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This Strategy Builds Your Writing & Publishing Success

One size doesn’t ever fit all.

Because we are individuals.

And also why no advice is useful until you test it. I like the phrase, “Opinion is like a belly button, everybody has one.” And like some parts of the anatomy, they are better kept out of sight and not discussed in public.

That said, I’m violating what Dorothea Brande talks about in the third chapter of her “Becoming a Writer.” (book | course) Well, mostly. (She says there, basically, keep your dreams to yourself until you have a decent first draft to hand around.) And my advice here is free, with the idea is that you test everything I say here. (Though some of us expose more than we should, perhaps.)

What you read here will either work for you or it won’t. Or parts of it might work.

In looking over what I’ve produced in this career as a writer, and where success hasn’t followed, some things stand clear:

• You have to keep metrics.
• You have to keep some sort of schedule.
• Finish what you start, but come back to things you had to put off.
• Audience building is key.

What you Measure, You Can Improve

Your top metric is subscriptions. Because being able to send information about new releases (and samples) to your audience keeps them in the loop.

Next below that is paid subscriptions. This allows you to keep your lights on. Bills paid, etc.

Before you can track book income, you have to have published words. That’s the word count of books you’ve published that week.

Also, to succeed as a writer, you have to read and you have to write. Daily.

The Writer’s Schedule

The trick with all these lists of things is to get a schedule you can keep.

Stephen King, in his “On Writing” said his schedule was basically

• Writing in the am.
• Anwering emails and doing business in the afternoon.
• Reading at night.

His quota for daily words was 2000.

Dean Wesley Smith starts writing about midnight and goes through until about 6am. He does business the rest of the day. And blogs about what he does every single day (http://deanwesleysmith.com)

Rachel Aaron in her “2K to 10K” says to basically keep notes on what you are writing, where, and how much. Once you have several weeks of these notes, then you can see where your best production occurs and when. She found going to a local coffee shop was best, out of the house completely. And writing what she was most interested out of the story. (This agrees with D. W. Smith above, as well as several other writers who recommend writing what you’re interested in, then come back to fill in the holes.)

How you write, when, and where is completely up to you.

What metrics you keep are just those that make sense to you.

If you keep words written daily, then you’ll be able to improve your word count daily.

I prefer words published, as I usually work on completed works, and then need to get these out so they don’t sit around and ask for endless revisions. (Muses can be nags.)

Also, if you publish two stories a week, like the prolific Corin Tellado did. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prolific_writers) She wrote mostly short stories and novellas. An average of one and two-thirds (1.67) titles published every week for 60 years. That’s prolific.

This was from a point that Dean Wesley Smith brought up. All the pulp fiction authors you really remember stayed at it for decades. And authors like Smith who made the transition from pulp fiction to corporate and self-publishing.

Corporate vs. Indie – How Printers Became Publishers

“Traditional” publishing has long been mis-named. It’s all corporate, including the in-house imprints Amazon has started. Traditions change. Printers used to produce magazines and books. Then some figured out how to make more income by adding marketing to the mix. Then editors had to be hired as well as proofreaders.

Corporate book publishers also did magazine print runs. There has always been independent authors and entrepreneurs willing to pay printing, marketing, and distribution costs for their own books and magazines. The corporations eventually either grew and merged or went out of business.

When Smashwords helped ebooks became a “thing” then these print-based corporations made the ponderous shift clumsily. Print on demand was pioneered by Lulu.com helped Indie authors to keep their printe books available indefinitely – a tactic the corporate publishers have also adopted.

There have always been corporate and independent. Self-publishing is just the bottom rung of indie publishing.

Charles Dickens ran his own magazine and produced most of the content for it as serials.

As printing technology evolved and made printing more profitable, authors like O. Henry could submit short stories to magazines and make a living from their longhand writing.

Jack London came a little later and was able to make the transition to printed collections of his short stories, for the audience he’d built from magazine readers.

Pulp fiction started as magazines and after World War II went to inexpensive paperbacks (mass market.) These would republish the novels they’d been publishing in installments monthly as regular books. Many science fiction, fantasy, romance, and detective authors were able to make this transition.

Isaac Asimov is probably the most well known of these. And he is credited with over 500 books of his own, plus another 200 that he co-authored or edited.

Frederick Schiller Faust (Known for his 15 pen names such Max Brand, as well as creating Dr. Kildare) started in the pulps and moved to Hollywood script-factory at the studios there. He published over 500 novels for magazines and nearly that many shorter works as well. His books are reprinted today.

Faust and William Wallace Cook (of “Plotto“) were known for hammering out a million words a year of production.

Authors after that point had fewer magazines to support their works, and the narrowing of corporate publishing opportunities tended to weed out authors.

Our current Internet-based publishing has enabled writers to now do their own “printing” and marketing, so filling most of the work that the corporate publishers would do. Practically, this is making it easier for the corporate publishing houses, as they can now recruit and sign indie authors. Like Amanda Hocking who already established an audience for herself.

There is a huge, almost unsatiable demand for stories these days. Because anyone can buy them cheaply (or “license” them, from Amazon and others.) And carry them around in bulk with their smartphone. If they don’t like the computer-rendered audio, they can also buy audio books.

