Hello and welcome to 2025. We completed another trip around the sun, things happened, other things didn’t, and for all humans did, Earth barely noticed.
Here we are with our 2024 year in review, another year of great learning for us.
Nutshell: we made it and ended our year enough in the black to hand out cash bonuses again. Good job, yeeha, and all that. We’re making plans for 2025 and would love to know your thoughts.
Expanded version:
We stayed low and busied ourselves learning marketing from a variety of sources. We talked with other authors, bookstore owners and managers, marketers, promoters, you name it, if they seemed halfway intelligent we spent time with them.
WOM – One quick learning: Nobody can strike lightning repeatedly. Once definitely, twice yes, three times and you better start bottling it.
So far nobody’s bottled anything. We talked with marketers who charge 14k$US to promote one book and wouldn’t guarantee the results. Another marketer didn’t handle books, a third didn’t handle our kind of books, a fourth didn’t keep records of their success/failure rates with clients.
First, how do you know what’s working and what isn’t if you don’t keep records?
Big Second, nobody we talked with showed consistent positive results.
What we’re repeatedly encountering from anybody dealing with or producing books is that word-of-mouth (WOM) rules. People act on WOM recommendations from friends, family, even things they overhear on the bus, the subway, carpooling, in the lunchroom, and some even act just seeing somebody reading a book (note: not an ePub, a physical book).
We’re investigating WOM methods. The method coming to the top right now is a Reviewing Circle based on the Goodreads model. More to follow.
Northern Lights Book Awards – Another marketing possibility is developing an awards program. Cash prizes, publication, and a handsome jpg you can share, post, use in your marketing, an “award winner” image you can put on book covers, all that good stuff.
Yes, there’ll be an entry fee (we’re considering 25$US) with 1st place winning 500$US, 2nd place winning 250$US, third place winning 100$US, and six honorable mentions worth 25$US each. We’re currently considering different methods to bring the entry fee down.
For example, every publisher and magazine submissions page has something like “To learn what we publish, read some of our books/back issues.” The challenge to that is few authors/writers ever do actually study a market before submitting to it.
The solution to that challenge is simple: Post a review of any current title or listed book and you’ll knock 5$US off the entry fee. Post reviews of five books (on a recognized site such as Goodreads, Amazon, BookBub, …) and the entry fee is waved. Submitters need to share links to their live reviews.
None of the above is difficult, what is difficult is selecting a category/genre. We’re going with “Well-Written” because such books are not easy to find anymore.
Audio – Next item is we released four audio books last year. Fascinating process, that. More learning than we cared to do, definitely, and all of it definitely necessary. We plan more audio releases this year because audio is a consistent good seller regardless of book or genre.
RoundTable 360° – A definite winner was launching the RoundTable 360° series cosponsored with BizCatalyst 360°. Once each month a group of creatives in different media gather to discuss issues relevant to all creatives regardless of media. Our panel and audience are growing, and we’re darn glad of it.
Rebranding – Last item, we considering rebranding our current titles as, while all but one is in the FSF line, each of them deals with people healing themselves, healing their lives, relationships, …
As you can see, much food for thought in 2025, and we plan it to be another successful, growing year for us.
