#2: 10 Mistakes Authors Make When Marketing Their Books

Posted July 13, 2022

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These are common mistakes we see indie authors make when marketing their books and our ideas + insights on how you can reach more readers. We have a special focus on subscriptions for this episode, per usual :).

#2 EPISODE OUTLINE:

#2: Full Episode Transcript:

Michael Evans: [00:00:00] Well, hello everyone. And welcome to another episode of the Subscriptions for Authors Podcast. Today, we’re gonna be talking about 10 mistakes authors make marketing their books, but if you’ve listened to any other podcast on marketing, there’s plenty of great ones, but we want to dive deeper and share a different perspective than you’ve probably heard elsewhere.

Michael Evans: You’re gonna get a lot of interesting advice, a lot of actual things you could do for your business. And hopefully we can all move one step forward to making our dreams come true of being full-time authors. And if you are full-time author, let’s make some more money.

Michael Evans: Now, before we officially get into the 10 mistakes that authors make I just wanted to pop in from the future. I’m editing this podcast episode currently. And I realize that we didn’t explicitly talk about subscriptions in the introduction. And this is where I wanted to say that we’re so thankful that you are here for the Subscriptions for Author’s Podcast, that you’re in our community.

Michael Evans: And that is the main focus of our podcast. And in this episode. Although we didn’t necessarily like brand it that way. We get deep in [00:01:00] subscriptions. We do talk about specific strategies people can use, but we also wanted to create this podcast. So that authors can use this to broadly promote their books because we know that almost no authors just make money using subscriptions and plenty of authors don’t yet use subscriptions.

Michael Evans: So this is hopefully meant for a broader audience of any indie authors and a lot of the podcasts that we are creating, we hope will be something that’s innovative and on the cutting edge that indie authors can use to apply to their business, no matter what they do, because we want to help all the others explore this new wave of the creator economy and how they can make more money and subscriptions are we think a huge part of it.

Michael Evans: And it’s what we’re focused on in our community. And it’s what we mostly focus on in this podcast. So I just wanna come here and say this at the end of the podcast. We’ll talk a little bit more about our vision. This is only our second episode, so thank you for being here, to the action now.

Michael Evans: This first one, we have 10 mistakes. First mistake, oftentimes authors over index on [00:02:00] performance marketing instead of brand marketing. Now that sounds like a bunch of jargon, but I’ll first break down what brand and performance marketing are. And the mean Emilia will kind of just discuss it. Brand marketing is like when you see McDonald’s commercial on television, they’re usually not telling you go to our store, click here and buy this product.

Michael Evans: They’re just trying to get you to remember McDonald’s that when you’re ready to consume food. You think about McDonald’s first and you think about the warm smile and the happy meal and you go, I want to be happy inside. So that’s, that’s brand marketing, building a feeling in the consumer, not worried about a direct sale performance marketing, something, that it hasn’t been new.

Michael Evans: The old school way was the guy on the street who like had the restaurant menus, like come into the restaurant now. This deal’s going on. And the modern day version of it is things like Amazon ads. You could put your book in a display ad, and when customers are looking to buy books, you can be in front of them right there and have them click Facebook ads are another good example.

Michael Evans: And we usually measure performance ads based on [00:03:00] ROI, direct sales and the money comes in quickly. Whereas brand marketing is much more focused on the long term. What authors mostly have focused on, at least up to this point in indie publishing is all performance marketing. That’s almost what all the conversations about it’s how do I get more sales tomorrow?

Michael Evans: And that makes a lot of sense when we’re all trying to be on the come up and get new readers. But today we wanna talk about hi that actually. Might be a mistake.

Emilia Rose: When I started it was all brand marketing. I built pretty much just a community of readers who really just wanna read my stories. And once I had like that community, I started branching out into performance marketing.

Emilia Rose: but it’s not going as well as brand marketing does for me. I really like to create feeling around my stories and a community of readers who love reading the next chapter. Love getting the next little bits of my character’s relationships. And when I build that relationship with a reader. They like to come back for [00:04:00] more.

Emilia Rose: I just like, personally, as an author, who’s really close to her readers. I like love seeing the reactions to the things. So it kind of like goes both ways. People are, or authors are really shifting to brand marketing right now, especially with TikTok and book talk exploding. It’s more about creating like this community or this feeling around books, which is really cool instead of like Facebook ads, thrill this book in your face.

Emilia Rose: We’ll see how it goes.

Michael Evans: For you specifically. I’m curious. How did you go about initially building your community? How did that brand marketing initially go? Where did you go? What tactics did you use? Because as someone in the beginning it’s, when you don’t have a brand yet when you’re just you sitting there…

Emilia Rose: My story’s probably going to be a little bit different from a lot of other authors, but I released on Wattpad for free my books.

Emilia Rose: Before I even considered publishing. And at the end of every chapter, I would always leave like an author’s note, basically asking like the community of readers, like, Hey, what’d you [00:05:00] think of this chapter? Did you like it? Did you not like it? What do you think is gonna happen next? And all these little questions, people.

Emilia Rose: At, at first, nobody really responded, cuz I didn’t have a lot of readers, but over time more and more people started responding to those questions and then they would even like comment on other people’s responses and it just started feeling like more of a community. So that’s how I personally started building or building that through brand marketing.

Emilia Rose: But you could do like similar things on like social media too. like asking readers, like, Hey. What would you think about this specific idea? or what about these tropes? Do you guys like them? Do you guys not like them, like little things like that?

Michael Evans: I took a very different approach when I was thinking about brand marketing points, marketing, and I was just vlogging my life.

