planning

First steps in marketing – developing the plan

13 considerations when setting up an email subscription service

April 17, 2011 in planning | No comments


There’s no way for me to subscribe!

Time to restructure my blog.

A few days back I described plans to offer a sign-up option for those who wanted to register as one of my Author Associates. As an Associate, you’re entitled to:

  • purchase my published ebooks at discounted prices
  • get special offers for your friends or reading-groups
  • make sure you never lose the copy you’ve purchased when you change your computer or reading device
  • participate as a reader/reviewer as I release early chapters of my next novel.

All well and good. Except there’s nowhere really for you to sign up. Or that’s what one of my readers told me the other day. In fact, that’s not quite true: you can subscribe to an RSS feed of the blog by clicking on the folded newspaper at the top right of the screen. Huh? RSS? There’s the problem. Many readers aren’t familiar with RSS. And even if they are, maybe they won’t spot my subtle signal. And then, even if they do, will they actually read my posts?

Let me be honest. I’ve subscribed to several blogs via RSS – I request a download to my Google Reader … and then I hardly ever read them. It’s another example of ‘greading‘, acquiring more reading matter than I could ever hope to read in a lifetime, let alone a single day. It’s not that I mean not to read these blogs – I set out with the best of intentions. But there’s just never enough time.

What do subscribers want?

What I do read every day is my email. Email’s important. It includes messages that I probably need to respond to, and which I can’t afford to miss. For that reason, I’m much more selective when I subscribe to a blog via email. Before I sign up, I ask myself these questions:

  1. Is it content that really matters to me – or could I afford to live without it?
  2. Is there any tangible benefit I get as an email subscriber?
  3. Is a digest offered, so that I can scan the main topics and see what I need to read?
  4. Do I have the option to receive new mails at the pace I choose? Is there a weekly as well as a daily option?
  5. Am I likely to be spammed with offers or content that I don’t want – and am I sure that my email details won’t be passed on to others who may send spam?
  6. Is there an easy option to stop subscribing if things don’t work out?

If I’m going to offer my readers the option to subscribe via email, I need to be sure I’m treating their inbox with the same respect that I expect others to show mine.

What does the blogger want?

But now let’s turn things round and look at my requirements as the provider of the service. For a couple of years I’ve been using Google’s Feedburner to allow readers to subscribe to the blog. It’s been a useful basic tool for promoting the blog, but it only really shows me how many subscribers have looked at a post. There’s no kind of interaction with them.

I also need to distinguish between different types of subscriber. My blog serves three purposes. It’s a place where, most days (but not today), I indulge my love of fiction – I try to put on a live writing show. Second, the blog allows me to interact with supporters of my ‘permanent’ writing, the published work. And third, I intend it to be a resource center for those who like me, are hunting down emerging writers who excite and inspire. (More about this in the next post.) So this is what I need to ask:

  1. Can readers specify the type of content they want to see? For example, if they’re interested in emerging writers but not in signing up as an Associate, can they do so?
  2. Can I then group members by their interests, so that they only receive notifications about the content they’ve requested?
  3. Whenever new subscribers sign up, can I be sure that they’ll receive all the necessary instructions to make the best use of the blog, depending on the content they’ve requested? For example, if they sign up as Associate, will they receive posts describing how to apply for discounts or gift-vouchers on my ebooks?
  4. Does the subscription list allow me to maintain my own database, making it easy for me to contact individual members or for them to contact me, when, for example, they apply for special offers?
  5. Will all this integrate seamlessly with my WordPress blog – so that once the system is set up I never need to worry about email notifications again?
  6. Does my email marketing service give me statistical analysis, so that I can easily see the impact of a post on readers – whether it’s moved them to take action or not?
  7. Can I afford the email marketing service I choose?

The last question is critical. When you live by your writing, you very quickly learn the importance of running a tight ship. As I’ve researched, I’ve already found powerful email management systems – costing hundreds of dollars a month. A great idea – for insanity publishing! It may be necessary to sacrifice some of the bells and whistles I’d like for something that fits my budget right now.

As ever there’s lots of guidance on the web: I’ve started with the Email Marketing Services Review from TopTenReviews, and I’ll be checking out each of the providers there in the coming hours – I’d like to have the system up and running by tomorrow.

But perhaps you’ve already been through this process and can point me in the right direction. Or maybe I’ve missed something important. Either way, I’d like to hear from you.

References:
Danielle McGaw, also running the Ultimate Blog Challenge marathon, has been showing us how to minimize expenses if you want to live without a salary. A recommended series for hungry writers.

Here’s the earlier post I refer to at the beginning of the article: Introducing the Author Associates Scheme

Or if you’re new to my blog, and you want something a little lighter for the weekend, try this: 14 ways to make friends with Americans (If you are an American, this post is for you too!)

Tags: , , ,

Introducing The Author Associates Scheme

April 11, 2011 in planning | 6 comments

On a more serious note today, I’m going to introduce a new scheme – Author Associates, intended as a model to strengthen the relationship between writers and enthusiastic readers. I want to look again at Andy Woodworth’s eBook Reader’s Bill of Rights, and suggest how we could give our readers real ownership of the eBooks they buy (which Amazon denies at the moment). And I want to show why Smashwords is one of the indie writer’s most important tools.

Expensive Tastes

First, let’s recap. In my last post, I explained (well, narrated really) why I’m increasing the price of my e-novel – to $5.95 in the US and £3.75 in the UK (plus all the various delivery charges and taxes that eBooks so unfairly attract). The reason was to change reader expectations. At $0.99, the expectation is probably low, and I may be damaging my book’s prospects in two ways: first by not attracting the right kind of reader; and second, by attracting the wrong kind of reader.

‘Right’ and ‘wrong’ is not a value judgement – it’s not the same as saying ‘good’ and ‘bad’. In the book market, there’s plenty of room for both fast-food and fine-dining. Both have their place. But you’d better be sure that if your customers are expecting McDonalds, you don’t offer soft candlelight, an expensive wine-list, discreet table-side service. Or vice versa. You’ll just get them confused – and probably unhappy.

What sort of customers do I want? I’m looking for discriminating readers – people who’ll come to the table with high expectations. They want a good yarn told with craftsmanship, artistry, polish. By increasing the recommended retail price, I hope I’ll be able to find them.

The Value of Sharing

Yet in earlier posts, I’ve often promoted the importance of sharing and the value of free. Not long ago, I wrote:

‘If I look at the books and the authors I love best, almost without exception I started reading because of the recommendation of a teacher or reviewer I respected, or a friend or a family member. In many cases, I was a borrower, then a convert, then a purchaser.’

Look at the copyright notice on The Lebanese Troubles and you’ll see that I’ve encouraged readers to share the book with friends and family, instead of insisting (as most eBooks do) that each reader must purchase a separate copy. It’s not because I don’t need the money: like most writers, I need to make enough to support my habit. But I’m taking the long-term view.

Will readers really recommend? If my work’s good enough, I believe they will. Our libraries and music collections define us: they show our friends who we really are. That’s why Goodreads is so popular. And if we spot a new talent, so much the better: we can claim credit for being one of the first to notice. Yes, people do talk when they find a writer or a musician they really enjoy.

So What’s The Pitch?

Here goes our schizophrenic writer again, raising the price on the one hand while advocating sharing on the other. How can this make sense?

Like this.

The recommended retail price sends my value signal to the market – and that’s where the price will settle in the long run. But at this point in my writing career, volume sales are far less important than winning the support of key ‘influencers’ – people who care enough about my writing project to become participants themselves. I need readers to post thoughtful reviews on the key reader sites – Amazon (US and UK), Smashwords, Nook, Goodreads. I need them to recommend my work to friends. And not least, I need direct feedback.

Where am I going to find these people? Right here, on this blog, if I use it properly. By investing the same amount of creative energy and care into the blog as I would into a novel, it becomes an interactive showcase for my writing. I hear some writers complaining that blogging takes time away from their real writing. For me, this is real writing, and it’s the place where I can interact best with my readers – putting on a series of live gigs. If you enjoy the gig enough, chances are that you may start buying the published material … and hopefully you’ll tell your friends too, so they can catch up with the next performance.

The Author Associates Scheme

It’s because this core group of influencers is critical to my success that I’m launching my new scheme. This is how Author Associates works.

If you enjoy the blog, or already have a copy of ‘The Lebanese Troubles’, you are invited to register. Then, as an associate, you may:

1. Purchase your own copy of ‘The Lebanese Troubles’ for just $1.99, via a discount coupon that will allow the eBook to be read in any format. This offer will expire after 200 coupons have been issued.

