SFFMP 156: Finding Success with a Cross-Genre Book Launch with Chris Fox
One of our favorite guests, Chris Fox, returns this week so we can grill him about the success he had with his space-fantasy launch, Tech Mage.
Here’s some of what we covered:
- What made Chris, the Write to Market guy, decide to take on a new cross-genre series that he wasn’t positive would sell well.
- How you choose what to emphasize on the cover when your novel crosses multiple genres and could fit in a number of categories.
- How Chris quietly put up a pre-order without mentioning it to fans, then used Facebook ads to see which ads and tag lines on the product page resulted in the highest conversion.
- Choosing different audiences to target (via Facebook ads) for subsequent launches in a cross-genre series.
- Whether anything different needs to be done with a launch for a book that spans multiple genres and isn’t necessarily written to market.
- Advice for newer authors who don’t have a list already built that they can rely upon for early sales.
- Keeping cover design simple, and whether it matters if you have a specific scene from the book illustrated for it.
- For the first time, Chris registered a domain name and put up a lot of bonus content for his new series: https://www.magitechchronicles.com/
- Why Chris plans to write ten books in this series rather than sticking to trilogies or smaller series as he’s often done in the past.
- Who should consider relaunching a series.
- Why Chris likes omnibuses as a way to kickstart a flagging series without redoing covers on all the original books.
You can buy or borrow Tech Mage on Amazon, or check out Chris’s Relaunch Your Novel for some tips on breathing life into a series that you felt underperformed initially.
Chris also has some great videos for writers on his YouTube channel. Of course, he’s on the web too at Chris Fox Writes.
Also, if you haven’t listened to them, check out the other episodes where Chris was a guest:
- Launching Books to Stick, Amazon Algorithms, and When Advertising Is Worth It
- Selling More by Writing to Market + A Novel in 21 Days
- Writing 5,000 Words an Hour and Selling Zombies and Werewolves
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Terrific interview, as always, and for what it’s worth, I also enjoyed listening to Lindsay and Chris at the recent 20BooksVegas conference. As a relative newbie in indie publishing, I definitely look up to you both!
Laura, your name seems… familiar…. Hm! 🙂 Thanks for stopping by!