Michael Evans: So it wasn’t even like directly related to writing it. Wasn’t like I was gonna like do a call to action ad in the middle of video. Like, so here’s my [00:06:00] book, everyone go buy it. It was just kind of like me and my life and getting people interested in who I was. And in my thoughts. It was something that definitely saw more success for me from an ROI standpoint, because I was running ads and I was making more revenue when I was running Facebook ads and Amazon ads.

Michael Evans: But I was kind of realizing like, these things are expensive, everyone’s doing it. And then margins are low until like, I can really reach a certain scale and I wasn’t there yet. And wasn’t sure how I was gonna get there at that stage in my career. So I started doing YouTube and I turned off all my ads and I remember.

Michael Evans: I still made and I didn’t even do any call to actions. Any of my videos, I still made like five or $600 in book sales the month after. And that was pretty cool to me. And I was not even thinking about it, like selling books. The next month I was thinking about like over the course of years, how can I build this relationship where these people who are so interested in me who part of this community are gonna be there to [00:07:00] buy every new book I released and I was willing to invest years into that relationship.

Emilia Rose: It does take a lot of time. And a lot of people like, even including myself, sometimes we get trapped in like that, like Facebook ads, Amazon ads.

Emilia Rose: Like if I run this I’ll immediately see book sales, but those book sales are probably not going to be from people who. Love your content right off the bat. they’re not going to be those super bands like, right, right now you’ll get that sale. And. You might, they might not buy another book from you for another, like six months to a year because they might just not read it immediately.

Emilia Rose: Whereas like, if you like really focus on building that community, you’re going to have readers who are like begging you to release your book now because they wanna read it right now. And they want like early access to it and all this different stuff. So yeah, it’s really hard to get trapped in. In performance marketing mistake.

Emilia Rose: Number two is [00:08:00] basically authors follow, eCommerce a lot and try to make things as cheap as possible to gain those new readers, which is definitely a, a marketing strategy that works well for some people. But a lot of other authors really struggle. Because they’re, they’re focused on making things as cheap as possible and not curating those communities of super fans.

Michael Evans: Jeff Bezos our Lord and savior. He said, I think a couple years in the interview that the world’s gonna change a lot over the next 10 years, which definitely probably a true thing. But he also said that I know there’s gonna be three things that customers always want, which is the cheapest possible things.

Michael Evans: Access to as many possible things and getting them as quickly as possible. And I don’t doubt, that’s like in the broad space of commodities, what people want. Like I have a banana right here, and if I [00:09:00] could get this banana for free every day and eat it, I’d be very happy to do that. Very happy to do that.

Michael Evans: And honestly, most people think I, everything for free would be very happy to do that. There’s a difference between commodities and stories. When we are thinking about a commodity, we look at the aisle and are like, okay, these cereals are roughly the same. This one’s cheaper than that one. So I’m gonna go with that one.

Michael Evans: And that’s a very logical pricing decision, but. At least for me. And maybe I’m, I might, I’m not alone in this, but also not everyone works this way, but many readers when they look at books, don’t really think that much about price. Like if it’s a thousand dollars, like that’s kind of insane to pay for a book.

Michael Evans: I don’t have that kind of money just sitting my bank account just to be like, oh, book. But if it’s $7 versus $5, That’s not a huge difference to me. If I wanna read that book, I’m willing to pay two extra dollars to read that book because that book is a totally unique experience. That even if it’s the same genre, right.

Michael Evans: Very similar tropes in that book, this author [00:10:00] has a unique way of telling their story and a unique feeling that they give me that I just, I can’t really quantify.

Emilia Rose: Going off of subscriptions and that same belief that like, Hey, my, my work and my. Isn’t valuable., I don’t think anyone is going to pay for it.

Emilia Rose: Why would they like, I think authors are kind of like forced to believe that at some point, like, Hey, like art isn’t as valuable as like a chair, or like these like physical products that I can buy. But the truth is like anybody could make like a foldable chair. Not everyone can tell, like the story that you need to tell as an author or draw or paint what you need to paint or draw as an artist.

Emilia Rose: and so it really comes down to believing that you can do that and your work is valuable. And when I started to really value my writing, I created a subscription model and there’s different. I had different price points for [00:11:00] different contents. My lowest tier that people pay monthly for right now is a $3 tier.

Emilia Rose: And that gives them pretty much all of my content, but there are more exclusive stories at higher tiers, like $5 and $10 where people, if they want to, and if they can, they can pay those higher pay in those higher tiers to receive additional content. so you’re really catering to, to fans all across the board.

Michael Evans: I agree, except $3 a month still, like for all the authors that I read, if I was to pay $3 a month for. The 10 or 20 authors I might read in a month, you know, we’re starting to the bank, account’s starting to, to yell at me. So I’m just curious. How do you also knowing that you do have this business model?

Michael Evans: Are you also pricing in different ways? Like, are you just in subscriptions?

Emilia Rose: No, I’m I I’m like everywhere right now. , I’m also selling eBooks individually, which are, most of them [00:12:00] are at 4 99.

Michael Evans: That’s a model. That’s an example of how authors can cater to multiple audiences. And one example that I’ll give that is kind of become standard, like lit RPG.

Michael Evans: I feel like a lot of authors are following this is that they first put their book up for free on whale road and they serialize it for free. They eventually start to gain people who are liking their stories, and then over time they convert those followers into people who follow them on Patreon and that conversion rate.