2. Apply for a batch of 5 gift coupons, allowing friends and family to get the eBook free of charge on your recommendation.

3. Apply for up to 20 discount coupons, allowing members of your reading-group to purchase the eBook at half-price.

4. Register your TLT purchase. Then, if you have purchased for one e-reader, you will be able to view the eBook in any format. You will also be entitled to a free replacement copy, should your original copy become inaccessible, for whatever reason.

5. View and comment on draft chapters of my next novel, scheduled from August 2011 onwards.


Reader Rights and Redundancy Marketing

Before we look at implementation, let’s just pause for a moment on clause 4 – being able to view the book in any e-reader format, and getting a free replacement copy if your original copy is lost or broken. My thinking here has been greatly influenced (again!) by Andy Woodworth’s e-Book Reader’s Bill of Rights. Here’s his complaint.

‘Digital Rights Management (DRM), like a tariff, acts as a mechanism to inhibit this free exchange of ideas, literature, and information. Likewise, the current licensing arrangements mean that readers never possess ultimate control over their own personal reading material. These are not acceptable conditions for eBooks.’


I wholeheartedly agree with Andy’s stand. In the digital age, equipment manufacturers and content providers have profited enormously from built-in redundancy. If you’re old enough, you’ll remember the Betamax/VHS divide in the early days of VTR. When VHS finally won out, my whole investment in Betamax videos was wasted: if I loved a film, I had to buy my Betamax version all over again to watch it on my new VHS machine. And then again when DVD swept in to replace video. And then again when I moved back from the Mid-East to the UK, only to find that my DVD player wouldn’t work with European disks, and that my new European player read my existing collection as a series of question-marks. It happens with printers as well. I’ve been using my trusty printer for years, but now they’ve stopped issuing the ink cartridges for that model. And how many times does Microsoft want me to buy their operating system? It’s just an operating system, for goodness sake! I don’t care!

We’re going the same way with eBooks, unfortunately. Yes, there’s apparently an industry-standard – ePub – and the ePub version is fine for the iPad and the Nook. But not on the Kindle. And if I publish via Amazon, using the .mobi standard, that’s fine for the Kindle, but not anything else. I worry about closed systems. I worry even more when I see, in the small print, that the purchase I thought I’d just made is only a license: the eBook doesn’t really belong to me, as a printed book does. If the only concern is to maximize sales and profitability – to sell the same product again and again as hardware is updated or replaced – then all this makes perfect sense. But for anyone who feels that the customer’s interests should come first, redundancy marketing is repugnant.

The good news is that – because I’ve taken the indie path to publishing – I can take a stand and offer my readers a much better deal. With a little help from Smashwords.

Smashwords To The Rescue

Smashwords is a very popular digital publishing platform, but I hear the occasional criticism from authors who say they never actually sell anything there; readers flock to Smashwords looking for free books, but when they want to buy, they go to Amazon. That may be true at present, but it’s a misunderstanding of the Smashwords mission. The site has been built by a writer for writers, and it’s a place where the writer’s interests always come first, where we can truly exercise our freedom to publish, price and market in the way we choose.

When I publish there, my eBook is automatically converted into 10 different formats. So no matter which e-reading device the reader prefers – Kindle, iPad, Nook, the Sony Reader, the PC or laptop, a mobile phone – one of the Smashwords versions is going to do the job (- not necessarily perfectly, but we’ll come to that another time).

The second huge Smashwords benefit is that it gives me complete control and authority over any discounts that I choose to offer. It gives me the flexibility to offer gift vouchers and discount coupons via Author Associates; better still, it has a reporting system that allows me to relate a coupon number to an individual associate, so that I can track coupons already used, and monitor the effectiveness of my scheme.

Getting Started As An Associate

There’s still work to be done to perfect the new scheme. Smashwords doesn’t tell me who’s purchased my books. Nor should they. I personally wouldn’t want to be pursued by every writer whose book I’d downloaded just to take a look-see. It’s important that Author Associates should be an opt-in scheme for readers who are genuinely enthusiastic, and that no-one should feel pressurized to participate. But that means I’ll need to build a special sign-up tool here on the blog. (Don’t be surprised if you see scaffolding here in the next few days.) I’m going to need a good database too, to keep on top of the interactions with associates. Luckily in another life, I’m a web/database designer – so I’ll be able to cope. No doubt there’ll be other teething problems…

But to get started, there’s nothing like starting. So if you’re interested in joining me as an Associate, and taking advantage of any or all the benefits of the scheme, just let me know right now in a brief comment, and I’ll get back to you by email with more details.

