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The official podcast from the team at BookFunnel, hosted by Jack Shilkaitis, Kelli Tanzi, and Emma Alisyn, featuring guest interviews, self-publishing industry discussions, and tips for using BookFunnel to build an author business.
0:00: And I don't care because One of the things that you had said was, you know, as AI begins taking over and the world is covered in AI slop, authenticity is going to be king.
0:12: So, I was like, I can do this.
0:13: I put the book cover up, I throw it up on YouTube, and underneath, I say something.
0:18: Like this is what, you know, explain that it's my author commentary, blah blah de blah, and then say, if you want the latest ones, go sign up for my newsletter, you'll get them all the time.
0:28: Otherwise, you just subscribe here and you're gonna get one every week.
0:31: Basically, that's what I'm saying, and then just send them to my book funnel page.
0:35: Hey folks, welcome to the Book Funnel podcast where authors get real-world advice on writing, publishing, and growing a career on their own terms.
0:44: Whether you're just starting out or you're deep into your author journey, we're here to help you build your readership, boost your book sales, and connect with your audience.
0:51: Each episode, we aim to bring you insights from authors, experts, and industry insiders who have been there, done that, and then some.
0:59: My name is Jack.
1:00: I am our lead author support specialist here at Book Funnel, and the host of the Book Funnel podcast.
1:07: And I am joined today by our guest, Danny Collins, a USA Today bestselling author of contemporary and historical romance.
1:15: Danny, I wanna welcome you here to the Book Funnel podcast.
1:20: Absolutely.
1:21: For those who might not be familiar with your work, give us a little bit of insight into like your background on your author career.
1:30: Because we got, we got some things we're gonna talk about today, about reader magnets and author commentary audio and stuff, which is really exciting.
1:37: But I kind of want to lay the foundation first for for folks who aren't familiar with you.
1:41: How did you get started in this, this, this industry, this crazy, right, indie author industry?
1:48: Yeah, crazy for sure.
1:49: I had always wanted to write romance.
1:51: I was pursuing a trad career for 25 years, got stacked hundreds of rejections.
1:58: Most of my books are with Harlequinn, Harlequinn Presents.
2:02: And then around the same time that I sold to them, which was 2012, I also started selling Small Town Romance to Tulley Publishing, which is a smaller publisher.
2:12: And then indie publishing was exploding.
2:15: So I was also starting to go that direction with sort of my orphans, which So I would say that my indie career, especially then, was not, it wasn't the focus, and it has never actually taken off hugely.
2:28: It's a bit, it's a bit of a tragic story, but I feel like that's good information from your other, for, for your audience because it's a struggle no matter what you do.
2:38: So I, I did.
2:40: Because I had all these orphans, it never really worked.
2:43: But a couple of years ago, as Prad Publishing has been, you know, more and more difficult as well, as we all know, you know, they got rid of mass market, all that kind of stuff.
2:52: So, even though my Harlequinn career is still very good, about, maybe about 2 years ago, I really started thinking.
2:59: I have to get more serious about the indie side.
3:02: And even at that, I was still almost like a, a new author starting out in indie, because I really, I didn't know where to go.
3:08: I knew I had to do a series.
3:09: I wasn't sure what to do about it, how to build it, how to exploit the work that I already have.
3:15: So, I did wind up writing a new book.
3:20: Went, I started going to places like, book signings, you know, starting doing in-person events, and wound up meeting a publisher, a new publisher.
3:27: Well, they're not a new publisher in Canada, but they were just starting a, a romance imprint.
3:31: So now they've gone ahead and picked up one of my latest, books.
3:35: It was actually one of my indie, my recent indie release called Afternoon Delight.
3:39: So that's now coming out with them at the end of October.
3:44: And, and I love it.
3:45: I'm so excited, but I'm like, but my indie career, what am I doing about my indie career?
3:50: I still have to build that.
3:51: Yeah, so that's kind of where I'm at with all my.
3:54: Sure, sure.
3:55: I, I do like the kind of diversity of tactics though, of this is something that Mark Fave talks about, and, you know, the, to, to be truly wide.
4:08: Right, as an author, doesn't just, it's not just a choice between KU and being wide, and I don't know if any of your books are in KU or not, but, but his point is that you should also look into like getting, look at some smaller publishers, getting short stories published and things like that, like, actually go go wide, and so the fact that you're kind of hybrid in that sense is, is great, I think, and something that authors on both sides of that fence.
4:36: Might kind of discount or have like written that off as an option, cause if you're really committed to indie, I, I, I can understand like you've done all the work yourself, and it's a grind.
4:48: I can understand like almost the, the pride you might have of like, nope, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna even go down that road.
4:56: And likewise, coming from the trad side, if you have had success there, some authors might, I, I know authors I've talked to who are mainly aspiring for trad, have been discouraged from going down that indie road because they've been told all sorts of things.
5:13: So I, I love that you've, you've seen both sides of that, and there's probably some, some misgivings that both sides of that fence have about the other.
5:22: What's that like, being in kind of having a foot in both worlds?
5:26: Cause I, I know like you said, like, you, one of those might be doing well at it, at the time, and another one might be languishing a little bit.
5:35: Languishing is the right word for some of them, because, I mean, I'm only one person, right?
5:40: And, and honestly, the dream is to just write a book, put it out, and, and have somebody send you money, right?
5:45: That's pretty much the dream for most of us.
5:47: So, to some extent, you get.
5:50: With Trad.
5:51: And that's very nice.
5:52: And there's a nice team there.
5:53: If you're happy with your team, and I am.
5:55: Everybody I've worked with has been awesome.
5:57: But also, like for something like Harlequinn Presents, it's also, you kind of got to stick to the billionaires.
6:03: It's, it's a, a narrow niche, right?
6:05: So if I want to write, which I'm talking about that, the October book, which is An older heroine, she's almost 40.
6:12: She throws away her accounting career and goes to work in a sex toy shop.
6:16: That's never gonna sell to Harle Quinn.
6:19: So if I want to do that, it, it's, you know, you look at indie or you look at other publishers.
6:25: Yeah.
6:25: And so then walking that line, I think the biggest thing is how much bandwidth does the the author have, and the indie career demands so much.
6:33: Of all those other skills, and that's where I really, I fall down a little bit because it's not, it's not that the will is not there, and I'm pretty sure I'm smart enough to catch up to most of it, but it's really, do I have the time and I don't really have the time.
6:48: Right, no, absolutely.
6:51: As somebody who is, you know, fighting that fight himself, I can, yeah, right, I can attest to that.
6:58: What, what is it they say that It's like a treadmill.
7:00: If you stand still, you're, you're moving backwards.
7:03: And if you're running, you're, you're standing still.
7:05: Like that's, that's what a lot of things are like, right?
7:09: But especially indie publishing, I think that's especially true there.
7:15: What reader maggots was one topic that we were going to focus on.
7:18: And that reader maggots to me are one of the tools that it seems like indie authors take advantage of the most in trad, I.
7:27: Don't see it a whole.
7:28: I've seen some of it, and especially more in recent years.
7:32: Trad authors having some bonus content available and that sort of thing, which I think is really neat to see.
7:37: But it's, it's kind of been an indie author staple for the longest time.
7:40: How is, how has that helped you in your indie career having Right, that, that resource, because I think some authors might look at it as If I'm just writing this like short story or whatever, just to give it away for free, is that really doing me any good?
7:55: Why am I not selling books, right?
7:58: I think that's the, the conversation going on in some people's minds.
8:01: Yeah.
8:02: I, for starters, I'm someone who really doesn't care for social media.
8:07: So, I had to look at ways to reach out to readers.
8:11: That was not me sitting in a Facebook group.
8:14: No shade on people who like to do that.
8:16: Fill your boots.
8:17: But I, I, I hate it.
8:19: So, so, and it was very early in my career, that I saw, I, you know, I'm taking all these, workshops, online workshops, and one was like, the best thing you can do.
8:30: I give away some of your writing as a sample.
8:33: And so I wrote a short story, and I put it out there, so if you sign up for my newsletter, you get it.
8:39: That's how it began.
8:40: And I really took, you know, really took to heart the advice that your newsletter is your strongest tool.
8:47: So I just, every way that I could, I'm always building that.
8:51: I don't, I won't say mine is, as, as great, you know, as it could be.
8:55: There's always room for improvement, but I am pretty happy with it.
8:59: And I really enjoy doing it.
9:00: So, yeah, so I found different ways to continually bring people into it, and then I cross my fingers that they'll actually buy a book.
9:08: Right, right.
9:09: What, what they say is, you know what the biggest room in the world is?
9:13: Room for improvement.
9:15: Oh, there you go.
9:15: Yes, there.
9:16: But, my, my dad always says that when I, I burned in my brain.
9:22: I think for it's, it's an interesting kind of way to look at it is like, it's the opposite in a way of social media, and I think a newsletter really is, which is interesting because of how book talk has exploded.
9:35: In the last few years, and every author has been told that you need to be on TikTok.
9:39: And I, I, as somebody who has to talk to authors, I feel obligated that I've got to kind of at least try all the things so that I can tell authors, this is kind of what it's going to be like, if you like that.
9:51: And I can tell you that it is, I mean, we, we recently had a a a book talk creator, not an author, but a book talk creator on the podcast.
10:01: And the title of that episode is Book Talk is Crazy.
10:04: And it because it is a little bit, and social media, TikTok is a little bit kind of like the wild wild west a little bit, so you get some of that, and that's definitely not everybody's cup of tea.
10:16: And there's a lot of rabbit holes you can go down, it's, it can be a big time suck.
10:20: And the thing I like about reader magnets that I guess maybe tell me if you, if you feel the same way.
10:26: Is that When you're, when you're putting work into a reader magnet.
10:31: Whether it's writing it, editing it, whatever you're doing, putting it out there in the world so people can discover it.
10:39: That's just part of your normal process as an author, producing the content you're producing is a book, essentially.
10:47: And so it's like self-reinforcing as opposed to having to have this independent skill set of like being able to perform on video, which not everybody is comfortable with.
10:57: Exactly.
10:58: Yeah.
10:58: And actually, I should have said to the previous question, one of the other advantages of doing a reader magnet was exactly what you just said, was it forced me to go through the whole process.
11:08: How do I make a cover?
11:09: How do I find an editor, which, because it was just such a little thing, I actually got one of the teachers from my kid's school at the time, you know, things like that.
11:18: But it, it just forced me to learn.
11:20: And then, yeah, but in a way that had an advantage at the end.
11:24: So.
11:26: Yeah, for sure.
11:27: And yes, I absolutely think that, especially a written piece of work, especially something that's going to lead like a A prologue or what or an epilogue or whatever something that attaches to something that's already out there is, is helpful.
11:41: Exactly, exactly.
11:43: I, I like what kind of what you mentioned there and the phrase that I use is like, it's like that feedback loop that you get, like if you've, if you've written a novel.
11:53: and you're talking about like the average novel lengths around 100,000 words, you know, the feeling of like completing your first novel, which, man, for me, that would have been back in like the early 2000s.
12:04: I finished my first novel and that feeling of accomplishment.
