I talk with bestselling author Joanna Penn about her excellent and very informative book,
You talk in this book about this being your 3rd attempt at blogging. It’s fantastic that you now have a platform, but you admit this has taken time and effort. You are 5/6 years in now, but how many years would you say it took before you could see a change from starting with nothing? After giving up 20% of your income, when did this actually become a full-time career for you?
I self-published my first book in April 2008, and I started the site, TheCreativePenn.com, in Dec 2008 to share all my lessons learned in self-publishing, but also in marketing and creative business. I blogged every 2-3 days for a year, started a podcast, and started on Twitter in the first 6 months, but I think it took about a year before I started to get a lot of comments or traffic. I had a couple of blogs before that, which lasted a few months – one around the topic of the first book (don’t do a book-based site, as you will grow and change!) and the other on a topic I ran out of ideas for. In terms of blogging, you have to do it for the love of writing and your passion for a topic. In terms of my income, I always intended to make this a full-time career, so I was blogging in a professional manner, learning about copywriting and search engine optimization, etc. I did a virtual Master’s degree in online marketing in the first few years! I left my job in September 2011 after nearly 3 years of working part-time building my creative business, with income streams from writing books, sales from online courses and products, as well as professional speaking.
Your advice on ‘When to start marketing’ is great. You also mention that launch sales are generally disappointing compared to what happens once the Amazon algorithms kick in. Would you recommend ‘a launch’ for new books, or just get it out there, and start marketing?
The whole launch mentality is based on the traditional publishing cycle of monthly releases and the fact that bookstores change their front-list inventory every month. Publicists at traditional publishing houses generally work on a book for a few weeks, then move on to the next book in the queue. For indies, we never need to have one specific launch period, since we can promote our books forever! A book is always new to the next person who finds it.
But in terms of my own launch strategy, I like to have a ‘soft launch’ where I load the books onto various platforms, get the formatting all sorted, and get some early reviews from my list. Then once that is all sorted, I will do some promotion, e.g., paid adverts on BookBub or Kindle Books and Tips, plus social media sharing. But the best form of marketing is really to build up an email list of fans over time, and then email them when the book is ready. ‘How to Market a Book’ reached #1 in several Amazon categories because I had a lot of people who were ready to buy, so when I sent the email out, the book went up the charts. All other marketing efforts should focus on driving people to your email list and growing it over time.
You have a section on experimenting and marketing, but if someone could only spare a small time for marketing, is there any particular area you would advise them to concentrate on?
Get your book right first: a great cover, title, description, price, and the right category. Then, at least have a website with an email signup area so you can start building your list. Then everything else is jam! I suggest using pictures to start building up a following – pictures of your life, things you see, and quotes from your books. Visual marketing is important right now, as the space is crowded and people make split-second decisions about whether to check anything out. The image can often make all the difference.
Many writers have jobs (or have experience in other areas other than writing). For example, I have an online wedding boutique, I’m a qualified wedding planner, and have written three non-fiction wedding books. Do you think that if fiction writers could find a non-fiction specialism (like yourself with Creative Penn), it could really help boost sales for their fiction writing?
I think the crossover from non-fiction to fiction is very small, unless you have highly targeted books. So I have two non-fiction books for authors, which sell to my blog audience at www.TheCreativePenn.com, but I never set out to write fiction – that came much later than my original non-fiction, career-change focus! Only about 5% of my audience have crossed over to my fiction.
If I was starting again now, purely as a fiction writer, I wouldn’t be writing about publishing or book marketing, I would just be doing it! I would still be blogging about my research process and writing itself, which I also do on www.JFPenn.com, my fiction site. But for me, I have two businesses, two incomeIf I was starting again now, purely as a fiction writer, I wouldn’t be writing about publishing or book marketing, I would just be doing it! I would still be blogging about my research process and writing itself, which I also do on www.JFPenn.com, my fiction site. But for me, I have two businesses, two income streams, so I need both. You can read more about how I manage two brands here:
www.thecreativepenn.com/2014/01/26/a-tale-of-two-author-brands/
We chatted briefly about when I was studying for my MA in Creative Writing; there was the belief that self-publishing wasn’t the way forward. You give some really great advice in this book about sending off press releases to journalists, but do you think there is still a stigma in the media industry about self-publishing?
I think the stigma has gone away in the US, and is on its way out in the UK. In the last few months, I have been a guest on SKY News Sunrise, in a British national paper, The Independent, and in the biggest free paper in London, Stylist. I didn’t pitch any of those myself; they all found me, and none of them asked or mentioned who my publisher was. Another friend of mine, and proud indie, Polly Courtney, is regularly on the BBC and SKY as a media commentator, as well as in glossy women’s magazines and more. Basically, the story matters, not the publisher, so I think authors shouldn’t even mention how their book is published. Just have a professional-looking cover, and no one will even ask!
Joanna offers lots of free advice and tips at http://www.TheCreativePenn.com, including a free 87-page Author 2.0 Blueprint all about writing, self-publishing, and book marketing. She has two books for writers available in ebook and print formats, ‘How to Market a Book,’ and ‘Public Speaking for Authors, Creatives and Other Introverts.’ She writes Thrillers on the Edge as J.F.Penn including the bestselling ARKANE series, and Desecration, a crime thriller.