06 Escaping With Help From Your Fans
When some authors started selling books directly to their fans - special editions - and found they were making more income from each book with direct sales, than through the big ebook distributors...
I found reports that there were authors earning between $20 and $50 dollars per book – and collecting several thousand dollars in profit during their launch releases that lasted only a few weeks. And this was consistent with every launch they did. All from a handful of loyal fans who want that author's particular type of writing with that author's own personal style.
These writers write and sell their unique style of books to an audience who wants books they could read over and over. They have an audience who craves more and become superfans, buying anything and everything that author released.
The other shoe eventually dropped – they weren't depending on conventional methods to market their published writing. They were shifting to proven unconventional business tactics other successful authors had quietly used since 2009.
Once authors discovered these tactics and mastered them, they started making viable money by re-marketing their backlist profitably and sustainably. They started making a profit off each release instead of hoping that their next ebook would be “the one” to finally start paying their bills and feeding their family.
Every book became its own success, growing and expanding a livable income with each launch. These authors could then re-launch their massive backlist as special editions that their loyal fans craved – to sizable profits.
This success route is probably not what you think it is. It takes a mindset shift. But you can learn it.
The “True Fan” model
In 2008, Kevin Kelly proposed the idea that having 1000 true fans who contributed $100 per year to that artist would then support a creator with a six-figure income.
It was no longer necessary to have a huge amount of annual sales of your book, or needing to have runaway bestsellers in order to make a livable income. But it did imply that the old publishing model of selling to anonymous buying readers was no longer viable. You had to be able to engage your buying readers and keep them engaged as not only fans, but true fans (or as now-called “super” fans).
In 2009, Kickstarter was founded and shortly after proved Kelly's theory. The idea of crowdfunding brought creators and their fans together through project campaigns and releases.
In 2013, Patreon was established, and strengthened this concept to a paid membership where patrons could support creators on an annual basis.
In 2017, Substack was established for writers to create a funded newsletter for their supporters. Each of these are monetized by taking a percentage (usually around 10% + fees) from the creator's income through that platform. They only make their money as you make money. It's not pay to play.
How does this affect the writer-publisher-marketer model?
How “Massive Success” Upended Amazon's Model
To make a six-figure income with $2.99 ebooks, you'd need 33,000 customers, each buying one book. With a click-through rate of about 5 percent, you'd then need about 635,000 subscribers on your email list.
With a single $40 book, you'd need only 25,000 sales to make six figures. Now, if you get them to buy four of those books every year, you need only 625 customers.
Further, writing and releasing those few books annually to your true fans would only take about 312 buyers to make that $50,000 Author Earnings income viability level.
Most book launches and releases through the book distributors depend on advertising blindly to a broad audience and sending them to some book distributor to increase their booksales there. Those are all still anonymous sales to you, since the sellers won't (or “can't”) give out email addresses. You never know who you sold to.
Crowdfunding connects the creator directly with their audience using email and so enables them to engage and expand their fan base on a personal basis. They are communicating directly through email. The creator finds out what the audience wants directly, and gets their funding to create just that.
On Kickstarter, your new launches are announced to existing supporters. And you can announce your later campaigns to earlier supporters. You're now building your subscriber list as they buy your books. Grahl's “long haul” approach is radically shortened while your income increases.
A Comic Author Saves His Career
In 2018, Russell Nohelty decided to crack into novel writing. While he'd had success with comics, he wanted to write books. And he'd heard the “real” money was in writing and publishing novels. So he assembled and digested all the popular books and Facebook posts about how to write and launch books.
He'd already used Kickstarter for his comics. But he'd heard and bought into the derisive comments about how Kickstarter wasn't used for “serious” book releases. So he wrote a several novels and then did a massive promotional planning with multiple-stacked advertising, fast-release sequences, newsletter swaps, everything.
His goal was to break even on his first book and then expand his sales with subsequent books in the series. Nohelty barely broke even on the first one. The next sold less, the third sold less, all while his carefully sculpted promotion had him losing more and more money on every book he released. That fifth book sold something like five copies total. And he was tens of thousands in debt because of all that promotion and production costs.
Dark times, indeed.
Then he realized he had written books which didn't hit the tropes and usual expectancies. And his researched “marketing best practices” were not only failing for him. In talking to other authors, he found that with few exceptions, most other authors weren't making sales either. They couldn't quit their day jobs. Only a tiny few were making this work.
