Friday, July 21, 2017

My First Do-It-Yourself Book Launch

I’ve lived a charmed life over the last 15 years – quietly cranking out one book after another for mid-major publishers, and watching many of them reach national rankings in categories like customer service and communications skills. With a lot of help. When you have publicists who place you in national publications, corporate sponsors with massive lists, and bookstore placement, you have a huge leg up. It’s kind of like making a great hamburger when you have the finest steak to start with.

Fast forward to 2017, and my first self-published book in my longtime “day job” as a psychotherapist. Self-help is a crowded field with literally thousands of titles out there, and while I’ve been doing it for the better part of a decade, I have no real platform as a shrink outside of my small town in upstate New York. But I still wanted to get my particular approach for treating fears and phobias in front of a wider audience, and knew this time that I would essentially be planting a tree in the middle of a very deep forest.

Still, my new book No Bravery Required did recently reach #1 nationally on its topic. With the help of a little bit of money, a lot of elbow grease, and no backers other than myself. Here’s how I did it:

Priming the pump. Well ahead of the book launch, I started publishing articles on the book’s topic. With my last book, I had great press including a feature article in Time Magazine, but I knew there would be no Time this time. Instead, I leveraged my existing blogging platform – I am a monthly contributor for a NY Times bestselling author and TV personality, and I have my own therapy blog – as well as this article for The Mighty, a national website for mental health issues with over 700,000 followers on social media and 150 million readers.

Getting reviews. Ansel Adams once said that in photography “it takes a lot of milk to get a little cheese.” Getting reviews on Amazon was very similar. These reviews were important because the better quality paid launch partners – which I will discuss next – required a certain number of positive reviews first. So I offered a free electronic review copy to our online community of over 400 regional therapists, and also mass mailed potential reviewers in my social network.

When it comes to getting reviews, you will discover that people are fundamentally busy, and this part was probably the closest I came to making a pain in the ass of myself. But with enough gentle persuasion and some one-on-one marketing, I eventually got what I needed to move forward.

Lining up paid partners. The real key to do-it-yourself book promotion is creating a so-called countdown deal on Amazon – offering the Kindle version of your book for 99 cents for a short time – and then paying to promote this on book launch sites with large lists of readers who want to hear about free or 99 cent books every week.

The 800-pound gorilla of paid promotion sites is BookBub. It costs much more than the others (think hundreds of dollars for many categories), and I would have gladly paid it, because it has a huge list and tremendous ROI for many people. But getting in at BookBub is kind of like making the guest list for the Oscars. I tried and, as expected, did not make the cut. I’ll consider them again if I ever make the New York Times bestseller list or whatever.

Ultimately I ended up going with BuckBooks (highly recommended, if you can meet their strict acceptance criteria), Awesome Book Promotion, RobinReads, BargainBooksy, and Bknights on Fiverr – total cost around $180. I also launched an Amazon sponsored pay-per-click ad campaign that generated over 10,000 impressions by launch day for just a few bucks, a very good deal.

Creating the buzz on launch day. Finally, I created a free goodie for people in my social media network who purchased the book on launch day – an edited and curated collection of articles on workplace stress, published as an ebook with a nice professional cover – and made a series of announcements leading up to launch day on Facebook. And on the actual launch day, many of my Facebook friends were incredibly kind about sharing this offer with their lists as well.


Then it was time to sit back and watch launch day happen! (In my case, sneaking a peek at my book’s rank in between therapy sessions.) One annoying snag was that the number 1 book in my category that day was actually a national humor bestseller that was only tangentially about fears and phobias, but still listed in that category – which raised the bar for how well I had to do. But thankfully by day’s end I had topped this book as well, with an overall Amazon rank near the top 2500.

In the end, I did get my #1 ranking for books on fears and phobias – and also a top 5 ranking in the very crowded self-help category of anxiety disorders (where many of the major self-help books live). It won't stay at that rank forever, of course, but I'm still pretty happy about that, and not just for my ego: a good launch and good reviews reportedly make a long-term difference in how likely Amazon is to promote this book in search results. (My previous book, which launched at #1 in the large category of customer service in 2013, still sells very well after over four years.)

But perhaps the greatest reward was an unsolicited reader review on launch day from someone who felt this book would finally help him or her conquer their fears. This is why I really went through this exercise in the first place – to add my voice to the dialogue about treating anxiety and help people. And I truly believe that a good launch campaign is the best way to do this in a crowded marketplace.