ISWG- March 2026

 It's the first Wednesday of the month so it's time for the Insecure Writer's Support Group..

This month's hosts are PJ Colando, Ronel Janse van Vuuren, and Natalie Aguirre, so let's give them a cheer!

This month's question is one I'll be interested in reading other peoples' posts about:

What elements do you include in your book launch? Or what do you have in mind for your future book launch? Or what advice do you have to offer to others planning to launch a book?

I'm actually pretty useless at releasing my books and I'm not ashamed to say it.  I have a company I work with (Itsy-Bitsy Book Bits if you want to know) who help with social media and stuff which I'm useless at.  They also have a big stable of in-house reviewers and that helps at release time too, especially since about 90% of the reviewers I approach directly usually turn me down.

Finding reviewers is usually the biggest part of my launch strategy and I spend a lot of weeks reaching out to bloggers and reviewers who read contemporary YA.  Most never respond, and the ones that do are  usually too busy with other books to accept anything new.  But I still feel like this is probably the best use of my time because reviews are so important when a new book is released.

I try to do some interviews if anyone will have me, and write some specific blog posts.  I also try to put together some kind of social media campaign of my own that's different to the stuff the company does - usually some graphics with the cover of the book and some quotes from the story and maybe some good early review stuff.

I make sure there's a page for the new book on my website with links to where to buy it, any good review quotes and other useful stuff to know about it.

And.... that's kind of it.  I don't have the budget to invest in ads or anything like that, and my publisher doesn't do much other than a couple of social media posts, so my books end up launching into a void.  My latest release also suffered from Amazon assigning it some truly bizarre keywords that hasn't helped that one at all.  I managed to get the non-fiction tag taken off, but it's still listed as sci-fi and fantasy which, as a contemporary novel about brothers, is probably not helping the right readers find it...

I'd be very interested to hear what other authors do to launch their books, especially if, like me, they don't have thousands of dollars lying around to spend on ads or billboards or anything like that.  So tell me what you do to launch your books into the world.  I'm listening!