Nohelty looked up the two books he'd earlier run Kickstarter campaigns on before – that he'd considered failures. They were his worst-producing campaigns in terms of income. But then he looked at the numbers and found those two books had sold a hundred or so copies at about $40 per book – and at a decent overall profit. Then he compared all the costs of putting his books on Amazon at 99 cents and at $2.99, which then required several hundred to break even.
Then the lights came on for him again.
So he took down his novel-series from Amazon and went back to Kickstarter. He made thousands in income from a few hundred fans from running a Kickstarter for those novels. Enough to finance producing the next five books in that series.
Compared to losing money on Amazon, this was a no-brainer for him.
Several profitable launches later, he'd paid off his debts and started building a “war chest” (as he calls it) to cover his production and promotion costs for his really big releases.
He has since launched his books first on Kickstarter and only then put the books on pre-release to the major ebook distributors. He'd proved they had an viable audience, and his production costs were covered.
Simple.
The reason why this worked? You promote to your list and invite them to become part of a movement, get involved, join a community to support this author.
Kickstarter has its own community, and can promote your book within that. Nohelty's general consensus is that if you bring 25 readers to your campaign, Kickstarter will bring you 25 more.
Your list is energized, and it's larger. And you've sold books and financed your expenses. Win-win-win.
The next action? Take your non-selling backlist and apply this release method to them. Rinse/repeat.
SIDEBAR: KICKSTARTER BOOK RELEASE SUCCESSES
As I was reviewing/revising this text, I came across a company called Ink Influence, who works with authors to produce special editions of books. These are then released exclusively to Kickstarter. This led me to research on Kickstarter under “publishing” to verify their claims. While I was there, I compiled a longer list:
Brandon Sanderson - $41,754,153 raised from 185,341 backers. A major author who released four previously unpublished books over a year.
Headstamp Publishing and Ian McCullom - 8,539 backers pledged $1,541,381 for a two volume non-fiction series about Chinese Domestic Handguns from 1911-1949
Will Wight - 5,046 backers pledged $1,103,498 for a three-volume (Books 4-6) set of special editions in faux leather.
Willow Winters - 868 backers pledged $304,596. She released 10 books with special covers and other treatments.
Jillian Dodd - 488 backers pledged $40,514. She released three books as part of a new YA Romance series.
Mind. Blown. This smashes the reported authors on Author Earnings list. No one makes this amount of money on Amazon with that few books. But that is the point of this research.
Divide their total pledged income by the number of backers and you'll see the price per book is close to or well above Nohelty's average. Yes, your mileage will definitely vary – but do your own research.
Why Conventional Book Marketing Fails
The reason for doing all this research and chasing these evident trails down was to sort out and discover why authors were having such a hard time making a livable income.
The observation early on was that the visible successes were at the confluence of writing and marketing. But that didn't explain why all these great advice write-ups about how to market your books either never worked or no longer worked. Why did all these bright people never figure this out?
One partial reason is the Bright Shiny Object syndrome. This is where people keep chasing the Next Big Thing instead of digging out why they failed for the earlier scam. It's related to Get Rich Quick mania. Earl Nightingale called this Following the Follower. As a herd species, humans tend to keep doing this. It's kept them living for quite some eons. But the advances in technology and culture are always chased back to the successful outliers, mostly entrepreneurs, who took a great idea and ran with it to a profitable conclusion.
The main reason seems to be that the long-observed phenomenon of God Vs. Mammon infected those corporations. Then they started feeding on their captive audiences. Their greed kept them focused on constantly amassing more wealth instead of doing the humane and ethical practice of treating others as they'd like to be treated.
The old model traditional publishers used was no longer viable. In those cases, authors seldom knew their readers and so wrote blindly to “tropes” which are simply broad averages of what readers want. When you match up readers directly with authors, then they get books that they want, in the versions they want. At prices they can agree on.
And it's no longer necessary to “appeal to the masses” for any product. You only need a few hundred or so supportive fans to make a decent living. Within limits, you can scale that deliberately to much higher levels. Evidence the several Kickstarters which amassed over a million dollars in support for a single campaign.
If you run your campaigns such that at least 50% of your costs are profit, then hitting a six-figure income from a set of books is dependent strictly on the quality of your books and engagement with those fans. Both of which are completely under your own control.
Does this new model upset any other staunchly-held publishing business datums? Short answer: yes. Now we can return to natural laws instead of arbitrary monopoly edicts.
Here’s that new beta-reader advanced copy: