A strong book launch is key to the success of most best-selling books. But how do you launch strong if you’re not already famous?
One of the most effective tools is email. In my courses, I teach authors to build their email lists long before launch day. People often ask when they should start preparing. The answer is like the answer to, “When should you plant a tree?” The best time was five years ago. The second-best time is today.
But you don’t need a massive list to have a successful book launch. A modest list can work.
To discuss launching a book with a modest email list, I interviewed Randy Ingermanson. He is a Christy Award-winning novelist known worldwide for his Snowflake Method of writing a novel. He recently launched a new book with a relatively small email list. It shot to the top of its category and became a number-one new release on Amazon. That is the goal for most book launches, and he achieved it.
What challenges did you face early in your launch planning?
Randy: Two years ago, I decided I had been working on this project forever, and it was time to get book one in the series out the door. My plan was to launch in the spring of 2019, but a lot of things took longer than expected.
But two years ago, I asked myself what I would need in one year from that point to launch well. First, I wanted to revamp my website so it was clearly focused on my target audience. Second, I wanted my email list in good shape and warmed up for the launch. So I hired my web developer to create a new site and transfer all my content over. That took a few months. It always takes longer than you think, especially if you already have content.
I wanted to make sure the new website was clearly focused on my target audience. So let me give a little history.
About 35 years ago, when I started writing, I had a clear vision for who I wanted to be as a novelist. I wanted to be the Tom Clancy of first-century Jerusalem fiction. I wanted to write fast-paced, suspenseful novels set in first-century Jerusalem. You might say that’s a strange niche, but on the other hand, there’s not much competition. That’s who I wanted to be.
My first novel was a time-travel suspense set in first-century Jerusalem, where a physicist travels back in time to kill the apostle Paul. If Tom Clancy wrote first-century Jerusalem fiction, that’s the book he would write. That novel won a Christy Award, and that was the novelist I wanted to be.
How did you get off track?
Randy: Here’s the problem. Novelists often like to show editors they’re flexible. We believe that if we can do anything, publishers will ask us to do everything. That’s not true. This is where we talk about branding and why it’s important. When you sell a book and gain fans, your fans want a second book just like the first one, only different.
However, I didn’t recognize that at the time. For my second novel, my friend John Olson and I wrote a Mars novel. It was a brilliant story, but neither of us realized we were violating my brand.
Thomas: People have expectations. If they go to Starbucks, they expect coffee. If they walk in and find spaghetti or fruit smoothies with not a single caffeinated item, they’re confused. People like smoothies, but Starbucks customers are there for coffee.
Randy: Right. John and I wrote this Mars novel, and the terrible thing is that we succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. That novel also won a Christy Award. Now I had one Christy for a time-travel novel set in ancient Jerusalem and another for a space novel set on Mars. There was almost no connection except that they were both suspenseful and geeky.
Then I wrote another Mars novel with John. Then I got back on track and wrote a couple more first-century Jerusalem novels. Then I wrote a contemporary suspense novel about quantum computing set in San Diego. After six books, I had three different genres going, and it was a marketing mess. I was no longer the Tom Clancy of anything.
What helped you realize the importance of branding?
Thomas: Since the Mars novel was successful, it created confusion. If it had bombed, you would have easily returned to first-century Jerusalem fiction. But since it succeeded, you were suddenly choosing between two very different paths and audiences. The readers of biblical fiction are not usually the readers of space adventures.
Randy: Exactly. I remember taking a box of Mars novels to the Messianic synagogue I was involved with at the time. These were readers who had loved my first-century Jerusalem novel. People handed me cash and checks, and I signed books for them. One of my fans looked at the cover and said, “What is this?” I said, “That’s my new book. I just signed it for you.”
Thomas: And she already wanted to return it based on the cover.
Randy: Yes. She said, “Oh.” That’s when I finally understood branding. When your fans see that you’ve violated their trust in what they believed you would deliver, it takes a long time to recover. The good news is she came back a week later and said, “I’ve never read a Mars novel in my life, but I really loved that story.” But she added, “I liked your Jerusalem fiction better.”
