In the Beginning…

“How did you reach people in the beginning?”

People ask me that more than any other question. Here’s the answer.

Market Analysis

1. I made a determination that I wanted to write and to see if I could find an audience.

2. I looked at my interests and skill set. I decided that I was best suited to science fiction and fantasy because I’d been reading it all my reading life and I knew the genre.

3. I looked at the market for science fiction and fantasy and determined that the best product was “novels in a series” because they afforded the best probability of success in growing an audience over time.

4. I looked for a way to get into that market and discovered that “podcast fiction” offered a low-threshold, under-served–but popular–genre niche.

5. I wrote the first book, recorded it for audio podcast, and released it through an aggregator (Podiobooks.com, now Scribl) under a donation model.

6. I built a backlist of four novels in the first year, establishing myself as a serious author and giving the podcast fiction niche something to talk about.

Note: These first six steps came about because I became interested in podcast fiction as a result of my day job. Steps 1-3 created a foundation for my decision to write, while my interest in podcast fiction triggered steps 4-6. Until I found podcast fiction, the existing barriers to entry–primarily bottlenecks on publication and distribution–prevented me from going further than step 3.

7. I continued publishing under that model until the demand for my work in text formats reached a point where I needed to provide those.

Note: This is a normal step in market analysis called “environmental scan,” where you look up once in a while and see if the market you’re serving has changed while you were busy. I took another scan in 2015, when Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program changed to pay-by-the-page instead of by-the-borrow, making the costs of exclusivity all but disappear under the advantages.

8. I made some wrong turns but started publishing text in 2010, fired my publisher in 2012 for failure to deliver as promised, and went full-time on my own imprint when I lost my day job in the summer of that year.

Note: This is another normal step in market analysis, where you look at your performance to see if what you’re doing is working.

Along the way, I built a reader community on my blog, through the podcast, on Twitter, and later on Facebook. I started collecting email addresses for a mailing list where I announce new releases in 2010.

By 2012, my podcast versions had been downloaded by 60,000 people for a total number of downloads in excess of 10 million. This information helped drive the decision that I could likely become a full-time author. I’d already built a small core audience in text, so even if only a few of my listeners crossed over to that form, I had a reasonable expectation that it would be enough to move the needle.

Guiding Principles

1. Yes is conditional. No is forever. I practice a very strict social media discipline and never mention that I’m an author unless asked. I almost never mention my book unless asked. I use a “soft release” strategy, where my goal is to keep a relatively high sales rank for as long as possible rather than try to have a very high sales rank for a short period of time.
2. I write the stories I want to read but can’t find. I specialize in novel-length work. I charge $4.95 for ebooks regardless of length, keeping them under the $5 threshold. I write in series so that I only need to convince somebody to buy the first book. If they like it, they’ll read through. This has the effect of winnowing out those people who don’t like my books early and making the later books very popular in my niche.
3. Frugality. I don’t advertise. I don’t promote. I don’t spend money that I don’t need to. I don’t waste time on things that have a marginal return.
4. Write the next book. What my fans want most–above anything else–is the next book. I try not to do anything that gets in the way of that.

Caveats

1. I picked a niche that has significant adoption to the delivery stream. SF/F had a relatively big share of the podcast audience in 2007, when I started podcasting. When the ebook market took off in late 2010, romance led the charge, but SF/F rode its petticoats. Other genres like children’s, MG, YA, and even NA still lag on ebook adoption, making it difficult to break into those niches.
2. I picked a form that provided good return on investment. While novellas seemed poised to take over the world in 2012, that fizzled. They’re still a good form and can generate a nice income if you can write them quickly enough. My skills (again, part of the market analysis) don’t go to forms shorter than novel. I’ve tried them. I can write a novel faster than I can write a good short story. Your skills should drive your decision.

So, that’s how I did it in the beginning. Usually people who’ve managed to sit through the answer follow up with “Yeah, but does that still work?”

Yeah. It does, but you have to be willing to do the work. You need to find a niche that you like enough to spend the next five years writing in it. It has to be a niche that’s big enough to support another author. I has to be a niche that has significant ebook adoption. (Picture books, coloring books, and kids books don’t meet that threshold). You need to write like your hair’s on fire and your pants are catching. You need to be willing to write four or five or six or however many works it takes. You need to face your audience with your network at your back. You need to remember that writing is neither a sprint nor a marathon. It’s not a race at all.

It’s a way of life.

Got a question you’d like me to address in the coming year? Leave it in the comments and I’ll see if I can answer it.

Image credit: Kolleen Gladden rockthechaos [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons