To have a successful book launch, you need to set some goals. Without knowing what you want to accomplish from publishing your book, you’ll inevitably become disappointed. Outlining what you want from your book release will go a long way in making your launch the best it can be.

The goals you make don’t have to be anything special or really out there. Depending on what you want to accomplish, your goals can be small or large in scale. Every set of goals will be different.

For my launch, I decided what I wanted from my book launch was to make the money I spent back. Not even to necessarily make a profit. Do I want to make a profit? Hell yeah. But more than anything, I want to make the money I invested into my book back.

Self-published authors in general do not make a ton of money. Even if they have written multiple books, self-published authors struggle to sell more than a few copies of their books. It’s even worse when it’s their first book because they are unproven, and are essentially asking people to take a chance on them and their work.

All of this and more is why I’m not setting higher expectations for Living Rent Free In My Head. Selling thousands of copies would be fantastic, but it would take a miracle for that to happen. Instead, I decided to keep things as simple as possible.

I spent $491 on my book, through a combination of editing, marketing, etc. So, I wanted to make my money back. Any money I made after the fact was a bonus. With this in mind, I did some math and figured out how many copies of my book I would need to sell so I could make my money back.

Keep in mind, that I’m selling Living Rent Free In My Head through 5 methods. It’s being sold as a Kindle eBook, Kindle Paperback, Draft2Digital eBook (aka book vendors that are not Amazon), Barnes & Noble Paperback, and Lulu Paperback (aka book vendors that are not Amazon or Barnes & Noble). By selling my book in these different ways, I have multiple ways I can make my money back.

Taking the $491 I spent and the royalties I get from selling Living Rent Free In My Head. The following information explains what I need to sell to make my original investment back.

• Sell 168 Kindle Ebooks or…
• Sell 135 Kindle Paperbacks or…
• Sell 207 Draft2Digital Ebooks or…
• Sell 138 Barnes & Noble Paperbacks or…
• Sell 277 Lulu Paperbacks

Completing any of these goals will return my investment. If I can complete any one of these tasks, I will consider my book launch to be a success. I think these are pretty good goals. None of them are too ambitious, but they would be great numbers for a debut book.

I plan on updating you guys on these goals after the launch. It wouldn’t quite be in the near future, as I want to give myself enough time to gather data on book sales. But once I do, I will inform you guys if I accomplish any of these or not.