In this week’s episode, JP and Crys talk to special guest, Dana Kaye, all about figuring out your author brand. From social media, newsletters, websites and more, they discuss the ins and outs of what they find works for them.
Question of the week: What confuses or scares you the most about figuring out your brand? Share your answer here!
Don’t miss our weekly check in on Patreon (it’s public!) where we talk about what we’re currently learning, any thoughts we missed in last week’s episode, and our plans for this week!
Show Notes
Your Book, Your Brand by Dana Kaye
Transcript
JP: Hello friends. This is episode number 70 of the Write Away Podcast, and it is Wednesday, November 3rd, 2021 as we are recording. I’m with my cohost…
Crys: Crys Cain.
JP: And we have a special guest today, Dana Kaye.
Dana Kaye, how’s it going?
Dana: Good. I’m excited to be here.
Crys: Dana started, owns, and runs a PR company for authors specifically, targeted authors. And we met Dana at The Career Author Summit. Loved your presentation. The way I describe it is that it was simple and helpful, and simple does not always mean easy.
It’s hard to make things simple and I think he did a great job, which led us to really want to read your book, which we have. It is our book club for the month, and then we also jumped at the chance to talk to you extra anytime we get.
So yeah, we don’t have any updates on our lives because we are recording this ahead of when it is releasing. And we’ll just jump on into the conversation. JP, you want to tell us about the book?
JP: Yeah. I am a hundred percent prepared. Your Book, Your Brand, it is a fantastic book in my opinion. And since we already had a book club in the scheme of things, you’ll already know this, but I really loved the beginning part where we talk about branding and developing that content strategy and then moving into those actionable steps. So that’s really what this book is about. It is about finding your author brand and where to really market those key things.
Crys: Yeah. And we’ve done quite a few marketing books this year. It’s one of the, I think the toughest topics for authors. Would you say that you find that’s true of the people who come to you, Dana, that this is the thing that they struggle with on their own most?
Dana: I think it’s a little bit of two things. Some authors come to me and they think, “I need social media, I need marketing, I need publicity.” And they focus on the functional tactical things without having any clarity of who their target audiences or who they’re hoping to reach. So they tell me things like, “I have to be on Instagram” or “this Book Talk thing is real, and I need to get on Book Talk” or “I just want to be on The Today Show.”
And the fact is, that if your readers aren’t on those platforms, if your readers aren’t consuming those things, then you really don’t have to be there, you can just say pass. And so I think that what we work with a lot of authors on is really understanding that you don’t need to do everything. Instead, we need to do a few things really well and focus on the things that actually reach your target audience and reinforce your brand.
On the flip side, we sometimes get authors who are like, “I just need to know what my brand is, but I don’t. I write so many different things.” And what I try to demystify in the book is that, although, yes, you all follow your creative muses and you’re multi-passionate and you write different things, all writers I know are drawn to a few key themes or topics or characters. And so even if you’re writing a YA trilogy and a detective series and a sci-fi fantasy novel, there’s some common threads through all of them that readers can actually grab onto.
And the best part about that is, rather than isolating your readers, meaning, okay, these are my sci-fi readers, these are my YA readers, you actually give them the opportunity to experience your different books and therefore potentially increase your audience. So if you talk first about characters, if you talk more about the characters, what drives them, what their plight is, or even like the setting, if there was a common thread in the settings. Maybe I don’t typically read YA, but if the character sounds interesting and setting sounds interesting, or the thematic topics sound interesting, I may take a chance on it. So I think not relying on genre constructs or age group constructs is really key to maximizing your audience.
Crys: We read Lisa Crohn’s Story or Die this year, and that connected a few little puzzle pieces as far as like understanding audience, but what I really liked about how you approach this in Your Book, Your Brand, that was one of the things that I struggled with Story or Die, is that you had specific ways to figure that out from your books that you have already written.
Dana: I mean, you need it to be actionable. But like you said, it’s not easy, but there’s action steps that you can take. I read a lot of self-help business books and I get really frustrated with the books that introduce a concept without any practical way to take action.
And so I wanted the goal of the book was really that every person can be a publicist. Like they can be their own publicist if they follow the instructions in this. I think I said it in the introduction. I’m actually recording the audio book this past few months, so I’m a little bit more attuned to the book I wrote four years ago. And I remember reading the introduction, like I don’t have a PR background. I came to this as a writer, as a freelance writer and a book critic who just love telling people what to read. And I figured it out and I really wanted to help other people figure it out too. So I really just see this book as a download of everything me, and now my team, do for our authors. And I really do believe that authors can do this themselves.
