by john | Sep 12, 2017 | Business of publishing, How to Sell Books, Writing
Yeah, it might seem like an odd question for someone who runs a small press to ask, but bear with me.
It is easier now than it has ever been to make money self-publishing. There are more ways to dissect the market, more tools to create and distribute a quality product, and more people making a solid living self-publishing their own work than ever before. So why would you want to work with a publisher? Particularly a small press, which might not be able to do anything better for you than you could do yourself.
I teach classes on this shit. I’ll be teaching this very thing as a workshop at Penned Con in St. Louis at the end of the month. That workshop is about choosing a path to publication, and it dissects the decision-making process about going indie, small press, or shopping a book to agents and then New York. Since I’ve never sold a book to a Big 5 publisher, or any other press that doesn’t accept unaccented submissions, I can’t say a whole lot about that.
I know, it’s never stopped me before. 🙂 It won’t this time, either. Don’t worry.
But for today, let’s look at the reasons you might want to use a small press publisher over self-publishing.
You don’t want to learn how to do all that shit.
There’s nothing wrong with that as a response. I’ve been at this for seven years and I still can’t design a decent cover wrap. Hell, I can barely design a serviceable cover at all. But I do know how to hire those people. But there are parts of the process that are non-writing related that you have to learn when you are a publisher, whether you are the entirety of the client list, or you have dozens of writers in your stable. You need to learn how to build an ebook, how to create a cover, how to create a cover wrap, how to navigate ISBNs, deal with CreateSpace, deal with Ingram, find an audiobook producer, navigate ACX, upload to Amazon, get the book listed on all other ebook distribution sites, and make decisions about pricing, exclusivity, and all sorts of other market factors.
That’s a lot of shit. If you have a family and a day job, you might just not have the bandwidth to learn all that shit, no matter how intelligent you are. My buddy AJ Hartley is a hell of a writer. He publishes with several big houses, and has had quite a successful career to this point. He also has a day job and a kid to raise, and his wife has a thriving career as well. He should never self-publish (I’m sure he’s glad to hear this, since he also has never wanted to), because he has too much other shit going on in his life. It’s all I can do to get him to send out his newsletter. 🙂 Love ya, buddy.
So not wanting to learn how to do all the things a publisher does is a perfectly valid reason to give up part of your royalties. Conversely, if you are very interested in how the sausage gets made, selling one book or one series to a publisher and following it through the creation and distribution process can also be a great way to learn.
You want to learn to be a better writer.
This is why Bell Bridge Books publishes The Black Knight Chronicles. I have often said that I consider working with Deb Dixon and Bell Bridge to be my MFA writing program, with a fair side of editing classes thrown in. I couldn’t have learned as much in five years of college as I did in the two years we spent taking the first three Black Knight books apart and rebuilding them. Every book I do with Deb, I learn more about story, pacing, plotting, building a series, and writing good, tight fiction. I sincerely hope that someday some of my Falstaff authors say the same thing about their work with me and my team. If you’re not learning, you’re pushing up daisies. So if you can find a bunch of people who you like working with that will help you grow in your craft, then the amount of money you “lose” by working with a publisher is insignificant in comparison to the increased earnings you’ll see down the road.
Let’s also be clear: I 100% made more money on The Black Knight Chronicles with Bell Bridge than I would have on my own, even if I had stayed 100% indie and pushed books out as fast as I can. In addition to the education I’ve gained, getting a Kindle Daily Deal feature several times sure doesn’t hurt!
You need a confidence boost.
It’s a tough world, and a lot of the time it feels like nobody is on your side. A good publisher will always be on your side. Sure, the interest is also partially self-serving, since you selling more books makes money for both of you, but that’s not a bad thing. I’m a fan of enlightened self-interest. It’s a motivation that I understand. So I try to be a cheerleader for my authors. I suck at it, so I usually give them a little Simon Cowell-style tough love and then bring in somebody else to be all huggy, but I try. But whenever you get down, and think it’s too much and you should give up, having a publisher behind you gives you at least one person who really wants you to succeed. And they believe that you can. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have wasted the ink sending you a contract. And they sure as hell wouldn’t have spent time editing your work, and building a cover, and doing all the other shit that we do. Even if we don’t put any money where our mouth is as far as an advance, we do put a lot of time, blood, sweat, and tears into making every book the best it can be. That’s another thing that a publisher does – we spend a fair amount of time as career counselor and cheerleader for our authors. Because a happy author is a productive author. And a productive author writes better.
