Speaker 1: 0:37

Hi everyone, Welcome to the AuthorWeal podcast. I'm Greta Boris, USA Today Bestselling Mystery Friller. Author.

Speaker 2: 0:45

And I'm Megan Haskell, award-winning fantasy adventure author. Together we are the AuthorWeal. This week's interview is all about author promotions and we have senior marketing manager from written word media, clayton Noblett, on the show. Written word media is one of my absolute favorite book promotion website and email newsletter sites. So they run Free Booksy and Bargain Booksy, amongst others, and if you haven't ever checked them out, you totally should. But more recently they've been branching out into promo stacks and ad campaigns. So Clayton is not an author himself, but he is very well versed in what it takes to find readers and get your book some extra visibility. But before we get into the interview and learn all about the book promotion world, how's your week, ben Greta?

Speaker 1: 1:34

It has actually been great and I'm so happy to say that because I've been whining at our listeners, I think, for a couple of months.

Speaker 1: 1:43

So, and I gotta say not, I'm going to get a little woo-woo on you guys, but you know, I heard this podcast and it was entitled your Joy Is your Job and it really resonated with me because the point was and I do this as an achiever and I think maybe, megan, you do this too, because we are both enneagram achiever types is that I get this idea that I can't give myself permission to relax and enjoy life or be happy about something until, fill in the blank, whatever it is that I'm trying to accomplish, you know that has to be done and you have to be serious and you have to get it done before you can relax.

Speaker 1: 2:21

And you know, writing a book for most of us is a pretty long process. It takes months and months. Some people it takes years, right? So if you say to yourselves head down focus, I'm not going to like have fun until this book is done, well, that's a whole long time. I'm being not happy Anyway. So it's made a big difference and so I'm really trying to do what I'm doing while I'm doing it to get a little. You know and enjoy everything and I'm just, I actually feel more productive.

Speaker 2: 2:54

That's great.

Speaker 1: 2:55

Amazingly, yeah, so I'm really loving it. Um so, but on the practical side of the world, I have to say I was really excited about our meeting this week for listeners. Megan and I sat down and we kind of hashed out our goals and what we want to accomplish in the, you know we took, we took a moment to clarify.

Speaker 2: 3:17

Clarify, yeah, before we simplify and implement.

Speaker 1: 3:23

I know that I'm getting ready to put it on my calendar so I can implement the things you might do.

Speaker 2: 3:29

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 3:30

But I it was a great meeting and I just you know I'm excited about the things we decided to do to make the podcast and our courses and our book all the stuff we do more valuable to listeners. So stay tuned for some changes, folks. Yeah, um, and so how about you what you've been up to?

Speaker 2: 3:51

Well, in addition to that, that meeting, which did I mean we, we were, we were together for what like three hours, four hours, it was a long it was a long meeting, it was great.

Speaker 2: 4:03

Um, but in addition to that, I have been just in prep mode for all sorts of different kinds of things. I've got all, all a bunch of things going on. Um. First, several events are coming up, but the biggest one, or the first one, is actually going to be WonderCon, and I'm so excited. It is now a hundred percent confirmed that I'm going to be on an author panel with Hugh Howie, woo woo, I can't even tell you how excited I am. I'm like doing a little, a little fan girl dance, um, but uh, I'm going to try not to not to be too much that way in real life. Getting it out now.

Speaker 1: 4:42

Don't trip over your tongue on your way to the platform.

Speaker 2: 4:45

Yeah, I got to get it out of my system. Now, yeah, um, but if you're interested, that is happening Saturday, march 30th, at 1130 am at the Anaheim Convention Center. So if you're in town, I would love to see you. I will also be selling books in the exhibit hall at booth uh, sp 23, I think, a small press area in exhibit hall a, um, kind of at the very back of the show, um, but that's where I will be all weekend. So if you stop by and say hi and tell me that you follow me online whether that's podcasts or social media or whatever it all counts Um, I actually have a little special guest, special surprises for my followers, so I'm excited about that.

Speaker 1: 5:28

Ooh, how fun. Yeah, yeah, maybe when we're off air and you can tell me what it is.

Speaker 2: 5:34

And then I'm also putting the finishing touches on my special edition hard cover Kickstarter campaign for the last descendant and I'm planning to launch that probably sometime in April. I mean, it's going to have to be some time sometime in April, but I don't know if it'll be early April or late April, just yet. Um got to kind of get the last little bits and bobs sorted and start the promotion and get the emails all set up, all that fun stuff. So I'm working on that. But if you're at all interested in the book or just want to follow along and see how the campaign does, I will put the link in the show notes for you. And before we move on, I just wanna take a quick moment to remind you to subscribe to the podcast, post a review if you love it and share your favorite episode with a writer friend. It really helps us to get the word out there and grow our podcast if you share it.

Speaker 2: 6:29

Now let's get chatting with Clayton. Today's guest is Clayton Noblett and we are thrilled to have him here. Clayton is a senior marketing manager at Written Word Media. He is passionate about helping authors find their readers and finding ways to sell more books. When he's not working, he enjoys spending time with his family, playing sports and making beverages, and I have to say that before we actually started recording, we already almost jumped into my very first question, which is what kind of beverages do you make?

Speaker 3: 7:04

Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be speaking with you both today. As far as beverages go, we can kind of go in two ways. So in high school I was a barista and got really into coffee. So I have a nice espresso machine, so I'm making a lattes and cortados with that a lot of the time. I also really like making cocktails. So, for example, we hosted a holiday party in December and I was making smoked old fashions how fun, and bees knees for everybody there.

Speaker 2: 7:35

Oh, that's fun, I love bees knees.

Speaker 1: 7:37

What's a bees knees? I don't even know what it is.

Speaker 3: 7:39

Bees knees is kind of a gin sour, so it's gin, lemon and honey and I like to put a little bit of cardamom as well.

