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November 13 - November 19, 2021
The best way to detect boredom is to identify where readers are quietly giving up and abandoning the book.
noticing where a reader’s comments stop.
Once you know where readers are disengaging, you’ll need to take a guess about what caused it and how to fix it. Nine times out of ten, the problem is low value-per-page in the surrounding areas.
This is yet another reason to invite actual beta readers instead of just pressuring your friends or hiring a professional.
Readers’ comments on your manuscript will reveal their experiences while reading. But if your book intends to change their behavior, mindset, skills, work, or life, then you’ll also need to watch what they’re doing in the weeks after they’ve finished reading.
Have you had a chance to design or run a workshop since reading it? Did anything not work? Are you stuck on anything? We’d love to help.
if you’re writing something that requires the reader to act, then going beyond the comments is invaluable.
Begin pre-sales once the book is mostly working for beta readers
I’d suggest beginning pre-sales during the second half of beta reading, once you’re fairly confident that the structure is correct and that the knowledge works.
I began selling an eventually abandoned “book” while it was still just a table of contents.
hammer your prose into shape through detailed, repeated editing passes.
Print it out and read it from front to back.
These early evangelists are called your seed audience (or seed readers).
How many readers do you need to find? Personally, I aim to get any new book into the hands and hearts of 500-1,000 seed readers before taking my foot off the gas, which could require anywhere from a few weeks to a few months.
each copy I manually marketed eventually led to another 60 copies sold (and growing).
Successful marketing isn’t really about marketing at all — it’s about product design, testing, refinement, and ensuring that you’re delivering real value to your readers.
Build a small author platform via content marketing and “writing in public” (most reliable and valuable, but time-intensive)
For the book you’re now reading, I’m (finally) spending the time to build a proper author platform.
it’s okay to play to your strengths, preferences, and constraints.
If I were starting over with absolutely zero resources, reputation, or connections, I would rely mainly on the fourth option — writing in public to build a small author platform — complemented by Amazon PPC ads.
Podcast hosts and digital event organizers are in the business of finding interesting, valuable content for their audiences;
So we started reaching out to podcasts. Who are the influencers? I’m going to hunt them down. And I don’t care [about their size]. Again, start small.
The only time you should go outside [to talk about] the book itself is opening day, day one, and get on TV.
That being said, most podcasts are extremely small. In 2019 there were 750,000 active podcasts, with a median of 141 listens per episode.[24]
People say that your first reaction is the most honest, but I disagree. Your first reaction is usually outdated. Either it’s an answer you came up with long ago and now use instead of thinking, or it’s a knee-jerk emotional response to something in your past.[25]
When they search on Amazon, they’re uniquely open to the idea of paying for a book.
The ads sold 25-100 copies per month at a moderate profit, returning $2-3 for every $1 spent while slowly building a seed audience.
If you’re familiar with other advertising platforms, you may be surprised to learn that you’re largely powerless to customize what appears in your Amazon ads. Your book’s cover and title/subtitle are its advertisement — you can’t just add a compelling photo or catchy tagline to make it more clickable. So if your cover is illegible and your title/subtitle mysterious, then your ads won’t work.
Avoid the “Kindle Lock Screen” ad type — they don’t convert anywhere near as well as the other options
For example, I’ve heard of authors in the fashion industry doing six-figure royalties primarily via Instagram and TikTok ads.
you should jump at any chance for your books to be given away to an event’s worth of ideal readers.
To seed The Mom Test, I gave away 500 copies at one event (they covered printing costs of £2.50 per copy), 200 at a second (they paid discounted bulk prices of £10 per copy), and marketed 100 myself via content marketing (which we’ll look at next), for a total of 800 seed readers.
The “official” launch of the book was at the Lean Startup conference in London, and I personally bought 250 copies of my book to give away to jumpstart it. I just stood there — there was a queue, people were arriving, and I was signing the books and giving them away.
After that first marketing push, there’s nothing else. People have to be saying, “Oh yeah, I used this book, and it worked.”[27]
the event will be more motivated to distribute and promote something that they’ve paid for.
To find willing events, you must first understand that from their perspective, even a “free” book is never free — any sort of giveaway carries a high reputational risk by acting as a tacit endorsement.
a typical paperback will end up costing you roughly $2-5 per book,
If you’re in the business of paid consulting or speaking, you can easily upsell clients by adding their logo to the cover and a custom foreword to the innards. I’ve sold five or ten thousand of these custom-branded books to a mix of corporations and universities, and they absolutely love it.
repurpose your manuscript into its own marketing.
All of my “marketing” was just sharing the work I was already doing on the manuscript.
You can reuse the book’s content as its own marketing You can begin doing this very early, even with rough drafts and tiny excerpts
Once a day, after you’ve done your day’s work, find one little piece of your process that you can share. If you’re in the very early stages, share your influences and what’s inspiring you. If you’re in the middle of executing a project, write about your methods or share work-in-progress. If you’ve just completed a project, show the final product, share scraps from the cutting-room floor, or write about what you learned.
This post took half an hour (since it was already mostly written in the book), got 122 upvotes, and led to a fair number of new customers and seed readers.
As a result, he ended up having over 500 beta readers helping him with the manuscript, and he built a happy seed audience as a side-effect.
Not long after sharing a quick screenshot of my Amazon royalties dashboard, I was invited onto several great podcasts to talk about my experiences.
Make things and tell people.
“Once a day, after you’ve done your day’s work, find one little piece of your process that you can share.”
In terms of value-per-follower, email is orders of magnitude better than social media.
The solution is to offer them an enticing digital gift — called a “lead magnet” — in exchange for their signup.
BUT — it helped the book spend five weeks on the Wall Street Journal list. And without really any other marketing, the book now sells 1,000-1,200 copies per week.[36]