12:07: But then there's this kind of like letdown afterwards, like, now you got to do that all again.
12:11: But with a reader magnet or a short story that you're writing as a reader magnet, you get to close that loop a little bit faster.
12:18: And that means that you're, there's some of those things like, Like, learning how to, you know, format, if you're doing your formatting yourself using vellum or or or certain software, or learning how to work with cover designers and that sort of thing.
12:31: That, that's something you learn from each book you put out there, for each product you put out there, regardless of how long it is.
12:37: So writing is a skill in and of itself, but then Right, like working with editors, working or finding a good editor for many people.
12:45: Like, so I, I think in, in my opinion, I like it when, when authors like start with the reader magnet.
12:51: I don't think very many do.
12:52: They start with the novel and then, you know, but if, if they have the presence of mind to think about it, like, let me start with something short, or let me write short stories, or let me do, like, let me write this as a web novel and put it out like one chapter at a time, and I get used to that kind of, so you have these smaller loops that you're building on.
13:09: Anyway, I could go way down that rabbit hole, but from what it sounds like from our conversation beforehand, is like you've got a lot of these reader magnets too, not just like one or two, is that right?
13:20: I do.
13:21: I have, so, I was telling you that I use kit, which Allows me to have a few different funnels, right?
13:27: Like, not all the newsletter things will let you have a whole bunch of sequences.
13:32: So I had started out with, hey, you've joined my newsletter off my new off my website.
13:37: Here's Cruel Summer was, the, the small, the short story that I initially wrote.
13:42: And then a few years ago, as I was like just really looking to build my newsletter, because I Again, bandwidth.
13:49: I was like, OK, what is my focus overall in terms of making sure I collect my readership?
13:54: And I really wanted to concentrate on building my newsletter.
13:57: So, one of the things I went with was a starter library.
14:00: So now if you go to my newsletter and join my VIP club, Get 52 of them are full length novels, 3 of them are short stories.
14:08: But, you know, boom.
14:09: Now you can see a lot of the right.
14:11: That's the other thing is I write so many different things.
14:13: I wanted to give people options like, oh, do you like historical?
14:17: Great.
14:18: Oh, you like, you know, the billionaires.
14:20: Here you go.
14:21: So that's one of the other ones.
14:23: Then I have I have, oh God, I don't even know.
14:26: I have this new one that I was telling you about, the prequel.
14:29: I have, there's another, oh, there's another one because I joined, you know, one of these mass author, it was a huge one, a mass author giveaway through prolific Works, actually.
14:39: Sorry, if they're your competitor, not sure.
14:42: And so there was like 100 authors in it and Yeah.
14:47: And so then that one, I wrote a specific short story.
14:50: And I kind of goofed on that one because all these other authors who were very keen with the, and had a robust indie career, they were like, I'm writing the first novel or one in the series, or it turned into a gateway into their series.
15:05: But I wasn't smart enough to do that.
15:06: I just basically wrote a standalone and said, Here, I hope you like my writing.
15:09: Come on into my newsletter list.
15:11: And it worked fine, but it wasn't optimized.
15:14: Yeah.
15:16: And so then this, this latest 10, actually, one of the other ones I have, and my publisher was really nice to work with me on this.
15:22: This was Tooly.
15:24: I was writing a trilogy, and after the first book, I was able to put in the back of their book, in the back matter that they could get the bonus epilogue.
15:33: And so as soon as people sign up for that, and I'm still getting signups from it, that book came out 3 or 4 years ago, and they That sequence says, oh, did you like this world?
15:43: Because here's book 2, here's book 3.
15:45: And yeah, so that one has worked out really well for me.
15:48: Yeah, I'm so glad that your publisher was, was open to that.
15:53: I've talked to some authors before who are like one author in, I'm not going to name any names.
15:57: He knows who he is if he's watching the podcast, but he, he wanted to pick my brain on this, and his, he has to host his reader ma, like his bonus chapters on his own website.
16:07: That he manages himself, like his publisher was like, nah, we're not gonna put that in the back of the book.
16:11: And I don't, I, it seems like why, I don't know, they were, they were managing, I think a mailing list of their own understanding that he was also doing his own mailing list, like they were fine with that.
16:23: I just didn't want to put the link at the back of the book.
16:25: And I'm like, oh my gosh, you're kind of shooting yourself in the foot there.
16:27: But I love that.
16:29: That that and, and that set up.
16:32: And the, the starter library is honestly something I, I feel like that's a topic that I need, that's a topic for like a webinar in my opinion, like now that I'm thinking about it, cause I have one of my own, finally, everything I write is in the same.
16:46: Like fictional universe, so they're everything I write is connected, but they're like different niche subgenres of science fiction, right?
16:54: I realize it's not necessarily what you're doing here, you've got contemporary and you've got historical, and I don't know what connections there are between everything, but But when you're writing a variety of things, once you've accrued enough of those things, like a starter library is like, that's a, that's a pretty nice sell for somebody who's like, you know, hey, I, this is a new author and I can kind of see what this is all about.
17:20: What do you, what do you see in terms of like conversion off of that?
17:24: Do you, do you notice that I'm not, I'm, I'm kind of the worst for actually looking at the metrics.
17:30: I know I should.
17:32: Again, that's one of those bandwidth things.
17:34: Every once in a while I have a little look at, at it, but mostly I look, you know, right on the dashboard.
17:38: If it says that I'm making, you know, oh, there's somebody who signed up for VIP, there's somebody who signed up for the nanny epilogue, things like that.
17:46: But But the Yeah, in my case, I, I wish that I was.
17:54: More strategic.
17:56: I keep thinking that I need to revamp that starter library to be a little bit more strategic, but at the moment it's there, it's working.
18:03: I'm just gonna leave, you know, again, bandwidth.
18:06: You'll hear that word out of me so many times.
18:08: But also, I like, not to brag, but I just finished my 101st book.
18:14: Wow.
18:15: I know.
18:16: And so I needed ways to, to give people some gateway into something so that, you know, figure out what you like in my books.
18:25: Do you like the billionaires?
18:26: Do you like the small town?
18:28: Here are all these different ways into it, because otherwise it's just this sea of books.
18:33: They're never going to find their way in, right?
18:34: Yeah, yeah.
18:36: And there's, it, it can be tough when you have, if you have, I imagine you have different series and some might be connected, but are most of them like independent from each other, that sort of thing, because that all does make it tough.
18:49: Yeah, Harlequinn, they, they will take occasionally they'll take like a trilogy or a quartet.
18:56: They prefer a duet most of the time if it's even that like they also like standalone, but they're open to.
19:05: Continuing to be in the same universe.
19:07: So I'll often bring in other characters, but they're only for a little glimpse.
19:11: I mean, these books are only 50,000 words, so they want you to stick really tight to the existing romance, right?
19:18: Tooly is far more open to, longer series, that kind of thing.
19:23: So they've been really good that way.
19:25: Yeah.
19:25: And then, and then like I say, I had all these orphans, so they were not really, I, I wish I could rebrand them.
19:31: I know some authors have done that.
19:33: They rebrand them so that they at least all look the same and they rewrite them, and I'm like, I don't have time for that.
19:37: Yeah, well, no, it's, it's, it's, it can be, it can be tricky.
19:42: I, I know a lot of authors, I'm not saying this is in your case, but I've talked to a lot of authors who Or like, I'm, I'm almost gonna finish my first novel.
19:51: It's, it's like a fantasy novel.
19:52: It's like epic fantasy.
19:53: OK, cool.
19:54: What, what are you gonna, you, you're the writing book too after that, right?
19:57: And they're like, no, I have this idea for a billionaire mafia romance.
20:01: I'm gonna write that one next.
20:03: And, and I it's something that's totally different from I think what you have going on, but we, we have this oh shiny moment like where we're kind of going around and bouncing around.
20:13: As opposed to like, writing things that are gonna reinforce each other.
20:17: So like staying within the same genre, or if you do, or related genres, if you do step out of there, just understand that you're not the, what you're doing over there is not necessarily gonna reinforce the work that you've done.
20:30: Over here That is very true.
20:33: I was that author.
20:35: That's why I have all these orphans, and yeah, and, and that's why I'm a tiny, like one of the reasons I wrote that prequel that we're gonna talk about because I'm concerned that my or my readership who loves these billionaires or loves the small town are not necessarily going to go over to mature heroin in a sex shop.
20:58: You know, that's just a different readership.
21:00: So every time you do these things, you are kind of starting from ground zero.
21:03: It doesn't matter how big your newsletter list is, they aren't necessarily gonna follow you.
21:08: Yeah, some will, but that's exactly, but you also In romance in particular, and this is an outsider speaking, so tell me if I'm wrong, I imagine there's also like readers are looking for a certain kind of of romance in a variety of different ways.
21:25: There's spice level, and then there's kind of the setting, it seems like, and some of the, the tropes that are involved, and It's I think it might be a little bit harder to convert like somebody who's really into like billionaire romance into maybe a historical reading and historical romance, cause you have, you have different settings, maybe different tropes, I don't know.
21:48: You can do a secret baby in just about anything, but yeah, things like that you could probably pull off.
21:54: But there's something you're absolutely right.
21:55: Like the historical readers, if they like regency, they're not interested in your hockey romance and vice versa, you know, like if they've decided what they like, monster romance, fantasy, those are huge, huge readerships.
22:09: They're not interested in my small town, this or that, you know.
22:13: Most of them, there's a small percentage maybe.
22:16: But yeah, so you, you, you kind of have to build those separate pillars.
22:19: I, I see something kind of similar in sci-fi because everything I write presently is science fiction.
22:25: I have some, some dark epic fantasy in my history that we don't bring up, but it's dark.
22:31: Yes, well, what is it, is it dark before the epic or dark before epic, epic dark fantasy?
22:38: I'm not sure anyway, but like being at events and Readers will walk by, or I, I'm, I'm, I'm way out there.
22:46: I have a kiosk in the local mall.
22:49: That I sit at 20 hours a week, while I'm, I can do, I can, for, for the, the powers that be a book funnel watching, I do my book funnel work while I'm sitting there and I just happen to sell my books, right?
23:00: So I'm not slacking off, but that's one of the, the beauties of working from home.
23:04: But you have somebody walk up and they're looking at the books, you'd be like, hey, do you read sci-fi?
23:08: And like, nope, fantasy.
23:11: This is not my thing.
23:12: I'm just looking at the books and, it, it exists at, at one point in time, I would have assumed and not so much, like it wouldn't have been like that, but I'm kind of coming around to the idea that, you know, maybe that's not just a, a romance thing, maybe, I mean, there's gonna be maybe a little bit more crossover between fantasy and sci-fi than say, You know, billionaire romance and historical romance, but there's still gonna be readers who, and rightfully so, I'm gonna use the word discriminate, like, they did, this is what they want, that's not what they want, and it's totally fine for readers to do that.
23:47: I think it It, it's not just a romance thing though, and so I've, I've seen it, I've seen it play out like live in person.
23:57: It's like, whoa, OK, I, I, I had some misgivings about this, but We've, we've mentioned, or you've mentioned that, that reader magnet, you, we took before we, we started recording, you talked about this reader magnet that you're, you have now.