Speaker 1: 7:47

Ooh, that sounds yummy.

Speaker 2: 7:49

One of our local bars here has a bees knees that I grew. Greta has a bees knees that I really enjoy. So, yes, awesome, yeah. So the reason why we always ask is because, well, greta and I both drink a lot of coffee.

Speaker 1: 8:05

Yes, Number one, copious amount.

Speaker 2: 8:07

Copious amounts of coffee. And then number two we both drink wine, but my book actually has a bartender, and so a friend of mine made a cocktail menu for the book, so it's attached. So, anytime I hear somebody likes to make beverages, I'm always like hmm, let's, let's chat.

Speaker 3: 8:26

I'll have to check that out. That's super cool.

Speaker 2: 8:29

Yeah, it's a lot of fun.

Speaker 1: 8:31

Also, before we move into authorly stuff although I will say cocktails kind of is authorly stuff, unfortunately, or fortunately, however you want to look at it I have a book that my kids gave me and it's like all literary cocktail names, you know, like tequila, mockingbird and like all these. So if you're ever into doing the literary drinks you might look it up. I forget the name of it but I'm sure you could Google it.

Speaker 3: 8:58

So yeah, maybe 20 years from now I'll have a bar only for indie authors.

Speaker 2: 9:03

There we go. Look with the name of that book.

Speaker 3: 9:05

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 9:06

Well and so then you just have to move to Southern California, orange County, and we will be your first regulars on the stools.

Speaker 1: 9:16

We are in, absolutely.

Speaker 2: 9:19

All right. Well, Clayton, why don't you start off really now by telling us how you got into the publishing industry and started working for written word media?

Speaker 3: 9:28

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I was doing marketing for a fintech startup in kind of like a startup hub, building so over 200 companies and one building really, really energetic space. That was a lot of fun. And the company I was working for got acquired and then written word media was actually on the same floor and they were hiring for they're actually looking for their first marketing hire and so I spoke with the founder, ricky, and it just made a lot of sense right off the bat.

Speaker 3: 9:59

I've always been a really big reader.

Speaker 3: 10:02

Growing up, we were one of those families that didn't have TV, so we would always go to the library with a bunch of grocery bags and then come out carrying grocery bags of books and everybody would be staring at us, love it, and so, yeah, yeah, big big fan of reading for as long as I've been able to read, and before that, my parents were reading to me, so it really just made a lot of sense. I have a lot of connections with the creative community. So many of my friends are artists and musicians, so I really connected with kind of the author mission and supporting the authors with the company, and then, of course, I do enjoy marketing. I know that's not common with authors. So I like to say, hey, I know you don't like doing this, so maybe I can do it for you and you can focus on the parts that you enjoy being an author. And so it's been really fun to work with authors and kind of share my expertise and then use my skills to help get books out in the world.

Speaker 1: 10:54

Why don't you tell just because some of our listeners might not really know what written word media does? Why don't you kind of tell us like a little overview of the company and the kinds of things you do for authors?

Speaker 3: 11:08

Yeah, yeah, absolutely so. Written word media, simply put, is a book marketing company. So if you are an author, you can come to us and we will help you sell more books. And we have two primary ways that we do this. One is what we call email promo, and this is where we email links to buy your book out to tens of thousands of readers. So, combined on our email lists, we have over a million and a quarter readers, and so when you schedule an email promo with us, you tell us the genre of your book, what price your book will be during the promotion on the day that we email it out to readers, and then what day you want the promotion to run, and then on that day we'll email a link to buy your book out to a bunch of readers who love your genre. So it's very targeted marketing tactic that way.

Speaker 3: 11:53

Another way we can market books is by running Facebook or Instagram ad campaigns for authors. So if you want to run a five day ad campaign or a 10 day ad campaign, you just go to writtenwordmediacom and click on our Facebook or Amazon ads page and then you can schedule the day you want the ads to run, and then we handle everything. We make the creative, we write the copy, we do the scheduling, we do the targeting, we do the optimization, and so, as the author, you're really hands off. It's kind of like buying a t-shirt it takes about five minutes and you're done, and then we handle everything else. So that's kind of in a nutshell what writtenwordmedia does.

Speaker 1: 12:29

So I've used the email list service, but I've not ever used the ad service, just out of curiosity, so like if I were going to say, schedule you to do a five day Amazon ad campaign for me, would you show me the creative, would I get feedback or would it just go?

Speaker 3: 12:50

Yeah, we would just make the ads and run them. But if you asked us to show the creative, we absolutely would. So, yeah, we don't show the ads that we make by default, because it's all made in our own ad account and all the targeting is done there as well. But, of course, we're happy to share what we've done and kind of our work as well. So, yeah, that's something that I really like about writtenwordmedia is our commitment to customer service. We get a lot of really great reviews from our customers and meeting people at conferences. Everybody's so excited to see us because we like to do a really good job of helping authors, and so that's something that I always tell people. If you have any questions, you have any concerns, just shoot us an email and we'll get back to you. Everybody's super nice. There's no dumb questions, so please just get in touch if you have any questions.

Speaker 2: 13:38

Yeah, yeah, and I will say too that I've done several campaign email campaigns through written word and that's been one of my biggest draw or takeaways is that like, as compared to like bookbub, which kind of does a similar thing as far as the email promos go, you guys are far more conversational and open and friendly, whereas I feel like with bookbub, like they're I think they're still bigger, you know a lot bigger, but so you probably reach more people that way, but working with them I'm always like nervous, Whereas when I go to written word I'm always like oh hey, it's written word.

Speaker 2: 14:14

I know how this works and it's great. There's people, there's actual people there.

Speaker 3: 14:18

Yeah, awesome, that's so great to hear. I think you know like, yeah, bookbub is kind of the big player in the book marketing space and so they definitely have a larger audience than us. But with us you can go to the site and schedule the promo and you're done. You know what day it's going to run. You can be much more positive that you're going to run on that day, whereas bookbub you have to apply and kind of wait and see.

