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    Strangers To Superfans: A Marketing Guide to The Reader Journey: Let's Get Publishing, #2
    Strangers To Superfans: A Marketing Guide to The Reader Journey: Let's Get Publishing, #2
    Strangers To Superfans: A Marketing Guide to The Reader Journey: Let's Get Publishing, #2
    Ebook129 pages2 hoursLet's Get Publishing

    Strangers To Superfans: A Marketing Guide to The Reader Journey: Let's Get Publishing, #2

    By David Gaughran

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    About this ebook

    From the author of Let's Get Digital and Amazon Decoded, this book will change how you think about marketing. Strangers to Superfans puts you in the shoes of your Ideal Readers, and forces you to view your marketing from their perspective.

     

    *Learn the five stages in the Reader Journey.
    *Identify where your blockages are and how to fix them.
    *Optimize each stage to increase conversion.
    *Boost sales by making the process more frictionless.
    *Build an army of passionate readers who do the selling for you.

     

    It's not enough to know who your Ideal Readers are, you also need to imagine how they feel when a recommendation email arrives containing your cover. You must figure out why they hesitated before clicking the Buy button. And it's crucial to determine why they liked your book enough to finish it... but not sufficiently to recommend it to their friends.

     

    The Reader Journey is a new marketing paradigm that maps out the journey your Ideal Readers take in their transformation from strangers to superfans.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDavid Gaughran
    Release dateJul 29, 2020
    ISBN9781386758822
    Strangers To Superfans: A Marketing Guide to The Reader Journey: Let's Get Publishing, #2
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    • 5/5

      Dec 3, 2019

      Fabulous book, even better than I expected. I liked that Gaughran not only explained everything very well and with good detail, but that he also laid out a plan of attack. I feel like I have a much better idea of where to start.

    Book preview

    Strangers To Superfans - David Gaughran

    From the author of Let’s Get Digital and Amazon Decoded, this book will change how you think about marketing. Strangers to Superfans puts you in the shoes of your Ideal Reader, and forces you to view your marketing from their perspective.

    • Learn the five stages in the Reader Journey.

    • Identify where your blockages are and how to fix them.

    • Optimize each stage to increase conversion.

    • Boost sales by making the process more frictionless.

    • Build an army of passionate readers who do the selling for you.

    And that's just for starters…

    Sign up at DavidGaughran.com/Newsletter to get your free copy of Following

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    Enroll free at DavidGaughran.com/Course

    Enroll free at DavidGaughran.com—this FREE companion course was designed to help you find your first readers and build an audience. Join today!

    To Phoenix, for dragging me out of the ditch.

    Introduction

    We’ve all walked similar paths. I know from speaking with lots of writers, on forums and at conferences and in workshops, that most of us started out thinking we had a discoverability problem. The book is good, we told ourselves, I just need to reach the right people and it will take off. And that was kind of true in 2010 or 2011. Professional presentation and a hooky blurb, combined with a price firmly in impulse buy territory, was often enough to get sales moving.

    By 2013, the Kindle Store had grown well beyond one million titles, and the challenge became one of visibility. I published a book called Let’s Get Visible: How To Get Noticed And Sell More Books, which broke down how the Kindle Store worked and why authors should tweak their marketing to take advantage of how the various algorithms functioned—like spreading launch juice over several days rather than hitting everything at once. Or, to be more accurate, I documented the efforts of some very successful self-publishers who had cracked the Amazon code.

    And that approach—which you might call Visibility Marketing—worked very well for a few years and helped a few people step up to the next level. In fact, the book was popular enough that I still get regular requests to bring out a new edition. Eventually, after four years, I agreed it was time. But when I began, I realized the game had shifted completely. Instead of one million books in the Kindle Store, there were now eight million. The average self-publisher was much savvier and had more titles out, with generally slicker presentation. Fortunes had been made by some, and many were plowing that back into ever-more-sophisticated marketing plans.

    The opportunities to reach new eyeballs had grown, but not at the same pace as the huge uptick in content. Visibility challenges had become visibility chokepoints. Even when authors did manage to get readers to their Amazon product page, there were a whole bunch of noisy distractions tempting them away from the Buy button.

    And all of that was only the beginning of the challenges facing today’s self-publishers. It was clear that what was needed was a fresh approach, a new paradigm.

