What’s The Best Day To Launch A Book on KDP?

The 1st or the 31st? Strangely, it does make a difference.

Does your launch day affect book success?

This is an issue that often comes up. Not usually in the way that it should, but that’s just a matter of framing. People ask me; What’s the best day to launch my book?

What they’re usually asking is, “what day gets the most sales?”

But this is pretty irrelevant. It’s usual for book sales to go up across the weekend and drop off across the week. But this has little to do with a launch day, as Amazon’s algorithms for organic marketing (whose inbox Amazon puts your books in, who it shows it to, where it pushes it without you paying for ads), are more powerful than any ad. And they work over periods of time, learning how ‘valuable’ a book is (ie. how easily it converts views to clicks to sales), and how much money you’re putting into it. It then progressively shows your book more and more — which is why blurbs, keywords, covers, openings are so vital.

But let’s not get off track here. What we’re talking about is the best day to launch your book. And quite simply, this is the last day of the month.

There’s a kneejerk to view your books in isolation, to view ads in isolation — but like with all things KDP, you have to step back and look at it all as one endeavour spread across multiple launches and over long periods of time. The value of launching on a specific day that has marginally ‘better sales potential’ than launching on the last day of the month, because that; minimises the length of time between actual launch, and the royalty payment but also, in a much more nuanced way, spreads the earnings across two months, instead of one, which provides a more even increase in royalties over time, which, if you’re thinking about ad scaling, is pretty vital.

But royalty payments come at the end of the month anyway — so whether I launch on the 1st or the 31st, the payment comes at the same time?

Right, that’s true. But if you launch it 30 days earlier, that’s 30 days fewer to finish and proof and generate hype around the book. And you still get the payment at the same time — only it’s 90 days later, not 60.

And if you push it just one day later (to the 1st of the next month), then you’ll get your royalties a whole 30 days after that.

The last day of the month maximises the time you have to finish the book and build pre-order momentum, while minimising the lag between pre-order cash-in and royalty payment.

I always launch at the end of the month — and I ensure to do so on the months where I either; a) need the pre-order bump to open my profit margins (April, I’m looking at you!) or to negate drop-off in tough months (like November and December).

That’s why you’ll see my books launch on March 31st (because April is a kick in the teeth for indies), and October 31st (because in November and December … well, same thing). Launching before these tough months can help mitigate lowered sales and revenue figures.