Launch week, without the panic
Most launch advice is written as though the week itself is where the work happens. It is not. By the time launch week starts, almost everything that decides how it goes has already been decided.
What the week gives you is a short window where a store's ranking, its recommendations and your own announcements all point at the book at once. Your job is to not waste it, and to not panic when it looks quieter than you expected.
Before the week starts
Five things should be done and finished. Not in progress — done.
The files are final and proofed. Not "nearly final". Uploading a corrected interior three days after release means readers who bought first have the broken one, and some stores keep serving it for a while.
The listing is written. Blurb, categories, keywords, author bio, series information. Writing your blurb at midnight on release day is how a good book gets a bad description.
The cover works at thumbnail size. Almost nobody will see your cover at the size you designed it. They will see it two centimeters wide in a list of twenty others.
Advance copies went out weeks ago. Four to eight weeks, not four days. A reviewer needs to actually read the book.
The people who will tell others already have it. Your street team, your newsletter, the handful of readers who talk about books. They should be finishing the book as you publish, not hearing about it for the first time.
If any of those is not true, the honest move is to move the date. A release date is a number you chose. Nobody is waiting.
The week itself
Publish a day or two before you announce. Stores take time to process a file, build the preview and show the right price. Announce first and you send people to a page that says "not available", or worse, to a page with the wrong price and no preview. Publish, wait for the page to settle, then tell people.
Check your own page as a stranger would. Open it in a private window, on a phone, signed out. Look at the cover at the size it actually appears. Read the blurb as displayed, not as you wrote it — stores mangle formatting. Open the preview and read the first two pages. Check the price, the categories, and whether the ebook and print editions are linked to each other. This takes ten minutes and catches the errors that quietly cost you the whole week.
Announce where your readers already are. One or two places where people actually know you, done properly, beats an announcement pasted onto nine platforms you do not use. A newsletter to people who asked for it outperforms everything else, every time.
Ask directly for reviews. The people who read an advance copy are the campaign. Email them on release day and ask, plainly, for an honest review. Not a good one — an honest one. Most reviews you get in week one exist because you asked on the right day.
Expect the first days to be quiet. They usually are. A handful of sales, no reviews yet, and silence where you imagined a response. This is what a normal launch looks like from the inside.
In the tools. The Cover Maker checks your cover at thumbnail size and exports the ebook cover at the store size, so you find the problem before the listing does. ARC Delivery emails each reviewer their own watermarked copy and shows you who downloaded it — which tells you exactly who to ask on release day. Start a book → · about the tools
The four ways it goes wrong
Announcing before the listing is live. You spend the one moment when people are paying attention sending them to an error. They do not come back later; they were never going to make a second trip.
A preview that reveals an unformatted interior. The reader clicks "look inside" ready to buy, and finds tab-indented paragraphs, a chapter heading that is just bold text, and no front matter. The cover promised a book and the inside says otherwise. This kills more launches than a bad blurb.
A cover that vanishes as a thumbnail. It looked wonderful at full size on your screen. In the store it is a small dark rectangle with an unreadable title. Fine detail, thin type and low contrast all disappear at that size.
Reading a quiet week as a verdict. It is not one. A first week measures your existing audience and nothing else — which, for a first book, is almost by definition small.
After
Reviews arrive over weeks. Someone who downloaded on day one may finish on day twelve and post on day twenty. The number you see on Friday of launch week is not the number you will have in a month.
A launch is a start, not a verdict. Books find readers slowly, through the catalog you build. Authors who keep going are routinely surprised by a first book two years later, once there are three.
A second announcement is free. If you have a large print edition or a hardcover, hold it and announce it a few weeks later. It is a real reason to talk about the book again, and it reaches the people who missed the first pass.
A short video does more than a picture. A few seconds of the physical book being held, opened, flipped through — that outperforms a flat cover image on social almost everywhere, because it shows a real object rather than a file.
The most useful thing you can do in week two is write the next one. Refreshing a sales dashboard is not marketing. The next book is.
In the tools. The Social Pack makes a 15-second vertical video and stills from your real cover, and the Mockups tool renders the physical book — so you have something to post in week two without owning a copy yet. Start a book → · about the tools
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Back to: Getting early reviews without breaking a rule · Also useful: How to write a book blurb · The thumbnail test · Amazon A+ content