24:14: Is teeing up a pre-order in the fall, is that right?
24:17: Yes, yes, that, that's, this is music to my ears, right?
24:21: So as somebody who talks about reader magnets a lot.
24:24: So walk us through this because this is a neat concept.
24:28: OK, I'll give you the slightly long story.
24:30: So this particular book is the one that the October book, Afternoon Delight is the one that I published.
24:36: I published it as an indie book and then wound up, it was acquired by the Canadian publisher, and so they're reissuing it.
24:42: So.
24:43: A side note to indie authors, it's a total pain in the butt to have to pull down your whole book and wait 6 months for it to come up again.
24:50: But I, I took that hit.
24:52: I was, I was actually happy to do it.
24:53: I'm really excited about this particular publisher.
24:56: I, you know, fingers crossed that this is going to be a success.
24:59: When I was Issuing it as an indie book, I was thinking this might be a nice little world where I could turn it into a series.
25:06: I had set it in Victoria, BC, cute little neighborhood, and I had a few secondary characters, and I was like, OK, yes, I can, I can turn this into An indie series.
25:19: Then it got acquired.
25:20: They wanted standalone books, and I had to kind of back off on that idea.
25:24: But one of the ideas I had for the series part of it was, so the heroine in Afternoon Delight, she throws away her accounting career in Toronto, comes to BC and takes over her best friend's sex toy shop while her, her friend is having surgery.
25:39: So her friend is Georgia.
25:41: I was like, OK, huh, I can do George's story.
25:44: She can be, I can, cause she needs surgery.
25:47: She's going through some stuff.
25:48: And I had kind of set up that she had a love interest, but I hadn't really got dug into it.
25:53: So, when you download this little prequel, it's about 20,000 words, I think.
25:58: You get her story of realizing that she's gonna need this surgery.
26:03: She's, her business is in peril.
26:06: Along comes Meg, who they, you know, she's like, Come on, Meg, you have to help me here.
26:11: Meg does all this and then Georgia gets her happy ending and then we're still kind of wondering what's going on with Meg so that that leads into that that's a good setup and Reader Mangus, most of the time.
26:26: From what I've seen, seemed to be an afterthought for most authors.
26:29: And, and this is, it's natural, you write the novel and they're like, now I've got to promote it, I've got to build a male, what do you mean?
26:36: I have to write another thing?
26:38: That's totally fine, like we, we learned that, but I love this, this idea of like, like.
26:45: Write the reader magnet.
26:46: I don't know if you wrote the reader magnet first or not.
26:49: No, it was definitely, I only thought of her as someone who could have her own story.
26:55: But, but you still nevertheless look at this like, oh wait, if I do this, then we got that pre-order coming up.
27:01: Like I'd love that idea because you're, I feel like authors, when it comes to, to launches, the launch of a book is maybe not the, the most important thing about like the book's long term success.
27:14: But if you do want to have a a solid book launch, I think this is one of the best strategies that you could do, and I don't see enough of it.
27:21: At least I haven't seen enough examples of it.
27:23: Like start with that reader magnet, and then pitch the pre-order.
27:27: You can be selling book one, heck, you can be selling book one, maybe before it's finished.
27:32: I would have some work done on book one, at the very least, before you would start doing that.
27:36: I don't like the idea of setting up a pre-order without some work done and some reasonable expectation of when you're gonna get it done, because especially if you're putting your pre-order up on Amazon, you can get into hot water if you mess that up.
27:50: It's a little bit easier if you do the pre-order direct through your own store, right, cause you have more flexibility with that, but that's a double-edged sword too.
27:59: So, how has that, how has that been going?
28:01: How long has that reader magnet been out, and when is the pre-order going live is the question that I have.
28:06: It is live.
28:08: I have, aside from giving it out to my newsletter people and Kind of putting it out on some like story origin book funnel into some of those promos.
28:18: I haven't actually advertised it that much.
28:21: Oh, I put it up on Pinterest in a couple of pins, but I've been meaning to, I've been meaning to, like, look at ways.
28:28: How can I get the news out that this is available.
28:31: Hey, guess what?
28:32: I'm gonna reach out to Book Funnel and tell them about it, and maybe Jack will interview me.
28:38: And that, that was the plan, was to get me here, just to, yes, no, I, I, I think all that's great.
28:43: I think there's, it depends on how much lead time you have, and if your, your newsletter is, is where you're already Doing a a, we're already focusing a lot of your efforts, I would say like double down on that.
28:59: And, and really hone in on that.
29:01: How can you, you know, squeeze the most juice out of that orange, so to speak, right?
29:06: As opposed to trying to necessarily go to something like you haven't done before.
29:11: Obviously, book funnel promos can be great.
29:15: What I always try to tell authors when you're putting a reader magnet into a book funnel promo, like a newsletter promo, understand that you're gonna have to do some filtering of those readers.
29:24: I recommend having that as like a separate Automation sequence or a second welcome sequence sequence.
29:31: Because there are gonna be some readers that are just gonna claim the free book, and they're not, it's gonna sit on their Kindle for a while, and they're not gonna get around to it, and that's fine, there's nothing wrong with that.
29:42: But in that 6 months to a year or 18 months, or however long it takes them to find it on their Kindle and read it, Like, they don't need to be sitting on your mailing list, if they're not gonna be active, necessarily, do you know what I mean?
29:55: So, if, if it's your, your mailing list, in my opinion, should be mainly made up of those who are actively engaged and are opening, right?
30:04: And interacting and doing stuff, so not just opening, but clicking and then converting and so forth.
30:12: So, if you're putting it on, on promos, just have a separate automation sequence for that, and honestly, at the end, if it's like a 5 email sequence, my thought process these days is, ask them, hey, You know, you wanna be here.
30:26: Do you, do you wanna be here or not, right?
30:28: Like, and if they don't take action, obviously phrase it in the, you know, don't make it confrontational or anything like that, unless that's your like style, and, you know, that's just how you do things.
30:40: Because, you know, for, for some of those readers, it is, that is more of a long tail thing that you're building up to.
30:46: Yeah.
30:48: I do have a, I have a sequence that I run maybe once or twice a year that does sort of, anybody who hasn't opened an email in the last 9 months, they get a little note that says, Hey, are you, do you want to be here?
31:01: So I don't mind keeping them on for a few months because we all get busy, you know, all that kind of stuff.
31:06: But yeah, I do, I do regularly sort of.
31:10: Yeah, and it's, it's hard too if you're If you're doing direct sales, it's a lot easier to be kind of vicious with that, because you can literally see the conversion.
31:22: Like, you opened the email, you clicked on the button, you went to Shopify and you didn't buy anything, and you've done that 10 times now.
31:29: What do I gotta do, right?
31:30: You can be a little more cutthroat when you're doing direct sales and you have all that data.
31:35: If you don't, then it's understandable.
31:36: Your list is probably gonna be a little bit larger to kind of hedge your bets.
31:40: On that, but I would look at like any anywhere in any format, you can put that in.
31:45: is my thoughts.
31:47: So, I know you don't like social media maybe isn't your thing necessarily, but just because other authors might be watching this, like, I would take that content and I would find a way to put it on social media, whether that is through like slideshows or on various platforms, which literally just pictures that they're swiping through.
32:10: You can use video b-roll in the background, that sort of thing.
32:14: This means you don't have to talk.
32:16: You don't have to get on video.
32:17: You're literally just using either stock images or b-roll in the background to text on the screen that's moving, or they have to swipe through, so not too much text on the screen.
32:28: And literally just post that like 3 times a day.
32:33: I'm writing that down, but I hate it.
32:35: No, no, I, I, I, I was thinking I would do an ad, but yeah, I'm hearing, I know, I know.
32:41: See, that's why I don't like social media is because you kind of have to be there.
32:45: Right.
32:46: Well, and, and the thing about, yeah, you have to be there, and I'm not, this isn't necessarily advice for Danny, right, right now, because, but, but for other authors, like if social media is something you're already doing, like, don't, I would not overthink it.
32:58: If you're on TikTok in in particular, TikTok is a platform that you kind of can brute force.
33:05: Meaning I'm just gonna post 3 videos about this thing every day for the next 3 months.
33:12: And because of the way the platform works, there's gonna be a handful of those that take off and get thousands of views, and a lot of those probably won't, but it's just a numbers game.
33:24: You just have to keep buying the lottery ticket, and it's better than a lottery ticket's chance, honestly, on, on a platform like that.
33:32: On other platforms, it's a little bit harder, but like, if you could do, you, you mentioned an ad, so we'll go to that here first.
33:39: Let me just touch on that.
33:40: I think that would be, if you're familiar with ads, like, whether it be Facebook, I know some authors focus on Reddit, whatever the case might be.
33:48: Reddit for romance, I don't know if that is a thing, it could be, but But Facebook is generally the higher converting platform.
33:57: Facebook ads to reader magnets are something I think is slept on by a lot of authors, and it's, it, it doesn't even have to be a huge ad budget.
34:06: Like I, I recommend like $3 or less a day to start, and I wouldn't, I wouldn't be like, I'm not gonna throw $10 a day at this thing, no, like $3 a day and do a lot of testing with headlines first.
34:21: I would use, honestly, the first round of ads, I would just use pattern interrupts.
34:26: I would not try to make it look really pretty.
34:29: I would not get, you know, do the opposite of.
34:32: OK, so, so a pattern interrupt would be.
34:36: You're scrolling on Facebook, right?
34:38: And you're see everything you're seeing is trying to grab your attention, right?
34:43: It's trying to like pull you in and suck you in, right?
34:46: And so you're gonna be distracted by this and that or the other, right?
34:50: Whatever, whatever your feed looks like, right?
34:54: And for me, it's like a lot of authors, because that's what I, what I engage with, and then like, like miniature war games that I do, that sort of thing, like painting and whatnot, like my hobbies, that sort of thing.
35:06: A pattern interrupt is something that's gonna, that's going to break that pattern.
35:11: So, most of the content on social media that you organically see is trying to grab your attention.
35:17: So you'll scroll past the video, and they like, they'll try to hook you in like the 1st 2nd, right?
35:22: It's very catchy.
35:23: And so when you see something that's the opposite, It can actually be more effective at getting you to stop.
35:30: So in a Facebook ad, this would simply be an image that is just a single color background.
35:37: With contrasting text on it.
35:40: That has your headline, and if you're testing, You're not gonna put anything else in the ad.
35:46: So Facebook has a spot for you to put like your ad copy and your headline, and, and I, I can't remember, it's been, it's been a minute.
35:54: Like there's a few different places you put stuff in there, and like you leave all that alone, don't touch any of that.
35:59: Just literally get like 5 different of these images that just have a headline on them.
36:04: It's like, you know, five-ish words on average, right?
36:10: Depending on how hooky it needs to be.
36:13: And then give them all an equal budget, so they're like separate.
36:17: This does mean that you might be spending like a couple bucks on each of them, but what we're gonna do is we're gonna wait a week, and we're gonna see which ones, and these are all gonna point to your reader magnet, by the way, or to a landing page that then will lead them to the reader magnet, and we're gonna then see, OK, which one's converted.
