Biggest issue with that is if you actually have the money. Nice if you have 250k making a hole in your pocket, but most people don't even have a few grand to spend. I get that you have to spend some, but surely you have to get the work out there first, start making your name?
I don't but i think you can - you have to use different names (so kriswriter instead of kris or something) my sister has two one in her own name an one under a pen name. Joanna Penn has two - one as the creativepenn, one as JF Penn .
Yeah he didn't do it in year one - that came about after he'd made a quarter mil plus ..... he says that paid advertising is necessary to make the step change from being a 6 figure author to being a 7 figure author (ie the ammount you take home after costs each year). I'll let you know if i ever get there, but i'm definitely going the content route initially.
Yeah a hell of a lot of first time authors are following a whole bunch of people indiscriminately, getting some back follows then tweeting "buy my book" every day and are then surprised when they get unfollowed. Or they tweet cat memes and bullshit , or they argue about whether trump is a twat or not ... and so on. No one is going to take them seriously as authors on that basis. Actually I'd have said Mark Dawsons twitter isn't all that - its 90% today's writing music links to spottify (Which i'd suspect are affiliate links) and the other 10% promoting his own books. I'd suspect that most of his 20k followers read one of his books first which is ass backwards (this is a consequence of his strong focus on paid ads i suspect) hes @pbackwriter if you want to have a look. His website and podcast are great - twitter not so much.
My feeling is content marketting - write more books, build an author platform, go on blogs and podcasts, (claim your amazon author page - also kobo etc if you went wide), oh and good writing and luck .... personally I'd be happy with the low fives If you don't have time or don't want to do that you could start paid ads earlier (still need the luck and good writing)... but again keep an eye on ROI - starting out you aren't going to make a lot of cash whatever you do so it doesn't make sense to drop eleventy thousand on promotion - that way big losses lie. Another thing people seem to be wasting cash on is 'trappings of success' - like most big indies will tell you that convertkit is the best for building an email list - they might be right, but its $29 dollars a month. Mail chimp is about 90% as good and is free until you hit 2k subscribers. The same applies to lots of other services - yeah you probably want to pay for web hosting, but you don't need to spend to spend hundreds on a custom theme - there are free themes that work fine. Same for covers - yeah you want a decent one , but don't spend shedloads on custom drawings and such. (editting is an exception - decent editing costs - that's how it is) This was what stood out when I looked at Ron Vitale's accounts he blogs them each year - he'd spent (or to be less charitable wasted) christ knows how much cash on things that had no bearing on the amount of income he was making .. like for example if your business isn't making money you have no reason whatsoever to be buying expensive CRM software. I used to be a wedding photographer (technically I still am but I haven't done much since my breakdown in 2016), and it wasn't unusual to meet people who charged twice what I did a wedding, and had more clients than me but were still making less net. In nearly every case the cause was that they had much more expensive equipment, and changed it more often than they needed to, and they were paying through the nose for stands at big wedding fairs. I on the other hand had relatively inexpensive kit, hardly ever did fayre or magazines, and got my clients mostly through word of mouth - which meant that although I had about 1/3 to 2/3 of their gross , mine was about 80% profit.
I prefer Mailchimp anyhow, tbh. Convertkit's got some sexy automation stuff but you don't really need any of it. I run most of our business stuff using Mailchimp so it'll be more than adequate for an author's subscriber list. Mailerlite's a good option too - the free tier doesn't give you as many subscribers, but when you do hit paid levels it can work out cheaper if you'll be mailing frequently.
Hmm, I think I'll give Mr Dawson's twitter a miss, it's not as if he needs my help. I think if you are serious about become successful as a writer, especially if you are serious about being a better writer, you will focus on the writing not the media. Surely the first is more important. Mailchimp? I have so missed the train on all this stuff.
