Podcast appearances and mentions of bryan cohen

Scammers are targeting authors, a major audiobook platform is expanding into new countries, and a new tool promises to simplify website building for indie writers. Plus, I uncovered a lesser-known audiobook distribution option you'll want to keep your eye on. All that and more in this week's self-publishing news roundup—don't miss it. Book Award Pro - https://DaleLinks.com/BookAwardPro (affiliate link) Subscribe to The Self-Publishing Hub - https://TheSelfPublishingHub.com Subscribe to my email newsletter - https://DaleLinks.com/SignUp Join Channel Memberships - https://DaleLinks.com/Memberships Join Me on Discord - https://DaleLinks.com/Discord Check out my main YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/@DaleLRoberts My Books - https://DaleLinks.com/MyBooks Wanna tip me? Visit https://dalelroberts.gumroad.com/coffee. Sources: If You're an Author, Don't Fall for This Scam - https://youtu.be/V_ied17gNNE?si=Bo7VopHf3nBjp6zk Spotify Expands Its Audiobooks Offering To Listeners In Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein - https://newsroom.spotify.com/2025-04-15/spotify-expands-its-audiobooks-offering-to-listeners-in-germany-austria-switzerland-and-liechtenstein/ IngramSpark presents Tertulia for Authors - https://www.ingramspark.com/easy-author-websites-in-minutes-a-special-offer?e AMPlify Audiobooks - https://proaudiovoices.com/amplify-audiobook-distribution/  StoryOrigin presents Beyond Distribution: Building a Strategic Roadmap for Success - https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/lwVxieXsTvqjDQNpm1VWyw#/registration  Authors Guild presents How to Book Podcasts as an Author - https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_QSdnfY2uR0is1BUfku_tHw#/registration  AppSumo presents DepositPhotos - https://DaleLinks.com/DepositPhotos (affiliate link) The Secrets of Successful Author Branding w/ Bryan Cohen - https://selfpublishingadvice.org/podcast-successful-author-branding/ Author Nation tickets - https://DaleLinks.com/AuthorNation (affiliate link) Kitboga: Scammers Panic Exposed on Live Video - https://youtu.be/IKvs3InhTMo?si=ybPP8WITDJvX4wB6  Where noted, some outbound links financially benefit the channel through affiliate programs. I only endorse programs, products, or services I use and can stand confidently behind. These links do not affect your purchase price and greatly helps to building and growing this channel. Thanks in advance for understanding! - Dale L. Roberts

Join Dale L. Roberts as he interviews self-publishing expert Bryan Cohen on the foundations of author branding. Learn how genre clarity, strong sales copy, and Amazon ads work together to grow your fan base and boost book sales. It's a must-listen for new and mid-list authors. Show Notes: Best Page Forward Sell More Books Show Sponsor This podcast is proudly sponsored by Bookvault. Sell high-quality, print-on-demand books directly to readers worldwide and earn maximum royalties selling directly. Automate fulfillment and create stunning special editions with BookvaultBespoke. Visit Bookvault.app today for an instant quote. About the Host Dale L. Roberts is a self-publishing advocate, award-winning author, and video content creator. Dale's inherent passion for life fuels his self-publishing advocacy both in print and online. After publishing over 50 titles and becoming an international bestselling author on Amazon, Dale started his YouTube channel, Self-Publishing with Dale. Selected by Feedspot and LA Weekly as one of the best sources in self-publishing of 2022, Dale cemented his position as the indie-author community's go-to authority. You can find Dale on his website or YouTube.

Send us a textToday is a bonus episode of the Cops and Writers Podcast I shall name, Author Spotlight. Think of it as an offshoot of the Cops and Writers Podcast, with more of an emphasis on giving writers actionable help with the authorly side of things. Not a bunch of fluff or theories. Concrete things that will help you build your author career. Think of this as an experiment, for now.I am not abandoning the Cop side of Cops and Writers! I will continue to bring you the best police or criminal guests to entertain, compel, and inspire you. For today's episode, I brought in a friend of the show and a publishing heavy hitter, Bryan Cohen. Bryan Cohen runs Best Page Forward, a company that helps authors to learn, profit, sustain, and scale their author careers. He's helped over 30,000 authors through his Ad Challenges and his Sell More Books Show Podcast has run every week for over a decade. Bryan's Author Ad Agency manages ads for authors selling millions of dollars in book sales per year.Bryan knows his stuff and has helped me throughout my writing career! Please enjoy my chat with the most awesome, Bryan Cohen!In today's episode we discuss:.·      How much of the experience of doing standup comedy at a young age helped you later on in life? · Real-world experience! Many authors don't have it. How do you overcome that?·      Bryan's book, “How to Write a Sizzling Synopsis.”·      What are the most common errors you see in book descriptions and how do we get better at writing them? What are the “must have's” in a book description?·      Will AI take over your best page forward blurb writing business? Or will you use it to help your business?·      The Sell More Books Show Podcast. I have been a long time listener and it was super helpful when I was new to the biz. Long time with Jim, some time with Claire, and now the rotating hosts and cut down on the length of the show. What is the future of the show? Why get rid of Patreon?·      How do we grow sustainable author practices? It can be a grind, but there is no silver bullet. Every profitable author I know has worked their butts off, especially the first few years and built up a big catalogue. There is no getting around that. I think it comes down to your own definition of success and what you want out of writing. ·      Speaking of success, how are you helping authors build a six-figure business in publishing? Things authors are doing right, and not so right.·      Author ad challenge. What is it and how does it help?·      What are some best marketing practices for fiction/nonfiction/memoirs?  ·      A.I., the cows are out of the barn! Where do you see it going and as authors, how do we use it to help our author careers? The Atlantic Article regarding Meta taking author's work and training their AI with it.Visit Bryan over at Best Page Forward! Check out the new Cops and Writers YouTube channel!Check out my newest book, The Good Collar (Michael Quinn Vigilante Justice Series Book 1)!What would you do if you lost the one you loved the most? How far would you go to quench your thirst for vengeance?https://a.co/d/2UsJPbaSupport the show

Innovative Keynote Speaker, Pulitzer Prize Nominee, Executive Trainer & Bestselling Author,  Bryan Cohen joins Joseph to discuss how to tell your story, identify your blind spots and emulate success in your niche.  GUEST LINKS BestPageForward.net  SUBSCRIBE  First100K.com  Music By: Purple-Planet.com

In this week's episode, we take a look at seven attitude shifts for writers that will make them happier and more productive. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 207 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is June 28th, 2024 and today we are discussing seven important attitude shifts for writers. Before we get into all that, we'll have an update on my current writing projects and then we'll do Question of the Week and then we'll move over to our main topic. For current writing projects, I am still in the first phase of editing for Shield of Darkness. I'm on chapter 20 of what I think is going to end up being either 27 or 28. A couple of my chapters were quite long, so I need to keep splitting them in half as I edit to not have, like 9,000 word chapters. So things are going pretty well with that and I am hoping if all goes well that the book will be out the second week of July, probably after the 4th of July holiday, because releasing new books on the 4th of July is not a great idea. So hopefully before too much longer, we will have that book out. I'm also 31,000 words into Half-Orc Paladin and that will be my next book once Shield of Darkness is done and that will hopefully be out in very early August. I'm also 14,000 words into Ghost in the Tombs. I'm not sure when that's going to come out. I'm very much hoping to have it out before October, but we'll see how things go in the next couple of months. In audiobook news, recording for Wizard Thief and Stealth and Spells Online: Leveling is underway. I believe both narrators started on recording this week. Spells Online: Leveling will be narrated by C.J. McAllister and Wizard Thief will be narrated by Leanne Woodward and they both did the previous books in the respective series. So if you want a sample, you can listen to the audiobook of Half-Elven Thief and Stealth and Spells Online: Creation. 00:01:50 Question of the Week (note: This section contains spoilers for multiple movies, including Casablanca and Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan) Now let's move on to Question of the Week. It's time for a Question of the Week, which is designed to inspire interesting discussion of enjoyable topics. This week's topic: what is your favorite ending to a movie? No wrong answers, obviously. The inspiration for this was that I've been editing Shield of Darkness, so I've been thinking a lot about what makes a satisfying ending and what does not. Obviously, I want to have a satisfying ending. We had some good comments with this one. Our first comment is from Justin, who says: I'll go with an oldie, Casablanca. Rick saves Ilsa, the woman he loves, and puts her on the plane to Lisbon with her husband. He puts morals above love and tells her that she would regret staying with him. Then he and Renault head off to join the Resistance. “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” Archetypes so powerful that you've used them. I'd argue that the Gray Knight's ending with Ridmark, leaving Calliande and go with Kharlacht is a variation on this. That is interesting because I meant that was not at all in my head when I wrote the ending of Frostborn: The Gray Knight, and I don't think I've ever consciously written anything that I would say had been influenced by Casablanca, though of course I have seen it and it is a great movie, which again shows it's a very interesting that people's interpretation of a particular piece of artwork can often have no connection to what the artist intended when he or she created the artwork, but both views are often valid. Our next come is from Michael, who says: probably the ending to The Illusionist, which is very satisfying or more infamously, Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, which often reminds me of a story writing tip you have given in podcasts about good endings not necessarily needing to be a happy one. Our next comment is from Brandy, who says: the end of Serenity, where Summer Glau is checking everyone and stimming. Then her brother is badly hurt and you see that mental click and all the worry that she's going to hurt the one she cares about shifts to a feral “I will make this stop” and it's both feral and beautiful. When they break in, she's got this look like, yeah, test me. But she's perfectly willing to continue laying waste. It's just moving. Honestly having thought about it, go watch Hellsing Ultimate Abridged on YouTube. It's like a quarterly watch at my house, along a lot of true crime right now because my partner is trying to find an appropriately gruesome way to get rid of a character. I have to admit I've never actually seen Serenity or Hellsing myself, so maybe I'll put that on the to watch list. Our next comment is from John who says: Casablanca. Walking off at the end saying “this is beginning of a beautiful friendship.” Becca says V for Vendetta for me, I think. The ending scenes link key scenes, people, and phrases from earlier, then shows everyone from earlier, even those who died, and how they are linked to the change (with the voiceover). Our next comment is from Jenny, who says: no loose ends, no open to interpretation BS. Our next comment is from David who says: Son of Godzilla. When he goes back to his son in the snow-powerful. Scott says: The Mist. What a twist! Juana says: The Wrath of Khan. Fred says: Alien: Covenant. I think it's interesting that a couple of different people both said that Casablanca and Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan have very satisfying endings (I'm going to assume you've seen both those movies, so for next minute, actually next two minutes, if you haven't seen those movies, skip ahead If you want to avoid spoilers) because neither one of those movies has what would traditionally be called a happy ending. At the end of Casablanca, Rick doesn't get the girl, and at the end of Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan, Spock dies, saving the Enterprise. Of course, there's a level of happiness to the ending because Spock dies, but he dies saving the entire Enterprise crew from being destroyed by the Genesis device. And in Casablanca, Rick doesn't get the girl, but she goes off with her husband and escapes. The Nazis continue fighting, and Rick and Renault, the police inspector join forces to be in the Resistance to the Nazis in Casablanca, which in a sense is also a happy ending. So I think that reinforces yet again, that if you are writing something, you need to have an ending that emotionally satisfactorily resolves the conflicts in the of the story that were raised in the story itself. It doesn't have to be a happy ending, but does need to be a satisfying ending. And I think I think it's very fair to say that both Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan and Casablanca have satisfying endings. Also, as Jenny said, you probably want to avoid loose ends and open to interpretation endings, because they really do seem to irritate people. 00:05:44 Main Topic: Seven Important Attitude Shifts for Writers Now on to our main topic this week: seven important attitude shifts for writers. I decided to talk about this today because actually this I'm recording this on June the 28th and yesterday was the first presidential debate of the 2024 campaign season and without, you know, going into too much detail on that, you see a lot of reactions from people that are very gloom and doom and the country is doomed and the civilization is going to fall and so forth, which overlooks the fact that none of us know what is going to happen tomorrow and might be good or bad or maybe a little bit of both. That got me to thinking about how much of life is essentially mindset. Very often, regardless of one's circumstances, happiness and contentment can be a choice, even in very extreme and extenuating circumstances, and it can be a choice that you reject if you're doing quite well. Like in the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible, the writer of the book talks about how a grievous evil he has seen under the sun is that there's a man with riches and palaces and food, and yet he's unable to enjoy any of them or derive any happiness for them, because he was not making the choice to, you know, appreciate the good things he had. He did not, in essence, have the mindset to appreciate the good things he had in his life. I've noticed this is very common for writers, probably because writing is such an intellectual activity that takes place significantly inside of one's own head, even before you start putting down words on the page. It's very easy to be your own worst enemy as a writer and develop beliefs that limit your ability to be effective or successful. I remember a long time ago when I was in college, I knew a couple of different people who said they didn't want to try very hard at things because one of them said the world was so evil that she thought the world was going to come to an end by before she was 30 and another one said that due to climate change and pollution, the world was going to come to an end before she was 30 as well. Well, I was the same age as them and I have not been 30 years old for a significant span of time. They were both wrong. The world has continued on for good and bad, for the significant span of time since we all would have been 30 years old. That is a good example of a mindset being self-defeating and not being in accordance with reality and essentially limiting what you can do because after all, if the world is going to end when you are 30 years old, there's no point in trying in your 20s and then suddenly you are hitting the mid-40s and upper 50s and like, hey, the world didn't end 20 years ago. So with that in mind, here are seven self-destructive attitudes I think both new and more advanced writers should train themselves out of. #1: the first destructive attitude: I should just sign up for one of those publishing services for writers because I don't have the time to figure all this stuff out. That is both a bad attitude and a very bad idea in general, because many of these services are predatory and don't offer very much for the large amount of money they're charging. It's better to pay in time than money when it comes to self-publishing. There are a lot of free resources online to help you learn to self-publish. Good ones include David Gaughran's newsletter that he gives that away for free. He has several free e-books on self-publishing. Bryan Cohen has what he calls his quarterly 5 Day Amazon Ads Profit Challenge. That is a very good way to start learning the intricacies of Amazon ads. Joanna Penn has a wide variety of free YouTube videos on the process of getting started with self-publishing and I think she has a free ebook on the topic as well. So there are all these free resources that you can use to just commit the time to learning the beginnings of self-publishing and not fork over thousands of dollars to do something. I mean granted in life, there are areas where it is probably better to hire experts. For example, I recently had to have a large tree taken down near my house because it was diseased and the bark was falling off. It was rotten and I was worried that it was going to fall on the house. Theoretically, I could have broken out my electric chainsaw and done it myself, but that would have been a very bad idea. It was better to hire experts who know what they're doing to do it safely to bring the tree down. However, self-publishing is not a giant tree that might fall on your house. It is relatively easy to learn the basics and to do so without paying money and you avoid predatory self-publishing companies as you do because you have to be licensed to run a tree removal company, at least in this state. You do not have to be licensed to buy a website and call yourself a self-publishing expert. So for all those reasons, I think this attitude is a destructive and harmful one, and it would be better for you to learn at least the fundamentals of self-publishing before you pay anyone for it. #2: Our second destructive attitude is: I should focus on building sales and a following for my first book before I bother starting the next one. I think this is a self-destructive attitude because it's what I call the decorating the bathroom before you've done dug the foundation of the house problem. If you want to have a writing career, or if you want to be a writer, actually doing writing needs to be the foundation of that. But writers tend to procrastinate and channel themselves into sort of writing adjacent activities, like working about their work on their website, or trying to build social media followers or building their newsletter or the other kind of things that can be important and useful for selling books but are nonetheless less important than actually writing the next book. I say that's like worrying about how your bathroom will be decorated before you've even dug the foundation of your house. You should really dig the foundation of the house, build that house, and then worry how the bathroom is going to be decorated before you start worrying about that. It's also very rare for a writer of any genre to have massive success on a first book. Everyone thinks about these debut novelists who released their first books and were big hits. However, if you look at the overall population of writers, these people are vanishingly rare in terms of percentages, like lottery winners. They just got lucky and found an agent who believed in the book, who passed it on to an editor who believed in the book, and the publisher believed in the book and decided to put a big marketing push behind it. That was enough to turn the book into a hit. This can happen to you, but it's about as likely as going to the gas station, buying a lottery ticket, and becoming a billionaire. It's probably not going to happen, and you're better off putting in the work yourself. So with all that in mind, if you're worried about the sales of your first book rather than getting your energies too diverted on the various writing adjacent tasks like newsletters and social media and websites and so forth, perhaps writing the next book might be a better use of your time. #3: The third self-destructive attitude we're going to talk about is “Ads and marketing aren't for me.  My book should stand on its own merits.” I recently heard of someone who attended a training session about ads where one of the other attendees refused to do any ads for their book but were frustrated that their sales had stalled. The person in question simply did not see the causal connection between these two events. It's a very cruel and very real fact that plenty of great books are never read because people never find them. It's important not to view ads as something dirty or shifty or uncouth. If you feel that way, you're probably doing them wrong. Ads are just a simple way to connect people with books that they're excited to read. It's as simple as that. You want to use ads as a tool where you will find the right reader for your specific book. It is intimidating to learn how ads work. I'd say Facebook is the most complicated and Amazon is the least complicated, but that's just matters of degree because they're both pretty complicated. There are free programs like Bryan Cohen's Author Ad Challenge for learning how Amazon ads work for writers, and this includes forums for asking questions and getting more help. As with just learning the basics of self-publishing, there are a lot of free resources and good resources out there that you can use to give yourself at least a basic competency with ads. That would be very helpful for your writing career. #4: Our 4th self-destructive attitude: It's a waste to spend money on ads. This can be true, with the caveat it's a waste to spend money on ads if you don't know what you're doing. It is very easy to aimlessly spend large amounts of money on Facebook and Bookbub ads. While it's much harder to aimlessly spend money on Amazon ads, you can do it. Taking the time to learn how these ads work and then starting out slowly and gradually building up the budgets is crucial to not wasting money. Amazon, Facebook, and BookBub's daily limits make it easy to budget how much you are spending on ads. Another reason people often think it's a waste to spend money on ads is because their targeting is way too broad. Like you hear about people saying Facebook ads don't work, and then you dig into their story a bit more and it turns out they set their category to “books” and that's it. They're just targeting everyone who liked books. That is indeed a waste of money, because with advertising in general and book marketing in particular, the more specific you can get your targeting down, the better you will do. This is most easily demonstrated in romance, where it's common for romance readers describe books as like, you know, a slow burn, enemies to lovers, sweet romance with a happily ever after ending. Which is like four different story tropes, but that's very commonly how romance authors talk about books. So if you wrote a book like that, you can dial down the advertising enough to target people who are just interested in that kind of book through comp authors or interests, then your ads have a much higher chance of being successful, so bear that in mind. It's only a waste to spend money on ads if you don't know what you're doing, and if your targeting isn't right. #5: The 5th destructive attitude is: if that my book wasn't successful right away, I'm a failure as a writer. No one ever does anything right the first time and you should beat yourself up over it. Additionally, many books do well after a re-edit, title change, or cover change. It's possible your book just needs one of those. I mean, I've written 150 novels and I still have that kind of thing.  I originally called my LitRPG series Sevenfold Sword Online, but that confused people with because they thought it was attached to the Sevenfold Sword series. Earlier this year I retitled it to Stealth and Spells Online, and it's done quite a bit better since that title change. The reality is that most first books don't sell well. It doesn't mean that you should give up. The solution is to keep writing. Keep reading books in your genre and keep learning what readers want to read. It's important to keep experimenting and keep trying new things. I'm currently reading a history of the Dune series as a franchise. Based on Frank Herbert's earlier career, you would not predict that he would have written one of the classics of sci-fi literature. In fact, what he was originally writing about that turned into Dune was a nonfiction article about how the state of Oregon was trying to control the sand dunes in the eastern part of the state and keep them from overrunning other lands. That was what Dune originally was, a nonfiction article about sand dune management and then he wasn't able to sell that article. He rewrote it into a fictional short story and it gradually turned into Dune. There's a joke that every overnight success takes 10 to 20 years to prepare, and it definitely seems to have been true in Frank Herbert's case. If you keep on writing, perhaps that will be true of you as well. #6: Self-destructive attitude number six: it's not worth self-publishing because people won't respect my book unless it's traditionally published. I always love this one because the prestige of being traditionally published is great. But do you know what prestige doesn't do? Pay bills! Would you rather have the prestige or the money and full control of your works? Like earlier this episode, I mentioned that I had to pay some people to bring a tree down in my yard. Can you imagine walking up to a bunch of guys and with chainsaws and telling them, hey, I'm going to pay with the prestige of being traditionally published, but not actual money? That would not work out very well. I have in fact been traditionally published a very long time ago and let me tell you, the money of self-publishing is so much better than the prestige of being traditionally published. Full control of your work and money, in my opinion, is much better than prestige. Additionally, if you do get the prestige of traditional publishing, you are paying for it quite a bit. Traditional publishing has been providing their authors with increasingly less editing, marketing, and creative control and are prone to giving you increasingly restrictive contracts in return. Royalties may take a very long time to arrive and more realistically, never arrive at all as many books don't pay out past their initial advance. Traditionally published authors are taking on an increasing amount of the workload of marketing and find that their books are often filled with typos because less attention and staffing are being provided to the editorial departments. Prestige is really the main thing that traditional publishing is still offering, and there's also the problem that that many people in traditional publishing are unethical. I mean obviously self-publishing has its fair share of scammers as well, but remember, traditional publishing is supposed to have prestige. Prestige doesn't keep out the scammers. Recently there was a meltdown on Twitter where a literary agent posted that she just read a great book and she liked the idea but she didn't like the author and so she thought about giving the idea of the book to another one of her authors to write for her. I suspect she was saying that jokingly, but it didn't come across that way and so all of literary Twitter fell upon her head. She followed the predictable course of deleting all her social media accounts and then getting fired from the agency from which she worked. If you talk to experienced traditional published writers off the record, very often they will admit that literary agents are often very sketchy people. So if you are self-published, one of the big advantages is that you don't have to deal with that. #7: The seventh and final most self-destructive attitude: I need to quit my day job to be a real writer. The answer to that is no, you don't. Just a few examples of authors who kept their day jobs: Franz Kafka worked in an insurance company, Anthony Trollope was a postal clerk who wrote for 2 hours in the morning every day before he went to work, and Toni Morrison was an editor. I don't think anyone in their right mind would claim that Franz Kafka, Anthony Trollope, and Toni Morrison were not real writers. Real writers usually still have a full-time job. The reality is that very few writers earn an income on their own larger than a salary and work benefits would be or if they do, they're not able to sustain that level of income over the span of their career. In an Author's Guild survey from a few years ago, even full-time authors were reporting a median yearly income of $20,300. There's nothing wrong with not being a full-time writer and nothing wrong with just doing writing as a side hustle that you enjoy. Now you might think this is hypocritical. Jonathan Moeller, you yourself are a full-time writer and have been for the last eight years. For my part, I didn't actually want to become a full-time writer at first. I found that I was obliged to do so because I needed to move for family reasons. It did work out in my case. And to be fair to myself, I have definitely hustled doing that. I mean, in the last eight years I've written like 80 new novels and at least half a dozen complete series in that time. Most days I am writing from about 7:30 in the morning to 5:00 in the afternoon with breaks for lunch and exercise and so forth. Then there's all the business stuff on the side and then audiobooks as well. So you can be a full time writer, but it is definitely a lot of work, which is what I've been doing for the last eight years. By no means should you consider yourself not to be a real writer if you also have a full-time job. If I had not been obliged to move for family circumstances, I probably would have kept my full-time job until my employer ran out of money (which would have been a real possibility a few years ago). So there we are, seven self-destructive attitudes that I think writers would do well to remove from their minds. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A quick note of thanks to my transcriptionist for helping me to research and pull together a list for this episode. A reminder that you that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

