Book Launch Secret #4. The 99 Cent Debut Launch

Welcome to this Book Launch Secrets Mini-Series! Over the next few episodes, I'll be sharing my best practices of getting both the Amazon BestSeller and #1 New Release Badge on your listing!

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Transcript

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So today we're going to talk about the 99 cent debut launch in why you should consider. Coming out of the gate with a special offer on your book. Let's get started. Welcome everybody to the market, your message show. I'm your host, Jonathan Milligan and author of the book. Your message matters in the new book. Discover your message. And today we're going to be talking about the next part of our series. So far, we have been talking about book, launch secrets. Go back and listen to the past episodes. If you're just now catching this one. But book launch secret. Number one, we talked about choosing the right categories. And why you should not just haphazardly select your three book categories when you're publishing your book on Amazon. Y you want to be strategic about picking low competition, but seeing or popular. Categories. It will allow you to get that new release badge and even the best seller badge. Then we talked about in the next episode, after that book launch secret number two, which is your book, launch team and how powerful it is to gather up a book launch team. And here's the insider secret. Your book launch team does not have to be full of your target market. This is what holds a lot of people back because they feel like I don't have an audience yet. The book I'm hoping will start to bring an audience to me. Can I make my book launch team, like people in my social world, my friends. Some family members. People that are for me. Coworkers and the answer is absolutely. Yes. For your book, launch team to be successful, you really need two things. One, you need them to consume the book. Number two. Be willing to share about the book. That's all you need them to be able to do. So go back and listen to that one. Then the last one we did book launch secret number three, the silent five day launch. And why I like to quietly. Launched my book on Amazon and there's a very strategic reason why. In fact. I'll give it to you again, in case you missed it. Here's the highlights.'cause. I like to have my book launch team, go leave reviews, get the book for free while it's free. Use KDP select. Where you can make your book free for five days and then utilize some of the places where you can promote your free book offer. Onto various email lists. And I walk through and go back and listen to that last episode on how I was able to get over 2100 downloads. And I think I paid$65 for the organization to email their list. They had a email list of people interested in business nonfiction. That was the size of around 160,000 people. And that's what drove all of the traffic. And then here's the secret inside of the secret? it's nice to make money on the book. My real goal is. It's the beginning of my customer journey. So inside of my book, one of the first things you'll see in this new book and every book moving forward. Is a free mini course. That is a compliment of what the book's about. And what we see is we have people every day. Opt-in to get that free course. And then they received three emails. Three to five emails. That introduces them to the membership site. That is the bigger training. And every day, since we've published the book, we've seen a new members come into our membership. That is the customer pathway. That's the customer journey now. You don't have to lead people to a membership. You could lead them to booking a call as a coach. You could lead to selling. A course, you could lead them to whatever you want to accomplish. But currently that's what we're doing with our books. We have three levels of membership and maybe I'll do a future podcast on this. We have a mini membership. Main membership and a max membership. Each of them have a little bit more that they offer and we run those three membership communities. So now that you're caught up to speed on this strategy today. I want to talk about the 99 cent debut launch, but first of all, if you haven't had a chance to get my brand new book, discover your message a 14 day guide to uncover your calling. And find your niche as a writer, coach, or speaker. You can get it today. You can get it in the form of a Kindle book, a paperback hardcover, you can also get the audio book version it's available on Amazon, also in bookstores everywhere. All you need to do is go to platform growth books. That's where all of my books are listed, but you'll find the most recent one there at the top. Platform growth books.com or click on the link in the description. For this podcast episode. Alright, now let's get into book launch secret number four. The 99 cent debut launch. So after I do my five days of free promotion to really get lots of book readers, and by the way, I get lots of email subscribers and even customers. For giving away my book for free. Then what's next. By now, Your book launch team had five days to go leave their review. So now we can actually do a public launch. If you have an email list. If you have followers, if you have a Facebook group, if you have Pinterest followers, if you have fill in the blank, doesn't matter. All of those things count along with. All of the social reach of your book, launch team. It's time for all of us to collectively shout it off the mountain top. This is what the first day of. This phase is what I consider my actual book launch today. Now, one of the things that I will do. Is, I will make the Kindle book. 99 cents. Now again, you might be saying Jonathan, isn't the goal to make money on the book. The answer is absolutely. Yes, but we want to have a longer term strategy. This is especially true. If you are adopting what I'm doing, which is to create. A book series. Because I really want them to consume book one and get excited about book two, which is coming out very soon. Eventually there'll be seven books in a series, all sequential to help you build your writing, speaking, or coaching business. What we're going to do. Is this 99 cent debut launch is going to be anywhere from seven to 14 days. Now for me, I did it for one week. So I officially launched the book on a Tuesday. Oh, by the way, Tuesdays are typically the best days of the week. I think it's because Wednesday is. As they call it hump day. It's a day that you getting a little bit tired from the week, or you're finally starting to get work done for a lot of people. Cause they procrastinated the first two days. And then you got Thursday and Friday, you starting to look toward the weekend. Mondays are often a grind because you're getting back at it after the weekend. So Tuesdays. Actually work really wow. So maybe you're saying, Jonathan, do you have any scientific proof statistics to back it up? I do have this. Do you remember? Back in the day when we really were buying up DVDs. Yes. They're still around. But we were really buying up DVDs. One of the things that Disney always did. Is, they would pull movies out of the vault. They