Upcoming book plans: serialization vs magnum opus

 The Presidential election is coming up and that puts some pressure on me to finish my book writing projects. America is always more open to intellectual change during a Presidential election, in many ways, the tone of the country’s intellectual discourse gets reset every four years. It's one of the few times when Americans pay attention to ideas and it would be foolish to miss it by not having a book out. So I will try to get back to writing soon. I’ve given up on my original plan of writing a lengthy and complete exposition of my ideas as a first book. Very few books succeed unless they were a success right from the start. There is no point in releasing a book and then chasing sales for years, it has to start off good or there will be no sales. 

This is especially true for self-published ebooks because of how the Amazon ebook marketplace works. For the first six months, a new book gets a boost to its search rankings. This boost decays on a daily, or almost daily rate and is strongest right at the beginning. So you want to combine your own promotional efforts with the search boost Amazon gives you to push your book into one of the over forty top ten lists Amazon maintains. Once your book gets into one of these top ten lists the list will be frequently displayed on visitor’s browsers and this will further boost sales. The ultimate goal is to make the two top ten lists that matter the most, all fiction and all non-fiction. If you can make these lists the book is a guaranteed hit, by ebook sales. This is obviously a rich-get-richer situation, but there is nothing you can do about it. You have to generate enough sales on your own to make a top ten list and in other ways get noticed, then this attention further propels the book sales and it starts to snowball. But you have to cross the first hurdle on your own, and it's easiest to cross immediately after release due to the search engine boost Amazon gives to new books.

So my previous goal was to gain attention for myself on Twitter by saying the stuff readers know I say all the time. This has gotten me to 3,500 followers and that is not enough to launch a book, it's not even 1/10th of what is needed. I’ve given up on first gaining the necessary following and then releasing a complete book. Instead, I will follow the most common promotional method in ebooks, which is serialization. Perhaps you have observed how fiction has been taken over in the internet era by serials based on a single character, often a mystery solver of some sort, a policemen, a detective, etc. The main character appears in a long series of books, the same character with a new mystery or adventure in each book. This sort of fiction has become so common in the internet age as to become tiresome, but it remains because it is the most effective way for authors to build an audience. 

The goal is to increase your sales count with each book until you cross that hurdle of making the top ten lists, and then the sales come easily. The idea is if you gain ten thousand readers with each book and keep all your old readers by book ten you will be selling a hundred thousand books, which is enough to make the top ten bestsellers lists, and once you are on those lists you will sell several times more than the amount it took to crack the list. The whole key is to crack the bestseller lists, once you become rich you easily become richer. So you create serial fiction around a repeating main character and you add a page at the end of the book asking to add your email to a list so the author can keep you "up to date". Then a few weeks before the next book, the author sends emails out begging the past readers to pre-order his next book. The pressure to pre-order is intense because then when the book hits the market Amazon counts all pre-orders as first week sales and that helps the book to crack that week’s bestseller lists. I hope you can see the pattern by now, it's all about cracking the weekly bestseller lists, which isn’t easy without publishing house support. 

I think a useful example of the trend toward serialized fiction is Alex Berenson’s serial centered on his dashing alter ego, the spy John Wells: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074CCNL6Y?binding=kindle_edition&searchxofy=true&ref_=dbs_s_bs_series_rwt_tkin&sr=1-6

I’m going to assume Berenson wrote twelve John Wells books for the same reason most authors serialize their work: it's the most effective promotional strategy for those without the support only a large publishing house can provide. This is more of a strategy for fiction authors, but I’ve decided serialization is my only hope. The odds are against you in selling books, it is one out of a thousand authors who makes enough to buy a used car from his royalties. At this point in time serialization seems to be the most effective way to increase your chances of buying that used car. I will break down my book ideas into many books all centered around the same larger theme and try to build the audience with each book release and hope that eventually one of the books will sell well enough to crack a bestseller list. There is really nothing else to do. My internet influencer career never took off so I’m not going to organically grow an audience first and then sell the books. I have to grow the audience as I release a series of books. It's what most ebook writers do anyway.

I want to get the first book out before the election because I think Americans are more interested in ideas around elections. People are thinking about the future of the country and asking questions. I don’t want to miss the opportunity so I will get one out on the market first and then try to keep writing steadily. I’ve done a lot of research on how to sell yourself on the internet and one of the most common themes is that the public wants consistent output. They want the influencer to perform the equivalent of “friendship maintenance”, where you don’t want to go too long without talking to someone or the relationship will die. You have to do follower maintenance and release content at least once a week to keep up interest. Without regular production of content, the public stops feeling a connection to the internet influencer and follower counts start dropping. 

This is one of the reasons why I haven’t been making a push to sell myself. There is no point in trying to sell yourself on the internet if you’re not ready to release interesting content at least once a week and I didn’t want to make a half start, get people’s hopes up, then disappear for a few months and lose the connection to the public. So I will try to release content on a regular schedule now and serialize my ideas into a long series of books and try to sell the books the way spy novels are sold. Have a long series of spy novels and slowly build the audience with each one until you sell enough for the sales to start snowballing. Without publishing house support there is really nothing else to do.

Since tomorrow is the start of the National No Screen Week, I will be taking a week-long break from Twitter. I’m not really sure if Twitter is even good for me, or for anyone else. A week away will help me to see if it is. When I come back hopefully I will be releasing content regularly, the only way there is to build an audience. Until then, goodbye for a week, and I hope you take the week off from Twitter as well. Good luck.