Michael Evans: SAtleastfrom what I’ve heard in our Subscriptions for Author’s Facebook group. And also just around in whispers tends to be one reader will convert to a subscription out of about every 33 to 50 followers. You get following your story. And this is how it works specifically in the Royal Road platform. There’s other serialization platforms like Radish, Inkitt, Galatea, which is owned by Inkitt. Wattpad there’s, there’s plenty, but that’s how it works there. [00:13:00] And these authors then have people who want to read those chapters that are being serialized on railroad early, and they get early access on, on a subscription platform and are then paying for it. And then when the book’s done, when that world’s done, the author takes it all up, bundles it up, puts it on Amazon.

Michael Evans: Then it no longer exists on their subscription platform. Typically these authors are putting it into Kindle Unlimited. So we all know the rules of Kindle limited. You can’t have your books in two places, but the people still stay on the subscription platform, paying them monthly for new content because the author will then begin writing a new book.

Michael Evans: And those same people will want access to that story before it comes out on Amazon. And also before it serialized on royal Road. So you and I have price points, everyone, people who wanna read the full book who want to be on Amazon, who wanna read the edited version, who want the audio book, you’re [00:14:00] gonna have to pay for that.

Michael Evans: And you could pay for it kind of like at, you know, ala-carte and, and the typical price point, the genre seems to be for, 4.99 to like 6 99 per book. And then they also have readers who could come in for free. And then they have readers who are paying monthly, all different price points. And I think how you could think about it is.

Michael Evans: It’s like almost like you’re moat, you can get the most people reading free. And that’s great. And if you can convert a certain percentage of them to a subscription, that’s great. And then you’re also gonna get a totally different audience. Who’s gonna come in on Amazon and read your books and probably pay for them or read them for free on Kindle Unlimited, which is super, super cool.

Michael Evans: And then if you have them going to subscription platform for the certain percentage who are willing to pay higher, like. If you have a hundred readers who are paying $4 for three books released in a year, your take home for like an author after Amazon’s fees is gonna be close to like $10 per reader. Um, and you will then have, [00:15:00] I think a thousand dollars.

Michael Evans: Cause I said a hundred readers. I hope I’m doing the math. Right. But if you get two of them, just 2% to describe to subscription platform and give you $5 a month, right there. You just made $120 doing the same thing. I’m doing a lot of mental math in real time, but I think the point is that you can make money from so many different places and not have to be like, oh, well, I don’t want you as a reader because you know, I only want people who pay me this much.

Michael Evans: You can be so inclusive. But make so much more money.

Emilia Rose: Like a lot of people think like, Hey, I need to like, put so much work into subscriptions. It’s going to take away from like all of my readers who are currently on Amazon. Which is like, usually it’s not the case. Like those, at least for me personally, a lot of my readers who are on my subscription platform that are also, they [00:16:00] also do buy the ebook once it’s released or buy the paper back or hard back, which is really cool.

Emilia Rose: They definitely do not have to do that because they’ve read the book already. But you’re really just like, they’re really there to support you and they really want to support you in any way that they can. So what I found personally, it doesn’t take away, any readers from Amazon or any readers from Barnes and Noble or Kobo, it’s just gathering your biggest fans.

Emilia Rose: And while also, yeah, when you’re, when you’re releasing on free free platforms too, you’re also giving people who might not have as much money right now the ability to read your story. but in like five or 10 years, they might have money to support.

Emilia Rose: You kind of, goes into our next to mistake is not getting readers before you release, but something you could kind of like offset.

Emilia Rose: This is doing serialization through Wattpad or Inkitt or Radish Royal Road, like we were chatting about before, and writing to [00:17:00] market.

Michael Evans: For me personally. I have dealt with this pendulum because right to market, we’ve heard everywhere. So I, I don’t wanna harp on that. I think a lot of people know it. If you don’t know it, please read Chris Fox’s book, write to market. There’s a lot of other people who talk about it in Facebook groups, like what is right to market. You can find plenty of articles in this, but I wanna talk about is how you can not write to market, but still find readers for you release, because that sounds like, oh my God, a dream. But for me, I did write to market.

Michael Evans: What I did maybe obsessively and weirdly was paid for a cover before I wrote the book, wrote a description, put it up on Amazon. And then I ran Facebook ads to it and saw it converted.

Emilia Rose: Oh my gosh, I would freak out if I did it that way.

Michael Evans: I knew that I was gonna then be able to write this book and, and make money that there was an audience.

Michael Evans: Cause it was hitting a specific sub genre. I was. Beyond writing to market. I was literally thinking about, is there a targetable, Facebook audience that I can reach with this through paid ads that I can then through paid acquisitions, scale up my business. It was [00:18:00] kind of a lot. And to boil it, I actually burnt out in the middle of writing that series because I market and not for me.

Michael Evans: And I think as a lot of writers like people I’ve talked to because. Me and Emilia were like, literally just in London at the self-publishing show live conference. And we, we love talking to writers. And the one thing I get from all of us basically is that like, we love writing. Like we just wanna write what our heart says, but like we know there’s people out there like us.

Michael Evans: So like the idea of like writing to market is important, but. It doesn’t always necessarily fit into like a neat sub genre. We wanna experiment if we do something new and that doesn’t necessarily work with the model of like go to the Amazon chart, see what’s selling and like literally right to market.

Michael Evans: So a way around that is to go on these materialization platforms and just start writing a story and have it something that speaks to you, but only right, like a chapter or two of it. And if people are starting to like it and you can see. [00:19:00] Then it’s like, oh, maybe I should finish it. And then if not, write a story and write a new story, and then eventually like, someone’s gonna be like, oh wow, this is there.

Michael Evans: This is it. I’m I’m into this story. And then you could finish it. And that might be a story that fits into a neat genre, but it might not fit as well into a neat genre. And that’s okay because some of the best selling books and the books that create new genres didn’t really fit into one to begin with.

