Marketing Collective Concept

[Demesnedenoir]

Setup under the umbrella of "Twelfth Star Publishing" but NO RIGHTS are held by me. You also have the option of using the "company" ISBNs at my cost to make things look more official, and I have about 80 ISBNs siting around. This way, when an agent or publisher comes calling, you can opt-out at any given time. There would be a Commons Store and every author would have a dedicated page with their books, author bio, interviews, blog links, etc.

BASIC ADVERTISING— Every author chips in $5/month into the FB Commons, let's say $25/month for 5 authors. Consider this the base, or just $150 per month. Whatever. This should result in a minimum of 100 page landings to the 12th Star Commons Shopping page with links to all authors and their books, but more than likely, around 150-200 page landings per day with the upper expected limit around 250. The store would be affiliate linked to try to make a few extra dollars here and there and cover website expenses and whatnot. All money the authors kick in goes straight to advertising. The Commons Ads would be rotating images of multiple books to attract different segments of the fantasy audience, basically an ad with multiple Images and headlines that FB chooses which ones are working best and we run with it. It would be a major advantage for the prospective buyer to see a selection, not just a single author's book, I suspect. It affords more time to spend on the website and to explore. I know that would work on me.

TARGETED ADVERTISING (Optional)—Facebook: If you're running a promo, you the author can send me $X for whatever time period. You can provide your own promo material, we can co-op, or just let me hammer it together. We use the FB Pixel to retarget the thousands of clickers who've already shown interest in the books, and hit them with an ad geared straight to your book/promo, and the Link goes straight to your Dedicated Author Page on 12th Star. Of course, they can still shop around, but then again, every time an author runs this sort of promo everybody will get more exposure and there are times when I will run $1k or more at FB ads in a month, so, we'd want to look at this as a Collective Perk.

AMAZON ADS (Optional)— This gets a tad trickier, but the best way to hit Amazon is to bring traffic from outside (FB, Twitter, TikTok, BB, etc.) while also running Amazon Ads to trigger the algorithm. The trick here is that $5 per day is really the minimum to do much of anything on Amazon. But, I could manage the ads, working together to formulate a strategy and then see how it all works out. One Advantage here is that we would be able to run Defensive Ads, so when shoppers hit our pages, they'd see some ads for authors in the group instead of always being other authors.

OTHER ADVANTAGES— One of the major advantages I see would be that everybody's blogs, vlogs, posts, tweets, or whatever could get pooled not just to individual sites, but the Collective, so that it is more active and diverse in content, giving people more of a place to visit. With 5+ authors ready to babble, we could easily setup a podcast, youtube channel, Tiktok stuff, and whatever else. Discuss all kinds of writing and book topics. Do interviews with other authors, Influencers, and Book Reviewers, which will also build a connection to getting those reviews. This would be easy t build out starting with everybody having conversations with the founding members. Other authors are easy, they're always ready to talk, and SPFBO type events would offer up a wild array of writers ready to talk.

FUTURE AUTHORS— Can be added with an upfront 3-6 month Commons ad buy-in, or some such.

A $150/month buy-in to me sounds right reasonable for the exposure, and if one member can build websites, even better!

Who's in?

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Oh yes, and author Blurbs from those in the group... just like the big boys do it, heh heh.

Book reviews, of course. Not just in-house but everything that keeps giving readers a reason to come back to the site. History discussions. You name it. Keep the group vital, and that's way easier with more than one person tweeting stupid engagement questions, heh heh.

 

[Prince of Spires]

I'd be game to hammer it out a bit further and see how we could make it work. It would be a fun experiment at least. I do have my own ISBN's, so don't need those. Bought my own batch of 100...

I'm on holiday for the coming 3 weeks, so I might be slow to respond...

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Yeah, this could be totally no cash to start too. It'd be best to have a core 5 authors with some crossover reader potential. Even as a cross-posting vlog and blog crew it could be useful to increase engagement. Part of this is based on what I gathered as effective from a group of writers that was going well until one author took their successes and went overboard, basically going all-in on coding an app and yadda yadda, but they had other authors buying in until getting too many, from my outside interpretation.

Of course, I have no idea what kind of money they spent to get there, but it was working.

I'd be game to hammer it out a bit further and see how we could make it work. It would be a fun experiment at least. I do have my own ISBN's, so don't need those. Bought my own batch of 100...

I'm on holiday for the coming 3 weeks, so I might be slow to respond...

 

[pmmg]

If I did this, I would use my Own ISBN's. I am mildly interested.

 

[Ned Marcus]

I like the idea, but at the moment, even $150/m is expensive.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

I consider ISBNs a potential perk, nothing major.

Main Points:

1. Pooling individual social media content — Everyone's individual content is shared by group members in one way or another, garnering engagement and encouraging more content from everybody.
2. Group Social media content — Partnered content, such as an "Author's Table" with rotating group members doing interviews, reviews, and discussions, all somehow connected to fantasy books/entertainment/writing. In an ideal world, this becomes the core content and engagement driver. Interviewing booktubers and other reviewers is a great way to advertise free while also building a rapport with some of them, could give the core authors a foot in the door to gettig reviews from them.
3. A Group website & Group Facebook Page — Obvious, to have a place to collect mailing list info and past episodes and blogs, etc etc. and of course, the Book Store with affiliate links.
4. Group Advertising (The Final Step) — If/When organic growth suggests we've achieved a base, then we could attempt paid expansion. Now, if organic is good enough, why bother? But, it would probably be worth a six month effort to try to build out.

