The Path To 10K In Sales: Strategy, Luck & Mistakes

I’ll admit my mind is blown knowing there are over
10, 000 Emotion Thesaurus books out there in the world. Becca and I are
thrilled, and so appreciative to all the writers and teachers who took a chance
on it. As aspiring novelists, we know just how hard it is to write and the perseverance it takes to create a book. Providing a tool
to help other writers with emotion is nothing short of an honor (sappy, I know, but
true. Writers rule and we love you guys!)




In that same spirit of wanting to contribute, we thought it
might be beneficial to share our focus as we sent The Emotion Thesaurus into
the world. We realize this is a non-fiction book, not fiction. Novels are a harder sell--instead of dealing primarily with what a audience NEEDS like NF, it is
more about what they WANT, and personal reading tastes are unpredictable.
However, much of the strategy we used with the ET can be adapted for fiction, so
hopefully novelists will find value here regardless.  




A Bit of History...




As many of you know, The Emotion Thesaurus started on the
blog as a 'set' of lists focusing on how to show a character’s feelings. Becca and I
struggled with emotion, and when we could not find a good resource to help us, we
created one. As it grew in popularity, readers asked us to turn it into an
enhanced book version. 




We chose self publishing for a few reasons, the most
important being TIME. It can take years for a book to find a publisher and then
be available to purchase, and writers and teachers needed it NOW. We also
discovered someone pirating our content for profit, so waiting any longer to
create the book would be foolhardy. We launched The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide To Character Expression on
May 14th, 2012.




What We Had Going For
Us




PLATFORM. Becca and I have worked since 2008 to build a place
within the Writing Community, providing resources through this blog and forging
genuine relationships with our audience. Our attitude has always been to
contribute and do what we can to add value. It was our hope that our readers would be
willing to help raise awareness for The Emotion Thesaurus book. 




NICHE. Our book tackled a topic that writers struggle with,
yet few resources were available to help. As writers, we knew exactly what type
of tool was needed to help with emotion and body language.  




What Stood Against Us




LACK OF CREDIBILITY. Becca and I were not authors (yet), nor
accredited editors, and certainly not psychologists or experts on emotion. We had
a platform, but no ‘book world’ clout. How could we possibly compete with the
biggies in the Writing Resource field, names like Donald Maass, James Scott
Bell, James N. Frey, The Plot Whisperer, or the dozens of other incredible, best-selling
authors/experts? 




SELF PUBLISHING. While the stigma is lessening, we all know bias remains. In some ways, creating a how-to writing resource and then choosing
self publishing over traditional acted as a strike against us, meaning we would
have to really prove ourselves with readers.




CONFIDENCE. This business is often a murky pool of feeling
not worthy, not good enough.  Without a
book deal in place for our fiction to give us credibility or a degree/subject-specific
education to hold up, we felt naked. Putting ourselves out there and donning
the hat of authority that comes with writing any sort of how-to guide was
terrifying. 




The Scale Tipper




PASSION, BELIEF & TEAMWORK. As writers, we knew people
needed this book. Heck, we needed it! We decided to create the best
brainstorming tool we could and put all our effort into making it discoverable to those who might benefit from it. Working as a team allowed
us to play off each others' strengths and aided in decision-making.




READYING FOR LAUNCH 




Set up a business
Paid for a professional
edit
Hired a cover designer
Outsourced formatting to a
HTML goddess because the book is full of links and redirects
Test-marketed it with a
select group of writers & used feedback to strengthen





MISTAKE:  choosing a launch date and under-estimating the
time it would take for setting up the business (two authors in different
countries is a pain), uploading, formatting challenges, fixing last minute
typos (again, our formatter Heather is worth her weight in gold!)  This created lots of down-to-the-wire
stress. Test marketing the book (while super valuable) also meant enabling changes late in the game. 