Michael Evans: So you can create your own market. and that’s just one way to do it. We’ll talk about other ways to like use multimedia forms to like build audiences later.

Emilia Rose: Yeah. Kind of going off of that. I had, a book that I was doing serialization on Wattpad. this was a long time ago before like demon romances got really popular, but it was like about incubus, demon.

Emilia Rose: And I think the book ended up getting like 10 million reads on Wattpad and it does very well as a serial and it had a lot of fans going into,, before I started my subscription platform. but that, that kind [00:20:00] of book didn’t do what, like super well on Amazon, it does really well on radish. So I would say like, If you’re writing something that you really, really love and it’s doing well on a serial platform.

Emilia Rose: And then it like flops on Amazon. Just try it somewhere else. Like try it, putting it on radish or a different serialization platform where you can get money from it.

Michael Evans: That’s a great point, different readers and markets hang out in different places. Sometimes readers like before genres get big, only exist in one place.

Michael Evans: And then those readers are everywhere, cuz there’s just more of them and it, it kind of plays into the fourth mistake that authors often make when marking their books is trying to do everything at once instead of focusing on building fly wheels. So what is a flywheel kind of sounds fun. Like a kite you put out and like you could get taken off into the sky.

Michael Evans: I don’t know. It’s like what I think of when I think of it, but the boring technical marketing term, that’s [00:21:00] actually. Really useful. If you can build one of these is a loop that on autopilot generates cold leads and those cold leads could go through a sales process where they eventually become more warm leads than paying customers of your company.

Michael Evans: So that’s like, well, how corporate America thinks about it? How can authors think about it? Well, you all have a flywheel when it comes to word of mouth and it is the most powerful flywheel. We have by far, if you get a reader to just talk about your book to someone else, that person buys the book because they trust them, reads the book and then tells someone else cuz they loved it.

Michael Evans: I mean that is like the dream, right. And we then have to think about, well, how do we find these people who just wanna talk better books and I’ll give one piece of advice. That’s not typical advice. And then I’ll let Amelia jump off. But the, the not typical advice. that I [00:22:00] would give. It’s actually something that Suzie Quinn gave in a presentation at the self-publishing show live.

Michael Evans: And I’m totally taking advice from the people. But when I do that, I’m going to share who it is and where I found it. And this was a really interesting piece of advice from her, where she said that you can write to a genre that has a approved audience, or you can write to a community. And that actually really spoke to.

Michael Evans: because a book like eat, pray love. That was a huge book. And that was written to single woman in their thirties or late twenties in their thirties. And, and that’s really powerful. And that means that every woman who has a friend, which I mean, you could see how, like, if I’m a woman in my my thirties, who is single.

Michael Evans: I probably have a friend who’s in her thirties. Who’s also single. So it’s very easy to kind of share through there because there’s this built in community [00:23:00] that isn’t necessarily like a typical reader community, but it’s very powerful. And that became a mega bestselling book. And that brings us to mistake number five, the indie authors make when marketing their books, which is not taking advantage of network effect.

Emilia Rose: Once you like have this community built, it’s really important to. Have language or story network effects built within the story or the series that you’re you’re promoting. And that includes like really having really awesome titles that are on brands or on genre, or even like on community as we’re we are chatting about.

Emilia Rose: Personally I found that it’s really, really helpful when you’re doing serialization because a lot of readers, at least in romance, they like to know what they’re getting into before they start. So like, I’ll give an example from my own writing. My first book that I released was called submitting to the alpha,, very high, highly spicy.

Emilia Rose: But the story is really spicy and it’s about, werewolf [00:24:00] alpha . Readers pretty much know exactly what they’re getting into. and the story itself is one of my best selling, on all different platforms. So on free websites on Amazon and on serialized websites like Patreon and radish, building that word of mouth through your marketing.

Emilia Rose: One example that I know from a romance. I haven’t read this personally, but everyone knows in the romance community. What the, the little dialogue phrase we love rainy days. Don’t we baby, by Kate Stewart, me and it just like provokes, or evokes this like really amazing, like sad feeling in a lot of romance readers

Michael Evans: that’s really, really cool. And that, that plays into two anecdotes. I wanna share one to like very much solidify this example and every author wishes they could become the, the next line, when I say bestselling series, what do you think about? [00:25:00] And I would say a plurality of people would think about Harry Potter.

Michael Evans: A lot of people think about Harry Potter. So then when you talk about bestselling books, you talk about Harry Potter, which gives Harry Potter more visibility. And gives it more sales essentially. And this is why, and people like Joe sari, who is incredible, also has a podcast author business podcast, I believe where it’s mind your author business.

Michael Evans: But anyway, it’s great. Joe’s awesome. and he talks about this concept of cumulative advantage that authors have, and this is really powerful in any business, but especially in what we do because of story network effects. When you become known in a community of readers for what you do, when readers start to talk about what they like to read, you become the first person they talk about.

Michael Evans: Not because they love you the most. That can be part of the reason that’s a super fan, but even they’re fans, but not supers. So just fans, they will still mention you when talking about you because they figure the other person knows you because you’re already popular. And, and so it [00:26:00] just perpetuates itself.

Michael Evans: It’s like, it is kind of unfair to smaller authors. To me, it’s a little bit discouraging, so like, no, one’s gonna mention my book when someone talk about best selling, because J K Rowling’s already there. But how you think about it is that first of all, you don’t need a billion dollars. That’s how much money she’s made way more than that.

Michael Evans: And that’s great, but you just want to make a living. You just wanna reach new readers, so you can kind of reverse engineer and think about what community am I not broken into yet that I can kind of become the thing that they talk about. And for us, we thought about that when actually building Ream which if that’s it doesn’t make any sense. What we’re doing is building a subscription platform for authors by authors, and we’re super excited about it. And it’s something we hope can help a lot of authors connect their readers and make more money. And we were really thinking about so Ream, who is this community for?

