by john | Jun 20, 2017 | Business of publishing, How to Sell Books, Writing
Sorry for the clickbaity headline, but I’d like to get some more traffic. 🙂 So yeah, really not a bit sorry.
When I talk to writers nowadays, sometimes I’ll have the conversation with people about audiobooks that goes something like this –
Writer – “Do you really make any money off audiobooks?”
John – “It’s almost 20% of my annual income, so yeah, I make some money off audio.”
Writer – “I don’t know anything about how to do it.”
John – “I have the technical skills of a tree frog and the patience of a hummingbird on meth. You think I edit any of that stuff? I hire people to do it.”
Writer – “But it’s expensive!”
John – “I usually work with my narrators on a royalty share. That way I don’t lay out anything up front. It’s not as lucrative for me in the long run, but I don’t have to pay a couple grand to get a novel narrated, and I don’t have to do it.”
Writer – “It sounds hard!”
John – “Now you’re just being lazy. I tell you that you can make a grand a month with no upfront cost, and all you have to be able to do is the equivalent of listing something for sale on eBay, and you still don’t want to do it? What the hell? You’re totally paying for lunch, just for being a buttmonkey.”
Disclaimer – I don’t think I’ve ever called anyone a buttmonkey, but I will almost certainly start.
That’s a brief example of the way I feed my family – I have multiple buckets out to catch the rain. If you have one bucket out in your yard, and you need ten gallons of water, then it needs to rain for a long time for you to get all that water. But if you put twenty buckets out in the yard, then you can get ten gallons pretty quickly.
In case you missed it, the rain is money, and the buckets are revenue streams. Just in case you missed it.
It’s increasingly important to have as many revenue streams as possible, especially for someone trying to make a living as a writer. You can’t just depend on one check twice a year from a major New York publisher. That’s crazy, unless the check is ginormous!
Here are the ways I get paid –
Monthly –
Amazon – This is the biggest bucket. I have books for sale on amazon in print and ebook. This makes up about 2/3 of my income. Amazon pays monthly. That’s kinda what I budget my life around. Most of my monthly living expenses are covered through Amazon.
Other sites – While I have a lot of titles listed in Kindle Unlimited, I do still have a few things floating around out there across other sites. I use Draft2Digital as the aggregator for those sites, and they also pay monthly.
Patreon – My patrons are wonderful, and they provide about enough money each month to cover the cost of the conventions I attend. This is quite helpful, especially when I have four cons in eight weeks, like I do right now.
Audible – Audible also pays monthly, which is very helpful. Most of this money goes into a savings account for emergencies or taxes, but if there are lean ebook months, I’ll dip into this.
Autographed books – negligible, although I do hope that since I’ve redone that page on the website, that will start to be a reasonable little dribble of money.
Convention sales – let’s face it, if I break even at a convention after I’ve paid all my expenses, it’s a really good con. I’ve been very fortunate this year that sales are going better than normal, but I still mostly pour all the money back into inventory, so on a good month, it’s a wash.
Quarterly –Â
Other publishers – I still have a little work out there with other small presses that pay me quarterly. It’s not a lot, but about enough to buy dinner for me and Suzy, or maybe a trip to the movies.
Semi-Annually –Â
Bell Bridge, the folks that publish The Black Knight Chronicles, pay me twice a year. This is like clockwork, and it also mostly goes into savings for taxes, but also helps defray the costs of cons like Dragon Con, which are way more expensive than normal conventions, and I don’t sell there.
Intermittent Income –Â
Sometimes I’ll do a story for an anthology that has a one-time payment associated with it, or have a small royalty check from some random work I did a while back, or pick up work that has an advance tied to it. Those are pretty much gravy, and they either go towards erasing credit card debt, or go into savings for taxes.
So I have a bunch of buckets out there trying to catch the rain. Not as many as some people, but a good half dozen revenue streams working. That’s how I can afford to make a living writing, and maybe not write much of anything in June, because I can count on another strong month out of the last Harker novella, and the latest two Harker audiobooks to carry me through any lulls in productivity or sales.