Matty Dalrymple talks with Bryan Cohen about WHAT HAS CHANGED AND STAYED THE SAME WITH AMAZON ADS, including ads as a research tool; whether Amazon product pages are actually getting busier; the impact of A+ content; the advice to go deep rather than wide on ad platforms; how AI is (or might be) changing the ad game; budgeting for beginners; and whether one book is enough for an ad campaign.   Interview video at https://youtu.be/1zBrNjHc7tk   Show notes (including transcript) at https://www.theindyauthor.com/232---what-has-changed-and-stayed-the-same-with-amazon-ads.html   If you find the information in this video useful, please consider supporting The Indy Author! https://www.patreon.com/theindyauthor https://www.buymeacoffee.com/mattydalrymple   Bryan Cohen is the CEO of Best Page Forward and Author Ad School. He's helped over 30,000 authors learn ads through his 5-Day Author Ad Profit Challenge. He also runs the Author Ad Agency, which helps full-time authors to scale up their self-publishing earnings. He lives in North Carolina with his wife, daughter, and cat.   Matty Dalrymple is the author of the Lizzy Ballard Thrillers, beginning with ROCK PAPER SCISSORS; the Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels, beginning with THE SENSE OF DEATH; and the Ann Kinnear Suspense Shorts. She is a member of International Thriller Writers and Sisters in Crime. Matty also writes, speaks, and consults on the writing craft and the publishing voyage, and shares what she's learned on THE INDY AUTHOR PODCAST. She has written books on the business of short fiction and podcasting for authors; her articles have appeared in "Writer's Digest" magazine. She is a member of the Alliance of Independent Authors.

The art of blurbs, navigating Amazon Ads, and seeking help . . . Writing is a lonely craft, but it doesn't have to be. In this week's episode, Bryan Cohen gets candid about the necessity of help-seeking in the author space, sharing personal stories of how collaboration and networking transformed his business. He opens up about his personal journey, the lessons he learned, and his secret sauce for sustaining successful ventures.Bryan Cohen is the founder of Author Ad School, Best Page Forward, and the Author Ad Agency. He's also the co-host of The Sell More Books Show podcast which just finished its 500th consecutive week! Whether you're a novice in the publishing world or a seasoned author, the insights from this episode can be the game changer you've been waiting for. Question of the Week: How have you incorporated feedback and outside help into your author business?Follow Us! Bryan CohenWebsite: https://bestpageforward.netFacebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2230194167089012The Author Wheel:Website: www.AuthorWheel.comFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/AuthorWheelCommunity Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/856705052538168Greta Boris:Website: www.GretaBoris.comFacebook: @GretaBorisAuthorInstagram: @GretaBorisMegan Haskell:Website: www.MeganHaskell.comFacebook & Instagram: @MeganHaskellAuthorTikTok: @AuthorMeganHaskellSubstack: https://meganhaskellauthor.substack.com Support the showFREE Mini Email CourseHave you ever struggled to explain to others exactly what you write? Or wondered which of the many fiction ideas running through your brain you should tackle? If so, The Author Wheel's new mini-course might be your solution. 7 Days to Clarity: Uncover Your Author Purpose will help you uncover your core writing motivations, avoid shiny-thing syndrome, and create clear marketing language. Each daily email will lead you step by step in defining your author brand, crafting a mission statement, and distilling that statement into a pithy tagline. And, best of all, it's free. Click here to learn more!

Ever wondered how being neurodivergent might affect your writing life? It's a topic that's close to many of our hearts but often stays in the shadows. Neurodivergence shapes our creativity, challenges, and even our storytelling styles in unique ways. It's all about embracing those differences and turning them into strengths in our author journeys. In this episode of the Author Revolution Podcast, I'm chatting with the amazing Quinn Ward, known from Bryan Cohen's Author Ad School and Write Your Own Path. Quinn's got some incredible insights on being a neurodivergent author. They're sharing personal experiences, practical tips, and how to navigate the writing world with neurodiversity as your superpower. Trust me, you won't want to miss this!

Amazon KDP had four BIG updates rolling out about their community tab, pricing, Kindle Unlimited pricing, and the KDP Select Global Fund. Also, TikTok filed for a trademark of a future publishing company. Publisher Rocket now gets MORE keyword data from Amazon. And, eBookFairs now has a service to generate your book descriptions. All that and more in this week's news! Join my community at: Discord - http://dalelinks.com/discord  Sources: Miblart Giveaway - https://DaleLinks.com/Giveaway  Things to do if your book has been pirated - https://goodereader.com/blog/technology/things-to-do-if-your-book-has-been-pirated  Fictionary - https://fictionary.co Story marketing vs. book marketing: What's the difference? - https://bookawardpro.com/blog/story-marketing-vs-book-marketing-whats-the-difference/  PublishDrive - https://DaleLinks.com/PublishDrive (referral link) How to Tune Up Your Marketing with the Author Marketing Audit - https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/how-to-tune-up-your-marketing-with-the-author-marketing-audit-reedsy-live-tickets-630771734237 The Hot Sheet - https://hotsheetpub.com Bryan Cohen on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@bryanhelpsauthors/video/7232042304113118510 8th Note Press trademark filing - https://lunch.publishersmarketplace.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/8th-Note-Press_Trademark-Electronic-Search-System-TESS.pdf  The Kindle Storyteller Award 2023 - https://www.amazon.co.uk/b?ie=UTF8&node=12061299031 KDP Community tab gets an overhaul - https://www.kdpcommunity.com/s/?language=en_US KDP Print Costs Increase - https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/GPGVYM9KWTYLD2GD Publisher Rocket - https://DaleLinks.com/Rocket (affiliate link) eBookFairs - https://DaleLinks.com/eBookFairs (affiliate link) eBookFairs Book Blurb Generator - https://vimeo.com/826630628 Where noted, some outbound links financially benefit the channel through affiliate programs. I only endorse programs, products, or services I use and can stand confidently behind. These links do not affect your purchase price and greatly helps to building and growing this channel. Thanks in advance for understanding! - Dale L. Roberts

Curious about starting a side hustle but don't have enough time? Too burnt out? Have a million other things to finish first? If so, tune in to On Point! This week's guest, Bryan Cohen, is the founder of Amazon Ad School, CEO of Best Page Forward & a Best-Selling Author who helps others tackle these all-too-common hurdles on their way to extra income. Learn how to determine which sacrifices are worth it and discover best practices to navigate mental blocks, work with no distractions, set goals, and get into a routine system to achieve success. Speaking from his experience, Cohen's insights can apply to all aspects of life including health, relationships, careers, and of course, money! Click Here to find your salon, spa, or fitness experience on Vagaro! Click Here to check out our website!

Find out the latest in the world of self-publishing. Amazon Advertising launches new certification course for video ads. KDP author and ads expert, Bryan Cohen, teams with Amazon Ads for a webinar. Bowker sells ISBNs in the millions, but have seen a drop in total sales since 2020. And, so much more!

Bryan Cohen is Da Guru when it comes to selling your book with Amazon ads. In this practical interview, Bryan gives us the inside scoop on how self-published authors can use Amazon ads to promote their books and other products and services. Bryan, the founder of "Author Ad School," is a USA Today bestselling author. He is also CEO of "Best Page Forward" and the author of many fiction and nonfiction books.   Great Moments in the Episode (4.10) How Bryan used fictionalized characters to engage the reader on an emotional level with his nonfiction books (6:20) Bryan's writing rituals (9:15) Bryan explains what an Amazon ad is and how it works (14:00) How Amazon is unique in that if you set a low enough bid, Amazon won't spend all your budget (19:19) How specific targeting helps you find the right audience for your book, including book titles, author names, and key words (22:34) How writing a fiction series can benefit you with Amazon ads (24:34) How nonfiction authors can promote courses and services with Amazon ads (26:59) The importance of growing your email list (29:30) Using a QR code in your nonfiction book to get people to visit your website (30:08) How Bryan thinks about social media as it relates to his publishing strategy (33:59) Where to go to create your first Amazon ad (35:50) Managing your expectations with your first Amazon ads   (41:08) Words of the Episode Obdurate Ineffable   90 Day Cohort Coaching Intensives Be sure to check out our 90 day cohort coaching intensives for writers who want professional editorial expertise to complete their writing project. Visit https://www.journeysixty6.com/cohort-coaching-intensives for more information.   Follow Journey Sixty6 https://www.journeysixty6.com/ https://www.youtube.com/@journeysixty6writingforpub https://www.facebook.com/journeysixty6 https://www.instagram.com/journeysixty6/   About Bryan Cohen Podcast: https://www.sellmorebooksshow.com/ How to Get Started with Amazon ads: https://www.authorsadvertise.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bryancohenblurbs/ Website: https://bryancohen.com/

This week we have a great show in store for you. Leave us a review on Apple Podcast and answer the Question of the Week in the comment section. Claire's book, Reclaim Your Author Career, is available: www.books2read.com/RYAC. Guest, Chelle Honiker of indieauthormagazine.com and Authortechsummit.com. Top Tips of the week include new features in Vellum that make your book's messaging clear, how our own Bryan Cohen has Amazon's official stamp of approval, if you need author copies of your print books, you need to order today, what Amazon's layoffs mean to the publishing business, and TikTok took our advice and started selling direct! The 5 News stories that matter most to indies this week include news about Ingram's new ad platform, how Google is giving Spotify what Apple won't, why authors are abandoning Twitter and starting from scratch, the latest scams hitting Amazon authors, and to sell your books and serials by chapter, books, or subscription. Question of the week: What are you plans for selling direct? What does that look like specifically?

