Your book may not be dead. As Miracle Max would say, it may only be “mostly dead” and waiting for a relaunch. A book that sold poorly three years ago could sell better today than it did on launch day.
Since that first launch, you've likely become a better writer, learned more about marketing, and grown your email list. You may have discovered things about your book you've always wanted to fix. Perhaps the original cover is the one thing standing between your book and the readers who would love it.
Most relaunches go wrong for the same reasons the first launch did. Authors start spending money on new covers, titles, descriptions, and even genres before they know what's broken. Some things about a book need to stay the same. If you don't know why your book stalled, you'll waste real money without getting real results.
A relaunch isn't a silver bullet. For some books, it transforms their trajectory. For others, it makes no impact, and the author would be better off writing the next book. Amazon also has a particular set of rules about relaunches, and authors who ignore them can land in trouble.
So how do you diagnose a stalled book and relaunch it well? I asked Julie Broad, founder of the self-publishing services company Book Launchers and host of the popular self-publishing channel BookLaunchers.TV. Julie is a #1 Amazon bestselling author whose titles include Self-Publish & Succeed and Self-Promote & Succeed, and her team has helped more than 400 authors write, publish, and market nonfiction books.
Why relaunch a book instead of writing a new one?
Thomas: A new book can reach all readers, while a relaunch can only reach some of them. Somebody who bought the first version may not buy the relaunched book. They'll say, "I already read that story. I don't want to pay again for a new cover."
Julie: That's fair. I've bought relaunched books and been annoyed when I realized, "Oh, this is all the same." It just looked prettier.
Thomas: I have purchased relaunched books that came in a fancier version. I may have spent $20.00 on the e-book or $10.00 on the audiobook, but now it has a leather-bound cover, and I'll pay for that so I can put it on my shelf. I
In general, though, a brand-new book can reach everyone, while a relaunched book has a limited audience. Why relaunch at all?
Julie: That's the first question to ask yourself. What does success look like for you? For some people, a new book would achieve that better. Sometimes, there's something about your first book you know you could do better.
Maybe you only sold 200 copies of the first book. That leaves plenty of people you could reach if you appeal to a specific audience more effectively.
Number one is deciding what success looks like to you.
Thomas: Number two is figuring out what caused the failure.
This is also true for TV shows. Netflix has a long history of taking failed shows and launching them to the stratosphere. Nobody was watching Suits before it was on Netflix. The Pendragon Cycle is now in the top three shows on all of Amazon Prime, but hardly anyone watched it on The Daily Wire because of its limited reach.
A relaunch done well can make a book feel all-new. If somebody hasn't read your book, it's new to them. You have to throw a party where readers feel like they're buying a new book rather than a used, dilapidated one.
Your core fans bought the original version with the original cover, and they liked it. Other readers need better packaging and a better promotion strategy because they're nervous.
Why are readers afraid to try a new book?
Thomas: Some readers are happy to quit a book they don't like. Most readers, however, were bludgeoned in school and forced to finish books they didn't like. That experience came loaded with moral tension, as if not finishing a book made you a bad person.
That kind of reader is cautious about taking a risk on a new author because they know they'll feel guilty. An unfinished book on the shelf will make them feel like a bad person for the rest of their life. They need to be convinced right at the beginning that this book will make them feel good rather than guilty.
That's what a good marketing package does. The cover, the description, the interviews, the PR, and the buzz work together in a full-court press to help the reader feel good about taking a risk on your book.
Julie: That makes total sense, but I've never felt guilty about a book I didn't finish. I've always thought, "You're going to the donation box because you did not earn my time."
A book has to grab me three times. It has to grab me when I buy it. It has to speak to me from my shelf and make me start reading. Then it has to make me excited enough to get back into it. If it doesn't, it gets donated. I put out a box of books for the donation center yesterday.
Thomas: Your attitude is the attitude of super readers. You've given yourself permission to move on. Many authors in my audience still have the "I have to finish the book" mindset, and it keeps them from reading more books in their genre.
You have my permission to stop reading a book you're not enjoying. Life is too short to read bad books. There are too many good ones out there.
How do you figure out why a book launch flopped?
Thomas: Diagnosis may be the most important part of a relaunch. Let's say an author tells you, "I launched my book five years ago, and it flopped." Where do you start?
Julie: I look at the sales history, any reviews the book received, and its current search visibility. We're running audits right now on how discoverable nonfiction books are, and it's incredible how many books you can't find by typing in the author's name or the title. Sometimes you have to type in both to find it.
