The AmWritingFantasy Podcast: Episode 53 – How to use read-through to REVOLUTIONIZE your series sales (with Adam Croft)

In this last episode of 2019, Jesper talks to Adam Croft.

Adam is one of the most successful indie authors in the world.

Having sold more than two million books, he earns seven figures a year as an author.

The concept of read-through is explained.

We cover why it’s important? How to calculate it? And how it could revolutionize the sales of your book series?

As a special for the Am Writing Fantasy audience, Adam is offering a LIFE-TIME discount on 50% on ALL of his author courses.

The discount code is AMWRITINGFANTASY and the courses can be found at: https://courses.indieauthormindset.com.

Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.

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Read the full transcript below.

(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).

Narrator (2s): You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self-published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.

Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper and this is episode 53 of the amwritingfantasy podcast and today I've got something special for you while Adam is away because Adam Croft has agreed to join me today to discuss, read through. And while autumn and I have talked about the importance of writing in series before, we've never really covered, read through in more depth. So Adam and I are going to look into why it is important, how it could revolutionize your series sales and how to calculate it.

So Adam is a seven figure author and assault more than 2 million books. He is one of the most successful indie authors in the world and he has been featured on BBC television and radio together with many other media outlets. So as you can here, we've got some real expert advice from you to uh, for this final podcast episode of 2019. So I think we're going to close out with a bang here. So welcome to the amwritingfantasy podcast Adam thank you very much for having me.

Yeah, so I just said, you know, I said just set the, when people hear this, we actually at the 30th of December, but we are recording willing in advance and tie in advance of time and we only at the end of November at the moment. So I don't quite feel the Christmas spirit yet, but I don't know about you as well. Yeah. Happy new year to everybody. I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas.

Adam (1m 59s): Yeah. I hope no major events happen in the next month that we're obviously not going to be able to reference.

Jesper (2m 5s): No, exactly. Yeah, yeah. It's just here in in in Denmark or there was no snow yet, and it's just raining and it's, it's a bit like a, it's a bit like boring autumn weather, but, uh, yeah, not, not much of Christmas feeling yet, but hopefully it'll come over the next coming years.

Adam (2m 21s): England is very much the same. Um, but in terms of the Christmas feeling, we're getting there. My son will be three in February. So yesterday we went to visit Santa and am. Yeah, we came home, put some Christmas music on and things like that. So you have to try and get into the spirit. We have to have to do a little bit earlier than we might otherwise because he's only small and he, he enjoys getting into it. But, um, yeah, Christmas spirit is, is growing here, I would say.

Jesper (2m 47s): Yeah. Yeah. They've started decorating some of the shops here, but I have not seen any sensors around yet though. They've all been over here. That's why he's not made his way past that Mark. Yeah. Yeah. All right. But, uh, we're gonna talk some read through stuff here today, but I actually, I was thinking Adam am because I also saw the, the book, the nonfiction book you wrote, the indieauthormindset and I know that you always talk a lot about taking the longterm view on your author career rather than focusing on short term gains.

And I really liked that because that's always what I advocate as well. But I think maybe when we're talking about read through, maybe it's relevant to just touch a bit on that because I think it's important that we don't get to to, you know, tie it up in how do I earn a lot of money, short term or kind of thinking isn't it?

Adam (3m 47s): Yeah, definitely. I'm in route through is um, without a doubt a longterm thing to be considering. It's am but it is vice or for you know, a lot of reasons we will cover and it will give you some, some information, some statistics which will effectively um, inform your advertising and allow you to know straight away when you're looking at an ad, whether it's likely to be prophesying or not in the long term. Um, it is, yeah, it's very much tied into the kind of the analytical business side of things when you're looking at the longterm of publishing and it's about calculating really whether a dollar you spent a day is going to make you back, uh, you know, perhaps five, 10 times that over the course of months or even a couple of years.

Jesper (4m 33s): Yeah, exactly. And and I think as well when we're talking about read too is also about four people, four people to go from reading your book one and onto reading the written at rest of the series. You need to put in the professionalism and do a good job in terms of making sure that the, each of the book, and especially of course that that book one is professional. So that is professionally edited. It has been through all the editing stages in terms of making sure that the plot is there and that there was a good story, does good character arcs and all that good stuff.

