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Angela's Fortunes
When the facts start landing on your lap, and the story of this growing electronic publishing empire unfolds, at first you begin to wonder why the 34-year-old Angela Adair-Hoy has made a fortune from online publishing when most have failed to turn in even a pitiful profit. A short while ago she was a budding but struggling online writer and self-publisher; now her companies are worth millions, and she works in the new home she could suddenly afford, an imposing nineteenth century house with a cosy view of the Penobscot River in Bangor, Maine, USA. "Two years ago my three children were eating cereal with powdered milk because my fridge had broken down and I couldn't afford to repair it," she remembers. "Desperate circumstances suddenly made me one of the most talented e-marketers on earth. I wrote How to Write, Publish & $ell Ebooks and started bringing in several hundred dollars every day."
As with all her other ebooks, Adair-Hoy churned out that book in a matter of weeks, and therein lies one of the qualities that pinned her success: impulsiveness. Good ideas are as plentiful as gulls on a seashore, but like New Year's resolutions, most ideas die a slow and sure death of idleness, uncertainty and procrastination. She explains: "I tend to do things quickly and without thinking. When I started, I completed the first issue of The Write Markets Report one month after the idea hit me."
That was four years ago, in June 1997 to be precise, and at the time she juggled her personal projects with a full-time accountancy job. Now she devotes most her time on The Write Markets Report, a subscription-based monthly e-mag that features in-depth reports on the freelance requirements of select publications, and Writers Weekly, a free weekly email newsletter that runs a clutch of freelance jobs and new magazines seeking freelancers. But her biggest company is Booklocker.com, an e-publishing house that has books by 700 authors, and which she co-owns with her second husband Richard Adair-Hoy, whom she married in May 1999. She has so far written six books, and one of them - How to Publish and Promote Online, co-authored with M. J. Rose - was snapped up by St Martin's Press for a five-figure advance two months after it debuted as an ebook. Royalties from her books, five of which are self-published ebooks, generate more than US$5,000 every month. Adair-Hoy has not gone unnoticed: she has been featured in Time Magazine, Publisher's Weekly, the BBC's Current Affairs programme, and included in an anthology titled From Rags to Riches, How Ordinary People Attain Extraordinary Wealth.
Although Adair-Hoy had discovered a niche when she launched The Write Markets Report, at first the going was tough. She worked so hard, up to sixteen hours a day including her day-job, that her ex-husband claimed abandonment and neglect in the divorce. Over the next year, steady sales brought in a few hundred dollars a month. "Nice pocket change," she quips, "but it sure took a lot of work to get that change jingling." In other words, she had found herself stuck in the niche she had carved out, and she needed to grow. This is when she started Writers Weekly as a teaser, hoping that by giving readers a free ride she might attract enough subscribers to hawk secondary products to, and to lure advertisers. The first in what is now a long list of secondary products was her first ebook, How to be a Syndicated Newspaper Columnist. As a book, it lays out the logistics of syndication and provides some insight on how to discover one's specialist subject, although it fails to mention that above all you need a finely honed voice to unify and carry a column from week to week. In any case, the ebook sold moderate amounts at $14.95 and she quitted the day job.
"I was suddenly unemployed for the first time in thirteen years," she recounts. "I had three mouths to feed, no child support from my ex-husband, no savings account. I was broke."
But she had laid the foundations of her business strategy. Writers Weekly opens with a lead story that gives advice into some aspect of daily freelance tribulations and winds off with a clutch of accessible markets that engage freelancers across the spectrum, from beginners to pros. A free newsletter of original content, the business reasoning went, would coax her subscribers (48,000 at the last count) to learn to trust the reliability of the information she dished out, so those readers would equally trust her books and hopefully be willing to pay for them. Every week she started running ads for her ebooks, all self-published so that, in effect, she had a royalty cut of virtually one hundred percent. To boost sales, she experimented with a variety of tested marketing ploys, such as "final offers" or lumping a handful of books into one discount package.
In a sense, her technique is nothing more than innovative and subtle direct marketing, but with two crucial differences. One, the audience is well defined and targeted instead of random, and, two, her subscribers sign up voluntarily for information they crave, which comes free and without obligations. That's where the potency of subtle advertising comes into play. Advertisers state that audiences have to see an advert three times before they take notice - Adair-Hoy's subscribers see the adverts for her books week after week, and in changing formats, the offers ever evolving.
In the beginning she enticed subscribers by participating in e-mail discussion lists and message board chats, all the while subtly inviting other members to check out her web site. Now she gives a free ebook entitled How to be a Freelance Writer to new subscribers. Success also bred more success, and she is now in the privileged situation that affords, by implication, this smug irresistible statement: I've made it, and now I am going to show you how you can make it, too, if you follow in my footsteps. She employed this marketing advantage to sell one of her latest ebooks, Profitable Email Publishing, in which she lays out the technicalities of publishing an email newsletter as well as boosting readers with doses of inspiration by elaborating on case studies of others who have been successful, too.
Since she bought Booklocker.com two years ago, she started encouraging her authors to adopt her tested business strategy. She is fond of emphasising the importance of aggressive marketing on the long haul, maintaining a steady momentum instead of an initial yet short blaze of promotion. "The secret of successful Booklocker.com authors is that the best selling authors all have ezines they self-publish to promote their works," she elaborates. "That's the major difference. Authors whose books are not selling are the ones who park their book somewhere, spend a week promoting it, and then forget about it."
The other secret to Adair-Hoy's success - the icing on the cake, if you will - is her warm persona. Over the years, she built an excellent rapport with her readers. In Writers Weekly she writes a snappy, regular column called News from the Home Office in which Adair-Hoy chats about her personal life or drops some observations about the vagaries of freelancing. In this way, she presents a human face and identifiable persona that readers can relate with, a personal touch that has gone down well in a World Wide Web that is often faceless, otherworldly, remote. She encourages readers to write to her with questions, and to share their experience; she is adamant about protecting and furthering the interests of freelancers. In other words, she convinces readers that she is one of them and on their side, and she wants to help them achieve their dreams.
Not only does she make herself accessible, she also invites readers to adopt her strategy, even to copy the format of her website and ebooks. In her ebook How to Write, Publish and $ell Ebooks, she writes: "I hereby give you, the reader, permission to copy my format. If you're using MSWord, simply click on File, then Save As, and rename the document you're reading right now. You now have a document with ebook formatting. Change the words, delete my pics, and so on, and you're on your way. In fact, you can probably make your book look better than mine. If you do, send me yours so I can copy your format next time." Such community building in the spirit of knowledge sharing is what makes a winning attitude. One could be cynical and point out that this charm offensive is motivated by the expediencies of marketing, but somehow Adair-Hoy's personal posturing comes across naturally and effortlessly. Perhaps she's just grateful for her success and genuinely wants to give a little tow to those who made it possible. She signs off her e-mails, "Hugs, Angela."
© Victor Paul Borg
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