The point of this is not to say “Look at how awesome I am for having a bunch of diverse ways to make money!” I mean, let’s face it, you’re here reading this – you already know I’m awesome. 🙂 It’s more to say that you need to explore all the different ways that you can monetize your work. If you are with a small press that doesn’t do audio – do it yourself. If you are self-published, and haven’t done audio – get on it! It’s a huge market, a growing market, and one that needs to be tapped.
I don’t know what the next thing will be that’s like audio, but you’d better believe that I’m looking for it. So get out there and make some more buckets!
by john | Jun 13, 2017 | Business of publishing, How to Sell Books
I’m going to do something a little different on this week’s blog about selling books, and give y’all a cautionary tale (and maybe some links to more) and some tips on how to avoid getting ripped off by a crooked publisher, or some signs on how to tell that your publisher is in over their head and you might be in for some problems.
This is spawned by the current arrest and charges filed against the owner of JK Publishing  in Colorado. According to this article and others I’ve seen, she is accused of defrauding authors of over $125,000 over two years. She ran a small erotica and romance press, and apparently fudged royalty reports to pocket a greater share of the money, leaving her authors screwed. She’s also accused of lying on her taxes to a degree significantly greater than just the garden-variety lying on taxes.
This gives all of us, authors and publishers, a black eye. It makes the whole business look shady. Just like when an NBA ref got caught shaving points it made all referees for all sports look bad. Anything that touches a situation like this comes away dirty. I hope there is a way that the authors can get what was rightfully theirs, but let’s face it, they’re probably screwed.
So what can you do to keep from getting screwed? After all, it’s not like there’s any licensure required to open a small press. All I had to do was file the LLC paperwork, pay the state a couple hundred bucks to incorporate, and away we went.I didn’t take a class. I didn’t get certified as anyone who was qualified to publish books. I just decided to expand my personal publishing efforts to help other people get published, and hopefully make enough to cover costs along the way.
So you can’t examine someone’s license, but you can examine the person. You can examine the contract they are offering. You can examine their website (which you didn’t want to do for the first several months that Falstaff Books existed, because it was hot garbage. Pure 100% dumpster fire. But now we have a wonderful web guru Erin, and she makes us look good.). You can examine the covers on the books they produce. You can look at their sales ranking on Amazon and see if they’re moving any books. You can read reviews of books they publish to see if they are full of typos.
You can also check places like Preditors & Editors and Absolute Write. These are peer-review sites of the most grass-roots. They’re message boards, and places for people to air grievances, but in the case of a very small press, they might not be very useful. So you need to contact a human.
Here’s a case in point. When I signed Michael G. Williams to a couple of contracts, he sent them out to be reviewed by third parties. Michael and I are friends, and have been for several years, and that has nothing to do with the fact that he was 100% right to get the contracts looked at. Darin Kennedy is one of my best friends, and we revised his contract several times before we were both happy with it. It’s not personal, it’s business.
That doesn’t mean be an asshole to your friends because you don’t like the contract, but it also doesn’t mean you should sign a bad contract just because your friend is offering it to you. Or because it’s a friend of a friend. Or whatever. Every contract is a negotiation. Both parties want different things, and the whole point of the contract is to outline everyone’s expectations and get them down on paper, so you can still be friends after you’re finished doing business. So be pleasant, but be firm.
What are some warning signs in contracts?
Well – the contract needs to be very specific about what rights it is asking for. Our contract at Falstaff is for ebook, print, and audio rights. We don’t ask for graphic novel rights, because I don’t have a way to sell them. We only ask for English language rights, but we do ask for worldwide English language rights. I can’t get stuff translated, but we can sell all over the world through the distribution channels we use. Â We don’t do film or TV rights, because I can’t sell them. If an author sells them, good on them. Hopefully it will sell a lot more books, and we’ll both get paid that way. Other publishers may have better ways to sell those things, so they may ask for those rights. If you don’t want to give them up, negotiate. But it needs to be clear.
When you get paid needs to be very clear. And the first time a publisher is late with a payment, you need to be concerned. We pay quarterly, but I give myself 60 days after the end of the quarter to pay. That means that I’ve paid First Quarter royalties, and we’ll pay Second Quarter royalties sometime in August. I definitely want to get those sent out before Dragon Con, so they money will likely go out mid-month instead of taking the full 60 days to pay people. That also gives me a buffer in case anything gets goofy with the mail or PayPal.
