Indie pubbers and authors in general, what marketing tasks must we do in the week after our books go live on Amazon or are otherwise published? Is it wise or necessary to monitor sales closely, or should we just let events take their course? What else should we be doing the week after launch? I have a particular reason for asking this. I had tentatively set my launch date for this coming Friday the 27th, but I might be pushing it to make it. I could do it the 2nd or 3rd instead, but I'm 85% sure I'm going out of town for nine days August 4th, and my Internet access will be limited. What did you do for your book the days after it went live, and how effective was it? Thanks.
Since I'm traditionally pubbed I don't have access to sales data until I get my quarterly royalty statement, so there's not way for me to monitor sales shortly after release. I do most of my promotion via Twitter and Tumblr, either by re-tweeting/reblogging my publishers promo posts, thanking book bloggers for any good reviews that come to my attention, and creating a couple of original promo posts of my own. I also monitor the stats on my website to see if I'm getting more hits than usual during a release week.
Well, I have zero experience with this, but I'd be concerned that if some large problem comes up with formatting or something, you wouldn't be able to act on it for some time. I'm still puzzled as to what's driving the date. If it was just a self-set deadline to keep you working, why not get the book totally ready to launch, and then actually launch when you get back?
@ChickenFreak, some of what's driving the date is my need to get the book done and out of my hair. It's stressful having it unfinished, and a deadline helps me focus. Some of it is the need to make hay while the sun shines. Once summer ends and school starts up, my time will be very short for the next ten months. Better to take care of business now. Another factor will sound weird, but it's real. For the sake of my Also-Boughts, I need to make sure that I don't get a flood of my high school students buying it when it's first out. Now, they may have just been running their little mouths when they said they would. But if they come through, my Also-Boughts will be full of YA apocalyptic novels and totally screw up my marketing demographic. I figure if I release in mid-summer, they won't be paying attention. I can market to my target audience first, and the kids can have at it later if they want. Still, even if I put off publishing till later in August, I still want to know what to do thereafter
Yep, that makes sense. On the deadline, I'm looking at it from the point of view of a programmer: I have never rushed a software delivery and failed to regret it. At this point, this is effectively a software delivery.
I don't do much promo, but when my publishers are doing stuff for me they usually contact bloggers about a month in advance to try to set up guest posts, excerpts, etc. Are you planning to try for any of that?
Just some brief things I’ve noticed. *The majority of your sales will happen in the first week (or first month) your book is published. *When you publish another book, it will spike sales for your first book again. Write more books. *Sales breed sales. If you are doing anything to market or promote your work, do it all that first week. You want the effect to multiply. *Look at books similar to yours. Watch authors similar to you. See what they did. Google their names. Read their blogs. Did they post excerpts, do giveaways, and blog posts? Did they do anything unusual? Did it work? *Watch sales if you want to. It won’t make a difference one way or the other.
I think the rush of 'publishing' will be followed by one big come-down. Why not enjoy August and make all this an Autumn project? Give yourself more room to research the backwoods publishers, and then if you are on your own, fire it away in October, be done, out of your hair..
Knowing me, publishing won't be much of a rush, more like an anti-climax, leading to more work and yet more work. But I'd prefer that the bulk of the "more work" be writing, not marketing. Gotta do what I gotta do . . . EDIT: Oh, dear. Did my interpretation of "rush" just out me re: the habits of my misspent youth?
tbh I didn't do anything beyond a bit of twitter (and building my author website) ... that's because I'm building the back catalogue before I do any paid advertising in order to get greater benefit from read through. In terms of stats - amazon reporting is notorious for under reporting, and also only includes sales not page reads (if you are in KU - the page reads are reported separately). I wouldn't bother to watch it, unless you are doing paid advertising (and if you are you are better watching the advert stats)
I am doing paid advertising and I monitor my KDP and CS dashboards on a daily basis, and track them on a spreadsheet. Hint, you can convert KENP pages read into books by dividing by the KENP length of your book; E&D is 1150 KENP, so 1500 pages read is about 1.3 books, which can be added to the regular Kindle CS books for the daily total. As to launch, I recommend Facebook, because unless you already have a well-established blog, with hundreds of followers, you set up a book or authors page on FB, populate it first with your personal friends, then do some cheap boosts to attract followers outside your immediate circle. Best to do this ahead of launch to generate some anticipation. Agree with @big soft moose, the first month's sales are volatile and probably will go down. That is your immediate friends buying your book, you have to get the word out to people who don't know you to sustain sales.