Book Launches, Real and Virtual

Most in-person book launches are poorly attended and sell few books. If the launch is in a bookstore, the store will get the pitiful proceeds of those few sales.

Online launches are blissfully risk-free. No munchies, no booze, no room rental, no cartons of books. Expenses, other than time spent by promotional staff, are zero. The possibility of a poorly attended failure when no books sell is almost zero. Sales needn’t suffer, since online events can be attended from anywhere in the world. And your friends and family don’t have to drive or take a subway to show their support for you and your book. They don’t even need to be fully dressed.

For all of these reasons, the pandemic has been fabulous for book launches. I’m hoping they stay on Zoom where they belong.

But people are hungry for face-to-face contact, and of course it does feel good to gather with friends and family to celebrate in person. So as we transition back to live events, it’s helpful to remember that book launches can work, if you keep in mind the main goals of the launch.

Those goals:

1.     Make the author happy.

In an ideal launch, the author’s friends — lots of them — get together to celebrate the author and the book. The author gets praised, congratulated, gets to feel good about the book and about writing.

2.     Get some publicity.

Make sure book reviewers and media people are invited. Make them feel special if they turn up to the launch, because they are! Give them well-written press releases and such to make it really easy for them to write or speak about the book. Make the author available for (and ready for!) interviews.

3.     Network like crazy.

As a publisher, I want to make sure I speak with absolutely everyone who attends. I always take a pocket full of business cards. There will be book buyers, authors, editors …. anyone who turns up at a book launch is my kinda person. I’m not trying to make sales or anything like that. I just want to make sure that everyone feels like they met me properly and would be comfortable following up if I could be of use to them.

4.     Sell all the books you brought to the launch.

I’m expecting someone — preferably not me — to lose money on the launch. If we’re expecting to sell 75 books at the launch, I’ll print 60 copies and some book-order cards to give people who didn’t get a copy. The pre-launch sales estimates are almost always optimistic, and I don’t ever want to be schlepping surplus books back to the office.

5.     Minimize losses.

If I’m expecting to sell 60 books at the launch and make $10 profit on each book, I’ll try to keep the costs down to $600. Anyone who wants it fancier than that gets to pick up the additional costs.

6.     Have fun and make sure the author has fun.

Come to think of it, most of these principles apply to online launches as much as they apply to in-person ones. It’s the author’s day. Whether they’re in a little Zoom box or standing at a podium, the goal is to celebrate their achievement and make them feel good.

—Greg Ioannou