Podcast Show Notes

On The Indy Author Podcast, we discuss the writing craft, the publishing voyage, and how we can navigate our way to the readers who will love our books. Click the links below for the show notes for episodes since 200, including summaries and transcripts.

Matty Dalrymple 4/8/25 Matty Dalrymple 4/8/25

Episode 282 - Unlocking the Power of Book Reviews with Rossana Corniel

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Rossana Corniel discusses UNLOCKING THE POWER OF BOOK REVIEWS, including the importance of reviews in understanding reader expectations and forming effective marketing strategies. Rossana discusses the finding that research shows that reviews can significantly impact sales and reader trust; the importance of tailoring your book's cover and description to your target audience ; and the emotional challenge of dealing with low-star reviews. The conversation also touches upon practical strategies for gathering reviews, such as using platforms like BookSprout.

Rossana Corniel is a romantasy and paranormal romance author who believes in the magic of storytelling to inspire and connect. Writing under the pen name R.C. Luna, she has published six novels and a children’s book, with six more books slated for release in 2025. Drawing from her almost two decades of experience in marketing and communications, including her current role as Head of Marketing at Booksprout, Rossana blends creativity and strategy to help authors grow and thrive. When she’s not writing, she’s raising three incredible daughters and chasing the next great adventure.

Episode Links

https://www.facebook.com/authorrcluna
https://www.instagram.com/author_r.c.luna/
https://www.tiktok.com/@author_rcluna
https://www.instagram.com/booksprout/
https://www.facebook.com/booksprout
https://www.tiktok.com/@booksproutapp

Summary

Matty Dalrymple talks with Rossana Corniel about the pivotal role of reviews. Rossana emphasizes the significance of reviews in shaping marketing strategies and driving book sales, particularly spotlighting the importance of understanding and leveraging reader feedback.

To kick off the discussion, Matty highlights Rossana's diverse writing background, which includes publishing novels and a children's book. Rossana shares her belief in the power of storytelling and her commitment to helping fellow authors through her role at BookSprout. This episode predominantly revolves around how authors can maximize their marketing strategies through reader reviews.

Understanding Reader Expectations

Rossana underscores the impact of reviews on authors, noting how they influence purchasing decisions. She cites studies to stress that a positive review can significantly boost sales. The conversation delves into strategic marketing, where reviews build trust and can be as effective as personal recommendations. For authors starting their journey, she advises focusing on reviews of similar books by other authors as a learning tool to understand market trends and reader expectations, calling this approach savvy.

Reading and Responding to Reviews

The episode explores how authors can use feedback efficiently. Matty and Rossana discuss the emotional challenges authors face when handling negative reviews. Rossana shares her experience of turning critique into actionable changes, like adding trigger warnings when necessary. Authors are encouraged to pick trends from reviews rather than reacting to individual critiques. Matty supports this by advising authors not to act on single reviews but to seek patterns that indicate areas for improvement.

Engaging with Readers

As authors expand their work, Rossana suggests interacting with readers through thoughtful dialogue, encouraging feedback to fine-tune future narratives. Sharing how endorsements from known personalities can sometimes mean more than detailed book previews, the episode highlights how this strategy might differ based on the book's price and format.

Building a Review Strategy

The importance of reviews is further tied to promotional opportunities, with a focus on the difference between paid reviews and ethical platforms like BookSprout. The episode clarifies that platforms facilitating honest reviews are legal and beneficial for authors looking for credible market feedback. Rossana describes how BookSprout helps authors place their books before potential reviewers ethically by emphasizing the distinction between paying for a platform versus paying for reviews.

Navigating Free Reviews and Giveaways

Matty and Rossana also tackle authors' hesitance to give away their books in exchange for reviews, highlighting this as a crucial component of successful book marketing. They touch upon tools like newsletter swaps to encourage organic, honest feedback.

Tactics and Timing for Collecting Reviews

Further into the podcast, the discussion transitions into strategic timing for gathering reviews. Rossana explains the benefit of aligning book launches with review requests to capitalize on algorithms that affect visibility on platforms like Amazon. This tactical timing can offer added traction and elevate a book’s presence when paired with a strong launch strategy.

Building Long-term Engagement

Addressing strategies for long-term reviewer engagement, Matty and Rossana discuss communication with reviewers and how authors can engage without locking into counterproductive exchanges with critical reviewers. They recommend focusing on building meaningful connections through gratitude and professionalism.

Concluding the episode, Matty and Rossana reflect on the invaluable insights reviews offer in strengthening an author’s market position. With effective use of platforms like BookSprout, authors can not only understand reader preferences better but also significantly enhance their marketing strategy and reach.

Matty Dalrymple 3/18/25 Matty Dalrymple 3/18/25

Episode 279 - LinkedIn Strategies for Authors with Troy Lambert

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Troy Lambert discusses LINKEDIN STRATEGIES FOR AUTHORS, including the evolving role of LinkedIn for authors. We delve into strategies for optimizing LinkedIn profiles, engaging with peers, and understanding platform nuances to enhance professional presence, network effectively, and perhaps build a side hustle.

Troy Lambert is the author of over 32 novels and several works of non-fiction. He's also an editor, book coach, and educator. When not behind the keyboard, he lives, works, and plays in the mountains of Idaho.

Episode Links

https://troylambertwrites.com
https://www.youtube.com/@TroyLambertAuthor
https://www.linkedin.com/in/troy-lambert/

Summary

Matty Dalrymple talks with Troy Lambert on The Indie Author Podcast about the evolving role of LinkedIn for authors. They delve into strategies for optimizing LinkedIn profiles, engaging with peers, and understanding platform nuances to enhance professional presence, network effectively, and perhaps build a side hustle.

LinkedIn's Evolution as a Social Media Platform

Troy acknowledges the transformation of LinkedIn from a digital résumé repository to a dynamic social networking site. The platform lets professionals interact beyond traditional job-seeking purposes, offering a more social dimension to business interactions. Troy points out that while LinkedIn still maintains its professional tone, it now serves as a space for people to extend their professional networks, share information, and even make purchasing decisions or explore new opportunities through these connections.

Optimizing LinkedIn Profiles for Authors

Authors, whether focused on fiction or non-fiction, are encouraged to maintain updated LinkedIn profiles. Matty notes her pet peeve with outdated profile pictures and recognizes the importance of current and professional headshots on LinkedIn. Troy stresses that an up-to-date profile signals competency and readiness for new opportunities, whether seeking freelance work, establishing expertise, or attracting podcast invitations.

He advises authors to actively showcase their expertise by listing publications in the profile's designated section. This creates a professional image, crucial for attracting book readers, especially in non-fiction, where showcasing expertise is imperative for credibility. Troy also suggests curating your LinkedIn contacts to reflect a network that resonates with your current professional identity and goals.

Networking and Engaging on LinkedIn

The conversation pivots to discuss the ways authors can engage with and understand their LinkedIn audience. Troy discusses using the platform to connect with peers in the industry. Authors should identify others within their niche or those they admire, then actively engage with their posts to learn and share insights.

This engagement strategy should extend beyond making connections to include thoughtful interaction. Authors should craft posts and comments that inspire discussion and exhibit their expertise. Troy shares his own experiences, citing how his LinkedIn interactions led to unexpected opportunities, such as invitations to speak on podcasts or contribute to discussions on topics of shared interest.

LinkedIn for Book Marketing and Author Services

While LinkedIn may not be the most effective platform for direct book sales, it holds significant potential for marketing author services and other higher-value offerings. Matty discusses her consulting service and how LinkedIn can help her connect with individuals transitioning to new career phases, such as retirement, who might be interested in writing a book. Troy suggests focusing on professional discussions about publishing-related topics to establish expertise and potentially attract clients interested in author services like editing, coaching, or consulting.

Using LinkedIn Groups and Ads

Their discussion briefly touches on LinkedIn groups, with Troy recommending caution due to the high risk of spam. He advises being selective with group participation to ensure interactions remain valuable.

Regarding LinkedIn ads, Troy shares insights about their effectiveness, especially for promoting non-fiction books and author-related services. He contrasts LinkedIn ads with other platforms, highlighting that LinkedIn users often search for professional development, making the platform a worthwhile avenue for educational promotions. However, he advises caution in using LinkedIn ads for fiction, which tends not to yield significant returns.

Current and Future Plans on LinkedIn

Troy concludes by advocating for intentional curation of one’s LinkedIn network. He emphasizes removing outdated connections that no longer align with current professional goals. He aligns this strategy with a broader trend toward streamlining social media interactions to focus on targeted professional objectives.

Matty plans to focus her LinkedIn strategy by engaging deeply with a curated list of professionals within her consulting sphere. By zeroing in on a small number of key contacts, she hopes to better integrate into the professional conversations that matter most to her.

Conclusion

In this podcast episode, Matty Dalrymple and Troy Lambert provide valuable insights into using LinkedIn effectively as an author. Whether for professional networking, promoting non-fiction work, or offering author services, a well-optimized and actively managed LinkedIn profile can open up a wealth of opportunities for authors who engage thoughtfully with the platform.

Matty Dalrymple 3/11/25 Matty Dalrymple 3/11/25

Episode 278 - The Perks and Pitfalls of Facebook Ads with Malorie Cooper

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Malorie Cooper discusses THE PERKS AND PITFALLS OF FACEBOOK ADS, including the significance of high-contrast images and textual elements in ad creatives, the benefits and drawbacks of Facebook's automated targeting suggestions, and the latest updates in Facebook's targeting mechanisms that can affect ad performance. Mal emphasizes the need for authors to diversify their advertising efforts, touching on the importance of also experimenting with platforms like Amazon Ads and BookBub for broader marketing success.

Malorie Cooper has been teaching authors how to run Facebook ads for over 7 years. Nothing makes her day more than knowing what she does helps to elevate authors' careers.

Episode Links

www.thewritingwives.com
https://www.facebook.com/groups/thewritingwives
https://www.youtube.com/@thewritingwives

Summary

Matty Dalrymple talks with Malorie Cooper about the intricacies of using Facebook ads as a promotional tool for authors. With extensive experience in teaching authors how to leverage Facebook ads, Malorie offers valuable insights into navigating this ever-evolving platform. The discussion covers the challenges and strategies associated with Facebook advertising, the importance of creative content, targeting, and how authors can diversify their advertising approach across multiple platforms.

Introduction to Facebook Ad Challenges

Matty kicks off the conversation by sharing personal challenges faced when running Facebook ads around 2020-2021. Malorie acknowledges these challenges due to frequent and sometimes significant changes Facebook makes to their ad platform. Such changes can disproportionately affect different genres or marketing strategies.

Malorie points out that Facebook has made several substantial changes annually, affecting some authors more than others. She mentions the impact of genre targeting and how certain techniques for targeting readers may have become less effective due to algorithm updates or changes in Facebook's ad delivery priorities.

Understanding Facebook's Algorithmic Changes

When discussing algorithmic changes, Malorie highlights that while Facebook occasionally releases information about upcoming changes, they rarely offer details sufficient for precise prediction of performance shifts. Authors often rely on self-assessment and anecdotal observation to gauge the effectiveness of their ads.

Matty and Malorie also explore the impact of legal requirements, such as changes following the iOS security updates and compliance with the FTC and COPPA laws, which influence how and where ads can be placed effectively.

Diversifying Advertising Efforts

Malorie advises authors against putting all advertising efforts into Facebook alone. She emphasizes that multi-platform strategies ensure visibility even if a significant platform change occurs. Facebook ads should be part of a broader promotional strategy that might include Amazon ads, BookBub ads, or other platforms like Pinterest and YouTube.

She suggests that while Facebook offers broad reach, its audience is not specifically looking for books, unlike Amazon and BookBub, where the audience is more inclined towards book purchasing. Thus, spread-out advertising efforts can hedge against platform-specific issues and ensure steady reader engagement.

Creating Effective Ad Creative

Effective ad creative is paramount, as Malorie outlines several best practices. She advises ensuring images are high contrast for visibility and legibility, even in grayscale, to check color contrast and accessibility for colorblind viewers. Text is now crucial in creative due to people's expectations from TikTok and reels, providing context promptly.

Additionally, she warns that Facebook's AI might ignore initial targeting instructions; hence, it's essential to visually and contextually signal the ad's purpose—such as including a book cover to confirm it’s an ad for a book.

Optimizing Targeting Techniques

Exploring targeting in more detail, Malorie discusses how Facebook's implementation of Advantage Plus Detailed Targeting can override manual selections, showing ads to unintended audiences.

Despite AI-assisted targeting, manual interest-based targeting tends to outperform Facebook's broader strategies. Malorie suggests testing broad targeting first and then narrowing it down to optimize ad performance.

Analysis and Realistic Expectations

Malorie highlights the importance of analyzing the performance of ads by using tools like Amazon attribution links, acknowledging that attribution data isn’t foolproof but offers a relative comparison. She gives practical metrics: aiming for at least ten pages read per click for KU books and one sale every 50 clicks for non-KU books.

For newcomers to Facebook ads, Malorie advises setting aside a budget and patience to allow for a learning curve that could span a few months, emphasizing the value of test-driven adjustments.

Conclusion: Broader Advertising Strategy and Commitment

In conclusion, while Facebook ads are not the easy wins they once were, they remain a critical component of a well-considered advertising strategy. Malorie encourages authors to bravely navigate the complexities of ad creative, targeting, and platform changes to drive their book marketing efforts effectively. Investing time and resources into such ad campaigns, with a willingness to adapt, can yield significant returns over time.

Matty Dalrymple 3/4/25 Matty Dalrymple 3/4/25

Episode 277 - Book Promotion and How to Break through the Noise with Leah Paulos

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Leah Paulos discusses BOOK PROMOTION AND HOW TO BREAK THROUGH THE NOISE, including the importance of early marketing planning, crafting concise and compelling pitches, and understanding the specific needs of different recipients. Leah also delves into leveraging email lists, using AI tools for crafting pitches, building relationships with influencers, and the long-tail approach to post-publication promotion. Leah provides practical tips for authors to maximize their promotional efforts and connect effectively with their target audience.

Leah Paulos is the Founder and Director of Publicity at Press Shop PR and Book Publicity School, and has worked at the intersection of books and media for over 25 years. Twice named a top PR firm by the Observer, Press Shop PR has worked on many notable books and #1 bestsellers including MARCH by Rep. John Lewis and ON TYRANNY by Timothy Snyder, as well as books by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Neil deGrasse Tyson, James Kirchick, and Pulitzer-finalists Samuel Freedman and Louise Aronson. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two sons.

Episode Links

www.PressShopPR.com
www.BookPublicityScool.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/leahpaulos/
https://www.facebook.com/PressShopPR
https://x.com/PressShopPR

Summary

This week on The Indy Author Podcast, Matty Dalrymple talks with Leah Paulos about effective strategies for authors to break through the noise in a saturated market. Leah, drawing from her extensive experience at Press Shop PR and Book Publicity School, provides valuable insights into how authors can effectively promote their books and connect with their target readers.

The conversation begins with Matty highlighting the many roles that indie authors have to play—not only are they the creative force behind their books, but they also need to manage publicity and marketing. Leah agrees, emphasizing how crucial it is for authors to start thinking about their promotion strategy early in the writing process. By keeping a document or spreadsheet of promotional ideas and contacts, authors can better position themselves when the time comes to market their book.

Leah stresses the importance of understanding one's audience and tailoring messages to fit different recipients, whether they are readers, media, or event coordinators. It's crucial to consider what the other party needs to know and how your approach should differ depending on who you are addressing. For example, the back cover copy of a book should capture a reader's interest and remain timeless, whereas a pitch to media should be timely, demonstrating the book's relevance to current discussions or trends.

A significant part of the conversation centers around the creation of effective pitch materials. According to Leah, every book campaign requires two key elements: a compelling pitch and an accurate recipient list. Authors need to craft pitches that are concise and snappy, avoiding excessive details and focusing on inviting the recipient to learn more. One of Leah's recommendations for pitch material is the "bar test," where authors think about how they would describe their book to someone in a noisy setting in just a few attention-grabbing words.

Matty and Leah also discuss building relationships with influencers and media. It's not about sending out mass emails but rather about connecting meaningfully with select individuals who can help promote your book. This involves engaging with them genuinely and understanding how your book might provide value to their audience.

They touch on the role of influencers in an author's promotional strategy. Leah advises that while influencer marketing can be highly effective, it is important for authors to engage with influencers who align well with their target audience. This involves participating actively in the community where these influencers operate and finding ways to offer value in the relationship.

The podcast episode ends with Leah suggesting several long-term strategies for book promotion. She emphasizes the importance of leveraging any media attention post-publication and using new information about reader reception to refine marketing strategies. Authors should remain adaptable, using feedback and reviews to tweak their pitches and focus on angles that resonate with their audience.

This episode of The Indy Author Podcast offers practical advice for authors navigating the complex world of book publicity. Whether you are just starting out or looking to boost an existing campaign, the insights shared by Matty and Leah provide a solid foundation for promoting books effectively in a crowded market.

Matty Dalrymple 2/25/25 Matty Dalrymple 2/25/25

Episode 276 - Navigating Legal Risk in Memoir with Kathryn Goldman

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Kathryn Goldman discusses NAVIGATING LEGAL RISK IN MEMOIR, including the delicate balance memoir writers must strike to avoid defamation, invasion of privacy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Kathryn explains the legal definitions and elements of these terms and offers advice on minimizing risk, emphasizing the importance of factual accuracy and distinguishing between statements of fact and opinion. We also discuss the complexities of protecting oneself when writing about identifiable real-life figures and the considerations authors must take into account when deciding whether to fictionalize elements of their stories. Finally, Kathryn touches on the implications of using real places and song lyrics in memoirs and cautions against seeking input from real-life subjects included in the memoir. She concludes with the potential benefits of including disclaimers to manage reader expectations and reduce legal exposure.

Kathryn Goldman is an intellectual property attorney who focuses her practice on the protection and enforcement of copyright and trademark rights for businesses and individuals. She represents creative professionals, writers, artists, photographers, and innovative entrepreneurs. Leaving 30 years in litigation behind her, Kathryn now focuses her work on keeping creatives out of court so they can create more work. Kathryn is also the Legal Advisor to the Alliance of Independent Authors.

Episode Links

Kathryn's Links:
https://creativelawcenter.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathryn-goldman-b9948211/
https://www.instagram.com/kathryngoldman/
https://creativelawcenter.com/register/memoir-how-to-minimize-risk/ (paid course)

Show Notes:
AI Update US Copyright Office Report on Copyrightability - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr_LnJgDTdU&t=1s

Summary

This week on The Indy Author Podcast, Matty Dalrymple talks with Kathryn Goldman about legal considerations for memoir writers and authors of nonfiction and creative fiction. Kathryn, an intellectual property attorney specializing in intellectual property and copyright, offers practical advice for minimizing legal risks associated with defamation, invasion of privacy, and the intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Kathryn explains how the legal definitions of terms like defamation can differ from common understanding. Defamation, she notes, requires a false statement of fact about another person, made to a third party, with some element of fault, and resulting in damage. She emphasizes the importance of truth and opinion in mitigating defamation claims, suggesting that writers should stick to provable truths or clearly frame content as opinion.

Invasion of privacy involves scenarios where private information is shared without consent. Kathryn describes different types, including "false light" scenarios, and emphasizes the importance of protecting private information. She also discusses the concept of intentional infliction of emotional distress, where conduct aimed at causing distress must be extreme, outrageous, and result in severe distress.

The conversation highlights the challenges memoir writers face when sharing stories involving real people. Kathryn advises that, while you can control how you present your story, you can't control others' reactions or potential legal claims. Writers should be mindful of how they depict real individuals and consider fictionalizing names, places, and recognizable details. Her advice extends to understanding local laws, as legal matters vary by state and country.

Matty and Kathryn explore different motivations for writing memoirs, from personal therapy to social justice. Regardless of intent, Kathryn stresses the importance of careful planning and understanding the risks involved. She emphasizes that happy lives don't typically make for compelling memoirs, which often center around transformative challenges.

The discussion also touches on the importance of setting expectations with disclaimers, noting that disclaimers can help frame a memoir as fictionalized or subjective, thereby reducing legal risks. However, when claiming a creative embellishment, accuracy and factual presentation should not be compromised.

The episode further discusses fair use, particularly in relation to song lyrics and copyrights. Kathryn advises against using song lyrics without permission, citing the complex licensing infrastructure and the importance of respecting the original creator's work.

To conclude, Kathryn cautions writers to weigh the legal risks in memoir writing and discusses strategies for minimizing potential legal issues while preserving the authenticity and impact of their stories. By seeking counsel and carefully considering the implications of their narrative choices, memoirists can protect themselves legally while still sharing meaningful stories. For more resources, Kathryn directs listeners to CreativeLawCenter.com.

This episode of The Indy Author Podcast offers valuable insights for anyone considering writing a memoir, with practical advice on legal issues and thoughtful reflection on the personal motivations behind memoir writing.

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for readability; please keep in mind that only the audio or video recordings of the conversation will reflect the word-for-word content of the conversation.

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, and welcome to The Indie Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Kathryn Goldman. Hey, Kathryn, how are you doing?

[00:00:07] Kathryn: I'm fine, Matty. How are you?

[00:00:09] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners and viewers a little background on you, Kathryn Goldman is an intellectual property attorney who focuses her practice on protecting and enforcing copyright and trademark rights for businesses and individuals. She represents creative professionals, including writers, artists, photographers, and innovative entrepreneurs.

Leaving 30 years of litigation behind, Kathryn now focuses on keeping creatives out of court so they can produce more work. She is also the legal advisor for the Alliance of Independent Authors, which is how I met her. I invited Kathryn on the podcast to discuss how to minimize legal risk when writing memoir.

Kathryn, you sent me a note in preparation for our conversation, which I liked a lot. You wrote: "Memoir can involve a delicate walk through the minefields of defamation, invasion of privacy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress." We'll talk about how to navigate these treacherous areas of law so a writer can tell their truth while still protecting themselves.

[00:01:12] One question I had for you is: to what extent will the information you share be applicable to nonfiction beyond memoir, or is it quite specific to memoir?

[00:01:47] Kathryn: Oh, it can be generalized to nonfiction broadly. These legal considerations apply to all types of nonfiction writing. They also apply to fiction—especially historical fiction—when real individuals and events are incorporated into the story.

[00:02:09] Matty: Perfect. I thought a good way to start would be to clarify some of the terms we used—defamation, invasion of privacy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Sometimes, the legal definitions of these terms are more nuanced than general understanding.

Can you explain, for example, what defamation means?

[00:02:09] Kathryn: Okay, so there are two kinds of defamation: defamation in writing and spoken defamation. Spoken defamation is slander, but we’re not going to discuss slander because we’re talking about written work, which is libel.

The elements of defamation are as follows: libel is a false statement of fact about another person that you communicate to a third party, not just to that person. There also has to be some element of fault on the part of the person who writes or publishes the statement.

You either knew it was false or failed to check whether it was true before spreading it. Additionally, the person about whom the defamatory statement is made must suffer some form of damage.

Damage could include harm to reputation, lost business, or even physical illness caused by severe defamation. These are the necessary elements of defamation, and all four must be present before a claim can be made.

So that's defamation. Do you want to take them one at a time?

[00:03:41] Matty: Yeah, how about invasion of privacy? That was another topic we wanted to discuss.

[00:03:44] Kathryn: Okay, so invasion of privacy—think of it as intrusion upon seclusion. You are in a private space, like your bedroom, which is common in memoirs. You have an expectation of privacy, but someone—a peeping Tom, for example, or even someone you invite into that space—violates that privacy and then shares it with the world. That is an invasion of privacy. The public has no reason or right to know those private details.

There are other types of invasion of privacy. One is appropriating someone’s name or likeness, which we see a lot in the college sports world right now—NIL, or name, image, and likeness. That is a form of invasion of privacy.

Then there’s false light invasion of privacy. This happens when you depict someone in a way that casts them in a misleading light. For example, if you write that someone was in the middle of a bar brawl and imply that they started it or were involved when they weren’t, that would be false light.

So those are different types of invasion of privacy.

[00:05:25] Matty: And the last term we mentioned was intentional infliction of emotional distress.

[00:05:30] Kathryn: Right. Intentional infliction of emotional distress occurs when someone engages in extreme and outrageous conduct with the intent to cause another person distress. The conduct must be severe enough to cause significant emotional harm, and in some cases, the law requires a physical manifestation of distress.

For example, if someone intentionally lies about another person to cause them distress, that could be both defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

One important point to remember is that all of these laws are state-based. This means the requirements for a claim vary from state to state and country to country. Some states or countries may not even recognize intentional infliction of emotional distress as a valid legal claim.

So, if you're concerned about this issue, you need to check your local laws and consult with a local attorney to determine whether it applies in your situation.

[00:07:11] Matty: I wanted to start with memoir because that’s an obvious example. Unless you’re writing about your time alone on a desert island, memoirs involve interactions with other people. They often pull writers in two directions: staying true to their experience while also being mindful of the legal risks you mentioned.

How do you advise memoir writers to avoid defamation claims when sharing stories about real people?

[00:07:49] Kathryn: The first thing to understand is that you cannot control how other people will react to your work. Even if you take every precaution to ensure you’re not defaming anyone, you cannot predict how they will interpret your writing or what actions they might take.

You can be as careful and reasonable as possible and still have a claim made against you. However, if you are prudent and take appropriate care, you will have a strong defense if a claim arises.

That said, when you’re concerned about defamation, remember that the first element of defamation is that it must be a false statement of fact.

If what you write is true and objectively provable, it cannot be defamation.

[00:08:50] Kathryn: The other thing you can do is frame your characterization of the situation, the person, or the event as an opinion. If you are expressing an opinion, you are not stating a fact.

For example, if you were to write a scene—memoir is often in the first person—you could say, It appeared to me as though she burned down that house on purpose. Or, When I look at that, it makes me think of… (using a simile or metaphor). You are framing the event as your opinion rather than a fact.

By doing that, you are building a defense against defamation. The primary defenses to defamation are truth—an objectively provable truth—or opinion. Those are two solid ways to prevent a defamation claim against you.

That said, right from the start, there’s also the option of fictionalizing the person. You can avoid identifying them by changing details—altering the town where events happen, modifying the setting, changing the person’s description, giving them a different occupation. You can alter these details entirely while still telling your story and conveying how that person made you feel and impacted your life—without identifying them.

That’s a decision you make before you even put pen to paper.

[00:11:22] Matty: Yeah, it seems like some memoirists are clear with their readers that they’re not reproducing interactions with particular people. For example, some memoirists I’ve spoken to say they combine multiple people into a single character—maybe they had two bad bosses and want to tell a story about dealing with a bad boss, so they merge those two into one. The reader understands they’re not going to find that named bad boss on LinkedIn or anything like that.

It seems really tricky. I was thinking about this in the context of creative nonfiction—when someone tells a story about a celebrity or a historical figure and puts words in that person’s mouth. For example, The Crown followed factual stories about Queen Elizabeth and her family but took great liberties with behind-the-scenes action and dialogue. That’s more of an exposé. Are there different legal approaches to those two types of works?

[00:12:43] Kathryn: Yes. When you're writing something like The Crown, there has to be a heavy legal vetting of the manuscript or script. That would involve applying U.K. law—so you’d have to analyze the U.K.'s defamation laws. Those are famous individuals, and the law in the U.S. is different for public figures compared to private individuals. It is much harder to defame a public figure than a private individual.

You need to analyze the manuscript and go through it to see what could potentially sustain a claim. But the legal elements will be the same for both memoir and historical fiction or creative nonfiction. Once you determine which law applies, the legal analysis will be the same.

[00:14:09] Matty: If someone is writing about people in their own life and comes to you for advice, how do you guide them on whether to name names or fictionalize details like names, places, or characteristics? Are there specific criteria you use to determine that?

[00:14:31] Kathryn: Well, you gave the example of a bad boss. That’s easy to fictionalize—you can change the company, job description, and other details. But if you’re writing about your abusive stepfather and using your real name as the author, that person is going to be identifiable. You can’t fictionalize that.

Then the question becomes—do you write under a pseudonym? If you are concerned that your stepfather might sue you and you write under a pseudonym, will you be able to talk about your book publicly? When writing a memoir, you must focus on your why. There are many reasons to write a memoir.

On my website, CreativeLawCenter.com, I have a workshop replay where I interviewed two memoirists. They discussed whether to identify themselves and, by extension, their family members or whether to use a pseudonym and the implications of that choice.

If your reason for writing is to share your story with others in similar situations and to speak freely about it, then you really can’t use a pseudonym. Some situations can’t be fictionalized. You have to decide at the outset what risks you are willing to take.

[00:16:47] Matty: That also made me think about another situation. Suppose someone writes about an abusive experience and wants to follow the book with public appearances to support others in similar situations. Legally, does it make a difference if they don’t name the bad actors in their book or talks, but those people could still be identified if someone did some research?

[00:17:24] Kathryn: If the person is identifiable in the book, that can lead to legal issues. Then you have to weigh whether that person—who hasn’t been named but is described and connected to the author—would want to out themselves by filing a lawsuit, which is a public record accessible to everyone. That lawsuit would essentially declare, I am the stepfather accused of this abuse, and I didn’t do it. Often, when claims like that are made, they draw more attention to the book and can drive book sales.

So you have to assess: will this person take legal action if they haven’t been openly named? That depends on your knowledge of the person, their risk tolerance for exposure, and your own risk tolerance for facing a legal claim. All of these factors go into the calculation of how to approach memoir writing.

[00:19:09] Matty: It seems like so much of this comes back to the underlying motivation for writing the book. Most of the time when I talk to writers, their motivations are positive—they have a story they need to tell, they want to share their experience, or they have advice that could help people. But in some cases, there’s a less admirable motivation—wanting to pay someone back for something. If revenge is the driver, the normal publishing and writing considerations may not apply.

[00:19:54] Kathryn: That’s an interesting point. Revenge. I’ve worked with many memoirists and reviewed many manuscripts for legal clearance, and I can safely say that none of them have admitted to revenge as their motivation. Most say they want to expose an unjust situation so that others in similar circumstances know they’re not alone. Or they want to share mistakes they’ve made so others don’t repeat them. That said, revenge-driven memoirs do exist.

This brings up another reason many people write memoirs: personal therapy. And sometimes, that means a memoir shouldn’t be published. Memoirs about happy lives are not usually that interesting. The most compelling memoirs involve transformation—something tragic or life-changing happens, and the person emerges changed. So when writing a memoir, you must ask: Why am I writing this? What is my goal? If the motivation is therapeutic, maybe the memoir is best kept private.

[00:22:39] Matty: Yeah, I've spoken to several memoirists who have said exactly that—the initial drafting was a therapeutic effort. They had something they wanted to get off their chest, to get out of their heart, to put onto paper, to purge themselves of it. Then they set that aside and said, Okay, now I want to write something shareable. And the final product looked quite different.

For example, they may have written their whole experience out exactly as it occurred, but that wasn’t an interesting way to present it to a reader. So they shortened time frames, cut out uneventful periods, and focused intensively on one key moment—maybe one crucial hour in their life takes up more of the memoir than uneventful years.

I like the idea of separating private writing from public writing. And among all the other craft considerations that go into revising that private draft into a shareable work, factoring in legal considerations is important as well.

[00:23:38] Kathryn: Right. And then when you’re doing that, the question becomes, Do you fictionalize it completely?Because the crux of the story—the theme, the event, the transformation—can still be true to your experience, but everything else can be fictionalized. The characters, the place, the setting—everything can be completely different, and you can still tell your story. And once you do that, you significantly minimize the risk involved.

So again, it goes back to: What is your why? Why are you doing it?

[00:24:14] Matty: Well, that whole question of truth versus embellishment—if it’s completely fictionalized, that takes care of a lot of concerns. But if you decide to present it as a memoir, let’s say you grew up in a small town, and that town is a very important part of the experience. You want to name it, and people will be able to identify individuals in the story. Since memoir often involves a level of creative embellishment, how do you balance storytelling with legal obligations to avoid misrepresentation?

[00:24:49] Kathryn: Well, if you’re going to name the small town and include real people from that town, you need to stick to objective truths. Objective truths or frame things as your opinion. That’s how you’ll have to tell that story. And then, beyond the legal issues, there’s the reality that you might have the whole town in an uproar. That’s not a legal question, but it’s something to consider.

Lawsuits are no fun. You have to decide if this is something you’re willing to go through. Is it really important to name that small town? Again, I’ll point you to that interview I did with two memoirists who spoke very openly about why they made the choices they did in writing their stories. One of them went so far as to help sponsor legislation in his home state. He was the victim of abuse as a child and worked to get a law passed to address that issue.

That’s a big why. You have to think about how much of your life you’re willing to dedicate to this memoir—even after it’s published.

[00:26:45] Matty: Yeah, I like the idea of framing it that way. It also suggests another consideration—we talked about intentional infliction of emotional distress. But what about unintentional infliction of emotional distress? A writer might put something in their book that they don’t think will upset anyone, but then someone reads it and takes offense. Do you have advice on how people can assess or avoid unintentional infliction of emotional distress?

[00:27:12] Kathryn: That’s interesting because it ties back to something I said earlier—you can’t control how someone else is going to react. You also can’t anticipate whether they’ll file a claim. I’ve had many authors come to me and say, Nothing I wrote is bad! Everyone is portrayed in a good light! And I have to remind them, That’s your perspective. But you’re not the person reading it. You don’t know what their circumstances are, so you can’t predict how they’ll respond. That’s unintentional, but it can still create problems. That kind of reaction is less likely to lead to a legal claim and more likely to damage relationships.

[00:28:15] Matty: That reminds me of my corporate days when coworkers would ask for input on their performance appraisals. Sometimes, even if I had a great working relationship with someone and appreciated their contributions, I’d still send my feedback to them first before submitting it—just to make sure I wasn’t saying anything they didn’t want to be said. I’d ask, Is there anything here you wouldn’t want your boss to read?

I can imagine a similar approach with memoir—looping back with the real people involved and saying, Here’s a chapter about an interaction we had—what do you think? Not necessarily promising to change anything, but at least hearing their perspective. What are your thoughts on that, based on your work with memoirists?

[00:29:39] Kathryn: I don’t like it at all. I do not recommend sending portions of a manuscript to a third party for review. Even if you say, I’m not promising to make changes, you are still suggesting that their opinion matters. So why are you sending it? And if you don’t say that, are you giving them editorial control over your manuscript? As a general rule, I don’t like it.

I’ve seen cases where authors have asked for permission to use real places or details in their memoirs. That’s one thing. But once you send a written request for approval, what happens when they say no? Are you willing to rewrite the entire book?

I’ve also had authors send parts of their manuscript to people from their past—people they hadn’t spoken to in 25 years—just to give them a heads-up. And it backfired. The recipient was upset, contacted the publisher, contacted the author’s spouse—it became a problem. So I don’t advise it.

You’re better off focusing on what you can control. Analyze the risks, minimize them as much as possible, and decide what level of risk you’re comfortable with. But I would keep it in-house.

[00:31:56] Matty: Yeah, I can imagine in that scenario with the seminary, it makes sense that it would be a real legal risk to use the name without permission. If they had said no, do you think it would have been sufficient for the author to just change the name of the seminary?

[00:32:17] Kathryn: Change the name, change the location, change the description, change the hierarchy of power—you’d have to rewrite it. You also have to be careful when using real places in your stories, especially in fiction. In nonfiction, real events took place in real places, so you have more freedom to use them.

[00:32:42] Matty: But in fiction, if you put terrible events in a real place, the owners of that place could be very upset. You have to be careful about that. Many of my novels are set in the Philadelphia area, and I went to Penn. I was originally going to use Penn as a setting, but I thought some nefarious things were going to happen there, so I changed it to “William Penn University.”

I think everyone knows what I was getting at, and in the end, nothing bad actually happens there, but I still changed it. Sometimes you just want the freedom to move things around, even if it’s not something negative—like if I wanted a cafeteria in a building that doesn’t have one. I don’t want to be tied to reality.

[00:33:42] Kathryn: Right, and in the grand scheme, does it matter where it happens? You’re writing about a university with ivy-covered walls—it doesn’t have to be that university. As a creative writer, you’re inspired by Penn, but you can take that feeling and create something new.

[00:34:17] Matty: Exactly. I wanted to talk about a different topic: fair use.

A lot of people reflect on their lives and think of certain songs or lyrics that were meaningful to them. They want to include those lyrics in their books. What’s your advice for people considering that?

[00:34:39] Kathryn: Don’t. You can use the title of the song. You can use the artist’s name. You can describe the feeling the song gave you. But you cannot use the lyrics.

