Planning a virtual book launch, Part 2; no hair left but was it worth it?

Barbara here, still alive to tell the tale. This post is the sequel to my Part 1 post two weeks ago, which you can find by scrolling through past posts. Today I talk about the invitation process, because that's where I lost most of my hair, and the actual event itself. So there I was; two weeks before the launch, I had designed a spiffy Eventbrite invitation, with the graphic courtesy of my publisher, I had bought a 100-participant  Zoom webinar package on top of the Zoom Pro Plan (for one month), and I had designed and scheduled the Zoom Webinar.

Eventbrite claimed it could generate an email campaign to send invitations to all my email contacts, and it could also interface with Facebook and Twitter to allow me to invite friends on social media sites. Having invitations delivered by both email and Facebook was important because I have friends and readers in both places. Email first. It turns out I needed to design an exciting email to catch their attention, which contained a link to the main Eventbrite invitation. More work! Fortunately they had a template which I could customize. So far so good. Then I had to send it out via my "subscriber lists", of which I had none. If I had Mail Chimp or Excel or other email list, I could import it, but it didn't like my jumbled mess of contacts. So one by one, I went through my contacts and entered their emails in my newly created subscriber list. Hours later, I had created three subscriber lists. One for local contacts, another for the rest of Canada, and a third for international friends. I figured splitting them up might save me time in the future. The good news is that Eventbrite saves these lists, so if I ever need them again, there they are! But this is not the time to ask if I'll ever use them again.

So I sent the emails out to the lists and turned my attention to social media. Twitter was a piece of cake. Eventbrite supplied a Twitter URL which I simply included in a tweet and off it went into the twittersphere. Facebook was where I lost most of my hair. Eventbrite said it had a seamless interface with Facebook, but they need to look "seamless" up in the dictionary. First, it wouldn't post it to my personal page, where most of my friends and readers hang out, but only to my author page. So it created an Eventbrite announcement that went on my author page, which almost no one looks at and which is almost impossible to navigate. I knew no one would see it there. I hunted around on the site and in the invitation, and finally found a way to "invite friends". So I went through my friend list and selected all those I thought might be interested. When I got through that task, Facebook gave me an error message so I had to do it all over again, breaking it into smaller groups.

Pressed share, and waited to see what happened. Nothing. By this time I had discovered that on my Eventbrite page, I could see each ticket "sold". Quite a few emailed invitations had been viewed and tickets "purchased." Facebook? Nada. I emailed a few friends whom I'd been using as guinea pigs, and one said there was nothing on her FB page and no alert, but she had found the invitation hiding in her Facebook notifications. Who checks their notifications? Not me. So then I posted notices (several over time) on my personal and author pages for friends to check notifications for their Eventbrite invite. An even sillier complication? The Facebook post on my author page gave people the option of clicking "going" "interested", etc. Numerous people had clicked "going", but that did absolutely nothing to get them a ticket. They needed to click on the "find ticket" button buried further down. So I posted more notices on my personal page to clarify the distinction. Bottom line? Eventbrite needs to improve their Facebook interface.

Was I ready for the event now? All running smoothly? Not quite. In the first twenty-four hours, I had "sold" half of the 100 tickets I could fit in my Webinar. And that was even before I invited on Facebook. I knew not everyone wold actually show up, but I didn't want people turned away, so I decided I had to buy a bigger Webinar package. The next size up was 500 participants, which was overkill, but given that I wasn't paying for a room, for food, or other launch costs, I went for it. I won't bore you with the details of trying to "chat" with the Zoom bots; suffice to say I needed an extra big glass of wine by the time I had made the switchover without destroying the existing webinar I had set up.

Once all that was done, I breathed easier and even designed a PowerPoint slide show to welcome people and entertain them while attendees joined in. In the end, 227 people bought tickets and 135 joined in on the night. Rick, my daughter, a tech savvy friend, and I had several practice sessions to make sure the settings were right, the chat and Q&A were enabled properly, the view was correct, and the lighting good. Even so, I chewed my nails. The event itself was a blast, and the feedback afterwards was gratifying.

Many people commented how much they liked the intimate, in-depth, conversational format and the fact they could tune in from home even if they were thousands of kilometres away. They even said they'd prefer this virtual format even when in-person events are allowed again. I enjoyed the hour but I did miss the personal contact. Launches are usually a chance to see old friends again and share some laughs, and it was very unsatisfying to talk into the green light of the camera instead. But I'm very glad that most people seemed to really enjoy it.

There were some technical glitches. Some people couldn't get it, some couldn't sign into Eventbrite on the night and others couldn't find the Zoom URL. Others just said it didn't work. I'm really sorry for these glitches, and sorry people missed out, but so much is out of our control when it comes to technology. 

The verdict? It was worth it. My hair and finger nails will grow back. Now, if only I'd remembered to record it!

