If you’re serious about making it as an author you need to always be thinking about your return on investment. To do this well you need to keep track of the amount of time you’re putting into your work.
Every minute you spend building your world, planning a storyline and eventually writing about it, is money that you need to reclaim through sales. All of those minutes and hours add up, and the longer you spend working, the more sales you need to make to get a return on your investment. Remember, you’re trying to make a profit.
Your Marketing Opportunities Are Limited
You’ve built your world, planned your storyline and written your first story. Now it’s time to get into the marketing game, what are your options? The hardest time for marketing is with your first story. Why? Because it’s the only sales channel into your world.
Whenever a potential reader comes along and finds your content you’ve put them in a make-or-break decision. Should they spend the money to find out whether your world is interesting or not. With only one story available to them their choice is almost always going to lean towards no. Why? It could be price, but most likely it’s because there isn’t enough content to truly immerse themselves, and readers want to be immersed.
What’s the solution? As a solo-worlder your only option is to write more stories to build up the amount of content available about your world. If a reader comes across your content and you have 5, 6, 10 stories ready for them all about the same world, your chances of converting them are much higher. They see a much better prospect of immersion.
What’s the problem? It takes a lot of time to get to that much content, and your sales income probably isn’t doing much while you’re creating it. So what usually happens? People generally give up. It’s an incredible shame that that’s what tends to happen, but the game is not balanced in your favour.
Collaborative worlds are a different breed
When you work on a collaborative world things tend to go differently. You’re not a solo-worlder anymore, so the burden of creating content about your world isn’t only on you.
One of the biggest benefits is time. With x number of creatives working simultaneously to create content for a world, the time it takes to reach a critical mass of content is much shorter. When we say critical mass, we’re talking about an amount of content that leads to a high percentage of potential readers saying “Yes, it’s worth the money to at least see”.
Another big benefit is that your stories are no longer the only sales channels into your world. The stories of your collaborators are also sales channels. What’s even better is that your stories are more likely to be purchased by readers if they purchased and read the stories by your collaborators.
Remember, your fans are not fans of your storyline, they are fans of your world. If they buy a collaborators content first, they become repeat customers for your content as well, because it’s about the same world.
Collaborative worlds have a much higher chance of success due to the nature by which readers make purchasing decisions. You’re more likely to get a return on your investment from working on a collaborative world than you are as a solo-worlder. As a solo-worlder the numbers just don’t stack up.
Takeaways
- You’re trying to make a profit from your work.
- It’s easier to convince readers to make a purchase if you have more content available.
- Readers want immersion. One story isn’t going to cut it.
- Readers read faster than authors write.
- Fans are not fans of your storyline, they are fans of your world.
- Readers can become repeat customers of your content without ever having purchased it
