Sometimes You Just Need More Books
Behind-the-Scenes #4: In which I dispense business advice that I desperately need to follow.
Teaching marketing and sales to writers is a tricky thing, in part because sometimes the issue is not marketing and sales. When people come to us with general business problems, that are simply solvable but not necessarily easily solvable, I often tell them…
“If you want, you can book a call and I can spend an hour telling you that it’s X. Or you can just acknowledge that it’s X, stop looking for a magic bullet around X, and finally fix X.”
X is often:
You need more books
You need better books
You need more audience
You need more profit per book
You need more people in your audience to buy
Let’s go through each one in turn, specifically for authors.
#1 - Sometimes you just need more books
Sometimes you just need more books. There is a network effect that comes with having more books. Your book catalog needs to be The Kardashians, not Paris Hilton. Every book is another chance to splash the news, build the brand, and sell more lipstick.
You need to have something to sell once, and then something to sell to the same person after the first thing. On and on, for as long as possible.
One little secret: it doesn't have to be books. There are plenty of people who have made money on books plus something else. Sometimes you just need more things to sell. Books take more time to create than many other things.
Getting to a catalog of things to sell at large enough price points as fast as possible is an extremely smart thing to do for your creative business. Most successful authors I know did this as fast as they possibly could.
#2 - Sometimes you just need books that more people want to buy
Sometimes you just need books that more people want to buy. This is a challenging reality for most authors, because it is rarely a critique of quality, but rather a critique of taste. It could be that your taste simply has a small audience. All of that is fine! That said, if you are running a business, it will serve you well to find an aspect of your taste that matches a large part of the market.
Every project has a ceiling. Instead of resenting that ceiling, consider working within the limits of it. Write down all your books or projects. What is the realistic ceiling (the highest number of people who might buy) of that book or project? You may want to think about this per platform as it varies.
When you look at these numbers, can you make an acceptable-to-you business with it by cobbling multiple books/projects under one umbrella? Can you build a marketing plan that reaches the right number of people who will buy the thing each year? Business is largely a numbers game, and only a few numbers really matter.
Getting more things that people want to buy as fast as possible is an extremely smart thing to do for your creative business. Most successful authors I know did this as fast as they possibly could.
#3 - Sometimes you just need to be in front of more new people
Sometimes you just need to be in front of more new people. How many new people do you need to reach every year to make your business hit your goal numbers (or to make your business maintain numbers based on audience retention and churn)?
Years ago, a friend sent me this amazing podcast episode from Rachel Rodgers at Hello, 7. In it, Rachel talks about numerous instances where her marketing plan got her part of the way there, but ended up only being 10% of what was required to hit her sales goals.
“What I had planned to do marketing-wise to get those clients was 10% of what was actually required to get those clients.”
Ten percent!
Her message: You haven’t tried everything to market—not even close!
Whatever number you think you need to hit to have the audience you need to make your business work, multiply it by ten. I started doing this several years ago and it’s proven out to be true for me. It is the reason I jumped to the next level.
Once you do that, make a new plan to reach that many people in the same year.
Getting a core audience for your work as fast as possible and continuing to grow the core is an extremely smart thing to do for your creative business. Most successful authors I know did this as fast as they possibly could.
#4 - Sometimes you just need to raise your price
Sometimes you just need to raise your price. It’s funny how the easiest and fastest thing to do is often the thing writers resist the most. But really, most of us are priced too low.
The biggest reasons in my mind to raise your price are to either:
Increase profitability
Make the math of ads work faster (which then creates infinite audience and sales)
In the end, you are making your audience-building profitable. When you can do this, business becomes a lot easier.
I absolutely hate optimizing ads. So a lot of times, I test making the price a little higher—raising it by a dollar, or a few. I don't worry about whether it's "too high" for my genre/niche/whatever. (As a note, every time I do it, my sales basically stay the same and my genre/niche seems to follow me. I suppose I'm a trendsetter!)
All you need to do at first is make a profit that you are happy with, through a mechanism that gives you a theoretical endless audience. At that point, your catalog becomes better than a high-earning investment account, where you can pour money in and get money out.
Getting your audience-building to profit as fast as possible is an extremely smart thing to do for your creative business. Most successful authors I know did this as fast as they possibly could.
You can spend a lot of months optimizing your ads, or you can just raise your price to what it costs to serve your un-optimized ads.
(Yes, I think about this even with fiction.)
#5 - Sometimes you just need to hit the tipping point between not buying and buying.
Sometimes you just need to hit the tipping point between not buying and buying. You can select the amount you need or want to receive from each customer, and then fill the bundle you are offering them until you reach a tipping point of happiness on their end.
For example, maybe you want (or need) to make $20 per sale of a bundle of books. Instead of asking, “is this possible?” you can ask, “how many books do I need to put in this bundle to get a person to give me $20?”
And then the question becomes, “how many books do I need to put in this bundle to get enough people to give me $20?”
Too much of the publishing industry is trying to squeeze another ten cents out of a cost-per-click, instead of just having a lot of things to sell people, that they can throw into a bundle at no additional cost.
Optimize your tipping point between buying or not buying.
That brings us back to, sometimes you just need more books...
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But wait! Sometimes you don't need more books.
I frequently talk to authors who have 20+ books, but think they need more books. No. You need to do more to sell the books you have. 10x your efforts to sell, and then see if you need more books. But in general, 20 books is enough to build a 5-6 figure-a-year business.
These five things are probably the core of the concepts you need to know to succeed at publishing. You are in a cycle of:
More books
More that people want to buy
More people
More money per person
Better offer to get the money per person needed
Over and over and over again. One of these five things is your most challenging problem right now. When you fix it, a different one of these things will be your most challenging problem. And on and on.
It is simple, it is even boring. When you up your tolerance for boredom and lower your tolerance for any drama around this, it really isn't that hard to build a sustainable creative business.
So which of these five is your most pressing issue right now? If you had to fix this in the next month, what would you do?