EP04: Project & Budget Planning (Part Two)

I recently met with an author who wanted to avoid spending any money on their advertising efforts. They would've instead invested another thousand dollars into their pre-launch plan rather than spend a dollar on launch. Why?

Because our pre-launch dollars are spent on an outcome. We get a deliverable back, a cover, or a round of edits. At launch, it can feel like you're putting money into a bottle, throwing it in the sea, and hoping it makes it to your location. So today, we will give that bottle in the ocean a GPS tracker (a plan).

Welcome to Episode 4 of Publishing Hypothesis!

Missed Episode Three? Read it here. Not a client? See the limited new client special:

It's essential that you read Episode Three before reading this article, as we cover most of the project budget development there. Today, we're focusing on our launch plan and target market outline.

What is a launch plan?

Your launch plan is simply the strategy executed within the forty-five days around your book launch: twenty-two days before, publication day, and twenty-two days after.

Today, we are going to outline & budget for your launch plan. Once we have the outline, we can drill down each specific step in the upcoming marketing section of the newsletter.

How Do We Measure A Successful Launch Plan?

It's common for authors to fail to give themselves a specific and measurable goal for their book launch. We just want to reach as many readers as possible. That's it.

Unfortunately, a goal that wide isn't going to yield measurable results. It will always leave us feeling like there's more to be done, no matter how many readers we've reached. We'll then spend aimless marketing dollars trying to boil the ocean. So, we must give ourselves a metric goal. Here's my recommendation:

It's proven that when a product gets between 1000-2000 first-time users, if the product is worthy, word of mouth can pretty much carry it the rest of the way into a steady stream of new users/ steady income.

A few recommendations on what not to do:

• Do not adjust your goal after you make it. You'll end up spending money aimlessly. (Exmp: I've reached 1500, but now I want to up my game to 3000)
• Do not make your success metric about Return On Investment (While ROI is important, this is not where we want to factor this in. It takes time to track.)
• Do not skip the target market piece and focus on general readership.

More Marketing Does Not Yield More Success

The above might seem like a counterintuitive sentence, especially since this piece of PubHyp is all about establishing a launch plan for your book launch. The reason I encourage you to take all the time that you need in the writing and pre-launch process isn't just to save money. It's to make your book good.

The reason I encourage you to take all the time that you need in the writing and pre-launch process isn't just to save money. It's to make your book good.

A good book is like oxygen to a campfire. The launch plan is just the flint that gives it a chance to burn.

A good book is like oxygen to a campfire. The launch plan is just the flint that gives it a chance. Once we understand that, we can understand that a launch plan is just the piece of the project that gets the fire started. It's not an endless marathon. It's a sprint. (We will talk about maintaining its steadiness later)

Building A General Launch Plan Outline

So we know we want to reach a certain number of readers. How do we budget for that? Do we need a concise timeline? The first thing you'll want to start with is profiling your ideal customer. Once we do that, we will track their consumer behavior and decide how best to reach them.

1️⃣ Step One: Finding Your Target Reader

Let's be very clear, your target reader is not anyone literate. Attracting the wrong readers can be detrimental for your book. If a romance reader takes a chance on your graphic horror novel because you hooked them in advertising and they hate it, (not because it's bad but because they never have and never will like your genre) they can tank your ratings and tank your visibility, blocking you from finding the readers who would love it.

Not only were your advertising dollars wasted, but they ended up setting you back. This is exactly what we don't want.

How to Identify Your Target Reader:

• Look at your genre (Commercial Romance, Nonfiction History, Ect.)
• Look at your comparison titles & the genre they're advertised to
• Think of your writing style.
  • Are your pop-culture references to the 90s or the 2000s?
  • What languages are you writing in?
  • Where do you envision "the book club" taking place? School libraries? Retirement clubs? Boutique bookstores? Online Reddit forums?

2️⃣ Step Two: Understanding Your Target Reader

Once you've got a vague understanding of who your reader is, let's make a list of their "most likelys."

🔑 Key "most likely" metrics to identify:

• 🚻 Gender of Reader (Exmp: A romance reader is most likely to be a woman while a sci-fi reader is most likely to be a man.)
• 📆 Age Range of Reader (Try to make this a ten-twelve year range)
• 👪 Family statuses (Single, Married, Divorced, With Young Kids, Empty-Nester)
• 📈 Income & "Free Income" Ranges (A single woman in her twenties is likely to have less income than a married woman in her fifties. However, the single woman might have more "free income" (without kids, spending mostly on hobbies) Therefore we might advertise to a single and married woman differently.)
• 📱 Average Time Spent Online (Exmp: A full time single father in his forties probably spends less time online than a single young adult male in his twenties)
• 🍎 Daily Habits (Where do they go, what do they do, who do they see, ect.)
• 📖 Reading Habits (Can't forget this one. You are writing a book after all. Does your target market read more audiobooks? Substacks? Are they reading paperbacks or mostly digital copies? How long are they reading per day? And so on..)

Once we have an idea of our reader, we can begin to pinpoint the best way to reach them. AKA: Our launch plan

Wohoo! You now should have a pretty robust understanding of what your "most likely reader" is like, we can now strategize our budget towards colliding with them over and over and over again.

3️⃣ Step Three: Colliding With Your Target Reader

The collision aspect of the launch plan is where our marketing dollars are finally put to work. While we're going to discuss each marketing method in depth throughout this newsletter, it's imperative for you to get an overarching plan of how you'll reach your reader, so that you can budget for it.