#065: Book Launches Don't Matter. This Does.

Read Time: 3 Minutes

Back in June, Lori and me went to Dallas, Texas, because I was making my first appearance on stage at InkersCon; an amazing author conference I encourage every author to attend.

On the final day of the conference, I was speaking to an author who has sold over 10 million books.

And he said something I've always thought (and I'm paraphrasing here):

The success of a book launch isn't that important.

Sure, having a knockout book launch is great; it brings a lot of new readers into your world, you see a nice Amazon Bestseller Rank boost, and a spike in royalties.

But it's not the be-all and end-all.

And most importantly, a book launch (good or bad) does not determine the success of that book, or your author career as a whole for that matter.

Launching a new book can be as stressful or as easy as want it to be,

I used to spend days planning a launch for Lori's books. Days.

Most of that time was spent booking and organizing 20-30+ promo sites and creating and scheduling Ads. It was all organized with military precision in a Google Sheets spreadsheet.

The last book launch we did (back in summer 2023) was as far from that as you can possibly get – we sent one email to Lori's email list. That was it.

And when you're launching a new book on Amazon, the readers who follow your Amazon Author profile will receive an email from Amazon telling them that you've launched a new book. So you've got that going for you too.

What's More Important Than A Book Launch?

If a book launch isn't that important, what is? Two words:

Ongoing sales.

Your author career does not rely on the success of your book launch numbers.

If you're relying on book launches to build your author career, not only can that be a lot of stress and pressure, but it can also be unsustainable physically and mentally.

On top of this, you're missing out on a lot of opportunities to make these books you've already written work a lot harder for you than they are.

Some authors will put everything into a book launch, and build their self-worth on the success of that launch.

They'll forget that book and move on if it doesn't go as well as they hoped.

They've just spent months writing this book, given it one chance and then moved on.

Anything can happen during a launch:

– Ad platforms can go down

– Promo emails could go into spam

– There could be an algorithm glitch on Amazon

None of this is in your control.

What is in your control though?

Ongoing sales.

You can strategically market/advertise the relevant books in your catalogue for years to come.

My wife, Lori, writes one book per year. Each of these books brings in multiple five figures per year. It adds up.

We only advertise Book 1 of Lori's series, but the high readthrough leads to some great numbers.

Imagine if we just forgot about Book 1 because the launch flopped (which it did back in 2020).

Generating On-Going Sales

If your books are in Kindle Unlimited you can run Kindle Countdown Deals once every 90 days.

You could run a BookBub Featured Deal (if you're lucky enough to be selected) at any time.

You could discount your book to $0.99 for a few days.

You could push a book hard with Ads for 30, 60,90 days.

You could revive a backlist series by discounting all the books in that series for a few days or weeks, then running Ads for the full-price version of Book 1.

There are so many ways to generate ongoing sales.

We have been advertising Book 1 of Lori's series every day since April 19th 2020.

Not a single day goes by when we aren't bringing new readers into her world.

95% of these new readers are paying full price for the books (or they are borrowing the books in Kindle Unlimited).

We don't run many promos; maybe 2 or 3 per year at most.

Our focus is on ongoing sales.

Wrapping Up...

Don't get me wrong, I think book launches can be a lot of fun and can make a big splash for your books.

But they can also cause a lot of stress and headaches.

Worse than that though, is that many authors bank their entire author careers on a book launch, which, in my eyes, is a dangerous way to build a business.

Ongoing sales are far more sustainable and allow the books you've previously written to continue working hard for you years after you launched them.

By all means, have fun launching your book, and go all out on it, but if it doesn't go as well as you hoped, don't let that stop you from focusing on ongoing sales for that book or series.

The launch is just the first stage of a book's journey. It's not the last. There's a lot more mileage in a book than just the launch.

That's it for this week.

Thanks for reading, have a wonderful weekend and I'll be back with you again next week.

To Your Success
– Matt