Smallest Viable Readership

We've been brainwashed by mega corps into believing we need to write for the largest possible market of readers

First, we are officially announcing fundraising totals from our OnlyAuthorz Calendar 🥳.

Because of all of YOU, we managed to get 24 orders, generated $928.28 USD in gross revenue over 69.69 hours on OnlyAuthorz, and after payment processing and Printful’s shipping and print-on-demand fees, were left with $306.60 USD in proceeds.

We donated 100% of the proceeds to charity, split evenly between Room to Read, Wounded Warriors, and Golisano Children’s Hospital.

You can find the full fundraising breakdown as well as receipts, screenshots, and more here.

Now, let’s dive into a game-changing concept for how you write and market your books, inspired by the wonderful Seth Godin and a recent conversation I had with previous Beyond the Book Podcast guest Maggie Beeler.

Smallest Viable Readership

The best-seller charts.

The bookshelves in your local bookstore.

The trending books that seem to be in every other TikTok video.

It’s all a conspiracy of a uniquely American fallacy.

Bigger is better – at least that’s what they say. But what if it’s a lie?

Bigness benefits those who already have power.

Bigness is great for those with money who have the resources to continue spending on ads, public relations, and more.

Bigness is not great for you.

Bigness is debilitating, intimidating, and misleading.

Bigness is wrong.

When we talk about writing to market, we often talk about writing to the largest possible market we can muster.

We package our books so that they can appeal to the widest range of readers.

After all… that’s the only way to climb the best-seller charts!

What if I told you the best-seller charts don’t mean shit. After all, so few books will ever make it to the top of the Amazon store, that me even telling you to optimize for that goal would be a false promise because 90% of you will never reach it, and for the few who do, the moment will almost certainly be fleeting.

When you compete in the sea of BIG, you get drowned out by the authors with the bigger budgets and by the horde of book reviewers clamoring toward the same few books they all got ARCs from publishers.

The answer is to create your own monopoly in the smallest possible market you can imagine.

Become a BIG fish, in a small pond.

What hyper-specific segment of the reading market will devour your book and need to share it with people similar to them?

After all, the goal of marketing is not to share your story with the world – it’s to create the conditions that allow your story to spread through the world.

Seth Godin calls this Smallest Viable Audience. I call this Smallest Viable Readership.

• Where are you uniquely positioned to create a story for a group of people who are underserved?

• How can you communicate that positioning in a simple way? (i.e. I write science fiction thrillers for founders of technology companies, primarily in San Francisco and New York City)

• Then, how will you seed your story with this group of people to create your Smallest Viable Readership? Your marketing strategy will look very different when your goal is to reach a very specific kind of reader versus all contemporary romance readers.

• Lastly, how many readers will you need to start kicking off word of mouth, where readers will share your story with similar readers? Go to Reader Cities (another superpower from the upcoming Author Marketing Superpowers) or places where these specific groups of readers already exist. Certain readers who congregate more often with other readers are more likely to spread your story. Make sure to make your story accessible in these environments (communities, events, etc.).

Simplify your marketing.

Compete in the world of the small. Most people will think you are crazy. But that’s likely because they too are brainwashed by our mega corps that believe an incessant chase of bigger is always better.

I say break the freaking rules.

You might just have no competition 😏.

And once you become a big fish in a small pond, you can move to bigger ponds, lakes, and oceans.

Just don’t forget… you have to start somewhere.

Smallest Viable Readership. And your Smallest Viable Readership may just end up being a lot bigger of a market than you can even imagine. The trick is no one has truly served them yet… until you came along 😊.

I’ll see you Wednesday for a new episode of the Beyond the Book Podcast and Friday for the launch of the eBook and Audiobook for Author Marketing Superpowers (you all will get it for free as subscribers of Author Sidekick).

In the meantime, don’t forget…

Together we are boundless,

Michael Evans

The Author Sidekick

P.S. I know I said I wasn’t going to send out a new essay this week, but I did anyway 😆. One of these weeks in March or April I will take off from the newsletter since my goal was to write 3 out of every 4 weeks a month. But hey… if the inspiration is there, I’m gonna let the words keep flowing 💙

P.P.S. Do you like shorter blog posts or longer blog posts better? Or do you not have much of a preference?