Michael Evans: And how do we have, like the word ream becomes. So. That means something in [00:27:00] our community. Our sixth mistake that authors often make when marketing their books is when we all jump on tactics that other authors do. I’ll give an example that we probably all know which is Facebook ads. It’s something that in the beginning when Mark Dawson was doing it, he was able to scale to basically zero to $40,000 a month in ebook sales.

Michael Evans: Very, very quickly in a span of like six months, he’s documented this way more. Like openly and thoroughly in his Facebook groups and podcasts and super, super inspiring. But for an author to do that today off of Facebook ads alone would be very difficult. Now people can always strike a chord with a story.

Michael Evans: That’s like the beautiful thing about what we do, but when it actually comes to like a marketing tactic in reaching people, Facebook’s significantly more expensive and significantly more saturated books. So now let’s think about. that seems to be the new wave, but is it really like there are already 55 billion views on the hashtag BookTok which means there’s a big audience there just like Facebook.

Michael Evans: There’s still opportunity, [00:28:00] but is that really the best place to break in now? Is that really the green open passion. So open for debate, but if you wanna focus on one thing and one thing only, I think it can be interesting to do something that’s working, but not where they’re doing it. Here’s an example.

Michael Evans: We know that readers love short-form video content, but I would suggest book to YouTube’s a massive platform. They need short-form video to work. There’s a huge book community on there, and there’s very little authors that I know of creating bookish content in short form.

Emilia Rose: I, I see a lot of people who are doing, creating like these short form videos on TikTok, but also like utilizing them everywhere including Instagram and some people are doing really, really well on Instagram.

Emilia Rose: More like better than they are on TikTok. Like some of the videos just take off, which is really cool. So like, you can, you could do both, like you could, you should definitely like, dip your [00:29:00] toes in TikTok if you haven’t yet. Just to see how it is and see how well you could do there, but you can also repurpose those videos for other places as well.

Emilia Rose: Like even stick some in your newsletter. Just to have all this content that you’re creating for TikTok. If you are using TikTok, but you could use it elsewhere as well.

Michael Evans: And another idea, and these are all just ideas, but paid advertising is something. You know, really was done effectively on Facebook and that still is, but, maybe more open pasture can actually be people who are doing well on book talk.

Michael Evans: These creators have audiences who want to follow them and receive book recommendations for them. A lot of these people are open to sponsorships and a lot of traditional publishers have moved into sponsoring these people, many authors have as well, but that could also be an opportunity for you, especially if you’re looking to.

Michael Evans: Actually spend some money in marketing. If creating short form videos is not something you’re passionate about, but you wanna reach that audience. It can be a way to, to reach them and to garner new [00:30:00] readers and not something that at least to my knowledge, many authors have jumped on yet.

Emilia Rose: Well, I haven’t even thought about that. That’s really interesting. I’ll have to take a look. Maybe I’ll jump on that next who knows?

Michael Evans: That would be really interesting. And. We are always working on interesting new ways to help authors get their books discovered. I’ll leave it at that. The second mistake that authors typically make when marketing their books is not focusing on sustainability and not hyper focusing on their product, AKA reducing reader churn, which that’s a weird way to describe what happens in a reader, stops reading, read through rate.

Michael Evans: We all talk about. For those who don’t know very simply how many people who read book one in a series will go on to read book two, then book three, then book four and book five. And for obvious reasons, a higher read three is a good thing. When it comes to anything you do, because a new reader will be worth more money.

Michael Evans: So you can spend more money to do it. Even if it’s not like paid [00:31:00] acquisition, just doing something your time’s worth more to be doing marketing. So it’s a very good thing to have a high read through rate. But that churn when someone actually leave. And stops reading. A lot of times, we don’t necessarily hyper focus on that in the way we should.

Michael Evans: And I think if we focus on building sustainable marketing systems, you don’t have to blow up and do it all at one and get super stressed out. Let’s just do one thing and see if it works and see if the readers are reading something very simple, slow and measured approach is something that I don’t see. A ton ton.

Michael Evans: And I think it’s a mistake that sometimes authors make.

Emilia Rose: I actually do something similar. So basically I’ll just explain it., every week I have, a short story that I release on my subscription. And when I’m ready to start a new story, start writing like a complete novel. I will have my [00:32:00] readers basically vote on their favorite story that they liked out of all this collection or short stories.

Emilia Rose: It might be like 10 or so. And from that, I will start writing the story that they wanna see. So it’s basically like taking the story that I know is going to do well and writing it for. My small little markets, my small community. And then from there releasing it to a larger community, of readers who are similar to mine.

Michael Evans: I love that. I think that really too, as well, kind of does that Pixar model of storytelling, which if no one studied the Pixar model of storytelling, it’s something I really recommend. many people know Steve jobs started Pixar and, you know, he’s someone that is idolized a lot and I won’t go on any sort of fanboy train, but I will say that I really do appreciate how he approached building products.

Michael Evans: He took a very similar approach from software and hardware that he [00:33:00] used with apple to then building stories at Pixar, which would seem very different. And I think there’s many differences. So there are, but one thing that’s similar is if you can get a group of a thousand people in a room, liking it and giving you feedback, and then eventually using that data to scale up, that’s, it’s a very good thing.

Michael Evans: And a thousand is the number that he would use at Pixar abruptly. He brought people in theaters and they wouldn’t even build like the actual animations yet. Cause that’s very costly. It takes a lot of time. They would just have like these sketches that like you could basically do on a napkin and they would then have it on a television screen, very janky, but it was still at the stage where you could see is the audience receptive to the story.