Planning a virtual book launch; Part 1, hair tearing and panic attacks

Today, as you read this, the United States and most of the world are collectively holding our breath, hoping for peace while fearing the worst as one of the most momentous shifts in power takes place. I don't yet know how it will turn out, but my thoughts are with the United States today.

But meanwhile, closer to home and on a much more trivial scale, I have been wrestling with my own drama over the past two weeks. That is when I began planning the virtual launch of my latest book, which has landed with a soundless thud smack in the middle of the pandemic dead zone. How hard can it be? I asked myself. I've done lots of Zoom meetings and chats over the past year, some small and personal, others more formal. I've even hosted the odd friend meeting. 

Hah.

The first challenge was how to invite people. I have a disorganized contact list of emails that includes everything from my plumber to the fan who wrote to me from New Mexico. I have no newsletter, no mail chimp, no quick and easy way to separate out the plumber from the fan. As well, I needed to send out the invitations at least two weeks in advance in order to give people enough time to block it into their calendar, but two weeks is a long time to keep track of that Zoom invite if their inbox is as chaotic as mine. So I consulted Google and Facebook friends, and settled on the Eventbrite solution. Eventbrite keeps track of registrants and sends out reminders, and most importantly, it's FREE if the event is free.

I tackled Eventbrite, bringing my knowledge from about 0% to approximately 25% in a couple of days and designing an invitation. There were step by step instructions, and the chance to preview my efforts along the way. Next I needed to somehow link it to a Zoom event so that registrants would receive the link to access the event. I knew I had to test this invitation and its Zoom link to make sure it all worked right before I launched it out into the world, so I created a dummy event – a Zoom meeting – which I inserted into the invite, and then I sent it out to a few close friends to see whether the whole thing worked. It did, and we had a brief Zoom meeting to discuss problems that were encountered. Not many, other than the tedious business of setting up an Eventbrite account and registering. But as my friends pointed out, almost every online business requires you set up an account nowadays, so that shouldn't deter people.

Next I had to set up the actual real Zoom event. Oy. I had no idea how many people would actually attend, but the beauty of a virtual event is that people can tune in from all around the world. I have friends and family, and hopefully unknown fans, all over. I wanted to invite everyone I could think of who might be interested (although not the plumber). 50 people might come, or 150 people. Who knew? I have been to Zoom meetings with 50 little thumbnail faces all over the screen. It doesn't work. It also wouldn't work to have 50 people trying to talk at once. Reluctantly I realized I would need to mute the attendees and hide their videos, so the audience would only see and hear me. Which would be incredibly boring. So I opted instead for an interview format and asked my friend and thriller writer Rick Mofina to interview me.

Once I decided on a two-person interview plus Q&A, I decided that one hour was the perfect length for the event. Shorter, and you can't say all the fascinating things you want to. Longer, and the audience's eyes begin to glaze over. And the date and time was also important. What hour would be convenient for most people, considering this would go across time zones? I settled on 7 pm. Here in the east, most people would be finishing their supper but not yet asleep in front of the TV. On the west coast, it would be 4 pm, at the end of the major work day but before supper. Cocktail hour. I did get notices from across the pond saying it's 2 am for us here, for which I'm sorry. You can't accommodate everyone, as the Olympics found out.

Next I started to research how to set up a Zoom meeting for this format. Google, YouTube, tech contacts, and Facebook friends put in their two cents. It was suggested I could hire a tech person, but being an author with all the financial limitations that entails, I thought, how hard can it be? In the end, I realized I needed a Zoom Webinar, not a Zoom Meeting. So I set about learning everything I could about Zoom Webinars in two days. Time was getting short. I watched three live training sessions on Zoom (all free) and read through their guides and step-by step instructions. First of all, I needed to purchase the appropriate Zoom plan (the free basic 40-minute one wasn't going to cut it). I settled on the cheapest Webinar package for 100 participants which, added to the Zoom Pro Plan, brought the cost to about $75 CAD. I bought only one license, because only one person can be a host at a time. But I could assign co-host duties to someone else (my lucky daughter, in Toronto on her own computer) during the event so I didn't have to juggle everything myself while being interviewed.

Then I set about scheduling and configuring the Zoom webinar. Luckily the live Zoom sessions and set-by-step instructions made this a "relatively" easy part. I invited both Rick and my daughter as panelists, enabled the Q&A function, and did a couple of other things that I hope work. I chose "no registration required", because the attendees had already registered through Eventbrite. One of the beauties of Zoom webinars is that they allow practice sessions, so once the event is scheduled, you can do dry runs as often as you like. 

Next up came the process of sending out the invitations, running the practice session, and finally the event itself. All that is a blog post in itself, so stay tuned in two weeks for Part 2; no hair left but was it worth it?Here's the link to the Eventbrite invitation, in case you want to find out for yourself. Meanwhile, if anyone has held a virtual book launch, or attended one, I'd love to hear your thoughts.