First Hurdle:
Launching A Book Without Feeling Like A Timeshare Salesman




For two writers who hate promoting, this was a massive
challenge. Look at me! I have a book! Buy
it! <---our personal
nightmare. We needed a way to let people know about the ET but not be
eye-bulging, book-waving maniacs about it. After many facetimes, we realized that to do this in a way that felt right,
we needed to return to our AUTHOR BRAND: writers
helping & supporting other writers. 




“Random Acts of Kindness for Writers” became our secret plan: instead of making our release date about us, we would do something to celebrate & thank writers. This was risky in the sense that to do it
authentically, we had to steer attention AWAY from our book’s release. However,
we felt the reward was twofold--traffic to our site,
and it allowed us a way to pour our flag-waving passion into celebrating people
who really deserve recognition and yet rarely get it. This event aligned perfectly with our pay-it-forward beliefs, driving us to do all we could to make it a success.




For
brevity's sake, I won’t get into the nuts and bolts of how we set up
the RAOK Blitz (but if enough people wish it, I can expand on this in a future post).
Suffice to say it drew thousands of visitors and hundreds of writers participated, becoming a huge ‘feel good’ week for everyone that showcased
the generous spirits of our Writing Community. :) 




Marketing Boost:  Becca and I gave away a free PDF called
‘Emotion Amplifiers’ as our RAOK gift to writers.
This PDF booklet is a companion to The Emotion Thesaurus and has a similar layout. Our hope was that if a writer found it helpful, they might check the ET as well. (It’s still in our
sidebar if you want a copy and helps with describing conditions like pain, exhaustion, stress,
inebriation, etc.)




Second Hurdle:
Reviews




A self-published book that is also non-fiction? Rough. Many professional
reviewers will not take on SP books, and those that do usually only read
fiction. So, instead of seeking out review sites, we put out a  call out to Bookshelf Muse readers and asked
if any of them were  interested in reviewing the book. After all,
the ET is BY writers FOR writers. Who better to review it? :)




We could not accommodate all the requests that came in, so
we chose some reviewers strategically for their audience reach, and others
through a random draw. 




MISTAKE:  We should have arranged for reviews much
sooner. Due to not leaving ourselves enough time to get the book ready to go,
we were unable to get a decent version out to reviewers until close to launch
or after.




LUCK! Many
people, after buying and using the ET, were so happy with it they wrote reviews on
Amazon and Goodreads.




MORE LUCK! These
reviews swayed even MORE people to take a chance on the book, and they in turn
became avid word-of-mouth spreaders, telling writing friends and critique
partners all about The Emotion Thesaurus. This led to better sales, top
20 ranking in several (paid) writing categories for print & kindle, a strong Amazon Best Sellers Rank, and placement on the Top Rated, Best Selling & Most Wished For lists (writing).

 

Marketing Tactics -
Swag




We chose to invest in a postcard-sized bookmark that
doubles as a Revision Tool.  Many
bookmarks lie forgotten in a drawer, or they end up being recycled. We wanted
ours to stay right beside the computer during revisions, so we printed a ‘Crutch
Word List’ on one side--words we commonly overuse and need to weed out. Our
hope was that by making our swag useful, writers would hang onto it!




Spreading the word about a book can be difficult, so we put
out a call (again utilizing our blog readers) and asked if people would be
willing to take our bookmarks and hand them out to critique groups, or give
them out at conferences and workshops. This allowed us to reach out beyond our
own circle and hopefully reach new readers. 




MISTAKE (?) This was a bit pricey considering the
postage involved (some were sent worldwide), and took time to get addresses and
mail out. We had no way to track the effectiveness. And while I have heard from
people who said they saw them at conferences or were given one by another
writer, we are not sure if the ‘mail out’ idea brought a significant return. But, the
postcards are super handy to have at events where Becca and I are presenting,
and we can pass them out afterward to keep the ET in people’s minds. So overall, this swag was worth it!




