What Authors Can Learn From Startups

The-Road-Not-Taken

Today’s guest post is by Ricardo Fayet (@ricardofayet), the Chief Operating Officer of Reedsy.


Bestselling indie author Nick Stephenson posted a brilliant article on his blog last month on the “cost” of self-publishing, highlighting how authors shouldn’t view the money they spend on editing, design and marketing as a cost, but as an investment, i.e., an asset that creates value.

This is especially important to understand in the current competitive market, in which authors are forced to behave more and more like business people and less like “artists.” If you think of an author as a company, the only “asset” the company has is the content and the rights attached to it. Investing in optimization of that content increases its value. Investing in marketing and promotion increases the company’s ability to monetize its asset(s), and therefore brings a higher and/or steadier cash flow. Authors need to calculate their return on investment, and base decision-making on that figure rather than the upfront cost of an investment.

In this sense, independent authors function similarly to startup—though they rarely approach the challenges with the same dynamism or creativity that startups have come to rely on.

First, you need more creative outbound marketing.

I must have read over 100 posts on book marketing, and to be honest they all more or less highlight the same things “you need to do” in order to sell books: build your author platform (website, blog, social networks, etc.), have an email list, run discounts and promotions (via Bookbub, for example), contact bloggers/reviewers, optimize your metadata, etc.

In the startup world, we talk about “traction channels.” For authors, traction basically means gaining new readers, while channels are the different ways in which you can attract readers.

Andrew Chen, a famous startup advisor on growth, proposed an interesting concept a few years ago that he calls “the Law of Shitty Click-Throughs.” Chen explains that, over time, all marketing strategies lose their effectiveness and end up resulting in poor click-through rates.

We can apply the Law of Shitty Click-Throughs to explain why many authors now get the feeling that popular strategies like “perma-free” (creating work that is permanently free) are no longer an effective marketing strategy: there are just too many free books on Amazon. Plus, Amazon adapted to the perma-free strategy by separating paid and free books on their bestseller lists.

What does this mean? You need to be more creative. Sure, you can find inspiration in what others have done, but also know that the less advertised “strategies” out there might actually be the ones worth pursuing (or at least testing).

All of the successful authors we’ve interviewed at Reedsy so far have done things that few other authors are doing, whether that’s replying to all reviewers on Amazon and Goodreads to announce a new book, inviting the local mayor to a book launch, building websites/newsletters for characters, or sending additional hard copies with every order.

So how do you get better, more creative ideas?

Startups have an incessant need to find new, creative ways to reach users. They are pushed to it by their lack of resources, limited time, and the need to demonstrate “traction” to investors.

If you read tech marketing blogs, I guarantee you’ll find ideas for your books that few other authors out there are considering:

  • Andrew Chen writes about viral products
  • Seth Godin focuses on building trust
  • Buffer discusses how to leverage social media
  • Unbounce teaches landing page (website) optimization

All these provide inspiration applicable to not just startups, but everyone who has to learn about digital marketing, as the last “Startup Marketing Blog” post points out: “Growth hacking is for smart marketers—not just startups.”

My No. 1 recommendation, though, is actually a book: Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers. Written by two startup founders, Traction reviews every single “traction channel” (i.e., marketing strategy) startups can use to find, engage, and retain customers. Surprisingly and crucially, almost every one of these channels is available to authors. I especially recommend the chapter on “Unconventional PR,” which offers great examples of out-of-the-box thinking from technology startups looking to generate a PR stunt.

Successful stunts include Uber delivering cupcakes and kittens to employees who wanted a break from work, or Blendtec, a blender manufacturer, starting the “Will It Blend?” videos, and testing their blades against golf balls or iPhones. Or DuckDuckGo, a competitor of Google, hiring a billboard in Google’s backyard in California to advertise.

Marketing expert Seth Godin says we’re operating in a “connection economy,” where mass marketing doesn’t cut it anymore. Gaining traction is about creating the extraordinary; these examples show how a little subversive thinking can help you achieve that.

Learning best practices from a startup

As Kristine Kathryn Rusch wrote in her slightly depressing round-up post on “things indie writers learned in 2014,” authors who want to survive in the new competitive landscape need to learn business, and place themselves in the same conditions and mindset as an actual entrepreneur.

What does this mean? Do what startups do: plan for your launch, set tangible goals and deadlines, and make yourself accountable. Create books that are easily sharable and recommendable by readers. Put links to your newsletter and website in the book. Offer a real incentive for readers to subscribe to your newsletter and/or to leave a review. And just to be clear, writing something like “reviews are very important for us independent authors, so please leave one” doesn’t constitute an incentive.

More importantly, decide what you want to do and do it well. This is the main point made in Traction: There are lots of “traction channels,” but you cannot make them work for you unless you focus on two to three at a time, after having carefully tested their effectiveness.

Creating a great book is vital, but everything else is optional. You don’t need to blog. You don’t need to tweet. You don’t need to offer giveaways. If you do all of these, chances are you’re going to be inefficient, or worse, obsequious. So focus on a couple of strategies and roll them out as thoroughly as you can. If you’re going for strategies that yield results in the long term (like blogging or building a following on social networks), start working on those long before the launch of your book. If you’re going for short-term strategies (like Bookbub promotions or Goodreads giveaways), make sure you have a product and platform ready to capture the sudden wave of readers you’re expecting.

Keep looking outside your “world” for creative ideas. If you are reading the same material as every other indie author, you’ll probably end up using the same strategies. If you look wider, you’ll find brilliant new possibilities!

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Heidi

Very helpful and thought-provoking!

