Launching a Book During a Global Pandemic (Patreon)

This is not a topic I would have thought would be relevant say, nine months ago. But here we are, and this topic has been a major one in my life for the past five months or so as I planned and then executed the launch strategy for Annihilation Aria. This post very USA-centric - it's where I live, it's the version of the pandemic I'm experiencing, and it's where the heart of English-language SFF publishing lives. As with many of these essays, YMMV.

1) Pick Your Moment as Best As You Can

In mid-March, as the USA was starting to shut down and flatten the curve, Parvus Press and I decided to move back Aria's publication date from May 5th to July 21st. We didn't know what the world or even the country would look like in July, but we did know that the levels of uncertainty about what could and couldn't be done between March and May could spell disaster for getting Aria into bookstores and readers' hands/computers/phones in a timely manner.

My book was far from the only one pushed back. We're quickly approaching a glut of titles in the fall, where books from the spring/summer were pushed back and will now arrive alongside already-established big Fall releases. This means taxing printer capacity, dealing with the logistical problems posed by ongoing sabotage efforts against the USPS, and more.

If you're an author and/or a publisher trying to decide on a release date, you may be pondering whether it makes sense to move your book up or back in anticipation of ebbs and flows in the pandemic. I am generally pleased with the choice we made for Aria, because it gave us more time to ramp up promotional efforts as well as to understand what bookselling would look like during a pandemic. 

The levels of uncertainty make it hard to call your shot with this. The best advice I can give here is to be deliberate, be thoughtful, and then be decisive and follow through.

2) The Intersection of Viable and Fun

Releasing a book into a pandemic means no conventions, no physical bookstore events, definitely no physical book tour.

I like conventions, I like bookstore events, and I love talking with people about books in-person. My original plan for Aria focused on BaltiCon, the Nebula Conference, and Origins Game Fair as big events to promote the book. I wanted to do events with local bookstores like Greedy Reads, Atomic Books, The Ivy Bookshop, and maybe to travel to Philly and/or DC for events at stores there.

All of that had to go out the window for obvious reasons.

So I went back to square one and reflected on what other types of promotional activity I like doing. The #1 answer I had was podcasts. I'm already a co-host on one podcast (Speculate) and an infrequent guest host on another (The Skiffy and Fanty Show). Throughout my writing career, appearances on podcasts to do interviews or join discussions have been some of the most fun I've had in terms of "doing a thing do sell my books". 

So I updated the big podcast list I kept and maintained for myself (formerly used to assist promotional efforts at Angry Robot) and started reaching out to friends and colleagues to ask if they might be interested in having me appear on a guest spot. 

Spending an hour doing a podcast usually leaves me more energized than when I was at the start, where spending an hour writing/revising guest posts (ala The Big Idea, My Favorite Bit, etc.) leaves me drained. But while there aren't as many bigger guest post platforms as there were say six or seven years ago in the SFF world, the conversion on some of those bigger ones is still worth the time and effort for me. You'll have to make your own decision calculus about where best to spend your time and energy. 

Recording actual play sessions for Speculate is already fun on its own, but it also counts as self-promotion. It's 'content marketing'. So I've tried to schedule more of it for the summer. Some uncontrollable factors have meant I haven't been playing as much more as I wanted, but I've been able to supplement that with appearing on my co-host's Twitch channel separately as well as the Ivy Bookshop online event with the fabulous Valerie Valdes.

For previous books, I've done like 50% guest posts, 25% podcasts, 15% conventions, and 10% everything else. This time, I wanted more like 75% podcasts and 25% everything else. Instead, it's ended up more like 50% podcasts, 40% guest posts, 10% everything else. I still have some podcast appearances that have been recorded but not released, which will help give me a bit of a long tail in keeping me and Annihilation Aria on people's radar. 

If three more podcasts all got back to me wanting to record over the next few weeks, I'd happily say yes. But if three more mid-sized venues wanted guest posts, I'd have to dig deep to make those happen. That energy-use economy of scale is good to understand for yourself so you can balance between the types of promotion you enjoy the most and those that will have the best chances of leading to sales.

3) Repetition

2020 was already a mess of a year before the pandemic. Wildfires, a dramatic contested presidential primary in the US, etc. The rate of political news in the US has not really decreased, and I know that quite a few people have cut back on their social media use.

