5 secrets of bestselling authors 😮

That's it, that's the game.  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

​ Hey, Want to learn the real secrets of bestselling authors? I'm sharing them with you today — right here, right now... after a quick work from our sponsor. In partnership with Plottr.​ Introducing a new way to visualize your stories ​ Have you ever wished for a powerful visual interface for outlining (or revising) your books within Acts? Plottr, the popular book planning and story bible software, is excited to introduce Act Structure 1.0 – one of their biggest updates ever – featuring three unique modes for structuring your story. Sign up for a live preview on March 28th and see how Plottr may just completely change your approach to organizing your books. ​Sign up for free​ The Difference Makers I have been lucky to work with many brilliant people during my career. Most eye-opening has been the consulting I did for a number of bestselling authors — and I'm sharing their secrets today. Not their numbers, but the things they do which set them apart from the crowd, the tactics, tools, and mindset which has driven them to the top. Don't worry, this isn't a come-on — I am not available for hire under any circumstances. One of the reasons for that I prefer working with authors on a longer-term basis, rather than being helicoptered in for one campaign. I've done a bit of that over the years too but I always preferred helping to grow things over time — and that tended to get much stronger returns for the authors too. Some of the launches I've assisted with have hit the very top of the charts and generated significant sales, and income of course. I'm very discrete when it comes to client work so I won't get into details but that would be pointless bragging anyway. And perhaps a little unseemly as they most certainly did the hard part. I'm just a dude walking around with a can of gasoline looking to blow stuff up. A gun-for-hire. A man without a past. Someone who… sorry, slipped into blurb mode for a sec. Everyone wants the deets, everyone wants the goss, but I've got something better for you. The reasons. The difference-makers. The things that set bestsellers apart. I've dealt with enough smart, successful authors now to notice some unusual qualities they have, practices and approaches which others could adopt, and perhaps see more success themselves too. Warning: There are no magic beans here, no secret Amazon hacks, no shortcuts to the top of the charts — none that dodge the hard work part anyway. Not everything on this list will suit every author. Weigh up the suggestions, and then carve out the useful bits for your own marketing sandwich (another skill of successful authors BTW). You can imbibe the contents of this email safely. There's no pivot to a hard sell at the end (or any kind of sell). An internet marketing alien will not pop from your chest in a few days and demand you enroll in a $1000 course. 5 Secrets of Bestselling Authors No one is required to do all these things, or indeed any of them. But if you get a few of these working for you, then you might be on your way. 1. Publish to Market Forget writing to market, bestselling authors tend to go far beyond that and cover to market, blurb to market, and market to market. The most successful authors often know their niche like the back of their hand – what covers/designers are trending, what titles are hot right now, which authors are attracting buzz, why certain tropes are surging while others fade, whether traditional publishers still have a chunk of that category on Amazon and how that affects the market overall. This allows them to package their books superbly (bestsellers tend to have a fantastic coherence across their covers, titles, description etc.), but also to know when the market is shifting, what trends could realistically be jumped on, and which authors are worth cross-promoting with right now. There's a misconception among authors that writing to market means selling out or otherwise doing things and writing stories that you don't care about. But what it really means is knowing where the readers are and meeting them halfway. The same goes for publishing to market — you don't want to copy anybody but you do want to tap into what readers are responding to right now, and in terms of everything from packaging to ad assets. 2. Ditch Losers ASAP Not those kind of losers… Bestselling authors tend to have a greater appetite for risk — which is easier when your royalty cheques have more zeroes in them, I guess. You might not absorb a financial hit so effortlessly but there's a lot to be learned about how they handle risk and how they respond to failure. Just because uber successful authors have a lot of money to throw around, that doesn't mean they spend recklessly. Risks tend to be smart risks — either with a good chance of success or perhaps something with low cost but significant potential upside. Probably the biggest difference maker between those who boss the ad platforms and those who haven't found their groove yet is that the savvy advertisers don't succumb to a popular fallacy. Gambler's Fallacy — aka The Monte Carlo Fallacy for the yachting set — is an accidental byproduct of our brain's hunger for patterns. Let's say you toss a coin — a regular, standard issue coin, which hasn't been monkeyed with. The odds of getting heads over tails is fifty-fifty. And let's also say that you toss this coin five times, and get heads the first time, and tails the next four times. If you were a betting type, you might wager that heads is overwhelmingly likely to come up next, but this is a mistake. It doesn't matter how many times in a row that tails has comes up previously, the odds on the next toss are still — always! — fifty-fifty. Vegas is literally built on this fallacy and this is one of the main reasons why the house always wins. Advertising isn't gambling, but people can make the same mistakes — trying to dig themselves out of a financial hole by doubling down (instead of changing approach). Experienced advertisers know when to call something a bust and move on, and the moving on part is just as important. Losses are part of the game. 3. Defeat = Harvest Time They say that victory has many fathers and defeat is an orphan, but I've found the opposite to be true when working with mega-successful authors. In fact, there can often be more fretting about success than failure — and the anxiety might surround how to keep something good going instead. Often when writers suffer a setback, they can be tempted to feel sorry for themselves, lick their wounds, and indulge in some self-care (aka gelato). Many of the