36:35: Cause we want to use a Facebook pixel, you can do that with a book funnel landing page.
36:39: Which one's got the most clicks, which one's got the most conversion?
36:42: OK, this one didn't get like barely any clicks at all, that headline is terrible, it's trash that one.
36:47: This one got tons of clicks, people clicked on this one, but it didn't convert.
36:51: Maybe the headline is confusing, maybe that headline, they clicked on it expecting something else, and then they got there like, oh, what's this?
36:58: So that headline is like a red herring, right?
37:00: We need to get rid of that one.
37:02: We want to find the one that has a good balance of the two, maybe that's one or two of those 5.
37:06: If we're lucky, maybe 2 or 3 of them even.
37:09: And then we go to the next stage where we take those 3 winners, and now we're going to run another experiment.
37:15: And we're gonna then pair those headlines, we're actually gonna put them in the the ad headline space, and we're going to then use an image creative against that.
37:26: So now it's not just a blank background, it's an actual image.
37:30: paired with those headlines, and now we get to see, OK, now these headlines we know that work, paired with these images, which combination of that works the best?
37:37: Right.
37:39: And then after you run that test, you add another element to the experiment, just one element at a time, like I'm painstaking, right?
37:47: Yes, no, I'm gonna stop there too, because we'll be here for an hour, but that, that would be, and to be quite honest, for a reader magnet, you might not have to go really past the first or second stage even if you are seeing conversion, right?
38:01: So if a headline on its own can sell.
38:05: The problem is that the way that most authors design ads, they can't even see the headline, it gets buried by all the other stuff on the ad.
38:13: And so you just do a, you know, a simple, I probably wouldn't do black with white text on it necessarily, but you could, that headline will be seen, right?
38:24: Maybe choose a font that really kind of sells it as, as romance or, or whatever flavor of romance it is.
38:33: Maybe, maybe pink on black, right, cause we're, we've got a sex toy shop, right?
38:40: But so like that gives us, right, that that pink is a little bit more playful and, you know, hints at romance, so.
38:48: That might be a little bit better at finding that that target audience you're looking for.
38:53: But that's like if you're going to go the ad route, that's what I would do.
38:58: And that's how I would, I would break it apart.
39:00: And it could, it could be the headlines could be the hook, right?
39:04: Like literally the, the situation that you've set up, right, where she's got to take over her friend's sex toy shop.
39:11: Like, that's gonna get some people to stop and be like, what?
39:14: Yeah.
39:14: Then they're gonna click and they're gonna be curious, and, and test test headlines that you might not even think would be like, I don't know if that one's gonna work, but I would, I would test it.
39:23: I come up with like 5 to 8.
39:26: Depends, depends, but that's, that's what I would, that's what I would suggest, and the ads can really work, and if you find an ad that that does work, and you can Especially since you're, you're, yes, it is a reader magnet, you know, you're not getting anything immediate out of that.
39:45: But because it is pointing to one discrete pre-order, you should be able to see the needle start to move, right?
39:53: And whether or not it is profitable in the long run.
39:58: Well, in the long run and the short term are two different things.
40:00: So in the short term, It's probably gonna break even at best, right, on those pre-order sales.
40:08: But if you've got those people on your list, and you know that they came from that ad, and you know that they probably bought the pre-order, right, you can keep them around and then continue to nurture them.
40:17: So in the long run, you make You make that profit back.
40:21: So that's the goal.
40:22: So yeah, otherwise I would say like even if, if it's a reader magnet, like can you, it's 20,000 words, can you read it aloud as an audiobook narrated by the author?
40:35: See, I don't have a strong audio presence for various reasons, so yeah, that.
40:40: And we'll, I'm gonna just lead the, lead the interview a bit and say that's one of the reasons I had a small misgiving against using the audio commentary, the author commentary thing, because it doesn't lead, I felt like it's such a great tool to get into audio and I don't have a ton of audio available.
40:57: But, but I do like that idea.
41:00: I don't know if I could read aloud a whole book well enough for it to be something somebody wants to listen to.
41:06: I don't, I think you might be surprised.
41:09: You might be surprised.
41:10: Take it with a grain of salt.
41:11: Like, you know, obviously, I'm also kind of speaking to the broader book funnel audience here to to an extent too.
41:19: But you, you might be surprised, in, in, in particular, and if I would say this, if you record yourself reading it, so you also have it in video, now you have video and audio, and that's two different mediums, and so the video can go up on social media, and in little snippets.
41:38: And the best way to do that would be take it in the middle of and read it in a casual conversational tone probably and take those little snippets that are like out of context and post those, right, right.
41:50: Nobody necessarily wants to hear you like, like the read the beginning of the book, maybe post it as a long form video on YouTube or something.
41:58: So people can go find it there if you have a presence on YouTube, but take those like little snippets, right?
42:04: I don't know.
42:05: I, I'd have to read the book to know, but I'm sure there are moments that like out of context would make people go like, what did that, what did she just say?
42:13: And, and then they're gonna stop and they're gonna pay attention.
42:17: So yeah, and even if doing it in chapters, so now I've got a bunch of episodes, that's also, I feel like helpful, right?
42:23: So, OK, I'm gonna think about that.
42:25: Thank you.
42:25: Yeah, that's a good idea, right, right.
42:27: And you know, you've got, you know, that that would be another route to take with it.
42:32: Otherwise, you know, it's, it's really a matter of, like, I know some, some authors will do like lean heavy into like cross promotion.
42:42: So you might, you could, there's various services out there that can blast your reader magnet out to their own mailing list and those types of things like those services are out there.
42:51: I know some authors focus heavily on those, so.
42:54: You've, again, what I'm saying here, all of these like different things that are like, pick the one that you feel most comfortable with.
43:02: And so, if that's like social media, you wanna lean into that one, OK, go for it.
43:07: If social media isn't your thing, right?
43:10: There are ways you can still do it, but if you just, if you don't want to even touch it, then, yeah, ads are a great way to not have to worry about that if you got the money.
43:19: So you're, it's trade-offs, one way or the other and all that.
43:25: Yes, exactly.
43:27: Now, the the audio commentary, the author audio commentary, cause this is, this is the, I wanted to bring you on here for a variety of reasons, but this was the, the, the big thing that stood out to me.
43:41: because this is something I've been telling authors to start doing.
43:45: And you reached out to us, and you've been doing it, and it sounds like it's going, it's going pretty well.
43:52: I think it is, yeah.
43:53: What, what was it just like a, hey, you know, this Jack guy might be onto something, did you just have a light bulb moment or was it like, or did you go into it skeptical, like, OK, I'll try it and see what happens?
44:06: No, I, so I had seen your presentation on it, and it sat in the back of my brain.
44:12: I gotta do it, I gotta do it.
44:13: And I just didn't have time until I was coming up to, I had a December book coming out.
44:18: It was a Christmas book, and I thought, I can do this.
44:23: I can do it badly and I don't care because One of the things that you had said was, you know, as AI begins taking over and the world is covered in AI slop, authenticity is going to be king.
44:39: So, I was like, I can do this.
44:41: You had said something like, you only need your phone and use GarageBand or something like that.
44:45: And I was like, You know what?
44:46: I'm just, I'm just gonna rumble my way through it.
44:49: It was, it was awful.
44:50: No, it wasn't.
44:51: It actually wasn't even that bad.
44:53: It was very rough.
44:55: I literally stuck some headphones in.
44:57: It was wired.
44:57: Into my phone because that's how I could only make it work, you know, because I, my tech education is fairly low.
45:03: And so, yeah, I was doing it on my phone, and then I would transfer it into my laptop and then just post it to Book Funnel.
45:09: I figured, you know, basically, Google was my friend.
45:11: I figured it all out, how to turn this file into that file and all that.
45:14: As I'd done a few, I realized I had to do things like offer a small intro.
45:20: Hey, welcome to Danny's.
45:21: What was I thinking?
45:22: I, I had to give it a name.
45:23: I had to kind of brand it in some way.
45:26: And it's not fancy.
45:29: Give them the episode number, you know, things like that.
45:32: And so I just started putting them out and I blasted my whole list.
45:35: Every time I sent a newsletter, I said, by the way, there's a new episode of this.
45:38: Actually, we were, they were coming out every Tuesday, so I, I just sent a newsletter every Tuesday.
45:43: But by I think it took me till June.
45:46: It took quite a while before I had the time to say in one of them, I'm not going to send you Tuesday newsletters anymore unless you want to be reminded.
45:55: And I had 100 people sign up for that to say, I really want that.
45:58: So, I mean, it's not huge numbers, but it told me at least 100 people want to hear this.
46:03: If you were in a room with 100 people, you'd be impressed.
46:06: So I, I think that's awesome.
46:08: Yeah.
46:08: And, and then watching how the metrics have gone, I think I sent you a couple of, of screenshots, but like every day I go in and have a quick look at where my stats are.
46:19: And so I've had since early December, I've had 1800, almost 1900 visits to the web, to the landing page, and 1600 claims.
46:28: That's a lot of people.
46:30: Yes, it's also that's across multiple episodes.
46:34: Do you know about how many episodes you 30, 36.
46:37: I just recorded number 36 the other day.
46:40: OK.
46:40: OK, so now some of my motivation was, I, I mentioned I have 100 books and I thought, I really have to find ways to exploit my old content rather than just always focusing on making something new.
46:54: Again, don't like social media.
46:55: And one of the other points you had made was that you have to keep feeding your readership, especially your super fans.
47:03: Give them more stuff to love you for.
47:06: And so this was a way for me to pull a book, say, Why did I write this?
47:10: What did I like about it?
47:11: It made me remember why I like writing, what kind of stories I like to tell, you know, all of those sorts of things.
47:18: Sometimes I would go, Oh, God, yeah, I remember this was a horrible revision, or this one was whatever.
47:22: It's just some behind the scenes goofball stuff.
47:26: And, yeah, and so I've just been putting that out there.
47:29: And I, I, I actually really like doing it.
47:31: It feels like it's direct from me to those people who actually want to hear from me.
47:36: And and kind of exclusive for them.
47:38: It's like not a thing that they can really get anywhere else.
47:41: It's it a little more intimate, in that sense, which, which I like social media.
47:49: OK, because you could do a very similar strategy to this on social media.
47:54: You like go for a walk, and you record yourself, and you do your little commentary video, and you put it up there, you could do that.
48:00: Somebody could do that if they wanted to, but it can, it can sometimes, if you're not careful, come off as like disingenuous, because it's performative, and it's for the app, and it's for views and, and all that stuff.
48:13: Whereas you're providing that commentary in in a way that like they can only get it, it's like exclusive, and I like that aspect of it.
48:22: Those are two different things, which can both work even in parallel with each other, of course, but that's, that's in my mind, the strength of it is that you, you are connecting with your readers, you're connecting with your readers in a way that is, like it's, it's very simple.
48:40: It's not, honestly, the, the, the less effort you put into it, to some extent, the better because it's going to come off as more genuine.
48:48: And that's something that they can only get from you, right?
