Why This Book Launch Failed... Don't Make These Mistakes | Kindle Publishing 2020

About this video

Sean does a case study of a failed book launch, contrasting it with a previous successful launch he says made about 1700 dollars a month. For the failed book he followed his usual launch: a 5 day free promotion, gathering reviews, then gradually increasing sales through low, mid, and high tier promotions, reaching 25 and 29 sales on some days. The cover was professionally designed and excellent, and the content, rewritten by Epic Write, was in his view 10 out of 10. The process was badly delayed: an Upwork writer was fired after one month, Epic Write took about a month and a half to two months plus another month for a revision, creating a 4 to 5 month delay in total. He had 16 reviews at launch and the title was somewhat keyword-stuffed and cluttered about who it was for. He concludes the real failure was the keyword: it had over 10000 books in search results, up from about 4000 when he first published in it three years ago, and he never rechecked profitability because he had made a little money there before. His 11 day launch only reached page 3. He says ranking there would require at least two weeks to 20 days of stacked sales, but it is smarter to niche down, for example from ketogenic diet to ketogenic diet for women over 50. His recovery plan is to target smaller broken-down keywords with AMS, rely on brand and series spillover, and use IngramSpark and other channels, expecting perhaps 20 to 30 dollars a month organically even without marketing.

Key takeaways

• Keyword choice can doom a launch even when cover, content, description, and reviews are strong
• Always recheck a keyword’s profitability — competition grew from about 4000 to over 10000 results in three years in this case
• A hyper-competitive keyword needs a much longer launch of 20 days or more to have a chance of ranking on page 1
• Niche down instead of fighting broad keywords, such as targeting ketogenic diet for women over 50 rather than ketogenic diet
• Brand, series, and backlist spillover plus channels like IngramSpark can slowly recoup a failed launch over time

Episode details: published May 22, 2020 · 17:20 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Sean Dollwet’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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