The big day of a book launch brings together authors, booksellers, industry professionals, and (most importantly) readers. They exist to welcome the finished book into the hands of excited readers, but also to generate excitement and publicity around a new release. It’s hard to pinpoint an exact number of books per year, but at one point, a figure of 2.2 million books published every year (a statistic attributed to UNESCO) was going around the Internet. With that volume, it’s increasingly necessary for authors to stand out from the crowd.
Publisher Versus Independent Book Launches
A large-scale event thrown by a publisher depends heavily on the book. Though bookstore events are common, publishers will choose to do larger, ticketed events for successful authors. Famous, well-loved writers tend to command more of an audience than can fit in a local library or bookstore. When I was a teenager, I went to a John Green launch event in the basement of a Borders bookstore. By the time of the release of Turtles All the Way Down, he was selling out major event spaces.
A book launch event is a small but important piece of the overall marketing budget devoted to a book. It’s not clear how the Big Five publishers allocate their marketing budgets for book launches and tours, but a larger sum for a book deal will likely lead to a larger marketing budget because the publisher wants to see a return on that initial advance. Basically, if they’re expecting the book to be a bestseller, they’ll put a lot of time, money, and energy into securing a big event space for the book launch.
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