This week, Holly talks with bestselling author Sarah Painter about the publishing strategy known as "wide" publishing. They discuss: Making smart cover choices Researching the other retailers Having a wide mindset Reaching readers beyond Amazon And much more Get the full show notes at www.unstoppableauthors.com Also mentioned in this episode, Bryan Cohen's Amazon Ads Profit Challenge. Join the free mini-course starting 12th October 2022 here: https://bryancohen.lpages.co/oct22/

In this educational interview with Bryan Cohen, he talks to us about running ads for our fiction books, specifically on Amazon. We talk about: 1) Why waiting until you have 3-5 books published to run ads might be bad advice 2) The most important stats for running Amazon Ads 3) How to use your right brain creativity in marketing 4) What to do if you aren't interested in learning ads 5) Whether Bryan should write a modern history of self-publishing And much more! So give today's interview a watch to find out if Amazon ads might serve you and your books on your author journey! Free PDF: 10 Plot-Thickening Events that Every Fiction Best Seller Includes: https://bit.ly/10Plot Connect With Me on Social Media: Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/theprolificauthor Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_prolificauthor Tik Tok (For Authors): https://www.tiktok.com/@theprolificauthor For Authors: Get my Crafting Fiction 101 course, which gives you all the basic elements of great stories you'll need to write compelling fiction: https://bit.ly/CraftingFiction Author Email Nurture Sequences That Sell Course: https://faba.authorlkhill.com/offers/awxzZzbn Free PDF: 10 Plot-Thickening Events that Every Fiction Best Seller Includes: https://bit.ly/10Plot (Where possible, I use affiliate links.) Check out Convertkit, the Number One Email Autoresponder for Authors: https://bit.ly/TPAEmail

Last week's Cover Clinic was so much fun, we thought why not continue the good times with a Blurb Clinic! Join the ladies as they discuss what makes a good blurb, what makes a bad blurb, and what you need to make yours better! They'll also look at their own blurbs as well as those of some volunteer listeners, so you're going to want to tune in for this episode!30 Days of Writing Sprint Prompts: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08MGR7431Our new Facebook Group! https://www.facebook.com/groups/liste...Visit our website: https://christianindiewriters.net/Learn more about the hosts...Jamie: https://writingshorts.net/Jenifer: https://jenifercarlltong.com/Tina: https://christinacattane.com/Rhonda: http://ddbouman.com

 Hello Writers and Crafters! I'm Valerie Ihsan, And I'm Erick Mertz, and this is Episode 76 of the podcast and it's July 14, 2022 as we record this. Main Topic: Marketing You Can Do While Drafting Your Book    This podcast is sponsored by our patrons at Patreon.com/valerieihsan. For as low as a $1/mo, you can get a shout out on the podcast and we can make announcements for you on the podcast. At other tiers, the benefits increase--free books, accountability Zoom calls, scene analysis, mastermind calls, and even free Writer Craft retreat tickets. Become a patron of the arts at Patreon.com/valerieihsan.      All marketing plans will be different based on your plans for the book, your career, and your personality, and--to some degree--your budget.   1) First, you'll need to decide what your plan is for this book and for any future books you plan to write. And you'll need to define TO YOU what success would look like for this particular book and also for your writing career. Do you want to write any more books? Do you want to be award-winning? Do you want to make a living with your writing? Et cetera. The answers to these types of questions will determine the answers to your other questions. Namely, how to market and promote your book(s).   It's also important to note that if your goal is to make a living with your writing, you cannot do that with book sales from one book. Think, 10 or 20, or more. UNLESS, you are also providing author services, like editing or retreats or teaching.   2) Paid Advertising. It's the way to go these days. It is a Pay to Play Market now. There are 8 million titles on Amazon alone.    The three top paid ads sites are BookBub, Facebook, and Amazon Ads. Additionally, there are FreeBooksy and BargainBooksy. As well as others. (For instance, if your e-book is published on the Kobo platform, there is a Promotions tab on your dashboard that enables you to partake in their promo days.)   Each of the ads platforms have different rules and suggested methods of operation. There are loads of books and other resources on all of them. (Help! My Facebook Ads Suck by Mal Cooper; Mastering Amazon Ads by Brian Meeks; Bookbub Ads by David Gaughrin; Bryan Cohen has an Amazon Ads School on his Instagram site @bryancohenblurbs--just to name a few.)   That said, up until very recently--and is still considered truth by many--the industry "standard" advice for advertising for authors with less than three to five books in one series is to NOT advertise. The return on your investment won't pan out very well with nowhere for the reader to go after reading your one book. (I don't know how many books you've published.) If an author has several books, then paying for an ad on one book can often lead a reader to reading the other books in an author's backlist, thereby making the cost of the ad click go much farther.   3) I believe the best thing an author can do to build excitement about their books is to write the next book. Seriously. If you look at it like any other business, a business owner (read: bookseller) needs to create more than one product for their store. They need to create free content marketing for their audience and to build a(n) [author] brand through engagement with their [readers] customers.   The most important first step in getting people to buy your product is to get readers to know it exists. That comes with getting on podcast interviews, going to networking events, doing book readings, teaching workshops at libraries, etc. That's Attract Marketing. Letting people know you are out there.   Then, you Engage with them. Write a blog, or do a podcast, or create some other way of engaging with the people that now know you exist, but still have not become a customer of yours (like get them on your mailing list).   Then, you Nurture them. That's where they begin to Know, Like, and Trust you. Still before they buy! This is the time when you'd be posting regular content for them in a newsletter or FB Live posts, or pictures of your life on Instagram.   Only then can you Invite them to buy.    And, in order to keep them as an ongoing client [reader], you must Delight them. Create the best book(s) possible and they'll come back for the next one and tell their friends.   This process isn't something you do in a week or even a month. It's a long-term strategy. It's part of the author life and part of our job. Have fun with it.    *** I hope some of that was useful and has given you some ideas for your marketing/promotional plans.   Another resource I would recommend is How to Market Your Book by Joanna Penn.   I'M READING: The Sixth Wicked Child Erick's Reading: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir Next episode: Erick's Coaching Session, Part 2   Resources:  Productivity for Creative People: How to Get Creative Work Done in an "Always on" World by Mark McGuiness Essentialism by Greg McKeown Lore podcast (and Prime series)   Announcements:   I wanted to announce that my friend, colleague, and mentor, J Thorn, just launched his new book, Writing Scenes.  I'm especially excited about this because I contributed to the making of this book in several ways, and I feel quite proud of all I did. One of the example scenes in the book is one I submitted from my current work in progress (my memoir). I narrated that scene (in the Before and After example) in the audiobook. And I edited the book for J. It would tickle me if you picked up the book for yourself. Here's the link: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/three-story-method-writing-scenes    Valerie's Services: https://valerieihsan.com Valerie's Author Site: https://valerieihsanauthor.com Valerie's Facebook Page and Instagram account   Erick's Services: https://erickmertzwriting.com Erick's free book on Ghostwriting: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cexki4kp5n Erick's Author Site: https://erickmertzauthor.com Erick's Facebook Page and Instagram account   Writer Craft Facebook Group The Author Life Community   Patreon: https://patreon.com/valerieihsan Passion Planner: https://bit.ly/3AUiJUx (affiliate link) ProWriting Aid: https://prowritingaid.com/?afid=9378 (affiliate link)

I'm happy to have returning guest Bryan Cohen on today's show. Bryan is the creator of Author Ad School, the founder of author copywriting agency Best Page Forward, and the MC of Self Publishing Live. He's also an author with eight novels self-published and over 150,000 books sold, as well as the co-host of The Sell More Books Show, a weekly podcast for self-published authors​In today's episode, we discuss:·      The hottest trends in book publishing, including TikTok.·      The long-running Sell More Books Show Podcast.·      Indie authors selling direct.·      Bryan's experience as a part of Pat Flynn's mastermind group.·      The rewards and drawbacks of owning your own company.·      Building a career around a lifestyle.·      Best practices for advertising your books.·      Dealing with rejection. ·      Bryan's success with his Kickstarter projects, including best practices.·      The importance of “Superfans!” And, how to keep them. All of this and more on today's episode of the Cops and Writers podcast.Check out Bryan on Author Ad School.Visit Bryan at his website. Enjoy the Cops and Writer's book series.Please visit the Cops and Writers website.If you have a question for the sarge, hit him up at his email.Join the fun at the Cops and Writers Facebook groupWould you like to buy me a coffee?Support the show

When Karen McQuestion's publisher rejected her book, THE MOONLIGHT CHILD, she decided to self-publish it, then poured on the marketing to give it every advantage. Eventually the novel reached the #1 spot on the Amazon Kindle charts and was the #3 bestseller in Kindle for 2021. Listen in as she shares her strategies and chats with Tess about book marketing in general.  Mentioned during the podcast:Novelist and Editor Barbara Taylor Sissel: https://barbarataylorsissel.com/Kindlepreneur Dave Chessen: https://kindlepreneur.com/ BKlink--to check book categories: https://bit.ly/3xCf64B Marketing guru David Gaughran: https://davidgaughran.com/ Bryan Cohen's Amazon Ads course: https://bryancohen.com/

Mark interviews Bryan Cohen who runs Author Ad School, Best Page Forward, and co-hosts The Sell More Books Show. Prior to the interview, Mark thanks his patrons, reads comments, offers a personal update and shares a word about this episode's sponsor. You can learn more about how you can get your work distributed to retailers and library systems around the world at starkreflections.ca/Findaway. During their chat, Mark and Bryan talk about: Bryan's "Best Page Forward" book blurb writing business that started in 2016 Slowly growing the business by starting off with "bargain basement" pricing, and then eventually growing to having 8 writers and having written more than 5000 book descriptions The misconception that it's necessary for a blurb writer to have to read the book they are writing about Adding instructions for Amazon and Facebook ads to his repertoire The fact that even people who work on the Amazon Ads product can find it complex and confusing The quarterly free Amazon Ad Challenges that Bryan has been running for the past couple of years The hands-on approach to this challenge that begins right at step-one Who these free challenges and the full courses are for Opportunities that exist within email marketing The forthcoming book that Bryan is working on that follows the "story" of helping a fictional author named Nina Bryan's long-running podcast The Sell More Books Show The importance of regularly scheduled down-time for one's mental and physical health A little bit about Bryan's own personal writing career Bryan's final "hot potato of wisdom" (a shtick from The Sell More Books Show) And more... After the interview Mark reflects on the importance of downtown for an author, as well as Bryan's reminder about starting off focusing on one writing thing and one marketing thing.   Links of Interest: Bryan Cohen's Website Best Page Forward Sell More Books Show Podcast Bryan's Kick Your Email Kickstarter Episode 251 - The Author Journey with C.J. Anaya Findaway Voices Buy Mark a Coffee Patreon for Stark Reflections Best Book Ever Podcast Lovers Moon Podcast The Relaxed Author Buy eBook Direct Buy Audiobook Direct Publishing Pitfalls for Authors An Author's Guide to Working with Libraries & Bookstores Wide for the Win Mark's Canadian Werewolf Books This Time Around (Short Story) A Canadian Werewolf in New York Stowe Away (Novella) Fear and Longing in Los Angeles Fright Nights, Big City Lover's Moon   Bryan Cohen runs Author Ad School, Best Page Forward, and co-hosts The Sell More Books Show. He's helped over 30,000 authors through his free Ad Challenges and has sold 140,000 copies of his own books as well.   The introductory, end, and bumper music for this podcast (“Laser Groove”) was composed and produced by Kevin MacLeod of www.incompetech.com and is Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 

How can you manage a successful Kickstarter campaign without burning out? How can you expand into multiple streams of income? Bryan Cohen talks about crowdfunding, changes in his business model, and more. In the intro, 10th year of double-digit audiobook growth [Publishing Perspectives]; Spotify's plans for audiobook expansion [Spotify]; Free webinars for audiobook month [FindawayVoices]; […] The post Kickstarter And Multiple Streams Of Non-Fiction Income With Bryan Cohen first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Mark has a conversation with Claire Taylor, founder and owner of FFS Media, about her writing, about story alignment, and about a creep problem that exists in the indie publishing industry. Prior to the main content, Mark shares some randomly drawn prizes for three of his Patrons (two copies of a book on worldbuilding by Angeline Trevena and a virtual course by Claire Taylor), a personal update, and a word about this episode's sponsor. You can learn more about how you can get your work distributed to retailers and library systems around the world at starkreflections.ca/Findaway. During their conversation, Mark and Claire talk about: How long it has been since the last time they saw one another in person due to that "thing that happened" (a global pandemic) Claire's start on The Sell More Books Show Podcast (with co-host Bryan Cohen) in Jan 2020 and the importance of how the two hosts can raise different points to bring perspective to the news and tips The challenge of reading news articles aloud live Claire's FFS media company and how her story alignment work first started The Enneagram (a typology system that describes human personality as a number of interconnected personality types) that Claire uses for her story alignment process Mark's mispronunciation of Enneagram as angiogram Aligning characters to their core motivations The different genres and series novels that Claire writes in. H. Claire Taylor as a writer of contemporary comedy novels; H. Clarie Taylor co-authoring with Brock Bloodworth (a pseudonym for Claire) writing a paranormal cop comedy adventure series; Nova Nelson writing cozy mysteries and magical Renaissance fiction; CLaire Feeny writing serial killer fiction Claire's passion for Renaissance Fairs Leveraging her husband's experience as a police officer (and soon to be detective) in making her cop fiction more realistic The culmination of having been writing since May 2015 Learning the importance of rest and changing her previous habits of being a chronic over-achiever The origin of Claire's "The Waffling" series of videos and its relation to her giving in to peer pressure Claire's social media "Hot Walks" Being at the two year anniversary of when everything shut-down/locked-down for "two weeks" Her publishing strategy of "Exclusive to Amazon Kindle" VS "Wide" The genesis for Clarie's March 14, 2022 Medium article "Indie Publishing Has a Creep Problem" How important it is for men to be aware that this type of thing is happening and how it's not going to be reported, and why women don't report it The importance of paying attention to and focusing on that "sixth sense" of just knowing something is wrong, or the body language being witnessed seems off How woman are often programed to diminish such an experience and to also gaslight themselves - so having someone acknowledge the wrong taking place can be extremely beneficial to them in validating the experience Claire's own Enneagram type and how that aligns with her deep-rooted satisfaction in doing what is right and what needs to be done And more... After the interview Mark shares a brief reflection about something that Claire said that really stuck with him. "My fear of seeming awkward in a situation is less important than the possibility of a woman being in a bad situation I haven't intervened in."   He also shares that the article Claire published to Medium will be the main content of Episode 241 which will be published almost immediately after Episode 240.   Links of Interest: Claire Taylor's Website 5 Day Indie Author Alignment Course (FREE - Virtual) Supercharge Your Story Course (Virtual) Indie Publishing Has a Creep Problem (Medium Article) EP 237 - Building and Destroying Worlds with Angeline Trevena Findaway Voices Findaway Voices - Title Discount Promo Superstars Writing Seminars Buy Mark a Coffee Patreon for Stark Reflections The Relaxed Author Buy eBook Direct Buy Audiobook Direct Publishing Pitfalls for Authors An Author's Guide to Working with Libraries & Bookstores Wide for the Win Mark's Canadian Werewolf Books This Time Around (Short Story) A Canadian Werewolf in New York Stowe Away (Novella) Fear and Longing in Los Angeles Fright Nights, Big City Lover's Moon   Claire Taylor is the founder and owner of FFS Media. She also leads the Story Alignment services offered by FFS Media. With over a dozen top-selling humor novels published (and many more on the way), she can write the crap out of a funny book. And she can help you bring out the humor in your story, too, without sacrificing a compelling narrative or strong character development. She has professionally edited 200+ fiction manuscripts, with experience in every stage of the editing process from outline evaluation to proofreading. Her passion lies in telling a story that sticks with readers long after they finish the last page, and she loves helping others achieve that goal. The introductory, end, and bumper music for this podcast (“Laser Groove”) was composed and produced by Kevin MacLeod of www.incompetech.com and is Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 

Welcome to episode 171 of the Creative Writers Toolbelt. My guest today is the author, writing consultant, and presenter Claire Taylor. Claire will be known to many of you as one-half of the team at the Sell More Books Show with her co-presenter, Bryan Cohen. In this episode we talk about what narrative cohesion is and why it matters, the way in which characters operate on a physical, emotional, and philosophical level, and how to use, (and how not to use) tropes, this was a really fun conversation I enjoyed talking to Claire, I hope you enjoy listening to it, here it is.

Welcome to episode 171 of the Creative Writers Toolbelt. My guest today is the author, writing consultant, and presenter Claire Taylor. Claire will be known to many of you as one-half of the team at the Sell More Books Show with her co-presenter, Bryan Cohen. In this episode we talk about what narrative cohesion is and why it matters, the way in which characters operate on a physical, emotional, and philosophical level, and how to use, (and how not to use) tropes, this was a really fun conversation I enjoyed talking to Claire, I hope you enjoy listening to it, here it is.

