Hey everybody! I hope you all are having a great week so far. Things are getting a little hectic at my house as both my sister and I are gearing up for the start of school on Wednesday. I’m looking forward to my junior year even though I’m spending it at home. I have a great lineup of classes in the history, Latin, and anthropology departments, and I’m writing my capstone this semester. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to keep it all straight!
My debut book launch was last Monday, and it has been an amazing time so far! I had a great week of promotion and sales and all-around fun with my family and friends to celebrate. I am still so surprised that I am now a published author. I can’t believe that Chasing Fae is out in the world and getting so much great reception from readers! Today, I want to share a little bit about what worked for me during this launch and what the results have been so far as we come around to around the two week mark of my launch.
Results From the First Two Weeks
Let’s start off with some stats. In the last two weeks, I have sold 86 Kindle ebooks and 16 paperbacks so far, excluding the number that I sold as part of my presale campaign to fund the publishing process. I am super satisfied with this progress because with the limited marketing that I have done so far, I feel like this was amazing progress. I also made my way to the top 100 list for YA epic fantasy on August 6th at #100. The listing was only up for a day, but it was such an amazing feeling to see my book alongside all of my favorite authors. I took screenshots of the entire list so I could remember that moment forever.
Here’s What Worked For Me
There are a few specific things that worked well for me during launch week that I want to pass on to you.
Bargain Booksy and ReadFreely: I saw a sizeable jump in sales mid-week during the days that I picked my newsletter promotions to be. I had both of these on the same day, so I cannot be 100% sure which one I can attribute to it. But ReadFreely also did an amazing job in tweeting out my promotions constantly for about a week or so. I loved seeing them pop up throughout the day.
Having lots of great friends on Twitter and Facebook: Getting involved in the Writing Community on Twitter and Facebook and keeping your family and friends informed about your writing process can really help boost your launch when it’s time. I had tons of people retweeting and sharing my links all day, and it led to a great buzz. Lots of my friends went ahead and ordered on launch day, and throughout the week, I got pictures of people receiving their paperbacks or confirmations of Kindle orders. They really made me smile. Writing can be such a lonely process, so it’s important to make connections with other writers to lift each other up.
Virtual Blog Tour: I spent several weeks leading up to my launch securing key guest post, interviews, and excerpt feature slots to promote my book. I got a lot of cross traffic to my website and definitely a few sales. As a new author, this was a way to get my name out to a lot of readers at once and offer insights into myself and my book. I honestly loved it. I hope to do more guest posts and interviews going forward.
What I Wish I Would Have Done
There are also a couple things I would have done differently in my launch that I hope to incorporate in my second book launch.
Have a Dedicated Launch Team: I needed to send out more advanced review copies and have a few dedicated people who would talk about my book over the first few days. I was so lucky to have people who shared and posted out of the kindness in their hearts and their friendships with me, but I could definitely use a little more organization next time for my own peace of mind.
Promoting My Launch Party Earlier: My Facebook launch party on Wednesday, August 5th was a pretty solid success, despite the technical issues. I would have loved to have promoted that across my other social medias more so that I would have had a bit more engagement on my giveaways in particular.
In Conclusion…
All in all, my book launch has been very successful so far. I hope that as I enter the fall semester of my junior year, I will be able to work out a good balance between marketing, writing book 2, and keeping this website flowing with more posts about the craft of fantasy writing. Wish me luck on that, folks.