If the good news is it's a success, the trick becomes to try and not to go Too Big or Too Much. I think that really hammered one author group that at least from the outside was successful. One of the more motivated members seems to have went way overboard and lost site of the core objective, IMO.

ALSO, if there is a member who isn't comfortable doing as much time input, they can opt to put in money that would go to advertising or incurred expenses.

If I did this, I would use my Own ISBN's. I am mildly interested.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

It would be best to start on the cheap anyhow. Money always complicates things anyhow, LOL.

I like the idea, but at the moment, even $150/m is expensive.

 

[pmmg]

You are way ahead of me on your thinking with this. I'm just pecking away at a book 4.

I dont see much I would not like. When my last writer group moved to facebook (and dragged me into facebook with them) they did in fact make a pretty big blog page there. But I found it was not for me. Mostly it was people saying by my book, and not sticking around to engage anyone. Kind of just spam. Those that did changed. Here on MS, there is no hard politics. My saying is politics makes you ugly. When you are on facebook and people can go look at your personal pages, they will start finding the stuff to have drama about. I pretty much 86'd my old group because the politics became all they were.

Anyway...I am following this and we look for ways to contribute.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

I think we would have to take an F-politics POV because I can piss off anybody on either side in the US, heh heh. All members would have to agree to disagree and stay away from any politics outside of, say, if AI reaches that point in legislation or something like that. If it's not book related, don't touch it.

I remember on Twitter when I joined the first time I followed King thinking he might talk books... I never saw a single tweet that wasn't politics from that guy. Didn't take long to unfollow. This time I joined Twitter I've been much more careful, and barely see politics any more. Whew!

Now, more to the point... I'd see where people would play to strengths.

Prefer print to video? Great. Personally, I prefer to read than watch videos because I read transcripts faster than the video. But, Video is huge, so we'd want people handling both.

Read alot? Do reviews. Interview the writers. THAT would be HUGE. How many times I've been asked for an interview and the people give me boilerplate questions? Argh. Having an interviewer who has read the book and could ask real questions would open access to a lot of writers and make the interviews way more interesting to readers. Personally, I think this would be killer. You just don't see it enough.

Fantasy is hitting Netflix and Prime more and more often, and talking about these draws engagement. Classic Fantasy book conversations, big draw. These are great conversation pieces, and they're EASY. Use pop culture and have fun with it with one person who likes a show and one who doesn't taking shots at each other.

Once a month "writers" sessions discussing something about the craft. Whatever.

With 5-10 people doing one thing every 1-2 months, we'd have plenty of varied topics to keep people going. The key is the right people sticking with it.

 

[skip.knox]

I like the idea. $150 per month is a bit rich when I'm earning maybe $5 a month (losing money, actually, after ads), but if this increases income, I'd still be listening.

More problematic for me is time. I'm getting very jealous of available time. It's all I can do just to keep momentum on writing stories. I have at least five novels waiting impatiently, and each novel to date seems to take me 18 to 24 months. So that's the next ten years spoken for, and that's without taking on anything that would eat into that time.

I realize I'm doing the literary equivalent of tossing rocks into a pond, but it can be pleasant just to watch the ripples.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

I'd be more apt to say $0 until proof of concept and a base of readers is formed. With your background in history, you'd make a great addition to a variety of topics. I'm jealous of time myself, as making money and the honey-do list are killers before I even get to writing, heh heh. Several people pooling valuable free-time could be useful.

I like the idea. $150 per month is a bit rich when I'm earning maybe $5 a month (losing money, actually, after ads), but if this increases income, I'd still be listening.

More problematic for me is time. I'm getting very jealous of available time. It's all I can do just to keep momentum on writing stories. I have at least five novels waiting impatiently, and each novel to date seems to take me 18 to 24 months. So that's the next ten years spoken for, and that's without taking on anything that would eat into that time.

I realize I'm doing the literary equivalent of tossing rocks into a pond, but it can be pleasant just to watch the ripples.

 

[ThinkerX]

I am willing to look into this. Sad to say I have dropped $150+ on promos that didn't go anywhere, so worst case scenario is I repeat that. However, I suspect this would work far better than those promos.

Side Note: As a sort of legacy of prior promos, I get quite a few book newsletters. Some of the outfits I deemed 'shaky' are not doing well at all - they went from eight or ten books per email to about three. Others...well, there be a *lot* of self-help and erotica type romance books on offer, Other genres...fantasy is out there, but it comes in like fourth.