Anyone can publish these days. The ones who are prolific and keep at it will be able to make a decent living regardless of the roadblocks put in their way. Corporate publishers like Amazon can’t corner any market of indie publishing.

The Tricks to Indie Publishing Success

These are mainly just a few:

• Be prolific.
• Consistently publish weekly and monthy.
• Enjoy what you do and so will your readers.
• Publish wide, everywhere you can and in all formats possible.
• Keep at it and build a long career.

Eventually, you’ll be able to reach for your million-books-sold title, and then your millions income earned. How fast you accomplish this is up to you. Most of it has to do with how prolific you are and how much you and your readers enjoy your writing.

The Simple Strategy for Writing Success:

• Keep your metrics.
• Figure out and keep your schedule.
• Write as good as you possibly can and make every story better than the last.

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The Great Fiction Writing Challenge – Week 52 (Final) Results

Finished the anthologies for this year. 7 more. Continued on writing the book with all the craft I learned this past year. With any luck, I’ll publish it today/early tomorrow.

Metrics

Published Words Fiction:

– free – 0  (Own Site)
– paid – 368217 (D2D, Amazon), 0 (Medium)

Published Words Non-Fiction:

– free – 2168
– paid – 0 (Medium)

Subscribers:

New Instafreebie/PW: 282
Overall Total: 3890

Book sales this week:

Amazon – 16, Draft2Digital – 1, Gumroad – 0 = Total Week’s Fiction Sales – 17

Books (pre-)published:

• J. R. Kruze Short Story Collection 02
• C. C. Brower Short Story Collection 02
• Ghost Hunters Anthology 04
• New Voices Volume 6
• Ghost Hunters Anthology 06
• R. L. Saunders Satire Collection 02
• Ghost Hunters Anthology 05
• And: working on a final book that sums up this Writing Challenge

Aggregate Production:

Total fiction books published this year: 139
Total short stories published as individual ebooks: 101
Total anthologies published: 34 (plus two novels, a preview and a bundle)
(Calibre now agrees with my math.)

Total Words Published this year: 2,652,297
Total Anthology/Novel/Bundle words published this year: 1,900,177
Total Short Story words published this year: 752,120

UPDATE: Posts to this blog for 2018 were 197. My average word count is around 2K words per post. Meaning around 394K words of non-fiction (excepting the non-fiction books I published). So I wrote and published well over a million words this year – a conservative count is 394000+752,120=1,146,120

Analysis

No new fiction books this week. Though my fiction writing habits haunted me all week.

Concentrated on wrapping everything up, which includes a new non-fiction book built from blog content.

I did a scrape and import of all my IF/PW subscribers and found some interesting patterns:

• Total: 7278
• Retained: 3743
• Invalid: 1
• Unsubscribed: 3339
• Bounced: 143
• Spam complaints: 46
• Banned: 8

So:

• Retained: 51%
• Unsubscribed:46%
• Else: 3%

(A note here – list hygiene moves the no-openers over into unsubscribed.)

A full export of these subscribers will then show some commonalities and other relationships I can work with. All in addition to the many segment filters I can use through Mailerlite.

Number Crunching – Year End

Starting to compile data from 2018 in fiction sales, as well as total sales for all books (the content-business side of things).

What is key to keep in mind is that this is a new author who has never published fiction before. And ran no ads this year, only built and mailed to a new list.

Here’s an interesting one – from Draft2Digital:

There you see the beginnings of a fiction author, starting from scratch with no fiction published earlier. Draft2Digital is able to be more granular in the data, but an over view is all we need right now, preferring to break out months from a spreadsheet instead.

Gumroad gives me more data as to who sent me my sales (from me, not surprising).

Since I send no real traffic to Facebook or other social media, this also shows a lot about how much stock I need to place in them and the search engines for book sales. Once I start running FB ads, this might change. But I’ll only be sending traffic to my own site or books2read link, so maybe not.

What is more interesting is that I get the subscriber emails from this, and they don’t have to opt-in. These then are forwarded to my email service provider as their own group.

I’ve also downloaded a complete year of subscribers from Instafreebie/PW. It numbered 7278, which you can compare to my numbers above – about a 50% drop-off. If I average 30% opt-in, then you’ll see the actual cost of getting subscribers – which is a fair bit of  advertising.

Final numbers from Lulu won’t come in until around 15 Dec, but I’ve already downloaded a 12-month CSV that ended in Nov. A pie chart shows I’m selling most through Ingram (61%) compared to Amazon (31%) and Lulu-direct (8%). Those are unit sales, though. Half of the Lulu book-units were bought by me as proofs. Lots more there to break down and extract – look for this in the first few weeks of next year. (Not too surprising: no original fiction sales in paperback or ebook from Lulu.)

I’ll also then have to look up PublishDrive and StreetLib for other reports. The small handful of books I already have on iTunes, Kobo, and Nook can almost be disregarded. My main use will be to find these to avoid duplicating them as I come back to publish all my books everywhere possible – that content-business strategy that is key.

Amazon is the pain, since it only pulls by the quarter at best (and you have to ask on the last day of that quarter to get the data).

All that will be next week. Again, I need to wrap up this non-fiction book, and then start in on a new one that will set the stage for next year. The above analysis will play a part in this, although the data on how to set up a fiction backend will be a part of the content-business strategy.

