It’s Launch Day! After 2 years away from writing children’s books, Carla’s Adventure in Kenya is live! Woohoo! I absolutely love researching and writing these beginning chapter books. Besides writing the story, here are some of the things I did to get to this point:
- Changed out the covers. I wanted the series to have a fresh new look.
- Reformatted the first 5 books so that they all have the same font, type size, etc. I used Reedsy.com for this. They don’t give you the option to change font size, and for my beginning chapter books, I’d like it to be a little larger print. I may see if Draft to Digital does a better job on the next book.
- Added the link to the new book at the back of the first 5. I want my readers to be able to see what books they haven’t read yet and get them easily.
- Commissioned the illustrations from the wonderful Ian Smiley. (I love working with him!) He is already hard at work on the next one.
- “Stacked” promotions for this week to get the word out. This means signing up for different promotion sights across multiple days so that Amazon’s algorithms start to see continuous sales and begin to promote things from their end. I have promos with ENT, FreeBooksy, Fussy Librarian, and Book Raid.
- Created a book trailer and posted it on YouTube. I scheduled a Facebook post for Monday to share it with my followers.
- Sent out ARC copies through Bookfunnel.com to some newsletter subscribers to hopefully have some reviews posted when the book is live.
- Reduced the price of book 1 to free for the week on KU. Making book 1 free is like giving out a free sample. If people like it, they’ll come back for more!
- Reduced the price of books 2 and 3 to $0.99 for the week. Kind of like the free sample, giving some cheap love may help get people hooked into the series.
- Set the new book at $1.99 for the week. Let’s call this the introductory price.
- Set up a podcast interview with Reading with Your Kids (not sure when it will air). I’m nervous about this one! I decided to do this because I would like to find new readers. Podcasts have a broad audience and it was free!
- Ordered author copies of the paperback to sign for people. I work in a school and several of my co-workers asked for copies. I ordered extras to have on hand, too.
Most of the advice for doing a successful launch that I have read is for adult books. Children’s books can be tricky because most sales are paperback, not for ebooks. We’ll see how this goes. I am working to get book 7 out in March, 2022; so that I can hopefully ride the wave of this launch. Book 8 will be coming in May, 2022.
As you can see, there are a lot of things to consider, if you want your book noticed. You can’t simply hit ‘publish’, sit back, and wait for the sales to come pouring in. With thousands of new books being published every day, it takes a lot of effort to get your book noticed. I’ll let you know in a few weeks how all of this pans out. Wish me luck.