Marketing Strategy Development: Product (2) (Patreon)

We talked about Products before in the previous post, about the various ways you can and should consider how your product can be created.

Now, here's something else to consider.

Product Line Management

Remember how I had a whole post on the Growth Share Matrix? 

Well, this is something to consider when you have multiple product lines (series) to play with.

But I wanted to introduce another thought, which might change things around for you a little with regard to the series management. And that's the 'refreshing' or 'relaunching' approach to series.

What if, you had a good product, that is in a high growth market, that for one reason or another never launched well? 

With ebooks, with the ease of updating and editing; isn't it easy to relaunch? Change covers, change blurbs, take the entire thing down and then edit it maybe for a bit? And do a quick launch period, one after the other? 

Could you make a Question mark series a Star series?

Add the fact that there's only so much work you can do per series before you have to sit back and wait a bit, and considerations like this definitely arise. 

To Series or Not?

Another author consideration / indie publisher consideration is whether to do series or not. There are very, very good arguments as an indie publisher to do a series. Specifically, that every book in a good series pushes up sales for every book in the previous series. 

This is mostly due to the renewed interest and ranking of the newly released book. As your book should be linked to previous books in the series, people who see book 8 of a series then can jump back to book 1, especially if there's significant social proof (like Bestseller tags, reviews, etc) to indicate the new release and the series is good.

To consider though, is the fact that series do have a 'lifespan', where each book reduces in the number of readers. Now, if you have a significant number of readers, that doesn't matter much. 

You can also have multiple 'entry points' to a series, allowing readers to find their way in and giving you multiple ways to promote. Some authors spend their entire writing careers in just one universe, writing multiple series within the universe.

Others write books that are standalone but are part of the series, allowing multiple entry points that way.

I like doing series arcs, so it might be the same series but I can do longer arcs, with multiple entry points (of sorts).  

On the other hand, one thing about book 1's is that they are some of the bestsellers (in terms of total sales & revenue). So, if you do stand-alones and have a very strong author brand; it's possible that it might work out well for you. 

This, by the way, is a supposition. I don't know of my any of my indie author friends who do stand-alones though.

Other Product Considerations - Release Speed

Lastly, one more thing to think about in terms of product considerations.

This comes back to writing (and thus release) speed (and capital to some extent). If you can write fast, you can release fast. Again, see earlier comments about how that effects your strategy, but I wanted to raise one specific tactic:

- Rapid release.  That is, launching one book every a week / two weeks / a month until you have 3/4 books launched. Or the entire series.

This kind of veers between tactic and strategy, since there are some major considerations in there but it's also very specific in its methodology. In either case, knowing your writing speed, knowing how fast you can backlog a bunch of books (or chapters in a serial, or audiobooks if you have money or whatever) will determine if you can use this tactic.

There are definite tactical advantages to this, and the same can be said for things like backlogging chapters for Patreon, etc.

And that's all folks

At least, I can't think of anything else without veering into talk of licensing (comics, TV, etc.) which isn't really within the scope of our discussion here.

Next topic is going to be the last of the 4P's - Promotion. I'm sure a ton of you guys are waiting for that one.