Selling Books on Substack

and Don't Write about Writing about Writing on Substack

Today’s article is in two parts.

• Selling Books on Substack

• Don’t Write about Writing about Writing on Substack

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Selling Books on Substack

I’m a mess. It’s Friday night, and I’ve been working on this article all week. The writing didn’t take that long; a version of this could have gone out last Tuesday. What took the time was the implementation, and tonight is the first experiment with the new system. I’m as nervous as if this were book launch or opening night at the theater, and the only thing at risk is 3-5 click-throughs from my post to the bookstore.

It all begins with the four power points of the sell:

• Traffic

• Conversion

• Purchase

• Retention

Traffic is everyone who reads a note or a free post. There’s gray area here. There’s conversion to becoming a follower or a free subscriber, but that’s still traffic if we’re focusing on moving someone to actually forfeit money for our work

Yes, I’ve refunded all my paid subscribers, but that doesn’t mean earning a buck here isn’t a goal for me. It is.

The current focus is on selling books. So, in this case, conversion happens when someone leaves my post to enter my digital bookstore. I’ve spent the week getting the bookstore ready and fixing the mistakes I noted in my earlier tease…

I’ve been calling the bookstore marketing copy a “tease” because I was using a sample from a book to tease readers to visit the store. I’ve moved away from that tonight, and the term sounds funny now.

I’ve been anxious about whether my efforts would be more or less successful than the tease I included with the short story earlier in the week.

To wrap up the seller’s four power points, purchase is anything that requires someone to give us money, and Retention is about keeping purchasers as a paid subscriber or book buyer.

My thoughts today will deal strictly with conversion.

What do we need to do get that first bookstore browser?

• Have a bookstore

• Provide inviting means for readers to visit the bookstore directly from the post.

I added those on August 23rd, and of the 233 views of my latest short story, 4 people clicked through to the bookstore.

The fact that anyone visited the store is a milestone, but is three people a reasonable click-through rate?

I needed a real measurement standard, and I found that in “likes.” The lowest bar of interaction is to click the like button, and 23 people have done that. That's roughly a little less than 10% of views.

17.4% of the people who clicked “like” visited the store. I think that’s a good rate, but it could have been better if I hadn’t made one specific mistake. The book I was teasing is the same one I’m using as a reader magnet. The 130+ new subscribers who received the book for free aren’t going to be tempted to visit the store because of it.

I don’t have data yet on what percentage of visitors to my store are likely to buy, but I’ve assumed 10% as a best-case scenario. My initial goal is to generate 10 browsers off of every post. If everything else stays the same, I’ll need to increase my free subscribers by 250%.

Traffic growth is an ongoing issue, but right now I need to look that components of this buyer funnel. I need good stories to draw in readers, and a strong invitation to improve conversion.

I did some brainstorming, and this is what I came up with:

• Consider sales. Should the book I'm teasing be offered at a discount?

• I'm teasing a novel that many new subscribers have downloaded for free. That's a mistake.

• I need to upload a new book, one with the greatest chance for broad appeal, and have it discounted by at 50% for a long as it's the book being teased.

I also need to provide a path to success for selling books once I have a sufficient number of people in the store.

I reworked my basic pricing policy, and brainstormed additional changes I needed to make. This is what I come up with:

• I need to add more books. Everything needs to be available.

• Anything I'm promoting in welcome emails needs to point to the bookstore and not Bookfunnel. That means I need to make those books available for free at the bookstore.

• I'll be hosting $1 book sales through Bookfunnel and giving books away to build my subscriber list. Those need to point to the bookstore. I can price the books I intend to use at $1.

• The yearly subscription price for the novella series now matches the price for a single novel. With free access to the first book, I believe that’s is a winning offer. It stays.

• I'm currently offering the Right-Reader Method at the Thaddeus Thomas bookstore, but I'll take that down. That mini-book is being used to secure new subscribers, and eventually Literary Salon will have its own bookstore.

Then I went to work implementing my ideas because I wanted to talk about what I’d done instead of what I planned to do. In that process, I came up with the ideas that resulted in the new version of tonight’s invitation. (A much better word than teaser.)

First, as a rule, work against the sales system you choose as little as possible. Use the tools it provides, and if those won’t suffice, use a different platform.

I worried that I made a mistake in choosing Laterpress. I’ll be using PayHip for Literary Salon, and they allow for some sophisticated sales operations. Laterpress doesn’t, but it does offer subscriptions—two types, actually. First, it offers a general subscription that will include everything your publish, except for the series, which have their own subscription. I enabled the general subscription, and labeled it for Super-Fans.

Today, it occurred to me to promote the Super-Fan subscription (and other options) instead of a specific book. I scrambled to get the store done and the new invitation complete before the first issue of serial released.

About 75 views in, I noticed my first mistake and corrected it. I’d included the price in the invitation. I’m understanding now another mistake I made. The invitation focuses on the features not the benefits—the emotion.

I’ve made other changes since: focused more on emotion; talk about one of the books.

I’ll run another version of the invitation on Sunday night’s short story and see how that compares.

In the meantime, you can check out the first chapter of Kraken in a Coffee Cup.

Kraken in a Coffee Cup: 1

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And visit our newest promotion. 25 books to choose from:

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This one’s short!

Don’t Write About Writing About Writing on Substack

We need to travel beyond our own gravitational pull to reach the broader reading public, and we’re often reminded that means we have to stop writing about writing, marketing, and the secrets of success on Substack.

Because readers don’t care.

I took those lessons to heart and began my work here with a focus on securing non-writer readers who are inclined toward the themes which dominate your writing. I resisted any hint of growth or monetization, going as far as attempting to cross promote with someone focused on those subjects. We weren’t of interest because of our focus on fiction, so the promotion proved to be strictly one-way.

At that point, I let loose the final restraints and wrote what I wanted to write. If you feel compelled to so the same, you have a couple of options. I’ve done both.

You can start your own devoted Substack to the subjects of writing and marketing on Substack, or you can guest post here.

I don’t recommend the first unless it’s worth what you sacrifice, and I’ll get to that in a moment.

What I do recommend is running an author site and a nonfiction newsletter. The reasons why are laid our in the Right-Reader Method. If you were to run a Substack dedicated to the art and/or business of writing, that would be in addition to everything else. That’s what I do. I have my author site, two nonfiction sites, and this.

So what do I mean by sacrifice? Well, I gave all my time to this project. My non-Substack reading came to a screeching stop, and I wasn’t working on my novels. I’m developing a healthier, broader approach now, and figuring out how to optimize my time. Toward that end, I’ve consolidated some projects so they’re all under one roof.

If meta writing is important to you the way the Literary Salon is important to me, go for it. My focus is on the business of writing, and I’m particularly interested in the growth of art-focused meta sites. Currently, I recommend checking out

Dan Lyndon

’s Storystack, and especially his series on the Dramatic Problem.

Otherwise, be careful. Know your goals and be sure your efforts are moving you toward those goals. If that goal is selling the fiction you write, don’t let Substack get in the way of your reading and writing.

I have something to prove so two nonfiction Substacks make sense. In most cases, you’ll want to keep it simple. One author site and one nonfiction.

One gentleman expressed his concern to me that he couldn’t manage the second site and write his fiction. I suggested he hold off a month on creating the nonfiction site but go ahead and work one article a week into his schedule. At the end of the month, he’d have and idea if the schedule could work. If so, he can begin the new Substack with a backlog of articles, if not, he can run the articles on his author site.

If you’re not going to run your own meta site, but you just have to write a meta article now and then, you have two options. You can run them on your author site, anyway, even though you know the material in that newsletter needs to be focused on your readers’ interests, or you can guest post here. If you choose that latter route, you’ll be reaching an audience with a taste for that material and you can (and should) includes links back to your own site(s) so they can follow you there.

—Thaddeus Thomas

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And now…

Become a Super Fan! (or just grab the book of your choice)

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• Download anything and everything in the bookstore

• Get early access to the dog-in-space novella, Warp & Woof. It releases to Super Fans a full week before anyone else can get it!

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There’s no feeling in the world like a bookstore—and when it’s a single-author bookstore where you’re buying directly from the writer, that’s a magic all its own.

Public Domain Photo by Alexandre Duret-Lutz

Steampunk Cleopatra: From the title I was expecting swashbuckling adventures against a vaguely Egyptian backdrop, but instead I found a finely crafted and exhaustively researched work of historical fiction, full of mesmerizing detail. The book is studded with details that make the world seem richer and slightly more unfamiliar than you'd expect. These are embedded in a story of palace intrigue, scholarly curiosity and - most importantly - several very different kinds of love.