As a publisher, you can’t always hit the mark with your marketing to create the buzz that a storyline deserves. Therefore, you roll with a strategy and hope for the best. When it doesn’t meet your readership expectations, decisions have to be made. I have one short book series that I believe needs a second chance. Any publisher can do a book relaunch and here is how to accomplish that effort.
Ways to Execute a Book Relaunch
Update the Cover
In most cases, graphic book cover gives the potential reader a sense of what’s to come in the pages. It always whets the appetite of someone who is locked in on that particular genre. For my Charlie the Hood Houdini series, updated covers were my first step. My covers have always been bland. It needs sprucing so I went for a fresh character appeal. I am hoping that revealing my protagonist’s full face would make a connection for a future fan. Audiences find faces more relatable when searching out new reading material.
Scrub the text
A book relaunch gives an author a chance to fix any mistakes that might still be lingering after the first print. You need to read the story as if it were your first time. Clean up any errors big or small. Sometimes, it can be spelling errors, wrong words, grammatical, and/or punctuation. These things can disengage a reader and cut the time that they spend trying to digest your plot. It becomes more like work instead of entertainment.
Add Something New
You need to add something new to the book. Most authors will have someone read the book and add a forward. You can also add an author’s note at the end to help readers understand how you arrived at the ending of the story.
These are just a few ways to execute a book relaunch. Books that become movies use these methods. The leading actors become the cover of the book. The dialogue is updated or changed a hair and there is an author’s note to explain how they arrived at the changes.
I am currently in the middle of scrubbing the books that are already in the marketplace. In addition, the final book in the series is rapidly approaching completion for release this summer. If you would like to give a new author a try, please start at the beginning with The Prequel – Charlie the Hood Houdini – Development of a Criminal Mind. This first installment is on me.