Review: Your First 10,000 Readers
Have you written a book? Great. Now it’s time to find Your First 10,000 Readers. In this author marketing course, Nick Stephenson walks self-published authors through all the steps to find an audience for their work. It picks up exactly where most people give up, which is uploading their first book to Amazon and waiting for the money to roll in. Instead, crickets.
Who Is it For?
If you have self-published one or more books, but aren’t gaining traction with book sales, you’ll want to look at what Nick Stephenson offers. If you’re still working on writing your first book, I would advise you to hold off. It’s too easy to get sidetracked with marketing when you really should focus on writing.
What the Course Covers
Your First 10,000 Readers currently includes 71 lessons (quite a few of those lessons are bonus content) helping authors get from writing a book to finding those 10,000 readers. The course covers book publishing basics, how and why to build a mailing list, everything you need to know about reader magnets, and how to find your readers on the internet.
Book Selling Basics
The first part of the course covers all the basic of publishing a book that sells. You can’t just write a book, publish it on Amazon, and expect thousands of people to buy it. It simply doesn’t happen. Even self-published books must meet the high standards people expect from their favorite authors.
Your book needs to be well edited, unless you look forward to getting terrible reviews. To sell the book, you need a brilliant cover that fits the genre’s expectations. Your blurb (aka book description) must be compelling. You also need to pick the right categories and keywords for your book. In the course, Nick Stephenson even walks you through pricing strategies and the pros and cons of going wide vs. being exclusive to Amazon.
One thing that really resonated with me was the importance of formatting. When readers browse your book and click on the ‘look inside’ on Amazon, what do they see? If your formatting is slightly off, your first impression is not as favorable as it could be. Don’t send readers elsewhere by missing out on the details.
None of this material is new or groundbreaking. You’ve probably heard it all before. But sometimes, people need to hear a truth a few times until they can have that aha-moment and act on it. Do you like your cover? That’s great. But does it really work for your genre? That’s an entirely different question.
Even if you already know this stuff, watch the videos on the basics. It’s worth it.
Building a Mailing List
This Day and Age, you can’t rely on the retailers to promote your book. They simply don’t care about it. They like new books, and they like books people are buying. But Amazon won’t send any traffic to your book just because you think they should. You have to do the legwork.
The basis of Your First 10,000 Readers course and lots of other gurus’ teaching is: You need a mailing list of fans to reach the pinnacles of self-publishing success. A targeted mailing list of super fans can help you:
Get reviews for new and old books
Build buzz for your next book
Sell more books
If you have a mailing list of a few thousand fans, you can move quite a few copies on launch day. That will trigger the algorithm of the big online retailers helping you sell more books.
Without a mailing list, you’ll spend more money on advertising to notify your fans of the new book coming out. And you’ll have to do it every time you launch a new book. The mailing list will amplify your marketing efforts, and it’s relatively cheap (or even free).
In his course, Nick Stephenson walks you through the setup step by step. How do you set up a website? How do you encourage people to sign up? How do you connect your mailing list sign-ups to your Facebook ads to judge the effectiveness of your ad campaigns?
I won’t lie to you. It’s pretty daunting if you’re not technical. But you can do this!
By the way, I do not recommend using Nick’s Authorcats website builder to have it all done for you. While you may have the perfect landing pages and website up in no time, you’ll also spend $60 a month just for the use of his theme. That price doesn’t even include website hosting or the cost for sending emails to your newsletter.
Reader Magnets
Nowadays, people don’t enjoy giving out their email address for no reason. You really have to give them something in return, such as a reader magnet. Reader magnets can be anything you want, a short story, a free book, a workbook, special content, or deleted scenes from your book. The reader magnet has to be special enough for potential readers to join your mailing list.
Incidentally, Nick Stephenson has a free eBook called “Reader Magnets” that acts as his reader magnet for his training program. I recommend reading it!
Find Traffic aka Readers
Now that you have set up your website with your reader magnet, you’re ready to collect email addresses. But readers are unlikely to stumble across your site.
That’s where Nick Stephenson comes in again. According to him, there is no shortage of traffic on the internet (and I believe he’s right). You just need to learn how to funnel that traffic to your site.
He teaches you how to use Facebook ads to build your mailing list. He also has information on Amazon ads and BookBub ads to find readers. You can even sell your books directly from your site, and Nick teaches you how to set that up.
What do you do with your mailing list once you have it? You run email campaigns building excitement about your books. Nick teaches you how to write emails that get people to buy your stuff. You’re not being sleazy selling them something they don’t want. Remember, they signed up for your mailing list because they’re interested in your books. When you use Nick Stephenson’s techniques, your readers will be excited to buy from you.
There’s a lot of information in the course about launch and promotion techniques and the use of giveaways to grow your mailing list, garner reviews, and most importantly, sell more books.
How Much Does It Cost?
In my opinion, Your First 10,000 Readers is worth every penny. When I signed up in 2020, I chose the payment plan of $59/month for 12 months for lifetime access to his training materials.
Successful indie publishers like Joanna Penn recommend his services. This course is absolutely worth it. Nick Stephenson, a USA Today bestselling author, has helped thousands of authors sell more books with his training program.
If you already have a mailing list and a way to get readers onto it, this course may not be for you. And technically, you can probably find all the information online yourself on what to do. But it will take a lot of time and trial and error. Personally, I loved the video content of this course. Nick presented everything in a very engaging and easy-to-understand manner.