There is no reliable law on fair use of song lyrics or poetry that would protect an author at this time. Some legal arguments suggest it could be fair use, but look at it from the perspective of the songwriter or poet. If you’ve written just a few short lines that move millions of people, those lines are the heart and soul of your work. Why should someone be allowed to take those lines and put them into their book without permission?

If you think about it that way, it makes sense why you can’t use lyrics—you’d be taking the very essence of the song. And on top of that, there’s a licensing system in place where you can request permission and pay for the right to use the lyrics. That’s my current wisdom on the subject.

[00:36:33] Matty: Yeah, early on, I was interested in using a passage from The Sword in the Stone by T. H. White. Not only did it take forever to track down who actually owned the copyright—it had passed from one company to another over the years—but when I finally got an answer, I learned that the cost wasn’t unreasonable, but it was limited to a certain number of books.

For example, they might have said, You can use this for up to 1,000 copies, but if you sell more, you have to renew the license. And I thought, How do you even track that? I didn’t want to spend my life keeping tabs on that permission. They were willing to negotiate, but I ended up not using it.

[00:37:36] Kathryn: That’s interesting. I worked with a documentary filmmaker who wanted to use a Sade song in the background of his film. He went to great lengths to contact her directly, and because the subject was something she cared about, she gave permission. So it’s possible.

I’ve also had authors approach estates to request permission to use quotes from a celebrity’s journals or lyrics from a song, and they’ve received permission. So sometimes it’s worth reaching out and explaining the project directly. Bypassing the standard licensing system and going straight to the source can work.

[00:39:01] Matty: So it’s going to be a case-by-case situation. But just to be clear—are you saying that you cannot quote lyrics without permission?

[00:39:26] Kathryn: Correct. You need permission. And when you get that permission, it will take a very specific form. The copyright page will need to include a formal acknowledgment stating that the lyrics from [Song Name] by [Artist Name] are copyrighted and used with permission. When it comes to quoting longer works, fair use is determined case by case.

And a recent Supreme Court case, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith, added a new layer to fair use: if a work is available for licensing—meaning there’s an existing system to pay for the right to use it—it will be harder to claim fair use.

[00:41:02] Matty: That’s a great point.

One final thing I’d like to discuss is disclaimers. How much protection does a disclaimer at the beginning of a book offer?

[00:41:14] Kathryn: Disclaimers can reduce risk. They can warn the reader about the limits of what you’re writing. For example, if you’ve created a composite character—like merging two bad bosses into one—you can explain that in the disclaimer. Some courts give disclaimers significant weight. There isn’t a lot of litigation on this, but disclaimers help set the stage for how the reader perceives the book.

[00:41:45] Matty: That’s really helpful.

Kathryn, thank you so much for sharing your insights on minimizing legal risks in memoir and other types of writing. Where can people find more about you and your work?

[00:41:14] Kathryn: Please visit me at CreativeLawCenter.com. I offer extensive resources for creative professionals, including writers, artists, and entrepreneurs who are building businesses around their creative work.

I cover topics like copyright, trademarks, business development, and internet law. I also have a membership program where I provide ongoing support. So please stop by—I’d love to connect.

[00:41:45] Matty: Sounds great. Thanks again!

[00:41:47] Kathryn: You’re welcome! Thanks for having me, Matty.

Matty Dalrymple 2/18/25 Matty Dalrymple 2/18/25

Episode 275 - Getting Unstuck in Book Marketing and Promotion with Michael La Ronn

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Michael La Ronn discusses GETTING UNSTUCK IN BOOK MARKETING AND PROMOTION, including how authors can get unstuck when traditional methods like ads and blogger reviews are not affordable or effective. He emphasizes the importance of having an email list and a reader magnet, using strategic pricing, updating book descriptions, and optimizing back matter. They also discuss leveraging relationships with other authors for cross-promotion and the potential of using Kickstarter. Matty and Michael highlight various low-cost and free resources, while underscoring the significance of setting realistic expectations and being persistent in the journey of indie publishing.

Michael La Ronn has published many science fiction & fantasy books and self-help books for writers. He built a writing career publishing 10-12 books per year while raising a family, working a full-time job, and even attending law school classes in the evenings. Visit his fiction website at www.michaellaronn.com and his resources for writers at www.authorlevelup.com.

Episode Links

Michael's Links:
https://www.authorlevelup.com
https://www.youtube.com/authorlevelup

Related Episodes:
Episode 169 - The Do's and Don'ts of Working with Book Bloggers with Kristopher Zgorski
Episode 221 - Leveraging Your Tribe of Influence with Stephanie Chandler
Episode 252 - Strategic Website Planning for Authors with Pauline Wiles
Episode 230 - The Good, the Bad, and the Surprising of Kickstarter with Megan Haskell and Jennifer Hilt

Summary

This week on The Indy Author Podcast, Matty Dalrymple talks with Michael La Ronn about strategies for indie authors to get unstuck when marketing challenges arise. They delve into the essential components of marketing and promotion, providing valuable insights for authors navigating the digital landscape without a hefty advertising budget.

Michael La Ronn shares his experiences and strategies for keeping momentum in book marketing, focusing on what is within an author’s control. A key takeaway is the importance of setting realistic expectations and defining what "nothing is working" truly means for one's writing career. Michael emphasizes that goals should align with what authors can control, such as productivity, website presence, and building relationships with readers and other authors, rather than focusing solely on sales metrics.

Matty and Michael highlight the significance of having an email list and reader magnet, noting these as foundational tools in an indie author's toolkit. They discuss optimizing existing resources and the potential creativity in developing reader magnets that extend beyond short stories to something that genuinely engages the audience, such as prequels or novellas.

Reviews, often a controversial topic in the indie publishing community, are examined with Michael staunchly disagreeing with the notion that they don't matter. He recommends several platforms, including Bookish First and Booksprout, as low-cost or free options to acquire reviews ethically. These platforms are excellent avenues for getting initial feedback, which is crucial for an author’s credibility and subsequent promotional efforts.

Additionally, Matty shares insights into leveraging social media and email newsletters not just for direct sales pitches, but as a method to build relationships and offer value through content that aligns with their readers' interests. They stress the idea that simply saying "buy my book" continually isn’t going to produce results; engaging, relevant content is key.

On the promotion side, Michael offers guidance for authors who may not be able to invest heavily in advertising. He recommends exploring Amazon Ads as a cost-effective option for those with tight budgets, pointing out that they generally do not spend the full budgeted amount but still reach potential readers. He also underscores the original method of marketing through building genuine relationships with other authors, suggesting newsletter swaps as a reciprocal way to increase visibility without monetary cost.

They discuss the potential and challenges of platforms like Kickstarter to fund book projects and expand reach. Michael sees this as an opportunity for learning and honing marketing skills, even if not every campaign results in full funding.

Finally, Matty and Michael cover practical changes authors can make, such as reevaluating book pricing and descriptions. A strategic look at back matter for cross-promotion of books within a series and ensuring that pricing reflects both the value and the competitive landscape of comparable titles on retail platforms, can make a significant difference in sales outcomes.

In conclusion, both Matty and Michael emphasize patience and perseverance, recognizing that success in indie publishing takes time, and continuous learning and adaptation are part of the journey. Authors should celebrate small victories, focus on incremental improvements, and remain mindful of long-term goals while building a sustainable writing career.

This episode of The Indy Author Podcast provides a comprehensive, actionable roadmap for indie authors needing strategic direction to overcome marketing hurdles and achieve a sustained path to success.

Matty Dalrymple 1/7/25 Matty Dalrymple 1/7/25

Episode 270 - Author Assistants: Finding One or Being One with Kate Tilton

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Kate Tilton discusses AUTHOR ASSISTANTS: FINDING ONE OR BEING ONE, including the various types of support an author assistant can offer, from organizing emails and managing forums to handling newsletters and connecting with PR firms. We explore the complexities of finding the right assistant, balancing workload, and the importance of clear communication and trust. Kate also touches on strategies for authors who find themselves overwhelmed and seeking help, providing valuable insights for anyone considering hiring or becoming an author assistant.

Kate Tilton is the founder of Kate Tilton’s Author Services, where she has been helping authors since 2010. Kate works with authors of all stripes, from New York Times and USA Today bestsellers to pre-publication authors. Becca Syme calls her "the best author support in the industry." A cat-lover and fan of many geeky things, Kate can likely be found curled up with tea and a good book, plotting world takeover, or connecting authors and readers in any way she can.

Episode Links

https://katetilton.com/
https://www.theindyauthor.com/072---mentoring-and-collaborating-with-interns.html

Summary

This week on The Indy Author Podcast, Matty Dalrymple talks with Kate Tilton about the role of author assistants and how to incorporate them into writing business operations. They discuss the origin of Kate's career as an author assistant and explore the essential considerations for indie authors seeking to hire help, and for individuals interested in becoming author assistants themselves.

Kate Tilton's journey into the world of author assistance began unexpectedly during her high school years when she stumbled upon an author seeking an assistant. Her career as an author assistant was born from this serendipitous encounter, highlighting how organic and unexpected career paths can be. This story emphasizes the importance of being open to opportunities and adaptable in career choices.

The conversation then delves into what an author assistant does. Kate explains that the role of an author assistant is highly diverse, often more diversified than many might assume. An author assistant can help manage emails, organize contests, manage forums, handle social media, and much more. This aligns with the needs of authors at different stages of their writing careers—from bestselling authors to those yet to publish a book. Kate stressed the importance of distinguishing what tasks are better suited for specialists, like social media or PR, vs. those that an assistant could handle.

The podcast episode also addresses the expectations authors should have when considering hiring an assistant. Matty and Kate talk about strategies for identifying when it's time to hire help. Kate recommends that authors should list everything they are doing, assess which tasks could be delegated, and identify the level of assistance required. For those who feel overwhelmed, a consultation with a coach who understands the indie author market could be highly beneficial.

Matty shares a personal story of employing a best friend as a business manager. She found that clarity improved when procedures were documented meticulously. It became evident during her collaboration that delegating tasks based on the strengths of the assistant could enhance productivity. This highlights the importance of a strategic approach when determining which responsibilities to hand over to an assistant.

On the other side, Kate suggests that for those interested in pursuing a career as an author assistant, starting with specific skills or tasks is beneficial. Building experience through smaller, more focused jobs and then expanding skills and services is a practical way to enter the field. Networking and getting recommendations from industry connections can also play a significant role in both hiring an assistant and becoming one.

Matty and Kate discuss the challenges and solutions in navigating client-assistant relationships, such as ensuring access to necessary resources without compromising security. The example of using password managers like LastPass increases security when sharing login credentials. They also talk about making sure that critical aspects of the business, such as website access, are adequately managed to prevent issues.

Kate advises being wary of potential 'red flags' when hiring an assistant, such as lack of professionalism or clarity in communication. Similarly, understanding the nuances between being an employee and a contractor is crucial for both parties to maintain a clear and productive working relationship.

The episode concludes with a focus on continuous improvement, both for authors considering hiring help and for aspiring assistants. The advice shared aides in creating productive partnerships that free authors to focus on writing while giving assistants the chance to refine their skills in the publishing industry.

This podcast episode provides valuable insights into the effective hiring and training of an author assistant, emphasizing the power of good organization and communication to streamline personal writing and business processes. By sharing her experiences, Kate encourages both authors and aspiring assistants to pursue the working relationships that best support mutual growth and success.

Matty Dalrymple 11/19/24 Matty Dalrymple 11/19/24

Episode 265 - Connecting and Captivating with Author Readings with Gary Zenker

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Gary Zenker discusses CONNECTING AND CAPTIVATING WITH AUTHOR READINGS, including how readings help create a personal connection with readers, practical tips for preparing and delivering effective readings, finding or creating reading opportunities, and ensuring that your materials align with the theme, venue, and audience.

By day, Gary Zenker is a marketing strategist; by night, he creates flash fiction tales that cross genre and focus on revealing facets of human nature. His stories have been selected for various print anthologies, including Chicken Soup For The Soul: Laughter, and online collections. He founded two writers groups in southeastern PA, and continues to lead one assisting writers to develop their skills and achieve their writing goals. He is also the creator of Writers Bloxx, a storytelling game.

Episode Links

https://www.garyzenkerstoryteller.com/
https://www.facebook.com/gary.zenker/

Summary

This week on The Indy Author Podcast, Matty Dalrymple talks with Gary Zenker about the significant role of author readings in building an audience and enhancing author visibility. The conversation explores the benefits of public readings for writers, particularly as a way to engage directly with audiences, control the interpretation of their work, and develop public speaking skills.

Gary Zenker, a seasoned writer and organizer of author readings, emphasizes the unique connection established when authors read their own work. Unlike print, live readings allow authors to observe immediate audience reactions and to influence how their work is perceived, offering a powerful tool for fan engagement and platform building.

The discussion delves into the preparation required for a successful reading. Gary advises authors to meticulously prep both themselves and their material. This includes reading the work aloud to identify necessary changes, ensuring clarity in dialogue through added tags, and timing the material to fit within designated time slots to avoid overrunning. Gary also stresses the importance of practicing the reading to maintain the rhythm and impact of the story, encouraging authors to practice in front of a mirror or an audience to build confidence and ensure effective delivery.

Matty and Gary address the common issue of reading too quickly, which can detract from the storytelling aspect of a performance. Gary recounts a situation where a poet’s rapid delivery overshadowed the beauty of the work, highlighting the necessity for authors to slow down and allow their audience to absorb the narrative.

Gary suggests authors always prepare multiple pieces, enabling adaptability depending on previous readers' themes or audience demographics. For logistical purposes, Gary advises against reading directly from a book due to its awkward handling, favoring printed scripts with backup copies stored electronically, ensuring preparedness for any eventuality during the reading.

The podcast further explores the critical aspect of self-recording during readings. By doing so, authors can review their performance and improve their public speaking skills. Gary notes, “It’s a different experience when you put all those people there,” suggesting that live recording grants invaluable insights into an author’s presentation.

Engagement with the audience is another focal point. Gary advises practicing to avoid fillers like "um," which can disrupt the flow of reading. Eye contact and cueing from the audience can enhance connection, showing professional confidence and respect for attendees.

After the reading, Gary highlights the importance of author-community interaction. He encourages authors to be active participants throughout the event, stressing staying from the first to the last reading to support fellow authors and maximize networking opportunities. He notes the value of feedback and relationship-building within the writer community.

Matty and Gary touch on hosting one’s own events if current offerings seem sparse. Coordinating an event involves logistics such as securing a venue willing to host for minimal cost, ensuring sound and lighting adequacy, and selecting reliable participants who will promote the event and adhere to its thematic and time constraints.

In summary, the podcast episode provides an insightful guide into leveraging author readings as both a creative outlet and a strategic marketing tool. It emphasizes preparing thoroughly, practicing diligently, and participating actively within a writing community to maximize the benefits of public readings. These efforts are depicted as fundamental in fostering audience relations and enhancing an author’s public persona.

Matty Dalrymple 11/12/24 Matty Dalrymple 11/12/24

Episode 264 - Building Your Brand through Networking with Dale L. Roberts

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Dale L. Roberts discusses BUILDING YOUR BRAND THROUGH NETWORKING, including BUILDING YOUR BRAND THROUGH NETWORKING, including how connecting with industry professionals, participating in community discussions, and utilizing online platforms can significantly impact an author's success. He emphasizes the need for a clear author brand and effective networking strategies, offering practical advice on overcoming imposter syndrome and speaking confidently. Dale explains the value of mutual support within the indie author community and discusses his new book, NETWORKING FOR AUTHORS, which combines memoir elements with actionable strategies for both introverted and extroverted authors.

Dale L. Roberts is a self-publishing advocate, award-winning author, and renowned video creator. With over 50 publications, he has become an authority in self-publishing, leading him to create his own YouTube channel, Self-Publishing with Dale, regarded as one of the premier information resources in the indie publishing community.

Episode Links

https://selfpublishingwithdale.com
https://www.youtube.com/selfpublishingwithdale
https://dalelinks.com/discord
https://www.facebook.com/selfpubwithdale
https://twitter.com/selfpubwithdale
https://www.tiktok.com/@selfpubwithdale
https://www.instagram.com/selfpubwithdale/

Summary

This week on The Indy Author Podcast, Matty Dalrymple talks with author and podcast host Dale L. Roberts about the power and importance of networking for authors. They delve into the nuances of building professional relationships and branding in the indie author world. This conversation provides valuable insights for authors looking to expand their reach and build a more supportive community around their work.

Understanding Networking for Authors

Networking is a critical aspect of any author’s career, especially in the indie publishing world. As Dale shares, a lot of his opportunities emerged from his connections and collaborative projects, highlighting the importance of being actively engaged with fellow authors and industry professionals. He emphasizes that networking doesn't require having a large platform initially, as relationships and opportunities can develop over time.

Developing Your Author Brand

A key point discussed is author branding. An author brand should clearly communicate who you are and what you represent. For instance, Dale suggests that knowing your value is essential, whether you are a young adult author or a self-publishing coach. Your unique qualities should be highlighted to create a lasting impression when networking.

Dale advises that authors work on being able to summarize their brand succinctly, mentioning that understanding your personal and professional strengths can significantly enhance your networking efforts. He encourages authors to have a clear pitch that can be altered depending on the audience, ensuring it reflects your journey as an author accurately.

Navigating Networking as an Introvert

Addressing the challenge for introverts, Dale shares that many authors, himself included, deal with feelings of imposter syndrome. He suggests viewing oneself from a third-person perspective to gain confidence in networking scenarios. This approach involves creating a persona that represents your professional identity and talents, potentially boosting your confidence even if the experience is initially uncomfortable.

Building Relationships Online

With numerous opportunities available online, Dale stresses the potential of virtual networking. He discusses how platforms like virtual conferences, online forums, and communities on Discord or social media can be powerful venues for making connections. Online interactions, he says, offer a veil of safety for those who might be uncomfortable in person, allowing authors to engage and build their network from the comfort of their own environment.

Dale shares an example from his own experience with Twitter, where despite initially using it primarily for link dumping, it led to valuable connections like meeting Kevin Tumlinson from Draft2Digital. This story underlines the unpredictability and vast potential of online networking.

The Reciprocation of Goodwill

The conversation also touches on the importance of reciprocating goodwill in professional relationships. Dale notes that while immediate reciprocity shouldn’t be expected, it’s essential to maintain a two-way interaction to nurture these relationships. He advises against continually giving to someone who doesn’t reciprocate and suggests focusing on those who appreciate and return the favor.

Conclusion

As this podcast episode illustrates, networking is indispensable for authors. Whether you are an introvert or an extrovert, whether you have awards to your name or are just starting, there’s always room to grow your network. Engaging with online communities, carefully crafting your personal brand, and understanding the mutual benefits of goodwill can create pathways to new opportunities. Dale highlights that networking not only broadens one's professional reach but also enriches personal growth and mutual support within the author community.

This episode equips listeners with pragmatic advice and encouragement to step out and connect with others in the writing and publishing industry, ensuring they aren’t isolated in their journey towards success.

Matty Dalrymple 10/1/24 Matty Dalrymple 10/1/24

Episode 258 - Getting the Word Out: Media Campaigns for Authors with Marie Whittaker

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Marie Whittaker discusses GETTING THE WORD OUT: MEDIA CAMPAIGNS FOR AUTHORS, including why press releases remain a valuable promotional tool, the five milestones that deserve a press release, how press releases compare with social media posting, media campaigns for crowdfunding, tips for approaching bookstores and libraries, whether authors can apply these tips to their backlists, and how to maximize the value of your website real estate.

Marie Whittaker enjoys teaching about publishing and project management for writers. She’s Associate Publisher at WordFire Press and Executive Director of Superstars Writing. She started her career writing horror. Marie created The Adventures of Lola Hopscotch, is published in Weird Tales, and habitually adopts rescue animals.

Episode Links

https://mariewhittaker.com/
https://www.instagram.com/mariewhittaker_/
https://www.facebook.com/marie.g.whittaker

Summary

This week on The Indy Author Podcast, Matty Dalrymple talks with Marie Whittaker about the evolving expectations of authors in both traditional and independent publishing. The conversation delves into the changing dynamics of the author-publisher relationship and emphasizes the importance of authors taking an active role in the marketing and promotion of their work.

Marie begins by highlighting a significant shift in the traditional publishing world. Gone are the days when publishers took complete control of an author's career and provided comprehensive marketing support. She points out that current publishers look for a partnership with authors. This means that authors are expected to tackle much of the legwork involved in promoting their projects.

Marie notes, "They're looking for a partnership with their authors. The heyday when they're going to do everything for authors and be your big motivation behind your work, that's over."

The discussion underlines that accepting this reality is crucial for authors. Embracing the need for self-promotion is not just advantageous but necessary. In both traditional and independent publishing, authors must be proactive in engaging audiences and driving the success of their books.

This insight into modern publishing highlights several essential actions for authors:

1. Building a Personal Brand: Authors should invest in creating a recognizable and professional personal brand. This can include a well-designed website, active social media presence, and consistent communication with their audience.

2. Engaging with Readers: Authors need to cultivate a relationship with their readers. This can be accomplished through regular updates, newsletters, fan interactions, and leveraging social media platforms effectively.

3. Collaborating with Publishers: A partnership approach with publishers can enhance the marketing strategy. By working collaboratively, authors and publishers can align on promotional activities and ensure that both parties are contributing to the book's success.

4. Learning Marketing Skills: Understanding basic marketing principles and tactics is becoming increasingly important. Authors should educate themselves on topics like SEO, social media marketing, email marketing, and content creation.

Marie’s straightforward discussion provides a reality check for authors aspiring to succeed in today's competitive market. While publishing routes may differ, the core responsibility of promoting one's work remains consistent. Authors must be ready to partner with publishers and readers to elevate their projects.

Marie concludes with a pragmatic perspective: "Might as well embrace that." This statement encourages authors to adapt to these changes willingly and actively participate in the promotion of their work.

In summary, this podcast episode offers valuable insights into the current expectations placed on authors, emphasizing the shift towards a more collaborative and proactive approach to book promotion in both traditional and independent publishing domains. Whether you're a seasoned author or just starting, understanding and embracing these responsibilities is key to achieving success in today's literary landscape.

Matty Dalrymple 9/24/24 Matty Dalrymple 9/24/24

Episode 257 - Book Sponsorships with Dale L. Roberts

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Dale L. Roberts discusses BOOK SPONSORSHIPS, based on his experience soliciting sponsors for his series of non-fiction books. We discuss the importance of matching sponsorships with your theme and brand; of reading the fine print in the terms and conditions of the platforms you will use to distribute your book; how he made the decision about where to place the ads and what reader response has been; the information you’ll need to pitch a potential sponsor, and the importance of asking “why” if you get a no. We also discuss some ways that fiction authors might pursue sponsorships for their books and whether sponsorships and crowdfunding is an either/or or a both/and proposition.

Episode Links

https://www.facebook.com/selfpubwithdale
https://twitter.com/selfpubwithdale
https://www.instagram.com/selfpubwithdale/
https://www.youtube.com/selfpublishingwithdale

Summary

This week on The Indy Author Podcast, Matty Dalrymple talks with Dale L. Roberts about the concept of book sponsorships and how indie authors can leverage this strategy to fund their publishing projects. Dale shares his personal experiences, strategies, and practical advice on navigating the world of sponsorships.

The Concept of Book Sponsorships
Dale delves into his journey of securing book sponsorships, explaining how his background in securing sponsorships for his YouTube channel led him to explore similar opportunities for his books. He shares the initial spark that led him to consider book sponsorships, mentioning a conversation with his friend Justin Moore, a renowned expert in brand deals and sponsorships. Justin had not only thought of book sponsorships first but had also envisioned even more ambitious ideas, such as securing multiple sponsors for a single publication.

Securing Sponsorships: The Process
Dale emphasizes the importance of approaching potential sponsors well in advance of a book's launch date. He shares his experience of reaching out to his dream brands, including Miblart, Draft2Digital, and Book Award Pro. Despite the tight timeline, he successfully secured four out of five sponsors, underscoring the necessity of having a strategic and proactive approach.

Presenting Ads to Readers
Matty inquires about how the ads are presented to readers within Dale's books. Dale explains that he places the ads in the front matter to capitalize on the "Look Inside" feature on Amazon, ensuring maximum visibility. However, he acknowledges feedback suggesting that placing ads in the back matter might offer better context and appeal once readers have engaged with the book's content.

Organic Product Placement vs. Traditional Ads
The discussion shifts to the idea of integrating ads more organically into the book's content. Dale recalls advice from Johnny Andrews, who suggested that product placement within the book's narrative might feel more genuine and less intrusive than traditional ads. While Dale admits this train of thought came too late for his current series, he acknowledges the potential of this approach for future projects.

Reader and Platform Response
Matty asks about reader and platform responses to these sponsorships. Dale reassures that he has not received negative feedback from readers. He also discusses the importance of reviewing platform terms and conditions to ensure compliance with rules regarding ads in books. While enforcement of these rules seems rare, Dale advises caution to avoid potential account issues.

Risk Tolerance and Suitability for New Authors
Addressing concerns for new authors, Dale highlights the importance of risk tolerance and the groundwork required to secure sponsors. He encourages new authors to leverage their creativity and to approach potential sponsors with a well-thought-out proposal that outlines the benefits for the sponsor. He also advises tracking data meticulously to support future negotiations.

Real-world Examples and Creative Opportunities
Matty shares her thoughts on integrating real-world locations, such as local airports or wineries, into her fiction books, blending sponsorships with the narrative in a fun and engaging way. Dale likens this to product placements in movies, citing Adam Sandler's effective use of brand integration. This creative approach can make sponsorships feel less commercial and more integral to the story.

Crowdfunding vs. Sponsorships
Matty and Dale discuss the parallels between sponsorships and crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter. Dale mentions his consideration of Kickstarter for his series but decided against it due to the additional workload while managing his sponsorship deals. He suggests that combining both methods could be viable for those with the bandwidth to handle the demands.

Final Advice
Dale concludes with practical advice for authors considering sponsorships. He emphasizes the importance of aligning with brands that resonate with one's audience and ensuring transparency about sponsorships to maintain trust. Matty adds that highlighting planned promotional efforts can also help authors without a track record to demonstrate their seriousness and gain sponsor support.

In this episode, Dale L. Roberts sheds light on the nuanced world of book sponsorships, providing valuable insights and actionable advice for indie authors looking to explore this innovative funding avenue. Whether you're an established author or just starting, understanding the dynamics of sponsorships can open new opportunities for creative collaboration and financial support.

Matty Dalrymple 8/20/24 Matty Dalrymple 8/20/24

Episode 252 - Strategic Website Planning for Authors with Pauline Wiles

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Pauline Wiles discusses STRATEGIC WEBSITE PLANNING FOR AUTHORS. This conversation was prompted by Matty's need to migrate her websites—MattyDalrymple.com and TheIndyAuthor.com—off Weebly, since Square, which owns Weebly, is phasing out support for Weebly. Pauline and Matty delve into the critical aspects of planning a website overhaul, such as understanding author goals, target readership, and key marketing tactics. Pauline emphasizes the need to keep sites simple and user-friendly and discusses tools and integrations that are effective for different types of authors. The conversation also covers practical tips for improving website functionality and engaging visitors, including the use of popups for email sign-ups.

Pauline Wiles is an author turned website designer, who helps authors and solopreneurs with books create modern websites for strong business results. Her strategic approach delivers a powerful marketing asset that grows your audience and sells your books and services. British by birth, Pauline is now a contented resident of California.

Episode Links

https://www.paulinewiles.com/
https://www.instagram.com/paulinejwiles
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIErOCKJGjRjsXz395fd0Bg

Episode References:
Episode 073 - Author Websites with Pauline Wiles
Episode 238 - The Big Indie Author Data Drop 2024 with Melissa Addey

Summary

[Summary]

Matty Dalrymple 7/16/24 Matty Dalrymple 7/16/24

Episode 247 - Newsletter Marketing as a Creative Endeavor with Roz Morris

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Roz Morris discusses NEWSLETTER MARKETING AS A CREATIVE ENDEAVOR, including how authors can creatively integrate personal stories and ongoing projects into newsletters to engage readers. Roz shares her journey of finding the right content for her newsletter, emphasizing the importance of marketing the author alongside the books. She provides insights into using personal adventures and research anecdotes to connect with the audience. And we also discuss the benefits of interactivity, the role of social media groups, and maintaining a consistent creative output that resonates with readers.

Roz Morris’s novels and memoir have been recognized by major mainstream awards. She’s coached award-winning writers in both fiction and non-fiction, taught creative writing for The Guardian masterclasses, blogged for Writers & Artists Yearbook and been a regular judge on Litopia’s Pop-Up Submissions show, critiquing manuscripts from promising writers.

Episode Links

https://rozmorris.org/
https://www.facebook.com/roz.morris.7
https://twitter.com/Roz_Morris/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/roz-morris-1102a019/
https://rozmorris.substack.com/
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:3h2h6nqdtxe4liyqemetux5o
https://rozmorris.tumblr.com/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyqCAHoKUsq3FOHt5srTfvA/
Newsletter: https://tinyurl.com/rozmorriswriter

Summary

In this episode of The Indy Author Podcast, host Matty Dalrymple and author Roz Morris offer insights into how authors can effectively use newsletters not just for marketing their books, but also for engaging their readers on a more personal level.

Recognizing Marketing as Creative Work

Matty opens the conversation by addressing a common dilemma for writers: the perceived separation between creative work and marketing. She points out that Roz exemplifies how these two can be intertwined, particularly through her engaging newsletter. Roz highlights that her newsletter became a way to embed her creative process, making it relatable and interesting for her audience.

Roz's Goal for Her Newsletter

Roz shares her journey of struggling to find content for her newsletter initially. Influenced by advice from Joanna Penn, she started looking for a unique angle. She felt that most indie authors produced content rapidly, creating template-based newsletters about books, research, and inspirations. In contrast, Roz writes more slowly and in less defined genres.

No Template for Roz's Content

For a long time, Roz didn’t know what to put in her newsletter. Unlike other indie authors who published quickly and followed set templates, Roz struggled to find a model that worked for her. But she eventually found her groove by making her newsletters more personal and reflective of her creative life.

Opening a Window into Your Creative Life for Your Readers

Roz discovered that by sharing personal stories and insights into her creative process, she could keep her audience engaged. She recounts how a travel diary from 2016 led to an idea for a book, which she shared in her newsletter. This approach opened up a more personal way of connecting with her readers, making them feel part of her creative journey.

Marketing the Author as Well as the Works

The conversation shifts to the idea of marketing the author, not just their works. Roz emphasizes that readers are often invested in the author's unique perspective and style. Matty agrees, adding that newsletters succeed when they let the author's personality shine through.

Elements of Roz's Newsletter

Roz outlines the structure of her newsletter, which includes a personal story, updates on current projects, and an ongoing story about her life with her horse. This segmented approach keeps her readers anticipating more, fostering a deeper connection with them. Matty admires this formatting tactic, noting how it encourages readership.

The Challenge of One-Way Communication and Interaction

Matty shares her challenge with newsletters being a one-way communication channel. They discuss creating a two-way interaction by asking readers questions or opinions within the newsletter. This strategy might engage the audience and make them feel more connected.

Giving Subscribers a Glimpse into Your Creative Life

Roz shares an interesting practice: posting a picture of her desk every Monday on her Facebook author page, which asks followers what they are up to. This simple act keeps followers updated about her activities and provides them with a tangible connection to her workflow.

Whether to Differentiate Fiction and Nonfiction Platforms

Matty has separate platforms for her fiction and nonfiction work. She talks about the different content strategies she employs for each, reaffirming the necessity of tailoring content to specific audiences.

Exercising a Fundamental Writing Skill

Roz discusses how writing newsletters can sharpen other writing skills. The challenge of making everyday experiences interesting can help improve storytelling abilities, which can benefit all forms of writing.

Ideas for Newsletter Fodder for Fiction Writers

Matty brainstorms ways to enhance her fiction newsletter by sharing research and behind-the-scenes insights. She suggests including excerpts from her work-in-progress and personal experiences related to her writing research, making the newsletter more engaging.

Conclusion

This conversation between Matty Dalrymple and Roz Morris offers a treasure trove of practical advice for authors looking to improve their newsletters. By intertwining creative work with marketing, sharing personal stories and research, and making the process interactive, authors can cultivate a more engaged and loyal readership. Whether you are an aspiring writer or an established author, these tips can help you connect with your audience on a deeper level.

Matty Dalrymple 6/25/24 Matty Dalrymple 6/25/24

Episode 244 - Understanding Your Book's Neighborhood with Nat Connors

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Nat Connors discusses UNDERSTANDING YOUR BOOK’S NEIGHBORHOOD, including the importance of understanding what books you want your book to appear next to and how authors can use data to guide their publishing decisions about positioning their books. We discuss wide versus KU, series versus standalone, pricing, cover design, blurbs, and compliance with genre conventions. We discuss the importance of tracking the best practices in your genre, how to solicit input from readers to get the most valid results, and using categories to educate the retail platforms about your books. And Nat has a special offer for listeners of The Indy Author Podcast!

Nat Connors is a romantic comedy writer, medical scientist, and dance teacher, and creator of the Kindletrends newsletter for genre fiction authors. Kindletrends started when he got fed up with trying to make sense of the Kindle Store and wanted a no-nonsense summary of the most important information. Nat uses the Kindletrends information to plan his own writing, publishing, and book launches, so it has to be focused, relevant and actionable.

Episode Links

https://kindletrends.com/
https://www.facebook.com/Kindletrends
https://x.com/kindletrends
https://www.youtube.com/@kindletrends

Fantasy 'State of the Nation', powered by Kindletrends: https://kindletrends.com/static/fantasy/ - a free interactive infographic for fantasy authors, referenced in our discussion.

Kindletrends newsletters: https://kindletrends.com - subscription is free for the first month, and you can cancel any time. Use the code 'INDYAUTHOR' on signup for a USD5 discount, making it USD10/month, forever.

Kindletrends free resources for authors:

Also Boughts Downloader Chrome Extension: https://kindletrends.com/download-also-boughts-chrome-extension/
Kindle Power Search: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUP5I1hBq00
List of categories on the Amazon Store: https://kindletrends.com/categories/

Summary

The episode of The Indy Author Podcast, featuring Nat Connors, delves into numerous strategies for genre fiction authors to enhance their publishing decisions and optimize their writing processes.

Data Utilization for Authors:
Nat emphasizes the importance of authors understanding their genre's dynamics, recommending a breakdown of big data into manageable segments. He advocates for what he calls "market awareness," suggesting that authors periodically engage with market trends while balancing writing and promotional efforts.

Choosing Publishing Platforms - Wide vs. Kindle Unlimited (KU):
The discussion shifts to deciding between publishing wide (across multiple platforms) or exclusively through Amazon's Kindle Unlimited. This decision is noted as genre-specific, with some genres traditionally performing better on KU. Nat mentions how book length and author preference for marketing channels play into this choice, with tools like Draft2Digital facilitating multi-store marketing.

Series vs. Standalone Books:
Considering whether to write a series or standalone books is another focal point. Nat points out that series may benefit more from KU due to the binge-reading potential, whereas standalone books might appeal differently to the market. He also discusses the impact of series on book cover design, stressing the need for visual consistency across series.

Pricing Strategies:
The conversation touches on pricing strategies, highlighting the recent trends of increasing ebook prices. Nat discusses the strategic pricing of series books and the implications of Amazon’s pricing policies on royalties, advocating for pricing that aligns with perceived value and competitive positioning.

Cover Design and Market Trends:
Cover design is a critical topic, with Nat advising authors to revisit their cover designs periodically to align with current market trends. He recommends subscribing to reader-focused newsletters to understand visual trends and stresses the importance of covers in marketing and reader engagement.

Blurb Writing and Genre Conventions:
The role of book blurbs and the need to keep them updated with genre conventions is discussed. Nat suggests using AI tools like ChatGPT to refresh blurbs, while cautioning against losing originality.

Understanding and Utilizing Genre Categories:
Nat explores the significance of accurately categorizing books in online retail platforms like Amazon to ensure they appear alongside similar titles, enhancing visibility and sales potential.

Kindletrends and Author Resources:
Nat concludes by discussing Kindletrends, which provides genre-specific insights and trends to help authors make informed decisions.

Transcript

Matty: Hello and welcome to the Indie Author Podcast. Today my guest is Nat Connors. Hey, Nat, how are you doing?

Nat: Hi, Matty, it's great to be back!

Meet Nat Connors

Matty: It is lovely to have you here, and to give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Nat is a romantic comedy writer, medical scientist, dance teacher, and creator of the Kindletrends newsletter for genre fiction authors. Kindletrends started when he got fed up with trying to make sense of the Kindle store and wanted a no-nonsense summary of the most important information. Nat uses the Kindle Trans information to plan his own writing, publishing, and book launches. So, it has to be focused, relevant, and actionable.

And I invited Nat back to the podcast, he's been a previous guest, to talk about the state of the genre. We're going to be talking generally about what is the data that every author should be tracking related to their own genre, but because it's always more fun to talk about something specific than something general and theoretical, we're going to be talking about fantasy.

I figured I talked so much about crime fiction, it was time to talk about something different. But if you're not a fantasy author, I would recommend you not tune out because the information we're going to be sharing is something that is applicable to really any kind of genre fiction that listeners may be working on.

How can authors use data to guide their publishing decisions?

Matty: And so, Nat, I'm just going to ask you to sort of step back and talk generally about how people should be looking at the data that's available to them out there, in order to better plan their writing and publishing work, and then we'll dive into the details of a couple of pieces of data that you specifically recommend people look at.

Nat: Yeah, sure. So, this is something that I've been thinking about for a long time, as Matty and many others will know, about how you go about getting your head around all of the things that are going on in your genre, and in your subgenre, and the specific environment that you're in, and I've got a bunch of stuff that I've written about this stuff. About ways to take a very big problem and divide it up into little chunks because when you're looking at a whole genre, something like fantasy, which has got so many different aspects to it and so many different moving parts, it can be a bit overwhelming. You read some books and you think, well, I like this, but do other people like this? Having a way of listing the things that I need to look at and the things I need to think about helps me feel like I'm getting around stuff and I'm not missing anything. One of the things I often say to people is that market research is an ongoing process if you're an author. In fact, I call it market awareness more than market research. I like to think of the fact that we need to be aware of our market, aware of what's going on around us. We make most of our time for writing because that's what we love, but we also have to look up from our keyboards occasionally and see what other people in our genre are doing, see how readers are responding to it, and think a little bit about how that affects us. So, I've got a few different things that I go through step by step when I'm looking at what's going on in my genre and we're going to do that sort of bit by bit with fantasy but to try and generalize it at the same time.

Wide versus KU

Matty: Well, one of the things that I think is top of mind for many authors who are deciding what route to take for their publishing is the whole question of wide versus KU. My understanding is that this is very genre dependent. There are just genres that have historically proven to do well in KU and genres that have not.

I think that would be a great point to start if people are deciding whether they want to go the KU route or not. What pieces of information do you recommend they be aware of in order to make that decision?

Nat: Yeah, that's a very good place to start, Matty. I think there's a bunch of factors, and some of those factors, just stepping away from the market, are also to do with you, the writer, and your own preferences for where you want to market and sell your work. and also for the length and the tempo at which you prefer to write.

I'd never want anyone to feel like they have to do a particular thing if they want to be in any genre. It's absolutely true that some genres have traditionally been quite heavily KU. We've also seen that changing, I think. And when we look at the fantasy, what we'll see is that there are some subgenres in fantasy, which are quite all-in on KU, but there are others which are pretty much 50/50.

So, I guess I'd put it down to a couple of factors. As far as the individual author is concerned, as we know, KU pay rates are per page. So, if you tend to write longer, then, relatively speaking, KU is going to be a better bet for you. So, a good example there is LitRPG, which has really exploded in popularity over the last, what is it, four years, five years, I think.

I probably first heard the term about 2019, just before the lockdown. now, and then that, that was a genre, subgenre, that was always around before that, but it sort of got this name and suddenly exploded in popularity. lit RPG books, my colleagues who write in that genre, tend to run quite long.

And by quite long, I mean more than a hundred thousand words. They are often sort of in serials. So I think that has contributed to them being in KU quite a lot. On the other hand, there are a lot of shorter fantasy, and there are a lot of more traditional, sort of swords and sorcery fantasy books that are published by small publishers, not by the big five, big four, but they, in that situation, they are more often wide.

So another factor for authors to consider, I think in terms of KU versus wide, as well as their writing tempo, is also how much they want to spend time on marketing to different stores. There are great services now like Draft2Digital, which will make it very much easier for you to get your books onto multiple stores, but then of course.

Remember, there's the exclusivity agreement, so if you are wide, then you are prevented from having your books in KU for a three-month period. We also know, then, that quite a few authors have practiced putting books in KU for the first three-month period and then taking them out and going wide.

Matty: Yeah, I think that one of the areas that I as someone who is not in KU have benefited from being aware of the KU versus Y distinction is when I'm running book bub ads. And I know that I would go through, and I would find other authors who are successful in my genre, which is Mystery, Suspense, Thriller, and I would run book bub ads against them.

But one thing that I realized very quickly I had to check was whether they were in KU or not. Because I realized that running a BookBub ad, now I'm talking about ads, not feature deals, but running a BookBub ad against a KU author's audience when I myself am not in KU is probably targeting the wrong group because KU readers are looking for something different than people who are not KU readers.

And so I feel like, you know, if I had spent money on advertising to KU author followers, then I probably would have been not using my advertising dollars to the best effect because I'm advertising to people who aren't used to interacting with getting content in that way.

Nat: Yeah, that's true. I mean, I think also there, my instinct is that it is less a matter of the difference in terms of what people are looking for, and maybe a bit more the simple fact that they have already paid for KU. So for them to pay extra money for a book, it's much more difficult for them to justify.

So, you're absolutely right that targeting if you're not a known author to them, it's much less likely that they're going to take a

punt on your book rather than taking a punt on another book that's actually in KU already. It's interesting also, and I don't know if you heard this, but as a romance author, traditionally, like five years ago, it was very difficult to get a book bub if you were in KU.

There was a belief, true or otherwise, that you were much more likely to get one if your books were wide than in KU, and you could get them if you were in KU, but you had to be a very heavy hitter. Was that a belief in Mystery and Suspense as well? I think it's changed a bit now, and I've seen, you

Matty: Yeah, not that I've heard of. And I also think that it's important to point out to people who aren't familiar with BookBub that I think you're talking about feature deals, sort of two approaches to BookBub. One is to apply for a feature deal, which is quite challenging to get and expensive if you land it, and then ads, which anyone can run. But, it could well be. I just don't recall, hearing, you know, hearing chatter about that in my genre.

Nat: yeah, yeah. So, so talking about the Y versus KU distinction in the case of fantasy, what we can see, just looking at the data that I've got in front of me now, is that actually, for the top 200 books in all of fantasy. They're actually pretty much 50 50 wide versus KU. if you look at this sort of split across other genres, like say paranormal romance, or urban fantasy, then you'll find a much higher proportion of KU, books compared to wide, but across all of fantasy, it's actually pretty much 50 50.

At the moment. Now there's a couple of, in the case of fantasy, there's a couple of, reasons for that. And probably one of the, the most common ones, or the most obvious ones is that, there are quite a lot of TRA published fantasy books in the top 200. Those are the ones which tend to be more wide.

So we've got a situation where kind of 50% wide, 50% KU. The KU half is mostly indie. Mostly and the wide half is much more trad. So that another, another factor, I think, for listeners is if you are interested in being trad published now or in the future, then that might affect your decisions about whether you're IN KU or wide.

Of course, Your commitment to, enrollment in KU is only a 90-day commitment, so there are always options to change things later on, and I think, we, and we'll see this when we get to the covers. I think in the past, there was a much bigger, distinction between KU covers and wide covers. It was generally believed that you sort of had to recover your books if you were going to go wide, otherwise they wouldn't sell.

I think that's much less the case now than it has been in the past. Yes,

Matty: to that conversation.

Series versus Standalone

Matty: Another piece of data that you recommend people look at is series versus standalone. And this is usually not something that people are, like, some people who are really organized are actually making this as a decision, but I think many authors, if they're like me, finish their book and then realize it's one or the other. So can you talk a little bit about when people are looking at data and using fantasy as an example, and they're looking at the series versus standalone, what are you recommending people look at there?

Nat: Yeah, sure. Well, another kind of obvious thing is that if you are in mind to write a series or you're continuing a series, then KU in some ways is a bit more appealing because if people like your work, it's very easy for them to binge and to just keep reading the next book in the series and the next book and the next book. And, as a lot of listeners will know, often, whether you're in KU or not, people in the past have priced the first book in their series quite low, so 99 cents or $2.99, in order to encourage people to take a gamble on it. And then, when you get them interested in your writing style and you get them invested in your characters, then you can carry on, you know?

However, of course, planning out a series is a lot of work, and it's quite reasonable, I think, to start, I've certainly done this, to start something without really knowing whether the world has got enough in it for you to write a compelling series, you know? I think not every long series, or even series of just a couple of books, starts out that way.

So, I think, and also, in fact, again, when we get to covers, we'll see that if you have a series that places different constraints on your cover design, because as we know, we want the covers to be linked in one way or another, and when we look at a cover montage, you can really see examples of things where there's a bunch of books in a series, and you want it to be very clear to the reader that that's what's going on.

Pricing Considerations

Matty: Oh, the pricing conversation is interesting because we're recording this in the middle of 2024. At the end of 2023, I made a change to my pricing because everything was getting more expensive. For a long time, my pricing model was that for my nonfiction books, my first in series book was $2.99 and then the subsequent books were $4.99. And I started feeling like not only is it nice to get more money for each book, but I felt as if the pricing defines the books that you want to be compared with. Now many of the traditionally published ebooks are $14. There are reasons that indie authors are not doing that because we get penalized for pricing a book over $9.99, but I put up all my first in series ebooks to $6.99, and then I increased my first in series to $3.99, which I still feel as if it's a price that I as a reader am willing to take a chance on, and I think that's kind of a benefit that indies have.

I mean, it's unfortunate that we're, in a sense, being forced to do this because of the Amazon rule that if a book is priced over $9.99, then you get a lower royalty rate, but it also makes it easier for readers to say, "Oh, here's somebody that looks interesting, but I don't know them, but I want to check it out."

And having that lower cost of entry to the series, I think, is really smart.

Nat: Yeah, that's true. I think also in your case, Matty, and I know I've said this a lot in the past, your covers and your branding are very classy, so it looks like it's done by a trad house, it looks like books that should be on the shelf next to some of the famous trad mystery authors, and that's a specific branding decision, and I think it's great. Look, fantastic, I've always been a big fan of your covers, but that's one decision and there are other decisions, but I think for where you are at and for the price point that you're talking about, particularly since, as you've said and we'll see, prices across most all genres have been steadily marching upwards over the past four years or so, which is great news because of that, I think you're absolutely right that your books can stand a higher price point.

Matty: Yeah. I'm sort of fascinated with this topic lately of what. What do you want? What books do you want to show up next to yours? And when I think about the books that I would love to have my books show up next to, many of them are traditionally published, and so you're sending a message one way or the other to your audience based on the kinds of information that you're putting on, you know, the quality of your cover, but the style of your cover, and it's all messages that you're sending to your potential reader.

Nat: Yes, exactly. It's a question of a sort of visual language and the pricing and the language in your blurb and so on and so forth. So, I'd never say to any author that they have to do exactly the same things that their comp authors or comp titles do, but I would always say that you need to be aware of them because if you want to be seen next to those books and also boughts and also reads and those kinds of things and in ads, then you need to be aware of what they're doing.

And to some degree, you need to align with it. I guess that's the point I'd say you've got to align with what those, in your case, those trade authors are doing. You don't have to copy it, but you've got to not kind of go against it, as it were.

Cover Design

Matty: Well, we've been referring to cover design and I'm going to seize the opportunity to go slightly off the fantasy topic because I'm very interested in this currently. For my Lizzie Ballard thrillers, I had covers that I love. Like, when I hold one of those print books in my hand, it gives me good goosebumps because I think they're lovely covers. But what I realized was that, first of all, the subtleties that make the print covers lovely are kind of lost in the tiny thumbnails online. And then the other thing I realized is that in some ways they were almost more fantasy-esque than thriller-esque. And I'm just having them redone, and I'm starting to be a real believer in the idea that you really need to revisit your covers maybe every five years because I always recommend that people subscribe to an email newsletter like BookBub or BargainBooksy, FreeBooksy, one of those, eReader News Today, Fussy Librarian, there are many of them out there. Subscribe as a reader to your own genre, because oftentimes the trends in the cover are so starkly evident when you look at the list, and I would pull up my daily BookBub newsletter for mystery, thriller, suspense. And I was like, I don't know, my book cover isn't looking like it fits in with these books now.

And you have these trends that come and go, like for a long time with a thriller, it was the woman in the yellow jacket running away. I don't know why yellow jacket was so popular. But I finally just thought, you know, I have to stop being sort of emotionally tied to the beautiful covers that I love and say, "You know, that was fine, but it's not what I need to be doing in 2024."

Can you talk more generally about advice you would give to people on that front?

Nat: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, I mean, first I always loved those covers and I think that was maybe one of the first things I said to you when we first started talking some years ago was, wow, those are really classic covers. But yes, you're absolutely right. The thing is, new books come out all the time. And, what that means is those books, the readers read them, and those books will change readers' expectations of what is being communicated, the visual language. of particular elements or colors or devices on the page that changes over time because of course it does and so what your book, what anyone's cover is communicating in 2018 or 2019 is not what it is going to be communicating to readers in 2024.

Those things don't change overnight. And, you know, I'd never say that you have to constantly be changing your covers because I think sometimes that could be confusing as well as expensive and a lot of work. But the timeframe that you're talking about, Matty, I think is absolutely right. and you're very right that subscribing to reader-focused newsletters is a great way to see a low effort way to see what other people are doing because you can, as you say, imagine your book next to them and say, well, does it fit in?

And you, like, if you will see, I suspect, probably, you were seeing books that, if you read the blurb or the ad, they sounded like your books, they sounded like a potential comp, but the cover was completely different. So you're sort of thinking, well, hang on, this looks like my kind of book, it looks like my reader's kind of book, more to the point, but my cover is saying is speaking a really different language to this book, which is kind of coming out now.

And again, you don't have to change absolutely everything, but it pays to be aware of that. And some of the best redesigns, I think, that I've seen have been quite subtle ones, where they are updating things, but they're keeping what was good about the original cover.

You know, you can see this a lot in fantasy and in some other speculative fiction genres with the trend towards what are called discrete covers. I think maybe we've talked about this a bit in the past, that there are now a lot more covers that have objects or sort of symbolic representations of them of things on them a bit like that so the classic example I think from a long time ago was the Harry Potter books that the first editions had illustrated covers and then there were some more ostensibly more adult, images of, of symbols and things.

And you can see the difference. And they convey, they convey different things in a way that's happened for a lot of people in fantasy now. And in fact, if when we look at a montage of all of fantasy books, we can see a lot more of those discrete object style covers. that, that they often include things about the, the nature of the story.

And they also just going back to the issue of, series. a discrete or object style cover often makes it quite easier for you to have a common through line in terms of the same, having similar elements or complementary elements on a particular series. So if you've got a series of objects or whatever.

Matty: Yeah, the Harry Potter one is interesting because my guess is that when they were first putting out the first book, and it was very much targeted at children, that they came up with that illustrated idea, and then they had to kind of carry it through, but then I think when they realized what appeal that had to adult readers.

They wanted to readjust it a little bit to make it less like, not cartoonish, but more serious. I'm not coming up with exactly the

Nat: something, something, yeah, absolutely something that somebody in their sort of 40s would be more likely to go into a bookstore and pick up. yeah, you're absolutely right. But I think also, if we look at the history of all of the covers of a sort of a very famous book or book series, we can see these changes as well.

So, one reason to change covers, of course, is to appeal to a different market segment. But another one is the thing that you were saying about your books that, even if you're trying to appeal to the same people that you were five years ago, their expectations have changed because of all of the other books coming out.

And now, just looking at the cover montage, now we can see that, fey or books about, fey or elves will often have these kind of symbolic discrete covers, whereas in fantasy lit RPG books will often have more cartoon, illustrated type covers, actually more similar to the old Harry Potter books in some ways.

Matty: And we're going to be talking eventually about an easy way people can see all this information, but a good available resource for people would just be to go to your favorite online retailer, go to your genre, look at the top, however many books, top 100 books or whatever, and try to picture your book cover among those and see if it makes sense to you, visual sense to you or not.

Nat: Yeah, absolutely. It's okay with you, Matty, in the show notes, we'll list a couple of free tools, which I've got, which will make it very easy for you to just download that kind of information. So to download a cover montage and the simplest things, you know, if you're very short on time, then the things that I would recommend would be one, as Matty says, sign up to relevant newsletters in your genre. Scan them, because that's what your readers are seeing, and the other one is go to the relevant top 100s in your genre, download the cover montage, and just look at that. That's a very short job every week, and once you do it for a month, you'll start seeing a whole lot of little changes, and those changes can be quite profound.

Matty: Maybe a good news for indie authors is that something I've noticed in my BookBub emails is that I'll see the same authors come up, over the course of a month, over the course of a couple of months, the same authors pop into those. And the covers from book to book are very similar, the overall design is very similar. In a sense, almost identical, but maybe the colors are slightly different. I'm following this approach with the updated covers for the Lizzie Ballard books, but rather than a cover designer having to start from scratch each time they do a new book in a series, it seems as if readers are accepting of and maybe even looking for more consistency. So you make a few tweaks from cover to cover, but the designer isn't having to start from scratch each time, which I think could be a more efficient and more cost-effective way of indie authors getting covers in, you know, if what I'm saying is true.

Nat: Yeah, you're absolutely right. And in some situations where you have serials, that is, and by serial I mean a story which follows essentially the same group of characters over perhaps three or four or even more books, and there is sort of an overall story arc and the focus is on that, which we do, we see in a number of situations. So, at the moment, short romance, just to take a quick look. Diversion, Short Romance, has a few different segments in it. Some of it is the sort of fairly steamy instant attraction thing, but there's also, and this is from fairly recent, quite a lot of serials which have very, very similar covers. And the reason I bring this up, Matty, is to pick up on your point about the similarity of covers. in that situation, the covers are so similar that I actually thought they were all the same cover, from a distance, you know, in a montage or in the sort of thumbnail size thing you get in an ad, they all look like the same book, and it's not until you, and it seems to work, but, it's not until you actually look at the thing, that it will sort of say, you Book five or book four or something like that. So the focus there, if you're a serial writer, is much more on reinforcing the brand of the serial as a whole. And of course, a lot of them are in KU. So it's easy for people to pick up The next one and the next one and to keep reading, you know, to reinforce the brand of the serial as a whole, rather than to differentiate the books in the serial, you know, because if people come to the book and they think, Oh, hang on, this is book five, and I haven't read book three yet, they're just going to go back to book three, they're much less likely to kind of give up. So different, I think the take-home message that I'm trying to get to there, Matty, is that, your choices, listeners' choices about, cover design, whether it's for stand-alones or series, are affected not only by your comps, but also by the reading habits of people in your genre. whether they prefer to read, sort of, long books, or whether they prefer to read IN KU, or wide, or whatever.

Matty: Yeah, I think another good takeaway for people would be, whatever tool they're using, whether that would be, email, like BookBub emails or other tools, that when you see a cover from an author that you would consider a comp author that you really like, just copy that off into a little, you know, a little, book. electronic bulletin board because, it's, it can be very informative. That's how I ended up landing on the redesign that I wanted because I started seeing this emerging, trend in thriller type covers. I'm like, oh, that's pretty cool. And so I, you know, collected half a dozen that I really liked, and I was able to send that to my cover designer and say, I

Collect Best Practices in Your Genre

Nat: Yeah, well, that's good. I mean, one per five years, that's probably okay. Yeah, absolutely. So keep a, another great tip, I think, for listeners is to keep a crib file, like a file of all the things that you like, which are relevant to you in terms of your comps, terms of phrase, advertising taglines, loglines for books, and also covers, of course. Sign up to one of those free services like Notion or Airtable, and you will quickly, if you do that sort of once a week, end up with a whole lot of stuff that you can use to start making decisions. Because I think in the past when I've tried to recover things or rewrite my blurbs, I've started from a blank slate, and that was a long way up the hill, if you know what I mean, whereas if you've got a bunch of other stuff that people are doing and you think, "oh, that's cool," or "wow, I wish I'd come up with that," that makes it that much easier for you to get into the groove of what it is you're actually trying to do.

Study Genre Conventions for Blurbs

Nat: When you're rewriting blurbs, because we, I know we haven't talked about blurbs very much this time, Andy, but again, that's a thing. Blurbs drift. They change just the same way covers do and for exactly the same reasons. So they are something that's worth revisiting periodically to see what the other blurbs in your neighborhood are saying to readers, you know, and they're also arguably cheaper and easier to work on than covers.

Matty: One of the things that I've seen that's very interesting is when, like, ChatGPT started to be all the rage. And I would do things like I would take my existing blurb and put it into ChatGPT, and I would say, like, rewrite this as in the style of a best-selling thriller or mystery or suspense novel. And, you know, a lot of times the information I got back was quite good. But I realized that there's like an identifiable ChatGPT style. And so it's just an argument for using these things as a tool, not for the final product, because what I did find is that I would think like, "oh, that's a word, like, it's using a word that I hadn't thought of." I'm going to incorporate that word. But I think as people get more sophisticated about it, I think it's a good look at the kinds of information that AI platforms like ChatGPT put out, then they're going to read something and it's going to be clearer that, where it's coming from, because there would be, like, there were very identifiable ways that it would close out the blurb. And, and it sounded okay to me the first time, but after I read three or four, I was like, "yeah, no."

Nat: In stats, it's called regression to the mean, Matty. And a lot of those LLM text generation things, it's very much regression to the mean where, it looks good the first time and looks pretty good the second time and then you do it a few times and you start to look in the store and you realize how many other blurbs are like that and you're like, "wait a minute, you're not being as creative as you kind of implied you were, buddy." So yes, absolutely a great way to help if you're creatively blocked, but generally much better if you use it as a starting point rather than as an ending point.

Soliciting Input - Ask People to Rank a Selection

Nat: The other tip that I have, if you don't mind me mentioning, Matty, which I know I've mentioned before, is when I get people to evaluate stuff, I never send one blurb and say, do you like it? Or tell me what's wrong. I always send them three. Not two, but three. And I say, rank these in the order that you prefer. And this has a bunch, yeah, this has a bunch. Now, maybe one of them is your real one and two of them are kind of crappy ones that you just got ChatGPT to do. Doesn't matter. Don't tell anyone that. Just present them neutrally, but the reason I do this is because people often find it much easier to rank things in order of their preference than to say specifically that they do or don't like something because in a way, saying whether they do or don't like something is a little bit of an emotive decision, you know, and if you don't like something, then it's sort of incumbent upon you to articulate why, a lot of people don't like giving feedback that is along the lines of, I don't really like this, but I've got no idea why. And yet, that's actually a valid feeling, particularly if it's something that a reader might have. Whereas, if you give your blurbs to five people, and they all rank a particular blurb bottom of three, probably don't use that one. Like, whatever else is going on, that's probably not the blurb you want to use, you know, if there's one, what I find usually is that there is one that everyone dislikes, and sometimes it's the one that I thought was good, and rarely there is one that everyone thinks is the best, and in that situation you go with your own intuition and your experience and stuff, but yeah. I hope that helps.

Consider the "Key Topics" of Your Genre

Matty: Yeah, that's great advice. When we were talking about, we haven't hit, I haven't given you a chance to talk about fantasy books specifically, very, but I think that the generic stuff is great because then this, everybody can apply it to their own. Circumstances, but this is one where we might want to, we might end up diving into fantasy as an example a little bit, but you had said key topics is another piece of data people should be looking at.

Nat: Yeah. Absolutely. So one of the things that I've spent a lot of time thinking about is trying to understand what's in a book that is resonating with readers, we use words like tropes, and archetypes, and settings, and themes, and so forth, and those are all, they're all perfectly valid words, and I use them a lot, but for me, they're all trying to answer the same question, which is, what's in this book? What am I going to get when I read it? And our blurbs, of course, are one of the main things, as well as the title and the cover. Those are the instruments by which we signal to readers what you're going to get, what's the emotional experience you're going to get when you, you pick up a book. Readers have their own language about doing this, and it's not always the same one that we do. And it's very genre specific. I think that's maybe a bit of a statement of the obvious, but one of the things that I try to do when I'm looking at a genre is to say, what does this specific word mean in this genre? So to give you an example, I'm looking at the fantasy, a list of sort of key topics in the top 200 fantasy books at the moment. And I'm seeing some, like, there's some kind of obvious ones like supernatural and dragons and fey and elves and yeah, it's not surprising that those, but I'm also seeing an interesting one, which is military. And the reason that I, I've sort of collected these things together is to get a general sense of what's going on. So in this case, in the fantasy books, if a book has any mention of military units, So, I don't just use general words or military words, so generals and corporals and captains or battalions or, you know, strategy, those kinds of things. I kind of group them all into one topic. So what I'm trying to do is to get a general sense of what's going on. in the case, this was coming, came to me this morning, the use of those military words in a fantasy blurb, it means something different to the way it might mean something in, say, a mystery blurb. So, if you see military words in a fantasy blurb, I think that's more likely to imply that there is

Assessing Your Genre Assignment

Matty: But I think the other thing that's always important to point out is you may have picked the wrong genre. I think that writers are notoriously bad at understanding their own genre because they're writing from their heart. Many writers are writing, "Oh, I want to write a military fantasy book," but some are just writing a story, and then they're stepping back and saying, "What is this?" And so if you're stepping back and looking and you're seeing a disconnect, maybe it's not a matter of changing what you're doing to match what you thought were the comps. Maybe it's a lesson that your comps are different than you thought. And if your blurb or your tropes or your cover is looking more like something else, maybe you just need to recategorize the genre that you've put your book in.

Nat: Yeah, totally. The way that I would put it is that at the moment it might be that the current conventions and reader expectations of that genre are not a fit for the story that you're telling. And it might be that other conventions and other expectations in another genre, at the moment, are better because we know that genres are constantly on the move, and reader expectations are constantly on the move. And so it doesn't mean that your book is doomed. It doesn't mean that it's never going to find a readership. It just means that the expectations of what people, what's resonating with people right now in that area, aren't a fit for what you're doing. So, there are a lot of other areas, and sometimes it can take a bit of work to go and find those other areas, you know?

The Neighborhood of Your Books

Nat: Maybe this is where I can talk about this concept that I've been thinking of to do with a neighborhood—that is, the neighborhood of your books is not just your genre or your subgenre, and it's not just your comps. For me, it's actually the things that make your comps and your subgenre what they are. It is the language that people around you, your authors around you, use in their blurbs. It's the visual elements that they use on covers to signify particular things. So, we'll be able to see that a visual element in one genre signifies one thing. Same visual element, different genre. Different signification.

It might also, your neighborhood, as an author, might also include some of the other products that your readers are interested in. So for instance, if you have a fantasy reader, they are much more likely to be interested in fantasy TV shows, so your neighborhood also in that case includes fantasy TV shows. It might also include podcasts or videocasts about fantasy. Now, I'm not saying all of this to sort of overwhelm listeners and to say, "Hey, you've got to spend all your time keeping up with all of this other media rather than writing," but rather to think of, to encourage people to think of their neighborhood as being kind of a broad thing, which includes the books that people are reading, but it also includes the language that they're using and what emotions are being triggered when they read books, for instance. And my argument, the reason why I'm talking about this, is because I think the important business decisions are actually made in that microenvironment. They're actually made in your neighborhood, much more than about the generally what's happening in your genre, so in mystery or in fantasy, there will be some big trends, but, my argument is actually it's the little trends, the things that are happening close to you, which are the ones that really affect the day-to-day business decisions you make as an author, like your covers, your example before, Matty, of how your reader expectations for books like yours have changed in terms of covers. That's a great example because if you were just looking at all mystery books, that might not be so obvious, you know?

Using Categories to Educate the Retail Platform

Matty: So, we've been talking, I think that the conversation about neighborhood is hopefully a good entree to the last topic I wanted to discuss, which is categories. So, I can imagine that neighborhood and categories have a connection, but how direct is the connection between those two concepts?

Nat: Yeah, well, I mean, a lot is discussed about categories on the Kindle store, and on the wide stores as well, although generally the wide stores don't have the same level of detail, I think, in terms of how many categories they have. Whether that's a bad thing or not, I'm not sure, but sometimes I think it's not a bad thing at all. But, one thing's for sure, there are a heck of a lot of categories on the Amazon store, and they are, the way I see them, is actually they're a way of teaching Amazon what books your books are like. They are the most direct way of teaching Amazon about your comps, and I think that's why they are important.

I think they're less important in the sense of an objective description of what's in your book. I think what matters is when you're looking at categories, where are the books that you want to be next to? Those are the categories that you should be in, even if the label on top of the category isn't quite how you'd describe your book. I would urge listeners to take a pragmatic approach and say, "Okay, well, this category, when I look at the top 100, or I follow it for a bit, I see that this category includes a lot of my comps and the language, the visual language and the language of blurbs in this category, is a fit for what I'm doing." So that's the category for me, even if the name of the category isn't what you personally see as being your book, you know, because ultimately all of that metadata is a way of teaching Amazon who to show your book to with the greatest chance that they're going to like it. When we look at a lot of these categories, a lot of them are actually pretty arbitrary.

Just looking at fantasy, obviously, most books in the top 200 in fantasy, have at least one category in fantasy, but there are also a fair chunk, so what, 25 percent of them have a romance category as well. A bit more than 25 percent are in one of the literature and fiction categories, so mythology and folk tales and so on and so forth. Now, is that where you want to be? Well, that depends, but it's always worth looking at the other categories that are kind of around yours, and you know, listeners I'm sure know that when you go to a book on the Amazon store, you can scroll down, and when you go about halfway down the page, you'll see the three top-ranked categories for a book. Again, I would put those in your crib file that we talked about a little bit earlier and make a note of those categories and go and investigate them when you can, because you might find that there are some other categories, as well as the obvious ones, which are a good fit for your book.

Matty: That's great. Especially now because I think that Amazon's trying to get its hands around this idea. You had suggested that maybe more categories isn't necessarily a good thing. And some of the changes that they're making, recently, I think, suggest that they also agree that more categories are not necessarily a good thing. And I think it's an incentive for people to think about it more carefully than maybe they would have in the past.

Nat: Yeah, well, I think maybe what's happened is that there was a huge explosion of them when ebook reading took off. And so they were added a lot. I don't know, Matty, if you've ever looked at all of the categories under mystery thriller and suspense, like the thriller ones and stuff. Boy, there are a lot of them. And boy, I don't know what the difference is. And I mean, you could sort of invent one, but then you go and look, and in actual fact, in the top 100 or 200, there's a lot of overlap. So what that's telling me is I don't think readers really know either, but it doesn't change the fact that at the moment, the important thing to do is go and find the ones where your comps are most likely represented and find the ones that are within your neighborhood and stick with them. It may be that there will be a reduction in categories in the future, because I don't think that readers really browse by category. I think this is, you know, pure speculation, but I think that most buying decisions are made by books being shown to readers, and the things that we talked about before, the visual language of the cover, the language of the blurb, those are the things

that make a reader give a buying decision. I don't believe that many readers come to new books and new authors by browsing categories. So they're still important, but they're important indirectly rather than directly, because they can teach Amazon who our books should be shown to, so they then make the buying decision.

Matty: And I like that idea of looking at it both ways. Go to the category and see what other books are there, but then also look at the books that you consider to be comps and go backwards and see what categories they're putting themselves in. So we've talked about lots of great information, some of which would be quite labor-intensive to collect manually. So I want to give you an opportunity to talk about a less manual way that people can get the information that we've been talking about.

Nat's resources, including the Kindletrends newsletter

Nat: Thank you, Matty. So, there are a few things. First, I hope we can fit all of this in the show notes. I have a bunch of free tools for the author community that make collecting information quite easy. I've got a Chrome browser extension where you can download cover montages, and data about the Top 100, and also about your also boughts.

We didn't get time to talk very much about also boughts, but they are important when they're around because they come and go. They are a really important part of understanding what's going on in your neighborhood because they are what readers are prepared to pay money for. They don't have to be your also boughts; they might be the also boughts of your comps or also boughts of an author to whom you aspire to be like. Go and look at those when you can find them because, to me, they are the most concrete aspect of reader behavior because it involves putting down some money, and that's what really counts. So, I have a tool that allows you to download all of the also boughts from a particular book very quickly and easily.

What I also do, though, to help people keep up with what's going on in their neighborhood, is make an author newsletter called "Kindle Trends," and this is a subscription thing. I'll give you a discount code just at the end, but the idea is that you sign up, and every week or every month, I send to your inbox a quick description of what's going on in your genre of interest or genres of interest. There are 14 different ones, and you get links to everything that's trending on the Kindle store and suggestions about books to look at because they've just come out and they're shooting up the charts, and so forth. So, what I'm trying to do is to take a lot of the donkey work of research out and make it so the author can spend all the time doing the stuff that only you can do, which is reading and understanding how it fits with you.

Matty: Yeah, I'm a subscriber of Kindletrends and, just as one example, one way that I've used it recently is when I was rethinking my pricing. It was great to be able to go into the Kindletrends newsletter and see the breakdown, in the top 100, of how many books were priced at each price level. Of course, I could have come up with that eventually myself, but it is super nice just to open a newsletter and have it right there for you.

Nat: Yeah. So, my 30-second description is it is like the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times for working fiction authors. If you've got 30 seconds, you can just read the front bit, read the headlines. If you want to dig into a specific thing that's going on in your genre, then it's all laid out for you there as well. I've got a bunch of videos showing you how to do things, and some examples of how to do research in your genre, and to keep up to date. What's going on using Kindletrends as a base and all of the data there. I want to take a moment to mention this: All of the data is available to you. So, if you want to go and do your own thing, if you really like using Excel, people like that do exist. If you really like doing that kind of thing, then, hey, look, then I'm very much an open data advocate. So, I try to make things straightforward for authors. But also, if you want to know why something is the way it is, or why I'm recommending things, there are no black boxes. It's all laid out there for you, and you can go through the reasoning yourself and come to a different conclusion if you want. That's one of the things I'm really trying to advocate now, is the idea that we can have kind of roundtable discussions, in a genre community about what's going on. And we might agree or we might disagree about what's going to happen, but we've all got a common evidence base of the information that I've gathered, and I think that's really important, and it's a lot of fun too.

Nat's offer to followers of The Indy Author

Matty: That's so great. Well, Nat, thank you so much. It's always lovely to chat with you and let people know where they can go to find out more about you and Kindletrends and the discount code online.

Nat: Thanks for reminding me about it. So, I am at kindletrends.com, and that's where you'll find all the free resources, we'll put some of the links in the show notes, for listeners of The Indy Author Podcast. I have a special deal, which is if you use the code INDYAUTHOR, then you will get a 33 percent discount. So normally, Kindletrends is $15 a month flat, never changes. There's no upselling, no premium tiers. There will never be any of those kinds of things. That's my commitment. It's one price. That's it. But if you are a listener of The Indy Author Podcast, then you can put in the coupon INDYAUTHOR and get it for $10 a month forever.

Matty: Thank you so much.

Nat: All right. Thanks very much, Matty. It's been a lot of fun.

Matty Dalrymple 5/28/24 Matty Dalrymple 5/28/24

Episode 240 - The Sales Flywheel with Chelle Honiker

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Chelle Honiker discusses THE SALES FLYWHEEL, including what a sales flywheel is ... and what it is not; building a community through the flywheel; finding the nugget of humanity; the danger of teaching readers to expect free; sharing of yourself, but within parameters you set; building cyclical, not transactional, relationships; the importance of not emailing people only when you have something to sell them; and the flywheel approach to book launches.

Chelle Honiker is an advocate for the empowerment of authorpreneurs, recognizing the importance of authors taking charge of both their craft and careers. She is the co-founder and publisher of Indie Author Magazine, IndieAuthorTraining, Indie Author Tools, and Direct2Readers.com; the programming director for the Author Nation conference; and a TEDx Organizer.

Episode Links

https://indieauthormagazine.com
https://facebook.com/indieauthormag
https://twitter.com/indieauthorzine
https://instagram.com/indieauthormagazine
https://www.linkedin.com/company/indieauthormagazine
https://www.youtube.com/@indieauthormagazine

Summary

Introduction to Chelle Honiker
In this episode of "The Indy Author Podcast," host Matty Dalrymple introduces Chelle Honiker, an advocate for entrepreneur empowerment and co-founder of several platforms aimed at supporting indie authors, including "Indie Author Magazine" and "Indy Author Training." Chelle's work focuses on helping authors take control of their careers through community building and strategic marketing.

Concept of the Sales Flywheel vs. Sales Funnel
Chelle discusses the transition from the traditional sales funnel to the sales flywheel. Unlike the funnel that tends to drop customers after a purchase, the flywheel promotes ongoing engagement by creating multiple touchpoints. This model encourages continuous interaction through newsletters, websites, and merchandise, enhancing the customer relationship rather than focusing solely on transactions.

