Case Study: Jonathan Fields
Book | Career Renegade
Primary tribes | Awake@TheWheel | @jonathanfields
[Quick note, this case study is a bit longer than some of the others, not because what I did bears more discussion, but simply because, well, I was there in the trenches and can share more of what went down behind the scenes]
I’m much newer to the online tribe scene than anyone else here. After leaving my post as a lawyer, I’ve launched, built and sold a few small health and fitness companies. Along the way, I also developed a mad passion for writing, marketing, entrepreneurship and the psychology of persuasion.
So, when I signed a book deal with Random House’s Broadway Books to share how I’ve done what I’ve done, the first thing I did (yeah, even before starting to write) was pour myself into the quest to understand how people were marketing books these days and find out what was working and what was bombing.
It didn’t take long to see that, without any offline celebrity or a deep pockets to fuel a massive campaign, the fastest way to build a community that would support the book was to take it online. With that, I started to blog and immerse myself in social media, while keeping an eye on (and documenting) what a lot of other authors were doing…and which online exploits were working. I blogged for about a year before even mentioning I was writing a book and made a commitment to grow my tribe by giving 99% of the time and asking only on rare occasion. I also spent a lot of time getting to know other online tribe leaders and developing relationships with them.
Two months before my book hit the street, I got a call from my agent. The economy was crashing, I was a newbie author and my message (leave your job to do what you love) was the last thing most people wanted to hear when they were desperate to hold onto the job hey had, no matter how lifesucking it was. In addition to that, the entire publishing industry had hit rock bottom with imprints, divisions and big publishers folding left and right. So, the decision was made to cut my opening print run to 7,500 copies.
I was freaked out. Momentarily devastated. It would be impossible to come close to making any big bestseller list with so few copies in print. But my sole question to my publisher was, “what do I need to do to get you to raise the run?” Their answer, “pre-sell more books.” There was very little time, though. And the economy continued to spiral. So, I started to brainstorm a way to do two things. One, tap my modest, but devoted tribe and relationships to pre-sell books. And, two, do something that would shift the bigger conversation around the economy from one of despair to one of hope and action.
With that, I wrote The Fire Fly Manifesto, and released it into the world, seeding it across social media. It caught fire as I worked behind the scenes to let people know about it, without violating any of the “unwritten” rules.
Career Renegade started that day with an amazon rank of around 1.5 million. It wasn’t even available for nearly two months. It ended around 1,400. The next day, my publisher called to tell me they were upping the print run.
As the release date came closer, I launched a separate website to create a very clean marketing funnel that would integrate strong calls to action, without breaking any of the silent rules of online tribebuilding and social media.
Then, I reached out to my broader online author tribe and extended family of eFriends and was blown away by how they embraced the book and helped evangelize it. And, while I’ve not hit the big bestseller lists, considering the timing, my topic and madness that was going down around the release date, it’s done well, holding #1 in it’s category on amazon for the better part of the first 2 months, staying in the low hundreds overall for weeks, low thousands for months and now consistently outselling 97% of all books sold on amazon.