Putting Pennies in the Bank For Your Author Career

Hey there, Igniter! Monica Leonelle from theworldneedsyourbook.com. You are listening to The Productive Novelist, and today I'm talking about putting pennies in the bank for your author career. And so this is a phrase that I use pretty frequently, um, the phrase putting pennies in the bank. And, uh, basically the, the reason that I talk about this phrase a lot, because when I'm it's a phrase I'm using to basically just describe content marketing. So if you're familiar with content marketing, you kind of know what this is already. But the reason that I started adopting this phrase specifically was that I was looking a couple of years ago, I was looking at my Growth Hacking for Storytellers series, which is now the Productive Novelist series. And I was looking at that and looking at, well, how like, where are my sales that I'm getting, which was all organic, no ads at that time? Where are these sales actually coming from? And when I investigated this, I found that almost all of my organic sales were coming from pieces of content that I had written 5+ years earlier. Or about 5 years earlier. And this was a little— it was a little bit surprising to me because I had done a lot over the course of several years. But it was really— and when I looked at it, it wasn't just like I've been putting out content for this period. It was that when the books first came out, I, you know, I did like an interview or I wrote a blog post or whatever I did that was essentially like some piece of pillar content in that it was, it was like an important topic that then kind of led straight into the book. And so those were the pieces that were driving it. And there were— it was only a handful of pieces, like maybe 5 pieces that were driving like a lot of organic sales to these books still 5 years later. And I realized like nothing I had done in the interim was doing that. And so, you know, like just random marketing stuff, like giveaways or even, even like building my email list. Like my email list was selling new stuff. It wasn't what was driving organic sales of the old stuff, even with an autoresponder. And I realized that basically I was making sales today based on some— based on not only books I had written 5 years earlier, but also marketing that I had done 5 years earlier. And so that was, that was kind of the approach. So the reason I was looking into this was I was starting a new nonfiction pen name. So this was September 2019. I was planning on writing this series. The first book ended up coming out in September of 2020, which I didn't know at the time. So I actually had basically a full year of like, you know, what do I do? How do I build my audience? That sort of thing. And so in September of 2019, I decided to embrace this concept of pennies in the bank. And so I decided I'm going to create a bunch of evergreen content. I don't know which of these pieces are going to be the ones that are selling books 5 years from now. But I do know that if I just create like 50 pieces of content that all point to this one book, then one of those pieces is going to— at least one of those pieces is going to be selling this book 5 years from now. So that was kind of my goal. And so this is— I did this. I said September 2019, through about August of 2020. I created about 100 YouTube videos, posted them, you know, kind of a couple times a week for whatever, 8 months, or, um, I guess no, more than that. Like, oh sorry, I started recording in September. I didn't start posting until January. So from January to August, um, you know, I posted about 100 videos. At some point during that time, I took that content and pulled it into a podcast feed. So I just pulled the audios off of all those and made them podcast episodes, which then expanded the reach of them. And the content was all, you know, it was all pillar content. It was, it was stuff that was like, what are the top, you know, if you were to go into a new niche, what are the top 100 questions that people are asking about this?. And I just had that list and just went through and answered each one in a video. And that was kind of the whole thing. That was all I did. And then my book came out in September of 2020. So I wanted to talk about this, though. So during this time, you would think with 100+ videos that, you know, I'd be seeing a lot of results from that. And so here were the results. By— so I started posting in January 2020. I stopped posting in August 2020. I didn't intend to stop posting. I just happened to stop posting. It's now April 2021. I still haven't posted, but I'm hoping to post again soon. But my results were that from January to August, I collected about 44 subscribers. You heard that right, 44 subscribers from 100+ videos. And I think I had maybe like 100 people on my email list. So not a huge amount, basically. So then from September 2020 to April 2021, I haven't posted any additional videos. And since then, I'm now up to 109 subscribers. And so you may think like, wow, this is— these, these numbers are really