Community and Collaboration
The conversation shifts towards the importance of community within the indie author ecosystem. Chelle highlights the benefits of collaboration, such as sharing newsletters and participating in anthologies with other authors. This approach keeps readers engaged and strengthens the community, moving away from the transactional nature of traditional sales funnels.

Human Element in Marketing
Chelle emphasizes the importance of personal connection in the digital age, especially post-pandemic. With the rise of video content and generative AI, there is a significant focus on maintaining the human aspect of storytelling and marketing, ensuring that technology enhances rather than replaces personal connections.

Challenges of Free Content
The dialogue also covers the challenges associated with offering free content. Chelle argues that while freebies are common to attract new readers, they can inadvertently teach customers to expect free products, potentially devaluing the work. Instead, she suggests assigning minimal costs to content to maintain its perceived value.

Social Media and Direct Engagement
The discussion addresses the evolving role of social media and the necessity for authors to build and control their own platforms. By fostering direct relationships with readers and reducing reliance on third-party platforms, authors can better protect their data and maintain engagement.

The Power of Collaboration
Chelle talks about the power of collaboration within the indie author community. By partnering with other authors and sharing audiences, indie authors can create a more robust and supportive network. This cooperative approach contrasts with traditional competitive market strategies, emphasizing shared success over individual gains.

Listening and Adapting to Audience Needs
The podcast covers how authors can listen to their community to adapt their marketing strategies effectively. Using analytics tools and engaging with audience feedback, authors can refine their approaches to meet readers' needs better, ensuring the flywheel continues to spin effectively.

Conclusion
In closing, Chelle invites listeners to explore more about her work through "Indie Author Magazine" and upcoming industry conferences. The podcast encapsulates the essence of the indie author movement—fostering a collaborative, engaged, and adaptable approach to authorship and marketing in the modern digital landscape.

Overall, the podcast serves as a comprehensive guide for indie authors seeking to leverage the sales flywheel concept to build lasting relationships with their readers, emphasizing the importance of community, ongoing engagement, and the human element in all aspects of authorship and marketing.Transcript

Transcript

Matty: Hello, and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Chelle Honiker. Hey, Chelle, how are you doing?

Chelle: Hey Matty, I'm great. Thanks for having me.

Matty: I am pleased to have you here.

Meet Chelle Honiker

Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background, Chelle Honiker is an advocate for the empowerment of entrepreneurs, recognizing the importance of authors taking charge of their craft and careers. She's the co-founder and publisher of "Indie Author Magazine," "Indy Author Training," "Indy Author Tools," and DirectToReaders.com, the programming director for the Author Nation Conference, and a TEDx organizer. And I was recently listening to an episode of the "Author Nation State of the Nation" podcast, and I heard Chelle mention the topic of the sales flywheel. I was so intrigued by that idea that I invited her on the podcast to talk more about it.

What is the sales flywheel... and what is it not?

Chelle: What is it, and what is it not? Okay, so in the concept of marketing, we've traditionally been taught that there is a sales funnel, meaning you start at the top and you bring a bunch of people in, then you move them through a funnel until you get to an eventual sale. Traditionally, you start them over again, and you start more top of funnel activities, offering them maybe free things, then you move them to the middle of the funnel, where you try to sell them something or go deeper in the relationship until you get to the bottom of the funnel, which is an eventual sale.

What my thinking is, and what I have seen tremendously on the rise in this industry, is the advent of what's called a flywheel. A flywheel means that you have different touch points. Think of it as a circle; you have different touch points, and you might touch someone with a newsletter or a website or something, and you keep moving them around in a circle so that you have a continuous conversation with them, rather than trying to get them to a zero-sum sale every single time.

Chelle: So the importance of that is that you're continuing the conversation and you're deepening the relationship with them. You're asking them questions, you might give them polls, you might offer them some version of Patreon or Kickstarter, you might have some merch, so you're basically just keeping them in your ecosystem and you're talking to them on a continuous basis rather than just cycling them through a sales process.

Building a community through the flywheel

Chelle: I've also expanded that a bit now as I've thought about it more to include not just you participating in the sales flywheel, but also other people in your ecosystem. For example, if you think of a satisfied reader as your goal, you can offer them other books. You might have other authors that are part of that sales flywheel that you collaborate with, or with whom you have anthologies, or that you swap newsletters with, so that you're continuously keeping that satisfied reader engaged, rather than funneling through a sales cycle every single time.

And you don't really need to start over; you just continue the conversation with them.

Matty: It does feel more comfortable in the sense that a funnel suggests—and I don't think I thought about this until I heard the alternative of the flywheel—it feels like dropping people off based on a perceived sense of their value.

Chelle: Yeah, their worth, right?

Matty: Their worth, yeah, exactly. It felt uncomfortable, and I think that the way you're describing it, there's a sort of more community-oriented approach. Interestingly, both with the people you're trying to reach as readers and, as you're saying, through the authors, it's just a more comfortable way of thinking about it.

Finding the nugget of humanity

Chelle: It's a more comfortable way of thinking about it, and it's more, I think, especially with this generation, they're used to having conversations and more personal connections with folks. While email still remains incredibly important, there's also video that people are accustomed to now. They're used to seeing authors and storytellers in a much more relatable way, as opposed to just blasting; we used to call it spray and pray, right?

And back in the marketing days, we would spray out an offer, spray out a message, and you would pray somebody would come back and buy something. Those days are kind of over, I think, because people are more sophisticated, and because now, especially with the advent of technology during the pandemic, we all sort of had to find a little more nugget of humanity and more ways to relate to one another.

I also think that with the advent of generative AI, that is going to be the salvation for the storytellers who want to continue and have successful careers, because nothing can replace that humanity. If you have a connection with your reader, if you have a connection with your listener or your viewer, if you're setting them up with video, generative AI is not going to replace that.

Chelle: It's not going to replace the heart and the humanity of the person-to-person connection. It's just not. And I have great hope for the things that AI will be able to help us with to get rid of some of the busy work and the junk so that we can get back to connecting with our readers and our fans. We can connect with our stories and make sure that we're doing the thing that we love, which is telling stories.

The danger of teaching readers to expect free

Matty: Yeah. You had mentioned freebies as an important part of the sales funnel that everybody's advised to offer—a free story or novella—in order to get people on their email list. What kind of role do you think giving away content plays when you're looking at a sales flywheel instead of a sales funnel?

Chelle: So I think, I have always felt that was a tricky endeavor, because you're teaching your reader to expect free. You're basically saying, here it is for free, you're devaluing it. I don't think readers realize that our initial thought was by offering a reader magnet, a lead magnet, those things for free, we were getting them hooked. But because they're inundated with so much, we've just trained them to expect things for free now.

And I think that's backfired in a certain way for us. You know, there are different genres that have different successes, so I think it's very different for each individual author as to how they incorporate some of that. But for me and for our marketing mix, we tend to do that a little more sparingly because it's a race to the bottom, and it devalues your work immediately. So even if you offer it for 99 cents, you're still assigning a value to it, and you're still teaching your reader to value your work. And I think ultimately, that's really been one of the most important hurdles that we as indies have faced because self-published has always been equated with vanity press rather than as a marketing strategy.

And I hope that we can start to reframe that conversation so that 'indie' now means taking charge of your career as opposed to just being self-published. So an indie author could be hybrid. An indie author could be traditionally published in my world. It just literally means that you are building a business and building relationships with your readers.

So I have mixed ideas on that. I mean, coming back to the idea of the flywheel, if you do a free newsletter swap and you get all those people in there, the way our email systems are set up—because we pay for every subscriber that's on our email list—we're often taught to shed people who don't open or engage, or do something. When in fact, we might think about how we engaged with them in the first place and how can we bring them deeper into the conversation or offer them something that's a little more of value.

For example, authors could offer to show up to book clubs if they're reading their book. You can offer a little bit more of yourself, which I know is very scary, right? There are a lot of us who are introverts and a lot of us just want to write books or just want to tell stories. I get that, but I think that we're overlooking an opportunity that we might not have thought of by connecting more deeply, connecting outside of social media networks, even.

The changing role of social media

Chelle: I think social media is going to change a lot as well.

I think we're going to have to rely less on social media and more on owning our own ecosystems, our own groups, our own direct sales, our own relationships. The data of our customers will be our intellectual property that we need to protect a bit more. So, I think we need to do more business shifting and start thinking about our businesses and not be so dependent on freebies or even retailers, right?

I think those are conversations that we need to have. I think that's sort of the future of publishing—owning our own distribution network and owning our own relationships with our customers in a slightly different way.

The power of collaboration

Chelle: That also means there are opportunities to collaborate with people because we don't have a zero-sum game of selling a single widget or selling a single book. We have the opportunity to satisfy a reader as the end result, and we can partner with people we trust and other authors we trust to keep that satisfied reader happy and in that ecosystem, and keep touching them on that flywheel. It's a subtle shift, but I think it's a necessary one.

I think it's going to be something we really need to think about as we move forward because there are things that are changing, and we are, to some extent, at the mercy of some retailers. And they are great partners; don't get me wrong. They've opened up doors and they've built careers. But if they decided not to give us commission, if they decided to shut down anything, there would be many of us who would be in deep trouble because we don't have a way to contact our customers directly, which is why newsletters have always been so important. In my world, they're vastly important because you need to have a way to connect with your customers.

If Facebook shut down the ability for us to have groups, which they've already done with some features—we're not able to go live in groups anymore—we need to be able to control how we connect with our readers. That's probably the scariest part of all.

Matty: There were two things I wanted to delve into. One is that I think this idea that there's more value in the relationship between a creator and the people who are accepting their creations is compelling. I had talked about this a little bit with Jennifer Holt and Megan Haskell. We did an episode on Kickstarter, and we were talking about how there are readers out there who are browsing for their books on Kickstarter because they like that idea of not just picking a book off a shelf or a virtual shelf; they like the idea of having some kind of connection with the authors. And I think that's very appealing to authors.

And then, kind of contradictory to that is this idea that you have to sort of be more putting yourself out there more if you're pursuing a sales flywheel versus a sales funnel approach. Do those feel contradictory to you, or do you have advice about how people can get over any part of that feels uncomfortable to them?

Sharing of yourself, but within parameters you set

Chelle: I mean, there are ways to... I think one of the things in social media is that we think that we're seeing an entire video of someone when actually we're just seeing the highlights. And so, everybody can choose what to put out there and what to say and how to say it. You don't have to give 110 percent of yourself all of the time.

You don't have to show your children's faces. You don't have to show your husband's face. You don't even have to, you could use initials, right? So, there are ways to keep some of that anonymity for yourself. And you have to choose whatever level of comfort you have with that. But I will say that some of the more successful authors that I see, for example, Lucy Score—she has a fantastic newsletter where she talks about things in a very humorous way.

And I devour her newsletters, just because they're so entertaining. The fact that she sells a book is almost ancillary to the whole reason why I read her newsletter. I like to hear about her shenanigans. And the other thing that she does at the bottom of them is she promotes good news. Those have nothing to do with her personally.

She's just created a vibe, if you will. She's created a network of positivity and engagement and lighthearted things. So she'll say, you know, here's something that happened that was really good. Here's a dog that was rescued, or, you know, there's really good things happening in the world, and she is perpetuating that without... She wouldn't have to do all of the things that she does, and no one should have to feel like they're sacrificing themselves on the altar of their readers. But there are ways that you can connect and create a persona that is very viable and engaging and worthy of it.

One of the things that we've done at "Indie Author Magazine" is we created an avatar. Her name is Indy Annie, and all of our newsletters come from her. We've created her as a slightly drunk agony aunt that gives advice, and she's an amalgam of all of us. There is someone that actually writes the advice columns, but her articles and her advice letters are hilarious, and they're so much fun. But we've chosen to make all of our newsletters come from her, so you know, there are ways to do that.

I know there are other authors that have personas, right? They have, I have a friend who writes mystery thrillers, and she has a hat over her eyes, and it's a bit mysterious, so she doesn't show her face. I have another who writes cozy mysteries, and she has a cute little spyglass over her face, and it's an avatar, so there are ways to do that.

You don't have to put yourself completely out there, and again, you don't have to be a Kardashian and overshare absolutely everything. But I think the opportunity is that indie authors don't have PR staff and don't have publicity teams and don't have gatekeepers. You have the ability to connect directly with your readers. So you can show them the highlight reel. You don't have to show them the behind-the-scenes.

Building cyclical, not transactional, relationships

Matty: It does seem like another key difference between a sales funnel and a sales flywheel is this idea that the funnel feels transactional, whereas the flywheel, not surprisingly, feels cyclical. Wheel, cyclical. How would you recommend that authors internalize that in their own reader outreach processes? Like, are there steps people should take, or red flags they should watch out for, that would point them in one direction or the other? Oh, you're going to have a better result, you're going to develop a better relationship with your readers if you approach it in a less transactional way. Do you have any tips there?

Don't just email people when you have something to sell them

Chelle: Yeah, so I think the biggest tip is don't just email people when you have something to sell them. And that's probably the biggest mistake. I try not to be prescriptive and say do this and not do this, but I can say that I see more success when people continue to have conversations. For example, if you're sharing recipes and just giving generously, not saying, "Here's a countdown timer and here's my book and it's coming, and it's coming," and having these transactional emails that lead up to it, that's priming the pump and people know when they're being sold to.

The difference is not subtle. If I'm being honest, I can see a subject line and know immediately if it's somebody interesting and engaging versus just priming the pump and getting me ready to sell something. If it says "countdown" or if it says "open now" or if there's a sense of urgency, we tend to listen to a lot of marketers, and marketing advice is great.

But I think the shift now is getting—not necessarily away from the commerce because that's important—but also focusing and prioritizing the relationship with your reader, asking good questions, giving them the opportunity to weigh in on things, talking to them on Kickstarter or other places, making one of the levels about killing off a character or saving a character. You don't have to write by committee, but there is something to be said for keeping them engaged and keeping them interested in the ecosystem and in the sphere that you have.

So, I would say, try to just analyze it and have people look at it. And if you find yourself only emailing your readers when a new release is coming, there might be a different way that you can engage.

The flywheel approach to book launches

Matty: It makes me think of a topic that I would not have expected to bring up in a flywheel versus funnel conversation, but that is book launches. I found that for the last couple of launches of my books—since I'm publishing a book maybe every nine to twelve months—by the time it's ready, I'm already onto the next book. And I became sort of fed up with launch parties and things like that. My last couple of launches were like, "Hey, I have a new book." And I realized that that was probably not the best way to do it. But as an indie author, I also feel like the real value of my books is in the backlist.

And I don't bank a lot on the backlist, so an underwhelming launch wasn't going to be a big impact for me. But do you think that there's an aspect of an indie author promoting their backlist that is better served by using a flywheel approach than using a funnel approach?

Chelle: I think, sure, especially depending on your genre, because you can thread in conversations from your backlist and maybe do a character study or maybe introduce a character or maybe have a short conversation in your newsletter about it or on social media. So you can remind people of interesting things that they have said without beating them over the head with "This is also for sale." And I think that's the difference too, is we have this run-up to a launch and so many times launch parties are meant to, I think the intent was to celebrate the launch when really it just means for the authors who are doing it, they're just beating their readers over the head with something new and they don't realize that it's not a celebration anymore.

And I think, you know, as indies, we are responsible for pushing it, but there's no doubt about that. There's no one that's going to push your book. You don't have a publisher that's going to launch a full-court press for you anymore. This is our responsibility and it's our opportunity to do that.

But again, I think if we look at the language and we start to think about how we can continue a conversation with them, bring in interesting things to engage and ask questions, satisfy them, bring in other authors and collaborate and do different things to make them feel special and included rather than transactional. I think it's going to make all the difference in the world.

Matty: Yeah, I'm realizing that one thing that had drifted off my radar screen was the idea that a launch celebration is supposed to be a celebration; it's not supposed to be a sales event. And I really like that idea. It would definitely be more comfortable for me to think about in what way do I want to celebrate the availability of this new book with the people who... And maybe attract the attention of people who don't follow me yet. That could be part of it too. But think, you know, I'm going to go on a Facebook Live with a glass of wine and I'm going to chat with people for an hour. It's a much more fun and less stressful way of thinking about it than some of the things that I see people doing for launches.

And I guess the other part of that, which kind of goes back to the cyclical idea of the flywheel, is that it's much more comfortable for me. So I have a book that's based on, its backstory is a big fire that took place in Maine in 1947, the fire of '47 in Bar Harbor. And so every October, I pull up, I find some video clips or something like that about the fire, which was a fascinating event.

And I post them. And I say, if you want to learn more, you know, I have a book with this backstory, which is much more comfortable for me and feels more organic than, than a big splashy launch for that book when it first comes out and then kind of letting it sit aside. So I think that there's a lot of nice comfort there to be had from the organicness and the non-transactional nature of this kind of relationship, this kind of flywheel relationship.

Pursuing out-of-the-box ideas for engaging readers

Chelle: Yeah, we also did a webinar the other day that talked about out-of-the-box thinking, and one of the things we talked about is, you know, if you write fantasy, instead of trying to do this big social media push, why not partner with a Renaissance fair? Why not have some of your characters cosplay and show up at the Renaissance fair, and get people to learn and know about your story and your world and bring them into your world? Instead of saying, "Here is a book I have for sale. Come read it," get them engaged in it. That's sort of one of the interesting things that we talk about in the "Future of Publishing" issue too, is the advent of transmedia, which is, you've got folks that learn about your world from alternate sources. A good example of that is "The Witcher," because it started out as a game, and no one knew that there was a book. And then there was a Netflix series, and no one knew there was a game. And so that's an example of bringing people in, and then, you know, taking them deeper or figuring out how they can learn more about your world and bring them into your fandom.

So, you know, there's lots and lots of ways to do that in very small ways, right? So you could offer a cookbook for sale, that's connected to your cozy mystery. The cookbook almost has nothing to do with it, but you know, learning about who wrote the cookbook, you know, it was a grandmother that wrote the cookbook or there's a ghost that wrote the cookbook. I don't know. Somebody wrote the cookbook, but it's tied to your story. So you've got different ways that you can make it interesting and engaging and do it out-of-the-box rather than, you know, slogging up Launch Mountain, which I think some of us just get so, it's exhausting. It really is.

So if there's a way that you can think out-of-the-box and come back to and make it fun for yourself too, how much more do you resonate with someone who's enthusiastic and engaged and excited about what they're doing? And, oh, hey, they have something for sale as opposed to, you know, feeling like you're getting beaten over the head with a credit card machine.

It's just a more organic way for you to feel better about it as an author and for them to feel better about it as a reader and to keep that connection a little bit more solid. Yeah.

Matty: I think that is an area where indie authors definitely have an edge on traditional publishers because traditional publishers are all about the launch, and I think they neglect the backlist. And I see some traditionally published authors that I follow on social media and it's like, "Oh God, I just can't look at another 'coming in a week, coming in six days, coming in five days.'"

Chelle: And it's also not their writing. It's not them writing it. It's some social media... you know, and there's nothing wrong with help. Believe me, there's nothing wrong with having people manage your social media for you or do something. But it's, again, it's that faceless transaction as opposed to how exciting it is when the author goes on there?

I live for Neil Gaiman's tweets. I live for them. He's engaging and he's charming and he answers people. And, you know, I said something one day about one of the audiobooks I love, "The Graveyard Book," which I absolutely adore, and he answered me and I was like, "I'm going to go buy 'The Graveyard Book' 74 more times."

Matty: Yes, I've listened to "Neverwhere" on audio more times than any other book I've ever read. I love it so much.

Chelle: I'm, I live for audiobooks now. It's just, it's one of the most engaging ways to enjoy stories. It's so great. So fantastic.

Matty: Especially when you're Neil Gaiman and you have that voice, and I don't bother buying anything of his books that he's not narrating. I just love his narrating so much, and I love it because, I mean, and this kind of gets back to that whole idea of letting your readers see you, that when you're listening to Neil Gaiman read a Neil Gaiman book, then you know it's the way it was supposed to sound, you know? You don't have any intermediary there. It's a direct experience with the author and there's, you know, there's very few authors that are bigger than Neil Gaiman and yet he's finding ways to make that connection to people.

Chelle: And he does. And it's so personal. And, you know, he doesn't have to—I mean, he doesn't have to—but I think he understands that the relationships, those are what feed his soul. Those are what sustain him and get him excited when someone appreciates his work and has questions about his work. And he's able to answer questions about his work. So that's, I mean, there's that is probably the most perfect example of somebody that's engaging, engaging... yeah. Organically and doesn't hide behind, you know, 16 layers of corporate.

Matty: Well, I'm going to flag Neil Gaiman on this episode and see if he notices, which is a great lead-in to another question I wanted to ask, which is, you had talked earlier about this flywheel idea being not just focused on your target reader group but a way to build a community and involve other authors in supporting that approach.

The generosity of the author community

Matty: Can you talk about that a little bit more?

Chelle: Sure. So, I think one of the benefits of this industry, again, is that we have the opportunity to collaborate with others, because if we think of the product as not being a book to sell, but if we think of the product as being a satisfied reader, a happy whale reader, somebody that reads more and more, you can't possibly satisfy that reader with just your books. There's just no way to do it. Unless, you know, unless you're Amanda Lee, who has 4,000 books or something, it's just not possible for you to be the singular person to satisfy them.

And so, if you think of your end goal as a satisfied reader, and you partner with people that you trust to offer their books or to connect them, then you develop this co-opetition of sorts, so that you're cooperating with your perceived competition. This is the only industry where you're not competing for a single sale. I'm not selling a widget. I'm not selling a sticker. I'm not selling a button. I'm selling an experience. And so if you think of that experience as broader than your one story and you think of ways that you can bring in other people to keep that reader, that fan in the ecosystem...

So for example, if you're an urban fantasy writer, you can partner with other urban fantasy writers. They're going to read more than one book. That is the beauty and the grace of this industry, that they're going to read more. And so if you think of it as putting other people on your flywheel to satisfy your reader and keeping their connection and keeping your own relationship with them at the same time, you can go... there's the saying that if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together, and that is the perfect example of it.

If you partner with others, you're going to go that much farther. And they have to have the same writing style or ethics, or they have to write a good book, they have to tell a good story. Your readers trust you to recommend good stories to them. So you do need to read it. You know, make good business decisions where those are concerned. That's where some of the great partners like BookFunnel and StoryOrigin can help you vet some of those and find some of those. Those are great resources for that, but then, you know, again, your whole goal is that satisfied reader.

So, you're never going to be sad. They're never going to be mad at you for recommending a great book to them. They're just not. They're going to be mad at you if you recommend a really bad book to them. So, be sure you're not doing that.

Matty: Yeah. Yeah, I think that aspect they were talking about, how unique the indie author community is, we kind of lose track of because we're in the middle of it. But if you think, if there was like the auto mall, you know, every city has their auto mall, their strip of auto stores, and you're never going to have a situation where someone says, "Come on down, we're having a big party, and, you know, I sell Jeeps, but across the street, there are Fords, you might like a Ford." Or, you know, there is no other industry other than the writing industry where it makes sense, it's both karmically good and business-wise good for people to be supporting each other in that way.

Chelle: It is. And I'm absolutely astonished at how generous this industry is. Constantly, not surprised anymore, I'm constantly gratified to see how generous people are. I can throw out a question to 20 different people and they're going to answer it and they're going to answer it generously, right? And they're going to open up their books or their ideas or share things. That to me is... I say this all the time, and it's absolutely true, I wake up every day and play with my best friends as a job. Like, come on, this is the greatest industry to work in. It's fantastic.

How to listen to your community to adjust your flywheel

Matty: I wanted to hit another topic on the whole idea of the cyclical nature of the flywheel; it's not linear, so you're gathering information as you're having these experiences, and so the people that you're collecting as your community have an opportunity to provide input, explicitly or implicitly, about how that's going. Do you have any perspectives on how an author should listen to their community so that they can make adjustments to their flywheel if that seems appropriate?

Chelle: Sure, so, of course, I'm a technologist, so the first thing I'm going to say is pay attention to what pages they visit on your website. Pay attention to, like, you need to own and pixel them yourself, right? So that you can ethically stalk them around and know what they're doing. That's the first thing, because those cues and those things are very important.

You can set your email up so that if they click on buttons, you get signals and you do have to pay attention to those signals and those are really helpful. So if, for example, you put out a poll, it's almost less important what they answer and more important that they even answer it all and that you're getting engagement back, so that you can see and gauge what kinds of things that you're asking them and what kinds of things you're putting out and what they're responding to.

So it's a constant, it's constantly testing things. It's always A/B testing, A/B/C/D testing, and so on and so forth. But you can pay attention to your data first. And that I think is probably the best. And it's actually the easiest starting point. So for example, if you have someone that comes to your website, the first thing you can do is you can ask them only for their email address. You're not asking them for all kinds of information. You're just asking for the lowest barrier of information, which is their email address. And then the next thing you can do is... You know, send them something that says, "I always like to acknowledge everybody's birthday. Can you send me yours? I always like to send a gift."

So then you're asking for a secondary piece of information, and you're collecting that as you go through, and you're starting to build that relationship. Then you can ask them for their first name. Then you can ask them for their last name. Then you can ask them, you know, what's the top five books that they love. So you can collect data over periods of time and collect that very slowly as you build trust with them, and then pay attention to what they're doing, and what they're reading, and what they're showing. You can offer free chapters on your website, and you can actually see, did they read the entire thing? Did they only read half of it? You can send them emails based on what they did. So if they only read half of it, you can say, "Were you able to finish this?" If they finish it, you can send them an email that says, "Hey, I noticed you finished it. Tell me what you thought." And if they tell you what they thought, that's obviously an engaged reader. You can then say, "Would you—I would love it if you would tell others about it. Here's an easy way to write a review." So you're asking for transactional things, but you're doing it incrementally as you're building that relationship, rather than just saying, "Thank you for buying my book. Here are 85 ways that you can leave me reviews. Here's my next book launch, and here's a freebie," and here's, you know, you're overwhelming them instead of building a relationship with them.

Matty: And I do think that people appreciate that, you know, in the sense of giving people value. I think traditionally the idea was, well, you give them value by giving them a free thing, but there's value in, as you illustrate, you demonstrating that you're listening to what they have to say and you're acting on it or considering it or responding back to them when they provide you with that. I don't want to take us too far down the path because obviously, we could have a whole other conversation about collecting data. But if anyone's listening to this and they're going, "Oh my God, collecting data, that's a good idea." Is there like one thing that you would recommend people do or one resource you would recommend people go to, to kind of start getting an idea of how they can tap into the data that's available to them?

Chelle: Sure. Well, obviously we have indieauthortraining.com where we sort of help people do that. So that is a free resource that we teach people and have webinars and do different things. I like Personally, I tend to not build on rented land, so to speak, so I don't use email service providers in the strictest sense. I don't use MailerLite. I don't use a lot of those others. They're fantastic. They're great to get started. I use Fluent CRM, which is built into my WordPress website, so it's free to get started. Some of the beauty of Fluent CRM is it's a free plugin for WordPress, but you don't have limits to how many emails you can have on your list. Like, some email service providers say, you know, it's free to 2,500 and then it's X number of dollars and X number of dollars, and they have that tiered system. I prefer systems that you don't charge for the numbers of people that you have on your list, so you don't have that impetus to shed people off your list, right? You don't have to be so ruthless to get people off your list.

That might be counterintuitive to what some gurus say, but That's just me. So I like FluentCRM. I also like MailPoet.com because it integrates with WordPress. And again, it's free. They do have the tiered system, but it's free for up to 25 people and inexpensive after that. The reason why I like that is because, again, your data lives on your website. It's not on a different system. It's yours, and you can do with it what you want. And you can see your data within one ecosystem and not off in others.

I have lots of opinions, Matty, don't get me wrong. I could share tech opinions all day long, but those are conversations that we have over on IndieAuthorTraining.com, which is the companion to the magazine, and we built it specifically so people could ask those weird questions and not feel like they're asking dumb questions because we have, and there's lots of people that have contrary opinions, you know, we have Tammy Labreck's over there, All the time, you know, sort of telling, no, that's not what I would do. I'm like, great. Let's figure out the best way for each individual person.

First steps to building a flywheel

Matty: Well, that's a great sort of starting point for people who are wanted to delve into the data side of it. And maybe a good way to sort of wrap up our conversation is to say, if people are similarly wanting to take one step, they're, you're, they're hearing this idea of the flywheel rather than the funnel, and it's feeling right to them. It's feeling brand right for the persona that they want to put out with, is there a step or two you would recommend people take in order to move in that direction?

Chelle: So I would start to look at the newsletters and the emails that you get and start to parse them in a different way and start to see because once you see it, you can't unsee it. Right. And once you start seeing things that you're feeling that you're being sold to, you'll start to see very quickly that they start to fall into two camps. And then you can start to start formulating your own system for, "Oh, that's something I like. I might say that in my next newsletter, or I that's something I like, I might, you know, work on that on my website." So I think the first part is just the awareness, start looking at the things that you're looking at your own email in your own newsletters and the things that you're consuming, and start to be more aware of that.

Chelle: I also, you're going to laugh, but I also think TikTok is a fantastic resource for folks to start studying some of this. They'll start to see how people engage. Now, there are lots and lots of theories about TikTok and how to do TikTok and why to do TikTok. But for me, it's probably the most interesting case study, if you will. You can see how people relate and the things that they say. There's one particular TikToker that I love. Her name is Natalia Hernandez, and she is so relatable, and she sells a million, billion, gazillion books, but she does it in such a relatable way. She asks interesting questions, and she stitches people, and she's got a great presence on camera. That's all well, good and fine, but you can start to study people that really do have that relational spark and start to think about ways that you can incorporate it. So it doesn't have to feel so antithetical to what you're doing now, right? You don't have to reinvent everything. You can just start to incorporate some of those things a little bit slowly.

Matty: I like that idea of taking a look at the things that each person relates to as a consumer and understanding that, that probably indicates it would be comfortable for you to do and therefore is the brand you want to put out there and should be comfortable for the people that you want to attract to yourself.

Chelle: Yeah, there are lots and lots of ways that you can start to move towards that without reinventing or, you know, turning the game board upside down.

Matty: So cool. Well, Chelle, thank you so much. I appreciate you talking through the sales flywheel with us and lots of other fascinating topics. So, please let everyone know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.

Chelle: Sure, so, the easiest way is to go to IndyAuthorMagazine.com, that's the baby, and also IndyAuthorTraining.com, that is our new conversation and education platform where we have lots and lots of different educators that are coming together in a space and, with support and a community, to talk about some of these things that are happening in our industry. So, and of course at AuthorNation, I'm the Programming Director for AuthorNation, so I'd love to see everybody in Vegas November 11th through the 15th.

Matty: I will be there.

Chelle: It's going to be such a great conference. I'm so excited. I can barely contain my enthusiasm for this. It's really, really great. I'm really excited about the transition from 20 books and keeping all of the great stuff that we had at 20 books for so long, I was there from day one, and now transitioning into something that serves our industry in the future, it's just, it's going to be fantastic.

Matty: Yeah, you guys are obviously putting a ton of thought and care into that. I've been interested in following that and the updates you're sending out and, the State of the Nation podcast. So, I'm going to be super excited to be there myself and see what's the same and what's different. Thank you so much.

Chelle: Thanks, Matty.

Matty Dalrymple 5/14/24 Matty Dalrymple 5/14/24

Episode 238 - The Big Indie Author Data Drop 2024 with Melissa Addey

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Melissa Addey discusses THE BIG INDIE AUTHOR DATA DROP 2024, including author income data; whether trad pub income is spikier than indie pub income; the growth of libraries; the continuing popularity of paperback; selling direct; trends in KU; the power of the backlist; behavioral aspects of indie authors (it's not what I would have expected!); the fact that indie and trad is not an either / or decision; and the importance of seeing the bigger picture (not just the shiny objects).

Until recently (when Matty took over the role) Melissa Addey was The Alliance of Independent Authors Campaigns Manager, focusing on ethics and excellence in self-publishing, as well as an author of historical fiction set in China, Morocco, and Ancient Rome.

Episode Links

ALLi's Links:
www.allianceindependentauthors.org
www.allianceindependentauthors.org/facts is where all authors can collect the latest copy of the Big Indie Author Data Drop

Melissa's Links:
This is the link for The Dragon Throne, the escape room based on Melissa's book! https://www.lockedingames.co.uk/rooms-prices/the-dragon-throne-2/

From Intro:
https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200672390#aicontent

Summary

This episode of "The Indy Author Podcast" features an interview between host Matty Dalrymple and guest Melissa Addey, Campaigns Manager at the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi). They discuss the Big Indie Author Data Drop Report 2024, author income data, and trends in indie publishing. Here are the key points:

Background of Melissa Addey
- Melissa Addey works with ALLi, focusing on ethics and excellence in self-publishing.
- She is an author of historical fiction set in different parts of the world.
- Her involvement with ALLi led to the creation of the Indie Author Income Survey, revealing indie authors often earn more than traditionally published ones.

Key Findings and Discussions
- Data Scarcity in Indie Publishing: Melissa emphasized the lack of comprehensive data in self-publishing, which motivated ALLi to conduct its own research, including income surveys.
- Indie Author Income Survey: This survey found that indie authors were making more money than traditionally published authors, with income growing 53 percent year-on-year.
- Big Indie Author Data Drop: ALLi gathered data from various organizations, revealing insights like 75% of books sold were part of a series, underscoring the commercial advantage of series writing.

Emerging Trends
- Growth in Library Revenue: Libraries are becoming significant revenue sources for indie authors, with a 45% increase in revenue.
- Demand for Diverse Characters: Readers, especially Gen Z, are seeking stories with diverse characters, reflecting a broader societal shift towards inclusivity.
- Preference for Paperbacks: Despite the rise of ebooks, there's a growing interest in paperbacks, partly influenced by social media and the tangible nature of books.
- Direct Sales Increase: There’s a noticeable rise in authors selling directly to consumers, highlighting a shift towards more control over sales and marketing.

Behavioral Insights
- Character Traits of Successful Authors: Research indicated that successful indie authors tend to be less amiable, suggesting a degree of stubbornness and resilience is beneficial.
- Positive Sentiment towards Self-Publishing: A high percentage of indie authors view self-publishing positively, highlighting satisfaction with this publishing route.

Strategic Considerations for Authors
- Series Writing: Given the commercial success of series, authors are encouraged to consider this format for their works.
- Diverse Representation: The call for diverse characters is not just about their presence but about integrating them into the fabric of the narrative in a natural, unforced manner.
- Direct to Consumer Sales: The growth in direct sales suggests authors should explore direct marketing and sales channels to enhance their earnings.

Conclusion
The conversation between Matty and Melissa provided a comprehensive overview of the current state of indie publishing, emphasizing the importance of data-driven decisions, the profitability of series, the significance of diversity and direct sales, and the positive outlook of indie authors on their publishing journey. The interview underscores the evolving landscape of indie publishing, where data, direct engagement with readers, and adaptability to market trends are crucial for success.

Transcript

Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Melissa Addy. Hey Melissa, how are you doing?

Melissa: Hey Matty, I'm doing well. Thank you for having me.

Meet Melissa Addey

Matty: It is lovely to have you here to give our listeners and viewers a little background on you. Melissa Addy is the Alliance of Independent Authors Campaigns Manager, focusing on Ethics and Excellence in Self-Publishing, as well as an author of historical fiction set in China, Morocco, and Ancient Rome. Melissa was also a past guest on the podcast in episode 150, "Hands Off Merchandising for Authors," and she was one of the contributors to my episode on "Podcasting Playbook: Navigating Guest Opportunities." That was episode 220. So, I invited Melissa back to talk about "The Big Indie Author Data Drop Report 2024."

The dearth of data related to indie publishing

Matty: So, this is something from the Alliance of Independent Authors. And I wanted to start out by asking you, Melissa, what made ALLi decide that this was something they should pursue?

Melissa: Well, it came about because there was a real dearth of data, facts, and figures on self-publishing. When I first started working with ALLi, coming from a business background, I already knew this. When I moved over into self-publishing, I wondered, "Where is the data?" In commercial life, you had to have the reports right there, and you had to have all the data in your head. If your CEO stopped you in the elevator and asked, "What are the sales like on this?" you had to have it all there, and it helped with making commercial decisions. So, I was like, "We need the data. Where is the data? How do you make proper decisions if you can't see what's happening? If it's all anecdotal, then you're never quite sure if you're just in a little bubble of your own and haven't realized what's happening on a larger scale."

Author Income Data

Melissa: And so, I started by doing the Indie Author Income Survey because one of the first things we didn't know was that we kept seeing author income surveys coming from all different parts of the world. They always indicated author income was declining. That didn't sound quite right. We were talking to many indie authors, and we also knew those surveys weren't easy for an indie author to answer because they were set up for a traditional author. Questions about your agent, your publisher, and your advance made it difficult for an indie author to participate. So, we conducted that survey last year, and the big news was that indie authors were making more money than those who were traditionally published. That was quite encouraging.