Rights reversion is a big thing, and you want a contract to define what is “out of print.” Technically, ebooks don’t ever go out of print, so you want a rights reversion clause based on sales built into the contract. We didn’t have this in the first Falstaff contract, but our newest version does. We’re learning. As more authors negotiated with us, we realized that it should just go in the contract.
But vetting a small press can be tough, A lot of it eventually is going to come down to trust. Meet people. Talk to people. I prefer to do business with people I know, because I’m old-fashioned and would rather operate on a handshake. I won’t, because I don’t live in that world, but I still like to know the people I work with. You should too. If you want to publish with someone, ask around about them. Dig a little. Somebody knows these people. And it’s entirely possible that the publisher has been great, but shit fell apart and they stole from the business to get themselves by. When that happens, you can’t predict it. But you can be vigilant about it. If you have two years of royalties at one level, then there’s a significant dip the next, ask why. If you’ve released a book that appears to be doing well, but your royalties haven’t increased, ask why.
And if your publisher doesn’t respond, that’s when it’s time to get pushy. I don’t mean respond within an hour, because people do have lives, and there are times you just don’t have reception (like most of last Sunday for me). But within a couple days, certainly. If you ask a money question, and haven’t gotten an answer in a timely fashion, there might be something wrong. People don’t like to talk about money, and they certainly don’t want to talk about bad things having to do with money, but you must keep a handle on your money, because it is your livelihood.
So get your work out there, but don’t get screwed. And it’s a lot harder to screw over somebody once you’ve looked them in the eye than it is someone that you’ve never met or even spoken with before. So meet people, Skype with people, talk to them on the phone. Humanize them, and become a human to them. It’s a strong negotiating method.
Good luck!
by john | Jun 6, 2017 | Business of publishing, How to Sell Books, Promos/Giveaways
Hey there!
If you follow me on social media, you might have seen a few pre-written tweet and Facebook messages that come out from my account. You might actually have seen enough to make you dread the thought of ever hearing from me again. But obviously not, because now you’re here to read even more of my crap, so either something I’m doing is working, or there’s something fundamentally wrong with you.
Or both.
Be that as it may, I do post a LOT of tweets and pre-scheduled social media messages. There are a few reasons for this –
- If commercials and junk mail (what I often refer to as the “shotgun approach” to marketing) didn’t still work to some degree, companies with a lot more money to buy marketing and analyze its effectiveness wouldn’t still do it.
- It takes multiple mentions of a product for it to stick in someone’s mind. That product may be a specific book, but more often than not, that product is YOU. So you need a fair amount of visibility. That means being active all through the day, particularly when the bulk of people are in a place to see it. My completely non-scientific belief is that most people fuck off in front of their computers the most from 9AM-5PM Eastern time. And even more between 11AM-2PM, because that’s lunch. That’s when I post most heavily.
- Facebook and Twitter throttle your posts so that only a small percentage of things you put out in the world are seen unless you’re willing to pay for the privilege. To combat this, I send out the same message once per day, six days a week. My hope is that different people will see it each time, or at least that a few new people will see it each time.
So that’s the “why” I post a bunch. But what about the “how?” What makes a good social media post? Well, here are a few things that I try to include in most of my posts, and this is something that is constantly being refined as I learn more and look at what posts get the most interaction.
By the way, I will refer to all of these as tweets, even though I have HootSuite set up to cross-post to Facebook and Twitter. Each message I create goes to five different feeds – my Twitter, the Falstaff Books Twitter, my Facebook page, my Author page, and the Falstaff page. But it’s identical, because I only have so much time in my life.
I try to be funny, witty, or at least entertaining. I frequently use over-the-top examples to push the humor if it’s a funny book or story, or I try to tie it to something that will make the person who sees it go “Wait, what?” In a tweet for the book Changeling’s Fall, I make mention of the fact that unless you read the book, you won’t know what part of a goblin glows in the dark. This is something that people aren’t expecting, and makes them want to look further.
You’re always working toward the click in social media. With pre-written messages, you aren’t just looking to make people remember your name, you’re looking for something that makes them think “I need to know what the hell he’s talking about” and click the link. They can’t buy your shit if they don’t click the link. And that’s the endgame – getting people to buy your shit. You are not playing around on social media because you’re a great artist, you’re playing around on social media because you are in business to make money.
