{"id":6007,"date":"2019-06-21T11:40:11","date_gmt":"2019-06-21T10:40:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/townhouse\/articles\/the-power-of-the-list\/"},"modified":"2019-06-21T11:40:11","modified_gmt":"2019-06-21T10:40:11","slug":"the-power-of-the-list","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/the-power-of-the-list\/","title":{"rendered":"The power of the list"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here are two facts about this ambition \/ profession of ours that can look daunting:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. It\u2019s damn hard to write a good book<\/li>\n
  2. It\u2019s damn hard to sell it, once written.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    On point 1: well, who cares? If it weren\u2019t hard, it wouldn\u2019t be fun. You wouldn\u2019t have the joy and satisfaction that comes from doing a difficult thing well.<\/p>\n

    And on 2: well, yes. Good point. Gulp.<\/p>\n

    It\u2019s true that you can write a great book, get a great agent, sell to a great publisher, work hard with a great editor, and then, yes, you stand a chance of selling very well.<\/p>\n

    It\u2019s also possible that you complete those steps, but when the publisher\u2019s sales team pitches to the supermarkets, the supermarkets just say no. And if they say no, that\u2019s not because you\u2019re a terrible author and you\u2019ve written a terrible book. Those things might be true of course, but the supermarkets wouldn\u2019t know. They haven\u2019t read your book.<\/p>\n

    To a huge and underappreciated extent, the race for supermarket sales (as far as debut or near-debut authors is concerned) is like twelve fat men running for the same door. Only one of the runners is going to make it and which one actually does is a matter of chance more than athleticism.<\/p>\n

    In short, beyond a point, there\u2019s not much you can do to influence sales through bricks and mortar retailers. You can go secure that great editor. You can work hard. You can smile sweetly at sales conferences (if you get asked) and all that stuff. But you just can\u2019t influence those critical decisions. You aren\u2019t even in the room, or anywhere near it.<\/p>\n

    But all that doesn\u2019t mean you can\u2019t be highly pro-active as a modern author. Nor do you have to self-publish to reap the rewards.<\/p>\n

    Here\u2019s the thing:<\/strong><\/p>\n

    The most powerful way to sell on Amazon is via your own mailing list \u2013 your very own group of fans.<\/p>\n

    The detail of building and using that list is relatively intricate. Not because it\u2019s so inherently complicated, but because this is an area where detail matters. Exactly how do you solicit email addresses? What do you offer in exchange? What language should you use? How you solve those things can make a huge cumulative difference to how many emails you get (and what quality those emails are.)<\/p>\n

    But that\u2019s detail.<\/p>\n

    The essence of selling via mailing list is really simple:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. You find people who like your books<\/li>\n
    2. You offer them something that they want \u2013 probably a shortish story if you\u2019re a novelist, something helpful if you\u2019re writing subject-led non-fiction.<\/li>\n
    3. People sign up to get the thing they\u2019re after. They also (knowingly and happily) sign up to get regular emails from you.<\/li>\n
    4. In those emails, you are charming, discursive, & helpful \u2026 and concentrate fiercely on the topic that brought these readers to you in the first place<\/li>\n
    5. When you have a new book to sell, you say \u201cHey guys, do you want my book?\u201d<\/li>\n
    6. They buy it<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      But that\u2019s not the clever bit! That\u2019s not the bit that explodes your sales and stuffs dollars into your bank account until you fall back laughing, \u201cEnough! Enough! Enough!\u201d<\/p>\n

      The clever bit is this:<\/p>\n

        \n
      1. Amazon notices the sales spike that your emails has generated<\/li>\n
      2. Amazon\u2019s little marketing robots get so excited that binary starts spouting out of their sockets<\/li>\n
      3. Amazon itself starts to pump news of your book out to all the readers it thinks are most likely to love it. That\u2019ll be via emails, via \u201crecommended for you\u201d banners, via Hot New Release promos, and much else.<\/li>\n
      4. A ton more people start to come across your work \u2026 and to buy it \u2026 and to discover the wonderful news that you are giving away a wonderful short story \u2026<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

        And the whole process begins again.<\/p>\n

        This is the critical motor that powers every really successful self-pub author\u2019s career. It\u2019s the trick that took me to six-figure sales in the US on the back of just 6 self-published books. It\u2019s why even really advertising-competent authors (like Mark Dawson) say that the three most important things in digital bookselling are \u201cmailing list, mailing list, mailing list.\u201d<\/p>\n

        And you can use that trick no matter whether you\u2019re planning on a traditional publishing career, or on self-publishing, or on a hybrid of the two. I\u2019d go so far as to say, there are almost no categories of author that shouldn\u2019t be thinking of building and nurturing an email list. (More details here<\/a>, if you need them.)<\/p>\n

        Say, for example, you are traditionally published and your publisher just messes up. You have the advance, but your book sales are disappointing, and your career looks fatally wounded. If you emerge from the wreckage with the start of a decent mailing list, then you have built an asset that will support and protect you for years and years to come. My US trad publishing career did crash and burn (thanks, Random House!), but my US publishing career just went from strength to strength.<\/p>\n

        Good books + mailing list = a strategy that never fails.<\/strong><\/p>\n

        And two other plus points:<\/p>\n

        \u00a0A mailing list prompts you to write a \u201creader magnet\u201d. That magnet doesn\u2019t have to be \u2013 and shouldn\u2019t be \u2013 a full length book. I use two magnets for my fiction, one of 7,000 words, one of 13,000. Those things are too long for short stories. They\u2019re way too short for any publisher to want to buy and print them.<\/p>\n

        But they\u2019re fun to write! And great for readers! They feel like a holiday from work, while being absolutely core to the work you want to do.<\/p>\n

        And hey: once you have a mailing list, you can do almost anything. If you\u2019re minded to write a 25,000 word story \u2013 for which, to repeat, no traditional publisher would pay \u2013 then you can write it and sell it via your mailing list, for $0.99 if you\u2019re feeling generous, or $2.99 if you\u2019re not. The basic mailing list strategy will still (once your list is somewhat mature) deliver real dividends.<\/p>\n

        If I had to pick just one brilliant thing about publishing in the last decade or so, I\u2019d have to pick the rise of Amazon and the e-book. If I got to pick two, I\u2019d pick the list-driven sales strategy every time. Nothing, but nothing, but nothing, has empowered authors more.<\/p>\n

        That\u2019s true if you\u2019re trad.<\/p>\n

        It\u2019s true if you\u2019re indie.<\/p>\n

        It\u2019s true if you\u2019re an exciting hybrid of the two, with the head of a goat on the body of donkey.<\/p>\n

        That\u2019s it from me. It\u2019s sunny. And in the cricket, England are about to start batting \u2026<\/p>\n

        Till soon<\/p>\n

        Harry<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

        Here are two facts about this ambition \/ profession of ours that can look daunting: It\u2019s damn hard to write a good book It\u2019s damn hard to sell it, once written. On point 1: well, who cares? If it weren\u2019t hard, it wouldn\u2019t be fun. You wouldn\u2019t have the joy and satisfaction that comes from<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29292],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-harrys-friday-email"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nJericho Writers<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/the-power-of-the-list\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The power of the list – Jericho Writers\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Here are two facts about this ambition \/ profession of ours that can look daunting: It\u2019s damn hard to write a good book It\u2019s damn hard to sell it, once written. 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I've published trad & self-pub. Love both. Best known for my Fiona Griffiths crime series. Oh yes, and I'm the capo di tutti capi at Jericho Writers.","url":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/author\/harryjericho\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6007"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6007\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}