Not only were they making more, but the amount was also growing rapidly, at 53 percent year on year. That was amazing. That was ALLi's own survey, with over 2,000 authors responding. Later that same year, the Authors Guild released their figures, which absolutely correlated with ours.

So it absolutely matched that and agreed that was the case. That was a fantastic piece of information to have. Then we thought, okay, we've introduced new data, but surely there's more out there. Large organizations across self-publishing must have information, and if we compile it all together, we could have something substantial. We called this the Big Indie Author Data Drop, asking numerous organizations to share what they could. Last year's drop was amazing, providing loads of valuable data.

For example, 75 percent of books sold were in a series, both fiction and nonfiction. That's crucial information for an author to make an informed choice. Writing a standalone novel is fine—it's your creative right—but it's beneficial to know that series may be commercially advantageous. This gives you the right information to make choices. Some novels I write are standalone because that's what I want, and I'm content with that decision. However, I write others as a series because I know it's commercially smarter. Being informed in these choices is better than simply writing a standalone or series on a whim.

Last year was truly fascinating, and we've decided to conduct the Big Indie Author Data Drop annually. The income survey, however, will be every two years; it's unnecessary to do it annually when we can observe trends over time. We've just completed this year's drop in time for the London Book Fair, which has been exhausting. I wanted to share some of the fresh data that's emerged this year in various groups.

Matty: I had a question about the Income Survey, and since this was not our prepared topic, feel free to defer, but I've always imagined that if you took income information about indie authors and compared it with that of traditionally published authors, the graph for traditionally published authors would be much spikier. For example, a traditionally published author might see a large spike from an advance, followed by periods of little to no income.

I also thought it might be spikier in that a few at the top might earn vast amounts, quickly tapering off to poverty levels, which is where I would be, using magic as an analogy. Whereas for indie authors, I envisioned more of a bell curve distribution, with some earning a lot over time, others earning little, and many in the middle. Is that true? Or does your data suggest otherwise?

Melissa: That's a valid point. We tried to obtain comparable data, considering the various income surveys out there, like those from the Authors Guild, ALCS in the UK, Canada, and Australia. We aimed for alignment, ensuring that comparisons were fair. We focused on authors dedicating at least 50 percent of their time to writing and publishing. This does exclude a segment of authors, notably those who self-publish a single book, such as a memoir. We felt that including these would skew the comparison, as many people publish one-offs.

They just publish a book for their family, and that's all they ever wanted to do. And that's a difficult thing to bring into the mix. So it eliminated that and people who were just starting out because we were trying to align them to the ALCS one in the UK, which was using 50%.

The Author's Guild uses primarily full-time authors, so they report more on the full-time ones. We were trying to align somewhere like that. It is tricky to line up the data, which kind of eliminated the spike that you're talking about for the traditionally published authors. These are people who spend quite a lot of their time on this.

By this time, things like advances should have evened out a bit more because they should be getting advances, royalties, and other income streams like festivals, appearances, and book signings. That should have evened out a bit for them.

For our study, we took the median, not the mean. I had to refresh my math on this. We didn't calculate the mean, which would be to take everyone's income and distribute it back out against the number of people you had. We calculated the median, which is the middle of a range of numbers. It's the number most likely to be true for the largest group of people.

This method removes the outliers. It excludes people making multimillions and those at zero to determine what would be the most likely income for someone spending 50% of their time on this.

So, this methodology kind of evened out both aspects. It is tricky, though, really tricky to get it right. Going forward, it will be easier because we'll be able to match our data to our own, rather than comparing it to someone else's, which is always more challenging.

Thank you. I appreciate that, especially coming from someone who considers themselves non-mathematical. It's important to me that the explanation makes sense.

Matty: What were some of the most illuminating commercial insights you found that you would want to share with indie authors?

Melissa: There are three major observations I made. First, libraries are seeing a 45% increase in their revenue. For those involved with libraries, this is a significant growth area. I believe this is happening because the pathway into libraries is becoming more streamlined. Libraries are getting more accustomed to indie authors. At the beginning, there were outliers and uncertainties, but now, the process and logistics have smoothed out. Libraries are adapting to indies quickly. According to data from Draft2Digital, this is a rapidly growing area. Indie authors should explore how to get their works into libraries. That's the first point.

Melissa: The second interesting trend is the growing interest of readers in stories with diverse characters, especially among Gen Z. This younger generation is actively seeking stories that reflect their own diverse experiences and identities.

I apologize for misunderstanding your request. Here's the corrected text with direct edits for spelling, grammar, and formatting, without summarization:

Gen Zs are readers

Melissa: And I thought that was a really interesting thing to see because not only are Gen Z interested in those diverse stories, but they're really into reading. So the Gen Zs, there's been a whole spate of stories recently.

They, 40 percent of them, read every day. And I think more than 50 percent of them are reading several times a week. They like going to libraries to socialize instead of coffee shops and such. They enjoy those spaces. Possibly also because libraries, in more recent years, have really stopped being the kind of shush, shush, shush kind of place and have opened up a bit.

They have bars, they have cafes, they have spaces where you can network and talk, and nobody's going to go shush, shush, shush to you. My local library has a big networking sort of space, and they say, "Oh, we open it up for kids to come and study." So they'll come into the library, and they'll study together.

And then they're making friends and they're talking to people. And they said, it's really nice to watch that. And of course, then they're surrounded by books, and then they get more into the kind of book vibe generally. So it's quite nice to know that there's this young generation who are really into reading because presumably they're going to take that through with them, and you have to hope that the Gen Alphas that are going to be next up after them are going to continue that pathway.

So for authors, it's a fascinating thing to know that you've got an upcoming, very interested in reading group who are searching for those diverse stories. So not only do they want lots of books, but they also want them to have diverse characters in them.

Melissa: The other thing that's interesting is they like paperbacks. They want the bookiness of it. So that's interesting as well because we all went ebooks, ebooks, eBooks. They’re now kind of pushing a bit of an interest in paperbacks. And I think perhaps some of that's something to do with the physicality of it. So, things like TikTok, you have people with books in the background, holding up the books. It becomes a prop, an actual product that you talk about and interact with physically. So, I really liked that. I thought that was an interesting thing for people to think about.

And when they say diverse stories, I was chairing a panel at the London Book Fair talking with various authors about this, and it's not so much that we want diverse characters and we have to just focus on what their diversity is. It's diverse characters just doing their ordinary lives. They just want to see regular life with the diverse characters doing the regular stuff. And I think that opens it up to far more authors really because it stops being about, are you in a position to write that diverse author? Well, I am if they're running a bakery and they're just focusing on the bakery running of it.

That's what they're there for. They're not there to investigate every aspect of their diversity. They're just running their normal life. And I think that is a really important and quite positive thing for all authors to think about. Are you including diverse characters who are just getting on with their lives like the rest of your characters are doing? Put everybody in there together. That's what life's like out there. So that's a nice thing to know.

Acting on the data

Matty: It does seem like all of those are things that one would easily want to act on, such as the popularity of libraries, ensuring your books are available to libraries, and offering craft tips about diversity and evolving perspectives on what diversity means. If people are loving paperbacks, make sure they are available in paperbacks. If direct sales are proving to be popular among readers, then tap into that.

Are there any cases where you were able to look at the data in a way that said, maybe those assumptions that you would make on the surface aren't necessarily true? Or data that would lead people to say, "Oh, this is something I should be doing less of"? I recognize that might be like two questions baked into one, but something beyond the typical "Oh, I see this is popular, I'm going to do it too" response.

Behavioral aspects of indie authors (it's not what I would have expected!)

Melissa: Interesting. One thing that was interesting from the first round of data we did was about Holly Greenland, who is actually our blog manager at ALLi, doing her PhD on the behavioral aspects of self-published authors. She was trying to see if there are certain behaviors or characteristics of authors that make them more or less likely to be successful.

And the one characteristic that came up as being linked to success, so none of them were linking except for this one thing, which was not being amiable. I was like, "Sorry, what?" And she's like, "Yeah, self-published, successful authors are not amiable people." We really laughed about that, but then we kind of broke it up a bit.

We're thinking, what is that about? I mean, really, it's about having a bit of stubbornness. It's keeping going on the days when you get a crappy review or when there's another thousand words to write or the editor sent you back something and you got to do all that work.

It's keeping going. It's not always being nice. It's not always everything being sweetie pie and hunky-dory. Sometimes you got to be a bit stubborn and have a thick skin and keep plodding on. And I just thought that was quite funny sometimes. I thought on the days when you feel like you've been too abrupt with someone because you have to keep your word count or whatever.

Sometimes you have to not be as amiable, and I just thought that was a funny thing. So that was a fun one that came out.

Indie authors are positive about indie publishing

Melissa: On the whole, what was interesting was that self-published authors are very positive about self-publishing. Ninety-three percent of them were saying it is a positive experience for me.

That's a very high percentage in an area where we know it's not easy. You have to work pretty hard at it. But the positivity was a really interesting aspect for me because I thought people could say, "It's really hard" or "It takes a long time to get things moving."

But actually, the overall response and feedback on how they feel about self-publishing was very positive. So that was good to know—that it's overall a positive experience for indie authors.

Matty: What you were saying about amiability is, I think, especially funny because of any profession I've ever worked with, I think indie authors are among the most generous. So, that lack of amiability, the examples you gave totally make sense to me, but,

Melissa: On the surface, it sounds quite funny. It sounds like this must be this terrible, curmudgeonly group of people, but they're not. Like you say, they're very generous, very open-hearted about sharing what's worked for them, what they think might work for others, cheering each other on, all of that. But somewhere at the core, there must be a core of non-amiableness that keeps you going on the tough days, I think.

The other thing that's come out that's really interesting is that younger authors, the under 45s, are now making self-publishing their first choice. It is not plan B anymore. It's not, "Well, I tried traditional publishing, and it didn't work, or I couldn't get the agent, the publisher, whatever."

And the reasons why—Authors Guild found that, but also in Holly's work, she was finding that when there was a list of reasons why authors chose self-publishing, a lot of it was around creative control and the higher royalties. And "I couldn't find an agent, or I couldn't find a publisher" was really low down on the list.

That was beginning to show that actually more and more people are informed about all the options available to them and are choosing self-publishing, which is a good thing to know. This is presumably also helped by the fact that other indie authors who are already in the game are being positive about it.

Indie and trad is no longer an either/or

Matty: And I think that these kinds of collections of data will either become more complicated or less complicated depending, or maybe both. In the past, there used to be a very clear divide: indie versus traditional, or I'll even say self-publishing versus traditional. I don't like the phrase self-publishing, but that's what it was.

It was yourself or it was a company. And I think, especially as authors start doing both, you know, the idea that someone is not just an indie author, but someone who has chosen an indie route for this particular book and when the next book or series comes along, they're going to make a business decision about that book or series.

And that focus on what you're doing with a particular piece of content, not what you're doing with your entire writing career. Do you think that will make it easier or more difficult to gather and assess this kind of data?

Melissa: Well, it's harder to gather the data because, even book sales, which are still not being tracked by the big book tracking organizations, are a struggle because you can't just go by the ISBNs, just track them. Some people aren't using the ISBNs, and some people are selling direct.

So, there's a lot of lost data out there, which is a bit of a shame. On the other hand, I think as people get better at self-reporting, so they're more able to go, "Well, I do this and this and this." If you can follow what the big trends are, then you know the right questions to ask.

We now know that we need to be including that selling direct data in there, because that's going to become quite a significant part of the information out there. So that is part of why we went direct to authors, because we thought, actually, there's a lot. It's no good anymore just asking a particular platform.

A particular platform can give you a big picture of what's a big trend happening, but you will never get the full picture of what an author is making, except from that author. So, yeah, it's complicated, but if you're watching the trends, it does help you to ask the right question and hopefully to gather the right data, which is always a useful thing to do, I think.

Matty: Were there any other insights you got in addition to the treatment of diverse characters, the inclusion of diverse characters that were more craft focused? Well, I guess, in a sense, that thing about standalone versus series is sort of a combination of craft and business, just as you were saying.

Trends in KU

Melissa: Yeah, there's an ongoing thing around going wide and Kindle Unlimited, which every time I see data, I think, "Right, for once and for all, I will definitely see which way to go." And every time, it's like, "Well, there's a lot of info on this, and there's a lot of info on that." And I'm like, "Oh, listen back to it again."

I mean, on the one hand, Kindlepreneur and K-lytics both did some interesting data on Kindle Unlimited, and they were talking about how Kindle Unlimited has a lot of the big best-selling books. So when you look at the top 400 that is happening with Amazon every year, a huge and growing percentage of those are part of Kindle Unlimited. That, though, does not tell you what's kind of hot and new, which is sort of the point of Kindle Unlimited.

The power of the backlist

Melissa: The point is to have exclusivity of the new stuff that comes out. But it doesn't, of course, take care of what's happening with all the back catalogue.

And as a lot of us know, the back catalogue is where a lot of the money is in the long term, because every new book is only new for a very short period of time, and then it moves into the back catalogue, and that's got a really long running tail to it. And actually, I think indies do much better with their back catalogues because they don't just focus on that launch.

They don't go, "It's the make or break for three months and then that's it." Like, well, no, that's your launch bit. And then after that, it's got a long life. It's got a long life after you're dead. So, you know, never mind the bit where you're still alive and can look after it and make it interesting.

That would be a really interesting thing to see studies on how much money the backlist of a traditionally published author makes, maybe in comparison to an author who is in the indie ranks.

Matty: But I would bet exactly what you're saying, like, when I describe the four C's of indie publishing, they are creativity, control, care, and cash, and the care is care of the backlist, because I feel intuitively that that is true, a benefit that indie authors have over traditionally published authors, but I don't know that I've ever seen any data about that.

Melissa: No, that's an interesting one to think about. And I love the idea of back catalogs and also what happens after you're dead. I mean, we asked a whole load of it. It was part of the author income survey. And it was only a quarter of them had a will which mentioned their literary estate in any way, shape, or form.

And, you know, you think that's 70 years of sales if someone were looking after it. I do like to talk about this sort of thing. Georgette Heyer, a big romance Regency author, has been dead now for 50 years, still with 20 years left to run. If you watch how her back catalogue is being managed, it's really clever.

You see how the covers are changed regularly, how the quotes on the front, the kind of testimonials, if you like, are updated—they change up who's saying them so that it's someone new and relevant and not someone you've never heard of who apparently was a big deal back when it was first published.

Every time "Bridgerton" comes out, a new series, whoa, the sales spike for the whole of the historical category. Lord knows what they're like for Georgette Heyer. Here, they must really spike anything. Someone is doing a very good job of looking after that back catalogue, which you could have just let sink.

You could have just gone, "Well, whatever." But no, there's a lot of books there and someone's doing a really good job looking after them. And I think all indie authors should have a little bit of a think about what's going to happen later on in life and what's going to happen when they die and what will happen to their literary estate.

And go have a look at Georgette Heyer. Go see how well you can look after a series and what kind of money that might make for your estate. I think it's...

Matty: I think it was a conversation that I either had with Orna or Michael LaRon about this very thing, and I was saying it seems as if there's a maybe newish profession within the indie author sphere of people whose entire job is to take care of your books either after you've died or maybe even just after you've stopped wanting to muck around in it, and you want somebody else to take care of it, kind of like an agent.

I actually just talked to David Morris, who is an agent, but he's a very forward-thinking agent who is welcoming of what the indie publishing industry brings, and I think that he's doing somewhat different things for his clients, depending on what their publishing approach is, obviously, but that there is this specialty of taking care of books after the author is either not there anymore to do it themselves or just not interested in doing it themselves anymore.

Melissa: Yeah. Oh, I think there's a lot of scope for that and I don't think it's quite taken off yet, but like you say, it should really. At ALLi, we have two books for our members which are all about how to write that literary estate and a sort of handbook for your heirs to go here.

This is what you do when someone leaves you a pile of books and you're supposed to take care of them. But I think that's definitely a publishing service that could develop because when you get older and you semi-retire, you should write yourself a kind of process Bible that says, this is how often you should update the covers, this is the target audience.

The power of a solid foundation

Matty: Well, there was one other, I'm going to hold it for the moment because I think it would be a good wrap-up comment, but were there any other things that struck you and especially things that you saw losing popularity in the sense that you would want to alert indie authors that maybe this is something that they shouldn't be keeping at the top of their priority list anymore?

Melissa: That's a good question. I have not seen things going down. It just all goes up to do more and more things all the time. I said this to one of them the other day, and I was like, "There's always something else to do." And yes, there is always something else to do.

I have not seen anything really going down. I think, and you sort of slightly touched on that just before. I think authors who grow find more and more interesting income streams and platforms and outlets for what they're doing, and not only do they find things like, you know, at the beginning, we say to everyone, you must have a mailing list.

You must have subscribers. You must, you know, and at the beginning, it may seem like, well, I'm not sure they're really doing anything. This doesn't seem to be whatever, but actually, Kindlepreneur showed that selling direct was a lot better the more subscribers you had on your list. They literally had a chart showing you have this many subscribers.

You get this much money. You have this many subscribers. So that was an interesting one. and then also, I think, things like Kickstarter and Patreon become bigger the more you're linking, the more you've got those subscribers, the more you've got those different projects to play with. And then you start getting into, as you were saying, what do you do with each book that comes out or each series that comes out?

What pathway do you take for it? And it isn't even just Shall I go trad, or shall I go indie? It's even more split up than that. It's what shall I do with the paperback? What shall I do with the audiobook? What shall I do with? And it's each individual format you can tease out more and more into all its different component parts and think to yourself, what happens to the licensing rights for each one of those?

Do I look after them? Do I hand them over to someone else? Shall I do, you know, and that, that means that the more successful you are, the more options you have to split out into those tiny parts. Rather than the old model of here, you have everything, and you sort it out. That's a really old model now.

I don't think many people do that anymore. And certainly not the successful people. They're really splitting it down to the fine details, and each one of those, they're considering, would it be better this route, or would it be better that route? And I think that is where the success comes from is really thinking through all your options for each potential, you know, creative use of that IP.

Acting on the data

Matty: Yeah, I think this idea that every report seems to put more work on the indie publisher's plate and not take much away is just the nature of a still maturing and growing career in the industry. But I can see an analogy where, you know, I think we've gotten past the point where, and this is one of the reasons I don't like the term 'self-publishing,' because it sounds like a terrible thing.

You're doing it all yourself. And I think most professional indie publishers now recognize that they are wordsmiths, not visual design professionals. So, they should really get a visual design professional to produce their cover. Nobody can effectively edit their own work.

So they really need to get a professional editor. I know for myself, I just know I'm not a numbers person. So I finally got to a point with my business where I said, I'm just going to hire somebody else to take care of it for me because I recognize I'm never going to be able to handle that side of things as effectively as I could.

And I think that what is now a growing pool of data sort of suggests another area where people maybe need more help because I see lots of pieces of data about this is becoming more popular, this is becoming less popular, 57 percent of authors are doing such and such. And a lot of times my response is, that's fascinating, but I have no idea how to act on that.

Beyond the obvious things like, oh, yeah, I should still offer a paperback book. And, you know, this is another way I can imagine there could be an evolving profession out there that is, I'm looking at the pool of data and now I'm boiling it down for you and I'm saying, you know, I understand the details, but this is how you should act on it.

Do you have recommendations for people who are looking, not just to understand the data better, but then to understand how they should be acting on it?

Melissa: Well, two things. One is, download the report that we've done and have a look at it because we've made it so readable. It is very, very readable. It is, lots of pictures. That sounds so patronizing. No, but it's broken up. It is not a report that just goes on and on and you're going, "Where is the bit that I'm supposed to..." it's not like that.

It's very much, here's a headline figure, have a think about that now. There's another headline thing. Think about that now. And it's very much designed to be very readable and to take stuff away from it, clear directions from it. Not just go, "Lots of things are happening. Oh my God, that means there's lots more things to do."

Seeing the bigger picture (not just the shiny objects)

Melissa: The other thing I think is really important for all indie authors is to know where you're at and to do the bit that's appropriate for where you're at. I meet people and they're like, "Oh my God, they've only just started and they go, 'Oh my God, all the things that you've done.' And I'm like, but I've been doing this for nine years, nine years."

So if you're looking at my stuff and starting to panic, and I'm not even the superstars, you shouldn't be panicking because I had one book and I had 12 subscribers on my list, and one of them was my dad, and then he unsubscribed like, hello. And you know, it looks all swish when you look at the people ahead of you, you need to slow it down a little bit and do a little bit at a time. But if you have the guidance, it does help you because if you know, if right away you get told it would be helpful to you to write in a series. So just consider that each time you sit down with a new book, think about whether it could be a series.

From a creative point of view, do whatever you like, but know that this would be beneficial to you. And then, you know, know that it's good to have a mailing list and subscribers. When someone then says, "Well, you should be selling direct," and you think, "Oh my God, that's another thing that I need to set up."

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. If it's panicking you, wait a little bit because the logistics will get smoother as they always do when something new comes in. And also, while the logistics are getting smoother, you can be building up your subscribers and your books, which the Kindlepreneur people have clearly shown will make it a lot easier when you go into the direct sale.

So rather than panic and think you must do everything, think about where am I at right now? What would be the best thing for me to be putting in place so that when I get to that next bit, it will make it easier for me? I always, you know, when I talk to brand new authors, I'm always like, "Let's get the foundations right."

Do not go rushing off and trying to do something that you think looks all shiny and whatever. Let's get the foundations right because then when you stand on those, they'll be nice and solid under you. Don't build some crumbly plastic thing, build something good and solid with bricks, you know, and then it will be easier at the next level.

And I think that happens all the way through. We are all guilty of, I do all the time, you look at the people up, up, up, up, up above you and you go, "Oh my God, how did they do that? Oh, oh, and I'm never going to catch up. Oh, and I should do all these things." But actually just think about where you've got to so far.

And, logically, what would be the next good thing to, to move up to? I do like having data because otherwise, I think you, you're just looking at the shiny stuff and you think you need to do all of that immediately. If you have the data in front of you, you can go, "Okay, it looks like that's a good thing to be doing. How would I get one step closer to that?"

Matty: Yeah. My author friends will laugh because I'm currently on a campaign to get people to stop saying "just," and one of them is, "I'm just going to self-publish it." And I was like, okay, that pains me for so many reasons. But the other thing I hear is that I think that we're surrounded by the superstar stories.

And if we're talking about email newsletter subscribers, then, you know, the "I only have 12 subscribers," it's, no, you have 12 subscribers. You can't expect to sell a thousand books off the 12 subscribers, but, you know, you have 12 subscribers, and I've even heard people saying like, "Oh, I only have 15,000 subscribers," and I'm like, That really makes me feel like lying down and taking a nap, you know, because now, it's like inciting comparisonitis. Now you've seen what the superstar is doing, and you think, "Oh, well, obviously I should have 15,000 subscribers," and so, I think a real benefit of having the data and not just the window dressing can really help people make more realistic assessments of their career and where they want to head it.

Melissa: Yes, yes, I think so. And I think that it allows you to see the bigger picture, to go, "Okay, this is what's happening, you know, the median amount of money is this. Okay, where do I stand in relation to that? What does it look like those authors are doing? And what could I do to move forward? Closer towards that."

It's just a little bit at a time. People always have a funny way of looking at being an author compared to any other job. And I'm always like, but it's like any other job. You don't take someone straight out of school, stuff them in a job and then come back a year later and go, "Why are you not the CEO?"

Why would you be the CEO? You're making coffee for everyone and doing what you're told and doing the photocopying, you know. After a bit you'll get a little bit better and a little bit better and if I come back in 10 years then it would be reasonable to say, "How are you getting on and have you been promoted a couple of times and what have you got your eye on for the future?"

I don't expect to come back and hear that you're the CEO because even after 10 years that'd be something. I mean, you have to have a sense of comparing it to a real job. It's a real job. It's not, we have too many shiny star stories, I think, and not enough middle stories. I like the middle stories.

I like the ones where you're making the same money you were making in whatever job it was you did before you became an indie author. To me, that is a big success story because you managed to equal or go above that salary. That's great. The super million whatevers, I mean, that's wonderful too, but that's a whole other thing. It's about is it a real job? The more you think of it as a real job, the better.

Matty: And I think that people should separate in their minds the aspirational goals without denigrating what they've done. So if you have 12 email subscribers, then of course you probably want 20, but you shouldn't be denigrating the fact that you have 12 on your way to...

Melissa: And also, yeah, but also the fact that you have 12, that means you must have set up a website and a mailing list and you got some people to sign up. You've probably got some kind of reader magnet or something that's getting them onto that list because they don't just sign up for nothing. So actually that must mean an awful lot of your foundational stones are getting in place because otherwise that wouldn't have happened at all, and I think you panic less over time.

Matty: Yes, we've morphed from data discussion to therapy for independent publishers.

Melissa: There should be a podcast that is therapy published on this. There really should be.

Matty: Today's caller is worried that they only have 15,000 email subscribers.

Melissa: Yeah, today's caller is crying because their dad doesn't subscribe from their 12 subscribers. We have to talk them down, you know.

Matty: Well, Melissa, always so lovely to talk to you, as I think our listeners can tell, and I'm sure people are going to be intrigued by this report, so where can they go to download their own copy of the report?

Melissa: Absolutely, so it's at allianceindependentauthors.org/facts and you will find there both the very latest one but also scroll down the page a little bit further you'll see notices to it and get last year's one as well because we tried not to repeat, we didn't just repeat the data, we put all new data and last year's one is just as worth reading as this year's.

Matty: Thank you so much.

Melissa: Thank you, Matty. Always a pleasure.

Matty Dalrymple 4/9/24 Matty Dalrymple 4/9/24

Episode 233 - Data-Driven Publishing with Pamela Fagan Hutchins

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Matty Dalrymple talks with Pamela Fagan Hutchins about DATA-DRIVEN PUBLISHING, including business and creative collaboration with a publisher; the rise of "super indie / alt traditional”; changing one's genre or plotting approach based on the data; battling imposter syndrome; the danger of violating reader expectations and the power of targeting the enthusiastic sub-genre fan; and the value of writing between bright lines. If one of those topics piques your interest, you can easily jump to that section on YouTube by clicking on the flagged timestamps in the description.

Pamela Fagan Hutchins is a USA Today bestselling and Amazon All Star mystery / thriller / suspense author who believes in soulmates, loves to laugh, and lives out the adventures in her books at a rustic lake camp at Maine’s Mooselook Lake and in an off-the-grid lodge on the face of Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains with her husband, sled dogs, and draft horses. She was also a guest on an installment of my video series What I Learned, when we talked about her book HER LAST CRY.

Episode Links

https://pamelafaganhutchins.com
https://www.facebook.com/pamela.fagan.hutchins.author
https://www.instagram.com/pamela_fagan_hutchins/
https://www.youtube.com/pamelafaganhutchins

Summary

In this episode of The Indy Author Podcast, host Matty Dalrymple and Pamela Fagan Hutchins, a bestselling mystery thriller/suspense author. The discussion focuses on Pamela's transition from being an independent ("indie") author to signing a contract with Bookouture, a digital publishing imprint of Hachette UK. Pamela describes Bookouture as a "super indie/alt-traditional" publisher that is highly data-driven in their approach.

One significant change Pamela discussed was Bookouture asking her to write a police procedural genre instead of her previous amateur sleuth and legal thriller books. Pamela was initially hesitant due to impostor syndrome, as she had no direct experience as a police officer. However, she embraced the challenge, seeking guidance from subject matter experts like police chiefs and sheriffs to ensure authenticity and accuracy.

Another critical shift was in Pamela's plotting approach. Her previous method was more organic, while Bookouture pushed her to adopt a structured five-act structure with a strong midpoint at around 49-51% of the book. This midpoint was meant to provide a significant revelation or plot twist to propel the reader towards the conclusion. Pamela acknowledged that incorporating this structural change was initially difficult but improved with each book, as her editor at Bookouture provided guidance.

Interestingly, Pamela mentioned that Bookouture was willing to change book covers if the initial designs were not performing well, something traditional publishers are often reluctant to do. This flexibility allowed for quick pivots and adjustments based on data and reader feedback.

Pamela also discussed the data-driven nature of Bookouture's decision-making. Their data suggested that readers preferred police procedurals with law enforcement protagonists, leading them to request that change from Pamela. While Pamela did not have direct access to Bookouture's data, she acknowledged that their decisions were informed by insights into reader preferences and buying patterns.

A notable challenge Pamela faced was introducing her existing indie readers to her new Bookouture books, which had a slightly different branding and style. She made efforts to align her indie branding and pricing with Bookouture's to signal continuity to her readers. Bookouture was supportive of these efforts, encouraging Pamela to maintain her independent success while collaborating with them.

Pamela highlighted the value of adaptability and writing within specific guidelines, which, though initially restrictive, can focus an author's attention and improve their craft. She emphasized the importance of understanding one's motivations for writing – whether for personal expression or commercial success – and tailoring one's approach accordingly.

In conclusion, the transcript provides valuable insights into the collaborative relationship between an author and a data-driven digital publisher. It highlights the potential benefits of such partnerships, including access to broader reader insights, structured guidance on plotting and genre choices, and the flexibility to make quick adjustments based on data. However, it also underscores the challenges of balancing creative freedom with commercial considerations and effectively introducing a new audience to an established author's work.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Pamela Fagan Hutchins. Hey, Pamela, how are you doing?

[00:00:06] Pamela: Hi, Matty. I'm great. How are you?

[00:00:08] Matty: I'm doing great also.

Meet Pamela Fagan Hutchins

[00:00:09] Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Pamela Fagan Hutchins is a USA Today bestselling and Amazon All-Star Mystery Thriller suspense author who believes in soulmates, loves to laugh, and lives out the adventures in her books at a rustic lake camp in Maine's Mooselook Lake. And if you watched an earlier video, you'll know why I'm emphasizing Maine. And in an off-the-grid lodge in the face of Wyoming's Bighorn Mountains with her husband, sled dogs, and draft horses. She was also recently a guest on my video series, "What I Learned," where we talked about her book, "Her Last Cry," and there I accidentally identified Mooselook Lake as in Minnesota. So, apologies to Maine, one of my favorite states, for making that mistake.

[00:00:43] Pamela: At least looking at such a small community, you offended very few people. A hundred at most.

[00:00:53] Matty: Well, still, I don't want to offend anyone in Maine as my second adoptive home there.

So it was actually our conversation about "Her Last Cry" that led me to invite Pamela to the podcast because we started talking about some changes to her publishing approach that I'm going to ask her to describe in a moment. And we wanted to talk about data-driven book creation.

What is "super indie/alt traditional"?

[00:01:14] Matty: Pamela, I thought it would be useful to start right out having you describe for our listeners what that big change recently happened in your publishing approach.

[00:01:23] Pamela: Well, I've gone from being a dyed-in-the-wool, rebellious, you can't control me indie for the last 12 years to signing a contract with Bookouture, they're with Hachette UK, and I think of them as, these are my words, not theirs, but what attracted me to them was I think of them as super indie or alt-traditional as a digital publisher that is extremely driven by learning from data.

[00:01:51] Matty: Yeah, I'm kind of a student of Bookouture, and one of the things that has led to is that I'm kind of struggling with a different way of representing indie versus traditional because I don't think that's the case anymore. I just think that professional indies have learned so much from the good stuff that the traditional publishing world has to offer. And the traditional publishers are starting to learn from what the indies are doing well. And I think Bookouture is a great example of an organization that's kind of tapping into the best of both worlds. So it's definitely a spectrum. It's not an either/or if it ever was. And I just think it's a fascinating company to follow. And you must have too.

[00:02:31] Pamela: I do too, and a mutual friend of ours is who I really got interested in originally, because of Lisa Regan, and she was so happy with them. We started chatting and I thought, "Wow, that sounds really smart." It sounded smart to me because it's what I've been trying to do in a smaller way on my own for 12 years. And all of a sudden, here was someone doing it bigger on behalf of a large number of authors with some very successful books. And I just salivated after all that data. How can you not want to be part of using good data to its highest possibility? I only have a small amount of data compared to them. I want their data. And I don't get their data, but I get the use of their data. I get to learn from their data.

And the other thing I really liked about them is, first of all, they embrace authors from the indie space because they don't have any snobbery to it, right? There's no "Oh, you're indie, you're dirty, we won't touch you." It's "Can you write? Can you sell books? Okay, we can do something with that. I think that falls in what we do. So cool, let's all play together." And they encourage you to continue whatever is working for you outside their space as well. Whether it's multiple publishers, indie career, keep those going. Just don't step on each other's toes. We put together schedules and things that honor that with each other.

The Value of Adaptability

[00:03:55] Matty: One of the things that I've really been impressed with, from what I've heard and read about Bookouture, is its willingness to pivot. And I think because it is digital-only, there are things they can do like changing up a cover if the first one isn't working, as opposed to having 50,000 copies of a print book in a warehouse somewhere. That's the cover that people are going to be seeing for the next decade, which I'm a big fan of.

[00:04:22] Pamela: Exactly. I think it's wonderful. A friend of mine early on told me, "Oh, think twice about Bookouture because they'll change your cover on you at the last second." And I was like, "Wait, that's what I like about them." I like that they're willing to say, "We were wrong, and we're going to do better in the long run by changing now than just letting this title not work after all the work that went into it." Letting it not work as a vehicle to reach readers because of some antiquated notion that "that's the cover, forever, we will never change it because we shipped it from China with 48,000 of its friends on a boat."

[00:05:03] Matty: I'm surprised at that reaction. Was that reaction about "watch out for them because they'll change your cover at the last minute," did you have a sense of what was driving that reaction?

[00:05:12] Pamela: That it ruins publicity. That you have these moments to publicize, and the cover reveal is one of them. Here you've done the cover reveal, you've created the impressions, and now you're changing it out on people. But frankly, as an indie, I've changed some of my book covers five times. I just keep playing with them and testing them through ads until I find what's working best right now, usually a series lead, right? The rest of them don't matter as much. I want to hook them on that first book, and so with "Saving Grace," which is the very first book in my "What Doesn't Kill You" super series, first book in the Katie Connell series within that, and "Switchback," which is my lead in my Patrick Blintz books, I've changed those covers over and over. I don't have anything tied to an identity with it or anything else. It's about what's working now. What makes someone say, "That's the book I want to read," when they hit that page. And we get it wrong, which is one of the reasons I wanted to work with somebody else, frankly. I felt like I was too emotionally invested in things like titles, descriptions, covers. That was my weakness. I felt like I could write well enough anyway, and that was my weakness. I was the one calling those shots, and maybe that needed to be a more data-driven decision.

Changing One's Genre Based on the Data

[00:06:32] Matty: There were a couple of things that we talked about earlier that were places where your writer life changed as a result of partnering up with Bookouture. And I'm going to throw them out, and we can take this conversation wherever. But one of the things that you had mentioned that was very interesting is not only does an author obviously get tied to their cover and description and so on, but also their genre. And so one of the things that Bookouture asked you to do was to write a police procedural. Could you describe a little bit about where that request came from and what your reaction to it was?

[00:07:05] Pamela: I had all these long, lovely conversations with the woman who is my editor now, before I'd signed with them. She'd say, "Great, we want to work with you, and we love this book, but we'd like you to change it from X to Y,” from what it is now to a police procedural. And I kept saying no, I don't think so. At one point, I literally said to them, "You know what? I'm going to go away for a year and we can talk again later, but I'm going to go ahead and write more books in this series because I believe in this book and I'm going to do it now." And they were like, "Wait, wait, wait, wait. Let's talk again." And I thought we'd reached a point where it was going to be amateur sleuth again because it was really an unconventional sleuth, not a cozy. I'm not a cozy writer, but an unconventional sleuth, meaning non-police.

And somehow we ended up again with, I was going to start immediately and start a police procedural. At which point, my husband and I, who collaborate closely on both our careers—I am his other half in his career, he's my other half in mine—we said, "If we're going to do this, let's just do it. You want to learn from them, you want to break yourself free of things that may be holding you back by working with them, just go ahead and do it." And so I said yes, and immediately called our dear friend who's a police chief and said, "Help me!" And he has.

[00:08:21] Matty: So, what was it specifically that was deterring you from pursuing a police procedural?

[00:08:28] Pamela: That impostor syndrome, feeling like a fraud. I had been the things that were often at the helm or the protagonist's main career or avocation. Whatever it was that stood out as their identity, I could identify with, in my other books, either through a close family member or myself, I felt I could write them with authority. And authenticity is really important to me, getting things right. I had never been a cop. I'd been a private investigator; I'd been a lawyer, but I'd never been a cop, and I was scared. It turned out that with the help of others, I could handle that just as well as I did any of those other fields.

