How I Was Wrong About Marketing (Case Study13)

And this happens more than I care to admit.

I was wrong, wrong, wrong.

Again, it's conventional wisdom that I swallowed years ago and has been an unshakeable, concrete, locked-down, Gospel truth in book publishing.

And it was wrong, wrong, wrong.

What was that wrong datum?

• You write the book from your inspiration, edit an hone it, get a fantastic cover done up, write and hone a fascinating description - and then either get a publisher to print it and distribute it, or self-publish and self-distribute it. And hope for the best. Meanwhile, then just get back to your writing until you have the next 3-5 books in that series ready - and run them through. 
• Once you have a series of books on sale (the first one perennially at .99 or free) then they all start taking off. (Then you start the next series.)
  

What is the correct datum?

• While you're researching your bliss to see how you can help people improve their lives with the value you know you can provide, you build your audience and get their input on what should be in that book. You write some of it and get a few trusted individuals to weigh in on it. Then you correct that section or part, get their and other's feedback, correct it, rinse, repeat. Then you write the next chapter, section or part and do that whole sequence again. Finally, you self-publish it and self-distribute it - announcing pre-release and low first week pricing, etc. to that audience.
• Then you start the next book and run it through as above.
  

What's the difference?

• The second wins because you are asking the audience about their concerns and they are helping you write the book. They are vested in that book and every book after that point. And every following book continues to build your audience.
• The first idea loses, because you remain anonymous to your audience and have to hope you got it right as far as what they want.
  
  

Do you get this?

I hope so.

You build your audience first and get them into a membership (doesn't have to be paid.) This allows you to interact with them and get them to help you write that book, and the next, and the next, and so on.

That first, wrong approach is built on statistics. Those statistics are built on the 97/3 rule - which states most people (97%) would rather lemming their way through life instead of finding what really works. 3% will question everything that comes across their plate until they find the underlying system which makes the whole scene make sense. Then they act on what they find.

That workable system they just found might be such a paradigm shift that they then change huge parts of their lives - or, if they've been frugal and lean, they've been putting the smaller changes in place as they find them and it won't be such a major shift.

What I'm saying here...

...is that the entire publishing world-view is upside down.

Books are not print-only, and they aren't print-plus-ebook, plus-maybe-audiobook.

Books are simply containers for a set of ideas. Those ideas might be best communicated as movies (some books wind up on the big screen or straight to DVD.) Some books are best verbally produced and wind up podcast. Some books are sung in multiple tracks on a Long-Play album, or as short singles. Some books are never more than presentations and live speeches.

Many books can and should be all of the above.

But all books start out with an audience. In fact, the audience-experience inspires the books, nurtures the book, and finally brings the book to life. In some instances, such as religious or inspirational/philosophical texts - people actually live the book.

And we all use stories to understand our lives, by finding other's stories and comparing our own life story through theirs. That is how marketing works, and actually is the only effective way to market that doesn't leave money on the table (and piss off about 80-90 percent of everyone who didn't buy.)

Your book is a performance.
It's a story that people should want to hear. But you have to perform it in front of an audience and get their reaction. (This is how Mark Twain wrote his books later in life - to his family and their children, then he'd go and correct them if they didn't get the expected response.)

Once you have your audience reaction, then you correct what's needed until you get a satisfactory reaction to your audience. Ultimately, this winds up as a book.

The wrong datum is to write a book and hope enough people buy it.

What does this all mean, now?

It means I'm done with this, because that Marketing Spreadsheet was back-to-front.

Here's what it should look like:

Site Setup
  Domain  Hosting  Analytics*  Mobile Template  Legal pages  Opt-in  Membership backend  IFTTT*
Market Research
  Keyword phrases  Alexa Demographics  1st Customer Avatar  2nd Customer Avatar
Book Research
  Area narrow-down  Theme
Book Landing Page  
Blog (on Membership site)
A/V (embedded on blog post)
  Audio (podcast)  Transcript (PDF) Presentation (PDF)  Video
Synnd Campaigns       
  Video  Bookmarking  Social News  Twitter
Doc-Sharing       
  Slideshare  Scribd  Doc-Stoc  Gdrive (public)
Video  
  Synnd
Audio   
  Archive.org  Soundcloud
Cover Art     
  Pinterest  Flickr  G+ (public)
Text Book Versions
  PDF  epub  mobi   
Lulu 
  epub  PDF  tradepb  GlobalReach   
Distributors
  Sellfy  Payhip  Google  iTunes  Nook  Kobo EspressoBM
Amazon Ed. 
LP Update 
Book Sites     
  OpenLibrary  Library Thing  Goodreads
Audiobook 
Course 
Other Promotion 
  Bittorrent Bundle
Affiliate Sales Bundles (under testing)
  Distribly Scubbly JVZoo MyCommerce PaySpree Click2Sell DigiResults BlueSnap

*Analytics
  Google Analytics  Webmaster Tools  Feedburner  G+ page  Facebook Page  Analytics.twitter.com
*IFTTT
  (See post on this.)