Marketing Tactics -
Discoverability




The bulk of our marketing energy went into discoverability. Because we have such an amazingly supportive audience at The Bookshelf Muse, we chose a 'grassroots' approach rather than solicit big bloggers/sites for exposure. In our initial blog post asking for assistance from readers, we utilized a sign up form so the people who wanted to help us could, and in a manner that most appealed to them. The results of this was amazing--so many people offered to help get the word out! 




One of our biggest needs was bloggers willing to host us for a visit. We were overwhelmed with gratitude to see how many people were willing to do this (have I mentioned how great you all are?) and we actually had to change how our form was worded to include offering book excerpts and reblogging previous TBM posts to accommodate the response. We ended up with over 115 hosts all told.




Attempting so many guest posts caused panic attacks, obsessive chocolate binging, feelings of inadequacy *coughs* was daunting. But Becca organized everything (SHE IS AMAZING!)
and put us on an aggressive schedule that would allow us to finish them all within
a 4 month window. We created a master list of topics, most centered directly on content that would tie into Emotion & Body Language, so that each post was
a planned, quality post. The best thank you to those who offered
to help us was to write content that would bring them strong traffic, not just
exposure for us.  




GUEST POST TIP: We did our best to
thank personally every person who hosted and helped. We also shared all links on
our social networks to bring new people to their blogs.  We truly appreciated their time and energy, and their
desire to see us succeed.




MISTAKE #1: biting off more than we could chew. This
was an enormous amount of guest posts (with more requests coming in as a result of this visibility) and so it meant we were both unable to
write anything but blog content for a good 4 months. We managed to get them
done and we have no regrets because of the great exposure, but it also meant
other things slipped. There were a few blogging relationships and opportunities
we were unable to stay on top of because we were so busy posting elsewhere. We
also had a tough time commenting on blogs and getting email written. With such a strict timeline to adhere to, I worried about messing up and forgetting something vital, letting a host down.




MISTAKE #2: not thinking enough about how to keep up
with our own blog AND everyone else’s. Luckily as we met new people at
different blogs, we found folks who wanted to guest post for us. We were able
to give them exposure in return and bring some good content to the blog (LUCK!) So while we made a mistake about
over committing, it worked out. 




MORE LUCK! These
‘seed’ guest posts led to some writing communities and bigger organizations
contacting us. This resulted in book reviews and giveaways that were included
in newsletters and offered exposure with bigger audiences. The Discoverability Tour worked!




Marketing Tactics:
Giveaways




We utilized giveaways to generate interest in our book and
bring attention to some of the blogs we visited. We purposefully did not host
book giveaways during the month of May to encourage people to buy, not wait to
win. We had a few giveaways in June and then more in July, August and
September. Some were bigger exposure opportunities like being featured in a
banner at the Writer’s Knowledge Base and as a prize at Ink Pageant (thanks
guys--you rock!) We tried to go where our readers would be, and took advantage
of opportunities that allowed us to reach beyond the Kidlit & YA writer’s
network we know best in order to create inroads with Christian and other Adult genres who might not
know us or The Bookshelf Muse. 




Marketing Tactics:
Distribution Channels 




Becca and I talked about going KDP Select but neither of us
could see the benefit to doing so right out the gate. In our minds, we wanted
to ask a fair price for the books and have it available across as many channels
as possible to reach readers where they are, not where we ‘chose’ to be. We
distributed widely and included a PDF option for those who did not have ereaders
or who felt more comfortable with PDF format. For those who like numbers,
here’s the breakdown to 10,000 which we hit in September: 
















SW


iTunes


CS-Amazon.com

(PRINT)


B&N


Kindle (Amazon.com)


Kindle 

(Amazon Euro)


Kobo


PDF


Total






May


17


10


243


62


412


25




102


871






June


13


19


503


66


905


50




89


1645






July


13


22


887


78


1334


77




76


2487






August


13


33


893


56


1297


103




60


2455






September


10


32


1036


53


1282


151


21*


47


2632














































































Total: 


66


116


3562


315


5230


406


21


374


10090









*Prior to September, Kobo sales were bundled with
Smashwords. Once Kobo created their own distribution, we uploaded direct. Sony sales are under the Smashwords umbrella.




