Four more days until BLAZE is released by Imajin Books, and I can hardly wait. My stomach is in knots. I don’t know why the launch party makes me nervous, but it does.

The post below was one of my most popular, so it seems appropriate to share it again as I lead up to my next launch party. I’ll be hosting on October 25th from 4 to 6 PM EST. (Click here to sign up)

BLAZE is being released on the 3 month anniversary of DESCENT. What a great excuse to have a party!

You may notice I shortened the party this time. The first party was 3 hours, and I found that a bit long. This time, I’ll try two.

If you’re interested, you can buy or download a sample of DESCENT at:  myBook.to/Descent. It’s still on SALE until midnight at Amazon.co.uk and  Amazon.com  for $0.99 USD.

This is a two-way street, as they say in cliché land, so please invite me to your Facebook launch party if you plan to have one. It’s a great way to make new connections.

Below is the story of how I created and hosted my first launch party. We’ll see how I do with my second…

Preparation for the event.

• Create a banner to announce your event. I used Canva.com. It’s free. You can see both banners I created. Click the BLAZE banner to sign up for the upcoming party.

• Set up event on Facebook. Remember to make the event public or only your friends can see it.
• Put the back description of your novel at the top of the page with a link to where your book is sold. You can use booklinker.net to create a link that will take the person to the amazon site of their home country.
• Invite all your friends and ask them to share your post.
• Send a reminder the day before and the morning of the event.
• Have something to give away. I had 14 books donated by other authors. My publisher recommended not to give away DESCENT as it is a new release. I limited each winner to two books. During the first party, I didn’t have time to give away all of the donated books. This time around, I only asked for 6 contributions. Again, my publisher recommended not to give away BLAZE.
• Create trivia questions. My questions were all related to the books being given away by other authors, but you ask anything really. I created questions  from the Amazon site for the books donated so people could look up the answers and there would be no confusion about the correct answer.
• Have winners direct message you with their email address. I only gave away eBooks to make the process easy and less costly for donating authors. People could attend your event from different countries and mailing a paperback could get expensive.
• If books are being given away, take a screen shot of the book cover from Amazon and post it with the trivia question. Don’t add the link to Amazon as the answer to your question might show up too.
• Keep the trivia questions and answers in a word document so you can cut and paste them instead of having to type them as you go. Things move fast in a launch.
• Create a list of pre-posts in word in case things get slow. I only used a couple of the ones I created. This could be a question about reading, your books or anything your guests might be interested in.

Let me know in the comments below if you have any questions or suggestions to improve a Facebook launch party.

Thanks for reading…