Building a Sticky Digital Readership

Courtney MilanRT ConventionMay 16, 2014

Half-Assing Promotion(and still making money)

Courtney MilanRT ConventionMay 16, 2014

Phases of Author Success

• Phase 1: Nobody knows who you are. You have to work for every sale.

• Phase 2: A few people know who you are. The algorithms are beginning to work for you.

• Phase 3: Readers are beginning to wait for your books. You hit the genre lists when your book comes out.

• Phase 4: The vendors know who you are. You have a merchandising contact (as a self-published author).

Where do sales come from?

• Sources external to vendor sites– Blogs, websites, reviews– Newsletters, Facebook– Word of mouth recommendations

• Vendor Algorithms (computer-driven, internal to vendor sites)

• Vendor Merchandising (affirmative human choice, internal to vendor sites)

A note about vendor algorithms

VendorAlgorithms

Sales More sales

If you don’t have any sales in the beginning, the algorithms won’t know what to do with you. You have to have sales to make sales.

An analogy: This is your book.

This is the landscape of digital sales

This is the landscape of digital sales

This is the landscape of digital sales

Phase 1

Why?

• The landscape of book sales are a complex system…

• …dominated at the bottom end by linear response…

• …and at the top end by nonlinear responses.

What the heck is “linear response”?

• It means: you get out what you put in.• In mathematical terms:

Sales = C * (effort in promotion)• The harder you try, the more sales you make.• The instant you stop promoting, sales drop to

zero.

Linear Response

Linear Response

Linear Response

Nonlinear Response

Nonlinear Response

Your Goal

• Most authors are down in that pit.• They work for every sale.• When they stop working, they stop selling.• This is why the median self-published earnings

are less than $500: because the author has to work for every one of those sales.

• This is also why the top 10% make 75% of the earnings: because once you can get out of that pit, you barely have to work to sell books.

Sales beget sales

• You need to sell copies of your books to appear on “also bought” lists.

• You need to sell even more copies of your books to appear on category rankings lists

• You need to sell lots and lots of copies to qualify for vendor merchandising (this is ‘aliens with a jetpack’)

• The more books you sell, the better you will do.

The Dreaded Phase One

• Here is what you need to get out of Phase One:– You need readers to read one of your books.– You need readers to like that book enough that

they want to read your next book.– You need to tell readers how to read your next

book.

Most important thing authors have to do

• Write books that readers want to read.• No, really. • If you’re not writing commercially viable books,

stop thinking about sales and focus on craft. Seriously. Just leave now.

• The more distinctive your books—the less exchangeable your books are with others—the faster this process will go.

• I’m not going to talk about this anymore.

Second most important thing authors have to do.

• Get readers to read your books.• I’m not talking about this, either.• Why? Because (a) lots of other people talk about

that and (b) I went through this phase years and years ago, and the market is very different for me. I don’t know what works for new authors anymore.

• If nobody reads your book, it doesn’t matter how good it is.

Third most important thing authors have to do

• Get readers who liked your last book to read the next book. This is what I call “building a sticky digital readership.”

• I’m calling it the “third most important thing” but if you can achieve #1 & #2 it becomes the most important thing.

• If you get out of phase 1 with Book #1, but aren’t keeping your readership, you have to start over.

Getting out of Phase One sucks.

• If, for ever book that you released, you had to do all the work to get out of Phase one, you’d spend all your time promoting and none of your time writing.

• What you need is a way to launch yourself.

A “sticky reader”…

• Is someone who: (a) wants to read your books(b) has a way of finding out when your next one isso that (c) she buys the next book shortly after it is released.

Get enough sticky readers, and you grease the engines at the vendors. You send out a newsletter and post to your Facebook page and you get a thousand sales and you’re done with promotion.

Actively encourage stickiness

• Get readers to attach to you in some way• Make readers aware of your other books• Encourage readers to buy your other books• Encourage readers to tell other people about

your books• Tell readers the book is out

Strategy #1: The Page After the End

• Someone who finishes your book is more likely to have enjoyed it. People who aren’t enjoying it often quit partway through.

• The page after “the end” is the most important page there is. It says, Hey, Person who liked my book—here’s how you can stick to me.

