I try to be involved with local authorpreneurs as much as I can, and this year, my first collaboration is the Flight of the Phoenix short story anthology. Being involved in anthologies are a lot of fun, and hashing out 12k words for the actual story is only the half of it. Flight is going to different than the previous anthologies that I was involved with, because 1 – the editor, Natalie Rivener is actually a lot of fun to begin with, and 2 – I’m doing a marketing case study for the book launch.
Book launch 101
I’ve nominated myself to be the Marketing Coordinator for the launch, and yes, it is as worthless as a title as it is completely reliant on how well the other 6 authors in the anthology respond to my requests for information. All six authors are indie authors, like you are, and all six have varying degrees of experience in the indie author space ranging from: “This short story is the first thing I’ve ever thought of publishing” to: “Please, I’ve got like a dozen books floating around out there.”
All six authors expressed a desire to be more proficient in sales and marketing of fiction books, so I’m writing almost daily posts on the anthology’s private group to give them ideas and inspiration. In return, I hope to get information from them about how their individual marketing and sales campaigns are doing, what they’re doing, when they’re doing it and what the results are.
What I will do with the book launch data
I’ve got an idea for a super-article, a great big piece of content that I will make available for free on this site, that will take the form of a case study for a book launch, in order to help the authors involved, and ultimately you, the dauntless reader, to get a better understanding of what works, what does not work, and what to do with your own book launch.
How the book launch case study is set up
The short stories were already pretty much completed last year, and at the time of writing, we’re putting finishing touches on the print book layout as well as the e-book layout. We’ve set a tentative launch date and is now in the process of launching our respective marketing campaigns. Each author goes at it alone, while simultaneously using shared resources, such as web elements created by a Photoshop savvy fellow anthology author, to get word about the impending launch out there. We’re constantly brainstorming new ideas on the anthology private group and I, as the Marketing Coordinator, try to make sense of the data coming in.
Future book launch blog posts
While writing the article, I will be blogging about the ups and downs of the launch as it happens, and will be continually testing new ideas to see what works.
Sound like fun?
Let me know in the comments how you would approach setting up a project like this, because, frankly, I’m making up parameters and metrics as I go along.
Until next time – Be Dauntless.