A Year-End Challenge Summary

Overall, a huge success. Yuge.

I had to realize in compiling this book from blog posts – that I did crunch out over a million words this past year, which sets me up on production with all the top pulp writers. Of course, they built up to this – as I did – by writing daily for decades prior.

A hundred published short stories, and nearly 140 fiction books published this year.

The main thing I saw was that I concentrated on Craft right up to about half-way. Then started working up my non-fiction theory after that. But my work was in writing fiction and still testing the craft side. And why I had to pull out the how-to business articles out – as they were untested.

Meaning that I was working on my next year’s preps for about the same time as I started working on this years preps – six months ahead of time.

Following that model, I’ll then be testing and implementing business basics through the first half of this coming year, and then setting up for the next challenge during the next half.

Oh, that challenge has already been worked up. From my print sales, I see that it separates into fiction and non-fiction, which in turn separates into Ag/Business/Self-Help as major categories. Since this is showing that my fiction and non-fiction need to get into audiobooks – along with promotional podcasts – this will involve me in converting the fiction, business, and self-help books over to audio versions. So I’ll then have a model to apply to Ag books in the following year. Ag is a different scene, as it’s very siloed – an apt pun – into completely different communities than fiction and self-help/business.

The rough layout for this next year is then this:

The point of this next year is to increase sustainable, independent income.

The best areas to expand these is through audiobooks, and courses.

Mining my existing demand to my site shows that I have many non-fiction books already with audio, but not published as audiobooks. Conversely, a few audiobooks don’t exist as repeating podcasts.

Courses are aligned to non-fiction, but I can also harvest my fiction subscribers into this area. As well, making mini-courses both improve my ability to convert subscribers to buyers and also gives me intro courses to port to Udemy and Skillshare.

Fiction book writing gets streamlined to only a single book per week, but definitely published through the other two aggregators as well as Wattpad and Medium. Meanwhile, I play catch-up weekly to get all these 140 books over to them (Publishdrive and Streetlib).

This makes my week about 2 days on fiction (still seeing that this is a big area of income expansion), 2 days on course development, and 2 days on catch-up publishing, then a day or analysis and accountability.

Ads: I’ll start running these for fiction, but also on my bestselling non-fiction books.

Summary

Mainly, I see I’m already chomping at the bit to get into the business scene.

It’s been a great run this year. A lot of breakthroughs.

See you next week for the next step on this journey.

Last Week’s To-Do’s:

• Emails out on schedule. (Today.) DONE
• One fiction book written and published. (Mon.) NOPE
• Publish fiction to own site, Wattpad, and Medium. (Mon wold be best, otherwise Wed/Thurs.) NOPE
• 7 Anthologies published. (Fri/Sat – after Christmas interruptions…) DONE
• Survive the holiday visitations. DONE (Whew.)
• Possible compilation of this year’s fiction-writing posts. (?) ONGOING
• Final Analysis (Sun) DONE

Next Week’s To-Do’s:

1. Podcast recorded for this Challenge.
2. Pull rest of Stats from outlets (Amazon, PubD, SL, Nook, Kobo, ITunes)
3. New fiction book written and published as text.
4. Set up New Podcast and publish first episode of fiction promotion.
5. Set up, record and publish audiobook.
6. Get lists of books published and compile master list (Lulu, PubD, SL, Nook, Amazon, Kobo, iTunes)
7. If time, find all unpublished audio books.
8. Analysis and first new Challenge report posted.

 

The new year’s challenge starts afresh. Lots of opportunities present themselves as I learn from the earlier two challenges through patient analysis…

The Great Writing Audience Challenge – Week 01 Results

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Metrics

Subscribers:

Instafreebie/PW: 113/441 (25.6%) 1 non-IF, 33 no-openers moved off.
StoryOrigins: 0

Overall Total: 2804 – slight increase.
IF/PW subscribers remaining after a year: 2673/10918 (24%) Percentage incresed. Note: I keep these more to see how IF/PW retention is moving. 6% retention rate after a year.

Book Sales: See below. Analysis for all of 2019 is complete. Next sales analysis is Dec 15 (this coming week) for November sales.

Books (pre-)published:

• The Healer’s Chronicles: Miracles

Books In Progress: 

• Erotika Jones (series) -> Book Four
• Growing Up Felicity (series?) -> What Their Eyes See -> Book Five
• Two Ghost’s Salvation Book Two -> Book Three
• Wolfer’s Nation -> Book Three
• The Healer Chronicles (anthology)
• Ghost Hunters Anthology 09 & 10
• New Voices Vol. 009

Courses in Progress:

• “Strangest Secret” (now in beta),
• “Get Everything You Want Out of Life”, (now in beta)
• “If You Can Count to Four…” (now in beta),
• “Completely Change Your Life in 30 Seconds” – still in alpha.

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Analysis

Goal Progress

I had a goal of 50 fiction works. What I accomplished was

• 33 single fiction works: 306,110 words
• 23 fiction anthologies: 1,554,709 words
• 4 courses, 3 mini’s and one mega still in alpha.
• 4 non-fiction (3 on writing and one Neville collection)

Total: 64 books.

Some interesting views on this just below.

