What if the future of book discovery and purchasing is mobile-first through apps like WeChat which dominates in China? I talk about AI translation, voice-first tech and more with Makoto Tokudome today.

In the intro, I mention the UK All Party Writer’s Group report into author earnings, and the Alliance of Independent Authors response which stresses the importance of author publishing and “the development of the entrepreneurial, empowered, growth mindset of the successful independent author.“

In marketing news, Google announces at their I/O conference that they will add podcasts to search results and a new podcast app to Android devices. Have you included podcasting as part of your marketing strategy? Do you have audiobooks on Google Play? [Marketing Profs]. Plus, I talk about my experience of Oxford: Decadence, Discipline, and Dreaming Spires on my Books and Travel Podcast.

This episode is sponsored by my Patrons, authors who are passionate about the future of publishing and help support my time in producing episodes like this. If you find this information useful, you can support the podcast at www.Patreon.com/thecreativepenn.

Makoto Tokudome is an author, language teacher, and coach based in China with an interest in A.I. and voice technologies for authors. His most recent book is The Thoughtful Language Learner.

• How Chinese readers find and buy books at the moment, including Douban social network
• The dominance of WeChat and mobile payments
• How to self publish in China on DangDang through PublishDrive. [My books are slowing getting there! DangDang]
• Using Amazon Polly (AI text to speech) to turn your book into an audio podcast
• Voice assistants and voice search, as discussed in Talk to Me by James Vlahos.
• The potential of AI translation and why Makoto thinks he will be out of a language teaching job in a few years (but why cultural translation will always be needed).
• NaNoGenMo: Spend November writing code to generate a novel of 50K or more (in parallel with NaNoWriMo).
• GPT2 Text Generator tool. You can play with it at www.TalkToTransformer.com.
• Getting excited about how we can use AI to enhance our creativity

You can find Makoto at www.mtokudome.com

Transcript of interview with Makoto Tokudome

[Joanna] Makoto Tokudome is an author, language teacher, and coach based in China with an interest in A.I. and voice technologies for authors. His most recent book is The Thoughtful Language Learner. Welcome, Makoto.

[Makoto] Hi Joanna. Great to be here.

[Joanna] Oh it’s great to have you on the show. First of all, tell us a bit more about you and your background across the US and China.

[Makoto] Sure. So you could probably guess from my name that I’m Japanese American. So I was born and raised in the U.S. I guess I would call L.A. or Los Angeles my hometown and my background. I’m happily married for the last twelve years and my wife and I have two kids and we currently live here in China. I work here in China as an English teacher at a local university. My wife is Chinese American.

[Joanna] And were your kids born in China or are they American too?

[Makoto] They are a blend. So part of our dream or our goal for them was they could have this cross-cultural experience living overseas and learn a little bit about Chinese culture, Chinese history. I think one of the greatest benefits is they get to learn Chinese as well and become bilingual.

[Joanna] I’m super jealous of your children! I don’t have another language and I think what you’re doing is fantastic. So let’s get into China and I and everything that you and I are interested in.

How do Chinese readers find and buy books right now? What is the current state of how we might reach them when writing in English?

[Makoto] Before this chat I was actually looking online, doing a little bit of background research. A lot of people know already that China has such a huge population. It’s now over 1.3 billion people, 830 million people that are online regularly and many of those people are shopping online, buying things online, including books. The book market is the largest in the world maybe surpassing the US, 50 plus billion dollars or something. So I think there’s definitely scope for authors thinking about the China market. There’s definitely huge potential but I think maybe there are also some challenges as well.

[Joanna] Absolutely. One of the things that I noticed when I went back to New Zealand last time is that people can now pay by WeChat or AliPay. That’s not something that we see a lot in the UK.

So what’s happening with apps for payments and how does that work with the book ecosystem?

[Makoto] Yes. Apps are a huge thing here in China. Just like many other countries. But maybe what’s unique about China is there are some very large companies such as you mentioned WeChat which is owned by the company Tencent.

Honestly, there is no parallel even in the US or in Silicon Valley. People say it’s a combination of a messaging app but also mobile payments. It’s a bit like Facebook and some people even do online reading on it as well.

