Indie Writers & Social Media - Part 3

David Shaw © 2010

Social Media Strategy for Print Publishing

In this Part 3 of a five-part series on indie writers and social media, I suggest a framework for self-publishing printed books.

In Part 1 we looked at commoditization and its effects, and the hype surrounding social media that gives so many people so much false hope. In Part 2 we explored the difficulties in being sales driven, the traditional book publishing model, and how we might use the economics of the long tail.

Now, with this background, we can get down to some practical nuts and bolts of the thing.

There has always been a stigma attached to self publishing. Obviously there are some issues like the lack of access to a helpful editor or some kind of peer review, which we’ll discuss in Part 5. Most of the bad press was really about defending the status quo in the traditional publishing model.

The status quo is not sustainable and, as discussed in Part 2, it keeps many deserving books off the market.

Core Strategy

The core of our strategy is to use a web-based print-on-demand service. The diagram below shows Lulu but there are several such services and probably others that I haven’t found:

• Lulu
• Xlibris
• Cafe Press
• Book Market

Essentially these services print copies on demand to fulfill orders. You can print one or small batches such as 10-100 and put them in inventory. The services are very economical, costing around $10 per copy for simple books with no inside colour.

Another approach is to write your book as a series of blog articles, and turn that into a book:

• Blog2Print
• Digital Inspiration

Lulu, for example, will take care of getting an ISBN for your book and listing it on Amazon. You could, of course, sell your book on your own web site but Amazon has more foot traffic and can spin the long-tail effect; whereas your site can not. I think it’s a form of hubris to use your own site. Amazon has better reach and is a bargain for around 30% of your cover price.

I can’t suggest a cover price. How many copies can you sell @$80? @$26? @$10? Maybe (nearly) free is more profitable. You have to figure that out, and it’s not easy.

Marketing Plan

In terms of overall strategy you need to develop a marketing plan and an engagement strategy (see below). A marketing plan identifies your audience (see Part 2) and provides enough information for you to make decisions about things like pricing and how to reach your audience.

You will remember we defined a hypothetical audience of 13 million young American women ages 25 to 34 that we were going to reach by advertising on FaceBook.

This is just an example; your audience might not be on FaceBook or there may be better ways to do this.

Engagement Strategy

The above diagram positions several social media on a time scale. Your engagement strategy should define the type of message that you publish through these different media. In essence it's a communications plan. The purpose of these messages is to engage your audience, so they have to contain something about your book or about you and your activities that resonates and causes your fans to respond. You’re trying to create a buzz.

All of these messages should link to the point of sale at Amazon, and they should cross-promote (join me on FaceBook, follow me on Twitter, etc.).

Generally, Twitter is CB Radio. It’s best for daily tweets and your headline news.

On FaceBook, you should have an account for yourself as an author that is separate from your personal account. Keep the personal account for your real friends and family. Set up a group for your book, and link it to an externally facing FaceBook ‘page’. Engage your followers at least every few days. Be imaginative, for example ask them to suggest plot lines or vote about your characters.

FaceBook is important because, like Amazon, it's where 400 million people go. Also, in June 2010, FaceBook linked to Yahoo! (600 million users) so updates can be shared across both networks. In turn, Yahoo! owns the social bookmarking service Delicious and the photo site Flickr.

You might also consider a blog as part of your promotional mix. A blog is like a daily or weekly newspaper, and a regular frequency is vitally important. You should aim to publish 250 words/day or 1,000/week about your thoughts as an author on any remotely related subject X. (Yes, I break both rules.)

FaceBook has numerous plugins for your web site to create viral feedback loops

On your blog, add some code for FaceBook Connect or FaceBook Like so there is a viral loop between the two sites. And everywhere you can, put a Share This link to social bookmarking sites.

Example Share at the top of the right-hand panel on this blog

Develop an email list. I suggest using it monthly because people hate spam. Use it to tell people to visit your latest blog, or to announce a sale or whatever. Don’t forget to put in links to Amazon and FaceBook and so forth.

Finally, don’t forget public engagements. Make yourself available as a speaker, attend book fairs and any other event you can wrangle. Take a few books with you, too. (There are services that will take credit cards over your smart phone.)

Next Time

In Part 4, we will modify this framework for eBooks.

