The launch campaign playbook (Part 1: planning)

A real book launch has two phases: the month before launch where you make decisions, and the two weeks around launch where those decisions play out. This post is about the first one. Part 2 covers executing on the plan.

Get the planning right, and the execution is mostly scheduling and watching the calendar work. Get the planning wrong, and you're ad-libbing at 11 PM the night before launch. Which is how most author launches actually go, and also why they're miserable.

Decide your timeline

Most author launches are 14-day campaigns anchored on launch day. Some are 21 days. A few are 30. Longer than 30 is usually a backlist push dressed up as a launch; let's not.

Pick based on how much pre-order momentum you already have:

• No pre-order, launch day is the first people hear of it: 14 days is plenty. Announcement → teaser → launch. Three beats.
• Pre-order has been live for a month: 21 days works. You've already had the announcement moment; now you're building toward the now-you-can-finally-read-it moment.
• Pre-order has been live for 90+ days: 30 days, but spread thin. You're maintaining rather than building.

For this post, I'm going to assume 14 days. That's the common case for indie authors.

Decide your anchor moments

Every launch campaign needs at least three anchor posts:

1. The announcement — the book is launching, here's when, here's what it's about. Usually day 1 of your campaign.
2. The cover reveal or a teaser — something visual, midway through the campaign, that gives readers a concrete thing to screenshot and share. Usually around day 7.
3. The launch day post — it's here, go buy it, here's the link. Day 14.

Everything else is glue between these anchor moments. If you only have time to do three posts well, these are the three.

Decide your platforms

I wrote a whole post on picking your platforms but for launch specifically:

• Your primary platform gets 14 posts — one per day minimum. This is the main character.
• One secondary platform gets 5–7 posts — the anchor moments plus 2–4 glue posts.
• One long-tail platform (usually Pinterest) gets the cover art and 1–2 aesthetic boards that run independently of the daily campaign.

If you're tempted to add a fourth platform, don't. Fewer channels done well beats more channels done poorly.

Decide your hook

What is this book about, in marketing terms? Not the plot. The hook.

A hook is the single most useful sentence you'll write during your entire launch. It's the answer readers give when a friend asks "what's that book you were telling me about?" Examples:

• Enemies-to-lovers between a lighthouse keeper and the climate scientist who wants to decommission her lighthouse.
• A grandma sleuth solving murders in a small Texas town, one pie filling at a time.
• A space opera where the villain is AI and the heroes are the librarians who keep analog records alive.

Spend an hour writing 20 candidate hooks. Pick the best one. Refine it. Test it on three readers. Then use it everywhere for the next two weeks.

This hook is what makes the AI campaign builder produce good output. Your Objective prompt in /dashboard/create should lead with the hook.

Decide your beats

Beyond the three anchors, what are you talking about for the other 11 days?

Good beats for launch campaigns:

• The world — setting, atmosphere, sensory details
• A character — usually your protagonist, sometimes a supporting character who's secretly most readers' favorite
• The stakes — what's at risk, what the protagonist is fighting for, why the reader should care
• A moment — a specific scene, conversation, or beat from early in the book (no spoilers)
• The craft — something about how you wrote it, a choice you made, a theme you were exploring
• The behind-the-scenes — your process, your workspace, a photo of the book's edit history
• The community — other authors you read, a subgenre you love, a trope you're playing with

Pick 3–4 of these beats. Don't try to hit all of them. Repetition with variation is the shape of a launch campaign — hit each beat 2–3 times across the 14 days, from different angles.

Pre-launch: the week before day 1

A week before your campaign actually starts, do the prep work:

1. Fill in your books library. If Salt & Sky isn't already in your books library, add it. Paste the Amazon URL. Let it pull cover, blurb, and keywords. Fifteen seconds of work, hundreds of uses over the next 14 days.

2. Refresh your brand voice guides if it's been a while. If your voice has evolved since the last launch, update your guides before you generate any AI drafts. Five minutes.

3. Pre-shorten the book link. Open /dashboard/utm, paste your Amazon (or universal-reader-link) URL, and generate a branded short link like storylink.to/salt-sky. This becomes your one-and-only link for the whole campaign. Every post that mentions Salt & Sky points to the same short URL.

4. Generate the QR code. While you're there, grab the QR code for storylink.to/salt-sky and save the PNG. If you do book inserts, conference flyers, or print bookmarks, that QR code goes on all of them.

5. Write your hook, 20 times, in different words. Have variations ready. You'll need them when you're tuning specific captions during the campaign.

Generating the campaign itself

Once the prep work is done, go to /dashboard/create:

1. Objective: paste your hook, plus the launch date, plus the platform priorities. (Re-read 14 days of content for how to write a strong Objective prompt.)
2. Duration: 14 days
3. Platforms: your primary + secondary (long-tail runs separately via manual Pinterest pins)
4. Books: pick your launching book from the library
5. Mix: adjust if you want (e.g., more carousels, fewer reels)

Click Generate. Two minutes later you have a draft campaign.

Review, don't ship yet

The draft is a starting point, not a finished plan. Before you schedule:

• Anchor moments are in the right slots. Day 1 announcement, day ~7 teaser/reveal, day 14 launch. If AI put them in weird places, move them.
• The hook is in the first three posts somewhere. If AI buried your strongest angle, rewrite day 1 and day 2 until the hook is unmissable.
• Your short link is in every post that needs it. Day 14 in particular needs the link in the caption.
• Carousels and reels have the right art. Generated images from AI are a starting point; for your launch, you probably have real book aesthetics, scene illustrations, or author photos you'd rather use. Swap them.
• Voice feels right. If it doesn't, rewrite 2–3 captions manually. That's faster than tweaking the prompt and regenerating.

When you're happy, schedule all 14 days. The calendar will show exactly what's going out when.

What goes on a launch sabbatical list

Things you don't do during the 14 days:

• Announce other projects (confuses the signal)
• Start a newsletter series
• Do a big craft rant
• Engage in author-community drama

The 14 days are about this book. Everything else waits until day 15.

What to do next

Planning is done. Now: Part 2 — executing the campaign, which covers what you actually do during the 14 days while the calendar runs. Daily-beat behaviors, how to respond to unexpected traction, how to handle failed posts, and what the post-launch debrief looks like.

If the 14-day format feels too ambitious, read about templates for evergreen content — a lighter touch that pairs well with a compressed 7-day launch for a smaller release.