Scale your author business like a startup
Call me delusional, but I really do believe that writers can build brands and businesses on par with any other industry out there.
This article is from one of my favorite new Substack writers, Kern Carter, about one of my favorite subjects, scaling your author business.
I recommend reading Growth, or something like it, Setting up your direct sales environment, and How to reframe capitalism to make sales and marketing work (better) for you to help round out this article.
If you are not a paid member, you can read everything with a 7-day free trial, or give us a one-time tip.
I love
’s Writers are Superstars Substack. So when they emailed me about contributing to The Author Stack I was super excited and couldn’t say yes fast enough. Kern and I share a love of using business strategy, especially tech startup strategy, and applying it to our author business.If you haven’t read their work, this is one of my favorite articles. Watch out, though. It’ll get your dander up.
Call me delusional, but I really do believe that writers can build brands and businesses on par with any other industry out there. We already possess the skill of communicating our ideas. What we need to add are the structures to make sure those ideas reach the right audience. I've always known that creating deliberate structures leads to success, but it wasn't until I started working for startups that I learned how to adapt those structures to my author business.
In this article, I’m going to share four ways you can scale your author business like a startup. By scale, I mean expanding your business to a mass audience outside of your current community. You’re looking for new readers or consumers, and you’re looking for a lot more of them. Scaling also implies speed, so your goal is to expand quickly, keeping in mind that “quickly” can be somewhat relative.
The reality is that passion alone won’t cut it, but you already know that.
If you want to scale, ambition is where you need to start. You really have to want this and be willing to harness that ambition into disciplined, repeatable steps that bring you closer to your goal of growth and expansion. Applying tactics utilized by startups is one way to get there.
Okay, enough preamble. Here are four ways you can scale your author business like a startup.
*** Please note that if you are reading this via email, Substack only sent out a partial version and the article will eventually stop without notice. If you want to read the whole 4,500-word article, then go to this website.***
Experimentation
When I started my first Substack, it was meant to be a place for me to release one post a month as part of a short story series I was working on called My Failures As A Father. That initial idea eventually turned into Love & Literature, a platform that hosted writers sharing real-life stories from all over the world in weekly chapters. From Italy to the Middle East, India to the U.S., Love & Lit formed into something I didn’t see when I initially wrote that short story, but because I was open to experimenting, to trying things, it turned into something else; something even more beautiful and impactful than I could’ve imagined.
What you’re looking for when you’re experimenting is the right mix between opportunity and impact. Opportunity involves discovering where whatever you’re creating fits into the marketing. Impact involves increasing the broadness of a community you impact and how deeply you influence that community.
This has to be a core part of your brand as you think about scaling. You need to develop a spirit of trial and error, test and repeat, create then ideate.
What does that look like for authors? It means experimenting with different platforms (Substack, website, social media). It means experimenting with different forms and mediums (blogging, video, short stories, audio). It can also mean experimenting with different ways of bringing attention to your writing.
Have you tried any guerilla marketing tactics1, in-person events, partnerships, or paid ad campaigns? The only thing that should limit your experimentation is your imagination.
Systems and Processes
When startups begin their journey, it’s one or two people doing everything that needs to be done. There’s no real system behind it. When something pops up, you handle it. Those are the beginning days. But when you’re ready to scale, you need to create predictability and consistency. You can’t create those things without implementing systems.
And yes, creative businesses have systems, too. For instance, my creative partner and I use “sprints” to create script ideas for the film production side of our business. Here’s how we do it:
We have one long brainstorming session to focus on loose story ideas that each of us have
The outcome of this session is one idea each that we can take away to start working on individually
We give ourselves three days to create an outline for the idea
We share the idea with each other and then give ourselves two days to give feedback
Once feedback is given, we give ourselves seven days to write a pilot (the first episode of a series)
Once pilots are complete, we share with each other and give three days for feedback
Once feedback is complete, we each have another five days to complete the pilot
Once the pilots are complete, we create a pitch deck for each one
In the last month alone, this process has produced four story ideas that we’ve pitched to production companies, broadcasters, and prepared for grants. We don’t do this every month, but when we do, we follow this process every time. The process creates efficiency and a system we can apply whether it’s just us or if we welcome other writers. It’s the most effective way to get from idea to offer (script) without sacrificing quality.
As an author, you can implement sprints to become more prolific with your output.
Indie authors who make the most money are typically the most prolific. They know how to take a story idea and quickly convert it into a book. When you have repeatable structures and processes in place, you can do the same thing, too.
Pitching [bold] ideas
How do you think startups get the money they need to scale? They pitch2. As an author, what’s one way you can convince agents, publishers, and readers that they need to buy into your book? You got it. Pitching.
I never understand why pitching isn’t at the top of the list of skills all authors fight to learn. When you query agents and publishers, you’re pitching. If you’re crowdfunding for your next book, you’re pitching. If you have an idea you want to execute to market and promote your book, that’s a pitch too.
Startup founders learn to get comfortable pitching for money. I’ve totally adopted this mentality into my author business. For instance, remember I told you about my original idea for Substack that turned into Love & Literature? My creative partner and I had this idea to create a similar platform but for teenagers.
That idea earned us a five-figure investment from a brand partner and we were able to execute exactly what we had envisioned.
We’re currently working on another idea and this time we’re not asking for five figures, we’re asking for seven. It’s a bold idea, but so what? We need to be bold. Entrepreneurs get funded for their startups every single day. Why can’t you?
And if you’re not into bold ideas, you still need to learn how to pitch. The reason we run our film production in sprints is so we can create enough ideas to constantly be pitching. The minimum amount we’ve earned for developing a film or series has been $25k. For actually producing a film, it’s been six figures. We didn’t have a full script completed when we received either of those funds. We pitched an idea. You can do that too.
Where can you get started? Pitching starts and ends with creating a deck3. A deck is a detailed summary of your idea for presentation to stakeholders or investors. In your case, readers can also be considered stakeholders, particularly if you’re crowdfunding, but also agents, publishers, and brands.
Your deck needs to distill your idea down to its main points. For example, if you’re pitching your book to producers as a series or film, you need to show why your story should be made into a film, the audience for that story, and why now is the right time for your story to be made. If you’re pitching to brands for sponsorship, you’ll need to include how your two brands align and what the potential sponsor stands to gain.
Creating multiple offers
For a business to scale, it needs revenue. To generate revenue, you need to be offering something. Those offers need to vary4 from premium to pedestrian, and all of them need to make sense within your brand.
A premium offer is your highest ticket5 item. It’s the thing that costs the most. If you were a musician, this offer would be your merch – those $120 t-shirts fans buy when they’re at a concert. When you’re building your author business, a premium offer can be a special edition of your book, it can be an author retreat, or it can be as simple as one-on-one time with you.
Ghostwriting is one of the services my team offers. Even within that service, we have several tiers. Our premium offer is essentially us writing your entire book. That can be anywhere from $25k-$40k depending on many variables. But we also offer book coaching, proposal writing, and developmental editing. These services are far more affordable while still serving our community.
We sell a lot more of the “pedestrian” services than we do full book writing. But that’s OK. Those services allow us to accomplish one of the essential pillars of scaling: recurring revenue.
Recurring Revenue
This point is a bit contentious for writers, but remember we’re talking about scaling. We’re talking about growing your business in similar fashion to Spotify or even Substack. Applying the points we mentioned earlier will help you scale, but it’s not possible without revenue, and recurring revenue more specifically.
MRR or ARR – monthly recurring revenue and annual recurring revenue – should be the cornerstones of your business. It’s part of the predictability I mentioned earlier6. In order to scale, you need to know how much money you’re consistently earning – month to month, quarter to quarter, year to year. When you add variety to your offers, this becomes more possible.
And to be clear, whether ARR or MRR is your gauge, you need a gauge. Monthly recurring revenue might not fit into your business structure, but what about quarterly?7 Can you assess your revenue in three-month increments rather than monthly? Or maybe yearly works better?
