Don’t tell your prospects how great
you are; tell them how great they
will feel when the ideas in your book
relieve the pain they are experiencing.
Harness the power of the Internet to drive a
huge volume of traffic to online book retailers
like Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com, and
generate an exponential viral excitement for your
book and for your credibility. If you plan and
execute well and drive lots of traffic to their sites,
these book-selling giants will be happy to help
you sell more books.
The opposite is also true.
Haphazard planning and execution will potentially offend
your target market, destroy
the goodwill you’ve
built, leave you looking
like an amateur, and holding on to more inventory than
you care to count at tax time.
So how do I plan and execute a successful electronic book launch? It sounds elementary, but make sure your book will be available
through major online retailers like Amazon.
com and BarnesandNoble.com. Your publisher
can tell you when the book will be available
on these sites. If you are self-publishing your
book, contact the retailers through their sites
to provide a review copy.
A great book launch begins with well-written
sales copy. Don’t tell your prospects how great
you are; tell them how great they will feel when
the ideas in your book relieve the pain they are
experiencing. Readers are most comfortable
with short paragraphs in conversational style.
Lead them to take action by including testimonials, endorsements and examples of success,
along with incentives for purchase from other
experts. This could include white papers, special reports, books, links to podcasts, newsletters, MP3 and video files—anything the reader
would consider valuable.
Invite your trusted professional colleagues to
assist you by emailing the announcement to their
contacts and by contributing to the purchase incen-
tives. Save them time and keep your message consis-
tent by offering suggested copy. When considering
which colleagues to invite, it is logical to consider
those associates whose expertise complements your
book’s subject. Creatively written announcements
to audiences outside your niche, however, can gen-
erate growth into previously untapped markets.
Storyboard and test the electronic pro-
cess until you have it right. Your pros-
pects should be lead though a simple,
easy-to-understand process from the
time they receive your announce-
ment until they collect the
incentives you’ve promised.
Technology that works invis-
ibly is impressive, but assuming the
technology is going to work correctly
is unwise. Don’t launch your campaign until you
know it’s going to work.
This all sounds pretty simple and straightforward, but each step requires a lot of detail. To
illustrate: You’re speeding down the street, late
for an appointment. As the car rounds the corner,
you spot a garbage truck on the left and a 10-year-
old on a bike to the right. The driver is not in the
truck and the kid is looking the other way. Oh, did
I mention you’re not behind the wheel? Although
it’s your car, you only have a vague notion of who
is doing the actual driving. As you hurtle down the
street, you toss a mental coin in the air to guess
which obstacle the car will crash into first.
If this sounds scary, then you have a good idea
of the difficult challenge we faced when planning
the launch of Willie’s Way: 6 Secrets for Wooing,
Wowing and Winning Customers and Their Loyalty
by Phillip Van Hooser, MBA, CSP, CPAE. Our
team created a successful plan that allowed us to