What’s remarkable I think is there’s just so many people that use it on a day to day basis whether you’re buying groceries or ordering an Uber. So the WeChat model or the reach a company can have with all this data across your shopping habits, as well as maybe for readers about what kind of books they like to read. For people thinking about entering the market, there’s potential for understanding where are the niche niches for your type of book, or what type of audience you’re trying to reach.

[Joanna] I feel like I need to get on WeChat. I know we can here in the UK. It’s just because it’s not really used. I definitely want to come out to China and I don’t think you can come without having that payment method.

[Makoto] I mean you can use cash, you can still use cash, but these days the majority of payments just happen. You know you scan a QR code, you pay with your phone, from young teenagers all the way to the grandmas and grandpas are all using it.

[Joanna] Which is incredible because that to me that makes digital so much more seamless than we have. I mean Amazon has seamless one-click payments but that’s about the closest and the payment still goes separately.

How do people find books? For example, I might put a tweet out here in the UK and someone might see that in the UK and buy a book.

What are some of the ways that people are finding books in China?

[Makoto] There are different ways that people might find books. It could just be through social media app like WeChat. Like I mentioned, there’s a messaging app but it could also be like Facebook where people are their friends, your community. They’re sharing different posts and then maybe that includes books that they’ve been reading.

From right there they can see what people are reading and even purchase the ebook through the WeChat program.

Another I think a big one that even a lot of my students use is called Douban.com and basically, that’s an app just like Goodreads. Well, it’s kind of a Goodreads on steroids. It’s a social network for books. It also includes music and movies and so many people go there just to see what’s trending. What are the most popular books these days. You can drill down on all sorts of categories whatever you’re interested in reading.

[Joanna] Fantastic. In terms of the digital bookstores that we might know, I think the Kindle China store is still open although they pulled out in a lot of ways.

But are there any ways that we can actually reach Chinese readers right now?

[Makoto] From what I understand the only way for those from overseas who want to get into the China market for self-publishing is to use PublishDrive. My understanding is they work together with a retailer called DangDang.

[You can see some of my books on DangDang here.]

But it’s China. My understanding it’s divided into two worlds or two spheres. So the first one if you want to publish books in China all these publishing companies go through the state. So there is a censorship process that all these books go through before you can obtain its ISBN.

That’s one sphere. The other sphere that really has been popular in the last couple of years is people who consume either short books or serialized fiction online. There’s a lot of different apps that are also doing this. I guess it’s kind of akin to Wattpad.com. There are so many authors and so many readers. Some of them eventually become a professionally published author because they become so popular.

[Joanna] Fantastic. So what about audio.

Are people listening to digital audiobooks on apps as well?

[Makoto] Yes, audio I think is another one that’s really growing. It’s not only audio books but the consumption of podcasts or consumption of audio lectures. There’s also these online audio apps or sites that people are using to listen to. I think many of them are very similar to podcasts like we have in the US or in the West but a lot of them are also paid for content. So people are using it to learn how to maybe improve their IQ or learn how to become a better manager. And so in some of those areas, e-books or books are also being turned into audio content as well.

[Joanna] Now we connected because you did a blog post on TheCreativePenn about using Amazon Polly for audiobook creation. You also recommended Talk to Me by James Vlahos which I’ve listened to now and it’s amazing.

So, how can authors use voice tech for creation or publishing and ebook marketing?

[Makoto] That guest post is really like a proof of concept. It’s basically taking your creative work, your written text, and using this text to speech technology that Amazon has. You’re paying not that much money to convert it into voice.

Actually, I use the British voice and so I took all the text of my book and converted it into voice recordings for each chapter. A lot of people maybe tried something like that a couple of years ago and they feel it’s very robotic. It’s hard to understand. Actually, it’s quite amazing just how far technology has come. I wouldn’t say you can fool someone to think it’s human narration but I think I could definitely listen at length to these different recordings.

And so for authors, you know some people are actually getting into recording their own books for audio books but I would guess including myself maybe I don’t have the background or maybe I don’t have the time. You can use these technologies. I think in the future to create your written work into audio work.

[Joanna] The book, Talk to Me by James Vlahos, is a lot about voice assistants and Alexa or Siri or the Google Assistant or in China I guess, is it Baidu?