There are a ton of people out there who’ll tell you why you don’t need a publisher today. And everything they say is correct.
But I don’t need a Krispy Kreme doughnut, either. Like, ever. But damn, a lot of times I want one.
by john | Jul 12, 2017 | Business of publishing, How to Sell Books
You’ve heard me say it – write more shit.
You’ve heard a lot of people say it – write more shit.
You’ve heard people more famous and touchy than me say it – write more shit.
But sometimes you might need to hear somebody say this, too – Slow the FUCK down!
Last week I saw a guy post something to a FB group that I’m a member of about his new book being basically dead after 30 days, because it’s no longer “new” in Amazon’s algorithms, and should he make it permafree to bring in readers, or just ignore it and keep trying to write the next book in the series to get that out there in the next few weeks.
Holy. Fucking. Shit.
Y’all, stop the goddamned presses. A book doesn’t die at a month old. Shit, some books don’t even find any kind of audience traction until several months into their life, or maybe a year or more. Let’s think about this for a second – if you like a band or musician, and you happen to not notice that they have a new album out the first couple of weeks that it’s out, does that mean you’re never going to buy that album? No. It means that you’ll grab it when you notice it.
Books are like that. Ebooks are especially like that. Y’all, indie writers have been bitching for years about trad pub working on a produce model and only giving a book 90 days to succeed before they pull all promotion of it, because that’s how long a bookstore can shelve a book before they have to pay for it. NOW you want to stop promoting a book after 30?
Look, I get it. You want to jam a bunch of work out there so your name stays fresh. Listen, I’ve been a proponent of publishing a bunch of stuff fast for a long time. That’s probably why I have so many damn titles out there. But that doesn’t mean that I give up on my babies after the initial rush of sales is over. I still promote (albeit less strenuously) The Chosen, which is the first book I ever wrote and self-published! That book is seven years old, and still makes me money.
Not much, don’t get me wrong, but for the five minutes I spend promoting it, the $50/month that book makes me is pretty good for a seven-year-old book.
No, it’s not much, but how much money did you earn off your second-grader last month? Right. I win.
For a less extreme example, let’s look at Calling All Angels, the Shadow Council novella I released in January. That book has been out for six months now, and the gild is definitely off the lily as far as any newness goes. I send out a tweet each day about the book, which cross-posts to Facebook. I do that with most of my recent releases, and I spent about an hour each weekend setting that up. So we’ll say I’ve spent an hour on that book specifically in the last three months, being generous.
It has earned me well over $600 in the past three months. That’s a pretty good rate for an hour. it’s not terribly specific, because I just don’t feel like digging through all the KDP reports to get the Kindle Unlimited earnings for the book, but in the last 90 days, it’s earned $450 in sales, so I feel safe assuming it’s earned at least another $150 in page reads, just eyeballing the chart.
Do I spend a lot of time flogging that book? No. Do I spend any money promoting it? No. But I don’t spend any appreciable money promoting any of my books. I probably spend less than $200 per month on promotion, and most of that is on Mailchimp, Hootsuite, and Instafreebie subscriptions.
So I guess my point is, and let me be very clear in case anybody misses it, because I don’t want to spend my afternoon explaining myself – THIS IS NOT A MOTHERFUCKING RACE. There aren’t prizes for flinging the most poo against the wall. There’s no blue ribbon for releasing the most shitty books and finally selling a fuckton of one of them in the first week it’s out. You’re building a goddamn career, not pulling a jewelry store smash-and-grab.
Don’t get me wrong – you still need to write fast. You still need to publish more than one book every three years. You almost certainly need to publish more than one or two books every year to build a career. But you do not have to throw a book out there, then immediately abandon it a month after it’s published just because the shiny wore off and Amazon’s computer doesn’t help you anymore.
For fuck’s sake, these tips are things to help you promote your awesome books, not ways to game the fucking system to force you into this rapid-fire shit-slinging like meth-addled monkeys at the zoo. Yes, you get a boost from the search algorithms when your book is new. That doesn’t mean give up when that help goes away, that just means work harder. It means be smart about how you spend your money. If you’re going to spend money on promotion, time it to coincide with when the system is working for you, don’t just give up when it starts to work against you. And shit, it’s not even that it works against you, it just ignores you. Okay, so you don’t get to exploit the search box anymore. Maybe you should, I don’t know, WRITE AWESOME BOOKS AND GROW A GODDAMN FAN BASE instead of trying to game the fucking system in some ludicrous get-rich-quick scheme.