Have you ever dreamed of quitting your day job and making a good living from your book business? I know what you are thinking. Didn't he start out his last podcast with this question? You are correct, but today I have a different indie author that was able to do this with his writing.  My guest on the show today is Zach Bohannon. Zach is a best-selling author who writes post-apocalyptic science fiction, horror, and thrillers. In addition to writing fiction, Zach is a book editor and writing coach. With J. Thorn, he hosts unique writing retreats and events all over the United States. He hosts two podcasts: Writers, Ink alongside J. Thorn and J.D. Barker where they talk to the biggest names in publishing, and the Creator Dad Podcast, where he has conversations with fellow creatives and entrepreneurs about balancing the responsibilities of life with their creative endeavors. In today's episode we discuss:·      How a drummer for a heavy metal band became a full-time author.·      Podcasting, Writers Ink, and The Creative Dad Podcasts and how they and other podcasts he has been involved in have changed his life and business.·      Who should start their own podcast and be a guest on one.·      The benefits and drawbacks of co-writing books. ·      How he and three other powerhouse authors wrote a book on a train and how that experience changed his life forever. ·      The benefits and what genres work best, or not best, for writing in a series.·      The advantages and disadvantages of having your first book be a breakout success.  All of this and more on today's episode of the Cops and Writers podcast.Check out Zach's website! Listen to Zach on the Writers Ink and Creator Dad Podcasts.Check out the Creator Dad episode with me :-)Check out the Career Author.Enjoy the Cops and Writers book series.Please visit the Cops and Writers website.If you have a question for the sarge, hit him up at his email.Come join the fun at the Cops and Writers Facebook groupSupport the show (https://patreon.com/copsandwriters)

Have you ever dreamed of quitting your day job and making a good living from your book business? My guest today did just that! Best Selling Author Dr. Cecelia Mecca had a good paying job in education and left that behind to pursue her passion for writing books. Since she left her day job, she has surpassed her income substantially and continues to grow her author career. Cecelia shares her incredible story with us and gives us a peek into her very successful author career and lets us know what works and doesn't work for her author business.In today's episode we discuss:·      How Cecelia started her author career.·      When she knew the time was right for her to be a full-time author.·      Her suggestions to those of you out there who want to go full-time as an author.·      What her writing process looks like and what a typical business day looks like for her. ·      Cecelia's marketing strategy and her adoption of TikTok and other social media platforms. ·      Why she chooses to be a self-published author.·      What's it like to have your husband being a part of your author business.  All of this and more on today's episode of the Cops and Writers podcast.Check out Cecelia's website!Go on over to Cecelia's penname Bella Michaelis page.Check out Cecelia on TikTok!Head over to Cecelia's Instagram.Visit Cecelia on her Facebook page. Enjoy the Cops and Writers book series.Please visit the Cops and Writers website.If you have a question for the sarge, hit him up at his email.Come join the fun at the Cops and Writers Facebook groupSupport the show (https://patreon.com/copsandwriters)

Hitchhiker (S8.Ep6) For some reason, I didn't record myself right, so I am sorry for the quality. If you can get through it, though, I have Bryan Cohen on for the first time to talk LOST DOGS track, “Hitchhiker,” Radiohead, and time zones… Reference: Binaural's Original Track Listing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_(album)#Originaltrack_listing “Hitchhiker” on Apple Music: https://apple.co/3pMNjMf “Hitchhiker” on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/track/2rpcj9ssUh9QQnitQtE1Eo?si=f48843a9a69b426a Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/brandenp Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/BrandenP Twitter: https://twitter.com/BetterBandPod Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/betterbandpod Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BetterBandPod Pearl Jam Podcast Community on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/606225600228342/ The Better Band Podcast is produced by ListenUpReno.com & Branden Palomo, and published using a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License. Please visit CreativeCommons.Org, or email BetterBandPod@gmail.com for more details. (Music played is owned by their respective copyright owners and publishers, and is for review purposes only, under fair use.)

Fear, anxiety, terror, relief, joy, and more fear, are just some of the emotions that a book launch can bring out in authors, especially new authors. My guest on today's show Courtney Kenney has your back! Courtney has helped numerous best-selling authors launch their books at the top of the charts, and now she is here to help you.Courtney shares her vast experience in book launching with us today and hopefully will calm some of your fears related to book launches.In today's episode we discuss:·      How Courtney got interested in helping authors with their book launches.·      How Courtney uses her past as a project manager for a major corporation in her present business helping authors launch their books.·      Best practices when launching a book.·      Tips and tricks to help you with your successful book launch. ·      Common errors that occur when authors launch their books. ·      When to use and not use preorders and what length.All of this and more on today's episode of the Cops and Writers podcast.Check out Courtney's website and get a free copy of the Pre-Order Playbook!Head on over to Courtney's author page. Enjoy the Cops and Writers book series.Please visit the Cops and Writers website.If you have a question for the sarge, hit him up at his email.Come join the fun at the Cops and Writers Facebook groupSupport the show (https://patreon.com/copsandwriters)

I find that Thanksgiving week is always a great week for contemplating all the things I'm grateful for. I've had a really great year as an indie author coach, author, and entrepreneur in general. But there's one thing that tops the list... In today's episode, I want to express my appreciation for all of the amazing people I've interviewed and had on the Author Revolution Podcast over the past two years. I'm going to give you a rundown of each person, so in case you missed their chat, you can go back and have a listen. Here we go... Be sure to check out the show notes by going to authorrevolution.org/108.

Today we're dropping a new news jingle, played by our own Jim Heskett. That alone should be worth the listen. However, if you need more persuading, join us as we discuss Bryan Cohen's Amazon Ads Challenge, a new offering from Facebook, and more! ### - Bryan Cohen's ad challenge: https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/library/case-studies/bryan-cohen - Facebook entering the podcast game? https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/16/22537023/facebook-podcast-rss-feed-publish-clips-pages - How to Write A Book to Market: https://www.writtenwordmedia.com/how-to-write-a-book-to-market - Agatha Christie's Fans want to Turn Her Home into Literary Center: https://people.com/real-estate/agatha-christie-fans-plotting-to-turn-her-3-8-million-english-home-into-literary-center/ - New Wizarding World Launches free Harry Potter Hub: https://www.thebookseller.com/news/wizarding-world-launches-free-harry-potter-hub-school-summer-holidays-1266289

