looking for a graduation gift, that that type of seasonality comes around every year. And so every year you're going to have an opportunity to use that in marketing your book. It's not, I have to get it right now and I have to do it perfectly this first time, otherwise, it's not going to be successful.

Joel 22:55

I think it's a wonderful way to say it, Sayde. And I've never heard you say that before. So it's it's illuminating. I love that. You've got to build your launch date and your launch timing around yourself. Because you're the most important factor in all this. Don't do it just because everyone says to do it here or there. Because remember, if you go at it, if you hit the right time, everybody else is going to be trying to hit the right time too.

Sayde 23:17

Right.

Joel 23:17

It's very relative. So you're just, you're the competition will be higher during those times as well. Absolutely. So you've got to find that time when it works for you. And I love that.

Sayde 23:25

And you know, there's definitely some, I mean, again, if you're self-publishing, we've been doing this long enough. And we know that uh the systems of self-publishing, both Amazon, KDP, and Ingram Spark, they can get kind of bogged down during the holidays. It can be tough to successfully launch a book during the holidays just because there's so much backlog and there's so many people trying to get their book out before Christmas that you might, you might be planning a thing and then you get kind of stuck in the wheels of their technical review and you're waiting and you're waiting and you're waiting. So there's there's reasons why I might sway someone away from a specific time of year, but it has much more to do with we've been around and we've seen it go wrong and we understand that it has nothing to do with, you know, like the author being prepared. It has much more to do with the with the systems of self-publishing. Um, but you know, when is it going to be good for you? And when is it gonna be special? When is it, you know, when are you gonna be excited about it? And just because you, if you're working with a self-publishing company like ours, just because you have all of the files ready and you've printed proofs and you know everything looks great, doesn't mean you need to launch right now. You know, you could you could wait and you could you could line up some some more things.

Joel 24:42

I love it. I love it. I think let's let's move on to our next point. But before we do that, I want to remind everybody again that if you're finding this helpful, uh, please subscribe on your favorite platform. We're on every platform, including YouTube. And also rate and review us. It helps us reach more authors. Uh, we obviously have a business that we where we help with uh book publishing and promotion, but what we're really doing with this show is trying to bring a lot of honesty and clarity to the publishing space because we're passionate about that and we really care about empowering people and protecting them against misinformation and giving them the real information from ourselves and also from other industry professionals and other authors about how to succeed. So if you're enjoying that, you found it useful, please consider rating and reviewing us and subscribing. So we're gonna move into our next

The Soft Launch Saves You

Joel 25:33

one. And the next one is it's similar, and this is an interesting one. This is one I've experienced virtually since the very beginning of my career in books, which is that you need to perfectly orchestrate all of your promotional and PR and marketing efforts like a symphony to go off voila on that first week. Yeah. So that everything perfectly compounds and are able to break through and make every and send your book to the top of the charts.

Sayde 26:05

Yeah.

Joel 26:06

So that everybody will be hearing about it everywhere on the radio and on the latest podcasts and on the billboards they see down the street, kind of like a big movie launch. Um and we talked about this a little bit in the first point about that those first sales, but it feels like it needs its own thing. Because I've seen a lot of authors get really worked up about making sure it all perfectly works together. And that can often work against you. Yes, because you burn out, you do all your stuff right up front, and then you have no energy left, and you don't have anything left for later. And a and a book launches a marathon, not a sprint.

Sayde 26:44

Absolutely. Not only do you burn out, but there are lots of things that can go wrong with your book uh during that launch week.

Joel 26:54

Whether you're self-publishing or even I've seen it happen with traditional publishers as well.

Sayde 26:58

Sure.

Joel 26:59

Murphy's Law beckons.

Sayde 27:01

Yes. And so if you have everything timed perfectly to happen on a day or a handful of days, the the chances of something going wrong are really, really high. And so we always encourage authors to give themselves what we call the soft launch. And this kind of is it's a, you know, people get get a little bit taken aback at this idea because it goes against everything that we've talked about, right? All of these, all of these myths that like you gotta sell books on day one and you gotta get customer reviews on day one, because otherwise, you know, Amazon's not gonna pay attention to your book. And yet we tell people, no, make your book live, turn it on, and do not tell anyone. And why do we do that? Why do we, why do we tell people to do that?

Joel 27:51

Mistakes happen. Mistakes happen. I mean, this is not the primary reason to avoid this, but yeah, you don't want there to be a mistake. We had a we had an author client uh who had been reading all kinds of content like this online and had put together the perfect symphony of marketing events, and they were insistent that we that that all of that coincide with the day that we make the book live. And we we fought and we pushed and we said, Don't do it, please don't do it, please don't do it this way. Give yourself some space. And luckily we won the battle because when we turned on that soft launch, when we made that book live for sale, three days after it went live, the cover had all the text disappear off of it on Amazon. So when people would show up to the Amazon page, they saw a cover with images only and no text. And when we called up Amazon and we asked them what happened, they said, sorry, we messed up.