Fast-forward ten years to the spring of 2018. I had all these books in different streams, and I was writing a novel about Jesus, which was the first in a four-book series. I wanted to downgrade everything that wasn’t first-century Jerusalem.
When I revamped my website two years ago, I consciously shaped the entire site around Jerusalem and the first century. I added the tagline, “I will take you on an adventure to ancient Jerusalem.”
I kept pages for my other books, but clearly stated that I don’t write those books anymore. I said those were mistakes. I needed to live up to my promise to my readers, and from now on, I would. I was never going to violate their trust again.
I had egg on my face, but the only way through the swamp is through the swamp. You have to admit when you’ve made a branding error, apologize, and get back to what your heart is set on. And my heart was set on first-century Jerusalem fiction.
It had been 15 years between the publishing of my last first-century Jerusalem book and this most recent book on Jesus. That is a lifetime, especially in ebooks and online publishing.
Thomas: When you released a book 15 years ago, indie publishing hadn’t really begun. The industry was very different. Lifeway still existed. Family Christian Stores still existed. A lot has shifted. Most readers don’t remember books or authors they read 15 years ago. So one of your big challenges with this new launch was that you hadn’t published a book like this one in recent years. You weren’t fresh in people’s memories.
Randy: That was an enormous challenge. In 2004, when I last published a novel, indie publishing was not an option. You had to go through a traditional publisher. Then I took a long hiatus and became an internationally known teacher on how to write fiction. I wrote several bestsellers on writing fiction, but I wasn’t writing fiction myself.
I wrote Writing Fiction for Dummies. It has sold close to 100,000 copies. It has been a major bestseller for me.
About nine years ago, I started rereleasing all my old books as indie ebooks, and they started making money. It has been about six years since I rereleased my City of God series, the three time-travel-to-ancient-Jerusalem novels. To my astonishment, in the first two days after rereleasing them, 5,000 copies were read. People immediately started reading book two and book three. I earned much more money from those three books as indie books than I had from my traditional publishers, Harvest House and Zondervan. Major Christian publishers were not able to market those books as effectively as I could as an indie author.
How did you decide to return to your original calling?
Randy: That summer, in 2014, I realized I could do this. I could go back to the dream I’d had 30 years earlier. I could be the Tom Clancy of first-century Jerusalem fiction.
I didn’t need a publisher telling me what I could or couldn’t do. I didn’t need covers I didn’t like or marketing strategies that didn’t work for me. I could do it myself. So I created a multi-year plan to return to my roots and finish the novel about Jesus that I had started and abandoned. It was a story that had been burning a hole in my brain for 15 years.
I used the money I earned from my City of God series to travel to Jerusalem several times. I worked on archaeological digs. I hired two editors. I put everything I earned into this new series.
I have now been to Jerusalem four times to work on archaeological digs in the last several years.
This spring, when everything finally came together and I had the cover completed, I realized I could release the book on Palm Sunday, and it was only one year later than I had hoped. I had been aiming for 2019, but the cover took longer than expected. I went through four different cover designers before I found the one I wanted.
About five or six weeks ago, I realized I could launch on Palm Sunday if I got everything in gear. So I asked myself, What are my assets? What do I have to market with?
What assets did you have for your launch?
Randy: I had a blog with 130 subscribers. I had an email list that, despite 15 years of not writing, still had 555 subscribers who were interested in my fiction. That audience is totally different from the readers of my Advanced Fiction Writing e-zine. Those are two completely different lists.
I had 555 long-suffering fans, many of whom emailed me every six months asking when my next book was coming out. Unfortunately, five of those subscribers were actually me. I use test email addresses to check how emails display on various platforms. So really, 550 subscribers. Not a huge list.
I had a Facebook profile with about 3,300 friends, but most of them were authors trying to sell me their books rather than readers interested in my fiction.
I also had some skill with running Amazon ads and had gathered 10 strong endorsements from fellow authors. It took me several months to line those up.
That was the extent of my platform. Notice I said nothing about Twitter. I do have Twitter accounts, but the last time I tweeted, I think Donald Trump was not yet in the Oval Office. I do very little on Facebook. I might post once every three or four months when a friend launches a book. I don’t do much with social media. And I hadn’t done much to build my email list because when you haven’t published a new book in 15 years, it feels silly to build a list for books that don’t exist yet.
That was what I had when I finally put the book up for preorder on Amazon.
Thomas: What you had was modest, but it wasn’t nothing. For someone with 50 email subscribers, 500 seems like a lot. For someone with 5,000 or 50,000, 500 feels like monthly churn.
Part of this is perspective. For big authors, 500 is nothing, but many of our listeners dream of the day they’ll have 500 subscribers. With persistence and good strategy, you’ll get there. But in traditional publishing, 500 is not much. Traditional publishers typically want to see four digits before they’re impressed.
Randy: I put my book up for preorder at a price of $2.99, roughly two weeks before release. With preorder, people can buy it, but they can’t receive it until release day. Once people start buying it on preorder, it shows up on the bestseller lists and gets an Amazon ranking.
A very important step was taking great care with Amazon’s AuthorCentral. I added all my metadata, endorsements, and wrote the best book description I could. I added an excerpt and wrote a custom author bio just for that book. You can do all of this in AuthorCentral. If you don’t know what you’re doing, it might take four hours. If you do, maybe one hour.
Items in that metadata will show up in Amazon search if people are searching for those words. One of the great virtues of putting a book on preorder is that it appears on Amazon, but nobody knows it is there until you tell them. So it is live, and you can test it. You can look at the page, fill out your AuthorCentral information, and get everything exactly the way you want it. Only then do you start telling people about it.
I sent a proof of the paper edition to a friend who is a book reviewer. He has a review site for writers like George MacDonald and C. S. Lewis. This guy is no intellectual lightweight. His father is a Nobel laureate in physics. He is a smart guy, and he likes the kind of book I am writing. But he was really the only reviewer I sent it to.
How did your email list respond when you announced the book?
Randy: Roughly 10 days before the release, I finally notified my email list on a Thursday night. The next day was Friday, and I kept watching how the book performed through the day. With 550 subscribers, I was hoping to get 10% preorder sales by the end of the day. That would be 55 sales, which I thought would be excellent. Not everyone opens the email, and not everyone who opens it clicks through. Of those who click through, not everyone buys. So 55 would have been a home run.
When I got up in the morning, I already had around 30 sales. I thought, okay, I am going to hit my 55. As I watched through the day, the ranking of the book climbed. Amazon ranks every book from number one to about 10 million. My ranking popped into the top 30,000, then the top 20,000, and eventually around 2,600 across the entire Amazon store.
In my categories of ancient history and ancient historical fiction, I was number two. In the Easter category, I was number one. In Christology, I was number one. If you are writing a book about Jesus, it should go in the Christology category if it is a significant novel making Christological statements. In Christian fantasy, I think I got up to number two. The book performed very well on day one, and by the end of the day, I had around 92 sales.
What elements made your launch email effective?
Thomas: That is a really high sales number for an email that only went to 500 people. For an email like that, getting 20 percent to buy the first time they are notified means something is happening with the wording.
Randy: Right. You cannot just send an email that says, “Hey, my book is here. Buy it. Here is a link.” That is not effective. You need to sell the book. Even though they are your fans, you need to give them a reason to buy today.
I started with the headline, saying “My book that I have been talking about for the last five years is available now on Amazon.” First, I showed the cover. The cover design is risky for a biblical fiction book because it does not look like a typical biblical novel. Those usually show Jesus-y characters in white robes. My cover only had the title, the series title Crown of Thorns, which I think is a strong title, and a single image of a gold ring.
Obviously, that has overtones of The Lord of the Rings. So the first thing I wrote in the email copy was, “What does a ring have to do with Jesus?” I took the bull by the horns. I did not evade the question. I told them, “Here is a problem to be solved. What does a ring have to do with Jesus?”
Then I explained that in ancient times, rings symbolized power, specifically the power to give judgment. When Pharaoh gave Joseph his signet ring, it gave Joseph the authority to carry out Pharaoh’s will and save Egypt from famine. In the time of Queen Esther, when the king of Persia gave Mordecai his signet ring, it empowered him to prevent a genocide of the Jews. A signet ring always symbolized power. It was the ring the king wore when he delivered judgment. In antiquity, the king was the ultimate judge.
