By Vicky Fang
A Scholastic early chapter book, out now.
So I just ran a launch countdown for my debut book, LAYLA AND THE BOTS: Happy Paws. If you’re curious about how I set it up, how much anxiety was involved, and what the results were, this is for you!
THE IDEA
One countdown post per day, posted to Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, for eight days leading to the launch of my book.
DAY BY DAY
Let’s look at each day and how it went.
8 Days to Launch: Book Giveaway
I wanted to kick off with something fun and splashy, so I ran my first book giveaway. Learning from the experiences in my Soaring ‘20’s debut launch group, I kept it simple. Just a Follow/RT with an extra entry for tagging a friend. This last part is key! It promotes your tweet to your desired audience and keeps the visibility of your tweet high all day. I did retweet once in the afternoon, and posted a thank you reply in the evening. As you can see, I got 142 retweets on this post. It’s hard to say how many followers, because they continued to come in over the next few days, but I’d estimate 50 followers on the first day. Facebook likes were low—I would guess because it didn’t have any new information for my friends and family and because the call to action pushed them to Twitter, which most of them don’t use.
Worth noting, too: I spent way too much time debating whether I should make the countdown a thread, or a nested retweet, or independent posts. I ended up going with independent posts for simplicity (even though it means a given day could be retweeted three days later with no context and therefore showing the wrong number of days until launch - I figured nobody would get too upset about the number of days and decided to just let it be.)
7 Days to Launch: Podcast Interview
I was scheduled to appear on Jedlie’s Reading With Your Kids podcast so I chose to promote this. One awkward thing I realized was that my graphic countdown approach made it difficult to retweet with comment or highlight the content link itself. I ended up using my graphic for visibility and including the link, but also retweeting (without comment) Jedlie’s post. I’m not sure what the best answer is, but if I had to guess, I would say the graphic helps promote awareness, while possibly dampening link action. It’s a tradeoff to consider on posts in general. Engagement on this was also much higher on Facebook, which makes sense as those are my friends and family who would be most interested in listening to me, as an unknown debut author.
6 Days to Launch: Free Stickers w/ Pre-order
On this day, I chose to promote free stickers on orders from my local indie, Linden Tree Books. I didn’t expect a lot of action on this, but I wanted to give my local indie some love and encourage others to as well. It probably only resulted in a handful of new orders to be honest, but it raised awareness for the book, for the shop, and felt like a nice thing to do.
5 Days to Launch: Online Activities
I wanted to post my online activities, especially since I had grown some new teacher and librarian followers from my first day giveaway! I expected this post to get more traffic than it did, but I didn’t want to retweet because at this point I was starting to feel some anxiety from shouting about myself publicly all day.
4 Days to Launch: KidLit411 interview
On this day, I was scheduled to appear on KitLit411. I was pretty relieved to not have to talk about myself and to let somebody else talk about me. I didn’t feel too bad about the lower engagement on my end because it was being promoted in a separate tweet (thanks to the KidLit411 folks!) You can see I chose to retweet with comment and add my graphic, because the KidLit411 content looked okay and clickable when I set it up that way.
3 Days to Launch: Bookshop.org List
If you haven’t guessed, at this point I was feeling quite, quite anxious about posting about myself all the time. I had another post planned to point to some past interviews, but I couldn’t bear it and spent the night setting up a Bookshop.org site featuring my favorite #STEAM books for kids so that I could talk about other people for a day! I also tagged all the authors I included. I enjoyed this one because it did allow me to interact with some of my favorite authors, some of whom I’m already connected with and others who maybe had never heard of me until I posted. I also feel good about having this Bookshop running list for books that align with my goals as a writer, in empowering kids in STEAM.
