Book marketing doesn’t have to be overwhelming, and thanks to LaunchMaster, it no longer is. In this episode, Juliet Clark talks with Kathleen Kaiser, co-founder of ProBookLaunch and president of the Writers and Publishers Network, about how their new AI-powered tool helps authors simplify book marketing, improve Amazon visibility, and reclaim time to focus on writing. From generating media kits and social posts to optimizing keywords and categories, LaunchMaster streamlines the entire process with precision and professionalism. Kathleen also shares expert insights on the latest Amazon algorithm changes, how to adapt your book’s metadata for better rankings, and why small adjustments can make a big difference in sales. Whether you’re a debut author or managing a backlist, this conversation shows how innovation and experience can turn book marketing into a seamless and successful system.
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How LaunchMaster Simplifies Book Marketing And Boosts Amazon Sales
“Book Marketing Workflow Innovation”
Our guest is one of our panelists for the book innovation panel that’ll be happening in December 2025. We are excited about people who are renovating and upgrading the book marketing world because it has needed it for a very long time. Our guest is Kathleen Kaiser. Her journey through the dynamic landscapes of marketing, technology, and the arts spans over five decades.
Beginning as a music journalist and transitioning to publicity, Kathleen has left her mark on the most exhilarating industries of her generation. Her career has been a remarkable evolution from the electrifying world of rock and roll in the late ‘60s and ‘70s to the transformative digital and internet revolution of the late ‘80s, ‘90s, and ‘00s.
She is the president of the Writers and Publishers Network, a national literary nonprofit, and a frequent conference speaker. Throughout her career, Kathleen’s words have graced publications in the United States, Japan, the UK, and Italy. In addition, she’s the author of 5 published books, 4 dedicated to the music industry, a novel, and a collection of plays.
She launched the engaging podcast, Talking Book Publishing with Kathleen Kaiser, in March 2021, co-hosted with poet and book marketer Adanna Moriarty, with whom she is Cofounder of ProBookLaunch, a new book marketing assistant tool. That’s what we’re going to talk about in this episode, so stay tuned for my interview with Kathleen.
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Kathleen, welcome. I’m so excited to talk about your new product.
Thank you very much, and thank you for having me.
How did you and Adanna Moriarty identify the need for LaunchMaster? What specific pain were the authors experiencing that you kept hearing over and over?
It wasn’t just that. We started developing it for ourselves because we’re book marketers. We were trying to speed up our workflow. Adanna started it because I was having her write the media kits. You have to be exactly this many words and everything else. Her husband said, “Why don’t you try it? You’ve been struggling with that for the last three days.” She put up what she had written, played with it, and sent it to me. I go, “This is good. What’d you do?”
We started working with it in 2023 to improve our workflow. She went to college and got certified in web design, so she understands the back end of a lot of stuff and can do a little coding. She did it for herself, but it was contained, so she could be working on different authors’ work over and over. It was all inside there based on their full manuscript.
She found that there was a way you could mark a box on ChatGPT so that it can’t take the material you upload and use it to learn from. They can’t learn from it. It’s protected. She was doing that with our work. When we started implementing it in 2024, our sales started going up for our clients. We were getting better keywords. We were getting better categories. The descriptions were fitting because LaunchMaster, the name of the product, would go out and say, “These are the hot keywords right now. Amazon fit your book and gave it to us.”
It was something we were using. I said, “This is a product.” There are other people who can’t afford to hire us but have good books. They send them to me and I read them. They’re like, “I don’t have any money. I can’t do anything,” but I’m like, “This is good.” I said, “Let’s turn it into something.” We worked on it for about a year and a half, and we kept doing better and better with it.
ProBookLaunch Revolutionizes Author Marketing
We launched in January 2025. Two weeks later, Amazon said they were changing all the algorithms. Classic great timing. We waited. We pulled back. We started talking with all of our other friends who work with algorithms at Amazon. We were like, “What are you hearing?” When they released it in June 2025, we were all ready. Adanna had all of her friends who were 30 years younger than me, and they were all playing with the algorithms. We figured it out, and she made all of the changes. She figured out what it was doing.
They announced in July 2025 that they were changing the ranking. That was also something, but that was more of a different thing. What we did was we needed help to speed up our workflow. I know most authors, because I am one, don’t want to sit around and do all that writing. How do you do a synopsis of your book in 500 words or less? How do you know if it’s catchy? How do you know if you’re using the right keywords and using the right dynamic verbs that will grab readers’ attention and make them want to read your book? We said, “If we put this out as a product, it could help them do about 80% of the marketing work that’s essential to their sales.”