Speaker 3: 14:40

And so people often talk about us competing with bookbub, but we actually find that they're actually a good source of business for us, because when someone gets a bookbub, often they stack it with some more promos as well. Yeah, and likewise, right. So, I think it's. There's not really a big competition between us and bookbub. It's authors using our services together to reach as many people as possible. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 15:03

Well, also because it is more affordable too. You can do. You know, like, bookbub is like a big pop, a lot of money. It's a big, huge one day event versus written word media. I feel like you can keep coming back to it more frequently and I have talked to authors who use that kind of campaign. You know where they're running something almost every month and they have enough books that they can do sales on different books, and so I mean it's just, it's like a different approach to sort of the same thing.

Speaker 3: 15:38

You know, yeah, yeah, exactly, and the and one thing that we launched in 2023 that we've gotten really great feedback on is readymade promo stacks. Yeah, so you know, a common strategy for any authors is stacking a bunch of promos together In a short period of time.

Speaker 3: 15:52

This helps kind of juice the algorithm on Amazon and keep your books ranked higher for longer. But this used to be a real pain because you would go to written word media and you'd schedule your promo there and you'd go to another promo site and apply for the promo or schedule the promo, but you wouldn't always know the day that your promo is going to run or if you would get it, and so this is kind of a logistical nightmare, right for authors, and we'd always say, well, you know, our site's really easy to use and they're like yes, that's great, but you're only one site that I'm going to and the rest of it is still annoying.

Speaker 3: 16:25

And so we've actually partnered with other promo sites, like the Fussy Librarian, even your News Today, hello Books, and so now if you go to our website, you can click on promo stacks and you can schedule an entire promo stack in one checkout process. So it takes the same time as it would to book one promo as it does to book five or six. Now, yeah, and so that's getting our reach. Some authors have compared. Some people that get really great results with the promo stacks have compared us to the results they got from Bookbub. So we all kind of working on that really big reach as well. That's amazing. So I will say my last launch, that's exactly what I did.

Speaker 1: 17:04

I did a promo stack and I went to Bookbub in a look at my. So it was trying to remember what they exactly called it like paranormal suspense or something like that or whatever your category is. Yeah, it was the similar. Your numbers were not that different. Yeah, because it's a more niche genre, right, so your numbers were like very close in terms of the list. If I did a stack and it was more reasonable, yeah, and so I didn't.

Speaker 1: 17:38

You know, I was just like not into the. I was just like not into the. I'm doing a launch, I want to pick my date. I don't want to go begging and pleading it, but, bub, I just want to do what I want to do, you know. And so I scheduled with you guys and I did great. I mean, I hit um Top 10 in several categories. I think I was number one in something for several days and, yeah, I was in the top 10 and a couple other categories. So Everybody listening, it works, mm-hmm, go do it. Go check them out. So that's my commercial for you guys. Totally works.

Speaker 2: 18:17

So why don't we move on a little bit here? I think we'll come back to maybe some of these tactics what I'll call tactics a little bit later. But what is kind of the most common road bro, roadblock or problem that you see authors Having or mistake that they're making when they're trying to approach their book marketing?

Speaker 3: 18:38

Yeah, yeah, I think probably the the biggest thing I see, especially with newer authors, is not thinking through the reader journey kind of from start to finish. And it makes sense, because this isn't something that that you would think to do on your own a lot of the time, but you really, in my opinion, it really helps to think about the readers as customers, right, and so when you think about a reader, they become aware of your book by you know they see the book cover somewhere, maybe running an ad on on Facebook or Instagram, maybe you post about in social media, maybe they just see it browsing on Amazon, and then if they're drawn in by that cover, then maybe they'll go and go to the book page and read the description. If the description hooks them, then maybe they'll click buy and then they go and they read the book and if they like the book then they'll try to find something else from that author. And I think for a lot of newer authors, kind of a link in that chain will be missing. So either the cover Won't be high quality and that will kind of turn off readers from the start, or they'll have a really high quality cover but the description maybe gives the plot of the book away a little bit, or seems like it does, or the description Seems to be of a genre that the cover isn't representing, and so that can turn readers off.

Speaker 3: 19:53

And then also, you know, I've seen authors who don't have links in the back matter of their books. So if a reader has purchased your book and they finished it, odds are they enjoyed it, right? A lot of people don't finish books that they don't enjoy, and so make it really easy For readers to go on and do something else for you as an author, right? If they finished your book and they're a fan, you want to make it effortless for them to help you out some more. So, I think your book. Make sure in your back matter you have links to your other books, if you have them, or links to your email. Sign up, if you have that. If you don't have any of those, just ask them to go follow you on social media, right, and so asking readers to do these things is really important and it's really easy to do as an author. But making sure you have all of these links in this chain ready to go before you really start pushing your marketing Will make everything you do to market your book more effective.

Speaker 2: 20:42

So, okay, this is kind of a detail question now, and and I've I've been around now I published my first book in 2015, so I've had a lot of different advice over the years, when, especially when it comes to back matter Everything from you should give readers as many options, as many links as you can, because they're gonna find the thing that they want to do Next from that. So, whether that's to go buy your next book or leave you a review, or sign up your newsletter or whatever To you should only have one, you should pick one, and that's the one thing that you want the reader to do, so that's what they should do. So what's your advice? Like, do you have a, do you have data I guess that would be interesting or any, any indicators that show whether one link or multiple links, or which links kinds of links, work Best for building that funnel.

