AuthorAZ

Operational Sequences

KU-First 90-Day Loop & Wide-First 6-Month Loop

Lesson 4 of 10 · 2 min · Updated 3 September 2026

Two operational sequences, one per self-publishing base path. Work through your own; ignore the other. Tick each gate off as you clear it — a gate is not "mostly done", and gate 3 is meaningless until gate 2 has actually passed.

If you have not been assigned a path yet, run the Path Router first.

KU-First — 4 Gates

Path 1 — KU-First

  1. Day 0

    Baseline

    No ads yet. Observe organic conversion before you pay for traffic.

    • Cover reads as its genre at thumbnail size
    • Blurb hook lands in the first two sentences
    • Look Inside opens on the story, not on eight pages of front matter
    • Metadata sanity-checked against the Priority Stack

  2. Day 14

    Conversion

    Diagnose in this order. Each answer points at exactly one fix.

    • Getting clicks? If no — fix the cover
    • Clicks converting to reads? If no — fix the blurb
    • KU pages trickling in? If no — fix keywords and categories

  3. Day 30

    Paid Promotion

    Only start if strangers are already buying. Ads amplify a working page; they do not repair a broken one.

    • Amazon ads at $5–10/day
    • Goal is visibility, not profit — 70–100% ACOS is fine this early
    • Stop any keyword with spend and no sales after 14 days

  4. Day 60

    Scale Decision

    • Scale only what is already profitable
    • Decide KU renewal against going Wide, on the data rather than the mood
    • Document what you learned while you still remember it
    • Plan the next book

Wide-First — 3 Gates

Path 2 — Wide-First

  1. Week 1

    Distribution

    Keep the launch surface small. Every extra platform is another thing to maintain before you know what works.

    • KDP (wide) and one aggregator live
    • Pricing consistent across every platform
    • Basic email capture in the back matter
    • Skip for now: IngramSpark, multiple social accounts

  2. Month 2

    Platform Signal

    • Confirm non-Amazon sales actually exist
    • Test Apple Books features and Kobo promotions
    • Build relationships with genre newsletters
    • Document what moves units where — the answer differs by genre

  3. Month 4–6

    Promo Stack

    • Two or three reliable promo channels identified
    • Add IngramSpark only if bookstore and library distribution is a real goal
    • Consider audiobook if the budget genuinely allows it

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