Michael Evans: And they basically tell people, walk out if you don’t like it, tell us what you don’t like. Be very, very vocal and. They would workshop this incessantly like toy story three, I think took five or six years of this process of going through it. And again, this was obviously after Steve jobs kind of had less involvement in it, but they continued the [00:34:00] process.

Michael Evans: And then finally, it’s like, we got our story, people responding to this. Now let’s animate it. Now let’s like really market it and make it something that tens of millions people will see. And you can think about that way for your books too. what is taking your most time and resources when building the product and what can you do very minimally to see very early on without putting it all that time.

Michael Evans: Is this something people want and how can I make it better? before I do all that extra work. And that goes into mistake number eight, which is not clearly defining your brand for your readers

Emilia Rose: readers, aren’t buying your story. They’re buying like a feeling that your story invokes in them. And kind of going back to what we were talking about in TikTok, and booktok.

Emilia Rose: I, I think the reason why like page flips and booktok does so well, especially, [00:35:00] or specifically in romance is because like a lot of these videos that authors are creating are not telling the entire story. They’re evoking a feeling in the audience, whether it’s like, like, oh, this is like really sexy. I’m gonna read the scene.

Emilia Rose: Or like, wow, this is like heartbreaking. Like I want to like cry my eyes out. So, yeah, I think that’s the reason why booktok specifically doing great with like these videos. but you can also see this in like Spotify, like people authors are making like Spotify playlists to like. Immerse yourself into like that world through music or like Pinterest boards, where you could like scroll through all the pictures and be like, wow, like this is the exact feeling I, I get while reading this specific story, which is really, really cool.

Michael Evans: I think it’s incredible. It’s what it’s really about at the end of the day, because readers, aren’t going to necessarily think about you in the context of genre. [00:36:00] They’re not gonna be like, oh, she’s. Enemies to love or author. They’re not gonna necessarily think about it, like in the sense of even tropes.

Michael Evans: Like that might be what brings them in. But at the end of the day, there’s something bigger about your brand that someone stands for. And this is something that a lot of really big companies use very, very effectively in terms of aligning values with Purchasing. An example is black riffle coffee. People may be familiar with it.

Michael Evans: It’s a very, very conservative, like focused on freedom coffee company. And I don’t necessarily think they make better coffee than like, like your average. I think a lot of it’s just the same coffee, right? So it’s just another coffee, but. They’ve built a, a multi nine figure business a year, which is insane, mostly focused in Texas, selling coffee and merch.

Michael Evans: It’s like a lifestyle brand now, cuz people wanna buy a black rifle, coffee merch. And it’s just because they’ve aligned their values super well in their messaging and marketing and they haven’t. [00:37:00] Like they don’t, they’re not building worlds in stories that actually make people feel this. They’re just doing some marketing tricks and making their company feel that way.

Michael Evans: And people just wanna buy their coffee that much. So imagine like what that power actually is like when translated to story, like when you have that awareness of, this is what I wanna give my feel, reader like, like it’s insane. It doesn’t even it’s it’s insane. And then, you know, you can think about like, wait, wait, so black rifle, coffee company.

Michael Evans: Aligned tons of people who are interested in freedom and brought them together. And now they’re willing to buy coffee and merch. And like, like to be honest, like who really needs the merch, like, you know what I mean? But like they, they wanna buy it. So that’s good. I guess like for the company and as an author, you can think about it this way too.

Michael Evans: Like what , what values am I bringing people together around? That’s what my community’s gonna be sent around. What other things can I give them that make them feel [00:38:00] closer to me and my brand? The story’s a part of it, a very important part, but you’re literally building a world that has limitless merchandising and product opportunities.

Michael Evans: So don’t forget that don’t, don’t get bogged down to that, especially in the beginning, but don’t forget that. And there’s people like galaxy edge, the two authors Jason Anspach and I’m forgetting the other author. I apologize. But incredible guys, they make more money. Off their merch than they do selling science fiction novels.

Michael Evans: And I don’t think they’ll be alone as more and more authors really get into building those kinds of businesses. So, well, we’ll talk a lot more about that later down the line, but aligning that, aligning your feeling that you’re giving someone with your story. That’s that’s how we build a hundred mini Disneys.

Emilia Rose: With your brand too like going back to one of our first points is you wanna build your brand through brand marketing and your brand could be like your romance [00:39:00] author who writes like really heartbreaking stories. And that’s what your readers, that’s the readers you want. And that’s the readers who want your book.

Michael Evans: Yeah. I mean, just thinking about how central romance is to our lives.

Michael Evans: Like, and this isn’t. News to anyone like, especially romance authors out there, but I could just myself thinking about it now. Like, you know, who’s writing for like people who are having like second marriages, like that’s so many people are entering second marriages. Divorce like, and these things are all like again, so many books have been written about it, but if you can have that awareness of like, I really wanna build a community of people who’ve been through divorce and felt that heartbreak and pain and are now trying to pick up and find a second love.

Michael Evans: That’s really powerful. And, and what can be built from that? I mean, I don’t wanna, I don’t want to get too crazy in terms of my business speculation and awesome things authors can do, but just imagine who that person is. And how your story is just a gateway into something bigger. That’s like the power of brand marketing and the power of [00:40:00] like really aligning your values with your readers and mistake.

Michael Evans: Number nine that authors make when marketing their books is not utilizing their readers to power their community and generate more sales.

Emilia Rose: Utilizing your readers and really, Focusing on your fandoms that you already have, or building your fandoms, and just a group of your super fans, rather than trying to like, get a little bits from everybody.

