7 Different Types of Book Launch Events

In this episode, I share 7 different types of book launch events (or a combination of more than one) you can use for your book.

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Can’t listen right now?  Read the transcript below:

Here’s an outline of the show and the full transcript is below.

The 7 Types of Book Launch Events

3 Things to Consider

1. Event Timing
2. Event Length
3. Type of Event

Book Launch Event #1: Discounted price

Depending on the price of your book, you offer a discount for a short period of time. I recommend 2-3 days. Many authors launch their book at $0.99 for the first week to generate interest and sales. But, this can be done at any time to help boost sales as well.

Book Launch Event #2: Bestseller Launch

A bestseller launch is a focused effort to launch a book on a specific day to drive sales to Amazon at the same time. This tends to get a higher bestseller rank faster. Usually you will include some kind of bonus for those who buy during your launch. However, realize these are not as effective as they used to be, but still an option to consider.

Book Launch Event #3: Virtual Book Tours

A virtual book tour is a powerful way to connect with another person’s established network. You can set the length to whatever fits best in your schedule. You can do this through guest blog posts, guest podcast interviews, etc.

Find a list of over 650 potential blog tour hosts here:

www.trainingauthors.com/bloghosts

Examples of two of my tours:

• Forgiveness formula blog tour (10 hosts): theforgivenessformula.com/virtual-book-tour
• Video tour: I had 21 different hosts post 21 different short videos I recorded along with information about my book. Here is one example: http://therisingmuse.com/2012/11/16/21-ways-to-celebrate-gratitude

Book Launch Event #4: Giveaways and Contests

Be creative and think outside the box. You want to pull in your readers instead of pushing them away and to be the FUN one!

Types of giveaways:

KDP select free days – https://www.trainingauthors.com/47-places-to-submit-your-free-kdp-promotion-for-your-kindle-ebook/

Rafflecopter giveaways – https://www.rafflecopter.com

Goodreads giveaways (paperback books) – http://www.shelleyhitz.com/goodreads-author-profile/

Book Launch Event #5: Group Promotions

With this option, you are able to harness the power of a group. All the authors involved agree to promote the group event and it is usually created around a theme.

Examples of group promotions I have helped organize:

• Christian Book 100% Off Sale: http://www.bodyandsoulpublishing.com/100-percent-off-christian-books
• CrossReads March Madness Promotion http://crossreads.com/marchmadness

A group promotion I participated in:

• March to a Bestseller: https://www.facebook.com/events/1642751759284824

Book Launch Event #6: Online Conferences

You can host an online conference via teleseminars, webinars, or Google+ hangouts. Then, you invite guest speakers that you interview during your conference. This gives you exposure to each speaker’s audience.

Get more information here: https://www.trainingauthors.com/teleseminar-services-for-authors 

Example of one of my online conferences:

Unshackled and Free Four Day Online Conference: http://theforgivenessformula.com/conference

Book Launch Event #7: Combine One Or More Of The Above

You can also choose to do a combination of the options I covered. This will require more time and effort, but may yield better results.

For example:

• KDP free promotion with a virtual book tour.
• Online conference followed by a bestseller launch.
• Group promotion, Rafflecopter giveaway, and virtual book tour.

Action Steps

• Decide When and How Long Your Event Will Be.
• Choose Your Event(s)
• Do The Work To Get It Done!

Read the FULL Transcript Below:

I’m going to share with you seven types of book launch events, so let’s dig right in. Here are the seven different types of book launch events that I’m going to cover: a discounted price, a best-seller launch, virtual book tours, giveaways and contests, group promotions, online conferences, and a combination of one or more of the above.

So here are some things to consider when you’re planning your book launch event:

• You want to consider event timing. When do you want it to be? Just during launch, leading up to your lunch, and so forth.

• You want to think about the length. How long do you want it to last?

• And finally, what type of event. That’s primarily what we’re covering.

The first type is the discounted price launch event. This will be where you discount the price of your book for a certain number of days throughout your launch. I usually recommend two to three days, and many authors will launch their book, including myself, at 99 cents for a few days, or the first week, to generate interest and sales.

