Three Strategies You Must Use To Pre-Launch Your Self-Published Book

Reverse engineering is the tactic that will pay off for you when you decide to self-publish a book. Notice, that having self-published a book already is not noted as a requirement or even as a desired place to start.

That’s because you must begin your pre-launch plans before you’ve written one single word.

Allow Trevor Crane of Step Up Strategies to elaborate. A best-selling book marketing whip and author and one of three Cranes holding the best-seller title, Crane knows what he is talking about. Most recently, he issued and achieved a challenge he dared himself: to publish 10 books in three months. He wrote five of them himself, and unbelievably his inspiring and adorable daughter, Phoenix Crane, just nine-years-old wrote the other five! In that same month, his wife also released her own book.

In addition to Step Up Strategies, a book marketing business, Trevor owns and operates the publishing companies Bestseller Big Business Publishing and the children’s imprint Super Kids Book Publishing. Crane urges authors considering writing a book to set their sights on the steps that precede the perceived onset. And just as his social proof strategy has repeatedly demonstrated, he advises you to assess your business needs before you kickoff your pre-launch campaign.

You must reinforce and build upon your business in preparation for the release.

Use these three tips to stay ahead of the publishing pack:

1. Get clarity about what you are promoting and writing. This is when you will do the market testing to gauge the interest of your finished work. Resist getting caught up in your story. That part will come, but it must come in due and logical time. Just like you can’t start building a house without a blueprint, you can’t write a book until you know who you are writing for and what your marketing plan will look like. To distill your clarity, you need to get help. Authors are too close to their projects, to their dreams. Look at your book as a product, and determine its relevance to your readers. Answer the questions people who are curious about your book will ask: who are you writing for? Where will you advertise? Where will you get your best results, and so on.
2. Declare to the world that you are writing a book. This one little (and sometimes terrifying) action holds you accountable. It forces you to take action to make good on your word. You can leverage the declaration that you are writing and that you will reach your target. One of Trevor’s clients sold 25 business sessions at a trade show before she had typed a single sentence. Once she had told the world what she intended to do, she went straight to the most acclaimed mentors in her industry and now her book contains highly valuable content and is of course, a best-seller.
3. Focus on your story. NOW, you get to plan your captivating content. But even in laying out your fortuitous tale, there are formulas to follow, hooks to be crafted, influencing foreword writers to woo. Whatever your genre is, research it, particularly the best-sellers. Repurpose it in your own fashion, in your own words and with your unique take on your subject. Your book should be readable, flow well, and adhere to creative guidelines: vary sentence lengths and set scenes, as an example.

Trevor stresses that a majority of writers he hires come to him harboring a strong dislike for their own books! All because they did not do the work to understand the importance of pre-launch planning. Pre-launch is a long game, an intricate design with many involved steps which when orchestrated correctly enable your ongoing success as an author.