Tips for Leading a Book Launch Team

What is a Launch Team? A Launch Team is a group of people that come together to build excitement about your book and help with the actual launch of the book. You are in essence borrowing other people’s platform for a short period in order to give your book the widest reach possible.

Tips to Learn More: To find out more, this is a great podcast with Anna LeBaron. Anna rogue launched Jen Hatmaker’s For the Love after she was part of the 4500 that didn’t make the official Launch Team. She coined #the4500, gathered the rest of the 4,499 and helped Jen reach the New York Times Bestseller list for the first time. She has since launched for a whole slate of NYT Bestselling authors including Jen Hatmaker, Rachel Hollis, Beth Moore, Bob Goff & John Maxwell.

I’d also recommend participating in a Launch Team prior to coordinating one for your book. I was a part of Jen Hatmaker’s Fierce, Free & Full of Fire, Bob Goff’s Dream Big, and Jon Gordon’s Relationship Grit. Some teams are application only and your entrance is based on how large your platforms are, some are completely open and some require a pre-order purchase of the book to qualify. Just search “launch team” on Twitter and you’ll find several.

What to Give: Many people will offer some perks for being part of the team: e-version of the book, paper copies of the book, special content, swag (stickers, quote cards, etc.) and more. I’ll focus on access to an exclusive Facebook Group where you share special content, give access to the author and create a community among your Launch Team around the topic you wrote about.

What to Ask: I mentioned some will ask team members to purchase the book. This group though is about more than just purchases; it is about promotion. The main “ask” is that they join you in the journey, help promote the book on social media and to submit reviews on Amazon, Barnes & Noble & Goodreads (and anywhere else they want) when the launch happens.

*Sample promo I shared to ask for Launch Team participants*

***Click here to see my Book Launch Team that outlines how I set mine up and includes the Google Form I used to garner participants.

Communication with Launch Team:

I took the contact information from the Launch Team Google Form and imported it into my Mailchimp contacts and used a tag for “Launch Team.” That allowed me to create high-quality emails to that specific group to communicate as needed.

I also created a special Facebook Group for my Launch Team to create community amongst the group, foster discussion around the themes of the book and share special announcements of things I needed the team to do along the way. I can already see that I’ll transition this group to a more permanent Facebook Group once the launch is over. You can start discussions, share content from the book, host Facebook live events with guest speakers, etc.