The Great Writing Audience Challenge – Week 52 Results

Great Writing Audience Challenge - Week 52 Final Results

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…

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

Metrics

Under study…

Books published:

Hail to the Thieves: Golden Age Space Opera Tales

Courses in Progress:

Farm Less, Profit More

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.

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:

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.

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:

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