The Midlister Conference

Welcome to the resources I discuss during The Midlister Conference, a Clubhouse app scheduled event through “The Writers on the Storm” House, on Saturday mornings (8am PST/11am EST). This is a space where midlist authors or authors aspiring to become a midlister can come for education and advice from Celeste Barclay. The rooms are on replay and available for you to listen to after we finish. I won’t put all the key points or notes on this page. But I will put some of the links to resources or images I mention.

In case you stumbled here from Clubhouse but missed my introduction, I’m Celeste Barclay. I’m a romance author who specializes in Historical (Highlanders, Pirates, Vikings, and Regency) under this name. I write Contemporary (Mafia) as Sabine Barclay. Combined, Celeste and Sabine have 50 titles between the two names. I published my first book (His Highland Lass) on April 15, 2018. You can learn more about me here.

I have both experience and formal education that I bring to The Midlister Conference rooms on Clubhouse and my private consulting. During our sessions, I work with aspiring and emerging authors or experienced authors who need assistance revamping their business plan.

I hold the follow degrees:

Bachelor of Arts in International Affairs, concentration in International Political Economy (The George Washington University)

Master of Arts in Teaching, concentration Secondary Social Science (Western Governors University)

Master of Professional Studies in Political Management, concentration Lobbying and Electoral Campaigns (The George Washington University)

The Midlister Conference Resources

Sessions are listed in reverse chronological order.

October 21, 2023

Conducting SWOT analysis allows marketers to identify and analyze internal (strengths and weaknesses) and external (opportunities and threats) that impact a business. There are many times when conducting such analysis may be appropriate. Among them are:
Creating a brand
Rebranding
Considering new products or markets
Altering a plan midway

Once the data gathering is complete, marketers must analyze their findings.
1. Identify alternative strategies:
Consider how to utilize strengths and opportunities to overcome weaknesses and threats
2. Prioritize alternatives:
Which have the greatness necessity?
Which are already have available resources?
Which can be implemented immediately?
Which take long-term planning and implementation?
3. Balance the priorities:
Financial commitment and ROI
Market share growth
Product excellence/superiority
Customer experience excellence/superiority
4. Create an action plan:
What is the objective? What is the target?
What are short-term goals and steps? 3 month, 6 month, 12 month, 18 month
What are long-term goals and steps? 2 years, 5 years, 10 years
How will you measure outcomes?

Session 5 July 1, 2023

Memory is often divided into two categories: short-term and long-term. Information that’s easily accessible or constantly being activated resides in our short-term, or working, memory. Long-term memories contain concepts, decisions, rules, and processes put in permanent storage.

Marketers try to position their products to take root in the long-term memory but are access often enough to also hold a place in the working memory. Positioning is crucial to getting a foothold into a highly competitive market.

Consumers often have an “ideal brand” that they favor. Positioning your product or books to align with that ideal brand will make your more memorable.
Ex. Object covers are currently very popular because Colleen Hoover and Lucy Score use them. Other authors have followed their lead to position their books as being similar or comparable to two authors many currently consider “ideal brands.”

Part of a marketer’s role is to teach consumer about the product. At the same time, marketers also learn from their consumers. As authorpreneurs, we learn about readers’ demographics and psychographics. We learn their preferences and teach them how our books and brands align with those.

Commercial examples

Positives:

Sarah McLachlan and ASPCA: What are we supposed to learn from that ad? How has that message and style positioned them to create and immediate reaction?
Snickers and “You aren’t you when you’re hungry”: What are they teaching us about ourselves? How are they positioning their product to solve that problem?
Coca Cola and “I’d like to buy the world a Coke”: The jingle, “Buy the World a Coke,” is to the tune of “I’d like to teach the world to sing.” What did they want people to learn about their product by using those words and that tune? What position in the market were they trying to take?

Negatives:

California Raisins and “I heard it through the grapevine”: They tried to position themselves as a fun snack food. What did they fail to teach? That raisins taste good and you should want to buy them not just sing along with the commercial.
Burger King: In 2019, during the Super Bowl, the home of the Whopper ran an ad with Andy Warhol eating one. Epic fail. Rather than enticing people to order from Burger King, it left people wondering why Andy Warhol would ever eat a Whopper, especially since he’d been dead for thirty years. The hashtag eatlikeandy appealed to a younger crowd who uses those on social media but used an icon that pretty much only Boomers relate to. They failed to position themselves with any demographic, so anything they wanted to teach tanked.
KFC in Hong Kong in the 80s: They wanted to position themselves as early innovators in Asian markets. They attempted to teach their potential consumers that they offered the best chicken ever by bring over their “finger licking good” slogan… Except in Chinese, it translated to “we’ll eat your fingers off.” Not so appealing. That hardly teaches the message that they offer superior fast food chicken, and it taught Hong Kong consumers that KFC hadn’t done enough research to learn how their slogan would be received.

