In a previous post, I said something about the wisdom of relaunching your book when it is your first book and you’re beginning writer. I cautioned against spending too much time and money on a book that still has significant flaws because you may need to learn more about the craft.
But there are definitely situations where relaunching your book makes a lot of sense. When would that be?
In that post, I also mentioned that the time to relaunch your first book would be after you have written a couple of additional books. When you are certain that you have learned enough to write an engaging story that people want to read, that is when you go back to the first book, and use what you have learned about writing, editing and cover design to fix up the book, especially when you have a second book in that series ready to go.
This is the most common way in which we see people successfully re-launching books, but it cannot be done in a vacuum. Just re-launching a single book is probably not going to be terribly effective, but it is a lot more effective if it goes hand-in-hand with the launch of a second book in the same series.
So what would be the best way of going about a relaunch?
If you have a first book that is just sitting there gathering digital dust, the cover is not terribly ideal, the editing was not that great, you may want to take it down if you plan on writing a second book and then relaunching both as s series.
Another reason to relaunch your book may be because you want to change the genre it is in. You may not be editing your book, but changing everything about the packaging to make it more in line with the new genre you are targeting. New title, new cover, new blurb.
Other reasons could include change your pen-name, re-organising your series of rebranding your covers.
Almost all of this type of stuff is done when you have a number of books and you want to fix up your first book or bring it up to speed with the other books.
Relaunches can be quite successful, but they work best if you treat the books like a new product. Change the title and change the cover and to make sure you have a whole series of books for people to buy.
This means not simply copying the new version of the book over the other version, but taking the old version down completely and re-launching as a new book with some ads and announcements to your mailing list.
Relaunching can work very well, but you need to have a plan, because just putting a new cover on an old book is unlikely to have much effect.
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