Bella Andre

Barbara Freethy

Hugh Howey

Debora Geary

Lilliana Hart

Marie Force

Courtney Milan

Things to have on TPATE

• A link to your newsletter• A link to Facebook/Twitter/other social media• A description of the books that are coming

next to get readers excited• A call for reviews• A call to lend the book to a friend• A call to recommend the book to

friends/other readers

Some newsletter statistics

• I did not have a call to sign up for my newsletter at the end of Unlocked, my first self-published work.

• Between May and October of 2011 (5 months), I sold 83,000 copies of Unlocked and had 38 newsletter signups.

• By contrast, I had 328 newsletter signups in the first month after the release of my latest book.

“Twitter/Facebook don’t sell books”

• You may be using it wrong.• Use Twitter/Facebook to connect with readers. That’s what they want.• You want people to stick, so give them a reason to stick around, and

don’t give them a reason to unfollow.• Talk about: your day, your cat, your dog, funny stories, the industry,

recipes.• DON’T: Whine (too much) or bitch about reviews (EVER) or readers

(EVER).• When tweeting links for other people, think about it from the readers’

POV. Treat your readers like your friends.• If I want to give a book visibility, I give away copies of that book. That

way it feels like a “win” for those who follow me, I drum up interest in that book.

Strategy 2: Linking Titles

• The second most important thing you can do is to link your titles.

• Make it easy for readers to figure out which book is next and where it falls in the series.

• Do not make people do additional work to buy your book!

2a: Back Matter / The Excerpt

• Include an excerpt for another book.• A few dodgy analytics I’ve acquired:– Excerpts for any book sell about 2x more copies than a

plain link to that book.– An excerpt for a book in the same series as the one

book the reader just finished sells about 3x more copies – An excerpt for the next book in the same series sells

about 10x more copies– The first excerpt will get 5x more hits than the second

excerpt.

2b. Back Matter/The Linked Title List

A note on active linking

• Always make it easy to buy your book.• It takes a reader about 20-40 seconds to open up a

web browser, go to a vendor site, search for your name, and scroll down to the book they want.

• In that time, they can get distracted by Facebook/twitter/children.

• Your links should be clickable and individual to vendors. You don’t want someone to get distracted before they click “buy.”

We interrupt this slide…

• To talk about back matter efficiency.• Readers are okay with back matter• Back matter sells more books• Nobody complains about back matter that’s

less than 90% of the book• Many people complain about back matter

that’s > 40% of the book• Use back matter in moderation!

2c. The Vendor Description

Note: All authors can change book description on Author Central. This is buggy right now, but you should still be aware of it.

The effect of this

• When I released The Duchess War, I got a HUGE bounce for The Governess Affair. (October sales for TGA: 2,328. November sales for TGA: 2,238. December sales for TGA: 10,003.)

• Publishers don’t often do this because they’re used to physical bookshelves: They don’t want to scare people away from Book 3 because they haven’t read Book 1, and Book 1 isn’t on shelves anymore.

• Your Book 1 is always on the shelves; don’t be afraid to sell it.

2d. The Website

• The old regime: Place your current release prominently on your website.

The Website

• New regime: Readers are searching for backlist titles as much as frontlist titles.

The Website

• Explicitly link series order on your webpage.

Consider a series page

List books by series on books page

Goodreads/Shelfari/LibraryThing

• Make sure your series are correct on social reading websites.

• If they are not, edit them.

Strategy 3: Tell readers how to stick to you on your website

• The website is the first place people go to find out about you.

• Your website is the beginning of attachment. Seal the deal.

Have a prominent newsletter signup

Have prominent links to social media

Have individual pages with all that information

• Because even though you posted it prominently on the front page, some people won’t expect it to be on the front page.

• Make it easy for people to find out about you.• If you think “people are browsing my webpage

wrong,” you’re wrong.• Do not be afraid to duplicate information.

Strategy 4: Get good analytics

• Know who clicks on which links. (Use a link shortener/affiliate codes)

• If you’re using Amazon affiliate codes, generate separate affiliate IDs for each site: Facebook, Twitter, your website, the end of your books.

• This will give you so much power in tracking data.