bestselling authors I have worked with approach defeats in a different way. It's not just that they view losses as part of the game, as I said above; they see them as opportunities too. The most successful can be ruthless about harvesting resources from a defeat, analyzing the misfire without emotion, and taking any useful insights into the next campaign, or next business decision. Whether it's a series launch which didn't hit previous heights, a Facebook campaign that torched money, a broken link in a new release email, or a promo site feature which didn't run, bestelling authors don't wallow in defeat and they don't allow the misstep to weigh on them — they take whatever data they can and move on. Again, the moving on part is important here too. 4. Bank Over Rank There are two types of author, those who obsess over their Amazon rank… and dirty rotten liars. After several years of therapy, some of us only hit F5 non-stop around the time of a new release. Baby steps. Mega-sellers are no different on this front, but one mindset they often have, worth adopting, is "bank over rank." By this, I mean that it's much more helpful to focus on the income that a book or series is generating, rather than the cheap high of seeing your book hit a certain rank, or place on a bestseller list, usually at a specific retailer named after a large river. You can't eat rank. (You can't eat money either, but you can swap it for all sorts of delicious treats!) Focusing on rank over bank leads us to aim for the wrong things (bragging rights over dollars), and can trick us into adopting the wrong strategy… or throwing out one that was working for you. A simple and obvious example is when a launch starts well and an author gets excited and rips up their methodical plan, instead throwing everything at the book to see how high it can go, or how long it can hang around that rarified air. This is usually a mistake (unless you are talking about the very top of the charts). Regular readers will know that Amazon's algorithms reward consistent sales over one-night stands. Bestselling authors take this concept further and avoid getting thrown off course by bumps in the road. They know that sales rank is relative — it doesn't matter how many books you are selling, if ten authors are selling more than you then you won't break that Top 10 no matter what numbers you are seeing. They understand that rank-to-sales is seasonal — it takes fewer sales to hit the Top 100 in June than at Christmas time for obvious reasons. You could easily launch a book in December, hit a far worse rank because of all that competition, but make more cash — which is the goal, presumably. And they realize that sales rank is temporary — when the dust settles on this launch in a few days/weeks/months, rank will most likely have worsened. No one is really going to remember in three months that you hit the top twenty of your genre's new release chart, and pretty soon you'll forget too. That money doesn't disappear though, it stays right there in your bank account. (Unless you spend it all on flamethrowers and hotdogs.) I'm not saying rank is unimportant — I did write an entire book called Amazon Decoded, going into great detail on all that stuff. But speaking in a more meta sense, it's very useful to make "bank over rank" as your north star. Income and profit are what ultimately matter, and that should be the basis for any analysis you conduct. 5. Master of One When I was a newbie author looking for an agent, everyone was obsessed with "breakout books" and many people were trying to write one (or trying to pitch their book as one). Which was a mistake for all sorts of reasons, not least because "breakout authors" don't tend to come out of nowhere with a genre-spanning book for the ages, which simultaneously appeals to several different types of reader niches — just like them Hollywood movies might have us think. Lightning strikes and lottery winners aside, authors don't generally "break out" of their genre until they have dominated it first, and they usually do that over multiple books. Bestselling authors understand the power of focusing on their niche. In a similar sense, the biggest authors tend to be more focused in marketing. Authors who are trying to level up can suffer from a lack of focus — switching from spending time on email marketing, to BookBub, to Amazon Ads, to tinkering with their website, to cracking the code on Facebook. The authors with the most impressive marketing machines don't try to boss everything — they focus. Successful authors know that you don't need to be winning at BookBub, Facebook, and Amazon simultaneously. You don't need to be best-in-class at email, social media, and websites too. Boss one channel instead. The biggest self-publishers will be very strong on one advertising platform — maybe two, at a push. Not sure I've ever met anyone who was amazing at all three, and that's partly because you don't need to be. And partly because it's far better to have one great pathway for bringing new readers to your work, rather than to be mediocre at all of them. When you get really good at one of the ad platforms, the benefits tend to multiply. Same goes for the after-sale side of things. Some authors are strong on social media, and cultivate reader engagement very successfully indeed on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or wherever it is their readers hang out. Others have a large and responsive mailing list instead, and don't bother so much with social media (or have an assistant handle that). A handful– mostly non-fiction authors – might have a very popular blog or website or forum which fills that role instead. All these things can be useful, but you don't need to be slaying everything like Buffy on speed. Pick one traffic source — i.e. Amazon, Facebook, or BookBub — and choose to master that instead of spreading yourself to thin. (And choose Facebook, if you want my advice.) Deepen your knowledge before broadening it. If you're already good at Amazon Ads, devote the time to improving further at Amazon Ads, rather than adding BookBub or Facebook into the mix just yet. And pick one engagement tool — i.e. newsletter, social media, website — and get bloody brilliant at it. As you might expect, I think the case for making your newsletter your choice here is very strong indeed. But whatever you choose, just make sure to really focus on it. All you really need is one source of readers, and one way of keeping them around until the next book. That's it, that's the game. Dave P.S. Writing music this week High Wire by Erroll Garner. Broomfield Business Park, Malahide, Co. Dublin K36 AT04 ​Unsubscribe | Update your profile​