would have like snow white in the vault, meaning they weren't actively producing disk and making it available for cell. And they would bring it out of the vault. What day do they always say that it was the launch day of the discs? Of the movies. Out of the vault. It was Tuesdays. Tuesdays were the day. So we know that they did their research and figured out Tuesdays is the best day to release. A new DVD out of the Disney vault. And so therefore Tuesdays have been a popular day. I've also had lots of author, friends who have tested this out. They've tried different days. And they say that Tuesdays are often the best day. Now that being said, let me be really clear. This is a big mistake. That authors make, especially newer authors. The success of your book. Is not dependent on the book launch. Now I know that's crazy because you like Jonathan, you just dedicated. Four episodes to this idea of a book launch and you put work and energy and effort into it. You do want to do your best with the book launch to create buzz. You do. But I have a longer-term perspective here. I am still every day, shipping out books. From my last book before this one, which was published in 2020. Your message matters because I've set up a free book funnel. And I went for almost two years on podcast to talk about the book. And people are just now discovering it. They're just now listening to the episodes. I think I did over 120 podcasts during that time. And books are still being shipped out every day. And that's a separate episode that we'll probably do around the strategy of doing a free book launch, and actually even fulfilling the own, your own books. Which is a great idea because you're turning readers into customers right away. But we'll save that for another episode. Okay. So this 99 cent debut launch we're launching on a Tuesday. And I'd like to have special pricing until Sunday at midnight. So what I'll do typically an easy one is to shout it from the rooftop on social media. Any of your social media accounts, it could even be your personal, if you don't have business accounts. You want your book, launch team to do the same? You want to give them. Even some words to put. In there, at for them. So it makes it easy for them to promote the book. You also want to have lots of images. If you remember the book launch team episode, I talked about having them curate their favorite quotes. Or one reason we do that is because we take the quotes and we throw them into Canva and we create social media graphics that they can then use once the book's launched to get the word out. And so everybody's putting their energy on social media to push people to the book. You can also do it with your email list. I would encourage you to do that. If you have an email list larger, small doesn't matter, you definitely want to send out three. Or for emails that week. Getting people to jump in. You also want to send out an email on the last day. Letting them know that the book launch pricing special pricing is going up. Grab that 99 cent book. Now the 99 cent book is only on the Kendall. With the paperback or hardcover, you can only discount it to a certain place where Amazon's going to allow you. But you're welcome to discount those as well. Because one thing that I found very surprising. Is how many people still want to buy the actual paper back book? DEfinitely do that. Once your 99 cent debut launch has ended. Then you want to go in. To Amazon or KTP. Dot amazon.com. And adjust the pricing. I like having kind of the recommended price for a Kindle book. And somewhere between 2 99 and 4 99, it fits the sweet spot in there. What's crazy as I've experimented with this with passbooks and. I, if I raised it to 7 99 or 6 99. I found that actually made less overall. So just pricing your book higher doesn't mean you're going to make more that's the lesson there. All right. Once we get to the end of this debut launch. Then what's next. I'm going to give you a little bonus here real quick. Here is the bonus. There is a website that I've been using. I'm absolutely loving. I'm surprised more authors. Aren't talking about this. There's a link in the description of this podcast. But it's called pubby. Pubby. What it does. Is it's for authors, people who just love reading books can sign up as well to be a book reader. And reviewer. But it's this massive library of authors. Who, any time you select a book and you read a book. Most of them are free. There are a couple that you have to pay for, but it's totally up to you. You get more snaps or points. That you can use if you review a book that you paid for, but. I find that. Most of them are free. I almost do almost all free or Kindle unlimited. And the books that you do pay for are just the Kindle versions. Anyway. So they're anywhere between 99 cents and 4 99, but you select a book. You read the book. And you leave a review on Amazon. Once you do that. Pubby will give you what they call snaps or points. For example, you read a book it's worth 1300 snaps. And now you can claim those snaps to have your book reviewed. By somebody else. So by requesting the review. At the time of this recording, it's 1,250 snaps for an average book. And you, then we'll have somebody read your book and leave a review. I up to right now, this recording, I've had 36 reviews added to my Amazon. By doing this process. And if you do this, you can get anywhere between five to 10 Amazon book reviews. Every single week. if You're interested in that, There is a free trial where you can get free reviews. They start with you with 6,000 points or snaps. So you literally can sign up for the free account. Get three or four book reviews. And see that it's legitimate. It's not breaking any of Amazon's rules around reviews. And if you like it. Then you can pay for it. Now. The link that's in the description. I wish I'd had this link, but it actually gives you 15% off. So you get the free trial. Plus you'll get 15% off. You can pay monthly or annual. So give puppy a try, take a look at it. If you already have a book out, you can use it for your old books. But if you're working currently on a book or you're going to launch a book. You can also use that as well. All right. So there you have it in just a few episodes. You've learned the big pillars. Of how I like to launch books. This worked really well for me in my recent launch. And as I'm gearing up for my next launch, by the way, the next book is called launch your platform. And it's coming out very soon. And I'm going to be incorporating a lot of the same. Principles that I shared with you in these episodes. All right. So that's it for this edition of the podcast. I hope this was helpful to you, and I hope you feel like you got a little bit of an idea of things you can do to launch a book and that you don't have to have a super large audience to have a successful book launch. So go back relisten to these episodes, especially as you get closer to launching your book. And I truly hope it's helpful. By the way, what would you like for me to cover in future episodes? Let me know. And also take a moment and like share review. Or just give us some feedback on our show. And until next time never forget your message matters