Speaker 3: 21:33

Yeah, so we don't have any data. All of our data is on the kind of the front end of the clicks. But as a marketer, what I would say is, if you have something to offer readers, that is your most effective offer to put in the back of a book. So, for example, a lot of authors will have a novella or a free story that they will give to readers if readers sign up for their email list. And if you have that, that's a really compelling hook for readers Like you. Enter your email address and you get a free story. A lot of people are gonna do that, especially if they liked the book they just read. So if you have something you can give readers in exchange for joining your email list or performing another Action, that is by far a more compelling offer than just saying, hey, please join my email list or please follow me on social media or please review my book. So if you have something to offer readers, that's your most compelling CTA or called action at the back of the book. So I'm with that.

Speaker 3: 22:28

And then maybe lower down on the page or on the next page, you can include other offers. I don't really like just including one, just because it kind of limits the options that readers have, and not every reader is going to take that option, right, so you can have one primary called action at the back of the book. That is kind of the highest value thing for the reader to do for you. But I do like to include other options too, because some, some readers really don't like to be on an email list, and that's okay. I sometimes I, you know I understand people not wanting to be on email lists and so maybe they just want to follow you on social media instead, right, so I like giving readers that option, just because that that's kind of how I would like to treat people makes sense.

Speaker 1: 23:06

Yeah, I do the, the novella, and I get signups to my mailing, like my mailing list, every single day. There's a couple, you know a handful, and that's just. It's just great, as Since I moved it from the back matter to the end of a chapter, the end of the last chapter, because I also think you know, if the reader and of course not everybody's selling their books on Amazon, but if your book, if your reader did buy the book on Amazon, amazon will also do the other things. Amazon will pop up and say, hey, why don't you review this or here's, you know, or push the next book in the series for you sometimes, but they're not gonna push somebody going to your website to get your freebie. So that's correct.

Speaker 2: 23:50

Not at all. Yeah, in fact, they'd rather they didn't.

Speaker 1: 23:54

They do not care about that. They just care about their. Their make what as they should.

Speaker 3: 24:00

We all care about our own businesses and keeping our own businesses running, so yeah, and an email list is just such a valuable asset For marketers in general and and authors right. So I think often your email list is the highest value action a reader can do for you. So even if you don't have, you know, a freebie to offer someone, I Would probably make that the primary called action a lot of the books, just because that's, that's just so high value, that direct line of Communication to these readers.

Speaker 1: 24:27

Yeah, so this is a total rabbit trail. I'm probably not that interesting to our listeners, so we should make it quick. But so the big email services like you guys, do you use outside services like Mailer, like that kind of thing, or do you do your own? Do you have your own? Yeah?

Speaker 3: 24:47

yeah, we. So it's kind of a combination. We kind of have this, this monster of systems behind the scenes, but we we have an ESP called sale through. That would be preposterous for any author to use because it's just built for really bulk sins, and then we have a lot of custom technology that integrates with that. So that's how we do it, but unfortunately that's not not really helpful for authors just because sale through is a not a practical System to use. If you have you know under in people on your email list.

Speaker 2: 25:20

Yeah, I was gonna say with it. With them 1.25 million Subscribers you can eat a. You need a. Quite the hefty tool to handle all that.

Speaker 1: 25:29

Yes, I would imagine so, yes, yeah, I was just in Miller light hell yesterday all day. So not that Miller light, there's anything wrong with it, but it was, I was good. Yeah, anyway, that's why I asked Little me. Greta Boris is having this trouble with my email. I can't even imagine sending everyday millions. I would just Truly a nightmare.

Speaker 3: 25:53

A lot of emails. It's pretty wild. We just had our annual review and we were looking back at every email we sent for the year and the. It's staggering, yeah yeah.

Speaker 2: 26:03

Yeah, I can only imagine. Yeah, ours is ours each individually. You know, we guys send one a week ish and so that, and then my list is, you know, not not huge. So, but thinking about now compound, oh Me gives me the shivers.

Speaker 1: 26:19

She gets the shivers. I get a stomach ache either way. Yes, we do need people like you play, because yeah, that's like ah sounds like a nightmare. So if you are gonna be advising, say a newer author who maybe doesn't have much of a mailing list yet.

Speaker 2: 26:41

Yeah, I was just saying let's let's break this down now into like beginning, like first book author Advice and then mid-list, you know, medium term author and then advanced author. What are kind of the range of advice that you would give? So, starting with that, with that first book debut author, how do you get their book out?

Speaker 3: 27:04

Yeah, so the first book debut author, the. The thing here is that there's not a lot of other things a reader can do for you after they finish the book, so except sign up for your mailing list.

Speaker 2: 27:16

So get a short story.

Speaker 3: 27:19

It's true, set up your mailing list to get a short story. So yeah, so here's the thing with one book. You know, we survey thousands of authors every year. We ask them things like how much they're earning, how many books they've published, and it's one thing we know empirically is that it's very hard to make a full-time living off of one book. Right, that's not gonna surprise anybody, but it's hard to make a lot of income from one book. And so when you have one book out and you're focused on growing a business as an author, that book one is setting up the rest of your author career, and so you should be less concerned about immediate profit and revenue and more concerned about growing for the future and setting yourself up for success.

Speaker 3: 27:56

So, megan, like you're saying, with the mailing list, that's the perfect thing to be focusing on, because then, if you get readers on your mailing list, they love book one, they're probably excited for book two, and if you have them on your mailing list, you can tell them exactly when book two is coming out, and you might even ask them to be an art reader and help you, help you produce the book right. And so, yeah, the email list set up. It's never too early to do it. It will feel a little wasteful at the start, right, because you'll have you four people on your mailing list and you spent hours setting it all up, but that's just the beginning, right. So getting it going early, yeah, it's never too early to start working on your email list.

Speaker 1: 28:33

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 28:35

I think that's I think that's one of our biggest pieces of advice to new writers is, like you said, it's not be so worried about trying to make huge sales or have a massive launch for that first book, because it's it's, quite honestly, it's, you know it, lightning in a lightning in a bottle. If you actually can make a profit on that first book Initially right out the gate, but it's working on the second book while also building your audience and getting capturing that audience is so, so, incredibly important.