bad. Like, by all means, this person is failing at this, um, which I kind of agree with you, uh, but what I found interesting was that I did no more work, but my subscribers more than doubled in the, you know, over the course of I would say about 8 months. So not bad, right? Like it's probably like a 60 or 70%. Sorry, it's 100, 100-some percent more than doubled in 8 months. And so I did the math on this. And if my subscribers keep coming at the same trajectory, I would have 50,000+ subscribers in 5 years if it's the same trajectory, if I don't post anything more. And so there's a lot of things that could change about that. The trajectory is certainly not guaranteed. It's far from guaranteed. And also, I intend to post some more. So even though I haven't posted in 8 months, I'm sure people think I'm gone. I'm not. I do intend to post again. I actually have like 4 things recorded already to post. I just haven't done it yet. But basically what looks like a complete failure, like by all accounts, like by every metric, this is a failure, failed experiment, failure on YouTube in general. But 5 years from now, at the current trajectory, 50,000+ subscribers if I do nothing. Okay, so that's pennies in the bank. Additionally, when my book came out in September of 2020, I actually didn't get very many sales from my YouTube channel or my podcast. What I was— I think, I don't know how many sales I got, but I would say, you know, if I were to quantify like what effect does this YouTube channel have on my book sales, I would say it created on average zero sales a month. So maybe like one or two people. So maybe it was like 0.5 sales a month, but it was not creating sales of my book either. And so that was for several months after, you know, after the book was out in April. Of 2021. So when I'm recording this, it is now producing about 5 sales a month of that book organically. So again, not a big number, but that's over the course of 8 months. It's gone up. And the reason— so the other thing is that the reason the channel is growing So there's a lot of content on there, first of all, and it's starting to like find its audience. It's also, it was very like SEO-driven content. So it's starting to start like kind of come up in search engines quite a bit more. And it basically, there was one piece of content that did significantly better than others, kind of similar to my You know, my nonfiction and that piece of content is like the bulk of, you know, where the subscriber growth is coming from. Now, that piece of content, if it were the only video on my channel, it wouldn't have created the same trajectory. So once again, this is pennies in the bank. You know, it started out looking like a pretty pointless exercise, but over time, so then it kind of got abandoned and I I never abandoned it. I just actually had to go do other stuff. But now seeing that it's growing, it's like, oh, let me add some fuel to that fire basically and try to grow it more. The 5 sales that I got this month organically on that book, which has sold through to all the other books so that first book came out in September. I now have 4 books in the series, one just released in April. The sell-through has continued, like it's gone through. So when I sell 5 of those books organically, I sell 5 of the next books in the series as well, of each of them. And my read-through rate on that is basically close to 100%. So that's good, right? And this is at 100 subscribers. That's what it's doing, or 109 subscribers. Again, 5 years from now, at the current trajectory, 50,000 subscribers, who knows how many people will be buying the book based on these 100 videos that I did, you know, just like, like basically a year ago. And that's what I mean by pennies in the bank. And so every time I do one of these, these experiments, I'm looking, you know, 5 years into the future, basically. So this happened to me. I'm going to give you one other example of this happening to me recently, and then I will tell you what I'm doing on the fiction side. So this happened to me again on a platform called Medium. So you, you may have heard of it. It's at medium.com if you want to check it out, if you don't know what it is. So back in January 2020, I was again on this pennies in the bank kick, kind of you know, for both of these brands at the same time, I decided to— one of my friends, Ashley Shannon, had said that she was making $1,000 a month on Medium. So I was like, okay, I'm curious about this and I just want to like experiment with it. So I decided to take some of my content and post it on Medium. I tried to post about once a day. So I think I got like 25 to 30 articles during January 2020, and then I got distracted. So I didn't continue posting and I just, I couldn't keep up with the schedule. But those 30 articles stayed up there and I ended up making, I think I made $100 the first month and then the next month I made $50 with no new posts. And then it kind of trailed off like it's, you know, I think I make like 15 or 20 bucks now every month. So not big money by any means. When