JP: I really liked that you did demystify that concept that we can basically write in whatever genre we want, because really it’s about the stories that you’re telling and that’s more or less the backdrop. When that section hit, I immediately was like writing down four stories that I had and looking for all the common threads, and luckily it fit with my brand. So I was like, I did well, I think.
So that was just a really fun and very actionable thing to find in your book. It resonated in a way that when I originally had that thought that, oh, I’m stuck in urban fantasy for the rest of my life, please no, I don’t want to be. And then seeing this and being like, yes I am able to tell the stories I want to tell without having to always fit those genre conventions. That was just a fantastic actionable piece of your book.
Dana: I don’t know if Crys and JP, you both get this sometimes, where readers will come to you and be like, “I love how you explore this metaphor of this.” And you just look at them like, mmhmm, thinking, I had no idea that I was doing that. So I also think when we talk about this idea of these common threads, the common denominator, most writers don’t realize they’re doing it.
So JP, like you said, you had these four story ideas and then you went through and you said, “oh, okay, here’s the common denominator.” You can’t write for that. You can’t say, “I’m going to write a book about familiar relationships.” You really just have to write the characters and write the stories you’re pulled to. This is work that’s done after the book is finished.
Crys: I will say that I did this exercise with a different mindset about a year ago. And I have written 60 plus books in romance in less than five years. So I’m quite burned out on romance. It’s not the genre that I ever meant to get into, just accidentally found success while I was there. And what I did is I went through and I said, “what is it that I get really excited about writing?” And pulled out, you know, I really am excited about writing neurodivergent characters, really exploring the emotions, pulled out those themes specifically to make sure that I did include them. Now, granted, I had a whole lot of work to look at and a lot of experience to look at, to know what it was that really excited me about writing and which books were easier and which books were harder and less enjoyable. And I’ve noticed since I did that exercise, when I don’t make sure that those things are in my book, it is a much harder book to write because I’m not writing it for me.
Dana: I think that if you break it down, I know a lot of people, like you said, like JP, I don’t want to be in urban fantasy for the rest of my life. Crys, you’re like, I’m done with romance. We feel like that’s the reason, we feel like it’s the genre conventions, that’s the reason. But ultimately, it’s because we’re writing something that you’re not passionate about.
And, to listeners, no one writes for money. If you do, you should really just go into iBanking because it’s way more lucrative. We’re writing because we’re storytellers and we’re passionate. So when we start trying to fit our stories into this box, so when I tell authors author brand, they are like, oh god.
So they feel it so constrained. But the fact is, we’re just creating your brand off of what you write. So if you have written urban fantasy or romance your entire career, and all of a sudden we have this like poetry collection, we’ll figure out how that fits in. And if it is truly different then we’ll just rebrand and focus on the new stuff and not focus on the old stuff. But very seldom have I read something where I’m like, oh, this is completely different. There’s always some common threads.
Crys: I want to jump to something that you wrote in the conclusion. You may not have gotten there in the audio, but I’m sure you remember this part. And it’s the very beginning of the conclusion. One of the most common questions I’m asked from potential clients is how do you gauge success? And this is a question that I love engaging with. It’s actually something that I started Write Away wanting to explore, because like you say later on in this, like a lot of people are like I just want to get my name out there. But they need to dig into, what does getting your name out there mean to you? What is the result you want? And I really like, not only just like for this particular thing that you’re doing, or whether you’re considering doing, but like overall, why are you writing books? What is it that you want to get out of that? And then like just drilling down what does that mean?
What does that thing that you say you want, what does that mean? And asking yourself, what does that mean, five times down to get to the core of what do you actually feel success is? Not what you think it should be. But I do like that you focus on that throughout the book, but specifically closing with that, because if you don’t know what success means, you never know if you’ve reached it.
Dana: Indeed. And there’s no shame around what you think success is. If your success is making a million dollars off of your writing, that’s legitimate. I believe that it is an achievable goal. If your goal is to see your book reviewed in magazines and newspapers and quote unquote legitimate media, that is an okay goal to have.
We have people who are more literary and poets who just want a tenured teaching position, and they’re hoping that our media and our speaking gigs we get them are going to lead to that. So there’s no shame in whatever your goal is, but you have to get really clear on it. Because we’ll have some people who are like, “I just want to sell as many books as possible.”
But I asked them, ” by any means necessary?” So if that’s the case, if you want to sell as many books as possible, then we are going to do all the things. You’re going to be doing all the podcasts, all the guest articles, all the media we get, all the schlepping around the bookstores, all the Facebook ads, all the Amazon ads, like everything. And you’ll invest a lot of money. And then they start thinking about that. Like, well, no, that doesn’t sound very rewarding. I also want to write. So if the goal is to sell more books than you did last time and do it in a way that you still have time to focus on writing, then that looks very different. So getting really clear on, are you selling more books than last time? Are you getting more revenue? Because sales and revenue aren’t necessarily tied.
So for example, let’s say your goal was to sell a hundred thousand books. You can do that with a lot of Facebook ads, a lot of Amazon ads, a lot of getting $1.99 BookBub deals, things like that.
But if you talk about the profit margin, you might have a loss. And is that okay? Is that okay for you? We’ve had clients who their main goal is just to get the book to as many people as possible. And they, I think, did take a loss. But ultimately if it’s about revenue, then you have to be more strategic on where you’re spending your money. And also time is also a very valuable currency.
So I think getting really clear in the beginning, and your goals from book to book may be different. Your goals from life to life period may be different. I know during the pandemic for me, my goal was more time. I mean, I had, as many of us did, we had homeschool. All of a sudden we’re homeschooling and doing all of these other things. So I was less concerned about revenue. I was way more concerned about time. As we get into this next season and the boys back in school and my house is maybe quiet again, then I may be okay, well now I want to do a bigger revenue push, or do they have more impact?
Maybe I want to look at what impact we can have on. We’re doing a lot with trying to create more equity in publishing, and that’s been a big focus this year. So your goals can change from book to book. And again, feel no shame in what those goals are, don’t measure your goals by other people’s.
Crys: So how do you help authors dig through to find out what their actual goal is? Because very few of them actually know. Anybody that I talk to rarely knows what they actually want.
Dana: Similar to what you were saying before is I ask them questions. I ask them, so that what? To what end? Why? What else? Those sorts of prompting questions I find really gives some clarity on what they really want. I also think that I’ll paint them a picture of, if they say their goal is, let’s say, to hit a New York Times list. That’s a common goal I hear of many authors who come to me. I’ll say, okay, this is what that looks like. This is an idea of what we have to do. And we could do all of these things and still not do it because the New York Times list is not something that’s fully in our control. It’s an edited list. I have no control over other people’s pub dates. I have some control over where people buy your book, but I have no control over how the New York Times values that purchase.
For those of you that don’t know, New York Times is an edited list. So it’s not numbers only. They value sales from indies differently than Amazon. They value sales that happen in a concentrated place, like all sales in Southern California, less valuable than broad sales all over the country.
So there’s a lot of things out of our control. So I’ll keep saying, this is what that will take, and this is what that will look like. How do you feel about that? Sometimes they’re like, “Game, I’m ready to do it, let’s do it.” But other times they’re like, ” Ooh, that actually doesn’t feel great.” And then they start pivoting and we start drilling deeper.
So I think it’s asking a lot of questions. I love visualizations. We’re all storytellers here, so we can all use our imaginations. Visualizing, like you wake up on launch day, and what would make you feel really successful? Is it seeing your name on New York Times list, but being exhausted? Or having a huge book tour ahead of you? Or having a really diminished bank account or savings account because you invested tens of thousands of dollars? Is it that you’re going to see your book well-reviewed? Is it going to be like ranking on Amazon? What does that look like? What’s your ideal launch week look like? And that will start to give us some ideas. I don’t think anything is unattainable, but it’s just, we really try to paint the picture for them.
And if we don’t achieve those goals, like again, the New York. We had a few authors who we were gunning for the New York Times list this year, but one of our romance authors, it seemed that every romance book came out the same day. I want to say there was like Julie Carr, W Mae Comber, like all the big hits all came out that day and we just didn’t make it. Because people may buy four romances, maybe five, they’re not going to buy seven. But I looked at it like we did all that we could. And her sales were better than normal. So even if she didn’t make the Times list, because we set it up for success, because we did a big media push, because we really got her newsletter really down and those newsletter subscribers engaged, it was one of her more successful books even if she missed the list.
JP: So when we’re talking self published authors, what are some overlooked opportunities that you see that could really help drive either their sales or get them on certain lists?
