Platform, audience, and assets
The success of any launch usually comes down to these three factors. Can you guess what they are? It's not a trick question.
Hi,
We all want to have a huge book launch, right. What if your launch isn’t a banger, though?
People ask me about this all the time when it comes to Kickstarter and I always tell them that you’re going to have bangers and you’re gonna have duds throughout your career. I know I have had a ton this year alone.
This graphic is the last four campaigns I’ve run under my account. All of these were launched in the last six months, yet ranged from $1.8k to $26k in funding, from between 60-800+ backers.
The one at the top left right now is live right now and its the worst launch we’ve had since at least 2021, and maybe as far back as 2016.
Meanwhile, our last launch for How to Build a World Class Substack went gangbusters raising $18,348 from 768 backers…
…and it ended less than 48 hours before this one launched!
“Of course it did, Russell,” you might say. “It’s a Substack book from Substack issues propelled by Substack…”
…and like, yes. It had a hook.
Shockingly, books that have hooks do better. Everything you launch should always have a hook if you want it to do well.
and I had a great hook for this book, just like and I had a great hook for our Direct Sales Mastery for Authors launch that ended in January, raising over $30k from 715 backers.
I don’t always have good hooks, though. The last project I launched before the Substack book didn’t have a great hook except that I wrote it. It was a stone cold bummer, a metaphysical book, and narrated by an angel, while also being esoteric and inaccessible for most people. The fact it raised any money at all is a minor miracle.
By the way, this book launch ended on May 16th, exactly two months before the Substack book launched, and 4.5 months from the Direct Sales Mastery for Authors campaign. Yet, it raised a fraction of a fraction of those campaigns.
I still think it did fab for a tiny little book, raising $5,233 from 227 backers, but it didn’t get beyond my existing audience.. My audience ended up liking it more than I thought, which is great, but it didn’t break into that next level.
What do I mean by levels? Well, if you’re looking at campaigns I generally think that:
A good campaign is 100 backers
A great campaign overall is 200-300 backers
An amazing is 500+ backers
An elite campaign is 1,000+backers
So, it was a great campaign, but it wasn’t amazing, which is about where my worst campaign landed until now. Before Time is a Flat Circle, we launched a NSFW comic on Kickstarter and it blew up. 822 backers pledged $26,604 to fund that campaign.
This one ended less than a month before the Time is a Flat Circle campaign began. Again, we designed the project that way from the jump, taking into account platform, our own audiences, and our assets.
I could go back years and years and show you projects that blew up and others that fizzled, and it almost always comes down to three things:
Platform: What are the demands and needs of the platform as a whole, and what kind of thing tends to do well there? How can we give the platform what it wants to succeed?
Audience: What does my own audience want, and how does it align with the needs of the platform?
Assets: What assets do I have to help spur this success along to get it beyond my core audience?
Notice…I still launched all these books even when they had a small audience and terrible hook, but I went in with my eyes wide open. I planned for them to be duds and they were duds.
Nothing I ever teach will tell you not to launch the book of your heart, but if you know what to expect you won’t be surprised. Imagine what would happen if I thought this launch was going to raise $20k. I would be devastated instead of resigned to the fact.
That doesn’t mean I’m not disappointed. Would I have loved my weird metaphysical novel to go gangbusters? Yes. Was there any logical reason to assume it would? No. Would it have been absurd to think that it would? Absolutely.
Why? Because the platform didn’t have a need for it and my audience wasn’t hungry for it. Additionally, I didn’t have any assets that could get it out beyond my core audience. Even then, it only serviced a small segment of them.
Meanwhile, with the Substack book we had:
Platform: A relatively niche audience without a lot of material on how to succeed on it, where people are hungry to learn about how to use it better.
Audience: Over 50,000 readers between the two of us that want to use the platform better. This book serviced almost all of them.
Assets: Dozens of successful publications that we could partner with in order to expand our reach beyond just what we could reach on our own. Plus, we hosted a virtual conference to bring even more attention toward the book and filled it with popular Substack personalities.
The same thing is true with Death’s Kiss.
Platform: People on the platform like NSFW books, and they tend to pay top dollar for them.
Audience: My audience loves comics and Kickstarter, SK Prince’s audience loves romance. Everyone likes sex.
Assets: We had a marketing budget for Facebook ads, plus a publisher helping push us forward.
That’s mainly why we coach people to keep their smaller campaigns shorter than the bigger ones. It’s because we have more assets to deploy and we need time for the book to gather steam.
If you have assets like podcast appearances, advertising, affiliate promotions, or other things to drop during your campaign that can keep your hype train going, great. If you don’t, probably 21 days is the longest you should run a campaign, and maybe even as little as 10-14 days.
This is because with the smaller launches, there is no steam to build. All you have to do is hype up your own audience, and that’s pretty easy. Granted, this is easier for me because I have a list of almost 20,000 people who like my fiction work and 44,000 that like my non-fiction work.
But the process is the same.
If you have a smaller audience and want to go viral, then you should make sure you launch something that meets the platform’s needs and brings together a lot of assets.
Yes, with a bigger audience you have a higher floor and a higher ceiling than you do with your launch, but you can still go gangbusters if you hit the platform needs and gather assets right. Generally, with time comes a network and audience that can help move your launch along, but that’s not universally true.
At the beginning you might not have the help of your own audience, but that doesn’t mean your launch is destined to fail, especially if you figure out those other two bits. Meanwhile, if you release something that doesn’t fit platform needs and isn’t built to maximize outside assets, there’s almost nothing you can do to create heat for your project.
Unfortunately, this launch is basically dead in the water. Hopefully we can break even on costs, but we probably won’t.
Notice, this has nothing to do with the quality of the work. All four of these projects is equally high quality, and yet they vastly range in how much they raised…
…even though they were all released within six months of each other.
How much a project raises has almost nothing to do with the quality of the book.
Even if you think you hit the platform needs and assets perfectly, they are always a moving target. What the platform wanted last week could vary drastically from what it wants tomorrow. The only thing you can control is the quality of the work you produce. If you love the work, the rest will work out how it works out. Sadly, there’s little I can do with this launch because not enough people care about it.
Some people do, and that is incredible. The fact that anyone resonates with the weird things that come out of our brains is incredible. I will never take that away from them, but there are things that happen when masses of people care at scale.
When people care they share, they back, they hype it up, they get off the fence when you contact them with additional information. That effect cascades out into your marketing and brings more people to the campaign. When enough people care, their effort extends beyond your own audience.
Since there aren’t many people who care about this book, it’s impossible to create critical mass to get the hype train to build up enough speed to break through the morass.
If I didn’t have another launch coming up, I would push this launch really hard, but I do, so I have to pick my battles. I still love this book as much as my other work. I still believe you will love it if you read it. All this tells me is that not enough people believe that to make it a hit.
I’ve done this so many times for myself and other people that I can pretty well predict how successful your launch will be based on platform needs, your audience, and your assets alone.
Yes, we can influence it slightly, but probably your effort is better spent developing something new than pushing that boulder up a hill.
What do you think?
How do you plan your launches?
Do you have the same violent swings in your own launches?
Let us know in the comments.
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Where to go next:
Is that Time is a Flat circle novel for sale somewhere? That looks good to me but searched Kindle store and it didn’t come up.