I started in January 2020, I had about a little bit over 100 followers on there. And the only reason I had that there, I had one article posted and I had posted it in 2014. It had about 75,000 views from 2014 to 2020. And that's where the 100+ followers had come from. So I didn't even know I had followers on Medium until I kind of like logged in and was like, oh, I posted this like 6 years ago and it's generated these 100 followers. And so those 100 followers over the course of that month, I think it probably doubled. So, so, you know, I was at like about 100, 150, I don't really remember. And by the end of the month or within The first couple of months of that experiment, I had somewhere from between like 250 and 300 followers. Okay. So then I abandoned it and about a year later, so I kind of just recently started posting again. I think I abandoned it because it was like the pandemic happened and I— so that was like March and I was just like, I don't have energy for this. So I kind of abandoned it and I've only recently started posting there again because I was just like really called to blog recently. And when I blog, I usually like post it on Medium first and then I post it on my blog. So I was looking at my numbers in April 2021 when I started reposting, you know, started posting again. And I've only posted like 3 or 4 articles. And I'm up to 800 followers. So again, when I stopped posting last year, I was at like at most 300. And now a year later, roughly at 800 now. I also noticed that my Productive Novelist publication, which I started in January of 2020, you know, the last time I checked it, it had 22 followers. Which like I didn't even know how people were finding it really. Like I didn't, I didn't really and I still don't really understand the publication thing and like how people find them and like, like why people follow them. Like, I don't, I don't really get any of that. But that publication had like 20-some followers when I last checked it. And then when I started posting again a couple of weeks ago, it had 70 followers. And then yesterday I got this email that from Medium and they're like, hey, your publication has 100 followers. And so that's So again, it, it went from 20 followers to 70 followers through nothing I did. Like, I didn't do anything to find those additional 50 followers or like for that publication to over double. I wasn't posting to it. And then now it's at 100 followers just a couple of weeks later because I did start posting, I guess. And that, like, when you— it's again, like, these are very small numbers. Like, all of these are really small numbers, but when you look at the trajectory, um, it's speeding up. Uh, so like, I don't know, I think that if I kept posting to it over the next month, I would be at like 150 followers or like 200 followers. And, and I think those numbers will kind of keep growing pretty quickly. Um, just something at Medium. So in the batch of stuff that I published, and I know this is going long, but I want to keep going. In the batch of stuff that I published was this Kindle Vella article. So Kindle Vella came out like a week and a half or 2 weeks ago. And this Kindle Vella article has had about 2,000 views since I posted it. Like, it's— I probably posted it in the last 2 weeks. As of this recording, it had about 2,000 views. But the more interesting thing was that the reason it has those views and like my other, the other posts that I posted during this time have had like 30 to 40 views. I just want to be clear. The reason that it had so many views is likely because two industry thought leaders, I guess you could call them, David Goggin and Joanna Penn, both reposted it or retweeted it to their audiences. And so that's part of why that article has done so well compared to my other stuff. So what do I want to say about this? Okay, so first of all, this article did very well recently, but it's not because of the article in almost any way, if you think about it. So The article itself, not specifically that interesting. I mean, it was a good article like my other couple, my other several articles that I posted on there are also really good articles. So this wasn't like an exceptionally good article. It was about an interesting news item. So Kindle Vella is like very timely right now. So that is probably part of it. But what the real reason that that article did so well is because of these 800 followers. So David Goggin and Joanna Penn, like, I kind of know that. I mean, so David Goggin, I've met him. I don't really know him personally. Joanna Penn, I know a little bit better. You know, we've like, like I've been on her podcast, we've chatted over the years. I've had a couple, you know, dinners with her, was in a mastermind with her, like a couple, you know, so like we have like a better connection, I would say, but I can't say that like we're close friends by any means. You know, I have great respect for her. I love her stuff. Friendly with her, an acquaintance, but she's not tweeting me because we're friends. Like, we just don't have that kind