A Financial Report on Bookmotion

Where we are and the journey that brought us here.

This a companion piece to this morning’s Newsletter-Growth News and will focus on sharing the financial side of Bookmotion as well as the emotional journey of building it. It’s necessary to get that second part down now before it becomes glossed-over with time.

Finances

My mantra is for us to spend as little as possible. There are necessary and worthwhile costs, but if we seek out the most cost-effective opportunities to accomplish our desires, then we’ll see the necessity of money spent when it’s required. There is a tendency for many of us to see how much is typically spent, think that’s what it costs to get read, and throw money into the void, not really understanding how any of this works.

A good cover will help close a sale. Editing will increase satisfaction with our work and encourage repeat sales, but there’s no sale to close if we don’t put the right readers in front of our books.

Here’s the business-minded problem with all that. If I’m selling a product, I bring to market the MVP—minimal viable product. I’m not waiting to make it perfect and then launching it to no sales. I take an early iteration and see if people buy and get feedback. Based on that, I make changes and new iterations.

This is the formula that makes sense to me as novelists, once we’ve built up our email list. We make the book as good as we can on our own. Our best editing. Our best cover. Keep our expenses low and sell direct to our list. These are direct-sale exclusives, offered before the book launches wide, and we make a big deal of that. As we approach the wide launch, we encourage our readers to be ready to leave reviews, and we decide whether the book requires additional expenditures. For the wide launch we consider buying a new cover and hiring an editor.

The wide launch is a big event in your newsletter, and the new cover will help solidify that idea.

The idea isn’t that we refuse to ever spend money, but that we choose wisely how we go about spending it and when.

Which brings me back to Bookmotion.

Upfront overhead costs: $54
Annual overhead costs: roughly $20
Bookfunnel annual costs: $300. Today that will become $600 and may reach $900 this week.
Advertising costs: starting soon at approx. $500 for the first 100 days.

Bookfunnel isn’t counted as overhead as that’s the cost for us to participate in these promotions. I’m separating promotional and advertising costs from overhead.

Revenue thus far:
$500 angel donation
$560 Bookfunnel client sign-ups
$240 paid or trial Bookmotion members, accounted for annually.

Again, many thanks to our angel donor which will allow us to advertise at the desired level for the first 3 months, but also frees up funds to expand our Bookfunnel offering.

Thanks to that angel donation, there is no better time to be a part of Bookmotion than right now. If you choose the Managed Bookfunnel option, you’re not only getting the BF promotions at a 20% savings, your participating in free advertising.

Managed clients also get a larger spread at Bookmotion. Spreads for two authors are already up. More to come.

If you’re a Bookmotion-only member, your advertising dollar is working up to 30-times its normal strength thanks to our cooperative effort, coupled with the donation.

If you already use Bookfunnel and wish you were working with us, instead, DM me, and let’s discuss your situation.

The Journey

My journey began with a failed newsletter promoting books promotions. I was hosting another author and myself on Bookfunnel and wanted to host others, but I was limited to 2 pen-names with a standard membership. I offered managed services at the time but only had one person interested, which was not a viable option. She asked me to keep her mind.

That was then. Now I’m providing managed services to over a dozen clients and couple that with Bookmotion.pro, a website that pools our resources to advertise our lead-magnets and discounted books to Facebook and Bookbub, all for less than the cost of Bookfunnel as a nonprofit service to my paid subscribers.

I’ll share my journey so you can learn the lessons I learned.

My journey began again when I discovered Whop.com which helps create a shell for your business so that it’s units aren’t publicly available and you can charge for use. At began work on a course, thinking I’d host it there.

My intent at Literary Salon is to be open about everything I learn, from both successes and failures, in growing a newsletter and selling books as a self-published author. I realized that building a product was becoming part of my system. I would need to teach how to build and offer a digital product, and I didn’t want to be in a position where the only digital product I’d ever built was the course teaching you how to build one. I needed another product.

Based on something a friend had said weeks before, I looked into the possibility of building a promotion site based on PayHip and SendFox. PayHip doesn’t charge up front, and SendFox allows you to collect up to three mailing lists for free. I paid a one-time fee of $49 to expand that indefinitely.

The product I put together looked promising, and I went to the community at Literary Salon looking for beta testers.

People didn’t come running.

We had a couple of people sign up, and then a few more. It was slow getting anyone to submit a reader-magnet though.

Once I finally had a few books up, and everything seemed in working order, I offered up the first round paid membership. I received just enough interest to be in trouble. People had paid money, but I didn’t have the resources yet to pay for advertising. I fell into panic and dread as I researched options to make this work on a small scale while I waited for more people to join.

And then I remembered that old idea about managed Bookfunnel accounts.

I returned to my original client, and she was still interested. Another author, stirred by the progress with Bookmotion, signed on as a Bookfunnel client. I was able to offer promotions as a stop-gap solution while working to build Bookmotion. In the meantime, I put all other interested parties on a waiting list.

Then I realized, at PayHip, some authors’ books were no longer connected to their mailing list. I quickly realized that PayHip would only connect to the most recent ten, and after that, mailing lists just dropped away.

Uncool PayHip. Uncool.

This was another moment of panic. I solved the issue by building a front-site using Google sites and connecting that to multiple PayHip sites and multiple SendFox accounts. It was an ugly, cumbersome solution. I needed something better.

Now, when I say ugly, I don’t mean Google sites. That surprised me. I had discounted it a first, refusing to give it consideration, but it proved to be exactly what I needed.

I put together a mini-course teaching people to how to connect SendFox to their own PayHip stores. I thought maybe that was the solution to this ungainly collection of accounts. If that’s something you need, the course is free, and you can cherry pick what lessons you are relevant. 

The next thing to happen was a butterfly flapped its wings. I tell you, if I’ve ever experienced the butterfly effect, this was that moment.

In the chat, a client reached out, saying that they’d entered the waiting list in time to take advantage of an early-access promotion but had never been given that early access.

That thread in the chat changed everything, and how do you predict such a thing? How do you replicate it? You can’t. It’s a random spark that sets the world ablaze — but in a good way.

I apologized, but I was hesitant to give the link now because I was out of room on Bookfunnel, my stop-gap solution. I didn’t want to bring him on only for nothing to happen.

At that same time, I was delivering another batch of subscribers, a much bigger batch than before. People were getting excited.

The next morning, I dropped the news. If you weren’t paying for Bookfunnel Managed services, you were in danger of being rotated out. Let me know if you wanted to secure your spot, I said. Two things happened because of that announcement. One, people who had a taste of growth didn’t want it taken away from and quickly announce they wanted to sign up. Two, an angel reached out with the offer of a no-strings-attached donation to help the startup get off the ground.

That surge of customers and investment gave the effort the funds it needed to begin advertising, but the system still needed a simpler solution. I found it, once more, with Google. Now the Google site leads you to a Google form when you select a book. The form sends the collected email to a Google sheet which I share with the author. The form’s thank you page provides a link to my PayHip store (just one store) where the book is only visible to those who have the link.

They download the book, and everyone is happy.

The next step is to expand into discount books and storefronts for my authors. I hope we’ll see you there: Bookmotion.pro.

Be well,

— Thaddeus Thomas

To join Bookmotion, you can click here.

Bookmotion Pricing

Remember that you must be a Founding-Level Member of Literary Salon to participate, but I’ll upgrade you for a months-long free trial.

The $5 Plan: five dollars every month.

The Yearly Plan: $50 for the year.

Bookfunnel Management: $80 a year. Availability limited. Contact me for information. You cannot sign up for this feature unless I send you the enrollment form personally.

To join Bookmotion, you can click here.