SNM102: Four Keys to a Successful Book Launch

speaker 0: 0:00 keys to a successful book launch on today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by thrive themes, blazingly fast WordPress templates and plug ins built to get more traffic, more subscribers, more clients and more customers to you To find out how thrive themes concern your blogger Web site into a money making work of art, go to serve no master dot com Backslash Drive teams Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated?

If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast where you learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host. I've been helping a lot of people launched their books recently and a couple of critical keys to a successful book launch on today's episode.

Recently, I've been helping more more people put together their book launches, and I've noticed that consistently people get caught at a couple of key points and I want to help you overcome those stumbling blocks. Those barriers before they happen, the mindset of most authors and this is something that happens over and over again. We decide on a launch date. We decide this is the damn want my book to go live.

And once we have that date in mind, it becomes this monster chasing us down a hallway. Now, I'm a big believer in setting those dates and creating a fixed moment. You're gonna release your books. You don't get stuck constantly, almost releasing, almost releasing and pushing her date back over and over again. I hate pushing back launch dates, even for just to my mind. So I'm totally with you there. But what happens is we only think about one aspect.

The book isn't done, the book isn't done, and we do everything we can to get the book done, and we finish writing a couple of days before that launch date. And then suddenly we were Oh, I've got a format this and so on launch day we struggle, we get it formatted. It's not perfect, but it's okay, but we release it. Or maybe it's its.

We're happy with how it's formatted we get that far and then we don't have all the other components ready, and we're kind of stuck in this moment, and we're so busy jumping for other things that we missed some really key pieces. And I don't want that to happen to you. I want you to be very strategic success on Amazon success With anything online, you have to be very methodical and very strategic. You have to be very, very careful of each piece.

At least two weeks before you plan. Upload in your book to Amazon, you have to start working on your cover. It will take at least a week in probably two weeks to get that designed done. When you hire someone to design your cover, they know what they're doing. Every single person that I hire offers for triple the normal price to finish your cover.

In 24 hours, they'll move you to the front of the line, and they have this offer and it's so successful for them because most people wait way, way, way too long. They go, Oh, my gosh, my books come out in two days. I need to order a cover and you get stuck now. In a previous episode, I talked all about exactly how to choose an amazing cover design. An amazing cover. So that's already something I've covered. What I'm talking about here is being strategic.

I always design a cover for the book. I haven't even started yet, So as I was working on the cover for breaking orbit, I began work on the cover for 20 came today, and while working on the 20 decaying a day book, I began working on the cover for the next book in the series. This approach means I'm always ahead with my covers because I know for me sometimes it takes three weeks to get a cover design exactly what I want.

I often send it back for multiple revisions. I usually hire three artists, and I want to see each of their work and compare things and get different ideas. Sometimes I realized I hated idea. The original cover for serving a master was totally different. I changed it completely because I realized, ah, couple of weeks before launch that I hated it, and having that time is very, very critical.

So even though you're caught up in writing your book and trying to finish it in there, tons of writing contest through about time frames and stuff. It's very, very, very important for you to keep in mind that you also did. You get that cover done because you can't release a book without a cover and the covers more important than the content. Anyways, people don't read the content till after they've purchased the book.

When they see the cover before, they've done anything that covers the first thing they say. People say Don't judge a book by its cover, but if it's an actual book, it will be judged by its cover. The second component is Justice Critical seat. When you're designing the cover for a paperback book, you have to know how long the book's gonna be. So it's this catch 22 week cotton. Why can't design the paper back cover?

Because they don't know how many pages that find a book is gonna be, And I won't know that till I finish in. Edit the book. So we wait to do all the cover work until we finish the book. It added the book because otherwise we can't really do anything. We get stuck there and This is where people get stuck, but I want you to do is get the Kindle covered. Done. The two D cover just a front cover done early early on.

Getting the spine and back cover done for the paperback version later is really easy. Compared to the front cover the back inside cover just have to match the front. So once the fronts done, the rest of it's not so hard to dio. I know that when you have an artist, they always say, Oh, for an extra 10 bucks or for next 20 bucks, I'll do the paperback version as well, But you don't want to do that. Don't get jump on that. Don't get excited by that.

Believe me, you could measure them later in the light you ordered at the same price. Anyways, what you want to focus on right now is getting that front cover done. Once your book is written, Once your book is edited, it's very important to formatted correctly. I have tons of training, tons of material on had a foreman upload to kindle and create space in my block, so I don't want to repeat myself over and over again.

But you need to form right those correctly and take that seriously. If you launch a book and it's only available on Kindle format, the longer it takes you to get to paperback format ready, the more likely your book is to fail. Now there are books that air kindle only that succeed. There are books that released the paperback version two months later that succeed, but they're in the minority. I want to maximize the odds of your success. Please don't skip this step.

Every single person fines that formatting for kindled start so hard once you figured out. But once you try to format for create space, it takes a whole day. When I have for murder book for creators by hand, it takes me sometimes three or four hours of just sitting there with a word document getting it perfect. Even when I format and export from scrivener to my create space format, it still takes me a while.

It still takes me a couple of hours when I do it that way as well. It's not easy to get it perfect. There's always little tweaks. I wanna make a catchy little Miss steaks, and you have to attract the page number has to be perfect. The former Asperger. You want stuff on the left page of the right page. All that stuff you really have to pay attention to for money for create space is not easy, but it's critical.

Right now, about 40% of the money coming in from Amazon is coming in from create space. My paperbacks are pushing up right now. Paperback versions for me are selling really well. So I want you to think about that. If you were gonna make $10,000 a month by not having the create space version, you knock yourself down to 6000. But that's not actually true. There are people that will not buy the Kindle version of a book that doesn't have a paperback version.

They look at the book, they say, Oh, there's no paperback version. This isn't a real book, and you'll lose another 10 to 20% of your sales. So now, from $10,000 you knock yourself down to 4000 and I know you're gonna say yourself Ah, well, you know, just do it later and you get in the procrastination dance. I'm just telling you, you're hurting yourself.

If you don't have, the paperback version will push your conversion numbers down and push down the number of people who visit your page and then by any version of the book dramatically, you'll lose about 50 to 60% of your conversions, which means Amazon will hate you. When Amazon decides they don't like your book, they will destroy you. And Amazon algorithm is merciless Amazon. Is that a friend? It was either ally. Amazon is in the business of selling books.

You get one shot to demonstrate that your book is it gonna be a success? And when you blow that Amazon starts adding negative marks in the back into your book. They start saying This isn't a Tier one book. This is a tear to book, and after a couple of weeks they'll knock you down a tier three into your four. This is why you'll notice some books that are failing. You'll see they don't do they not silvery copies, but they're ranked like 300,000.

Then you'll see other books that are ranked like five million. That means they sell maybe a copy a year, or maybe a copy every three or four years. Amazon hates those books, and that's why it pushes them to the very, very bottom because they messed around with these key steps. So get your cover done right. Get your paperback first and done right. Take it seriously. It's just us important. It can't reiterate how important this for you. Take every step in this process seriously.

You absolutely need to have your cover done right. You need to get your pick back version done right. And yes, once you have the paperback version, you can then go back and order or get the full paperback cover done. So you have to go back and forth and do those steps. That's why you want to get everything done in advance. Your book should really be finished two weeks before you want to launch it. The next step that's critical is taking your review process seriously.

When your book goes live, you launch it at 99 cents. Following my very simple launch template, you have 1 to 2 weeks to gather as many reviews as you can. What I'm noticing is it Even when I tell people how important it is, most people strategy no matter what I say is to ask their friends or friends of friends for reviews. Now here's the problem with that. Amazon is smarter than you. Amazon is always checking to see if you're being naughty.

Now, if two people of two authors read each other's books and review each other's books randomly in general most of the time Amazon will delete those reviews, Amazon assumes, even if it's totally innocuous, that it's not because so many people do review swaps. The second problem is that Amazon tracks I P's and tracks Facebook activity. If you're Facebook friends with someone, there's a very good chance they're review of your book will disappear. If your Facebook friend of a friend, the review still might disappear.

So asking your friends, asking your friends friends, asking people that you know when you're so slick over for reviews. More and more Amazon is fighting against this, and this is something that other platforms are having a problem with. The same promise happening with I Am D B, which does movie rankings. If you see an independent movie and you look at the ranking, sometimes it'll have under 1000 reviews.

But it would be like nine stars, and that's a sign that the people who worked on the movie all left reviews. Now there's nothing wrong with that, right? People left in the reviews, and most people say I worked on this movie. Here's my thoughts. I don't have a problem with that. But a lot of people are noticing that, and it's affecting the trust. Ryan Devi. So anytime I see less than 1000 views, I don't believe the reviews. Ariel.

We learn to mentally discount what we think of his fake reviews or pseudo reviews or untrustworthy reviews, and in the same way, Amazon. These other systems are trying to catch them through their own mechanics. The review part of the process is so critical every review get that's real. The longer the reviews you get, the more seriously people write. The reviews are, the more successful your book will be. Just asking your fans reviews. That's fine. Okay, it's a great bass line, but I have other podcasts.

Blawg episodes have a blueprint. I'm entire horse where I teach over 30 different ways of getting reviews. Go back to that previous podcast episode. Listen to it, but how to get reviews. There's a reason I made that episode. There's a reason I share so many different methods. I don't hide all of my methods just to my training courses. You absolutely must approach us many people and its many different ways. It's possible to get reviews.

