Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode. at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see a a guest. If you have specific questions feel free to post them on the page and I will answer them on the podcast.
This summer I'm adding a co-host, fellow author Kate Karyus Quinn. We'll be doing a series that focuses on hybrid and indie authors. If you're thinking of going the Self Pub route we've got authors who found success with six figure sales, as well as authors who are just starting out on the road to indie publishing. Learn from them. Learn with us.
Today's guest is David Gaughran, author of the historical adventures Liberty Boy, Mercenary & A Storm Hits Valparaiso, and has helped thousands of authors to self-publish their work via his workshops, blog, and books such as Let’s Get Digital, Strangers to Superfans, BookBub Ads Expert, and Following.
In May 2020, he was one of the recipients of the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award. The SFWA President said, “David Gaughran has been doing yeoman’s work for years, alerting indie writers about predatory schemes and warning them about changes in independent publishing. His work makes the science-fiction and fantasy landscape safer for writers.”
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Mindy: So I know that you have a lot of information that you put out into the world for other indie authors, and Kate is always forwarding your newsletter to me and saying, Check this out. David said this, David said that. And I'm like. Okay, Cool. So could you just talk a little bit about how you ended up in the indie publishing world at all?
David: So I started writing seriously, like writing with the aim of actually getting something published somewhere about maybe 10 11 12 years ago, something like that. Because back then, self publishing wasn’t really a viable option. At least not in 2008, 2009. I think there was a handful of pioneering romance authors that were starting to do well at it. But that news hadn’t really reached me. I was still under the impression that self publishing was like the last refuge of the scoundrel, you know, or something that would irreparably damage your career.
I was querying agents, and I think I queried nearly every agent out there him with a book that probably wasn't fully cooked either. So rather inevitably, I got a whole bunch of rejections. But towards the end of the process, you know, I started getting, you know, non form rejections where they actually put your name in the email and the title of your book. And these little tea leaves that you're reading, you know, looking for progress anywhere.
And then an agent actually told me he wants to represent me. And I remember, I remember getting the email. I think it was It was just before Christmas and this agent says that he read my book and everything. The office had read the book and they loved it. And they wanted me to be there next author, you know? So obviously I was excited. The last line of the email, he said something like, We're just about to close for the Christmas holidays. So please give my office a call when we get back when we reopen in January. And he gave some date, which is, like, three weeks away or something.
So I was just on tenterhooks the whole time. Actually, I wasn't on tenterhooks. The whole time I assumed that I made it as a writer. So I during the Christmas holidays, telling everyone I was going to be the next big thing and, and spending all the advance money in my head. And then in January, when I made contact with the agent again, and he’d just changed his mind. He wasn't interested anymore. And I don't know, Um, maybe he read it a second time and saw there was issues there that maybe were trickier to address or maybe took on something else in the same niche. You know, or maybe he got a book from an existing client in the same niche and didn't want to go out to the same editors with a similar book. I know there could be lots of lots of reasons for this kind of thing.
Kate: He didn't give an excuse or like...
David: No, he basically ghosted me. Didn't return my call. He just sent me... I think his assistant sent me a one line email. Thanks, no longer interested. It was all very weird, you know? And this was before I had any kind of public life, or was engaging in various spats on Twitter or anything like that. So it couldn't have been something like that. And so I never, I never really knew the reason why, but as I found out, as I got more experience in the industry, that stories like that aren't that uncommon.
Now I think the power shift has a little bit more towards writers. At the time, I was pretty despondent, tried to shake off the disappointment and hide from everybody that I told I was going to be a literary sensation. I just got cracking on another book, you know, and something a little bit more commercial, something with an American protagonist and something set in a place that might be a little more familiar to the American audience I was aiming for and I got a few chapters in and then I kind of hit a wall and I just couldn't push through.
I was thinking, you know, it was the first, you know when you use that first sticky point in a book. Everything, everything questioning my ability as a writer whether there was any point to doing any of this and I was thinking about giving it all up, and I was just casting around, you know, what should I do here? And then I think I stumbled across some forum where a lot of self publishers were hanging out, and I just started reading some of the posts and seeing these people having a lot of success just from publishing their own books. And like in the last couple of months before that, I'd started hearing about you know, these first people that I had started getting success from self publishing people like Joe Konrath and Amanda Hocking and these these first kind of self publishing superstars about 10 years ago.
But most of them were people who had come from traditional publishing, and they had maybe a backlist ready to upload. And obviously they had a bit of experience and some storytelling chops and maybe some contacts and, and all that kind of thing. Which, which, you know, most people starting out won’t have any of that. But these people in this forum were all people who have just started a few months ago, and they were all posting their sales figures every month. You know, they start off first month, making $10 next month. They might make $35 the next ones after that, 150 and six months later, they're starting to pull in $1000 a month. I was just like, this is amazing like this... it seemed possible for the first time I could see an actual path to making money out of it.
I was still in thrall with the idea of getting an agent and a publisher like Self Publishing at that time was very much a Plan B for me. And now it’s a Plan A, and I wouldn't I wouldn't take a publishing deal unless there was some kind of obscene money on the table. But back then it was definitely a Plan B. And so I start off just self publishing a few short stories just to see and just to learn the ropes, to see if I enjoy the process of being a publisher and of being a marketer of my own work. But also, I could keep one foot in the world of traditional publishing because I still think, I think I still had a couple of agents who were reading the full, you know, so I just I didn't want to close that door by self publishing the book until I heard from them. Never, of course, did actually hear from them.