Note: see Goals (below) on this in our near future. we’ll also be including audiobooks in this mix, but may or may not include hardcopy books in this count.

Changes in Self-Publishing

Key point that the analysis brought up, which only supported a hint I’d gotten otherwise, that paying attention to Amazon isn’t worth my time or money to invest in it. Meaning I can throw almost all of that data out (set aside, actually, since owning several terabyte external hard drives says that backing up data is simpler than ever.) Most of the advice is for authors who have only a few books that they can fuss over while they are hobbying-out their next one. (Taking a year to produce each novel meanwhile.)

I routinely crank out more than one original fiction story per week and then another half that as collected anthologies. This coming year, I’m planning to use a similar model for courses – collecting these up into mega-courses by using the smaller courses as modules. Meaning, I should be back up to a hundred books published next year.

Year End Booksales Analysis

These are rather revealing

Because they are based on raw stats.

Any analysis has to start with raw stats and then look for comparatives in the substantive data.

We’re saying there, is that you look at unit sales to see what’s selling where. Then you look to figure out how come.

All of this is looking for commonly recurring (stuff that happened over and over) where you can see a lot of a certain title selling. And you’ll be able to see where these are selling. So you know what to improve in your marketing.

Marketing is finding an existing demand and tailoring your promotion to that. In my case, the promotion is in the title, author, and cover for these books. I haven’t spent on advertising because there’s something I don’t know about it, so invested my time into understanding and practice in how to write better – as well as polishing covers and titles.

Fiction writing is great with that, since you can hone your abilities into being able to write a lot of stuff rapidly.

What we have to study here is there are two approaches with this “organic” approach. Ruling out advertising (also called “soft-launching” your books) means that we are depending on distributors/marketplaces to do our presentations. We are relying in search engines and search engine functions to bring customers to our products via those distributors. Except on Kobo and Apple where there is actual human curation.

My biggest income source has been Lulu non-fiction. Next largest is Amazon with about 25% direct sales. Below that, they drop off rather rapidly:

Distrib Unit Sales Percent Sales
Lulu->Ingram	1517	58.59%
Lulu->Amazon	647	24.99%
Amazon Pb	230	8.88%
D2D Pb (Ingram)	104	4.02%
Lulu direct	91	3.51%
Total	2589
Ingram Tot	1621	62.61%
Amazon Tot	877	33.87%
Lulu direct	91	3.51%
Total	2589

Now, these aren’t apple-to-apple comparisons. Most are aggregators or sell other materials as well. Only Kobo sells just ebooks. Streetlib and Publish Drive are aggregators. Lulu mostly results POD sales, but also has it’s own digital marketplace. Amazon print and ebooks are separated out to see their impact in sales. Also, I haven’t published all books to all aggregators. Not really worth my time to invest that way for minimal returns.

Draft2Digital started print sales this year, but is only through Ingrams right now.

Outside of Lulu’s direct sales, Ingram has over 60% of hardcopy sales (paperback and hardback) and Amazon sold just over 33%.

The major difference is probably found in a single title which has been blocked on Amazon as ebook and probably paperback as well. Only on Amazon. A false DMCA complaint. One title alone (my top-seller) is completely non-Amazon and itself is over 600 copies (about 12% of total). Meanwhile, my second-best-selling book is nearly 9% of total sales and sells almost exclusively on Amazon.

As a note, it’s worked out better to use Lulu to send books to Amazon, as KDP Print has a poor interface (worse than CreateSpace, if you can imagine) and also, that gives them digital access to my files, so they can block them easier with their self-serving acceptance policies.

Those sales I’m getting from direct paperback sales there are then legacy books from 2018 CS publishing. Publishing fiction to Lulu is far more time-consuming than D2D and with almost no sales. So I’ve dropped that effort.

You can also see that my workup above belies the touted trends in Amazon income. Amazon may have 50% of the US market, but doesn’t contribute more than a third of my own income. And not surprisingly, I get more income from each hardcopy sale than I do through most ebooks. That stems from Amazon’s “race-to-the-bottom” strategy where indies are foot-shooting themselves on that platform. Non-fiction is almost always higher on Amazon and other ebook platforms.

Of course, I had to spend hours digging through all that to get here. It was faster than last year’s analysis and more complete.

The core takeaway is that I get the bulk of my sales though paperback (and the vast majority is non-fiction) this says where I should get more income expansion by tapping and leveraging these sales. The bulk of these are not giving me email subscribers, and that is the single approach to improve.

I noted this the last two years, going into this as an experiment that I would use my recurring non-fiction sales to finance my fiction experiment. And when I saw, then confirmed that my approach with fiction wasn’t producing any viable volume of sales, I see that this is the single approach to take immediately.

The argument is that I get more personally out of writing fiction. But a hobby is a hobby. Now, it may take five years of producing 50 books per year (on average) to breakthrough this logjam. And I will probably have to start advertising on Bookbub to make that happen.

However, the simpler approach is to start treating courses as a form of published book in themselves. These have built-in email subscriptions, at least where they sign up directly. (Udemy and Skillshare – and newcomer TabletWise – do not enable email access, much like the other book outlets.) So the paperbacks (and ebooks) need to be revised as soon as possible to enable that.

