The book is done.
Now it needs a plan.

Six months if you can, three at minimum, and the reason is lead times rather than effort. Trade reviewers want finished copies three to five months before publication and simply will not consider a book that arrives later. Podcasts commonly book six to ten weeks out, and the good ones longer. Newsletter swaps and bookstagram features fill calendars weeks ahead. Cover reveals need a finished cover, and covers slip. None of the individual tasks are hard, but a third of them have deadlines that fall before the book feels real, which is why a visible timeline outperforms a checklist so decisively.

Four phases and their assets. Pre-launch, covering the cover reveal, the ARC campaign, trade review submissions, podcast and newsletter outreach, pre-order setup, and any pre-order incentive. Launch week, planned day by day: announcement posts, newsletter sends, live events, and the pinned thread. The long tail, meaning the three months after, where most sales actually accumulate and where almost every plan stops existing. And a standing assets section holding the cover, graphics, bio, blurb, and links, so nothing has to be created or hunted for while the week is happening.

Not during early access. Storyflow is paid-only right now, with plans starting at $9.99 a month, and a Free plan for solo use launches before the end of 2026. Anyone a paid member invites to a board joins free today, so a publicist, a co-author, or an assistant can work on the plan without paying. If you need free this minute, Notion's free tier will hold a launch database and a calendar view, Trello's free tier does the ARC pipeline nicely, and a spreadsheet costs nothing. None of them show the assets beside the dates, but all three are honest free options.

No, and it does not try to. Storyflow does not send email, manage a subscriber list, schedule social posts, distribute ARCs, or report sales figures. Those jobs belong to ConvertKit or MailerLite, Buffer or Later, BookFunnel or NetGalley, and your retailer dashboards, all of which are better at them than a planning canvas could be. What Storyflow holds is the decision layer: what goes out, when, with which asset, to which list, and what has to happen first. When the plan is settled, the individual pieces get loaded into the tools that execute them.

Treat it as a pipeline rather than a list. Put every potential reviewer on a card with their name, where they post, and their status, then drag cards across columns as they move from identified to asked to sent to posted. The status is the entire value: an ARC list without one is a list you email once and never follow up, and the follow-up is where reviews actually come from. Set the deadline for sending copies at least eight weeks before publication so reviews can land in launch week, and keep a card for each platform's own requirements, because they differ and they change.

You describe the book and the launch: the genre, the audience, the publication date, whether you are self-publishing or traditionally published, and what you already have in place such as a newsletter list or a podcast history. The AI lays out a phased timeline from that, with pre-launch, launch week, and long-tail sections and task cards in each, so the lead-time items are on the board before you would have thought of them. From there it uses the whole board as context, so you can ask it to fill an empty week or draft a pitch structure, and re-prompting builds around what you have already scheduled.

You should, and it is the part almost every plan omits. Launch week produces a spike; the three months afterwards produce the readership, especially for nonfiction and for series. Plan a monthly rhythm for that period: a piece of content that reaches a new audience, a podcast or newsletter appearance, a promotion or price experiment, and something that serves the readers you already have. Lay it on the same timeline as launch week so the drop-off is visible. Authors who plan the tail tend to be the ones who describe their launch as slow and successful rather than loud and over.

Yes. Send a view-only link and they read the entire launch in a browser with no account, and they sign in to comment on the specific week or task they have a question about, which is considerably better than explaining a spreadsheet on a call. If they should actually be doing the work, invite them to the canvas and they can move cards, update statuses, and add assets alongside you. Invited collaborators join free, so bringing in an assistant or a co-author does not cost you a seat. Sharing and commenting work on every paid plan.

Yes, and small presses and series authors should. Run each title as its own timeline on the same canvas with the dates aligned, and two things become visible that are otherwise easy to miss: launches landing close enough together to compete for the same newsletter and the same audience, and the gaps where a backlist promotion could carry attention between releases. For a series, laying the sequel's pre-order on the tail of the current launch means the handover is planned rather than improvised, which is where most of a series author's compounding actually comes from.