DISCLAIMER:

What you are about to read is controversial.

These ideas challenge industry conventions and common practices.

With the focus and time authors put into marketing, would it surprise you to see a review like that?

What happened to get authors so wrapped around the axle of marketing and advertising?

Now that I'm in the industry, I see the pain marketing books causes an author;

• The stress,
• the vicious cycles of trying the next gambit,
• and the erosion of profits from increased advertising costs.

What broke?

The disruption to traditional publishing wasn't just about removing gatekeepers.

With the advent of digital publishing, e-readers, and direct publishing, the entire way to market was disrupted.

The headlines have been about how this disruption has left traditional publishing on its back foot, how they fought the changes and lost.

The media rarely talks about how this disruption to publishing created a significant market surplus by allowing more authors into the market to meet readers' insatiable demand.

The disruption also left all authors wondering how best to go to market.

Authors that had trad pub deals never had to worry about marketing and indie authors had no frame of reference for how to market.

Grasping for solutions, early indie authors adopted the practices of digital marketers.

Direct marketing is effective. Combined with digital tools and interest-based advertising, it was an obvious choice.

Early adopters were printing money using direct digital marketing strategies.

Now it was time to scale up!

To do that in direct marketing, you fill the funnel.

Facebook, Amazon, and Google profit from selling other's attention. They leveled the playing field by providing a way for any budget to reach an audience.

The results of buying attention was astounding. For a low cost, you could buy the right person's attention and convert them into a sale.

Digital marketers also provided tools to help warm up and qualify prospects.

Tools like;

• email,
• the sales funnel,
• and the lead magnet

 The go-to tools for authors to close deals.

The recipe was simple. Just pour more traffic into the funnel's top, and a corresponding ratio of sales would flow from the bottom.

Digital marketing tools deliver results until they don't.

Need better results.

• Pour more traffic into the funnel.
• Pay more.
• Seek more sources of traffic.

Not catching enough fish? The obvious solution is to broaden the waters where you fish.

Funnels are sorting systems to find those ready to convert. The way to get better results is to push more through the funnel, or is it?

Digital marketers eat themselves alive by pushing harder and harder to generate more traffic. More ads on more platforms, more often with higher retargeting is resulting in higher resistance in an audience to all digital marketing.

That's where we are today.

When you find yourself competing for ad space with sixteen-year-old YouTubers selling courses, it's not that they are outspending you (maybe they are), it's that the audience refuses to give you or anyone else their attention.

We are all building herd immunity to calls to action. Just look at yourself as an example. How often do you ignore ads on social media?

You create a vicious marketing cycle that works until it doesn't.

Slowly you begin to pay more in time and money to get the same or worse results. You assume that it's working for everyone. But you.

It’s not working for most, but digital marketers don’t have a new solution other than getting more traffic and optimize your funnel.

In my research for Advantage, I discovered little to no correlation in ad spend to sales in top-performing authors.

It’s not your application of advertising that is the cause of failed ads its advertising as a marketing strategy that is failing.

To make matters worse, most authors are on the same crowded path, resulting in long-term damage to their brand and business prospects.

The short-term solution to do more discounts and ads to get higher rank visibility is flawed.

Your secret wish that suddenly at some time in the future, a higher paying devoted audience will find you because of visibility is a fantasy.

You feel it in your bones. I'm just saying it out loud, direct digital marketing is failing for most authors.

A vicious marketing cycle that focuses on traffic and conversion attracts the wrong audience.

Over time you begin to feel like your readers just see you as a transaction.

They do because you treat them like one.

Like most businesses, you focus on the customers you don't have.

You want all the customers!

This isn't sustainable.

Have you thought about what you need to make six figures a year?

I won’t bore you with the math, but an author that writes four books a year and sells them at an average price of for $3.99 with 30% of your revenue coming from sales and 70% from kindle unlimited needs roughly 9,135 people to read all of your books each year to earn $100,000 in sales.

Imminently doable given the population of readers in the world. That doesn’t include casual readers or reading books in your backlist.

The real deal is you need to win readers one at a time.

Who is your favorite author?

Did you fall in love with them because they did the hard sell?

More likely is that you connected with the story and the characters. You found a piece of yourself in those books. Even to this day, a part of YOUR identity is tied to those books.

Satisfying one reader at a time is the secret to building a scalable author business.