Speaker 1: 29:03

And you know Joe Salari too. If you go to his website he has this breakdowns about, like, how many books and what you can expect. And like any other business, I mean it usually the first few years of Publishing you're running a deficit and that's okay. It doesn't mean you're a failure. You know, and using tools like if you need to invest in something like you know, right word media, written word media is thing, if you're using it to help build your mailing list by putting that back matter in, by having that free novella, by getting people over, that's just an investment in the future.

Speaker 1: 29:41

And you know, I think a lot of the time Newer writers I know I did this in the beginning you kind of feel like a failure if you're not making a whole bunch of money on your first book and it's like really no, nobody does, except for those few people who get a huge advance from a publishing company. But the publishing company might not make a lot of money on that first book. They're just banking on the fact that this writer is gonna write more and eventually they will.

Speaker 3: 30:06

So yeah, that's so true. I think that's one of the things I really like about the surveys we do is that we can really show people hey, if you are feeling like a failure because you're not a millionaire after publishing one book, you're actually not a failure. You're perfectly normal. You might actually be doing better than than you might expect to based on the numbers. So, yeah, yeah, it's really important to know that just publishing one book I'm turning a profit probably shouldn't even be a goal, right. If you're turning like a profit off of one book, maybe you're not investing as much as you should as building for the future, right?

Speaker 1: 30:41

So yeah, that's good point.

Speaker 3: 30:42

Yeah, thinking about kind of the what the first book can do to build your audience and kind of setting up this Audience engine for that, for your future, is what you should be thinking about with with one book published.

Speaker 2: 30:54

That's so. It's so interesting because it's I'm Flipping mindset a little bit, you know, and I mindset is so important. It's something we kind of have touched on on with multiple different interviews in different ways. But, looking at it that way, if you're making a profit your first year off of your first book, you know, yeah, maybe you're not. That's different.

Speaker 1: 31:17

Yeah, you might not have spent enough on your cover or your editing right. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3: 31:23

So it's one of those things where you know if I, you know, if I was speaking to someone who just started a business that nothing to do with a Publishing and they were saying, yeah, I'm turning this great profit to me, that's a sign that they've got something right. But if they're not investing a lot in building it, then maybe they're kind of throwing away some potential. Yeah, you know, that's why a lot of businesses go into debt in the first three years Is because they want to build as much as they can and kind of catch this momentum while they have it Mm-hmm. So yeah, I think if you're an author that's really focused on income and growing revenue from your books, I think investing in the future of your author business is the way to think about it.

Speaker 1: 31:59

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 31:59

But then of course you know some some authors aren't as interested in the, in the income and the revenue side of things, which is also completely valid, so I do like to throw that out there. I talk a lot about money and earning money from books, and that's because I market books, but it's not because that's the only value I assigned to publishing, right? I think there's a lot of good just sharing your work with the world, and stories are so powerful. So just because we talked a lot about money and earning revenue from books doesn't mean that's the only thing that matters here right, absolutely.

Speaker 2: 32:27

Thank you for saying that. That's my soapbox. Oh, I'm so excited. No, I mean because it is true, like we, we used to have this author personality quiz. We still have it somewhere, greta, we got to find it, make sure it's available. But I think that's where we kind of, through a series of questions, developed kind of a Profile of who you are as a writer, what your skill sets are, etc. Etc.

Speaker 2: 32:55

And then it was not everybody has the same goals, right. So we had the artist, who is, you know, maybe somebody who was more in it for the craft of writing. We had the bucket list, or, which was the person who just had one book that they really had to get off their chest. It was like the thing that they had their entire life they wanted to do. It was on their bucket list, hence the time of the name of it.

Speaker 2: 33:16

We had the, the calling card writer, which is like the business person who needs a book or wants a book to sort of improve their credibility in their industry or to use as conferences and things like that. Then there was the Dabbler, which was always fun, like the person who's kind of just a hobbyist, trying things out, experimenting, doing all the things and having fun with it, and not quite necessarily sure of the one path forward that they wanted to take with their books or their writing or their career. And then the last one, the last one on the list was the entrepreneur. You know, like there's.

Speaker 2: 33:57

There's so many other ways of approaching this industry. However, even if you're not in it for the money, and unless and assuming you're not a dabbler, which might not be as interested in this, I think everybody, every writer, wants to get their books out there and get them read. So even if it's not about that profit margin, it could still be about breaching as many possible readers as you possibly can, which you know different services like this, an investment in that growth can still be valuable, even if it's not a, even if it's not a financial goal.

Speaker 3: 34:35

So yeah.

Speaker 1: 34:36

I just had this conversation with an author the other day who was saying that her main goal really is just to kind of Touch readers hearts you know what I mean and and have that community of readers, and it's not about the money for her. But then we both agree, so so, but she had had it somewhat disappointing book launch and I said so. But so why are you disappointed in your book launch? Because you said you don't care about the money and she that she goes. Huh, you're right. And I said it's because you didn't reach readers, and that you know so, regardless of whether it's the money in your bank account or it's, you know, building that community of people who enjoy your work, or for most of us, it's probably a combination of both. Yeah, you know, I mean, there are, I'm sure, just mercenary writers who are just writing anything Just to make money, but I'm not friends with anybody like that, nor do I care to be honestly so, yeah, yeah, you know, I think, for most of us it's a combo.

Speaker 3: 35:36

Yeah, I totally agree with that. Most, most authors I talked to. It's kind of a clear combination. And yeah, and of course, if you know, if someone wants to give you a lot of money for your book, you're not gonna turn that down, right, I know.

Speaker 2: 35:50

The control that the control that you have to give up in exchange for that money is. Yeah, megan's a bit of a control freak. I'm a little bit between that. Okay, so mid list before she gets mad at me, I'm gonna change this to subject.