Join Autumn and special guest Bryan Cohen to discuss AMS ads, book blurbs, and, oh yeah, the worst advertising mistake authors can make. Bryan is an expert on book blurbs and his free AMS ad challenges have helped thousands of authors learn the ropes of using Amazon ads. Does that mean AMS ads are hitting saturation? What might be the next big move for self-published authors to connect with readers? We discuss that and more! Check out Bryan's podcast the Sell More Books Show at https://sellmorebooksshow.com/. And learn more about Bryan on his website: http://bryancohen.com/. Join Bryan's January 2021 AMS challenge at https://bryancohen.lpages.co/january-amazon-ad-challenge-2021-ov4/ Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.   SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.   Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going. Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (1s): You're listening to the am writing fantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt, and Jesper Schmidt. Autumn (30s): Welcome to the am. Writing Tennessee podcast. This is episode one Oh five I'm autumn. And today Yesper has the recording session off and I have with the very special guest instead author and entrepreneurial Brian Cohen. Whoa. Welcome to the writing fantasy podcast. Brian, Bryan (50s): Thank you, autumn. I appreciate you having me. We had some nice technical difficulties figuring this out, but I'm so glad we were able to make it work Autumn (1m 0s): Well. It's always nice working with someone who is probably, I mean, you do live webinars and all these other things. So I have a feeling you can roll with the technical difficulties very well. I wasn't worried. Hey, that's the nice thing is, is with modern technology. There's always a workaround. There's at least like three or four, so we figured it out and you're here and I'm so excited for you to join us today. So I know you through these amazing AFS ad challenges you run, but I had of course heard of your name way before the AMS ad challenges, because you were known as like a guru of book blurbs, but I know that's not even close to everything you've done. Autumn (1m 43s): So if you could introduce yourself, that would be fantastic. Bryan (1m 48s): Sure. Of course. Well, of late, the big thing that I I've been doing is I run these free courses that we, we talk about them as challenges, these free challenges about Amazon advertising. One of the, the, the strangest weirdest little advertising platform is Kindle author them. And it's our goal to try to just make it simpler, but it also try to make them not spend all of your money. And those are the five day Amazon ad profit challenges and, and I've been running them and I have a really good team behind them and it's a lot of fun, but originally I would say some people might know me from my podcast, the some more books show, some people might know me from the author copywriting agency. Bryan (2m 47s): I run best page forward. We write book descriptions and ad copy, and I'm an author myself having written multiple young adult scifi fantasy. Depends on it. Depends on where you're placing superheroes. Amazon has a category on both sides. Autumn (3m 6s): Oh, that's so is it like more techie? So it ends up in this Saifai side or if it's more magic it's on the fantasy side or is that, Oh, Hey, that's excellent. Bryan (3m 20s): But yeah, so I am not currently writing fantasy, but I have been in the state of M writing fantasy in, in the past. So hopefully I still qualify. Autumn (3m 32s): Oh, absolutely. And I mean, just for your expertise alone, I think it's fantastic. I, I said, I've done at least two or three of your AMS ad challenges and I learn something new every single time. They amazing. And so it's great to have you on here, but yeah, you, you get some of the fantasy mindset and the world-building and the powers and making rules so that people, you know, aren't going crazy and can do anything in their God. And that just makes it so less tense and fun. Yes, this is true. Well, I mean, there's so many things we could talk about. It was hard to choose even a focus other than I know, you know, I know you threw AMS at challenges, but you help authors so much with the marketing. Autumn (4m 19s): And I mean, market from the book, blurbs to the AMS ads, are you aware when authors market books with all your experience and all the people you've helped, what do you think is the number one thing authors do wrong when they're trying to get their book out there in the world? Bryan (4m 37s): Well, I think it has to start with, with the foundation of the book. The, I don't know who invented it, but I'll, I'll borrow it and not take credit for it. But writing the book with the marketing in mind is so key. When I, the first, I think I remember it being like conceptualized for me when a few years ago, when Adam Croft a very successful mystery and thriller author, he talks started talking about writing the hook, the, the, the first line of the book description, the thing that could be used on ads, the copy, as some people call it to write that before the book. Bryan (5m 28s): And I just thought, well, how smart is that? If you don't even have a good hook, if you don't even have something that would get people excited about it, chances are you're going to have a hard time getting people excited about your book. So I loved the idea of writing that, that big one-liner, even before the book. And I've heard of some people writing the book description for a book before they write the book. And I think that that is a thing that a lot of people get wrong is they write the book and then they do all the marketing stuff after. Bryan (6m 14s): But really you might want to start by doing some of the marketing work first to make sure you're writing a book that you're going to put so much effort into that, that there will actually be people who are interested in, Autumn (6m 30s): Right. Oh, I should say whew. Cause I, I definitely one of those people who I do write little descriptions before I start writing, and then I refer back to it. Cause that's, it's one thing to come up with an idea and develop it with a description or a hook, but then you have to make sure you actually pay attention to it. Not you're like halfway through the novel and go, Oh, that's not even close to what I'm doing. It kind of it's, it should guide you not be this exercise that you put aside and don't even think about until you're done. And then you realize you're completely off the rails. Bryan (7m 1s): Oh yeah, no, absolutely. I was working with a friend of mine who was trying to write the market and trend. It was a paranormal cozy mystery and she sent over the book description and I read it and I thought, you know, I don't think this is paranormal cozy. At least not the way the book descriptions written. And I check in with her, you definitely want to write in this genre. Right? She says, yes. And I said, all right, well, let me connect you with someone who writes a lot of paranormal cozy and she can give you opinions on what would need to change. Bryan (7m 43s): And certain like setting pieces and character motivations and tropes as they are often referred to changing those in that early stage of the game has now made her a huge, like on the edge of five figure author per month access. And it start. And obviously I'm not taking credit for that. She, she has written out 13 books in that series, but when you take a minute, take a breath, share it with some experts, share it with some people in that early, early stage, it could be worth a lot of money, but it could also just be worth like helping you to write the book you were meant to write. Bryan (8m 39s): Anyway, Autumn (8m 40s): That's true. Or even just drawing out some of the, the tidbits. I like the tropes, like you mentioned, like, well, did you consider this? This is popular right now, or that's been overdone. So stay away from it. It could save you months of writing to write something. You could've gone a different way. And it might've been a little bit better. I have to been I've recently did read Chris Fox's book right to market. And we had him on the podcast, but of course we didn't. We talked about Kickstarter and not his right to market books, but it's wonderful. Pretty cool. But I do really appreciate the idea. I think a lot of authors, you know, they hear that right to market and they think, Oh, you know, you're, you're taking away the, the, the fun of it, the innovation of it. Autumn (9m 27s): But it's not really that it's sort of looking at it from a business perspective, saying I'm going to spend this many months of my life and probably give up some things like family time. So I can do this. And I want to invest that wisely with something that I really would like to do well, at least as well as the best chance it has. Bryan (9m 46s): Yeah. I have an analogy that might help those. So I used to do improv comedy. Anyone who's ever been to an improv comedy show, you know, that they often take suggestions from the audience and like a word or I've, I've been to a show where they use a title of a musical, or they use a news story that they have to read out loud and then they, they will take that inspiration and they will use that to inspire them for a scene. You might think you get some weird suggestion. Of course, people are always trying to use potty words, whatever, but at least drinking on a Friday, Saturday night. Autumn (10m 33s): So just setting the idea there. Yeah, Bryan (10m 36s): Exactly. But you've got this word that you think, Oh, this might constrain me, but I have seen words and concepts and titles and news stories inspire incredible things. Even though you might think that word or that concept would constrain you, it it's really what you do with it. What you do within that framework. That is where the creative process happens. I mean, Shakespeare's plays are nearly all adaptations and they have stood the test of time, even though they weren't his original idea. Bryan (11m 21s): He took these concepts, these other plays, these stories, these pieces of history. And within that framework created something we're still talking about 400 plus years later. Autumn (11m 37s): That's a great analogy. And it really does bring it home. I agree with you. I had never considered it in terms of Shakespeare. And I only have this complete work sitting on my bookshelf and I've read most of them. So that's Oh yes, I, yeah. That's a whole different conversation, but that is fantastic. Bryan (11m 58s): That and the Shakespeare podcast. Autumn (12m 0s): Oh, excellent. I will see you there. As soon as we find it. Bryan (12m 5s): Great. Autumn (12m 6s): Send me the link. So that's wonderful. And that kind of develops too. So obviously, I mean, I already know you, you like to, you're so good at writing blurbs. You even teach in the AMS ads, challenges, you teach a little bit of blurb writing and how to hone them and refine them. And I have to admit, so it's a nice to hear that you, you, you think that they should be part of like the original story development, it leads so much into your marketing and that's where you grow it. And you've seen probably thousands of blurbs. I mean, what do you think authors get wrong the most when they're developing it? Because I love you have a very solid strategy of saying, you know, sentence one, sentence two. I have it like copy and pasted in my Scrivener file when I'm developing my blurb. Autumn (12m 50s): I just already have it copied there so I can look at it and develop mine. Yeah. I really am thrilled to have you here today. Bryan (12m 58s): Oh well, I'm, I am honored, but I think the thing people th that they struggle with is, is I think partly it's not getting themselves in the right mindset in the right framework. And you might hear some buzzing. I, I am in a hotel rooms, a fear just came on, but it is what it is when you are trying to fit in a blurb in the 30 or so minutes that you've allocated for yourself and not realizing that this is a piece of marketing. Bryan (13m 42s): This is a piece of poetry's someone whoever created, just do it. The slogan for Nike probably hammered on it for eight hours. I mean, you aren't necessarily going to be able to complete something that is going to make every reader who stumbles upon it excited unless you give it the time that is needed and the space and for it to be your creative time, not your well, I do my writing in the morning and I do my marketing after three o'clock when I'm half falling asleep, you need your creative time to work on this piece of the marketing, because that piece of the marketing is something that requires creativity. Autumn (14m 35s): Yes. So you'd definitely recommend probably coming back a couple of times, not, you know, you're 30 minutes and you're done and never look at it again. Bryan (14m 45s): Yes, definitely. Don't do that. You don't know if you have any typos, you should check. Oh. And share your blurb with your editor when you are writing the book, because then they will catch the mistakes that you don't catch yourself. Autumn (15m 4s): Yes. That's a very good point. And I definitely have seen some what looked like very well sounding blurbs online, but then yeah, you read them and you notice, you know, sometimes it's little things come as a periods, but sometimes it is a word wrong. You're like, Oh, I can always, always do a good deed and let your author know so that they can figure it out. Yeah. Bryan (15m 25s): You see something about a blurb, say something about a blurb. Autumn (15m 28s): Yes. That's a very good idea. Well, I mean, we've mentioned the AMS challenges you've run. So just, just in case there's an author out there who is not aware of AMS ads and what they are. Could you give a quick description of what they are and how did you come up with doing these challenges? Bryan (15m 49s): Oh, that's a great question. So Amazon ads, AMS ads, whatever you want to call them. These are the ads that you see on Amazon. When you're searching for a book, when you type something into the search bar, you'll often notice there's some ads at the top. There's some ads kind of interspersed in the search results. And then there's also some ads that show up on every page, every book page, there's a carousel. You'll see a little sponsored icon when you know the hat. Those are, those are the ads. And those ads are placed by publishers or other authors who are run through the Amazon advertising platform. Bryan (16m 36s): And they will bid what they want to spend per click. They say, I want to bid 40 cents per click. And then someone, if, if a reader clicks on the ad and then goes to check out your book page, you get charged for that click. So you would get charged 40 cents or a little bit less for someone to click onto that ad. And the goal of course is to bid low enough so that you're not paying so much per click because you could bid $5 per cent. I know people who've accidentally bid $5 and get $5 clicks. Bryan (17m 20s): Chances are, if your book is selling for $2 and 99 cents, that is not going to be a effective use of your money. No. Yeah. And so if that's part of the game is bidding low enough. The other part of the game is, and it goes back to the blurb. It goes to the cover. It goes to how well something has been written to market. You want to get a sale for as few number of clicks as possible. Because even if you're, if you're getting clicks for 10 cents, if it takes 40 clicks for someone to buy your book, well, then you're going to be paying $4 every time you sell a book. Bryan (18m 5s): And if your book's two 99, and then you're, you're not going to be making that money. So you play the game of getting as low as you can and still getting traction and making sure that your book converts with as few clicks as possible. I like to say about six to eight clicks. I used to say 10, but now I say six to eight clicks because some books are shorter. Some books are standalones and, and ten one sale for every 10 clicks. Sometimes isn't profitable. So about six to eight, especially if the books in Kindle unlimited six to eight clicks per sale is a good ratio for profitability and then trying to keep that bid low. Bryan (18m 59s): So that was the, just the answer to the first question, answer to the second question is I I've, I've been pretty fortunate to connect with a few people who have really had success running challenges. One of the first challenges I ever joined as a participant was a challenge called the simple green smoothies. Oh, I know. And I was very fortunate to be in a mastermind group, which is a group of entrepreneurs or group of people trying to use their smarts together. Bryan (19m 45s): So it's the master mind. And this, this group had one of the co-founders of the simple green smoothie challenge in it. And one of the things that her name is Jada Sellner. And one of the things I learned from her was that challenge for spending $0 on marketing brought in over a million people. Wow. Oh, that's amazing. Or challenges. Sound cool. Yeah. So seeing that challenge and seeing other challenges, I knew I really wanted to do one and it was just a matter of trying to figure out, well, what about Amazon ads? Bryan (20m 32s): Could we do a challenge about, and really, I think that the thing a lot of people struggle with is the creation of these ads. And so if we could provide as much support as possible, the right documentation, the right to help people get over every technical hurdle, mental hurdle, just like a glitch hurdle, Autumn (20m 60s): Time hurdle, just making the time for it. Yes. Bryan (21m 4s): And getting over all of those in a short period of time. I think that I thought that people would, would really take to it. And we've been very fortunate that word of mouth is good. We, we do spend a lot of money on marketing, our own thing. And, and now we're on our sixth one and it's been over 20,000 people have taken the challenges. Autumn (21m 30s): That's fantastic. And they are, they're a great motivational. I mean, if you, if you're tempted to do AMS ads and you just don't know where to start, or you're just, you know, you can go find all this research in different places and just not take the time to synthesize it. And you just put it in front of you and you give a deadline and you have people supporting you and commenting on your stuff and, you know, helping you out. It's like, it's a whirlwind, but you get through it. And you do finally, if it's, if there's some hurdle for you to start, you kind of get beyond it. The next thing you know, you're doing AMS ads and it's amazing and it's been a month. And then the, you know, the next challenge comes up and you have to join that one too, because you always have something new to learn. And it's like nano Ramo. Autumn (22m 10s): You know, you're, you're joining with a bunch of authors. And I see a lot of faces that I I've known. You know, I've been an author since 2012. So there's a lot of other writers I know, and you connect and you lose touch over time and then you reconnect and I've seen them in the challenge. So it's also been a great, like, Hey, how have you been doing, I haven't seen you for two years. So that's very, it's fun. It's a fun group that you do run and they're informative and helpful. Bryan (22m 37s): We, we really enjoy it. And, and I love fostering those connections. We need community more than ever right now. And so if I can play and my company and the people I work with can play a small role in providing some of that community. We are absolutely all for it. Autumn (22m 57s): No, I definitely think you do. And yes, 2020, especially we need our community a little bit more sympathetic and a few more extra arms to support us all this year. So with the AMS ads, do you think, I mean, you've noticed that, you know, your, your, the number of clicks, you've dropped it from 10 to six to eight. So do you think as well that there any keywords or genres that AMS ads might be getting saturated in? Is this something you're concerned about in the future? That, cause I noticed like Facebook ads, I had a golden age and now they're a lot harder to get traction on. Do you think the same thing will happen with the AMS ads? Bryan (23m 39s): I think it's very possible. I was at the 20, 1920 to 50 K conference and I was talking about ads and I mentioned that Amazon ads are under priced right now because a lot of people can and do make profit off it. And I didn't realize at first I was hearing a noise from the crowd and they were sh people were shushing me. They were like, there's Amazon ad reps in the, in the room. And I'm like, Oh, okay, sorry. Don't raise our prices. Come on to this point, they are still under priced and people can still make money off of them. Bryan (24m 20s): I think the very, very popular genres, your, your paranormal, your contemporary romance, those are going to be more saturated. There's no question. But one of the things that currently is true here in December, 2020, because things are always changing. But currently right now, because Amazon doesn't just focus on the price of your bid, but also on how relevant your book is, how similar your book is to the things you're targeting. Bryan (25m 4s): It's not just a care. I used to think that it was a ranking system and it was the first place as a $2 bid and second place as a dollar 80 in third place has a dollar 60. I used to think that I think it was Janet Margo, who can, who, who had worked with Amazon advertising and developing the platform. She was the one who I think was the first to inform me that actually you could have a 40 cent bid, 30 cent bid and be the first in the carousel. Oh, I didn't realize this. How is this possible? And it's because relevancy is such a huge factor. Bryan (25m 46s): If your book is so perfectly a coming of age fantasy, it's got the right cover. It's got the right title. People are clicking on it. People are buying it. The conversion rate is very good. And at the conversion rate, particularly from the ads is good. It's going to be higher up in the rankings than a book that isn't as well marketed. Autumn (26m 13s): It has a higher bid price. So that's interesting. Bryan (26m 17s): Right? So that's why you always want to target books that are very close to your own and you don't want to try more is not necessarily going to be better unless you can come up with more and more, very perfect targets. Autumn (26m 35s): Okay. Well, that's, that explains a lot of the strategies. Even you teach a refining the key words and finding the right books to target, because that's really the key to not spending a ton of money, but also getting your books seen. Bryan (26m 51s): Yes, exactly. Exactly. Autumn (26m 54s): Like I said, every time I talk to you, I learned more. So this is really, that's a good tip. Now I'm 30 thinking. Well, you do definitely. Oh, that's interesting. So you think, so, that's good to know that, you know, AMS has, are not saturated because they are working now and it's always important to find a way we've gone past the, you don't need to market. If you want your book seen, you basically need to market in some way, these years, 20, 20, 20, 21. It's, that's just the reality we're in we're now, you know, the book, big book publishers are, they're still out there, but there's enough indie authors that we're running this as a business that we've got to consider advertising anymore. Bryan (27m 36s): Yeah. It, it, I, I, you are an author since 2012. I started in 2010 and it used to be easier. Autumn (27m 44s): Yes. Oh my goodness. Yes. I refer to those early years as the wild West where, I mean, you could just dash up a book dash up a cover dash up, you know, something you wrote as a blurb and people would find it and buy it. And even if you did a five K Kendall, K you unlimited countdown, I mean, people would download it by the thousands because there was less than a million books, but it's a little Bryan (28m 12s): And thought that those books were paid. So your sales rank would be like, number one, afterwards, those, those were interesting times for funny glitches to be discovered that made some people very well. Autumn (28m 25s): Yes, it was good for them. I did not get on one of those glitches, but that's okay. I'm still doing it. I still love it. And I love helping other authors as well. I mean, it's just, it's half the community. I think this is one of the nicest communities you can find online or other authors. So it's just a really wonderful place to be. I agree. I agree so well, do you think though Amazon is always going to be the King either for finding books or the ads? I mean, do you think there's going to be eventually, maybe down the road another way for readers to discover authors? I know a lot of, as Amazon grows and they don't even give away how many books they now host on their platform and on their servers, it's, you know, people are saying eight and 9 million books easily. Autumn (29m 15s): What's going on. Do you think it's going to get too crowded? Is, is there going to be something else other than Amazon that readers will be able to find other authors or is it just going to be, you know, like really crowded beach we're in doing Scott, they're a little square and that's about it. Bryan (29m 31s): We've been, we've been waiting and hoping for someone to just come out of the gate and be the next Amazon. And there's definitely lots of smaller pockets of, of some people who are having some success on Kobo or Apple or Barnes and noble, but I'm most intrigued by people selling direct and what, I've, what I, I, I remember Michael Scott aro, who was, I believe his books were taken down from Amazon. Bryan (30m 20s): Amazon had said that there were some rules violated. I have no idea everything I consider allegedly until I see see some documentation on it, but from what I hear, and he was doing very, very well, top hundred, one of the top hundred authors on Amazon at the time and making a lot of money. A lot of it was from Kindle unlimited. A lot of it was from, from Amazon type sources of income. But from what I hear, he has used more of the crowdfunding and direct sales models based on a very, very large email list to just say, well, if Amazon won't have me, then I'm going to do it myself and Chris on your podcast talking about his very successful Kickstarter. Bryan (31m 21s): Now I know his was with his RPG connected to his world's IP, but it's still connected. I have a student who crowd funds his, his comic books. I mean, there is just so much opportunity to branch, into connecting more directly with the consumer. And there's so many benefits. I think Alex peer Alex Jonty, who has had some amazing posts on the 20 bucks to 50 K group, he's had months of 50 to $100,000 a month selling direct from his, I believe he, he uses a Shopify store and I could be wrong about that, but I know he does it direct. Bryan (32m 13s): And he, and, and, and Michael and, and Chris and folks who do have that more direct relationship via email, they have the ability to pivot when something doesn't work as well on Amazon. And I think there may come a reckoning in 2021, 2022, if something funky happens with Kindle unlimited or audible, or what have you, the folks who have primarily relied on Amazon, who do not at the same time, grow their email list and their fan base, they could be in trouble. Bryan (33m 3s): I think that it's a really good idea to not put all your eggs in one basket and to always be growing your base of people and connecting with them. Autumn (33m 14s): Oh, I love, I absolutely love that message personally, because I'm wide. And I actually do sell off my website. I mean, it's small. I have a small list and I have a compared to these people you're referring to these other authors, but it is good and readers. I think I've gotten very savvy. Some, I mean, a lot of readers are also authors a little bit, so they know what's going on. But yeah, I do have some readers who will always go to my website and buy my books directly from me, or they'll at least asking what's the difference. And I just, I think that's fantastic. They understand a lot more about the marketplace than I think a lot of people realize. And that's good because it is, it is important that they're seeing a value in our writing and they want to support authors and have them write more books because that's the only way that they'll get more books is by supporting, you know, their favorites. Autumn (34m 6s): So that's, that's really interesting. So I did want to know. So we got into the author and writing conversation. So with everything you're working right now on the next challenge, which I'll have to ask you in a couple of minutes when that's going to happen. But first, so you're an author too. How much time do you get to write with all of these other things you're juggling, you have your own business and you have these challenges and so much going on. Bryan (34m 38s): Well, it's funny, I'm I, I sit in the hotel today, right? My it's funny. It's like, I've done this a few times now and now my, my three-year-old daughter says, let's go to your hotel and like Autumn (34m 56s): The hotel Bryan (34m 57s): Room that we can walk to, but yeah, it's adorable. So I sitting here working on the slides for the upcoming challenge, and I look at my I'm typing into a Neo two and I look, all right, well, how much have I written today? How much have I written? Then it's like 6,800 words after 6:00 AM onwards. And I write plenty, but I have not had much chance to write books of late. And it's been a couple years. And I, and I do miss it. Bryan (35m 39s): I think that I I'm hoping to fit them in, in 2021. I'm, I'm hoping to squeeze some in, but I also know that if I don't, I it's okay. Because as I often am telling a lot of the people, a lot of the authors I work with find the thing that is, is providing the most value. Find the thing that is providing the most profit, whatever your goal is, find the thing that is most achieving that. And then focus a lot more on that. Like if you have, you know, three readers from this series, you never finished from like five years ago and you have three readers who keep asking, don't do the old, well, people keep asking about it. Bryan (36m 34s): No, not people, not my readers, three readers, keep asking about it. And if only 20 people bought that series in total five years ago, then no, that is not the thing you should be working on unless it provides something else for you because you need to be working on the most important thing. The one thing as the Gary Keller book says, you need to find the one thing and you need to focus on that because it is so easy to be pulled in a million different contradictory directions. Bryan (37m 16s): And right now, writing a book might be a fun middle of the year project for me. But for now it's like, this is the thing that helps the most people. My, my goal in authored is to be at the point where if 10,000 authors emailed me on the same day, needing help of all different varieties that my team and I could actually handle that to me, could support basically the entire community at scale all at the same time. Bryan (37m 58s): And that is a goal that's going to take a long time to get. But the challenge right now is the thing that best fulfills that goal. And so everything creative, every I used airline points, but this hotel was not, was not cheap. Anything I can do to help that goal, that one thing, goal, that top priority goal I'm going to do. And I think everyone listening should do the same thing. That was just Autumn (38m 36s): Brilliant. And I just, so you know, you are already doing a fantastic job because I know any question that gets asked, any question I've asked in the challenge group, you or someone from your team has gotten back to. And usually several people have gotten back to and given tips and help, and actually spent the time where I know I've been in other places and challenges and other groups where, you know, you just kind of sometimes hear crickets when you ask that hard question. And yes, you even helped me once on a Permafree you trying to figure out what, what bid price to put in by the way it worked. So thank you for that. Yes, it's very good. Autumn (39m 16s): So when is this challenge you're working on, when is it going to be ready? When are you going to do your next one? You're sitting number six, Bryan (39m 24s): Number six, it's coming up January 11th. So Monday, January 11th and, you know, kicking off 2021. And as per usual, it'll be five days of videos. They're, they're not all contiguous. So they kind of do bleed in to the following week and there is a video of zeros, so it really ends up being six. And so just block out that whole, January 11th to about the 20th and, and that'll be a good time to, to work on it. And I can absolutely autumn give you the link to it. You can check it out. Bryan (40m 5s): And I'll probably put a link@sellingforauthors.com powers last January. Now that I'm thinking about it. And then, yeah, I I'm, the more the merrier, we always try to have like several dozen people at any given time just available to answer anything and everything so that we can help people at scale. Yeah. Autumn (40m 30s): I, one of my favorite things about your challenge is that it is not, it's five. You call it five days, but then, you know, with the zero, it's a six, but you give a break. There's always, I used to think it's usually between three and four, but you let people catch up on their homework and I've had to use that for sure. And it makes it a little less stressful. You don't, you don't feel so before behind you, you're like, okay, I've got the weekend. I can do this now. So that's always been wonderful. Bryan (40m 58s): Yeah. I, I know I would want the same. So I'm glad that you, Autumn (41m 1s): I found it helpful. It is. You're very, very kind to the authors. You help in many ways. Well, yes. So that's perfect. Cause this is going out on December 29th. So just 12 days from when this is live, it'll be time and you'll be done with it and you will not be in a hotel room. I'm pretty sure that's correct. Okay. Yes. So where else can listeners find you other than we'll put the links in show notes as well? Of course. Bryan (41m 37s): Sure. Well, I, if you like podcasts, you can also listen to the sell more books, show podcasts. We just did episode 340 something. I think. So. Thank you. That's that's been going for, I guess, six and change years. So we're happy to always keep doing that. And if you haven't listened to in like a year got a new co-host H Claire Taylor, who was just fantastic and definitely that, that, that is aside from the challenges. That's another great place to hang out with me. Autumn (42m 19s): Excellent. Well, thank you again for the time. Is there anything you would like to any last words of advice you want to give to authors out there for whether they're thinking of blurbs or marketing or AMS? Just some last bit of hope as we end 2020 as this will be like one of the last days of the year when this is released, Bryan (42m 44s): It's very, very, very likely that 2021 is going to be better than 2020. So please, if you have not taken into account that 2020 was very hard. If you've not taken that into account with your writing productivity, and you said I had a bad year writing, or if your sales have been down and you say I had a bad year of sales, just give yourself a little bit of, you know, leeway, give yourself a little bit of wiggle room because it was a hard year, very, very challenging for a lot of people. Bryan (43m 26s): And you should not hold yourself to the same high standards of the past when a generationally bad year comes around. So please be kind to yourself. And in 2021, continue to be kind as you do everything you can to snap yourself out of any funk and go do the work you need to do to be as successful as you hope to become. Autumn (44m 1s): That is a wonderful advice for the end of, I love that. A generationally trying your, it was, it was a doozy. It's one we'll talk about for a long time to come. So many means. Yes. Thank you again so much for joining us, Brian. We appreciate it. And I look forward to seeing you in just under two weeks in the AMS edge challenge. Bryan (44m 25s): Thank you, Adam. I'll see you there. Autumn (44m 27s): Bye. Join us next week when Yesper will be back and we'll be sharing some 3 (44m 32s): Great book ideas that we don't think we'll ever get around to writing, but Hey, maybe they will inspire you. Narrator (44m 41s): If you like what you just heard. There's a few things you can do to support the am writing fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Ottoman Yesper on patrion.com/and writing fantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the M writing fantasy podcast going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

Alida, Robert, & Kathryn welcome Bryan Cohen of Best Page Forward back to the Round Table to talk about writing book ads. We also get into the question of genre. How do you decide which genre to write your copy to when your book is cross- or sub-genre? Show notes & links at www.StoryWorksPodcast.com.