So a good tweet is made up of three things – a hook, a hashtag, and a link.
I’ve already talked about the hook. It’s kinda like your back cover matter, only super-condensed. Or it’s a cover blurb, only super-condensed. When I tweeted about Midsummer, a Bubba meets Shakespeare novella, I made mention of A.J. Hartley, because he’s a Shakespeare expert. When I tweet about Of Lips and Tongue, I mention that it’s one of the best novellas released last year. When I tweet about Pawn’s Gambit and War Pigs, I’ll mention that they are finalists for the 2017 Manly Wade Wellman Award (Congrats to Darin Kennedy and Jay Requard!).
Your hook is that “Wait, what?” moment. It’s what makes the person seeing it read further. It’s what cuts through the noise, and there’s plenty of noise out there. You can (and will) have multiple tweets about each release. You can make one funny, one serious, one scary, one referential to another work out there, whatever. Just use part of your 140 characters to make it interesting.
You need at least one hashtag, preferably two. I’m just getting better at this, because hashtags baffled me for a long time. Hashtags are the way people filter social media. If someone wants to see all the tweets and posts about ConCarolinas, they can search using #concarolinas, and all the posts using that hashtag will pop up.
Do not use very specific hashtags. If you’re reading this, I’m going to assume that you aren’t a huge bestseller. If you aren’t James Patterson, using a hashtag with your name is useless. If no one will ever search for the hashtag, it’s just a waste of space. I find that #kindle #amazon #audible #audiobook #ebook #bargain #free #fantasy #horror #scifi are all broad enough to be useful, while #falstaffbooks or #johnhartness would be absolutely useless. No one is searching twitter feeds for those terms, so don’t bother with them.
Don’t overdo it with hashtags, either. After a while, it just becomes a parody of your content and the message is lost. I think one or two is plenty.
The link – this part is easy. You need something that people can take action on, namely to buy your shit. But there are a few things that go into making a link, and some of them you might not know about.
- Universal Links – We all know how much is sucks to have your book available on ten different platforms but you can only fit one link into each message. Well – Books2Read is your new best friend! Books2Read makes universal links for your book. You just go to their site, insert the buy link from any online store into the field, and it will scour the internet for everywhere else the book is available, and create a Universal Link that points to ALL of them! What happens is that your customer clicks the universal link, and they are directed to a page that says “Hey! This book is available all over the interwebs! Where do you want to buy it?” You customer says “Here!” and clicks their favorite ebook store. Books2Read sends them there, and remembers their choice for next time. So next time they click any Books2Read link, it takes them to the book on their selected store. This gives you the opportunity to share the link to all online stores in one shot, and your readers can get your shit wherever they want.
- Link shorteners – most social media aggregators like HootSuite or TweetDeck have a tool that will shorten a link for you. I don’t use them. There’s nothing wrong with them, but I use bit.ly. Bil.ly shortens the links, lets you customize the link, and gives you tracking for the link. All with a free account. I use them for all my link creation.
So there you go, the short version of how to build a tweet that sings instead of sucks. Build a hook, a hashtag, and a link, and then go promote the fuck out of your stuff! Remember, art is awesome, and as soon as you make enough money, you can make all the art you want!
by john | May 23, 2017 | Business of publishing, How to Sell Books, Promos/Giveaways
Let’s talk about social media, shall we? I know, you’re probably tired as fuck of hearing about social media. You’re either baffled by the idea of social media, because you don’t really do the technology thing, or you’re paralyzed by anxiety about social media, because you hate dealing with people and are terrified that someone might talk to you, or you’re annoyed with social media, because people like me keep telling you to use social media and you have no idea what is the right way to do it, and you wish someone would just tell you exactly what to do and then you could do it and get on with your life, but you don’t want it to take up too much of your writing time, because you already have a day job, and kids, and hobbies, and other family, and can barely squeeze in an hour each day to write, and now some asshole has you reading these blog posts every week about how to sell books when what the fuck does he even know about how to sell books anyway?
Does that pretty much sum it up?
I thought so. Look, social media is, at its core, two thing. It is a way for friends to communicate with each other, and it is a way for companies to get their name out in front of customers. There are a lot of types of social media, and it is very easy to drive yourself absolutely bonkers trying to keep up with what the cool kids are using. Is it Instagram? Is it Tumblr? Is it Pinterest? Is it Twitter? Is it Facebook? Is it MySpace?
