Book Launch Secret #3. The Silent 5-Day Launch

Welcome to this Book Launch Secrets Mini-Series! Over the next few episodes, I'll be sharing my best practices of getting both the Amazon BestSeller and #1 New Release Badge on your listing!

Links mentioned:
https://kindlepreneur.com/list-sites-promote-free-amazon-books/

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Transcript

0:41

So what are my favorite book? Launch secrets? And how can you use them for your next book launch? Welcome everybody to the market, your message show. I'm your host, Jonathan Milligan and author of the book of your message matters and the brand new book. Discover your message. You can find all of my books that are designed to help writers, coaches, and speakers by going to platform growth books.com. Platform growth books. Dot com. All right. Today, we are going to book launch secret number three. Which is thus silent launch. Now I want to explain the silent launch because I think it can work really well in your favor. So this current series I'm really focused on the Kindle books only. So there's definitely a lot more to book launching, but go back and listen to secrets. One. And two, if you haven't already in book long secret, number one, I talked about the importance of choosing the right book categories, how I select my three categories so that I'm able to have the greatest chance of hitting not only the best seller, but getting the new release. Badge or the. The top or release badge. On my book that Amazon puts on your listing and it makes it stand out. All right. And then book launch, secret. Number two, we talked about your book, launch team. And how important it is to have a book launch team, have people consume the book and get ready to leave that book review. Now you don't have to have a large audience. The cool thing about a book launch team is all you need is to be on social media. Friends, family members, coworkers. People who know and love you. They all qualify. Because everybody's got an Amazon account these days, and almost everybody has read a book sometime in their life. And so that's all that you need for someone to qualify, to be a part of your book, launch team. Today. I want to talk about the silent launch process. Now the reason I call it silent launch. Is because your book is going to go live on Amazon. But you're not going to shout it from the rooftops yet. Your book launch. Team's not going to shout it from the roof tops yet either. So if you have an email list, if you have a social media following. They don't get what I'm about to share with you during these five. Days. So the silent launch phase is going to do a couple of things for us. First of all. As soon as the book is live and we're talking Kindle only on this. As soon as the Kindle book is live on Amazon. Then my recommendation is to go and roll. Into KDP select. Now, what does KDP select offer you as the author? There's several things. Let's start with the downside. The downside is that you're not able to sell the digital version. Or ebook. Anywhere else, but Amazon, during those 90 days if you were going to sell it directly, If you were going to try to list it in. Barnes and Nobles and other places you cannot, again, digital book only if you're doing a print version does not count. You can still publish it. Everywhere. So for the ebook only we are going to opt in for the 90 days. Now you can always re-enroll every 90 days if you'd like to retain the benefits. So what are some of the benefits to enrolling in KDP select? First of all, They are going to give you the opportunity to make your book free. For people to download for up to five days. Now you could use those. During, one day here and one day there during those 90 days, or you can do it all at once. My recommendation is you do it all at once. So for my last book, what really worked well? Was to immediately go. And list my book, enroll it in KDP, select and list it free for five days. Okay. So again, this is the silent launch. Now as soon as the book is live on Amazon. I then tell my book, launch team. Hey guys. It's live on Amazon. We're not shouting it from the rooftops yet, but here's what I want you to do today. Today. I want you to go. Download the free book. And then I want you to leave the review. Now, currently it's up in the air as to whether or not. It's a verified review. If it's free. The funny thing is I've seen where it still says verified. So I don't know, but the bottom line is you want them to actually download the book. That's going to help with your rankings for your algorithm for exposure. And then you're going to tell them, leave that review. They're ready to leave a review because if you remember from the last episode, We talked all about giving them an advanced copy of the book and how I do that. So the goal here. Is, we want them. To leave a bunch of reviews. So when we're ready for our official launch, which we're going to talk about in the next episode, the official public launch. Your listing already has hopefully 10, 15, 20. Or more book reviews. That is incredibly powerful when it's time to start shouting your book from the rooftop. Now, this is not as important. If you have a big following an established following, because they're going to get your book anyway. But for most authors. Think about it. If you see a book that has a no reviews. Are you. More likely or less likely to grab that and pay for that book less likely. But if a book already has 10 or 12 reviews and hopefully they're positive. Then you're like, oh man, I need to pick up this book. The social proof is powerful. So one of the things we're doing, one of the reasons we're doing the silent launch. Is to give our book, launch team an opportunity, give them a couple of days. To get their review in before we publicly launch. Okay. Now there's other reasons why to do this free promo. First of all your book really gets exposure during this free promo time. People love free books. They're scouring for free books. There are some people who are basically just looking for free books in their favorite book categories. And so by having your book available for a few days on Amazon itself, You're going to get lots of downloads. It's not going to be uncommon for you to get hundreds, if not thousands of downloads per day during these first few days. Why is that important? For me. Yes. I want ongoing royalties from Amazon. I want to make money on my book, but more importantly, if you are. A speaker, a coach course creator. If you've got other income streams or you want to create other income streams. Then what this free promo, the silent launch does. It's a list builder. Now, if you do this correctly. I am going to recommend that you have some type of a freebie. In your Kindle book. Now here's a little pro tip. I don't know if anybody's talking about this, but I just happened to