However, a discounted price event can be done any time to help boost sales. It can be a special event you run during the summer. Maybe it’s a July 4th sale or you have a back-to-school sale or something like that. Or maybe it’s a special event for your birthday. But for book launches, it can be very effective.

Now, you do need to note that for print books, you will have to keep a higher price, so 99 cents is for an eBook. And on Kindle platform, 99 cents only gives you 35% royalties so you won’t be earning as much money. If you want to earn more royalties, you’ll need to keep it at $2.99 and above.

However, it does get people to buy because that 99 cents is an impulse buy and that can be a very effective way to launch your book.

You can also do a best-seller launch. This is a focused effort to launch a book on a specific day to drive sales to Amazon and have all of those sales happen at the same time. This tends to allow your book to get higher in the best-seller ranking on Amazon faster because they decide their best-seller ranking hour by hour depending on how many books have sold, so the more books that sell during that time period, the higher your best-seller ranking will go.

This type of launch event usually will include some kind of bonus for those who buy your book during your launch. A lot of times, for our author books, when we’re launching a book, we’ll offer an additional training free for those who buy during our launch.

So that could be something valued at $27, $97, or even more. For fiction authors, you may have to get a little more creative. It may be a special webinar with you, [where] they get to ask any question, or maybe it’s another book in the series that they get when they buy that current book during your launch.

So there are some different things you can do. However, just know that these best-seller launches are not as effective as they used to be, but it’s still an option to consider. As you’re thinking about what kind of launch event you want, if you’re creative and if you really come up with an amazing offer, you’re going to be able to sell books during that time.

Now, another option, this one I really highly recommend, is virtual book tours. It used to be you would go and travel around the country and do an in-store book tour. And you would meet your readers, sell books, do events, that sort of thing. Now, you can do everything online and do it virtually, and this is a powerful way to connect with another person’s established network.

So they will invite you to be a guest on their blog or invite you to be interviewed on their podcast, and they will introduce you to their network of followers. If you find blogs that are similar in genre to yours or similar in topic, then it’s going to be pretty effective because those people that are already interested in that topic will be introduced to you and to your book.

We’ve put together a list of over 650 potential blog tour hosts. If you’re interested in doing that, we definitely recommend you check that out. It’s at trainingauthors.com/bloghosts.

Here are two examples of the tours I’ve done in the past. My husband and I wrote a book called The Forgiveness Formula. We did a two-week tour Monday through Friday. And so we had ten different hosts.

You can see how we lined it up on our blog at theforgivenessformula.com/virtual-book-tour. Then I also did a video tour. I have a book, 21 Days of Gratitude Challenge, and it was 21 stories of gratitude and 21 prayers of gratitude. I was actually doing the video book tour to promote 21 stories of gratitude. I’m thinking that’s the one it was. But I was pretty much promoting the entire series and it was around Thanksgiving, so people kind of had gratitude on their mind and because I have the 21 theme in my books, I decided to find 21 different hosts, and I decided to record 21 different short videos on ways you can celebrate gratitude at Thanksgiving.

So I kind of bit a lot off, but what I did is I batch-recorded them, so I sat down and recorded all the videos at once—they are all short—and then I had a specific format I used for each blog, and I would just insert the different things for each blog into that. So I had a system and it worked.

Another book launch event you can do is giveaways and/or contests. I really encourage you to be creative and think outside the box. Think about something different that you really haven’t seen before or think about how you can do this in a little bit of a different way, and you want to pull your readers in instead of pushing them away. And so, instead of just saying, “Buy my book, buy my book, buy my book,” you can say, “Hey, I have this amazing prize. You can enter to win here.” And then introduce them to your book. So you want to be the fun one. You want to be the person that they want to come and visit on your Facebook page or your Twitter or your blog, and you want to be drawing them in.

Giveaways and contests are great ways to do that, so there are different types of giveaways. You can do a KDP Select Free Day, where you give away a book on Kindle, Rafflecopter Giveaways, and then another giveaway is a Goodreads paperback book giveaway if you have a paperback book.