[00:09:09] Matty: And did your publisher provide any help in terms of getting you the information that you felt you needed, or was that really on you as the author to find the subject matter experts to tap into?

[00:09:20] Pamela: I never asked them to help me, so they might have, but I did it on my own, and I told them what I was doing. I actually reached out to the sheriff and the undersheriff in our county. The sheriff was wonderful, but it ended up I relied on the police chief more heavily even though I was writing something that was more rural and was a sheriff's department.

But I found that the law enforcement people, most of them found it fun. Some were nervous. Some were like, "Oh, don't tie my name to that." But I found just the right guy, one who's ready for me to crow his name and find him lots of writers to work with.

[00:09:53] Matty: Yeah, as I often say on the podcast, it is fun to find those subject matter experts who know inside and out what happens in real life but are willing to say, "Well, yeah, that normally wouldn't happen, but you could make it work if this." Like, "Oh, I love you. Yes."

[00:10:07] Pamela: There's nothing worse than the expert who says, "But it just wouldn't happen." And you're like, "Hmm, can't or wouldn't?" Wouldn't is good. Wouldn't is exactly where we're pushing to. We want something that is more exciting than every day.

[00:10:21] Matty: Yes, if the books were all about what happens every day, then nobody would be reading them.

[00:10:24] Pamela: Exactly. Yeah. So, that was different for me, but I've enjoyed it. I'm on the fourth book in the series right now, and I'm feeling more confident about trusting my instincts and knowing we can fix it later, and saving some of my questions for Travis, my consultant, until we're down the road.

[00:10:43] Matty: And we can fix it later is related to the details that you put in about--

[00:10:49] Pamela: Yeah, and I want to strike a balance between my details being correct and not burdening a book with details. And I found that one of the things that's good about me never having been a cop is I am not, I don't feel burdened by the details. I want as little as possible so that we can keep the pace of the book up. And I'm not constrained by needing to include all this background and all this detail, etc. Because to me, it's meaningless. I really think of it more like a reader. How do we get from point A to point B, while doing it correctly, but on the edge of vigilantism, and not getting thrown in jail.

So we don't get fired or thrown in jail today; it's roughly what a cop could and would do, and yet we get there fast enough to satisfy a reader who wants to read a thriller.

[00:11:36] Matty: Yeah, I think that, the idea of what details do you leave out, I was at a talk that James McCrone gave at the Brandywine Valley Writers Group meeting last night, and I think he was quoting Keith Richards, or maybe about songwriting, but it was, "You're not done when you have nothing else to say, you're done when you've taken out everything you can." Something to that effect, but I thought it was great words to live by for authors.

[00:12:04] Pamela: I think that's fantastic. It's one of the things I find challenging when I write books that are written more by people who are subject matter experts, is that it's harder for them. The ones that have that expertise and can leave out enough are spectacular. That's what I want to aim toward.

Changing one's plotting approach

[00:12:24] Matty: Absolutely. Genre is obviously a pretty central thing that you were asked to change, but another really important thing that you were asked to change was your plotting approach. So can you describe what your plotting approach was before, what your publisher asked you to change it to, and how that change went for you?

[00:12:41] Pamela: My plotting approach was pretty much "throw it all to the wall until it sticks" and get there somehow. And I roughly was embracing a three-act structure, really it's a five-act structure, with an inciting incident somewhere at, say, 15 to 20 percent of the way into the book, then three major acts, and then an act five, which is your ending, your denouement. That's how I looked at it. I did a lot of work on these in the past. I would print all my pages out, in a two-page book format, tape them to the floor, go through with highlighters, and look for continuity issues, see if I was dividing the acts up correctly. But in dividing the acts up correctly, what I wasn't thinking about was the midpoint of the book.

The midpoint of the book is the midpoint of the middle act. I was thinking about the beginnings and ends of acts and how do you get between those. So when my first draft came in, they said, "We really need a midpoint." And I'm like, "Talk to me about this midpoint." So they had me read a book called "Into the Woods" by John Yorke. So I read "Into the Woods," and for the most part, I was going, "Yeah, yeah, this is what I do," until I got to the part about the midpoint, which basically was, this is the point at which you move from what you didn't know towards having some kind of explosion of knowledge or a change point that leads to, at the end, your acceptance of what you've discovered, your reawakening, your endpoint.

And that your big moment of key discovery is right there at the end, between 49 and 51 percent, hit it right on the nose, Pamela. And I went through and, sure enough, for a crime thriller, I did not have that huge key discovery, which in a crime thriller, one would expect also to come with some whiz-bang, right? You want something at risk so that the protagonist is pushed forward into the second half of the book, resolving whatever it is they've now discovered and can't avoid resolving.

I'd always thought of it more as an inciting incident, and then you have an act, and an act, and an act, and an ending, and that whiz-bang in the middle was missing. So I did that. The first structural edit was just awful. But then the second was good.

And by the time we got to "Her Last Cry," the third book in the series, my editor gave it a kiss and a hug and said, "By George, I think you've got it." And now I'm writing book four. And literally last night, that's what I was doing, was looking at what I'd written so far, realizing I'd crested what I intend to be the midpoint, and that I needed to revisit it before I moved on, because my key discovery was there, but I didn't have enough whizbang. So anyway, I went back, and that's what I did this morning, was worked on my midpoint, because to me now, I really think of the book in two halves, as the biggest structure, and then I obviously also think of it in all those little micro pieces as well.

[00:15:56] Matty: I want to loop back to the same question for genre because I realized I kind of lost the thread of the data-driven thing. But talking about the structure, did you ever get a sense of what data your publisher or editor had that was leading them to push you so forcefully toward this structural approach?

[00:16:16] Pamela: No, I don't really know, from a data perspective, what they have that pushes them toward that point, other than it is their predominant theory of how you structure books and that they sell a lot of books. And when you master that, they feel it pushes their readers through the book and into buy-through, if they're buying the books, or read-through if it's on Kindle Unlimited.

My suspicion, and it's a question I didn't actually ask them, was that their data came from series writing and moving on to the next book. Someone can buy your book and stop at 47 percent because it wasn't satisfying, or they can stop at 75 percent because you didn't show them a compelling enough reason to be pushed from this key discovery towards the inevitable ending. That was my feeling.

The genre issue was much clearer. They were saying their data shows that their readers prefer police procedural or crime fiction that has a law enforcement detective, usually, as the protagonist. This isn't all readers; it's the readers they can reach, their data, specific to them and who they have reached in the past, and as a result, keep expanding into selling more too. For this particular portion of their business, because they have multiple genres, but for crime fiction, their data showed that they didn't do as well with Amateur Sleuth, except in the cozy space. They didn't do as well with what I was writing when I came to them, which was more of a legal thriller. That just didn't translate to series that took off and were worth sticking around for a few more books.

[00:18:02] Matty: It's interesting that this can be extrapolated on a micro level for an individual indie author. I don't think anybody has a favorite publishing imprint, but Bookouture books are very distinctive looking. You can run through a montage of the top 100 Kindle books or top 100 selling eBooks, and you can kind of pick out which ones are Bookouture books. They're very heavily color-saturated with a natural scene with an object in it, like a barn or a boat. You can see them and know, "Oh, that's a book like this other book that I read and really liked." I can imagine they're using data because you have a sense of what readers everywhere are looking for, and you home in on that. Or you kind of create your own data because if they've now trained Bookouture readers to recognize the books, and then to expect that between 49 and 51 percent there's going to be that midpoint moment, then you're satisfying a reader expectation that you've created. A publisher can create an expectation among a pool of readers in a way that maybe an indie author over many books can do, but you're exponentially expanding the expectation setting if you're doing it through a publisher.

The danger of violating reader expectations

[00:19:22] Pamela: But I think that's a really good point. When I reached books 12 through 15 in my "What Doesn't Kill You?" super series, which as I wrote it was probably 9 through 11, but I pushed them to the end of the series because they didn't perform well. I'm convinced the reason they didn't perform well is because I moved out of what I had set reader expectations to be.

I took a character that I, one of my favorite characters, and I personally think the books are great. I think the books are great, but they were not what readers had come to expect from my protagonist in my first few times giving protagonists their turns at bat, and the sales showed that.

And to take that another step further, by doing this with Bookouture, I've taken a two-year chunk out of what I'm doing, right, because I'm on books four through six with them right now. And I'm not meeting reader expectations because I was writing amateur sleuths. My covers looked like my covers. There were no serial killers, or there were, but they didn't get a point of view. This is a very big difference in this genre they asked me to write versus what I was writing. I still had multiple murders in my books; people are dying left and right, but I never did the antagonist, the nasty bad guy point of view in my books. Bookouture's brands their crime fiction towards what their data shows them is the way to brand it that will reach the most readers, their readers and hopefully additional readers. That brand doesn't necessarily match what reaches mine.

So it's been a struggle for my readers to realize that these are A, my books, and B, they should be their books. Even though when you open them, they're still Pamela Fagan Hutchins books. Very character-driven, you're going to fall in love with this kick-ass protagonist, and there's no glorification of serial killers, and people aren't getting mutilated on the page. But that isn't so clear to them from the brand, so it's all been very interesting, their data versus my data, and where in the end this will have us all end up, right?

But teaching my readers to shop outside of the brand to get me has been interesting. I changed all my covers, some of my descriptions, fonts, everything. I changed my website, I changed my pricing, all trying to signal, "It's okay, we're all the same. This is the still Pamela." But it was an interesting shift and we're not there yet.

[00:22:11] Matty: Did you alert your publisher that you were making changes in your independently published books to make them visually more similar to theirs? Were they concerned about that at all?

[00:22:23] Pamela: No, what they want is for those over 3 million books that I have out there in people's hands to bring those readers with me while also wanting their readers to embrace me. What they didn't want, which is contractually prohibited, is for me to release books 45 days before or after they release one of my books so that our advertising doesn't overlap. Our major advertising pushes can't completely avoid overlap because you always have to be doing something for your indie books, or they'll die, and you'll never get it back. But they were like, "Whatever you can do to bring your people along."

We coordinate on newsletters—I have a list of 15,000—and how do I bring them along? What does it look like for authors with medium to big lists when we coordinate with what you're sending out? Coordinating on advertising, when they're advertising, what do I do, etc.

All of that, we've been trying to signal to my readers that it's okay, these serial killers aren't going to get you. They've been really cooperative with that and very open when they think they don't want me to do something, asking me please not to do X or Y.

They may not love everything that I do, but I know that they do have some of us, because some of us bridge indie and this new world of digital publishing, which is quasi-indie or alt-traditional, whatever you want to call it. We get way more into their business on this than their other authors do. The ones that come from traditional are like, "Okay, you take care of it," and I'm like, "What were the numbers like?" I literally woke up last night because there's a price promo running on book two in the series, and the rank tanked for 24 hours, so I wrote a letter to my editor asking what happened, what didn't scale, and expressing concern about not being able to pivot very fast. Then I didn't send it because I know they're aware. But it's my first inclination. If it were me controlling this advertising campaign and the spend increased but the rank went in the wrong direction, I'd say I had the wrong audience, but I've already told them that, so they know.

[00:24:49] Matty: So when you, in other circumstances where maybe you've sent the email or you've talked through it with them, have there been other circumstances and how does that interaction with them work where they have one group of authors who are saying "you take care of it" and the other, a second group of probably indie authors who want to be more involved in it? What has been your experience with how they receive that?

Business and creative collaboration with a publisher

[00:25:10] Pamela: They're so polite, first of all, because they're British, so I'm not really sure what they really think of me. But when I say, "I'm so sorry, I know that I care a whole lot about this, maybe more than your other authors, and here's why," they've actually invited me to give them more feedback, and I've caught them in some boo-boos. They're not perfect, they're humans. We had some things that on the first promo they did didn't go real well. And when they finished it, they said, "What would you have done differently?" And they literally got on the phone with me and said, "What is it that you see that may have gone wrong here? What can we learn from this? Because you're right, this didn't go like we expected." And it was nice to have that conversation.

Yeah, the second one is going better. Notwithstanding me wanting to send that email this morning. But going much better. I think they were having like a 35 percent conversion rate on people who clicked on the ad, and they were really excited about that, that was 10 points better than their normal conversion.

So, I think that when you do work together, especially when you're trying to combine audiences, if you will, they want my audience, I want theirs, or they want my readers, I want theirs. Audience is probably the wrong word. I'm thinking in terms of ads, which is audience, but at the end of the day, those are readers. And when we're trying to strategize on how to find the readers that are going to love this book out of their readers and my readers and the whole world of readers and collaborate on it, that's been nice. I didn't expect it.

They also changed my covers when I didn't think that they were going to work. And I was told never to expect that they would ever change a cover. And they changed all three of them. I wasn't ugly or anything. I was just like, "Those are barns in Kansas. And these books are set in Wyoming. And honestly, those aren't the same places, you know?" And they were like, "Okay, you're right. We really looked at this too much from an 'America is America' perspective and not what really shows the ruggedness of these books." So they changed them all. I thought that was cool.

[00:27:13] Matty: Any publisher is probably going to have more data than any individual independent author. Did you feel that the areas where you were able to bring more value in terms of maybe correcting some misdirection were more personal or because of reader interaction? You're not tapping into a giant database. So where did you have the edge in those conversations?

[00:27:37] Pamela: I have a lot of engagement with readers. And while you can't take what any one person says, a lot of times, if you get a couple of people saying something in different places, they're representing a large number of people; they're just the ones that spoke up. So if I get a couple of data points spread out over different platforms, I start to think they're saying something here and I should listen.

I started getting people saying, "I'm so glad I read your book. I really was afraid that it was a serial killer book. And I was really afraid to read it." Bookouture was saying, "Your pre-orders were fantastic. They were the best we've had in a very long time for a new series. And then we didn't get the sales we thought we'd get once the books launched. Do you have a feeling for why?" And I said, "I don't think my readers are coming to the party. And I don't think they're coming because of something that I don't think you're going to change. But it's the description of the book. It doesn't read like what they're used to reading."

They're trying to please the hardcore crime thriller readers, and my readers are trying to move to crime thriller from where I had them. You open the book, and it's a combination of crime thriller and Pamela Fagan Hutchins, and my readers are happy, but some of them are scared. So, I think we're getting late adopters.

We're trying to figure out how to bring my people along at the same time as we bring the world along with it. It's going to be hit or miss. The conversation was very much about what I would be doing differently, how I would adjust the audience. We were talking ads, basically. What would you be looking for?

I was able to come back to them a day later and say, "That feeling I had, that the ads weren't reaching the right readers when you did the 99-cent price promo with heavy Facebook advertising. They were using their proprietary ad groups, and the day after the promo finished, all my also-boughts on the series were British-based crime drama. That's not who's going to ultimately fan me. I'm more like C.J. Box, Craig Johnson, Jeff Carson, D.K. Hood, the people that write Mountain West, rural, rugged, etc. Amazon is telling me these are the people who responded to your ads, and that says that's who received your ads. If I was looking at what to do differently, I'd be thinking long term, which is, are these going to be devoted fans of these books? And you haven't convinced me that the answer is yes yet. So that's what I'd be looking at: Are we reaching the right people?"

[00:30:24] Matty: That's interesting because that's data that anybody can have access to. You don't need a giant corporate database to do that.

[00:30:29] Pamela: Exactly. Look at your also-boughts the day after you run a promo, you've got more data than you're ever going to have, but a lot of it disappears very quickly, right? Those change every single day, so it's a matter of looking at your own data while it's hot. It's there because it's going to go away. I mean, I look at things like rank every single day for my top six books, my series leads, and my new releases just because it's an indicator of what's happening. But looking at those also-boughts right after a big promo, that tells you who bought your book. It's the closest you're ever going to get to knowing with Amazon.

Targeting the enthusiastic sub-genre fan

[00:31:11] Matty: Any conversation about reader targeting that I've ever heard assumes that if you're writing cozies, you're finding the people who read all cozies all the time. If you have a very niche romance, you're looking for those people. But I've got to believe that there are a lot of readers out there like me, who one day are reading chick-lit, the next nonfiction history, then a sci-fi series, then a police procedural. I feel like a successful publisher with access to all this data is almost incented to target the enthusiasts of a specific sub-genre, like readers of C.J. Box but not Liane Moriarty, whereas in reality, I think there's a lot more overlap in real life than any publisher, indie or traditional, is allowing for. Do you agree with my assessment, and do you think an indie author or a publisher is better positioned to tap into readers who have a wider interest?

[00:32:34] Pamela: I think that for an indie author who's been at it for a while, you potentially have a better ability to tap into that wider interest because you're doing it specifically for your books, as opposed to a group of books where you're getting more granular. You're grouping the books and readers together.

I do agree that people read broadly, but with advertising, your best conversion comes from targeting your best converter. You're looking for someone that sees your image and your copy and immediately thinks, "This is for me!" So when planning my advertising, I'm looking for the superfans of the genre, the superfans of what I write, and then hoping that through their recommendations and their reviews, they bring other people along with them.

But I'm looking for the most efficient use of my spend. So, I agree with you, and when targeting, I would really focus on those superfans.

[00:33:41] Matty: It's always tough to distinguish the marketing targeting from the creative process because I know that I limit my own ability to reach readers because I have to write the things that are of interest to me, not necessarily the things that I think will do best in the market. And so, if I could train my creative brain to be more disciplined in that way, I'd probably be doing better. But on the other hand, I probably wouldn't be writing books. Kind of doesn't matter.

[00:34:06] Pamela: I do the same thing. When I sat down to write this series for Bookouture, I first wanted to make the protagonist an MMA fighter. I wanted her to be really badass and it just interested me at the time. And they were like, "Our data says that women who actually physically fight in an organized fashion are a turnoff. She can still kick some ass if she wants to, but it needs to not be in an official capacity." At first, I had my feelings hurt, and then I realized I had other things that interested me. But had I been writing that book on my own, I might have just run with that. It interested me right now.

The value of writing between bright lines

[00:34:41] Pamela: I'm going to see what I can do with a really, really badass woman. Instead, I went a different direction. It's been interesting to me because it's trained me to work a little bit more between some pretty bright lines, whereas before, my lines were pretty dim and fuzzy and wherever I wanted them to be. And if I wanted to write a series of books that did terrible, which I've done before, then I can do that, and I can waste two years. So, yeah. It's never a waste, right? We always get better. Somebody loves those books. They become the body of work.

[00:35:17] Matty: And I don't think there's that much difference between an exercise, well, except for the time you're spending on it. There's not that much time between an exercise where you're saying, "I'm going to write a really great story in 150 words." That's a really interesting and intriguing exercise. Maybe I don't want to spend a year writing the 80,000-word version of that, but those guidelines can be restricting, but they can also be sort of empowering in the sense that it's focusing your attention in a way it otherwise wouldn't be focused.

[00:35:50] Pamela: Yeah. I agree with that. And at some point, you have to decide why you're writing. And what I mean by that is if you're writing for yourself, then you should write whatever you want all the time. If you're trying to sell your books, then you need some kind of idea of who you're writing to and what they like to read, and thus that creates some guideposts for you. It may be that you are unconscious of them, and you aim toward it just out of affinity with your readers, and that's fantastic, but they're still there. If you are writing towards it being a commercial venture as opposed to, "I'm doing this for me, and I don't care if it sells. I just love it. I live to write.”

I'm trying to make money. I mean, I'll be honest, because I gave up my day job. You know, I'm trying to make money. So, at first, it felt a little bit limiting, and then I embraced it because I embrace data. It's like, 'This is a learning experiment, and it either works out or it doesn't, but either way, I'm better for it,' you know, having gone down this road.

And that's really how I look at it. If it all ends tomorrow and I don't write another word for them, I'm a better author, an indie author, and businessperson in the world of publishing than I was before because I've been exposed to a new way to do it and have that to consider and potentially inculcate into what I do."

Matty: I actually could think of other questions, but that is such a nice wrap-up. I think that I'm going to go with that. Pamela, it is always so much fun to talk with you, and I appreciate so much you sharing the kind of behind-the-scenes inside scoop of what your experience has been making this transition. So please let the listeners and the viewers know where they can go to find all your books, regardless of who publishes them, online.

Pamela: All right, I can do that. PamelaFaganHutchins.com will point you in the right direction. My Bookouture books, the new series, Detective Delaney Pace, are only available in Kindle eBook form on Amazon, although the paperback and audio versions are available anywhere that you can order your books. Bookouture is a digital-only company. They do partner with print providers that stock bookstores and things like that, but anywhere online. My books are available everywhere online. We're not exclusive to Amazon with those anymore, so you can get them anywhere. And the best place to interact with me, and I encourage you to do it, talk books, whatever, talk publishing, dogs, is Facebook. I have a Facebook page and a Facebook group, and that's where I'm really most active.

Matty: You do have a super fun Facebook feed, so I'll just put another plug in for that.

Pamela: It's always nice to see Matty come up on there.

Matty: Well, Pamela, thank you so much. It's been so much fun to talk with you.

Pamela: You too. Thanks for having me.

Matty Dalrymple 4/2/24 Matty Dalrymple 4/2/24

Episode 232 - What Has Changed and Stayed the Same with Amazon Ads with Bryan Cohen

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Bryan Cohen discusses WHAT HAS CHANGED AND STAYED THE SAME WITH AMAZON ADS, including ads as a research tool; whether Amazon product pages are actually getting busier; the impact of A+ content; the advice to go deep rather than wide on ad platforms; how AI is (or might be) changing the ad game; budgeting for beginners; and whether one book is enough for an ad campaign.

Bryan Cohen is the CEO of Best Page Forward and Author Ad School. He's helped over 30,000 authors learn ads through his 5-Day Author Ad Profit Challenge. He also runs the Author Ad Agency, which helps full-time authors to scale up their self-publishing earnings. He lives in North Carolina with his wife, daughter, and cat.

Episode Links

https://learn.bestpageforward.net
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2230194167089012
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT_vHN_rKtRhtxs81s892vQ

Summary

This episode of The Indy Author Podcast features a conversation between the host, Matty Dalrymple, and guest Bryan Cohen, CEO of Best Page Forward and Author Ad School. They discuss various aspects of Amazon ads, providing insights and strategies for authors, particularly indie authors, in marketing their books.

Bryan Cohen has helped over 30,000 authors with advertising and emphasizes that Amazon ads can be an effective research tool to understand book positioning and market receptiveness. He notes that while the perception exists that Amazon ads have become more expensive, he's observed that costs can remain low, offering valuable data on how well a book is positioned in the market.

The conversation delves into the strategic use of Amazon ads, with Bryan pointing out that these ads can serve not only as a marketing tool but also as a means to gather insights on a book's reception and market fit. He suggests that even with just one book published, authors can benefit from Amazon ads to assess market response and refine their marketing and content strategies.

Bryan discusses the changes in Amazon ad placements, indicating an increase in ad spaces on product pages, which has made the pages busier. However, he advises that not all ad placements are equally effective and emphasizes the importance of strategic ad placement and understanding Amazon's advertising mechanisms.

A significant part of the discussion revolves around the use of A+ Content on Amazon and its impact on book sales. Bryan shares insights on how A+ Content can affect conversion rates and the importance of testing to see whether it enhances or detracts from sales performance.

The dialogue also touches on the broader marketing landscape for authors, comparing Amazon ads with other advertising platforms like Facebook and BookBub. Bryan suggests that while different platforms have their strengths, authors should focus on understanding and leveraging each platform's unique capabilities to maximize their advertising effectiveness.

Throughout the conversation, Bryan advocates for a balanced approach to marketing, where authors should not only focus on advertising but also on creating quality content and engaging with their audience. He emphasizes the importance of adapting strategies based on market feedback and continuously learning and refining advertising approaches.

In summary, the transcript covers a comprehensive discussion on the use of Amazon ads for indie authors, highlighting the importance of strategic advertising, market research, and the continual adaptation of marketing strategies to achieve success in book publishing. Bryan Cohen's insights provide valuable guidance for authors looking to navigate the complexities of online advertising and market positioning for their books.

Transcript

Matty: Hello, and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Bryan Cohen. Hey, Bryan, how are you doing?

Bryan: Hey Matty, I'm doing well. I'm happy to be here.

Meet Bryan Cohen

Matty: I am pleased to have you here. And just to give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Bryan Cohen is the CEO of Best Page Forward and Author Ad School. He has helped over 30,000 authors learn ads through his five-day Author Ad Profit Challenge. He also runs the Author Ad Agency, which helps full time authors to scale up their self-publishing earnings. And he lives in North Carolina with his wife, daughter, and cat. And I also wanted to send out a big congratulations to Bryan for passing 500 plus and 10 years of his great Sell More Books show podcast. So, Bryan, congratulations.

Bryan: Thank you, Matty. It's been a great, a great long time helping indie authors.

Matty: Yeah. Well, that is a very, very impressive track record. And the fact that you, you've done it so consistently and for such a long time and with such great information is, a great testament to you. So thank you for doing that.

Bryan: Of course. Of course.

Matty: So we are going to be talking today, not surprisingly, about Amazon ads, because obviously Bryan's the guy to go to for Amazon ads.

Strategic changes in Amazon ads

Matty: And so I wanted to start out by asking What have you seen change, if anything, at a strategic level with Amazon ads? Like, if someone had asked, are Amazon ads, any good, is the answer you would give about why different now than it would have been a year ago, five years ago, however far back you want to go?

Bryan: Sure. Yeah, no, I do think it's a little different than it would have been a few years ago. not for the reasons people might think. People might think, oh, well, Bryan's going to say it's more expensive, which Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It's not necessarily more expensive from what I've seen. I've seen authors get hundreds of clicks at very low costs here in 2024.

Ads as a research tool

Bryan: So I know it's not necessarily that it costs more. I have seen that it can be a really good research tool to know how well your book has been positioned. which I wasn't always aware of, even, that when ads, we've heard the refrain, Amazon won't take my money, you try to run ads and it doesn't work.

We have found that sometimes it's not about Bidding too low, or it's not about, oh, this market is too expensive. I can't get, sometimes it's about your book's seven KDP keyword phrases and your book's three categories and your book's title. Sometimes little things like that actually will let Amazon spend your money or not spend your money.

And so, I used to think, and this is something I even see people still talking about today, when Amazon, when you have a book out on Amazon, you're not ready, you should wait until you have three books. And I've changed my tune on that, because I think Amazon ads can be really helpful, even just with your first book out, helping you to figure out, okay, Is Amazon taking my money?

If there's not, if they're not taking it, it's probable that something in the information you gave Amazon when you publish, Amazon isn't receiving it in the way you thought they would. And so I find that Amazon ads can still be one of the lower cost marketing methods. But it can also be a really good tool when you're starting out or when you're trying out a new series to see, okay, is Amazon figuring out what I'm sending it?

Is it picking up what I'm putting down? Whatever metaphor you want to use, that is one of the reasons I still recommend Amazon ads.

Matty: And is Amazon better at identifying those things than let's say, I don't know, book club ads or Facebook ads or something like that because there's such a strong tie between the data you're giving KDP and then the performance of an Amazon ad?

Bryan: I do think that Amazon can be in line and more so in line than maybe a BookBub ad or a, a Facebook ad. I think it can be. The problem is a lot of authors do have misalignment issues somewhere in the midst of the keywords. Subtitle categories, all of that stuff. And so I think the public perception of Amazon ads is that they are not as strong at connecting readers, as the other platforms, but it is interesting that when we have seen, and this is especially the case with a lot of our agency clients, they are already selling well, cause they're already full-time authors. It's easier to get those ads to spend even as low as 27 cents a click. We're getting those ads to spend when a newer author comes to, through our challenge or through ad school, and they say, I can't even get one click.is the platform broken? And then we look at this other account and we see a thousand clicks in a day.

We say, no, platform isn't broken, but there might be a disconnect here. Yeah. Yeah.

The desire for immediate social feedback

Matty: it is. It's a very different mindset. I have, experience, I've had some experience across all three platforms, but more on Facebook and BookBub. Those are the three I think of, like, when I'm thinking about advertising for my own books. Those are the three I think about, and I think one of the things that appeals to me about Facebook ads is you get this very immediate and personal response.

Feedback on why people are liking or not liking your ad, in some cases. So the example I can think of is that a couple of years ago, I was testing out a new tagline for my, Lizzie Ballard thrillers, and I, the tagline I had come up with was, what happens when an extraordinary power transforms an ordinary life?

And so, I thought that sounded pretty cool, so I started writing ads against it, and then someone made a response to the post, that made it clear that they thought it was going to be like a religious book, like an extraordinary power. They thought that was not true. We're talking this through non religiously affiliated power, but it was going to be, really does it.

Oh, well, that's really good to know because, that's something I could easily pull back from, whereas it's harder. My experience is it's harder to get that kind of sense of why, like you could see that your ads aren't spending, but is it the keyword? Is it the quality of the cover? Is it the quality of the content? Can you glean that kind of stuff from the Amazon ad results?

Bryan: I think that's a really good point, a really good observation, because you do get that social feedback on Facebook. You do get that social feedback on some, on a platform like TikTok, and you wouldn't get that feedback from, from Amazon. And so my answer to a certain extent has always been, well, take our free challenge and send us the links.

Cause we do it. eight weeks a year that we're around there for free, send us the link. We'll go take a look. we'll look at your keywords, but yeah, I mean, I think that if you have some money to spend and you want that immediate result, absolutely makes sense for Facebook or TikTok to get some feedback, but I think it really depends.

And this goes back to Authors having individualized ways that they take care of things based on their personality, based on the way they like doing things. Fortunately, I think they're, if people like the hand holding, they come to us. If they want to get immediate results and don't want to have to talk to a person for real and make it more on social media, go to Facebook, go to TikTok.

Either way, I do think it still comes back around to when you have a book that is selling. And maybe you found success with it on Facebook. We have found that success can be doubled when they're also running the ads on Amazon and not just confining it to one platform. I think that Amazon ads can be a primary driver of traffic to a book.

But they're a really good secondary driver when something else is working.

Are Amazon product pages actually getting busier?

Matty: One of the things that I feel like has changed over time on Amazon, and I'll ask you to confirm or deny, is that the pages seem busier and busier. So, if I'm shopping on Amazon and I go to a book and I start, looking for, I realize I've clicked into book two of the series and I want to go look for book one.

It becomes harder and harder to find that information because there's just so much there. Is that actually changing? And if it is, is that something that has made you adjust your strategy about Amazon ads?

Bryan: I learned some interesting things this past year. late last year, as part of my agency, I reached out to Amazon and found out some things. And it turned out that, and my team was helpful with this. Amazon has their AMG ads is what they used to call them. They're called something different now and the name escapes me, but as it often does, but there is the AMG ads were always known as, okay, if you've got 10,000 to burn, you can go to Amazon and say, Hey, I've got 10,000.

And they say, great, that's our minimum. You spend 10,000 with us a month, we'll run some special ads for you. I said, okay, well, I don't have these 10,000 to burn for my books, but, is there a way to do this without 10,000? And they said, well, we subcontract through some agencies to let you run ads that are very similar, which Amazon refers to as DSP or platform ads.

And it turns out that we've Could, if we hit 10,000 across lots of authors, we could actually run some of these ads for authors. And these ads are what has made the system feel busier. It used to be there were a couple places you'd see ads. The carousels on the product pages that you'd see that kind of have replaced also boughts in a lot of places.

And the search results. That became a little busier with sponsored brand ads starting to show up at the top of the search results. But then how does it feel busier? You go to an Amazon page, you see at the very top of the browser, there's now an ad. Underneath the buy button, there's an ad, and often underneath the product description, there's an ad.

Now sometimes regular old sponsored product ads can show up in these places, but more often than not, these are DSP ads or Amazon's own AMG ads. Now, interesting data from running these for six months. Most of them don't convert. The top of the page ads. Terrible. The ones that are even near under the button. Terrible.

The only ones we found that have been able to convert for us, and mileage may vary, is right under the product description, which makes sense. In the web terms, these are above the fold, so you don't have to scroll to get to them. Now, all of that being said, to answer your question, yes, the pages are busier, they're busier because of these other ad placements that Amazon is now selling in other ways.

Us normal folks, we can't usually get access to these kind of ads. But the good news is, those ads, for the most part, in our experimentation, aren't really that valuable. And so, it's the kind of thing where, even though sponsor product ads a little bit cheaper, a little bit more affordable for the regular author. We still find that these ads that all authors have access to actually do better and have better tracking somehow than these fancy pantsy ads that we've been able to peek under the hood and see. And so, I think that despite it being busier, there are still lots of really good opportunities there.

The impact of A+ Content

Matty: One of the things that I realize makes some pages look busier is the A plus content, so I know that for my Ann Kinnear books, there's a huge part of the page now taken up with one of those, like, triptych, sort of, I made them in Book Brush, you load an ad and then it breaks it up for you so you have, like, three parts of one image, which looks super cool, but I'm like, I wonder how long Amazon's going to keep doing that, cause that's, A huge amount of screen real estate for basically just a giant picture that I uploaded that was associated with my story.

Have you seen any pro or con impacts of A plus content on the success of people who are running Amazon X?

Bryan: Well, you brought up that Amazon, are they going to keep doing this? Amazon loves A plus content. Not sure why. I wonder if there's a search engine optimization something. They get more search traffic by having more images. That I don't know. But they love pushing it. I've been fortunate enough, Amazon has had me come on and teach some classes.

And at the end, they have these, Q& A sessions that aren't really live. They're just answering some questions in an Amazonian kind of way. And Amazon loves making sure that A plus content is delivered. mention. Maybe it's because it was a very requested feature and they're hoping that it makes readers happy, or authors happy. But, for a long time when A plus content was first announced, we did experiments on it. We looked, hey, does this improve a chance of a book being profitable or does it reduce the chances of a book being profitable? And because of all that real estate taken up, we actually found that because, and we think it's because it took so long to actually get to the reviews.

That it did reduce conversion. It did make the royalties, and, the profitability worse for those books. It's gotten a little better over time. places like Book Brush having tools so that the images don't look bad because part of the reason I think conversion was worse is because the images looked bad, but it's still a bit of a problem that it takes up all that real estate.

And so I'm a big fan of testing. Get 100 clicks without the A plus content, get 100 clicks with the A plus content, compare group 1 to group 2, and see, did you profit better, did you convert better, when you had the A plus content in place, or did not?

Matty: If someone does not have A plus content yet, do you recommend that they provide some in order to run that test? Or is it the kind of thing that you say, if you don't have it now, don't bother, but if you do have it, maybe test it without to see if it improves?

Bryan: If you don't have it now, don't bother, is what I would recommend.

Matty: Okay, this example just popped into my head. I recently got a screenshot of a friend's Kindle. He had opened up his Kindle. He had, purchased other of my books before, and it had an ad on the lock screen for one of my books.

Unpaid lock screen ads

Bryan: Inexplicably, it had an ad for one of my short stories, which I thought was weird.

Matty: But that was with me not thinking. Not having paid anything, I wasn't running any Amazon ads, do you know how often Amazon just puts an ad up? Like, I've got to believe that for that person's Kindle lock screen, there was a whole queue of other books that were maybe paying to have that placement.

Do you have any insight into how, those lock screen placements, are assigned?

Bryan: So you're not the first person I've heard who's had a book that they weren't running any ads for just randomly show up. I do think sometimes this is a function of kind of a pseudo also bought or books that you might like kind of carousel loaded in for when there aren't enough lock screen ads to actually go around.

but it is pretty rare. I don't think that it's something we can count on with any, reliability. I don't have deep, deep insight, like, one of my contacts at Amazon has told me specifically. It will show up 1 percent of the time, so I don't have anything specific to that. But anecdotally, it can happen sometimes, but as many know, and many have probably come on this show to say, we're in a pay to play environment.

More often than not, you are going to have to pay to get placement. That being said, I would not pay for the lock screen ads. They tend to be, a little bit pricier, and often it prices out authors who are trying to get a lower cost click on their ads.

Follow one course until success

Matty: So you had mentioned earlier the idea of Amazon being sort of a primary driver of sales and perhaps being supported by other ad platforms. for someone who's relatively new to the advertising, the book advertising game, are there combinations that you recommend or combinations that you recommend people stay away from?

Bryan: That's a good question. I think if you're new, sticking with one is probably going to be better, better to go deeper on one than to necessarily broaden out and try to learn multiple things at once, because it is like a four year degree, any of these things that you are going to be going deeper on in order to truly go as deep as you need to go, you know.