Sayde 28:42

Yeah.

Joel 28:43

So can you imagine if all of the emails and all the tweets and all the promotions had gone out before we had a chance to test it and make sure and people showed up on that page, some people still probably would have bought it, but I guarantee you would have been significantly less.

Sayde 28:58

Right.

Joel 28:59

Because of that glitch.

Sayde 29:00

And that's just that's one small piece. Yeah. You know, we've seen I've seen books go live and Amazon has pulled over customer reviews from a different book that had a slightly similar title, but not the same title. Um, there's the there's technical glitches, and the only way to fix those is to get a hold of Amazon and alert them. And it does they don't fix it overnight. I think that cover issue one that took us a week, if not more, of just kind of hounding Amazon and re-uploading files and sending them screenshots and showing them that no, the file we uploaded did in fact have the text on it before it before it finally, you know, magically got fixed. And so you have to give yourself time to handle any of those glitches that may occur. Maybe you're for whatever reason, maybe your ebook is not linking properly. And so when you go to search for your book, there's two listings showing up. Maybe Amazon has connected you to the wrong author central account or Goodreads has connected you to the wrong author. That one happens a lot. And again, you have to contact the system and tell them what the issue is in order to get those kinds of things fixed. So giving yourself some time before you start your heavy hitting with marketing, before all of your, you know, all of your promotions and all of your things go out, giving yourself, I mean, I would say a minimum of two weeks.

Joel 30:26

Yeah. And it's not just about the errors either. You know, I was speaking with someone the other day about this, and I it occurred to me, it's really difficult to figure out what marketing is going to work for your book. You really don't know. There's some best practices, sure. There's some some simple things everybody needs to do, but everybody's marketing is going to be different. It's going to fit your book, it's going to fit your genre, it's going to fit your budget, it's going to fit your personality. Your personality might be someone who wants to go and hit a bunch of podcasts because you love to talk to people. But or maybe you don't want to, you don't want anyone to see your face or hear your voice. So you might have another way of promoting your book, like doing guest articles or doing lots of tweets, whatever. Everybody's way of doing marketing is going to be different. And you need some time to experiment.

Sayde 31:10

Yes.

Joel 31:11

And I always want people to test and experiment and start to figure out what works for them, starting small, adding their stacks, as they say, of different marketing tools before you go for it whole hog. Because if you go for it whole hog on a strategy that's theoretical that you've never tested, and that someone else told you you needed to do, you might waste a bunch of time and money on something that's just not going to work for you.

Sayde 31:37

That is a that's a fabulous point. And, you know, I we've talked about this and you've made YouTube videos about this. Like your marketing, you you do need time. You need time to test what is going to work for your book and also what is going to work for you as the author. Because you are going to have to, as long as you want to sell books, you're going to have to market your book. As soon as you stop marketing it, you are going to stop selling it. And so you're going to have to figure out what marketing do you enjoy? What do you like to do? Because if it's if you hate it and every day you're like sitting down at your desk, like, well, I have to make another social media post and I hate being on social media, that is not sustainable. That is not going to work. And so you also have to enjoy it.

Joel 32:17

That's right. Amen to that. And here we are, Sayde, we've stumbled into our last point, which is that there is a one right way to do a book launch. And I think we've talked about why that isn't true.

Sayde 32:29

Right. Yeah. And I I think we've also kind of hit on, you know, why people want that to be true. Obviously, we all want a hack and a and a plan. And if you do step A, B, C, D, E, your book will be successful and you'll sell a million copies and you'll make all your money back. Like I think, of course, we all want that. And we, if that were true, if there was a way, a plan that we told all of our authors, do these things and you will 100% be successful and you will sell books and you will make your money back, we would love that. We would, if that were true, we would love that and we would tell you that. But it's just not true. There's no right way. There's no right way and there's no one size fits all.

Joel 33:07

Absolutely. So I'm sure there's many other myths around getting your launch just right. These are just the ones that we were able to think about today. But I don't want to keep talking about the myths because I feel like we've done enough disabusing of notions today. When I talk to people about this in casual conversation, they often say, okay, well, then what am I supposed to do? What do I actually do? And so I want to spend a little time talking about that. And the reason this is important, to echo a point we made earlier, is that we want you to focus on the right way of building a successful book promotional and launch campaign, as opposed to getting overly focused on all these exaggerated, not I wouldn't quite call them wrong ways, but you don't want to put all your eggs in those baskets because you'll be disappointed. Of the others.