of like close relationship by any means. So, you know, they both know who I am, but they're not That's not why they're tweeting about my article, I don't think. So there are a couple of factors that help this, this particular article. But really, this article, the reason it got retweeted and got reshared so much and got the views and everything is because of the 30 articles that I posted in January of 2020. Those articles are what got me to the 800 followers. Those 800 followers, they, you know, they came through because I had had a little bit of activity on the platform and that activity, you know, it was pennies in the bank at the time. It was not making, you know, not making money, not getting visibility, nothing. But over the course of the year, those pennies have turned into, you know, nickels, dimes, and quarters basically. And my following there has more, again, more than doubled. And so with those 800 followers now, pretty much anything I write is going to have a solid viewership, you know, and, and then people like repost this information in groups. I know the post was also posted on Reddit, so that kind of helped, not in terms of visibility, but in terms of somebody influential seeing it on Reddit possibly. But it's just like the, the reason that the article did well is because I had this foundation of following that then was able to kind of share it and get it going. So I, as far as I know, David Goggin and Julian Penn do not follow me on Medium. Maybe they do. I don't, I don't think they do though. And so they must have seen it through like the sharing mechanism. And once again, you know, Medium, it was pennies in the bank at the time. I didn't see really results from it when I did it. But now I am seeing results because it was a foundation upon which to build. And so now when I post there, like now I'm seeing more and more value in posting my content on Medium and in writing to Medium and nurturing that audience because the trajectory is so strong now. And when it started, it really wasn't. And the same with YouTube. So now I know when I post to when I post to my other podcasts. Um, I know that on YouTube I have over double the following. I know that's going to help me in the algorithms. And then on my actual podcast feed, which has also grown, that's also going to increase my visibility. So these pennies in the bank, they really matter. And, um, seeing the trajectory of those two things just based on my content marketing and seeing how those posts they really, um, they actually grow really rapidly. They're, they're a good investment that you don't, you don't really see the investment for a while. And I think that that's kind of almost the definition of an investment, especially financially, is that you, you know, do some work now and then eventually it pays off. And so I'm starting to see that with these two things based on this concept of the pennies in the bank. So I believe— I've given you a couple of nonfiction examples, but I believe, of course, that the same thing is true of fiction. I've seen it in fiction as well. It's one of the reasons I'm aggressively wide in fiction and why I decided to do that and to not be in any exclusivity program, because I've just seen results in nonfiction of being wide. And then it's also one of the reasons that I focus on evergreen. I do this in nonfiction kind of naturally, just from my previous experience. But, you know, fiction is kind of even more evergreen in some ways if you write it correctly. If you are chasing trends, that's when, you know, I've seen a number of fiction authors, they chased a trend. They didn't really— they basically just kind of rode on the visibility of that trend. And they weren't really building something bigger. In the nonfiction space, at least in my experience, everything I do in nonfiction, it's a foundation for something. It's like a springboard for future Monica. And I think the same is true in fiction. So you see people who maybe they kind of write in the same world, for example. So they'll do a new series, but it will still be in the same world. That to me is this concept of pennies in the bank. Or maybe they are posting, you know, a chapter at a time to their website. And you probably, you know, you post a chapter and you're like, yeah, like didn't really get me. You know, I got like one new subscriber from that or Like, I just got, you know, I got this like kind of pittance of a result from it. And then I did it like 50 times and, you know, I still was getting a pittance at the end of that. And so then people give up, but there are people who don't give up and they keep going with that. And then over time they've built like actually a massive audience based on that. And that, again, pennies in the bank. So on the fiction side, something I'm experimenting with, and if you're interested in following my experiment, you can check out my Substack because that's, that's where I'm going to be posting about it more. You can go to theworldneedsyourbook.com/substack. It is a free newsletter. A lot of this may be behind