I haven't posted in a while because I'm deep into my law school class.
Regularly scheduled posts will be back in a few weeks, but I do want to launch a new thing I'm trying.
Every October, I design my strategy for the next year. If I don't do it in October, January will sneak up on me and I won't get it done ahead of the new year.
This year caps my fifth year as an indie writer. The next five years will be incredibly important for me, so I spent a lot more time on my strategy.
Since many of you reading this are likely part-time writers, I thought it could be cool if I was transparent about my “behind the scenes stuff” so you can be a fly on the wall as I make business decisions.
Many of the decisions I make on a daily basis are likely identical to yours, except on a different scale. Maybe seeing my thought process will help you, maybe not.
Ultimately though, it's me documenting my journey in a new and unique way so when people ask the question “how did you become successful?”, I can point them to a body of actual thought processes instead of just saying “I worked really hard, man”…
Mission Statements
Fiction: To serve my readers by writing engaging novels. (It really is that simple—I try not to overthink my fiction goals)
Nonfiction: To help indie writers become professional writers and create a sustainable income for themselves and their families by helping them master writing craft, make sound business decisions, and leverage new and existing technology.
My Journey So Far: My 2014-2019 Strategy
The strategy that has guided me so far has been a four-pronged approach: People, profit, expenses, and growth.
People are my first priority. My readers, my YouTube subscribers, other authors. You don't have a business that will last for very long without being exceptionally good to your people. I learned this as a manager at a Fortune 100 company. Invest in your people and profit takes care of itself, eventually.
Profit is self-explanatory, but it hasn't been a big focus for me as of yet because I've deliberately used the last five years to experiment and try new things. I wrote in many different genres, did YouTube, learned public speaking, went to law school to learn intellectual property/risk management, etc. This flexibility has been great because it has improved my knowledge base. I'm 1000% more knowledgeable and fluent in many different skills as a result. If I had solely focused on profit, I would have had less flexibility. Now it's time for me to focus on profit more because I have built flexibility into my business model.
Expenses are the costs I've spent to invest in my writing. I've invested in a lot of groundwork—writing apps, automation tools like BookFunnel, outsourcing, and other tools to help me get organized. I've also invested in my education through law school and writing courses. The great thing about expenses is that they're relatively predictable for me now, whereas they were not in my first 2-3 years because I was experimenting with many different services. The beauty of being a writer? Other than taxes, expenses don't (really) increase as you make more money unless you write more books than usual. The level of writing-related expenses I have right now will be fairly close to what it will be if and when I make six figures from my work.
Growth is all about new products, backlist, and marketing. I've written a LOT of books. I haven't focused on marketing, though because I've put most of my budget toward new product development (books, courses, and podcasts, for example). Over the next five years, I plan to balance my focus between creating new products and optimizing my backlist for sales.
Anyway, my strategy around people, profit, expenses, and growth guided me for a long time, and it's the reason you're following me now.
2020 Strategy and Beyond: Sustainable Income and “Staying Power”
2020 is the year where I will start pivoting toward profitability.
The goals I set this year will set the tone for the next five years and beyond. You'll see me focusing to the future and being more marketing-focused.
My 2020 strategy and beyond: to create a sustainable income and staying power as a professional writer.
Why “staying power”?
The publishing industry is on the cusp of enormous change.
The self-publishing sector has matured somewhat, but the relatively calm waters that we are experiencing today will soon be stale.
Those writers who are most comfortable today are at risk of discomfort in a few years.
Here's why:
- Artificial intelligence will mature and redefine the value proposition of a human writer. What it truly means to be a “writer” will not be the same 10-15 years from now.
- Artificial intelligence will become a unique selling proposition for traditional publishers because they have mountains and mountains of data. The moment they wake up and start investing in it, the game will change. Think about it: what if a traditional publisher could run a model that could predict how a book would do in the market, with good accuracy? How does an indie writer even think of competing with that? Hence the rise and return of tradpubs again. If you don't think that's possible now, consider that the retail industry is already experimenting with AI to monitor which products are selling by using cameras to track subtle customer behaviors and preferences. That kind of technology could very easily be brought to books, and has already been used at Amazon for many years.
- Artificial intelligence will likely create a solution to discoverability and fundamentally change how readers discover books, making pay-per-click advertising irrelevant. Or, marketing will get more and more granular and require different skills to run profitable ads.
- The public (and governments) will turn on social media companies and start demanding better stewardship of people’s personal data, which will disrupt the pay-per-click advertising model (which is based on using people’s personal data to market to them). More people will seek anonymity online. The PPC model is one of the primary ways that writers make money today, but it probably will not exist forever. Tomorrow, we might look at pay-per-click advertising like we look at billboard advertising today.
- Blockchain and micropayments will upend the financial payments industry and change how writers package and distribute their books. Imagine downloading a nonfiction book for free and only paying for the content that you actually read. You can do that with blockchain and cryptocurrency. In a not so distant future, readers might be empowered to only buy chapters relevant to their particular situation, gutting the dearth of “surface level” nonfiction books that only cover the basics of a topic. There will be a demand for deeper, more informed content, which is why being a credible expert will more important than ever before. Any author who doesn't provide real value in their nonfiction will be screwed because if you think attention spans are bad now…just wait. Could the days of nonfiction books as we know them be numbered? Maybe.
- More and more corporations and brands will realize that they can create ROI positive book and multimedia content cheaply, and then they'll start flooding marketing channels with their content, hurting indie discoverability. This has already happened on YouTube. Many of the top channels with 1 million or more subscribers are brands, not YouTube creators. This will probably happen with books and podcasts, too, at least for nonfiction.
- Readers will read fewer ebook and paperback books and choose to experience the written word in different formats, such as audio. Combine this with driverless cars, more time on the road with more time to “do” stuff other than driving, emerging popular tech like smart speakers, and Apple AirPods and Amazon Echo Buds, and year over year audiobook industry growth—and you have a compelling case for audiobooks becoming the predominant reading format in probably 10-15 years.
- Amazon will continue to do what it does best: change, innovate and disrupt. Some of those changes will destroy some writers’ incomes.
- Writers will not have the funds to adopt many of the emerging technologies on their own, which means they are at a significant risk of being left behind. Case in point: artificial intelligence. AIs require an insane amount of data to work properly. A single writer doesn't come anywhere near producing the amount of data needed to fuel an algorithm. 100 writers together probably don't have enough data. This means unless the technology changes, we’ll have to compete in the marketplace with one hand tied behind our back.
That's the future we will be living in, and why “staying power” will be the unwritten requirement of having a long-term career as a writer.
That's why it's my key strategic focus. Expect to hear me talk more about it.
Tomorrow, I'll cover my 5-pillar approach to help me navigate this new world and develop staying power, including what I'll be focusing on on a daily basis.