Dana: Yeah. So the fact is that even though readers don’t care who publishes the book, it really is a different marketing. It really is different promotion campaign for indie authors and for traditionally published books. And so I think that a lot of the indie authors we talked to are really looking at what traditional authors do and are trying to replicate that.
And the fact is that, does it work? So for example, again, everyone wants to be on The Today Show. Everyone wants to have a New York Times review. But if your book is not widely available in bookstores where people are wandering in and looking at it on a front table, the conversion rate from people who read that review to actually buy the book is pretty small.
Instead ,you want to double down on people who are going to easily buy the book from whatever media or marketing opportunity they saw your book in. So I really think that, I don’t know that this is often overlooked, but I think a lot of authors don’t want to, is the email marketing piece. I think that your newsletter subscribers are your biggest fans.
I think what gets overlooked is, this isn’t an advertisement, like this isn’t a weekly or monthly ad that you send to someone’s inbox. This is a really great way to learn and engage with your audience. The advantage indie authors have is that when books are bought through the website, you can track that and have your subscribers tagged as having purchased that book.
So let’s say you have an urban fantasy trilogy. You have book one, book two, book three. You can track who has bought book one and not bought book two and book three. So what’s overlooked is, people send newsletters to their entire list, but if you tag people and segment people you can get really tailored on your marketing. So you could specifically have emails to people about book two, about book three, why they should buy them both. Maybe you bundle them together to give to people. So I think that while the newsletter for most authors feels like a chore, what’s overlooked is this opportunity to actually just send a note to your reader and not overly sell them.
You don’t want to say, “Hey, I noticed you haven’t bought book two and book three.” Instead, sharing reviews, sharing interviews, sharing like fan mail of like, I can’t believe this happened in this trilogy. Give those readers a reason to get excited about buying the next book. So I think that’s a big opportunity too, rather than focusing on like getting all trade reviews and I’ve seen a lot of people paying for trade reviews and I’m not a big fan.
And so instead just say, I have an advantage of I know a lot about my customers, especially when they buy through my website. I have the opportunity to engage them, to make them feel really special, to tailor content to them. And I think that’s a missed opportunity that a lot of indie authors have.
This isn’t everybody, but historically, I’ve seen a lot of indie authors really focus on playing the eBook deal game, like the FreeBooksy and the BookBub and all of these things. And that’s lovely to boost some numbers, there’s a place for that, but the downside is when you do that, you’re not actually engaging with those people. They go and they download a free book or a 1.99 book. 5% chance that they actually read it. And you need people reading your books in order to buy the other books. So we’ve done things that, rather than focusing on selling the book in people’s email marketing, we’ve done things where we encourage people to read the book.
So we’ve done things like book clubs. Whether it’s in a Facebook group or a network where they’re going to be discussing a chapter every week. I know not everyone reads the book at book club, but you feel a little bit added pressure to read it because there’s going to be spoilers. And so thinking about ways that you can move people along in actually reading your book, engaging with them, getting them to buy the next book. Because it’s hard to attract new readers, but if you have multiple books, I mean, Crys, you have 60 plus books, like one new newsletter subscriber, you have the opportunity to sell them a lot of books, but you have to help them on that journey. They’re not going to just download your entire library.
Crys: Yeah. Yeah. Getting somebody into the ecosystem is worth a lot, especially because 20 plus of them are in the same series. If we get somebody into that series, that sell through on that is worth so much.
Dana: And there’s just more to talk about. You already have so much content, there’s a lot to talk about in terms of the different characters, the different features. So I would be really curious, if you have someone who downloads the book one off your website, what would it look like to have an automation sequence talk to them about book two? When they purchase book two, give them a month and then start talking about book three. Like I’d be very curious of this, like a potentially three year automated email sequence.
Crys: That’d be wild.
Dana: So that’s what I’m thinking about less. I think people think about newsletters, like you send your newsletter every month. I’m right now really excited about tailored, segmented, automated emails. Because it might be automated to you, but it doesn’t feel automated to me, the recipient. That’s another misconception, when people hit send on their newsletter, they envisioned them broadcasting to those 200, 2000, 20,000 people. In reality, the experience is, I’m on my phone brushing my teeth and I just get an email from you. It’s me and you.
Crys: Yeah. I thought one of the really interesting tidbits that you shared was this particular time that you found is good to send because you had originally operated that kind of middle of the day was the best time to send an email and then it turned out that around the time people are brushing their teeth was the best time to send an email.
