Brand Management (Patreon)

It's been a while since we've had a business post, so I thought I'd let you into my brain for a bit, and the roughly $15,000 I'm probably going to end up spending incrementally over the next few years!

Wow, jotting up all the totals is kind of terrifying. Let's ignore the total price tag for a minute. >.>

This year has been a pretty eye-opening one for me, in terms of facing facts about what makes a book easy to promote, and how promotion is what makes for successful books. I've had cold hard evidence that so long as your book is of sufficient quality (and that quality is a lower bar than most authors assume) and meets sufficiently the reader expectations for genre, its sales are more controlled by promotion than by anything else. You can spend forever writing the perfect book, but it's not going to do any better than an adequate book you spent half the time on.

(I still strive for perfection because I am fussy that way. But for those of you worried that missing a few typos is going to sink your work forever, relax.)

But books can be more or less marketable, and that's the wall I've run into. Having bashed my head into it, it's time to fix things.

My number one issue is covers, which is where being an artist has hobbled me. If I can slap an adequate cover on a book and get it out to readers faster, I often will. But unlike adequate stories, adequate covers are death. Covers need to be good, y'all. You gotta spend the money. So I've made a list of all my underperforming series so I could start finding cover artists for them. Getting new cover art for them is my next priority.

Priority #2 is to box-set all the finished series I have (which requires another outlay of cash for the box set graphics). Promoters like promoting bundles, and it gives you two chances to promote the same series with the same advertisers.

Those are my two big capital outlays in the future. Artists aren't cheap. I should know. >.>

After that, my next big priority is audio, because audio not only sells more than print, it provides a really good secondary income stream on promoted books: audio listeners who find a promotion on a novel that has an audio edition will pick up both, which gives me an on-sale sale and a full-price sale (the audio edition). That's a nice chunk of cash: the times I've promoted a book without an audio edition, I've noticed the lack.

Finally, finishing up with the print editions rounds things out nicely for gift buyers, and lets retailers tell shoppers that they can get the e-edition for cheaper, which... works. It's one of those marketing tactics I find uncomfortable to witness, but people are price-sensitive, and even if they're not in the market for a print edition, seeing that the e-edition is 'cheaper than!' is motivating. (There are books about these psychological marketing techniques. I've read them. They are... illuminating.)

The other thing I want to get in order for next year is the re-launch of serialization on my website, and the fansite. Those of you peering at the serialization notes on that photo will notice two: Kherishdar's Exception (which I hope we'll be back up over the $1000 a month mark to afford once I get to it) and... the business books. Because serializing those on my blog will be much easier than doing it on this Patreon blog with its bizarre formatting issues. *eyes it*

The fansite is the part I'm most excited about, and it's partially in progress. I'm getting the folks on the Patreon Discord chat to help out with it as I have the time, but it'll have forums and a fan-run blog and it's going to be awesome. <3

But anyway. As you can see, I've got a lot of capital expenditures in my future. I'll probably run some Kickstarters for them next year to see if I can accelerate the schedule on them. But doing this will make my books more attractive to advertisers, who hate to see unappealing marketing fluff, and the more I can book with advertisers, the better I do.

That's the plan. *nods* And that's the inside of my head lately. More soon: we've got the PG6 launch next week, plus I'm doing another raffle for a Kindle on my mailing list, and the Patreon chat for the month is December 31st: I've got another Bookbub lined up so we can watch sales numbers together. :D

More soon!