Advanced Fiction Writing Blog

A Virtuous Cycle for Marketing Your Books

April 21, 2021 by Randy Ingermanson 6 Comments

in Marketing Tagged: core marketing machine, Virtuous Cycle

Marketing books is hard. There are many dozens of things authors are “supposed” to be doing to increase their sales. The problem is that everything takes time, and authors are busy people.

It’s natural for an author to ask what their core marketing machine should look like. If you reduce things to the bare essentials, what would that be?

Here’s my opinion. The core marketing machine for an author should take the form of a “Virtuous Cycle” with three basic parts:

Your books send your fans to your website.
Your website invites your fans to sign up for your e-mail list.
Your e-mail list onboarding sequence promotes all your books.

This is called a “Virtuous Cycle” because each part of it feeds into the next, like this graphic:

But Where’s the Beginning?

You might ask, “which of these is the beginning?” That is, where do your fans get into this Virtuous Cycle?

The answer is that they might join it anywhere:

They might happen onto one of your books in a store and discover that they like your writing.
Or they might chance across your website in one of the thousand ways somebody can come to a website.
Or they might join your e-mail list in one of many common ways.

But no matter how they enter the Virtuous Cycle, they keep going through until they’ve done it all. They’ve visited your website, they’ve joined your e-mail list, and they’ve read most or all of your books.

Why This Matters in the Short Term

Once you’ve built your Virtuous Cycle, you can then expand on it in many different ways. Each way will inject new fans into the Virtuous Cycle at some point:

You can advertise your books directly using Amazon ads or Facebook ads or BookBub ads or any of the major deal sites.
You can focus on bringing in traffic to your website using search-engine optimization or ads on Facebook or Google or interviews on blogs or podcasts or many other ways.
You can focus on building your e-mail list using Facebook ads or joint author giveaways or many other list-building methods.

Each of these extensions to your marketing engine may or may not be cost-effective in the short-term. That is, running paid ads to promote one book may be a money-loser for that one book. But if it brings more readers to your website and then they sign up for your e-mail list and then they buy all your other books, then it’s a win in the long-term. And if the ads don’t work, you can stop them at any time, and your Virtuous Cycle still keeps working.

But the important thing is that you can now experiment on all those dozens of marketing methods that authors are “supposed” to do. Each of them will theoretically inject new fans into your Virtuous Cycle at some point. Each of them may or may not be cost-effective. Each of them can be turned on or off at any time, and the core marketing machine still just works.

Why This Matters in the Long Term

In the long term, you will continue to write books on a sustainable schedule. Maybe you can write one book per year. Or three. Or ten.

It’s up to you to find a schedule that you can keep at for the long haul.

If you’ve built your core marketing machine as a Virtuous Cycle, then every time you launch a book, here’s what will happen:

You’ll send several e-mails out to your True Fans, who will generate a big spike in sales during your Launch Week.
This will drive your book up the bestseller charts in its various categories, bringing it to the attention of readers who never heard of you before.
These new readers will now enter your Virtuous Cycle and grow your e-mail newsletter fan base.
They’ll discover all your other books, and those will all see a surge in sales.

So over time, your set of True Fans will grow and grow. And each book launch will do a bit better than the one before. And in between launches, your growing backlist of books will attract new readers, so your fan base will grow faster and faster.

The mathematical term for what happens when you have a working Virtuous Cycle is “exponential growth.” If that sounds awesome to you, it is. Exponential growth is how all successful products become breakout big winners.

How to Take Action When You’re Busy

What this means for a busy, overworked author is this. If you feel overwhelmed with all the marketing you’re doing or all the marketing you could be doing, then focus on your core marketing machine.

Create your Virtuous Cycle first. Build your website and hook it up to your e-mail newsletter signup. Get your onboarding sequence written for your e-mail newsletter, and use it to promote your books. Make sure all your books give your readers an incentive to go to your website to sign up for your e-mail newsletter.

Once your Virtuous Cycle is in place, you can afford to try other things—various kinds of paid ads or search engine optimization or social media or whatever you want to try.

Each of those is an experiment—an optional way to inject True Fans into your Virtuous Cycle. If they work, great! If they don’t, abandon them and try something else.

