438 indie authors responded to this question:

Responses to this question highlighted how much authors LOVE a good conspiracy theory.

Some folks really let their imaginations run wild. :)

Some even went so far as to link successful independent authors with some other conspiracy theories currently making the rounds in popular culture.

But this "conspiracy theory" actually has nothing to do with conspiracy, and everything to do with smart business.

Because the statement is true:

There actually is a strange-sounding market testing process behind some extremely successful indie careers.

But what does market testing have to with being an author?

Is it something worth considering if you're looking to improve your book quality and  your sales numbers?

Is market testing one of those "nice-to-do" things that isn't really all that important, or....

Here's a related question from our recent indie author blind survey:

Here again, responses were all over the map.

Some indie authors emphatically agreed.

Others lamented the state of a world in which authors should be forced to lower themselves to such distasteful depths in order to sell books. 

Others had never heard of market testing.

But here's what data from our 1200+ strong author community makes clear:

The answer to the market testing question depends entirely on your writing goals.

If you're writing for fun, there's no reason to test anything. Just write.

But if you want your books to be purchased and read by readers...

That's different.

If we want to be paid like professional authors are paid, we have to do the work that professional authors do.

In today's world, this almost always requires market testing.

Naomi's story is special.

Her husband is a pastor in rural Michigan, and she runs the church school.

Before Naomi sold all of those books, she and her family lived below the federal poverty line.

In fact, their family of five had lived in poverty for their entire life together.

But in 2019, Naomi started market testing to learn how to create profitable advertisements to sell her books.

They were on food stamps one year...

And the next year, she sold $311,000 worth of her books.

She brought in $189,000 in take-home income for her family.

(Update: Naomi is well on her way to reaching $2,000,000 in book sales as a result of her market testing, and she's providing a terrific income for her family.)

What helped Naomi turn the corner?

She discovered something:

Unusual name, crazy results.

This strange-sounding market testing process has become quite a "thing" in the indie author world over the past seven years.

It's how multi-seven-figure-per-year author Rachel Hanna builds the ads that power her direct-to-reader sales system.

It's how author Othniel Dory built the ads that sell $180,000 of his company's children’s books every month (800 to 900 copies per day), directly from their Shopify store.

It's also how Urban Fantasy author Lydia Sherrer built the ads that sold over $1M worth of her books from her Shopify store and the usual book retailers.

It's also how finance writers Britt and Laurie-Anne scaled their course sales to $400,000 per month.

And it's also how historical fiction author Naomi Rawlings built two book ads that sold $25,840 in 7 days.

This strange-sounding market testing process is how 14 individual seven-figure-per-year independent authors develop their book ads.

And how author Alana Terry built the ads that sold $94,000 in books and courses in one month alone.

So let's talk about the process.

It's called "Click Testing."

(No, it's NOT the same as "click baiting" :)

Before we get started, however, I want to make something perfectly clear:

If you're looking for shortcuts, hacks, tricks, loopholes, or the ever-elusive Easy Button...

I have bad news. They don't exist.

Regardless of what our (unpublished and unknown) writing professors might have taught us, being a professional author is the same as being an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship is a tough game.

There's a 90% failure rate.

The number of authors who never break even on their author career is a very large number.

There are 60 million titles for sale 24/7/365.

If you want to make money selling your books...

Your books need to be special.

Your marketing needs to be professional.

This doesn't happen by accident.

The authors I mentioned above are true professionals.

They do the work, year in and year out.

If you're looking for quick money, "passive income," unicorns, pixie dust, or fairy magic, the book business is not for you.

But if you're aiming to be a true professional like the authors above...

market testing will likely be a game-changer for you.

Indie YA Author AJ Vanderhorst sold 115,728 paperbacks last year.

He sold and shipped them directly to his readers. How did he do it?

Hard work and outstanding products, of course. They're the price of entry to any business, especially ours.

But there are thousands of hardworking authors who aren't making money, and millions (really) of outstanding books that aren't selling.

So AJ did something else, too.

He decided to market his books in a professional way, and he started by following our Click Testing process to build high-converting advertisements. 

Click Testing is how AJ built advertisements that really spoke to his ideal buyers, and motivated them to buy over $1.4M worth of his books at a healthy profit.

My claim is this:

Click Testing is the fastest and cheapest way to build profitable book ads.

The premise is simple:

When users on social media see something they like, they click on it to learn more.

Every click is an anonymous vote.

More clicks = more votes in favor of your idea.

(of course, there are serious rules about how you MUST set things up to avoid fooling yourself!)

"Click Testing" is backed by over 6,000 tests and 7 years of experience in over 75 different industries, including just about all of the bookselling genres.

It's responsible for $200M in extra revenue every year.

The best way to understand what we're doing and how it can help your author career is to sign up below.

I invested over 100 hours creating the introductory video to ensure that it's informative, fast-paced, full of examples of successful authors, and also reasonably entertaining.

I'll also send you instructional emails walking you through all of the key principles that have made "Click Testing" so reliably effective.

If you'd ultimately like to go deeper with Click Testing, I'll show you how to ensure you execute the testing process properly.

That way, you won't be fooling yourself with false results or bad data.

Why bother with all of this?

To sell more books to more happy readers. :) 

So what is "click testing," already?

Glad you asked :).

Click testing is a straightforward process to determine whether your book marketing messages and ideas are resonating with readers.

In other words...

"Click Testing" teaches you what your customers REALLY want.

And this same process can help you determine which of your ideas for your next book are of interest to your market.

(So you don't waste any more time, money, and energy writing books that few people care to read).

So click testing produces two outcomes:

You would think that it goes without saying, but the internet has taught me that I have to be excruciatingly clear:

This material is only useful for writers who want their books to be purchased and read.

Many writers don't care about that.

If that's you, beautiful － write with reckless abandon.

But if you're an indie author who wants to sell more books...

You're in the right place.

There are no shortcuts to success as an author.

The odds are stacked against you.

There is no hope of success unless your books resonate with your readers.

There are two ways to achieve market fit:

1. Write what you want, slap some ads together, and hope your market likes it. This is what most authors do. It's why only 0.06% of indie authors ever sell more than 1,000 copies in their lifetime (source: creativindie.com).

2. Use a methodical approach to test your ideas. When you have the integrity and respect for your readers to actually discover what they really want, your odds of success increase dramatically.

This post, and my every waking moment, is all about option 2. 

Here's how it works.

These six tests build on each other as you progress through the testing process.

Each test focuses on a specific area of what will become our complete, stress-tested advertisement.

We break things down into parts, find the best idea(s) for each part, then assemble the parts together in our growth ads.

But how do you test PART of an ad? I mean, you either run an ad or you don't, right?

I'll show you a unique way of setting up your ads as experiments so that you can isolate individual components and test them in isolation.

You'll discover in very granular detail the kinds of things that readers in your market best respond to.

This is what helps you sell the books you've written, and helps you write better books in the future.

If you write fiction or story-based nonfiction (like Michael Lewis's books Moneyball, Flash Boys, and The Blind Side), you'll follow our "STORYTELLER" testing track.

If you're a nonfiction author whose books help people solve problems, like improving their health and fitness, getting out of debt, starting a successful business, etc, you'll follow our "PROBLEM SOLVER" testing track.

Most authors think up a title, subtitle, hook, tagline, book description, story premise, etc, that they happen to like.

Maybe a couple of them.

That's great.

But here's where most of us fall flat on our faces:

We assume that readers in our market will like exactly what we like.

But in 95% of cases, we're wrong.

I've been doing this for many years and have seen over 50,000 different testing elements, so I'm only wrong 90% of the time these days. :)

Our data from 6,000 tests in 75+ industries, helping 800+ authors and business owners to earn an extra $200M per year, shows very clearly that only around 5% of our ideas resonate with our potential customers.

That's one good idea out of every 20.

So we need to challenge ourselves to think of more and better ideas.

But those ideas must meet certain criteria to ensure that we're attracting readers who are ready to buy books.

These criteria change with each test, so I'll walk you through all of the details for each individual test inside our paid program, "Click Testing for Authors."

Each of our six tests lasts for roughly 1 to 2 days, and we use an advertising budget of $30 per day for each test.

When our tests finish, our market will have ranked every one of our ideas from best to worst.

The individual readers out there in the world who see our ads don't have any idea that's what they're doing.

They're just responding to our test elements if they find them interesting.

And they're ignoring our test ads if they don't.

Along the way, we gain the kind of market knowledge that has unlocked hundreds of millions of dollars in extra revenue for the entrepreneurs and authors who have used this testing process in the past.

But how do we know if our best ideas in each test are actually good enough?

I'll show you how to apply concrete, unambiguous, numerical criteria to know with certainty when an idea is good enough to be shown to potential customers.

If your top ideas don't meet our criteria, you'll simply try again, but with the benefit of your market's feedback to guide your next round of test ideas.

As we progress through our six tests, we'll collect winning elements that our future readers loved most.

We'll assemble those elements into a high-converting advertisement for our book or series.

By the fifth and sixth tests, we'll no longer be testing fragments of ads. We'll be testing complete advertisements.

These advertisements will be relevant, informative, complete, and professional.

They will be designed from the ground up to attract people who are ready for their next read.

They'll be designed from the ground up to resonate with your ideal readers...

Because they'll be selected by your ideal readers.

That's the "magic" － caring enough about your customers to give them what they want.

But great books and book ads are not the only benefit of "Click Testing."

Remember all of those ideas that we tested?

Things like hooks, taglines, headlines, descriptions, and pictures?

They're not just useful in our advertisements.

They're also powerful tools to improve your book sales in other ways.

They'll help you make better web pages (for signups or book sales)...

And they'll help you write better emails that sell more of your books for you.

So that's the overview. But...

I'm sure you have more questions about "Click Testing."

So I've put together some resources to help you understand if: 

• I'm legit. (It's an election year, and everyone is a scoundrel until proven otherwise, right? :)
• My programs are useful and effective.
• Click Testing for Authors is likely to be useful and helpful for you.
• You're up for the challenge of marketing your books professionally.
• The costs of training and testing are within your reach.