The Secret to Having an Amazing Book Launch

I’ve had miserable book launches and joyous ones. And the amount of misery or joy had nothing to do with how well the book did.

It had to do with making the decision to enjoy it, rather than to try to control it.

It took me six books, and an escape from traditional publishing, to finally understand this.

There’s a lot out there about post-launch depression. Story after story after story. And for good reason: it’s real! I know that all too well.

The first time I experienced it was, of course, on my first book, Party Girl. No matter how many times I heard that it was incredibly rare for a book to be a breakout success, I put my figurative fingers in my ears and ignored it. Sure, that was true for most, I figured, but not for me. My book had sold to the biggest publisher in the world. Producers were after the film rights before the book even came out. The guy who started GoodReads, when he was asked what book had the most buzz at the time that GoodReads launched, said “Party Girl by Anna David.”

And then, well…it got TONS of press but due to the fact that my publisher was fired a few months before its release in the biggest scandal to hit publishing1, weak sales. No one explained to me, when Regan Books evaporated, that It was Over. Party Girl was not going to be the monstrous hit we’d all hoped. There was no company to support it. Instead, I was told, I was lucky that the book was getting released and wow, look how much press it’s getting!

And then, well, nothing. Press is great but if you don’t know how to capitalize on it by selling a service, it doesn’t do much of anything. And so, despite the fact that I had hundreds of people at my LA book party, I was miserable. I kept waiting for something to happen but nothing did. I felt like a filmmaker who’d had a studio hire them to write, produce, direct and star in a movie and were behind me the whole way, until it came out. And then they disconnected their phones. People would ask me how the book was doing and I wouldn’t know what to say, but I knew the honest answer would have to be something along the lines of: “Not all that great.”

But hope springs eternal and when my editor at HarperCollins told me they felt terrible about how I’d been caught in the Regan cross fires on Party Girl, they would make it up to me on book two. So they gave me a (much smaller) deal to write my second novel, Bought. They were very encouraging—up until the time it came for launch.

“Unfortunately, because Party Girl didn’t sell as well as we’d hoped, bookstores aren’t as interested in Bought,” my editor told me. (This was 2008; bookstores mattered more than Amazon.)

“But you told me it wasn’t my fault that Party Girl didn’t sell as well as we’d hoped and you’d make it up to me on this book,” I reminded him.

He shrugged.

But still, I thought, I will be the exception. I’d seen Down With Love and every episode of Sex and the City. It would all work out. How could it not?

Anyway, you get it. I went through this six times with HarperCollins, before eventually doing a book with Simon & Schuster that became a New York Times bestseller.

I have now seen the “I will be the exception” look on the faces of approximately 99,9999 people since then. I’ve tried to share my experience. I’ve explained that more often than not, we’re not the exception; that’s why it’s called “exception.” I’ve said that most of us don’t buy lottery tickets and insist, when people explain that it’s a lottery, that sure, yes, but don’t they understand that I have the winning ticket?

Every one of those Harper launches, no matter what I got, I wanted more. I got on The Talk but why not The View? My friend’s book got reviewed in the New York Times. Why not mine? I never took a second to enjoy and appreciate what I was getting. And I got desperate; I’m not going to say my publisher made me feel desperate because no one can make us feel anything but they sure did always remind me that my book wasn’t selling very well so anything I could do sure would be great. I remember, for my fifth book, Falling for Me, being on the phone with a producer at Anderson Cooper’s then talk show. My friend worked there and he said they could do a segment about my book IF I WOULD COME ON THE SHOW WITH AN EX-BOYFRIEND AND DISCUSS GETTING BACK TOGETHER. It shows just how desperate I was that I called several men I hadn’t spoken to in years, and had no interest in getting back together with, to see if they’d join me in this televised conversation. The fact that I couldn’t get any of them to agree is only, of course, Desperation Frosting.

My point is this: my launches were miserable because I thought I could make them successful in exactly the way I wanted to. But since I can’t—since none of us can, except, I guess Glennon Doyle—now I just focus on what I can control.

Say, making it the best possible book it can be—from the writing to the editing to the cover.

Say, reviews. I can ask people to review my book on Amazon.

Say, media attention. But rather than looking at it from a who-can-have-me-on-their-show-or-write-about-my-book perspective, to look at it from the point of view of how could I (or my book) serve their audience?

I get to decide if a launch party would be fun for me. For my last book, On Good Authority, I had an amazing opportunity to do an event at Book Soup. But then I thought about recruiting people to go there. It was the same week as my baby shower and I was already getting all my friends to show up for that. So I assessed what the event would take out of me vs what it would give me and was proud of myself for passing.

So it’s really that simple. You can have a great book launch simply by deciding to and remembering you can’t control any of it so just appreciate every single moment in the sun your book gets. Publishing a book is an amazing accomplishment and too many of us have managed to take this amazing accomplishment and make it into something terrible.

If you have a service you sell that your book is going to attract clients to, then the launch really doesn’t matter anyway, because the book is going to be serving you for the rest of your life.