I never look at only one thing. You may have had tremendous sales in the beginning, but the market may have shifted, and now nobody cares about your topic. "It used to sell well, so it should still sell well" doesn't give me enough information.
First, I gather information on sales, reviews, and search results. Then I dig into judgment calls like the cover.
Which books are the best candidates for a relaunch?
Thomas: A book that sold well initially and then fell off is probably not a good candidate for a relaunch, especially soon. That pattern tells me the market may be saturated. Everyone who was going to buy the book has bought it.
It's like what my grandmother told me when I was single. She said, "Thomas, you need to go to a new church. All the girls in your church have met you, and you've met all of them. Go to a different church and meet different girls."
Some books have a limited total addressable market, and everybody in it has made a decision about your book. A relaunch won't convince many of them to reconsider, especially after a strong initial launch. A new book written from a new angle or with more cultural resonance will convince them far more than a new cover.
Culture changes over time. In 2020, political books were selling like crazy. Now, if you write a political book and sit at a signing table, nobody will make eye contact with you, even readers from your own party.
On the other hand, if you only sold a few hundred copies, your book may be a much better candidate for a relaunch. You haven't saturated your market. Most of those readers still don't know who you are or that your book exists.
Julie: How many authors have sold tens of thousands of copies? If you have, you've probably reached the chunk of the market that was interested in you.
If you sold 1,000 copies at launch and know what you did to market the book, I'd argue that's a good sign, as long as good reviews followed. If readers hated your book and posted bad reviews, that's a different story.
If the reviews were positive but you haven't done much marketing since, you can probably make some tweaks and relaunch to regain momentum.
Momentum is the key to any launch or relaunch. Many authors launch strong, and then they're exhausted. They wrote the book, told all their friends, and had a great launch. Now they're tired.
The other thing I see all the time is authors so excited about the next book that they abandon their first baby and go make a new baby.
If your first book had good sales indicators and good reviews but you didn't do much after launch, that's a great opportunity for a relaunch. You may not need to change much. Bring the book into the modern day and adjust the search metadata. Then do a big relaunch with a post-launch marketing plan so you reach new people. Strong early sales and good reviews show the book was resonant and still has opportunity.
Why should you delay your book launch or relaunch?
Thomas: I have an episode called 10 Reasons to Delay Your Book Launch. Rushing to publish is one of the most common mistakes I see beginning authors make. They want their book on Amazon within weeks of the final edit rather than months, and that's a disaster.
Exhaustion is a huge issue. By the time you finish your final edit, you hate your book a little because all you've seen for the last rounds of edits are mistakes. You haven't looked at chapter three, which is nearly perfect, in months. You've been staring at the worst parts of chapter seven, which has been a hot mess the whole time. You fall out of love with your own book, which puts you in the worst possible mental state to promote it.
You also need time to set up interviews, write a launch plan, and build a launch team. Those are only two of the 10 reasons. I've never met anyone who regretted delaying, and I've met many authors who rushed to meet an arbitrary deadline, like the 70th anniversary of the battle in their historical novel. Nobody cares. It's better to have a good launch you had time to prepare for.
The same applies to relaunches. You can get into the same frantic place and repeat every problem from the first launch. A good launch takes planning and buffers so that everything lands at the same time. You want a parade, not random traffic.
Julie: Vanessa Van Edwards is a repeat New York Times bestselling nonfiction author, and she says her launch takes a year. Once the book is done, she spends about six months lining up podcasts and media so all the articles, interviews, and magazine features drop in the month around the launch. It looks like she's everywhere all at once, but it was a year in the making. Most of us won't go to that extreme, but it shows what a massive launch takes.
Thomas: This episode was four months in the making, between our planning, reaching out to Julie's team, and scheduling. It won't go live for another two weeks.
If Julie had a book coming out next month and reached out now, she would have missed the window for this interview to land near her launch.
Our podcast moves faster than most. I know a podcaster who records all his interviews for the year in one two-week window. He kills himself doing back-to-back interviews and hates his podcast by the end, but then he gets a year off. If your launch date is in June and he records in November, you have to reach out in August or September.
Many authors hold on to the fantasy that everyone will recognize their dazzling work of staggering genius and drop everything to book them. That doesn't happen for anyone. Maybe it does if you're J.K. Rowling with a new Harry Potter book. Until you've sold $1 billion worth of books, you have to put in the work and build the timeline.
