It’s been a while since I did a business post, so here we go! and it’s about my decision this year to shift focus to direct sales. I’m not sure I ever explained that decision fully, so let’s jump back in time to Jan/Feb or so. The idea of direct sales had been floating in my head—by most authors standards, I was halfway there with my patreon-locals/etsy/kickstarter constellation. I’d been resisting the idea of focusing and consolidating my efforts though, because I was nervous about the set-up.
Listening to Joanna Penn’s podcast is my Monday ritual when I’m commuting, and I’ve been going through the backlog, which is how I ran into to this episode with Russell Nohelty, recorded in late 2023. And he said something that went through me like a lance:
Catalog sales are very different to direct-to-customer sales. When I say catalog sales, Amazon is a catalog, Sears is a catalog. So if you remember actually getting—like I'm old enough to actually remember getting the Sears catalog, the JCPenney catalog, and the Macy's catalogs. And when you're flipping through, the goal of the catalog is to be just like the other things, like to be the blue shirt that they want. They've already curated that Macy's can curate for them, and so whatever Macy's wants, like says that they should buy, that's what they're looking at.
That's how Amazon sales works. That's one of the reasons why people say every paranormal romance should look the same, everything with the same subgenre should look the same. It's because when people are looking through the catalogue of Amazon books, they are picking the one that looks most like the one that they have already read.
When you're talking about direct sales, it's the opposite. It's really people who are trying to find a unique and different experience.
I thought: that’s me. That’s why I keep floundering. I’m so stubbornly unwilling to look like everything else. The thing that people keep telling me about my work is that it’s not like other things. That’s WHY THEY LIKE IT.
So at that point, everything else crystallized: why I’ve always had more success with more personal approaches, why I’ve always done better when I’m interacting with my audience in some form (whether it’s Mucks or Livejournal or Discord or streaming), why I love the Kickstarter experience and why it has always felt natural to crowdfund my efforts, even before crowdfunding was formalized by corporations that wanted to streamline the process.
After that, it was obvious that I needed to launch myself off the cliff and trust the wings would unfurl before I discovered there was a bottom to the abyss. That’s when I started putting my head down into figuring out the Shopify store…which I started with in March! And didn’t launch until June! So it was a lot of effort and a significant learning curve, but I think I’m approaching happy with where it’s at. It wants more effort, but it’s already functional and earning money, and that’s Minimum Viable Product right there.
But that brought me to the second part of the equation which was to consider whether my existing way of launching books rewarded that personal and interactive connection, or whether it was a relic of the retail strategy (you can guess the answer there). I asked then, ‘what does a direct-sales-focused launch strategy look like?’ And that’s how I fumbled onto what I’m doing right now, with FireBorn’s Legacy. I got part of it right: I am making the launch a fun event everyone can participate in and feel excited about helping with; and I’m making special editions that will only be available to people who buy direct from me. But I messed up the timeline; I wanted the Kickstarter version to be in people’s hands before the retail launch so they would be in the know before everyone else. But I didn’t push the retail preorder date out far enough, and when I ran into unexpected delays perfecting the hardcover, I couldn’t compensate. Fortunately the KS finishes the day of the retail drop, so at least people won’t get it later! And it's still an author edition with art, so it'll still be special.
So some things go through my mind as I learn from my first attempt to do this:
- First, my old way of launching was more efficient from a time perspective: when the book was done, I put it up for sale, emailed people a few times, and was already moving on. This kept finished projects from taking up my attention, but it also meant less money, less fun, less visibility, and less reward for my long-term fans, some of whom have been with me for decades. If I visualized my production schedule as a pipeline, then it was a long period for production, a very narrow one for preparation-to-market, and then a nearly nonexistent period for launch and distribution. Very lopsided!
- Second, granting that I want to continue doing these audience-first launches, I need to plan them much farther out. That means I might finish a book and then have to sit on it for a few months while I prepare all the various launch activities, or (better), I start building up a backlog. The goal would be there’s always a book in some stage of the pipeline, and those pipelines are roughly equal in length: production->prep->launch->distribution.
- But third, this seems like a sane way to run things; it means my fans can expect and plan for projects more than a few weeks in advance. I know many of them will appreciate that because I’ve been told I’m too precipitous before and will probably be told I’m too precipitous again until I get this figured out.😅
My immediate goal, then, is to get FireBorn’s Legacy fulfilled (probably wrapping up in late October/early November, since the hardcovers take a long time to produce) and do another test project to figure out how to better manage my timelines. The most likely thing is an art book for the Blood Ladders trilogy, because it’s mostly done already and it’s just a matter of finishing and prototyping. That’ll give me a not-fiction project to continue finetuning my production processes while I finish up at least one or two novels and get them ready for next year.
As usual, I’m grateful to all of you for your patience while I learn radically new things! In the past five months I’ve tackled everything from hardcover layout (not minor!) to international shipping set-up to backend sales triggers/delivery systems. It has not been boring!
All very well and good, Jaguar… show me the shinies! Okay. How about some test layouts for the art book?
I'm excited about this one! I have so much art! I can put in the conlang stuff! There will be fancy coated paper! I'll get practice doing art books, and I want to do more art books!
But yes, that's where I'm at. Learning a lot! Enjoying myself more than I expected! I hope you are too.