You see the difference with this new concept?

1. You set up your site (or preferably pay someone to set it up right - you don't want the headache of maintaining a site, believe me.) You also set up your IFTTT, since these ultimately go to social media which each have their own tribes. Of course, it has an opt-in to get members to follow you.
2. Your book research tells you generally what people want, so you start blogging this.
3. The feedback you get will tell you if you're on the right or wrong track. Meanwhile, you are assembling data which can be put into your free membership - and promoted to people so they can join your list to get access.
4. Every post is syndicated in as many formats as possible, everywhere that will accept it. And you push social signals at that content so people can find it.
5. When you have cover art, it's posted everywhere for feedback as well. And Synnd.
6. Once you have enough blog posts for a book (yes this works for fiction as well as non-fiction) then you fine tune it (with a few very trusted audience members) and craft the book.
7. At that point, the whole self-publishing scene kicks in.
8. The only marketing after that is to assemble free and paid bundles and see if you want to mess with Affiliate sales.

What's up now with this Case Study?

I'm still going to get the epubs out there. I'll publish them to iTunes and Google, where they will simply take the books without my having to do a lot of hand-holding to get them accepted.
I'm also going to set up links on their landing pages, and embed Payhip and  also port to Sellfy so it shows up on my Facebook page.

Then I take a hiatus from this blog while I get my membership up and running.

The next podcast will be from that site - and all these podcasts will be transferred there (so you can find them again, easily (I'll just change the RSS feed, you won't have to adjust the dials or anything. Happy?)

What you can takeaway from this

We're not done yet, although it may be awhile before you hear from me on this particular subject again. I'm pushing the backlogged podcasts out to you, but very minimally. (No downloadable PDF transcript.)

We're going to eat our own dog food and get the sequence straight.

When I have that membership set up, you'll be invited, for sure.

It's all very exciting for me, since this has narrowed down my bliss to a very fine pointed target. It will become apparent when you see my membership go live.

Until then - luck to us all!

- - - -

Ensure you are opt-ed in above to catch the next white-knucked, cliff-hanging episode of Selling Your Book Online.

See you next time...

Related articles

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• The new and streamlined assembly line for book publishing online.
• Staring an Indie SOHO Publishing Career and Making Income Immediately
• Getting Started on a Right Foot - with Online Book Selling
• How to Publish a Dozen Books in an Afternoon.
• Postcript: Tracking ebook links for fun and profit

How I Fouled up Self-Publishing My New Book Series - Case Study 10

(...and what you can do to avoid this mistake)

(Yes, I know - Fouled up isn't the same as Fowl, which isn't a cute chickie...)

Video edition:

OK, I got busy getting some hard-cover books done up - mainly because Lulu had a 25% discount which ended last night. (And that mostly paid for shipping...)

I had these books which I thought were ready, but actually were only half-way there. Out of the 13 books in that series (yes it grew from the first 6), I was able to get 8 of them coming to me as proofs. (I have one more actually ready, but was too close to the midnight deadline to order, and the others are either too short to print, or have a lot of work yet to make them ready.)

The problem was, I screwed up with the self-serving links in them.

I told you years ago - or was it just last year sometime - that you need to start tracking your links from these books.

It's true that Google is able to read these books, and so can follow links. If you put a link-shortener in there, you get no SEO. So my foul-up isn't that bad.

OK, let's backtrack a bit - this is getting us both confused.

The error you shouldn't make

I had these books ready, or so I thought.

Instead of putting a single link back to the site, I thought to add a "Bibliography" to each book which would give links to all the books in that series. (This is instead of a single link front and back.)

What I did then was to quickly set up landing page addresses for each book (set up the page on the site, copy the link, then turn the post back to draft.)

The step I omitted (which isn't a big deal, since the print versions don't have links anyway) is to convert all these books into bit.ly-shortened links.

The two reasons for using bit.ly are, first - they are the only shortener left standing which actually tracks your links and can give some analytics on it. The second reason is that they have become a form of social media in themselves.

The whole point of this is to have trackable links from your ebooks to show you whether they are coming from your books or somewhere else. I don't know that Google Analytics can't track these, but the point is that you want to be able to - and bit.ly is the only way I know of right now to do so.

Why the trade paperback isn't a bad start

It's true that they don't have links, but why paying for the expense of getting these books printed instead of the easy route of ebooks?

Well, for a start - Amazon can't/won't reject them. Second, you are only paying a few bucks for each book and will have a nice copy for your effort, with the satisfying touch and feel - being able to dog-ear and use a real bookmark, etc.