Indie Writers & Social Media - Part 2

David Shaw © 2010

Know Your Audience

In Part 1 I said that social media could be used to support an existing brand, but not to establish a new brand, and that it was not a sales tool. I didn’t mention that social media is a collaboration tool. To me, this is the most important aspect, but I’ll leave that for the last article in this series.

The promise of the web is that it can amplify the presence of an indie, so that we all look as successful and well fed as the big corporations. Sort of. The problem of the web is that if you have a good idea, several million other people thought of it at the exact same instant, and you’ll be buried on page 42 of the search results.

Suppose that we decide to go for volume (low price) instead of niche specialization (high price) or an aggregation model (e.g., be a blog publisher, not a blogger). In Part 1, I posited a book for young American women ages 25 to 34. There are around 13 million on FaceBook. If we could sell to only 1% at $26 we would gross a cool $3.38 million.

Whooo hooo!

The difficulty is that as an indie, we are sales driven not market driven. We have to ‘work our network’ to make individual sales to family, FaceBook friends and Twitter followers. With a brand, you’re market driven: people come to you.

We could partially address this by buying an ad on FaceBook targeting our demographic. FaceBook has a program to do this that allows you to set a monthly advertising budget.

But we still have to convert people to a sale through a sales funnel. To do this, we could make the ad clickable to a shopping basket application. All that is left is processing credit cards, printing and stocking some books, packaging and shipping. In spare time, we could write the next book.

An alternative is to write a best seller and find a branded publisher to deal with the grubby nuisance of making money.

So let’s digress and look at the business model of book publishers and how the long tail creates opportunities for indies.

Be a Best Seller

This is how book publishing works.

Publishers have to print books from dead trees, ship copies to book stores, wait for the stores to sell some of them, and then remainder the rest while paying for designers, editors and other stuff, plus bricks and mortar. Obviously this is high risk, so the general-consumer business model revolves around best sellers more so than intellectual content. Book stores follow the same model. For an extreme example, take a stroll through your local HMV and see how restricted is the music and video selection.

In the printed-book business model a typical consumer book will be priced around $26 with 50% going to the retailer. That leaves $13 for the publisher, who will spend $5.05 on production and $4.05 on overhead and profit. That leaves $3.90 for the author. Obviously you have to have a best seller (high volume) to play in this game.

To yield a modest salary of $70,000 for you, your publisher would have to sell around 18,000 copies of your book (average in my town was an astounding $96,000 last year).

But if you could reduce the retailer from 50% to 30%, and keep the other costs constant, you could net $9.10 per copy. Now you only have to sell 7,700 to earn your annual salary. That starts to sound interesting, eh? We’ll explore a strategy to do that in Part 3.

An eBook is a bit better for the publisher but worse for the author. eBooks are selling around $9.99 to $12.99. Assume the best case with the retailer getting $3.90. That leaves $9.09 for the publisher who spends $1.28 on production and $5.54 on overhead and profit. That leaves $2.27 for you.

In this case we can’t reduce the retailer much, since it is already at 30%, but we can produce the book ourselves. So our net is $2.27 + $1.28 + $5.54 ($9.09). We’ll explore a strategy to do that in Part 4.

Both strategies will use the economics of the long tail.

The Long Tail

A rising tide floats all boats.

Think about that. It doesn’t matter if you have a huge luxury super yacht or a row boat, a rising tide will lift both the same amount.

The long tail is a special mathematical curve that has been facilitated in business by the Internet. In any product there will always be best sellers, lesser sellers and onesies trailing off into the sunset. This is the long curve, if you can picture it.

Before the Internet, book publishers couldn’t afford to print and distribute the lesser sellers and onesies, no matter how valuable the intellectual content. Book stores wouldn’t carry them.

But the cost of listing inventory on the Internet is close to zero. Amazon can list all the books in the world, even those that only sell one copy, at almost no cost. All that is left is fulfillment, which we will explore in the next few articles.

Engagement raises the participation level

However, the long tail has two peculiarities:

• It never goes to zero.
• Activity at the head of the curve (the best sellers), drives more activity in the tail (and vice versa). The overall level of sales rises.

This is why Amazon is a better place to sell your book than your own web site. Amazon is the big box store in the mall with all the foot traffic; your site is the lonely bookstore in the east end of town. People go to the mall to shop, they don’t think of tripping out to the east end. In other words, go to where the people are on the web, don’t force them to come to you.