Let's walk through some common symptoms of a stalled book. For each, we'll look at the problem, the fix, and whether a relaunch is the right solution.
Symptom #1: Few People Saw the Book
Thomas: The first symptom is that few people ever saw the book. That seems like a visibility issue. How do you fix it, and is a relaunch the solution?
Julie: It can be. Maybe you launched three years ago and have since built your platform. Now you have many people on your email list.
I'm guilty of this myself. I have two books that are relevant to everybody on my newsletter list, but they feel old to me, so I don't talk about them as much as I should. This is what I do for a living, and there are still thousands of people on my list who don't know these books exist.
A relaunch would give me a targeted, conscious reason to tell everybody on my platform about the book and why it's relevant to their world.
Look at what's changed since the book launched. Do you have a different network? Have you built a platform or a community? Any of those can give you a reason to talk about the book more.
Thomas: Another fix may be saving money. Of the three steps, attract, engage, and convert, attraction is by far the most expensive. Books commonly fail to get visibility because the author spent a few hundred dollars or less putting the book in front of strangers.
Sometimes authors spend nothing. They think, "I don't have any money, so I'll put my book on Amazon and hope people find it." There are 5,000 books added to Amazon every day. Do you know who puts books on Amazon and hopes people find them? The people behind the 3,000 of those books written with AI. You're signaling to the world, "My book is no better than the AI books because I'm unwilling to invest in it."
If you're willing to invest hundreds of hours writing your book, you should be willing to invest thousands of dollars promoting it. You can get that money through an ancient technique known as saving money. While you wait for your launch, set money aside every week or every month. That gives you dry powder to spend strategically on reaching likely readers.
If your issue is visibility, there's a non-trivial chance you were too cheap in your launch. You expected that because your work was staggering brilliance, strangers would find you on their own. They didn't, so you have to try another way.
Learn more about where to spend your marketing dollars and how to budget:
- Where to Spend Your Marketing Dollars
- How to Launch Your Book on a Budget
- How to Publish on a Budget
- How to Market Books When You Have No Money
- How to Market Books When You Have Money
Symptom #2: People Saw the Book but Didn't Click
Thomas: Another thing that can break is that people saw your book but didn't click, either on the cover to learn more or on the buy button once they reached your page. What causes that symptom, and is a relaunch the fix?
Julie: Almost always, it's the cover.
Thomas: Round up the usual suspects. Authors will say, "But Julie, my cover is beautiful. My friends said it looked like a real book. My author Facebook group liked it too. Are you telling me my cover is still bad?"
Julie: I talked to a guy the other day whose cover had lovely artwork but was a terrible cover. He said, "The guys at the car wash said it was great."
I asked, "Are they your target reader?"
Why shouldn't you ask friends which book cover they like?
Thomas: I've done a couple of episodes on split testing covers this year, including one with an author who relaunched his book around a new cover. The main point is not to ask people's opinions about your cover. They don't know, so they make up answers. "Lying" is too strong a word. They're simply unreliable.
When you ask a friend which of two covers they like, your friend will look at a big, full-color version and give each cover full attention. That's not a true test of whether your cover can grab somebody scrolling past hundreds of covers on Amazon.
A better test is to split test your cover on Facebook. If a new cover is part of your relaunch strategy, split testing must be part of it too. Then you can know with confidence that the new cover gets three times the clicks of the old one for the same ad spend. Test it on target readers, and instead of asking their opinion, watch their behavior. In marketing, we call this a revealed preference.
People may not even know their own revealed preference. Ask somebody what kind of coffee they like, and they'll say, "I like strong, bold coffee." Then you watch them cover it in sugar and cream. Their stated preference and revealed preference are completely out of sync. You want to deliver on people's revealed preferences.
Julie: Especially for a relaunch, study the top 10 bestsellers in the category you most want to focus on and look for the trend.
Cover trends change. Right now, we're seeing many covers with big, bold fonts and little or no imagery. Your cover may need a refresh simply because trends have changed.
Put your cover next to the top 10. If it stands out for the wrong reasons, like having a big, bold image when everyone else has large all-caps fonts, your book won't perform. Readers scan for their type of book. They know their category even if they aren't conscious of it.
Thomas: One sign of this problem is a book that had a strong launch followed by solid evergreen sales. The typical book has a big spike at the beginning and then drops to almost nothing.
Most books get almost all of their sales in the first 60 days.
Some books keep selling. You can have a book that sells $1,000.00 every month for years. Sometimes it drops to $900.00 a month in year two and $800.00 in year three, and then it starts to fall off a cliff.
That can indicate a cover that grows more out of sync with the market every year. The book makes up for it with lots of reviews, but the dated cover becomes more of a drag. A simple cover refresh without a relaunch can pop sales back up because the book itself resonates with readers. It only needs branding that says, "This is just like the other books you already like."
Julie: Amazon Ads will also give you data. If you aren't getting clicks, there's a mismatch with your title or your cover. If you're getting clicks but not sales, the cover probably isn't the issue, because readers clicked on it. It's more likely something in your description or your reviews that's keeping people from buying.
Will X ads work for authors?
Thomas: You get really good data from ads, and Amazon ads and Facebook ads are the best sources. I'll make a prediction live on the air so everyone can hold me accountable: I expect X ads to finally have their day.
X recently released an MCP that lets Grok or whatever agent you use, like Codex, run your X ads campaign and make the tweaks for you, fully automated from top to bottom. SpaceX runs X and makes xAI, so it's all AI running the ads you control. Authors haven't had good results with X ads up to this point, but few have tried them. I wouldn't be surprised if people finally make them work.
For nonfiction, I suspect X ads may outperform Facebook ads in certain genres because the conversation about those topics is happening on X. That's especially true if you're targeting men. Men are leaving Facebook and Instagram and moving to X, and men are 50% of the nonfiction market.
Symptom #3: Low Ratings or Few Reviews
Thomas: Sometimes a relaunch isn't the solution. What if the book sells okay but has a low star rating or few reviews despite relatively high sales? What does a bad ratio of sales to reviews tell you?
Julie: If the reviews are bad and you can fix the reason, then yes, a relaunch can work.
Thomas: Let me translate. The most common cause of bad reviews is that the cover promised a thriller and the book turned out to be a mystery. A mystery is slow and boring if you're expecting a thriller, so you get low-star reviews saying the book is boring.
The book is plenty interesting for somebody looking for a mystery. The cover and all the branding have to say mystery. If some of it says thriller, readers come with the wrong expectations, and that leads to bad reviews.
Julie: Absolutely. Readers may also have been offended, hurt, or scared by some element of your story that wasn't disclosed.
Thomas: "You didn't tell me the dog was going to die. I don't read books where the dog dies!"
Julie: That's valid. The question about getting sales without reviews is interesting, though. Even knowing how important reviews are, I have to really love or really hate a book to post one.
Many of our clients sell books in bulk, so they don't get reviews from those sales.
Otherwise, my gut says your book is average. It isn't great, but it isn't bad. A relaunch could work, but if you don't understand why your book is average, I'd probably write a new book.
Does your book have a marketing problem or a product problem?
Thomas: If you ask people for reviews and they don't follow through, that tells me they didn't finish the book. They haven't admitted to themselves that they won't finish, so they aren't telling you they won't review it. Your book isn't grabbing them. They aren't curious enough to read the next chapter because you didn't manage the tension well enough. If they don't finish, they don't review, and a relaunch is not the solution.
Instead, consider a rewrite, particularly for a novel. Rework the tension so readers always have to know what happens in the next chapter. There should always be a dangling thread pulling them forward that fits your genre and your target reader. There's more than one way to do this, but you have to find the way that pulls your reader to the end.
If your book doesn't do that, a relaunch is the worst thing you could do. You'll waste more time and money on a book that readers aren't finishing.
You could invest that same time and money in writing another book with all the skills you've gained. You'll get much better results from a brand-new launch because the problem is ultimately a product problem, not a marketing problem. That may be the biggest differentiator.
Julie: You've nailed the point of whether to relaunch or not.
Thomas: A relaunch can fix marketing problems, whether with the wrapping (meaning the cover, description, or title) or with the promotion.
When the problem is the book itself, it fails to deliver on its promise. Sometimes you can fix that by changing the promise. If you promised a thrilling adventure but wrote a cozy mystery, promise a cozy mystery. You've fixed the book without changing the book.
If readers say, "This mystery wasn't very mysterious. I figured out whodunit at the end of chapter two," then it's a book problem.
Many authors don't want to hear that their book is only average, but readers don't read average books.
There are 1,000 books launched every few hours on Amazon, more than anyone could read in a lifetime. Readers will only read the best book for them in that moment. Average is not good enough in this competitive landscape.
