Amateur Writers Focus on the Front-End When Acquiring New Readers

Why it’s important to take a pro stance with your indie publishing business

Generating a new reader can be expensive. If we run ads, or spend our free time trying to entice a new reader to our platform, the costs add-up. So, when a new writers enters the world of indie publishing, it’s tempting to avoid losing money on the front-end.

If I pay five dollars in ad spend to acquire a new reader, I better make $5.01 off her in book sales.

I used to think this way. I don’t anymore. This scarcity mentality is a great way to hobble the growth of your publishing business. Amateurs focus on the front-end. Professionals focus on the back-end.

If I was of the scarcity mindset, I’d want to earn money on the first sale.

It’s hard work to get a new reader. I want a return on my effort. Maybe you feel the same way. But the problem with this mindset is we ignore the true value of the reader — her lifetime value, not the value of the initial sale.

Sometimes losing money is a great strategy

I know it sounds counter-intuitive, so I’ll give you an example: Let’s say you sell the first book in a series for ten bucks. The amateur will think they’ve got a ten dollar per buyer budget.

The pro thinks differently.

Maybe you’ve got a series of ten books, each with a ten buck price tag. The average customer reads eight of them, with a smaller percentage reading all ten. This gets your lifetime value average up to nine books, or ninety bucks.

Your customer is worth nine times the original sale. Your advertising budget just grew a lot.

This also means we can lose money on the first sale. Even the second and third. We’ve got almost ninety-dollars per customer to play with. We can offer our first three books to our referral network, and pay 100% commission.

Why would I want to lose all the money off three books?

Because you can recruit an army of people willing to promote your work to their lists. If you offer these folks a 100% commission, maybe they’d love to promote your work to their lists. Now you’ve got leverage, and a way to introduce your work to influencers in your space.

It might be a bitter pill to essentially give all your sales to the person promoting your work, but you get the new customers in return — for none of the work the influencer did to build their own list.

You got a new, ninety-dollar customer for thirty bucks (or ten, or five).

The numbers must work

If you want play the customer acquisition game you’ve got to make sure you’ve got predictable numbers:

• You know the subscription rate on your opt-in page.
• You know the closing rate of your book offer.
• You know which version of your book description sells the best.
• You know which email offer works the best to close the most sales.

When you lose money on the first sale, you’ve got to know all your numbers or you’ll put yourself out of business quickly.

The numbers don’t lie (neither do these hips). But once you figure them out, you can play a much bigger game than you fellow indies. For it’s the person who can spend the most to acquire a new customer is the one who wins.

You will make mistakes.

Strategies don’t work forever. Old offers no longer attract new readers. Sometimes an offer will stop working altogether. Then it’s time to re-tool and re-think all the parts of your customer acquisition process. What worked this week may not work next year.

You can build a bigger audience than you thought

With a little strategy and an iron stomach, you can lose money on the first sale, while building a great business, simultaneously

Over a million new books are published each year. There are only so many reader to go around. With zero barrier to entry, more people are trying their hand at writing than ever.

The one who can spend the most to acquire a new reader wins.

We’re all comrades in the indie community, but we’re also in competition for our readers’ time. If you want to sell books, you’ve got to be ready to reward those who can grow your customer list.

We’re waiting for you.

(Grab My Free Email Masterclass. Get Your First 1,000 Subscribers.)

August Birch (AKA the Book Mechanic) is both a fiction and non-fiction author from Michigan, USA. A self-proclaimed guardian of writers and creators, August teaches indie authors how to write books that sell and how to sell more of those books once they’re written. When he’s not writing or thinking about writing August carries a pocket knife and shaves his head with a safety razor.