Here’s a hint – it ain’t MySpace. But any of the others are perfectly valid places to spend time interacting with people and telling them about your books, your life, your cat (people fucking love cat pictures), your poop (less love for the poop pictures), or your kids (they might love or hate kid pictures). It’s all about what you want to focus on. For the purposes of this article, we’re going to focus on scheduled posts on Facebook and Twitter, because that’s what I do. I do scheduled posting on Facebook and Twitter because it’s easy and I can do it without taking up too much of my writing time.
A lot of people will tell you that this kind of shotgun, junk mail posting on social media is worthless, annoying, and will alienate fans. I will tell you that on weeks that I do not do scheduled posts, I see an average of 10% less sales than on weeks where I do scheduled posts. I sell between 30-50 books per day, depending on the month and the recent releases, so we’ll say I average 275 books per week. So I sell about 28 books more in weeks that I do scheduled posting. That’s worth around $75 cash.
That is more money than I am willing to leave lying on the ground for the hour that it takes me to schedule a week’s worth of Facebook and Twitter posts.
I also do a lot of organic Facebook posting, sharing, and interacting with people. I don’t hang out on Twitter a ton, but I go on there every once in a while and go on a retweet or liking binge. But I hang out on FB a lot, so I do a lot of organic activity there in addition to my structured posts.
Here’s the way I set it up each week. I block out about an hour on Saturday or Sunday (the days of the week I am most likely to not write) to do my social media. I have created Word documents with pre-written tweets that I copy and paste from. Yes. this is time-consuming on the front end, but if you write 2-4 different tweets for every product you release, and save them all in a master document, it’s really easy to stay on top of it. If you’re coming into this with 25 backlist titles, that’s going to be a pain. Too bad. It’s still worth it.
All this is my opinion. None of my opinions are humble. That’s your last caveat. From here on out, we’re presenting this as the Gospel According to Hartness. Don’t like it? You don’t have to read it. You are welcome to do your social media however you like. This is what I do, and how to copy what I do. If you want to do it, go for it.
So – I have a Word document with 2-3 prewritten tweets for each thing that I have out there. That’s every book, every audiobook, this website, my Patreon, my mailing list, and my podcast. I don’t promote everything every week. Some stuff is older backlist stuff that I just promote when I don’t have a new release. Some stuff I just rotate through. My Patreon gets promoted every week, my newsletter gets promoted every week, and this website gets promoted every week, These things are evergreen, and I always want as many eyes on them as possible, so I make sure they get promoted. Any new releases get promoted first, then new audio releases, then most recent releases. I try to promote at least one product from each of my three main series every week.
I use Hootsuxte to aggregate my tweets and auto-schedule them. Because I’m an early adopter, the plan I’m on costs me less than $10 each month. The same plan now costs $15/month, which is still a bargain. Because ain’t nobody got time to sit down every day and schedule a shitload of Twittering.
I set things up so that I send out a tweet (which cross-posts to Facebook on my timeline, my author page, the Falstaff Books FB page, and the Falstaff Twitter feed) every hour on the hour between 9AM EST and 6PM EST. That’s ten messages every day promoting me and my work. I do this Monday – Saturday, with the idea that fewer people look at Twitter on Sunday, so that’s often the day I’m using to build the following week’s posts.
Then I go back through and send one message per day for every product that Falstaff Books has published or has scheduled for pre-release. Every book we’ve ever done gets promoted every day, once per day. It’s all I can do, because we have a promotional budget of somewhere near seventy-five cents, and this fits within that budget.
I try to make the messages funny and interesting. I use Bit.ly to build all the links, because I can shorten them, and it offers some tracking. I used to embed my Amazon Associates link in the messages, but someone pointed out that it was against the Amazon Associates TOC, so I stopped.
But that’s it. I end up programming somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 tweets per week, and it takes me less than an hour. It will take you time to get the list of messages built, but once you have that established, you can get all this done in not a ton of time.
