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Building your platform on a social network is a house of cards. The same is true of building it on booksellers exclusively.
What if all of your content was suddenly pulled from one of the big sellers, or the ranking algorithms change such that you’re suddenly invisible to browsers?
Build your own platform that you control. Stop relying solely on sharecropping and start planting crops on your land. You can and should use the other platforms out there — currently places like Facebook, Twitter, and obviously the big booksellers — but your axis of connection to readers should ultimately be your own website and mailing list. If
Hell, you could implore them to support your next book via a Kickstarter campaign. But those things are only possible if you have your own platform.
our main call to action — which steers readers to RealmAndSands.com — we offer free books. They can pick up as many of our pilot books for free as they’d like (The Beam: Episode 1, Unicorn Western 1, Namaste: Prelude, and a bunch of others), and if they actually join our mailing list, we’ll give them any book priced at $4.99 or less from our catalog as a thank-you. Put yourself in a new reader’s shoes and ask yourself if our kind of fiction sounds interesting to you, if that call to action would compel you — and ultimately get you that much closer to being one of our 1000 true fans.
Goodreads.com
Don’t try to game Goodreads. The way to use it properly is to act like a human, talking to readers one-on-one or in small groups. Remember, a writer’s brand builds slowly, person by person. If you show up regularly, are polite and respectful, have an intriguing personality, and keep producing new work, you can end up with a nice network of connections. But it’s still just about groups of readers and authors, not about broadcasting or spamming your releases. Goodreads
Smart marketers understand that no matter what you do, you’re going to attract some people and repel others
You can’t please everyone, so don’t even try.
“That’s right; this stuff is too awesome for you. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”
Most people don’t respond to the fans who take the time to contact them, so simply answering your fans will make you stand out.
Someone sent a tweet to Pat and me on Twitter, and Pat and I both replied with some species of thanks. The guy who sent the original message was flabbergasted. It was honestly kind of embarrassing. He said he couldn’t believe we’d responded. As if we were big Hollywood types, too important for such things as gratitude. This is good news for those of us who understand the power of interpersonal connection. It wasn’t some notion that Pat and I were “big deals” that made the encounter unbelievable to our mutual fan. The only reason he was so surprised we’d responded was because nobody else does.
Think of social media as a cocktail party. You enter the room, look around, and see different groups mingling among themselves. You wouldn't burst into the
room, throw your arms in the air, and yell, “Hey everyone, I’M AN AWESOME WRITER!! Read my new book!! Check out my blog!!” Now imagine that same cocktail party.
The sweet spot, in our opinion, is to use networks in a (wait for it) social way, but to be very, very careful about how much time you spend doing it. Don’t think “marketer”; think “person chatting with friends.” And if you have a tendency to go down rabbit holes, time yourself with a stopwatch, stopping when the alarm sounds. Social media isn’t a magic bullet. Stories of social media rock stars
We use the Hangout feature to host our podcasts. That way, we can all see one another, and Sean and I can rib Dave to his face. Our Hangout is then uploaded directly to YouTube, and my assistant puts the audio up on iTunes later. Because of Google+, the three of us get live audience interaction with our podcast each week, and that’s pretty terrific.
YouTube might seem like the last place for a writer, but used effectively, video can be very powerful — especially for nonfiction writers.
using YouTube's metadata options (where you get to insert information about the video that search engines can see), you
make your videos rank for specific search terms. Searchable video makes it easier to find how-tos, tutorials, and general information, making it simple for nonfiction writers to market themselves through video.
For fiction authors, audience bonding means everything. When people know you, they enjoy buying from you, and the video format allows a writer to communicate with the audience in ways that aren’t possible with text. YouTube also allows you to embed videos on websites, meaning you can easily copy and paste code to put your latest awesome video right there in your blog for all the world to see without worrying about hosting large video files on your own site. Even though we never set out to use YouTube as a social network...
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We’re going to talk about newsletters a bit later, but the short version for now is that you should start broadcasting regular e-mail bulletins to the people who join your list. Don’t gather e-mail addresses and wait months to contact your readers. The worst thing you can do with an e-mail list is to let it go stale. You need those people to grow accustomed to hearing from you and opening your e-mail because there are always goodies inside.
