Authors will flock to you if you can provide one or more of the following

1) Visibility - A way to reach readers

2) Sales - Actual sales to readers

3) Make Technology Understandable - Most authors are not tech savvy and will Love It if you can make technology easy and understandable for them

4) Remove a Pain Point - remove a pain point for authors and they will embrace your service/product

5) Provide Statistics and Data - If you can provide authors with a better and/or easier way to track sales and other data

6) Wisdom and Details on Any Aspect of Selling Books or Writing Books - every author is looking for details on how to do things better

7) A Place authors can meet other like minded authors

8) Technology Infrastructure - anything that lets them host their website, gather emails, share books with readers, etc

9) Anything that becomes the Path of Least Resistance - If your product takes less effort and/or is faster than existing solutions, everyone will flock to it

10) A product that lets authors focus more on writing

11) Anything that makes it easy to sell to readers - For Example: underlying technologies like payment methods

12) Anything that gives authors more control of their destiny

13) Tools and Products related to writing

14) Anything that lets writers benefit from social media, without being social

15) Courses and Guides that help authors become better writers and better authors

The list is pretty long. You can look through the different sections of Review0 and see the wide variety of products authors use. Provide a product in any of these areas, make it great, make it available at a reasonable price, and you can build a very large Client Customer Base


These are some of the things to keep in mind when building a customer base

1) Authors always want a cheap or free version
Yeah, Big Surprise

2) If you give away the main functionality for free, they will never upgrade to the paid version
Again, not really a bit surprise

2b) Do not make assumptions about what functionality and features authors will pay for - give them lots of choices and see which ones they pay for, and focus on those

3) Authors give an inordinate amount of importance to what other authors say, even when (perhaps especially when) the other authors have no demonstrated track record of success
So your best friend - Testimonials and Reviews

4) Authors HATE technology. Anything you can do to make them avoid dealing with tech issues and tech challenges, they will love

5) Most (perhaps all) Authors really dislike customer support and social media and other messy human interactions. If you provide them a way to not have to do the human connection/touch/support aspect they will love you

6) Authors make for very loyal customers. If you deliver a good product, they would like to just focus on their writing and let you handle whatever your product does
There is a very big upside to delivering a good service. Customers stick around

7) (In Violent conflict with the previous) Authors are constantly getting killed by the tech monopolies in the ecosystem. Their strategy literally is to wipe out authors who start figuring out the ecosystem and start becoming self reliant
If you provide services to authors, you will hardly ever lose customers from them switching
However, you will lose lots of customers from them being wiped out by the tech monopolies in the ecosystem
That means you need constant customer acquisition

8) You need some way to easily and quickly and cheaply reach your client base. Apps and Email Lists are two good solutions

9) Pareto Principle applies - 20% of efforts lead to 80% of rewards
20% of your clients will generate 80% of your revenue
2% of your clients will generate 95% of your headaches
20% of your marketing channels will lead to 80% of your customer acquisitions
Pareto Principle sometimes applies repeatedly

10) Have a tight Terms of Service. You would not belive the kind of requests you would get. Having a tight Terms of Service protects you



This might seem painfully obvious. Don't let go of these principles when building your customer base

1) It must be people you enjoy working with. There are tens of millions of authors. Absolutely no reason to work in cases where it's painful

2) It must make you money. Make sure each client is profitable
Fire clients that are a net loss to your bottomline. Pareto principle applies here too - 2% or 3% of your client base will generate 80% to 90% of support costs and additional costs

3) It must be clients for which you can do great work
For some clients you can't do great work
A few clients will not let you do great work because they think they are the expert of everything
Work only in cases where you can deliver great work

4) Long term clients are exponentially better than short term clients
Clients who are dabblers and will purchase your service once and then leave the ecosystem are not the best customers
Look for customers who have been in the ecosystem for a long time and will continue to be your loyal and regular customers

5) Follow the Golden Rule

6) Keep in mind you will be much happier if you enjoy working with your clients and if you make a decent to good amount of money. They almost always go hand in hand. The reverse also holds true - problem customers are not profitable and are a pain to work with. Fire them the first chance you get