Learn from my Bookmotion Mistakes

All the issues I've faced thus far

A bad idea might be a good idea in another context.

In this case, it was an issue of scale. I’d previously wanted to purchase a publisher’s account at Bookfunnel so I could help other writers grow. The idea then was to carry a few paying clients who would enable me to afford the package, and then I’d rotate in authors who were telling me they couldn’t afford Bookfunnel. Only, I didn’t have enough interest on the client side… it was a large amount of work… and it wasn’t scalable.

I was emotionally invested in the idea but had to let it go. At least, I though I did. In truth, a variation on the concept was about to save me from an early mistake in building and promoting Bookmotion.

I’ll put this section in a block quote, in case you’ve heard it before.

Literary Salon has a problem. It’s a lot of information, thrown at you really quickly. It can be confusing for members who actually want to implement what I write about. The scope and depth of what I cover here has proven overwhelming to my most dedicated readers.

My solution is to build an online course. When ready, it will take subscribers through the journey from being an ineffectual self-publisher to becoming a radically independent author. It will be organized and systematic, available to follow at your own pace, and only open to my paid subscribers here at Literary Salon.

Now, the point of what I’m doing here is to walk the journey myself and then teach you what I’ve done. The course is a product I will be offering my mailing list to increase the value of what I offer. It wasn’t just a solution to my problem, it was to become part of my process. As such, I needed to include it in my teaching.

This created another issue. I didn’t want to teach you how to build and offer a product, when the only product I’d ever offered was the course I’d built, teaching you how to offer it. I needed to walk the walk.

It was

Jenna B. Neece

who first suggested that Payhip could be used to mimic Bookfunnel, but the idea didn’t resonate with me at the time. The Bookfunnel business plan wouldn’t translate well, and with the work involved, I was better off paying for Bookfunnel than trying to build my own.

Now that I needed a product, I thought about what she’d said.

I was looking at whop.com as the home for my course, and Whop provides a shell for you to be able to charge for products you build outside of what they offer. I could offer a promotion page at Payhip and use Whop to collect fees and pull all the customer-side pieces together. I built a form on Jotform to collect book information. I opened a Box account to create files I could share with my authors, and I purchased the tier-1 plan at Sendfox so I could collect emails, create automated emails, and correspond with all my authors at once.

The only additional part I needed was the means to drive traffic to the promotion page. Following Bookfunnel’s example would be unsustainable. Those promotions have to change constantly because they depend on the audience of its participants. The offerings grow stale. So at Bookfunnel, every promotion exists for a brief period of time, and then you start again with a new group. I needed a solution that could drive an ever-fresh flow of traffic so the offerings could remain the same.

My solution was Facebook ads, paid for by the pool of funds from Bookmotion members. Each member would pay very little, but the combined ad spend could be significant with enough participants.

At this point, I was still under the delusion that Bookmotion would drive a profit, and I offered Jenna 50% for handling the manual part of the on-boarding. Thankfully, she declined, not being able to commit to the work. I say thankfully, because Bookmotion won’t generate a profit. Its funds will be used for ads, and my gain from the product will be in limiting future members to paid Literary Salon subscribers.

An additional point of personal gain will be in my own subscriber growth, with the Literary Salon offering being promoted as a cross-sell with any book chosen.

When all the pieces were in place and I conducted tests with beta users, I opened Bookmotion to paying users, and that was a mistake. It could have been a really big mistake and damaged my hard-won reputation in the community. In those initial days, I was in a panic.

My initial group of paying customers lacked the scale necessary to make the ad strategy work. I’d quickly burn through what few resources we had, with no guarantee of results, and any additional ad spend would come out of my own pocket. Suddenly, I was facing the possibility of losing money and the trust and goodwill I’d built.

Maybe it doesn’t seem so bad from the outside. If worse came to worse, I could have refunded payments made, and entrepreneurs succeed because they allow themselves room to fail. Intellectually, I can agree with all of that.

Emotionally, all my hours of work were about to be undermined because I’d underestimated the difficulty in drawing customers, no matter how promising the premise.

And the premise behind Bookmotion was solid. I just needed away to get from where I was to where I needed to be.

Then I remembered my original plan to become a Bookfunnel micro-publisher. The idea that had no scale potential was the perfect stop-gap for the idea that only worked on scale. I bought the upgrade and gave Bookmotion a waiting list so I could gather new members without them having to pay until I was ready to move forward.