But when social media is pretty much *the* main organizing/communication tool for promotion during a pandemic, that can make it harder to reach readers/colleagues/book people to get attention on your book.

I've had to embrace a level of repetition and frequency of promotional posting that I would have found annoying in years past. But as previous experience and recent anecdata tell me, posting once on pub date and then two times more over the course of the following week is absolutely not enough to get the word out. I've set up scheduled posts, I've RTed and QTed my own tweets and those of reviews/hosts/podcasts and I *still* feel like I'm not breaking through the din very effectively.

Some people get up early and check the news/feeds once, then disappear into work all day and spend their evening with their kids. Some people are working long hours as "essential workers" and have even less free time to follow their feeds. Some people stay away from social media to avoid the political firestorm of Trump et al. 

There are readers in all of those groups, and we have to figure out how to reach them in a way that fits into their lives. For me, that's meant a few things:

A) Make sure to communicate well with your existing readership. That's meant lots of updates for Patrons here and tapping my low-volume newsletter. People that have already said they want to hear from me.

B) Repetition and varying times - scheduled tweets, repeating similar information several times in one day, and numerous ICYMI re-posts of interviews, guest posts, reviews, etc.

C) Covering the bases. I'm hitting Facebook, Instagram, my blog, Goodreads, etc. My blog feeds to Amazon and Goodreads, so one post there produces several ways of potentially reaching people. 

4) Lift All Boats

Annihilation Aria was one of more than a dozen SFF releases from traditional publishers in its week. That's a dozen other authors trying to make good on months if not years of work of theirs and their publishers'. Plus at least as many if not more being self-published.

We're all in this together. In the pandemic, and in publishing. More people reading is a win for all of us. More book sales mean more bookstores/booksellers surviving the pandemic means more homes for books and book lovers when we're through to the other side.

Be a part of a community - recommend other books coming out around when yours is, team up with people that have nearby releases, and focus on the fact that the whole book world is going through this thing - readers, writers, booksellers, publishers, etc.

I've tried to make sure to not just celebrate the releases of other authors (on my book's release date and others), but to share the spotlight where I can - from recommending books by colleagues to sharing opportunities where they pop up. The double-header event I did with Valerie for The Ivy Bookshop was an absolute delight, and it was less pressure on me because I had a colleague beside me to talk up. Valerie's book Chilling Effect is an absolute delight and if you liked Annihilation Aria and/or the Ree Reyes books, there's a very good chance you'll like Valerie's books. I made sure to order physical/ebook copies of colleagues pandemic releases, partially to keep up and have something to read to take me away from the conflagration that is the world, but as an investment in the kind of future for publishing that I want to see - one where many authors can flourish, not just the big names.

5) Cut Yourself Some Slack

This year is going to carry a gigantic asterisk in the history books. From book sales to the elections to postponed conventions to broken streaks to disrupted careers and much more.

Every book published in 2020 is going to bear the mark of the pandemic to some degree. Even books released in January or February, where they will lose out on months of being still on shelves even if they're not brand new. Any book published while stores are shut down and travel restricted is going to have a sales pattern warped by those changes. 

The bookselling world isn't all that's changed. Authors' lives are impacted - jobs lost, extra caretaker work with kids at home or other loved ones needing extra care. Just the ambient threat of the pandemic and poor national response has meant that I'm much more exhausted more or less all the time and have less energy to put into writing and promotion. And I know I'm not alone in this. 

Between those external and personal factors, I've had to adjust my expectations about Annihilation Aria. Expectations about what experiences I get to have promoting it (traveling to cons, appearing at bookstores) to how sales numbers may stack up, expectations about my ability to put tons of time into promotion. I've put basically everything I have into the book the past six weeks or so, and it's a lot, but it's hard to feel like it was enough, especially with so many factors being totally out of my control. Even more than in a "normal" year with a more normal book release.

There will be other books. I'm about to start revising my next book, and no matter what happens with Aria, I will have the chance to take another swing at the publishing industry. The impact is going to be more keenly felt by debut authors, since the industry still has far too much of a focus on What's New! and New Voices!

But books can have long lives. And I hope that there will be specific efforts by bookstores, book blogs, and more to ensure that books launched during the pandemic aren't forgotten. I'm certainly going to be trying to shout out 2020 books for years to come. When there is a vaccine/treatment, when we in the USA are able to safely travel again for conventions, I'm going to do my damndest to make sure that the books that launched during the pandemic get another chance to shine.