This week, we welcome our friend, Bryan Cohen, to the Round Table to discuss writing book copy. Those tight little paragraphs that adorn the back of your book, your sales page, your query letters, your marketing. If you've been dreading distilling your masterpiece into a few pithy sentences in order to attract readers, then you must listen to this episode.  Join Bryan's free Amazon Ad Challenge right now at www.bestpageforward.net/challenge. Show notes & links at www.storyworkspodcast.com.

An email question came in: "I just published my first book. How do I promote it?" All marketing plans will be different based on your plans for the book, your career, and your personality, and--to some degree--your budget. 1) First, you'll need to decide what your plan is for this book and for any future books you plan to write. And you'll need to define TO YOU what success would look like for this particular book and also for your writing career. Do you want to write any more books? Do you want to be award-winning? Do you want to make a living with your writing? Et cetera. The answers to these types of questions will determine the answers to your other questions. Namely, how to market and promote your book(s). It's also important to note that if your goal is to make a living with your writing, you cannot do that with book sales from one book. Think, 10 or 20, or more. UNLESS, you are also providing author services, like editing or retreats or teaching. 2) Paid Advertising. It's the way to go these days. It is a Pay to Play Market now. There are 8 million titles on Amazon alone. The three top paid ads sites are BookBub, Facebook, and Amazon Ads. Additionally, there are FreeBooksy and BargainBooksy. As well as others. (For instance, if your e-book is published on the Kobo platform, there is a Promotions tab on your dashboard that enables you to partake in their promo days.) Each of the ad platforms have different rules and suggested methods of operation. There are loads of books and other resources on all of them. (Help! My Facebook Ads Suck by Mal Cooper; Mastering Amazon Ads by Brian Meeks; Bookbub Ads by David Gaughrin; Bryan Cohen has an Amazon Ads School on his Instagram site @bryancohenblurbs--just to name a few.) That said, up until very recently--and is still considered truth by many--the industry "standard" advice for advertising for authors with less than three to five books in one series is to NOT advertise. The return on your investment won't pan out very well with nowhere for the reader to go after reading your one book. (I don't know how many books you've published.) If an author has several books, then paying for an ad on one book can often lead a reader to reading the other books in an author's backlist, thereby making the cost of the ad click go much farther. 3) I believe the best thing an author can do to build excitement about their books is to write the next book. Seriously. If you look at it like any other business, a business owner (read: bookseller) needs to create more than one product for their store. They need to create free content marketing for their audience and to build a(n) [author] brand through engagement with their [readers] customers. The most important first step in getting people to buy your product is to get readers to know it exists. That comes with getting on podcast interviews, going to networking events, doing book readings, teaching workshops at libraries, etc. That's Attract Marketing. Letting people know you are out there. Then, you Engage with them. Write a blog, or do a podcast, or create some other way of engaging with the people that now know you exist, but still have not become a customer of yours (like get them on your mailing list). Then, you Nurture them. That's where they begin to Know, Like, and Trust you. Still before they buy! This is the time when you'd be posting regular content for them in a newsletter or FB Live posts, or pictures of your life on Instagram. Only then can you Invite them to buy. And, in order to keep them as an ongoing client [reader], you must Delight them. Create the best book(s) possible and they'll come back for the next one and tell their friends. This process isn't something you do in a week or even a month. It's a long-term strategy. It's part of the author life and part of our job. Have fun with it. *** I hope some of that was useful and has given you some ideas for your marketing/promotional plans. Another resource I would highly recommend is How to Market a Book by Joanna Penn. Good luck!

Episode Show Notes What's your 2019 reading goal? Did you hit it? How many books have you read this year? Let me know in the comments or tweet me @rebelauthorpod Book recommendation this week is Atomic Habits by James Clear get your copy on Amazon UK or Amazon USA. *** If you'd like to watch the Scrivener metadata tutorial in January, join the 13 Steps to Evil Facebook group. *** Listener Rebel of the week is Claire Good. *** Thank you to the two new patrons this week Meg and Holly.  *** If you'd like to get early access to all the Rebel Author episodes, you can support the show by visiting: www.patreon.com/sachablack *** Find out more about Bryan by visiting his Amazon Ads challenge website: https://bryancohen.lpages.co/amazon-ad-profit-challenge-landing-jan-2020/  Visit his Facebook page for his blurb service Best Page Forward Follow Bryan on Instagram *** Please note, I do use affiliate links.