Speaker 1: 36:02

So mid list authors, you know you've got these people who've got like a handful of bucks, maybe five to 15 bucks. Well, 15 is pretty advanced. Let's say 5-ish, 8-ish, 5-ish, 8-ish, and you know a mailing list of maybe a couple thousand or whatever, and and they just, and they hit I Think this is common, actually. They kind of hit a they were growing, growing, growing, and then all of a sudden they start leveling off and they're like how do I get more momentum, how do I hit the next level? What kind of advice would you give, would you?

Speaker 1: 36:40

give an author like that.

Speaker 3: 36:42

Yeah, well, you know, of course it's gonna be on a case by case basis and kind of what they've done and what they're doing now. But you know I'll talk about it in terms of what written word media can do and what I tell authors who haven't used our services a ton or kind of. Use them once a year or so. If you have five or more books out, you have some real potential to earn a lot of money as an author, right? Especially if they're in a series, you can have these readers kind of going through your series and kind of. If you think about your average reader value with one book, you know, maybe your book is 4.99 and sometimes you're discounting it, so the average value of a reader is under $5 for you, right? So you're gonna have to get a lot of readers to earn much money. If you have five books, your reader value goes way up because someone who buys all of your books, you know their value could be $25, $30, depending on how much you're charging for your books, and so the key when you have five or more books is getting a ton of readers to that book, one in the series, and that's what we are really good at average word media. And so if you haven't run a free promotion before where you make your first book in the series free for a limited time, that's when I really recommend people start doing that.

Speaker 3: 37:57

That can be like a tough, like a mental hurdle to get over. Right, giving away an entire book for free and I do think that's completely valid Like if you spend a year of your life working on something giving it away might not feel very good. So if you can't get over that hump, that's okay. But what I will counter with is almost every big author you see up on a stage at a conference, all these big name authors, they're all running free promotions and it's because they understand the value of getting a lot of readers introduced to the series. And then those readers who like it go on and pay full price for other books in the series and find other books by that author, and so it's all about getting readers to that book one and by running a ready-made promo stack with us at written word media, that's a great way to introduce a ton of new readers to that book one and then hopefully more of those readers go on to read book two, three, four and five.

Speaker 1: 38:54

Yeah, I would agree.

Speaker 2: 38:55

So going off of that a little bit now, there's obviously some authors who are strictly with Kindle Unlimited and so they do their. Usually, when you're with Kindle Unlimited, your first book and series might be regular price, but you have the KU option so people can quote unquote, read it for free in Kindle Unlimited, but then you get your period of time.

Speaker 3: 39:18

You get however many days I can't remember now what it is, but five is a five.

Speaker 2: 39:24

You get five days free that you can use within your 90 day period on Kindle Unlimited. So that's one strategy or one method. But then you've also got wide authors like me, who I have my first book Permafree. So if you wanna go read the Last Descendant, go get it, cause it's free. It's a good book. I'm glad for myself here for a second.

Speaker 1: 39:46

Yeah, no, it's got carnivorous pixies. You should go get it everybody.

Speaker 2: 39:50

It does carnivorous pixies exactly. Anyway, I went off track. So for a wide author, is there different advice for those two options when you're doing a free promotion, or is it the same?

Speaker 3: 40:04

Yeah, I think it's pretty much the same. The one thing with wide authors is if your first book is not Permafree, then changing your book to free can be a bit of a challenge. You need to change it to free on retailers like Google Play and Apple and then make sure that Amazon matches it. So if you've scheduled a free promotion, make sure you start that process, maybe four or five days in advance, to make sure that your book will be free when you need it to be. So that's something to consider. But other than that, no, the process really works the same. Right, you still have a series of books you're trying to introduce readers to. It's just across multiple platforms. So, yeah, I think that the strategy is largely similar for wide authors and can unlimited authors.

Speaker 1: 40:48

Yeah Well, and I would think but you guys can correct me if I'm wrong, because right now my indie pub series is in KU but I would think that even if book one is Permafree, you're still dipping into an audience that wouldn't know about your book. So if you run a promotion, an email promotion, that says, hey, this book is free, they don't know it's always free. And even if they did know it was always free, they're just looking at this book, going, oh, this looks interesting to me. I think I'll give it a whirl. It's not. So you're just exposing your free book to a whole audience of people you wouldn't have been able to expose it to otherwise.

Speaker 2: 41:33

Sounds wrong, but I'm not that one.

Speaker 1: 41:34

Sorry, I'm feeling showing.

Speaker 2: 41:41

I can come up with these stories.

Speaker 3: 41:45

That is so true, though. That is something, actually, that I do see newer authors making a mistake with occasionally is they'll be in Kindle Unlimited and they'll run a Kindle Countdown deal or a free day, and that's the only action they take to market the book, and that's not enough, right? That is the beginning. That is a reason to market your book. Making it free or discounting it for a limited time, that alone won't reveal your book, as you said, to enough people, right?

Speaker 1: 42:12

Reveal that's a good book.

Speaker 3: 42:14

After you have a compelling price point for your book, then you need to tell people about that. So it's really you're not just dropping the price and then not changing anything else that you're doing.

Speaker 1: 42:24

Yeah, yeah, I know I've been approached by Amazon twice about doing Kindle deals where they're gonna control the price of the book and drop it and they're gonna market it. And the advice I got from several people was, when they do that, run ads because capitalize on it. Yes, they're gonna show it to a whole bunch of people, which is great, but if you run ads also you're gonna get even more people there, and and then you know that just builds the whole momentum. I do feel like a lot of this whole book marketing thing. The analogy that kind of came to me is like a kid's birthday party where they play the game, keep the balloon in the air, and so you get a big promotion or a book launch. It's like you're whacking the balloon up and then all these other things are like oh, it's falling, bap, it's falling Bap, run another ad, bap, do this Bap, you know.