If your newsletters are personal and
engaging, which they should be, you’ll get a few responses. This is more likely if you encourage responses — which, again, you should from time to time. Treat those e-mails as you would any other. Respond to all of them, and know you’re also building relationships with the readers who never e-mail you back. They’re h...
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What a Funnel Is Simply put, a product funnel is a way of organizing your works so that one product
leads logically into another. You’ll do this by setting up a series of pointers — in the backs of books, in product descriptions — in order to steer readers to the places you want them, and to give them compelling reasons to do so.
you ultimately want to sell a big book bundle for $9.99 or consulting for $499, does it make sense for the very first thing people see from you is that big-ticket
Absolutely not. Ten bucks is a lot to pay for an e-book by an unknown author, and $500 is a lot to pay for anything. If you want to sell those later items, you’ll need to sell them last — which, to bring this metaphor full circle, is what happens at the very bottom of your funnel, where a few die-hard devotees (or true fans) remain out of that huge group who entered the funnel.
Products at the top of the funnel must be easy to consume. Product A, which casts your widest net and scoops in as many prospective readers as possible, should ideally be free so that there’s no barrier to entry for anyone even remotely interested in what you eventually want to sell.
Product B can be a bit more expensive, and you work your way down further and further until, for a certain focused segment of customers, they’re invested and confident enough to pick up your Product C … or D, or F, or however deep your funnel goes.
It's Easier to Keep a Customer Than to Gain a New One What do you think loyalty cards are for? What do you think “returning customer discounts” are for? The merchants you shop with, if they’re smart, know that on average, it will cost them five times as much to get a new customer as it will to keep an old one.
The best way to sell any product in your catalog is to sell it to someone who’s already a customer, and you can do that by hooking them in with the ones at the top of your funnel, which are easier for them to consume because they’re cheap or free.
Each Time Someone Says "Yes," the Next "Yes" Becomes More Likely
Old-school vacuum cleaner salesmen asked
classically trained and good at their craft, they would only ask questions that they knew in advance would be answered wit...
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with what they were selling: “Isn’t this a beautiful day?” “Don’t you love it wh...
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That’s a funnel. We paid nothing, then
paid 99 cents, then paid more and more for merchandise.
Funnels Require Multiple Products
Wouldn’t you make the first one free if, by doing so, you thought you could sell three copies a day of the other?
book to another to another — and, if you want a really good funnel, to a bundle of many books — and that only happens after you’ve ushered plenty of product to market.
funnel: an entry product (the short story) that’s free and a book for $5 or so. You could also make the short story 99 cents, but that will mean a lot fewer people in your funnel.
If you have a free product and a paid product but they’re not at all alike, that’s not a funnel. It’s a free product and a paid product that stand alone.
You can have a CTA that leads a reader to your book’s sequel or a bundle, a CTA to join your mailing list, a CTA to review the book they just read,
No CTAs on the Unicorn Western 1 Product Page We want entry into the series to be totally
and completely frictionless. If someone knows nothing about Unicorn Western, we don’t want to distract them with extraneous information, and don’t want them thinking in advance about future purchases. So they see that there’s a book with a cool
CTA at the End of Unicorn Western 1 That Gives Two Options
GET COOL STUFF! If you liked Unicorn Western #1, you’ll LOVE Unicorn Western #2 (this saga gets better by the book!). CLICK HERE to start reading Unicorn Western #2 right now, or (and this is DEFINITELY SMARTER) CLICK HERE to spend 60% less for all 9 books in the Full Saga.
CTAs in the Product Descriptions of Books 2-5 At the top of the product description (on the actual sales page) for Unicorn Western 2, in big, bold type, is this: SAVE 60% WITH THE FULL SAGA! This book is also available in the UNICORN WESTERN FULL SAGA, which contains all 9 books in the series. Saddle up and get it here: http://unicornwestern.com/saga
someone who’s about to buy Unicorn Western 2 and yelling, “WAIT! Wouldn’t you like to Super-Size that?” We have them on books 3-5 as well, but don’t generally bother to add them to the later volumes. If you’ve made it all the way to Unicorn Western 8 or 9 and still haven’t gotten the bundle, learning about it for the first time before
you buy will only piss you off. A Generalized CTA at the End
