Setting Up a Book Launch

Over the last month, I’ve been privileged to be a part of Michael Hyatt’s launch team for his new book, Platform. Through this experience, I have seen the need to plan way ahead when writing a book. If you are going the traditional publishing route, it’s probably a good idea to start at least a year ahead, to give you time to put book proposals out and see if there is any interest in your title.

This is one area that self publishers have an advantage. They can move ahead with the process much faster since they don’t have to shop proposals, wait for approval, and hope that something comes through.

However, in our fast paced world, how do you know what things are going to be like in six months, much less a year? It’s tough.

I’m working on a new fiction book and I decided to plan out the complete project from beginning to end to give my self a timetable for production. The first thing I did, was to ask myself what would be the best time to launch a new book. In my genre of personal development web traffic explodes on January 1st and then tapers off until April where it stays relatively flat for the rest of the year. So it seems like a safe bet to launch in December or January.

Next, I looked at my experiences with my previous fiction book, The Path of Consequence. The basic writing of the book took about three months, writing two hours per day. Working with an editor took three months of back and forth corrections while the self publishing part took an additional three for formatting, beta reading, and proof completion. The launch took three months to get the web site up, the word out, and everything up and running.

Overall about one year from start to finish.

Now that I have gone through the process once, I’m sure I can streamline many of the facets to put everything together much faster.

So I looked at my book title, the content, my desired audience and came up with a date.

This is where the problem comes in. To build interest in a book, the marketing and platform building need to start about six months prior to launch. In addition to the book, additional products and resources need to be in place to drive sales. I’ll also need to build a tribe of interested subscribers to be on hand for the product reveal.

Unfortunately, I hate trying to plan things that far in advance.

However, I decided to give it a go.

I put together a preliminary poster with an important date…

The end of the world (Mayan Calendar)

This is what it looks like..