But when I when I started self publishing, the first thing I noticed right away was I just got out of that funk that I was in, like being a querying author is... It's such a negative place to be, you know, especially when you're just getting rejection all the time. And it's so very hard to keep summoning up the energy and the positivity that you need to write, when all you're hearing is no or your writing’s not commercial no, or it's not good at all, or you just, You're not even getting a foot in the door. No feedback to work with. You know, that's just the nature of the business, but it's tough being in that position when you're starting out.
But once I start something, it the dynamic changed completely like the internal psychological dynamic changed completely. You know, you're getting people, strangers are buying your book. They're giving you money. They're reviewing your book, they’re emailing you. I just like we just go with the pure joy of writing again. I remember writing another short story at my kitchen table. I think within two weeks I had that short story, had a cover for it. I had edited, formatted, uploaded and then it was on sale.
And so it just seemed like so radically different from the traditional publishing process that, you know, I was just amazed like I just how different and how positive experience it was for me personally. So I think by the end of that first month, when I got my first sales report from Amazon, I was like, Okay, I'm self publishing everything from now on, like I don't care what agent is reading way book now I'm just I'm going to self publish it, and I haven't had any interest in returning to the path that—the thing that I was dreaming about so much, you know, I have no interest in going that direction.
And it's pretty funny, I think one of the agents that actually rejected me for my historical novel, she read one of the short stories that I self published, and she asked me if I want to turn it into a YA novel. So I got the opportunity than to send her rejection letter, which was extremely Oh, if you ever get a chance as an author to do that, I strongly recommend going for it. It felt really good.
Kate: I often hear people talk about the early days of self publishing as almost like how people talk about like the gold rush, like the first people to discover gold like they were just like scooping it off the ground. And now it's, you know, so many people have heard there's gold in them hills, and they've all rushed. You really gotta you know, you gotta dig for it and some people go mining and they don't come up with anything. Is that totally different 10 years ago to today.
David: It's a constant discussion that we have as self publishers, you know whether things have gotten a harder if it's harder to start today. It's changed in positive ways and in negative ways. I think the challenge is different. I don't think it's necessarily harder. I think you know, the standards are higher these days in terms of reader expectation, and presentation and branding. And obviously the marketing side in the last five years particularly, has gotten a lot more complicated as self publishers and and publishers get savvy about things like mailing lists and Facebook ads and Web sites and everything else or the other.
And the market has just swelled so much. The markets is so much bigger than it was in 2011. So even like a you know, a moderate success in 2020 can can deliver huge amounts of sales. And also the tools we have for reaching readers are just so much better. Like I was talking about, you know, these authors that I was reading that in forums who were hitting that kind of success level on, back then in 2011 and someone started selling 1000 books a month in total across, you know, whatever they had published, we consider that they were on the way. That was just, you know, the kind of watermark everyone had, or if they were making $1000 a month or if they're selling 1000 books a month. People would basically consider someone was on the way. That they’d crossed through to the other side. They were now officially successful. You can take out a Book Bub, for example, or Bookwell feature deal, and you can sell two to 3000 books in a day.
Kate: I've only been, um, self publishing for a year. 1000 a month is definitely on the lower end. You know most places they have those levels of success and 1000 seems like a very one of the lower benchmarks that people are aiming for?
David: Yeah, and just to give an idea to anyone who is not aware, like of how lucrative that can potentially be. You know, we're often selling our books for 2.99, 3.99, 4.99, now is is a very common price point for Self publishers, and we're making basically $3.5 per sale. So if you're selling a thousand books, that's starting to become like a real income.
Kate: Mindy and I were just at the same time as you are entering publishing is approximately the same time that Mindy and I were, but on the traditional side. I started writing seriously in 2007 and I queried two books that were not successful. And then my third book, I found an agent in 2011 and I was published in 2013. I'm still hybrid. I'm trying to keep a foot in both worlds. It's interesting, because when you're talking about how self publishing was seen then, I totally know, because with those two first failed books, I was like, should I self publish these? I was looking, you know, there are a lot of smaller online publishers. It was definitely the feeling that that, like you want to be traditional. That is definitely a choice, and I definitely feel like that has changed. I know tons of authors who were traditionally published and now are indie authors, and that is their income. That's a more reliable income, frankly.
David: You have more control over which, you know, especially in times like we're probably facing right now of economic turmoil. I think it's great for me personally. I like the idea of being able to control my career if sales dip or something happens that I have more direct influence over that, rather than leaving it in the hands of somebody else.
Mindy: And also too, just in traditional publishing. I've been fortunate. I've worked with the same editor for six books now, but turnover is crazy. So it's like you generally start to develop a working relationship, a good working relationship with an editor, and things were going awesome, and then they move houses, and that's just the way it is. They just, that's how it works. There's so much turnover and so much traveling in between publishing houses. I think I've had five or six different publicists in 7 to 8 years.
And as income? Yes. I mean, obviously, that's always a potshot. You have no control over things, and you can see opportunities like, for example, I have a book that is post apocalyptic and it deals with a world with very little water to drink. But the setting is very much like isolation and things like that. And sales really did take off on that book again here in the quarantine.
Luckily enough, they had already settled it to be for a dollar 99 during a certain time period, and it happened to coincide with the quarantine. So that was great and it helped. But it's like I couldn't put dollars toward marketing that, like I could use my social media. I could do things like that. I could, you know, try to get a Book Bub. But I don't have the infrastructure that a really successful indie has. You're just so much more nimble on your feet. You can react immediately to trends and what's going on in the market. I love being traditionally published. I get a lot of perks from that, but I see those pros for self publishing and indie publishing.
