Behind the Scenes of a DIY Book Launch (Part 1)

Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4

When a friend of mine went to publish his book, he was faced with two questions. How does one make money from a book? How does one create a market for a book?
Actually, he approached the second question like so: How does one create a marketing campaign for little or no money up front and still reach enough of an audience to culminate in ‘Brand Awareness’? Answering this question correctly was particularly important as he was selling a book on brand awareness. He solved the puzzle, and remained in Amazon’s top ten best-sellers for an entire week. He even continues to sustain sales online, as a residual from the media he put into place during the book launch. Before I tell you how he solved the puzzle, I’ll have to explain all the pieces.

To begin, celebrity is a basic metric in an attention economy. A certain level of celebrity is that same level of latent attention. He already had a modicum of celebrity, and that celebrity was narrowly focused into a specific community. By working with a number of friends who’d been established in the marketing community, he quickly made a name for himself as the guy smuggling secrets out of advertising agencies and into the hands of entrepreneurs.

Network online marketing, where the real question in the restaurants and back hallways in between seminar sessions is “How big is your list?” (Meaning “How many people are subscribed to your double-opt in newsvertisment emails you send out?”) Working a reputation within such a community could be likened to a kind of high-stakes poker without cards. Money is generated overnight, re-invested into the next big seminar, the next killer script, or the next infoproduct. There are infoproducts now on how to make infoproducts within a complete back-end in as little as a month, how-tos on how to write a book in six weeks. And these products are expensive, with even more expensive one-on-one coaching sessions in the deluxe packages. The pricing structure seems arcane, corresponding to a tested metric of trial after trial, and marketers seem to have settled on ending all product prices in sevens last time I surveyed the field. $97 and $197 dollar ebooks are commonplace. $497 packages are out there, as are $1,297 and $1,497 seminars and home study courses. Some seminars can go for as much as $30,000 for three days.

Just a quick glance at the “infoproduct” label on google video shows a number of amature commercials for a bewildering array of creation tactics for information packaging. Specifically, something like a four-dvd, 1 cd-rom home study course on Removing a Target’s Resistance to Persuasion, consisting of about 2.5 hours of video footage and a 50 page four-part pdf goes for about $247.00. A 1 book, 1 workbook, 3 audio CD set on creativity goes for $47, and with dvd, will be $97. A 2-binder, 4 audio cd, 10 dvd home study course on high-speed real estate investing can go for $1,497.00. It’s not about the cost of the materials in this culture, it’s about the perceived value of the information. The entrepreneur community is tightly knit, a series of interconnected network alliances that if modeled in 3-d would resemble so much heaped spaghetti (made of wormholes). Drop a product in front of the right person and thousands of people might hear about it within an hour, as long as the affiliate pay-off looks good enough.

To this community, with their mastery of evaluation of information, my friend brought the information he was selling as an ebook, along with a series of interviews and an exclusive community to those who purchased his ebook. The book was a .pdf, and he sold it for a considerable amount of money. However, his only overhead was the coding he paid for and the hosting fees. He also paid a hefty teleconference fee to record those conversations back then, but this cost can now be bypassed. A group of Iowa telcos have made high charges for recording teleconference interviews a thing of the past, and if he did this today he’d have an incredibly minimal outlay to achieve the same results, further increasing his profits. This was when his book first debuted, and most of the money on the book that he would make via direct sales came from selling the .pdf e-book at this time. The launch of the physical book wouldn’t be about making money as much as it would be about driving traffic, and I’ll explain what I mean in the final part of this four-part expose’.

First, about the people that actually learned something from the book, and the community. See, this is where things take a direction in book marketing that wasn’t really available twenty years ago. Those people who implemented the technology they got from his teaching went on to substantially increase their returns in the quarters that followed, and they had created a sort of platform of awareness within the larger community. He then went on to use this platform as a stage to broaden his audience within the internet marketing community, through attending seminars, meeting people, discussing joint ventures, and just generally entertaining and training a lot of people along the way. Even more important, these interactions gave him enough interactions with enough people to know with whom he could comfortably work. Online social networks, be they a formal arrangement of profiles and message boards, or more free form networks of CC’ed email correspondence and blog rolls or chat rooms, provide a unique testing ground for finding personality matches for potential joint ventures. When those are expanded into social meeting grounds, some curious alliances form.

I theorize that an idea needs to be fully represented both abstractly and concretely,to be replicable most effectively, or, to rephrase, to be modeled, and reproduced, an idea must exist in all possible permutations from abstract idea to digital form, to a physical presence, be that a book or a building, but something that signifies back to the pure abstract form of the ideal in it’s physical make-up. Without getting too esoteric here, I was able to watch the community that had manifested around the abstract and digital forms come together in a physical space, and create a documentary out of that that, while being created prior to the physical book, will go on to inform that book’s presence and the ideas bound up within it.

With the sale of an online book being followed by another release event of the physical book, one vector of this theory is in play. Another vector is that of creative representation by way of analogy and metaphor of the idea vs. that of analytical, quantitative, qualitative, and technically engineered approach to the idea. Again, the space the idea takes up is crafted through media to play out as effectively as possible across as many media forms, with as little overhead expenditure as possible. My vantage point was a chance to see two vectors cross as at the point thus delineated a product was created. Watching my friend transition from the place where he had a successful ebook to having a published book accessible at any Borders, Barnes & Noble, Amazon Online or two-bit Carroll’s in backwater Kansas was one hell of a learning experience.

An author spends years learning and distilling ideas and knowledge into a few hundred pages, then spends a few weeks, perhaps as much as a month on the radar, if they are lucky. Those with the best luck manage to retain a modicum of celebrity, a few units of potential attention, potential reputation with which to leverage awareness on down the line. The more books an author sells, usually the more celebrity they then accrue. I have come to the conclusion that people are addicted to exposure to celebrity, enough so that they’ve gone and fragmented that economy as well as the primary one that floats on debt capital, which means everything is more or less an illusion, as far as reality is concerned. Onward through. It’s all an allusion to something else, everything is a metaphor, and in the new economy appearance is everything. “How big is your list” is the only question that matters.

Links:


Wikipedia | Attention Economy


Michael H. Goldhaber: The Attention Economy: The Natural Economy of the Net


Joe Matheny: The Attention Economy: Is the Marketing World Ready for a New Consumer Culture?


Jon Udell: Attention Economics