 

[skip.knox]

Setup under the umbrella of "Twelfth Star Publishing" but NO RIGHTS are held by me. You also have the option of using the "company" ISBNs at my cost to make things look more official, and I have about 80 ISBNs siting around. This way, when an agent or publisher comes calling, you can opt-out at any given time. There would be a Commons Store and every author would have a dedicated page with their books, author bio, interviews, blog links, etc.

BASIC ADVERTISING— Every author chips in $5/month into the FB Commons, let's say $25/month for 5 authors. Consider this the base, or just $150 per month. Whatever. This should result in a minimum of 100 page landings to the 12th Star Commons Shopping page with links to all authors and their books, but more than likely, around 150-200 page landings per day with the upper expected limit around 250. The store would be affiliate linked to try to make a few extra dollars here and there and cover website expenses and whatnot. All money the authors kick in goes straight to advertising. The Commons Ads would be rotating images of multiple books to attract different segments of the fantasy audience, basically an ad with multiple Images and headlines that FB chooses which ones are working best and we run with it. It would be a major advantage for the prospective buyer to see a selection, not just a single author's book, I suspect. It affords more time to spend on the website and to explore. I know that would work on me.

TARGETED ADVERTISING (Optional)—Facebook: If you're running a promo, you the author can send me $X for whatever time period. You can provide your own promo material, we can co-op, or just let me hammer it together. We use the FB Pixel to retarget the thousands of clickers who've already shown interest in the books, and hit them with an ad geared straight to your book/promo, and the Link goes straight to your Dedicated Author Page on 12th Star. Of course, they can still shop around, but then again, every time an author runs this sort of promo everybody will get more exposure and there are times when I will run $1k or more at FB ads in a month, so, we'd want to look at this as a Collective Perk.

AMAZON ADS (Optional)— This gets a tad trickier, but the best way to hit Amazon is to bring traffic from outside (FB, Twitter, TikTok, BB, etc.) while also running Amazon Ads to trigger the algorithm. The trick here is that $5 per day is really the minimum to do much of anything on Amazon. But, I could manage the ads, working together to formulate a strategy and then see how it all works out. One Advantage here is that we would be able to run Defensive Ads, so when shoppers hit our pages, they'd see some ads for authors in the group instead of always being other authors.

OTHER ADVANTAGES— One of the major advantages I see would be that everybody's blogs, vlogs, posts, tweets, or whatever could get pooled not just to individual sites, but the Collective, so that it is more active and diverse in content, giving people more of a place to visit. With 5+ authors ready to babble, we could easily setup a podcast, youtube channel, Tiktok stuff, and whatever else. Discuss all kinds of writing and book topics

 

[skip.knox]

Some specific questions.

If initial buy-in is zero, how do we buy advertising? Maybe run for a while with none?

Would those isbns show Twelfth Star as publisher?

I'm Amazon exclusive right now. Does that matter?

That's a starter set.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

These are a little bit detached from one another and just slapping around ideas. The notion went from an immediate cash advertising start to a social media collaborative effort to establish a possible base.

Nothing is really an official plan, more beating the bushes to see what works for people. A collaborative system of engagement might get the ball rolling.

If the ISBN was searched, then 12th Star would be listed, yes. In effect, how you are published wouldn't matter, the 12th star ISBNs would be optional. So, technically, one could be trad published and still join the promotional group, as well as exclusive or wide. The bigger point would be an organized, cohesive, and ongoing cross-promotional effort that could build on the basics of individual blogs and adding collaborative efforts and other points of interest to keep audience engagement and let the audience get to know the writers... that sort of engagement will keep folks around. People who know your history history and are into such things will be more likely to buy, and the more people we have attracting a pool, the more of those people we should find. In theory at least, heh heh.

Some specific questions.

If initial buy-in is zero, how do we buy advertising? Maybe run for a while with none?

Would those isbns show Twelfth Star as publisher?

I'm Amazon exclusive right now. Does that matter?

That's a starter set.

 

[ThinkerX]

If I understand this correctly, my D2D issued ISBN's shouldn't be an issue.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Yeah, nothing about the concept has any legal entanglements for ISBNs or anything else.

If I understand this correctly, my D2D issued ISBN's shouldn't be an issue.

 

[skip.knox]

What would be first steps? Set up a web site? Formal list of founders? Commitments, even if not actual cash? A road map?

Somehow we would have to move from possibilities to practicalities.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Founding members and then a basic list of expectations/commitments. A website/FB page would probably become a need right off. We could use Twelfth Star's FB Group, which already has 178 Followers as a teeny tiny starting point. Those are all organic, which is a positive because I've never really pushed it. Using that, I'd just invite all members in as editors/managers of the FB page.

Website: I've forgotten more than I remember about coding websites, and have been using Squarespace for a long time. So, a website could be setup through them using 12th Star or another name we cobble together.

First Commitment: monthly blogs that aren't pure self-hype. People will be put off by pure advertising. Interviewing authors from here and Reviews (both Indie and Trad) would be better. Writing theory. History. We schedule them out and everybody cross-promotes to drive traffic to Group Home.

I have a friend who's been tossing around the idea of doing Fantasy Reviews, so he could jump onboard to give us additional content... if he's game.

Then, we could push toward more collaborative projects. Feet wet first.