How you decide to track your revenue is not as important as actually tracking it.
Yes, creative industries are a bit different, but business is business. To properly scale, you need money coming in consistently so it can be allocated consistently and intentionally8.
Remember I told you that part of scaling is speed. The more consistently you’re able to earn revenue, the faster you’ll be able to scale. And the faster you scale, the more readers you touch which fuels your business to continue scaling. It’s a cycle. For example, if Substack is your main vehicle right now and you have 1,000 subscribers after one year, scaling would be trying to get to 10,000 subscribers in the next six months. When you hit those numbers, you’ll be able to pitch potential sponsors. That brings in more revenue that leads to more growth and the cycle continues.
Being a writer isn’t hard. It’s what we love. Becoming the type of person you need to be to run a successful writer business is hard. It often feels counterintuitive to implement processes and systems into something as personal and intimate as writing, but if we want to make money and scale our businesses into something that feeds our lifestyle, then we need to become those people.
If you liked that one from Kern, make sure to check out their
Substack for even more of this good good goodness.I recommend reading Growth, or something like it, Setting up your direct sales environment, and How to reframe capitalism to make sales and marketing work (better) for you to help round out this article.
If you are not a paid member, you can read everything with a 7-day free trial, or give us a one-time tip.
Guerrilla marketing is an advertising approach that borrows the concept of “guerrilla” warfare, or the element of surprise, to communicate with target audiences. This form of marketing relies on unconventional and inventive displays to elicit wonder or shock and can be especially effective for driving publicity.
With guerrilla marketing, a company could spread a campaign without spending a ton on advertising.- Coursera
I wrote about pitching in How to Build Your Creative Career, in the Basics of Selling section.
If you want to get somebody interested in buying your product, whether it’s a book, a print, or even your services, you need to start with a dynamite pitch.
In my experience, you don’t have much time to catch somebody’s interest. Luckily, I’ve perfected the steps to a good pitch so you can gain somebody’s attention in a minimal amount of time. Once they’re hooked, you can spend as much time as you want with them. The trick is getting them interested in the first place.
I’ve tailored this formula through dozens of shows, but it can be used on social media, in meetings, or basically anywhere you need to get somebody’s attention.
A pitch needs to be simple and concise with specific appeals for your intended audience. There are tons of steps that go into a great pitch. Don’t worry if you get frustrated with it. Pitching, like any art form, gets better with practice.
Step 1: The question
The first step in any good pitch is the question. This is where you get your potential customer to engage with you by answering a simple yes or no question.
My first question to passersby at a con is usually “Do you want to see a cool comic?” However, as the variety of titles at Wannabe Presses grows, my pitches vary depending on what I am trying to push on any given day. If I want to sell more of my murder mystery novel, the question is “Do you like murder?” If I am trying to sell kids’ books, the question is “Wanna see something that will put your kid to sleep?”
The people who stopped and replied “yes” were immediately self-identifying that they were interested in what I was pitching. I knew they were in my target market because they said “yes.”
One of the most important concept in sales is the idea that many small yeses lead to one big yes—the big yes being a sale. If you can get people to say “yes” over and over again, they are confirming their interest in your product, and you have positioned yourself well to win their business.
If you are selling yourself and not your product, your question might be, “Are you sick of freelancers that bail?” or “Are you having trouble making people notice your brand?” If you are selling prints, you might ask, “Are you looking for a new accent piece for your bedroom?” or “Are your walls annoyingly bare?”
You won’t know exactly what works until you get out into the world and test several possibilities, but the idea is to get somebody to say “yes” to you right off the bat with a simple, innocuous question.
Step 2: The option
Once your potential customer is engaged with your pitch, you need to give them a simple two-choice option to move the conversation along to the next step. This option is another way to make your potential customer self-identify their preferences. When there are two comic books on my table, I ask “Do you like psychological mind screws or girls that kick butt?”