Think about some popular commercials from the U.S. and whether you can identify the product or service they represent.

Flo
Limu Emu
We are Farmers, bum-ba-dum, bum-bum-bum-bum
Jake in the red sweater
Gecko

They all represent insurance companies (in order: Progressive, Liberty Mutual, Farmers, State Farm, and Geico). Do any of these immediately make you think insurance or is it the persona you recognize? Have any of them convinced you to either explore them or purchase insurance from them?

How about “Can you hear me now?” This was the famous Verizon slogan. Can you picture the commercial? Do you remember it? Did it make you think they provided superior service?

Questions to consider:

What do you want your brand to teach people?
How can you position your books to do that?
Tell me a genre without telling me the genre. In other words, what are keywords or phrases that will let a reader know the book is what they want without announcing it? So what’s happened here? Readers have learned about these terms, and they’ve been imbedded into their memory. When they hear or read these terms, it triggers an action—buy the book.
Think about your favorite book in a genre you regularly read.
Do you tend to read other authors who have a style that’s similar to your favorite?
Why?
Before you tried these other books, something must have made you think you might like it. What was it? The cover, the blurb, reviews? Did these remind you of your favorite? Or if you think about it now, can you identify similarities?

If you love x, then you’ll love y.

These statements are meant to position your product or book to be close to what a reader might consider as the “ideal.” This wraps us back around to the beginning and how to harness the power of memory to position your book.

Session 4 May 20, 2023

Motivation in business is the same as motivation in other aspects of our life: what makes us want to do something. What is it about a product that makes the reader want to buy? What encourages them to make the effort to get it?

The motivation process has five key stages:

Recognition of a need or want—a new book (an ad, social media post, recommendation—all can serve as stimuli to create this first stage)
Search for information/solution—looking for a new book (does your cover catch their attention? Does the blurb entice?)
Evaluation of alternatives—browsing search results (Is your price comparable or better? Are your reviews more numerous and/or better?)
Purchase—buy your book (your book won)
Post purchase behavior—read the book and decided whether it met internal standards/expectations (Assimilation-Contrast Theory)

Utility—does your book serve its purpose, entertain, educate, persuade, etc (dissonance-reducing, spendthrift, frugal)
Branding—are they attracted to what they see or know about the brand (habitual, dissonance-reducing, frugal, analytical, spendthrift)
Understanding—have you explained or shown how they can use or enjoy the books (dissonance-reducing, analytical, frugal, spendthrift)
Struggle—they have a hard time differentiating between products, so which stands out (variety-seeking, dissonance-reducing, impulsive)
Psychographics—family, friends, social media, etc influence them (habitual, dissonance-reducing, frugal, spendthrift, impulsive)
Information—before buying, the reader so research such as reading reviews, looking for recommendations on social media (dissonance-reducing, analytical, frugal, spendthrift)
Peer influence—seeing other people buying a large amount of your books makes them want it too—FOMO—how many reviews or ratings, how many people are talking about it. Lucy Score, Colleen Hoover, Tom Clancy, James Patterson, Dan Brown (dissonance-reducing, variety-seeking, analytical, frugal, spendthrift)
Income—readers influenced by increase or decrease in income; pricing model and availability (dissonance-reducing, frugal)
Income—readers don’t change their habit even with decrease in income (habitual, spendthrift, impulsive)
Economic downturn—they cut spending during economic downturn, even if their income is still comfortable (habitual, spendthrift, impulsive)

Assimilation-Contrast Theory—it’s what happens after a reader consumes your product. Does it meet their expectations for how they’ll feel or the quality they expected from you? These will affect whether readers comes back—whether they are motivated to come back.

Session 3 May 13, 2023

Frame of reference and outside influences can sway perception, which is highly subjective and easily distorted. Your consumers’ perception of you and your brand is absolutely vital and can often determine success or failure.

Perception can be divided into three concepts: exposure, attention, and sensation. In simplest terms, perception can only be created if the consumer is exposed to the stimuli (your brand/products). If you aren’t visible or your advertising doesn’t hit well, then you won’t get the attention you need. Without being aware and paying attention to your stimuli (brand/product), you can’t elicit a sensation. No sensation means no connection to your brand or product. Without these three things, your actions have no effect on behavior.