Is it really worth it attending author conventions and events? And if it is, how can you ensure to get results from it? What is you would like to organize your own convention or event? What do you need to consider and are there financial risks to take into account? Zach Bohannon & J. Thorn from The Career Author podcast (http://thecareerauthor.com/) are sharing their experiences. New episodes EVERY single Monday. To subscribe on YouTube, go here: http://bit.ly/1WIwIVC PATREON! Many bonus perks for those who become a patrons. https://www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy LET'S CONNECT! Closed Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/AmWritingFantasy/  Blog and Courses: https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/  Jesper on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SchmidtJesper  Autumn on Twitter: https://twitter.com/weifarer  Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Jesper (0s): Have you ever wondered if it's worth going to writing events and is it worth your money and is it really worth your time and what if you are sort of further along in your career and then you won't be speculating about is it worth creating some of my own events? That's what we're going to talk about here today. If you're fantasy author then you've come to the right place. My name is Jesper and together with Autumn we've published more than 20 books and it is our aim to help you in your writing and marketing endeavors. Jesper (36s): So today I have been joined by somebody else. Then the, actually it's the guys from the Korea author podcast. I listened to their podcast every week and I will let her put the link in the description field below for our podcast so that you could go and listen to if you want. But the reason that I wanted them on here to cover this topic is because I know that they have talked about it before because, and they also have both of their perspectives on this thing, so they both joint conventions by themselves. As a participant, but they have also an art creating events for other authors themselves. Jesper (1m 10s): So we want it to try to cover both angles here and they're welcome to, uh, the amwritingfantasy, uh, channel. Uh, Jameson. J. Thorn (1m 19s): Yeah, thanks. That's for, we're really happy to be here. Thanks for having us. Jesper (1m 23s): Thanks a lot. And, uh, well I guess we can sort of just jump right into it. I know you guys have participated, if we start with sort of the participation angle, and I know you guys have gone to different events just as participants where you have not been new organized so a bit, but I wonder if you could sort of share a bit about is. Is it worth the time and the money that it takes to go to these events? And if you do go to these events, how should, could you go about it to make sure that you actually get anything out of it? Because, uh, it, it is at least, I think quite a both expension of time, but, but also as S introvert authors, maybe it's not the coolest thing that we can think of. Jesper (2m 1s): Is it worth it? J. Thorn (2m 3s): Yeah, I think it's totally worth it. I can say that without hesitation. Uh, I'm thinking back on some of the live events I've done more recently. So I've done, I did the indie author lab that was put on by publishers weekly. Uh, last year I did podcast movement I think in 2016, 2017 which sort of like a big convention. Uh, I did a story grid certified training and a and a story grid weekend with Shawn Coyne last year and a couple of years ago. J. Thorn (2m 34s): Uh, so yeah, participation I think is really important in those and. And I think what's most important is that it's not necessarily what you think you're going to get. It's going to be what happens when you're there that you can't plan for. You can't anticipate things like conversations with other authors over a cup of coffee that leads to a further discussion that leads to a possible project or you know, you meet someone who happens to know somebody else and it's a good connection way. And I, I hesitate to use the term networking cause especially for introverts that makes our skin crawl. J. Thorn (3m 6s): It's got sort of this really dirty connotation, but, um, it really isn't, it's not networking in the, in the sleazy internet marketers sense. It's more about making connections with other people and, and really allowing yourself to be in the moment and to absorb what's happening. Certainly the speakers and the content is important and I think people will probably only sign up for events that they believe are going to help further their career. Um, but I don't think that's the main reason for going to a live event. J. Thorn (3m 36s): I really believe it's the interaction with the other participants, possibly the people who are putting on the event and then all the potential that comes from that. And even if I don't meet someone and I don't have a very, uh, concrete outcome from that meeting, there's always a skill or a strategy or a new way of looking at things that, that comes out of those events that doesn't happen for me online. Jesper (3m 59s): Yeah. No. And I know, especially from what you've shared in the past, us facilitated that you get quite exhausted from Merde, sir, you said in person events or things. So how do you go about it? You know, if you, uh, if you are like an author who are very introverted and don't really like seeing other people, do you sort of mentally pitch yourself up to, okay, I need to talk to a few people today are, how are you doing? J. Thorn (4m 25s): Yeah, that's a great question. And uh, I mean it is, it's a very broad generalization that, that creatives are introverts. Not all creatives are introverts, but I anecdotally, in my experience, I've found most of the writers I deal with are introverted or towards the introversion scale of, of the Myers Briggs and and. There's really sort of two ways, uh, an introvert can approach a live event to make it more manageable. The first one is exactly yes for what you, what you mentioned, which is to kind of set a little game of buy it for yourself and just say, okay, today at this event I'm going to talk to at least two people. J. Thorn (4m 59s): I don't know. I'm going to introduce myself to two people or one person. Like it doesn't matter the number, right? It's that you are your creating a little incentive for yourself that will put you in the right mindset and sort of open, um, you know, you're sort of opening your mind to, to meeting other people. But then on the flip side, it's really important to both at the event and after the event to have time to decompress. And I think this is where introverts really have to do this for themselves because it's not usually built into the events. J. Thorn (5m 31s): You need time within the day of the event to go and sit by yourself for 30 minutes or go read a book or go journal or just go and not talk to anybody like you. That has to be built into the day. And then I think it's also good and I think this applies to for extroverts as well. Once you get home from the event, you need time to decompress as well. I think it's really hard to just kind of jump right back into your, into your daily grind. You need time to, you need time to recharge and get some of that energy back. J. Thorn (6m 2s): Because for introverts, being in those crowded environments is not impossible. And it's not that we hate it and that's a misconception. It's just very draining on your energy and you need to, you need to be able to wait to do that and not sort of at a secondary level. I think it's really important both leading up to during and after the event that you are paying very close attention to your biological needs, making sure you're getting enough sleep, your eating properly, you're exercising if possible, because there's a tendency at these events to kind of go off the rails and eat and drink and, and, and you know, and do things that you wouldn't do at home. J. Thorn (6m 37s): I call it living like a teenager. And so if you're not a teenager that, you know, that's gonna take its toll too. It's, I think all of that taking that sort of comprehensive approach can really make not only an experience great, but make the least amount of disruption in your day. Zack (6m 52s): I'll also add real quick, like, I mean I'm definitely JL straight up, call me an extrovert. I don't know if I'd go that far. I mean I definitely have introvert tendencies, but um, I'm definitely more extroverted than he is in a lot of other authors and but to me, one thing I've noticed being at these events though too is that, you know, this, it's not the same thing as going to like a cocktail party or like a work Christmas party or something. I mean, there's a lot of other people in the room who are Waikiki and I think that knowing that comfort and that you're not the only introvert, most of the room is going to be introverted from what I've seen. Zack (7m 25s): I think that really helps open up people talk. And I know with our bigger events, specifically our conferences, you know, we try to, uh, you know, we, we do like the round tables where people were kind of forced to sit together, but it's not like there's never really been any kind of uncomfortable thing for me. Then we have our genre at dinners where people put together by the genre. So like we're kind of encouraging people to kind of break out a little bit, but not in like a funky like, uh, you know, speed dating type of way or something like that. But it's like really uncomfortable, you know? Zack (7m 56s): So that's just kinda my perspective from being a little less introverted, much less introverting I should say. Jesper (8m 1s): Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think from my own experience when I've been to sort of conferences or events or stuff like that is it's not as hard to strike up the conversation as one might think in a way you just sitting at the table and as long as you're sort of smiling and are open to people, then usually you can start talking. But where I think it's a bit difficult and where I'm curious, what would you guys say about this? Because the aftermath of it, you know? Okay, so you've gone home, you talk to five people, but how and why should you get in contact with them again? Jesper (8m 32s): That that part is a bit mysterious mystical to be, you know, how are you supposed to do that? I mean, okay, I can just find a, send an email to somebody. Hey, it was great seeing you at that event. But that's it's a bit, yeah, I dunno. I think that's J. Thorn (8m 45s): a good first step. And a lot of times you don't really know how or when or if that's going to happen. Uh, I remember I went to podcast podcast movement when it was in Chicago. Brian Cohen up from somewhere book show and he's very outgoing and extroverted and he had no problem walking up and talking to a lot of people. And and I think that was good for me and I, and I think if you are, if you tend to be more introverted and you have a more of an extroverted buddy you can bring with you, I think you can play off each other's strengths in that way. J. Thorn (9m 16s): And so I was able to kind of kind of tag along with Brian and then like I was really good at sort of looking at all of the offerings and saying, okay, well why don't we look at this one and sort of thinking about this one. And that was not something Brian was like really good at. So we kind of, we kind of balanced that out. And then what I did was when I came home, of all the people I met, I did exactly what you said. I sent an email and just say, Hey, it was really nice to meet you, a podcast movement. Um, if you, if there's anything I can ever help you with, just reach out. J. Thorn (9m 48s): And I kind of gave myself permission to leave it at that and I thought, you know, I'm going to do that. It's sort of a, it's courteous, it's kind and um, if something's meant to come from that, I'll hear back from them. And some people, I didn't, some people I didn't and and you just never know. I think the big thing that we always preach is that if you start a relationship by giving as opposed to asking, it's always, it's always better that way. So even, even the following up with a thank you from a live event, I think if you're just saying, Hey, thanks a lot. J. Thorn (10m 19s): If I, if there's any thing I can ever do for you, just let me know and then leave it at that. I think, um, that's, that's a good way to approach it. Not feeling that pressure to sort of work all those contacts that you just, you know, you just got all, all those business cards, you collect it. I don't, I don't think you necessarily have to have to force yourself to, you know, make connections with those people that aren't a natural. Jesper (10m 41s): Is there any specific events that is spread? You mean, I'm going to hook you up on the spot here, so it's okay if you don't know, but, but I'm just thinking that some of the people who are watching this video and, or listening to this podcast might be people who are also pursuing my traditional publishing wrapped. So are there, in your view, certain places that are better than other, if anybody wants to walk over there? J. Thorn (11m 5s): No, it's perfect timing because as we're recording this, I'm about three weeks away from heading to New York city for thriller Fest for the first time. Uh, so I, I think, uh, you know, if your listeners are not familiar, thriller Fest is the annual gathering for the thriller writers and that's where they have all their awards and there's Pitchfest and agents are there. In fact, I'm going to pitch fast, I'm going to be pitching a project to am to several agents. And I think every sort of a top level genre has that annual gathering. J. Thorn (11m 36s): Like for the horror writers association, they have Stoker con, uh, waa, waa has a big gathering. Uh, the, uh, science fiction and fantasy writers of America have an annual gathering. So I think if you are looking for, you know, an agent or if you're more interested in sort of the traditional publishing world, those, those, those are the events that you want to attend. And those are the big ones. And, uh, and, and they're, they're somewhat affordable. Like they're not, they're not out of reach. I think for, you know, a few hundred dollars per ticket. J. Thorn (12m 8s): Uh, you can, you can go to any one of those. And, uh, and I think that that would be a great way for people to get to know what, what that industry is like. Jesper (12m 17s): So I guess we can conclude, conclude that it's definitely worth going to these events and you need to put a bit of your extrovert hat on and then go through wasn't and try to build a bit of relations but, but I'm wondering then if we sort of jump into the time machine he say then we fast forward a couple of years and now the people listening or watching the video, they have sort of grown a certain pattern to a certain level in their career and they're starting to thinking, okay, maybe it would be cool to actually organize some events on my own and thus maybe use it as something that supplementary income to my book selling or whatever it may be. Jesper (12m 53s): Maybe it would be worth if you guys just spend like a minute of talking a bit about what you guys are doing and who you, so just to set the scene a bit for talking about what kind of events you are renting and how you're going about it and what you're thinking about and so forth. Zack (13m 8s): Yeah, we, uh, the, the whole thing started kind of funny for us. I mean it really came out of, we ended up doing a authors on a train is kind of our like a event that responded and that came out of us going on a train trip with Lindsay broker and Joanna Penn and spending a week writing and a VALIC. We went, rode on a train plan to book out and it's been a week in new Orleans, Louisiana. I'm writing a whole novella together and you know, J and I were sitting outside one night, uh, having, having a burger before went to a concert while we were in new Orleans and we just kind were like, man, I'm like, why couldn't we do this with other people? Zack (13m 48s): This is like a really cool niche event type of thing that really we didn't, we don't see anyone else doing stuff like this. Like you see people doing writer's retreats from, they'll go like rent a cabin every, want to work on their own stuff. And um, you know, you see the conferences and stuff, but you really don't see these like smaller, really unique things. Like who else was taking people on a train? And then my, you know, the really weird thing and that's really what started it. And it's spa, you know, it kind of snowballed into the smaller, like the world, the world building type advanced or we'll go and we'll pick a unique place and go build a world out together. Zack (14m 24s): Um, and then of course we're stood in authors on a train and we have our bigger conferences as well, which is the career author summit, uh, formerly the somewhere bookshelves summit. Um, so yeah, that's, that's kinda the, the main stuff that we have going on and we can obviously as conversation goes down deeper in each one of those. J. Thorn (14m 39s): Yeah, I would add to that there's sort of an intermediary step for someone who's, who's thinking about this. And, and I, I think it's very, uh, this was really good. I think it's really great to be thinking about diversifying your revenue streams as an author. I would ha, I would highly encourage people who feel like either organizing or putting on one of these events sounds like something that like to do. I think that you should definitely do it. Am don't listen to that. The, there's too many or there's too many people doing it. I don't buy into that. Um, I think there's always room for more voices, new voices, new experiences. J. Thorn (15m 12s): But I think between being at an attendee and then, uh, running our hosting, there's this other space that I would recommend people explore, which is start, uh, talking or offering to speak at other events that you're not running. I think it's really important to not only refine your public speaking skills and your ability to present because as you know with a podcast, whether you're on a podcast or on a stage, you are performing, it's a performance. And it, and it takes a certain level of skill and practice. J. Thorn (15m 43s): It's not the same as having a casual conversation with somebody. So I think you need to practice getting in front of people. And the way I did it is I started offering to do talks for fruit for my local library system. And I would go in and I would hold these little workshops and I would do these talks. And I did that for years. And uh, and I was a classroom teacher before that, so I had sort of the presentation mode refined. But doing those presentations sort of gave me the understanding of, okay, number one, what do people want? And number two, if that's what they want, how can I provide it? J. Thorn (16m 13s): Or how can I find someone who can provide it? So I think there is this middle ground where you, you really have to kind of find tune your chops. And one of the ways you can do that, going back to our previous point is you could reach out to people who are organizing events and offer to speak for free and say, Hey, I'm, I'm getting, you know, experience and speaking. I love your event on, uh, you know, I've been following you. I would love to S I would love to present for free to your audience if that's okay with you. And you know, some people are going to ignore you and some people won't. But I think getting your feet wet and really getting experience presenting, especially on a stage live in front of people would be really important before you kind of go all the way to that point where you're going to be the organizer of the event. Zack (16m 54s): I think another, I think another step you could even take is not think this is kinda gonna depend on where you live. Um, but I almost feel like running some kind of really small event locally could be really good. And even if you don't charge anything, you know, go rent a room at like a local coworking space or something. And obviously you know, you, if you're probably gonna want to be in a city where there's like gonna be a lot of writers that could come, but there's a whole other level of complexity of planning event and risk when you're talking about go like, you know, and for instance, in September we're going to Seattle and we live in Cleveland and Nashville and Seattle is a like fi five or six hour plane ride for each of us. Zack (17m 34s): So like to plan an event in Seattle and not live there is like, there's a lot of complexity around that and you know, J and I both have a background playing music and I know me personally, I know he has some, like I used to plan like a festival on stuff. Like I'm a small music festival and so like I have some event planning background and um, and I mean there's a lot of little logistical things that you may not think about whenever you're playing an event. And you know, we're still learning as we go and learn along the way. Zack (18m 4s): But I think that doing something locally small, maybe you get, try to get 10, 15 people or something to come show up and you do like a lecture type thing. Or maybe you guys do like a world building, I don't know like, but I think that can kind of help you start to see kind of the logistics of putting something together and getting people to show up as well, which is kind of a step ahead of like having a library organized, something you showed up in speaking, which I also think that's a great, great way to get started on that too. Jesper (18m 30s): Yeah. And it is a great point around getting a bit of practice with people or speaking in front of people because even for an introvert is certainly doable, but, but you sort of need to to get used to it a bit and then you can, uh, you can make yourself do it, so to speak almost. But, but I want, I mean I, and I think it's a good point too, to sort of work your way up to it and, and do some of those smaller events for four. I started if that's what you want to go, but, but at the same time I also know that it's pretty important for you guys that the event doesn't grow too big. Jesper (19m 2s): So I'm wondering how do you balance this side of, okay, you, you're of, you'll have some costs into it because you have to rent a place and probably get some food and drink and whatnot. And then at the same time, if you don't have enough people come in, then I guess either you can have a very, very high ticket price, which I don't think you guys are doing either, unless I'm mistaken. Or you can have a ton of people at a lower price, but what but how do you balance it out? Because if you're doing, I mean if you're just doing it for fun, then it's fine. But if you're doing as a sort of supplementary income, then you need to learn a bit from it. Jesper (19m 35s): Right? So what are your thoughts on that? J. Thorn (19m 38s): Yeah, I think it's really important to be completely transparent and honest and say that anytime you're organizing an event, you're taking a risk, uh, financially, mostly financially, but you're, you're risking your reputation as well. I mean, I, I don't think we're at this point anymore, but I remember we had conversations of like, what if we went, if we roll out an event and no one shows up or no one's interested like that, you know, there's a cost that's involved there. Um, and at a certain point, but, but more importantly, you know, the, the events, you know, for, for authors on the train, we're renting a mansion in San Francisco. J. Thorn (20m 14s): Well, we had to put 50% down on that before we put up the landing page. And for the career author summit, we had to secure the, the, the conference center before we put the landing page up. And, you know, so part of that is you need some savings. You need to have some money set aside that you're willing to risk. I mean you can mitigate your risk, but at the end of the day, anytime you're putting money up before you're selling tickets, you are taking risks. So I think it's important to recognize that. And uh, and we've been, we've been willing to do that. J. Thorn (20m 44s): And you know, we've been successful. We haven't lost a ton of money doing and we've made money in most cases, but you do need to have many willing to sort of put up and to secure those. As far as the event themselves are concerned. Our wheel house, our specialty is really these small sort of intimate gab world-building gathering since. So authors on a train and am PSI Phi Seattle and vampires in new Orleans, these are events, we're really taking a dozen people. J. Thorn (21m 14s): So we know that we don't need to have, you know, $100 in Facebook ads. Are they running to drive traffic to that landing page? Cause cause we're, we're going to sell them out. It's only 12 people and we charge enough that we're going to make some money, but it's not so exorbitant that people can't afford it. So that's sort of the, the one style of event that we really like doing. The career author summit, we kind of kind of fell into our lap. Um, it wasn't something we had planned on doing. Uh, summer book show, Bryan Cohen decided he didn't want to do that summit any longer and we had such positive energy momentum for that event. J. Thorn (21m 47s): We didn't just want to let it go and so Zach and I went to Jim Kukral and said, all right, well Brian doesn't want to want to do this anymore. And it was all good. In fact, Brian is going to be speaking at the career author summit, but we said, what if we continue it? We'll rebrand it as the career author but we made a very hard, definitive decision, very public decision and said, we're not growing it. It's at 120, 115 hundred 120 years about the match. Yeah, that's about the number of seats we're going to sell. And we're not growing it past that. I will not sell out those sell out. We could, we could buy, you know, we're, we're very close to having that sold out now and it's 11 months away, so it's not, and that's not a slight against events that grow larger become larger. J. Thorn (22m 29s): But we find in our own experience that, uh, once you go above 115, 120 people, it's, it starts to feel more like a trade show and less like a conference or a workshop. And that's just not what we do. We, we'd like to be able to walk around and interact with everyone. We like people to have the opportunity to meet all the other people there. And once you go North of one 25, it's hard to do that, Zack (22m 51s): I think. I think going back to kind of swing back to your original question too, is, you know, it's, it's very risky and J will tell you like what we kind of laugh because we joke that when we're coming up with these things, J always starts with yes. And I always start with no. So J comes to me with the super ambitious ideas and I'm always like, no, no, we've got to pare it down. And we ended up somewhere in the middle and it really works out. But I think that not getting too ambitious and trying to knock it out of the park so hard the first time when, if, when you're not really sure what all the costs are going to be in stuff, uh, it's, it's really important. Zack (23m 26s): So don't, you know, you obviously want to put on a good event, but you know, that doesn't necessarily mean you have to take all your attendees to the fanciest restaurant and have the fanciest venue. And we've made that mistake. I mean, we, we had, uh, one of our events, you know, we, uh, we're going to try to make it a little bit bigger and we rented a bigger type of, who ran a whole theater, you know, and, uh, we, we did a lot of different things and that event, as awesome as it wasn't as fun as we ended up having on it, uh, ended up losing money for us. So, and it's because we kind of went, we got too ambitious and we learned a lot from that though and and realized, you know, we, we'd rather deliver these really cool experiences. Zack (24m 5s): The problem was is that we were trying to get more people than we really should have and we really realized then like for our smaller well billing events like 15 people, max is kind of like that's really worse. Sweet spot is. And with that, you know, we can still make enough money to like be at the rock and roll hall of Famer at the Mo pop museum and see like we could still do really or rent a mansion. You know, we could still do this really cool stuff and still have room for us to make money as well. Jesper (24m 33s): One element is around the venue that you are reserving are paying for, but the other part is also how what type of event you're running. And by that I mean if you're running something like, like you're talking about here, like a willpower thing event where it doesn't take much prep in the way that, okay, maybe have some initial idea for a world that people then come to the UN and and basically the work is done, they're in the oven. But if you have more like a presentation type of event, either you would need to run the same presentations every time so that you don't have to prep too much or you what because if you do want to create a new presentation every time at the end of the day that his time away from writing and unless you are really earning money on that event, if you're just covering your cost or earning $1,000, you know, my question would be is that really worth it? J. Thorn (25m 26s): I I think that's a very legitimate question. I think the answer is going to be really dependent on on the individual situation Zach and I need to make enough money to make it worth our while. We sort of, we know between us what that is and that that's got to cover our own costs of, of getting there. The cost of not writing during that time, I think, I think that's an an another cost factors into it. And I think it depends on the event. So if you're talking about something like the career author summit, preparing to present at that, a lot of the work comes ahead of time and then you present and it's kind of over. J. Thorn (25m 59s): But world-building is kind of the opposite of that. So there's not a ton that we do leading up to it. But then once it's over, we published an anthology and Zach's right now is going through all the stuff from, from rocket park in Cleveland and that's, that's a full on anthology publication, revision, editing. It's a lot of work. So you know, and like that's, that's work that we're not quote unquote getting paid for. That was part of the ticket for the event. So that's just stuff that we're obligated to do that we enjoy doing. So I think it really, it really comes down to the person as far as like what type of event do you want, do you want to put on, what do you hope to get out of it and, and what sort of resources do you have to spend on it? J. Thorn (26m 40s): And that's both time and money. Zack (26m 41s): And I think too, I think, I think it is important to mention too that there's two of us, which are best, not obvious, but for people who don't know, you know, we do these events together, but we also write fiction together. So even when our fiction production doesn't necessarily have to stop you because J might go do be working on a presentation, but I might be working on our fiction. So I do think that's important to bring up cause, but that's not to say that one person's still couldn't manage this stuff on their own and still run their fiction business and do events. There's nothing that says that by any means. Zack (27m 12s): But, uh, I just think that's important to bring up for this conversation to those. Jesper (27m 16s): Yeah, true. Yeah. And I certainly don't think that this is anything, you know, the, the starting out author should really worry about or try to do. But even if you're not collaborating with somebody else, you know, if you're a bit further down your career path, you might have a virtual assistant who can help booking stuff and whatnot. So, so Zack (27m 34s): of course you're probably gonna need some help to do an event. There was no doubt. Yeah. Depending on the size and scope, what you're trying to do that you're probably gonna need some help. But like you said, you can definitely hire people out to help you or stuff. So Jesper (27m 47s): is there anything else we should cover around organizing events to say anything that I should have asked you that I do? J. Thorn (27m 56s): I mean, as far as organizing an event goes, I think it, you know, really the big takeaway, what Zach mentioned is is if you're, if you're really interested, do something very small and local for free. And that's the best way to get a feel for a lot of this. Everything from logistics to, uh, the type of people you want there to, the presentations or the workshops that you want to do. And maybe depending on where you live and who's near you, you can just invite a few of your friends and just say, Hey, come for free. You know, let's all do this together. J. Thorn (28m 26s): I'll, I'll sort of run it and I'd love to just get your feedback on it. And I think starting small and starting locally is probably the best way to do it. Because the last thing you want to do is to, is to think planning something like the career author summit sounds awesome. And you'd love to do that. And then you start to do it and realize it's not something you enjoy or it's, or it's something that you don't want to spend time on and then you're kind of stuck. So I think if you start small, then you're going to have a much better, uh, you'll have much, uh, a much better idea for yourself as to what, whether you can do something more grandiose in the future. Jesper (28m 60s): I think that's very good advices. And, uh, it's all, it's always good to get some advice to somebody who has actually done it, you know, rather than people speculate to be good on that. So I very much appreciate that. Sure, absolutely. I did mention the Korea author podcast in the beginning and I will put a link to that. So if you're watching on YouTube, it's going to be right below this video. And if you're on the podcast, just go to the show notes, but is there anything else, guys you want to mention where people can find your, or is this just the curiosity podcast you want to point people? Zack (29m 31s): Yeah, I mean, everything's over@thecareerauthor.com you can get the podcast there. Uh, if all our events are there. So if you're interested in attending one of our events, um, you know, we're, right now, we are, uh, all our 2019 stuff. Well, the only thing we have left to by Seattle, it's sold out. Our 2020 stuff is almost sold out. So, um, we, we have the career author summit in Nashville, Tennessee. That's a in may of 2020. We've got some great speakers will be there. We've got Joanna Penn, Lindsay broker, Brian Cohen, Jim Kukral, Mark Leslie, the fade, a honorary quarter. Zack (30m 7s): We've got some really good speakers lined up for that. Um, and we're getting really close to being sold out for that as of this recording. I don't know what it would be when you guys, when you air, but we're, I think we have like maybe 12, 15, 20 tickets, 15 tickets. Um, so we've got that going on. We have a authors on a train, California dream and is what we're calling that am. So we'll be taking a trip, we'll be taking a train from Los Angeles, California to San Francisco, uh, with a group of authors. And we will be doing, we'll be staying in a mansion for a few days and we're gonna build out an anthology together, write stories, collaborate. Zack (30m 43s): That's a collaboration event. Um, that has like one or two tickets available as of right now. Um, and then we also have vampires of new Orleans, which, uh, will be taking place Halloween weekend, which if anyone who's never been in new Orleans, that's like a the best time to go to new Orleans. The weather's really good. Um, and, and there's so much cool stuff that happens there during Halloween and, uh, we're going to be doing, we got some really cool stuff lined up. We're gonna be doing more. We're there, but then we're going to be writing vampire stories, publishing anthology. Um, and that is, we don't have any treats left for that either. Zack (31m 15s): I don't think so. And again, yeah, so this is all for 20, 20, so you can check all that stuff out. I mean, if you're someone, again who's interested in may rain events, you can, it's got all the stuff there. You can kind of see what we're doing and um, you know, maybe, maybe that will spark some ideas for you as well. So yeah, but everything's at the career author.com Jesper (31m 33s): yeah, and I don't take just anybody within this, a fantasy author audience here who doesn't like vampires. The only thing you need is you. You're missing the dragons, so you need to put them out there. We'll get there eventually. One a 21 maybe we'll come closer where you live and I will get a castle somewhere and dragons. Yeah, exactly. All right. Thanks a lot for coming onto amwritingfantasy guys. I appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you for having us. We appreciate it. All right, and to your opt in, see you next Monday.

