A few people have been asking about my launch – why I did it, how it went, would I recommend it to other first-time authors, and so on. So I thought I’d post here a little post-mortem I wrote for the digital newsletter Pass It On. I loved my launch! We could certainly have been better organised, but there are some things you only learn by doing, and that’s part of the fun.
“Launching Yourself (or, what I learned at my DIY launch so you don’t have to)”
1. Advance Planning
Have a range of possible dates and look into any other events that might be on around the same time. If there’s a festival or similar event, you may be able to piggyback your launch on this, sharing costs and publicity. On the other side of the coin, you might end up clashing with another launch or important book-related event that will affect turnout to yours.
Work out what you want from your launch. There’s symbolic value, a kind of punctuation, in a first-novel launch, drawing a line of sorts between your pre-published life and your sparkling new career (heckling to a minimum, please!), but it can also serve a number of important functions. I wasn’t able to make any decisions with regard to who/what/when/where/how until I’d worked out what those were for me. In my case, the goals were:
Celebrate the book! Mark the occasion with friends, family and colleagues. Kick back and grin. Say ‘huzzah’.
Meg McKinlay 