If you prefer a video format, check out the video here.
If there’s one thing more tortuous than editing, it’s marketing. Today I’m discussing my promotional calendar for my upcoming book release. The launch will be in August, and it will be a collection of poetry, but nothing else has been revealed… yet.
Calendar
Firstly, I want to break down the promotions I plan to use for this book launch. For the calendar, I’m using the Promo Calendar from the Writing Mastery Course out together by Jessica Brody and Bethany Atazadeh. You can take the course on Udemy, which is where I took the course last year. I learned so much about the art of publishing as well as marketing, and I love that this calendar is less of a task-focused calendar like my weekly checklist and more of a calendar-guidebook hybrid.
I know that the title and cover reveal will come the same day in July, and it will be a month before the book’s release. I had a three-month preorder for my debut and a two month preorder for my sophomore release, and for both titles, about 80% of the preorders came in the first month. Therefore, I’m cutting the preorder time down to about 30 days to maximize the time I have to prep beforehand with videos, reels/shorts, and static posts.
My initial plan is to post 5 times a week, focusing on video, and minimizing the cost of boosted ads on Instagram. I don’t want to spend any money on marketing if I don’t have to, considering this will be my most expensive book to date. With that in mind, let’s dive into my promotional plan.
Sites for Marketing
For social media, I’ll utilize YouTube, Instagram, Threads, and Pinterest, with much more emphasis on the first two. As I mentioned, I don’t want to do boosted ads this time around, so I want to flood the algorithm with videos, posts, and stories to reach the largest audience possible. I managed to reach 30,000 accounts uploading 30 reels in 30 days (video here), which should be large enough to gain some interest.
I haven’t used a marketing site or even done an Instagram book tour, but I’d like to have a few books available before I use one of those services to provide readers with a large enough library, if you will, of titles to choose from. Right now, they’re all poetry, but even my poetry touches on different themes for each of my titles.
Pre Order Announcement
For my pre order announcement, I’m going to kick off with a Wheel of Fortune-style game of guessing the title for the 5 days leading up to the title and cover reveal. These will all be static posts, and each day one new letter will be added until Friday when the title is announced.
I plan on uploading my book to Amazon KDP, Draft2Digital, IngramSpark, and Kobo Writing Life. I will not be putting the title into Kindle Unlimited (video here). I want this title to start wide and stay that way. Kobo Writing Life allows an author to upload their books into Kobo Plus, which is their version of KU, but without the exclusivity clause. Draft2Digital will be for all other ebook platforms while IngramSpark is for print distribution.
I’m still not talented at making sure everything goes live at the same time, so I think I’ll set everything up the Thursday before, in the evening, to guarantee everything will be live Friday morning (for the most part). I also plan on using the next month or so to create all the posts and videos that will go live during the month-long pre order campaign as well as enough reels to promote the book for the first two weeks after it launches.
ARC Readers
While 30% of the readers who signed up for my last book left reviews on Goodreads, StoryGraph, and Amazon (and thank you so much if you did), I didn’t see a boost in sales because of the Goodreads reviews, which is where nearly all of my ARC readers posted. For that reason, I will be asking for ARC readers through my videos and posts organically.
I won’t have a cap of how many readers will get a free e-file of the book, but I will be choosing the readers based on how they answer the questionnaire. I don’t want to give my book out to readers who don’t read poetry, which is what I did last time and saw the correlating less-than-positive reviews because of that. Now, don’t get me wrong, I do want honest reviews, but if someone rates me below 5 or 4 stars simply because they don’t read poetry and it didn’t convince them to read poetry, then it was not a book they should have signed up for.
If you don’t read a genre, do not sign up to ARC read. We as authors rely on those reviews, especially on Amazon, to make more sales early in a book’s life, and giving out free copies for reviewers to forget about them damages the relationship and trust between authors and ARC readers. We can argue about the defunctory role ARC reviews play now that indie authors can be as bestselling as trad published authors, but it’s still a way to gain trust with new readers with a relatively new or unknown author.
I plan on opening up the ARC request form for two weeks and sending out the e-file two weeks before the book releases. A poetry collection often doesn’t take a ton of time to read, so two weeks should be plenty. Also, for any ARC readers out there, a quick PSA is that Amazon is removing reviews that include any phrase similar to “the author supplied me with the book in exchange for an honest review.” Just leave that out of your Amazon review in order for it to show. Sites like Goodreads and StoryGraph are unaffected by this.
Pre Order Campaign
This next promotion is one I’ve never done and it’s a pre order campaign. I’m thinking of giving away an Amazon gift card, but I’m still finalizing the details there. But I do want to provide readers more incentive for preordering and if they show proof of receipt for the new book, they’ll be entered into a drawing. Likewise, if they show proof that they’ve added it to Goodreads or StoryGraph, they’ll gain an additional entry and showing proof of purchase for either of my other two collections of poetry will gain them additional entries.
This is the promo that I’ll be testing for this book (since I test something new for marketing with each of my books), and I’ll check back in after release to see if it helped push for more preorders. This one will begin after the cover reveal and last for the month-long pre order. As with the ARC reader team, the form to fill out will be a Google Form found on my social media profiles and my blog.
Pre Order Goals
My goals for this pre order campaign are to earn back at least 75% of my costs by the first week of release, to get 50 pre orders, and to have 10 reviews of the book on Amazon by the end of the first week. I hit these goals (minus the reviews because I got 8 in the first week) for my first book but completely flopped the marketing plan for my sophomore title. This time, I want to be as relentless as I was with The Ones in the hope of giving this new baby the introduction to life it deserves.
This is my current promotional calendar and marketing plans for my August release. I’m so excited to share this latest piece with you all, and I can’t believe we’re so close to my third book being out. If you're an author, let me know your tried and true pre order tactics in the comments!
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