Emilia Rose: really curating that community of people who want every bit of your, your stories, and who will, once they read your stories are going to like market it for you. To their other fans through word mouth really, really, really important.

Michael Evans: One thing you can think about as well is how can you actually give your readerships, like agency in a sense to actually go out there and, and be your champion.

Michael Evans: And one example of this in a non-book world, then I’ll give a book, world example in the non-book world. [00:41:00] There’s this podcast called my verse million. It’s a very, very popular business podcast and they run a podcast where people. They don’t like TikTok, the guys who run the podcast, they just don’t like it.

Michael Evans: They don’t wanna do it, but they think, well, talk’s important. So we should have people creating it. Why don’t we have our fans?

Emilia Rose: Oh, wow.

Michael Evans: Cut up our podcast in eclipse, posted TikTok under this hashtag, then have a contest. And then one with the most views every month gets a certain amount of money. That’s what they do.

Michael Evans: And millions and millions and millions of views in TikTok, new people coming into their podcast, totally an autopilot. And you don’t have to give away money for that kind of thing. Like you can do a contest where you say, Hey readers, I have a new book coming out and I’d love if you can share this on TikTok underneath this hashtag.

Michael Evans: And if you do that, the one with the most views, I’ll give this prize to the one that I think is the most creative, well, ill vote in it. I’ll give this prize to, it can be an hour call with you. It can be a special signed edition of your book. It can be something really cool like that. And it’s just something that [00:42:00] readers get for talking about your books.

Michael Evans: Those they already want to do. But when you like give them that space, It’s really, really special.

Emilia Rose: That’s really cool. I didn’t know. They did that. That’s really interesting. and very, a very different way to like grow on a platform that you might not even be on, or you might not wanna take any part in.

Emilia Rose: Really interesting.

Michael Evans: About TikTok specifically as well. It tends to be more ephemeral than a platform like YouTube or your own mailing list, meaning that your reach can vary a lot. And if you go to like Facebook groups that like have authors specifically talking about stuff like this, they will mention like, wait, like why are my TikTok views really down?

Michael Evans: And it’s because TikTok is basically like a casino lottery. And it’s like it’s honestly like, it started off as a teenager hive mind that then turned into like the world’s hive mind for specific communities. But think about it that way. And then think about, wait, if I have like a hundred readers, all talking back and forth, like, why do I need to be there?

Michael Evans: You still might wanna be there. There’s still a ton of opportunity for authors. But like, if you get your readers [00:43:00] talking. Be really, really powerful and you can incentivize them to do it. You don’t even have to create a contest. You could just tell your fans, it would be really helpful if you shared a TikTok about my book.

Michael Evans: I do think it could be really fun. It’s something that brings your community together. If you made it a fun event, but you don’t have to. Hell, you’re busy. You’re writing a book a month. You’ve got a full time job. You’ve got like three kids. Just tell your readers and your mailing list, like, like high key.

Michael Evans: This would help me out.

Emilia Rose: Yes. Super fans love you. They’ll they’ll do the best they can to support you.

Michael Evans: I agree. I agree. And this goes into our last point, which is the intent mistake authors make is not thinking enough about multimedia marketing and. This one, I’m going to use an example just to show you something different because I can out come up with all the million ideas you can use to market your books or where your readers might hang out.

Michael Evans: But there’s this awesome, awesome author. Her name is Victoria E Leiske, and I really apologize if I misspelled, mispronounced her last name, but all of like [00:44:00] these links that we’ve kind of talked about in the chat should be in the description of the podcast. So you can find this specific post I’m referencing there, but she posted about 20 books and this is wild.

Michael Evans: She started posting her audio books on YouTube, which is interesting and they’re free on YouTube free to access, but she’s garnered a million views on. Since launching and made over $14,000 in cents with over 800,000 hours of watch time, which is incredible. She’s making probably about a hundred dollars for every thousand people who tune in and just click and listen.

Michael Evans: She is one of her videos with 280,000 views. It’s just insane. And I think there’s two ways you could think about utilizing this one is that you can put your first in series. free up on YouTube. Get those views, get paid for it, [00:45:00] cuz of bad sense. And then convert those people into later books in a series I should mentioned as well.

Michael Evans: She still has that first book in these books that she’s putting up on YouTube in audiobook retailers through find a way in ACX. If you’re interested in doing that, you can check out her post more information, but there there’s just ways you can utilize these things that.

Michael Evans: People aren’t necessarily thinking about like Emilia, you were mentioning earlier about like a line and book that’s really like powerful and that resonates in emotion. You can post that on TikTok, on Instagram, on Facebook, anything you wanna do, but utilizing music with text or with an image that gives people a feeling of your book does work no matter where it is.

Michael Evans: And the last kind of point I’ll make is that artificial intelligence is making. Easier and there’s programs out there already, like Dall-E 2 that are still in its infancy, and it’s just something to keep an eye on. And we’ll definitely talk about more in this podcast that can [00:46:00] take text that you put in there and create an image, which is kind of wild.

Michael Evans: And I see in time, multimedia becoming more and more important for authors as the tools to create multimedia experiences for our readers become easier and easier. And I hope that tool will provide. less friction for more people to be reading. So you could just think about different ways to, to reach your readers in that sense, even like events like outside events, like that’s like totally different channel, but you can be doing like a live with a few authors and all together, be on a live stream, talking about your books.

Michael Evans: And that can be a way to cross promote and deeply connect your readers in a different format. .

