Writers Should Focus on Customers, Not Buyers, to Grow their Businesses

The plea for developing a relationship with your tribe before the big ‘ask’

Once I used the terms buyer and customer interchangeably. The two words mean roughly the same thing. You give someone a thing. That someone gives you money in return. But there’s a finer point — an overlooked distinction we writers need to understand before we go off half-cocked with our marketing and promotion.

Buyers are transactional.

Customers are relational

A buyer wants something. Maybe she does a search. Maybe she shops for the best price. She’s got a want and tries to solve it by buying something. Whether it’s food or toilet paper, shirts or furniture — buyers are on a mission to solve a single problem.

Customers, on the other mitten, are relationship-based. A customer is also a buyer, but with an added component. The customer has some form of connection to the seller.

As writers we want to be in the customer business.

Earning the first sale is the most-expensive thing way to acquire a new customer. Whether it’s your time or advertising dollars, to earn the first sale is brutal.

Once we’ve earned a customer the second (and all subsequent sales) are much easier. As we build rapport and trust with our customers (readers), it’s much less work to keep them returning for more, than it is to grab someone off the street and sell them once.

As writers we shouldn’t worry so much about the first sale. We want to think about the third.

What do I mean?

You can pay to run an ad and make a sale, but to keep a customer coming back of her own free will, takes skill, perseverance, and determination of service — a process that isn’t followed by most business owners.

This means you’re in luck.

You care about your readers. You also want to be paid well for your work. If you want this two-way relationship to serve both sides of your business, you’ve got to serve first and ask later.

In a second, I’ll give you five ways to develop your new readers into customers.

The longer you can keep your readers engaged with your work, the faster you can grow your publishing business. Think of it like a leaky bucket. There’s a small hole at the bottom (customer attrition) and a big opening at the top (new prospects). As long as we can pour new prospects in the top of the bucket faster than the bucket leaks, we’ve got a growing indie publishing business!

Five ways to earn and keep a customer

I’ve built my publishing business around these five principles. I’m not some rich guru, but I’ve got 20 years experience building email lists and earning customers through giving.

1. Build rapport and trust —

We do things that don’t scale, so our customers will help us do things that do. People remember small acts of kindness for a long time. Why? Because it’s rare, especially with the go-go, hustle-face culture of the internet.

The funny thing is we can get the same results as the guys who take selfies in front of rented supercars, but we don’t have to be jerks to get there.

I ask my readers to email me. I respond to most of them. I also give thoughtful advice where I can. I worry about these folks. They are my tribe. They have struggles and I want to take them away as much as I can. Replying to individual emails doesn’t scale. I send hundreds of emails a week. Sometimes I get back-logged (you’ll know if you every get a response from me a few weeks later).

But I try.

When your reader knows there’s a real human on the other end of the transaction, not only will they be kinder to you if you make a mistake, but they’re also more willing to help lift you up when you’ve got something new to share.

2. Ask for a small purchase immediately —

This one is controversial. In a second I’ll talk about giving. But if you want a list of customers (meaning a relationship with people who buy), you’ve got to begin the relationship in a commercial situation. I give. A lot. Probably more than I should. Much of what I give away, entrepreneurs charge a lot of money for. But I also start my email sequence with an ask before I deliver my Easy Invite (opt-in offer).

This small purchase sets the stage for my expectations from my tribe, and not only covers the effort of acquiring a new reader, but also pays all my business expenses for the entire year, every month.

If someone is deeply-offended by my initial ask, they get off my list early. These folks are not the people I wish to serve, so this self-cleaning process works twofold (income growth and sorting, simultaneously).

3. Give until it hurts, then give a little more —

If we give enough people what they want, eventually they’ll help us get what we want. Zig Ziglar’s legacy lives on. To gain a customer, you’ve got to give first. Why would I buy your book if I have no idea who you are, or if your writing style will suit me. We don’t pay for our meals first.

This may be the most-argued topic — how much to give. There are marketers who love a good funnel and want to milk each new prospect hard and fast. It’s a common practice. I’m on all their lists. But I’ve rarely bought anything from these folks, because the practice is so obvious. They don’t care about me first.

As writers who want to earn customers, we’ve got to care abut them first. So, we give until it hurts. Then we give a little more. You can give away almost 98% of your work free and you can still make a great living from your writing.

Writers have posted entire books for free, one chapter at a time, only to find most of their readers buying the bound book, so they could have it on their shelves. This is how we earn customers.

4. Give so much value, even the freebie-seekers will walk away with something great —

Design your publishing business, so even if someone never buys from you, they’ll get a ton of value from your content. They can walk away with actionable or entertaining.

Maybe a new reader has no intention on making a purchase now. But if I treat her the way she wishes to be treated, maybe she’ll buy something next year. Every customer counts and we all have a different buying cycle. I recently bought a workout program after being pitched 2–3 times a week for four years (sometimes I’m slow to buy).

5. Don’t teach, info-tain —

This is the golden combination. Sure, stupid memes and cat jokes fly around the internet like cold flies on hot meat, but cat jokes won’t pay for my shoulder surgery.

In walks infotainment.

The highest-paid people are those who entertain us, be it music, sports, or Hollywood. Look where teachers’ salaries are — towards the bottom. Even tenured professors make around $80K after a lifetime of work.

But, your customers want solutions to their toughest problems.

What they don’t want is to be talked-down to, or lectured. They want to laugh. They want the bullets. They don’t want to guess. They want to be entertained and engaged, while they learn something new.

Boom. Infotainment.

You combine all five of these phases to your publishing business and not only will you build a loyal tribe of readers, but you’ll have a indie publishing empire that will feed you perpetually, for life.

…but there’s one, final step you must have in place.

If you don’t own your traffic you don’t own your business

If you’re a writer and you build your entire business on the back of social media, or someone else’s platform, you don’t own your traffic. You could lose all your income overnight.

Not only do you not own your traffic, but you’ve got to pay increasingly more to reach the people who’ve already raised their hands to support you.

There’s a better solution.

…and if you set this up for your publishing business, you can contact every reader in your tribe, whenever you want, (almost) for free.

The answer is email.

As writers we’re been blessed to have readers as customers. Readers love to read. Email is all about reading. Not only is email a focused, semi-distraction-free way to communicate with your tribe, it’s also delivered in the way your tribe prefers to hear from you.

If you want your first 1,000 subscribers (or your next 1,000), I built an email masterclass for you. Tons of happy students can’t be wrong. I’d like to give you the masterclass free. Just tap the link below.

We’re waiting for you.

Enroll in my 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. As a self-appointed guardian of writers and creators, August teaches indies how to make work that sells and how to sell more of that work once it’s created. When he’s not writing or thinking about writing, August carries a pocket knife and shaves his head with a safety razor.