Release Strategies Read online

  It was an expensive lesson that vastly extended the earn-out period—the time it takes to earn your initial investment back (or in the case of traditional publishing, the time it takes to earn more than your advance royalty payment). You don’t need to learn the lesson the hard way. Learn it from me.

  I’ve also had new books do well. My first foray into space opera did great because I knew that readership. I knew who the big authors were. I targeted my ads at my favorite authors who I thought my book was closest to. I was also active in a couple of space opera forums—not talking about my books, but principles within.

  That isn’t what I did with my mystery series. I jumped in, but I was impatient. With space opera, I could talk about that all day long. Same with British mysteries on TV. We watch them all.

  Back to ground zero—what do you need to do if you don’t have any other books?

  You must know what genre you are writing in, or at least know other authors (hopefully with big followings) whose readers might relate to your stuff. All of your marketing will depend on your ability to find these readers. Every distributor and retailer is going to stick your book in a box. You have to select two general categories when you upload your book. In Amazon, you can ask them for ten more, although they’ll stick your book in the ones their algorithms select based on your subtitle, blurb, and keywords. Even if you think you’re breaking new ground, you still have to put that new ground in an old box. Find the ones that will bring the greatest number of satisfied readers.

  Or you could be like me and stuff a great ghost-hunter adventure series into a cozy box and get low sales and no reviews. Don’t be like me. Get it right in the first place. Put your genre-bending-artist hat aside—gently—put on your business hat, and it’ll be easier to find your success.

  For your story, you might be able to float your first ten thousand words through BookFunnel as your introduction and a way to find your first bunch of core readers.

  I don’t recommend rapid release for you unless you have a reader magnet of some sort—that short story or longer where readers can take your style for a test drive. If they like it, then you have passed the first test and can start building your readership. I recommend doing it through a newsletter, but if you can, get them onto a blog, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Amazon Author page (you have to have a publication with Amazon before you can build your author page), or any other way you can think of to have direct contact with them. Do lots of that. Connect and stay in touch with your readers.

  Write the story

  Find the genre that resonates best

  Find the readers within that genre

  Start connecting with those readers

  Establish a presence (website, social media, email—this is building your brand)

  Share art

  Share story snippets

  Ask for input (secondary character names, a village name, bar name—anything that gets the readers personally invest in your story and you)

  Run Amazon follower giveaways (detailed next)

  Generate buzz—regular updates as you grind toward a release (whether one or more is up to you, but remember, under-promise and over-deliver)

  Run newsletter-builders, but usually you have to have a story to add to a bundle in a group with others

  If you have no other books, readers generally can’t find you unless you are super-engaging on social media. Without a book or story of some sort, your posts will define you. People may like your wit or insight. Offer them the chance to follow you there or as part of your newsletter, or best is to follow you in all those places. Email can break down or get routed to spam folders and social media might restrict what people see, so the more places you can get your stuff to readers, the better off you’ll be.

  Building Amazon Followers

  Above, I talked about a giveaway (sorry, but these can only be setup out of US accounts. I heard they were coming to the UK, but any US account can set one up for you—I’ve tested this with a Canadian author, and it worked well for her). If you find someone who loves a certain author in a certain genre and you think those readers will like your stuff, give that author’s book away. If, for example, you think the readers of my book called Discovery might like your book, then go to that book’s page on Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07RCH7S9L) and scroll to the bottom. You should see a place where it says to Set up a giveaway (see below). Click on “Set up a giveaway.”

  This is the page it’ll take you to. The top part (not shown here) is self-explanatory. In this section, I can set up a one in one hundred giveaway for a lucky winner. I would recommend keeping your giveaways low, like two or three books at first, until you can see how it works. With three books, you could pick up three hundred new followers on Amazon or through your YouTube channel (if you have one). You’ll see where it says “change” on the Amazon follow. This is where someone in the US can set one up for you if you are outside the US. That is completely aboveboard, not a violation of Amazon’s Terms of Service.

  You won’t ever get to see who follows you on Amazon, and you’ll have no control over when they send the notification of your new release to your followers. We’ve tried, and Amazon is unbending on this issue. The good news is that they maintain this list and perform this service at no cost to you. If you release only one title a year, you have to look at your total cost to see the value of gaining those ghost followers.

  I have run a bunch of major giveaways—the latest greatest Kindles to get readers. I think I have upwards of 50k followers. I get a very nice bump in sales when the new-release email goes out. To me, that notification accounts for an additional one hundred to three hundred sales. Those giveaways have paid for themselves and then some for me.

  But if you are starting from scratch, you have to take the time you need to establish yourself in the genre you are trying to carve your market share from.

  And the good news is that the readers can read faster than we can write, so you are gaining market share, but not necessarily at anyone else’s expense. We all win together.