David: Being able to react to events very quickly is, is such a boon. I remember one publisher in a conference talking about, you know, things that can happen in a writer's career that aren't their fault. But they often end up carrying the can for them. Like I think she was talking about some big debut that she was launching. I think it came at the same weekend as one of the recent royal weddings, So all that PR they'd lined up all that stuff that's really important for a traditionally published book. All that stuff got axed so they could do a 12 page special on Will & Kate. Or whichever one of them it was that weekend, and that's out of your control. But when you know when the publisher, maybe then is looking to offer you a contract, a new contract when you're looking for, and your agent is trying to get you a new deal. A few years later, there's no Asterix be beside those disappointing sales number saying Not the authors’ fault. Honestly, I would have been a bad psychological fit for traditional publishing because I would not have been able to handle a situation like that. I would have been burning down the house, burning bridges, probably an all directions. So I think it worked out better for both sides that I ended up self publishing rather than traditional publishing.
Mindy: It's interesting too, you mentioned, um, you know the things you can't control. I'm lucky I have a long enough tail that the epidemic is not going to ruin me. But debut authors that had a book come out, you know, in March or in April and probably here rolling into May. They're screwed like their royalty statements are gonna be printed in red ink. And so they started trying to delay releases if it was a big book, if it was something that people, they'd sunk a lot of money into. But that's not gonna happen across the board for everyone. A lot of people's careers are just gonna nose dive right out of the gate because of something that has nothing to do with their ability or talent. It's just bad luck.
David: Yeah. Unfortunately, the writer usually ends up footing the bill for whatever random event has happened, and that's just the structural nature of the business. And, you know, when I look at the way the economy might be going globally. I've always heard it said that books are a little bit recession proof in that, you know, people might. I know these aren't normal circumstances we have now. But normally in the recession, and people might tighten their belts by not going out for a meal. We're not going to the theater or to a movie and then just read a book instead. But I think that phrase was probably coined in the period before the $35 hardback and competing with the $9 Netflix subscription.
And I think, you know, sometimes we view the world of books as kind of separate and distinct, whereas really, our customers, our readers are people who could conceivably spend their leisure time and their disposable income on anything. I think you know, if you are traditionally published your leading out with an expensive hard back in the climate that's to come, It's gonna be pretty tough for you and the advantages of being self published, of course, I get to control all such things like price.
So I was just looking ahead at a couple of releases that I have coming up myself. I was trying to decide on a pricing strategy and a marketing strategy for the launch. And I ended up choosing a strategy which would be more aggressive than I would usually do at a launch. A cheaper pricing structure. Purely because I'm looking ahead and seeing that people probably will have a little bit less disposable income. So I want to plan around that, and I have the ability to do that. You know what? I'm probably three or four weeks away from launch that I can change the plan completely, whereas A publisher simply wouldn't be able to do that.
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Kate: So, speaking of your newsletter, you have a fantastic newsletter. I think I first came to subscribe to your newsletter because I was on Facebook in an Indie author group, and I think it was when the whole MailChimp went out, thing went down and someone posted a link to your newsletter and too, I think you're blog and it was so great. It was so informative and helpful. And so that's I think, when I was like, Oh, I have to sign up and get this newsletter I'm missing out! Preach the gospel of the newsletter and speak about why it's so important and what it's done for you. I know in Indy World a newsletter is like the first thing every person says is like the importance of it. And I feel like in the traditional world, it's kind of seen as like just another tool in the toolbox. I think it's lumped in with, like Twitter and Facebook like—If you like it, do it! I think that's undercutting its importance.
David: I absolutely agree. I think it's a huge mistake not to prioritize your newsletter. Like if you compare a traditionally published author to the typical self published author, we're talking about the lack of control. You have less of those levers that you can pull to generate book sales for yourself. There's just simply less you can do because you don't control pricing. It doesn't make a lot of sense to spend money on Facebook ads and that kind of thing, which means you really need to focus more on the things that you do control.
And, you know, mailing list is something that anybody can set up. And every author really should have one and not just have one, but really be and trying to maximize the benefits from from that strategy. And, you know, we were talking about uncertain times, and we don't know how the industry is going to look in a year. Will Barnes and Noble still exist? How many bookstores will there be? A lot? These questions are circulating, and no one knows the answer. But the best insurance policy. What they're concerned about Barnes and Noble going out of business, where you're concerned about Amazon, you’re concerned about your own publisher merging, losing your editor, whatever it is, doesn't matter. The best insurance policy you have against anything like that happening in the future is to have your own mailing list and have as many readers as possible. As many of your own readers as possible not just random people, but actually people in your target market of who actually read your niche. Not your friends and family, actual core fans of your genre. As many of those people that you can get as possible on your mailing list, the better off you’ll be and the more insurance You will have against any turmoil in the industry.
I think a lot of people know that and they might have a list. But they might not know what to do with it. Or they Might not realize the benefits that you can get from being a bit more proactive with your strategy, and I guess because, like when I started in self publishing, there's so many things you have to wrap your head around: websites, marketing, publishing covers all that stuff, and I didn't pay a huge amount attention to my mailing list. I made a number of key mistakes, and hopefully other people could learn from my experience. I basically did most things wrong.
