Stop marketing your books. Do THIS instead...

First, you should know that the Author Marketing Superpowers Deck is closing on Kickstarter tomorrow. I’d appreciate your support! We are so close to our next stretch goal which will unlock AuthorHub (an all-in-one book marketing tracker and optimization tool).

Backers of the Kickstarter get access to the physical deck of cards for the 50 Author Marketing Superpowers, along with bonus workshops, templates, a digital workbook, AND even a special challenge to help you sell your books before you write them (it’s called Readers First and is the ultimate book marketing course + challenge wrapped into one).

You can get many of the rewards at a massive discount (over 50% off compared to the regular price) as a thank you for being a backer of the Kickstarter. Just make sure you get in before it closes to not lose your discount! 👇

Now let’s get into Day 4 of the Author Marketing Superpowers Bootcamp all about Scaling Your Readers. You can complete Day 1 here, Day 2 here, and Day 3 here.

The goal for this bootcamp is in <5 minutes a day to help you use the Author Marketing Superpowers to take a story idea to $1,000 in book sales and beyond with as little stress, time, and money as possible.

Now that you have (Day #1) picked a target audience, (Day #2) validated you can sell your story idea to that audience before writing your book, and (Day #3) wrote a story and tested that it has engaged readers, you are ready for the day that many look forward to for years.

It’s time to scale your readership. But you probably are thinking about scaling all wrong.

Most authors believe that:

• Marketing takes a ton of work

• Getting more sales means spending more energy marketing

• That you have to do a lot of different things to market your book successfully

In reality, marketing is NOT about selling books. It’s about building a system that sells books for you.

That system is what we call a Reader Growth Engine – a scalable way to grow your readership.

The magic of a Reader Growth Engine is that it can be as varied as the books we write! You can focus on specific platforms, fine-tune your engine to help you reach any readers you want, and you can even design your engine for specific business outcomes (some authors want more upfront sales, some want to optimize for leads, etc.).

Just like the engine of a vehicle, Reader Growth Engines have certain types of “fuel” they run on. Here are the three types of Reader Growth Engines:

#1: Paid Ads: When you pay to reach the audience of a platform, creator, or company. You can utilize paid ads on platforms like Meta, Reddit, Pinterest, TikTok, Google, and more.

#2: Building a Media Brand: This is creating content on social media, but instead of simply advertising your books, you are creating a show that viewers want to come back to over and over again. Over time, your viewership will compound on social platforms like TikTok and Instagram, and for the same relative effort to make each new piece of content you will get a greater audience and return on your investment.

Ex: Bookish conversational podcasts, BookTokkers and BookTubers reviewing books, and even new formats such as fictional vertical television. Check out this article for more on where bookish media is going. However, you can go “beyond books” to create media formats that would interest audiences broadly, such as entertainment or educational content related to your genre (i.e., videos and articles on science and technology as a sci-fi author or historical videos and articles as a historical fiction author).

#3: Affiliates and Collaborations: This is the most advanced Reader Growth Engine. This is when you get other people to do the selling for you by building long-term partnerships with podcasts, retailers, and more.

Most authors will start by building a Reader Growth Engine that utilizes Paid Ads or a Media Brand (aka social media content).

Now it’s time for you to create yours 🥳. And we have the Expansion Powers: Scale Your Readers to help us do just that. But before we get overwhelmed and try and conquer the world at once, remember that one Reader Growth engine is all you need to scale your author business to six figures and even seven figures and beyond.

Now reflect on the following questions and reply with your answers to complete Day 4 of the Author Marketing Superpowers Bootcamp:

Step #1: Marketing Fuel – what marketing activity energizes you most? It’s YOUR Reader Growth Engine, not anyone else’s. You get to decide what “race” you want to run. Do you enjoy blogging? Facebook Ads? Reddit Ads? TikTok videos? And to get even more granular, what style and approach do you want to bring to these platforms?

There’s not a singular content format or ad style that is “correct”. Instead, it’s about creating the marketing that energizes you and allows you to build the growth engine you desire.

Step #2: Content Cannon – how can you get started creating content for your growth engine now? The Content Cannon states that a few pieces of marketing content will lead to most of your sales (whether that be a few winning ads or a few great TikTok videos). The trick to creating great marketing content (since every Growth Engine is fueled by content… content is fuel!) is to continually iterate based on previous content.

Without starting, it’s VERY hard to know what the perfect marketing content looks like.

Instead be willing to experiment, knowing your engine may be messy, loud, and not even move forward at first.

The goal is to treat your marketing like an experiment, constantly looking at what ads get the most engagement and what videos have the most views and retention, and understanding why. Then double down on what’s working, and look at what’s working for others to see how you can adapt for yourself.

For folks creating a media brand, experiment to dial down into a consistent, yet evolving format so that audiences want to come each time you release new content (this is the power of this growth engine!).

Step #3: Infinite Reader Loop — how can you get paid to market your books? If content is the fuel for your engine, then it takes money to make and share with the world (either through the creation itself or paying for eyeballs with ads).

If you don’t design your Reader Growth Engine carefully, even if it’s working great, it can run out of fuel quickly. That is no fun!

Thus, we must design a system that allows us to get paid to market our books. This is the only way our Reader Growth Engine can be sustainable. After all… growth for growth’s sake is fun for nothing but a dopamine rush if it makes a number on a screen go up but not your bank account (oh… flashbacks to day 3 of the Author Marketing Superpowers Bootcamp anyone? 😅).

Here are some ways you can design your marketing to pay you:

• Sell book bundles or other products directly to your readers to capture a higher average order value upfront and help pay back your ad cost fast (best for paid ads-centric growth engines). I could write a whole article just on designing these Reader Journeys for upsells, downsells, and cross-sells. That will have to be one for another day!

• Advertising or sponsorship within your social media content. Brands will pay you if you get consistent viewership on your social content. Whether it’s a beauty and cosmetic brand or software, companies always want to reach eyeballs, and if you can reliably reach eyeballs, your ad costs can help cover your production costs for your media brand (best for media brand-centric growth engines).

Now that you have built the foundations of your Reader Growth Engine, the fun is just beginning. Your engine will need constant repairs, upgrades, and at some point may even crash and need a new engine entirely.

With that said, the key is now that your engine is humming, you can take a step back and focus on operating it. When things run smoothly (hopefully most of the time!) it’s great.

In fact, continuing to optimize your growth engine to be more engaging is an incredible way to make more and more money from your marketing (AuthorHub, inside of the Author Marketing Superpowers, if we hit our next stretch goal 🤞, helps you do just that 😉).

But there’s one BIG problem with this. Just because you have a way to grow your readers, doesn’t mean you have a way to keep your readers loyal to your stories and brand.

That’s what Day 5 of the Author Marketing Superpowers Bootcamp is all about. The ONE way to make your author career sustainable over the long haul (and way more profitable).

I’ll see you then.

If you are a paid member of Author Sidekick Plus, then you can read on. In this email all about the Reader Growth Engines, I’m also sharing with you our 2-hour March workshop, all about the Reader Growth Engines.

We cover:

• Why you need a Reader Growth Engine

• The nuances to succeed with content creation and paid ads as Reader Growth Engines

• Workshop with two authors live optimizing their Meta Ad campaigns and building a reader community as a growth engine (we spent close to 90 minutes on this and went super deep, covering everything from pixels, to community design, ad campaign structure, and more).

You can get that all here 👇