Advanced Magic Bakery… Chapter Six
Chapter Six… Who Are Your Customers?
Right now this Advanced Magic Bakery metaphor is getting a little extended. You think? So to understand exactly what this is about, make sure you have read the Introduction and first five chapters.
So you have been baking for a number of years and getting better at making your pies (stories) taste better and be more desirable to readers. And you have a bunch of short fiction pies and over twenty major book pies in your magic bakery.
(In your magic bakery means you have published your stories wide around the world. That is all.)
The pies are all on your wonderful magic bakery shelves and when a customer comes through the door, they stay and shop. If you only have five or so things on your shelves, customers take one look and leave. So you now have enough on your shelves to get customers interested after they have found your magic bakery.
(Early stage writers do not understand this concept of stocking shelves with enough product to hold customers.)
So who are these customers who find their way to your magic bakery? Basically, they fall into two major classes.
First… If you are only publishing in English, they are English readers from all over the world. Your store is magic, remember, and a customer looking for a good story can live in South Africa, Europe, Australia, or anywhere else that your book or story has gotten to for them to find.
This kind of customer is called a B2C… Business to Consumer.
Your magic bakery can be a listing of different books and stories you have published on different sites, or it can be your own web site, or even better, your own Shopify store. All of those function as arms of your magic metaphor bakery. And all of them blend together to form your magic bakery.
IF, AND THAT IS A HUGE IF, the readers read and like the first things of yours they read, they will look for more and if your magic bakery has enough product, they will license more to read. Your job as a storyteller is to have readers enjoy what they read of your work. That is why you have to always keep working on craft and being a better storyteller. Better baker.
A reader in say, South Africa, likes the sound of one of your stories and licenses it to read from an online store.
The pie representing that story is still as whole and as fresh as the moment your finished it, but money appears in your cash register.
Magic.
Second Type of Customer… Other businesses, or B2B.
These customers often find you in the same way as a consumer does. They find something they like in your work and can imagine licensing it for a game or a television show or movie or you name it? So they come to you in your magic bakery.
Again, if you do not have enough product on the shelves, they turn around and leave and forget you.
But say your magic bakery looks good, with enough product. So this type of business customer tells you what slices of your magic pie they are interested in licensing.
Time is everything in these deals. Where the old traditional publishing took most if not all of your pie and then sort of made a contractual promise that if a bunch of things happened, then maybe you could get part of your pie back. I talked about this last chapter. This kind of thing is called a “claw back” and in modern publishing it is worthless.
In regular licensing agreements in the real world, they are timed. Often for just three years with an automatic snap back of all rights.
That means you license a slice of your pie to say gaming for three years, for three years that very thin slice is missing from your pie, but then after three years it magically just appears again in your pie to be licensed again.
There are other ways to attract businesses to your magic bakery. The biggest is things like the Licensing Expo, or simple outreach. At this level, be ready so that areas of pies in your magic bakery have great brands and trademarks.
Over the decades, for me and Kris, about 75% of our business with other businesses came from them finding our work through regular consumer channels. This often comes about when one person reads a story or novel, then tells another person who has a business.
This lately for us is being helped by Kickstarters and our Shopify stores.
The other 25% of our B2B licenses have come by us reaching out, or contacts we started at one point or another. Got a hunch that might level to 50/50 over the next ten years. And grow a lot in volume.
The magic bakery is a wonderful place. You make these pies and get them on the shelves and even in the early days money trickles in while your pie stays fresh and hot on the shelf.
Thirty years ago I baked a pie, a short story with the title “In the Shade of the Slowboat Man.” It was maybe my 300th written story. (Imagine if I was only writing 5 stories a year, I never would have gotten to that story when I did.
For thirty years that pie has been hot and fresh in my bakery and it has made just over $25,000. At times it had small slices out of it, but the slices returned after a bit and the pie is as good and as hot and as fresh as the day I spent three hours baking it.
I hope you are starting to see why I call this a magic bakery.