Dana: For my audience, it is. I think that’s the other thing to experiment. Like promotion should be your laboratory of experimenting with different things. And so I may find that my newsletters get opened at 6:30 to 7:00 AM mostly. But then again, it’s also because that’s when I usually send them. And so who’s to say. I do some resending. So I’m sending to people who did an open with a different subject line. I’ll send that on a weekend and we do get some additional opens. But we have other people who, I think it’s Jane Friedman, sends her newsletter on Friday night, which I always read her newsletter, I never read it on Friday night. I read it on Monday morning. But I always read it. There might be something to that. Maybe her audience likes a good weekend read. So I think it’s about looking at sending at different times and then seeing what works best for your audience.
Crys: And for those of you out there who the idea of doing this consciously that might seem like an overwhelm, I think MailChimp has us on their higher paid version, they’ll do that kind of testing for you. You just say, hey, activate this and figure out like what’s the best time. And then it’ll do some tests of when it sends your stuff and kind of figure that out for you.
JP: Thank you. Because I’m that person. I’m like, what?
Crys: I’m cheap as all get out and I use Sendy because I’m like, I’m not going to spend $200 a month on my romance email. But I do want to go and see if there’s some plugins for it that I could put in that will help me do a bit more of the tagging and stuff so that I don’t have to figure out how to code that personally. But yeah, tagging is powerful and I love it.
So yeah, you said that a lot of people come to you asking about social media and you have a pretty strong stance on social media.
Dana: That it doesn’t sell books.
Crys: Exactly. But what does it do?
Dana: It helps you engage with your readers in between books. So unless you’re Crys and JP who write a lot, many authors are only writing or publishing a book once a year. Like I think that’s on average. So that takes into account the once a monthers and the once every 10 years. And so if you’re thinking about you’re publishing one book a year, that’s a lot of time spent in between.
So social media serves as a way to engage with people in between books. It also is a way to convey your brand and give people like a more personal connection. As much as this legitimately freaks me out, people feel like they know you based on what you share. So there are people on social media that I have never met, and yet I meet them in person and they feel an immediate connection.
If I follow them back, I probably feel the same immediate connection, even though we’ve never spoken. And so I think that’s a really powerful thing. Just like any other business, people want to do business with people. People want to read books from authors that they like. So while I’ve never seen, I’ll say never, I usually like to say I’ve rarely seen, but I have never seen someone who follows, let’s say a bookstagrammer, and was like, oh, I see a book, that looks good, bye. That very seldom happens. It takes a number of bookstagrammers that people trust to get a reader to follow the author on Instagram, the reader follows the author on Instagram, is like, oh, this person’s pretty legit, I like their stuff. Okay. Now maybe I’ll try. But it takes that long.
Crys: Seven to 12 touches for them to remember.
Dana: And then you have to think about if it’s favorable or not. I believe in being a magnet. So I believe that you should attract your target audience and repel those who are not. So if you are looking, like for me, if you’re like, I want someone who is going to sell 10,000 books in one month and I want the quick answer turnkey thing. That’s not me. So I don’t want to attract those people.
And so same with your readers. Like if you write steamy romance, then people who don’t like cursing, if you write a lot of curse words in your book, you can curse on social media. It will repel those who are offended by it, who wouldn’t like your books anyway. And so I think that’s what you should be as a magnet, that’s attracting your target audience and repelling the ones that are not for you.
Crys: With the attraction and repelling I want to add there just as a side note, like this is the same thing with your reviews. Bad reviews are not bad to you. They are good. They send away the wrong reader and they call in the right reader.
JP: That’s what I was about to say. I have bought books based off of the bad reviews because I’m like, “oh, this book has too much queer content” and I immediately put it into my cart and I’m like it’s mine now.
Dana: And that’s the tricky thing with consumer reviews. Like with professional reviews, their job is to convey whether or not the person will like it. Their job is to describe the book, share what kinds of things are at stake, what’s working, what they think maybe isn’t working, but it’s really to share is this book for you? I should get an assessment of even if this reviewer raved about it, I should know whether or not I’m going to like it.
Consumer reviews are funny though. Because if someone says oh, it’s too much cursing. I’d say, eh, I’m not bothered by cursing. Everyone else says it’s good, so that’s great. Too much queer content, too much this, too much that. I don’t get too hung up on consumer reviews, just because if you read the bad ones, meaning like not negative, but bad like they’re just not good, well-written and quality reviews, that there isn’t like a lot of stock in it. So I try not to have authors put too much stock into those consumer reviews because people are nuts on the internet.