notice it. I made the change in it, improved my results. So when you open a Kindle book, Have you noticed that it automatically starts you with the introduction? That's by default. Typically, if you think about it, you have to scroll back. To get to the table of contents or even the book cover. So a big mistake that a lot of people make is they put their freebie. Before the introduction. And guess what happens? People don't see it. So my little pro tip is have a nice little introduction to your book. And then offer your free gift on a page. So mine says something as simple as free gift for you. And here is a companion. Mini course to go with the book. That's what I do. I call it like the name of my book in the word accelerator. So if you go grab my, discover your message book. You will see this in action or just go get the Kindle book itself. I think it's only 2 99 on Amazon. So if you go get the Kindle book, you will see exactly what I put and I've got, Hey, thank you for grabbing a copy of the book. As a thank you. You can grab this free mini course. It's the discover your message accelerator course. And then there's a link in almost every day. I think just about every day since I've launched it. I've gotten at least one new subscriber some days. Multiple email subscribers. And really had a lot of subscribers early on. When I did this silent. Launch. Because you're having a lots of people grab the free book and they're seeing your freebie offer. Now here's how we pour fuel on the fire. There's one more part to this process. It's actually two pronged and that is to send out your free book offer. To book promo sites. So there's a lots of book promo sites where they have email lists. Of readers. That they have categorized by their favorite categories. So some like romance, some like historic fiction, somewhat business fiction. Or nonfiction. And so on. So they have these large email lists and you can share your free book offer. Now there's a two-pronged approach. There are sites. That will send your free book offer. To their list for free. Yes free. Now you might be saying, why do they do that? Here's a little insider tip. They actually use their affiliate link. Obviously it's a free book, but there's a cookie. Wow. Without getting too technical. That means if somebody goes to Amazon and they buy anything else along with the book. Then they will get a commission. So they're earning commissions that way. And there is a great article that has a massive list of these book promo sites. Some are free. Some you have to pay for them to send it out to their email list. But I will put the link. In the description. So you can check that out. So I went to this link that I'm mentioning that's in the description. And I found, let's see, I'm looking at my document. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. I found 13. Sites that were free for them to send out an email about my free book offer. Pretty cool. And then there were a couple that I decided to test. Where you actually pay them. It's not a lot of money, but you pay them. To send it out to their list. So here are my three favorite. And in this order and there's possibly a fourth that I like the first one. That's a must is called free. Booksy. So free the word book S Y. Put it all together, search for it right on Google Freebooksy anywhere between 50 and a hundred dollars is what you will spend, but they will send that out to hundreds of thousands of people. I think in the non-fiction business category, it got sent to 150,000. People about my free book offer. Pretty cool. Another one is E reader, iq.com E reader, iq.com. It was only$25 and it was sent out to their list. Another one was book doggy. So just type in book, doggy was only 21 bucks to send that one out. And then another one that I I don't think I have listed here. Is the I think it's called the busy librarian. Going off the top of my head. Something like that. So the free book. See the one I first mentioned, if you do, none of them do that one. I was able to get over 2100 downloads. From free Booksy.'cause I picked when you sign up, you pick a certain day where they are going to email their list. And the day that I chose was a Saturday. And boom, 2100 free. Books were given to potential readers. Many of those, if you're following closely. God on my email list and some of them have already purchased one of my memberships. That's the power of this free. Silent. Launch. Okay. So again, let's recap this cause I know it's a lot of information. Number one, I love a silent launch because it gives me a chance to get my book launch team, to leave reviews. Number two. By having my book free. It exposes it to a lot more people that are just on Amazon that are looking for free books. And number three. You can pour fuel or gas on the fire. By submitting to these book promo sites. There's a link in the description in this podcast. Now there's so much more I could say about this and in my insider program, which is my top tier program. We have a whole course. By step, it kinda breaks every single thing down. But for all of you, I wanted to give you at least a headstart. And so this is secret number three, the silent book launch. Now in the next episode, I'm going to talk about the 99 cent debut launch. Again, talking just Kindle books here. 99 cent debut launch in a Y. I think you should consider pricing it at 99 cents. And we'll talk about that in the next episode. So again, How are you enjoying this? Hopefully you're learning something and you've got something practical. If, whether you currently have a book or you're working on your next book, then follow along. Because I am doing a lot around book launching. I just started a new book series. Just released book. Number one in my series called the your message matters series. And my goal over the next 18 months is to produce seven books. Yes. I said seven. I'm all in. Two. Map out for you, the entire process for how you go from the topic that you want to share to being a writer, coach, teacher, speaker, online and making multiple income streams. So book one is outright. Now it's called discover your message. You can hop over to Amazon and check that out. I will also leave a link. In the description. Area. For that first book. And the second book I'm already about halfway through writing it. It's going to be launching in January, 2024. And it's called launch your platform. How do you officially launch, open your website? Get everything set up and be officially open for business. That's what the next book will be about. All right. So that's it for this episode. Let me know what you'd like for me to cover in future episodes and as always take a moment to like share subscribe rate, or even review our show and let us know. Again, what you'd like for me to cover on future episodes. And until next time, never forget your message matters.