We started a company called ProBookLaunch. LaunchMaster is our main thing. We also have email lists for reviewers that they can get data-assigned templates for media kit one-sheets that are attractive and eye-catching. LaunchMaster writes all the stuff for your media kit, too. Plus, the other thing authors don’t like doing most of the time is social media. It will write social media posts and give you the active hashtags at this time that relate to your post. We put all of this into it. You fill out a questionnaire, if you’re having a book signing or something, upload that, and it will write a press release for you. It’s a full cycle of a lot of stuff that takes a lot of time.
Having done this my entire career in different industries, but always being in publicity and marketing, you work on those subject lines. You have to have the right ones. What we did was we had it give three. Which one do you think will appear? LaunchMaster will catch eyes, but then we do it. We started getting higher opens on stuff and different things. It was very exciting.
We did it to help people. It streamlines your workflow. Instead of spending your time writing all this stuff, researching all of it, going through all of these things, and trying to put together a media list, we’ve got it all here for you. You can spend your time sending emails to podcasters. You can spend your time and open up MailChimp or MailerLite and send out press releases. We’re like, “Here’s the list you upload and send it to.” If they want to buy a regional list for the media and where they live within a 50-mile radius, we include that, so that they can go ahead and send them out. We try to speed it up so they have more time to start writing again while they’re still marketing their book.
“AI Revolutionizes Publishing Process”
That is amazing. I’m a publisher, so I go through that same series of things that you’re talking about. We have our own program that does it a little bit differently. It’s amazing what you can do with AI and being able to streamline everything that used to take us hours before. We did that with the Audience Accelerator as well. We did it for us, and then we were like, “This is a product.”
It’s amazing once you get into it and realize that what you’re doing has so much value to someone who maybe can’t afford your one-on-one products but can go get the same results. That is amazing. What’s the typical workflow for an author using LaunchMaster from start to finish? What are they going to do in that process?
If they visit ProBookLaunch.com, we have a video. It takes six minutes to run the entire thing. You start by uploading your manuscript, and it writes a synopsis of your book. This is, to me, the most important point. You read it and make sure it’s emphasizing the things you want emphasized. With one, it kept emphasizing a brother, but the author wanted the ex-lover to be more important than her brother. I say, “Rewrite it, emphasizing the ex-lover, not the brother,” and it would rewrite it. It’s like, “Now, this is the basis of what we’re going to work from.”
It then writes your back cover copy. The next thing it does is write your Amazon description. It gives you three different lead lines that are attuned to the A10 Amazon algorithm. You can use those in other places. It’s good. It gives you your keywords for Amazon. It gives you your categories and various subcategories that are highly competitive, less used, but might get you higher in the rankings and stuff like that.
We then go into IngramSpark, coming up with IngramSpark’s categories. We found the description for Amazon works on IngramSpark, too, so there is no need to change it. It comes up with social media postings for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X. There are five of them. It comes up with hashtags. You can go back in and say, “This week, compare my book to this news story.” It’ll write you hashtags and postings. It can create graphics for Instagram and stuff.
You go from there, and then you fill out the form. It’ll put together everything for your media kit, the author bio, and all of that stuff. It’ll put it all together for you. It’ll also put together the press release if you need to do that. It takes you through all those steps, and it takes six minutes. All you have to do is read what it says and say yes or no. If it’s no, tell it what you want changed. If it’s yes, it goes on to the next one.
Can you go back? Let’s say that my book isn’t out yet, but I want to start building my platform. Can I keep going in and having it write continuously so it’s not just a one-shot?
Use it over and over.
That’s amazing. How user-friendly is it? I find that a lot of authors are not that tech-savvy. Is it something that even someone who’s not very tech-savvy can easily work with? It sounds like with yes or no, probably, it is.
We’ve done a video and we’ve done a step-by-step with illustrations on how to open up the ChatGPT-5 Pro or Plus account. They keep changing it. You set that up, and then we show you how to add LaunchMaster. We have videos on it. If you’re a reader or a visual learner, you can do it, and then you upload your manuscript. It’s basically yes or no.
That is amazing. What specific marketing assets can LauchMaster generate? It sounds like it’s pretty customizable for the genres. If I am an author who maybe has a couple of different genres I write in, can it handle those different genres in different books?
