What I Know About Being a Data-Driven Publisher

Some of you may know me as a writer, but I also run the business side of Ink Monster, along with my brilliant partner in crime, Aileen. Together, we moved more than a half million paid and free ebooks across thirteen titles in our first eighteen months of business. Being data-driven nut jobs was a big part of that success.
So, in the interests of sharing best practices, here’s what I know about being a data-driven publisher.

1. Quality only gets you to the door

I come from a high-tech background, and I’ve seen a ton of start-ups fail even though they had great products. As I think of it, having a stellar offering only gets you up to the door. What steps you past the threshold is crafting a solid business plan.

IMPORTANT: I’m not talking about using data to develop your product. As Henry Ford said, “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” What I’m talking about is using data to answer questions about how to take that product to market:

Who is interested in this book?
How many of those people are out there?
Where are they?
How do you reach them?
How much do you need to charge them to stay in business?
Knowing all of the above, when should this book be brought to market?

You only get one chance to launch something. I find that having what’s called a Go To Market Plan gives you the best chance of success. In software, those are written by folks called Product Managers. The Marketing Communications people then put those plans into action. We follow that model at Ink Monster.

2. Beware of making decisions based on hearsay instead of data

Let’s say you have a great book that you want to launch, but none of the Go To Market questions above have been defined. In my experience, without a plan, they still get defined, but based on hearsay and hunches. Not good. There are two ways this happens, in my experience. First, someone inside the company supplies the hearsay information. In my life, this someone has most commonly been a sales superstar who’s rumored to have a golden gut. As a marketer, this is an unpleasant way to live, and it’s a situation I think many publishers (and editors!) find themselves in without making a conscious decision to be there.

The second kind of hearsay comes from outside the company. In other words, from what everyone else is doing. This is another recipe for disaster. I learned this lesson the hard way when I founded a company that made CRM software. I had customers paying me six figures for our solutions, but in the dot-com boom, everyone was going to venture capital for investment money. So that’s what I did, too. Wow, was that ever a dumb choice. If I’d focused on customers instead of investors, I might still be in business today.

3. Some data is better than no data

Let’s say you decide to collect some data. The next question that inevitably comes up is: “how can we get anything that’s really useful?” This bit is typically followed by twenty reasons why the data is somehow misleading or inaccurate.

Here’s the truth. I have never met anyone, anywhere, from any data-driven company who is 100% happy with their data. There are always caveats and asterisks all over the place. There are also always people who go to data in order to prove themselves right, not to learn what’s going on, hence the phrase ‘torture the data enough and it will confess to anything.’

That said, some data is ALWAYS better than no data. At a base level, you can get a ton of information by just picking up the phone and talking to a customer. Many survey tools are out there as well, which is how we did our first reader survey here at Ink Monster.

4. Have a Go To Market Plan

You knew this was coming, right? In my experience, the biggest thing that data drives is NOT the product, but the Go To Market Plan. In other words, most of the business data that I use asks how to position and drive what someone else has already developed. Every product gets a plan that goes over a period of years, end of story.

5. Build a relationship with your customer

This is another one that bears repeating. Asking a customer what they want doesn’t mean you have to do it. But handing over the keys of your customer relationship to any third party is a bad idea. In high-tech, we go to crazy lengths to get people to register their software with us. Do we have to do this? No. Our distributors would happily push information to the end user. However, that gives the so-called ‘disti’ way too much power. They can shut off our sales if they want to, and in the early days of high-tech, some start-ups died this way.

IMPORTANT: I am not talking about adding a buy button here, but the ability to independently get information to and from your end user. For example, if one disti goes out of business, you can tell your customer where to go next. In addition, direct information makes it possible to build a solid Go To Market Plan. Every book holds years of sweat and worry inside its many pages. IMHO, every volume deserves a fair chance at success, and therefore, a thorough Go To Market Plan.

The hardest part about all of this is getting started. Change is terrifying, whether you’re an indie writer or leading a large company. Hopefully, this blog post gives some ideas on how and why to take the leap. Good luck and happy Go To Market planning!

More publishing stuff:

What I know about ebook publishing

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