    This book will teach you how to look at marketing in a new way, from the perspective of the people most critical to your business: your readers. It will teach you how to identify your Ideal Readers, and explain the five different stages of The Reader Journey from strangers to superfans. You will learn how to optimize each stage and lose as few of these precious people as possible along the way.

    Not only that, it will give you a new, more powerful, and efficient way to manage your backlist. It will pinpoint the flaws in your marketing and help you revitalize sales on books that have fallen away. And it will teach you how to launch the right way, from the start, so you don’t go running off in the wrong direction, making expensive mistakes and creating trouble for tomorrow.

    Let me explain quickly how this book is structured, because it starts off quite conceptual, and you might worry that there will be no practical application. Fear not! We’ll get our hands dirty after we map out the territory.

    Part I has the fabulously grandiose title of A New Paradigm—The Reader Journey. It covers how marketing has changed and how the latest approaches translate very well into the world of books. It explains the importance of granular targeting and helps you identify your Ideal Reader.

    Part II outlines the five states that readers pass through on their Reader Journey from strangers to superfans: Discovery, Visibility, Consideration, Purchase, and Advocacy. Then it dives right into the action, rooting out blockages like discoverability myths, visibility chokepoints, and the distraction crisis playing out on our Amazon product pages.

    Part III tackles the escalating problem of conversion by showing you how to optimize each stage of The Reader Journey, from getting discovered to converting browsers into buyers and turning DNFs into OMGs.

    Part IV unveils The Failure Matrix, which is such a cool name I almost used it as the title for this book. It’s also a system for helping you identify blockages in your own Reader Journey, so you can manage backlist efficiently and spend more of your time and energy on writing, instead of endlessly puzzling over non-performing titles, wondering what to fix. When we’re finished, you’ll be able to tell a Visibility Fail from a Consideration Fail, and you’ll know exactly where to send the nanobots. You’ll also know in what order to accomplish these tasks (and understand why that’s important).

    And to help you apply all the knowledge you will learn in this book, I’ve assembled a collection of bonus resources, exclusive to readers of this book; this will also serve as a handy repository for all the links, tools, and services mentioned here, as well as somewhere you can ask questions. Access this Resources page on a private part of my website—DavidGaughran.com/SuperfansResources. No need to bookmark that link now; I will repeat it throughout.

    One last thing: don’t be overwhelmed. Selling books is more complicated today but the tools we have at our disposal are much more sophisticated and the readers are out there in greater numbers than ever. The bar has been raised. It’s time for us to do the same, and refocus on readers.

    Strangers to Superfans: A Marketing Guide to The Reader Journey will show you how.

    PART I: A NEW PARADIGM—THE READER JOURNEY

    Increased competition means that the challenges facing self-publishers have grown much more complex. Luckily, there is a new marketing paradigm that can help us understand why some readers buy our books when others don’t. I call it The Reader Journey. And the protagonist of this story is someone you need to understand a little deeper: your Ideal Reader.

    1: The New Marketing

    Marketing has changed and publishing has fallen behind, once again. While our industry has never really been on the cutting edge, a recent shift in the wider marketing world completely passed us by.

    My own professional background is in tech and marketing, and I decided to refresh my skill-set a little while ago. I started off getting AdWords certified again. It’s not a great platform for selling books, but it is still a good grounding in the basic principles of digital marketing and was an easy way for me to shake the cobwebs loose. From there, I delved into content marketing and inbound marketing—in some cases it was just updated jargon and tools, but there were some interesting new concepts too. One idea that stood out was that of The Buyer Journey—and I could immediately see how well it would translate into the world of books and readers and, lately, algorithms.

    The basic concept was straightforward, and it was a mindset shift more than anything, away from the idea of sales funnels. Traditionally, businesses looked at marketing from the perspective of their company and the effect marketing has on their sales (sometimes forgetting about their customers in the process). The Buyer Journey didn’t allow you to do that. It was a POV shift to the customer, training you to view all your products and marketing messages from the buyer perspective.

    But before all this gets too abstract, let’s jump over to the world of books and start applying these concepts in tangible, familiar forms.

    Translating The Buyer Journey

    Have you read On Writing by Stephen King? Whether you’re a fan of his fiction or not, it’s an interesting book, the first I read that spoke about writing in a matter-of-fact way without leaning on some faux-mystical babble. King talked about writing as a craft, rather than an art, which helped me immensely—and still does. (I think it’s both a craft and an art, but internally classifying it as the former gives me a better work ethic, quite frankly.)

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