You will notice that Print is quite strong. We
believe this is partly because many writers like 'craft' books in paperback. We also have had feedback that some original digital buyers were so pleased with the ET, they later decided to invest in a print version, too.




Pricing: We chose
the 4.99 price point for digital, and 14.99 for print. We have not changed the
price nor offered the book for free. In the future we may change our pricing,
but for now it works well with Extended Distribution, which we sell enough
through to make it important to keep.




MISTAKE: not enabling Extended Distribution right
from the start. Originally we didn’t think it would do us much good, until we
realized without it, we could not get onto Amazon.ca. Seeing as I live in
Canada, it is important that the people I meet at events or at my workshops
have a way to get the book. Not doing this before May meant a six week lag of
fielding emails from Canadians unable to buy the book. 




Marketing Tactics: Paid Advertizing




We opted to not invest in any paid advertising. I think this
was the right decision for us, but do see us choosing a few select ads in the
future. 




Where We Got Extra
Lucky




Winning Top 20 Best Blogs For Writers with Write To Done a few months before The Emotion
Thesaurus released. This raised our profile significantly, and at a
critical time.
Once sales started climbing,
Amazon would send out mailers to people who purchased writing related
books, and sometimes The Emotion Thesaurus was listed as a ‘Those that
purchased X might also like’ pick.
A price war between B
& N and Amazon. For the last week of September, the two duked it out,
lowering the book’s price daily until the discount put it under 10 bucks.
Average sales nearly doubled for print (although sales dipped that week
for Kindle).





A Few Extraneous
Mistakes




Not soliciting endorsements. We didn’t do this in advance of
publishing the ET because we were worried about being turned down, worried
about getting the cold shoulder because we were newcomers and new authors.
Now more than ever we are seeing an acceptance of SP, and of Traditional
authors making the leap. Endorsements probably would have helped us
greatly and so moving forward we’ll be seeking them out.
Not believing in ourselves enough at the start. I think we
wasted a lot of energy on doubt because we hadn’t published before (except
in magazines) and we were afraid that while we felt The Emotion Thesaurus
added value, others would not. The response to The Emotion Thesaurus has
been nothing short of phenomenal and knowing that Illinois State
University is using it in their Creative Writing curriculum makes us
incredibly proud. A self published book going to University...who would have thought?





Thoughts to Leave You
With




Looking back, I believe we did two things right that led to everything
else:




First, we created
a book that readers are very happy with, and it fulfills a need in a way that
they are excited to share it with people they know. (We are so, so, SO grateful to
this word-of-mouth. Thank you all for doing this!)




Second, we live
our brand: writers who help and support
other writers. This is who we are! We love writers and have forged genuine
relationships with our readers. When we needed help to spread the word, people
responded, and more than that, became our advocates. There are not enough thank
yous in the world for me to say what this means to us.




If I can encourage writers
planning to publish to do one thing beyond the above, it’s to be authentic in
whatever you do. When you build your platform, start in advance and think
very hard about what your brand will be. Be yourself, be likable, do what feels
right and resonates with who you are. Understand your audience, their likes and
dislikes, and search them out. Use keywords to find blogs, forum discussions
and hashtags that will help you discover people who might be interested in a book like yours. Interact, be genuine and think about how you can add
value, not how you can market to them. Focus on giving, not getting. Trust that
the rest will come. :)   




Do you have any questions about what we did or why? Becca and I are happy to answer if we are able. And again, the biggest, squishiest, bacon-filled thank you for all your support of us and the ET. Your word-of-mouth has allowed writers and teachers everywhere to discover this book!