Amazon also delivers point-of-sale services, shipping and delivery. All that’s left is production.

And Amazon, and now the Apple iBook Store and Google’s new eBook service can work the long tail to raise your indie sales tide.

Whooo hooo!

Next Time

Part 3 print strategy

Social Change On the Network

The election of Barack Obama as President of the USA is in part an indicator of the maturation of social networking and also the profound demographic shifts occurring in western societies. Obama successfully used tools like Facebook and SMS text to energize his Generation Y supporters. He carried the 18-29 youth vote by 34% over McCain. Obama’s web MyBO is the most Internet savvy site ever mounted by a politician.

Born August 4 , 1961, Barack belongs to Generation X (see Comments about Generation Jones). Social networking aside, his election is also a passing of the torch from the Boomer generation to its progeny. Most boomers don’t instinctively understand Web 2.0 and its social networking. If they have any understanding, it is likely as late adopters or lurkers. Incidentally, Barack delivered his first weekly radio address via YouTube, and is appointing a technology tsar to his team as he prepares to be President 2.0.

Having some understanding of the different values driving these three generations is key to adopting social networking in any organization.

The most flagrant indicator of the maturation of social networking is Microsoft’s extremely late entry into the field as a mimic with a planned Windows Live update in the coming weeks to compete with MySpace and Facebook. The update will integrate notification of Twitter messages, Flickr photo uploads, Yelp reviews and WordPress blog entries.

Most organizations expect social networking to creep in through the back door because they don’t understand how to plan it. With some justification: planned societies always fail. It’s like trying to set objectives for knowledge capture without understanding that knowledge is contextual and has a shelf life. The sell-by date comes quickly.

Every application and process in an organization has a social aspect. At its simplest, it’s how we get things done. Sociologist Robert Putnam argues that voluntary association with other people is integral to a fulfilled and productive existence—it makes us "smarter, healthier, safer, richer, and better able to govern a just and stable democracy."

At a different level there may be some visible benefit. The value graph for a book-keeping program is very different from that of a community of practice. The social activities around book-keeping are more about how do we get things done. For example, “Does anyone know how I can get reimbursed for these expenses?”. Having a prior chatty relationship with someone can pay dividends.

In a community of practice the social activity is more structured but still semi-structured. There are conditions of admittance and higher expectations of contribution to the social group. The benefits are more widely visible.

One of the difficulties is that social groups tend to be age groups. Boomer males are not welcome in the group of twenty-something females. Mixed sex and mixed generation groups do not have an easy dynamic. If you’re a boomer you can check this out by joining Facebook and looking for a group to join.

The differences are profound. In earlier times, people tended to follow in the footsteps of their parents. But two brutal world wars sowed the seeds for massive demographic and attitudinal change.

In 1996 David K. Foot published Boom, Bust & Echo describing the demographic shifts occurring in society and the consequences. The Echo generation is also the Net generation. Generally, boomers are defined as born in 1943-1960. GenX is 1960-1980. GenY, the echo, is 1981-1996. Don Tapscott in Wikinomics defines the Net generation slightly differently as 1977-1996 (6.5 million in Canada).

Worldwide there are more than one billion people in the Net generation. These are people who have grown up with the Internet not as something new but as something that is part of the fabric of their lives. Today (2008), they are 12-31 years old, so the leading edge of this cohort is already entrenched in government and business. These are the people who are aggressively socialising using Web 2.0. Their experiences with collaboration on a wide scale do not fit well with rigid hierarchical top-down modes of organization. A mixture of hierarchical and peer-to-peer is advisable.

Slightly earlier in 1964 Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media foresaw that “….the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society.” Web 2.0 is about participating on a shared canvas rather than passively receiving information. It is the New Gutenberg that Telidon and Web 1.0 failed to deliver.

Another difficulty is that much of what passes for socializing on this canvas is drivel. “I’m at home with a sick kid.” “I’m sooo mad!” “Should I buy the blue one or the red one?” You start to think that GenY is very lonely. Then you catch yourself sending a friend a text about your walk by the river, maybe with a phonecam picture attached.

Yeah, we all want to feel a connection with someone.

© 2008 David Shaw
david.shaw.x23@gmail.com