So yeah, if you want to jump on a bandwagon, then go for it. Hop right on, write a book and forget about it after a month. But if you want to build a career, you don’t abandon your shit right after you make it. It takes time to grow a readership. Years, even. So write faster, but slow down.
by john | Jul 4, 2017 | Business of publishing, How to Sell Books, Travel
Hey there! If you’re one of the new people who found me through Chris Fox linking to me, welcome. If you’re looking for more contentious debate, I think this week may disappoint. But if you’re looking to sell more books, particularly by hand at conventions, then hopefully this will help out.
If you’ve been around here any length of time, you’ve probably seen me say that you usually won’t make your money back in the short term doing conventions. They’re part of the long game, rather than a quick ROI project. Conventions are about marketing, brand-building, and networking. Selling books is a side part of the gig. Most of the time. Some cons, like comic cons and the big media cons, are way more about selling stuff, because in a crowd of a couple hundred vendors and 50,000 people, it’s going to be hard to get noticed enough to be “sticky” in someone’s head unless they buy your shit and love it.
So for the purposes of this article, let’s use the term “con” to refer to the small to mid-sized Sci-Fi and Fantasy cons like the one I did last weekend (LibertyCon in Chattanooga, TN) and the one I’m doing next weekend (ConGregate in High Point, NC). These events can have anywhere from a couple hundred people to several thousand, and running a table at one of these cons takes a few more things than you would initially expect. So here are a few tips and “con hacks” that I’ve come up with through the past seven years of doing this.
1) Have some flat swag – Have something to put into people’s hands. Bookmarks, postcards, even a xeroxed one-sheet about your book if you don’t have the money or wherewithal to make anything better. But a lot of people are not going to buy your book at the con, realistically you’ll talk to far more people who won’t buy the book than people who will. So you need to have something to put in their hand so they can remember you when they leave.
2) Have a Sharpie – Especially at bigger cons, you’ll have folks who say “I’ll come back.” If you give them a piece of flat swag, they still might not be able to find you amidst all the chaos. Write your booth number on the back of the bookmark. Look, I didn’t say these tips were rocket science. I just said they were helpful.
3) Carry plastic bags to the con – You intend to sell shit to people. People need a way to carry shit. Plastic bags are cheap if you buy the crappy ones you get at all the dollar stores, or free if you just recycle plastic grocery bags. But I have made more than one sale by beckoning over some poor soul who is barely able to carry the stack of books and crap they’ve bought, and they’re so grateful to have a bag that they listen to my pitch. Admittedly, I’m way more likely to help out somebody with an armload of books than an armload of Funko Pops, but I don’t sell Pops. I sell books, and someone who has already shown a predisposition to buy books that day is my target audience.
4) Flat stock is the devil – Don’t lay your books down so that the shopper has to stand completely over them to see the cover. Invest in some cheap wire folding book stands (sometimes also called plate racks) and stand your shit up! You spent money on the cover to that books, or someone did, so show it off. Standing up your books helps draw in the long-distance browsers, the folks that don’t want to get too close to the table, lest they buy something. Until they see something awesome, and can’t help themselves. if they can’t see your book, you aren’t giving yourself the option to be that something awesome.
5) Witty bookmarks are the absolute jam – I have one piece of marketing material that i can trace to direct sales. For The Black Knight Chronicles, I made a run of bookmarks that say “Suck It, Edward” in big letters at the top. So when I put those in my vampire books, and stand them up, people from across the aisle can see me making fun of Twilight. Frequently they’ll chuckle, then walk all the way over and either pick up the book or ask me what it’s about. Worst case, they want the bookmark. But more than once I’ve had people buy either the Omnibus ($23) or the entire set of Black Knight books ($50) just off seeing the bookmark. H.P. Holo makes bookmarks with a big circle at the top that says stuff like “SPACE PIRATES” or “WIZARDS & MONKEYS” (it doesn’t really say wizards & monkeys) on them. This lets people see what the book is about from a distance, and draw them in. That kind of dual-purpose swag is awesome for drawing people in.
6) Take Credit Cards – I did a comic con this year, in 2017, with a comic artist who didn’t take credit cards. He proclaimed his disdain for a smartphone, why he wouldn’t need one, why he does fine without a Square reader, and why all this newfangled technology was silly and useless. At the end of the one-day con, after he watched me ring up over $200 in credit card sales, compared with his $20 in cash sales, he said to me, “Maybe I need to look into getting one of those.” I understand that it used to be hard to accept credit cards. There was expensive equipment, monthly fees, and all that BS. Square is free. Paypal is free. Yes, they take about 3% of the sale. Last weekend I processed almost $300 in credit card sales, and I only had a sales table for Saturday. Square can have their $9, because I guarantee you that I picked up at least $100 in additional sales by being able to process cards. Added Bonus – money that is spent with you on credit cards usually doesn’t hit your bank until after the con, so it’s not burning a hole in your pocket whenever you walk through the deal room!