What you never want to do is abandon your Virtuous Cycle. Like diamonds, your Virtuous Cycle is forever.

Exporting Notes From an E-book to Your Computer

March 24, 2021 by Randy Ingermanson 2 Comments

in Research, Technology Tagged: e-book reader, notes

If you read a lot of e-books, you may find yourself wishing you could highlight interesting segments in your e-book reader and transfer them to your computer.

You can! At least, you can on the e-book readers I’ve tried.

I do most of my reading on the Kindle app on my iPhone, so I’ll show the process I use. If you use a different app or a different device, the exact steps may be somewhat different. You’ll need to experiment to figure out how to do it on your system.

But if you do a lot of research, this is a process that will save you boatloads of time, so it’s well worth figuring out.

Step 1: Highlight the Section You Want to Capture

On the iPhone Kindle app, you can highlight anything by selecting it with your finger on the screen.

The image below shows a screen capture of the entire first page of my novel Son of Mary, with more than four paragraphs highlighted.

Step 2: Open the Notes Section in Your Kindle App

On the iPhone Kindle app, whenever you touch the screen in a non-highlighted area, a toolbar appears at the top of the screen, and one of the icons in that toolbar is the Notes icon.

The image below shows a screen capture of the first page of my novel after I touched a blank spot on the screen. I have drawn in a red arrow to point to the Notes icon in the top toolbar.

When you touch that Notes icon, the Notes Section of the app appears on the screen.

Step 3: Click the Share Icon in the Toolbar

On the iPhone Kindle app, each Note you’ve highlighted shows up with a small header that tells the location the Note came from. You can scroll through the Notes Section and see every snippet that you’ve highlighted all through the book.

Notice that the paragraphs have been all smushed together from the segment I highlighted in my book. You can undo this later, after you’ve emailed yourself the Notes.

The Notes Section has a toolbar on top. There is a Share Icon in this toolbar.

The image below shows a screen capture of the Notes Section. I’ve drawn in a red arrow that points to the Share Icon.

When you touch the Share Icon, a dialog box appears at the bottom of the screen that gives you the choice of exporting your Notes to Flashcards or Email.

Step 4: Choose Your Export Option

Assuming you want to e-mail your Notes to yourself, choose the Email option on the dialog box.

The image below shows a screen capture showing the dialog box at the bottom of the screen. I’ve drawn in a red arrow that points to the Email button in the dialog.

When you select the Email option, an Export Notebook page pops up that lets you choose how you’ll format the citation of your Notes.

Step 5: Choose your Citation Option and Export Your Notes

Choose whichever citation style you like best. The default style is None.

Once you’ve chosen the citation style, click the Export button in the upper right corner of the Export Notebook page.

The image below shows a screen capture of the Export Notebook page. I’ve drawn in a red arrow that points to the Export button.

You’ll notice at the bottom of the screen there’s a line of text that tells you how much of the book you have exported as Notes, including the Notes you’re about to export. The publisher of each book sets a limit on the amount of text you can export as Notes. The Kindle app won’t let you export more than that.

Once you’ve clicked the Export button, the e-mail app on your phone will pop up, ready to e-mail yourself an attachment with your Notes. All you have to do is enter the email address you want to send the Notes to, and then send the e-mail.

Step 6: Go to E-mail and Open the Attachment

Your phone has now sent you an e-mail with your notes. Go to your e-mail account on your computer and find the e-mail. There will be an attachment file in the e-mail with a name that ends in “.html”.

On my machine, I found the best way to open this attachment was to right-click the attachment and select “Open With…” from the menu. This pops up a subment with a number of applications. I chose Microsoft Word, and this opened up the attachment nicely in Word.

Step 7: Reformat Your Notes

As we saw earlier, the paragraphs in your Notes are all smushed together. You may need to do some reformatting to make the Notes look nice.

Do whatever reformatting you need to do.

That’s all!

Your e-book reader and your computer system may be different from mine, so the steps you take may be a bit different. But the process above should inspire you to figure out the exact set of steps to transfer notes from your e-book reader to your computer. If you run into problems, you may need to use a search engine to find exactly how to do the job on your e-reader and your computer.

Have fun!

