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MARKETING

Joe · 2022-06-21T17:25:05Z

“I’M YOUR NUMBER ONE FAN”: THE IMPORTANCE OF GENERATING THE RIGHT FAN BASE. Is there such a thing as a ‘wrong’ fan base? Surely ALL fans are good, correct? Correct! BUT not all fans are buyers. Let’s look at Facebook as a functioning example of: ‘Fanbase in waiting’. I have looked at the friend lists of hundreds of horror authors. Most of them have friend lists operating at less than 50% capacity and encompass their personal lives and writing lives. The ‘Friend List’ can take a maximum of 5,000 people, so let’s assume that your profile isn’t directed at real life friends and family, but is under a pen-name and solely for your writing pursuits. You’ve spent a long time in various groups and successfully networked, building that friend list to where you’ve maxed that sucker out at the 5K so all is good. People really like you. You release your first book. 5,000 potential customers, am I right? Okay, no, I’m not, because Facebook won’t let you reach them without paid advertising, BUT even if it allowed all 5,000 to see your book release and you post twice a day so you can drop night and day, there’d still be the potential for you to sell fewer than a dozen copies, hell, it’s even possible that you’d sell NONE. Why a dozen? Because there are various limiting factors, such as recent reports which show that adults in the United States averaged 33 minutes each day on Facebook.I’d be willing to bet that not all the 5,000 people on your friend list are writers, which will present the possibility that they have no product to promote, and so their need to spend time on Facebook integrating with authors is possible shorter than that of a writer. So why a dozen copies? Well, there are no solid statistics for this because of the difficulty in calculating on a case-by-case basis, so I am now going to do the dangerous thing of making assumptions based on my own observations within the Facebook Get Writing Horror group and others which I own or Administrate. When someone who is reasonably popular within the Get Writing Horror group makes a ‘general subject’ post, i.e. nothing majorly controversial, they’ll perhaps generate 10 likes and 6 written responses from other members. A controversial post can treble that number and generate 100 responses in the conversation thread. The same person can go on the Get Reading Horror group, post a link to their first book release, and get a couple of ‘likes’, maybe one or two ‘Good luck’ messages, perhaps even have their post shared, but it’s equally likely that they face tumbleweeds as so many actually do. Someone who interacts far more, has become deeply involved with various others and supports the community, will fare somewhat better, they can get double the amount of interest in their posts on Get Writing Horror, and could even generate a few sales on Get Reading Horror based on the closer relationships they have built on Get Writing Horror, I say that because there’s hardly any conversational interaction on Get Reading Horror as it falls into the trap that most author groups do; it gets viewed primarily as a billboard to advertise books on. For those of you who are wondering about the difference, Get Writing Horror has no book promotion. Get Reading Horror allows it. What it boils down to is that the friendships built in a group which does not allow book-promotion are greater by volume and stronger than those on what are basically ‘marketing’ platforms. Who uses marketing platforms? People who want to shift products. Who else? Buyers, but most buyers don’t go to Facebook groups to buy books, they’ll Google them or search on Amazon. Who isn’t using a marketing platform? People who want to interact with friends. There is, however, always an exception to the rule, and in this case, it’s the ‘Books of Horror’ group. At the time of writing, that group has 22,000 members. It has a lot of conversations with members recommending the books they have read, which is an important distinction as it’s not full of authors giving the ‘hard sell’ of their own work, it’s a group full of readers using the best advertising tool that there is… Word of Mouth. There are, of course, writers in the group, but the instances of them pushing their own work are much less than other people talking about the books. It’s a fact that the interactions in that group have generated considerable sales. My dangerous assumption is that any well-liked newcomer with basic interaction in groups stands to make a potential dozen sales on release. I’ve seen many people complain about far fewer sales and even zero, and some members have done rather well, but they seem to be in the minority. It is actually far more common to see much more popular members who spend a large amount of time socialising without plugging product achieving higher sales. They usually have a much tighter group of more constant friends, some of whom are ‘fans’ and some of those develop into ‘Superfans’. A casual acquaintance in a group probably won’t b...