  On a final note about starting from ground zero. You can always re-release book one at a later date when you are firm and have books two and three ready to go. Say, for example, that you never intended a series, but the readers demanded it. At some point, you pull the first book, add some new content to it, change up the back matter (all that stuff to sell your author persona and your books), and relaunch, possibly even with a new cover. Then drop books two and three at intervals that work for you.

  Understanding your genre

  This is the most important groundwork you can do. I know. You write cross-genre with mashups in three more. You can fight the system that exists, or you can learn to work within its confines.

  Amazon makes you pick two main categories (genres) when you publish, and then you can send an email and ask for eight more. When your book is published, Amazon shows the top three categories where your book is ranking best. That’s it. That is the box in which you must work.

  Find the books that are closest to yours and who writes them. Look at their stuff. Read books in that genre. Celebrate how yours is different, but you still have to get your foot in the door. That is what your main genres are all about. It’s to give readers a starting place. You can go wherever you want, once you have them on board with your great story.

  It also gives you the opportunity to find what resonates and brings new readers to you. You might have to adjust, like I had to with my Free Trader series. I’ll discuss that later.

  It’s okay to put yourself in the wrong category. Give yourself time, and then adjust as necessary. Make sure you bring the business mindset to the genre. The readers aren’t wrong. “I bought this book as a thriller, but it hit me in the feels as a paranormal romance. I’d read more PNR like this.”

  What would you do if you received a review like that? I would recommend nothing. But if you received three reviews like that, along with other comments on your social media, maybe the readers know something you don’t. Take the PNR category for a test drive and see how your book does.

  Authors are usually the worst judges of what their best category is. Trust your readers, books in that genre, and research.

  Where would you research where the most popular yet underserved categories (genres) are?

  K-lytics from Alex Newton is one of the best places for that kind of research. https://k-lytics.com/

  Publisher Rocket by Dave Chesson is a piece of software with lifetime support. I have it, and use it often to help me find where I can best leverage new readers. https://publisherrocket.com/

  You can make a genre work for you. Don’t put your book where it doesn’t fit. Amazon will put it wherever you ask them to, but if you are filling up a category with books that aren’t right, you negatively impact the reader experience. If enough readers complain, you could have problems.

  The best answer is to put your books where they fit. Put your books where readers of that genre won’t be perplexed at finding your book there.

  Building a readership

  Let me state this clearly: rapid release won’t help you if you don’t have any readers. For a rapid release strategy to work, you have to gain some momentum from your book launch. What’s the right number? I don’t know, but if you can get a hundred sales on the first day and keep sales going at ten per day for the next week or two, you will probably find a foothold. I hope this truth doesn’t crush your soul. There are no magic bullets. There are books that take off and no one knows why. And then there’s the other 99.999%.

  This is where it’s important to temper your expectations. If you’ve never published before, rapid release can show that you are here for real. There are a huge number of authors who publish one book. It doesn’t sell. They quit.


  Don’t be that person. To this day, I’ve sold a grand total of fifty-three copies of my first book. I think my dad bought fifty of them. Had I quit, I would never have sold the next quarter of a million books. I would have never made over half a million dollars in my first three years of self-publishing.

  I hoped they would sell, but I wasn’t crushed when they didn’t, because at one point they started to sell. I didn’t get any extra Amazon love. It was me putting the books out there with great covers and good blurbs (I think I’ve rewritten those blurbs dozens of times). And then I publish the next book.

  I have no idea who is reading my books nowadays. I hear from maybe one in a hundred readers. But I started at ground zero and built readers slowly through various processes—list-builders with a group of other authors, promotions, advertising, putting short stories in anthologies, and finally, engaging on social media. Your friends may share a post touting their friend, the author.

  What is a list-builder? That is a single or group effort to add reader emails to your newsletter list. There is a certain numbers game that we play. Having a hundred percent of your readers engaged is an extreme challenge. It’ll be more like ten percent. If you have a thousand emails on your list, that means a hundred of them will engage with you. If you have a hundred thousand… You can do the math if you don’t have engaged readers, but if you can build your list to a hundred thousand with engaged readers, then the numbers game is forever in your favor. Finding engaged readers takes time and effort, but if you keep at it, you’ll find what works best for you.

  Engaged readers falling in your lap in droves? Accept that that won’t happen. Each one comes hard, and you need to work just as hard to keep them.

  I’ve seen a great number of giveaways where the people who signed up were entered to win an Amazon gift card of varying value. Those are what is known as low-quality names. You may get only one percent interaction and have a high unsubscribe rate (which puts you in trouble with your newsletter provider).

