SFFMP 180: Discoverability, Flagship Series, Product Funnels, and Newsletter Concerns

Hey, folks! I (Lindsay) got back from the Sell More Books Show Conference this weekend, where I was one of several speakers. I took notes on some of the presentations that resonated most with me, and I shared them with Jo and Jeff on the show tonight. We proceeded to discuss them a bit. Hopefully, you’ll find it useful to listen!

I’m going to share the books of the speakers we were talking about, so if you want more information on a particular topic, you might want to check them out. After that, I’m going to paste in my notes from the convention, in case you find it more useful than just getting some bullet points here. They aren’t organized, and I’m sure they are full of typos. Read at your own risk!

Books from the speakers:

• Chris Fox: Plot Gardening
• Bryan Cohen: How to Write a Sizzling Synopsis: A Step-by-Step System for Enticing New Readers, Selling More Fiction, and Making Your Books Sound Good (this wasn’t what his talk was about but the book would tie in well with Brian Meeks’s information on Amazon ads)
• Brian Meeks: Mastering Amazon Ads: An Author’s Guide
• Monica Leonelle: Get Your Book Selling: Jumpstart Your Sales With a Simple Plan That Just Works

Also, as mentioned during the episode, the Andrea Perason show where she schooled on us setting up email auto-responders for your new newsletter subscribers: http://www.marketingsff.com/advanced-newsletter-tactics/

Notes! (Scroll to the bottom for the YouTube video and download link for the show.)

Chris Fox on creating a flagship series

• Many well-known authors have done this, over 1 million words total
• Become known for the series if it’s popular enough and might not have to work again

Create by having:

• Opening loops – lots of questions to be answered over the course of the series
• Narrative drive – lots of stuff going on and carrying the series: simple plots don’t draw in the reader for the long haul
• Character drive – lots of characters with goals and motivations they’re working toward. Make sure to flesh out all the side characters and not just the main character. Some books may even focus more on these other characters

Marketing your flagship series:

You’ll keep advertising your book 1 as you release more books so you have to be smart or you’re saturate your target audience and your ads will become less effective.

He likes a “crop rotation” method: With his Tech Mage series, he has three target audiences: military SF fans, epic fantasy fans, and litRPG fans. He started out targeting one demographic with ads and even the cover of the book, then the next when he released Book 2, and he’ll do the other audience later.

 

Mailing Lists Bryan Cohen

 

Creating your lists, writing a giveaway, and creating an autoresponder sequence (Andrea Pearson episode, there’s a lot about this) before you go hunting for any signups.

Remember to be personable in your emails, tell little stories about yourself, and don’t always make the hard sell.

But do remember to plug the old stuff and maybe you want to point to a list of all your books or include them.

GDPR – Damon from Bookfunnel chimed in and said most of us are probably okay if we haven’t been doing anything shady, if they have to double opt in, and the unsubscribe is clear in the footer. If readers are signing up on our site for bonus material or just to follow you and you’re making it clear that they’re going to get monthly updates or new release updates – whatever you do.

• Be careful if you got subscribers from Instafreebie or joint promos or anywhere you were just handed a batch of email addresses and put them into your database, or if you’ve just been adding people who email you to a homemade list. This isn’t cool even with CAN-SPAM stuff, so fix that.

Thoughts on culling lists?

You may have to do it if you’ve been growing your list fast with a lot of promos to get subscribers, and you’re getting pushed into more and more expensive tiers. Do check before kicking people off.

As Damon said, not all the data is accurate. If people’s email clients don’t automatically load images, your mailing list provider won’t get a ping back that says the pixel they insert was loaded, so they won’t see the message as “read.” You can help with accuracy by including images in your emails that people want to see, so they’ll click load images.

 

Amazon Ads Brian Meeks

 

You should have lots of ads that you try for the same book. Tinker with copy and keywords (authors) you target.

After about 5 days, things will start to fall off (may drop as much as 80%) with how many impressions you’re getting. Sometimes a good ad will work longer, but he’s putting in new ads every week to keep the clicks coming on his books. He’ll kill the old ones instead of letting them run.

Good copy on the ad and targeting the right audience will get you more clicks on your ads which brings down the cost of each click and will get you more impressions. Amazon wants to show the effective ads to its shoppers.

Good cover and blurb will help you more than anything. When you send clicks to your book page, you need them to convert into sales or borrows, otherwise you’re spending way more than you need to be on these ads. The better the conversion, the more you’ll make in the long run.

• Short blurbs with lots of white space and hooks questions above the “read more” link. He says not to worry about cramming a bunch into that space. Just make them want to click and read more. No walls of text.
• You don’t have to say what’s going on in the story. You just have to hook them, make them buy. This is not a synopsis. If you wrote query letters to agents, it’s like that middle paragraph.

 

Never look at ACoS since it’s slow to report, not always accurate, and doesn’t include page reads.

Important to figure out what your read through is for your series and how much you make when someone reads the series. Then you know how much you can afford to spend on ads to get a new reader.

He tried a test with a SF author with an 8-book series who wanted to advertise a free Book 1 that was 99 cents, so he was only making 35 cents for sale. They had to wait a couple of months to get the full picture, since it might take people that long to read through the series if they were going to. They judged that it took until Book 4 to turn a profit, for the money spent on ads to be worth it.

More competition now, so you have to big higher, so it is getting tougher especially in romance (he mentioned SF as getting there too). It may start to only make sense to run ads on a first in a long series.

He still sees people getting 13-15 cent clicks on niche things for specific keywords, but that’s getting rare.

*Note Amazon will tend to give a boost to ads for books that haven’t been advertised before, so if you’re finding your Book 1 just isn’t working anymore, you might try advertising a later book in a series.

 

Monica Leonell on Business/Product Funnels

 

You need a product funnel… free or low cost product that can get people in the door. Then, after they know they like your work, they are willing to buy higher priced items.

People don’t jump from not knowing anything about you to buying a 9.99 ebook.

Novelists Delimma:

In most industries (artists, musicians, non-fiction authors), there are higher priced items ($100 to thousands), but not so much in the fiction world. There are lots of multi six figures authors now, but not many multi seven figure authors, as there are in other businesses, and she thinks it’s because we haven’t yet figured out how to make these higher priced kinds of things for our super fans.

Why not doing it:

1. Codependent on retailers – if Amazon changed anything, most of us would be hugely effected
2. Lack of a real model – for most, having movies/series made by Hollywood is the only way to break into the superstardom necessary
3. Fear the answer to this question: why would my readers spend $100, $200, $500 on us?

Maybe survey your newsletter subscribers and see what cool things they want?

She had a quote by Taylor Swift about how you can be accidentally successful for three or four years, but a career takes work.

 

 

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