Is this better than real engagement with your buying public? Not by a long shot. Is this better than sitting around bemoaning the lack of sales? Yes, by a long shot. If commercials and junk mail and spam weren’t effective, we wouldn’t get so much of it. And you’re not just sending out ads for dick pills, you’re telling people who actually like you and/or your work what’s going on with you. This is much more targeted than that email about your schlong or the RedPlum flyer in your mailbox yesterday. So give it a shot. I find it valuable, maybe you will too.
By the way, I’m working on the page to let y’all buy autographed paperbacks from me. If you want to check it out, click the link that says “Autographed Books” at the top of this page. Thanks!
by john | May 16, 2017 | Business of publishing, How to Sell Books, Promos/Giveaways
Last time around, we talked about the two types of email list subscribers – incentivized subscribers and organic subscribers. Organic subscribers are the ones that come to you naturally, they are interested in you or your work, and they seek you out and sign up of their own free will. These are the unicorns of email list subscribers – they’re lovely, they’re beautiful, and may very well be mythical.
Nah, not really. But while they are the best type of subscriber, they are also the toughest to acquire, and the ones that require the most effort to cultivate. They are the folks that sign up from convention appearances, from links in the back of your books (you do have a link to your newsletter signup page in the back of your ebooks, don’t you?), or just from finding you on Facebook or the interwebs.
The other flavor of subscriber is much more prevalent, and they are the ones who subscribe because you give them something for signing up. I call these incentivized subscribers, and while it may seem at first blush that I value them less than organic subscribers, that’s not true at all. They just require different care and feeding.
Organic subscribers are easy to keep, but much harder to get in the first place. Incentivized subscribers are easier to get in the door, but much harder to keep once you have them. Both type of subscriber can turn into true fans over time, you just need to know what kind of cultivation you’ll have to do for each one.
There are good and bad ways to incentivize people signing up for your newsletter, and multiple methods of each. My favorite method of getting people to sign up for a newsletter is to give them a free ebook. I offer a free Quincy Harker short story, High Fashion Hell, to new subscribers. If you aren’t already on my email list, you can click here to join and get your free ebook. This story is available for sale, and it’s also available in an anthology, but there have been hundreds of copies of it claimed by people signing up for my email list since I started giving it away. So there is still some incentive to sign up, even with a story that is available elsewhere.
The way this works is – people see the link, click the link, and they are taken to a signup form on Mailchimp. Once they fill out the signup form, and confirm their email address, they receive another email that directs them to a page on BookFunnel. Book funnel hosts the ebook file and sends it to people in whatever format they request, for Kindle, Nook, iPad, whatever. You don’t have to put anything else in place. Mailchimp costs a monthly fee based on the number of email addresses on your list, and Bookfunnel charges based on the number of downloads per month.
I pay $25/ month for MailChimp and $10/month for BookFunnel. I also pay $20/month for Instafreebie, another service I use to send out ARCs and rewards. I’ll talk more about IF in a later post. With Hootsuite, another service I’ll talk about later, I spend about $60/month in automation and services to help with my marketing. As my lists and reach grows, so will that number. Nothing in life is free, and if it is, it’s probably worth what you pay for it. Hell, I even have a blurb at the end of this post asking for money, so this advice isn’t even really free. (BTW, if you think this advice is valuable and want me to continue making posts like this, feel free to join my Patreon.)
So how do you boost your numbers quickly? Well, there are a couple of ways. First, you can do newsletter swaps with writers that have more subscribers than you. Or even writers with the same number of subscribers as you, because they’re almost certainly different subscribers. Here’s how that works – A few months ago, Eric Asher set up a six-author mailing list swap. Each author sent out a newsletter to their list with everybody else’s book cover in it, and built a link in the cover to that author’s signup page. So all the people on Eric’s list who clicked on the High Fashion Hell cover got the chance to sign up for my email list. All the people who clicked on Eric’s cover in my newsletter got the chance to sign up for his list (and get some awesome free books. Go to his website. Sign up for the list. Tell him I said Hi).
I gained several hundred new subscribers, because they wanted free ebooks. A lot of them stuck around, because they were already pre-sorted as people who wanted to read the kind of stuff I write, because Eric and I write in similar genres. Those are incentivized subscribers, but they’re vetted leads, and much more likely to become “sticky” than a blind signup in my next example.