In each type of book content, I have several market leaders, which usually sell more than 90 units this last year. So those will then become supplemental mini-courses.

In courses, you have your own-hosted versions, but also through Teachable/Thinkific. Satellites to these are Udemy, Skillshare, TabletWise, and Leanpub. Those all are where you put mini-courses which can give you links back to your site for email opt-in. Otherwise, they mainly give you some scattered income. This goes back to hub-and-spoke marketing. And your promotion to these subscribers forms the backbone of your non-fiction promotion.

As covered earlier, this says that when you publish non-fiction, you produce and “publish” the course first, so that you can then link to it in the backmatter, as well as your other digital and print versions. Since these exist in vertical silo’s, they are much more easily leveraged than fiction. They will tend to buy more versions.

What Makes Fiction Sales Fail – Conventional Wisdom

More and more and more, I see the mistakes I’ve made were drinking the Amazon Kool-Aid. Where I’ve dealt with people who push KDP Exclusive is where I see the biggest failures. Those authors who have gone “all in” with KDP have seen their incomes halve. With AMS ads now polluting the author spaces (both author page and book pages) that is simply another tax – and Amazon already (per Gaughran) host some 200 alternate links on any Amazon sales page. Ads run on book sites that have nothing to do with that book.

And since they are only a third (Amazon ebooks are actually just under 17% of my income, and fiction ebooks are just over 7% of my total unit sales (again, with lower royalties than non-fiction) then that is about the amount of attention I need to give to selling fiction books there. And the amount of attention I need to give to Amazon in general.

Earlier this year, I worked out that if you were going to promote books, it would be through Bookbub (subscription-based newsletters) to Kobo (the single ebook-only sales outlet). And my work in fiction will now reflect that, as I simply start publishing my new fiction books through Draft2Digital to Amazon – on a sink or swim approach.

Non-fiction are put through D2D if based on original material – not public domain. (Otherwise, the single aggregator still willing to take PD books is Streetlib.)

Now, in essence, it’s worked out best to have one aggregator take care of your publishing. While you can have hundreds of more outlets deal with your books through PublishDrive and Streetlib, if you don’t go to Apple, B&N, Amazon, and Kobo through them, then you won’t see many sales. Just a simple fact. So the extra time and care it takes to also go through these other aggregators isn’t worth it.

That starts to give us a workflow on these…

Fiction:
1. Publish original fiction through D2D. They’ll create print versions for you if long enough.
2. Publish public domain through Streetlib.
3. Skip fiction print versions for PD fiction unless they take off there.

Non-Fiction:
1. Produce your content backwards in text, audio, video, graphics.
2. Publish your alpha course to your own site or Thinkific/Teachable. Proof this up and develop it to beta.
3. Publish ebook, print, and audio through Draft2Digital – with backmatter that promotes the course as well as the other versions.
4. Cross-publish mini-courses of these on Udemy, Skillshare, and TabletWise.
5. Polish these up as you get feedback and your skills improve.
6. Rinse/repeat for the other top-sellers in your subject area.

Crossovers:

Like a set of courses to study all-time classic fiction: set this up as a weekly or bi-weekly paid email subscription with links for downloads sent to subscribers. You could also sell these through gumroad as a single digital download. As well, the books could be offered through Streetlib with links to the course.

Next Steps:

Out of this, I’ve seen that my top-selling book is on Copywriting. Not too strangely, this also improves both fiction and non-fiction writing. So that is my next step. Produce this book in several modules, and also the books that come next in sales. Offer a list of the collected works in the back of each book, all in addition to their course. Build longer courses out of these mini-versions and sell them as an overall subscription.

The trick is to publish one fiction, one non-fiction each week. There is more work to building a course than a simple non-fiction short-story book, even though the amount of text is close. And that is how you build course modules as well. Then combine the modules into a flagship course. Where any module isn’t viable, you can leave it or come back and improve it later.

So that is then my approach to book production this year. Continue weekly fiction writing and also work on a course that week. 2 days for fiction, the rest for non-fiction. Simple. (Other than the single day where you do analysis like this and your emails.

That’s the gig. I won’t particularly promise at this point that I’m go into taking ads out for books. But I will be doing the content marketing gig on these. Publishing fiction and non-fiction to Wattpad/Medium respectively. And boning up on Content Marketing again, as Copyblogger gets a rebirth now that its founder has made his millions and can come back to devote his talent to his real love. (While Pulizzi is experimenting with fiction writing…)

Instafreebie/Prolific Works – Fail and Handling

Essentially, I got a small tribe of subscribers that I am winnowing down. Staying connected to the various IF/PW giveaways enables me to add a few on each week – less than 25% of who claim my books through their giveaways (which is already only 30% of total claims). And only 16% of these remain after a year. So 4% remain active – close to that 97% figure that I bandy about. Another commonality appears. About 1 out of 10,000.

Still, it’s a relatively cheap way to get potential fiction subscribers.

Acquiring Real Audience

Obviously, I need a re-study of Pulizzi’s Content Inc. That is written for non-fiction authors, and so that aligns as I’m seeing my income is more from non-fiction. The conventional wisdom for acquiring fiction subscribers is by running ads. While non-fiction is getting them by getting them to your site and having them opt-in organically.

