Launching Multiple Books at Once: Pros & Cons

If you’ve hung out on the indie forums or listened to the various self-publishing podcasts, you might have heard of new authors finding success with variations of Liliana Hart’s “5 down and 1 in the hole” technique (summed up on Hugh Howey’s blog):

The idea is this: Annual releases are too slow to build on one another. And not just in the repetition of getting eyeballs on your works, but in how online recommendation algorithms work. Liliana suggests publishing 5 works all at once. Same day. And she thinks you should have another work sitting there ready to go a month later. While these works are gaining steam, write the next work, which if you write and edit in two months, will hit a month after the “hole” work.

I haven’t tried anything like this yet (I’m horrible at holding stories back — I haven’t even tried preorders, because I like to get a book out there to readers as soon as it’s ready), but because I’m fairly prolific, I’ve definitely seen how much easier it is to gain momentum (sales and readers) when you’re publishing regularly with a series. When I was publishing my Emperor’s Edge books, I tended to get new novels out about every six months, and even though I’m not writing more books in that series (there might be some spinoffs down the road) and the sales aren’t what they once were, those books still account for the majority of my income.

If I had it all to do over again, would I have held back and released the first few Emperor’s Edge books at all once? Probably not, but I’ll tell you what: I am planning to release the first three novels in my pen name project within a couple weeks of each other (and maybe a novella to boot).

Why?

I’m not planning to announce the pen name, at least not at first (if it fails miserably and gets straight 1-star reviews, I would like the privilege of being able to sweep it under the carpet!), so I’ll be starting from scratch. Not only that, but it’s in a cross-genre niche, which is going to make it tough for advertising (people who like X may hate the idea of Y mixed in and lots of people who like Y wouldn’t touch X with a 10-foot-pole).

In other words, I think it’s going to be hard to gain traction.

So my plan is to make the first book permafree, right off the bat. And, going on the assumption that there’s not much point of having a free book out if there aren’t follow-ups for people to buy, I’ll launch the second at $3.99 shortly thereafter. I’m also planning to take this opportunity to check out KDP Select/Kindle Unlimited (since nobody’s waiting for these books, I don’t need to worry about upsetting Kobo, iPad, Nook, etc. readers). I want to put a third book (which can be read as a stand-alone) into KDP Select at $3.99 to see how that goes. The novella may or may not go into KDP Select too. I want to see how the borrows work for me and maybe try the countdown deals and such.

Now that I’ve blathered about my stuff, I would love to share my thoughts on the pros and cons of following this multi-book launch strategy. I would also love to hear your thoughts!

Pros of Launching 3+ Books in a Series at Once

Possibility to gain traction and reach a “tipping point” more quickly — In case you didn’t guess, Liliana Hart and her technique are on people’s radar because she gained momentum and sold piles of books that way. From Hugh’s post: “Lila Ashe, Jessie Evans, Cristin Harber, and Marquita Valentine, are just a few who have used the 5 down, 1 in the hole release schedule. These are authors who just got their start and are already making full-time wages from their writing. Does that mean anyone who does this will have success? Absolutely not. You’ve got to have great stories, catchy blurbs, professional covers, quality editing, and the right metadata. But you are sunk without these things however you publish. Having them should be a given.”
Utilize the power of free or permafree right out of the gates — Having a single book out there and making it free can work, insofar as building an audience goes (make sure to encourage newsletter signups!). In a niche I watch, I saw a book with a hideous cover and a so-so blurb skyrocket up to the Amazon Top 100 during its first week out, thanks to the fact that Book 1 had been free and out there for a couple of years, gathering hundreds of reviews and who knows how many reads. But why wait to make money? If you publish a number of titles at once, you can make one free, plug/advertise it anywhere you can, and hope people will be dying to read the following one.
Ability to more fully flesh out the world/characters before going live — Some people do a lot of pre-planning before jumping into a series, but if you’re like me, you might just do a quick outline and then get going. Sometimes little character quirks and interesting details might be worked in during the editing or as the series goes on. If you wait to release the series, you can go back and do major world/character changes to Book 1 if you think up something cool and new as you’re working on 3. By writing the first three or more books before launching, you have the leeway to go back and tinker.

Cons of Launching 3+ Books in a Series at Once

If the first book bombs, you may have wasted a lot of time working on a series that’s never going to take off — We all like to think we’re brilliant and that everyone will love all of our books, but the truth is that some series do better than others and it can hard to tell in advance which ones will be winners. When you’re publishing your first novel, in particular, it’s tough to be sure if you’re ready. Sometimes the feedback on that first novel can be eye-opening (or slit-your-wrists depressing). Either way, it’ll probably be a learning experience.
You don’t get to make any money for books that aren’t published yet — If you’re prolific, have a good day job, or have another series that’s already earning you an income, this might not be a big deal, but every month you sit on a title that’s ready to go is a month that title isn’t making you any money. Will the hold-and-release strategy end up making you more than if you’d put the books out as they were ready? Maybe so, but it’s a gamble, and if you’re not prolific and it’s going to take you years to get all those books ready to go… well, who knows if Amazon’s algorithms will work the same way in a year or two?
By the time you get feedback on the first book, you’ve already published several more — Even though you might have more solid characters and worlds built up since you waited until you’d written a few books before finalizing and releasing any of them, publishing the first X novels in a series at once means that you can’t take reviews/feedback you get on Book 1 and make changes to the following books. What if you did something awful to a character that people hated so much it made them put down the book (and the series)? Or what if you focused on a character that didn’t turn out to be nearly as popular as some side character? This kind of thing might matter less in romance, where you’re presumably focusing on different heroes and heroines in every book, but in an epic fantasy series? You may very well want to take an unplanned path in the road, based on early feedback.

All right, that’s all I have to say on this subject until I actually try it out (October, I’m hoping!). Do you have any related thoughts or experiences? Please let us know in the comments.

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