That's what separates books that shoot into the stratosphere from books that do okay for couple weeks and then disappear. You have to get your systems in place, and they have to be absolutely frosty. They need to be perfect. There's nothing more important to Amazon than getting reviews, and they have to be recent. Amazon is all about What have you done for me lately screwing around with that process? And I understand the things that we get busy, right?

We're busy with life or busy with other things, and we're just so excited that a book is out that we only think about getting it out there and selling copies. And those things do not matter for the first couple of weeks. All the matters first to exceed your book is you have to fight and bleed to get more reviews any time you play around with it, or don't take it very seriously your book will suffer, and that's a really big problem.

If you wait more than a month to be serious about reviews, it's probably too late in order to save a book. Once your book's been out for more than a month and you haven't done this, it's a whole different ball game. You have to go into a massive revitalisation campaign, which is about three times more work and costs a lot more money. Well, their first chance is your best chance to do really well.

If you don't take it seriously, you come back later and you got to do It's gonna be a lot harder, and I find it very painful and very sad when people miss tiny steps. And that's why the book is suffering. It doesn't matter how tough a category is. It doesn't matter how tough the competition is or how many books are there in the competition.

There's always an opportunity if you follow the steps correctly, so once you go through the review process and this process is very important, this process all your measuring is reviews. Don't worry about sales. Don't worry about attractions is not when I push for sales. I don't want you to do that. This is not the phase for that. When you first launch your book bogus on reviews and nothing else. When you first want your book, don't tell anyone you know about it.

Keep it a secret because it's not really a proper lunch. A proper launches. We have a book deal. You got paid thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in advance. That's one time a book launch. We're not doing that. What you're trying to do, what you want to do is get the word out there about your book at the right time. So even if your book is live on Amazon for those 1st 2 weeks, focus on getting out as many review copies.

You can't send review copies to anyone who will accept what some people will write you review two days later, some people will never write you review, and some people take six months or a year. I just got a review from someone I sent a free copy to six months ago, and that's fine. It's no problem for me. That's why I sent up so many copies. If you can send out 1000 free copies to people that I'll say, Yeah, we want to do a review.

That's what you should D'oh. Probably 5% of them will do a beautiful 50 solid reviews, and that's really, really valuable. That's your baseline. Once you have that stack of reviews, then you begin to think about the process of the full launch. But unless your book has really solid reviews, unless you have your multiple versions, unless your cover's amazing, your books not ready for prime time skip any of those steps. Screw around with any of steps, and it's gonna get harder and harder. Justice critical.

The fourth element that I want to talk about today is the book description. For some reason, after the cover, the number one area that people phone it in authors phone It is in the book description, and you can tell immediately, I'll tell you right now, my book descriptions aren't good enough. I'm constantly redoing my constantly improving my constantly tweaking HTML because they need to be better and better, and I believe that my cover's on descriptions can always be better.

I'm really big believer in tweaking the copy kind of improving things and I believe I really need to do some stuff to improve the descriptions of a few my books. I'm going to go through this week or next. We can redo him again, and I redo my descriptions at least once a year. Now. I'm trying to do every three months and keep improving. And that's the minds that you have to have to stay ahead.

See when you redo the whole description Someone who saw your book before and didn't buy and I see a new description you get a second bite of the apple. Why turn that down? So what you want to dio is be very, very serious about your book description. First of all, it needs me more than paragraph if you write a one paragraph description.

If you right, just a couple of sentences and you're throwing together cause you wanna get your book up there, you're gonna have to redo it. Amazon is so generous, they let you redo description as much as you want and you can redo it every couple of hours. You redo it, it goes to their check process and three or four hours later to be live on the Web site.

When I first launched a book, one of the reasons I don't want to tell you what about it is so that I could make these changes without feeling weird. If you know your friends are looking at the page changes, description makes it feel like, Oh, they already seen it. I don't want to change it. I will lose my credibility, these thoughts and to your mind, and you don't want those there. What you want to dio is simply focus on getting the listing perfect.

The listing your page on Amazon is not a description is not a catalogue page. It is a sales page I want you to think about when you think about a catalogue. Think about that catalog giveaway in planes. I forget what it's called. It's the duty free to have a duty free, cataloguing them one called Like Sky. That's Guy Skinner Skytrax. I don't know. I know I should probably member there, but it's the airplane magazine that's filled with expensive stuff, and it's the airplane catalog.

Now you look at that and you think, Oh, this catalog is curated. It's a list of things that are really cool that is 100% wrong. That is not how that catalog has put together. People fight to get into that catalog. They get one shot, and then based on their performance, they get to stay in there or they're gone by the next month. The only things that go in there are things that sell and every page in their every word.

And there's written and describe to sell each product is that to inform the purpose of your Amazon sales pages, not to informants. Not to describe it is to sell. It is copyrighting and it is critical. And when you were writing that description, you always want to think so. What? This is a book about learning yoga. So what? This is a book that will allow you to learn yoga even if it's scarier, even if you're in bad shape. So what?

