A to Z Challenge - Day 12: L is for Launch!

I'm participating the this crazy challenge on 2 of my blogs. This one and Paranormal Lounge. The A to Z Challenge is a blogging event that takes place every April. The challenge is to write a post for each letter of the alphabet and post nearly every day during April, omitting Sundays.

My theme for this challenge is: Marketing is like war. I'm going to try to stick to that theme as much as possible, but I may have to deviate. L is for Launch!

So you have your book and it's all ready to show the world. You need to plan a launch! If you are going to launch your book, you gotta do it right!

The best thing to do first is to get it up on the buying sites a week or two before and ask your ARC readers to post their reviews in that time. This way, when you officially launch and direct new customers to your book on Amazon, there will already be reviews there for them to check out!

Next you should write up a blog post that can be posted to your friends' blogs too. Ask your friends if they would like to help you with a release day blitz and let them know that all they have to do is copy and paste the HTML code you give them from the post you wrote up on your blog. Be sure to include cover, blurb, buy links, links to your social media and optionally, an excerpt.

You can also do a giveaway if you want, but I'd recommend a swag only giveaway. You're trying to sell books, not give them away.

Write up some tweets and facebook/google+ posts and ask your friends if they would like to send some out for you. Be sure to return the favor if they ever ask you to do something like that in the future.

Have a facebook event and a goodreads event. The facebook event is awesome since you can actually interact with people at the event. The Goodreads event is nice because you can update it on the release day with the link to your book and select the notification option so that the people going to your event know that you've added the link.

You can also throw a launch party on twitter or facebook. Or both if you are really ambitious. Just make sure that whatever you do is BIG! Be careful not to overdo it though. People usually understand release day stuff, but tweets every 10 minutes is a little overboard.