SFFMP 188: A Successful Fantasy Series Relaunch
On this week’s show, we chat with dark/epic fantasy author and podcaster Andy Peloquin. Andy got the rights back to his first series and did a big and very successful relaunch, revamping it to appeal to assassin-loving epic fantasy fans instead of the dark fantasy fans it previously targeted.
Here are some of the specifics that we covered:
- Andy’s background as a freelance writer.
- His first forays into publishing, including signing with a small publisher.
- Why he decided to ask for the rights back to his first series and relaunch it himself.
- How he redid his blurbs and covers to target a larger audience than previously.
- Researching not just in his genre but in his specific niche (assassins, mercenaries, sellswords, etc.) and seeing what kinds of covers were selling.
- Creating an effective epic fantasy cover with stock photos instead of paying a fortune for custom illustrations.
- Changing the titles to hit on popular epic fantasy tropes.
- How he contacted other authors in his niche and asked for them to plug his book when he was ready to release the new Book 1.
- How he’s designed effective Facebook ads that don’t cost him much per click.
- Whether his Fantasy Fiends podcast has been useful for networking with authors and making book sales to listeners.
- How to know if it’s worth doing a relaunch for a flagging series.
You can visit Andy on his site or check out his books on Amazon, including the newly relaunched Hero of Darkness series.
You can also check out Andy’s podcast, Fantasy Fiends, on YouTube, iTunes, etc.
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Another interesting show. Thanks!
I would like to make a comment pertaining to SMART URLs. It looks like a fair number of authors don’t know about these. This is a re-routing URL that you can update any time. It’s useful, for example, when you are publishing Book 1 and want to have a buy link to Book 2 (or to the preorder for Book 2) in the back, but at the moment of uploading that work, you don’t actually have a live buy link yet. What you do is pop a smart url in the backmatter as a placeholder and have that direct to your author website. Then, the moment you do have a live buy link for Book 2, you update that smart url. This way, the file you uploaded to Amazon, Kobo, etc doesn’t have to be changed.
Smart URLs are free to use and I find them extremely handy. They also show you how often any given smart url has been clicked so you can use them to track info. For example, you could have a different smart url in different spots in your book (ie frontmatter vs backmatter) or different smart urls in different versions of your book (KDP, Kobo, etc) to see where exactly those clicks are coming from. That helped me discover that my newsletter offer of free stories attracts clicks both at the beginning and at the end of most of my books, but at a rate of roughly 1/3 front, 2/3 back.
In short, smart urls are handy in many ways and yet, a woeful number of authors don’t seem to know about them. They are definitely worth looking into.
Great information and clarification. Thank you, Anna!