48:51: That's your thoughts on, like, I think authors in general, we kind of sell ourselves short in terms of what we think our fans and our readers would be actually genuinely interested in hearing from us, like, You know, especially doing events in person, the questions that I get asked sometimes, like, how did you come up with these ideas, or like, where does this stuff come from, or, or, you know, even questions like that, that readers are actually genuinely curious about.
49:21: And I think, I know I do this myself, which is that I assume nobody's really that interested.
49:27: They just want to read a good book and they're going to move on.
49:30: And maybe some of that is, you know, Amazon, you know, Kindle Unlimited, and, you know, rapid release kind of warping author's perception, mine in particular, of what we're really doing, right?
49:44: If you're used to that sort of thing, like you're creating a product, you got to really, the only thing they care about is the next book, release the next book, and that's true, they care about the next book, but they also want to know the person behind it as well.
49:58: And like they, they want to know what's, what's going on in your head.
50:02: What's been the, like the reception that you've gotten?
50:05: Aside from all the stats, what, like, I don't know how interactive your, your newsletter audience typically is, but have you gotten any feedback or anybody saying, hey, I really like these, or that was really neat?
50:18: I have at different times.
50:20: I've had, you know, oh, I like this episode, that kind of thing, or I remember that book.
50:24: I get that one quite a bit.
50:26: I'll, it'll be either, I hadn't seen this book.
50:28: I'm glad that I can now go get it, or, oh yeah, I remember that book.
50:32: I really enjoyed that episode because that was one of my favorite books.
50:35: So yeah, I'm getting.
50:36: Enough of that.
50:37: I won't say it's a, a blanket every week.
50:39: I get something, but I get them often enough that I feel like I'm actually talking to real humans.
50:44: And I also wanted to be clear that, yeah, I still send out my Tuesday email to that 100 and whatever people that want it.
50:53: But I also, on a monthly basis, I give them a wrap up.
50:56: I'm like, In my main monthly email, the people who, like, that's my broadcast to everyone, I say, Oh, and in case you missed it, these are the episodes I did.
51:05: And I always see a bunch more claims after that's come out, come out.
51:09: So, yeah, it's also what the pattern of person is.
51:12: Do they want to listen every week or do they want to catch up at the end of a month and listen to a few episodes in a row?
51:20: Right, right, and both of those are totally, people are just going to consume it differently.
51:25: Yeah.
51:26: So the, that's interesting that you say that people are like, oh, I remember that book, and it's kind of as a way to potentially like strengthen your backlist because I wonder how many of those people go back and even if it's just reopening and rereading a book they've already bought from you, I think that that's actually like one of the, the highest compliments you can receive of receive as an author.
51:48: It is for somebody to reread your book.
51:51: They're not gonna, they're not even paying you again, right?
51:55: But they're gonna read your book again.
51:57: Like that's reading through it once is one thing, but the fact that I, I, I, I imagine that that's probably spurred some of those readers to go back and revisit some of your backlist.
52:07: Which means that they, they might be, you know, like talking to their friends about it, or that sort of thing, so, It's a hard thing to measure, perhaps.
52:18: Right, because you don't necessarily know, but, but I, I, that's a very interesting insight that I, I wouldn't have necessarily anticipated, so.
52:29: About how long are these episodes as you're recording them, because I know you're using book funnels like short audio media feature, which is like up to 2 hours in length.
52:41: So I don't know.
52:41: Are you filling out the whole 2 hours, or are you keeping it short of that?
52:45: No, I try and make sure it's at least 20 minutes because I think if you look at podcast, you know, how to start a podcast kind of thing, they usually say the sweet spot is between 20 and 40 minutes, and that's pretty much where I land.
52:57: Now that I've got a bit of a pattern, I open, you know, hi, welcome to What Was I Thinking.
53:02: I'm Danny Collins.
53:03: This is episode number such and such.
53:06: It's going to come out on such and such a date.
53:08: And I'm doing, today I'm doing this book.
53:11: Then I'll give a little warm-up, like, oh, we had a bear in the yard, you know, whatever's going on in my life.
53:16: Then I read the blurb.
53:18: I remind them, this one came out with Harlequin Mills and Boone.
53:20: This was a Tooley book.
53:21: This is one of my own, blah, blah, blah.
53:23: And then I kind of just get into it.
53:24: I'll be like, Oh, well, the reason I wrote this was because this, or this one was a series, and so blah, blah, blah.
53:31: And then I, I kind of go through some high points, and then I make a point, like, and I'm preparing this, you know, loosely ahead of time.
53:38: And so, then I'll also kind of go through the tropes.
53:41: And I find this is a good exercise for me because I'll look at a book and go, Oh, yeah, it doesn't have that many tropes to draw out.
53:51: Maybe that's why it didn't sell very well.
53:54: So, but it'll be like, oh, and this one has, you know, of course, the secret baby and enemies to lovers.
53:58: And, and then I'll pick up like a microtrope.
54:00: I'll be like, because some people really like when the hero looks after the heroine, or, you know, because she's been injured, or he, he fights for her in a specific way, like defends her or whatever.
54:13: So those kind of smaller tropes that aren't necessarily enemies to lovers.
54:18: You know what I mean?
54:18: So I'll kind of try and pick out some of those.
54:21: And then, you know, thanks for listening, and next week I'm gonna do blah.
54:26: So that forces me to actually start thinking about what I'm gonna do next.
54:30: And I've learned to try and batch them into books that are loosely connected because I think that's better for the listener that they're, you know, initially I just grabbed a book from January because I was in January.
54:42: And then the next book because that happened to be a trilogy, so it's the first book in a trilogy.
54:46: So then a couple of months later, I was like, Oh, I really should have done these all in a batch so that people could find them more easily.
54:52: So I've kind of, you know, learn as you go.
54:55: The other thing I keep thinking, like I said, I just did number 36, and I've gone.
54:59: I have to do 60+ more of these.
55:03: But I'm OK with it.
55:05: Like, it just on a week to week basis, I'm in a, I'm in a routine, but it does every once in a while.
55:11: I'm like, what have I bitten off here?
55:12: This is crazy, right?
55:13: Well, see, I don't think it stops there.
55:17: Personally, so I think you mentioned you just published book 101, yeah, finished.
55:23: It's going to the publisher this weekend.
55:24: OK, finished.
55:25: What's the plan then when you've like when the audio commentary, because this, this is one commentary per book, right?
55:32: What's the plan then when you catch up and you've got as many.
55:36: Yeah, I honestly, I thought, oh, I could start interviewing my friends.
55:40: I have a lot of author friends, as we all do.
55:43: I could start bringing them in at different times to give them a boost, and I'm, I'm absolutely.
55:49: I want to say I'm open to it.
55:52: As a future aspiration, I don't feel I'm good enough now.
55:56: Well, but, but I think doing this on your own is great practice.
56:00: I think you're like miles ahead of somebody who's just like.
56:04: On a whim, I'm gonna start a podcast.
56:06: Hey, you're my friend, can I interview you?
56:08: Like, there's, you, you've, even from what you're talking to me now about, it's like, you, you've got an idea for what the audience wants, you, you've got like an introduction, you know, all those, you know how to set the whole thing up.
56:20: So I think you're, you're ahead of the game.
56:23: If that does, if that does come to pass.
56:25: One thing that I, I'm, I'm gonna put this out there and I want you to tell me if it's crazy, or like I would never do that.
56:31: It's totally fine.
56:33: And because I have ideas for this, but And this is, so you've done them commentary like book by book.
56:40: Yeah.
56:40: Have you considered taking a book?
56:44: And doing commentary, a little bit shorter, but chapter by chapter.
56:49: Simply not because of the volume I have, I face right now.
56:52: So I want to get every book done.
56:54: And I felt like I could easily talk for 20 minutes about a whole book, but I don't know if I have that much info about a single chapter.
57:01: Sure.
57:03: I was going to say something else, and you could cluster them together too, because my, my thought is that almost functions more as like, like, you, you know, you see like the director's cut of a movie and they're like, doing commentary over the movie as a play like, honestly, it's more like if you got a book that has, you know, 30 chapters in it, each one of those is like 5 minutes long, maybe like that's a decent chunk of content for somebody to sit down and listen to.
57:33: That to me is more like, that would be a bonus, like an add-on that I would sell that.
57:38: I'll be honest with you.
57:40: Like that's something that I would, I would, I would.
57:44: Put behind a paywall because there's a lot of effort involved in that, but let's, let's explore that.
57:49: First, I'm sorry, I wanted to go back.
57:50: One more thing that I meant to say during my format.
57:53: I also will do small readings from the book.
57:56: I'll be like, oh, here's a cute line that I thought that, so I wanted to just include that because if your readers are considering that, that's another piece of it.
58:04: But, OK, yeah, let's go to the paywall idea, because I have considered that, because, OK, so now I've got these 30 episodes.
58:11: Right now they're available through Book Funnel.
58:13: And I'm like, and, and I, I just give them to my newsletter.
58:18: I'm like, OK, how do I get people to sign up for this?
58:22: Would they pay, for instance, on Patreon.
58:25: There's also a, a, a paid side of kit, which is what I use.
58:30: I just haven't figured it out yet.
58:32: So I'm like, how could I do that?
58:33: Do I want to?
58:35: What's the payoff, you know, are they, am I now just producing something?
58:39: Like, are they gonna go through and actually buy my book?
58:41: So why would I make them pay for an episode when I really want them to buy the book, you know what I'm saying?
58:46: Yeah.
58:46: But also the other idea you've given me, so now we're just, I'm just throwing junk out at you, is this October book, I could do something more intensive.
58:57: Maybe 20 episodes leading up to when does it come out on the 20th of October.
59:01: Maybe 20 episodes daily so that people are more excited.
59:05: That's actually a really good idea.
59:06: So yeah, no, that's a valid way to look at it too.
59:09: Like you've got a launch coming up and something like that commentary would be a great way to do that.
59:14: Yeah.
59:18: For something like a Patreon like.
59:21: You could, there's a couple of ways you could do it, because you're doing it regularly, something like Patreon or like a subscription could make sense because And in fact, this would really help reinforce the backlist.
59:34: It kind of becomes like a book club in in some respects.
59:37: Like this month we're gonna be the in-depth commentary is gonna be about this book, and next month is gonna be this one, and you're gonna have your readers like, oh, I haven't read that one yet, I better pick it up.
59:47: So that I'm ready for when the commentary comes out, you know, in August, right?
59:51: We're recording here near the end of July.
59:53: So, just as an example.
59:56: So, you can kind of, like if you're worried about, well, my readers might not have read that book, why would they pay for it?
1:00:02: Well, that's the whole thing, they better buy the book then so that they're there for the commentary.
1:00:06: That's how I would, would do it.
1:00:08: Make sure it's set up so they know at least like maybe the next couple months, what books are gonna be, and I would take your time, I would release those over the course of a month and kind of drip them out.
1:00:17: In a Patreon style subscription model, whatever that looks like, a kit might have a subscription.
1:00:23: That you could do you could with book funnel, but you couldn't deliver those.
1:00:29: There's ways to do it.
1:00:29: There's ways to do it.
1:00:31: Here's the obstacle that I see is I'm like, OK, here's my newsletter, and they already get them for free.
