Book Launch Blueprint

“Do you want to be a professional writer, or just someone who wrote a book once?”

If you can answer this question quickly, you’re already on your way. Well, either on your way to your first and only book or onto your first of many. If it’s your first and only, you can stop reading this review and you also don’t need to bother to read Tim Grahl’s book and you can just write your book and call it a day.

However, if you want to be a professional writer, you should read, “Book Launch Blueprint: The Step-by-Step Guide to a Bestselling Launch.”

For the record, in case 1,500+ posts Every Single Day since November 1, 2012 isn’t professional enough, I’m squarely in the Professional Writer category and these books are not only the sort of books I read, they’re the ones I devour, review and strive to live by.

Here’s another way to let yourself off the hook: if you’re looking for a quick fix, get-rich-quick scheme, this also isn’t it. I’m so sorry to disappoint. But this is more along the lines of, “Sit down and write out every step of the process, from pitch to publish, and look for ways to make each part of that easier and even more of a win for the influencer.”

By the way, you’re going to want to know what an influencer is as that’s going to be key to selling more of your books than you can imagine. Here are the basic steps of the book from a helicopter view:

1. Sell to fans.
2. Encourage sharing.
3. Influencer outreach.

That’s it. Got it?

Right. So who are fans anyway? How can you get them on board then happily sharing your work? Who are these influencer people and how do you build your Street Team with them? Do you know how to find them, contact them and have them thanking you for allowing them to be on your team? HINT: this is where research and “real work” come into play. If you have written your book and you thought that was hard, you’re just getting started. If you know anything about book marketing, you already know this, but if you know anything about book marketing, you’ll want to read this book–to know more and learn how to implement your strategies.

Without copying and pasting straight out of the book, here are just the verbs Tim uses in a section on what he did to get an author onto a popular podcast:

1. began
2. spending two hours
3. read the last few months
4. listened to interviews he did
5. read the reviews of other books
6. got extremely familiar
7. before I did anything else
8. send an email to the blogger
9. pitching the idea
10. didn’t send some form email
11. wrote a personalized email
12. referenced other authors
13. gave specific raesons
14. offered to do an interview (in blogger’s format)
15. received an email back

These are the kind of brass tacks this book is full of. Again, just to warn you, this book will cause you to work harder than you have before and if you don’t like hard work, just don’t even start the book as you’ll be discouraged. Remember, this book is only for authors who want a bestselling launch, not just a regular launch that’s going to lose steam within a matter of days.

I’ll leave it at that for now. If you’d like to know more, at least download a sample of Book Launch Blueprint: The Step-by-Step Guide to a Bestselling Launch and give it a go. Tim Grahl is the real deal. If you’re on your way to becoming The Real Deal as well, you would be doing yourself a favor by becoming familiar with his work.

P.S. Tim recently launched a podcast that has been great out of the starting gates: Book Launch Show.