I did the good part of actually having a list and having kind of having a bit of text in the back of every book, saying, You know, if you want to, want to read more, if you want to get an email when the next book is out, sign up here, and that was actually my first mistake. I decided that I didn't want to bother people. That people had, were getting too many emails anyway, and that I’ll only email them when I have a new release. And I think this is the kind of default position for most writers. They don't know what to say anyway and don't want to bother people. And they're trying to be considerate. And they decide to only email people when they have a new release. And this is a huge mistake, and especially if you're a slower writer and I'm a slow writer. I'm not one of these self publishing speed demons. So if you're a slower writer and you know you'll only email people, when you have a new book, the chances are that they will have forgotten who you are. Or you know how much they enjoyed your book when they get your email and what you’ll gradually see over a period of time. As I saw myself over a period of you know, eight years or whatever, however long I was doing this the wrong way and you see gradually falling engagement on those emails you know, less people replying, saying, Oh, well done. I'm excited to read the book.
Less people opening the mail, less people clicking, less people buying the book. This has a cumulative effect on your own psyche. Of course. Where you starting to think that you know, people are just not enjoying your books, which they used to. Maybe you have lost that kind of X factor in your prose. And I remember I released a book in uh was the last historical novel I released, which is a few years ago, maybe 2016. And it was the best thing at the time was the best thing that I'd written by far. I thought, I felt like my storytelling and taking a big step forward with this book. And I sent out the mail, And I'm telling my partner within half an hour I said, This launch is a bust and she said, Oh, no, it's far too early, don't you? She thought I was just having launch jitters or something. But I knew straight away, just by seeing open rate on the email that this launch was gonna be a bad one and I knew it in half an hour because I could see that people just weren't opening the email. Either it Wasn't getting through in boxes because I didn't have very high engagement. I didn't have a lot of contact with these people in the last two years or whatever, or it was going to spam where they were seeing it and just ignoring it.
Kate: They were like, Who the hell is this? What is this junk?
David: Yeah, because they didn't remember. Probably, I'm sure we like to think everyone on our list is eagerly awaiting our next book. But they might have signed up and, you know, they might have enjoyed your book signed up hoping to here when the next one is, and then just forgotten about you like I can't remember, especially heavy reader readers, you know, a book every three or four days or something like there's no, no possible way they'll remember all the authors they've enjoyed or all the list they signed up to, or whatever. So you've got you've got to maintain some kind of connection there.
And I remember I read this book called Newsletter Ninja by Tammy Labrecque, which is the best book out there on email. If anyone wants to get better at e mailers, I strongly recommend reading. Anyway, I read this book and actually was a course I did by her that she then turned into a book and I realized I was doing everything wrong. And I decided, you know, for once, I'm not going to just argue with somebody and question everything I'm being told to do. I'm just gonna zip it and do everything she's telling me to do because she sounds like she knows a lot more about this than I do. I don't get too many of those moments in life, but thankfully I had one at this particular moment.
So I said, Okay, I'm gonna start doing a regular email. I said, I'll do it first for my nonfiction audience and then I'll roll it out to fiction. And so I did that. I started with my nonfiction audience and I started doing a weekly newsletter which before anyone has a panic attack, I don't recommend doing that level of frequency for fiction. You don't need to. Monthly is fine, and but for this particular audience, it suited me and suited them to do a weekly email. It was It's a weekly email on, mostly on marketing. And once I started doing that like it was amazing. The difference, Um first thing I thought was I’m going to lose a lot of my list because I'd essentially broken the promise I'd made during sign up saying, I only bother you with a new release. Everyone's delighted to hear more regularly, most people were. You lose a few, but you know the amount that you gain is just so much greater.
I started getting a lot more just direct personal emails in response too. I started having two way conversations, which is, which is good for the algorithms that are looking at, You know, whether you're a spammer or not. But it's also good for you psychologically, because you actually feel like you know, there's a point to writing these emails. I noticed the tone in my emails totally changed, whereas before I was almost apologetic. You know, this is a launch email. It should be. It should be. It should be hype. You know, you should be you excited going, you know, because people respond to passion! It should be you saying, Hey, I've got a new book. It's great! You're gonna love it! The characters are amazing. And it said, It's kind of like, Well, you know, if you're not too busy, you could click, maybe... maybe buy this book. And of course, you know that has an effect on on whether that email converts. If you're not excited about the book, the readers are like Why? Why should a reader be excited?
So yeah, once I started doing this and just being a bit more professional and proactive about the whole email thing, it just took off like, like the sign ups went crazy. And then just you know, the responses to it as well. The opens, the clicks, the purchases. I'm, for me just as a writer, personally, it had a transformative effect akin to when I first started self publishing. I think I've gotten into a bit of a rut in my career for a variety of reasons and this really kind of signaled a kind of a rebirth. And it's only, I've only started rolling because I was focusing on the nonfiction side of my business for about 18 months, and then I started switching back to fiction. So I was rebooting everything. And I started rolling this process out in, I think it was January for my historical fiction, just doing it monthly.
There's a few bumps in the road as I kind of adjusted to talking to people in a very different way. We're talking about stories from history and things like that. But once I, once I started getting it nailed down, the same thing started happening. Sign up started increasing and the response, when I do talk about my own books, which isn't, I should note that it's not something that I do in every email. Usually I'm talking about other people's books, their, or their stories from history that aren't directly related, to the world's that I'm running in, and then every so often I will mention, Oh, I've got a book or I've got a freebie right now. Got a sale or can you review this book? And then the response is amazing.