My favorite is I did a launch event, I interviewed one of our authors for his launch event, and I said, as an opener, we’re going to read all of your one-star reviews that you’ve got on Amazon. So one of them was, “Worst time travel book ever.” Yes, because there’s no time travel in that book. Things like that. And so I will caution authors. My baseline is stay off Goodreads and stay off Amazon. If you have thicker skin and are more critical, there is a potential to learn something. I think we learn a lot from the two and three star reviews. Because those are people who didn’t hate your book, they just had some things about it. And if you have a thick skin, you could potentially learn something about your reader, could potentially learn something about your writing.
Crys: I’m the odd duck who purposely goes to Goodreads, the cesspool of Goodreads, and reads my one-stars for a giggle.
Dana: If that helps your process, then go for it. The other thing that’s interesting, I will say too, like we’re dealing with this now on one of our clients. She’s typically a crime fiction author. But her foray now is into, what her publisher is calling women’s fiction, even though I abhor that classification. I think it’s more romantic comedy. But what’s interesting is that the negative consumer reviews on NetGalley, the book hasn’t come out so this is on NetGalley, that there’s infidelity. And apparently that’s a no-no in romance
Crys: A hundred percent.
Dana: And so what’s interesting to me, she’s upset about it of course, but also I’m thinking I feel like there’s a lot of romcom readers who wouldn’t be bothered by infidelity. And so maybe this is good that’s out there, like in lieu of a trigger warning, so that we don’t want to sell it as a romance that meets all the genre convention. Straight line romance. I like that. I’ll use that. But it’s like a comedy. It’s a comedic tale with romantic elements.
Crys: Yeah. It’s so hard. Yeah. That’s the thing like with the branding, like exactly. Is it a romantic comedy? Is it comedy with romance? Like how do you position it? Which readers are going to like it? And then how do you share it to those readers, but not the other ones?
Dana: But that’s those reviews and the marketing copy and all those things. So they’ll know, okay, it’s a romcom. Like the tone and the style and the plot, it’s like an enemies to lovers trope, like it’s great. It’s the same with the cozy mystery readers, a cozy mystery is no sex, violence or cursing. Some cozy readers can deal with a damn here and there, or like a little drop of blood or whatever. You just have to make sure that’s well known upfront.
Crys: Yep. And there are like, yeah, genre conventions change. There are a little bit more rougher cozy mysteries coming up, but like, you know that those are going to be of younger readers. And it’s just interesting to see how the brand of the genre changes, not just of the authors as time goes on. It’s an ever growing idea of what your brand is. It’s not static.
Dana: Absolutely. And it goes back to, if you know who your reader is, like I think it all comes back to your reader. So you can say like you write in this genre for this age group or this type of thing, but ultimately you know your readers and if you are able to start with your target audience, it makes it a lot easier. Because the fact is most of us, you can jump in if you disagree, most of us read widely. I don’t know many people who like just read police procedures. Or just read romance. I know people who read widely, but with some barriers, right? They have deal breakers, their no-nos. But I think most of us read widely. And so I think if you just focus on your typical reader, rather than relying on the genre conventions, I think you’ll be in a much better place.
Crys: I would say that romance readers stick pretty tightly to romance most of the time. They might read a bunch of sub genres, but a lot of the whale readers specifically, the ones that are reading a book to five books a day. Because I have one reader who she posts her reading lists, and she posts them only for genre. She has different groups that she’s a part of, so she’ll post like the three to five that she’s read in my genre. But I know from a writer who writes in two genres under two different pen names that she does the same thing for her YA reading.
I don’t know how this woman does it. She homeschools five children and crochets. It must be audio books. I don’t know. She is wild. Not the normal. But there are readers who will stick pretty tightly into like, I like romance and I like all flavors of romance and that’s what I’m going to read. But there’s always some swing space, no matter what it is. Just like we’re talking about finding your core as author, like what are the things that tie you together, readers have those things too. They have the things that tie them together. So that’s why they tend to attach to one author because there’s things that that author always does that they like to follow.
Dana: Yeah. I think going back to the emotional piece of it is really key because I think you can get readers to swing if you play into the emotional piece.
