Lean Publishing for Beginner Authors, With Orna Ross and Dan Parsons: Foundational Self-Publishing Podcast

In this episode: lean publishing for beginner authors. If you’re an author who writes for pleasure, you can write for yourself but if you’re an indie author, you're also a publisher, and so your book(s) must also please readers. Lean publishing is one way of achieving that, using social media or other methods to publish a book-in-progress and, based on reader feedback and digital metrics, improve its chances of success as you write.

Join ALLi Director Orna Ross and Production Manager Dan Parsons as they discuss how authors can publish books, the lean way.

This podcast is brought to you by specialist sponsor Dartfrog Books. ALLi Partner Member DartFrog Books provides indie authors with opportunities for bookstore placement and promotion to more than 27,000 book clubs. Their self-publishing, hybrid,  traditional, and single-service publishing platforms are designed to engage authors of all types, at every stage of their journey. We'd like to thank Dartfrog for their support of this podcast.

And, if you haven’t already, we invite you to join our organization and become a self-publishing ally. You can do that at http://allianceindependentauthors.org.

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Show Notes

• K-Lytics
• Publisher Rocket
• Lean Book Publishing: How to Drastically Increase Success Rates by Publishing Books the Lean Way (Sabrina Ricci blog)
• Write to Market (Chris Fox)

About the Hosts

Orna Ross writes and publishes historical fiction, inspirational poetry, and nonfiction guides for authors. She is director of the Alliance of Independent Authors.

Read the Transcript: Lean Publishing

Orna Ross: Hello. Good evening from London, and welcome to the Alliance of Independent Authors podcast, our weekly podcast. This week, we are on our foundational level for beginners, people who are starting out in this wonderful world of self-publishing. I am here with ALLi production manager and all-around indie author supremo, Dan Parsons. Hi, Dan.

Dan Parsons: Hi, Orna. Hi, everyone.

Orna Ross: So, yeah, this evening we're going to be talking, and I know it's probably not evening where you are but it's evening where we are, and it's very evening-ish because it's moved into November, so it's kind of dark here.

What is lean book publishing?

We're going to be talking about lean publishing, which is a term that's a bit of a buzzword in the community at the moment, being passed around quite a bit, and there's a little bit of confusion about what it actually means. So, some people think, quite logically think, when they hear the term lean publishing, they think it's about budget-conscious publishing, if you like, keeping things as lean and as tight as possible, and that is, I guess, one definition.

But that's not quite what we're talking about here this evening. It is one of those publishing-jargon words that has quite a specific meaning. So, do you want to have a go at a definition, Dan?

Dan Parsons: I can give my definition at least, yeah. So, lean publishing is essentially a way to produce content by looking for an audience first, to ensure that you actually have a product that aligns with an audience before you invest a lot of money. So, it can stop you from wasting a ton of money. It sort of takes the luck element out of it, because we all know lots of authors, and I think ourselves included probably, who have created books in the past, spent lots and lots of money on covers, we've done editing, and we've not really thought about the audience that it's going to align with. And what lean publishing does is it helps you to produce an initial book, fairly cheaply, budget conscious and all the rest of it, and then you can find an audience for that and then tweak the product to meet the audiences demand so that it maximizes your return as much as possible.

I know some people possibly think that takes a little bit of the art out of it, but we are publishers ultimately as well. So, you've got to think about, how am I going to produce a positive return on investment, because how else can you go full time?

Orna Ross: Yes, and I think there's a few things to be said about that. You're absolutely right about the art thing, and there are some people who are listening and going, ahh, this is completely cart before the horse kind of thing, completely the wrong way around, this isn't why I decided I wanted to do writing for my living, or for my pleasure.

So, we are not saying you have to do this, but we do want you to know that publishing is different now. And in the old days, you didn't have any choice, but to take a punt and put a book out there and see what happened, and kind of go from there, put out the full book in other words. And that was the end of the book, the book went, it either failed or succeeded. And in either case, you moved on to the next book and you didn't really learn very much; the book just went into the marketplace.

Sorry, were you going to say something?

What tools do indie authors have that make lean publishing easier?

Dan Parsons: Yeah. Well, one thing that we've got now, obviously that we wouldn't have had years ago is print-on-demand and digital publishing. So, whereas before you had to sort of hedge your bets on a book that you think will do well by getting a large print run at the start, whereas now you don't need to do that as much because you can bring out a product, it doesn't cost you anything really, other than some of the small investments that you make just to bring it to market in a readable state, and then you can always update the features without having to pulp 3000 copies of your book and then buy new ones. Updating an eBook doesn't cost anything, and updating a paperback is a minimal cost through Ingram and KDP print and places like that. So, we were in a state where we can move quite nimbly, especially as indie authors, because we don't have this history of having to have all of this upfront investment and all of the research done beforehand. We can do it on the fly and move quite nimble.

Orna Ross: Absolutely, and I think this is something that hasn't sunk in for authors, and particularly for people who are starting off. Very often when we come into indie publishing, we're carrying a lot of assumptions about how books are made. We assume we have to do a print run, loads of authors who join ALLi, every week, come in with the assumption, you know, some authors haven't even gotten around to thinking about eBooks or audiobooks, or don't fully understand the difference between print-on-demand and consignment.

So lean publishing, as a term, is a way for us to begin to understand that we have lots of different publishing options, and maybe to open our minds up a bit about what is possible for us as publishers. And I think the other thing to note about it is that publishing today is for authors, and the advantage that we have as indie authors is how close we can get to our readers, and how we can actually get their feedback and get their input into our books as we are making them, and that again is a terrific advantage that we didn't have before. And it's one to be grabbed because readers love it. They love being involved in the actual making of the book and it can be a really enriching experience for the author as well.

Dan Parsons: Yeah, I agree, and obviously we'll talk a little bit later on about the exact relationship you could have with readers to include them into your lean publishing, your schedule, if you wanted to do it that way as a regular process, or if you wanted to do it as a one-off, you can do it that way as well.

But we've also got other tools that don't directly correlate with us talking to readers, but they are tools that we've got now that we can see things that happen in the markets with the readers, without them needing to be involved. So, things like, you know, we can do some of the analysis beforehand to see if a book is going to take off before we actually even start producing the original product, to save some money. So, we can track the market using, I know there are some services out there, there's K-Lytics, which tracks a lot of the, I think it's just Amazon they do, I haven't downloaded one of the reports myself, but I know that they do in-depth Amazon reports where they say; this is a hungry genre, these are the estimated number of readers in this sub-genre, and this one is growing over a five-year period, this is how many sales you need to get to this rank, and these are the trending keywords for people who read in this sub-genre. And so, you can use that sort of data along the things like KDP Rocket, or I think it's called Publisher Rocket now, where you can find out what popular keywords that people are searching on Amazon, so you know that there's a demand for certain keywords and not for other ones.

So for example, if you're publishing a non-fiction book and you're thinking, oh, I'd like to write on a particular topic, you can find out what keywords you need in your title to gain enough of a momentum with leaders who are searching for those particular topics, and you could always find that the thing that you want to write about actually doesn't have a demand, because this isn't just about finding a gap in the market, because you don't just want to find a completely original idea, you want to find a hungry gap. So, there's nothing wrong with taking a new spin on an existing idea if it's going to get you a lot more readers.

Orna Ross: Yeah, and it's worth saying, I think, that it's easier, as with all book marketing around SEO and keywords and so on, it is easier for nonfiction to actually identify that hungry market, I think. With fiction and poetry, there's still going to be a little bit of gut reaction there, the keywords don't align necessarily as cleanly and as clearly as they do for nonfiction, but the essential point remains that looking at it this way around is a huge learning experience.

Even going into your large genre that you want to write in, and then looking at the sub-genres and the various ways in which they break down, can be a really useful exercise to do, and you can learn a huge amount about it. And then in terms of, if you do find something that you feel has a potential market, then you can test that. And I think the important thing to say is that books that are approached in this way, generally convert much better. They get more organic sales, they get a better return on investment all around, and there is that fan connection, they are far more likely to actually connect with, you're actively doing the job of connecting with what people want, rather than what you want, and so, you're more in service mode. So, yeah, if you can make the sort of mental shift.

Dan Parsons: What you can actually do, just to go back to your point on poetry, because obviously it's a little bit more difficult with keywords for poetry, because there's not necessarily a niche sub-genre for different poetry genres, because there's just not a huge market for that, and there also aren't different reader demographics that you can really track very well with poetry. What you can do is look for keywords based on feel or theme, for poetry, and I found that things like, with research I've done in the past, I found that poetry that makes you happy is much, much more highly searched than any other type of poetry. So, I think people, you know, if you're looking purely from a data perspective, they want quite upbeat, different poetry, because I think a lot of poetry tends to be introspective and very deep and morose. Whereas, clearly there's an untapped market for people who just want happy poetry that they can sort of read on the loo once a day to set them up for the day, or something like that. So yeah, it doesn't necessarily have to be about sub-genre.

Orna Ross: That's very un-poetic.

Dan Parsons: I mean, some of the {inaudible} poetry is not poetic so, you know.

Orna Ross: No, I'm kidding.

Dan Parsons: But, yeah, so there's lots of things you can look into.

Orna Ross: Yeah, that's really interesting, because you and I have done a bit of this in the very recent past, looking at poetry, and looking at the keywords that actually sell, as opposed to the ones that, we, or I, thought might sell. When we actually looked into it, there were some interesting keywords, weren't there, that really you would never probably think of if you didn't do that research.

Dan Parsons: And even keyword strands. So, you can look into things like long sentences, do you think, you know, that's hardly ever searched, but when you find out it's actually, there's a huge number of people who have a similar track brain, so they must be searching the same sorts of things.

So yeah, you can actually find long strands of keywords that other authors wouldn't necessarily be targeting because, you know, why would they with a long set of keywords? You think a really popular single keyword would be a stronger choice, but yeah, often you can find that there are these things that people want very specifically, and lots of people want the same thing.

But yeah, you should probably start with data, if you're looking into analysing the data before you produce something. But then also, once you've produced your initial book, there's a concept in Silicon Valley called Minimum Viable Product, and this is what Facebook did, where they basically brought out the Facebook, the original version, and then pitched it to students in the Harvard campus, I think it was. And then based on user feedback at the time, quickly made iterations to make it better, because that's probably better than trying to create an end product, taking a lot longer to do it, and investing a lot more time and money, and then ultimately creating something that people don't want.

So yeah, you can make this minimal viable product and then just sort of AB test to iterate into something that's marketable.

Orna Ross: Yeah, and I just want to say one thing about minimum viable product.

Dan Parsons: MVPs.

Orna Ross: MVP, much easier. I have heard people recommend putting out an MVP book without an editor, without editorial, and that is something that we would not recommend. So, even though you're going to do a small lean tester, it still needs to be done to professional standards. The fact that we're saying put it out there to get feedback, we're not saying put it out there with lots of conscious mistakes in it. We're saying just to put out the minimum, to leave yourself open to learning, and to give yourself, because yes, it saves you money, but it also saves you time. And time is our most precious resource. And it's also a really good learning experience.

So, there are all sorts of good creative reasons for doing this, it isn't just a commercial thing. Creatively, it can be very enriching as well.

But yeah, it doesn't mean you do without an editor, editors are always needed.

Dan Parsons: Yeah, and one thing I would say is that if you're going to go down this route for commercial reasons, just because something is built with commerciality in mind, that doesn't necessarily mean it's lost its art sense, because even something like some of the original Shakespeare plays, I did a literature degree and studied a lot of Shakespeare when I was in Uni, and I know that a lot of that was sort of adapted after it was initially shown to the audience, for some of the jokes and things like that where things were rewritten over time.

Orna Ross: Absolutely.

Dan Parsons: And so even some of the greatest artwork is adapted in this way.

Orna Ross: Dickens put his stuff out serially and then modified it when it came to putting it together in book form. So yes, you're not in any way being untrue to your inner artist to approach things in this way.

I think of it as being in service to the reader. I mean, I haven't approached publishing in this way, and I think it's a very interesting way to think about things for somebody like me who did come through the old school way, and it's a big ship to kind of turn it around and start thinking about it, but it's certainly something that I will be adopting as we go forward.

How do you use reader feedback to create a book that sells?

So, once you've done your analysis, then. Once you've got some data and stuff, what next? How do you use that feedback to actually-?

Dan Parsons: So, yeah, you create your MVP, and initially you want to look at the packaging. So, we'll move from packaging to contents, because packaging is the thing that, if people don't get through the packaging, they never see the contents.

So, you use a sort of data driven perspective for analysing how effective your packaging is. So, this includes things like your title, your book cover, your product description on the sales pages, and things like that. So, you want to make sure that you optimize those-.

Orna Ross: I think we've lost Dan there. Oh, yeah. Sorry, you froze there for a moment. Do you want to just repeat that?

Dan Parsons: So yeah, you'll want to test different quantitative parts of your packaging, so things that can be measured with numbers basically. So, things like your title, your book cover, your product description on sales pages. And then what you can do is, you can run things like Facebook ads, or Google AdWords ads. I think famously, Tim Ferriss, who wrote The Four-Hour Work Week, did this when he was pitching nonfiction books. He ran Google AdWords ads, and then hadn't even created the book yet, just created a fake sales page and then saw how many people clicked through and clicked the buy button so he could optimize his book cover, and product description, and title, based on ads before he's even created the book, because these people thought they were going on to buy the book, so they're completely unbiased. Obviously, the buy button wouldn't work and then they'd just click away, but he would have already collected the data to know which things worked and which things didn't, and that's how he AB tested. I think his book has sold 2 million at this point. So, obviously it's a process that works particularly, like you said, in non-fiction.

So, you can use these data points, and just AB testing is a process in marketing where you change one variable at a time. So, say you'll change the title first and you'll just test the title, two or three different variations of titles, and then compare the performance of those titles against each other.

Once you've got the ideal title, you can move onto the book cover and create a few variations of the book cover with the same title, and then see which ones of those gets the biggest reaction. And then eventually you'll go onto the product description and see which ones of your variations gets the best conversion rate.

So, it's this process where you're moving customers into readers through this sales funnel, essentially, and just trying to make it as efficient as possible. And then once you've got through the packaging element and you know you've definitely got people to buy the book, the next step that we're going to have to talk about is trying to get them to continue reading the book after they've looked at the first page, because that's an entirely more difficult and nuanced thing that you've got to approach.

Orna Ross: Yes, and there isn't as much data, so it's much easier to actually test your title, and your cover, and stuff like that, than it is to see where people fall off reading, for example. It would be great to be able to get more detailed information about stuff like that. So, what can people do to actually get that information?

Dan Parsons: Okay. So, I know lots of big successful authors who use their arc team, so their advanced reader team who give them reviews and stuff, before they engage with them for that they talk about beta reading their book. So, they'll send them an early version of their book that I think has had one editing phase but hasn't gone through the full editing phase with an editor, just to make sure the story aligns with how the readers would like it to go.

So, if you were using a romance novel as an example, we know that romance readers like a happily ever. So, if you are a romance author and you thought, oh, I'll change it up a bit and I'll end this in a violent death instead, you know, and very, very different, and then you got horrible feedback from chapter 17 onwards, of your novel, where everyone hates the end, you know, right, I clearly need to change chapter 17. Otherwise, they're not going to go on and read the sequels and, you know, contribute to read through. And then you can actually, there's one little tip that I didn't put in the show notes before I started, but if you use Wattpad, their analytics are based on chapter reads. So, you can see how many people have read each chapter in your book all the way through, and you can use the comments section where readers can comment on your book to actually see what they liked about each chapter, and then possibly increase your readthrough rate based on how many people then continue and you can see the later chapters ramping up the number of reads. So, it is a really good tool, Wattpad, to use to calculate your exact read through, and find out where a ton of the people drop off because you can see the numbers per chapter, and also see the live comments saying exactly what it was that they liked and disliked.

Orna Ross: If you can build a following on Wattpad first. So, it's something that you kind of need to, you know, this happens spontaneously, I think, or sorry, very organically on Wattpad with people who go on to use it and build over time. Yeah, go on.

Dan Parsons: Yes and no. So, yeah, you can build organically on Wattpad, but there are also merchandising deals. So, if you just contact the Wattpad merchandising team, I think they're called the Wattpad content team, you can ask them what carousels and things they've got coming up. I did one with a zombie book once, and that was because they were promoting the release of the movie of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. So, they wanted a few different funny zombie books that they could then promote in a carousel to readers that would like the same books. So, you can just find out what they've got coming up, and you don't even have to be particularly popular on there. If the content team pick you up it's because they've got an editorial choice, and it can make you far more popular, and then you get all the readers come through and give you that data that you need.

What tools can indie authors use to get feedback on book content?

Orna Ross: That's great. So, if you've got the kind of book that works on Wattpad, that's a really great way to go about it. What other tools can people use to get some feedback on their content?

Dan Parsons: So, you can, obviously, just use the basic email, that sort of stuff, where you get people to respond based on you sending out arc copies, and things like that. And if you're looking at the conversion into buy-in rates, then a really good tool that I've never heard any other authors talking about is Smashwords. So, we sort of neglect Smashwords a little bit now because some of the newer players have come out, Draft2Digital, and they're doing sort of different things, and PublishDrive and all that. There's a lot more competition, whereas Smashwords used to be the big player in the distribution end of eBooks, but they've got some really interesting tools that talk about the conversion on sales pages.

So, if you actually look at directing readers to your sales pages, you can see how many people have viewed the page, and then you can see the sales of the book, and then, you know, they've got extra analytics like that. So, that can help you through the process without you having to build your own website, or build traffic yourself, because they've got a little more organic than you might be able to generate.

Orna Ross: Fantastic. And of course, when the book is out and actually published, reviews should be treated in exactly the same way. So, reviews are an absolute, you know, a lot of beginner authors dread and fear reviews, but actually, the healthy way to approach your reviews is as feedback and a learning opportunity in just exactly the same sort of way. And I think if you can build your review process into a whole lean publishing process, then it's very easy to slot it in, in that way, and it can take a lot of the kind of emotional, I mean, it never takes it all away, nobody's going to love a bad review or, you know, hate a good review. It's not going to get rid of it completely, but it certainly can help to see it in the context of the entire publishing process, rather than seeing it as a personal attack.

Dan Parsons: There are also platforms like, I know Kickstarter is the big one, but there are also GoFundMe and Indiegogo, and things like that, where you can build an audience over time to try and get different projects off the ground by getting them pre-funded, where people will pay for copies of the books and things before the book is out so that you can actually use that money for editing.

And you can actually get in contact with those people in the same way that you can with, oh, what's the platform I'm thinking of where people pay you every month and then it supports you as a creator, you know the one.

Orna Ross: Patreon.

Dan Parsons: Patron, yeah. So, it can work a little bit like Patreon, where you have direct methods of communication with people who aren't necessarily your existing readers, but they're interested in the concept that you're building around the book.

So, I know of an author in the past who wanted to create a maths picture book for young children, and they were talking about the different children who may be dyslexic or have other learning disabilities, and they could talk directly to the people who would be interested in that project. Whereas they may not be able to find those people organically in their friendship circle, you know, before they've got an audience.

So, you can actually put out bits of content and get feedback on it before you've even released the book through Kickstarter, and all the while, while you're doing that, you're building your audience and you're becoming funded.

Orna Ross: Yeah, Kickstarter is particularly good of all the crowdfunding platforms for books, and Oriana there is really helpful and always happy to work with any authors who have ideas and to show them samples of ways in which people have used the platform before. So, if way of doing things appeals to in any way, definitely have a chat with Kickstarter.

And there are some other interesting platforms as well, you know, there are more and more platforms, I think, coming up all the time. It's also possible to serialize and write your book in chunks before you put it out, and of course, Kindle Vella now allows that as well. So, you can do it on the Amazon platform.

So, I think it would be fair to say that publishing is moving in this direction, and that those author publishers who don't move with that flow are likely to find themselves without sales, unless of course you organically and accidentally hit on an {inaudible}, which does happen and can happen to you, but relying on that chance, relying on that luck, is probably not a great business plan.

Dan Parsons: Yeah, I know there are already murmurs of traditional publishers working a bit in this way, but they're getting authors to do the lean publishing research and development before it actually comes to them publishing the book. So, they can do all the marketing, and if they've got the budget to go behind that, but they're actually getting the authors to do that.

So, there's Unbound is one of the fastest growing publishers, and they've got a traditional publishing model, but then they use a sort of lottery system, or more of an X-Factor style system, where authors have to compete against each other, and then the most popular rises to the top and they get a publishing deal. And this is not completely dissimilar from the way Amazon Publishing work, because obviously they already see the data behind the scenes on Amazon, and then they approach authors to give them Amazon Publishing deals, and they know that they're already going to be successful because this author has already got a big audience.

So, it's all very data-driven, and I think even quite slow-moving traditional publishers are seeing that this is the way things are going and they are using data analytics tools, and the same market research tools, to develop books before releasing them that indies are.

What if I just want to write the books I want to write?

Orna Ross: So, a comment from Stewart, “God, this all sounds so depressing. I just want to write. I've decided I don't care if I never sell a copy, I'd prefer that than funnelling customers after AB testing covers, et cetera.”

And Stewart, that's 100% a valid response, and if you just want to write, absolutely, you wouldn't want to do this. We're not talking about this from a writing perspective for yourself, we're talking about this from a publishing perspective. So, publishing means thinking about the reader, and if you want to publish to sell, then you have to think about these things. You may not decide to do the AB testing, which I have to say brings me out in a rash as well, but we've given lots of different ideas. You don't have to do AB testing, but the point is that you do have to shift the mindset that says, oh God, I just want to write, if you do want to sell. If you don't want to sell, fantastic, no worries, great, away you go and write happily ever after, but this is a publishing prospective

Dan Parsons: You could also sell without doing this. So, there are some authors that write the book that they want to write, and then they end up selling anyway. So, this isn't the only way to sell, this is just a way to improve your chances.

Orna Ross: Absolutely, and week after week after week, we have authors in ALLi saying, I'm not selling, and you know, we're always looking at all the different ways in which that can be changed, you know, and for those who are selling, in which they can sell more books. And I mean, I think that's the important thing to realize. When you go from being a writer to being an author/publisher, a self-publisher, an indie author, whatever word you want to put on it. But once you put that publishing bit in there, everything must change. Your mindset can't stay the same.

It's not just, you know, I'm going to write the book and put it out there and look who's going to take it and run with it. It might happen, and you might win the lottery and, you know, there might be a blue moon someday. But you improve your chances when you actually take some actions, and lean publishing is one way to approach that challenge.

So, any final words of wisdom, Dan?

Dan Parsons: Yeah, it would just be, once you've lean-published your book, there's always opportunities to lean-market your book, and this is sort of the way that indies have been doing it already. So, if you've had a little bit of a handle on marketing, you'll already sort of understand the lean publishing model. One thing I will say is a recent development is, I know Amazon in the past has not liked people using affiliate links to get people to record clicks and things, because some authors, obviously they make a lot of money from affiliate income through Amazon affiliate links when they're promoting their book, people buy things like TVs and stuff, and they get a portion of all those sales.

What it seems Amazon have coming down the pipeline, or it may have already started, because I've seen things in the Amazon ads, is a concept called an attribution link, which you can use on any platform you want. What it does is, it doesn't give you the affiliate income, but it does allow you to track click-through rates and conversions of sales on the other end. So, you get all of the data, you just don't get the affiliate link income, which means that you can be a lot more flexible and use these in things like email campaigns or Facebook messages that you can use, you know, targeting readers.

So, it doesn't have to be complicated. You don't have to set up your own systems when it comes to the marketing, as well as the publishing, because you can actually track different styles of marketing and see how they compare against each other just by using these sorts of links. And as the industry is developing, and more and more software-as-a-service companies are growing, we're getting more options and there are lots of different places that you can use these sorts of links.

Orna Ross: Great. Okay. So, that is it on lean publishing. Do let us know if you have any further questions arising from what we've been talking about this evening. This episode will go out on our podcast on Friday next, selfpublishingadvice.org. You can find it there and you can subscribe and get the show notes, and we'll have some helpful links.

And there are two resources we'd like to recommend. One is a blog, a good intensive blog called Lean Book Publishing: How to Drastically Increase Success Rates by Publishing Books the Lean Way, and that's by Sabrina Ricci.

And there's also the sort of Bible, for the lean publishers, which is Chris Fox's, Write to Market

We'll have the links to those onto other things that we've mentioned here in the show notes on Friday.

And next month, being the holiday season, we don't have a podcast. So, we will be back, we will be doing our highlights from the year next month and so we won't have a live event here on YouTube or Facebook live, but we will see you again live here in January on the third Tuesday of the month.

Until then, happy writing and happy publishing.