By giving them the choice, I’ve forced them to buy into their preference. Psychologically, this puts people in a more receptive mood to buy. By choosing their favorite, they agree they are interested in what I am selling. Now, all I have to do is make my case and hope they bite.
The beauty of this option is that I know every possible outcome and can plan my pitch accordingly. You know what your pitch will be if they say option one, and you know your pitch if they say option two. Even if they don’t pick either option, you know your next step because you’ve limited their potential responses. For instance, if they say “both,” or if they pause for more than a second, I always pitch my best seller.
Some people prefer to ask their customers open-ended questions, but that is a dangerous game. If you ask a question like “What are you shopping for today?” or “What do you like?” you are giving the power to the buyer. They could say anything. For all you know, they might say, “I’m here because goats are cool.” By using the two-choice option, you get all the advantages of engagement with none of the risk posed by open-ended questions.
By narrowing down your potential customer’s options, you can nail your pitch every time. With pitching, even a few seconds’ delay can be the difference between a sale and the customer walking away in disgust.
Step 3: The pitch
Did you notice there are two steps before we even get to the pitch? This is called “priming the customer,” and it allows for you to get a couple of yeses before you even pitch the product. It also forces the customer to self-identify as a member of your ideal audience—twice. This leads to a more engaged listener and higher overall sales.
Your pitch is a simple one-sentence summary of your project’s biggest hook. This isn’t a summary of what your product does, but an emotional appeal to your customer. People make purchases based on emotion, so you need to make an emotional connection to the buyer. The good news is they’ve already self-identified that they want to hear your pitch. Now, all you have to do is nail the emotional hook.
Emotional connection is a powerful thing, and it’s the most powerful buying trigger you have to help boost your sales. When somebody doesn’t know you, they must be able to connect with your product emotionally in order for you to make a sale.
Don’t worry if you don’t have this down perfectly at first. Discovering the emotional resonance of your product is difficult. You should write out ten to twenty potential pitches and then start delivering them to people to find the one with the best emotional connection. Most likely, you will need to combine the best parts of several pitches for the best effect.
Before a product ever even launches, I spend hundreds of hours developing the exact wording of its pitch. I show people our in-progress work, tell them as much as I can about it, and watch how they react, noting which parts of my description light them up. I mold that all into the perfect pitch. By the time the product launches, I know the exact emotional beats necessary to maximize sales.
Step 4: The flavor
Once you finish your pitch, let it settle in for a moment with your potential customer. Let them look at the product and turn it over a couple times. Once they’ve looked at it for a few seconds, you should start adding on some flavor elements to spice up your pitch. This is when you start peppering in some unique selling points and your value proposition for whatever you are selling.
These flavor elements are things they can’t find easily by looking at your product, like where it was made, why you made it, or who worked on it with you. Every product is different, and you need to find the right “spice” to resonate with a product’s ideal audience.
For my graphic novel, Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter, people respond when I tell them about our influences for making the book, that we used a single artist for everything, and that it’s a complete story. With Katrina Hates the Dead, I know they respond when I talk about the artist going on to work on a Star Wars story and that we have additional process images in the back showing how we made the book. Each of these bits of flavor perk up the reader and strengthen their desire to buy the product.
Step 5: The acceptance
Before you ask for the sale, you want to get them to agree once again that the product is cool. This can be as simple as “Pretty cool, right?” You are priming them one more time before asking them to buy. They’ve agreed this is a product they want—three times—and now it’s time to ask for the sale.
Step 6: The ask
Ask for the business by stating the price of your services and giving them another optional close. For instance, you could say, “This book is twenty dollars or two for thirty,” or “Will that be cash or charge?” This final optional close once again primes the customer that they are going to buy. Instead of the option being yes or no, it’s, “How do I want to pay?”
Don’t be too pushy here. You’ll see their reaction when you state the price. Most people will back off, some will buy, and some will be on the fence. For the people who back off, exchange cards and add them to your mailing list. For the people who buy, have them pay and add them to your mailing list. For the people on the fence, move on to step seven.