There will also need to be a re-study of Copyblogger, now that they’ve streamlined their core staff and focus.

What is needful to both is enabling content syndication for each as a different public.

What is the Real Promotion?

Ads:

Bookbub. (Forget the privacy-stealing Facebook and Google. Forget AMS – that’s just another tax on authors.) Bookbub is built on an email list. So it’s the only real method to directly get your books in front of people who really want to only buy books.

Most effective promotion:

• Guest blog posts (Wattpad, Medium, book bloggers)
• Guest interviews

Least effective promotion:

Social Media, real or virtual book tours, and just about everything else that’s recommended. (See Tim Grahl’s work on this – he has a repeating 45-minute seminar that takes his up – and as common, the last half is a sales pitch.)

Best Outlets:

• ebooks – Kobo. They only do ebooks.
• hardcopy books – Lulu
• aggregators – Draft2Digital
• courses – Thinkific, self-hosted. And promote your courses by putting mini-versions on Udemy, Skillshare, – and – TabletWise. These then should send you a little income and enable readers to access a (landing) page that offers the main course and it’s textbooks.

A Short Amazon Summary

• Use a via (aggregator) to get your books into KDP – not worth personal your time. Most advice in this area is for people who want to write novels, and take at least six months to get their next book ready, if not years. (Not like us people with over a thousand books in our backbench – and adding more each week.) Best aggregators are Draft2Digital, Lulu, Streetlib.
• Without running ads, your Amazon book disappears. AMS is just another tax.
• Go wide and ignore their idiosyncrasies. Focus on commonalities all other outlets use. (I.e. ignore advice about getting reviews. Instead, tell people to leave recommendations on Bookbub.)
• Ignore all advice about fiction publishing there. Real income comes from non-fiction, where the silos are vertical and there is much less competition, but lots of cross-sales in other book versions.
• Amazon and all outlets are best used as subscriber pools you can go fishing in.
• Amazon doesn’t own any course providers – that’s where your real income is. So put your ebooks out there so that you can get course subscribers and leverage your real income.

How Writing Fiction Model Has Changed

I first started out simply writing with headlights on – trusting the story to tell me where it’s headed. And I still do this quite a bit. But while I sorted out building courses last fall, I still worked with my fiction stories and wrote down the inspirations I received – from my own ideation and my First Reader as well.

Still, these aren’t plots. But you do work out a lot of the story arc and some interesting details. It’s also given me more stories that are there to be written as I sort out continuity issues. A lot of these have come from writing backstories for various characters.

And I do find that the core skills I’ve learned are valid as I’ve tested them. Some greater or lesser amount of these I owe to taking DW  Smith courses. While I quit because of finding myself routinely having to winnow his opinions out from actual useful principles, I am sorely tempted to invest in one of his challenges (writing a short story every week) and so earn a lifetime access to all his other courses.  Since I’m doing that anyway, I could leverage that. Pay $600 and get access to some $5200 worth of 120+ courses and lectures. Very tempting, even if I’m prepared to throw 90% of it out.

DW Smith, like most authors-turned-professors, prizes his own opinion very highly. But his heart is in the right place. And is worth studying for his business model example (far more profitable than reading his fiction.)

Upcoming Lessons Learned

I’ll make some time in the next few months to take these 52 posts and extract what I discovered. Edit these into a single book and publish.

This Year’s Goals:

• Fiction books published – one  per week.
• Courses published – one every other week – with updating those book series with backmatter and cover/metadata upgrades.
• Weekly curation – three articles/installments per week  to both Wattpad and Medium.
• Podcasts – building a 5-day, 50-week set of Nightingale lectures and upgrading my existing recurring podcasts. Then work up new non-fiction collections by theme out of these.
• Other books – audiobooks will come into view for non-fiction. So figure that these will be present for every course production. If D2D does the paperback it won’t be counted – but where I need to go to Lulu for a hardcopy book, it should be.
• Figure something like at least a hundred new books (not updates) will be produced this year.

Last week’s to-do’s:

1. This analysis & emails – Yup
2. Monthly analysis of Nov booksales – Yup
3. New fiction book written and published. – Yup
4. Copywriting research the rest of the week. – Yup
5. In the squeaks of time, continue notes for next year’s challenge. – Yup

This week’s to-do’s:

• This analysis & emails –
• New fiction book written and published. –
• Re-queue podcasts. –
• Define and start next year’s challenge. –
• New course added in spare time. –

 

Courses continue to be the focus, as I streamline the production to maintain output of my regular publishing. Shifting off finding fiction readers and onto leveraging non-fiction topsellers…

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“See the challenges in your life as fuel to fire you up. Look around, and you’ll find opportunities silently waiting for you to recognize them.” ~ Les Brown

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Metrics

Under study…

Books (pre-)published:

• Lester del Ray: Golden Age Space Opera Tales

Courses in Progress:

• NEW: Author Freedom Guide (in beta – upgraded)
• NEW: Backwards Book Publishing (in beta – upgrading)
• NEW: Get Your Self Scam Free (back into beta – upgraded)
• Becoming a Wealthy Writer – overall program (pre-alpha)
  • NEW: Writing Non Fiction (alpha)
• “PMA: Science of Success” (now in beta, 2nd revision)
• “Strangest Secret” (now in beta),
• “Get Everything You Want Out of Life”, (now in beta)
• “If You Can Count to Four…” (now in beta),
• “Completely Change Your Life in 30 Seconds” – still in alpha.
• And some more that I already recorded for podcasts…

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Analysis

OK, it’s December and I have some three weeks left – but we’re missing reports… (sigh.)

I shut off Instafreebie and down-graded my email service as well. Because I just don’t need the freebie-seeking fiction readers. I do consider that I need to promote through Bookbub, and run 99-cent promotions, since those will be paid buyers (through Kobo). I think Draft2Digital will help me with promotional pricing. Not something to get going on instantly. As a pure test on fiction, that would be nice, but I’d be better working through non-fiction as that would get me opt-in’s to my books and courses.

But there are other promotional outlets, as well as pre-recorded webinars to create…

And that brings up a key point: I’ve long said that writers should read daily and write daily. This is how they learn their craft and build their backlist. There is a third point that they should promote daily. One point that “Chicken Soup for the Soul” co-author Jack Canfield says is to do three promotion actions daily.

So you can imagine my astonishment when I realized that I was only dealing with one-half of what Joe Pulizzi talked about in his “Content Inc.” He was pushing “content marketing” – but all I was dealing with was the content half.

At this point, I already have audiences for these routinely top-selling books of mine. So my work would to develop the courses for these and revise them, promote and leverage them. Key point is that the audience who’s been buying my books isn’t necessarily part of my email list.

Courses

Started in on upgrading PMA: SOS Introduction, and wound up getting the last third of “Becoming A Wealthy Writer” up as a mini-course. Because I am/should be working on getting the base there for my backend. With the simple basics up, I can then build depending on demand.

That course isn’t posted as I write this, but will be shortly. Then I go through and solve both assigning memberships to those courses and also working out how to accept payments for them. After that, I’ll need to take the key mini-courses and port them to the four viable marketplaces for them (Udemy, Skillshare, Leanpub, and TabletWise).  That gives me the needed feeder routes (self-liquidating offers).

Podcasts

PMA: SOS itself will be worked up as podcasts, with three lessons per chapter so that the entire course can take a year to run – or having three podcasts scheduled per week and repeating these three times a year. This has been successful with my other perennial podcasts that have been running for around 5 years now. The video’s will simply need ads front and back, edited through a video editor into a new version. The audio is TTS on these, but the boilerplate ads will be live speech (by yours truly.)

This becomes a testing model for other courses.

Other Stuff

Not much else going on. I’m continuing to push out PD anthologies of space opera classics, with the idea of building a big library of these for both entertainment and study. Gutenberg is now cranking these Planet Stories out, so they are giving me plenty of material to convert. The added value is being able to find these anthologies through the various online marketplaces. These are aggregated through Streetlib to go over to places that don’t mind PD works.

But I’ll probably be working on my backend this coming week, once I get these latest lessons posted to the site.

THIS JUST IN – Breathrough…

Something came to me early this morning – and it’s one of those DUH moments. I was working up this whole scene about teaching authors to be productive and wealthy, which are very good things. But at the same time, I was ignoring my money-making books – the routine top-selling books of mine. All of which are non-fiction.

The obvious scene then – and I’ve done this before – is to pull all the data down and see what’s selling best, and what has continually sold well over the last few years. Since I’ve published through many aggregators and many more individual booksellers directly, I’ll need to pull all this data down.

But the logical plan is to take the top three and then rebuild the site around these, making routes from the book to the site directly to the courses and library that they most want. Of course, I still have all this fiction material around, but it doesn’t have to be prominent. And this probably means building weekly newsletters for each, since they aren’t all that inter-related (Nightingale’s Completely Change Your Life talks do lead to PMA: SOS, Breakthrough Copywriter needs to lead to other marketing books, Rational Grazing books are on their own.)

This then sorts out the mailing list I have according to these, and changes my newsletter. Of course, I have the overall newsletter that addresses fiction readers, and Nightingale already has a second one, so working up one on copywriting and another on grazing shouldn’t be hard. It might be, like Nightingale, that I can create a set of newsletters that are evergreen, with about 80 or so emails in them that can simply be re-sent. (Although I’m going to be adding to Nightingale, as I have a lot of audio to build out for his stuff – a podcast that probably runs some 250 episodes per year.)

All great stuff. Still lots to do. But it shortens the amount of courses I need to create by quite a bit.

Consider this a heads-up. And the Challenge for next year is “The Great Syndication Challenge” – as I simply need to get all the versions of every top-selling book syndicated broadly through all possible marketplaces.

Last week’s to-do’s:

• Sun: This analysis & emails – Yup
• Publish at least another Golden Age anthology in series – Yup.
• Continue cranking through courses – Yup

This week’s to-do’s:

1. Sun: This analysis & emails
2. Publish at least another Golden Age anthology in series
3. Revise my plan by verifying top-sellers in print and ebook, then align these by category.
4. Keep the farm running by priorities.