But because out of without all of that, I mean if, uh, w I guess what I'm trying to say is that if people go into all the marketing and advertising space here with the mindset of, let me put out some quick books in a quick series here so that I can get some read through and I can earn some money, then I think they would be shooting yourself in the foot.

Adam (5m 29s): It would. And I, I know a fair bit about that. I've been there myself. Um, I mean, I will say to people, yes, you, you do really need at least probably three books out in a series before you're going to start doing any heavy advertising or before you, you know, want to get anywhere near making a profit from that advertising anyway. There's nothing, nothing wrong with getting the name out there and finding those readers, but giving them something to read onto is absolutely vital. Um, and yeah, it, it is the case that you want that book obviously as you do with all your books to be the best they possibly can be.

Um, I fell foul of that myself. I wrote my first book in my series, my main series him, well finished it in 2010 and that came out the first couple of days at 2011. Um, and I wrote the first book of my other series a few weeks later. So at that point I didn't really know how to write. I certainly didn't know how to publish. Um, this was in the early days of the Kindle over here, so it was very much hitting the hope.

The books weren't great. They're still not brilliant. I mean I have revised them since, but I can't, you know, while I would like to do is rewrite them all from, from head to toe. But that's obviously not practical for a number of reasons. So yarn battling that myself. In fact, having fairly low read through, um, on that series because the first couple of books are just so poor.

Jesper (6m 54s): Yeah. Autumn and I also discussed it at one point. I do not recall right now if it was on a podcast episode or if it was just in awe one of our personal conversations. But we did discuss at one point this dilemma of going back and rewriting a book one day. And also it's like, I guess you could say it also depends on how long the series is after that because is it really worth, because it will take quite a lot of effort and is that really worth it? I don't know. I guess,

Adam (7m 21s): well this is a thing. I mean if you've gotten a long ongoing series, then I would say just carry on writing a series. Um, the new books that you write, the more of those you have out, we'll will flood out the poor ones earlier on. I think people expect a series to get better as it goes on and the writer's career to get better as it goes on. Um, and as you say, the amount of time it takes and the benefit that you might get from that. Um, I think it's probably the case that it's not worth doing major revisions. I mean if you go back and there are loads of typos and things and stuff that just doesn't make sense and is, um, is objectively poor am then by all means make some small tweaks.

But I don't think major rewrites are good unless you've got, for example, a very tight trilogy or something like that where one really poor book is going to stand out quite clearly against the other two.

Jesper (8m 11s): So maybe, maybe we actually, we should actually start out by defining what we mean when we say through

Adam (8m 17s): yes, we can try. Um, I mean it is essentially the percentage of readers which will, um, read through your series or read through from one book to another. So, for example, if 100 people buy book one in my series and um, in a similar period of time, 25, we'll buy book two, then I can assume, and I underline and embolden that word, assume that, um, basically a quarter of people who've read book one or who at least who bought book one bread book too, you're not going to get figures that high for a number of reasons, which we'll go into later.

But that would give you a read through percentage of 25%. Um, you'll read through all likely drop the further you get through a series mainly because more people will come in and book one and will not get as far as book too, then won't go as far as book three and so on. Um, but there are a lot of things that can influence readthrough is not necessarily the case that if you've got to read through a 2% or 5%, that doesn't mean that 95 or 98% of people didn't enjoy the book.

Generally speaking, most people who buy the book won't even read it. I mean, I think we all can attest to the fact that the number of books we have on our Kindles or even on our bookcases is, um, infinitely more than the number we've ever read. So most people who buy the book won't read it. Um, people who do buy it, um, some of them won't enjoy it. Most of them probably will. And even those ones who do enjoy it won't necessarily automatically, and I kind of automaton robotic style, go and buy the second one, they might think, Oh yeah, I'll get the second one at some point and then forget about it.

Or they might pop it onto their wishlist and never actually buy it or the doorbell might go while they're in the middle of doing it. So, you know, all of these things will contribute to effectively lowering your read rate. Um, and it, it doesn't matter so much what the read through rate is. It's not really about influencing that number. It's more at calculating it, finding out what it is, and then utilizing that, um, in your advertising and your marketing as a piece of information, which can actually be very helpful to you.

Jesper (10m 43s): Yeah. And I was wondering while you were talking there, do you have any like guidelines or whatever we wanna call it on? So if people calculate their read through rate, I am, I don't know, we haven't really explained how to calculate it, but maybe we can come back to that in a second. But if they do calculate their read through rate, um, do we have any like, guidance or ideas about what, when can they consider like, okay, now I have a, a fairly good read through rate versus this is not good enough, for example. Or do you think it doesn't matter and you, you, you sort of benchmark against yourself more the most?

Or what do you think

Adam (11m 18s): exactly. I think you do benchmark against yourself. I think to a large extent it is what it is. It's not massively, um, influenceable to be honest with you, you can't really influence the readthrough rates too much other than writing a better book. And you know, as I said at the top of the show, we should be writing the best books we can anyway. So, you know, it, it, it's kind of kind of irrelevant really whether the read through rate is good or bad, there isn't anything that is good or is bad. Obviously the higher the better. But I wouldn't be alarmed if you calculate yours and find it coming out at sort of 2%, 5%.

Um, you know, it's not the case. That's, that is a huge failure. It's going to make life more difficult for you of course. Um, because effectively if you're selling, um, a copy of book one and it's costing you more to advertise that than it is the royalty you're making on book one. That's not necessarily the end of the road because the logic is that a percentage of those people will then go and buy book two, book three, so on. If you've got a series of 10 books and if you know who that X percent of people will buy all 10 books, then you know that a sale of book one isn't just worth a sale of book one is worth the sale of book one plus X percent of sales of 10 books, if that makes sense.

So it's about calculating the value of a reader rather than a sale and calculating a read through is about, um, getting that magical number of how likely that person who has bought that book is to become a reader of the series rather than just a purchaser of book one.

Jesper (12m 55s): Yeah. And, and I think, at least from my perspective, I would say, and maybe that was what I was trying to get at us. Well I guess I would say that people shouldn't be scared when they calculate a number because it's going to be much lower than you think. Oh yeah. It's not like a be like, well 70% of people who read my book, one is going to read book two. It's, it's probably not like that.

Adam (13m 15s): Yeah. I mean, 70% of people who bought it won't even read it. So mine like it and get to the end or their Kindle might crash or um, you know, we've all read books by authors that we've loved and we notice more they're in the series, but we still haven't gone out and bought them for whatever reasons. We've just forgotten or, you know, life gets in the way. And that's, that's generally, um, the biggest influence when it comes to books and buying books is that life gets in the way. Um, every time I put a new book up for pre-order for example, I, um, I'll put something in my, my readers group on Facebook's got a couple thousand people in that.

Now I think, and I always put a quick straw poll out and say, in case you've not already bought the book, um, can I just ask why out of interest, you know, is it, is it priced too high? Does the blurb not sounded enticing? Am have you just not got around to it yet? Have you not seen any ads for it or anything like this? As it's the first you've heard of it and overwhelmingly 70, 80, 85% of the am results are that people say they just haven't got round to it yet despite me emailing four or five times or you know, putting things up on Facebook all the time.

It, they just, people are busy, they put us in the back of their minds, they would do it at a later date. Um, and, and that's going to be a case when people have read your book and the only, I'm not just, they get to buy the next one, um, is a mention in the back of the book perhaps or your, your Kindle lawyer, Kobo or whatever it is popping up and saying, actually, do you know there's more books in this series? Would you like to grab them now? If they don't do it then, then they haven't got any more reminders. So you know that it's going to lower the read through rate anyway quite naturally.

Jesper (14m 51s): Yeah, absolutely. And

Adam (14m 52s): then as you say, they are of course, it's a very good idea to put that a link to the next book in the back of the first book so that they can go on straight to am to buy the next one if they like what they just read. And at least it's more likely at that point in time that they will do it right away because there they are right there on the page and the link is staring at them. So that's, of course that's a good trick. Um, but I would also say it, it's, it's, I think, I, I don't remember the exact number, but I read somewhere something like you had to have read, I don't know what, where it was like five, six, seven books, something like that of an author before you, before you actually start remembering the author's name.

Yeah. So, yeah. So that's also what you're battling against. Here's the people just don't remember and e-readers have made that really difficult. Um, well, one area has made that really difficult and that our beloved Kindle, which, um, doesn't give you on the lock screen when your, your Kindle is locks and most of them don't show you, um, the book that you're reading. And then when you unlock your can look, go straight back to the text. So you can't remember the title, you can't remember the author. Um, some of them like I books am we'll show you the covers.

Um, Kobo as well. When you lock your device, the, the front cover is the safe screen. Um, so some of them are better in that regard, but many of the Kindles, um, don't do that. And a lot of people, I, I'm forever getting emails from readers telling me that they loved my latest book X. And I think I've never heard of that book. Um, they're talking about characters of mind that their favorites and I'm thinking they're not mine and I'll, you know, I'll Google them or search on Amazon and find out who did write that and I'll go, Oh yeah, that was by so and so, wasn't it? Yeah. That they are, that was, that was a great series too.

And, you know, try not make them feel too daft about it cause they have taken the time to email me after rule. Um, but yeah, it is phenomenal that people don't know the books they've read. We quite often remember the stories, we remember the characters. Um, but it can take a while. So remember the name of the author or at least the, the title of the books. So, um, yeah, again, this goes back into why creating a strong brand is so important. Um, and why when we're calculating, read through or trying to gain, read through and get rid of us through our series am I think there really does need to be a kind of a fresh approach that I'm not sure what it is yet, but it does need to take these things into account and recognize the fact that the am the world is, it is the ecosystem as it is.

The technology as it is, um, kind of works against us in many ways.

Jesper (17m 24s): Hmm. Yeah, absolutely. So maybe could you say maybe some words about how do people actually calculate this stuff then maybe, maybe, maybe that's a good thing to get into.

Adam (17m 34s): Well, this is a difficult thing. Um, I mean I probably should give a few cautionary notes beforehand and it comes to calculating, read through. There are many things that can skew it and can cause some issues. And one of those is Permafree. Um, we mentioned how, you know, few people, sometimes we'll read through from one books to the other and if you've got one but which is permanently free, perhaps your first in series, um, that effect is going to be amplified massively because free books on the whole just don't get red.

Um, people fill their Kindles with them. Um, you know, I've got hundreds of free books on my Kindle. I'm never going to get, get through to reading them all. It's just not gonna happen. But you see one, then you think, well, it's not costing me anything. I might as well grab it and then read it. One, I've got some time in the future and as we all know, um, most of us writers and creators are also procrastinators. We know very well that when we say we'll do something in the future, it's not going to get done. Um, so those books, laundry, you don't get read. The ones that do get read, a huge percentage of those am will be read by people who only get free books.

They know they're on low incomes or don't believe you should pay for books or, or whatever the reason is. Um, they're just not going to go and buy book two because you know, for them, reading is a free thing and that's fine, I guess, but they're, they're not going become longterm readers of yours anyway. So this is why I'm, I'm, I'm kind of on the fence about free. Um, I think it can be helpful in some ways, in some big ways. And that's a, that's a, an episode for another time. Um, but things like that can really skew the data.

Jesper (19m 10s): Yeah. Sorry for interrupting you, but I was just about to inject there because we actually did release a podcast episode like, I don't know, three, four or five episodes back or something like that about PERMA freeze because we also surveyed, um, a lot of our readers and we were asking them different kinds of questions. But what really came out as a conclusion from that? Is that what you just said? Basically because the book is free, people downloaded it ends up on the Kindle, they never read it again.

So our conclusion out of that was actually that we don't think free books are any good anymore because it doesn't help. It's much better to get them to, because we also asked to read those questions about, so we, we ask them questions. If you have got a book for free, do you read it right away or at least right after the one you're currently reading or, or, or what most of them said no, they will get back to it at some point. Which means of course in translation they will never get back to it. No,

Adam (20m 8s): it's free. Does have some uses. I don't think it's a longterm vulnerability. Um, I think, um, it's could for sometimes a quick burst of am visibility, you know, free books will get downloaded more, they'll get seen more, they'll get found more. Um, and also, I don't wanna go too far off piste here, but you can, um, if you've got audio, for example, um, with whisper sync add on enabled, then for example, I'm having a book free for a short period of time to get a BookBub featured deal, um, can actually reach you in a fair bit of cash in audio add on through whisper sync because a lot of audio listeners, when they've run out of there, they're free books for the month or they're included books for the month in their plan.

Um, will download free or cheap Kindle books and then pay an extra couple of dollars for the audio add on. It's a much cheaper way of them doing that. So, um, yeah, there can be some cash we brought in there. But I digress. I like to read that derailing you. Sorry. Oh no, that's fine. It's am, it's a vital point of, of, of this Ray of vital part of calculating retreat, you know, accounting for all of these things. And you know, thinking in terms of being an indie publisher, nothing is a, is a satellite thing.

Everything kind of influences each other. Um, and that does make calculating read through more difficult butts. Um, I'll try and break it down into its most basic parts. Um, it is radically oversimplifying it, but effectively, um, you want to take a period of time, which ideally, and this is where it becomes difficult again, um, gives each book a fair crack of the whip. So for example, if you're taking the last year, um, you've got a five book series and you're taking the last year, um, but book five is only been out for a month, then you're not going to have a full compliment of data there.

Am you might just want to include the last month in, in that case. So you're essentially giving each book a similar amount of time on the market. Um, so you've got a fairly clean data. You also want to make sure that that period of time is as long as it can be to be fair so that you've got, um, the biggest amount of data you can then the data therefore should be truer. So effectively what you ought to do is look at, um, the number of downloads, um, a purchases that each book has had in that period of time and the amount of money at book has made in each period of time.

Um, you're then calculating am for example, I did this in, um, in one of mine, I took am a fairly short time period. Um, I looked at my series and in that period, um, one book of book one sold 518 copies, book two sold 390 book through your 312, but for two 75 and book for a book, five to 40. So yeah, these are just kind of fairly random numbers, but you can see the numbers reduce each time.

Of course, as readers drop off, they forget to buy the next book. They give up on the series, whatever it is. Um, and you're then calculating the percentage that read through, um, from one book to the next. So book two's download numbers are X percent of, but one's book threes are X percent of book twos or whatever. Then gets the end of the series your looking at the number who have got right through to the end compared to the number who have, uh, started the series and looking at what that percentage is, uh, of, of all readers, you know, what percentage got as far book five.

Um, that's the reader you're looking for in a calculation that you're, you're, you're aiming for there. So say for example, you calculate that am 20% of your readers, for example, make the full way through a five book series. Um, you then want to calculate the value of that series. So you've got book one where you might have a royalty of a dollar and say books two, three, four, and five. You've got a royalty of $2 each.

So somebody reading the whole way through the series would earn you $9, but 20% of people read their whole way through the series. So essentially somebody starting book one has a 20% chance of reading through the series and earning you $9. Um, and this time in the morning, I'm not going to try and work out what that is in my head. I think it's about $1 80, something like that. So, um, or is it, let's, let's work that one out. Um, so it's $1 80, so that's, um, Rita wouldn't actually be worth that $1 am to you.

It actually be worth almost twice that. So when you're sending a, uh, you know, advertising a book and you're spending, I don't know, whatever it is on, on advertising that and you're not quite making a profit, in fact, you are, you've probably doubling your money in, you know, just using those numbers that I've, I've plucked completely out of nowhere. Um, so if you know that, that am read through sort of, that reader would earn you that a $1 80 for reading through the whole series, which is is, is pretty low.

It's just a number that I F generated through inventing random ones. Let's face it. Um, then if you also know your conversion rate, um, which you can work out through some funky and manipulation of the Amazon ads, um, uh, dashboard for example, then you can work out what you can spend on an ad. So if you know that you make $1 80 for somebody who reads through the series, um, you know that 10% of people who hit your landing page will convert into a sale, your conversion rate is 10%, then you know that that scent, the scent of that $1 18 means that if you're spending less than 18 cents a click, you're likely to be making a profit across the series.

Um, so essentially it's, it gives you that final piece of data, that final piece of information, um, that will enable you to make a calculation as to looking at an ad and knowing fairly instantly whether it's likely to be profitable and knowing what your benchmarks are for advertising and knowing that you've, you've got that ceiling there and as long as you spend under that, you am you'll be making a long term profit. That's it. I was going to say in shorts when that wasn't very short

Jesper (26m 44s): at no, but I think the main point with with this read through and why it's important to do this in calculation here is because it increases the bar so to speak on how much you can spend on advertising your book. One because if you look at your book one in isolation and you tried to work out, okay, how much can I spend looking at my conversion rate to make sure that I get at least a, let's say a 1% return on investment or something like that.

Then that number will be incredibly much lower on how much you can actually bit on your ads on Amazon for example, on Facebook or wherever you're advertising compared to when you take into account all the revenue you're going to get from the rest of the series. Then you can increase your ad spend and your bidding and basically making sure that you have a fair chance in your ads actually being served. Because if, if you only look at like a two 99, three 99 book one or whatever, or even let's say four 99 when you take away two royalties from that and you take away the conversion rate will will drop you down to let's say it and 10%.

Then you are bidding so low to ensure a positive room at return on investment then that you add, I'll never going to get shown on Amazon anyway.

Adam (28m 3s): That's right. Yeah. I mean I, I looked at, for example, my am, I just found my fingers there while you were talking rather than inventing ones. I thought I'd find the actual figures that I did. A couple book, one in my series at the moment is am at 99 cents and that's a price point on testing there. So I will learn probably about 25 cents, something like that. Um, then you 30 cents for a download of that book for sale of that book, which makes you think, well, actually that's not even worth advertising, but that's theories based on my read through rates.

I've worked out what a, um, you know, a reader, a am that comes across is worth over the lifetime of their, their readership. So for example, I've worked out for each different vendor. Um, and I can see that, for example, a Kindle reader to me, um, in that series is worth six pounds 51. Um, a Kobo reader is worth seven pounds, 10 Apple reader is worth seven pounds 81. Um, so they're, they're actually, it's worth somewhere around the seven pound Mark.

I'm a reader. So whereas it looks as if there's a 20 or 30 P royalty to be made there, that's, that's not the case. Actually getting somebody to, to read that series, it could be worth about seven or eight pounds to me. Um, and that's a, that's a massive, massive difference, um, from, from what you believe that reader is worth. Um, you know, we're not talking about being pennies out here. This is no thousands of percent higher, um, and will make a massive difference to the way that you do your marketing, your advertising. Um, of course you're not gonna see that seven or eight pounds possibly for a couple of years.

Um, but that's a huge, huge, um, and with most businesses not making a profit in the first couple of years anyway. Um, I mean, I would happily talk away am a pound or two if I knew that it was gonna be making me back seven or eight a couple of years later.

Jesper (29m 55s): Yeah, absolutely. And this is where I guess we can tie back to the beginning where we talked about that this is a long term view on, on things, right? It's not, it's not about making a quick buck or something. Um, and it takes, I mean, I don't, I don't know. I mean, I know some people can read a book really quickly, but for me it takes months and months and months just to read one book. So if I'm your reader, it'll take forever.

Adam (30m 19s): Yes. And that's the thing. Now, everybody is different. Um, and there are so many different variables that go into this, which is why having the maximum amount of data we can is, is vital. Um, I mean, for example, if you're a new author, um, you might not have, um, the, the volume of sales and the amount of time behind you to be able to get clean data to calculate this, which is why I think calculating the read through is something that is best done. Um, the more, um, the more you go on, for example, it is something which is worth doing throughout your am author career.

It's worth doing, you know, every few months. And just, um, you know, seeing, um, seeing what your, uh, you'll read through rate is at that point in time because it will change, the data will get cleaner. So it's well worth repeating the exercise.

Jesper (31m 16s): Hmm. Yeah, for sure. I was just wondering as well, so when, or for those people who have their books in Kindle unlimited, I guess that will complicate matters a bit because you will have some people buying the book. You will have other people's pouring the book. Um, so we need to be a bit careful with calculating their, I guess, right?

Adam (31m 39s): Yeah. Uh, yeah, kinda limited does um, does complicate things as well. Um, you'll read through rates will probably be higher, but the competition is also higher and your roti rate will be lower. Um, also doesn't help that the amount you get paid for page reads changes and drops, let's face it every month as well. So that does complicate things. The calculations there are a bit different and an even more complicated. I mean, things like this aren't, aren't difficult to get across in the medium of audio anyway.

It, um, but um, yeah, there is am there is a little something I can do for your listeners to help out there, which we'll we'll cover at the end of the show I'm sure. Um, and yeah, even things like box sets can complicate things because you think, well, okay, somebody reading for example, if you've got a box set of books, one's a three. Is somebody reading book for coming from book three or are they coming from your box out of one to three? Um, also a lot of people read out of order. A very large number of people will read out of order. I'm for rather getting messages on Facebook and emails saying, Oh, I've read these three books of yours.

Which one should I read next? I'm thinking what you've read books two, five and seven out of water. Um, so you don't have, I'm glad you've enjoyed them because that's frankly miraculous. You'd recommend that order. Um, but yeah, people, people do. And it doesn't matter how much you say this is the next book in the series or you have things plastered all over your website, all of your emails. I love your Facebook with all the books in order. Um, you know, people are people, they would just do whatever they want this to be honest with you. So, um, yeah, read through is, um, probably the, the line of best fit.

I would say it's am is the best thing we have at the moment. Um, but when we're dealing with that amount of unpredictability and general human nature, we're never going to get something perfect butts. Um, you know, it, it's better than nothing. Um, which I know is not, um, the best sales message in the world.

Jesper (33m 40s): No, but it's, it's, I think it's more about looking at the big picture here because if, if, if, with the example you were talking about early on, you know, if you know that you are earning like I mean seven, eight, $9 for for, uh, those people from, from one person starting the beginning of the series and when you're taking into account all the drop off and whatnot, you know, but okay, Rita is worth seven, eight, $9. It's, it's not about the seven or the eight or ninth. It's more about understanding the reigns of, OK, so it's, it's, it's around this level that I'm gonna earn.

Uh, let's see. My, my Redis worth around this level of money. I mean, if it's 7.5 or 8.5, that's not going to rock the boat, but it at least it gives you indication on, okay, how much can I approximately bit and still end up profitable in the end? Maybe a couple of years later as you say, but, but I think that's the takeaway, right? That, that you need to, to think it longterm and ms an indicator rather than like an exact number.

Adam (34m 41s): Exactly. Yeah. It's, it's going to be closer then you have beforehand, that's for sure. It's, um, you know, it's not going to be exact. It's not going to be foolproof. Um, but yeah, you will, you will be closer than you, you were otherwise. So it's definitely worth doing. Um, it can really give you, um, some, some excellent insight into what a reader might be worth, which otherwise we're just, we're just guessing. And as you say, the only number we've really got is the royalty that you get from that, um, specific, um, up front sale rather than am from looking at, um, you know, the, the, the whole bigger picture.

Jesper (35m 26s): Yeah, exactly. So, I don't know. Adam is there any things we missed out? Oh, I forgot to ask you about when it comes to read through that as important to covid. I think so. Um, the only thing else I was to mention is the,

Adam (35m 38s): um, as I say, difficult to am to get this through in in audio format. Um, but if it's something that's am listeners or sort of podcast are interested in, I do have a short course, um, on calculating read through, which I'm, I'm, I'm very happy to give your listeners I'm half price access to, um, as an exclusive deal for them.

Jesper (36m 1s): That's great. Yeah. And I will put a link to am to that discount code or link a router in the show notes below. So, uh, for for you, dear listener, if you're interested in checking out Adam's costs on this, uh, you can get that very special amwritingfantasy podcast a discounter her by, by going from that link below. And I think Adam you said that it's not going to expire that link. Is that right? So people can just use it?

Adam (36m 30s): Yeah, that'll be there forever. I think it's, um, uh, courses.indieauthormindset.com I think we get 50% off of all of the courses, but if you go for the, um, the, the read through one, I think the, uh, the code is am am amwritingfantasy am and that will mean that the course actually costs less than $25. So, um, yeah, it makes it makes it a great deal.

Jesper (36m 53s): Oh yeah, absolutely. So I would say go and check that out and uh, we I know we just passed Christmas now, but maybe a late Christmas gift for yourself. Maybe that's an idea.

Adam (37m 2s): Navy, Navy, you can use your Christmas money on it.

Jesper (37m 7s): Yeah, yeah, for sure. All right. So I would say thanks a lot Adam for coming on to the amwritingfantasy podcast and share your views and thoughts and knowledge about read through to, to help our listeners to, to make their own series more profitable longterm. I thank you. It's been a pleasure. All right, thank you for listening throughout 2019 and have a very good new year's Eve tomorrow and we will see you in 20

Narrator (37m 39s): if you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the amwritingfantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Adam and Yesper on patrion.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the amwritingfantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.