Tribe-Building Essentials for Commercial Indie Writers

As indie writers we’ve got to own our customers lists to survive

I don’t know about you, but as an indie author, not only do I feel it’s my duty to serve my tribe to the best of my abilities (to help them get what they want), but it’s also important that I’m paid well for my hard work.

As creators, sometimes it’s hard to sell our work.

Not that our writing isn’t good enough — it’s just as good (or better) than the stuff in the bookstores — but selling is hard, because we’re humble. Maybe we were told we shouldn’t push to hard, that our work will sell itself if we just keep writing the next book.

Well, no one will buy our work if we don’t tell them about it first.

And we’ll have no one to tell if we don’t build a tribe, with a message we control. The means we can’t rely on social to sell our writing. We can’t rely on word of mouth, because WOM, although super-valuable, is also unpredictable.

I want to eat. You want to eat.

Instead of writing and hoping, or pounding social media with disposable posts to ten-percent of our followers — let’s build a platform we own, where we control the exact message sequence, in a safe place with little distraction.

It’s time to grow our tribe.

Everyone starts with a list of zero, so you’re in good company. There’s no shame in having a list of zero. Soon it’ll be a list of one, then one-hundred, then one-thousand. No one can take your list from you. Social platforms come and go. You can lose all your social followers overnight. When you own your list they can take your pride, but they can’t take your customers.

I sleep better at night knowing this. You might too.

Whether you’ve got one book, no books, or one-hundred books, it’s never too early to build your list. Most authors do a terrible job with list-building. It’s not their fault. Marketing isn’t something we want to grow up and do, as writers. However, if we want to sell our work, we’ve got to become great marketers too. The process is fun once you understand how the game is played. Today, I hope to lift the curtain a little. Maybe you won’t make all the mistakes the other authors do.

How to grow your tribe in three steps

1. Create your Easy Invite —

Have something really valuable that you’ll exchange for a customer’s email address. I call this the Easy Invite (EI). Your ‘newsletter’ is not valuable. No one wants to be on your newsletter. Think of a gift in terms of what your reader wants.

Don’t say “join my email list.”

You can call it your list, but your reader doesn’t want to feel she’s on some list. Gross. We want to feel like the author wrote us a custom email, one at a time, and gave us a valuable gift in exchange for our valuable email address.

We’ve got to sell ‘free.’

If you write fiction, create a full novella, short story collection, or similar, full book. No one wants your first two chapters. No one wants to be on your ‘new release list.’ We want stuff that benefits us, not you. We want solutions to our problems, not yours.

If the problem is fiction, we want a new escape from reality. If you’re a new author, we’re taking a gamble with our time. We can’t get our time back. If you pitch us two chapters, I won’t gamble my time for that.

If you write non-fiction offer me a transformation — from where I am now to where I will be with your EI in my life.

When you create an EI, think of a way to deliver so much value it hurts. This should be an offer worth actual money, not a one-page checklist, or a ‘blueprint’ that’s little more than a sales pitch. Your EI should stand alone, 100% even if a reader never buys from you, ever.

We serve our entire tribe at all lengths of the buying spectrum.

2. Drive readers to the Easy Invite —

Without traffic there will be no book sales. There are many ways we can drive traffic to our EI. Write content, host a podcast, buy ads, become relentless on social media (but entice your social followers to join your list), start a YouTube channel, write more books, swap lists with another author, create an affiliate program, develop a street team, bribe your current readers to tell everyone they know.

There’s no magic bullet with traffic.

If there was a secret-plan everyone would use it and the plan wouldn’t work anymore. Instead, choose a list-building format that works for you. Not everyone likes writing content. Not everyone wants to start a podcast. Find a way to get your first subscriber and repeat that process until it stops working for you.

Once you find one method that works, try a second method, but don’t ignore the first one. The more traffic legs you can add to your stool the better.

3. Keep in regular contact, forever —

Your tribe wants to hear from you on a regular basis. We use email. With email we can create a single piece of content once and use it forever. We’ll develop and automated welcome sequence. Not only will we deliver our valuable EI, but we’ll also automate the sales process.

Is this hard work? Hell yes. Setting up a new email sequence takes forever.

But once you’ve got the bones, all you have to do is periodic maintenance and copywriting changes. You’ll test and re-test your assumptions. You’ll grow slowly, then medium-ly, then you’ll have so many subscribers you’ll barely be able to keep your pants on.

Throughout this customer relationship you’ll never let your readers forget about you. This is how we sell our books. This is how we grow an indie publishing business.

Every email we send provided value and entertainment in the same package.

If you’re dry and crusty, no matter how great your content, we won’t stick around long. We like cat videos just as much as we want to learn new things. Coat your dry lessons with candy. This is infotainment.

Your tribe members will come and go.

Unsubscribes aren’t personal. Maybe you said something. Maybe the reader doesn’t like your writing. Maybe she doesn’t have any money. Maybe he’s too busy to read your email.

If we make it a daily practice to drive new readers into our tribe, while infotaining the current readers, we’ll have a nice, little indie author business in no time.

This is work.

You can do it.

How bad do you want it?

We’re waiting for you.

(Enroll in 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.

You just read another exciting post from the Book Mechanic: the writer’s source for creating books that work and selling those books once they’re written.

If you’d like to read more stories just like this one tap here to visit our page.