Go deep rather than wide

Bryan: You need to focus. the old, acronym, I heard John Lee Dumas say it once. I don't know if it's his. Follow one course until success. It is helpful to focus on one. Let's say, though, that you have learned one of them. And, there are various combinations. Let's say you've learned Facebook ads first. Amazon ads are helpful to set up. in addition, it will look like they are not doing anything because if Facebook ads are already sending traffic to your books, you may assume just, this is our natural psychological assumption. The thing I was already doing is the thing that's working. The new thing probably isn't. That isn't always true in what we've found, but I will say that if you are running Facebook ads already and then you start Amazon ads, I would run the Amazon ads for at least three to six months. I would not make any quick assumptions on whether or not those are working. Let's say you've already run BookBub ads.

and you're trying to run Amazon ads. These can work really well together. BookBub ads spend a lot faster. And so, you are going to want to keep an eye on your budget. I don't necessarily have any huge concerns, oh, that I, that are different than the Facebook and Amazon combo. Similarly, give the ads three to six months.

If you've run Amazon ads, or you know Amazon ads, and then you're adding another one, I would probably add Facebook next, but take it slow. No need to add big budgets. There are some really good courses out there. I'm a big fan of, Matthew Holmes's, work on Facebook ads. He's got a great free book out there, that can help you start.

I've learned from other great people, like Mal Cooper, like James Blatch and company. Like, there, there's a lot of good stuff out there. But when there are different schools of thought on the same platform, sometimes it makes sense to take this idea, and this idea and combine them together, but a lot of the time it doesn't.

And so just be careful when you're saying, well, I tried to take Matt's idea. I tried to take James's idea and mash them together because it felt right to me. But feeling is not fact. You need to consider going deep on one of the methods. For that specific platform first, then you can consider adding some bells and whistles to it, but I would not, go to the buffet and add different parts, to, to one particular learning style because it is possible they will not go together well.

Relying on the algorithms

Matty: Well, the mention of, Matt Holmes is interesting. I'm going to glom together two questions here. So I took the Matt Holmes, course on untargeted Facebook ads, where you allow Facebook to determine, you don't provide these, this, people who like Stephen King are going to like this.

You let Facebook do that. And it totally made sense to me. And I tried that for a while. It wasn't really panning out for me. I'm not necessarily blaming the theory. It's there are a lot of moving parts. So. I know it's working well for some people, but one of the things that appeal to me about it is that it makes sense to me that if, if AI is writing novels, if AI can do the things that it can do, then Facebook algorithms as a form of AI, like I trust that they could be better at picking targets for me than I could be.

And that the platforms that rely on me doing research into my own books, like Better Understanding Comp Authors, I'm kind of looking forward to the day when I can press a button and, Chad GPT will say, as it does now, I'm not sure how accurate it is, but, oh, you know who good comp authors are for your books?

These. And I think Amazon is. is perfectly positioned to do this because they, like, they have the text of your book. I feel like it can't be that far away that they're going to be doing the equivalent of untargeted Facebook ads. That was a whole mess of stuff, but can you comment on, like, the pros and cons of you making the decisions about who will like your books versus a machine making decisions about who's going to like your books?

Bryan: Well, it's very interesting because, we have found that especially for some of our authors who are making over 6,000 a month, so they qualify, for our agency, they, they find that they're getting the most clicks on their auto ads, which is, Somewhat just generated by Amazon, based around your 7 KDP keyword phrases, based around your categories, based around previous maybe data that you have going to your book.

And so it is kind of similar in that way, nowhere near as detailed or sophisticated as Facebook's Advantage Plus, audiences, and I have heard of them working for some people, not working for others, but yet you got to try it because if it does work, there's your push button, there's your chat GPT, pick all the things that, if you can get it to work with less Input from you and less effort from you, and it works.

You got to do it because there is only so much time in the day, right? There's only so many hours. There's only so much energy. There's only so much passion that can go into a single day. And if we can figure out that, oh, this Facebook method saves time, saves energy, great. Amazon doesn't feel like it's quite there yet.

I would love for it to be there. I would love for it to be a little bit easier. I feel like, sometimes teaching Amazon ads, we're bending over backwards, trying to explain the little, quirks of the platform. It'd be nice if those quirks weren't there and it just kind of worked. but I do think in a few years, Matty, we will be in a position that it will be easier for everyone to be able to advertise, but that will mean some of the people that here in 2024 who currently have an advantage, over, over authors who maybe are struggling with those ads, that advantage may dissipate.

And, you know as well as I do, when, authors who are secure in their earnings start to see that gap, dissipating, they're going to be angry, and they're going to say, this is no good, and they're going to say mean things about that platform, or the machines, or how it works, and it's like, Well, this is why you build up an email list.

This is why you try to future proof your business. This is why you, you become anti fragile in whatever ways you can. This is why you connect deeper with your readers, while you have that advantage because these kinds of advantages could be temporary. And so it's good to build a stronger foundation for your business.

Matty: Yeah, I can imagine that the improvement of AI is not only going to be potentially a time saver for authors, but also remove, provides a more objective source. So for example, I could see someone writing a book and they say, this is definitely a police procedural. I'm going to, I'm going to put in a lot of police procedural related terms into my keywords.

And then, they put it up, it doesn't do anything, but behind the scenes, if you let a machine. Picket, they would say, oh, no, this is really more cozy. And they start showing it to cozy readers. And then suddenly the sales boom. And I just think that a lot of these is, ad approaches require the person who's probably the least good at objectively assessing the work to assign this stuff that is supposed to be objective, like keywords. It provides that third party perspective in a way that I think it can be very difficult for authors to bring to their own work.

Bryan: Yeah, you need, whether it is a person or a program, getting some neutral point of view on your books can make a huge difference. I absolutely agree.

Matty: Yeah, an experience I had was taking my, The description of one of my books and putting it into mid journey or something like that, and saying, give me a cover, not because I was planning on using the cover, but I was just curious, and it featured a secondary character much more prominently on the cover, and I thought, oh yeah, because you know what, that character's name shows up Before my protagonist's character in the description, maybe it would be a good idea if I didn't do that, actually put my protagonist's name first. So, those kinds of insights, I think it's useful to play around with this stuff, even if you don't end up using it in the real world, just to see. Oh yeah, I never thought of it that way before.

Bryan: Yeah, that totally makes sense. Good exercise that you did there for yourself.

Attributing performance results to advertising efforts

Matty: I think one of the challenges of using multiple platforms is this question of to where do you attribute the results? And so for a lot of my author career, I've only been doing one thing at a time. So if I get a big jump in sales, I'm like, okay, well, I was running Amazon ads. It's probably from Amazon ads.

Is there any, again, sort of strategic advice you can give when people are running ads on multiple platforms or making multiple promotional efforts, how they know where those came from?

Bryan: When you get really complicated when you're like some of the clients that we work with who are running Facebook ads, Amazon ads, they have a vibrant TikTok following. They're doing maybe TikTok shop or they're also doing Shopify, and some of the people who don't buy on Shopify will then go over to Amazon and buy This makes it.

Like, if you think back to high school calculus, this is a multi-variable equation. And so you want to look at potential cause and effect. Any assumptions you have to throw out the window, because if you see that, hey, I got more Facebook clicks this day, it must've been that. But then you dive deeper, and you see that, oh, well, there's a chance that Facebook, that Facebook traffic was actually going to a bad, irrelevant source that day.

And so you say, well, maybe it wasn't the Facebook. It is very, very difficult. And so, what you have to really look at You have to look at the data very objectively. You cannot go into it with a bunch of assumptions. I have had authors say, well, I know that these five sales didn't come from my ads because my uncle said he told his friends about it, and they must have bought it.

And it's like, well, you don't know anything when it comes to this because Amazon is not going to share that data with us. And so you really have to come at it very much from as much of a neutral perspective. We were just talking about a neutral perspective. As much as, as neutral as you possibly can be, because once you, when you throw in Amazon plus Facebook, okay, it gets a little more complicated.

If you have 3 or 4 promotional methods going at once, it is very difficult to tell where the sales actually came from. I would, for the most part, not recommend 3 to 4 promotional methods, unless you're already doing pretty well, because it, there comes a certain point in your career, and we've seen this with some of our agency clients, they’re making 20 grand on a bad month.

And so they know, well, if I spend five to 10 grand across these platforms and make 30 grand, it doesn't really matter where they came from to a certain extent. They're just happy that they threw money at ads and good things happen. They had a good profit margin and they're going to do it again. And there might come a time where they have to kind of reckon with that.

but in the short term, if they know I'll spend 10, I'll make 20 30 or 40, then they can go ahead and do that. But for folks who are starting out, you might want to keep things more simple.

Budgeting for ad beginners

Matty: I think that brings up another thing that I always like to encourage, people who are experts as you are to talk to is if someone is just starting out, I think we hear these, I spent 10,000 a month on Amazon ads and I earn, 10,000 times whatever. When people are just dipping their toe in the water.

What should they be budgeting, as a daily budget, as a weekly budget, however they, you would recommend they approach it, when they're just starting out.

Bryan: Yeah, absolutely. With Amazon ads, we usually put a 5 daily budget per ad. but then if you're worried that those ads are going to spend. All that money. If you have five ads, you have 10 ads, and you don't want to spend 25 to 50 a day, which they usually won't if you bid pretty low, around 34 to 39. But let's say you're nervous about it.

You can actually put all those ads into an ad folder that's called a portfolio, and you can set a portfolio budget cap and say, Actually, I don't want this to spend more than 40 for the month. And you say on a recurring basis, each month I want to spend 40 or less. I would say that. When you're first starting out, you could set those portfolio budgets, 40 to 50 in a month.

when you're just starting out, when you just have one book, it's not even likely to spend all that. but it's nice to know that budget is in place. I think a lot of authors, when they come into this, they say, well, I've got 400 earmarked. I'm going to spend this on ads. Then you go to Amazon, and it spends 4.

And you're like, but I budgeted 400. Why didn't it spend it? I'm going to raise my bid, which is not what we would recommend. And so you might want to budget for a certain amount, but you just got to keep in mind with a platform like Amazon, it might not actually go and spend that money, but, it’s good to know those numbers so that you could put them in as a portfolio budget cap.

Is one book enough for an ad campaign?

Matty: So I wanted to ask a time investment question. you would mention before about, we all have lives, and so how much time do we invest in this kind of thing? So I think that a piece of common author advice is, if you're wondering what to do with your time, you never go wrong using it to work on your next book.

And I think that's generally true, although I'm kind of hearing a shift, because I think if I had heard you speak as I have years ago, then the message would have been, if you only have one book, maybe wait until you have another book. Now I think I'm hearing more of a shift to, there's no harm in running ads against an early book, because it can advise, it can give you that market research insight.

That suggest, maybe this is really cozy and not a police procedural, or maybe people aren't sympathizing with your character, whatever that might be. But, I think there's also a point where you've got a bunch of books, like, I have, I currently have, 10 novels by the end of this year, I should have 11 or 12, and I almost feel like, maybe it's better, like, maybe I should make 2025 my promotional year, not stop writing altogether, because I think there are dangers there, but do you ever think that there's a time when you would advise an author to say, now it's time to shift your, Let's shift your focus a little bit.

Let's have a concerted chunk of time that is strictly going to be focused on learning and optimizing and using promotional tools like Amazon ads.

Bryan: I think folks do this naturally. I think that people do kind of go into promotional mode, especially if they buy a course or they are trying out a new method. I think there can be benefits of it, but right now, and I got a little bit in trouble for this, this was exciting. So I was talking about on some more book show that this exact question, if you have, one book out, or how many books would you wait until you run ads?

And I say one, because if you are planning to write a ten book series, and first book has no chance of selling once you've run the ads, and you realize, like, maybe you didn't quite get the genre right, maybe you didn't get the tropes right, then, hey, the ads have actually pointed you in the direction of, well, maybe you could write something a little bit different and see how that goes.

I got in trouble for it a little bit, because someone listened to that post, or listened to that, episode, and said, Bryan is telling me that I should cancel my series if it didn't sell well on ads. And then that was posted in a public group, the writing gals, and a lot of people were like, That's terrible advice!

And it's not exactly what I was saying, but it's not exactly the opposite of what I was saying either, because What are you going to get more out of? Are you going to get more out of writing and researching a series starter, running ads to it, determining, eh, it's not where it needs to be, and then writing and researching a second series starter.

And then maybe taking the lessons learned from that and writing a third series starter for a totally different series, maybe even a different subgenre. Or writing three books in one series and then running ads to it. do you get more out of? I wonder if you get more out of option A, because that writing and research process that usually we don't do until we've finished a series, put it on the shelf, moved on to another series, is where the growth can happen to a certain extent.

I remember I was writing a series, and I was writing book 5, and I was like, this is the best book I've ever written, and no one's ever going to find it. Because it's deep in a series that the book one isn't so good. And so to go back to the question of, is there a time where you focus on promotional methods or you, or do you always just keep the writing going? a big fan right now of you focus some time on the writing and research and. You can focus some time on promotion, but I think the big growths, the Richter scale, 10x growths, those happen jumping from a series to a different series to a different series. Now, I did message the person and all these comments come in and I said, you don't have to quit a series.

You don't have to give up a series. But there is nothing wrong with saying, I'm going to write another book one and I'll come back to book two of this later. You never have to kill a series, but I am very big right now, Matty, on can I save an author two to three years of their lives? And this is kind of the theory I'm going on of, especially based on lots of authors I've seen who've had success.

This might be the thing to concentrate on. And you might want to wait until you have the big hit where one of those series starters does seem to take off on its own. maybe you go into promotion mode, not necessarily when, you're in a position where you'd need to double your sales to be happy. To me, that feels like, well, ads are going to bump what you have up 20 to 30 percent at most. If. If you're not happy with what 20 30 percent more would bring, then I wonder if you focus on that next series starter and go deeper into that writing to market genre research and then save the promotional time for later.

Theoretical? I'll put that, forward, philosophical maybe, but I'm always trying to think of how can authors kind of level up, and this feels to me like maybe the direction they need to go in.

Matty: Well, I like that idea that you're not suggesting people trash their starter if it's not doing well on the ads, but that by the time you've tested your third starter, and this is the one that catches on, then it's easier to step back and say, oh, you know what I did differently?

I spent more time developing the character, and you know what I could do? I could go back into series one, and I could write that second book, except this time, guess what? more character development, or an interesting backstory, or whatever that might be. And so, the learnings that you can gain from what it was about that one that finally hit could be profitably applied to the earlier ones.

Bryan: right. that's, like I said, the theory, but I've seen too many authors. All of those have success with their 3rd series or their 4th series or their 5th series. And I wonder, well, what if that didn't happen in year 6 of their career? What if it happened in year 2? And it just makes me wonder.

Matty: So, Bryan, I appreciate you being willing to delve into all these sort of philosophical and theoretical questions about, Amazon ads, and I know you have lots of resources for the more tactical side of Amazon ads as well, so, please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about those resources and everything you do online,

Bryan: Absolutely. And thank you, Matty. It's been a lot of fun talking with you today. So, the 5 Day Author Ad Profit Challenge is a free event that we do quarterly. The next one's coming up April 17th, 2024. We'll have more in the future each quarter. this is a free course, free support, free Q&As. Often copied and duplicated. People try to do these kinds of challenges, but, I feel like we've really gotten a good handle on our process here, and that's why this one coming up is the 19th challenge we've done, and usually several thousand people are taking it at once, we love putting this on, it's a good way to learn the basics, it's a good way to.

Matty: Get your hands dirty and actually make a few ads, but do, to do it in a safe environment where you have a lot of support, where you're not doing it all on your own. That is at AuthorsAdvertise.com. That's AuthorsAdvertise.com and you can register for the challenge. as I have done myself.

Bryan: As you have done yourself,

Matty: That's right.

Bryan: I'm so excited that you'll be there.

and then I have a podcast too, the Sell More Book Show podcast, sellmorebookshow.com or anywhere you listen to podcasts. as Matty mentioned, we just hit 10 years, hoping to do as many more as we can.

Matty: Great. It was lovely talking to you, Bryan. Thanks so much.

Matty Dalrymple 3/19/24 Matty Dalrymple 3/19/24

Episode 230 - The Good, the Bad, and the Surprising of Kickstarter with Megan Haskell and Jennifer Hilt

Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!

Megan Haskell and Jennifer Hilt discuss THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE SURPRISING OF KICKSTARTER. They offer their insider perspectives, covering both fiction and non-fiction books, including how Kickstarters enables authors to tap into a growing desire among readers for access to creators; which comes first, a Kickstarter campaign or a reader community; how Kickstarter has become a platform where readers browse for books (and aren’t looking for bargains); the importance of starting small; the challenge of data management; the value of a campaign as market research; ideas for backer tier offerings; which parts of the campaign were harder or easier than they expected; and the importance of not just adding a Kickstarter campaign on top of your existing schedule and of building in rest time.

Megan Haskell is the award-winning author of The Sanyare Chronicles, the epic fantasy "Forged in Shadow," and a women’s contemporary fantasy series, starting with "Aether Bound." And she and Greta Boris are the forces behind The Author Wheel.

Jennifer Hilt is the author of THE TROPE THESAURUS series, including TROPE YOUR WAY TO A STRONGER STORY and books on horror and romance tropes. She is also the USA Today bestselling author of 24 books across four pen names. And Jennifer is my co-host for the MINING THE MOVIES WITH TROPETALK video series that you’ll find on The Indy Author YouTube channel.

Episode Links

https://meganhaskell.com/
https://www.jenniferhilt.com/

Summary

This episode of "The Indy Author Podcast" features a discussion with Jennifer Hilt and Megan Haskell on their experiences with Kickstarter campaigns for their books. They cover the basics of Kickstarter, their personal motivations for using the platform, and the different strategies they employed in their campaigns. Jennifer focuses on non-fiction projects related to tropes, while Megan discusses her fiction series. They share insights on setting up campaigns, choosing reward tiers, and the importance of direct reader engagement. Challenges such as fulfillment, international shipping, and managing backer expectations are also discussed. The conversation highlights Kickstarter as a tool for expanding reader reach, testing market interest, and providing unique reader experiences. Both authors stress the importance of understanding Kickstarter's community-driven nature and the need for clear planning and execution in campaigns.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guests are Jennifer Hilt and Megan Haskell. How are you guys doing?

[00:00:07] Megan: Good!

[00:00:09] Jennifer: Happy to be here.

[00:00:10] Matty: Yes, I'm very happy to have you here, one of my few multi-guest podcast episodes. So, this is a special acknowledgment for you guys.

Meet Jennifer Hilt and Megan Haskell

[00:00:18] Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Jennifer Hilt is the author of the "Trope Thesaurus" series, including "Trope Your Way to a Stronger Story" and books on Horror and Romance Tropes. She's also the USA Today bestselling author of 24 books across four pen names. Jennifer is also my co-host on the "Minding the Movies with Trope Talk" video series that you will find on the Indie Author YouTube channel.

Megan Haskell is the award-winning author of the "Sanyare Chronicles," the epic fantasy "Forged in Shadow," and a women's contemporary fantasy series, starting with "Aether Bound." She and Greta Boris are the forces behind the Author Wheel. So, as soon as you've caught up with the Indie Author Podcast, please go over and subscribe to the Author Wheel Podcast, which is a wonderful podcast.

[00:00:59] Megan: Oh, thank you.

[00:01:01] Matty: And I invited Jennifer and Megan on the podcast to talk about Kickstarter because Kickstarter is just in the news so much, and I thought this would be a good combination because we have someone who has had success with a non-fiction Kickstarter, Jen, and someone who has had success with a fiction Kickstarter, Megan, and then we have someone who has no experience with Kickstarter whatsoever, me. So, we figured that we would bring a good combination of perspectives to this. Jen and Megan have also promised to share not just the glory moments of their Kickstarter but also some of the more challenging moments as well.

What is Kickstarter?

[00:01:48] Jennifer: Before that, can I just take a minute to define what I think Kickstarter means? Because I didn't know that.

[00:01:55] Matty: Oh, sure. Yeah, please.

[00:01:56] Jennifer: If you're listening here and don't get it, Megan, chime in with whatever you think. But Kickstarter is a way of what we call direct sales, and you're interacting with your readers. It's similar to GoFundMe in that idea, except Kickstarter is only for creative projects. That's just kind of like the basics, which I didn't even really understand when I first was like, what is this Kickstarter thing? So just to give you a rundown of what that is. You can only use it for creative projects, and then we'll go into all the details about that.

Background on Jen's Kickstarter campaign

[00:02:27] Jennifer: My Kickstarter, the reason why I was interested in it, is I sell non-fiction; my non-fiction books are obviously about tropes. I've been using those wide, and I was seeing people like Sky Warren, Brian Cohn, and Russell Nolte doing Kickstarters with their non-fiction books and having success with that. I was like, I know zero about this, like, probably even less than zero if that's possible. So, I was wondering if that would be something that would work for me. That was kind of how I got my entry; I just plunged into it.

I had a book, "My Trope Thesaurus Romance," my second book, that I hadn't put out on Amazon or wide or anything like that. And I had a pretty good draft of it. It wasn't completely done, but I had a pretty good draft. And I thought, well, what if I use that for a Kickstarter? That was pretty much all I thought with it. And I went into it quite naive, I would say. Megan and I can talk more about that. But that was my entry into doing it: I have this product, I see other people having success with it, let me give it a go and see what happens.

Background on Megan's Kickstarter campaign

[00:03:37] Matty: And Megan, how about you? Give us a little background on your Kickstarter.

[00:03:41] Megan: Sure. So I actually have done two so far. The first was nonfiction, which was for the Author Wheel. We did a Kickstarter for our "Foundations of Great Storytelling, Preparing to Write," and that one was reasonably successful as well. Then I did my fiction one, which was kind of me putting my toes in the water because, like Jennifer, I didn't quite know what I was doing and was figuring things out. I wanted to test something that I already knew how to do.

So I did a paperback Kickstarter for the second book in the "Rise of Lilith" series, "Aether Crossed." Like Jennifer, it was successful. I fully funded within a couple of hours and exceeded my goals. I was really excited about it as a way to kind of get going. And now I'm just about to launch my second fiction Kickstarter, which will be for a special edition hardcover of my debut novel, "Sanyare: The Last Descendant," for the "Sanyare Chronicles." I think that's my big tip of the day: go slow, put your toe in the water, and build from there. That's my two cents on my Kickstarters.

The mechanics of Kickstarter

[00:05:10] Megan: The way Kickstarter works is that you set up your sales page, your campaign page, and you set up different tiers for the rewards that your backers can opt in and support you at. Then you hit launch, and you can choose how long your campaign is and how much funding you need to make it happen. For my paperback fiction campaign, I set my funding goal at $500, which would basically cover the print costs and shipping costs of the books and give me a little boost for the launch of the book. You can launch elsewhere afterward, but for the Kickstarter, I set a small goal because I was putting my toe in the water and wanted to fund those costs.

Then you set your time period; mine was a 21-day campaign, meaning I had three weeks to convince enough people to back me to achieve that funding goal. I managed to do that, getting $500 in a couple of hours, which was fabulous. That let me know I was going to meet my minimum goal and would be able to fund the print of the paperbacks and all the associated costs.

If you don't fund on Kickstarter, meaning if you don't get enough backers to meet your goal, the campaign doesn't fund. I don't like looking at it as failure, but it fails. And so, none of the backers get charged, and you are not required to complete that Kickstarter. For example, there are Kickstarters out there, like for a board game, they set usually high funding goals because they have bigger costs than we do as authors for books. So if they don't hit that 100,000 funding goal, they don't have to make the game at all. They don't owe it to anyone. But if they do hit that funding goal, they have to fulfill it for their backers. So it's really important to set your funding goal at a level that is achievable but covers your costs, so that if you fund, you can actually afford to make the product.

Expanding reader reach

[00:07:44] Matty: I'm curious to ask both of you, what were your own author business goals when you decided to pursue it? Jennifer, you had talked about that a little bit, but did you have very specific goals in mind, like what you wanted to achieve? You wanted to fund something, or you wanted to expand your reach, or you wanted to get more visibility or anything like that. Any additional goals you had there.

[00:08:06] Jennifer: Yeah, I definitely wanted to expand my reach and find other readers/community because it seems like often the people who are supporting Kickstarters are not exactly the same people you're going to find on the other channels. So it's really a way to give you more audience. That was kind of the thing that I was interested in because, like Megan said, when you're finished with your Kickstarter project, authors usually wait a minimum of three months before they put up the product for sale on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other vendors.

So, you're selling the same product twice to two different groups of people, I guess. That was obviously very appealing as an author because we don't get that a lot. That said, there's a lot of work involved in doing that. And, like the things that Megan talked about, like setting up your page and campaign, the first time I did it, I would say that all that took me a month. I'm not a particularly techie person, probably that's not a surprise, but just figuring out what everything meant took me a lot of time to figure out what rewards really mean, what a tier is, how that works with someone, and then just working out the pages themselves to make them look attractive and those kinds of things.

For me, all that was a really big part of the learning process that I was glad I did, but it definitely takes time and energy to do. It's not a set-it-and-forget-it thing in any kind of way. And it's just important for people to know that. I wanted to look for more of an audience, and I definitely had that opportunity, but it also took a lot of time and energy to learn how to do that search. So, that was really my biggest thing, because, oh, one of the things that was really nice about it is because the Kickstarter people are often other creative people, they really tend to want to sign up for your mailing lists. We're always trying to improve our mailing lists.

So that was a really great benefit that I found as I gained a whole bunch more newsletter subscribers. Things like that were more long-term goals. But the initial thing was just to broaden my reach and learn a bit more about ways to sell direct besides what I had been doing.

A growing reader desire for access to the creator

[00:10:28] Megan: I think for me it was, like Jennifer said, reaching a new audience. The interesting thing is that we're in this moment of transition within the author and reader communities, where there are huge differences between the readers that are in Kindle Unlimited, for example, who just want to read as many books as they can, and maybe they find favorites and become a different kind of reader, but they start out there, at least. And then there are the readers who are interested in having a physical copy of something, in supporting an author directly, that kind of sustainability of the creative industry. There are readers out there who are strongly in favor of that and in favor of reaching those authors and having access to more, you know, to the creative process for that author.

So I'm not saying you need to go out and have coffee with them, but like, just that access is a premium.

[00:11:30] Matty: That's a really premium deliverable to give them.

[00:11:31] Megan: That would be huge.

[00:11:33] Matty: It would be a really premium deliverable.

[00:11:36] Megan: Absolutely. One of the premium tiers that I did offer on mine was a one-on-one coffee on Zoom. I didn't meet them in person, but on Zoom. It was a very high tier, a high-cost item, and there were a few other things involved with it as well, including the books, obviously. But I did have a few backers who were like, "Yeah, I'm going to spend a couple hundred bucks so I can sit and chat with you because I think it's so cool to have access to an author and talk about the creative process and how you came up with the story idea." So it's a different audience. And for me personally, that's the direction I wanted to go, or wanted to pursue, that more community-based, experience-based group of readers rather than the 'as many books as fast as possible' reader community.

So that was just a personal strategy decision for myself. It feels right for me. It's the kind of business I want to run. But I know there are plenty of authors out there who are like, "No, I just want to write and I can write fast and I want to put out a lot of books and make sure my readers have that bingeable quality." And that's totally cool. It's just a very different mindset and a very different type of reader.

So for me, it was largely starting to try to tap into that community. And then also that first campaign, the paperback campaign, I knew it wasn't going to be a big-ticket seller like the really super high edition, luxury hardbacks. But it was my way of being like, "Is this even really feasible for me? I know how to make a paperback already. So, okay, let's do that and see if we can start to figure out what this Kickstarter thing really is, and how much work goes into it," because it is a lot.

[00:13:34] Matty: Yeah, we're definitely going to be delving into that, and I wanted to share a story that I think I heard at 20 Books, but I remember someone talking about the fact that someone did something like a Kickstarter, and one of their tiers was where the author would fly to the contributor's hometown, meet them at the airport, have lunch with them, and hand them a signed book. This was a multi-thousand-dollar tier, and he got like two people who were willing to spend, I don't know, $10,000 a piece or something like that for him to fly to their airport and hand them the book. It was really just a great example of almost literally the sky's the limit if you have the kind of community you can tap into.

The chicken and egg question of reader community

[00:14:15] Matty: Which leads to my next question, which is sort of a chicken and egg thing because you want to build up more of a community using the Kickstarter, but you kind of have to have a community that wants to interact with you in that way to start with. I do sense that a certain amount of the Kickstarter activity is Kickstarters supporting each other, especially in the author community. There's this community of Kickstarter-using authors, and they're very generous about supporting each other's Kickstarters, but among your reader base, it has to be seeded with people who want to, or maybe already are interacting with you in that way. So, Jennifer, can you talk a little bit about that? Which comes first? The seed of that kind of community, or can that come as a result of the Kickstarter?

Kickstarter as a platform for browsing for books

[00:15:02] Jennifer: Yeah, one thing that I keep learning, and I keep forgetting, but I keep relearning, is that there are so many people out there. Especially in our author communities, we sometimes feel like there's only a finite number of people interested in our work. That probably is true, but there are also just so many people out there. Kickstarter has shown me a window into just how many other people out there that I didn't even know who could be potentially interested in my work. There's a lot of people on Kickstarter. The biggest challenge when you put something up there is gaining visibility for them to see you. They have this little sticker that if your project funds in a certain amount of time, you get a "projects we love" thing, and then you get a little more visibility.

In general, I just think there's a whole lot of people out there who want to read and are interested in different ideas. Like when I did two campaigns, either time I have done very little promo, like pre-order equivalent, just because it's taken me so long to set it all up. I tend to be like, "Okay, guess what, this is coming out in three days, the campaign's going to start," and it's been really interesting to me that immediately I see people backing it who I don't know any of these people.

[00:17:12] Matty: Yeah, I guess I always just assume, because this is how I would use Kickstarter, and of course, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking everybody else is using something the way I'm using it, but I only ever go to Kickstarter if I hear somebody that I already like announce they have a Kickstarter. Then I'll go look and say, "Oh yeah, that looks good, I'm going to fund that," but I would never go to Kickstarter just to poke around.

[00:17:34] Jennifer: But I know people that do.

[00:17:36] Matty: Yeah, evidently. Megan, what are your thoughts about that?

[00:17:39] Megan: Yeah, so I agree. I think there are people that Kickstarter has become the primary way that they shop for books. They want, especially book collectors, who want that physical copy in their hands. I think there are people, that's how they do it. They like the system, they like interacting with the authors directly, they like having that physical, gorgeous product in their hands. It's a completely different audience than the people who are just reading ebooks online and are used to that. So I think there's that aspect to it.

As far as the chicken and the egg, I think it's both. You need both. If you've been primarily or exclusively online with Amazon, especially if you're exclusive with Amazon, but even if you're wide, even if you're across all the ebook platforms, your audience is therefore going to be mostly digital. They're going to be the ones that have subscribed to your list. Now, some of those people will be super fans or want that physical, beautiful collector's edition because they love your work. But, as a percentage, it's hard to say what that percentage is going to be. It will fund some, but it's probably not going to be everything.

Meanwhile, now you've got this Kickstarter page, and especially after your first campaign. And we'll see how this works out for my second campaign. So, Jennifer, you might be able to speak to this a little bit more. But it starts to snowball because all the people that backed your first campaign you can now message them and say, "Hey, I've got a new campaign up, I've got a new book, or I've got this special edition." So now they do already know you, they're already in the system, and I think there's more momentum there. Start small. On that first campaign, again, this is why I think, my personal belief, and I have not done enough Kickstarters to prove this out yet, but, my personal belief is that you start small. You put your toe in the water, easy funding goals, something you already know how to do, something that's digital, or, I mean, Kickstarter likes physical products, so you still should do a physical product of some kind, but start small, don't have massive goals for your first Kickstarter.

[00:20:22] Matty: I'd be interested in hearing from both of you about how your Kickstarter experience differed from what you expected, like what were your biggest surprises as you went through the process? And Jennifer, let's start with you on that one.

[00:20:34] Jennifer: Biggest surprises... Let's see, I would say, overwhelmingly, backers have been lovely. Like, if you have some worry about like, oh, I'm going to get some, no, people have just been great. I've really enjoyed interacting with them; they've been nice, enthusiastic, understanding, just great.

The challenge of data management

[00:20:52] Jennifer: The management of how you deliver the stuff is a whole other thing and a very real part of it, and so the data management part of a Kickstarter campaign is kind of basically three things for me. One, a product that you create. Two, the Kickstarter campaign itself that we were talking about, that you're trying to get funded. And then three, what they call fulfillment, of how you actually get all those things that you've promised people to them. And so those are, in my mind, pretty much three distinct things that I have to do. The fulfillment part takes a lot of time and energy from me as I'm learning how to do it.

And there's not just a platform you can use Kickstarter to do it, but there's another platform that can help you do it, and one of them that I use is called BackerKit, and they do it for a fee, but it helps you manage all the people, like the email addresses and the physical addresses and who gets what, because as you get a whole bunch of tiers, it can get very confusing very quickly.

So, learning how to do all that has been something that's taken a lot of time and energy, and I feel like, oh, I'm really understanding it the second time, but the first time that I did it, I was like, very much pulling my hair out, like, "What am I doing? How does this work?" And it was very intense for me to figure all that stuff out.

So I think it's just kind of like everything else. You don't know until you do it, and I wouldn't have thought there would be so much, like, data management involved, which is probably incredibly naive on my part, but that, but there it is.

Controls on use of backer data [00:22:26] Matty: I'm curious as to how much of the backer data you get. Do you get email addresses and mailing addresses because you need them to fulfill, and are there any restrictions on how you can use that data?

[00:22:46] Jennifer: You cannot just take and download all the emails and put them on your list unless you ask. I can communicate with them through Kickstarter or BackerKit about their order, but if I want to send them an email privately or send them my newsletter, there's a way that you ask them in a survey at the end of your campaign, with a question that says, "Hey, do you want to be on my mailing list?" Overwhelmingly, that community says yes, which is why it's a great way to grow your email list. But you absolutely, 100 percent, cannot just take and download all these emails and put them on your list.

[00:23:47] Matty: Makes sense.

[00:23:49] Megan: And they don't give you any of that information until your Kickstarter funds and closes. During the campaign, other than sending backer updates within Kickstarter, it's like a message through Kickstarter to your backers or people who are following your campaign. So you can do that, but you don't actually see who those backers are until after the campaign closes and is funded. Then you can move them over to BackerKit or there's another one called PledgeBox. There are a few different companies, as Jennifer was saying. That's when you get that information, and on all the sites, they have this big thing that you have to check the boxes that say, "I understand, I will not copy, save, or distribute this email list. I understand this is their privacy, laws and all that stuff." So that's an important consideration as well. But for people who are concerned about being backers, that's what you can tell them, is that you don't have access to their information other than what you need to do to fulfill the Kickstarter, and you're not keeping or saving it anywhere.

[00:24:59] Matty: So Megan, I want to give you a chance to answer the question about what was the biggest surprise for you as you ran your Kickstarter campaign.

Kickstarter as market research (e.g., readers want to read but not take online cocktail classes)

[00:25:05] Megan: So again, kind of going back to this is an ongoing learning process, right? So I thought for my fiction campaign, because my series has a protagonist who is a bartender, I created cocktail menus for each of the books with the help of a bartender friend. And I thought as an upper-tier add-on, people would love to have an online Zoom cocktail class with my friend who teaches them, right? It was just such a no-brainer, why would you not do that? But nobody backed it.

[00:25:45] Matty: Really?

[00:25:45] Megan: Yeah, nobody backed it, except for a couple of people who bought in at the highest tier because they wanted the one-on-one. Honestly, they didn't really care that much about the cocktail class, but nobody else backed it. So, I was like, "Oh, well, fun fact of the day, readers like to read, not attend a cocktail class." Sometimes I think Kickstarter can be another great way, like live events, to really start to understand who your audience is and what they really want, as well as interacting with them more personally and so forth like we've talked about. But that was a big aha moment that like, "Oh, no, this is, that didn't fit. It wasn't what the readers wanted." So taking that information moving forward, I will not be offering a cocktail class in the future.

Ideas for backer tier offerings

[00:26:43] Matty: Well, we've mentioned sort of in passing what you were offering as different tiers. Megan, can you just go through what your different tiers were in one of your Kickstarters and what the financial commitment was from a backer for each of them?

[00:26:55] Megan: Yeah, I'll do my best. I don't have it up, but, so the base level was just to support the project. So I think for $3 or something like that, you could just support the project. And I had a couple of digital downloads, like coloring pages, for that one. Then I had the digital-only or ebook-only tier, which was just for the ebook of "Aether Crossed." I kept the same lower-tier items as well, so it still had the coloring page, a computer wallpaper, but digital downloads. That one I think was $10. Then I had the two-book series in digital, it might've been like $15 for that one or something. So that was all my digital-only tiers.

And then I had the paperback, so that was my first physical tier where I actually had to ship stuff out. With the paperback, you also got a bookmark, and it was signed by me, and then I think I charged $25 because it included shipping. Shipping is tough, and I'm still, for my next campaign, I want to figure out international shipping, which Jennifer, I don't know if you've done international shipping, but I may have to

[00:28:09] Jennifer: We should talk because I would like to figure it out too because people ask all the time and I'm like, I'm afraid, I'm afraid.