Sayde 34:00

Yeah.

The Long Game That Works

Joel 34:01

And we've identified a few of these. We're going to go through them briefly because each one could probably an hour-long podcast in and of itself. And we can talk about this more in future episodes if people want. But I would say one thread running through all these is the marathon, not a sprint philosophy, which is the doing the right thing to make your book a success is not something that you can do pre-launch. It's not something you can do launch week. It's not something you can do in the first three months, not even the first six months. It takes a long time to build an authentic platform and readership for your books. So we've identified a few of these. The first one that we talked about, Sayde, is write more books. That's one way to do this well, is to write multiple books.

Sayde 34:48

Yep, absolutely. And, you know, I think, I think this is often such an overlooked way to build your readership and build your community is to write more books. And, you know, we've kind of been, we've been on this for probably years now, I think. It was your interview with Michael Larson several, several years ago. You can check that out on on YouTube, where he he also made this point. He was like, you know, it takes three books. It takes three books to build a community.

Joel 35:12

So it's true. And I've I've since heard that from many, many, many, many successful authors who are both indie and traditional published. The ones who really crush it, especially in fiction, are writing many, many, many, many, many, many, many books because one of them is really hard. It's hard to make a profit. It's hard on a single book. But if you can get people interested in that first book, then they're going to want to read the next book and the next book and the next book. You have to keep giving them a product, right? You have to keep changing your menu to use a restaurant metaphor. You have to keep feeding people things. Otherwise, it it'll never really take off. So that's one thing you can be doing. What's another thing that you can be doing?

Sayde 35:52

You can do an outreach campaign.

Joel 35:54

I love outreach campaigns. What's an outreach campaign?

Sayde 35:58

Well, uh, an outreach campaign is is where you look look at your network, your your people, your contacts, uh uh colleagues, folks that you've worked with, folks you went to school with, um, and and you start gathering lists of people that you can pitch your book to, or you can at least talk about your book to. And so there's there's a couple levels of this, right? There's like your personal network, that's level one, always the most overlooked. Everybody wants to go for the big dogs. And then there's your niche audience. So, what are some themes in your book that there might be some podcasts out there that are talking about those themes? There might be blogs and online newsletters and Substacks and other people, other authors, influencers in that space that are also where some of your some of your themes uh overlap with what they talk about. And start gathering all of that information and figuring out ways to reach out to people, talk to them, have a conversation with them, not just about your book, but about your what you are passionate about. I love it. You know, they can be highly successful, incredibly grassroots and a lot of work. So much work. I'm working on one right now. You know, they can there it's it's it can be a little bit daunting how much is out there, but if you'll make a few connections, you will. There will be someone that you reach out to and that that will be interested in talking to you.

Joel 37:26

And this is again, this fits this theme, right? You're not just putting your book up and hoping that people will come to you. You're actively going, you're building relationships, you're finding the people, you're finding the plat the platforms, podcasts, websites, you're finding organizations, you're making connections, and you're actively hustling to slowly build that network for your book. We've got a whole video on our and article about this called Three Ways to Mobilize Your Tribe for a Book Launch, which you should check out. And by the way, we'll include links to everything that we've mentioned in the show notes in the description here for people.

Sayde 38:00

The other thing that's so great about an outreach campaign is you're you're working on your pitches. You know, you're you're writing marketing copy about yourself, about your book, about the themes in your book, why people should care. And and you're sending those out into the world, and then you're getting feedback on what's working. What are people responding to? And you can continue to refine that, and that's only gonna help you.

Joel 38:21

That's fabulous. So again, we could talk about this for days, but let's move on to another one. Um, and this is one I'm gonna I'm gonna skip around a little bit because this is probably the most important thing, which is you need a great book.

Sayde 38:33

Yeah.

Joel 38:33

And I think some people overlook this. And I know everybody knows they want to have a great book and they put a lot of effort into it, but I do find that sometimes people will skip some of those last steps in making their book amazing, both inside and out. Though inside, that might look like not bringing in a really experienced copy editor to help them, or even a developmental editor, if you've never really written a book before and you need some deeper help. A lot of people will skip that step.

Sayde 39:01

Yeah.

Joel 39:02

And so they'll bring something to market that's that's imperfect. On the outside, people will hire a cut rate cover designer or just use Chat GPT to generate one. And it's good, even if you have a beautiful book or sorry, a wonderful book, if it looks amateurish, it's gonna be really hard for you to penetrate the market and compel people.

Sayde 39:22

Right.

Joel 39:23

Uh so you need to make sure that you've done the right amount of work in that product itself.

Sayde 39:31

Absolutely. Yeah. And no one wants to n necessarily hear that or believe that, or that's a hard pill to swallow. That, you know, you can throw all kinds of marketing dollars at your book. You can try all kinds of things, you can, you know, you can literally spend thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars. And if your book is not good, it's not going to work.

