5 checks every ebook marketing plan needs before launch

What to take away

An ebook marketing plan fails where a claim outruns the file behind it. These five checks sit between the finished manuscript and the first paid impression. Run them in order: rights, identifiers, delivery file, accessibility metadata, tracking.

Check 1: rights and territory

Confirm you hold the rights you are about to sell: text, images, quotations, and fonts. That includes the territories named in each contract. Write the edition number, owner, and approval date at the top of the record.

If a contract excludes a market, the retailer list has to exclude it too. A book sold where you hold no rights is a takedown and a refund, not a sale.

Permission for quotations often routes through the Copyright Clearance Center, which issues per-use licenses. A desktop font license does not automatically cover embedding in an EPUB. Amazon's KDP Select requires 90 days of digital exclusivity, so a title enrolled there cannot sit beside a rival store's edition.

Check 2: identifiers and metadata

Every edition needs its own ISBN, and the metadata attached to it has to match the file. Title, subtitle, contributors, language, and subject codes travel to retailers as structured fields. A mismatch between the store page and the book is what readers see first.

In the United States, Bowker is the ISBN agency. A single ISBN typically runs about $125 and a block of ten about $295. Free ISBNs handed out by a store's own program usually tie that record to the one store.

BISAC and Thema subject codes drive shelf placement, and larger publishers ship ONIX feeds instead of typing records into each store dashboard.

Fix the metadata before the file ships. Changing a title or contributor after retailers have ingested the record means re-supplying it to each one, and some stores cache longer than others.

Check 3: the delivered file

Upload the release candidate and open it through the seller's own preview or delivery path. Buy a live copy where practical and record the file hash; SHA-256 is enough.

KDP's Kindle Create guide says its Previewer shows tablet, e-reader, and phone views, and directs authors to verify contents links and navigation. Repeat the same pass for every other store and format you sell through, and check at several text sizes rather than one.

EPUBcheck flags structural errors before a retailer rejects the upload, and Calibre's viewer shows how reflow behaves at the smallest text size a reader can pick. Aggregators such as Draft2Digital and IngramSpark push one file to several stores, so one bad file reaches all of them.

Check 4: accessibility metadata

The W3C EPUB Accessibility 1.1 recommendation defines conformance and discoverability requirements for EPUB publications. Test the actual publication and report the result accurately.

Using EPUB, or adding accessibility metadata, does not make content accessible. The metadata tells a buyer what to expect; the test tells you whether it is true. Accessibility metadata is one of the ebook marketing benchmarks worth defining before you compare stores or formats.

Ace by DAISY reads the file and reports accessibility problems, and EPUBcheck flags missing or malformed accessibility metadata. EPUB Accessibility 1.1 builds on WCAG, with conformance claims usually made at level AA. A screen reader pass in NVDA or VoiceOver is the practical way to confirm reading order and alt text.

Check 5: tracking and claims

Define paid, free, refunded, subscribed, and net activity before launch day:

A refund spike read as a sales spike is worse than no dashboard.

Named sources disagree by design. Amazon KDP reports, a spreadsheet built from KDP's CSV exports, or a tool such as BookReport counts a purchase differently from Meta Ads Manager, which records a click seven days back by default.

Tag campaign links with UTM parameters in Google Analytics 4 so store sales and ad clicks line up at all.

Link each marketing claim to evidence you can show a reviewer. Get permission and disclosure right for email, reviewers, partners, and affiliates. The W3C Privacy Principles statement warns against shifting privacy work onto individuals, so decide what the campaign collects and why before it ships.

A worked example

Say a launch sells 400 copies at $9.99 and 60 come back as refunds inside the window. Gross is 400 times $9.99. Net is 340 times $9.99, minus the platform's per-transaction fee on all 400, since refunded transactions still carry a fee on most platforms.

Substitute your own refund rate, price, and fee, and check the platform's current published schedule for the fee that applies to digital goods.

On Amazon's 70% royalty plan, a $9.99 title pays about $6.99 before a delivery charge based on file size, and that plan applies only between $2.99 and $9.99. If net revenue after refunds and fees does not cover the campaign spend, the launch is not ready.

Record the gate result

For each of the five checks, record one of four outcomes. The outcomes are pass, fail, not applicable, or accepted exception. Also record the evidence location, reviewer, and date. Stop the release when a mandatory rights, file, privacy, or accessibility condition fails, even if the other four pass.

The CISA software acquisition fact sheet raises supply-chain and vulnerability questions for acquired software. Treat those as questions for your vendors, not as local approval.

Set the next review date and name the change that triggers an earlier one. A new edition, format, distributor, or material metadata edit reopens all five checks. The online course marketing checklist uses the same gate structure for a different product.

Common questions

Who owns these five checks?

The publisher or product owner holds the record, with named approvers for rights, file quality, access, and marketing claims. One owner per check beats a shared document nobody signs.

Must every retailer be tested?

Test every material channel and market, starting with the paths most readers use. Seller-specific preview tools differ enough that one store's pass says little about another's.

When does the gate reopen?

On every new edition, format, distributor, or substantive metadata change, and before any campaign that makes a new claim. A price change alone does not reopen it, but a territory change does.