Launching Your New Book: Book Releases Done Right
Ray Brehm knows his way around a successful book launch, and he was good enough to release a book letting the rest of us know how he did it with "The Snowball Book Launch."
Even if you just recently started writing your book, it's never too early to start thinking about your book launch strategy. Some of this lines up with advice I’ve been giving on my YouTube channel, but in reading his book, I also found some tips I hadn’t implemented myself.
Since I have a new book coming out next month, I’ve been doing some research, and it didn’t seem fair to keep it to myself.
The key concept behind the Snowball Book Launch is to use your book's 90-day pre-order period on Amazon to maximum effect. Rather than just putting your book up for pre-order and hoping for the best, Brehm recommends actively marketing during this crucial window to accumulate early sales and build momentum - like a snowball rolling downhill.
The Three-Phase Process
1. The Build Phase (30-90+ days) - This is when you prepare all the components for a successful launch, like researching comparable authors in your genre, optimizing your keywords and categories, and crafting compelling sales copy for your book description and ads.
2. The Release Phase (90 days) - On the first day your book is available for pre-order, you enter the Release Phase and start actively marketing through targeted ads on platforms like Amazon and Bookbub. The goal is to drive a high volume of pre-orders before your official launch.
This is crucial for several reasons:
- Bestseller status: Amazon updates its bestseller lists hourly. By concentrating pre-orders in the days leading up to your official launch, you maximize your chances of hitting bestseller status in your category once the book goes live. This gives you the coveted "bestseller" banner on your book page and earns you "street cred" as an author.
- Sustained visibility: A strong pre-order period signals to Amazon's algorithms that your book is in demand. This can lead to your novel being featured more prominently in search results, recommendation emails, and "also bought" suggestions - giving you a visibility boost to keep sales going post-launch.
- Social proof: Having a large volume of pre-orders and sales on launch day itself provides powerful social proof. When people see that others are buying your book, they're more likely to check it out themselves. This is why many successful authors now focus more on pre-order numbers than launch day numbers.
- Audience building: Driving pre-orders allows you to build a group of readers invested in your book before it's even available. You can then leverage this audience for reviews, word-of-mouth marketing, and promotion of your future works and offerings.
- Less stress: Knowing you already have a foundation of sales and readers before your book even goes live takes a lot of pressure off your actual launch. You can go into launch day with momentum and excitement, rather than starting from zero and feeling the notorious "launch day jitters."
You should market your pre-order through:
- Running targeted ads on Bookbub to drive pre-orders from readers of comparable authors
- Using Amazon ads to show up in searches for relevant keywords
- Leveraging the "runway" of pre-orders to test your book description, ad creative, and targeting before the official launch
- Enlisting early reviewers and getting editorial reviews to provide social proof on your book page from day one
- Building lookalike audiences of interested readers to retarget after launch
The Release Phase is all about laying the groundwork for a strong, sustained launch. By focusing on driving pre-orders in a systematic way, you give your novel the best chance of continued success beyond just the first few days after release.
3. The Impact Phase (post-launch) - After your book goes live, you shift to getting reviews, running book promotions and sales campaigns, and using your book as a funnel to grow your author platform and sell other products/services.
While it takes work upfront to implement the Snowball method, it makes your actual launch much less stressful and sets you up for long-term book marketing success. You'll release to an existing audience of buyers and have an evergreen system in place to keep sales coming in.
The book is packed with specific tactics like category selection, writing book descriptions that sell, building lookalike audiences based on similar authors, and leveraging ads to hyper-target your ideal readers. But the overarching message is that taking a strategic, proactive approach to your pre-launch is the best way to launch your novel like a pro.
If you want to get into the nitty gritty, rather than just the summary, I’ve provided, you can READ IT YOURSELF.
The Nonsense-Free Editor offers book marketing and launch services if you would like expert PR and platform strategy. Check out our book marketing options!
