Book Launch
Planning A Successful Book Launch
By Julie Tollefson
When Dr. Randy Overbeck’s sixth book, Red Shadows at Saugatuck, came out in July from Wild Rose Press, he had a publicity game plan in place, a routine developed over the decade-plus since the publication of his first book. “I wouldn’t have known how to do this, nor could I have done this even with the second book,” Randy says. “It took that much time to be able to pull these pieces together.” Here, he taps his years of experience to share five tips to build momentum toward a successful book launch.
1) Start early — Randy’s first step is to develop a long-range calendar, starting six to eight months before publication day. “You really have to start that far back, at least, to hit the ground up and running,” he says.
As part of that effort, over the last decade, Randy has assembled a database containing the names of nearly 30 review sites, the contact person for each site, whether the site charges for reviews, and the kind of books they review. The database serves as one foundation for much of Randy’s publicity efforts in the months leading up to publication day. Some of the sites on his list have been recommended by his publisher, but most have come to his attention through word-of-mouth from other writers.
“One of the really incredibly great things about Wild Rose Press is they have about 500 authors and a couple of email loops that you can get on and ask for help. Those fellow authors have been tremendously helpful,” he says.
Some of the sites do charge for reviews, and of those, some charge more if you need the review immediately. Long-term planning is key to both getting reviews and keeping costs down.
2) Reach out to reviewers — Early in the six-month period, Randy asks a select number of reviewers to consider his book well in advance of publication day. Typically, the sites don’t release their reviews until closer to publication day, but an exceptional advance review can be featured on the cover or in the front matter of the book.
Later, Randy contacts more reviewers. “I might ask 20, and I’ll get 15 or 17, if I’m lucky, to do reviews,” he says. “My goal is to have those reviews scatter out, starting the week or two prior to launch and continuing for the next two months.”
Randy acknowledges the debate as to whether reviews influence readers. But, he says, “The problem is you don’t really know what works, so you keep doing what you can.”
3) Brainstorm blog posts — While Randy waits for reviews to come in, he preps topics to draw on for guest blog posts. The posts are never about his book, he says, but rather are book adjacent and usually take one of two approaches.
The first relates to genre — he writes paranormal mysteries — and settings. He’s prepared posts on ghosts, statistics about ghosts, believing in ghosts, or interesting ghost sightings. He’s also written deep dives into how location inspires his work. Take the setting for the second book in the series, Crimson at Cape May. “Cape May happens to be one of the most famous haunted seaports on the eastern seaboard,” he says. The guest post prep for that novel included compiling information about famous ghosts reputed to be in the town.
Randy’s second approach builds on social issues, such as racial injustice and human trafficking, threaded through each of his novels, which are set in the late 1990s and early 2000s. “I have carved a story that is a murder mystery, but the mystery is tied to a social issue, one that the country is grappling with presently,” he says.
As with review sites, Randy maintains a database of authors, podcasts, or colleagues who will welcome guests in their space. Each site wants something different — in the way the post is structured or accompanying information such as blurbs, excerpts, or interview questions — so the work Randy does during this period is all preparation that will allow him to pull together a final product quickly when the time comes.
Regardless of which approach he chooses, he ends each post with a brief pitch for his book.
4) Stagger your public “appearances” — For his most recent book, Randy prepared 24 variations on blog posts, interviews, and spotlights and juggled the schedule so that every two or three days, his name appeared in the public eye. He also balanced these appearances with guest spots on about a dozen podcasts.
“Once I have this calendar, I coordinate with my social media assistant. We try to post three or four times a week,” Randy says. “I’ll be honest, it’s a little overwhelming, but I have most prewritten in one form or another.”
Randy also produces his own podcast, titled “Great Stories about Great Storytellers,” where he discusses the success of a famous author, director, or poet, always with a twist listeners may not have heard before (“kind of like Paul Harvey’s ‘The Rest of the Story’”). Though he doesn’t discuss his own work during the show, he does add a plug for his books at the end.
5) Make the most of social media — During the lead-up to publication day, Randy staggers his social media schedule to have a constant stream of content to pique readers’ interest: cover reveal, hints about the book, early reviews, blurbs, excerpts. On launch day, he sends a special launch email to all his contacts — about 6,000 total for his newsletter, Facebook, X, and Instagram, the channels in which he’s active.
Before that day, though, he combs through all of his contacts to identify 80 or 100 whom he knows personally or who have reached out to him in some way. To that select list, he makes a personal appeal for help getting the word out about his new book. For his newest title, Red Shadows at Saugatuck, he crafted a promotional email for those willing to share it with their contacts. His supporters posted that email a day or two after his own launch email went out. Without real-time data, he says, it’s impossible to tell whether this personal approach makes a difference in sales, but Amazon sales ranks provide clues.
“The day I sent mine out, there was this big bleep,” he says. “Then, when supporters sent out theirs, a bigger bleep. It certainly didn’t do nothing. I’ll be anxious to check out the actual sales data when it’s released in a few months.”
Like many authors, Randy struggles with the balance between promotion and writing. The reality, though, is promotion is imperative. “How is the reader supposed to find you?” he asks. “If you don’t do all this stuff, no one will notice your book.”