7) Make friends with your neighbors – I try really hard to help out the people next to me at cons, whether I know them or not. Selling books is not a competition, and a rising tide really does lift all boats. Getting a book in someone’s hands is awesome, no matter if it’s your book or the book from the guy next to you. Because once people are predisposed to buy books, they will buy a variety of books. So it’s good for everyone when everyone is selling. Being nice to your neighbors also means that you’ll have someone to keep an eye on your shit when you have to go pee. So don’t erect huge displays that fuck the sightlines of people getting to your neighbor. Don’t blare sound music all day through the con (no matter how cool it is), unless of course you’re a band or a musician, then at least try to mix it up so your neighbors don’t have to hear the same song for three days. Bring extra bottled water and share it with your neighbor. Be happy to break a twenty for them if you have more change. Just be nice and friendly, and it’ll work out well for you in the long run.
8) Get a bigger hand truck than you think you need – I had a decent little $50 hand truck from Lowe’s that I used for a couple years. Before that I had a nice little fold-flat hand truck that did me well until I had too many title to carry on that in one trip. At RavenCon, I had the Lowe’s hand truck, which theoretically had a flatbed load rating of 400 lbs, loaded down pretty damn heavily. We hit a pothole in the hotel parking lot, and one of the wheels shattered. A few feet further along, and the overburdened other wheel gave up the ghost. We struggled that shit into the room, set things up, and did the show, but that hand truck was toast. For the next con, Suzy bought me one like this. Mine is a little different, but it can do vertical or horizontal, has 1,000 pounds capacity, and is big enough to carry everything for two authors (at least) in one trip. It’s friggin’ awesome and I wish I’d just spent the $150 on that one the first time.
There’s a million other things, but I’ll leave with just a quick inventory of my “con box,” the big blue tub that I carry around that has no books in it, just the stuff that I feel like I should have with me to do a booth or a table.
- (2) 8′ Black Tablecloths – I use them either to cover the table if one is not provided, or to cover up my crap at the end of the night.
- Falstaff Books Table Runner – this is new, but it’s just a nice little banner that drapes over the table with our logo on it.
- (12) folding wire book stands – I almost always need less than this, but it leaves me one or two to loan out. See point #7
- Package of big zip ties – I have a sign that ties to the back of my book rack. Also useful for hanging my bags and a trash bag.
- plastic bags – I got a box of “t-shirt bags” years ago and they haven’t run out yet.
- Bookmarks – I have a Falstaff Books bookmark, plus one for Bubba, Harker, and Black Knight. On the back of the Falstaff Books bookmark is a link to a free ebook download of a sampler that gives people a taste of everything we publish.
- Stickers – I have stickers for each property that I have bookmarks for. Buy a book, get a sticker.
- deodorant – I forgot it once on a trip. Never again.
- Drugs – I keep a stash of ibuprofen, immodium, and claritin-d in my con box. These treat the three main things that can ruin a con for me, so I try to stay prepared.
- post-it notes & a small legal pad
- pens and a sharpie
- SC Business License – not all states require a state business license to vend at a con. SC does. I just never take the license out of the box, so I always know where it is.
- Business cards and holder
- spare phone battery – it’s one of those little things by Anker that can recharge a phone, iPad, or more importantly, a Square chip reader.
- Square reader, iPhone 7 adaptor, and Chip reader – I know the chip reader is more secure, but more importantly to me, it’s more efficient. The swipe reader takes multiple swipes at least 50% of the time, but the chip reader almost never takes additional time and effort. I hate the fact that the iPhone no longer has a headphone jack, but I didn’t get to design it, so I bought an extra adaptor and put it in the con box.
- (2) Snap light stick – shit happens. Some con spaces have very few windows, or are even underground, like the Charlotte Convention Center. I don’t ever expect to need to have a small chemical light source, but the day I want it will be the day I REALLY want it.
- pocketknife – I don’t leave home without it.
- Leatherman – some jobs are too much for even a pocketknife
That’s what’s in my con box. It goes to every con, and is the most important thing that goes into the truck.
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 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.