2 Days to Launch: Critique Giveaway
On Day 2, I stuck to my plan and posted a critique giveaway. This time, I decided to try out a Rafflecopter, with entries tied to Twitter follows and newsletter sign-ups. To be honest, I knew that at this point I had saturated my feed with my countdown and that I couldn’t expect huge engagement, so with Rafflecopter entries being invisible (vs Twitter RTs/Follows) I figured that as long as I got one entry, it would be all good! (I got more than one entry, forty-five to be exact.) I retweeted once in the evening with a thank you. From this retweet, I got a lot of likes in the morning, which made me realize that tweeting at 7am PST missed a lot of the EST morning Twitter traffic.
1 Day to Launch: Thank You Blog Post
My last day was saved to thank my editors, illustrator, book designer, agent, launch groups, and critique partners. I considered posting this on a blog with larger influence, but it felt most relevant to writers and I didn’t have a good outlet in mind on such short notice, so I kept it on my personal blog.
That night, I picked the winners and optimized the images on my website. Why I didn’t do that BEFORE the launch countdown, I don’t know.
Launch Day!
I posted a launch graphic and announced the winners. This was fun!
THE POSITIVE TAKEAWAYS
Overall, I was happy with the results of the countdown. Here are the upsides:
I grew my audience:
By the end of the week, I had gained about 110 new Twitter followers. To be transparent, there were also many factors and activities outside of the countdown happening. I snuck in book reviews and retweets of other authors to ease the anxiety of self-promotion. I also posted cute pics of my kids to my smaller networks. My publicists and launch groups continued to post articles and interviews that I continued to retweet.
I partnered with my publisher:
I do think the countdown was appreciated by my publisher, including my editors, my publicist, and my marketing partner. It gave me a way to share with them my own enthusiasm and willingness to pitch in. The countdown was one piece of the puzzle. I also generated original content for them (STEAM activity blog post, activity sheets, and video).
I generated awareness for my book:
Even when engagement felt low, I do think awareness grew just through the visibility of the countdown, which really was the point. There were many instances when something surprising would come out of the woodwork—a friend that I didn’t know was an influencer in another sphere tweeting about my stuff, a friend choosing to order from my local indie, close friends suddenly asking where to buy my book or telling me they finally ordered it, friends ordering from bookshop.org who hadn’t heard of it before. Even though I felt like I was shouting about myself, each post had tangible results and brought my book back to the forefront of people’s crowded minds.
LESSONS LEARNED
This was a decent amount of work. Every night, I found myself finalizing content and every morning, I was manually blasting my social networks. I had fun doing it, but it was also anxiety-inducing. In the end, I think it was worth it and I would do it again. But here are my notes-to-self for my next countdown:
Keep the simple giveaway kickoff.
For mental sanity, consider running it for 3-5 days instead of 8.
Find ways to ease the self-promotion anxiety, for example:
Have scheduled content from a blogger/influencer.
Find ways to promote other people’s books.
Continue to tweet about other books/things/people.
Be flexible and adjust to what feels comfortable on the go.
Tweet early and retweet later in the day if you want more visibility.
And one more note—I’m not sure if the graphics helped or became tedious for my audience. I think because not many people are running countdown graphics, it was okay, but if everybody starts doing it, then it might lose its appeal. So I plan to keep this fluid in future countdowns, depending how I feel.
Okay, that’s what I learned from running this countdown! I hope this is helpful for you as you think about promotion for your own books and that you figure out a strategy that works for you. Onward!
(And keep an eye out for my next launch countdown for INVENT-A-PET, starting very soon!)
Vicky Fang is a product designer who spent five years designing kids’ technology experiences for both Google and Intel, often to inspire and empower kids in coding and technology. Through that work, she came to recognize the gap in education and inspiration, particularly for girls and minorities. She began writing books to provide kids with accessible STEAM-inspired stories that they can read again and again, learning from characters they love. Her goal for her books is to inspire computer literacy for a wide range of kids—while letting their imaginations run wild with the possibilities of technology! Her debut books, LAYLA & THE BOTS (Scholastic early chapter book series) and INVENT-A-PET (Sterling picture book), are launching in Spring/Summer 2020 and feature courageous and innovative girls in STEAM. You can find Vicky on Twitter @fangmous or at her website www.vickyfang.com.