Chapter 14: The Celebration Announcement: Launch Parties and Virtual Tours
Advantages to Holding Your Book Launch Party
Live Book Launch Party Strategy
Steps to Prepare Your Live Book Launch Party
A Simple One-Hour Book Launch Party Format
The Virtual Book Launch Tour
Advantages of a Virtual Book Launch “Tour”
Strategy for Virtual Book Launch
Steps to Creating Your Virtual Book Launch Tour
Virtual Tour Stops
Checklist, Step 14: Launch
Tear-Out Sheets: Author Platform Publicity Plan
“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
—Henry David Thoreau
1 Author WebsiteNew Rule: Online tools must work together. Learn how to set up your author site as your central location that all other online locations point to so that you can keep control of your platform.
2 Your BlogNew Rule: Draw in and converse with your audience through comments. We show you how and where to set up your blog and suggest best practices, including how to enable and pursue comments.
3 TwitterNew Rule: Build social authority and influence by having others share your ideas with their network. Learn how to jump into the huge pool of your audience that participates on Twitter, get set up easily, and gain a following.
4 GoogleNew Rule: Search engines like Google define your findability via keywords, metadata, and more. We help you understand the power of Google and how to harness it, how Google is continuing to reward authors who create great written content, and why Google+ is far more than a social network.
5 FacebookNew Rule: Authors must create motivation for interaction among members of their audience to rank higher and be found more often. We show you how to use Facebook as a billboard (while still maintaining your privacy with your friends and family) and why “likes” on your author/book page are important.
6 LinkedInNew Rule: Expand your network of supporters by joining the networks of many others. We show the power of using LinkedIn to grow community with peers, add to visibility, and add to your following through posting, joining LinkedIn groups, and using LinkedIn Tools.
7 Personal AppearancesNew Rule: Success depends on how well you understand and speak from your audience’s point of view. We show how to use tools that maximize audience by teaching, training, and speaking.
8 ArticlesNew Rule: Open up multiple avenues for others to talk about you and your work. We illustrate the value of creating an article bank and repurposing your written content for maximum exposure.
9 AudioNew Rule: Your audience needs interaction with you, and you’ll learn how to use audio to connect personally with readers. We lay out the many avenues of audio available and why it’s an especially effective medium for authors.
10 VideoNew Rule: Video is a huge and growing draw on the web; authors must use multiple media. Discover how to maximize your author brand by creating video interviews, YouTube videos, channels, book trailers; repurposing your videos; and more.
11 Book WebsiteNew Rule: Become an online bookseller with the Buy button. We show you how and why to build your book site and how it sells books.
12 AmazonNew Rule: Align with the “customer experience” at Amazon. Learn how to use Amazon, with all the tools in this author toolbox, to build your audience.
13 ReviewsNew Rule: In public view, authors must showcase reviews and praise from your audience. We show you how to go about getting solid book reviews.
14 Book LaunchNew Rule: Authors must search for their audience in multiple locations, using virtual and in-person appearances. We’ll walk you through how to combine all of these into a fireworks show to launch your book with parties and virtual tours so that you can break into new audience networks.
PIECES OF A LIFE and of every creation come together in ways we never expected or anticipated. This book combined the puzzle pieces with many contributions to allow a complete vision. The number of people who helped, influenced, and supported us over the years to create this book is countless, and we send out our thanks to you all.
First, thanks to three thought leaders whose work greatly influenced our book and shaped our approach to our audience of authors. These three saw and articulated the paradigm shift that allowed first a glimpse, then a full grasp of the magnitude of change that the move to a digital world has encompassed:
Nicholas Negroponte, author of the paradigm shift title that moved awareness from atoms to bits and bytes: Being Digital. He is also founder of the MIT Media Lab and the One Laptop per Child Association.
Tim O’Reilly, publisher, speaker at conferences, including ones at Waterside, a renowned tech expert who popularized the term Web 2.0. He envisions the Internet developing into a sort of global brain, an intelligent network of people and machines to function as a nervous system for our planet.
David Meerman Scott, online marketing strategist and author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR, who saw immediately the shift away from media controlling a message and toward a democracy of influencers with ideas, enabled by the tools of social media and all other online media.
Thank you Glenn Yeffeth, Publisher at BenBella, for supporting and believing in our vision to publish our book to enable authors. Thanks to all of the publishing experts at BenBella who supported us and contributed their time and expertise throughout the book-writing process. First and foremost, thank you to our editor, “Saint” Paul Eisenberg, for your patience, and for your development, ideas, contributions, and editorial skills par excellence. We could not have had a better editor. Thank you to Sarah Dombrowsky for creating our blue branding color and cover design and typography, to Publishers’ Design and Production Services for the clean, compelling visual book design.
Many thanks to all at BenBella: to Debbie Harmsen and Vy Tran for editorial support, to Jessika Rieck for guiding our book through production, to Jenna Sampson for assistance with photo-wrangling, to Jennifer Canzoneri and Lindsay Marshall for their marketing expertise, and to Adrienne Lang, who understood and applied her knowledge of publishing to every aspect of our book process. Our thanks as well to Stacia Seaman for copyediting.
Deepest thank-yous to all who shared their time and talent in quotes, models, and formats, and to the many author client influencers for this book who shared their expertise so