Creating a Minimum Viable Product

February 18, 2021 by Randy Ingermanson 2 Comments

in Fiction Writing, Production Tagged: Minimum Viable Product

Most writers are perfectionists, and that’s good. It means we like to produce excellent quality writing.

Most writers are perfectionists, and that’s bad. It means we’re never done.

The art of being a writer is to balance that good perfectionism against the bad perfectionism.

There’s a way to do that. It’s a method that has become wildly popular in the world of entrepreneurs.

The idea is to rapidly create something called a “Minimum Viable Product” and release it to the world.

But you don’t stop there. Once you’ve released it, you continue to improve it. Forever.

Let’s elaborate on all that.

What’s a Minimum Viable Product?

A Minimum Viable Product is three things:

A Minimum Viable Product is a product. It’s something useful to the world. Twitter is a product. An author website is a product. A blog post is a product.

A Minimum Viable Product is viable. It actually works. It’s not something half-baked that you just throw out there. It does one thing and it does it pretty well. Twitter lets people communicate in little snippets to a list of followers. An author website tells the world about an author and their books. A blog post puts out one idea.

A Minimum Viable Product is minimal. It doesn’t try to be all that it could possibly be. It’s the smallest possible version that can be released. When Twitter was first released, it didn’t have all possible features. Not yet. That came later. When you create an author website, it doesn’t have to be packed with 500 pages of content. Not yet. That might come later. When you write a blog post, it’s not a whole book. It’s one post, 500 to 1000 words. More words will come later.

To summarize, a Minimum Viable Product is a useful product that actually works pretty well, but it’s not as perfect or complete as it will be someday.

Why Release a Minimum Viable Product?

The reason you release a Minimum Viable Product and not a maximal perfect product is because the fastest way to achieve a maximal perfect product is to release new versions of a product rapidly.

You should of course make your Minimum Viable Product reasonably good (you want it to be viable), but you don’t have to make it as big as you can (you want it to be minimal), and you can’t possibly make it perfect on the first try.

And why release it rapidly? Because then you can start testing it. Does anyone actually want it? What do people like about it? What do people dislike? What could you do better in the next release? What’s missing that you should add next?

When you release a Minimum Viable Product rapidly, you now have incentive to improve it, because now you’re hearing from actual users. And they may well have ideas for making it better that you never thought of.

What Does a Minimum Viable Product Have to Do With Novelists?

Everything.

Novelists create many different kinds of things that could be released rapidly as a Minimum Viable Product. Here are a few examples:

A scene to show to your critique group
A synopsis to take to a writing conference
A proposal to show to agents and editors
A first draft to show to your critique buddy
A second draft to show to your editor
A final draft to hand off to your proofreader
An author website
An author newsletter
A landing page for an email signup form
A marketing plan
An advertising campaign

Nobody will ever get any of these perfect on the first try. You should absolutely do your best to make it as good as you can. But you should also recognize that small is beautiful and fast is better than perfect.

Create a Minimum Viable Product—one that works but is small. Get it out to the appropriate audience. Ask for feedback. Don’t feel hurt to learn it’s not exactly right yet. Try again and make it better next time. When you hear that it’s good, add more to it. Write another scene. Or another synopsis. Or another proposal. Or another draft. Add pages to your website. Send out your newsletter regularly. Build out your marketing plan to be more advanced. Create more ads.

Build. Release. Get feedback. Improve. And then do it all over again.

It may occur to you that each step in my popular Snowflake Method is a Minimum Viable Product for the next step. And you’re absolutely right, although I didn’t realize that when I created the Snowflake Method.

An Example Video Course I Loved Watching

If you’d like to see a Minimum Viable Product created in real-time, let me refer you to a short video course. It’ll show you how to create a Minimum Viable Product that most authors will need at some point in their life—a landing page to gather signups for an email newsletter.

I thought I understood Minimum Viable Products before I watched this video. And I did, mostly. But watching the video reinforced the ideas in my brain, and it helped me see how the idea of a Minimum Viable Product applies to practically everything I do as a writer.

The video is part of a whole set of video courses called “Thrive University.”

As you might guess, the people at Thrive University don’t create free courses out of the goodness of their hearts. They sell an amazingly powerful set of marketing tools, which they call “Thrive Suite.” I recently bought Thrive Suite for myself and I’m incredibly excited to finally have all the tools I’ve been wanting for the last 20 years for building my website into a dynamite marketing machine.

