What a couple of months! There’s nothing that quite compares with having to rewrite a 10-year-old manuscript, update it with new research and then line edit it (twice) in just four weeks. A brief respite, defined by playing catch-up on all the other aspects of my life that didn’t make the 12-hour-a-day cut, didn’t quite prepare me for the opening salvos of my book launch.
Heads up for all those of you who are getting ready to publish your books. You’ll be starting your book launch four to six months before your pub date. You’ll need advance reader copies in hand at that point, which, of course, I don’t have since I only recently finished the rewrite and line edit. And which I won’t have for a while, since the two-to-five-day window it usually takes IngramSpark to print has stretched to 22 business days thanks to Covid.
Lucky for me, most of the book review sites that used to require one to two advance reader copies are now accepting digital submissions for the same reason. Otherwise, I would have never made their deadlines, since the pub date for the book I’ve co-authored—Breaking the Brass Ceiling: How One Heroic Cop Changed the Face of Policing—is November 20th.
I know what you’re thinking. “You could have just changed the pub date.”
Nope.
With nonfiction and memoirs, tying a pub date to a newsworthy date or event can help garner media attention. In this case, November 20th marks the 40th anniversary of the Consent Decree—the signed accord that set national precedent in terms of women and minority representation on the LAPD. So my pub date is set in stone. Good thing I realized that I needed to move ahead on this book when I did. A month later and I would have been sunk.
It’s also a good thing that I had just finished writing my new Book Launch Checklist, along with templates to help authors request book reviews and endorsements, and could use those as my guides. (The Launch Package is available for purchase—check out https://incubationpress.com/promotion/.)
Speaking of guides, I’m so thankful for @KeriBarnum, who will be handling promotion for my book and for Incubation Press clients who want to market their books. She helped me figure out what I needed to do and how to do it. And the media kit she created based on the pieces I’d written is a masterpiece. But that’s another story and another blog post. Next week’s, in fact.
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