Joel 39:52

That's right. That's right. So, so another one that we have is building an authentic platform for your work. And I think this is really important. And again, this is the kind of thing that is often daunting for people. They'd rather do the keyword stuff or get the algorithms right or just pay someone to make their book succeed on Amazon where they don't have to do stuff. Platform building is difficult. So, what is it, what is an authentic platform, Sayde? What was that, what does that look like?

Sayde 40:21

I think what that looks like is an a platform is where you are showing up in the world and how you are showing up in the world and how you are sharing yourself with the world. And, you know, it's it's not gonna be cookie cutter. Um, it doesn't, it also doesn't need to be incredibly overwhelming or all over the place. I think sometimes even I tend to go straight to social media when I think about platform building.

Joel 40:48

Like TikTok, it's gotta be on TikTok, like TikTok, right? Like people crush it on TikTok.

Sayde 40:51

You gotta crush it on TikTok, you gotta get on book talk, you gotta get, you know, you and and sure, okay, that's you know, that can work for some books, but where you as the author show up authentically online and offline is how you will build your platform. And again, finding the ways to show up that you enjoy that are not gonna feel forced, they're not gonna feel fake, they're not gonna feel cringy. And maybe that is TikTok. You know, there are some fabulous TikTok influencers out there who are showing up really authentic, really engaged, and doing great work. But maybe it's a Substack. Again, maybe you're an author, you don't necessarily want your face out there. So maybe you're writing weekly Substacks about your travel journeys and you know, you're doing world building through your Substack. There's, but that's, you know, that's what authentic platform building is to me. And it's a long game. It's not a, it's not a all of a sudden you have a hundred thousand subscribers and publishers are looking at you because they're interested in your audience. It's it's a long game because you are building slowly and you're keeping people engaged with you as as you go. It's not just about how many, you know, numbers are behind your name. Do they care about what you have to say?

Joel 42:08

Absolutely. And that's why that authenticity is important. And this is a long game, like you said, and it requires a lot of patience. So that means if you go out there and you you've you you know you're committed to your SubSec and you write two SubSac posts a week for four months, and by the end of that four month period, you only have 75 subscribers. That doesn't mean it's not working. You can't just give up, right? You need to look at what is working within that strategy. You need to shore up your wins and then maybe make some tweaks, try different things.

Sayde 42:41

And I tell people often when they're starting with platform building, you're gonna feel like you're talking into the void because you are. There's no one there yet. And that's okay. You you have to keep showing up.

Joel 42:52

I love it. So again, there's more, way more detail on all this stuff. You can check out all kinds of resources about our approaches to marketing, our philosophy about how to do this stuff on our our blog, YouTube channel, and on this podcast. I would say sort of the parting, the parting strategy, which is more of a meta strategy, is you've got to test and you've got to experiment. I know we've been saying this a lot. I like to use the Swiss cheese metaphor. And forgive me if you've ever heard me say this on another episode of uh YouTube or podcast, but I I really like it. It's the Swiss cheese method of marketing. And what that means is every little slice of Swiss cheese has holes in it. But when you stack them, it can become solid. And every author has to build their own stack of Swiss cheese marketing strategies, right? Promotions, uh social media, platform, outreach campaigns. You've got to do that, but you've got to do it slice by slice, and you have to understand that no single one is gonna is gonna move the needle for you.

Sayde 43:56

Yeah, and I think that's I think that's the point, you know, that that we're certainly hoping. That this drives home, which is there's no shortcuts. There's no shortcuts to having a successful launch or even having a successful book or having multiple successful books. There's no shortcuts. You have to put in the work and you have to earn it. And and these are, you know, some ways that we have found uh helpful for folks to for folks to see a little bit of success. But you know, every approach, like Joel said, has holes in it. And so there's no, there's not going to be a perfect slice of cheese that just sells you millions of books. There's going to be imperfect slices of cheese that you're going to, you're going to figure out which ones work the best for your book. And so giving yourself that time to test things out, to see what you like, what are readers responding to, you know, giving yourself time to write another book, all of this can help. It's just not, you're not going to have overnight success.

Joel 44:58

Awesome.

Closing Advice And Contact Info

Joel 44:59

Well, Sayde, thank you. I I really enjoyed the conversation. I hope everybody else did as well. Uh, please share this with your friends. Um, subscribe to our platform if you want to hear more, if you want to hear more content like this and uh give us a rate and review. If you have any questions for us, you can write to me, Joel at launchmybook.com, J-O-E-L at launchmybook.com. Uh, I can answer your questions and I would also be open to potentially exploring something on a future episode. So thank you for tuning in.