Quick question: I’ve always heard it’s a bad policy to outright ask for a review from your readers (on Amazon etc. — not necessarily a blog) or to run a giveaway/raffle for anyone who leaves a review within a certain time. Would you be recommending that strategy? I’m curious.

Werner Stejskal

Those are the people who never get any reviews! You need to ask people three times with various reasons. Only 1% will write you a review. I manage over 50 reviews for my books. You can work out how many people I approach. This is a full time job until you have a list of reviewers together who will do this for you every time. I am promoting every month another book of my series for free to gather the reviews, after which I make it paid again. Of course I am talking about ebooks here. Reviewers are everywhere you just need to spend endless time to find them on blogs, Amazon, Google etc. etc. So don’t listen to nonsense. If you don’t ask, you don’t get. Make sure you only address people who are into your genre, and add the cover picture to your email. Good luck!

Alexis

There are a lot of great suggestions and links in this post that are well worth considering! I wanted to add one more (although full disclosure: I don’t have a book available yet so my “book marketing expertise” is approximately zero).

Start well before your book is available. What I’ve learned from developing a relatively high-traffic blog is that the rate of readers acquisition increases as you get more readers. So for example, on Facebook, it takes ages to get your first 1,000 fans, but it takes half that time to get to 2,000. It took me 2 years to get to 5,000 FB fans but now I’m adding 500 a month. So you want to frontload your reader-acquisition efforts to take advantage of this trend.

Got a book coming out in 6 months? Maybe the time to invest in marketing and traffic generation is actually today!

Ricardo Fayet

I hear you, Alexis! I’m in the first year of the Reedsy blog so reader acquisition is still slow, very slow… But the good thing is that if you keep blogging consistently and putting in the efforts it is often worth it as it grows quicker and quicker.

Blogging (content marketing) is a “traction channel” that is known in the startup world both for its attractiveness (it’s very cost-effective) and for the amount of time and energy (and patience) it requires: you’re not going to see any results before a year or so. So if it’s a strategy you want to use to sell books, you should certainly start at least 6 months before launching the first one!

Lucy Carol

Alexis, I’m getting ready to shut down my Facebook Fan Page. After 3 years I have a little over 1,000 followers but it doesn’t do me much good with Facebook keeping my posts hidden from all but a handful of my followers. I’m talking about numbers in single digits. Unless I pay Facebook every time I post, almost no one will see it. Are you regularly paying for your posts to be seen? Do you recommend “paying the piper?”

Alexis

Hey Lucy,
IF Facebook is where your readers hang out, then yes I do recommend it. Look, email is the gold standard for being able to contact people, but even that isn’t 100%. The average open rates for email are between 30-40%, so not all your email subscribers are going to see your content either. But the truth is that FB is a great source of free/cheap website traffic, highly targeted advertising opportunities, content sharing, and reader engagement. So I wouldn’t get too hung up on “I have to pay for people to see it” but look at “what is the value of the relationships that I create via this channel” – how does that math work out for you?

For me the math works out well in my favor. If I have a big post I want to promote, I can get FB traffic for $.01-$.05/click (this is insanely cheap). My FB readers are highly engaged and I learn as much from our interactions as they do from me. Also my FB numbers (which at 8K are still small) are a bit of social proof. Sure 50K fans would be BETTER proof, but 8K says “I’m not a total nobody” so that’s helpful as well.

Does this math work out for everybody? No. But I would strongly encourage you to consider the bigger picture than paying the piper!

Ed Cyzewski

I really appreciate how note the shifts in publishing trends that authors need to adapt to.

I’m curious though, what kinds of incentives are you referring to when it comes to asking for reviews? Amazon makes it clear that you can’t offer incentives for a review: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200414320

Ricardo Fayet

Yes, Amazon does have a rule like this. However, I have read several books lately that offered a “reward” to the first X reviewers on Amazon and these books are bestsellers in their categories… I wouldn’t necessarily recommend being so ‘blunt’ if you’re worried about it, because there are more clever ways to go about it.
One author I know (Eliot Peper), offered to send a digital ARC of his second book to all the people who reviewed his first book on Goodreads or Amazon. He got a very high conversion rate for that, and most of the people he sent that ARC to ended up leaving a review for the second book on the day of the launch. Technically, he didn’t incentivize the review…

Ricardo Fayet

Glad you liked it, Heidi!

I think that if someone has read your book, you are certainly entitled allowed to suggest to that reader that he or she leaves you an honest review. All the last books I have read contained a paragraph like that in the end. What they lacked though, was an incentive for readers to do so (or to subscribe to their newsletter). A giveaway is a very commonly used incentive, but still seems to work well I think.

Now, what you shouldn’t be doing is cold-emailing people who are not yet your readers and to ask them to read and review your book (even with an incentive), but that’s obvious 😉

tspoetry

Loved ‘Traction.’ There simply is no easy way to sell books, that’s for sure. Occasionally, a book sells itself. And that… is pure heaven 🙂

marcymckay

Terrific, Ricardo. As intimidating as it is to think like a business person, rather just an artist — it’s a must for success. You broke down these concepts clearly and gave great suggestions. Thanks!

Lucy Carol

Thanks for these suggestions, Ricardo. I need to branch out and try something different. 🙂

Ricardo Fayet

I think that’s actually the hardest thing to do. And it’s the same for me and Reedsy. Sometimes you need to just sit down and think whether you could be doing things differently, and look for inspiration outside your world. Because even if you have the right strategy since the very beginning, that strategy might not allow you to reach all the readers you could reach. Different strategies target different market niches.

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Angie Dixon

The law of shitty click-throughs. Ha! Thanks for this. I actually started several businesses while also writing, and I’ve seen my self-publishing efforts improve as I gain more business knowledge. This is a great post and although i know these things generally, I always appreciate a reminder.