Yeah, because it works from one manuscript. The Opium Lord’s Daughter, I uploaded that manuscript once, but I have worked on it over and over. I added things and changed things. They always work like that. It can keep doing it. For the next book, you upload that manuscript, and you have everything sitting there inside LaunchMaster of everything you’ve done with that. You can copy it. It will export it as a Word document. The other thing that we’ve done on each of these steps is to explain why this is important.
That’s very good, because a lot of these people don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing.
Understanding The “Why” In Marketing
Most people have never had anything to do with marketing in their lives. We put, “Why is this important?” I thought people need to understand why they’re doing this, or why it’s like this. I’m a why person. I want to know why this is happening and why this is working. That’s what we did. You can walk all the way through it.
If you want to keep the why parts, you have to copy them out because when it exports it as a Word document, it drops all of that. We can’t get it to include them. It’s stubborn. The fact is, the more you run stuff with it inside the program for that book, the more it gets adjusted to what you like. It’s learning all the time. It’s learning what you like and what is going on. This one book I’m doing is a historical fiction novel, but it also has a great romance. I said, “Let’s pitch the romance side. Let’s come up with a romance approach for this, that, and everything.” It redid all of it, emphasizing the romance in the story.
That’s very nice. This is not limited to new authors. If you were an author with a backlist, you could bring that in and probably refresh everything that you had. Maybe if you published a few years ago, you’re getting those new hot keywords and what people are looking for.
Here’s the other thing. I had lunch with two authors at the end of August 2025. They said, “My July sales dropped off.” These are women who have sold hundreds of thousands of books. I said, “Have you changed your description for the new algorithms?”
They’re like, “A new description? A new algorithm?”
I’ve been trying to tell people about it because it makes a difference. We’ve gone back to almost all of our clients and asked if it’d be okay if we updated their stuff. They all wanted it, and they’re picking up again. You’ve got to get into it. The one thing that’s odd that Amazon did is on ranking. Before, every hour, they updated your ranking, sales ranking, the top three categories, and everything. Now, they’re doing it once a day. They started it on the 1st of July, 2025. We had a book coming out on July 11th. We never even got a ranking.” It came out on Thursday. It took until Tuesday to get all three categories. It was selling. It started taking off. It’s a much slower launch on Amazon.
Changing your descriptions for the new algorithms makes a difference. Share on XThat’s interesting. I like that, though, because there’s nothing more irritating than having to check every hour, like they were doing before. It’s never on the hour. It’s delayed hours. You never know.
Who knows what time of day they were doing those? You never know. You want to go in. Especially if you’re a number one new release or something, you want to grab all of those screen grabs of all of that verification. It’s important. It’s much slower. This makes launching a lot better.
I would think it was, too. I haven’t done a bestseller campaign since they’ve changed it over. We’re starting them again. It would make it much easier to screen grab. It always felt so artificial to do a campaign where we’re all going to open at the same hour. It seemed silly.
Thursday Launches For Small Publishers
That’s why I always launch on Thursdays. The big houses launch on Tuesday, so they’ve grabbed all the oxygen out of the air for Tuesday and Wednesday. I like Thursdays. It’s a little bit better. It’s interesting. The other thing you were saying for authors with bad catalogs is that this is also a program for small publishers. We have a pro version of it. It’s a little more expensive, but then they can do their multiple books. For small people, with the time you spent writing all that stuff, it speeds it up.
Everything that is AI-generated does that. The Superbrand Audience Accelerator used to take me a day to write all the information that’s in it. It’s amazing how much all of this speeds up and streamlines what we’re doing as professionals. When we first started using AI, I felt like I wasn’t working because I suddenly had more hours in my day. It was like, “What am I going to fill those with?” You probably experienced the same thing. Once you get the hang of it, you’re like, “I can fit so much more in.”
“Reviving Creativity: Novel Writing”
That’s why I’m back, working on my second novel, because I’ve had enough time. I’m doing it because we wanted time. Adanna is a poet. She has stuff she wants. She’s had a couple of volumes. We’re authors also in our hearts, so we understand this will help so much. It drives sales. It drives eyeballs. If you’re going to run an Amazon ad campaign, an eBook campaign, or something like that, that’s the other thing.
You can ask it, like, “I’m doing an eBook campaign. I need a 300-character, a 650-character, and a 900-character.” It’ll write them for you. When you upload them, instead of sitting around counting the letters, you can go to Word and go to character count. That took so long to do, but it was essential to the eBook promotions. It pops them out.