Julie: Agreed. I don't review the books in the middle. They're average, or I didn't finish them, or I don't care about them.
Thomas: They're in the box you just took to Goodwill.
Donated books ultimately end up on ThriftBooks and Amazon Used. Very few are sold in the store. Every time you give away a free copy of your book, you may end up competing against that same copy once it's donated. Sometimes that happens fast, because somebody would rather sell your book to a used bookstore for a few bucks than read it.
This isn't the episode on when and how to give away free books, but be very careful giving away free copies. It can kill your paperback sales.
What is the first step in relaunching a book?
Thomas: Let's say somebody thinks, "Yep, my book has a marketing problem. The problem is that nobody knows it exists. I want to relaunch." What's the Julie Broad plan for relaunching a book successfully?
Julie: I would start with positioning. You know your goal. Make sure you know exactly how the book needs to be positioned compared to how it was positioned before. That includes the category it's in, who it's for, and why they'll care. Positioning is everything.
When somebody asks, "What's your book about?" make sure you have your one-liner nailed and that it flows through every decision you make. Then ask, "What do I need to change about this book to bring it into complete alignment with that positioning?"
That quite likely includes your cover. Even a slight cover update will help.
Then there's the description. Is there anything inside the book you need to update? Sometimes a book references people you no longer want to reference, or it has storylines you want to bring current. Once you have your positioning, you can decide what needs to change and get to work.
Thomas: If you have access to the Patron Toolbox, I've built many tools to help with positioning. The Trope & Genre Finder reads your book, identifies its tropes, and gives you a genre alignment score. Many authors think they're writing in one category and turn out to be a terrible fit for it. This tool shows how aligned you are with the genre you promised.
The Zeitgeist Vibe Checker is based on the Zeitgeist episodes of our other podcast, Author Update, a forward-thinking news and culture show. We ask where the culture is now and where it will be in two years, so your book resonates with where culture is headed when it comes out. The tool reads your book, compares it against where culture is and where it's headed, and gives you a Zeitgeist alignment score.
Book to Blurb reads your book and gives you several one-sentence summaries, one-paragraph blurbs, and even full back cover copy. It's not meant for copying and pasting, but a third-party perspective is helpful. As Jim Rubart used to say on this podcast all the time, “It's hard to read the label when you're standing inside the bottle.”
In nonfiction, authors often try to sell features instead of reader benefits. Maybe your book is about increasing the protein in your diet. It's not really about protein. It's about having more muscle and less fat, being more attractive, landing the job interview, and having the energy to play with your kids. It's about being a healthier person. Sell the quality-of-life benefits for the reader.
Book to Blurb and my other blurb tools are good at teasing out benefits you're not seeing.
If you're giving your book a new title, my Book Title Optimizer tool analyzes your title and gives you new, search-optimized options.
Julie: Those are great tools. If you get the positioning wrong, your book will struggle.
Thomas: The Book Cover Analyzer scores your cover, which is much cheaper than a split test. It has broken many hearts. People say it's mean, but they rarely say it's wrong.
What comes after positioning in a book relaunch?
Thomas: Let's say you realize your cover was promising the wrong genre. Now you have a new blurb, new back cover copy, and a new cover, all making a better promise connected to your reader's hopes and dreams. What's the next step?
Julie: You have to do the work. Go through the book and see if there's anything else you need to change, and hire people or do it yourself.
Then comes the relaunch strategy.
I always go back to what worked last time. No one strategy works for everybody, because everybody has a different audience, platform, and set of strengths. Some of us are great with video. Others are great with the written word.
We look at what worked before, where the reader is hanging out, and how we can get in front of that reader. Did you get any editorial reviews? Those can be really useful if you're trying to get into libraries and bookstores. Did you line up readers to write reviews? Once we know the positioning, we start working on those pieces and think about how to make a big splash and build momentum.
Should you publish a second edition or simply update?
Thomas: In one sentence, you covered what could be months of work: to second edition or not to second edition?
Sometimes a relaunch doesn't mean a new ISBN. It means uploading a new cover to KDP along with a new description and new categories. You keep all your reviews, and your book gets a new moment in the sun.
The other strategy is a new version, either a second edition or a new title altogether that shares some content.
Before we get into the legalities with Amazon, how do you decide from a marketing perspective whether to make it a second edition or give it a new coat of paint?