So what does justice have to do with Jesus? That is the entire theme of book one.
Thomas: I want to jump in and explain what you are doing at a more fundamental level. You broke down the question, “What does this ring have to do with Jesus?”
You created curiosity. You made readers curious with the email, curious with the cover, and curious with the copy on the Amazon page. The more curious they got, the more they itched for answers. The only way to scratch that itch was to buy the book and read it.
You have two challenges in a launch: get people to buy the book and read it. Your friends may buy the book out of courtesy, but that does not mean they will read it. You must make people curious enough to read the book, and then the book must deliver so that they rave about it. You need enough early readers to start the word-of-mouth snowball. The email, the cover, and the copy all work together to arouse curiosity.
How did you use Jesus’ backstory to build curiosity?
Randy: In the next 500 words, I talked about something everybody knows about Jesus but nobody talks about, which is that Jesus was apparently, in the eyes of his village, illegitimate. I asked, “What did the village of Nazareth think of Mary? What did they think of her explanation when she showed up pregnant months before the wedding?”
This is a major disaster in any small village. Nazareth was maybe 200 people, and it’s everyone’s business to know who the father is. If it is not Joseph, then it must be another man in the village.
You might say, “But they knew about the angel Gabriel appearing to her and that she was carrying the Son of God, right?” How would they know that? There is strong evidence in the biblical story that nobody knew. Mary never told a soul.
In Matthew, it says, “Joseph, being a righteous man, planned to put her away quietly.” Why would he need an angel to explain the situation if she had told him and he believed her? Either she told him and he did not believe her, or she never told him at all.
Think about it. If you are 12 years old and pregnant, and people ask who the father is, do you tell them, “The Holy Spirit came over me and overshadowed me, and I am pregnant with the incarnate Son of God”?
I had three daughters go through that age. If any of them had come home with that story, I would not have believed it. People in Mary’s time knew how children are conceived. It is not because God makes a girl pregnant. When a girl is pregnant, there is a man involved. My strong hunch is that Mary never told anyone.
That is how I wrote the story.
Thomas: Whether or not that is exactly what happened, you make a strong case that it likely happened that way. And as a novelist, you get to decide and explore the question, “If this is what happened, what would the consequences be?”
How did you frame the speculative nature of your story?
Randy: This is a speculative novel, and I made that very clear in my email. We cannot know these things for sure. We can only guess. But I am the author, so I get to speculate. I invited readers to pursue that question with me and see how it works.
Then I asked, “If nobody knew who the father was, and Mary would not say, how was Mary treated?” Mary must have been treated savagely. She must have been bullied worse than almost anyone. Every day, people would see her and say, “Who is the father of your child, Mary?” She says nothing. They spit at her feet. They would have stoned her if they could.
Mary had a difficult life, and she could never tell the truth, because who would believe it? Who would believe it, even in her own family? If she did not tell Joseph, and she probably did not because an angel had to explain it to him, she probably did not tell her mother or father either.
So the question is, when you are treated brutally and cruelly for years, what do you want more than anything in the world? You want your name cleared. You want justice. Justice is being vindicated when you have been treated maliciously and cruelly by people who hate you for years. That is what Mary wants.
Now the problem is, does Jesus know the truth about his parentage? If he does, how can he solve the problem? He does not come with a label on his forehead that says, “Incarnate Son of God.” To the villagers, he looks like a regular man and a regular carpenter. So how can Jesus give his mother justice, even if he knows the truth? That is the central problem.
What results did you see from your launch email?
Thomas: You included your pitch in your email to get people curious. What happened after you sent it?
Randy: The open rate was around 60%.
Thomas: That is a really high open rate in general. One advantage of a smaller list is that smaller lists tend to have higher open rates.
Randy: Twenty-six percent of the openers clicked through on that day, and I had 92 sales. I had 145 clicks and 92 sales. So you can see the drop off at each point: 550 subscribers, about 300 and some opens, 145 clicks, and 92 sales.
