Planning my book’s 1st Anniversary…

UPDATE: I have decided to postpone these options for later, bigger anniversaries, and am going to have smaller anniversary merch going while focusing more on highlighting one of the causes my series promotes instead: anti trafficking. 🙂

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Hey y’all!

The first book in my series “The Squad: Rising” released in June of ‘25, and now we’re coming up on its first anniversary! (Or book birthday, or whatever you wanna call it. ^^)

I’ve been batting around a couple ideas to celebrate its anniversary while also giving the series another extra boost of publicity. My two main ideas were either a special edition run of the series, with fancy special edition covers, or an artbook full of concept art and other art pieces I’ve done of the characters and parts of the story (there is a lot of art. XD) I polled pretty much all the communities I’m in who would be interested, and a small amount of people has so far unanimously voted for… both. 🤣

Given this is a small anniversary and probably won’t get that much hype from readers, both options being wanted at least give me the possibility of doing one idea this anniversary and the other idea another anniversary.

After looking into production costs of an artbook run, it seems like the best course of action would be running a Kickstarter for it (with some fun stickers and maybe even signed copies of book one as bonuses). I haven’t figured out every cost yet, but it would be close to $800 for a run of just 20 art books. (I have a couple events I could sell leftovers at, though.) But my readership is still growing, and to be honest I don’t know how many people will currently want an art book enough to back a Kickstarter to completion.

On that same note, I’m not sure if the series is ready for fancy special edition covers to celebrate one year of publication—that seems like something most series get for anniversary editions after five or ten years. It would be a cheaper option… but I would need to look into how to publish special edition sets while being locked to Amazon as a seller. I’m not sure how easy that process would go.

I am planning on running some sales, too. But I wanted to do something a bit bigger to garner a little more attention. Thoughts on these options? Ideas that I may have missed?

Thanks!!