It’s crazy. I see a lot of AI programs popping up. Have you seen others that you particularly like? I’m buying them and trying them here and there. I have to say, a lot of them I haven’t been impressed with. They need improvement. Let’s say that.
For a lot of them, I think they had AI create it.
I never even thought of that because with outs, it was something we were already doing. We just fed in the task. As a publisher, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if AI could generate the formatting and I could get rid of the formatters?” I tried one of the new programs, and I was like, “This is awful-looking.”
That’s another thing. What Adanna coded into this is that it follows everything in the Chicago Manual of Style. It’s doing things correctly. It’s got the Oxford commas and all those things that drive a lot of people crazy. What we’re giving them is the professional level of stuff we give our clients. They’re producing for themselves, so it has to be correct. I like Grammarly. Everything I open up, it types in Grammarly for some reason. I’m getting everything done. These tools are out there. They’re tools. They’re not taking away your creativity. You have to be creative, in a way, but marketing is a science. This is a tool for people who haven’t spent their lives marketing to do.
As an author, you have to be creative, in a way, but marketing is a science. Share on XMarketing Is A Science
Do you know what’s interesting? People don’t realize that it’s a science. It’s trial and error like science. A lot of times, they’ll have the first campaign, and it won’t work. They want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We have to go through it and tell them, “It’s probably a little tweak here or there that’ll make a big difference.” It’s not something that hits every time. A lot of times, you’ve got the right stuff, but you’re in front of the wrong audience.
That’s because your keywords are wrong. Maybe your categories are wrong. Something is off, so have an assistant like LaunchMaster go out there and do this for you. It gives you options. You can select the ones you want. It gives you ten short keywords or long phrases. There are different kinds you can use. You select the ones you think are it. It doesn’t do that for you, but it gives you the best.
Let me go back to that for a minute. I know a lot of you run keywords. You don’t run long phrases or long keywords. A lot of times, those can make a huge difference. If you’re not in the industry, you don’t even realize that that’s something you can use in there.
Fifty-seven percent of people who buy a book on Amazon have no idea what they’re going to buy when they enter Amazon. They just put in searching for something. That’s all the keywords. You’ve got to be able to talk to those. The longer phrases are often what people type in.
It sounds like this could be the difference between you being 5 pages back or being on those front 2 pages. Believe me when I tell you, most people don’t go past those first two pages. They hardly ever do so. Where can we find this and find you if we want to know more or purchase it?
It’s all at ProBookLaunch.com. That’s our company. If you go there, you’ll see a demonstration of it. Adanna and I’ve made videos of it. It gives you a lot of help. You can purchase it there. We’re welcome to have you there. If you want to contact me, I’m Kathleen@KathleenKaiser.com. Tell me you knew me on Juliet Clark’s show. Put that in the subject line. You’ve got to catch my eye because of the 200 or 300 emails I get.
Book Innovation Event Announcement
I know. We get a lot of emails. Thank you so much for sharing this. I love that we’ve got innovators coming along that are renovating this whole book world because it needed it. The marketing end of this has needed this for a long time. Also, if you don’t know, we have a December 2025 event coming up. It’s a book innovation event. Kathleen is going to be one of our speakers. You’ll get a chance to ask her questions about this towards the end of that panel discussion. Kathleen, thank you so much.
Thank you.
Important Links
- Kathleen Kaiser
- Kathleen@KathleenKaiser.com
- Talking Book Publishing with Kathleen Kaiser
- ProBookLaunch – use the discount code: PBL20
- Writers and Publishers Network
- The Opium Lord’s Daughter
About Kathleen Kaiser
Kathleen Kaiser’s journey through the dynamic landscapes of marketing, technology, and the arts spans over five decades. Beginning as a music journalist and transitioning to publicity, Kathleen has left her mark on the most exhilarating industries of her generation. Her career has been a remarkable evolution from the electrifying world of rock and roll in the late 60s and 70s to the transformative digital and internet revolution of the late 80s, 90s, and 00s. She is President of the Writers & Publishers Network, a national literary nonprofit, and a frequent conference speaker. Throughout her career, Kathleen’s words have graced publications in the United States, Japan, the UK, and Italy. In addition, she is the author of five published books, four dedicated to the music industry, a novel, and a collection of plays. She launched the engaging podcast, “Talking Book Publishing with Kathleen Kaiser,” in March 2021, now co-hosted with poet and book marketer Adanna Moriarty, with whom she is co-founder of ProBookLaunch, a new book marketing assistant tool.
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