As I explained in Part 1 of the book, cultivating an active, long-term fan base for your work is key to becoming a successful independent publisher.
However, building a substantial body of work is also critical. So, you need to develop a balance between time spent growing and managing your fan base and writing time.
The challenge is not identifying the things that waste our time (e.g., surfing the net) when we should be writing. We can all identify those—even if we sometimes lack the willpower to stop.
The challenge is identifying which activities, among the entire range of things you can do, benefit your career the most. Lucky for us, we can make this challenge easier if we apply a simple principle humans have understood for around 200 years—the Pareto Principle.
The Pareto Principle, or 80/20 Rule, states that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. This is not some trendy business-speak—we have had a solid understanding of the 80/20 Rule since the 19th century. It applies to human endeavors and many natural phenomena.
Applied to indie publishing, the 80/20 rule says that 80% of an author’s success comes from 20% of their efforts. The corollary of this is that you waste 80% of your efforts for little gain.
Which brings us to the two core principles of the Indie Publishing Machine. To be a successful author with maximum writing time, you must:
- Identify the activities that bring you the most value (the 20%); and
- Automate these activities as much as possible.
Principle 1 is the most difficult. Identifying the 20% of activities that give you most of your results is not obvious at first. It takes time to work out what works for you.
I’ve spent years experimenting and researching successful strategies used by other independent authors. Over time, I have discovered there are a few things necessary for establishing a successful writing career. These essentials form the core of the Indie Publishing Machine—a system that puts these high-value activities into practice.
The Indie Publishing Machine has four essential parts:
- Outreach content
- Your books for sale online via Amazon and other retailers
- A professional author website; and
- A mailing list
These are the essential few; the four things that only require 20% of your long-term efforts but will give you 80% of your results. You can automate many of these essential parts, and once set up, they are simple to maintain and free up time to write.
Set up right, your Indie Publishing Machine will make money for you 24/7 every day of the year, with minimal input from you. It still takes effort to set up, and you must keep writing books, so there’s nothing magical or get rich quick going on here.
The technical parts of your Indie Publishing Machine are simple to create, even if you’re all thumbs with technology. In the remaining chapters of the book, I will show you how to set up each of these four essential parts.
If you are not great with technology or don’t want to get your hands dirty with the technical side of your Indie Publishing Machine, the last chapter of the book shows you where you can go to hire techies for reasonable rates.
How it Works
Remember in Part 1 how I said the immutable math of publishing is to be successful you must:
- A: write more books; and
- B: sell more of your existing books?
I appreciate this is obvious, but what separates successful authors from the rest is they understand A is much more important than B. This is because writing more books leads to selling more books with minimal extra effort from you.
Let me illustrate with an example. The conventional advice goes like this:
- Publish a book
- Market the heck out of the book
- Repeat
While this is interesting and straightforward advice, what actually happens is the author:
- Markets the heck out of the book
- Nothing happens
- Repeats until the author goes insane or gives up
This is because the conventional advice does nothing to answer the trust question I wrote about in Chapter 5. You can scream “Buy my book!” from every rooftop in the land, but it won’t make any difference because nobody cares.
I don’t state this to be miserable and negative, but as a fact. Think about it; you are one voice in the thousands a potential reader will hear today. If they don’t know you and trust you, the chance of them caring about what you have to say is zero.
The Indie Publishing Machine turns this thinking on its head by accepting that until a reader trusts you, marketing your book to them is a waste of time.
With the Indie Publishing Machine, you:
- Publish a book
- Update your other books and content, so they link to your new book
- Repeat
Note there is no mention of marketing. Remember what I said in Chapter 5? You do not “sell” books, nor are you trying to make people buy your book. You are putting it out there in the market and making it easier to find for those who are already looking for a book just like yours.
Once they’ve read one of your books (or any other piece of content you wrote), and trust you, the links provide the reader a pathway to your other work. This linking—where each piece of your content links to one or more other works—is not only organic marketing best-practice, but it’s also incredibly effective for books.
And it explains why writing more books is much more important than trying to sell more books. The more books and content you have out there, the more of these organic links you will collect, and your books will sell more with no additional effort from you.
Like all things, it is possible to overdo it and reduce its effectiveness (not to mention waste a lot of time). Getting back to the 80/20 rule, this is what I find to be the most effective implementation of the Indie Publishing Machine:
- Your outreach content (wide end of the funnel) directs potential fans to a landing page on your website that provides valuable, free content for an email address.
- Every book you have for sale online has a Call to Action (CTA) in the front and in the back that directs the reader to a landing page on your website that provides valuable, free content for an email address. This content does not need to differ from the content for Internet browsers.
- Your website homepage has links to the landing pages for the above free content.
- Your website lists all your published books, with links to Amazon and other book retailers.
- Your website lists the current book you are working on, and forthcoming titles, with a waiting list sign-up form.
- Your website also has a sign-up form where people can join your newsletter.
Keeping your Indie Publishing Machine running is easy; it should not take any more than a few hours a month. All you need to do is:
- Post outreach content (e.g., social media posts, blog posts, articles, a new story on your website; the list is endless). You decide how much you want to post, but try to be consistent.
- Send one or two emails a month to your mailing list.
- Answer any queries you get from your readers.
- Update your book catalog when you have a new book available.
And that’s it. I know you might wonder how it could be so simple, but honestly, this is all you need to get that 80% return.
You can and will add to this over time, but to get started on a successful writing career, this is all you need. Remember WIBBOW?—your writing will always be more important.
That’s it for this chapter. In the next chapter, I will teach you how to implement an effective outreach program. Outreach is your number 1 tool for engaging and building trust with potential readers and turning them into lifelong fans.