Iterate And Optimize

Optimize your creative business for profit

The top-to-bottom guide to taking your writing and publishing business  from “Square One” to “Stratosphere.”

Iterate and Optimize is a behind-the-scenes peek into how indie publishing company Sterling & Stone grew their three-author team into a juggernaut — and a next-level guide for authors looking to explode their sales and do the same.

In Write. Publish. Repeat., bestselling authors Johnny B. Truant, Sean Platt, and David Wright explained how to build a thriving international publishing empire with no luck required.

Rather than resting on their laurels in the years since WPR was written, they’ve been evolving their once-fledgling business a little bit at a time: expanding to eight publishing imprints, ten high-profile podcasts, a coordinated staff working behind the scenes, millions of words published and hundreds of thousands of books in the hands of eager readers.

In Iterate and Optimize, they show you how they grew their business from the ground up in tiny, incremental steps — and give you a road map so that you can do it, too.

More than “just another self-publishing guide,” this book delves deep into the business behind the success of Platt, Truant, and Wright’s company Sterling & Stone, making it the essential “advanced course” follow up to Write. Publish. Repeat. It explains how to tweak your processes over time while maintaining momentum, wringing more profit out of assets you already have. You’ll learn how to diversify and create more products with less work, generate more money doing what you already do now, and set yourself up so you can build a readership who will support you in the specific ways you intend to evolve. You’ll learn how to grow from a bare-bones, minimum-viable-product business into a slightly larger business or an outright empire — not with massive, flashy (and risky) moves, but by the sustainable magic of incremental growth: small improvements made consistently over time.

In this book, Platt, Truant, and Wright give you all the nitty-gritty they’ve learned and implemented since their last nonfiction publishing bestseller. You’ll learn how to “iterate and optimize” the way you handle:

• Exclusive versus “going wide” distribution

• International and multi-format sales

• Advertising and marketing

• Optimizing book covers, descriptions, and metadata to increase conversion

• Slowly and sustainable building your assistants or contractors, plus outsourcing right

• Advanced product funnels, including the changed role of free books

• Networking and in-person meet-ups

• Workflow management and systems

• The writing and pre-writing process so you can “write better faster”

• Social media

• Podcasting

• Crowdfunding - what works and what doesn’t

• And much more!

This book isn’t for the faint of heart! It’s only for serious “authorpreneurs” who’ve read and internalized the lessons of its predecessor Write. Publish. Repeat. and are ready to kick their businesses up a notch. In Iterate and Optimize, the authors hold nothing back … giving you a true insider’s look at all the details that make Sterling & Stone run.

There has never been a “gold rush” or “magic button,” despite the flood of online marketers who want to convince you otherwise. But for those authors who are willing to do the work, there is a path to success. It doesn’t require luck. It only requires two things: making little improvements over time, then finding ways to get the maximum out of what you already have. Or in other words: Iterate and Optimize.

Ready to get serious about your business? This is the guide you’ve been waiting for.