A spreadsheet of your book's first year
How to launch your next big project from a simple spreadsheet
Have you got a book coming out soon? Do you dream of getting a traditional publishing deal someday? Then this post is for you. It’s about one of the biggest problems you’ll face as an author and an easy, free, legit way to manage that problem.
This tactic can work for other kinds of launches, too, regardless of your creative discipline.
Spreadsheetville, here we come.
First, we need to lay a little groundwork. Why are book launches surprisingly hard and painful? How come it hurts to have your dream come true?
The author DongWon Song described the problem in a recent newsletter post:
The thing about publishing a book is that it's horribly anticlimactic. You put it out into the world and on the day it goes live all the little flags at all the retailers go from pre-order to buy now. All the bookstores put it on their shelves, maybe in a new release bay, maybe front of store, if you're lucky. You do an event, online or in person. You go sign some stock. You celebrate with your friends, maybe have a party.
These are all good things. These are all exciting things. But then, the next day, it's just another day. Years of work, of planning, of marketing, of pitching, of writing. All the stress and heartbreak and joy is out in the world, between two covers, ready for readers to fork over their cash, spend their time reading.
Unfortunately, it takes time to read a book. It takes time to form an opinion, to post it somewhere, for people, friends and strangers alike, to let you know how they feel about your work. It takes time for publishers to collate sales reports, for returns to come in, for royalty season to roll around. It can take literal years to get a clear picture of how your book did.
That’s the gist. By the time your book is released, you’ve already put in so much work, yet the results data is SLOW to come in. You’re stuck flapping the polaroid around for a solid year. Maybe several years.
It’s a spiritual problem. Worse, it’s a business problem.
If you’ve been reading this newsletter any length of time, you know I’m always banging on about data data data.
I can’t help it. It’s bleed-through from my day job in corporate marketing. When I make decisions at work—like deciding to pause a campaign or increase the number of sales emails on a given day—I can make those decisions based on real-time data. I’ve got numbers on email open rates, open times, clicks, video views, surveys, price tests, sales, et all.
At most, I may have to wait one day to get a clear read, and if I have granular questions, I can hit up our business-intelligence department. None of this is fancy or unusual. It’s 2022. Most every business in the entire world uses data to make informed decisions and to optimize their operations.
Everyone else in the world does this too, only more casually. If you are even an occasional user of social media, you’ve probably developed a sense of what “works”—what drives likes and engagement—and what doesn’t. That’s a data-oriented sensibility, an optimization-oriented way of thinking, conscious or not.
So you can see why delayed results data might be a big ‘ol source of pain for authors. As DongWon pointed out, it takes a while for sales numbers to come in. Ratings and reviews tend to trickle in, too.
This delayed-data problem is extra painful for debut authors.
It’s a hard moment in history to be a first-time author, just in general. The 21st-century book market is extremely winner-take-all, with the biggest successes capturing a clear majority of sales. Think of the way retailers’ algorithms work—they’re feedback loops built to favor proven winners, which stacks the deck against new entrants as well as quiet or niche entrants.
Amazon is the obvious biggie here. It’s pretty much a dead cert that Amazon will be an author’s most significant source of sales, and Amazon is an algorithm-driven machine in a literal sense. But that’s just the most glaring example. Algorithms of various kinds drive the rest of this business, too. Less formal feedback loops see publishers heap attention on only the biggest sellers, and ensure readers only ever get exposed to the biggest sellers.
All of which means that your debut may be the beginning of your career or—[cracked, hysterical laughter]—the end of it. If your first book doesn’t sell, you may never get another deal. The stakes are highest at a time when you have the least experience.
Now, your mileage may vary, I’m not an expert, the only constant in life is change. Etc. Still, before we get to my spreadsheet and yours, it might be helpful to sketch out a traditionally published book’s basic sales window, illustrating the major phases and flagging some of the biggest opportunities that each phase represents.
An album of your baby’s first year (and beyond)
Pre-launch phase. In the months before your book is officially for sale, it appears on Amazon and elsewhere, which allows people to pre-order it. Why are preorders so important? Because they signal interest in your title, which can make bookstores more eager to place orders. This alone would be good a reason for you to try to rack up preorders, but there’s a kicker, too: Did you know that all your preorders get counted as week-one sales? This means that, if you’re ever going to hit a bestseller list, then week one is your sheer best shot—with months’ worth of sales tallied all at once. Yes yes yes, bestseller-list requirements change all the time, but there’s probably no future in which preorders aren’t really important. Big preorder numbers create buzz, so don’t fail to bug your friends and family. You might also look into arranging a Goodreads giveaway and/or a low-priced pre-order deal on Bookbub.