1:00:38: So if I'm going to put them under, behind a paywall, so am I taking, say, just for the argument's sake, I take the 1st 10 episodes and make those behind a paywall for whatever reason.
1:00:51: As a book club, the people who are like, how, first of all, how am I driving traffic over to that book club because I'm already trying to drive traffic to my newsletter and the newsletter is not gonna follow and start paying for something they could have got for free.
1:01:03: So, you know, it all gets very muddled.
1:01:06: Right, right.
1:01:07: So, so what, what I would suggest is, what you're already doing, going book by book, and kind of releasing these like weekly or so, that is free content is fine.
1:01:18: I don't necessarily think you need to put that behind a paywall at some point, you could, you could sunset some of those older ones, and then that becomes something that they can get as, as bonus content some other way.
1:01:29: That might Also be something that, you know, if you can't necessarily, I don't know like how this would work with with your publisher necessarily, but you can't maybe sell the book direct, but maybe you can sell the audio commentary direct for a couple bucks or something like that's, that's one way to look at it.
1:01:45: I don't know that I would go that way.
1:01:47: I think what you've done and having it free and accessible, and it's just something like a podcast, I think is actually great.
1:01:54: The in-depth chapter by chapter commentary is something that I would treat more like a book club, and that's a separate thing entirely.
1:02:04: So you have 12 months out of the year, pick a line up 12 books.
1:02:11: Kind of prepare, like, prepare yourself because it's gonna be a bit of work, right?
1:02:16: And go through you, you might even have to reread some of that stuff and go through chapter by chapter or maybe cluster some chapters together if you don't have a lot of in-depth commentary.
1:02:26: And then the, the long form 20 minute commentary you had on the whole book.
1:02:32: Actually becomes the gateway to that to the chapter by chapter in-depth commentary.
1:02:38: So you have like, the broad commentary, and then the in-depth, which is broken down chapter by chapter, and that's behind a paywall, if you really want to go deeper, if you want to read along with me, as we go through my backlist, and that's something you can recycle, like, you know, 12 books a year, and you've got about, you got 100.
1:02:58: You know, plus titles out.
1:02:59: Yeah.
1:03:00: That's a good decade of work, right?
1:03:03: Really, when you think about it.
1:03:06: So, That's one, that's one way to, to, I think one of the things that's been my focus, and, and you're just kind of making my brain work here.
1:03:16: My focus has been, A, feed the people I have, and B, bring in new people with however I do that.
1:03:26: And so, I guess what I'm still kind of stumbling on is, oh, I've been feeding my people, but now I'm gonna ask them for money to be part of this other extra group.
1:03:35: And for some reason, I'm not 100% on.
1:03:37: To that, I feel like that other group has to be people who are willing to pay.
1:03:42: You'll get over that.
1:03:42: You'll get over it, yeah, but I don't know.
1:03:44: Maybe you sorry, I'll get over it.
1:03:46: You, you'll, you'll get over it.
1:03:47: You, I'm, I'm, I'm saying you'll get over it.
1:03:50: Here.
1:03:50: Here's, here's, first of all, I mean, I wouldn't make it a huge financial, you know, hurdle necessarily.
1:03:57: Make the price reasonable.
1:03:59: I also wouldn't undervalue it too, like the price of a coffee, you know, it's like 7 or 8 bucks a month, I think is, is totally reasonable.
1:04:08: Especially on a platform like Patreon, where you're gonna have to be given a chunk of that away.
1:04:12: If you were doing it in a more direct way, you could maybe settle for a slightly lower price, but the thing is, there are, there are people on your list, right, there are your people right now who are already hungry for more.
1:04:24: Yeah.
1:04:25: You've got 100 people who are, yeah, I wanna get that weekly audio commentary, and like, maybe it's only 10 of them.
1:04:32: That are like, yeah, I want to see the in-depth stuff, but who are they going to talk to and then be like, hey, you gotta join this, this lady's Patreon book club, like she's doing this, like they're gonna talk to people.
1:04:44: And so in a way that can pull other people in.
1:04:48: It's, it's one of those things where just like this, it's gonna, it's going to be something that you have to build over time, right?
1:04:56: And so, What that looks like.
1:04:59: Again, it can be.
1:05:01: It, it can be challenging to see right now, like what the hurdles would be, it might be worth it to just like experiment with one of them.
1:05:10: And see like what the reaction is, and maybe have that one like free so anybody can access it, and then kind of test the theory, see what kind of engagement it gets, and then you can like go down that road, and the people who are really engaged, they might be willing to do that sort of thing.
1:05:26: So, Over time that those kind of things, those kind of things can start to build.
1:05:31: It might also be, I don't know if you have a Patreon.
1:05:34: No, because I'm in kit and they have.
1:05:38: Their own sort of thing.
1:05:39: But, but I look at all of them and I look at sub stack too because I'm like, they, you, I feel like, and you can correct me, I feel like Patreon, you have to kind of drive traffic to it, whereas Sub stack has a little bit more discoverability.
1:05:53: Is that true?
1:05:54: Yeah, it is.
1:05:55: Patreon is adapting to that a little bit though.
1:05:57: They've now introduced like a feed.
1:06:00: where things are discoverable, you can do quips and things like that, is what they call them, little short posts you can make that are discoverable.
1:06:08: That you can drive traffic to your content.
1:06:10: So Sub stack might be the way to go, at first, Patreon, if you, if you like it, and you, you do have to drive traffic to it, you do.
1:06:20: Your newsletter could be that source of traffic.
1:06:23: And likely your newsletter is gonna have to be that source of traffic for sub stack too.
1:06:27: Because I know, see, and I'm like, but I've, I've fought so hard to get them into kit.
1:06:32: I don't want to now be working for somebody else.
1:06:35: And, and you don't have to, right?
1:06:36: Like if Kit has those, I, this is not something I'm super familiar with, but if they have some kind of subscription model, and you want to keep it all in-house, I'd say go for it.
1:06:47: And and then set it up that way you can still use book funnel on the back end of that and keep it all kind of insulated.
1:06:57: and then, you know, you can, you can deliver that commentary to those folks in a way that, cause like Patreon, I know you can just upload the audio files directly to Patreon and post it within Patreon.
1:07:10: With, with something like Kit, you, you're probably gonna want to send them to book funnel, is my guess, and then either have them download the file or however they want to do it, right?
1:07:21: I, if, if you're more comfortable with that, and you want to keep everybody in your newsletter.
1:07:27: I'd say go for it, because there's kind of some expectations for something like Patreon too, which is like commentary on its own might not be enough for something like a Patreon.
1:07:36: There's just expectations there of like, what else are you doing if you're running a Patreon.
1:07:43: For a lot of authors, that's like releasing chapters in a serialized way, or exclusive bonus content or other things in there.
1:07:52: So, if you had other ideas that you wanted to add in with that in-depth commentary, then Patreon might be the way to go because it can support all that stuff, fairly, fairly easily.
1:08:06: But if it's just the comment you want to like just lean into this one thing, then I think Kit would be Kit would be a good fit for that if you're already comfortable with it.
1:08:14: Yeah, I, I, that's kind of where I've landed that Patreon, you know, if you have author art or whatever, you know, book art, things like that, and stickers and fan club, like you're really building a robust fan club that's, that belongs over there.
1:08:28: This, if, you know, if I'm just trying to Feed my readers extra stuff that keeps them happy, then I think I'm in a reasonably good place.
1:08:36: But, but again, there, so then there again I'm looking at how do I use the author commentary to pull people in.
1:08:45: I really like your idea of reading the book online.
1:08:49: And I've been trying to figure out how to post the audio onto YouTube so that hopefully I'm finding some people there, but, you know, it always turns out like you just have to drive people.
1:08:58: Now I'm driving people to YouTube so that they'll come to my newsletter list, you know what I mean?
1:09:01: Just come to my newsletter.
1:09:03: Yes, you can, if you, if you put it on to YouTube, I would, I would not worry about driving traffic from your newsletter to you.
1:09:11: In fact, I wouldn't, I wouldn't suggest driving traffic to a social media platform from your newsletter.
1:09:16: I would do it the other way around, right, right, so I would post it on YouTube and if you already have 36 episodes, so that's something you could schedule out like once you could.
1:09:27: Do these in bulk and schedule them out for 36 weeks, which is a good chunk of time.
1:09:32: And if you've just recorded audio, you could just have, you don't even need to have anything fancy, just a simple background with maybe the book cover or something like that.
1:09:43: Maybe worth considering doing future ones in video too, so that you can, you can still use the audio for your audio commentary, and then you have the video to use on you if you wanted to.
1:09:56: Pardon me, but I would just put it up there as discovery, like just pure discovery.
1:10:01: Like people, you're gonna release these episodes, it's gonna start to snowball.
1:10:06: It's gonna be a, a hockey stick, you know, hopefully, and then, then people are gonna come from YouTube, and then they're gonna go to your newsletter.
1:10:15: So I would use social media to pull people in.
1:10:18: And maybe if I did it as a YouTube short so that I'm not doing the whole audio, I'm just doing some snippets, maybe that's what, yeah, you can do both, you can do both.
1:10:27: They, they, if you're not worried about building a YouTube channel.
1:10:33: To monetize it, like YouTube isn't, if YouTube is gonna be your, you're paying all your bills, right?
1:10:39: The general wisdom is you kind of want to pick one lane.
1:10:41: You want to do long form content or short form content, and you want to lean into one of those two things.
1:10:47: But in this case, for authors, I don't even recommend that's a totally different paradigm.
1:10:51: It's pure, put it out there, let it get 10 views, right?
1:10:55: And that's fine.
1:10:56: Because out of those, like, you're you're trying to to find the right people, not the broad audience of YouTube.
1:11:05: So you could do a little bit of both, there are tools that that make that fairly easy too, to be able to take a long form video and break it up into chunks, or take the juiciest little snippets of the commentary and put those up there.
1:11:18: Like that could be a way to repurpose that content and purely you're just putting it out there so that it gets discovered and then people make their way to you on your newsletter.
1:11:30: The beauty of YouTube is that YouTube wants you to post and schedule content in advance.
1:11:39: So for an author, this is something you can sit down and be like, OK, today I'm gonna do it all, or this weekend, or whatever the case might be, and you just eat the whole elephant, one bite at a time.
1:11:50: As opposed to a platform like TikTok, which does not want you to schedule content, they, you can save it as a draft, technically, but they want you to post it, like, from the app, otherwise they kind of discourage it.
1:12:03: So, YouTube is built for that.
1:12:07: So that would be where I would recommend you go if you're because you can, again, you can schedule it all out and you don't have to like babysit the app and then you just check in on it once a week.
1:12:18: Do you have some thoughts on like how would I create the actual video?
1:12:25: Behind the Audio because I, I know they do it like whether it's abstract or sunsets or I know Canva has some things, but I haven't like really dug into it to figure out how.
1:12:35: Yeah, you could, you could use some B B-roll would be more important for something like short, right?
1:12:41: So short form content, vertical content.
1:12:44: For long form content, the long form content video, the background can literally just be an image of the book cover.
1:12:52: It doesn't need to, probably doesn't need to be doing anything fancy in the background.