Julie: From a marketing perspective, I like second editions. A second edition feels like a new book, while a new cover is just a new cover. Sometimes it's mental. Frankly, you can make a splash about whatever you want.
Making enough material changes to qualify as a second edition, and saying so, is often worthwhile for your sake, the reader's sake, and the marketing's sake.
If you're only changing the cover, though, that's not a second edition. That's an update.
Thomas: Part of the question is whether your book is fiction or nonfiction. For nonfiction, your publish date becomes a liability. People don't want to read nonfiction from the '90s because of an awful worldview that says new stuff is good and old stuff is bad. I personally reject that worldview. I'm studying Aristotle, and I think the old stuff is better and much of the new stuff is nonsense. Most people, however, assume the version copyrighted this year is better than last year's.
For some topics, that's true. If you have a book on AI copyrighted two years ago, that book is garbage. The techniques have changed so quickly that there's not much usable in the older book beyond the fundamentals.
Humans don't change, though.
For nonfiction, the publish date is in some ways more valuable than the number of reviews. Newer, cutting-edge advice may be worth starting over on reviews.
Fiction doesn't carry as much bias against older books. Nobody avoids The Chronicles of Narnia because they came out in the 1950s. Nobody asks, "What does C.S. Lewis know about writing fantasy?" He knew a lot, and his books are selling just fine.
For fiction, the number of reviews matters more. If your novel has 1,000 reviews, approach a second edition with fear and trembling. You don't see many novelists do second editions because leaving those reviews behind for a new ISBN is hard.
Can you keep your Amazon reviews when you publish a second edition?
Julie: You don't have to leave your reviews behind. When we do second editions, we get the reviews carried over all the time.
If you change your title, you won't be able to carry the reviews over. If the title stays the same and only the ISBN changes because of the second edition, you can keep your reviews. You have to contact Amazon, and if you're working with IngramSpark, you may need to go through your IngramSpark contact too.
Reviews wouldn't be a reason for me to avoid a second edition, fiction or nonfiction.
If you change your title, though, you have to believe the title is the reason your book didn't perform, and you have to be willing to say goodbye to those reviews.
Thomas: The time to use my title brainstorming and search optimization tool is before you publish the first time, when changing your working title is cheap and easy.
Let's say I keep the title the same, update 20% or 30% of the book, and want Amazon to move my reviews over. What do I say, and where do I send it?
Julie: I have a team who handles it. They say, "This is the same book. Here's what we've done. Transfer the reviews." More than half of these messages aren't read by humans at Amazon, so be to the point. It doesn't have to be an eloquent letter.
Thomas: If you're doing a rewrite, how much can you change before you can no longer move the reviews over?
Julie: KDP says manuscript changes that alter the page count by more than 10% require a new edition. (See KDP’s current policy here.)
Thomas: Amazon shifts those rules from time to time, so check KDP's current guidelines on editions before you make changes.
Can you change your book's title or subtitle on Amazon?
Thomas: Amazon has been cracking down on the spam and shenanigans around relaunching. What other Amazon pitfalls should authors watch for?
Julie: That's why we stay so close to Amazon on relaunches. Amazon will sometimes say, "This is duplicate content, and we are not publishing it," if you don't make clear that the upload is a relaunch of an existing book. You can run into this on all the platforms, not only Amazon.
That's where keeping the title the same really helps. Keep the title, the publisher tied to the ISBN, and as much else as possible the same.
Thomas: What about changing the subtitle? Is that locked as well?
Julie: You can get away with it occasionally.
Thomas: It's like asking Amazon for an exception. You have to make a good case or get to the right person.
Julie: In general, any title change will be problematic. If you change anything beyond the exact title you launched with, expect problems.
We generally won't try to push even a small change. Sometimes a punctuation change can move forward after many bot battles to reach a human who says, "Okay, fine." I'd stay away from title changes unless you really need one. In that case, you're doing a second edition, or I should say a whole new version of your book.
Thomas: One of the best books on branding is Seth Godin's All Marketers Are Liars (affiliate link). It did really well when it launched, but I suspect Seth came to believe the title was too antagonistic toward marketers. He wanted to change it to All Marketers Tell Stories, which is really what the book is about.
If you look it up on Amazon right now, the title is still All Marketers Are Liars. On the cover, however, "Are Liars" is scratched out, and "Tell Stories" is written underneath in what looks like marker. That was the best they could do to preserve the reviews without a second edition.
