Last week, I finished writing a novel. Next week, I’ll publish the novel on time: July 30. This is an ambitious deadline. You do not need to keep to this. However, I have the ability to do it for a couple of reasons, one being that my editing team has been working on the book while I was writing it, and we have years of experience moving through a book fast like bunnies. The other being that I don’t need to wait on anyone else. Just my editors. The rest of it? I’m handling. You should really, ideally, allow more time for this process, to get the book through edits, revisions, staggered promotions, cover artist sketches to final, hype, and so on and so forth. That said, the sane approach is closer to three months… If you’d rather watch the accelerated version, here’s what my current schedule looks like.

X Days before the novel is complete…

The cover is finished and goes to a small trusted group for feedback. Illustrations are being wrapped up (this is very much a me thing, most of y’all aren’t my level of nuts)

Day 0: The book is done! Long live the book!

Day 1: Write a companion short story (or in my case, recipe and etiquette booklet, this is for the Groundskeeper series) of, oh, at least 2500 words but probably more like 5000.

Also on Day 1: draft a blurb, get feedback if you can. I put mine into an announcement on my blog and asked for thoughts.

Day 2: Revise, format, and prepare the short story for a lead magnet to lure readers into subscribing to your email newsletter (https://cedarsbooks.substack.com/ if you are curious). I’m choosing to upload the reader magnet as a pdf to Substack itself (note that this is NOT my blog, most people don’t want daily emails from an author) so when people sign up, the welcome email has a download link in it. Don’t make people click more than the absolute minimum, because they will not do it. In the future I plan to use BookFunnel, I am not there yet.

Also on Day 2: updating backmatter on the previous books in the series, to reflect the new book, the new email newsletter signup with goodie, and anything else you need to do while you’re in there.

Day 3-5: Manuscript Prep + Metadata + Marketing Prep

Complete any revisions or polish of the manuscript. Check for series continuity. By day 5 this is my final pass once the editors have finished up with it.

Figure out pricing: for my genre and length (~60K words) I’m looking at $3.99 or $4.99
Figure out Keywords: look at the rest of the series to see what’s working, look at other books in the genre, you need 7 keywords. Amazon likes to see intentional phrases readers may actually be typing into the search bar rather than single words or strings of words in the keywords. Don’t use words that already appear in the title or subtitle of your book. Try to get fairly specific here: this is where you’re going to find your niche readers.
Figure out categories. I will look at the top sellers in my subgenre to see what categories they are sitting in.

Write and schedule announcement posts. Use fun little graphics because most social media prioritizes a picture over just text. Don’t include links just yet. You can come back with those when the book goes live. If you can ask a question and get people to answer in comments, this boosts engagement.

Day 6: Format and upload. Now, I will be using Vellum for this, because I’ve got it. You don’t need to invest in a desktop formatting software until you’re doing multiple books a year. You can hire someone to format a novel for you (I charge $100 for this, don’t know what other people are charging, but that should be about right) and you can do it in Word although it’s a PITA. I’m not planning to do a preorder with this book, but if you want to, you’ll upload the manuscript much earlier and give it a good, oh, I think two weeks is a minimum.

Evening of Day 6: hit that big yellow publish button! You can start out with the paperback if you want it to drop live at the same time as ebook. I don’t generally worry about that detail of timing. I’ll be putting this book in Kindle Select (Kindle Unlimited) so I can include that with my promo graphics and text.

Day 7: Announce, announce, announce. Send the book to promo sites and reviewers if you have access to those. Send out an email to your newsletter subscribers. Post something on your blog, your website, and of course social media. Remember graphics for social media.

Day 8 and onward: Monitor early reviews, be ready to adjust keywords. If you are running ads, this is when you’re going to want to check and make tweaks if necessary. Continue promoting. Don’t promo more than once a day, don’t promo in groups unless it’s explicitly allowed: be respectful.

Day whatever, after the launch: I’m going to be doing an Amazon Virtual Voice of the book for audiobook listeners. This will take some time to set up as I will have to listen and correct any mispronunciations, but not doing any audio while I dither around trying to decide on the best audio approach is leaving money on the table, so this time I’m doing it. I’ll slowly work back through the series once I have the new book up.

This is what I’m doing. This is not necessarily what I’m recommending. You ideally should allow months for this. I’m wanting to get this book out so I can start writing the next book, and because it will boost my royalties for this month (remember I’m relying on this income for paying bills). So my timing is not your timing. That being said, these steps are ones that you should be considering. Just maybe not so rushed, because I’ll be relying on the long tail of this being book 6 in a popular series. Particularly if you are new at this, building hype ahead of the launch is going to have a better trajectory in the algorithms.