Mailchimp's an autoresponder - that is, a service that lets you e-mail lots of people at once. For authors, it means you can ask for e-mail addresses from people who are (for example) interested in when your next book's coming out, and then you can mail them easily when they can buy it. You can also send updates on how your writing's coming on, sell (as an affiliate or otherwise) books from other authors etc. Personally I'd say an e-mail list is the most valuable promotional tool you can have, but then I use them fairly heavily in my day job, so there's going to be some bias there.
Writing definitely comes first - if you don't have the books or they are crap you're on a hiding to nothing whatever else you do. (there is unfortunately a lot of self published dross out there - it gives self pub a bad name, which is why I tend to say indy for those doing it properly) Mail Chimp (like aweber/convertkit/secondblue /mailer lite/lots of others) is for assembling an email list - basically you put a link on your website or in the back of your book or both, and ask people to sign up... generally you give them some incentive like a free novella. I wrote Honest intent with that purpose in mind, although i'm also going to sell it because, why not. The idea is that you assemble a mailing list of people who like your writing (you'll also get people who sign up for the freebie and then unsubscribe - but that's a cost of doing business, and at worst they are still reading your book and might like it or tell people about it) then in basic terms when you launch another book you can email them and get a bunch of sales and/or reviews - you can also use the list to recruit beta readers and so on. As you progress your career the list grows and so does the number of sales you can get - say you have 2k people on your list ... word is that the buy through is between 40 and 20% so say 30 for the sake of illustration, 30% of 2000 is 600 sales - if your book is selling for £3.99 that's £2394 gross income per book before you spend anything on marketing. Of course it takes a while to build to 2k subscribers and you need to invest time in building the relationship you can't just give them one freebie then ignore them til you want them to buy. You said you get mail from Joanna, that'll be because at some point you've signed up to one of her mailing lists. (also of note is that although mail chimp is free below 2k above 2k it costs about the same as convert kit, so you may as well swap over to CK - unless of course by the time you (we) get to 2k there might be something better and cheaper out there. Costs on all these services scale based on subscriber numbers so if your list keeps growing, by the time you get to say 10-20k, its not worth using a web based service and you're better off with software based which costs a lot to buy but has no ongoing cost other than bandwidth. ). On the other hand if you've got 10k subscribers you've also got circa £11,970 per book - and the software doesn't cost that much.
I can all but guarantee your buy rate won't be anywhere near as high as 40%. Getting a regular open rate of 40% is fucking impressive, and then only a proportion of those who opened will click your link, and only a proportion of those will buy. I mean, it's not inconceivable, but you'd need a hyper-engaged list - probably one made up entirely of people who'd bought your last 5 books already and were waiting desperately for your sixth. With more standard engagement levels, if you get a buy rate of 10% (so 40% open, 50% click, 50% buy) you're doing stunningly well. Personally I'd expect to see buy rates more in the region of 1-5%, with most of the drop-off from the above calculation coming at the 'buy' step.
Right, mailing lists, subscribed to a few of those myself. I can imagine how much time that saves. The one thing that stands out here is just how much time you need to spend doing this. This is marketing isn't it, a trad publisher is already assigning someone to do that for you, it makes sense that a lot of time would need to be found in order for the self published or Indie to succeed.
Yep - and thats why a lot of self/indies fail - either because they don't know what to do, don't have time to do it, or don't want to do it .. there was a time (some people call it the goldrush years) when kindle first launched when people could just slap a book on amazon and forget it and still make money ... not anymore (there was also a small period in which kindle select was paid on a flat fee basis instead of page reads - some people made a killing on uploading short stories ... again not any more) Mind you if you went the trad route, you still spend a lot of time writing queries and like that with no guarantee of success, and increasingly trad authors are doing their own twitters/facebook etc ... I think on the whole if someone just wants to write and not do anything beyond writing their best bet is ghosting or copywriting where you are just paid for the job. (my sister is making a part time income proofing and rewriting translated scientific articles ... doesnt appeal to me.) although even then you've still got to network to get jobs and do your admin and taxes to get paid When I was running my weddings business on the side I reckon I did about eight to ten hours a week , not counting shooting or editing time - social media, website, blog, admin. When I was a tree surgeon/countryside contractor (which was full time) admin and marketting took about 1 day a week. Everything I've done self employed has taken time ... Fortunately I don't have kids (unless you count the furbaby), I also don't drink or go out much, or do any time consuming sports ( I go to the gym at lunch sometimes), so writing (and carving, photography, other entrepreneur stuff) is pretty much what I do when I'm not working the day job, eating, or asleep.