the paywall. I'm not sure yet. Or you can go to— so if that link isn't working, you can also go to aggressivelywide.substack.com. And so I share a lot of things on this newsletter. It's kind of like industry news, but it's also, you know, behind the scenes, some of the WIDE experiments that I'm doing. And so one that I'm doing now is around AI read audiobooks. And specifically, so kind of, you know, I have experience in podcasting and I've seen a lot of results with just, you know, doing some SEO for podcasting and specifically on Spotify. Spotify is kind of killer for audio search. They also just opened into audiobooks just just like this week, I think they finally opened their audiobook section. So they just started doing audiobooks. I don't really blame them. I actually wrote an article about this on— and it is on Medium— in my, in my publication, The Productive Novelist, which we were just talking about. But definitely check that out to hear why Spotify is so interesting to authors right now and why it is going to be kind of important. So I'm experimenting with AI-read audiobooks. And basically I'm doing this because I don't like— one, I'm going to give it away for free, so I don't want to put a lot of time into it. And I just— I don't have the time right now to do audiobooks, really. I just have limited time. So I'm putting together these AI-read audiobooks. I'm going to have a podcast feed of them. And I'm going to do a behind the scenes of each chapter. So every— so like each podcast episode will be like a chapter of the book and then— and it's AI read. So it's not, it's not like high quality, it's not great quality, but that's okay. People can find the book on retailers as well. So they don't, they don't have to listen to it in this AI read format. They can just get the book. But then after each one, there's going to be like an after show type of thing. And so this probably works better with fantasy or sci-fi. I watch a lot of fantasy and sci-fi television shows, and I and my husband were kind of addicted to like after-the-show type of podcasts or television shows. So like for Game of Thrones, for example, I think it was called— there's one called After the Thrones that we listened to pretty religiously. It's crazy that these you know, an episode was like an hour, but sometimes these podcasts would be like 2 or 3 hours or even like 2 or 3 podcasts that were each like an hour, hour and a half. And we would listen to it every single week. We loved it. And I think— and we also like would go back. So if we started a show late, which, you know, like who watches television as it comes out these days? We also like will go back and we'll be like, okay, we're going to listen to like you know, the like episode 1 analysis of this. And so because I love that so much, I wanted to experiment with doing it for myself as a podcast and just having the chapter and then the after show podcast. So I kind of expect it to fail for like a long time, just like my YouTube channel did and kind of pretty much still is by all standards. 100 subscribers is not very many guys for 100+ videos. I expected to fail for a long time. So that is kind of exciting for me though. And same with my Medium experiment from January 2020. Like it was kind of a failure and that's okay. It will probably fail for a long time. But whenever I do these experiments, it's always fun because I know that 5 years from now it could be a totally different story. I really, really believe in this concept of pennies in the bank, especially having been in this industry for a while. And I think it's worth trying for yourself. So if you have ideas and you're really not seeing the traction— now, some people, sometimes you do need to see traction. I get that. Sometimes you have bills to pay and that sort of thing. You have limited time. You want to focus on what works, I'm all for that as well. If you do have the energy for an experiment, I think it's worth it. And I think, and I have seen personally, that this idea of pennies in the bank, it really, really works. And it actually, it doesn't take a lot from you. It really takes you creating some sort of foundation on any one of these platforms. Making sure it's really evergreen, making sure it's really searchable. And from there, really letting time do its magic and seeing if, you know, you can get that virality coefficient that's more than 1. And what that means is that in the course of a year, did you more than double? And if you have that and if you can create that, even just a couple months of effort can turn into something big later on down the road. And so I just encourage you to try this for fiction, to try being consistent. I was able to create this in the nonfiction space. That typically means that it would do even better for fiction, typically means that there are far fewer competitors in fiction. And I just think it's worth doing. So that's all for me on this topic about putting pennies in the bank for your author career. Thank you so much for watching and listening, and I hope you have a great day.