Starting Over - Relaunch old books?

[Samuel Thews]

Howdy folks,

I was on these boards for awhile back in 2011-2012 and launched a couple of books in that time. I say "launch" but really all I did was put them on Amazon and solicited maybe a couple of reviews. I did not do anything resembling a proper launch/marketing for either book.

The first organically garnered almost 40 reviews, sold about 850 copies and netted me something near $3k. Not great, but not bad for middle grade fantasy back in 2011-2012. A large chunk of those sales were from the time when you could just throw up a book for free and have the downloads count as sales and up your rank, etc.

The second book I did even less, never marketed anywhere at all, never solicited a review and it only has 3 and has 35 sales in the 5 years it has been up.

Anyway, life is back on a better tack now: work is tame and I think we have finished having babies so there is less crazy and I have been writing more, daily for the last almost 4 months, one book finished and another in progress. Waiting to go back and revise the former.

I am trying to decide how to restart my fledgling career. I will have the new book ready in another month or two, but I really want to revive the second book (Andromeda Nyx). It is a good book and I want to relaunch it and give it another shot. It is worthy of much more than 35 sales (what author wouldn't say that?) I am currently redoing the cover, reading a lot of marketing posts on here, everything on Nicholas Erik's site, etc.

Given the length of time since I wrote and launched anything, how would you folks recommend going about this? I've read the posts about throwing good money after bad on a relaunch of a failing book, but as I never threw a dime at it the first time around, I think it deserves at least one shot.

Thanks to any and all responses.

[Elizabeth Barone]

Welcome back, Samuel!

I know a lot of authors found Chris Fox's Relaunch Your Novel: Breathe Life Into Your Backlist helpful, so you might want to start there.

I've done a couple of re-launches and I've learned that, as with anything else, having a strategy is key. If you do re-launch, you might want to focus on refreshing your covers. I never would've guessed that these were children's fantasy books, based on the covers in your signature. They look more like horror to me. You also might want to consider changing your title. Andromeda Nyx sounds like a sci-fi novel to me.

Children's books are a bit harder to market, because kids don't have e-readers and credit cards. You're really marketing to parents. You'll need to think about how you'll reach your audience -- especially offline. (Think libraries, elementary schools, etc.)

Also, hang onto your ASINs because if you re-launch, you can email Amazon and ask them to transfer the old reviews to the new page.

[Samuel Thews]

Hi Elizabeth,

Thanks for responding! I saw Chris' book on some of the forum posts and it's on my list to read.

I am definitely refreshing the first cover, although it is more YA than Children's. I've actually just unpublished it while I consider the re-launch. For the cover on the first, actually people love that one. I'm not really getting the horror vibe but thanks for that input. The second is in the process of being replaced and I am probably going to drop the Andromeda part and just call it Nyx. Hopefully less sci-fy.

If I re-launch with a slightly different title, will they allow me to bring over the reviews? I read in one post that if the title changes, you cannot.

Agree on marketing children's books...it's what I love to write, though. :-/

Thanks again.

[The Bass Bagwhan]

If you unpublish and republish your book entirely you'll get the 30 day cliff again. Otherwise, you're basically trying to resuscitate a dead book. All the marketing, etc, from 2011 is looong changed with saturation and promotional sites just chockers with too many titles.
All I'm suggesting is that you should look more toward things like Facebook advertising and anything non-Amazon based. Just kind of ignore where your old books are in the Amazon scheme of things, because trying to get visibility inside Amazon is getting so hard. It's more about using third-party promos to point browsers to your product page, not hoping the Zon search engines algorithms will do that for you.
Just my two cents worth..