Related posts

Triple Filtrée – No Smooth Outcome. Positioning the novel – as a large potato, or a large beer?
Whose eBook – Yours, Mine or Amazon’s? Am I buying the eBook or just licensing it?
Go On! Lend My Book! – My original post on book-sharing – including a sample ‘sharing’ copyright notice.

Other References

The eBook Reader’s Bill of Rights: Andy Woodworth
Smashwords: sign-up page
Smashwords: my novel page

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Short Stories To Build Readership

March 12, 2010 in planning | 3 comments

I made a big decision a few days ago. I’d entered a short story, Waiting For Orders, for a competition. I was really pleased with the story, and the competition results were due to be announced any day. The top 10-15 stories would be published in an anthology, and I knew there were fewer than 100 entries. Reviewers were pretty positive. I had a reasonable chance.

But I pulled the story out of the competition. Why? Because with my evolving marketing plan, it just didn’t make sense to keep it there.

Of course, I might not have won through. When we enter our writing for any competition, it’s always a gamble. What if you just don’t connect with the judges? But let’s suppose my story had been selected. What would I have gained?

  1. Publication. A GOOD THING because:
    • I’ll like it. It proves that someone else thinks I can write. And it gives me something to brag about to agents and publishers later.
    • My friends will like it. They’ll tell me that now I’m featured in a proper book, I’m a proper writer.
    • My mother will like it – once she’s recovered from the shock of the swear-words, the heresy, and the unwarranted, unkind attack on poets in the story.
  2. Money. The winners will be paid $50 on acceptance, and there’s a chance there might be more later if the book does well. But I’d be surprised if any of the contributors ended up making more than $200.

I’m sorry. It’s not really a very convincing list. But I can think of lots of convincing disadvantages.

  1. If accepted, I would have to give up my rights to the story for 5 years – the length of the contract. I would have no right to publish anywhere else – whether in print or electronically. But I need this story in my portfolio.
  2. I would have no control over the publication date. I want to use the story now – but in the hands of a publisher, it’ll probably take at least another six months before it appears in print.
  3. I’d lose control over pricing. If I want to distribute the story free of charge in order to build my readership, I won’t be able to do so.
  4. I’d like to experiment with different publishing formats – including audio-shorts for the IPod. This story, with its distinctive ‘voice’, is a good candidate for audio treatment, but if accepted, this might have been difficult to negotiate.

My decision has allowed me to start using Waiting for Orders to build my readership right now – today. You’ll notice that I’ve added a new page for Short Stories to the blog, and if you open the page, you’ll see that I’m encouraging you – if you like the story – to share it with friends and to promote it by posting it to social-sharing services like Stumble Upon, where you can also review it.

If you have a blog and short stories ready to show the world, why don’t you join me to help to build your market too? It doesn’t matter whether you’re following the traditional agent/publisher route or, like me, are planning to publish electronically. In either case this should help us to build our readership. And if we let each other know what we’re releasing, then we can all indulge in some beneficial cross marketing.

There’s an important quality control rule though: none of us should recommend a story unless we believe it’s of the highest standard, and that our friends would be bound to enjoy it. If we don’t keep our standards high, our friends will think we’re spamming them when we share.

And if we notice that our stories aren’t being shared, that’s probably a sign that they are not making sufficient impact.

Note that my intention is not to sell stories at this stage. The time for that will come when people are consistently reading what I publish. As ever, I’m going to set a measurable objective. I aim to release a new short story at least once a month. Once I see that these releases are consistently being read by at least 100 people, then I’ll introduce a small charge for new stories … and we’ll then be able to study the impact of different pricing levels.

I’ve also posted a short Twitter message this evening: ‘An environment-unfriendly short story for your reading pleasure – http://www.arealwriter.com/short-stories/waiting-for-orders/’. Will this result in any new readers? I don’t know, but I need to test it – at present I have around 70 Twitter ‘followers’. Will this boost their numbers? Will it bring new people to the blog? I’ll be monitoring the results in Google Analytics very closely, watching to see the source of new readers. And then in coming days, I’ll also test-publish the story on various other writer sites, and check the response. I’ll take just one different site each day to make it easy to measure the results. If you’ve previously worked with any sites which e-publish short stories, I’d be interested to hear your experiences.

Finally, I’m aware that some of you still have entries in the competition I’ve opted out of. To all of you, the very best of luck. The decision I’ve made is right for me, but may be completely wrong for others. I read a lot of high quality submissions, and I’m sure the anthology will be great – I’ll certainly be reviewing and promoting it here when it’s published.

 

Related reading: Two time winner of the Faulkner Award for Fiction, John Edgar Wideman explains why he has decided to self-publish from now on: ‘I like the idea of being in charge. I have more control over what happens to my book. And I have more control over whom I reach.’

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Google Analytics to measure engagement

March 7, 2010 in planning, Results | 3 comments

 

In the next three posts I’ll be looking at reader engagement. This time I’ll look at how to measure engagement, and propose short-term targets in an Engagement Scoresheet. Next time, the topic will be how to build engagement. And in the third post, I’ll explain how I plan to convert engagement into sales.

To make a start, let’s see what Google Analytics can do for us in this 5-screen display.

 

Download (PDF, 77.45KB)

This display created with Google Docs and the WordPress plugin, Google Doc Embedder.
Another WordPress plugin, WP Google Analytics, helped me to connect the blog to Analytics in just a couple of minutes.



There’s much more that Google Analytics can do for you. For example you can find out which links have been clicked (although I can’t get this to play with WordPress at the moment); you can see how many times people have revisited; you can see which outbound links are the most popular. But which are the most important measurements for me?

Once again I need to go back to my objective. $18,000 net income per year is my target. Let’s suppose that my receipts are 50% of total sales revenues (and if I can improve on that percentage, that’ll be good). So I need to aim at $36,000 in sales revenue. That means I’ll have to find around 3000 engaged readers who are prepared to spend at least $12 a year on my creative output.

How do we define the number of engaged readers? I’m going to be measuring the number of people returning at least three times a week. I’ll be tracking also the number of visits per week where more than 3 pages were accessed, and where the time spent on site was more than 3 minutes.

I also want to measure how many people are actually reading the creative writing elements – at the moment how many people are reading the sample chapters of The Lebanese Troubles. And when they’ve started, do they continue? This after all, is the point of the whole marketing exercise. The key measurable here will be how many people have read at least 50% of the creative writing samples on the site – we’ll be aiming at 3000 by March 2011.

Am I expecting to get 3000 engaged readers for this site – A Real Writer? Absolutely not. I hope that fellow-writers will enjoy my experiments in literature, but I’ve identified other niche audiences for my work too – which I’ll talk about next time. I’ll be aiming for engagement with them too, but they’re unlikely to follow me here. There will be other sites, a Facebook fan page, Twitter – I’ll expand more on this as we go on. But for now, let’s look at a possible Engagement Scoresheet, laying down some fairly modest targets for the next 30 days.



Engagement Scoresheet

A monthly update, showing the results achieved to date and the targets for the next 30 days. (This display created with the Wordpress plugin, WP-Target Reloaded)
1st MarchTarget
31st March		Notes
BLOG Visits0600Fairly low expectations for Month 1 - Seeking min 150% increase per month for each of these targets.
Unique visitors050
People > 12 visits this month040
Visits > 3 minutes0200
Visits > 3 pages0200
Feed subscribers020As recorded by Feedburner
FACEBOOK friends3050Novel fan page planned for April.
TWITTER fans3360Tracking writer communities this month.
TWITTER mentions + questions020
No of Sales00First sales expected May
Net income- $60- $60Cost of website for 12 months

 


Nothing too ambitious for month 1, but if I want to achieve the targets, I’ll need to register month-of-month increases of at least 150%. How? That’s for next time.

Now tell me which other key measurements I’ve missed.


Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

A Writer’s Objectives

March 5, 2010 in planning | 12 comments

 

In my first post I mentioned that my objective was not simply to see my name in print. What I want is:

To be a full-time creative writer engaging enough readers and generating enough income to support myself and my family.

In business, that would be called a mission statement.

I’ve chosen the words carefully. ‘A creative writer‘. That rules out taking on writing and research assignments for others. Plenty of writers do supplement their income like this, but it’s not for me: I know I’d lose focus and there wouldn’t be enough hours in the day for my creative work. That’s always been the problem – finding enough time to do the writing that really matters to me.