That has more to do with how you build your list - the idea is to wind up with an engaged audience through engagement campaigns where not every email is a demand to buy something. Pretty much you should have a near 90-100% open/click rate - because if they don't want to open it what are they doing on the list anyway. For example I'm on Joanna Penn's list (and frances caballo, lots of others), I open everything she sends me because its nearly always interesting, I click through because I know her content is good and she doesn't waste my time with crap, and if she announces shes bringing out a new book (and offers a discount to mailing list - I'll probably buy it the same day. That's what you are aiming for, and that why engagement (and twitter, facebook everything else) takes time and can't be easily outsourced. Its completely different to the big end marketing for corporations where you are pretty much coerced to sign up if you want to use a service or product (adobe do that and I never open their 'might as well be spam' emails) and then bombarded with 'offers' with no hint of a personal relationship with anyone . That kind of 'marketing' is playing a volume game where they build a list of hundred of thousands if not millions and bet on a 0.5-1% buy rate because 0.5% of millions is still worth having. Not to mention of course actual spam fed off purchased lists where the buy rate is exponentially lower and the volume is likewise higher to make up for it
I'm wondering if the decimal point was misplaced and the buy rate is actually .4 percent. (That is, four-tenths of one percent, or a little less than one sale per two hundred subscribers.)
Nah... look, I've been doing this for years, and there is no way you ever get 90% open rates regularly, even if your list is made up of just 100 people all of whom are your mother. Even if people signed up for stuff they were genuinely interested in and enjoy your messages, sometimes, they'll just be too busy or they won't spot it or they'll decide to read it later and then forget. That's not you being bad at engagement, that's just people being people. I'd go so far as to say that if you're getting 90% open rates, you're doing it wrong - you should have a wider spectrum of people because that's where your new purchasers are coming from. Get great engagement and you can get open rates of 40%, but it won't be the same 40% opening every time.
As a comparison point for a commercial mailing list I run, a buy rate of 1% across a campaign is standard, 3% is exceptional. Now, this is for more expensive items than a book and the list is of people who have shown interest in the area rather than people who specifically signed up to say 'tell me when I can buy this thing' so I'd expect an author's mailing list to get a better buy rate when running an offer on their latest release. I'd still consider 40% massively optimistic for a campaign, let alone a single e-mail, though.
With respect Nige you haven't been self publishing for years according to what you said previously (neither have I, but the people I listen to have)- you are talking about general business marketing, and its not that you are wrong per se, it's that this is different - you don't want a wider spectrum of people because you don't want new purchasers (from your mailing list, obviously you want them in general) as a self pubbed author you want repeat business - people who sign up to your mailing list because they loved your whatever number of books and want to buy the next thing you write. The last thing you want is a shitload of subscribers who aren't that fussed about your books because you have to pay for the service based on your total number of subscribers . In nature its more like a fan club for a band administered by email than it is a commercial mailing list - think of the screaming tweenagers who buy anything with 1D on it (or whoever the big thing is now) You get a damn sight more than 3% from them if you contact them and offer more 1D merch ( It's not a perfect comparison because writers don't generally attract that degree of hysteria - thank god ) The reason its about a 20% to 40% conversion rather than 100% is partly the factors you mention - life getting in the way, and such. Plus of course you get people who sign up for the freebie and don't bother to unsubscribe. Not many but some. Mostly freebie scoopers hit and run.