In this episode Chris gives listeners two cardinal rules to guide their content creation. Content doesn't have to be complicated--it just needs to be strategic. Learn how to quit wasting time putting our purposeless content and do only the work that sells more books and builds raving fans.   Show Notes & Links: -Two cardinal rules of content: 1. Your content should be designed to hit on one stage of the sales funnel (discovery, awareness, sales/conversions). It must be goal-driven. It may hit on two, but it needs to be aimed at one. 2. You need to have three different types of content to reach everyone you're aiming at in that funnel.  -Three types of funnel content you need to produce: 1. Interruptive - content that interrupts what the user is already doing. 2. Opt-in - the content you're already doing. Content that followers or fans have already opted in to. This content needs to follow the 80-20 Content Rule. Needs to provide value. 3. Search- content that is designed to help people find you and your books quickly and take a desired action when they are searching. Keyword-driven.  Links: click 'em, they're live: -Becca's Better-Faster Academy - check it out! -Chris' class - The Content Formula: A blueprint for engagement and loyalty. Find out about the class here.  -Sumo (tools to help you convert people easier). They have a free beginner plan that integrates with WordPress for pop-up forms and more. -Link to Podcast 102 (How to optimize online bios for discovery) -Bryan Cohen's copywriting manual, How to Write a Sizzling Synopsis -Link to Dave Chesson's KDP Rocket Jump to the podcast page and join the conversation!    

Bryan Cohen talks the do's and don'ts of book marketing for both aspiring and established authors on today's podcast. This is a must-listen for speakers and experts preparing a book for release!   In This Episode, You'll Learn…   The ‘cardinal sins' of book marketing How the book description is more important than the book cover Taking control of your book sales Bryan's ‘Something Nice to Say' Podcast and its separation from his branding Brian's podcast: ‘Sell More Books Show' Why you should write more than one headline and survey peers for the best one   Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode   Bryan's Website 'Something Nice to Say' Podcast 'Sell More Books Show' Podcast

In this episode Chris interviews copywriting expert and author Bryan Cohen on how to fix the most common mistakes authors make writing their book descriptions and ads.  Show Notes & Links: -Why writing a book description is more like poetry than prose. -Waste not, want not. Why every word is important. -The 4 elements of a successful book description. -The most common mistakes authors make when writing book descriptions & how to fix. -Why a plot summary is not just a retelling of the book. -Less is more. Why too many details can turn your buyer off. -Where does this stuff go: NY Times or USA Today bestselling author status, info about a series. -Why you need a call-to-action or selling paragraph. Do you want to leave 20% of your book sales behind? -How comparisons can increase your sales and how Bryan does it. -Why effective online ads require research and testing. Not for the newbie or faint-hearted. -Quote of the show: "Publishing is something you cannot do for a dollar." -Don't miss Bryan's smarty pants tip at the end--it's gold. Links: Click 'em, they're live Bryan's website here Bryan's copywriting book, How to Write a Sizzling Synopsis Bryan's online courses on Teachable Bryan's Amazon Author page The Sell More Books Show RWA Conference - Denver Book of the Month: Sell More Books With Less Marketing by Chris Syme. Spend less time marketing and more time writing.     

Today we talk with Bryan Cohen - author of fiction & non-fiction, as well as on-line educator and service provider.  This is a man who wears a lot of hats, and has a lot to say about marketing.  We discuss giving people many "access points" they can stumble across to learn about you and your services or products. Check out the info Bryan has for you at SellingForAuthors.com - it's good stuff!  And like me, he highly recommends using MailerLite to build your first email list. 43 min 40 sec

In today's episode Chris interviews Rebecca Pollard, Digital Marketing Manager from AWeber, on the process and how-to's of using Facebook ads to grow your email list.  Show Notes & Links: Definitions you'll need for the podcast (we got a little nerdy at times) CTA - call-to-action. This is the button, link, or text phrase that asks people to take an action on your content Lead - another term for contact information of a prospective reader, whether it is a name, address, email, or phone number. Facebook pixel - line of HTML code that is embedded on your website or landing page that allows Facebook to collect people data when they arrive on that page. The pixel information is in Ads Manager. If you are new to the Facebook Pixel, read this information in Facebook's help center first: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1058078787600162?helpref=faq_content#install Retargeting: This is a method of sending ads or emails to a group of people that did not take an action on a first sales ad or email you sent them. Persona - a term marketers use to define a target audience. It is the collection of data about your audience - demographics, etc. After you gather this data, you can make up a "person" or persona that is a sum of all the data you've collected about your ideal audience. Email integration: the process of connecting your email account (AWeber, MailChimp, etc) with your Facebook page through an app that allows you to gather email addresses directly on your Facebook business page. In This Episode: -What is the Facebook pixel and why is it important when finding a target audience for your Facebook ads? -Why you should have other sources of gathering email addresses besides just Facebook ads. -Some of the pros and cons of using Interest Targeting in your Facebook ads. -What is the ideal number of people in an audience for a Facebook ad? -What is a lookalike audience and how do you create one? -The Bryan Cohen podcast link on email follow-up sequences. -Rebecca's post on Aweber's blog on the types of targeting that work best for Facebook ads to build an email list. -Rebecca's contact information:  rebeccap@aweber.com -Learn about AWeber here -How to leave a review of the podcast on iTunes: http://theauthorbiz.com/how-to-leave-a-podcast-review-at-itunes/  

In this episode Chris and Becca talk about the three marketing goals that every author needs. Show Notes & Links: -Why do authors need marketing goals, anyway? -How to get new readers to discover your books? -Why authors tend to skip discovery marketing and just concentrate on sales -The three main components authors need to sell books. -How does building fan loyalty help you sell more books? Links: -Preorder Chris' new book, The Newbie's Guide To Sell More Books With Less Marketing for just 99 cents until June 9. The books includes a free online course. Get your copy here.  -Link to the podcast on author platform levels. -A review of the 80-20 Content Rule: 80% of posts must give value, 20% can be used to sell.  -Bryan Cohen's podcast on how to put together an email welcome sequence.  -Roni Loren's podcast on fan loyalty -Join the SMART Marketing for Authors Facebook Group How to leave a review on iTunes

In today's episode author and entrepreneur Bryan Cohen previews The Selling Trilogy, an innovative set of strategies to help authors sell books more effectively.  Show Notes & Links: -Why good copywriting sells more books (and the data to prove it!) -Good copywriting starts with a hook that leads people to read the next line. -The characteristics of a good hook. -Should authors be using review snippets in their books descriptions?  -How to get people into your book sales funnel so they ultimately became raving fans. -Bryan shares his ideal email welcoming sequence that turns new subscribers into loyal and engaged readers. -Why you should edit your marketing like you edit your book A personal message from Bryan: It's unlikely that one trick is going to make all the difference for your author career. But when you're set up with a strong foundation, you increase the chances you'll earn more money in the long-term. As a bestselling author, I recently passed half a million downloads of my own books and I've helped hundreds of other authors spin their own success stories. By helping them nail the “forgotten essentials of selling more books,” I've contributed to authors making the USA Today bestseller list, hitting the Top 100 on Amazon, and selling thousands of books. I can help you too. Join me on Tuesday, May 16th at 3pm Eastern for a free webinar. Click here to be a part of the event! https://www.sellingforauthors.com/may-16-webinar/?ref=68 I hope to see you there! Link to sign up for an email notice for the limited time 99 cent preorder for Chris' new book, The Newbie's Guide To Selling More Books With Less Marketing. Be the first to know by clicking here. 

Bryan Cohen is the author of Ted Saves the World, the first book in a new YA sci-fi/fantasy series, and a collection of creative writing prompts books. His books have been downloaded over 400,000 times. Bryan has always been interested in writing. He started his indie publishing journey by writing a blog about writing inspiration. […] The post 132: How to Write Book Descriptions for Fiction and Non-Fiction with Bryan Cohen appeared first on TCK Publishing.

Author Biz listeners agree that book descriptions are one of the most useful elements in selling their books. So why are we so afraid of writing book blurbs? Author, teacher and podcast host Bryan Cohen joins us to discuss why book descriptions are so important and then we consider the four essential elements of any book description. The post TAB109: Writing Great Book Descriptions, with Bryan Cohen appeared first on .

Chris Jones and Kayla Dawn Thomas discuss the best podcasts for writers and authors from fiction writing-focused podcasts to general creativity, entrepreneurship, social media, marketing and leadership.  Fiction Podcasts The Creative Penn iTunes | Android Host Joanna Penn offers information, inspiration and interviews on writing, self-publishing, book marketing and making a living with your writing.   Self-Publishing Podcast (Explicit) iTunes | Website These guys put a whole new spin on the self-publishing world! You'll get everything related to getting your writing published ... and making money doing it ... in today's new DIY digital publishing frontier.   Sell More Books Show iTunes | Android Gives the news in the self-publishing world.  Jim Kukral and Bryan Cohen give you helpful tips and ideas to make your book sales soar.   Rocking Self Publishing  iTunes | Website Podcast interview authors who have made it in the self-publishing world. The interview provide actionable advice and inspiration for those who want to self publish.   General Creativity Magic Lessons with Elizabeth Gilbert iTunes | Android A companion to her book "Big Magic” this podcast helps another batch of aspiring artists overcome their fears and create more joyfully.   Entrepreneurial Podcasts EntreLeadership (Inspiration)  iTunes | Android EntreLeadership Podcast features discussions and tips on leadership and business by some of the top minds in the business, like Mark Cuban, Seth Godin, Jim Collins and Simon Sinek.   The Cardone Zone (Sales) iTunes | Android Grant Cardone pulls no punches when it comes to a no-nonsense sales-focused podcast. You'll learn how become a better sales person and the value of creating streams of revenue around your products. Not for the faint of heart and does have some language.   EOFire (Entrepreneur Inspiration) iTunes | Android John Lee Dumas talks to entrepreneurs from every walk of life about how they started, what their biggest failures were, and how they overcame them.   Kate's Take (Business Building) iTunes | Android Kate Erickson is a systems and processes kind of girl. You your writing business need structure and foundation, she's your girl. Her Fire Path series is perfect for the writer who isn't fully sure where the fit in the marketplace and that needs a self-paced discovery pep talk.   Online Marketing Made Easy w/ Amy Porterfield (Social Media) iTunes | Android Amy rocks when to comes to the digital world, monetizing social media marketing and blogging in particular. With her, you'll learn about creating lead magnets and courses around your products, creating editorial calendars for posting your content on your blog or social media, and how to grow your audience with Facebook Groups and Live, Instagram, and others.    ProBlogger (Blogging) iTunes | Android Darren Rowse has been in the blogging game since 2005. His podcast focuses on turning you into a power blogger who can earn income using your blog as your mothership.   The Portfolio Life (Writing-Life Balance) iTunes | Android Jeff Goins hosts this podcast about how writers can get head, grow their businesses, and stay balances while doing it. He features guest interviews, tips, strategies and thought provoking shows that help every writer keep the portfolio of their life in perfect balance.     If we missed a great podcast that you love and would like to add to our list, comment below. If you question specifically for me you email me at chris@readywritelaunch.com. I'm also on Twitter at chrisjonesink. And you can find Kayla at kayla@kayladawnthomas.com or on Twitter at kayladawnwrites.

In this episode of The Smarty Pants Book Marketing Podcast, authorpreneur Bryan Cohen shares the perfect recipe for book descriptions and gives advice to authors who are considering writing in a new genre. Show Notes: Bryan shares his background as a copywriter and how he got started as a writer. Why authors need to learn how to simplify their book's plot for a better book description. Why you need a call-to-action at the end of your book description. How writing in a popular genre you love to read can kick start your author business. Show Links: The usual suspects: SMART Marketing for Authors Facebook group (Chris & Becca on book marketing) Weekly Insider book marketing tips sheet (free book marketing super pack still available)  Links from our guest: Bryan's new book How to Write a Sizzling Synopsis Link to the Sell More Books Show podcast Cinderella Dreams of Fire (Bryan's new book under the pen name Casey Lane) Sell More Books Show bonus episode on Bryan's book launch experiment Selling For Authors Facebook group Best Page Forward copywriting service

While every author has heard the age old advice that it's important to have a professional looking and beautiful cover that appeals to the target audience, not as much attention has been paid to the blurb, description or "sales copy" that helps inspire the potential reader to click that all important BUY button. This interview with Bryan Cohen, author of the TED SAVES THE WORLD series, podcast host and man for all seasons includes an in-depth look at the importance of a strong and solid blurb. Also included are two different amazing prizes for writers. Contest 1 -- Win one of three carefully crafted book description services valued at $149 USD. Giveaway ends Sept 31, 2015. ENTER HERE Contest 2 -- $1000 Copywriting for Authors Giveaway. Giveaway Ends October 9, 2015 - ENTER HERE   Bryan is interviewed by Kobo Writing Life Director Mark Lefebvre. During their chat Mark and Bryan discuss: The great work that Bryan and Jim Kukral do putting together the SELL MORE BOOKS SHOW podcast and how that keeps Bryan on top of things for his own writing The non-fiction works that Bryan has written to help prompt writers to get started, which include the first one that Bryan wrote in 2010 (1000 Creative Writing Prompts), and how these books are still often among his best-selling titles How, if Bryan himself is ever stuck doing his own fiction writing, he can often turn to his own prompts Bryan's site Build-creative-writing-ideas.com which has about 700 articles and sees significant traffic on a daily basis How writing something timeless will ensure its long term viability and sales Bryan's YA podcast co-hosted with Robert Scanlon about reading and writing called The Split The work that Bryan does writing "sales copy" blurbs for writers (BEST PAGE FORWARD) -- and how the demand for those services has recently exploded How a solid writing blurb can work as effectively as a good cover at helping convert those looking at your book's landing page into buyers THE CONTEST BY WHICH a KWL LISTENER CAN RECEIVE A FREE BOOK BLURB FROM BRYAN How Bryan is looking into also helping writers with drafting email campaigns for auto-responders, helping with Facebook ad copy, author bios and similar communications The importance of priorities when it comes to maintaining a balanced life while producing as much content as Bryan produces Knowing your own strengths and weakeness for performing different types of tasks at certain times of the day and what makes Bryan a fantastic husband (he may love his readers, but he loves his wife more) How TED SAVES THE WORLD came from watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and asking the question: "What if Giles and Buffy were the same person? (ie, combining the intelligence & wisdom with the power and ability)" When Bryan, who used to do improv comedy, changed himself from a "panster" to a "plotter" while developing TED SAVES THE WORLD from a novella into a full novel and series. And the seeming contradiction in how Bryan often feels like he is "pantsing" in the discovery process of plotting out a novel. The replacement of the original terrible cover and the local photo shoot with actor friends that helped Bryan to produce a well-branded and consistent series. http://robotbraindesign.com/ Bryan also shares his favourite advice for beginning writers   Mark then provides a quick summary of some of the advice and examples regarding a strong professional product as gleaned from the interview and then provides further details about the aforemention contests.   Other links: Bryan's website Bryan on Twitter Bryan's TED SAVES THE WORLD BOOKS on Kobo Bryan's non-fiction writing on Kobo Sell More Books Show Podcast

From idea to publication in only 90 days? Is it possible? Bryan Cohen released his first fiction book, Ted Saves the World,  in July of 2014. Today he is about to release his fourth. Join Clark Chamberlain and Peter Turley as the discuss with Bryan the mindset and tools needed to edit  a running series and how to get it done on a tight release schedule. Bryan shares his week by week schedule from idea to publication.   This is one podcast you don't want to miss.

Hi everyone and welcome to the tenth episode of THE WRITING PODCAST! On this episode Adam and Lindsay interview Bryan Cohen, an author of both fiction and non-fiction, as well as the co-host of the ‘Sell More Books Show'! Not only does Bryan fill us in on his self-publishing journey so far, he gives tips on how to make your writing career a priority (even among chaos), and reveals a new project that YOU can take part in!. You won't want to miss this one! Be sure to check out Bryan at his website – http://bryancohen.com If you'd like to comment or watch the video version of this podcast, please visit the show page at http://thewritingpodcast.com/10