  This is where a collaborative effort by like-minded author-peers can pay dividends. Everyone shares with their already established list (may only be a hundred, but your first hundred are the hardest). Give away books in your genre so at least you’ll know you’re getting genre-aligned readers signing up.

  You never know where the next reader will come from, but if you’re doing nothing to get them, they won’t magically appear.

  Chapter Review

  Remember what I said—there are no magic bullets, but hard work (without being the buy-my-book shill) will pay dividends over the long term. As I heard a wise man say, there are a lot of magic bullets, but there is no magic gun from which to fire them.

  At the beginning of your career, time is the currency you use to determine your best value. Spend it wisely.

  Every one of us started from ground zero and we had to deal with:

  Finding your niche (the genre, the categories that distributors use)

  Making sure your books appeal to readers in those genres

  Find those readers through a variety of measures (don’t count on just one)

  Newsletter list-builders

  Newsletter shares

  Promotions

  Ads

  Giveaways

  Social Media engagement

  Blog

  3

  Determination of Intentionality Based on the Theory of Constraints

  Intentionality

  Engagement

  Organizing

  Stockpiling

  Determination of Intentionality, blah, blah business consultant words that sound important but mean nothing

  I gave this chapter a ridiculous title so it would sound business-y. I’ve talked to CEOs and COOs using those terms. I’m so ashamed. Not really. It was what they expected, but the recommendations behind the terms were sound, just like I think this information is. Maybe Sun Tzu said it best with something like, know your enemy and win one hundred battles. Know yourself, and you will never fall.

  Bottom line up front—if you manage your reader expectations, you will have a positive experience with your release. If you overpromise and underdeliver, that’s when your problems will arise. And every time a reader finishes your book, you want to give them a place where they can follow you. Nothing is more effective than a good newsletter. You want those readers on your list.

  If the readers love your stuff, they will beg, cajole, berate, and do everything else they can think of to expedite the next book. That’s on them. The vast majority of fans will wait patiently for the next volume from their new favorite author.

  Unless you ended a book with a major cliffhanger and then told them it’d be another year before they would find out what happened. Many readers might not come back in that case, but with the release of the second book, you may pick up new readers who are now able to grab both books at once. Great books have a way of finding an audience, whether upon release or later when you get your targeting dialed in.

  Those are things to consider about what your book is and the release timing.

  Also, the Theory of Constraints is a great read. I would suggest The Goal as a book. It’s non-fiction written as a fictionalized tale. It’s about finding the bottlenecks within a production process and eliminating them for optimal monetization. As a self-published author, you have to do all those things, so you don’t want to waste money or time. I hope this book helps you maximize your productivity and your time to deliver eye-popping financial results.

  Intentionality is simply going after what you want according to a plan. Wanting is one thing, but are you doing what needs to be done to get what you want? Intentionality. Deciding the steps you have to take and then taking them.

  Make your words deliver a revenue stream that brings a smile to your face and relief to your home budget.

  Engagement

  No matter how quickly you publish, you want to hook those readers into following you. You want them on your newsletter list. I know people who don’t have newsletters, and they are successful. That’s not me. I want every reader to join my list so I can let them know when I have a new release. Everything else is outside your control. Whether they follow you on Amazon, BookBub, Apple, your blog, or anywhere else, they have to go there to see what you are up to. With a newsletter, you tell them what you’re up to, and they get it right in their inbox.

  I prefer control and active engagement over the passive approach.

  Building your newsletter is a critical element to long-term success. This is where I recommend Tammi Labrecque’s book called Newsletter Ninja to maximize your engagement and your impact. Details are in the bibliography.

  Organizing

  A quick word on organizing your books. The standard assumption is a chronological/linear progression. JK Rowling, year one through year seven. The Hunger Games. In order. Each story builds on the last.

  I do most of my series that way, but I’m publishing one series that is organized by character in a parallel progression through three books. The first book is 130k words and starts with the three sisters together before they each go on their own epic quest. The remainder of book one is dedicated mostly to the Dragon Sword. Book two, the bow. In book three, the scepter, where all three storylines are brought back together and the plots are resolved.

  It shows that you don’t necessarily have to do everything chronologically. Plus, when you have great covers, you want to show them off. Nevertheless, the premise here is parallel stories written sequentially.

  What about your prequel? I listed it as book zero, which does not show up in my Amazon series listing. Amazon only lists books with whole numbers starting with one. Sidebar stories. 6.5, for example, won’t show in the series and it’s problematic to go back and change things. Keep that in mind when you number your books.

  Why did I make a book zero? Because I didn’t want to put it on KU. I wanted to make it free through BookFunnel to get people to sign up for my newsletter, and it is on Amazon for 99 cents. If someone reads book one, they’ll find a reference to book zero in the backmatter, and if they join my newsletter, they get it for free. The rest of the series is in KU.