This is Ah, book that will allow you to start losing waiting, feeling attractive again. So what? This is a book that will let you see your shoes, and this is a book that will let you start to feel like you're in control of your life. Are you tired of feeling like the fat kid that gets picked last in high school. P E. Yes, everyone is. This book is here to help you cure that feeling and make that go away forever.

That's what I get to what I so what, myself over and over and over again about a yoga book. Okay, and I used a lot of my example. There's lots of other examples we can do, but that's what you really want to do. And not only do you need to write a really brilliant description, you also need to format, and that means using HTML. And I've posted links about writing descriptions before.

I can't express how important this is, what people are deciding If they're gonna write your book, they read your book by your book. They read the description. Who wouldn't? You have to be serious about the description. You can't screw around with it. So after you write an amazing description, you have to also format it well, and I really recommend that you just find a book that's formatted perfectly. They think it's formatted really, really well, and copy the way they've done it.

Copy their structure from their H one h two headline tags all the way down to which words they bolt which short they talents and which were the underlined Get a feel for how they organize stuff. You want to use all of those elements to make your description look really, really good.

And yes, this is one thing you can wait until after you launch to dio, but you have to take care of it right away while you're getting others reviews constantly, we work and redo your description if you get stuck if you get frozen by something else happening in your life and one of these steps isn't finished, you're gonna notice some really top stuff coming down the pipeline.

If you don't do these steps properly at the very beginning of releasing your book, your book is probably gonna die. It doesn't matter how much effort you put it. If your book doesn't have enough reviews, if your book doesn't have a really solid description, if your book doesn't have traction right out the gate, going through the launch phase doesn't matter. None of that will matter. There's nothing you can do. I don't want that to happen to you. So please take your book.

Launch us seriously don't skip phases. I know that we can get very distracted by life. I know that it's always other things going on and some of the things I'm working on, that's exactly what happens. But please don't let that happen to you, because all that's gonna happen is disappointment. The effort of writing the book is about 1% of the deciding factor. Whether not the book succeeds.

The quality of the book is actually so unimportant, and I know it hurts to hear that it took me a long time to learn this lesson. This is a final lesson I'll share with you today. When I first got into online marketing and building stuff, I was a product creator. People approached me to write books, and I'm still very heavily on that side of the market, and I can tell you right now that's always been my greatest weakness.

See, the product doesn't matter if it doesn't sell, the product is irrelevant. The infomercial is everything. Traffic and conversion are 10 times more important than product creation. At least I've been working very hard for last 2.5 3 years to get really good a cop trying to get better and better cop writing, and it continue to get better traffic because they're more important and this applies to your book right now.

It doesn't matter to write the best book in the world if no one reads it, and no one will read it until you do these other parts, right until you get those reviews, until you get those descriptions until you get the cover. Perfect All those pieces until you get those other formats. You have to get those done right so that people gave in. See your book to find out if it's good your book won't get a chance.

Otherwise, most books they missed these four critical components and they fail even if they're great books. I know a lot of people that are better Writers may have put out better books than me, and no one sees it, and no one ever will, because they don't take these parts seriously. And so from the bottom, my heart, I beg you when you release your book, be very serious about these pieces.

The more seriously you take these little pieces, the more money or books will make when a book is properly launched when you follow these steps, even if you stop right at the end of this podcast episode and never do anything else. If you get a great cover, get multiple formats, get some really good reviews to launch the book and write an amazing and beautiful description. The book will sell for years. You'll make money from it forever. You won't make a lot.

You make a lot more than anyone else, and that's really key. That's really really what you want. And so I'm trying to put you in that position, believes Take your book launch Seriously, please take the preparation seriously. Yes, I know it's your baby. And writing your book and releasing its really important. That's great. But you wrote a book as you want people to read it, and I'm sorry to break the bad news.

But the book description to cover the content of that sales pages all more important than the book See, you probably only gonna get one review out of every 100 readers anyways, and so unless you do these other pieces first, you'll be lucky to generate 100 reviewers and nobody who doesn't know the author doesn't know the book sees a book with one review of For five stars. That's two or three sentences. This is a pretty good book. I thought it was pretty sweet.

I was gonna buy your book out. Based on that, we have to do better and I want you to succeed. And that's why I'm sharing all this critical information. And if you use thes five key principles, you understand exactly what I'm sharing with you. You can launch a very, very six houseful book. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Serve No Master. Make sure you subscribe, so you never miss another episode.

We'll be back tomorrow with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race. Head over to serve no master dot com forward slash podcasts Now for your chance to win a free copy of Jonathan's bestseller Serve No master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you tomorrow. Thank you for listening to the serve. No master podcast. Make sure to subscribe so that together we can achieve true freedom