So how do you think this voice-first and voice search technology is going to change the way that books are found and consumed?

[Makoto] Yes. So a lot of people I think these days throw this phrase around: voice first. I think that’s going to become more and more important, not just for authors, but I think it’s something that authors and creatives should also be paying attention to.

James Vlahos in his book, Talk to Me, gives the history or the background of how far voice technology has come. And then he slowly starts to paint a picture of what it’s going to be like in the future. That is, the way we interact with devices and technology. Maybe it won’t be that we’re standing or sitting in front of a computer screen typing Google searches, but that more and more the way we search for stuff, the way we interact with our computers, will be more driven by voice.

And so I think that authors and creatives need to maybe start thinking about, well, if that’s the case, then how can I make my creative work, my author platform, and all those things easier to be found through either voice assistants like Alexa or Siri.

This is a huge area that Amazon is spending and investing a lot of money in. Maybe authors can explore or think about how they can slowly put their presence onto this area as well.

[Joanna] I’m currently writing a 10-year business plan around voice-first. It is a fascinating area and I feel like I’m on day one of learning about it. So thank you for recommending that book to me.

Now I want to ask you because you’re a language teacher and you help people learn languages. But one of the fascinating things is A.I. language translation.

At the Beijing Book Fair last year (2018) they translated a book from English into Mandarin in a couple of seconds [The New Publishing Standard].

Translation has incredible potential with AI. But what do you think as someone who makes his living this way?

[Makoto] It’s funny because I’m a language teacher but then at the same time I’m an enthusiast. I geek out and like to learn or read about the technology that’s coming.

I actually realized that maybe my job as a language teacher could become replaced or obsolete maybe in the next five to 10 years.

I think there will still be a place for language teachers or cultural teachers but a lot of this A.I. translation, whether it’s translation or interpretation, it’s getting better and better and better. Some jobs maybe will be replaced by technology.

One of the interesting things I was looking at the other day as regards to authors is whether machines can create fiction from scratch. In parallel to NaNoWriMo, they have NaNoGenMo where they can see if they can create generate fiction from scratch. It’s many years down the road to have something interesting to read, but just to know that people are working on something like this is maybe something to pay attention to.

[Joanna] I’ve been playing with the GPT2 Text Generator tool which is kind of crazy. You can play with it at www.TalkToTransformer.com.

You’ve said five to ten years with AI translation. But things speed up, don’t they. There’s already language translation where you can do Skype calls where it translates as people speak.

What are the other things that we both geek out over?

The book, AI Super Powers by Kai-Fu Lee. In the UK, it just wasn’t being stocked in bookstores. It’s not being talked about really. I couldn’t even buy a copy for a friend of mine. I was like “Where is this book?” This should be everywhere. I think it’s because of the negative press around China and technology most likely.

What are some of the things that you’re particularly excited about in terms of AI and how that might impact authors and writers?

[Makoto] Big question. AI Super Powers, I also thought is a fantastic book. Anyone interested in just understanding in the last five or 10 years what’s been happening technology-wise in China. I think it’s a great read and especially in the area of A.I. and how jobs will change as this technology continues to progress. Like I mentioned about my own job as a language teacher, and what are the other types of jobs or industries that might be at risk.

For authors or creatives, I think this is where maybe we can be a little bit encouraged. He has this I guess this pie graph or this x y axis talking about what are the jobs that will be most secure and what are the jobs that maybe are at risk being replaced by AI.

He talks about the ones that are most probably the safest or most secure are the ones that depend highly on creativity, so creatives and artists I think can be safe from these AI technologies.

Instead of seeing AI as something that you’re trying to run away from, more and more I think we can think about how we can use it to compliment our creativity.

So I think already in areas like music or painting people are using A.I. to teach them. Maybe in music they’re mixing jazz and classical music and they create these brand new compositions and music that gives them maybe new ideas or inspirations.

And I feel that even with this NaNoGenMo, maybe you’ll never produce a bestselling book but it can be used to generate creativity and it’s something that we should look forward to versus maybe be afraid of.

[Joanna] Oh yeah, I see technology more as a leverage point or a way to supercharge what we already have. So you know, without the internet I wouldn’t have a business, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

There are lots of creative ideas. So instead of me writing a book on say ‘how to write a novel,’ why don’t I write an Alexa Skill instead. That’s really an interesting idea.

