Launching a Book in The Current Circumstances (Patreon)

It’s hard to think about big picture publishing stuff right now, for a variety of reasons.

The pandemic is a huge one, though it's certainly not the only big thing (the 2020 election, the movement pushing for racial justice and for police abolition/reform). 

2020 has upended so many parts of life in the USA and beyond. Publishing is no exception.

Some states are allowing bookstores to be open again during this stage of the pandemic, but many people are choosing to stay home even when their area is allowing more businesses to be open to some degree.

Barnes & Noble just fired most of their senior buyers, which suggests that the chain’s future will be one with narrower, less precise buys in many categories. Which, as a science fiction/fantasy writer, is pretty daunting.

So more than anything, what I want to share right now is that if you’re a writer and you’re worried about what the future holds for you and your career, you’re not alone. Delayed releases, bookstore closures, canceled conventions, scrubbed book tours, and more.

This year is going to be a Mulligan in a lot of ways.

But for those of us with book releases still to come or that came and went fast during This Weirdest of Years, we have to muddle our way through.

Fallback Plans

I’ve got a book coming out next month. Next month would sound like a bit of time, except “next month” is tomorrow, so there are actually just 21 days until the book comes out.

At that time, I am guessing that most US states will be in a place re: the pandemic where they *should* have bookstores be closed to walk-in customers, even if they aren’t. So that’s not great.

But it’s about what I expected when I made the call with Parvus to push back the release from May until July. I was already expecting that I’d have to move all of my promotional activities online.

A million years ago, during The Before Times of late February, my launch plan was like this:

Go to Balticon, the Nebulas, and Origins, promoting ANNIHILATION ARIA along the way, trying to sell copies at the first two through booksellers and to hand-sell my own copies at Origins. I’d also do a mix of podcast interviews, events with local booksellers, guest posts, and my own podcasts with Speculate and The Skiffy and Fanty Show. I’d try to make a big splash the week of launch and then support the book for several weeks with more activity, and see how things went.

Now, with conventions canceled and events moved online, I am less focused on the week of release and more on being active across the course of a few months.

(Almost) All Launches Are Soft Launches Now

Sometimes, when a book has a strong headwind leading into release, the author and publisher plan on a Hard Launch. That means that there’s a great deal of focus on maximizing sales on the very first week through pushing pre-orders and doing events in the first week. This is the way books are launched to hit the New York Times bestseller list. When you see an author on a book tour doing five events in a week across several states, they’re taking the hard launch approach. Hard launches also take advantage of good placement in bookstores like B&N. When I worked for Angry Robot, we’d get co-op buys from B&N, which could last two or four weeks. This meant that B&N took a larger # of copies and featured them in a mass market display tower or on a front table in exchange for some $$ up-front. When we had co-op buys, it was extra important to try to drive sales in those early weeks to get the most out of the co-op expenditure.

ANNIHILATION ARIA is not going to really benefit from a hard launch. We don’t have the sell-in to bookstores to hit list, we don’t have a co-op buy at Barnes & Noble. Instead, we’re working on building a good Soft Launch. This means that first week sales are less important than the idea of showing consistency in the hope of building word-of-mouth over time to give the book longer legs. Where a Hard Launch looks like a sharp spike of sales and then a rapid cool-off, a well-done Soft Launch looks like a slow ramp up with a strong tail of sales over the course of several months.

And honestly, a lot more books will be well-served by the Soft Launch approach this year. With many of the tools for driving Hard Launch approach off the table (in-person conventions and bookstore events), and with current events dominating social feeds so overwhelmingly, the amount of work it takes to break out to wider awareness is pretty big, and may be easier to achieve over time with repeated exposure instead of a smaller number of high-profile events.

There are lots of exceptions, and some individual events or actions may still be able to break through in some big way.

Live to Write Another Day

Generally, I think it’s a good idea to cut yourself some slack as much as possible when it comes to big expectations for any 2020 releases. Publishing is a crap shoot even when things are working “as normal”, and this year is absolutely not a normal one. I had hoped that ANNIHILATION ARIA could maybe catch on and exceed the expectations I had for it as a small press release with a great cover but not a ton of promotional heat behind it.

And it still absolutely could. Two trade reviews (including a Starred Review) ahead of publication is pretty great, and I have lined up a goodly amount of promotion with the assistance of the Parvus team. But I am trying to treat any level of traction with this book as a blessing and focus on the fact that there will be other releases, that things will find some new equilibrium after the pandemic, even if that looks very different from the way things were in The Before Times.

My heart goes out to people debuting in 2020, because a debut is less replaceable. Publishing still puts far too much emphasis on debut releases and “New Writers in X Genre!” buzz. Most writers get better over time, and build on the themes and topics they started with.

Folks with 2020 releases already under their belt – how has promoting/releasing a book this year been for you? What’s worked? What’s been especially hard? And if you’re like me and have a book forthcoming, what do you need help with and how can we work together to help you out?