Hacking The NY Times Best Seller List
manyniches.com
manyniches.com
My book: http://www.amazon.com/Will-Teach-You-Be-Rich/dp/0761147489
My blog: http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com
Let me know if you guys have questions about monetizing content, book sales, or the psychology of getting people online to pay. There is so much interesting stuff I've learned over the last few years.
I would love to email you some questions about my book project and where to take it from where it is. I am blwatson at gmail
Let's do it here so others can benefit from the back-and-forth conversation. You can email me your super-private questions separately.
I had put together an outline a year ago for a book. The working title is The Failing Point. I started writing, and built up a good head of steam. I knew that getting a publishing deal as an unknown was almost impossible. Since the content is in essay form, I started posting them online in blog format at the url www.TheFailingPoint.com.
I got into a 2x per week posting rhythm, and the strategy was to do this for the first 2 chapters, over the course of 2 months, and then stop. I had planned on taking the "success" of building traffic to a publisher. I didn't want to keep posting all of the content that would eventually be in the book at the risk of putting off any potential authors.
In the second of 2 months, I generated 20K uniques without spending any money. Links were posted here and Digg. I also tried to incorporate TweetMeme (great) and Yahoo Buzz (useless).
Well, the few publishers I was able to get the proposal to have either passed or taken their time in getting back to me (which is the same as a pass). So now what to do?
Based on the feedback I saw in the comments here at Hacker News, and emails I got, people appreciated the content. My "why" for doing this is not to say that I am a published author. I'd love to make some extra money, sure, but mostly because I feel like I have a unique set of experiences and am a decent enough story teller that the content is useful to those who would come after me. It's the content I would have liked to have seen before I embarked on my startups.
This project is well outside of my comfort zone, and perhaps I relied too much on a "if you post it, they will come" strategy. Now that the first two chapters are out there, and I have no traction with the few publishers I have approached, what would you suggest?
Anyway, here's the deal.
You have clearly thought a LOT about this and have all the elements in place. I'll just suggest a few different ways of thinking about what you wrote above.
1. Publishers don't care about your posting rhythm or how many Twitter clickthrough rates. In fact, many don't even care about your book topic.
They care about your platform and how well other books in this vein have done.
I noticed that you yourself indicated that there are few books on failure, while many books on success. Why do you think that is? What would make your book different?
2. A series of musings is usually a very bad book. Who is the market? Do you already have a presence there? For example, publishers started approaching me once they noticed that iwillteachyoutoberich.com was popping up in the personal-finance space.
3. On a tactical note, typically authors find an agent, who then finds the publishers. If you really want to publish a book, go find agents who have written books similar to yours and send them a pitch letter.
4. Also on a tactical note, driving 20k uniques in 2 months is very good. However, from looking at your site, you haven't captured those people. In other words, they came once and left, never to return. Think carefully about how to capture these people so you can continue sending them material that they want, love, and expect.
I can get into outbound marketing if people care, but suffice it to say that many, many startups overvalue social media and ignore channels that actually convert. Hint: Twitter. (Test it and see for yourself.)
4. MOST IMPORTANT. What is your goal? You indicated you don't care about the ego boost of being an author. So carefully consider whether a book is really what you want to do. There are many, many other channels (ebook, blog, etc) that don't require the back-breaking work of writing a book. Mine took 2 years to complete. A book is specifically useful for building your brand and spreading your ideas. But in most cases, there are other channels that work better.
(Incidentally, we should come up with a name for areas where people who work tell others NOT to do it. Examples: Authors, musicians, lawyers...)
Hope that helps. Let me know if you have other questions.
A while back, Tim Ferriss and I did a video covering lots of stuff on writing/marketing/entrepreneurship.
Specific clip about self-publishing vs. a NY publisher: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffYVm5g6oSk
Full 88-minute video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JesBi91m39E
We paid authors $5/signature and sold the book for $10 over MSRP. The author pre-signed thousands of books that we bought from major retailers at a discount (orders in the 10s of thousands). Then we organized speaking events and book tours the week the book released. On the book tour, when the stores ran out of stock they would buy our autographed copies because the publisher couldn't ship them fast enough. Any books that we didn't sell back to the retailers, we would sell on our online store at markup.
The key to hacking the system was negotiating with the retailer to report (on Nielsen BookScan) X number of books on release day, X number the day after, and so on...
Probably a good idea to filter only the "good" books, but how?
We were 4/4 for #1 NY Times Bestsellers.
With authors I've frequently decided to become an online fan after being an offline fan for up to years. However I've rarely done it the other way, and never for a book.
I would be interested on what percentage of his online readership purchases his book on pre-order/first week vs how many of his readers are buying it in 6 months to a year.
Which channels are better than others for securing conversions? Which outlets SHOULD startups be focusing on?