Things I learned at LibertyCon:
1. Upon feeding a friend who’s a 21-year-old-male (a demographic that pundits opine aren’t reading), I asked him where he finds the stories he reads.
The answer: TikTok, Instagram (reels), and Royal Road.
Okay, none of these are venues I use myself – and Royal Road is its own ecosystem, where you can read chapter by chapter, unlocking some with payment and deciding whether or not to donate for others you read free.
And while people do pull chapters and sell the books elsewhere, they usually put them behind a paywall at Patreon for several months. Which not only given them alpha reading on Royal Road, and some income while building audience, you then get more income, beta reading and copyediting on Patreon, before finally releasing the compiled volume for sale on Amazon or elsewhere.
Which means if you read God of Trash, whether on Royal Road or Patreon, it’s not trackable to the statisticians. So they’ll be convinced demographics aren’t reading because they can’t track it, not because it’s true.
1A. I need to explore more to see if these avenues are a way to reach my target demographic as well. If so, it’s worth the time to learn them.
1B. Amazon’s internal recommendations are broken. I’m not the only person going “I can’t find anything good to read when I go looking in KU.” Ergo, learning external recommendations to drive sales to the books, instead of optimizing for discoverability in the system, may be the far wiser move.
2. Live A/B testing is awesome because you can not only track which cover people would choose, but you get to hear the reasons why, and you can quickly figure out whether the person is part of your target demographic.
3. Remain openminded about your target demographic(s). Because if you get locked into who you think your readers are, and miss entire segments of who actually reads you, you’re artificially limiting your reach for visibility and discoverability.
…
More later. Sleep now.
Mad Genius Club 
11 responses to “Interesting Notes”
Good perspective–figuring out how to work with what’s happening.
There’s a lot of angst in various writer communities about the changes in the way Amazon does its rankings, which means less organic visibility for anyone not at the very top. I’ve also read that Amazon gives sales that come from outside the eco-system less weight.
This is too bad for me, since I use FB ads to get traction, but I see I need to think like a mammal, not a dinosaur. Hmmm.
Interesting, and excellent point about “if we can’t track it, it isn’t happening.”
Taking a slightly different angle, that a young man is on tiktok finding books would smack a lot of the noisy folks upside the head.
I’ve been assured BookTok means Karen pr0n, and nothing else! Reee!
…I’d say I’m exaggerating, but not really. There’s a lot of folks invested in The World Is Ending and absolutely every avenue out is evilbadwrong. Not, “it doesn’t work for me,” but just flat evilbadwrong.
I know the last book recommendations that hit their mark were from a blog of someone whose tastes I’m familiar with who suggested them for a specific problem. This isn’t something that an author can capture to promote their own work–anyone who’s listening to them on tiktok or reading their blog already got sold on their writing. At best you might get someone who goes “Oh, this person promoted Beware The Chicken, for these reasons that are also why I like it, maybe I’ll like their writing.”
There is also the HFY writing-focused channel on Reddit that is quite active. Some of the post are juvenile, but some are very well written, Sturgeon’s Law still holdsA pair of posters named KyleKKent and KamchatkasRevenge have to be the anti-Martins, they have been working on story arcs for years without signs of stopping and with pretty good writing too.Kyle created a ‘verse named “Out of Cruel Space” which has 1,370 posts (mostly daily), plus there is an side story arc “Of Fox, Volpir, and Man” by KamchatkasRevenge with almost as many posts. The second author groups his posts and publishes them as full books on Amazon. 5 of the 8 are done and published.
Dear Son (27) reads on Royal Road. That’s how we learned about it and we’ve been in the business for years. He likes some stuff so much he subscribes and throws money to the author. Yet, as you say, his reading isn’t counted and thus doesn’t exisit.
What I find so weird about the numerous sites like Royal Road is that Bill was an active member of 20Booksto50K for several years and he NEVER heard anyone there mention these sites. As though they didn’t exist.
It really is hard to see outside your personal bubble.
Royal Road started out as a fan translation site for Asian web novels, and only later became more centered on English-language original works in genres related to the original Asian web novels. Depending on when Bill was involved with 20Booksto50K, Royal Road may have been more of a fan translation/fanfic site, which would have made it kind of a no-no for authors looking to get paid for their work to pay too much attention to.
It was last year! So, not that long ago.
yeah, I would think RR would have been on their radar by then.
It was startling, considering how large and diverse the group is. It’s like they can’t get past Amazon and eBooks as being the only way around trad pub. Even when discussing going wide, it’s still eBooks on more platforms.
It all depends. I did some research using my kids:
Daughter, 20, knew about Royal Road, but didn’t use it. She loves fiction, and reads paper books (from my library), and reads manga/graphic novels on WebToons. Both kids say WebToons has gone downhill. When she’s out on her own, I suspect she’ll love Kindle and KU.
Son, 18, mainly reads non-fiction, watches a lot of Youtube and Youtube shorts (no TikTok allowed), mostly humor and informational videos. When he reads fiction it’s mostly graphic novels.
My nephew, in the early 20s, is also mostly a non-fiction reader.
Yeah, I am/was familiar with Royal Road.
One, I used to be follow unlicensed translations, and quit maybe ten years ago because of time considerations.
Two, I have been into fanfic, off and on, for maybe twenty five years.
Right now, I don’t know if non-fiction reading is displacing fiction reading. Generally, when I hit zero interest in fiction, non-fiction, etc., depression has gotten bad.
I like WebToons okay. I could believe that it has declined. There is a monetization side that I do not know about. The non-paying experience is heavily going to depend on which stories are currently running and publically available to non-paying users. (webtoons dot com is a venue with app and browser interfaces, that does webtoons, a Korean style of comic that scrolls on smartphones. A lot of the Japanese comic preparers instead are focusing on the magazine/book formats, from what I can tell. Basically, there are some really vast ecosystems that I am slightly aware of, but do not really know anything about.)