Attention comes in different forms.

Planned—
- running targeted ads,
- doing NL swaps,
- joining social media promos;
- this is goal directed. This forces consumers to pay attention, which means they’re going to have some type of sensory reaction.
Involuntary—
- Amazon puts you in another author’s also boughts,
- readers mention you to others;
- a firetruck or ambulance goes by, and you can’t help but look
Spontaneous—
- you’re in a social media situation where you’re able to self-recommend
- you’re having a conversation and you can mention your books
- consumer is browsing books online or on a retailer
- someone notices your cover while scrolling through books on a retailer site

Perceptual selectivity: We’re confronted by thousands of stimuli every single day, from nature to manmade. Texts, emails, social media, phone calls, rain, snow, sunshine, traffic signals, car horns, turn signals, keyword or data targeted ads on Facebook or IG or TT—there’s just a barrage. We simply can’t take all of it in, so the brain screens the stimuli and picks what it can manage.

When we can tap into sensory reactions that feed and/or satisfy the individual factors, we create a brand perception that sells. There are two ways that people formulate these perceptions:

Bottom-up processing—the stimulus factors of your books—size, color, shape, feel—these sensory inputs get processed, and the consumer begins to perceive your brand as something that satisfies their individual factors.
- Going back to last week, these may be your variety-seeking buyers or complex buyers. They tend to be either impulsive or analytical depending on the product.
Top-down processing—the individual factors like needs, interests, expectations, and experiences create a pattern and determine how they will react to your stimulus factors.
- These may be your dissonance-reducing buyers and your habitual buyers. They may be your frugal or spendthrift buyers.

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Session 2 May 6, 2023

Below, you can see there are four types of buyer behaviors. This chart helps illustrate the types of decision making based on differences between brands (you and another author) and how much involvement (consideration) is needed for the consumer (reader) to decide.

For each of the four buying behaviors, there are buyer attitudes to go along with them.
Limited Decision: This buyer may have few choices available, so comparing features and benefits will concern. If you write in a niche genre or subgenre, take this into consideration. Knowing your readers’ buying attitude and the size of your market may influence niche authors’ choice between wide and KU.

Impulsive: This buyer doesn’t consider price and generally does little research or exploration, but psychological factors (slogans, celebrity endorsements, ads) will influence them. These may be KU readers who feel no pain threshold (b/c it’s “free”) to try new authors or books. They may also buy outright if they see a book they think they want to keep, even when they normally only download through a subscription.

Frugal: This buyer is price sensitive and wants the best value for their money. They’re mindful of budgets and spending limits, so these are buyers who will consider price before psychological factors, so they will tend toward free/discount and subscription programs (ie KU/Kobo Plus).

Average Spending: This buyer likes a happy middle between price conscious and features (length of book, preference for series or standalone). They will research what they want, and they may spend outside their budget if they believe the value merits it. These are often wide readers or readers who have KU but are willing to make outright purchases.

Spendthrift: This buyer is all about quality over cost. They’re willing to spend more for items they believe are worth their money. These buyers are great for emotional appeal and building author-reader relationships. These can be the type who prefer trad because of a perceived higher quality over indie. These may also be wide readers who are willing to pay more to avoid Amazon or simply prefer other retailers despite possible price increase.
The diagram below is not absolute. These are tendencies. Buyer attitudes may and can crossover in other ways depending on the goods or services, financial situation, and other factors.

Regency, Frequency, and Monetary Value (RFM) is a method to segment readers using data-driven information. You can gather this information by polling your readers on social media and your newsletter. Each category response receives a 1-3 score (assuming your pollable readership is 30K or less; larger consumer base needs a larger scale), 1 being lowest and 5 being best. An ideal reader-buyer would score 3, 3, 3.
Scaling examples (you can set different parameters or increments to suite your needs):
Regency: 1-a year or more ago; 2– 6 months-to a year ago; 3-within the last six months
Frequency: 1– a third of your catalogue; 2-two-thirds of your catalogue; 3-entire catalogue
Monetary Value: 1-Free; 2-Discount/Sale; 3-Full price

Session 1 April 29, 2023

Digital Marketer offers this excellent free Customer Avatar Worksheet that I’ve used with tons of clients. If you follow the link, you’ll not only be able to download an editable copy, but there’s more information available to help you complete it for your current and your ideal reader.

This resources enables you to examine what you know about your readers along with offering you insights into information you may want to learn to fully understand your readers’ shopping and behavior patterns.