True, I've said to get them out into the ebook distributors first and then only spend the time and money on proven sellers.

And that is still very valid advice. When you are broadshooting with a few dozen books available to publish, that would be the way to go. Particularly with PLR to show you which book markets are hottest - of course you've already done your market research to pick out PLR ebooks based on what you've found. Publishing ebooks just tends to verify and narrow your field (providing your covers and descriptions are enticing and fascinating.)

And maybe this was a mistake. I kinda think not - since I can sit down and rattle off a 5-10 minute book trailer with a hardcopy in my hand, doing a half-dozen or more books in a single sitting. This then gets the book trailer out of the way.

It also takes time to get those books to me, while I then build out the landing pages for each one (yes, you can imagine having to build 13 landing pages will take some time.) With snail-mail (cheapest) figure about 10 days to 2 weeks before they arrive. I should be able to get all those pages back up and running.

The other error I'm correcting 

It has to do with IFTTT (If This Then That - ifttt.com). This we've covered - it's a way to get your message out to all sorts of social media. I have to post the original video, cover, blog post, audio, and PDF to basically five sites. Then IFTTT sends these out to:

Tumblr
Wordpress
Blogger
Facebook Page
Instagram
500px
Twitter
LinkedIn
bitly
delicious
diigo
digg
Box
and Facebook

And some get multiple posts. That saves me a lot of work promoting these - the problem is: I don't have these set up via IFTTT, either. Or all verified, anyway.

So I pulled down (reverted to draft) all the landing pages I had put up. So when I put these live, they'll be covered. (You can see my CYA post here.)

All that work is headed in a certain direction - which is how to market these books, any books, effectively. And as I said before, what starts right tends to go right, but you can always start over...

What about this Membership stuff?

Funny you should ask. That's probably the fourth error I have to fix.

When I started looking ahead to all the work I had to do, I considered that I wouldn't want to do anything twice - and that why should I invest my Synnd coins on a Blogger blog, when I can spend them promoting the same post on my membership site which I can then syndicate over to that Blogger site (which IFTTT then syndicates to Wordpress and Tumblr, etc. for me.)

About the time I get all done, I'll need to change it again. Not funny.

So my next real step is to figure if I can CNAME deep inside my membership, or simply redirect my Blogger blog over to a category inside my wordpress-based Rainmaker platform.

The original Blogger site will still get set up as planned, it's just that the main promotion is going to be spent on my Rainmaker-hosted site, with the freebie site carried as a version of the first. Is it worth it? Well, you never throw away a blog which has been around for awhile. And this standalone blog will be devoted entirely and only to assembling and promoting the know-how of creating children's books. (I've got plans after this as well - when I start cranking out children's books by the gross, literally...)

Lots of work ahead, one step back for every two forward, and so on.

But you're worth it, aren't you?

You are why I'm doing this after all - so you don't have to go through this pain on your own.

- - - -

Be sure you're subscribed by email or news-reader to this site so you don't miss anything coming up...

Presentation version:

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Getting Started on a Right Foot - with Online Book Selling: Case Study 07

(Photo:  Augustus Binu)

Your site is the right first step to take in getting your book selling online.

There I was, running through all these to-do spreadsheet list actions - and I realized I'd skipped over a huge piece of this puzzle.

Yes, I really just want to get to work on these books - but part of that was telling you just how to get started right. Because I so often just haven't - and see so many authors out there who also just didn't.

That might explain why so many authors work so hard and then have almost nothing to show for it. Well, they have their day job...

You first have to know who your selling to...

And that's no easy first step. A lot of writers start with this incredible story in their head, that's just screaming to get out - won't let them sleep, etc. (Been there, done that.)

But in the back of their mind, they are really writing for someone. They've studied the genre, studied the artists they like, know the general layout of how that type of story goes - the know what people want to read and will buy.

Those that don't - well amateurs and suckers are born every minute. Millions and Billions.

Amateurs become Pro's through lots of practice and study and practice. Amanda Hocking wrote over 10 books before she hit her stride and became a million-seller on Amazon. Louis La'Mour studied all the classics and wrote tons of short stories (some even got accepted and published) before he hit his stride - with a unique style built from what the successful writers used: Shakespeare, Beowulf's author, and the dime novels from Street & Smith which sold and sold and sold. So: his books sold - and his books were in demand the world over.

It's more than craft, though. Online sales depend on a website which provides exactly what people are looking for. A website doesn't just list the books you wrote, it mirrors the people who are reading them. Their site contributes to their author-journey, giving them the tools and weapons to defeat any opponents and resolve the struggles they will face.

How you find who and what your'e looking for.

It's not really all that hard to get from where you are to where you want to be. You've just been missing someone who's left a trail after wandering the maze before you.

You need to meet your avatar. Some call her Emily. She's the single persona that represents your typical buyer.  You write exclusively for her - once you find where she lives and what she wants.