So KDP Select Free Day, just so you know, this strategy is not for everyone. Not everyone will be interested in this. But it can be powerful for certain books when used correctly, and I have definitely seen this to be true, even recently. This is something to not put out of your mind. Some authors say I don’t want to give away my book for free. However, this is great for books that are in a series. So if you have a series of four books and they are fiction books or nonfiction books, you can give the first book away free to encourage downloads and purchases of the other books in the series. If that person likes you and likes your writing style, it’s likely they will go on to buy your other books in your series. And so it’s great for books that are in a series, but it’s also good for new authors just to get some exposure and also get introduced to readers.

However, you must give exclusive ebook rights to Amazon for ninety days at least in order to do this, and then they give you five free days to use. We have on our blog a list of some seventy-six-plus places that you can post your free books, so if you do decide to use this strategy, definitely check it out. It’s at trainingauthors.com/kdpfreedays.

Another option is a Rafflecopter Giveaway. Rafflecopter is a free tool you can use. You decide what you will give away and make it something related to your target audience and what they would like.

Here are a few ideas for prizes. You could give away an autographed copy of your book. Let them know it will be an autographed copy as readers love this, and you’re able to give that personal touch. You can [also] give away digital copies of your book.

But I really like, personally, if you can give something other than your book to draw them in. So it could be a gift certificate, it could be something electronic like giving away a Kindle, or something that I’ve done in the past is gotten donations from other companies.

So I would approach people that have products similar to mine or that are in my similar niche and ask them for donations.

If you’re a fiction book author, you could introduce them to other fiction authors by having a book bundle that those fiction authors donate, or if you’re a nonfiction author, you can find other people in your niche who have products that they might be willing to donate for giveaways. You fight find companies willing to donate physical products for the exposure for advertising during your launch.

I wanted to mention a Goodreads Giveaway. It’s an additional way to get exposure on a social media platform for readers. Goodreads is a platform for readers, and so that’s where readers hang out a lot.

However, to do the giveaway on Goodreads, you must have a print book. This is a good option to do in addition to any other book launch activities you schedule because it’s just another layer of exposure, another way to reach other readers, and you only have to give one print book away.

And you can specify which countries if you’re concerned about shipping costs. One of my books, Unshackled and Free, I had 800 people request it and 123 mark it as “to read.” And when that happens, what it does is it also posts that on their wall on Goodreads so their friends see it, so it’s a great way to get additional exposure for your book and another thing to consider as you’re preparing for a book launch event.

The fifth option that I’m going to talk about today is group promotions. Through group promotions, you can harness the power of a group. There is so much power when you work together. And then when you come together, all the authors involved agree to promote the group event so you have the promotional power of ten people instead of one person or twenty people instead of one person, depending on how many people are in the event, and it’s usually created around a theme.

A couple of the group promotions I’ve done were, I did a Christian book 100%-off sale and all of the authors involved agreed to give their book away for free on KDP Select or on Smashwords with a coupon for that sale.

And then on Crossreads, I helped promote a promotion, March Madness. It was during basketball season and a lot of authors and readers may not always be into basketball, so we were giving them an alternative and giving them all of these books to read.

That specific promotion, I think we had both free and 99-cent books, and then another one that I’ve participated in is March to a Bestseller. The link on your notes is to the current event that was going on in 2014, but we were also involved in an event earlier that was organized by Brian Cohen as well, and our book did really well. They were all books that were 99 cents and all books for authors. And so it was very successful and Brian did a great job, so we decided to be involved in it again. But again, it was just an example of the power of a group promotion.

Something else I have seen people doing lately that’s very successful when done correctly is box sets. Authors will come together and will put maybe three – I have even seen a dozen. I saw one box set called The Deadly Dozen and there were twelve different fiction novels included in that box set, and they ran a promotion for all of those books for 99 cents. What it did was it introduced all the people to those authors and then got them interested to read their other books.

There are so many different ways you can do group promotions that I just encourage you to get creative in your brainstorming.

Another option is to do an online conference. This is something I don’t see a ton of authors doing that I think you really could capitalize on more often. You can host an online conference via teleseminars, and there are free tools. I love freeconferencing.com, and you can do it through webinars or even Google Plus hangouts.