The first 90 days of your launch. Your book is now officially for sale. Congrats! Your prize is a roughly 90-day, super-high-stakes window in which to drum up media coverage. This is the only time when reviewers and reporters can describe your book as “the new book on [something],” the only time its existence may qualify as news. Correspondingly, now’s the moment to focus on PR outreach, pitching magazines, TV, newspapers, websites, podcasts, radio, influencers. Once this window closes, it’s closed, so it can be wise to make an all-out sprint, no matter how incredibly burned out you’re feeling at, say, day 60. For me, the biggest lesson of this phase was that hyper-local outlets can create sales spikes on the same level as huge, national publications. My notes on that phenom are right here.
The rest of your first year. Once your first sales quarter ends, you may feel a bit lost. The metaphorical phone has probably stopped ringing quite so much, and now you’re less sure what you should be doing. One quick n’ dirty answer is to stump for ratings and reviews on Goodreads and Amazon. You can also dress up your Amazon page with what’s known as “Amazon A+ content.” This is a section of the page in which your publisher can insert additional images, blurbs, or even small excerpts, so—to sound like a pharma commercial V.O. here—talk to your publisher about whether Amazon A+ content is right for you. You can also talk to your publisher about potentially changing ebook pricing, and about doing a Bookbub Featured Promotion and/or a Chirpbooks Promotion. Around July and August, you can nudge your publisher to include your book in their holiday catalogue. In September and October, you can contact local bookstores to schedule appearances and signings circa the holidays—bearing in mind that, like other retailers, they do the bulk of their business from mid-November through Christmas, so that’s likely the best time for you to be there, too.
Backlist time, i.e. the whole GD point. Like we discussed in the last post, “backlisting” refers to what happens with your book after its first year in print. Does it continue to sell after the newness has worn off? Will bookstores still stock it once it’s out of the “new release” phase? Or will the vibes fade and your efforts die on the vine? It’s this phase that should inform your overall work/craft/sales strategy. (Well, arguably.)
Which brings me to the tactic you can use, too.
On a friend’s advice, about a year out from my book launch, I created a spreadsheet, and in this spreadsheet I dumped every idea for promotion that tripped across my brain, no matter how vulgar or underdeveloped. In went freelance ideas, podcasts I might guest on, YouTube videos I might make. Every dumb, déclassé notion got bagged and tagged.
At that point, my spreadsheet was just a stockpile, with columns like: IDEA / POSSIBLE VENUE / TIMING / NOTES.
Then, as sales data dribbled in throughout my first year on the market, I refined my spreadsheet to track the performance of my efforts, so that now the columns read like this: OUTLET / TITLE / DATE / SALES / NOTES.
The result is what I will unironically call a sales playbook. I’ve got some data now on what tends to work and what doesn’t, which means I can make better use of my time. I can rerun winning plays and stop putting effort into low-ROI activities.
For what it’s worth, I recommend this dry and artless approach. I am grateful someone told me to do it. There aren’t many sure things in this business. Only some efforts are predictable. None of us know exactly what’s going to work. However, we can track and learn, and then we’ve got a set of winning plays we can run again—with our first book and maybe even with a second book, please God.
New to this newsletter?
The next post in the series will be about hand-selling your art in real life, at conferences and events and such. If you’re not yet subscribed, maybe drop your email below. This newsletter is free, but not published on a consistent basis, so email delivery is the best way to avoid missing posts.
A good link
Here’s DongWon Song’s very good newsletter, Publishing Is Hard.
I’ve been obsessed with Karina Longworth’s film-history podcast You Must Remember This for years now. Her latest season on ‘80s movies is her best yet.
Speaking of audio, my publisher has the Poe for Your Problems audiobook on sale right now for $3.99. Audie winner Jennifer Jill Araya reads to you and her voice is LOVELY, the vocal equivalent of a champagne toast. The sales ends tomorrow night.
As always, thank you for reading. Wishing you the best with your own déclassé spreadsheet initiatives,
Cat
Also a fan of YMRT. Loved the Polly Platt season (great takeaways).
Vulgar and déclassé are my calling cards. Will integrate this lesson into my current spreadsheet.