09 Evergreen Elements of a Sustainable Writing-Publishing Business
The summary of this series arrives. Here are the distilled elements necessary to building a livable author income. And an outline of steps that employ this new model for you.
Here's the summary elements of a successful Writerpreneur Operating System:
Regular writing as a habit.
Regular freemium newsletters sent to subscribers to engage with them. Enable upgrades to paid via Substack or similar.
Kickstarter releases.
Selling books directly.
Connection and engagement through paid newsletters and podcasts.
Regular podcasts to deepen your relationships with readers.
Insistence on producing quality print works in all those versions as your main income. Pay yourself first.
Secondary distribution of ebooks through distributors, starting with their pre-release via aggregators, post Kickstarter. Diversify your output.
A balance of non-fiction with fiction.
Publish mini-courses from your non-fiction.
Enable your fans to become emissaries with affiliate offers.
Arrange those elements anyway you see fit – work with them to refine your marketing as you refine your author craft.
That's what I'm doing. Testing, refining, continuing.
Book Marketing Basics
The general approach to finding audience to engage with it is through two actions:
1) You need to be asking for email addresses.
2) Your platforms need to be transaction-oriented – meaning, the person is there knowing they will be buying something or at least pitched an offer.
HOW THIS WORKS
Again, social media isn't designed to ask people for money – in fact, you'll often be terminated if you do. People go there to get a dopamine rush from having their approval button pushed. They aren't there to shop or even subscribe.
Kickstarter, Substack, Patreon and others all have the commercial side of this front and center. Their visitors come with the expectancy to reward the creators there.
These sites also gather email addresses and make them available to creators. If you ever want to move to another platform you can take those addresses and your newsletter-material with you.
Social media and third-party book distributors won't let you do that.
Your most successful actions in terms of ROI will be through these types of sites – which includes having your own website.
Always be gathering emails in your book marketing. If you can't get emails directly (or at least give a link that they can click on to opt-in to your list) then you're wasting your time. Social followers have never equated to subscribers in any decent ratio.
A SIMPLE STRATEGY TO TEST:
0) Finish up getting your own website (on Gumroad) live for direct sales. You need to be able to give people a buying link where you get their email in every sale.
1) Move your list list and posts to Substack. Continue to post newsletters from here. This cuts your cost of an email service provider. Their Notes is all the social media you'll need. This is a long-haul, continuing program of weekly writing. And you can get paid by those who support your newsletter. Direct income.
2) Get your next book set up with it's own Kickstarter to launch it. Mine previously published books to add value to that release. Make that a special edition ebook, paperback, and hardback just for Kickstarter. Add on digital bonuses, especially the earlier books in that series – plus your cutting room floor notes.
3) Once that Kickstarter is successfully funded, that original book then is put on pre-release through Draft2Digital as an aggregator for ebooks and paperbacks, with Lulu fulfilling distribution of the hardbacks. You can then take advantage of various pre-release offers through their distributors. They'll distribute your Print On Demand paperbacks for you. These book versions don't give you email addresses, but you have a giveaway “reader magnet” offer in their backmatter so they can go to your direct sales site. You've already paid for your production costs with your Kickstarter, and rewarded your devoted fans with special editions. Now you send out a version of that book out to the rest of their world to broaden your email list. It's called a Self-Liquidating Offer – they pay you for the book while they are promoted to join your list and buy others in that series.
4) Follow that same process upcoming books. Write in series. Add all new subscribers to your newsletter list. Also add gifts of annual paid newsletter subscriptions in the Kickstarter bonuses. Ensure each of your Kickstarter campaigns is set up with “late arrival” bonuses so they are perpetually able to generate income and subscribers on their own.
5) If you can get up to running 4-6 Kickstarters per year (with 17-day releases), then start working back through your non-fiction and fiction back list to develop audiences around these topic-areas and genres.
6) Meanwhile work to upgrade the Annual and Founding Member paid bonuses on Substack, as well as updating your automated email welcoming sequences.
The core points of this is to make Substack your fan engagement center, with Kickstarter into a regular income source. You create unique limited editions, which are supplemented with all possible versions on the various book distributors as a follow-up. Your author income gets under control this way, and you can start running my publishing as an actual business.
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There are several great advantages to this type of audience-centric operation.
1) You gain by direct sales to your fans. Kickstarters alone can earn you a livable income, once they are mastered. They expand your email list and also excite the list you already have.
2) Through Substack, you gain an additional income source of paid newsletters. Some authors then publish their current book through their newsletters and then compile these chapters into a finished book and release them (of course) through a Kickstarter.
3) You regain your time as you drop out all social media other than Notes on Substack. Notes will add free subscribers to your list there – which then can upgrade to paid subscribers, supporting you directly.
4) Controversial: You drop having to run ads as part of your marketing. So you have more time to invest elsewhere, as well as income. Grahl's marketing approach is simple – keep it that way.
5) Ignore having to get reviews and anything else you hear about how to leverage Amazon's algorithms. In this model, the priority is reversed. When you publish through D2D or other aggregators, they'll give you regular BISAC categories as genres to publish through. And if Amazon accepts your book, fine – otherwise, you already have it up everywhere else. For if it sells on Amazon, it will sell everywhere else (and vice-versa) – without ads. If they don't accept it – you're still making income everywhere else.
6) Especially for non-fiction, you'll start earning more income from paperbacks in those categories that support print sales. Researching these categories then frees you to write directly for readers who value quality books. This frees you from “needing” to “write to market” for the “whale readers”. You attract a specific type of reader through your Kickstarters – and find your true fans don't have to be thousands of anonymous readers. So those fans then will support your work and give you direct feedback on the books you're writing for them.
You've just turned Amazon's model upside down. They can keep their whale-ebook-reader model as long as they can. You don't care anymore. Because you service your true fans directly. And get to write for a living.
It's a new world.
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We've come all this way and answered many questions.
Authors fail to make a living when they don't build their personal audience by collecting their email addresses and engaging them directly.
Successful authors are marketing their next book before they start writing it – and through the whole process right down the line – making sure your fans are delighted with the book they received, by keeping them involved in its creation. Those enthusiastic fans then tell others – and continue the sales process just as a flywheel keeps the engine turning.
You're no longer writing “for market”, but you are writing directly for your personal audience. Big difference in result.
We've now uncovered a model that works to make you a livable career as a writer. How high you take this is up to you. There are no real limits except those you set or accept for yourself.
PS. The next book in this series is about Copywriting. Stay tuned...
Earlier in this series:
Here’s that new beta-reader advanced copy - still available: