August 31, 2018 “Ten” Marketing Status: 3 of 12

This post marks the end of Q1 reporting of progress, three more to go. Tenacity… and perseverance! This mantle of “Persona non grata” while originally a sort-of dig at the publishing establishment is becoming a challenge statement. Remember, it takes years to develop a reading audience, years! Please keep this in mind across the next nine months, because I certainly will.
This is all about learning and improvement, so what am I learning and what do I need to improve my writing in order to grow audience?
This writing thing is all about the form of the content — the form of the content such that it, the content, resonates with the reader. Big lesson here for me, the content! What this reflection means relative to my audience growth results is that I really need to focus on improving the written form, to result in form that resonates enough that some small percentage of readers will want to tell others, resulting in an improved viral affect. This will be an interesting endeavor because there has to be a spectrum between commercial text resonance and good storytelling resonance. Part of the answer, I think, will be to get back to reading some classics. Good form never dies, it’s just reinterpreted to make it relevant, or so the pattern goes historically. Two books I will focus on reading:
September will be all about writing for audience resonance (which is made up of audience plus content), reading classics and trying to incorporate a little of what I learn from reading others into my pieces here on Warrior Writers. I also need to research target audience venues to see if/how to get in front of a more targeted audience, where this type of content would stand a greater chance of resonating.
Translating this into weekly goals, each week across September I’ll strive to improve my writing by reading others (above two books) while trying to incorporate something from that read into my piece, and secondly look for a more targeted audience venue to get the piece into.
I’ll be back at the end of September to share the lessons and results, numbers.
One other thing to keep in mind as we enter Q2. There is an assumption that we are checking, that may or may not be true, that growing audience will somehow correlate to increased book sales. It may well turn out not to be the case. We may well see audience growth with no corresponding book sales. At the end of Q2 we should look back over these numbers to report. Right now there is no apparent relationship.
I knew going in that this would be a crawl, walk, run effort, all about doing something, learning from it, applying the learnings, and iterating. No doubt, the metrics don’t lie, I’m still in the crawl phase, although Great Expectations.
Quick overview:
- I’ve committed to completely bootstrap this effort, which means I can only spend half the money made on book sales on marketing efforts. The other half is committed to Summer Search Seattle.
- As you see below, there wasn’t enough book sales to support marketing spend, not yet.
Status report:
Ten sales:
- July $3.09 (for a total of $6.18 with matching)
- August $1.03 (for a total of $2.06 with matching), thank you! (I know who said they bought a book during this time period)

Audience:
- Twitter followers: 113, +11 (was 102 at end of July)
- Medium followers: 593, +20 (was 573 at end of July)
Activity:
- Supported Warrior Writers — Go Warrior Writers!
- Published 15 articles on Medium within Warrior Writers across August (same as in July) and followed up with links in Flipboard, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+in order to measure highest value source of viewers.
Analysis:
- Traffic to articles was mostly from a combination of Flipboard and Medium, Google+ was zero (I’m done with that venue), Twitter was a distant third (I’ll give Twitter another month or two to show ROI), Facebook was low. I may reduce my invested time in Facebook and move that focus to a new venue, TBD. A somewhat typical example below.

- Where do I go from here? I’m going to state the obvious - this effort is all about creating and measuring the viral affect of engaging content. If the content isn’t engaging then why would anyone want to share it, the definition of “viral” affect. The takeaway — I need to improve the content that fits the theme yet is more engaging to hopefully drive more traction. So the goal for September is to focus on creating engaging content. I’ll have to think through that, and read others to see what that means and how to assimilate what I find. See you at the end of September, I hope you check back in, with the results of this exploration.
Half of the royalties from the sale of “Ten” the first part of Time, will go to Summer Search, Seattle to help kids from low income families through high school and into college. Please consider getting “Ten” on Amazon, meet Max, Beth, Spencer, Maya, and Core, and enjoy a little fantasy about the building of the first testable computer-based awareness and the unintended consequences that follow, and in so doing also help real kids get to college.
Get “Ten” and become even more a part of this adventure!


