The Publishing Talk Daily, normally a pretty reliable and handy publishing grapevine site, just gave top billing to a post making quite a claim. It’s from website Copyblogger, which since 2006 “has been teaching people how to create killer online content,” courtesy of Johnny B. Truant and Sean Platt, who promise that: “100% of Independent Publishers Who Do This Will Sell More of Their Work.”
Wow, some “This.” What “This” is this? I’m sure TeleRead‘s many eager self-publishing author readers who need every ounce of help and guidance they can get will be dying to hear.
Well, it comes down basically to what the guys call “building product funnels,” because, as they assure us, “most independent authors and content creators aren’t thinking in terms of building product funnels when they write their books and stories.” Absolutely. I tend to concentrate on writing when writing, and don’t think of the product funnel first. I don’t even tend to wear a funnel hat while writing.
How remiss. Because, as Truant and Platt assure me, “in our opinion, putting your work into product funnels is the very best (and most important) thing an author can do to increase sales.” And simply put, a product funnel is “a series of pointers (in the backs of books, in product descriptions) in order to steer readers to the places you want them to go, and to give them compelling reasons to do so … You want to scoop as many people into the top of your funnel as possible, then understand that they will sift apart … as they move downward.”
Seems pretty straightforward. Though Truant and Platt walk the puzzled and dazed would-be self-publisher through numerous nips and tucks, like, “funnels require multiple products” and “you must be able to send readers from one book to another.”
Johnny B. Truant and Sean Platt, according to the Copyblogger blurb, “published 1.5 million words and built full-time self-publishing careers from scratch in 2013. In their comprehensive self-publishing guide Write. Publish. Repeat. they tell you everything you need to know about how to do the same. The book is half price for launch (and comes with a bonus book) through Friday, December 6, 2014.”
Personally, I’m breathless with anticipation. (Though it’s going to be a long and asthmatic wait all the way through till December 2014 – some dating mistake, maybe?) And I know that, once I’ve bought that book, I will own 100% more of it than I owned before.
In other words, they’re advising authors to write series books, which has been a thing since Homer gave us the 12 labours of Hercules.
There! Saved you six bucks.