Today became “Dear Evil Tester” launch day.
Surprise!
I suspect ‘professionals’ create a plan and stick to it. I’m more of a kanban, ship it when it is ready, kind of guy.
On the 16th March, I received a final proof copy, and I reviewed that. Then on the 17th I hit publish.
I found the free pdf comparison tool “diff-pdf” very useful for final leanpub print ready pdf comparison during my final proof phase.
The launch process proceeded as follows:
- start at leanpub
- check the book details
- realise you haven’t added a price
- add price (make it slightly cheaper than amazon kindle because of the difference in royalty rates)
- click publish
- check the page looks OK in incognito mode
- tweet
- tweet that a sample is available now so people can try before they buy
- move on to createspace
- click publish
- stare at the message that says “this might take 3-4 days” and wonder how people manage to create a co-ordinated launch across all platforms
- move on to kdp (kindle direct publishing)
- click publish
- again stare aghast at the “this might take 3-4 days” message
- be amazed as you start responding to peeps tweets about buying the book. Thank you all.
- see that Amazon.co.uk have listed the book for sale
- tweet that
- start editing all your web pages
- notice that the feedjs server you were relying on for your rss feeds has stopped responding, so create a new endpoint for your existing rss caching to work on different sites
- notice that the kindle version has been published
- tweet that
- respond to more peeps tweets. Thank you all again.
- Write a promotional blog post
I still have more to do in the launch.
- make sure Amazon notice that the paperback and kindle book are actually the same book and are listed together
- create a leanpub promo video
- amend the sales pages
But overall, the ‘publish’ part of ‘self publishing’ has become quite smooth.
Thank you for your support.
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