So for example, my wife and I have very different television tastes. I like very few television shows if I’m being honest, but she likes a lot of them. And there’s some that she can’t watch. Some shows that I like that she’s like, I can’t watch this, it’s too stressful. But then I see what she’s watching, like she watches the new Nancy Drew and she watches Chicago Fire and like all these things. I’m like, these seem really stressful. There’s a lot of things going on. And she said, yeah, but I know everything turns out okay in the end, so I’ll deal with the stress. She’s like ,the stuff you watch, these are documentaries that do not end well, and so I don’t know that there’s a happy ending to that story. And so it’s too stressful for her to watch. And so that was like, oh, it’s actually not about that she likes bad TV, in my opinion.
She can deal with action and tension and a little bit of anxiety, as long as she knows that it’s going to end up all right. And I think that’s the appeal for romance, like you know there is a happily ever after. But you’re able to get readers to expand if you focus on the happily ever after aspect, even if there’s a crime element or a paranormal element or a comedic element to it.
So I think even drilling down with your readers of like why they’re drawn to it. Like, are we drawn to true crime because it’s just so out of anything we’ve ever experienced? Are we drawn to fantasy because the worlds of possibility are endless? And just really tapping into why we’re drawn to certain stories.
And for me, I’m drawn to different stories at different times. If I’ve read a few heavy books where it’s, these were good, but oh man, is it depressing and sad and full of weight, then I do need some romance and I need some humor and I need some lighter, cozy mystery to serve as a palette cleanser.
JP: That makes me think though, that that means your brand is your promise to the reader. It is your way of telling them, this is what to expect whenever I see what you write. For your wife, the promise is, things are going to end up okay. For you, reading those heavy things, it’s, I’m going to emotionally wreck you. And then you’re like, okay, I’m okay with this for today. I need to find a new brand for tomorrow, one that makes me feel lighthearted. But that’s like your promise to the reader then.
Dana: I love that, JP. I love that so much. Can I use it in the audio book update?
I’ll quote you.
Crys: Excellent. So this is a bit of a selfish question because this is where JP and I both find ourselves, but we have very strong ideas of who we are as fiction writers. That’s what we’ve been building over the last year, especially as we’ve been doing all this look into branding. And we’re doing the same thing with ourselves as nonfiction teachers, service providers, and neither of us has any interest in trying to craft two separate identities and websites to direct this.
So what are your thoughts/cautions on any of that?
Dana: That’s why I hate pen names. It’s like all the work that you do for one author, you have to do for your other alter ego. And it’s a lot of work. So what I think is you can have a both and. You can have a platform that informs readers and writers and the Venn diagram of that is there’s probably some overlap to that Venn diagram. There’s tons of readers who always wanted to write. Like, I see right now we’re in the midst of NaNoWriMo, and I see all the bloggers and bookstagrammers and readers who are participating in NaNoWriMo.
So it’s clear that there’s a draw that people are like, oh, I wonder if I could read this. And there is probably a part of a Venn diagram that has your readers, there’s probably a portion of them who are interested in being writers. There’s also a portion of them who are just interested in a behind the scenes look to process. Because if you’re not a writer, but a reader, it’s a magical thing. I know a lot of writers get annoyed when people ask, where do you get your ideas? The truth is it’s because readers don’t have ideas. I shouldn’t say that, many people don’t have ideas. They don’t think of it. Like I say things and my wife is like, you should make that into a book, you should write that book.
Crys: No, it’s a lot of work.
Dana: Exactly. It was just an idea. And then on the flip side, there’s a lot of people who might find you because of your writing courses and your teaching, who may be like, are these people legit, I’m going to read their books and see if they know what they’re talking about.
So I think that it’s possible to create content that will interest both. So you have to think about when you’re talking to people, my instinct says that if you’re talking to people, you want to be very specific on who this particular post is for, this particular newsletter is for. You don’t want to talk to everybody.
So if you’re going to let’s say, go live on Instagram and talk about the writing process, that’s when you say, ” Hey writers, we’re doing an IG live at this time.” You can say, Hey writers. So if I’m just a fan of your books, like, oh, that one’s not for me. I can skip that.
You can say, “Hey, romance fans. We’re talking about the new series.” And so I think like you can just direct it and people will self-select. People will say, okay, that one’s for me, that one’s not for me. And that’s totally fine. The dance becomes, if you try to talk to everybody at the same time, that’s where it gets difficult because you end up hedging your bets.
So I have, most of my followers on Instagram are writers or people in the publishing world, but I also have, because I’m active in the entrepreneurial space, I have a lot of entrepreneur people following me. So if I speak about writers, those entrepreneurs are going to be like, oh, unfollow, that’s not what I wanted. Because I also balance enough universal content or content about me, that it serves multiple people.