Seth Godin is a New York Times bestselling author who knows the Amazon people. He even published under Amazon's in-house brand. If he couldn't get a substantive change through, you have to be careful trying it yourself. Any time the process involves asking Amazon to make an exception for you, you're in tricky waters.
How do you avoid Amazon's duplicate content flag?
Thomas: From Amazon's perspective, people uploading the same book over and over is classic spam, carpet bombing the ecosystem with the same thing. How do you keep your upload from getting flagged as duplicate content, especially with a second edition that has a new ISBN and a new cover but much of the same core content?
Julie: You have to clearly indicate that it's a second edition.
Thomas: This is a metadata issue. Nobody wants to listen to my metadata episode, but I keep harping on it because it's so important. You designate the second edition in your metadata. Do you also link it to the first edition's ISBN in the interface?
Julie: If you've made enough changes to qualify as a second edition, you'll tie them together. In general, keep everything you can the same. If you're only refreshing the cover and description, you don't need a new ISBN or a second edition label.
If you change the title, which I'd do only in very limited cases, put "previously published as" somewhere very clear. If you keep the title, put the edition number in several places. We always make "Second Edition" clear on the cover. I think it shows up in the title field, and it's definitely in the description.
You also want to deactivate the old edition. Leaving both active without a clear reason, which requires an exception from Amazon, splits your sales history and messes up your data. It can also produce angry reviews when somebody buys one edition expecting the other.
Publish the new edition, make sure it's working, and then unpublish the old one.
Donated copies like the ones in my box will still show up on Amazon through third-party sellers, but those are different listings from yours. Also, don't assume reviews will transfer. You have to contact Amazon to get them moved over.
Thomas: Turning off the old listing can be really helpful, particularly if the reviews weren't great. Maybe your book wasn't very good, and the low-star reviews were right on target. You can take the old book down, change the title, rework it so it really becomes a new book, and launch it as one.
As long as used copies are around, you can never fully get rid of the old listing, though poorly launched books often have none keeping the listing up. I have seen resellers realize they have the only copy in the world and price it at $80.00 or $200.00. The author ends up spending $200.00 to buy back the ARC that's keeping the listing alive.
Even a dormant listing won't disappear, but with so many books on Amazon, somebody has to dig deep to find one with no books for sale. Amazon doesn't want to send people to pages with nothing to buy.
Julie: They want conversions. That's all they care about.
What other Amazon mistakes should you avoid when relaunching?
Thomas: Be careful with Countdown Deals and similar promotions if it's a new book. Some techniques you use for older books go away during the first 30-day window.
The main issue, though, is duplicate content. You need to be very upfront with Amazon. You can't try any shenanigans or have the same book listed twice. You only get one ladle in the bucket, so to speak.
You can make changes to an existing print-on-demand book or e-book without creating a new edition. If you have good reviews, you can certainly fix typos, and you can make some substantive changes within Amazon's rules for manuscript updates. Amazon is pretty forgiving about tweaks to digital books. It makes them a bit of a living document, which has its positives and negatives.
Julie: Know that things change at Amazon, and your book could get rejected. Make changes when you really need to, not every time the urge strikes. We've had authors whose books did fine for eight months. Then they said, "We really have to change this one thing," and suddenly the book got rejected. The bots may decide that something you got away with before is no longer okay.
Thomas: Do you have any examples of why those books got rejected?
Julie: One issue kept coming up for a while. You used to be able to reference other bookstores in your book, sometimes even with links. Then Amazon decided, "No, you can't talk about Apple Books in here." It happened in the other direction too.
A reference doesn't have to be a "buy my books everywhere" list to cause trouble. It may be a book like mine that talks about all the places authors can sell their books. That can trigger the bots, and then you have to explain why the reference is needed.
We had a book about the Amazon River, and let me tell you, it was a whole journey getting the aggregators and other bookstores to accept it. We kept saying, "It's about the Amazon River. It's not about Amazon."
Thomas: The safe harbor is linking to your own website rather than to other bookstores. I haven't heard of an author getting dinged for linking to their own website. It's even encouraged for ancillary products, like a checklist that goes along with the book.
We recently did an episode that goes in depth on Amazon's rules for back matter, and it links to all of Amazon's ever-changing terms and conditions. You're absolutely not allowed to link to your book on a competing bookstore.
It is funny, though, that Amazon is sensitive to the word "Amazon" even when it's the river. There are many ways to land in Amazon jail that have nothing to do with your launch, and you could trip over any of them while relaunching.