Kate: I think that's so important what you're talking about. You have the list and you're emailing more frequently, but also your content is really, really good. You have information that is very current, and you put personality into your emails. That's something that I actually had a big thing with Mindy about ah, a year ago. And I was like, Mindy, your e mails are just like there's my new book that just came out. There's some other books you might like. See ya. And I was like, Mindy, you have to like... I was like, You're funny, like we've done tons of panels together and Mindy always kills and people love her and they think she's so funny. And then they look for her books and they're like... These books are not funny, but yeah,
Mindy: There's always a little bit of a let down when they realize that I'm actually just, like, kind of a monster.
Kate: But you give good panel. And I was like, Why don’t you put some of that personality into your email And she was like, I don't want to do that. People don't want that. And I was like, Yes, people want to feel like I'm opening this email and you, you know, it starts to feel like an email from a friend. Oh, what are they up to? And you always put David at the end of yours, like what you're listening to and I always think that's so fun.
Mindy: Kate actually told me to read Tammy Lebrecque’s book the Newsletter Ninja, which I completely endorse as well. And I did the same thing. I was underlining passages. I was highlighting stuff. Step by step. Did everything that she said to do. And my newsletter like it exploded. I think my open rate had been like five percent, and my click had been like at one. And now my open rate is like 40 and my click is usually around 11%.
David: That's great. That's great improvement. Yeah. Do you feel better now about writing an email?
Mindy: Yeah. Before it was such a chore and I was doing exactly what you said - I would send an email when I had a new book, and it was basically just me asking for their money. You know, once a year, the dis enrollment rate was so high cause like you said, they didn't remember me. They didn't know who I was or they would think that I was spamming them. I would get emails that woud be like I didn't sign up for this because they didn't remember because they signed up 11 months ago so, I mean, that's another reason to keep going out there once a month. I want to circle back then and talk about the fact that your newsletter is such a Touchstone for lots and lots of people in the indie world. How did you make this transition to becoming an authority?
David: The first thing you have to understand about me is that I'm 99% powered by spite? It's a renewable resource as well. So I never had planned to get into writing nonfiction and writing about publishing and marketing and all that. What I started blogging about all the steps I was doing in self publishing as I was doing them, it was all down to a forum argument I had somewhere way back in 2011. I'm sure you guys remember there was all these wars between traditional publishers and self publishers. What was the best path, and everyone was cheering for their team. I think it was someone was telling me that I was, I was going to fail and the only people that can self publish are people who come from traditional publishing with all that experience and knowledge and backlists and everything else. And I said, Well, I'm gonna give it a go because all these sort of people are doing it. And so you know, why can't I give it a shot?
So I said, you know, I’ll blog every step of the way so you can see if I fail or not. And I was actually posting my sales reports. I stopped doing it after about a year, I think. But I was posting all my sales reports every month. Even the 1st one was, like $15 or something and just saying what I did every month to get those sales and also then blogging and that, you know, had to find a cover designer because back then, that's the other difference from today. Back then, there was, there was no, I don't think there was a single guide to support to get there. Not enough for the digitally focused self publisher. It was, for the older kind of people would be going towards vanity presses or offset printing and all that.
So, yeah, we have to kind of create all these resources ourselves and figure everything out ourselves at the start, like What's the best way to, you know, format an E book and all that kind of thing. So I was sharing all this stuff as we were all figuring it out. And it was just towards the end of that process, one of the people who started reading my blog asked me if I could put all the post together in a pdf so he could print it out and then follow it along as he was doing it himself. So I said, Sure, no problem. As I started assembling it though, I realized that I was, I had accidentally fallen into writing a book and I said, Well, I could write a guide to self publishing even though I've only sold 150 books and I've been doing this for about 10 seconds, I'm sure I'm perfectly qualified on that.
That's how it started. I purely fell into a backwards. To be honest, it was a lot of luck involved. I was in the right place the right time. You know, some people like to hear from an expert with loads of experience on how to do something, and then some people find it more reassuring to almost have a beginner. You know, teaching the class, someone who's one step ahead of them, because sometimes they can speak to them. They can relate to them a bit more. Sometimes when you have a lot of knowledge on a subject, it could be difficult to explain it to a pure beginner. You almost know too much, you know. And I definitely didn't have that a problem in 2011 of knowing too much. I was perfectly positioned to to play that role. It was also the summer that self publishing started hitting the charts for the first time. It just, I was just in the right place at the right time.
Kate: Basically, I mean to keep a blog going for this long and to grow it into an audience. I mean, like, yes, there's something about being in the right place at the right time, but you've done all the right things and kept it going. You are obviously no longer a beginner. You are now in that position where you maybe have too much knowledge. But you still have a passion for helping others and explaining, you know, various facets of the business and helping people along.
David: A lot of my income comes from other authors recommending my books to authors who are starting out. You know, I've never lost sight of the fact that my whole career basically has been built on others. People helping me like I got a lot of breaks at the start from other authors, either, you know, giving me advice or featuring me on their blogs Or, or like when I release that first edition of my guide to self publishing, I think I realized my biggest weakness was that, you know, nobody knew who I was. I hadn't sold loads of books. So I decided to kind of counterbalance that by getting a lot of experience, successful self publishers, names that people might recognize to contribute to the book. And the amazing thing was that, I think I made a list of like, 35 authors, and I fully expected never to hear back from like, you know, half or 3/4. Um, I was thinking if I get five or six or seven of these guys to agree, that would be a win, and I think 32 of them agreed to countribute to the book. How am I gonna fit all these in now? I have to go to restructure the book a little because I wasn’t expecting to get that many people say yes.