Now, I have member books in a Bookfunnel promotion with another gearing up to star. Adding to my six paying customers, I now have ten on the waiting list. It’s shy of my goal, but it’s enough that I can start planning how soon to bring people off the waiting list. This is going to work.

I was helped along by a client who hired me to handle Bookfunnel for her. Today, that became a client list of two. At $80 a year, it’s not something you’d do as a business, but it gives me room to work Bookmotion without operating at a deficit—which helps with sustaining my wife’s trust and good will.

It’s not the money I’m worried about. We’re talk about small amounts here, but I have to prove to myself (and I feel like I have to prove to my wife) that this isn’t like my last foray in self-publishing which saw a lot of money going out and very little coming in. This time, I need a knowledgeable, disciplined approach using methods I can actually follow.

And yes, all of this is about succeeding as a self-published author, but that no longer means trying to earn a pat on the back from Amazon. I’m building and nurturing and audience, establishing relationships, and figuring out how I can bring the value necessary to earn paid subscriptions.

The ironic part is that I’ve already refunded more in paid subscriptions than was at risk with this venture. I can tell you why I did that, and for most people, those reasons would be excuses covering for the self doubt we all face. Few of us feel worthy of those surprise paid subscriptions. It’s probably not uncommon to worry that someone upgraded by mistake. If our places were reversed, I’d tell you to believe in yourself and accept the payment.

One factor convinces me that refunding those early subscriptions was the right choice. Unlike you, I’m writing this newsletter, and its very nature merited suspicion and doubt from the moment I introduced the Right-Reader Method. I carry a burden of proof that most newsletters don’t. The way my non-fiction counterparts overcome that burden of proof is to point to the money they made on Medium and hope that warrants faith they can help you achieve financial success on Substack.

My journey is my proof, not my past but my present. I had to refund those subscriptions. I had to give paid subscriptions away for free—and for those who were here at the beginning and formed the community that gave any of this a chance, that meant free for life.

Other Mistakes and Issues

So, the first mistake was a failure to test my ability to bring in enough customers to scale immediately into an ability to purchase ads and keep those early customers satisfied. What I should have done was introduce the waiting list from the very beginning.

Because I was desperately trying to figure out how to overcome that first error, I was slow to communicate to customers after they’d submitted their files. This was another mistake. I now have a welcome email automation. It’s not fully automated but close enough. I’m also in a place where I can bring people on before they’re charged, which reduces stress for everyone, I hope. Even when the risk point is low or non-existent, communication is key.

I’ll include the next one, even though I don’t classify it as a mistake. The interplay of Payhip and Sendfox had one draw back. Payhip offered the download immediately, but Sendfox required a double opt-in. This meant readers could download the book without ever confirming their email address.

I developed a solution but it was clunky, and I hated it. It was the one ugliness about the whole customer experience, but one of the smart things I did was continue to run tests to prove the process. I noticed that I’d collected the emails that weren’t confirmed in a double opt-in, Sendfox simply wouldn’t send these unconfirmed addresses emails unless I upgraded.

That was fine. I didn’t need Sendfox to do anything. These emails were for downloading and uploading on Substack, and testing that out proved that Substack accepted the emails.

A double opt-in is wonderful, but it wasn’t worth the ugliness I’d introduced to the system. I stripped all that away. Now readers are given the files right away, and we get the email address. It’s elegant and pretty, and I love it.

Another issue that wouldn’t be classified as a mistake came to my attention by way of my bookstore. I’ve been using Laterpress, and as customer noted how difficult it was to covert the epub file into something he could use on Kindle. I see no solution on Laterpress and am planning to leave the platform as a result. On Payhip, however, I can offer multiple files.

To avoid similar difficulties with our readers, I have members submit an epub file, and I convert those so the reader can download an epub, a Kindle file, or a mobi file. They can have all three if they want. That way, we know they have access to a file that will work in their reader.

Marketing was another issue. It’s easy to think advice applies to me when I’m nowhere near that level of operation. After the first five customers came onboard, I spent too much time and effort playing with pricing strategies. It’s good marketing advice, but we have to figure out what really applies.

For example, this weekend, I announced that anyone who joined the waiting list before the end of September would be given early access to Bookmotion, even while they were still on the waiting list. That strategy worked and immediately resulted in a surge of people signing on.

I hope insight to the mistakes and issues I’ve faced proves helpful when the time comes to pursue your own products, and if that stage seems very far off, don’t worry. The course should be ready by then.

—Thaddeus Thomas

Click the image to see Bookmotion’s growth and join the waiting list at whop.com/bookmotion.