David Gaughran - Strangers To Superfans: A Marketing Guide to The Reader Journey

Strangers to Superfans

A Marketing Guide to The Reader Journey

David Gaughran

Editor: Tammi Labrecque

Cover: Alexios Saskalidis, 187Designz

Updated EPUB Edition published August 2020

Copyright 2018, 2020 David Gaughran

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to others. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Strangers to Superfans

From the author of Lets 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

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Dedication

To Phoenix, for dragging me out of the ditch.

Introduction

Weve 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 Lets 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 functionedlike 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 approachwhich you might call Visibility Marketingworked 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 todays 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 dont 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! Well get our hands dirty after we map out the territory.

Part I has the fabulously grandiose title of A New ParadigmThe 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. Its 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 were finished, youll be able to tell a Visibility Fail from a Consideration Fail, and youll know exactly where to send the nanobots. Youll also know in what order to accomplish these tasks (and understand why thats important).

And to help you apply all the knowledge you will learn in this book, Ive 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 websiteDavidGaughran.com/SuperfansResources. No need to bookmark that link now; I will repeat it throughout.

One last thing: dont 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. Its 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 PARADIGMTHE 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 dont. 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.