The Business of Art
Sharing the business plan behind my first self-published book
When you announce you are writing a children’s book, the first thing people bring up is Harry Potter. It could be my ticket to millions, they like to say. While a worthy ambition, that wasn’t the reason I wrote the book (nor is it the outcome I expect).
Instead, I designed my business plan to maximize sales, not profits. I want this book to be a gift, to my nephew, and then to do what I can to give something back.
Why didn’t I want to maximize profits?
Well, I had already sunk a lot of cost and time into the book, and recovering that would be a big stretch. I also do not have the time to do in-person events at schools and independent bookstores. That sounds like an amazing experience. But I have an entire other career ruling my week and needed another solution. In researching my business plan, I looked at how the non-fiction self-publishing world worked. Those authors thought a lot about how to use self-publishing to drive revenues and profit. I added the values of the in-person efforts of children’s fiction, that careful linkage of audience and purpose. Of course, I included my own thoughts and perspective from my professional career. I designed a sales plan with a large focus on online sales through Amazon and a handful of in-person events.
As with all business plans, this is but a very nice way of guessing. It is full of assumptions and is likely to be wildly off. I promise to go back and revisit them in six months and in a year. I expect it to be wrong, but know we will all learn something from a good variance analysis.
Without Further Ado…
My goal is to sell 400 books through a mix of online and in-person sales to raise approximately £2,000 for a charity. That amount will save 20 acres of land in one of their projects.
The Assumptions behind my plan, and why
Because I am time-poor, I knew that I had to invest my efforts into using an online presence to drive sales. As you can see, I’m not exactly any sort of modern social media influencer. I’m an average person, with pretty average number of friends. I do have access to large alumni networks. None of them know me as a creative and this is my first book; I lacked credibility. I wanted something to be able to give myself a marketing edge, a reason to take a chance.
In my network, I found someone who was willing to introduce me to their charity. Through the introduction, I was able to connection my vision and their goals. I hope that this implied endorsement will be my marketing edge. I hope it will be enough to convince people in these larger networks to go ahead, take a chance and buy my book.
Of course, the charity also gives me access to their members, their supporters. I hope that my book will be an appealing way for them to be able to support the charity. This allows me access to another audience, but I set the impact of it to an achievable level.
To set my goal, I looked at the sizes of the networks I can access. I created a high and low penetration rate, to back into how many I could possible sell. I won’t be able to track this in a great amount of detail once sales start on Amazon. I will look at those who buy my book and try and see how “close” they are to me. The goal feels about right to me; it’s the same as everyone I know buying one copy. Yet I don’t rely on that. It is a path to build sales across the audiences and networks I can access.
Sales & Marketing Support
During the next twelve months, I have three separate sales & marketing phases planned. To support the launch, I will use my personal network to drive activity to Amazon. I will be making prints of my animals and using those as a giveaway to those who go ahead and buy online and write a review. The second phase will be Christmas, when I expect sales to peak. The combination of solid reviews and a larger online presence should generate sales. Depending on volumes, I might add in-person sales in London at a Christmas fair. Next spring, I want to run another animal-based campaign with another art giveaway.
What Next?
I will return to this topic in February and then again next August. I will check how I’ve done, what I’ve learned. If I’m wildly successful, I will post earlier and share what has happened that I didn’t expect and adjust my goal (fingers crossed!). This is another one of my goals. Given I have a business background but new to the creative space, I want to share my different perspectives with creatives out there.
