Take the pressure off launch

Launch week is a chaotic, stressful time for most authors — because most books will get most of their sales in the first few months. But this changes completely when you write for the back catalog.

If you know your book works for readers — because you’ve beta tested it before publishing, and you’ve focused on a problem rather than a broad topic — your can expect your sales to grow over time as more readers discover, benefit from, and recommend your book to others.

If you pull it off, this recommendation loop becomes more powerful than any amount of PR, marketing, or hustle you could possibly put in.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t celebrate your launch, and take advantage of the excitement to get your book in front of others — for ideas on how to do that, see our interviews with Jeff Gothelf and April Dunford. But there’s no pressure to cram all these activities into one manic week. If you’ve written a useful book, you get to treat launch as a year, not a day.