That’s a good way to incentivize signups – you aren’t spending much cash, and the thing you’re giving away is something that people who want to buy your books will want, but the general populace will have little interest in. Someone who doesn’t read will have no interest in signing up for my email list to get a free ebook. But they might want a free iPad!
Yeah, big-ticket giveaways aren’t worth a shit. They just aren’t. There is some value to giving away something like a Kindle Paperwhite, but a Kindle Fire or an iPad has just as much value to a non-reader as it does to a reader, and even with a PaperWhite, there’s no guarantee that the winner will read in your genre. If you write paranormal romance, you aren’t going to get a whole lot of value if a Chris Kennedy fan wins a Kindle from you. But if you like Military Sci-Fi, check Chris out. He’s good people.
The stickiness of a subscriber who joins up for a big-ticket giveaway like that is much, much lower than someone who signs up to get a free ebook. When I’ve done big massive email list building promotions, I see a lot of quick signups, then a lot of quick unsubscribes as soon as they get the first newsletter. And that costs money, not just in the cost of the item given away, but also in the escalation of your mailing list numbers, which costs more for MailChimp. So be careful about participating in those kind of campaigns. I just don’t think they’re worth it.
So what should you do if you’re just starting out trying to build an email list?
- Set up a MailChimp Account. This will manage the list so yo don’t have to fuck around in Excel or Access or something else awful. If you don’t like MailChimp, find another email list service. But use something of that ilk.
- Set up Automation so that you as soon as someone signs up for your list, they get a welcome email from you. This is where you can set up your giveaway as well.
- Set up a BookFunnel with a free ebook to lure subscribers in. It can’t be anything that’s available in Kindle Unlimited, but it also doesn’t have to be a novel. I feel like too many writers give away the farm to get email subscribers. If you’ve only got two novels published, don’t give one of them away for an email address. Write a prequel novella, or even short story, and use that as bait.
- Put a widget on your website with a link to drive signups. The book cover with a “Sign up for my Email List” tag is all you need.
- Create a Call to Action button on your Facebook Author page that is a signup button for your email list.
- Automate your Twitter and Facebook (or other social media outlets) to send out one message every day reminding people that they can get free shit by signing up for your email list. Every. Single. Day. Yes, even you, with one book out. Don’t do it every hour, but do it every day. Less than 20% of your FB contacts see the things you post, so you have to post frequently to get them out there. I don’t care if you think it’s annoying, shut up and do it. I’ll teach you how to Hootsuite later.
- Find some other authors who have shitty newsletter numbers and do a swap with them. Find other writers in your genre and do a newsletter swap with them. See if your publisher will send out a newsletter with your book cover linking to a newsletter signup page.
- Find authors who like you that have much bigger lists who will let you ride their coattails a little and do a newsletter swap with you. Don’t use this willy-nilly, and don’t email me. If everybody that reads this emails me, I’ll be overwhelmed. I might even get ten emails, given the traffic I get here. 🙂
- Communicate with your list regularly. At least once a month. Don’t consider it spam. Don’t consider it bothering people. Your readers, as much as you love them, aren’t your besties. They are your customers, and your job is to make sure they know about everything you have out there that they can buy. So go get their money!
That’s a pretty good primer on building an email list. I hope it’s been helpful. If you think I missed something, hit me up in comments. If you think I’m an idiot, then you probably shouldn’t have read this far and should go do something more fulfilling. 🙂 If you think I’m brilliant, buy all my shit. Or click the link for my Patreon.
by john | May 10, 2017 | Business of publishing, How to Sell Books, Promos/Giveaways, Writing
So you know you need an email list, but you have no idea how to go about building an email list, right? You don’t think you have anything interesting to say, or anything that people will want to hear about. You don’t release a book every month like some crazy bastards you know (BTW, the new Quincy Harker book is out for pre-order, and you should totally do that), you don’t think you lead a terribly interesting life, but this Hartness asshole keeps telling you to build a mailing list. So how are you supposed to do that?
There are a lot of ways to build a mailing list, and we’re going to start with my preferred method. The two styles of mailing list construction are Organic Growth and Incentivized Growth. Organic Growth is slower, much more labor-intensive, and requires writers to do the one thing that many of them hate to do – interact with people.
