Hello hello — it’s good to be back!
For all my new friends, welcome to The Launch. The purpose of this newsletter is to document my latest book launch and discuss all things creative.
It was also an experiment of sorts — An experiment to find new ways that authors can make a living outside of book royalties.
One of those experiments was serializing a novel and releasing it over a newsletter. So that’s just what I did. For the past few months, I released a novella called Tik Tik Gone. The newsletter also included a murder mystery game where readers tried to guess what happened to fictitious Tik Tok star, Evie Holiday.
If you missed it, you can read the whole thing at tiktikgone.substack.com.
PS - If you saw the announcement two weeks ago, my wife had our second daughter! We are in the newborn “no sleep” phase, aka, please disregard any typos.
Ok, here are the results of Tik Tik Gone
On November 16th, I published the first chapter of the story. The email went out to 4,000 readers and got 1,857 opens.
Eight weeks (and six episodes later), I released the last chapter. The final email went out to 3,742 readers and got 2,129 opens.
The Takeaway
Serial novels work — the open rate even increased over time! To be honest, I expected a sharp drop off after week one and then slowly lose readers each week, with maybe a hundred or so readers crossing the finish line. I feel super grateful that so many readers followed the story to the end.
I’m also thankful for the encouraging notes I received along the way, as well as all guesses that came in with the Murder Mystery challenge.
So after processing the journey, here’s what I think I did right and what I could have done better.
What I did right
I believe part of the retention was because I wrote the novel specifically to be an online serial novel. Being a digital marketer has given me insight into the difficulty of competing for online attention. In my vocation, the less text and fluff you insert into an ad, an email, or a direct message, the better chance someone will read it.
With this in mind, I wrote Tik Tik Gone to be quick, punchy, and short. It wasn’t too complex or layered, and it read more like a movie script than a novel. I don’t think any of my previous novels would have worked in this format.
Another thing I did was treat the release like an actual book launch. I did a cover reveal, an inexpensive book trailer, and significant outreach to book reviewers on Instagram. That helped me get a solid open rate for chapter one.
What I could have done better
Once I began releasing chapters, I stopped doing outreach. Maybe I figured it would be too difficult for readers to catch up. Or maybe it was a self-preservation tactic if the experiment flopped. Either way, I could have done a better job finding new readers each week and sending them a separate email with links to the previous chapters. Instead, I lost 400 emails from the list instead of having a net gain.
I also missed the boat with the TikTok tie-ins. At the beginning of all this, I had grand plans to hire a student film crew to bring this story to life. Each week, I wanted to reenact the Evie Holiday Tik Toks, which I would release as teasers on TikTok itself. Nothing ever panned out, and in the end, I did very little marketing on the platform in which the book was about. That was a miss.
Final Takeaway
Would I write and release a serial novel again? YES! Serials are a great way to stay in front of your readers, especially if (like me) it takes you more than a year to release your next title. It was also super fun. Instead of spending years perfecting a large body of work, this felt more like an incubator to test out an idea.
Tik Tik Gone was much easier to write than a full-length novel. I believe the entire story took me about three-four months to write and edit. The whole story was about 22,000 words.
So what’s next?
My original plan was to use the conclusion of Tik Tik Gone to launch my next novel, either as a paid subscription via newsletter or as a Pre-Order on Amazon.
I chose neither.
The goal of these experiments was to find a new way for authors to earn a living doing what they love, and neither of those options felt like the game changer I’ve been looking for.
Which leads me to my next eperiment…
Publishing x Web3
If you’ve been following this newsletter (or sat with me at Thanksgiving) you know that I’ve taken a dive down the NFT/Web3 rabbit hole. I truly believe that this technology is revolutionizing the way artists are being paid for their work.
My next experiment is going to be to launch an NFT.
ONE NFT, specifically. The cover of my next book.
Next Tuesday I’m going to be launching a 1/1 NFT in the hope of finding a Web3 publisher for my novel.
Stay tuned.
Artists that are inspiring me.
The Director of Squid Games
Did you know Director and writer, Hwang Dong-hyuk had the idea for Squid Games in 2008? At the time, he was living with this mother and grandmother. To make ends meet, he literally had to stop writing the script and sell his $675 laptop.
When he did finish, the idea was rejected by every studio. The time wasn’t right. Fast forward a decade, and streaming services have emerged. Moreover, the global landscape has changed enough for Squid Games to suddenly feel timely and relevant.
Suddenly, the world was ready for Squid Games.
His big idea finally got his time in the limelight.
It became the biggest show on Netlfix EVER!
The Takeaway — If you have have a big idea, stick with it!
This was a great retrospective. Interesting points about writing the serial in a way that is more conducive to reading in an email/on a website. I'm definitely going to do an event-style serial story in between writing books 2 and 3 of my series, thanks for the inspiration! And excited to see your NFT launch!
Figuring out how to market a serial story midstream is a challenge I haven't solved yet.
Really interesting (as always!). I’d love to hear more about why you’ve decided against publishing on Amazon/other online ebook sites.