Step 7: Objection handling
Most people aren’t going to buy your project. Some will flat-out say no, but others will sit on the fence waiting for you to convince them to buy. They want your product but you haven’t given them a strong enough reason to give you their hard-earned money. So, you have to give them a good reason to buy.
With these people, you want to give them another question, like “What’s stopping you from buying this right now?” However, a better question would be, “I know you want this, but you’re trying to save your money to see if there is something better, right?”
They will almost always agree with this, and then you can make them a special offer, something like, “What if I gave you a money-back guarantee? If you find something better at this con, come back and I will give you your money back.” I’ve been making this offer for years, and nobody has ever come back to get their money back.
Maybe they will have a great reason, like “I’m not getting paid for two weeks.” Maybe they have a crappy reason you can easily overcome and make them a customer. Perhaps the pricing is too high, and in that case you can lower the price slightly, or maybe they really want multiple pieces, in which case you can offer them bundle pricing.
If you can overcome these objections in one round of objection handling, then you should have a customer on your hand. If they still have objections, try to flush them out with one more round before giving up.
You want to do at most two rounds of this objection handling. If you can’t make a sale by then, exchange cards, add them to your mailing list, and make them a future prospect. You can keep going for as long as you want with objections, but I’ve found if you can’t convince them with two chances, then they most likely won’t buy, at least not until later.
In practice, this entire pitch, from meeting a customer through objection handling, takes no more than a couple of minutes, max. It’s the whittling down everything you want to say into a couple sentences that takes forever. The actual pitch should be no more than two minutes.
The first time you do it, it won’t take two minutes. It will take forever, and you’ll get everything wrong. You’ll sound terrible. You’ll say things in the wrong order. You’ll say things you didn’t mean to say. You’ll ramble on forever. You’ll be…just awful.
That’s okay.
It’s unnatural to talk about your project. Nobody likes to do it. Since you don’t want to do it, either, you’ll stop after two or three attempts. Then, you’ll hang your head in shame and never want to do it again.
Don’t give up.
That’s the key to this. You can’t stop. You have to keep going. Over time you will get better. The more you practice your “pitching muscle,” the better you’ll get and the more natural you will become. The key to a pitch is that it can’t sound like a pitch. It has to sound natural, and it can’t sound natural until you’ve done it a thousand times. You can’t do it a thousand times if you stop after the first attempt.
You’re supposed to suck at this at first. Sucking at something, as Jake the Dog from Adventure Time says, is the first step to being kind of good at something. If you want to be kind of good at pitching, you have to do the work. There are no shortcuts in coming up with and practicing a compelling pitch. The only secret is to do it a whole bunch of times.
Techcrunch does pitch desk breakdowns every week. https://techcrunch.com/tag/pitch-deck-teardown/
This is generally called a value ladder. https://www.thinkific.com/blog/value-ladder/
A value ladder is a marketing strategy that is designed to take customers on a journey from a low-priced entry-level offer to a high-priced premium product. The goal is to create a series of products or services that are progressively more valuable, with each step building on the previous one.
Business speak for most expensive.
This is one of the biggest reasons why authors feel so unstable all the time. They do not have recurring revenue.
and contend that all authorship is a subscription business since you’re trying to get people to keep buying your books. I think most business, even a coffee shop, are subscription businesses at the end of the day, even if you have a launch model.Best practices for all businesses are to at least have a quarterly meeting with sales goals. I recommend setting a goal at the beginning of each quarter.
One reasons authors fear scale is they don’t have recurring revenue since everything is based on the next book launch.
 | A guest post by
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Yup! It gets easier over time if you build a flywheel instead of a pump, though. https://www.theauthorstack.com/p/setting-up-your-direct-sales-environment
So much to think about here! I was particularly struck by what you said about writing not being hard (it’s what we love to do), but rather promoting our writing being hard. I totally resonate with that: basically no one read my work before I got the Substack app and started actually connecting with others and sharing my work with them 🙈 but I do find it is much harder than the writing part!