It’s also the best way to build a mailing list. With organized growth, you are slowly cultivating people who actually want to hear from you. People who have either seen you on a panel, or at a con table, or met you in line at the restroom, or in the bar, or read one of your books, or whatever – they have had some interaction with you or your work and they WANT to know more. Maybe they’re just another writer friend and they want to know when you have something new coming out. Whatever. You don’t care why they want to hear from you, they have interacted with you in some way, and made the decision that they actually want to hear from you.
These are the best mailing list subscribers. They are already predisposed to want to hear from you. They like you, and people buy shit from people the like. They don’t like to be lectured at, they don’t like to be preached at, but they like to laugh, so make people laugh every chance you get. Or cry. People like to cry, too, They don’t, however, like to feel like they are trapped in an elevator with Aunt Marge from the family reunions who always smells a little like pee and wants to pinch you. So don’t be Aunt Marge.
That escalated quickly. Moving back to the point, the people who subscribe organically are more likely to click on a link in your newsletter, and more likely to open the newsletter in the first place.
On the other side of the coin are the Incentivized Subscribers. These are people who want a free ebook, or want to enter to get a free Kindle, or whatever they are getting out of signing up for you list. These folks will have a high number of join and drop folks, and you won’t be able to convert that many of them into real fans and readers. Sorry, it’s just true. You might have 8,000 people on your email list, but if you’re only getting a 10% open rate on your newsletter, then you’re not doing any better than someone with a 2,000-person list and a 50% open rate. So look for quality over quantity, or ideally a mixture of both. Because you do need to be visible, and giveaways and mailing list swaps are good ways to do that, and they are often good ways to increase your mailing list dramatically in a very short time. I’ve added 1,000 people to my mailing list since the beginning of this year, and a lot of that has been off of Incentivized Subscribers. I’ve also had a lot of people drop from my mailing list immediately after downloading their free ebook, so the long-term success of those programs is yet to be determined.
So how do you get the Organic Subscribers? Well, there are a few ways.
If you are self-published, you can put a signup link in the back of all of your ebooks. If you are traditionally published, you can put a link in your author bio and either hope your publisher doesn’t see it, or ask your publisher if it’s okay. If I publish you, it’s fine. I want you to have a million people on your email list, because then we both make more money. This is a passive method that will slowly net some signups.
Please note that all of these organic methods are slow dribbles of signups. They are like putting out dozens of little buckets in a rainstorm. You don’t get very much water in any one bucket, but when you collect everything out of all the buckets, you can fill a bathtub pretty quick. These are your buckets.
Your website is another bucket. You’ll notice there is a link one the right-hand side of the page here with a picture of the High Fashion Hell cover. That’s a signup link for my website. People click on the picture, cover by the lovely Natania Barron, and they are directed to a signup form for my email list. Oh, you don’t have a website? Well, welcome to the late 20th century, you need a website. I suggest it be your name, not any book or series name, because you will have your name longer than you will have any given book series, and you want to remain easy to find online. Same with email addresses – get one that’s just your name, because eventually you will no longer want to be known as Hot2Trot4Cumberbatch420@whateverthefuck.com.
My author page on Facebook has a call to action button, which is another email list signup. That allows people who find me on Facebook to sign up for my emails directly from there. You don’t have an author page yet? Well, better get on that shit. You are a professional, whether you do this for your entire living or not, and you need to be able to use all the tools at your disposal.
I also use Twitter to drive email signups. I’ll get into the scheduled Twitter and Facebook posts in a later article, but suffice to say that at least once per day a message goes out on Facebook and Twitter telling people that I have a mailing list, and that they can get a free ebook if they sign up for it. I don’t get a ton of email signups, I have about 2,500 people on the list, and I add 5-6 per day. So it’s pretty good, and it’s growing nicely, but it’s not yet a huge list by any stretch. And I’m good with that, because it remains the single most effective marketing tool I have (heh heh, I said tool).
So that’s a little bit on organic methods to grow an email list. Next time around, we’ll talk about Incentivized Subscribers, good and bad incentives to build a list, and how to streamline all this shit so you don’t have to babysit it all the time. Until then, if you have any questions, leave them in the comments, and if you love what I’m doing, feel free to subscribe to my email list by clicking the book cover to your right or you can subscribe to my Patreon by clicking the link below. Thanks!