1:12:56: When people are watching long form content on YouTube, I mean, I do this all the time.
1:13:00: I'll be listening to a video.
1:13:01: I lock my phone, stick it in my pocket while I got my headphones in.
1:13:04: So people are gonna, will be comfortable with, yeah, people even listen to audiobooks on YouTube, so they're very familiar with, OK, that kind of content doesn't need to be visually stimulating.
1:13:17: Anything that's gonna be in short form should.
1:13:19: And so a couple ideas here for you.
1:13:22: So, one way that you could repurpose this, which would be the, this is the hard way, I'm gonna preface this ahead of time, this is the hard way, is you're gonna take your commentary, and you're gonna do something that you're already in the middle of doing, like going for a walk, and you're gonna pull your phone out, and you're not gonna point it at yourself, you're gonna point it away, you're gonna point it at like the trail that you're walking on, and you're just gonna start You know, repeating that commentary, right?
1:13:46: Almost like from a script.
1:13:48: However, the easy way to do this is to go on that walk, get, you know, 40 minutes to an hour of footage, right?
1:13:56: And then just use that as the video to pair with the audio you've already recorded, just put it over that.
1:14:04: Or record yourself cooking, record yourself like, like taking notes on a notepad, like you don't even have to have to show your face, like, and you can reuse that B-roll.
1:14:14: So I would suggest creating your own B roll.
1:14:18: As opposed, because it comes off as more genuine.
1:14:21: As opposed to finding, there's some like, you know, B-roll, there's some apps and things like that that you can use to add B-roll to things and that kind of stuff is really more for like explainer videos or they're going, they're talk, they're talking about a topic where there's some relevant B-roll, right?
1:14:40: In this case, it can be something completely unrelated, like I said, like you walking your dog or whatever the case may be.
1:14:48: And then you've got that hour or so of B-roll footage, and then just Put that that juicy little snippet over that for like the 32nd long clip that's gonna be your YouTube short.
1:15:01: Yeah.
1:15:02: OK.
1:15:04: See, now you've made, especially the part where you said the long form can be basically just the book cover.
1:15:08: You've made this very easy in my head.
1:15:11: I'm like, I can do that.
1:15:13: Yes, yes.
1:15:14: No, like it doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be anything harder than that.
1:15:18: The Yeah, listening to, there's plenty of, I've listened to audiobooks on YouTube, there's plenty of them out there, that authors have put out themselves, there's some that are been put up by publishers or even in the public domain, that sort of thing.
1:15:32: And for the most, like, for the most part.
1:15:35: There's nothing going on on the screen, right?
1:15:37: There's, there's nothing like that.
1:15:39: people are not wanting to read along or anything like that, they're just wanting to listen to the audio.
1:15:43: So this kind of thing, this commentary, Fits perfectly into that.
1:15:49: So.
1:15:51: And because you already have the content created, I would, I would rather see you just repurpose it rather than try to re-record it.
1:15:59: Same, same, same.
1:16:01: So, so there's a lot of, and, and you might find like the discoverability might be slow at first.
1:16:08: But if it's something that you kind of build up to, and again, if you run out of books to do individual book commentaries on, and you maybe go down the in-depth route like we talked about, you can maybe put the first couple of chapters up on YouTube as like a a way to to pull people in.
1:16:25: So, You, you have that there as an option.
1:16:32: As well, like when you run out of books, you know, just for clarity, I, if I put up a 30-minute episode, YouTube is gonna stick their, their ads in the middle of it anyway, and before and after they're just gonna be like, suck it, right?
1:16:46: They will, they will.
1:16:47: You, you have some more control, I think, after you do get monetized, right.
1:16:52: But I, I'm a YouTube junkie, so we, I have YouTube Premium.
1:16:56: I don't want, I don't watch ads.
1:16:58: I pay not to watch ads, so.
1:17:00: That's just something that, you know, the, the, the users of YouTube are have come to expect.
1:17:07: So yeah, it's gonna happen.
1:17:09: It, it is what it is.
1:17:10: I, I wouldn't be too worried about it.
1:17:14: And then if you really, oh, go ahead, go ahead.
1:17:17: I was just gonna say if you really do have some success with it, like if it really does take off and you find like maybe one of your commentary videos does get a ton of views, there are options even on YouTube to promote that video to a likely audience within YouTube.
1:17:33: Like we're talking ads on YouTube here, so that's something that I would a route I would only go down if you post some content and something like really takes off and you see there's lots of engagement.
1:17:44: OK, maybe we do wanna throw a couple bucks at that to get it in front of some more eyeballs.
1:17:49: That's like the, you know, that's the long play and in most, in most cases it's not even necessary, but it's there as an option.
1:17:56: OK.
1:17:57: And so, so, OK, so I start with my December 1st video.
1:18:01: I put the book cover up.
1:18:03: I throw it up on YouTube, and underneath, I say something like this is what, you know, explain that it's my author commentary, blah blah de blah, and then say, if you want the latest ones.
1:18:15: Go sign up for my newsletter.
1:18:16: You'll get them all the time.
1:18:18: Otherwise, you just subscribe here and you're gonna get one every week.
1:18:21: Basically, that's what I'm saying.
1:18:22: And then just send them to my book funnel page, and I'll have, I actually, I have already built it.
1:18:28: I just haven't used it, is one of the landing pages that asks for.
1:18:33: Subscription.
1:18:34: Yep, yep.
1:18:35: And, and even if it's, if it's commentary on a book that's available for purchase, I also link to that book.
1:18:42: YouTube, YouTube doesn't have a problem with you putting links and stuff.
1:18:46: They, they love it.
1:18:47: They're like, yeah, put all the links in there, please.
1:18:49: And whereas other platforms are very restrictive on, on links.
1:18:54: So then it's just a question of like, you know, for this long form content, and you know, Facebook becomes another platform potentially to put this kind of thing on.
1:19:03: That kind of content can do well on Facebook.
1:19:05: Facebook, can you put a long form on there?
1:19:07: You could do a 40 minute blabby blah.
1:19:10: OK.
1:19:10: It's a, it's a little different than YouTube in some respects, but in this discoverability is, is a little tougher on Facebook in particular, and they really tend to push reels, which is their short form content, but it, it, it's discoverable.
1:19:26: People can find it and It just becomes an, an, you know, if you're gonna take the time to do it on YouTube, you Facebook, you might as well.
1:19:36: I would, I would do one at a time, though, right?
1:19:39: Like stagger those, so you don't have to do both of them at the same time.
1:19:43: Yeah, no, I'm excited about the YouTube idea.
1:19:45: That sounds like very easy.
1:19:47: And like you say, once I make the actual book cover, that banner, I'm just cranking those out in Canva.
1:19:54: I've got my blurb.
1:19:55: I just have to update it with a few links like you say, just.
1:19:59: Yeah, and you even, you have, you have podcasting platforms too, because it's basically what you've created is a podcast.
1:20:06: You even have a name for it, right?
1:20:08: So, so podcasting platforms outside of YouTube is, is one of the bigger ones for podcasts.
1:20:15: But you, you have, you have Spotify, you have Apple Podcasts, like you have other, and you, you don't have to do it all at once either.
1:20:23: You can do one at a time.
1:20:25: Like this month I'm gonna get YouTube set up, and next month I'm gonna do this and, and, and put it out there in the world wherever it can be discovered and stumbled upon.
1:20:33: And you know, you cast a wide net, right?
1:20:37: And, and that would be another way to kind of, yeah, just repurpose it without having to do the work all over again.
1:20:44: Right.
1:20:45: So, and it is especially, it's kind of It's a way to maybe kind of get around the social media.
1:20:53: That's exactly what I'm trying to do, you know.
1:20:57: Find a way.
1:20:58: Find my own game for the system.
1:21:00: Yes, exactly, exactly.
1:21:02: It, you know, even if you find the short form content like I talked about, like where you put your own b-roll with the commentary audio, if you find that there, there's some content there that works well on YouTube, you can then replicate that content on other platforms in short form, even TikTok if you wanted to, right, because yeah.
1:21:21: You never know.
1:21:23: So there comes a time though, and you, you do have to look at like, The time commitment to all of that, because it's a very real cost to it.
1:21:32: And in, in many cases, if you're not seeing a direct financial return off of that, Like there are people who espouse the idea that you should be posting 7 times a day on every single social media platform, the 7 big ones, right, every single day about whatever it is your thing is all about.
1:21:52: And that, that's one strategy, it's like the nuclear option, but it's gonna be very time consuming, or can be very time consuming, and you're, it's gonna be hard to measure the return on all of that in some cases.
1:22:07: And so, I think it's, it's better if you're already, you're already bringing in revenue from somewhere else.
1:22:14: Right, to, to just take it slow and steady and not, not to put too much pressure on the system because the system is the system you build is already bringing in revenue.
1:22:26: If now you've got to post 7 times a day on 7 different social media platforms, like that's gonna be too much, and then that's gonna undermine the system.
1:22:35: And I think it works well if you're, an early author who has a few books, so now you have to invest in those handful of books or that singular series.
1:22:46: Then I think the, the nuclear option, as you're talking about, makes sense.
1:22:50: But it doesn't make sense for me to go spend a crap ton of my time on this title when I've got all of these titles.
1:22:58: I have to sort of bring it all into me.
1:23:00: That's, that's how I feel.
1:23:02: Right, because the other thing like I'm looking at is at some point, If you were gonna go down that road, like, it might, you might be considering, well, should I hire somebody to help me do that and get the the content posted, and then it's like, OK, well now, now this is another cost.
1:23:18: And is that what we really want to do at that stage, not necessarily, so.
1:23:24: For if you, I mean, heck, who knows, maybe you do see that you put it on YouTube and it just explodes, and then, OK, great, wonderful, but it doesn't have to do that for it to be a success.
1:23:37: It doesn't have to go viral for it to be a success, right?
1:23:42: You can just, you can slowly drip people in from those sources without having to.
1:23:49: You know, make it this, you know, again, it doesn't, like I said, doesn't have to go viral for it to be a success.
1:23:54: So, When you have that in mind, then some of those, some of those ideas of like hiring a social media manager, nothing against social media managers, right?
1:24:05: But it, it, it, the math doesn't add up, right?
1:24:09: Like what, what you're, what you're getting out of it is not necessarily.
1:24:13: Easy to measure anyway.
1:24:15: So, to, to full disclosure, I do pay somebody to run my social media to post on there for me, and that I look at that cost as, that is the cost of me not having to be on social media, right?
1:24:28: Like you're already paying for myself, yes, and so you're already doing that.
1:24:32: And so from, from my perspective, like if you weren't already doing that, I wouldn't necessarily suggest you do it.
1:24:38: But if you do have somebody who you are paying already, and that's already something that you've factored into your, the, your costs, right, it's already a, a piece of that the machine that you built, then, OK, maybe you could be a little bit more ambitious because that person can just post a few extra pieces of content for you, you know, that kind of thing.
1:24:55: So, in that case, it might be easier for you to, to lean into that method if you do start to see some traction from it.
1:25:04: But repurposing, I think is the big thing.
1:25:08: And yeah, and I'm just so glad you've given me some really good ideas.
