3 times how I almost screwed up my book launch completely - and how I still made it to a Nr. 1 on Amazon

In this Post I will talk about 3 things:

1. First Screw-Up: Marketing too late

2. Second Screw-Up: not working with experts

3. Third Screw-Up: Spending money for... What actually?

First things first - This my book that I am talking about! My book is on Nr. 1 on Amazon in Management & Leadership. And on the German store, it went to Nr. 3 of ALL free FOREIGN Kindle books!

Which there are like a million or so of - so I am actually more proud of that, than hitting Nr. 1 in one category. Since I am originally from Austria, this gave me a huge home field advantage there.

Am I telling you this just to show of? No! But I have to admit that I am proud of what I achieved. Thousdands of downloads in just a few hours and massive preorders for the paperback book. The reason for my post however is not to state these facts, moreover it is to point out 3 MASSIVE pitfalls that I had, that could have cut down the entire project. So whether you are a first time self publishing author like myself, or you are an experienced author but have been struggling, look at these 3 points and ask yourself how you are doing in them:

Mistake Number 1: No marketing until last minute

When I started writing my book "25 Stories I would tell my Younger Self" it was February 2015 and I had no fixed idea in mind when I wanted to release the book, how or in what form. It was only until around May of 2015 that I started thinking about these things and since my partner Bettina had an excellent logistics background, she took care of the publishing side. This meant printing, sourcing, shipping and setting up the online accounts. Neither one of us cared about actually paying attention to the third and last pillar of a successful book launch: the marketing.

The question did not come up until in August my first editor commented: "Wow, Julian, what a great book - only question I have: how will people find out about it?" Up until that point I had not even considered that. I had thought my book would sell itself... haha - that is what every author thinks: As soon as the writing is done - the job is done - right? WRONG! So for 4 months I had to catch up what I should have done for the entire year already. I marketed 10-12 hours a day. I actually made a guest blog post on Book Marketing Tools - so head over there to get the details about what I did. 

So I started contacting a crazy amount of people absolute last minute, to help me with the marketing of the book. I literally drove everybody nuts and contacted around 5000 people in less than 100 days personally to tell them about the book launch. 5,000 people! Personally! Gladly I had quite a lot of people who helped me out, one of them for example is Nana Domena who is running B2B Event in Cologne. Check out his page - it is really cool and I will try to make it to their event on December 12th! You should be there too! made this awesome video for me (in German - but it is amazing to watch), that got close to 19,900 views on Facebook in just 2 days. That helped big time:

So, I really want to thank once again, all the podcasters, bloggers, promoters, marketers and of course all my friends and family, who supported me during this short notice!

Key Take Away: Start marketing your book the day you have your idea!

Mistake Number 2: Not working with experts

One of the key parameters of the success of any venture is the group of people getting it all together. For me this basically meant Bettina and I. I was very convinced that my writing would be good, and I was sure that Bettina would do a great job on the logistics. And both of us did. But to get a book of the ground, it takes a couple of more people, especially cover design, editing, layout and specific marketing knowledege in certain areas. Well, without offending any one, let's say that most of these positions weren't doing a good job, and so if it weren't for my final Editor Gillian Kew, my entire book would have never ever gotten that spot on. Also, in the last couple of days before the launch, I changed the entire rest of the team. The ENTIRE! New designer, new layout, new tech support. I even changed my newsletter system. It was crazy and many times I thought it would never work out. We submitted the final book seconds before the cut off.

Key Take Away: Invest into a great team. A good book with a shitty team, will not work out. Pay for a good designer and editor. The will cost you money, but they are worth every penny. Do not rely on help of friends for this - it has to be done professionally!

Mistake Number 3: Spending Money without clear tracking or expections

Mistake number 1 & 2 pretty much led to mistake number 3. Since my book was launching on a Sunday, and everything got finished last minute on Friday, I almost had no time to actually prepare everything properly for the launch. Emails hadn't been written, scripts hadn't been made and a proper budgeting plan hadn't been established. I knew I had to invest into marketing tools to extend my reach. Since I did not prepare properly, I just took anything I could. That meant I spent quite some money on Facebook advertising, blog promoters, twitter promoters, facebook promoters, email promoters and much more. With no clear idea in mind the big question was? Did it work? Well, it got me onto Nr. 1 on Amazon with all the marketing around it, but what did actually work, and what did not go well?

To be honest, I am still figuring this out, and if you are interested I can make a future post about my exact budget for the book and also what marketing actually worked. At some point I got so worried, that I pulled the plug on everything which almost killed the entire launch half way through.

The Key Take Away is: Set a financial budget, plan ahead and track what actually brings you results.

So, I hope you are getting value from these 3 mistakes - eventually it all worked out well, but only because I reacted last minute, and I am sure I could have even better results had I done it all properly. Well, now you know :-) 

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Also, don't forget to buy my book if you want to read "25 Stories I would tell my younger Self!"

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Cheers,

​Julian Hosp

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