Speaker 1: 43:21

So, I, and it's another tool in your job. Your tool belt is to just kind of, like I said, I don't want to use the word expose again, I'm trying to come up.

Speaker 2: 43:32

I've made you self-conscious.

Speaker 1: 43:35

OK, anyway, I'm done, all right, all right.

Speaker 3: 43:37

I love that analogy, though, of the balloon. Though I think that's so true, right, if you think about the height of the balloon as your book's ranking on retailers, right, you're always just hitting it up and getting it back up there, right?

Speaker 1: 43:47

Yeah, and it will fall without a little pat. But I do think the initial bat up in the air is going to be your hardest and biggest and most expensive. So then, if you can kind of line up your tools, use stacking types of things to give it little pushes periodically, every couple of months, every month, whatever it's just it's going to help keep the momentum going. So we didn't do the big deal. Authors. Yeah, yeah. So how do you help them? Big deal. Authors.

Speaker 3: 44:16

Yeah, absolutely so.

Speaker 3: 44:18

The kind of the biggest challenge I see with authors that have 10 plus books. We work with authors that have over 200 books, which is hard to believe, but there's a lot of authors with a lot of books out there and when you reach that stage it's really easy to kind of lose track of all of the different series you have and everything you're doing to promote them. So at this stage, I think the biggest challenge for authors is, honestly, logistics. Right, you're writing and then you're also trying to keep this marketing engine going at the same time, and so I think a mistake for authors that have a lot of books out is to get two in the weeds on performance of individual ads or individual promotions, because really what you're doing when you're at that size is creating kind of a marketing engine.

Speaker 3: 45:08

Right, you're no longer a small business that is targeting Clayton, who lives in Carbroad, north Carolina, to come to your coffee shop.

Speaker 3: 45:16

You're now a lot more like Pepsi and you just want people to know about you because they'll know where to find you.

Speaker 3: 45:21

And so I think making a schedule of promotions to make sure all of your book ones are getting hit with intense marketing on a regular basis and really sticking to that for a year or more to see the impact is a really important thing for authors of that size. I've talked to a lot of authors who will write one series that does well, and then they start on a new series and they get really invested in writing that series, of course, but then of course their marketing focus goes there as well, because that's the series they're living in and working in day to day, and then their first series starts to fall off, and that doesn't need to happen, right? You should try to keep everything going at the same level for as long as possible. So I think for authors of that stage, it's a logistical challenge in making sure you're consistent with your marketing even of series that you aren't as attached to or working in day to day anymore.

Speaker 1: 46:14

That's a really good point, because I have seen I know authors that have done that and then they have another pen name, say, or something, and it just completely falls off the edge Because they and those are great books. It's not because the books are bad, it's because they lost interest in them, because now they're writing over here and this is more interesting. So it could be a good time to hire an assistant.

Speaker 3: 46:39

Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2: 46:42

Well, and I will say too that one of the features I'm going to call it a feature I don't know if, technically, software developers around the world would call it a feature but one of the features that I actually appreciate is when you guys email me saying, hey, it's been whatever period of time since your last promotion. Can we promote your book again or can we promote another book? And it's kind of that nice little reminder that like, oh yeah, by the way, I'm supposed to be doing marketing and not just writing, and not just making covers or doing other things. I'm actually supposed to be putting money behind this too. So I've always kind of appreciated that, that there's kind of that like, and obviously it's a little bit self-serving, because can we help you?

Speaker 1: 47:24

Yes, you can help. Let me give you my money. But, it is a good reminder. It is, and I actually I just got one from you, I just and it's said from Clayton too.

Speaker 3: 47:36

So thank you, clayton, it was a little reminder.

Speaker 1: 47:39

Can we promote to die for again and it's like, oh, I have to think about that. I probably you know.

Speaker 3: 47:45

Yeah, so, yeah. So after we promote a book, we send out reminders after if the book hasn't been promoted again in a certain period of time, say, hey, this book could use some promotion. Our audience we've added 20,000 new readers Like this book would probably do well again. And so these are emails that we send out, and when we started doing these I did debate. I was like this is like a little. You can see how this would be a little annoying, but it's honestly surprising how many people kind of feel the way you do it, where it's a nice reminder.

Speaker 3: 48:16

I've talked to authors who have said you know what? I didn't have the money to run another promotion with you guys, but it was a good reminder that, hey, I should post about this book on social media. So it was kind of helping their general marketing strategy as well, yeah. So yeah, I do. I like to hear that those are not too annoying and hopefully they're just a helpful reminder that, hey, this book could use a little love.

Speaker 1: 48:34

Yeah, if it came every day it would be annoying, but it does come every once, every couple of months. It's like oh yeah, I need to do this. No, I think that's very helpful. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 48:46

All right, well, do we have any other questions, greta, before we kind of start wrapping this up?

Speaker 1: 48:52

The only thing that I would say is that I'm just so much less familiar with your doing the ads for people like Facebook ads or the Amazon ads. Maybe could you just talk for like a couple of minutes just about what that program is like and how it's priced and all that kind of thing.

Speaker 3: 49:12

Yeah, yeah, so, yeah. So we call our ads reader reach ads and we can run them on Meta, which is Facebook, and Instagram or Amazon, and the standard ad campaign is Five Days. We also have 10 and 30 day ad campaigns, but we'll just talk about five for the sake of the discussion. And we chose Five Days because if you're in Kindle Unlimited, then you can run a countdown deal for Five Days or run your five free days. So we wanted to line up with that period. And so, if you run a Facebook ad campaign with us, you go to the website, you choose Facebook ads and then you choose the genre of your book and it costs $150. And at least 60% of that goes directly to the ad budget on Facebook. And so then, after you schedule the ad campaign, you choose the start date. Then you're completely done as the author and you can go back to writing and not doing the ads, which is our goal here. And then our team people like me who really like to do Facebook ads and we think they're super fun we take you, give us the link to your book and then we will download your book cover from Amazon and we will make ad images.