Thomas: That is really good performance from the first email. The drop off from people who clicked to those who went on to buy is often very low. Your results tell us that the copy on the page and the cover are both strong. And this was before you had any reviews! People often abandon a page because it lacks reviews or has the wrong kind of reviews. But you had no reviews yet, so this is a really good indication.
What did you do after the first email?
Randy: A few days later, I posted on Facebook on my profile page, saying I had a new book out, with a link to the Amazon page. I gave a short version of that email sales letter, and had a lot of activity there. Friends from high school and even my creative writing teacher from 45 years ago, whom I had not seen since 1975, commented and said they wanted to read the book. I tried to respond to everyone.
Then I posted on my blog for my 130 blog subscribers. Each of these actions brought in some preorders.
Finally, on launch day, which was Palm Sunday, I sent a second email to my list.
Thomas: Sundays are usually low open-rate days even in a normal week. This was a holiday week in the middle of a pandemic. You had a lot going against you, although probably fewer people were emailing that day, so you may have had the inbox to yourself.
How did the pandemic affect your launch decisions?
Randy: I actually felt like a lot of people were sending emails. And I felt bad because, in the middle of a pandemic, people are worried about survival. I wondered how I could justify launching a book. I asked myself, “Why should I launch now when people are worried about survival?” It felt tacky and self-serving.
But then I asked, “Do I know for sure when this pandemic will be over? What if it is over in a month, but I do not survive it? What if I die from coronavirus?” That could happen. I did not want to die without having launched this book.
So I put that in my email. I said, “This is real. We do not know that we will still be on the planet 30 or 60 days from now. I might as well launch now as any time, because who knows how long this will last?”
Thomas: I think mentioning the pandemic is important because it keeps you from sounding out of touch. You have to acknowledge it in your emails.
Randy: Whenever there is a negative, the best way to deal with it is to acknowledge it. I was brutally honest. I sent that email on launch day, and over that day and the next, there were about 80 more sales.
Then I blogged again and posted a short Good Friday meditation, using some copy from the book.
Finally, on Easter Sunday, seven days after launch, I sent a third email to my list. I said I had offered a special half-price launch price for the first seven days and would be changing it sometime the next day, so they should get it now while the price was low. It was a very short email, and I included one of my endorsements.
Why is a “reverse coupon” effective?
Thomas: That technique is called a reverse coupon. It is one of the only kinds of coupons you can implement on Amazon. It is a warning of a future price increase, which creates urgency, and it keeps people from complaining about the higher price. No one complains about an email warning them of a price increase if they have time to act. If you send the email 20 minutes before the increase, they might be annoyed, but if they have time, it works.
For procrastinating readers, the reverse coupon is powerful. Many readers procrastinate buying a book indefinitely. They always mean to buy it, but continue to put it off. You have to give them an inciting event, some urgency, and some pain if they do not act now, or a reward if they do. A reverse coupon does both. They feel rewarded for paying attention and getting in early at the lower price, and at the same time, they want to avoid paying more later and feeling bad about it. That creates a useful sales bump and leaves you with a higher price point going forward.
Randy: By the end of launch day, I looked at my total orders, combining preorders and launch-day sales. At the end of Easter, I had logged 364 total orders. I would guess that around 250 of those came from my email list. So 250 out of 550 subscribers means my conversion rate was roughly 45 percent, which is phenomenal.
Interestingly, I had about five more email subscribers at the end of launch than I had before I started. I lost a few who unsubscribed during the campaign, but I gained several. Where did they come from?
At the front of the book, I had several maps I had drawn of Jerusalem, Galilee, and ancient Palestine. I added a note saying, “You can get these maps free by going to www.ingermanson.com/maps. On that page, I offer high-resolution downloads of those maps.” They are hand-drawn by me and unique to my book, and they fit the story perfectly, so readers naturally want them.
On that download page, I also have a sign-up for my email list. People who bought the book in the first week or so downloaded the maps. I can see the number of downloads and see that some of those people subscribed. So there was a bump in newsletter subscriptions.
How do you optimize all your marketing efforts?
Randy: In marketing, everything you do should point to everything else. My email list points to my book. I use my list to sell the book. But my book points back to my website to get people to sign up, because some readers will discover my book by chance and have never heard of me, and I want to capture them on my list.