Now that the relative insanity of 2020 is over, we can cautiously peek out and hope for something better – but from our own efforts and our own goals…

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“It’s better to walk alone than with a crowd going the wrong direction.” ~ Gandhi

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Metrics

• Under study…

Books published:

• Hail to the Thieves: Golden Age Space Opera Tales

Courses in Progress:

• Farm Less, Profit More 

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Analysis

So we’re done with this challenge. Time for a new challenge. (More on that below…)

What was learned from the Great Writing Audience Challenge

Mainly that fiction writing is fun, but not as rewarding as non-fiction (which pays my bills.)

The use of Instafreebie (Prolific Works) proved out to be more of the GRQ (Get Rich Quick) phenomenon at work. Because people expecting to get something free have to be retrained to buy. And you just load up your subscribers with freebie-seekers or hangers-on that expect to just get your free content forever and not contribute.

I’ve covered earlier that it’s around 4% of the IF/PW subscribers that are still around after a year. And my daily subscribers list shows me unsubscribes and I give a little smile of satisfaction. Because I also see daily that there are some people who are coming from “back of the book” opt-in’s in both fiction and non-fiction. Those are the people I want – because it takes more effort to do that. So they will tend to stick around.

I’ve quit joining IF/PW giveaways, and went back to free on my account there. I’ve also put my giveaways out to 2024 so I can keep them diddling around as links. So these type of opt-ins are slowing/quit.

The main point is that the big hustle about writing fiction is just fiction itself. Non-Fiction gets organic discovery through search engines for no cost. Fiction requires running ads. Another point proved is that anything that is Amazon-centric is flawed. I publish all my original work through Draft2Digital and this means the longer works that qualify become paperbacks, which always bring me more income – especially in non-fiction.

It’s not that I’m done with non-fiction, but now I have so much work to do that I can’t see taking the two days to get a short story written.

Did I get done what I wanted?

Kinda, sorta. At least I now know why the audience I got is what I have. A lot of this was due to getting into IF/PW and their freebie-seeking mailing list. Just doesn’t work. (Laid out above.)

The audience I have are pretty nice about staying around and thanking me for nice emails (and pictures of my calves – the cow-kind).

They don’t go out and ramp up my new release sales, but I do have a couple who like what I write enough to buy it right off the bat.

So the audience isn’t all that much bigger or better than last year. And now I understand. It has to do with the foibles of fiction-writing. And now I’m shifting gears after three years.

The Great Syndicated Books Challenge

This is based on an observation from some years back, called the “multiple eyeballs” theorem, where you want to take your content and set it out in front of as many people, in as many formats as possible. Because no two people like their content arriving in exactly the same way. In non-fiction, some people like it in multiple formats. You like the ebook to carry around with you and look up stuff on the fly, but you also have the paperback to relax with and tab/dog-ear/underline. And they may like to listen to your audiobook on commutes, and also buy access to your online course to study your work more intensively.

All that means more income. Leveraged through syndication into all possible platforms and all possible formats.

Courses can bring 100x the income that an ebook or print book will give you in royalties. (97% of a $37 mini-course compared to 70% of $5.99 ebook or 20% of $14.95 paperback.)

Extra sales from the audiobook is just more gravy on your potatoes.

I have my books laid out in order of sales, the four content areas I’m already in, and now it’s just taking these books and building out with all their formats. Several of the goal achievement books have already been recorded, but not published as audiobooks (too busy writing fiction and doing other things).

Compiled public domain books

Even though I don’t expect much back from collecting anthologies of Golden Era Space Opera Tales, I do these because I figure my fiction readers will want collections of short stories they can dissect to improve their own craft as a writer – and to otherwise just be entertained. Plus, I like these stories myself. (And Gutenberg has found them becoming popular downloads – I think it’s their garish and nearly lewd covers…)

The goal is to create an ongoing series of books which are able to be read, enjoyed, and dissected. And keep the quality of these high enough so people know they will always get a good read out of them, plus find out what they can improve in their own writing by studying other authors and finding where they become bumped out of that story while reading.

With any luck, this series will become a hit on its own and become a regular source of income. I have something like a couple of years of collections set up with covers for editing. So this will continue every week.

Other areas of content

My weekly email has become sort of a newsletter. And I’ll need to expand this to have content for every area I’m working on. I’ve got readers coming in from non-fiction and need to serve these as well as my fiction-reading subscribers. And I’ll have to check into what their “welcome” email consists of.

So that’s about it for now. Next installment will be covering the layout of the Syndicated Book Challenge. Stay tuned…

The special is still on

The “Hail to the Fraud Bundle” is still available. Political satire and timely until Jan 20, at least…

Here’s those individual books:

• Hail to the Fraud: A Golden Age Space Opera Tales Anthology
• Hail to the Fraud: Imposters and Cheats, Fakes and Hoaxes, Politicians and False Elections
• The Last President Anthology

Well, back to it for me. No rest for the muse-afflicted…

And you can see above that the satire is still rolling out. Just figured out three more books today, based on Golden Age stories I’ve uncovered.

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Last week’s to-do’s:

• Sun: This analysis & emails – Yup
• Publish at least another Golden Age anthology in series – Yup
• Finish this first round of mini-courses, on last category now… – Nope
• Keep the farm running by priorities – Yup

This week’s to-do’s:

1. Sun: This analysis & emails
2. Publish at least another Golden Age anthology in series
3. Finish this first round of mini-courses, on last category now…
4. Keep the farm running by priorities.