Emilia Rose: Yeah. I think there’s even like some Bridgerton, I think is doing a Bridgerton ball experience. I could be wrong. I heard this, like, I heard this from somebody else who probably heard it from somebody else, but I think they’re doing like something where [00:47:00] everyone who’s like watched they could like buy a ticket into like a ball basically where they get dressed up in gowns and just like have a good time with each other that really builds community, and really helps market even more, to other people who might have not watched Bridgerton before or read the books.

Michael Evans: It makes a lot of sense though. And I mean, you can think about it, you know, as an author as well.

Michael Evans: Like maybe you. like live on Twitch or even TikTok, like you live, stream your writing once a week and you can have your readers talk to you. Like while you’re writing a book, like that’s pretty cool. And you can do things like that. And then being on these platforms, new people will discover you. Cause like wait, writers, writing sci-fi book live.

Michael Evans: I wanna check that out. I wanna be there. and you can, you can start to do really interesting things like that. And then, especially in the beginning, you can think about it. Like if someone comes to your live stream, and they’re one of your first fans or potential fans. [00:48:00] What if you named a character in your book after them , if you were just a stranger who found this author online, who happens to be interested in their books and then like this author is connecting with you that deeply you’re gonna kind of love that book and want to tell people about it.

Michael Evans: So like that, there’s just a way to use these multimedia platforms that allow. just connect with fans. Different ways to very quickly build very deep relationships that people will just be like, oh my God, this is a great person. This is a great story. And then ultimately they’ll tell other people about

Emilia Rose: yes, word of mouth. That’s what we love.

Michael Evans: That’s that’s our 10 mistakes though, that authors make while marketing their books. We know this is a lot. I think we threw a million ideas at you

Emilia Rose: the biggest thing, it always just comes down to building your community and building those super fans who want to talk about your book to other people, and really want to support you in any way that they can.

Emilia Rose: So, yeah. Keep building your audience, keep building your community. [00:49:00]

Michael Evans: I think that’s, that’s lovely. The Internet’s under indexed on safe places for people to be. And I think that we as storytellers have. An immensely valuable role to play and building these safe, awesome places for people to just feel belonging in.

Michael Evans: But my big takeaway would be most likely you listen to all this are like buzzing with ideas. Maybe you had a notepad out and you probably have a list of things to do. I would take that list down at just one. Think about that one thing that makes you the most excited. You’re most passionate about. And in general, when thinking about your whole career and passion as an author, I would focus on what makes you feel the most excited?

Michael Evans: What thing gets you so energized gets you to feel so passionate about it and, and do that. And don’t focus on all of the other trends, the buzzwords, the [00:50:00] tactics, the strategies, just do what you would want to see as a reader. What you would wanna see your favorite author do treat your readers, treat yourself like you would want that person to do.

Michael Evans: And I think that’s who you can build a very sustainable career and a very happy one because I firmly believe that outside of a really nice dopamine rush, number one in any chart is not going to be what actually makes you. When you go to bed at night, it’s gonna be something else, something, something greater in a sense, even if it’s not greater in sales numbers, it’s gonna be greater in terms of your soul.

Michael Evans: And I would encourage you to pursue that. Thank you so much. If you listened up to this point, this is our second podcast on the descriptions for authors and you’ll notice the first two podcasts were me and Emilia and that’s changing. Changing. We have some really cool episodes coming up. We’re gonna be releasing every week.

Michael Evans: When we’re recording, I don’t think we’ve picked the day of the week. We might not actually get settled in two day of the week until a little bit. We wanna figure out [00:51:00] what works best for the community and all y’all, but we’re gonna be getting to a set day and releasing once a week. The first episode, I was absolutely blown away.

Michael Evans: Y’all like, were so receptive to it. Justin enjoyed it. So many of y’all watched it and I was just like, wow, we’re onto something. And me and Emilia, we were traveling at that point, , to different writers conferences, which we met. Many of you y’all at. Went to like four different ones.

Emilia Rose: It was a lot.

Michael Evans: Yeah. We were travel. Yeah, we were traveling most of June and we recorded that first episode actually back in may, which is crazy how much changed since then. So we really want to take some time and think about the future of this podcast. How we could bring on people and give you perspectives that we don’t think other writing podcasts are giving.

Michael Evans: Not because they aren’t lovely, but because we think that we have something new and interesting to provide. So that’s our goal. We’re gonna start doing that. Hopefully this episode lived up to those [00:52:00] expectations, but we have plenty of more awesome, diverse, exciting perspectives coming in from guests. We also will still do some solo episodes like this every once in a while.

Michael Evans: If you have any, any ideas, any people you would like to see us chat with, please let us know. We’d also love to chat with you. If you have a story, if you have a struggle, let us know, because we don’t just wanna like bring on successful people. We also wanna bring on people who, you know, feel like they’re not successful, even though I think we all are successful in our own way, but people who are really kind of in the trenches, struggling with something very specific, struggling with maybe just a whole crisis of their career, I’ve probably been there.

Michael Evans: I’ve struggled with a lot of things as an author, Emilia, maybe hasn’t, she’s kind of kickass

Emilia Rose: I’ve struggled a lot. Don’t let ’em fool you

Michael Evans: together I think we’ll be able to provide some interesting insights and they’ll just have a great time together. So thank you so much if you’re not already a part of our Facebook group.

Michael Evans: Please do that. Cause we think it’ll be really cool for you. So go to Subscriptions for Authors on [00:53:00] Facebook. We’ll have the Linked down description. You can join the wait list for Reem, which is our author subscription platform. That’s coming live in Q4, AKA late fall, and otherwise share this with a friend. We would love for you to share this podcast around.

Michael Evans: We want more awesome people to be part of this hi of mind and do better and better things to. That’s about it.

Emilia Rose: Thank you for joining!

#2: Links Referenced in Podcast