What new authors need to know about “Discoverability”
If you’re an author, you’re probably used to seeing something like this in discussion groups, forums and various other places online:
“I’m certain about my cover-art, I’ve iterated on my blurb, my landing pages are compelling, my reviews tend to be good, I’ve got Twitter, my blog gets some hits - but I just can’t seem to get enough sales.”
Assume, for a moment, that you’ve gotten everything perfect. Your cover genuinely is amazing. Your blurb drives people into a frenzy of wanting to read your book. You believe your prose is good (not flawless, I mean c’mon, no-one is that conceited) but you think it’s worth buying.
It can be very frustrating, then, to refresh your Amazon bookshelf over and over, hoping for sales that just never seem to materialise, or traffic that just doesn’t reach your pages.
What I’m here to tell you is that you’re not alone.
The problem of Discoverability
Discoverability is the term used for this kind of stuff, and it applies to media as a whole. It’s the same if you’re making videos for YouTube, meme-images for Tumblr, games for the iPad or books on Amazon. The truth is, there are so many titles released every day on whatever service you’re using that it really is a bit of a lottery.
Getting discovered by the general populace is hard. The internet isn’t a hive mind, but the interconnected nature of social media means that people tend to gravitate towards things someone near them already knows. Punching into that bubble takes effort, but more importantly, it takes either luck or persistence, and I want to give you an example of each.
Unfortunately, these aren’t books - but I like them because they’re so closely related to each other.
Flappy Bird is a game for mobile devices made by a one-man Vietnamese developer. Most people will remember it. This person had made several games before, always quite simple in concept, but he was still quite a new developer when he struck gold with this game.
Flappy Bird was everywhere. It was all over Tumblr and other social networks, and reportedly made the developer around $50k per-day at its peak (through advertising revenue).
So how did people “discover” Flappy Bird? The developer still maintains it was purely “luck”. It just struck a chord with people in a way he couldn’t explain. This can be supported by the idea that Flappy Bird isn’t particularly original; the basic concept for the game is similar to Nintendo’s Balloon Fight from the 80s, but there are even other games on the iPad/iPhone which are similar. These similar contemporary games didn’t see anywhere near as much success.
Most people have heard of Angry Birds. It’s another iPad/iPhone/smart device game, which went on to spawn a large series of successors and spin-offs.
What you might not know is that Angry Birds was not simply “luck” like Flappy Bird. Angry Birds is the end result of many a long period of development by Rovio, the team who created it. I once heard that it was their 40th game, which I don’t know for a fact to be correct, but I do know that they made many similar games beforehand, testing, tweaking and iterating on the core idea before they hit the big-time.
Prior to Angry Birds, there were similar-looking games on the iPad, there were similar-playing games on the iPad, but it was the fusion of the visual branding and gameplay that made it stand head-and-shoulders above the competition.
The key thing, though, is that they didn’t slave away, tweaking and tuning a single game. They made a game, released it, tweaked it, learned from it, then went onto game 2, then game 3, then game 4…
So what should you take away from this? In honesty, it’s that you can promote your book all you want (and certainly, you should do everything you can to make each book successful) but always remember, if you’re not a success right away, that doesn’t make you a failure, and it doesn’t necessarily mean your book is bad. Most importantly, it doesn’t suggest you made a critical error in your promotion, a “mistake” that can be analysed and “fixed”.
The reason I’m telling you this is that over-analysis for problems that cannot be solved is dangerous. It’s our old friend “analysis-paralysis” again. Personally, I find this quote to be pretty spot-on:
There comes a point where you’ve analysed your mistakes, you’ve made observations, but you must move on and continue to write, otherwise you’re spinning your wheels and you’ll get nowhere.
Remember, this game is about luck and persistence. You have to persist long enough to get lucky. I can’t promise you success if you do, but I assure you that the longer you persist, the closer your odds will trend toward success.
Thanks for reading! I’m Ethan Fox, and I post stuff like this pretty regularly on my blog. I also have a mailing list where I mail out regular tips and advice; join up now!
Mailing List - Tumblr - Twitter - Facebook
annaxmalina
dededos
izzy806
gummygunk
jbbartram-illu
dailybridgerton
origamiaround
areudirty
