More Sales Channels, Better Business
There’s a massive tendency for writers to neglect learning about business. Amongst the ones that do, there’s a tendency to try and protect their writing from the truths of business: words are a commodity, asset and tangible product for sale.
I can understand that; writing is a direct link between our brains and the world, so it’s easy to assume that there’s massive value to the words we write, and there’s a fear of putting a price on those words.
However, it’s crucial to your success to start thinking of your words as products and assets. If you don’t, there are billions of people who are only happy to assume that your words have no value, and subsequently, neither does your business.
This article isn’t about dispelling the notion that words aren’t worth anything and neither are writers, because that’s a moronic thing to suggest and if anyone tells you this stupid thing, you need to punch them in the face. (Probably not really though.)
Instead, this article is going to assume you understand that writing is worth money and as a writer you are producing a tangible product. The rest of this article is going to talk about a single concept: The more channels you’re in, the better your business runs.
More Channels, More Money
Out of the billions of people on the planet, only a very small percentage of them are ever going to be interested in your words. Whether you’re a journalist working for The Times, an author penning romance novels or a copywriter spinning those silver-tongued sales letters for clients, only so many people are going to be interested in your products and services.
Naturally, we want to make as many of those potential customers aware of our business as possible.
However, most writers don’t do this at all. Let’s just cut out the ones that walk straight into a job at an advertising agency and work exclusively for that advertising agency. Let’s also cut out the authors who sit and wait for years whilst a major publishing house twiddles their thumbs about releasing the author’s debut novel. Let’s talk about the writers that are self-employed and freelancers.
Author Bob decides to write a crime novel. He puts it in Kindle Unlimited because that’s what everyone tells him to do. “Kindle is the biggest market and you want your sales rank to go up!”
Freelancer Timmy decides he’s going to write copy for companies. Realising that there’s a ton of copywriters out there, he decides to differentiate himself by working in a niche. So, he says, “I’m only writing copy in the financial industry” and then writes a profile for UpWork accordingly.
One Channel = No Freedom
Just over a year ago, I had a problem with a freelance website. I was making reasonably good money – and most of my money – from this one site, so naturally I put a lot of effort into it. I was writing pitches, doing customer service, finally getting consistent, real work with an increasing amount of pay. It was all going well, to the point where I’d scaled down other operations to make time for it.
One day, I got an email from support. “Your account has been disabled.”
What?
I aged about twenty years on that morning. I got through to support eventually, and apparently one of my clients had been dicking around with fake IP addresses and issuing chargebacks and doing all those sorts of things that scammers do.
Of course, this had absolutely nothing to do with me but my account was involved – in fact, I’d lost money as well due to the chargebacks – but my account got automatically flagged.
To cut a long story short, this got sorted out eventually. My account was fully restored and I could access the money in my account and whatnot.
However, it showed me an important thing: Freelance websites are not your friend. They are not your business. They are not your employer.
I was stupid for spending all my time on one sales channel. When it comes to freelance websites, I can think of about ten off the top of my head, and you should be on all of them.
You should also be seeking work from outside freelance websites and in the real world. You should probably also be offering services completely outside of freelance writing. More channels = more security.
Now, if I never got another order from one freelance website again, I’d be a bit irritated at the dip in income, but at least I wouldn’t be worried about my future, my income and client list.
What About Books?
A writer is lucky in that one piece of intellectual property can create multiple assets. I can write a single book, and with a bit of effort and investment, I could have:
- A course
- An e-book
- A Paperback
- A Hardback/Limited Edition Type Thing
- An Audiobook
- A Video course (if that’s applicable)
- A Seminar (if that’s applicable)
- A Workbook (if that’s applicable)
Added to that division, you can sell all of those products in multiple places. In fact, if you were to split every book you wrote into all of those things, you’d have a near limitless amount of different sales channels to pursue. That’s with a single piece of work. Once you’ve worked out how to sell into those channels, it’ll take you a few hours to make your product available in all of these places.
If that sounds good, then think about what happens when you have five, ten or fifty books. If you write at pulp speed, you can easily write ten books in a year. Following the process above and saying you create an e-book, paperback and audiobook and sell each one of those things in five places, you’re taking ten books and creating one-hundred-and-fifty sales channels.
It doesn’t take much mathematical skill to work out that having products available in one-hundred-and-fifty places available is going to add up quickly even if you only make one sale per book per week per channel.
Final Thoughts
Creating your product or service is the hard part. Sure, you have to market your business and its assets. Sure, it takes time to write pitches or create book covers. However, the hard part is in doing the thing that makes you the money, whether that’s writing articles, books or something else.
Once you have done the hard part, selling it in the digital age is relatively trivial. You upload a profile, pitch or pdf to somewhere on the internet and then point people to those places.
Learning to upload your book to Amazon is easy. Learning to upload it to B&N or Apple is just as easy. It’ll take you five minutes to do each one, and you can input the same information for all of them, so it’s not any more difficult. The upside is huge though.
Freelance and copywriting is the same. If you’ve joined one freelancer site, you’ve joined them all – so you might as well actually do that. You aren’t gaining anything from going exclusive with any of these places, so why would you?
Think of yourself as a supplier with an unlimited amount of product, get yourself into more sales channels and reap the rewards long-term.