[00:28:14] Megan: Yeah, international shipping is tough. But for U.S. shipping, I included that in all the tiers so that it was all wrapped up in a single price. Then I had the two-book paperback tier because it was the second book in the series. And then I started adding on the VIP tiers, or the experience tier. It was an expensive high-ticket item, but it was a cocktail class, a group Ask Me Anything on Zoom meeting, and of course, all the digital books, all the physical VIP tier, which had all the physical books, as well as all the digital stuff, as well as all the classes. And then I had the super extra VIP experience, which included the one-on-one. So, yeah. I want to say that one was like $350.

I think I offered a discount at the beginning of the campaign to try to get people in there, and then after a week or something, I think the full price was $350, I want to say, so, yeah, that was how I broke that one up.

Now, for the hardback edition that I'm about to do, I'm going to try and keep it a little simpler because it was a lot to manage on the back end as far as understanding which backers were in which tiers and what they got and making sure they all got the things that they were supposed to get and all that stuff. So I think I am going to try and simplify it a little bit, but we'll see. Sometimes my ideas run away with me.

[00:29:51] Matty: And Jennifer, how about you? What were some of the things you offered at different backer rates?

[00:29:55] Jennifer: Yeah, similar to Megan, the same thing of like ten dollars was the ebook. I had like a one-dollar PDF. Ten dollars was the ebook and I think thirty dollars was the paperback. So when you get the paperback though you get the ebook and you like everything below it. So it all kind of meshed. And then the BackerKit, the users are used to that. So you don't have to explain that. You know, it's pretty laid out. So that makes sense. I simplified for my second one because it really seemed like people are just basically interested in books and classes and then doing some more one-on-one things.

So those are the kind of things I offered. The neat thing about this is that in addition to the things that you're actually offering for the tiers and things, there's also things that are called add-ons. And that's how people who have a really good backlist, like Megan's fans, per se, they can go back and get copies of her books that she has. I can also get those also, even if they're not in a tier. So it's a different way of adding.

I think the one thing that I really learned that I think is important that sometimes gets lost is, if you have a really good product, you don't have to knock yourself out with lots of bells and whistles. So I think it's okay to not offer 9 million other things to have a good thing and some various versions of that can appeal to people at different price points, but you don't have to do all the things. And I think that, I've seen that has helped, you know, work for me, but I also see other campaigns where that's working, too. If people like it, they're going to like it. You don't have to entice them with a whole bunch of other extraneous elements.

Backers aren't bargain hunters

[00:31:39] Matty: I'm curious about how you balance the price you're charging or asking for from a backer for a product, and then what you eventually want to sell it for when you get to the point where you can put it up on a retail platform.

[00:31:51] Jennifer: I don't actually think that's an issue. Early on, I made the mistake of thinking these were different kinds of backers who want different experiences. They're not just looking for a bargain at $7.99 for an ebook. They're happy to pay a higher price if they're going to have some interaction with you, they're going to have a paperback that's signed, and those kinds of things, so it doesn't really compare directly. It's not as much of an issue as I would have thought at first.

[00:32:22] Matty: That's interesting.

[00:32:32] Jennifer: Did I have a philosophy? I guess I'd heard or read somewhere that the $60 tier should be really good stuff, so when I do a $60 tier, it's like, it includes a class, a digital copy, and a physical copy if you're in the U.S. I really try to make sure that has a lot of good stuff for that price point. The things below it tend to just be more like regular book sales. That was just my way of doing it.

[00:33:33] Megan: To add on to that, the key part here to remember is that you have to know your costs. Understanding your budget before you go in is incredibly important. So figuring out what it's going to cost you to print, are you going to do print on demand or a print run, what the shipping materials costs, the credit card fees costs, all these other costs have to be built into that Kickstarter tier. Backers understand that.

So when you're coming up with your pricing, it matters, but not as much as you might think. The nice thing about nesting everything is that you can have all these little digital add-ons that give your backers something exclusive for Kickstarter, like the wallpaper or coloring book page I made, which haven't been sent out any other time or place. For some backers, that's going to be awesome.

If you just have a lot of digital items included in your tiers, you can build up over the course of all the tiers what those are, and those digital items, at very basically zero cost, add to that backer experience and give you that higher tier price value.

[00:35:19] Jennifer: For example, I just did five small videos, mini vids, talking about tropes in various movies that are only available to people at the $60 level and above, and they get the little code to watch those, and those are theirs.

[00:35:32] Megan: So those are like in addition, you know, so like she's saying, you can add other things on digitally that's not more like things that you're shipping.

Which parts were more difficult than expected?

[00:35:40] Matty: That's cool. So, that leads into the next question I wanted to ask, and I'm anticipating the answer a little bit. But, of all the people I've spoken to about Kickstarter, the thing that people said took much more time than they expected was fulfillment. I'm wondering if that was the case for you, or if there was some part of it that was much more difficult than you expected, whether that was time-wise, effort-wise, or psychically, what was much more difficult than you expected? Jennifer, let's start with you.

[00:36:08] Jennifer: I think it was just, like we talked about, figuring out who gets what, when. You can just use Kickstarter to do it. You don't have to use one of these other fulfillment providers. I used BackerKit the first time because people had said it makes it easier for subsequent campaigns. It was pretty stressful figuring out all the stuff the first time. The second time, things have gone a lot smoother. Part of it, I think, is BackerKit has improved. It still takes a lot of time to figure out how all this stuff gets to everybody.

[00:37:09] Megan: There's a learning curve. Go in knowing that it's going to be challenging, from campaign setup all the way through fulfillment. Don't bank that money until you get everything shipped out because there is a new ecosystem to learn. It's going to be challenging, especially if you haven't ever worked in a warehouse. You have to give yourself patience and grace and break it down into small, easy-to-complete steps. Figure out the next thing you need to know, and then the next thing. Don't expect to create the campaign page in a week and then launch the campaign and think it's going to be all smooth sailing. It is a lot of work and a lot of learning. So just be prepared for that.

How KS compares to running an online store

[00:38:38] Matty: It might be useful for people who aren't familiar with Kickstarter to think of it as setting up an online store, a more elaborate one. They need to figure out the technology, fulfillment, and how to reach the customers they want to reach. There are analogies to all those things for Kickstarter. It's like establishing a new outlet with all the little pieces and parts that need to be accommodated.

[00:39:12] Megan: For authors interested in more direct sales, Kickstarter is a great first step because it guides you through the process. You can use templates and information out there. It's easier to do direct sales like a Shopify store after Kickstarter because you now have inventory, copywriting, and many pieces you need, which you built with Kickstarter's help.

[00:40:21] Matty: That's interesting because I would have assumed it would be the other way around, starting with the online store and then Kickstarter.

[00:40:32] Megan: You can do it that way, I did. But Kickstarter's active community and the guidance they provide can make it easier to then transition to an online store setup. It's just that the nice thing with Kickstarter is that there's such an active community, and they do kind of walk you through the pieces to get you set up, and then you have all those pieces in place, so you can more easily transfer them onto a website, what would be an ad hoc or more ad hoc website system.

What was easier or smoother than expected?

[00:41:02] Matty: Was there any part of it that was easier or smoother than you expected? Megan, let's go back to you.

[00:41:12] Megan: The easy part for me was actually running the campaign. The setup process to get the campaign ready was stressful, making sure I was going to make a profit. But the actual campaign run was less stressful because I had systems in place. I pre-scheduled a lot of stuff, so during the actual campaign run, I wasn't as stressed as I thought I would be.

[00:42:52] Matty: And Jennifer, you had mentioned that you found the BackerKit experience made that part smoother than you had worried it would be. Are there other things that ended up being smoother than you expected for you?

[00:43:03] Jennifer: Like Megan, I found the pre-launch pretty stressful, as I was trying to figure all this out and wondering if anybody would want the things I'm coming up with. But once the campaign itself is going, it does kind of roll along. You tend to it, but you aren't making big changes or doing big things, so it's more just emotionally being there. When it's going, you're less actively working it as opposed to the beginning and the end.

[00:43:58] Matty: That's lovely. So I wanted to ask both of you about just in general, how did you feel about the results of the campaigns you've run? Did it deliver what you were looking for? Are there any major changes you would make the next time you ran one? And Megan, let's start with you.

[00:44:13] Megan: The biggest change for the next campaign is that I'm going to simplify the tiers a bit and not offer a cocktail class. This next campaign will be very much more focused on the product itself, the hardback, making it really beautiful, getting enough backers to afford the print run. The first fiction campaign was successful because I learned a lot, what my audience is looking for, and what the audience on Kickstarter in general is looking for. The first one's tough, I'm hoping the second one is less so.

[00:45:18] Matty: Jennifer, what's your thought on that?

The importance of building rest time in

[00:45:20] Jennifer: I agree with all the things she said, and I'm just really thinking about going forward, making sure to build some rest time in because when you finish, you're like, "Oh, you have all these other things to do." And then you're thinking about the next one, but also realizing, "Oh, I need to take a break." There are people who can run many close together, but I'm probably not that person. And just to kind of honor the way that it works and not feel like, "Oh, just because this person did it this way, I have to do it that way." Kickstarter is very much a great platform to take a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and work out what thing works best for you. But you don't have to follow so much of a set pattern and knock yourself out.

Don't just add KS on top of your existing schedule

[00:46:03] Megan: I like that a lot. Expanding on that, the thing I learned from my nonfiction campaign, which we're finally almost completely fulfilled with because we had to make some courses, is that you can't maintain your standard schedule on your creation of stuff when you're trying to fulfill or when you're trying to do these Kickstarters. You can't stay at that same level and then add something on top. It stresses you out. So, making sure that you go, "Okay, this is now a component of the process, and so some of the other things that you normally do are probably going to slow down. And that's okay, and you need to be able to breathe." My current mantra is "pause, breathe, recover."

[00:47:00] Matty: It could be PBR, except that's already Pabst Blue Ribbon, right? You could use a PBR to PBR.

[00:47:06] Megan: Yeah, there we go.

[00:47:08] Matty: Well, I love any suggestion that a guest ever makes in support of self-care and reasonability, and taking care of yourself as well as taking care of your business. So thank you so much to both of you, and I want to give both of you a moment to share where people can find out more about you and everything you do online. Megan, let's start with you.

[00:47:26] Megan: My fiction website is meganhaskell.com. All of my books are available there, in signed paperback as well as ebook, and I have a few titles that have been done in audio at this point as well, so that's all there. They are also available wide. For the nonfiction side of my life, you can visit authorwheel.com. And then I also have started recently writing a new newsletter called Clarify, Simplify, Implement on Substack.

[00:48:16] Matty: Perfect. Jen, how about you?

[00:48:19] Jennifer: You can find all my stuff at jenniferhilt.com. I've got my nonfiction there, and there's a little bit of my fiction too, if you'd like to take a look. And like Megan, I have a Substack going to trope talk and YouTube channel so you can find me around doing that stuff. And Megan's Substack, I really love.

[00:48:39] Megan: Well, I was going to say, I really love yours too, so we can all be happy together.

[00:48:44] Jennifer: Whenever your thing comes, I'm like, "Oh God, I needed to hear that right now."

[00:48:49] Megan: Yay!

[00:48:50] Matty: I love it when you guys do the promotional work for me. So thank you both so much. This was a great conversation.

[00:48:56] Jennifer: Thanks, Matty.

[00:48:57] Megan: Thank you for having us.

Matty Dalrymple 3/12/24 Matty Dalrymple 3/12/24

Episode 229 - How to Make Your Work Accessible with Michael Johnson

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Authors, who would like to tap into another 20% of the reading population? You can do that by making your works accessible to the community of potential readers with print disabilities.

Michael Johnson discusses HOW TO MAKE YOUR WORK ACCESSIBLE, including the requirements of digital accessibility, such as making images and graphs and charts accessible; tools and services for accommodating accessibility; IP financial and rights considerations; SEO benefits; and the impact of AI. Michael talks about both the social obligations of making work accessible as well as the financial benefits of doing so—there’s a substantial audience out there eager for more accessible content.

Michael Johnson is a seasoned executive with almost 40 years of experience in the technology, publishing, and distribution markets. He is the Vice President of Content at Benetech, working with publishers, conversion houses, technology platforms, and booksellers to help them understand and implement processes that allow for accessible content to get from authors all the way through to the end reader.

Episode Links

Michael’s Links:
https://bornaccessible.benetech.org

Mentioned in episode:
https://authors.sounded.com/
https://www.vitalsource.com/

Summary

This episode of "The Indy Author Podcast" features Michael Johnson, Vice President of Content at Benetech, discussing the importance of making digital content accessible for people with print disabilities. Johnson, with nearly four decades of experience in technology, publishing, and distribution markets, emphasizes the necessity of creating digital books that can be easily consumed by individuals facing challenges such as blindness, low vision, dyslexia, and other disabilities.

He details the role of conversion houses in transforming manuscripts into digital formats, highlighting the critical nature of this process in achieving accessibility. Johnson outlines key issues in digital accessibility, including the need for alt text descriptions for images and graphs, accommodating mathematical and scientific content, and maintaining print page fidelity in digital formats to ensure that readers can navigate texts as intended.

Additionally, Johnson discusses the tools and standards required for creating accessible digital content, such as the use of specific markup languages and platforms like Microsoft Word and DAISY Consortium's tools. He addresses the accessibility of print books, mentioning large print and braille as alternatives, and explores the financial and rights considerations for authors and publishers looking to make their works accessible.

The conversation also touches on the impact of AI in improving accessibility, particularly in audiobook production, and the potential for digital braille to offer on-demand access for readers. Johnson concludes by highlighting the commercial value and social justice importance of making digital content accessible, suggesting that reaching the underserved market of readers with disabilities not only aligns with authors' desires to be read but also offers significant untapped commercial potential.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to "The Indy Author Podcast." Today my guest is Michael Johnson. Hey, Michael, how are you doing?

[00:00:06] Michael: Doing great. Thanks for having me.

Meet Michael Johnson

[00:00:08] Matty: I am pleased to have you here, and to give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Michael is a seasoned executive with almost 40 years of experience in the technology, publishing, and distribution markets. He's the Vice President of Content at Benetech, working with publishers, conversion houses, technology platforms, and booksellers to help them understand and implement processes that allow for accessible content to get from authors all the way through to the end reader. And that is what we are going to be talking about with Michael today: achieving accessibility for your work.

What is a "conversion house"?

[00:00:36] Matty: But before we dive into that, or maybe as a way of diving into that, I had mentioned in your bio that you have done work with conversion houses. What is a conversion house?

[00:00:47] Michael: Okay, that's a great opening question. Most publishers in the world no longer handle their own end-to-consumer or reader process. They're not printing their own books anymore. They've been contracting out for decades to printing houses in various parts of the world, and they rarely do their own conversion from manuscript to an eBook for your Kindle store or any of those types of things. So, there's a subset of the publishing ecosystem that takes publisher files, typically InDesign files, or perhaps files from Vellum or a platform like that, and turns them into the various eBook formats. So when I say conversion houses, that's what I mean: they convert manuscripts into digital content.

What is digital accessibility?

[00:01:33] Matty: And I can see how those kinds of services would have a key role to play in accessibility. But I think to lead us into our conversation about accessibility, can you just describe a little bit, when you say accessibility in terms of books, what are some of the things that you're talking about there?

[00:01:50] Michael: When you talk about accessibility at Benetech or anywhere in the digital world, what we're referring to is making the books readable by people who have a print disability. A print disability might be blindness, low vision, dyslexia, color blindness, or any of a host of other muscular, skeletal, or neurological challenges, which basically means if I handed somebody my phone and it had an eBook on it, would they be able to read it? If the answer is no, the odds are there's some sort of print disability getting in their way. There are a number of ways to make a digital book accessible to those types of readers. By the way, those types of readers represent between 22 and 25 percent of the Earth's population, so it's a significant number. When we talk about digital accessibility, we're talking about some key issues.

Making images accessible

[00:02:39] Michael: The first one is around images. These could be simple images, like a picture of a dragon at a chapter heading, or more detailed images if it's a biographical work. Maybe you have a picture of George Washington or Sojourner Truth, whoever your biography is about. And these images need to be described so that people with different visual challenges can still understand what the image is.

[00:03:27] Michael: So the rule of thumb there is if the image is part of the comprehension of what we're talking about, then it's critically important to do an alt text description or perhaps a long description so that a reader with a visual challenge would still be able to get that comprehension from the image.

Making graphs and charts accessible

[00:03:27] Michael: The next thing would be anything that has to do with math, science, accounting, or any sort of numbers, like charts and graphs. A lot of this shows up in science fiction because people are talking about breaking space barriers, magical time travel, and other things, and there's often math involved. Not always included in the books, but when they are, anything around math, formulas, tables, charts, those sorts of things need to be made accessible.

[00:03:52] Matty: Is that a matter of helping someone who is visually impaired absorb the information, or is it about converting that information, like in a table, into some other format to make it more accessible to more people?

[00:04:15] Michael: No, it's not about repurposing the image itself. Some might say, for example, pie charts are easier to understand than bar graphs. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about whatever the image happens to be, you can use specific markup language as you're creating the manuscript that describes the image. If it's a pie chart, you could say, "This is a pie chart representing population counts. The largest part of the pie is blue, representing 52%," and so on. It's additional information as part of the image description.

Accommodating print page fidelity

[00:04:49] Michael: And the last one, which may seem mundane but is really important, is print page fidelity. If the page numbers are important in your book, then you mark them as such so that the reader who's reading in a digital format can follow along with the pages. Typically, if it's a mystery, sci-fi, romance, or family history, the page numbers aren't that important. But if you're publishing an economic treatise or something where the page numbers are referenced, like "see the chart on page 26," the digital copy needs to know where print page 26 is. So when the reader goes to page 26, they're not on page 17 in the digital copy because you didn't align the page numbers.

[00:05:41] Matty: I'm intrigued by that last point because I imagine that in many cases, if people were doing this without accessibility in mind, they might replace what would have been a page number with a link that takes someone to that data. Is that still accessible? Are you describing a different scenario that isn't accommodated by that kind of link that would adjust according to how the information was displaying on the person's e-reader?

[00:06:12] Michael: Well, you asked a Boolean question there, either-or, and the answer to both is yes. People still do link in their digital copies to other parts of the book. The danger is you either have to let the reader know, "I'm taking you away now, and I haven't provided a way for you to come back," at which point the reader can make their own bookmark or whatever it is in their book so they can click back to it. In terms of print page fidelity, what I'm talking about is literally having markings in the book that indicate "this is print page 26," "this is print page 27," so that the reader can navigate that way.

Tools for accommodating accessibility

[00:06:47] Matty: And what tools would authors use to do this? If someone has a package like Vellum, which is very commonly used, especially in the indie author world, are there built-in things in a package like Vellum, or is it something you have to add on?

[00:07:01] Michael: We have not done an in-depth analysis of Vellum, but I have had a few exchanges with them, and some of your indie authors have published on Vellum, and I've seen some of the output. It is certainly possible to do these things in Vellum. How one does it, I don't honestly know because we have not analyzed the Vellum platform. These things are easily done in Word, which has pretty good accessibility markup, and there's a free tool available from the DAISY Consortium called Word to EPUB, so you can take your Word file, run it through accessibility checkers built into Microsoft Word, and then convert it to EPUB, which you can usually upload to most eBook services. I've seen output from Vellum that is very accessible.

[00:08:01] Matty: I do know that being a Vellum user myself, they support the provision of alt text for images. So I'm sure they accommodate those other things as well, but I haven't done that myself. So, I have some to-dos coming out of this.

Accessibility in print

[00:08:21] Matty: We've been talking exclusively about eBooks so far. Is there an accessibility aspect to print books as well? Like, I have large print editions of my books. Is that a world you get into at all, outside of eBooks?

[00:08:36] Michael: Benetech does not. We are a digital-first, digital-only organization, and our focus is on making digital content available for the print disabled. There are two main choices for people with reading challenges: large print and braille. There are still many blind people who read braille. The American Printing House creates braille, and the Library of Congress has the National Library Service, which is a massive braille production workshop. Those are a couple of entities, the American Printing House and the NLS, where your authors could make a query to get their books produced in that way. But we don't do any physical, so I don't have details about that.

[00:09:27] Matty: Yeah, I found, just to share my own experience, that getting large print books is quite easy. The only added expense for me was the brief amount of time I had to spend in a tool like Vellum, which was hardly any time at all, just a couple of clicks to create an interior version that was large print. Then, a little bit of extra money with my book cover designer to create a design that was large print-specific with a large print badge on it. If you do that at the same time as your standard print cover, it's not very much extra because they're working on it anyway.

I found that I haven't been advertising it as much as I did when I first put them out, but it's one of those things that serves a new population, as you're saying. Especially if one is writing in a genre where the demographic might skew towards people who are looking for larger print, then it's a worthwhile thing to do and quite easy.

[00:10:21] Michael: That was very gently phrased.

Braille book production

[00:10:24] Matty: Can you talk a little bit more about the braille production process?

[00:10:30] Michael: I can talk about it in general, certainly. Most people are familiar with what Braille is — a series of raised dots that enable communication. The American Printing House and the National Library Service inside the Library of Congress are probably the two largest braille producers, but there are other blindness organizations with braille creation capabilities as well. Just a word to the wise: a large print book is much bigger, not just in footprint but also in pagination, than a traditional print book. A braille book is huge, typically given away under various government stipulations and processes. The National Library Services, for example, gives away their books, and I believe the APH does as well, though I'm not certain.

There's also digital braille, which brings Benetech back into the conversation with the electronic braille format (EBF). Imagine a blind person, who doesn't necessarily have to be blind as almost all Braille users are, with their hands on a Braille display. This is how they send emails and perform other computer tasks. With digital Braille, the keys pop up as if they're reading a print book, so they can lay their fingers on the display and the Braille appears. Benetech has a collection called Bookshare with 1.25 million titles, and any of those titles are available to our members in Braille. We do the Braille translation on the fly. It's not a physical production, but we do offer a digital braille format for our members.

IP financial and rights considerations

[00:12:18] Matty: If authors want to make their books available in these kinds of formats, is it something where they're granting rights to an organization to create that, or are they paying to have it done? What's the financial side of that? Or the rights side of it also?

[00:12:35] Michael: When it comes to Benetech, there's a donation agreement, and authors must sign it. There are no payments involved; neither we nor you pay anything. We handle the conversion for free, and the Braille copy is available to our members at no cost. We are a charity and receive some funding from the federal government, but a significant portion of our funding comes from various foundations and individuals who donate to us.

There is an agreement in place to protect the author's rights, and we have our own security measures to ensure that only qualified users can access the content on Benetech.

Most authors who are not associated with a publishing house contribute content because they want to reach readers who benefit from these services. The best recommendation is from one reader to another, saying, "I read this book, you're going to love it."

We have completed 29 million downloads in the 20 years we've had the service, so a lot of people are reading our books. Authors, individual people, small presses, and even some of the largest presses in the world, with a total of 900 publishers and almost 2,000 imprints, donate content to us. We add about 10,000 titles a month. So, in our situation, there is no cost for conversion and no revenue generation; neither we nor the authors make money from these distributions.

Most other Braille production houses do incur significant costs for creating physical Braille books. I don't believe the Library of Congress charges for these conversions, although they certainly bear the cost of production. For physical Braille inquiries, one would have to consult the American Printing House (APH) or the National Library Service. However, since we are a digital-only organization, I can't provide details on their processes.

Creating digital editions on the fly

[00:14:38] Matty: Creating a physical Braille book can be financially and time-consuming, and there may need to be an assessment process to prioritize which books to convert. If you're offering digital Braille versions, do you need to prioritize among the books submitted for conversion?

[00:15:13] Michael: At Benetech, we translate Braille on the fly. We accept EPUB files into our collection, and when a qualified member requests a particular book in Braille, they initiate the process. Our servers perform the translation, which takes some time, and then we provide the member with a link to download the Braille file. We only translate books when a reader requests them.

Terms to address authors’ and publishers’ rights concerns

[00:15:51] Matty: And as you were putting together the contract that you sign with the author or the agreement, a lot of people, knowing there are bad players out there, would be concerned about signing over rights and may feel nervous about that. Can you talk a little bit about what is or is not included in the contracts to accommodate authors' or publishers' concerns about that?

[00:16:14] Michael: Sure. The donation agreements were co-written by the American Association of Publishers. So that's the publishing world speaking. I realize that's not the independent publishing world, but that's the big folks, and we had guidance from them on what publishing houses and authors would demand.

It's a very straightforward agreement, if such a thing can be true in legal terms. Basically, the person asserts that they have the necessary copyright permission to donate the file, and we confirm that we will only use the book to make it more accessible, and only qualified members of Bookshare, who have a certified print disability, will have access to it.

We do not hyperdistribute, so we won't put the book anywhere other than Bookshare. Some authors and publishers give us worldwide rights, some only English language rights or North American rights, or other specific distributions, similar to the typical publishing rights matrix. There are no royalty statements because there are no royalties since there are no sales. The arrangements are not exclusive, so authors can distribute their books elsewhere as they wish. It's about as harmless as a legal document could be.

[00:17:30] Matty: If someone has an update to their ePub, what is the process for updating it on Bookshare?

[00:18:00] Michael: You would use the traditional feeds you use anywhere in your distribution channel, typically ONIX for that sort of thing. You can inform us if a book is out of publication or if there's a new edition and request us to use the updated version. While I'm oversimplifying the process, that's the general idea.

Accommodating the desired reading experience

[00:18:27] Matty: Accommodating readers who are blind versus those who are dyslexic can be quite different. Does Benetech address both kinds of needs? And if yes, what are the differences, and how do you accommodate them?

[00:18:43] Michael: Yes, we serve all of those print disability categories mentioned earlier, and it really becomes not just about the certified print disability but also about the intended reading experience of the individual.

[00:20:18] Matty: I can imagine that AI is making a huge difference. Certainly, the availability of AI-generated voices is going to make the production of new audiobooks much easier. Can you speak to how AI is being used to improve accessibility?

[00:20:34] Michael: There are a couple of things there. You mentioned AI as it relates to voices. There's a very interesting group, I have no connection, I just find them interesting, called Sounded. S-O-U-N-D-E-D, Sounded.com, and they have very good audiobook technology. They also do a tremendous job protecting the voice actor themselves.

So what they do is they get a voice actor, sign a contract with them. One of their founders is a lawyer who's very sensitive to rights and permissions. So they get the voice actor to agree to say, yes, I understand I'm going to do what you asked me to do, get my voice recorded.

And if you use my voice downstream in a commercial enterprise, then I get paid. So that's one thing. They use that voice and then apply artificial intelligence to take that specific person's voice and apply it to a textbook. They're not just reading a text and having what we used to call Microsoft Bob read it to you.

Even though those synthetic voices are getting much better, this is not that. This is an actual human's voice used in an enhanced way. So that's one thing I think every author, every publishing company should look at that group, Sounded.com. We use artificial intelligence to try and correct machine correctable things for accessibility.

I'll give you a specific example. We are far away from AI being able to solve the problem around image descriptions. Here's just a quick story, right? We're going to have three books. Each of the three books has a picture of the Eiffel Tower. The first book is a cookbook, and at the chapter header around soufflé, someone in editorial thought it would be interesting to have a picture of the Eiffel Tower.

Not teaching me how to make a soufflé, not teaching me what kind of eggs to use, whether I want them at room temperature or straight out of the fridge, there's no information being conveyed; it's an affectation. So, you can do two things. You could mark it as "Image: Eiffel Tower," which is probably just going to annoy people because it's a cookbook; what do I care about that?

Or, you can specifically mark it to say this is a decorative image, and the assistive technology would just ignore it. A lot of blind people read cookbooks, so if you just mark it as a decorative image, then the screen reader will just pretend it's not there. That's one thing. The exact same picture in a different book, in a travelogue book, whether it's a Frommer's type travelogue thing, or whether it's my own personal travel, or whatever it is I'm writing this book about, and now we're on the chapter about what to do in Paris.

Okay, the picture of the Eiffel Tower makes sense. So you say "Image: Eiffel Tower" and then you're going to add a long description. Maybe something interesting about Gustave Eiffel. Maybe it says don't go on Tuesdays; they're closed. I don't know what you're going to say, but something which says it is the Eiffel Tower and here's why I bothered to put the picture of the Eiffel Tower in this chapter.

So again, we're trying to convey knowledge. The third book, the same picture. Maddy, you could have taken the picture. They could have got it from Getty. I don't care where it came from. The same picture, but this is an engineering book. And the picture of the Eiffel Tower is there because we're going to be discussing the tensile strength of structural steel.

So AI is not going to be able to understand. AI could probably say it's the Eiffel Tower with growing degrees of accuracy, but I don't know how AI is going to be able to say, well, the author probably meant this. That's just, that's not a thing, right? AI is useful to us, right? When it comes to things like math and chemistry because the AI can read those formulas if they're in a good format and then translate in a long description to say, "X squared equals Y plus 4Z."

Okay, AI can take that, which might actually be a picture, a PNG or something that the publisher put in the file, and perhaps turn that in. So we do use AI in those circumstances, but to use AI to solve the image problem, to use AI to solve the print page correlation problem, I just, we're not seeing anything about it, and I spend a fair amount of my time talking to these guys.

I just had a talk yesterday with a firm that's focusing on image descriptions. And it's happening. It's better on the web in February of 2024 than it was in February 2023, and it'll be better in 2025, but there's a long way to go. Machines don't actually learn, despite what people tell you. So, we do use it.

It is helpful in certain circumstances, but with my simple Eiffel Tower example, I hope you understand that there's much work to be done yet.

[00:25:10] Matty: Yeah, it seems like the most immediate, practical benefit for people with reading disabilities would be the easier and cheaper availability of audiobooks. And, in the face of people who hate AI, one of the arguments I've made on authors' panels and things like that is that I think the positive side of this is that there are many books that would never have been available in audio had it not been for AI, not that it's suddenly going to displace all the human narrators.

Like I still hire a human narrator for my fiction books, but I do make my nonfiction books available, when I can, via AI-generated narration because those are books that wouldn't be available in audio otherwise.

[00:25:55] Michael: You're absolutely right. And we've been producing DAISY audiobooks for a very long time. The disability community and the accessibility community have been working in the audio space for quite some time, not forever, but for many years.

What is DAISY?

[00:26:15] Matty: You had mentioned DAISY a couple of times. Can you discuss in a little more detail what that is?

[00:26:20] Michael: Sure. The DAISY Consortium is a global organization focused on accessibility standards. I happen to be on the board at DAISY, representing Benetech. I can't even remember how many countries are involved, but there are scores of countries that participate in DAISY projects worldwide. The primary focus of most DAISY organizations is on people who are blind, but not exclusively.

Benetech, for example, covers a wide range of disabilities. So, we interact with the World Wide Web Consortium and the EPUB standards. Actually, the organization is very heavily involved with all sorts of digital and accessibility standards.

Accessibility best practices beyond books

[00:26:59] Matty: And I wanted to also jump back to something we talked about earlier, which is accommodating people with dyslexia. I have read that certain fonts are easier for people with dyslexia to read. Independent of books, if someone is, say, putting together a PowerPoint presentation or something like that, do you have advice on how they can make that more accessible with relatively simple to implement changes, like using one font over another?

[00:27:27] Michael: This becomes a religious debate, to be honest. I usually stick with Times New Roman because most of the people I interact with seem to think that Times New Roman is okay. However, everyone has their own personal preference. The important thing around disability and font choice is not to lock it up in a file, like a PDF, where I can change the font size but can't change the font itself.

So, if you have a properly done digital file, the user should be able to change the font to one that is suitable for them. PDF, of course, doesn't allow for that. But PDF has been a staple for many years, and it does an excellent job of taking a picture of pages.

The issue, of course, is that blind people can't see pictures, so it's not useful from an accessibility standpoint. There are some things that make PDFs more accessible, but really, EPUB is the answer. And EPUB is what the distribution channels want, anyway.

All Microsoft tools have built-in accessibility checkers and aids to help you ensure your documents are accessible. The big challenge with PowerPoints is reading order. So, you know, have you done a good job of defining headings, subheadings, bullet points, and so on? The accessibility checker will help you a great deal with those things.

[00:28:47] Matty: Can you talk a little bit more about that? Like, what is the significance of defining those elements clearly?

[00:28:53] Michael: Sure. Reading order is critically important for people who are blind or have low vision because the PowerPoint is essentially an image. If the image is not effectively described and the content's consumption order is not clear, especially with a complex slide that has a graph here, some words there, and various other elements, it can be confusing. Those with print disabilities, whether they're blind, have low vision, or dyslexia, need built-in navigation that allows keyboard use, as clicking is not an option for those who cannot see where to click. The slide should be structured logically, just as one would order a table or headers.

Imagine you're in a classroom, like in my early days when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and you have a pointer, tapping it against the board to direct attention. You want the user's focus to follow the flow of information you intend to convey. That's what I mean by reading order.

[00:30:26] Matty: I can imagine that for both books and presentations, the trend of placing headers at the bottom of the page can be problematic.

[00:30:37] Michael: Yes, and please avoid doing things like having a header three without a header two. Assistive technology does not handle that well.

[00:30:45] Matty: Interesting.

[00:30:46] Michael: It's not that hard to count to three. You know, it's H1, H2, H3. It's really not that complicated.

Next steps for making your work accessible

[00:30:51] Matty: Don't skip any numbers. So, Michael, if someone has listened to this and they're enthusiastic about making their books available to a broader audience, what steps would you recommend they take or what resources would you suggest they use to do that?

[00:31:05] Michael: Well, certainly, we're here to reach the disability audience. My email is michaelj@benetech.org. Anyone can reach out with questions. Michael La Ronn, one of your members, is an accessibility superhero. So, you know, ask him questions. He's probably already built a YouTube channel about it or something. He's on top of things. That's another good resource. The DAISY Consortium is an excellent resource. If you make your books accessible, you can deliver them to Kindle, Barnes & Noble, and others, and much of your work will translate across these platforms.

I can't speak for what Amazon or Barnes & Noble are up to, but they are certainly aware of, and will accept, EPUBs. They are quietly rolling out more accessibility features to their reading environments. Through the generosity of a company called VitalSource, Benetech even has its own ebook retail store, which is exclusively for accessible ebooks.

[00:32:52] Matty: Okay. Well, Michael, thank you so much for sharing that information. That's an area that is new to me and, I'm sure, to some of the other listeners as well. So thank you for giving us a glimpse into that.

If there are any other places you would like to send people to learn more about you and what you do, please let us know.

[00:33:14] Michael: Yes, benetech.org is the main site for the organization. There's a ton of information there, including some really compelling stories about how lives are changed when readers who previously couldn't access books now can. That's basically why I left my commercial work to join a charity. You read some of those stories, and it's clear it's not that hard to do, and the impact you're going to have on someone's life is incredible. And again, it's over 20% of the population. So, I'm not saying all 20% of those people will buy your book, but I am saying they're not buying your ebook now because they simply can't read it. There's a lot of commercial value there too.

SEO benefits

[00:33:53] Michael: There's also the group of people who decide what you see when you search for things on the internet. I talk to those people all the time, and they are delving into your ebook files, your EPUB files, and taking those alternative texts and long descriptions and using them. So, when someone searches for, say, Sojourner Truth, if you were doing work on slavery, civil rights, or the Underground Railroad, and you might not have Sojourner Truth in your book title or in your ONIX feed, but if you have an image of Sojourner Truth in your book and you've described it with your alt text, that will start to surface when people search for it. So there's that aspect too.

You should do it for the social justice reason, of course. Independent authors typically have struggled their entire lives to be heard and to get published, and we're trying to reach readers who have struggled their whole lives to get books they want to read, so it's a natural match to me. There's the social justice part, but there's also a lot of commercial value, a huge marketplace that is being underserved, and also the challenge we all face as authors: just getting people to know about our work. It's hard enough to write a book and get it published, even if you self-publish. But to get people to know that you did it is even harder. So this is another opportunity.

[00:35:20] Matty: Yeah, well, obviously, you've said all the things that are going to really attract the attention of authors everywhere. So, Michael, thank you so much.

[00:35:27] Michael: Well, thanks for having me. It's been fun.

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Podcast Show Notes

On The Indy Author Podcast, we discuss the writing craft, the publishing voyage, and how we can navigate our way to the readers who will love our books. Click the links below for the show notes for episodes since 200, including summaries and transcripts.

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Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!

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Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!

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Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!

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Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!

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Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!

Episode Links

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Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!

Episode Links

Summary

Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!

Episode Links

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Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!

Episode Links

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Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!

Episode Links

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Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!

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Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!

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Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!

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Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!

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Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!

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Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!

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Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!

Episode Links

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Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!

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Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!

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Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!

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