After I bought the tools, I decided to become an affiliate. In simple terms, that means that if I refer someone who buys Thrive Suite, I get an affiliate commission.

I’ve been using Thrive Suite for several weeks now, and I love, love, love it. But Thrive Suite is a story for another day.

For the moment, I recommend that you just watch this short video course on building a landing page as a Minimum Viable Product. The course is absolutely free, and I expect it’ll revolutionize your thinking.

See if you agree. Click here to go to the “RAPID Landing Page Building” course on Thrive University. (affiliate link)

And have fun!

How to Make an Action Plan

January 21, 2021 by Randy Ingermanson 4 Comments

in Organizing Tagged: action plan

Nothing happens unless you take action.

But you don’t want to take random, chaotic actions.

You want to take intentional actions toward some goal.

To do that, you need an Action Plan.

One problem with most projects is that you don’t know all the steps required to complete the plan.

The solution is to make an Action Plan that evolves in time. As you work through the steps in your evolving Action Plan, you’ll continually add new steps, because you’ll learn more and more about how to do your project. Eventually, you’ll run out of steps, and at that point, your project will be done.

The Theory Behind Action Plans

I wrote a very long article on the theory of Action Plans in the November 2020 issue of my Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine. Look for the article named “Executing Hard Projects.” (All past issues of my e-zine are archived here.)

If you want to learn the theory, you can read that article now.

It’s great to understand the theory, but theory is not enough. If you actually want to execute a hard project, you need to put the theory into practice.

You do that by building an Action Plan.

If you’ve never done that before, it might seem complicated.

So I’ve made a couple of templates for you to use. Most writers use either Microsoft Word or Scrivener, so I’ve made a template in each format.

I’ve also made a sample Marketing Action Plan for a hypothetical writer who wants to market their books better. I’ve written in the first few steps in the Action Plan, so you’ll see how you use the Action Plan. But I haven’t created the whole Action Plan for you, because I don’t know your exact marketing needs. You need to create an Action Plan that’s customized for you. Only you are qualified to do that.

The template files and sample Action Plans are compressed in a zip file named “Action_Plan_Templates.zip”.

How to Get the Action Plan Templates

The Action Plan templates will cost you nothing. Just click this link and the zip file will download to the usual Downloads area for your web browser.

After you download the file, you’ll need to unzip it. Here’s how:

On a Mac, just double-click the zip file and it’ll uncompress into a folder with the various template files.
If you’re using Windows, uncompress the zip file using whatever method you usually use for your version of Windows. If you’ve never done that, you’ll need to Google how to do it.

How to Use the Scrivener Template

The Scrivener file is an all-in-one file named “Action Plan Scrivener File.scriv” that contains both the template and the sample Action Plan. I recommend that you keep all your Action Plans in this same Scrivener file.

To create a new Action Plan within this Scrivener file, do the following:

Right-click the folder named “My Action Plans”.
A menu will pop up.
Select “Add > Next Text From Template > Any Action Plan”.
A new document will appear named “Any Action Plan”.
Rename this and edit the document.

The new document has directions on how to fill it in. Follow those directions to create an Action Plan that will evolve as you learn more and more about the project you’re trying to do.

How to Use the Microsoft Word Files

You’ll find two Microsoft Word files in the “Action Plan Templates” folder.

The template file is named “Action Plan Template Word Document.docx”.

The sample Action Plan is named “Sample Action Plan Word Document.docx”.

To use the template file, just make a copy of it and edit that. Keep the original template file so you can use it again and again for other Action Plans in the future.

To use the sample Action Plan, just open it and see how I filled it in. It has some directions to tell you how to keep building out your Action Plan as you learn more and more about the project you’re trying to take action on.

Want to Learn More?

I’ll be talking more about Action Plans in the next issue of my Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine.

If you’re not already subscribed to that, you can find out all about it and sign up here.

In the January 2021 issue, I’ll be talking about how to build out your Marketing Action Plan in 2021. This will probably take several months, because marketing is a large and complex topic. But we’ll take it one step at a time, and focus on the marketing tasks you should do first to build a powerful marketing machine that will work for you while you sleep.

Stay tuned!

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