This might have changed a little. Now things got a bit more bit bigger and a bit more kind of competitive between self publishers for various reasons. But certainly at the start there was a very strong feeling of community, possibly reinforced by that kind of us versus them dynamic with traditional publishing. But definitely there would be in self publishing itself, that dynamic was 100% positive, and it was all about lifting each other up. And, you know, we had a big enemy, so to speak, that we could all focus on the binds us kind of together on. We all help each other. There was never a sense of, a little bit now, of like pulling the ladder up afterwards, there was always a sense of reaching back and helping the next people come up. Some of that is down to the structural differences with traditional publishing and self publishing.
It's not because we're nicer people or anything, but I think in traditional publishing, sometimes you're competing with your peers for limited slots like an agent might only take on a couple of authors a year. There's only so many books, a bookstore competing in the window. There's only so many books that's going to get the royal treatment from from a publisher. So you are, in a sense, kind of competing. You're competing for grants. Maybe you're competing for teaching slots. There's a lot of that, and there's very little of that – or at least there was, it has changed a little bit. And there was very little of that in self publishing . We realized early on that Let's say I find somebody else who also writes historical fiction set in Latin America. I don't think “competitor” straight away. I think that's that's a partner in crime, that’s somebody we can pool our audiences we can do newsletter swaps. Maybe we could do a box set, and maybe I can target him with my Amazon ads. You know, we don't... we just see possibilities when we see someone else writing in our space.
Kate: I definitely find that in the indie world, people are very willing to share information, very open with numbers, which is shocking because in the traditional world it is like you don't talk numbers unless you're like on event and you’re in the bar. It's not something you would ever post like in a public forum and say, Oh, you know, my advance was this. And it's constantly done everywhere. People are so open and it's not bragging. It's meant to be like, you know, this is what I did. You can do it. You know?
David: It’s interesting about, to kind of ask the question of Who does that? Who is that helping? Who does it hurt? You know, I think we've all worked in offices where there was definitely an atmosphere of nobody discusses what they're earning and then ones where it was more open. And it certainly serves the paymaster’s interest to keep every in the dark about whatever anyone’s earning, whereas transparency, you know, that empowers authors, so maybe that's not. That's why it's not encourage so much.
Kate: Publishing is a very small world, the traditional publishing world, I think all publishing, you know. Eventually everyone bumps into everybody else. Think there's this fear that it will get back to, your publisher or whoever and you'll be seen as, you know, the troublemaker.
Mindy: I remember one of the things that my very first editor said to me, like on our call in our first phone call, our meet and greet, She was like, You don't talk about money, Don't tell other people how much you got paid and, you know, don't talk about money. And I was just like, Okay, you know, that's the... whatever you say. And now, um, I do now just because I do think that it's helpful for a lot of people. On the other thing is in the YA world in the traditional publishing world, my name is pretty well known. You have the opposite experience where people think I'm a bigger deal than I actually am. People recognize my name within the industry. In every day homes, I'm not a common name. So people think in the industry that I have greater sales or that I'm a bigger deal than I actually am. And so it's kind of funny when I do share numbers and they're just like, Oh. They are sometimes surprised I'm like, No, I am not as great as it may seem.
David: I think it's probably getting more similar now in self publishing. I think in traditional publishing, the power curve is often so extreme that there's, you know, there's there's a thin slice atop that are earning like eye boggling numbers. And then, you know, that falls away quite quickly. And I think, especially with the changes over the last 10 years, with the midlist getting hollowed out quite a bit, that's probably accelerated. Self publishing is probably trending that way to a certain extent as well, which is probably inevitable.
Mindy: So if you were going to give an indie publisher a self publishing author, that was just starting out, if you're gonna give them one piece of advice, what would you, what would you tell them to do?
David: Think very deeply about your ideal reader. And I think most people will be familiar with the concept from Stephen King's On Writing, where he talks about his wife Tabatha as his ideal reader and the person that they're writing for, and I think that's a very useful concept for the creative side. But I think it's also very useful for the publishing and marketing side of the business.
One of the biggest mistakes that new authors make when they're starting out is that they want to tell everybody about their book. It's perfectly natural inclination, and usually we have friends or family or colleagues who want to support us by buying our book, and they don't realize how that can actually hurt them. That what you really want to do is solely focus your attention and your marketing on core readers in your genre. Like so much of discovery and visibility and sales, is now powered by algorithms. If you look at how Amazon works, it's always trying to figure out what kind of book you have and who it should recommend it to like.
The whole Amazon system is built around trying to recommend everyone the products that they're most likely to purchase, not the ones that make Amazon the most profit, or the ones that Amazon has the best relationship with. Like Amazon will happily recommend a 99 cent book over a 19.99 book, even though it makes them way less money. They'll happily do that to build up that kind of user trust, the relationship that people actually like the recommendations they get from Amazon.
But if you start off getting Bob from accounting and your uncle and all these other people who don't read, let's say you're publishing like a sweet romance and they don't read that kind of book. And but those kind of people are buying your book at the start. You're going to give Amazon a very, very muddled idea of who your true readers are and they will start recommending your book to all the wrong people. So people can make a mistake like this, right at the start of their career, not realizing you know what they have done. That kind of self sabotage just by, you know, giving into the natural inclination to share from the rooftops that you've got a new book.