For email marketing, if you’re able to create different lists, I highly recommend it. Because it’s easier to get specific and you can always combine. If you have one really big announcement and you’re like, okay, the writers need to get this too, you can send it to both lists, not a big deal. But to have a list or a group or whatever verbiage your email marketing provider uses. There’s some way to segment who’s a writer and who’s a reader. That is a really great way to make sure it’s talking to your specific audience. But always do the dance of trying to get people onto both because I always find for whatever reason, a lot of authors find themselves on my entrepreneurial newsletter, which I don’t really send that often because it’s not my primary audience.
And I call people to introduce themselves when they get the first newsletter, I’ll say, introduce yourself. And they’ll be like, I’m a writer of these books. I’m like, Oh, don’t you want to be on my author newsletter? Didn’t you want to select author? And then we can funnel people that way. So I think there’s a constant calling people to introduce themselves, to share why they came and then try to funnel them and tag them appropriately.
Crys: Yeah. I love that.
Dana: You do not have to do an entirely different platform.
Crys: Yeah. I refuse to. That’s too much work.
JP: I’ve actually found that having the three keywords that I like to say on my website has driven some people to me for services that write in genres that I don’t write it. And it’s because of those three key words. So they may have a queer content is the main one here. And they really just want an editor who’s willing to say that as part of their brand, because that’s what they’re looking for in services. So I found that really interesting that I was able to bring in that audience offering services without actually having to write in that genre, because really it’s all about the topics.
Dana: People don’t necessarily want to work with you because you’re a great fantasy writer. They want to work with you because you know what you’re doing, you know how to tell a story. It’s not necessarily about genre. There’ll be maybe certain people who are like, oh, you don’t understand self-help or you don’t understand this and that’s fine. But ultimately people want to work with people. We have poetry clients, I don’t understand poetry, but I’ve taken those leaps because I like the people. I really think that they have a good sense of their audience. I think there is a marketing aspect, so like I fallen in love and now we have, I think, three poets on our roster, which is wild.
And I think that if you, yeah, if you like the people, you’re much more inclined to do business with them, even if it’s not something you typically read or a genre you write in.
Crys: We have one last question to wrap this up. And JP has it written down in better wording than my quick caveman notes, which is about the one thing. Do you want to repeat what you wrote?
JP: So for someone who is either just starting out or maybe has an Instagram that they only post videos for the Podcast and nothing else, that’s not specific at all. What would be the most single most important thing that they should do in regards to what they do for books, brands, and we’ll just toss in Podcast?
Dana: Get really clear on your author brand and share it everywhere. It should be the tagline on your webpage. It should be in the bio of your Instagram, you could even make a little video to post to your Instagram that gives your elevator pitch or your brand summary, should be in the signature of your email, when you introduce yourself at writer’s conferences it should include that. You should get really comfortable with saying your tagline or your brand regularly. Memorize it, get comfortable with it, and tell people everywhere. Because the fact is, we meet a lot of people and we’re also super impatient. And you only have a moment to make a lasting impression and be memorable.
If I see someone tagged JP on Instagram and I go to the feed and all I see is the Podcast, I’m like, okay, this is a feed for the Podcast. I can decide whether or not I want to do it, follow it or not. I don’t know what you write. I don’t know if I would like those books. If you have the little like pride flag I’d be like, okay, there’s like queer content probably, that’s cool.
I’m looking for an indicator. You want to help people make a decision. That’s the short way of answering that. So by putting your author brand everywhere, I can quickly make a decision about, do I want to engage with this person? So when I get what seem to be quite spammy emails, meaning like hello there dot, or we would like to collaborate, Dana. I could quickly see those are indicators that I’m like, okay, I don’t need to respond to this, delete.
If someone does tailor an email for me, I can go to their website. I can see, oh, these are the buzzwords. Nope. That’s not for me. Make a decision. So I think getting really clear on your author brand and putting it everywhere is going to help people make a decision whether or not you are right for them.
Crys: Excellent. Excellent. We did not prepare yet a question for our listeners. So I think what I’d like to ask everybody because we’ve done a lot of branding talk this year is: what confuses or scares you the most about figuring out your brand?
JP: Love it.
Crys: All right. Thank you so much, Dana, for joining us.
Dana: Thank you. This was so great. And thank you for reading the book and promoting the book. As authors, you know that it means a lot.
Crys: Oh, we appreciate when people put easy to understand education out there and recognizing simplicity, but not easy. So thank you so much.
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