Speaker 3: 50:18

We have different. We call them recipes that we've tested. So we make a variety of different images, write all the copy for the ad, and then we have targeting presets that we use as well, and then we start running the ad campaign on the day that you selected it to start. So, as an author, if you're someone who really hates running ads or wants to try out our expertise on them, it's a really easy thing because it takes you about five minutes to schedule the campaign and then you don't have to worry about all the technicalities or learning a new system or staying up to date with all the changes with ads.

Speaker 3: 50:57

So many about meta ads is that they're constantly evolving and changing. We stay on top of that because that's largely how we acquire readers for our email lists. And then, of course, we're running hundreds of ad campaigns for authors every week. So, yeah, we like to think it's a way for authors to use our expertise to benefit them and, yeah, it's been a really successful product so far. And in our ready-made promo stacks, a lot of the promo stacks include an ad campaign within the promo stack as well.

Speaker 1: 51:26

That's great. So authors are seeing I'm assuming they're seeing beneficial really good results.

Speaker 3: 51:34

Yeah, so I think the results are different than an email campaign. An email campaign when we email your book out you tend to see one big spike on the day that the email went out and then kind of a trail off after that. With the ad campaigns it tends to start slow and then get up to kind of a base level and stick there and then drop off right. It's not as dramatic as an email campaign. So that's kind of the difference in results. We like to keep our cost per click CPC below 20 cents and that's something that we've done the math on, and for most authors that tends to make it worthwhile, and in the past year we've actually made a lot of progress here and a lot of our ad campaigns are lower than 20 cents on the cost per click front. So that's been a good innovation.

Speaker 2: 52:21

So do they have to be on a deal, like, for example, first book and series and you want to do maybe more of a drip campaign over the course of the 30 day period? Does it have to be free or can you do it at full price?

Speaker 3: 52:35

You can do it at full price. Yeah, so that's a big difference with the ad campaigns is, yeah, the book can be any price. We find books that are 299 or lower tend to perform better. But if you wanted to try something, we do have a lot of authors that run a 499 book Above 499, we tend to find that it's tough to make a solid return as an author, but we could. You know, it's one of those things where, if you're curious about your specific title and different price points, send us an email with a link to your book and tell us about it and then we'll see if we've done anything like it in the past and kind of tell you what we think this would do.

Speaker 2: 53:12

All right, writing a note to myself, yeah.

Speaker 1: 53:16

I like that. I'm telling you these interviews that we do on the podcast. They just increase our to-do lists. It's like crazy. Every time we talk to somebody it's like, oh my gosh, no, we have to do all this. It's like I don't know, this podcast didn't start out this way.

Speaker 3: 53:35

Well, if I can add one more thing to your to-do list that we haven't talked about yet, we did launch one other product in the fall.

Speaker 3: 53:43

That is about helping authors build their email list, and it's called subscriber search giveaways, and basically what it is is authors can enter, and so what you do is it costs $75. You give us a link to the book that you want to enter into the giveaway, and so the book can be any price. And then what we do is we put your book on a landing page with other books in the same genre, and then we drive a lot of readers to that landing page and the readers enter to win all of the books on the page and a higher ticket item like a Kindle, and so the readers can click to join different email lists and they get another entry for each email list that they join. And then at the end of the giveaway, we give all the authors, like a CSV file, a spreadsheet of all the readers that have signed up for their email list, and so the authors can just download that spreadsheet and upload it to Mailer Lite or MailChimp or whatever system they're using, and then market to the readers directly.

Speaker 2: 54:39

But it's specific for your book. So it's not like a group giveaway where the readers are saying that they subscribe to everybody's list but they're not going through and clicking I want this one and this one and this one. You're only getting the clicks on your book.

Speaker 3: 54:53

That's correct.

Speaker 1: 54:53

Yes, so much better. Oh, my gosh, because I've done some of the others where you get this massive list and then you get these massive unsubscribes.

Speaker 3: 55:02

Yeah, yeah, yeah, so yeah. So that's a new product that we launched in the fall. So, yes, wanted to get that out there, and sorry about the two lists, I know.

Speaker 1: 55:16

It's all good.

Speaker 2: 55:17

It's all good If you can actually the ads at least would take something off my list really.

Speaker 3: 55:22

So you know good to know.

Speaker 2: 55:25

Well, we are up on time. Unfortunately, because I feel like we could talk more about both of those programs, but I think for the most part, for most of our listeners, I hope you know, got some good feedback, some good ideas out of this and what written word can do? Because, yeah, I've been using you guys for years and it's always a great experience, so Awesome, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 55:49

Yeah, I would agree. So, clayton, why don't you just tell everybody where they can find written word media and all the programs that you, we talked about today?

Speaker 3: 55:58

Yes, yeah, so written word mediacom is the best place to go. There you can purchase all the promos that we talked about. We also have a great blog with a lot of information about publishing that you can use for free, and then, of course, we have a contact us button. So I can't emphasize enough. If you have any questions or anything confuses you, if you have questions not about written word media, but about book marketing in general, please get in touch. We're happy to help everybody we can in any way we can. So, yeah, so go to written word mediacom and everything you need is there.

Speaker 1: 56:29

And the link will be in the show notes. So that is a fabulous author. Because offer? Because a lot of authors have a lot of questions about book marketing, that is for sure, and we need help. So this was great. So, everybody listening, run on over there and get your questions answered. And you have some questions about what you were doing in this whole author business, why you're doing it and even some of the motivations Megan was talking about earlier. You might want to go to authorwheelcom and pick up our free course seven days Declarity, uncover your author purpose, and you will get seven emails, one a day, which just will help you examine yourself and your motivations and your genre and all these fun things and come up with a mission statement and a tagline. So don't forget to check that out and until next time, keep your stories rolling.