‘Engaging readers‘ is different from ‘winning fans’. We saw in the previous post that Josh Woodward has used the web to attract huge numbers of fans, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that he has huge sales. In the age of viral marketing, all of us are signing up, subscribing, following – it’s a fad. How many times this year have you signed up for a site? How many do you continue to follow? How often have you parted with money?

Engagement is converting brand recognition into brand loyalty. More important than the number of fans is the number of people who come back and read again, the amount of time they spend reading. And ultimately whether they’re willing to put their hand in their pocket for the work I sell. As Gary Stein explains in a recent post, the most effective interactive marketers are ‘forcefully evolving their engagement strategies away from a simple number of who-has-the-most-fans to something that actually has some value: what-do-my-fans-get-me?’

There’s much more to say about engagement; in my next post I’ll explain how I propose to build it, and how I’m going to measure it. But now I need to expand on my mission statement. It’s still too vague. The stated objective is to generate income to support my family. How much income – and in what timeframe? Without real numbers, there’s no way to evaluate success or, later, to judge whether the strategy needs adjustment.

What I’m doing here is to apply to myself the same rules I’ve been using in my professional career for the past few years. As a business consultant, I’ve helped businesses and individuals to define their objectives and then manage achievement. The golden rule is always to set up measurable targets. When individuals say they want a career-change, I ask them to write their resumé – as they want it to look in three years time. Then together we work out a route-map to get there, with clear milestones.

I’m not giving myself the luxury of a three-year plan. I know myself too well. When I dive into a project, I find it very difficult to focus on anything else – I’m not a multi-tasker. So if I’m going to get serious about writing, I need writing to support me within one year. Support – what does that mean in real money? Well let’s not get over-ambitious or write in too many luxuries. In fact, let’s depersonalize it, by setting as a target the equivalent of the UK minimum wage for a 40-hour week. That’s around $18,000 per year. Of course I’m not going to start earning right away. But by March 2011, I need to be earning a net income from writing averaging at least $1,500 per month.

If I was stacking shelves in a supermarket it would be a breeze. For a writer it’s not so easy. But by setting my objectives, I’m already sensing the shape of the plan.

  1. At this stage in my career I won’t be looking for an agent or a publisher. Even if by some stroke of good fortune I was signed up quickly, it would take months before a book appeared on the shelves. Any advance for an unknown first-time novelist would be relatively small – certainly lower than $18,000. Assuming I earned a 10% royalty on a $14.99 book, I’d have to be selling 1500 books a month to meet my target. That very rarely happens – not at the beginning of a career.

  2. E-publishing looks a better bet than self-publishing or print-on-demand. It’s faster – and I need to get started as soon as possible – less expensive, less risky, easier to distribute, and while a novel would be priced lower (typically around the $4.99 mark – anyone like to research this?), the royalty would be 70% or greater. This would leave me with only around 425 books to sell per month to reach my target.

  3. But even this sales target is high. There will need to be other sources of creative-writing income. So what might they be?

(Now it’s time for you to put your thinking caps on: let’s have some left-field thinking – can we learn anything from musicians, artists, business, politicians … did you hear today that Tony Blair is getting a £4.5 million advance from Harper Collins for his forthcoming autobiography?)

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Building An Audience

March 4, 2010 in planning | 6 comments

Josh Woodward

I’d like to introduce you to someone I’ve never met, never spoken to, communicated with only once. Josh Woodward. That’s him on the left. Josh writes dark, sensitive songs which I love. Listen to Josephine and I hope you’ll see why.

How did I come across Josh’s work? Well there’s a website called Garageband, where unpublished musicians post their work, which is then reviewed anonymously by reviewers. I was keeping my writing skills sharp a couple of years back, writing music reviews, and that’s when I first heard Josh.

I liked what I heard, and wanted to find out more. I checked his profile page. What I found there was an enormous catalog of material – 150 songs, 7 CDs. Today many of Josh’s songs are flying high at the top of the Garageband acoustic charts. And there’s something else. If you want to download any of the songs, you can. For free! Alternatively, Josh offers the physical CDs and charges a flat $4 for shipping costs, but leaves it up to his fans to decide what they want to pay – there’s a minimum charge of $2 to cover the material costs.

Is this a good business model? I don’t know. I’ll see if I can persuade Josh to tell us whether his music is supporting him, or whether he does something else to earn his daily bread.

