Useful Books
Helping non-fiction authors write books that sell
The target for April was to sell at least 24 books and get 35 new community members.
We sold 36 books and got 41 new community members.
A few posts when viral. I wrote about hitting the front page on Hacker News here. That helped a bit, but HN tends to convert poorly in my experience. (It'll probably depend on how aligned your product is with that audience.)
The content calendar, [which I showed in this update] (https://www.indiehackers.com/product/useful-books/march-95-mrr-528-in-one-time-payments--MYdxKr0QsNyFJH-3VH3), makes it easy to make sure that each week I do enough content marketing. From that, it's figuring out what's working and what isn't.
IH unfortunately hasn't been working as well as I would've liked. It's possible that the content I've shipped here is of the wrong type, so I'm not ready to throw the towel in just yet, but it's possible that this just isn't a good platform for Useful Books. The "here's how I made $X in Y days, does seem to do well though."
What else... Oh Twitter. Still grinding away. https://twitter.com/hey_wub is at 96 followers, so almost at that 100 followers milestone.
Although, my main priority is to have high engagement and not necessarily a ton of followers.
Alright, wrote this off the cuff so feel free to ask me questions if there are things you'd like to know that I haven't answered.
Posted the article Why most nonfiction fails to make money with a slightly tweaked headline on HN and it took off.
Good reminder that in marketing effort and results aren't correlated. They behave in a non-linear (perhaps convex way). I.e. try a bunch of stuff and something blows up.
As I said in my previous update, I'm not watching the numbers yet. I'm solely focussed on keeping my nose to the grindstone and focussing on leading indicators.
I'll analyze all our limited data (Fathom analytics due to user privacy) in early May and then we'll see.
I have some experience with HN for Youngling Research and know that their traffic typically doesn't convert too well.
So while I'm not expecting for Useful Books to be rolling in cash, I'll happily take every little bit of growth I can. One step at a time, and we'll get to our destination.
I suspect there will be positive second order effects. Namely, at least an order of magnitude more people saw our product than those who took the time to comment/upvote. That's quite expensive exposure at the cost of putting the link up. Again, I'll take it. Those people might become customers at some point, or if someone they know wants to write a non-fiction book, they might point them to us.
Alright, quick little update. Hope it was useful.
RJY (Marketing @ Useful Books)
STATS
Hit the following Milestones in March Useful books:
- 5 new subscription members at $19/month
- 22 books sold at $24 (one-time payment)
I've been marketing more on IH, Sub-Reddits like r/writers, r/entrepreneurridealong, and r/nonfictionbookclub.
CONTENT DASHBOARD
Here's a screenshot of my content dashboard. I find it easier to stay organized with this when it comes to repeating tasks. But for literally every other task, I (and the rest of the team) use a Notion Kanban.
I also make a sticky in the Kanban when I start working on these tasks just to keep the process the same and also so others can see what I'm doing and have done at any given time.
This is the EOM overview. This allows me (and the rest of the team again) to see how much has been shipped each month. The right column is the "outcome" column. This is a type of goal used in behavior science. Green means I've hit it. Red means "I done fucked up". I update this Fridays.
And finally, this is the lagging part of the dashboard.
I've decided against using a goal and working backwards and opted for using the previous month as a baseline and improving upon that.
The reason why is because of my background in behavior science.
Goals, especially early on, aren't based on anything. You just pull them out of the ether. Then if you do really well but just barely miss them, there's a huge tendency for people to get tremendously discouraged.
So instead the overall aspiration is to grow, but the monthly outcome is to do X% better. I kept it small at 10% for now, because behavior science shows it's better to have a small outcome and crush it than the inverse. It's feeling successful that leads to an escalation of behavior change but I'm getting off-track.
I'll keep tweaking these numbers as I get a better understanding of what's doable.
GAMEPLAN
The game plan for April is to simply continue doing that and then review what's working in early May.
Then it's "do more of what's working and axe that which isn't."
As you can see, I'm focussed on leading indicators. All the stuff within my control. Then it's observing the lagging indicators to see if the work is impacting them.
CONTENT
I'm also experimenting with different kinds of content. It's still difficult to reproduce content that resonates. Most disappear into the void but such is the nature of the content game early on. The goal is to keep trying different formats until I find something that resonates.
E.g. This one $7,144.56 in royalties in two weeks from books performed poorly much to my surprise. However, this one This is How You Make Your Book Sell More Every Year, performed better. And here's a quick link one that did just as well April Dunford on Nailing Positioning.
That's a beautiful demonstration of what we all already know... there's not really a correlation between how much effort you put in and how valuable it is to people.
Alright, I'll get off my soapbox. I hope this has been useful but mostly I'm interested in what you guys think. What's your marketing game plan like?
And of course, if you want to become better at writing content that sells go have a look at Write Useful Books.
RJY signing off.
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