In marketing-speak, some of this is known as demographics. Outside of some very good (and quite expensive) services out there, where does a beginning/struggling author supposed to find what they are looking for?

One free tool - Alexa.

While their paid version gives you way more data, just searching up the top sites you're avatar is familiar with on their free data will give you tons of insight.

What I'd suggest is getting your copy of Market Samurai (a one-time payment, life-time updates) and find the sites which come up for the keyword phrases you want to use. Check those in Alexa and really get your data straight - find out in-depth what your avatar is looking for - before you set your site up.

Spreadsheet addition - prepare your site to rock your world

(Yeah, I know - yet more to-do list? Oh, come on...)

Let's keep this simple: 

Market Research     Keyword phrases, Alexa, demographics, Avatar
DomainHosting     Analytics Analytics
    Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Feedburner, G+ page, Facebook Page, Analytics.twitter.com
Mobile Template
    Sharing widgets, social profile, affiliate links, G+ badge, Facebook Page badge
Opt-in
    content hosted, script, tested
Legal Pages
   disclaimer, disclosure, terms of use, privacy  

You see that this doesn't fit on the regular spreadsheet. Because it's really more  a checklist. Then you fill up your site with landing pages and so on. But you first have to get it all set up. That's why the checklist.

We've covered Market Research. Look these up, don't skimp.

Domain name is selected as a result of your keyword research - as the Search Engines give you credit in your domain name.  We're talking here about having a domain for your series.  But there's a trick to use - particularly where the domain you want is already taken - subdomains.

That's http://subdomain.domain.com - see?

I long ago got the domain midwestjournalpress.com as a publishing imprint. This then gets extended by simply setting up a site at the subdomain. (Like http://picturebook.midwestjournalpress.com - our test case.) Of course, I take this a bit further by setting these new sites up on Blogger, with CNAMEs. You can see that the original domain is then infinitely extensible - so you can put any sort of keyword in front of your current domain and have the best of both worlds.

Analytics

A bit tricky here - you want to know what's going on with your site. Who's visiting, what they are using to get there, that they like best, the countries they come from - all that and more. Wherever you host your domain, if you have a site there, you can find out all this from your host.

However, if you are just passing your subdomain over to Google, then you could be missing some analytics. Not to worry - Google has even better analytics, due to combining their Adwords tools and Webmaster Tools in one interface. With Google, and getting your site running for awhile, you'll find all sorts of data about your avatar - way more "granular" than you can get from Alexa or your own domain host. For all the limits of Blogger as a platform, this more than makes up for it. (Of course, you can get these analytics for all your sites on any platform. So it's a tool you should be using whether you run ads or whatever you do. Also your Analytics can plug into almost anything that has a web address...

Other points: burn your feed with Feedburner to get some additional analytics (it's another Google product.)

Having a Google+ page for your series makes a lot of sense (as G+ is part of the Google universe.)

Facebook has some analytics, as well as Twitter. Might as well access them if you're doing promotion down that line.

A note here: access these weekly, or at least monthly, to see how your traffic and links are going. Then you can adjust your marketing - change course, or expand what you're doing right.

Mobile Template

As I went over elsewhere - the world is going mobile, so having a website/blog which does mobile right is essential.

Some other points you want to include are:

• Sharing widgets
• Any affiliate products you push
• G+ badge (from your Google+ page)
• Facebook badge (from your Facebook page)

All these back up your social signals (and can earn you more income.) But that's not all...

Opt-in

This is what I've been most guilty of - not building my list. And it's pegged my income.

So do what I haven't - get your opt-in (and ethical bribe) ready from day one - even before you post a single landing page. Really. Just do it.

Get your email provider to give you the script and plug it in - make sure it's prominent and shows up on your mobile version.

Test, tweak, test - until it's great. Just what your avatar has always wanted.

And yes, this is great to introduce them to your membership (both free and paid.)

Legal Pages

Google wants these:

• disclaimer 
• disclosure  
• terms of use  
• privacy

There are a lot of scripts online which can give you versions of these, which you just post as pages and then link through the template so they show up on every view. 

Summary

Well, that about does it. Remember to use this as a checklist - get it done, but have fun with it. Let your muse guide you: there's still a lot of leeway and creative work to do in these.

Remember, though, that your real work still lies ahead. Your site just gives you a great start in getting your books to sell.

Note: why do I keep talking about a blog instead of a static site? Simple: Search engines like regular new content. Having a blog format gives you a leg up in this area. Even if you neglect it, it will still rank better than most other sites. Tumblr and Wordpress even as backups (through IFTTT) will help you rank better - as they will also be ranking along with your main blog.

- - - - 

I hope next post to get back to work with my books. Bring you up to speed and show you where I left off before I started this whole "organize" scene. A bit shocking, even for me...

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