1:25:12: YouTube was the one that I really felt was a good spot for it.
1:25:16: So yeah, I'm really excited about that.
1:25:17: Thank you.
1:25:18: And another thing to, another thought is to repurpose it in, in text.
1:25:23: So if you have thought about that, yeah, OK.
1:25:26: And so then what do I do?
1:25:27: Put it as a blog.
1:25:28: OK, for instance, I have a dead blogger account.
1:25:32: I could put it over there and again, end it with, if you want to get the, the, you know, the most up to-date one, go over here.
1:25:38: Or where do you think I could print, like post those transcripts?
1:25:42: Yeah, I mean, you, you have social media platforms that are text-based.
1:25:46: It could work.
1:25:47: So Facebook is a place where it could work.
1:25:49: Any, any place where you could just put a wall of text and people will actually read it.
1:25:53: Blogs these days, like a lot of people like host their blog on a social media platform or like a sub stack or something like that, like where, where people are reading.
1:26:03: You could also make them like downloadable and people could, could read them, right, like as an ebook, right?
1:26:11: A companion to the, to the companion ebook commentary for people who would prefer to read it.
1:26:18: Yeah, to some extent, it is a little bit of, of extra legwork, right?
1:26:24: You're probably, it's the 80/20 rule, right?
1:26:30: How much more is that gonna give you, you know, how much juice is left in there?
1:26:36: I'd say, you know, posting on a platform like Facebook, right, where people do read walls of text, right, they do, it's not just images.
1:26:46: Again, that's kind of the pattern interrupt thing again.
1:26:50: Where People are used to seeing content that's very engaging, and then they see a post that's just a wall of text that has some engagement on it, they're like, what's this all about?
1:27:00: Right?
1:27:00: And, and they'll click through and read it.
1:27:02: So, that would be, I see that kind of as parallel to the YouTube strategy, it's just repurposing it.
1:27:08: What about putting the transcript below the YouTube?
1:27:11: Oh yeah, you can, you can definitely, you can definitely do that.
1:27:14: I, there might be limited on space.
1:27:17: Right, With YouTube, but, I, I would maybe focus more on where people are going to be reading content versus watching content.
1:27:27: And, and I mean, text-based content is, again, undervalued, and there's not as much competition.
1:27:35: And to some degree, the argument is also that another argument is, People who have the patience to read your commentary are probably more likely to be readers than people who are gonna be watching video content, and so, Social media can be kind of awkward for authors because our medium, the the thing that we produce at the end of the day, is words on a page, right?
1:28:03: And so it's hard, like if you're, if you're any other kind of artist, you make any other kind of art, right?
1:28:09: You can, you can put it on social media and, and it, I have a friend of mine, a childhood friend of mine.
1:28:16: Who does a hand-drawn art pieces.
1:28:19: And do you have a ton of content to put on social media and people will watch it because it's visually interesting sitting, watching somebody sitting there typing away at the keyboard is not particularly interesting.
1:28:31: So for authors, it can be tricky, but there are some social media platforms where text is already a thing and where text-based posts are something people engage with.
1:28:40: And so that's where I would, I would put that kind of stuff.
1:28:44: You, you can, you can potentially make it a little prettier on some platforms.
1:28:48: By like taking a snippet of the commentary and putting it over a nice image and that sort of like on Pinterest, for example, it could work there.
1:28:57: I'm not an expert on Pinterest though, but so there's lots of ways that you can, you can repurpose it without having to do the work all over again.
1:29:04: I mean, it's still gonna be work.
1:29:06: Yeah, yeah, no, but it's, it's like literally running the audio through some transcription of like voice memo or something.
1:29:13: And then, yeah, like.
1:29:15: It's, it's not creating new content.
1:29:16: It's just pulling, and I'm, I'm good with that.
1:29:19: And, and I again, like you said, I don't have to do it all tomorrow.
1:29:22: I can just pick away at it.
1:29:24: So yes, pick, pick one elephant to eat at a time.
1:29:28: That's the trick.
1:29:29: You, they're all elephant, you know, you know the phrase, right?
1:29:32: Right.
1:29:33: Every, everything is an elephant when you drill, drill down to it, right?
1:29:38: I, in looking at my own author business, I, I look at the 5, my business in 5 different pillars.
1:29:45: And so, you've got writing, and you've got editing, and you've got publishing, all of those have different tasks associated with them, right?
1:29:54: You have reviews is another big one, like social proof, like there's tasks associated with managing an arc team and, and all that stuff.
1:30:01: And then the fifth pillar is marketing and advertising.
1:30:04: And when I, when I'm going through like, OK, what do I need to do in a given month or a given week, that one, that list will dwarf, or, you know, the, the other four, it will be longer than the other 4 combined, because there's so many different things you could do.
1:30:20: And each one what the problem is that each one of those things that you put on that list.
1:30:25: Is the proverbial elephant and it's a great idea, but how do I execute?
1:30:31: So that's yet another reason why I'm here, right?
1:30:33: Like, great idea.
1:30:35: I'm halfway there.
1:30:36: Help me figure, you know, figure out other ways to use it, right?
1:30:38: Right.
1:30:39: And what you've already done is, is, in my opinion, a resounding success, even if you stopped there and you or just kept doing this as you did it, right?
1:30:49: We've, we've talked about a number of different things.
1:30:52: And for the audience's sake too, I always like to remind people when I'm, I'm talking about these things, it's like, I'm an ideas person.
1:31:00: So I, I'll, I was at a, a Comic-Con this past weekend and You know, I would go by some of the vendors, and there was a couple of them where I'd stop by and be like, you know what, you could do this.
1:31:13: Like, you don't have to.
1:31:14: This is not a, you know, I would try not to be that person, but like, did you ever think of this idea?
1:31:20: Because that's just the way that my brain works.
1:31:22: And so I just want to be clear that we've put out a lot of ideas here into the ether on this episode of the podcast.
1:31:30: And I Like maybe a long term you could implement all of those whether it's you, Danny, or somebody watching like, but it's, it's, it's not something that you'd have to do all of it in order to for it to be worth it, right?
1:31:45: You don't have to do all the things you can kind of some people might be saying like commentary like I don't know, I'll just post on social media.
1:31:53: You can do it that way.
1:31:55: You can post your commentary as, you know, spontaneous shorts on TikTok or something.
1:32:02: If that's what you prefer to do, right?
1:32:03: So, and something else I've learned as a sort of a publishing lesson in general is we all feel this urgency.
1:32:09: We're constantly feeling like if I don't do that right now, I'm leaving money on the table.
1:32:15: I'm doing this.
1:32:16: I'm failing.
1:32:18: What we have all these crazy voices in our head.
1:32:21: You know what?
1:32:22: The audience will be there when you get to it.
1:32:25: You'll, you, you're only one human.
1:32:27: Do what you can do.
1:32:29: Yeah, that's all you can do.
1:32:31: Absolutely, yeah, that, that amount of stress is for the, the big publishers to worry about, right?
1:32:37: That's their job, right?
1:32:39: They have their quotas to meet and all that stuff that let that be their problem.
1:32:43: I think part of indie publishing in general is that you are afforded that patience.
1:32:51: Like that's not, that's something that you shouldn't take for granted.
1:32:54: Like, I, I have books that I released.
1:32:58: You know, back in 2019 and even later than that, like going, you know, farther back, that I can revisit if I want to, and I can come back and I can reinvigorate those.
1:33:08: It's not a one shot sort of thing.
1:33:12: The traditional publishing industry just over the years has kind of given folks that impression that this is like it's one and done, like make it or break it, like, like your book launch matters like, you know, that one in particular, yeah, and for sure make your do things to make your book launch a success like having a reader maggot that that leads to a pre-order.
1:33:33: I love it, right?
1:33:34: Or and then like releasing commentary leading up to it.
1:33:37: I think that's a great idea.
1:33:39: Those things can.
1:33:41: can help.
1:33:41: I think those are things that like for for an author who's new to this, new to indie publishing in particular, when you're doing everything yourself.
1:33:50: Like, you're gonna get some things wrong this that first time.
1:33:53: You're gonna get a lot of things wrong.
1:33:55: The point is not to get everything right.
1:33:58: The point is to make it through to the other side and then repeat the process, which I think clearly, you know, with how many books you've written and And, and put out there in the world through publishers and, and yourself.
1:34:11: So you, you just have to kind of take things in stride.
1:34:15: Yeah, that and also the, the book that, you know, is coming out on October 20th, Afternoon Delight.
1:34:21: It was not something I wrote last week.
1:34:23: Like I started it in 2018 and we're eight years later and it's being reissued.
1:34:30: So a book can go through a lot of different adventures before it arrives.
1:34:36: So right.
1:34:38: Right.
1:34:38: Books are not movies.
1:34:40: Yeah, you know, movies, they have the box office to worry about and all, all that sort of stuff.
1:34:47: Like that's where they, it's this big show, this big event where they've got to make all their money, and books aren't like that.
1:34:52: But yet we sometimes try to put the same amount of pressure on them.
1:34:55: Well, Danny, thank you for joining us, joining me here.
1:34:59: I'm flying solo today for the, the Book Funnel podcast.
1:35:03: I wanna give you a moment here to shout out anything you have going on, that pre-order perhaps, or whatever you'd like to, to tell the folks at home.
1:35:11: For sure.
1:35:12: So, Afternoon Delight is coming out October 20th, and like I say, that's A heroine who's almost 40, and she throws away her accounting career, comes to Victoria, BC and starts working at her friend's adult toy shop.
1:35:25: and then she falls for the landlord next door, and he happens to be a younger man.
1:35:29: So it's very sexy and fun, very funny.
1:35:31: And I have, if you want a taste of that before, it comes out.
1:35:35: I have a prequel called After Hours Rendezvous, and you can get that on my website, dannycoollins.com.
1:35:42: There is a link right on my homepage, but if you can't find it, then you go dannycoollins.com/afternoondelightrequel, and you'll get there.
1:35:52: Excellent.
1:35:52: And make sure to put those links.
1:35:54: Yes, in the show notes as well, make sure those are there.
1:35:57: Absolutely.
1:35:58: Well, thank you again, Danny, for joining me.
1:36:01: This has been, this is a fun episode, a little different from other episodes we, we typically do, but I like that we're kind of brainstorming and kind of diving deep into these topics.
1:36:10: So thank you.
1:36:11: Thank you.
1:36:12: I really appreciate all your suggestions.
1:36:14: It's been very helpful.
1:36:15: Thank you.
1:36:15: Absolutely, of course.
1:36:17: And of course, thank you to you, our viewers, if you're watching here.
1:36:20: On YouTube.
1:36:21: Make sure you subscribe to the channel and like this video.
1:36:24: Also, leave a comment or two or three with your takeaways that you got from this conversation.
1:36:30: I'm sure there's a few you could probably list in the comments.
1:36:33: If you are listening to the Book Funnel podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or anywhere else, please follow us there and leave a review.
1:36:40: It really does help.
1:36:42: From all of us here at Book Funnel, I wanna thank you for watching and listening, and we will see you all in the next one.
1:36:48: Thank you for watching.
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