Should friends and family review your relaunched book?
Julie: Getting friends and family to review the book is a mistake. This has gotten really problematic. We're seeing reviews get blocked and issues with some Amazon accounts. I don't think any accounts have been terminated or suspended over reviews, but you can lose a lot of reviews.
You may already have a bunch of great reviews when you relaunch. Then friends and family review the book, and Amazon says, "We know these people aren't at arm's length from you." Next thing you know, Amazon removes 35 reviews. You may have had only five bad ones, and now you've lost 35.
Thomas: Do you know how Amazon knows they aren't at arm's length from you? Facebook. Meta Platforms sells data to Amazon. That's why you want to avoid all launch activities on Meta platforms except pure advertising. Pure advertising is safe. Anything else is super dangerous. Don't organize your launch party on Facebook. Don't ask people to review your book on Facebook, because so much data transfers when people click through.
Facebook isn't just ineffective for marketing your book anymore. It's poisonous. If a marketing guru tells you to go on social media, don't listen. It doesn't work the way it used to, and it's bad for you psychologically. Get off Facebook. It's not your friend.
Julie: Use different email addresses too. If you use the same email address for everything, you've given them a guaranteed way to tie you to everyone you're connected with.
Thomas: I recommend a KDP account connected to your professional email address. If your name is Joe Smith, use joe@joesmith.com to sign up for a new Amazon account you use only for KDP. That sandboxes your professional life from your personal life. It also lets an assistant, a bot, or an AI agent make changes to your book without seeing your shopping history.
I've done this from the very beginning. I don't know how effective it is at sandboxing away Facebook, because they only have to connect the accounts once, but it's still good practice. If you used your main personal account, it's very difficult to untangle. Take my course How to Indie Publish Your Book before you publish, and you can avoid many costly mistakes.
Is relaunching a book cheaper than launching it?
Thomas: You don't get transfer credit. If you did something for the first launch, you still have to do it for the relaunch, plus everything you wish you'd done the first time. Relaunching isn't easier or less work. Count the cost before you do it.
Julie: Absolutely. Give yourself more time, more money, and more opportunities to get in front of your ideal readers. Going too cheap is another mistake. Authors still don't invest in the things they needed the first time around.
If you're relaunching, invest in this product. That might mean a professional cover or some of the tools you talked about. If you're putting in the energy and effort to relaunch, you obviously think the product is worth it.
Julie: We actually help nonfiction writers relaunch, so if you're writing nonfiction, come over to BookLaunchers TV. We'll help you with all the things.
When is the best time to relaunch a book?
Thomas: BookLaunchers.TV has plenty of book marketing training that leans toward nonfiction. With some creativity, novelists can borrow nonfiction techniques to sell certain kinds of fiction. It doesn't work as well for romance, but it might work for YA or religious fiction. If you can find a nonfiction motivation for your fiction, a whole new toolbox opens up.
You also have a book on how to relaunch a book. Tell us about that.
Julie: We have Self-Promote & Succeed (affiliate link). It's not specific to relaunching, but it's very specific to nonfiction book marketing and platform building.
Thomas: Relaunching isn't for everyone, but for some people, it's the thing that gets them unstuck. I think most people who try to relaunch would be better served by writing a new book and launching it well.
Choosing not to relaunch now doesn't mean you can't relaunch later. If your cover is three years out of date, it's only three years out of date. In 10 years, it will be 13 years out of date. The cost to refresh it will be the same, but the benefit will be bigger because you're going from bell-bottoms to whatever came after bell-bottoms.
The longer you wait, the bigger the advantage, unless your book falls out of sync with the culture. Run it through the Zeitgeist Vibe Checker to see how in sync it is.
What final tips do you have for authors wondering about relaunching?
Julie: My final tip is always that the missing piece is action. Nothing will happen if you sit there and think about it. Whatever your gut is pulling you toward, whether it's writing the new book, relaunching, or producing a second edition, go do it.
Connect with Julie Broad
- JulieBroad.com
- BookLaunchers.com
- BookLaunchers TV
- Self-Promote & Succeed (affiliate link)
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Darlene Corbett, author of Mesmerize (affiliate link)
In a globe-trotting romance spanning Las Vegas, Boston, and Dubai, one woman discovers that the most important story she'll ever tell is the truth about her own heart, but will it be enough to reclaim the love she threw away?
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