Now I don't think, you know you should hide the fact necessarily, that they've written a book, but at the very start, those 1st 50 sales, it's crucial that they go to core readers in your genre on Amazon, because those 1st 50 sales are you know, what Amazon needs before it starts putting those also boughts on your book. I'm sure you've seen them on a book’s page. There's something like “customers who bought this also bought that,” we call those also boughts. Those 1st 50 sales are when Amazon's getting the first read of what kind of book you have. No, it won't see the couple clenching on the cover or the font choice that you’ve used. It's gonna be looking at the metadata, but it's also gonna be looking at Who's buying the book because that Amazon should be an indication of what kind of person we should be recommended to. So if all the wrong people are buying it. Then it's gonna start recommending your book to all the wrong people. And this is something, a mistake I've actually made personally myself. When I tried to try to market some of my historical fiction to my writer audience, I did that right at the launch, and it was like all the wrong idea of who The audience for that historical novel Was and started recommending it to people who wanted how to books on writing and market talk. That launch was a disaster.
So try and focus your marketing attention on your ideal reader exclusively, especially at the very start. And then, you know, you can tell your friends and family and colleagues maybe after a month or something that you have a book out. But at the start, don't try and lean on that. Just try and focus on core readers in your genre.
Kate: I’ve noticed, um, in the last, I don't know, maybe 2 to 3 weeks, maybe months, that when I look at my books on Amazon, my indie books the first row of books that are not advertised books instead of showing me, you know, readers who also bought it, saying, Here are some books that you may also like and it's based on my browsing. I know I looked at those books. Don't show them to me again. I want to see my also boughts. So what are they doing?
David: Amazon plays with that bit of real estate because it's an incredibly valuable real estate and it plays with it all the time. It's always doing experiments. Sometimes it slides in another row of ads there, and you get this horrific double row of ads on your book page. It's tried various different things in that slot and has done for as long as I can remember. There's just more public awareness at least among authors and when Amazon makes those changes these days, because people are starting to understand how important also boughts are and the whole kind of Amazon system.
Firstly, don't panic because it probably won't stick. It never does. Whatever change they make there. And the second reason not to panic is this is only a visual representation of the underlying system. And even if those also boughts disappear from your page forever, it doesn't change their impact on the whole recommendation engine, as I like to call it. It’d be equivalent to a sign post pointing towards a town disappearing. Now, it might be harder, might be a little harder for people to find the town, But the town itself hasn't disappeared so that there's no real reason to panic. You know, people will get there eventually.
I wouldn't panic too much about changes on your on your product page itself. The underlying system is what is important, and that system is still working away in the background. Whether those also boughts are on your page or no, that's just a visual representation to you. It doesn't actually affect the recommendations that are going out to customers. It doesn't affect the millions of emails that Amazon sending it with targeted recommendations to readers every day. It doesn't change the millions of recommendations they make on the website that are personalized for each individual reader every day. So that system isn't going away. There's no reason to worry about that.
Kate: That's great advice, because I yeah, I would just think like, Oh, that's gone, So that's not a tool in your box anymore. But it is. I feel like anytime Amazon does anything, there's always a lot of, like chatter and discussion about it on all the different indie groups. And, like you said, indie authors are definitely more sensitive and more aware of all of those changes in a way, like we were talking about how traditional author our overlords are, You know, the Big Five and our publishers and stuff. And there's that power differential, but a little bit that exists with Amazon, because Amazon is just huge and so many people, all their income is in Amazon. All my indie books are in Kindle Unlimited, because that's where we make most of our money. I definitely do sometimes feel at the mercy of Amazon.
David: Yeah, well, they have so much of the e book market in particular, not just in the US but like I think, US they are estimated to have, what, 70 75%? I don't think anyone has a very clear read on that. In the UK, it's even greater. It's 90% or more. So, like it is very important, Like if anything happens on Amazon has, you know, really noticeable effect on the livelihoods, of lots and lots of authors, self publishers in particular. I think everybody wants a healthy book sector with lots and lots of competitors.
But the other side of that is that Amazon has always given us a more level playing field. So that's why, in that sense, we've always had a kind of more positive disposition towards Amazon. There was always a feeling, now some of the other retailers might dispute this, and fair enough. But the feeling among self publishers and this is something I would agree with, is that Amazon has always made it easier for us to bootstrap our way to success. Like it always felt like a lot of the prime spots on the other retailers were being kept for Random House or Penguin or HarperCollins, whereas front tables on Amazon it feels like everyone has a shot of getting there and that, you know, nobody is particularly favored. Good luck picking the bones out of that. We have a lot of kind of conflicted in opinions about the whole thing.
Kate: I think that's one of the reasons I do like keeping, having that hybrid thing. It just makes me feel a little more able to pivot. So I don't feel like I'm totally beholden to publishers. I don't feel like I'm totally beholden to Amazon. I definitely still feel like I could be screwed at any minute because I do make my living making words.
David: Well one thing that it gives me more confidence today about, you know, some massive structural shock coming, and it might just be virus related or economy related. There’s a lot of noise about breaking Amazon up, and but I feel a lot personally a lot more confident about weathering a storm like that now because I have a much larger mailing list. So I feel like OK, if Amazon went down tomorrow or stopped being an effective place for me to sell books that would hurt. But, I feel like I could put something together quicker or recover faster because I have a greater control of my platform. I have so many more of my readers on my mailing list or liking my Facebook page or whatever. And they like the unique advantage of email, as opposed to having lots of Twitter followers or Facebook likes or whatever else is that you 100% control that platform. Like with Facebook. You know, people are complaining that there's less organic reach. Twitter is a crapshoot over, You know, whether anyone ever sees your tweet or not, It seems you don't even really have the option there of dropping some cash in making sure that everybody see it.
It doesn't really work so well with email. If something happens, I could just take my list on and walk like I did with MailChimp. When they jacked up their prices and changed their terms. I was just able to pull my list cause I own it and walk and you can't do that with Facebook. I can't... if Facebook suddenly, you know, doubles the price of their advertising or whatever, do something that messes with my business. I can't just take all my likes and leave. I can't download them, you know, and bring them over to a new social network. They don't allow you to do that cause I don't control that list. I don't control that territory whereas I do with my mailing lists, and that's very empowering.
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Kate: I wanted to ask one other thing. I can't remember if it was an email or a blog post of yours that I came across a while ago, but I thought it was really interesting because you talked about going viral. And pros and cons of that. What you could do with that, which seemed like your take away, was not much. But our last guest that we had, we talked about going viral in a bad way. When you get at the bottom of one of those Twitter pile ons. I've never gone viral. I've never been a person who everyone on Twitter decides to scream at. I actually don't really want either of those cause it terrifies me a little bit. What are your thoughts on going viral or on the Twitter pile ons?
David: What I was trying to address in that post is that going viral is something that people seem to want to engineer. And there's obviously negative effects to going viral, as your last guest would have, would have cover conclusively. But my take on it was a little bit different in that I think the danger in trying to engineer something like that and is that you'll start doing all the wrong things, right.
So, for example, I had to build up a brand new Facebook page in January for my, because I republished all my historical fiction under a slightly tweaked version of my name. Just to separate everything out, I decided to start a fresh Facebook page just for historical fiction readers that wouldn't have my author audience mixed in and just so I could put a tailored content just for that channel specifically.
Now, if you want to build up a Facebook page quickly or get more likes or comments or shares, the easiest way to do that is to post pictures of cats or dogs are share memes. It's easy to fall into that trap because, you know, we're trying to talk about our books, we’re trying to talk about, you know, that the subject matter around the books, the research, or books we like, and those posts might get a few likes a few comments if you share and then you put up a puppy and things go wild, right? There's a picture of your daughter or or something like that, which is of general interest. And it's really easy for lots of people to like that photo, And that is really easy for you to start thinking. Well, I should do more content like that. But then one kind of audience area building up your, building up an audience of people who like puppies and cute photos of Children or whatever else. You're not building up an audience of people who are rabid fans of the kind of books that you write.
And that's what you gotta focus on, Not not this number chasing not, you know as much going viral as much as possible. You just want a, you want a narrow beam of content. And if it's turning off most people, that's great, because that means you're actually really zeroing in on the little, little niche that you want to target. And these days, the market is so big that you really need to drill down to the people who will respond most to your work and just exclusively target them. And in on your social channels, and in your emails, exclusively putting out the kind of content of these kind of people like, you know, not kind of content that everyone likes. The kind of people just these people like. And if most people don't enjoy us, that's fine. That's actually good for you because you don't want passengers on your email list, cause you'll end up paying from, and it'll affect your open rates.
And when you have lots of people not opening your emails, it even starts to affect the deliver ability of your email. So even the people who do want to get your emails might start not receiving them. And it’s the same on Facebook. Like a lot of people talk about how organic reach has been reduced dramatically. I think it's been reduced, but I don't think it's that dramatic like, because I now have such narrow beam of content on both my Facebook pages. And I don't make a cross the streams at all. I sometimes have engaged rates off 25% or 30%. Still, when people say that's been impossible for five years, maybe it is if you build up likes by posting memes all the time. But if you keep your content to that narrow beam of content, then you're gonna build up an audience that’s really, really responsive to that kind of content you're putting a.., Maybe it's harder work. Maybe it's a slower build, but it's ultimately I think, the best way to handle it.
Kate: I've seen tweets that go viral and usually below it, the person will say something like, Oh, this tweet really blew up, buy my book! Once your tweet goes viral, you're supposed to like follow it up with a sales pitch. But I wonder how many people even click on that sales pitch link because I never do. I'm always like Oh, good for you. I'm like, funny tweet, moving on.
David: I've never had something like, you know, bo properly viral in in that sense, but I've had, like, kind of many, many viral sensations, if you like. I remember there was something during that terribly tiresome Amazon Hachette dispute a few years ago, and I wrote an article on and I think Stephen Fry retweeted it. And I got like, 40,000 people in the space of an hour coming to my website, which thankfully, didn't crash. But that’s kind of drive by traffic and I think it's the same with all viral traffic. It doesn't stick around. They don't subscribe to your blog. They don't check out your books, they don't buy. So chasing that traffic is really, really pointless, and it's actually self harming if it means that you're putting out content which isn't actually going to help you build a targeted audience of buyers of your work.
Kate: Don’t cast a wide net. Cast a small, finely-knit net.
David: Like Barbie trying to catch a butterfly or something.
Mindy: Thank you so much. I really appreciate all of your time.
David: Thanks for inviting me!
Mindy: Writer Writer Pants on Fire is produced by Mindy McGinnis. Music by Jack Korbel. Don't forget to check out the blog for additional interviews, writing advice and publication tips at Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com. If the blog or podcast have been helpful to you or if you just enjoy listening, please consider donating. Visit Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com and click “support the blog and podcast” in the sidebar.