If you have only 50 subscribers, do a modest launch with modest expectations. Get your book out, sell a few dozen copies, and get it on the bestseller lists. Then people will notice it and start buying. Those buyers who never knew you before discover your book, then come to your website for something they can download. Your book tells them they can get that resource on your site. This is called a reader magnet.
Once they are on your site, you can invite them to sign up for your email list, or in some cases, require them to sign up to get the reader magnet. You can do it either way. I tend not to force people. But now your book is promoting your email list.
My hope is that a year from now, when I launch book two, my email list will have grown to 5,000 people instead of 500. If that happens, the launch of book two will be much bigger, it will go higher on the bestseller lists and stay there longer, and it will do better at promoting my email list.
So you get a virtuous cycle. Your email list promotes your book. Your book promotes your email list. Your Facebook activity promotes both. Everything you do in marketing should point to everything else.
Thomas: Or at least point to the email list. It is not that you point to everything at the same time, but the email list and the website are the hub of the wheel. As the wheel turns, each spoke is constantly reconnecting with the hub, so to speak.
What ongoing marketing are you doing now that the book has launched?
Randy: I have started running Amazon ads. I will be running Facebook ads. And I will probably be approaching various podcasters who focus on biblical fiction to see if I can get on their shows to talk about my novel. I am using the ideas from your course How to Get Booked as a Podcast Guest.
Thomas: Because you have that email-list connection, all the marketing you do now gives you a double dip. As people read the book and join your list, you will be able to tell them about the next book and keep working that flywheel.
This is how it is done. You are faithful with the little things. You did not become a bestseller in all of literature or even in all of Christian books. You became a bestseller in the Easter category, which is not super competitive, but it was Easter week, which is arguably the most important week to rank in that category.
Randy: It was nice to rub shoulders with books by N. T. Wright, Max Lucado, and others in the Christology and ancient-history categories.
What mistakes should authors avoid?
Randy: There are a billion mistakes to make. I have probably made most of them, but they are slipping my mind at the moment. The branding mistake is the biggest one I have made in my life. It has probably cost me years to recover from that.
Thomas: It is a mistake I have also made. When you have many interests, it is easy to try to be all things to all people at all times. I
had to go through a pruning phase just like you did, though in a different way. For example, when I first started this podcast, it was to support me as a literary agent, and now I’m no longer an agent. I cut a lot of other activities as well. That honing and focusing is painful, but I think it is what allowed your launch to be as successful as it was because you had already been priming the pump. You had been getting people interested and signaling through your emails and your website that, “I am no longer a science fiction writer. I am committed to being an ancient Jerusalem writer.”
Writing about Jesus in ancient Jerusalem is a natural expression of that. Who is the most famous person living in ancient Jerusalem? Jesus Christ. There is no close second. Maybe King David is the next most famous, but not nearly as famous.
And so it fit. People who had read your time-travel books about the apostle Paul were also fans of Jesus. It is an easy sell.
Where can readers find your work and resources?
Thomas: The fact that you visited Jerusalem four times and worked on archaeological digs is what gives these maps value. You did not just scribble something on paper or copy someone else’s maps. You went there and dug things out of the ground.
Randy: In a sense, the geography dictates part of the story. I have a map of Nazareth and maps of Galilee. Those maps limit what can happen in the story.
Thomas: I love how it gives the story context. Often, the maps in the back of the Bible are so zoomed out that it is hard to understand how any one story works. Any city is just a dot. It is hard to picture where the cliff was that Jesus was almost pushed off. Understanding how close that is to the synagogue helps that story make sense. Was the synagogue right next to the cliff? A mile away? How long was he being muscled by the crowd? How long did he have to disappear? All of that is influenced by the maps.
What final advice would you give authors?
Randy: Make a long-term plan and then follow that plan. You can be flexible, but you need to have faith in your plan and in yourself as a writer that you can execute that plan.
Links:
- Amazon Author Central
- Randy Ingermanson’s Website
- Episode #40 – What Authors Need to Know About Book Metadata
- Crown of Thorns Review
- Son of Mary: A Tale of Jesus of Nazareth (Crown of Thorns Book 1)
- Ingermanson.com/maps
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