“Treat it like a party!”

Four weeks today I launch my first novel, Blue Tide Rising. I’m using a tried and tested formula, stumbled upon by accident in 2014 when a group of fellow writers and I decided to publish our own anthology.

We had no idea what we were doing, so we made it up as we went along. We’d made friends with the marketing manager at our local Waterstones, and secured the spacious top floor meeting room for our event. It holds 120 people. There were seven authors, and we each vowed to get ten people there. That way, we figured, the room would be more than half full.

We picked a Sunday afternoon in March for our launch, and in the event, our respective ten friends invited their friends and some of them brought entire book groups. We ended up having to bring out more chairs and packing the place to the rafters. Even with the extra chairs people were left standing.

The anthology, called Seven Echoes, was themed around the topic of memory and sold in aid of the Alzheimer’s Society. This gave people another good reason to buy the book. We were gobsmacked, later in the week, to learn that Seven Echoes was the Nottingham Waterstones bestseller that week!

Other touches were live acoustic guitar music as people arrived (JP, my other half, is a guitarist), and refreshments including wine. At least one person came just for the wine!

Since then, I’ve been involved in a number of other charity book launches and followed the same formula. It’s worked every time.

Before planning my launch, I asked around authors I know for any advice they had, and compiled a list

Top tips for planning a book launch

• Invite everyone you know, and get them to invite others
• Share your invite among writing groups, readings groups and associated social media platforms
• Have cake, and wine! (Or Prosecco)
• Ask someone to host/compere the event,
• Have someone on the door to greet people and direct them to where to buy the book, this leaves you free to mingle
• Keep readings brief
• Consider having music playing as people arrive
• Ask attendees for their contact details to set up a mailing list (needs to be GDPR compliant)
• Most important – treat it as a party not a business event! Enjoy it!

Five years on from the ‘phenomenal success of Seven Echoes’ (in the words of the marketing manager mentioned earlier), I’m launching my own book in that same room, on a Sunday afternoon in March. It happens to be Mothers’ Day – a fact I’d overlooked, not being a mother and not having one. But there will be plenty of mothers there, lured by the promise of cake, Prosecco and some new reading material!

So if you happen to be in Nottingham on Sunday 31st March, why not come along? Details here