But one thing’s for sure. He’s certainly built up a large fan-base. Josh is all over the web. As well as his website, he has a presence on MySpace (40,000 plays), ILike (8400 fans), Facebook (1300 fans), YouTube (top songs have over 10,000 plays). Not forgetting Twitter, where he engages one-on-one with fans.

All this without a publisher. Which has other advantages. Josh retains control over what he records, when he releases it, and the price he charges for it. So, when the Haiti earthquake struck, Josh recorded and released a song ‘Motionless Land’, the same day, inviting listeners to send donations to Doctors Without Frontiers. OK, as he says himself, it was a rough cut, but on this occasion he wanted to respond immediately.

So what can we writers learn from this web pioneer? Well, most obviously, that it’s possible to build a career and a fan-base without an agent and a publisher (or in his case a manager and a record-label). Provided there is:

Commitment: The fan base didn’t grow overnight – I know that Josh has been working on this since at least 2005.

Continuity: Josh has been releasing new songs every few weeks, so that his fans never forget who he is. Now I’m planning to publish The Lebanese Troubles fairly soon, but I’m not likely to finish another novel for another year or so. So if my aim, like Josh’s, is to steadily build my audience and help readers to remember me, then why not publish a few short stories as well … and release them as he has, on the web? Perhaps in audio format too, for the IPod. I wonder if there’s a market?

Control: At this stage in my career I, like Josh, want to retain control of the entire publishing and pricing process. I want to be able to write a story and get it to my audience next week, not wait six months for it to appear. I want to be sure that pricing is set to encourage the maximum number of purchases. (Incidentally there’s a good deal of evidence to show that ebook sales are not necessarily stronger when the price is set very low – but that’s a discussion for another day.)

Coverage: Readers need to be able to find our work easily and see our names regularly. We need to be on all the main social networking sites, and be clear about what we are trying to achieve on each one (- again a topic for another post).

Communication: I’m incredibly impressed that with all these fans, Josh still manages to communicate with them personally. People who talk to him will feel they have a stake in his success. Twitter is a good choice as a communication channel. As the fan network grows, it keeps messages short – or we could find this overwhelming.

Creative Commons Licensing: We need to learn when it’s best to allow readers to copy, download and share our work. In publishing, there’s huge discussion at present about DRM – Digital Rights Management. Essentially this is all about publishers defending their traditional territory – ensuring that work cannot be copied and current pricing-levels are maintained. In the process of building my market, I want to be DRM-free.

Put it like this. If Josh Woodward hadn’t made his work shareable, I wouldn’t have been able to write this post – and he may not have been able to pick up a few more fans today.

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Left-Field Marketing

March 2, 2010 in planning | 11 comments

In the left-field

So I have an unpublished novel manuscript, a few short stories, and a handful of readers. How do I turn a handful into a hundred, a hundred into thousands?

I know it won’t be easy, because everyone tells me so. ‘Just think of all those great novels lying undiscovered on publishers’ slush-piles. Be prepared for dozens of rejections. Remember: the successful author is the last one standing.’

But wait! Haven’t I spent my whole career dreaming up impossible schemes, making plans out in left field? And then persuading people to share my enthusiasms and get involved, to love what I love. OK, maybe it hasn’t always been successful, but it’s always made me a living – and sometimes much better than that.

So, why can’t I apply what I know about marketing ideas and products to the world of books? What’s so different? After all, a reader is just another kind of consumer, and the task is always the same: to identify them, to reach them, and to delight them.

Left-field thinking means taking nothing for granted, leaving no assumption unchallenged. Right now I’m thinking about my objectives as a writer. Most writers I know seem to be focused on the difficulty of finding an agent, then a publisher. But in the world I come from, these would only be channels to the consumer. So would the bookstore. My training and instincts tell me to focus on the reader first, and then work backwards from there. If the channels are blocked, maybe there’s a better way to build a market.

Am I right? There’s only one way to find out. I need to do some test marketing. To plan a campaign and execute it out there in the real world. And I need a product to use as a crash-dummy. I have one. It’s called The Lebanese Troubles.

This blog will be a daily record of my left-field book-marketing adventure. I’ll explain my plans, research and thinking. I’ll also be publishing the detailed results of the experiment – the number of readers, the sales, the costs. If you’re following along, there will be opportunities to get involved as I suggest a few research topics. Warnings, dissenting views and cheering from the wings will also be appreciated as I try to make the journey from part-time wannabe to someone who makes a full-time living from creative writing – A Real Writer.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: , , , , , , ,

close