Last spring I watched a mid-size publisher blow through their entire Q2 marketing budget by March 15th. Not because they didn’t budget—it’s not just the rushless publishers don’t plan—they actually did more planning than most. The problem was that their budget only survived for what you saw coming: ad spend, review copies, maybe a book tour.
They didn’t budget for the chaos. The chaos cost them an additional $47,000 before summer arrived. The first thing that’s going to eat up your budget is reactive marketing and no one ever talks about it enough.
And here’s what I’m talking about. You’ve launched a book, you’ve got your plan, and then something happens. Maybe a competitor drops their book two weeks before yours.
Maybe your author says something silly on Twitter and you need a crisis PR response. Maybe—and this is the good kind of chaos—your book receives unexpected buzz and you need to get ahead of momentum you didn’t expect to have. It’s all going to cost you in ways you didn’t plan to spend.
I’ve watched publishers set a contingency of maybe 10% when they should really be closer to 25-30%. I’m not exaggerating. I have seen this happen too many times to play it down.
Platform Algorithm Changes
Platform algorithm changes will wreck your packaged ad time-frame. You spend $5,000 on Facebook ads based on your CPCs from the previous quarter. Meta makes a tweak and overnight your CPCs double. This occurred to a client of mine in January—their book launch ad campaign spent out in half the time because they’d based projections on data already outdated since the day they launched.
The Solution
Budget for the platform you have…not the platform you had. Put a 40% buffer onto any social ad spend because the numbers WILL change, and they very rarely change in your favor.
Author Availability Problems
Author availability problems are a budget line item no publisher ever budgets for.
Your author is hit with nausea during launch week. Your author’s day-job suddenly needs them 200% more. Your author refuses to do another podcast until you’ve built an entire campaign around podcasts.
Now you’re trying to come up with last-minute materials, maybe hiring someone to do appearances for the author while they stay home, maybe switching up your entire marketing plan in the middle of things. I’m not sure how to predict this one adequately, but I’ve started to recommend what I refer to as an “author contingency fund”—roughly $3,000-5,000 depending on the title’s overall importance. Feels like grief money until you need it.
The Hidden Cost: Time
My biggest cost, though, the thing that really kills a campaign: time. You staff hours on marketing rarely ever get accounted for against a campaign budget. Your marketing director spends three hours on the phone with a last-minute display planning meeting.
Your publicist emails you every day for a week trying to schedule a last-minute interview slot. These hours accumulate and because they always get buried in overhead, no one ever notices how much more a given book ends up costing to market than, say, all the budget spreadsheets say. Track staff time by campaign, even if in rough estimations.
You’re going to be horrified. But at least you’ll know.
Radical Advice
My most radical advice in this is that practically all publishers should reduce the budget that they plan to spend on marketing a certain project by about 20%, and take that money and create an unnamed contingency fund instead.
That’s where publishers get pushback. They say they are planning on doing less marketing. That’s not true.
You’re planning smarter. If you’re budgeting to plan an effective, small campaign that can still adapt to the realities that will hit it, your campaign will be more successful than planning to do the maximum you’re sure you can get away with. Because I’ve watched perfectly-orchestrated campaigns burn to the ground because there was no latitude for changes.
And changes happen. The publishers who make it through to the other side are not the ones with the best campaigns on paper. They’re the ones who budget for being wrong.