What you do is you invite guest speakers that you interview or they share something, a presentation, during your conference. This gives you exposure to each speaker’s audience and also helps you to build your list, and you can also then do this leading up to your book launch, so that you build a list of interested buyers—interested prospects, I guess I could say, interested customers—and you share your product with them.

I have a ton of information on how to host these and the technology and even a video tutorial. You can see it at trainingauthors.com/teleseminar.

One of my conferences that I did with my husband was the Unshackled and Free four-day online conference. You can see what we did at theforgivenessformula.com/conference.

We held it, and we did a teleseminar where we interviewed different people on the topic of forgiveness, and we did this leading up to our book launch. It worked really well. Plus we were able to use the recordings as a bonus during our launch. So if someone wasn’t able to listen live but they wanted the recordings, they could get those when they bought our book.

My favorite is actually doing a combination, so you can choose to do a combination of the options I’ve covered. The more creative you get, the better the offer is, the more likely you’re going to get sales. And so this will require more time and effort, but generally it does yield better results.

So, for example, you can combine a KDP free promotion with a virtual book tour. You can set up a blog tour for the days that your book will be free, and that way it’s promoting your book to that person’s audience and getting those downloads, getting them into your funnel, and potentially getting new readers and fans.

You can do an online conference followed by a best-seller launch, which I was just mentioning with our Forgiveness Formula. That’s what we did. You can do a group promotion, and in that group promotion also have a Rafflecopter Giveaway, which we’ve often done, and on the Rafflecopter Giveaway, we’ll give away an Amazon gift certificate, and you can combine that even with a virtual book tour, where the people hosting you on their blogs know about it and can participate.

So there are many different opportunities, many different options. I just encourage you to take some action, and even if you’ve already published and launched a book, you can re-launch it with something fun around an event, a holiday, something like that. You can decide when and how long. You can choose what kind of event you want to do or a combination, and then it’s time to do the work to get it done. That’s really what happens for successful authors: they not only have ideas for marketing; they actually put them into action.

Lights, camera, action. Are you ready for this week’s Take Action Tip?

What I want you to do is go through again those seven different book launch events and decide which one or which combination of events would work best for you and for your book. It could be either a brand-new book or you could be re-launching a book you’ve already published. If you need to review those seven book launch events, make sure to get the show notes and download my PDF that has all seven events and all the links that I talk about in this episode. You can get it at AuthorAudience.com/8. That’s the number eight. Authoraudience.com/8.

Before we end, I want to give you a backstage pass in this week’s Godly Gain Segment, which is all about keeping Christ at the center of all we do. When planning a book launch, it can get very overwhelming. And that’s where you really need to stay focused. Stay focused on the time that you have, the resources you have, financially, and what is practical for you right now.

If you’re working another job, it could mean that you’re not able to do as much as someone else that’s doing this full-time. But when you get overwhelmed, I encourage you to look to God for help. Psalm 121:1-2 says, “I look up to the mountains. Does my help come from there? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.” This is a great reminder for those of us who are Christ followers. God created the heaven and the earth. He’s more than capable of helping you work through the details of a book launch. You will face obstacles. You will face technical issues. You will have things to overcome. But you’re not alone. Your help comes from the Lord.

And if you would like a community of support and accountability and ongoing coaching, I recommend that you join us at authoraudienceacademy.com, where we can help you even one step further.

The Take Action workshop for this month is in the Members area and will be there ongoing for you to take advantage of it. Take the planning of a book launch one step further. Consider joining us if you really feel like you need that extra help, support, and encouragement, but most importantly, I encourage you to lift your eyes up, not to the mountains, but to the Lord. That’s where ultimately our help comes from.

Don’t miss the next episode. This is a special episode in my expert interview series. I’ll be interviewing experts that will be sharing their success strategies. The next episode will be an interview with Diane Cunningham, and she’s going to talk all about publishing and marketing a multi-author book. I think you will really enjoy it. So make sure you tune into the next episode, and I’ll see you next time.

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