Coming back to the OP ( I CBA to have the self publishing doesn't work, yes it does, no it doesn't argument again - lets just agree to differ) I just heard back from Mark Dawson on twitter in regard of twitter ads - He says he's tried them but they aren't very effective which is why he concentrates on facebook. I would guess by ineffective he means that the ROI is too low to be worth it
No, I don't mean I've been self-publishing for years. I mean I've been e-mail marketing for years. Going on a decade now. And yes, it is more like a fan club for a band administered by e-mail - and those don't get 90% open rates. They definitely don't get 40% buy rates when the 'buy our new album' mail goes out. You'll get better numbers than standard business mailings, absolutely, but it won't be that much better. As an example: the best e-mail open rates come from the ones that are delivering whatever freebie the person signed up for. No surprises there, right? In fact, on those e-mails I have regularly seen 100% open rates. But the click rates to download the item they literally just signed up to get are generally in the 60-70% range. That's 30-40% of people who got as far as opening the e-mail and then never bothered to download their freebie. If you see those rates off a free item where they've just said 'yes, I want this!', you're not going to see 40% of your mailing list hand over money after an e-mail blast. I mean, I don't disagree with the approach. Like I said above, I think an e-mail list is probably the most powerful marketing tool you've got and you should definitely be building one. But if you're expecting the kind of numbers you've been quoting from it, you could be running a perfectly reasonable campaign and thinking you're doing something horribly wrong because 'only' 50% of your list opened the mail.
Seems to me that mailing lists are the key to making headway in the self-publishing world, you know, after you've actually written your book.
They are one element - the real key is to keep writing , you won't make much headway indy publishing with one, or two or even three. All the people I know who are making it work have upwards of ten , in most cases more like twenty plus. One difference between trad and Indy is that Trad is generally about the big spike at the beginning (this is less true than it was before advent of online sales), you get an advance, earn it out and then get some royalties... but unless you go blockbuster you have only a short window in the shops and the promo before you are replaced by something else. (these days there's more of a tail on amazon/kobo etc but its not likely to be promoted unless you do it yourself) Indies don't generally get that big spike - they don't have the power of a big publisher behind them, they also don't get an advance they have to earn as they go, they also mostly don't get into the shops ( I have a local book shop who says they'll take a few copies of mine and see how they go but that's not going to make much) ... Indy publishing is about the long tail, and you have freedom to promote old books, re do covers, do box sets, alter pricing etc etc. (also Indies get about 60-70% of their royalties on ebooks - so you get 60% of a long tail bringing a little bit of income for a long time) The best advertising for an old book (especially in series) is to put out another one, if people read the new one and like it they may well go and buy everything else in the series. If you have one book making a little bit of income - you've got a little bit of income.. if you've got 20 books making a little bit of income each, you're doing okay. Of course you do still have to do some marketing/social media/mailing list stuff because there's no point in having 20 books no one knows about.
How do you chose which books you are going to buy ? Is it a question of following certain authors - so you buy American Gods and the go hey Neil Gaiman is cool, look at his amazon page or website and say hey I think I'll buy Neverwhere , or is it about cover art or also boughts or something else ? Do you follow your favourite authors on twitter or facebook ? Mailing lists for indie authors only recently became a thing - in the last 5/10 years and really only for E books. The main point about mailing lists is the adage not to build on rented ground ... you could have the most amazing twitter following ever but it won't help if Twitter lock your account, or if twitter itself disappears (not likely but it essentially happened to myspace) - the idea is to move the contact with your fans onto ground you own. (If mailchimp goes pop it doesn't matter because you still have email list file and can take it to another provider) As I said earlier its one weapon in the arsenal and its not intended to engage every single reader, but rather to assemble a kernel of hard core fans ... did everyone who listened to the beatles join the fan club, probably not. Did that mean the fan club was bad marketing move ? Coming back to the OP - doing your own marketing is not a one shot move. The best twitter account in the world won't help if you don't do anything else, likewise with mailing lists, websites, blogs, podcasts , price promotions, whatever. Also none of it will help if the book is crap