[Makoto] One of the cool things I was checking out earlier this year, Alexa came out with a new skill Choose Your Own Adventure stories [TechCrunch].

I remember reading these as a young boy. I love those books. If you choose to go down this mountain, turn to page 76 or something. Now it’s turned into audio form and so far I think they have maybe five or six different stories which take you to dozens of different alternative endings. And I think that’s so cool that fiction writers can use technology like that.

We’re just on the beginning stages of exploring voice technology together with fiction writing and maybe something especially for fiction writers to pay attention to if you can be early into this kind of market you can really do well for yourself.

[Joanna] It feels like 2009 for e-books. Like people keep saying, Why can’t we have all this stuff for audio books like we do for e-books? (marketing, categorization etc). And I’m like well that’s because we’re still at the beginning.

I mean the audiobook stuff in the last 18 months has really taken off but things are changing. A very exciting time. Tell people where can they find you and your book online.

[Makoto] My book is called The Thoughtful Language Learner and you know Joanna I just want to say I’ve been listening to your podcast for a long time. I’ve been a big fan and many of your episodes have been instrumental or helpful and just this self-publishing process so.

I appreciate all the content you make. So my book is available on Amazon both Kindle and paperback. And if people want to connect with me they can find me on my Web site, www.mtokudome.com

[Joanna] Fantastic and I’ll put all the links in the show. Thank you so much. That was brilliant.

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Some people say that publishing has already been disrupted, that this current state is the new model. But I don’t think the disruption has even started yet. As Jeff Bezos says, “it’s always Day One.”

In the last ten years, we’ve seen the rise of digital publishing, print on demand, and the independent author movement, as well as the growth of streaming audio and the use of internet marketing tools like Facebook and Amazon Ads to sell more books.

In this episode, I’ll talk about some of the possible disruptions to come for authors and the publishing industry due to the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the next 10 years. 

This episode is sponsored by my Patrons, authors who are passionate about the future of publishing and help support my time in producing episodes like this. If you find this information useful, you can support the podcast at www.Patreon.com/thecreativepenn.

Why write about AI now?

Ten years ago, when I started self-publishing, I was over-the-top excited about the potential of ebooks (see my embarrassing video here!). I could see the incredible possibilities as a creator to reach the whole world with my words.

Since starting out in 2008, I have built a multi-six-figure business as an author-entrepreneur, taking action on that feeling of optimism and learning everything I needed to know to write, publish, market, and make a living with my writing. [See my timeline here].

I started blogging and making money online in 2008 and self-published on the Kindle as soon as it became available. I started my podcast in 2009 before it was even called podcasting and jumped on Twitter around that same time.

Me with some of my books!

I’ve adopted new tools over time — like Scrivener for writing and Vellum for publishing — as well as working with new partners like Ingram Spark for print and FindawayVoices for audio plus the incumbents like Amazon, Apple, and Kobo — but I haven’t really seen a significant change in my business model over the last ten years.

Then, in 2016, I talked on my podcast about Alpha Go Zero beating Lee Sodol at the game of Go and I had an aha moment similar to the one I had when I read my first ebook on the Kindle. Since then, I’ve been devouring books, audiobooks, and podcasts about AI and also attending events about AI developments, sharing thoughts in my futurist segments every Monday.

In the last six months, I’ve felt a significant acceleration — a shift from AI being a thing of the future to it becoming very much of the now. It feels like 2009 all over again in terms of the level of excitement I feel and the new tools that are emerging are both exhilarating but also terrifying for those who don’t embrace the change.

Before you start to envision anything too dark about our future, I am even more excited about the future for authors and publishing in a new world powered by AI tools, and I am determined to be part of the next shift. 

Humans are innately creative and in this new AI-powered world, we can create even more than we ever dreamed possible.

In this article, I outline the ways in which AI might impact the business model of authors and the publishing industry over the next ten years and how we can surf the change rather than drowning in the deluge to come. I’ve built a new business plan based on these possibilities because I want to embrace AI rather than resist it. 

Here’s the overview and then I’ll go into each one in details as well as how to react to these changes. These are in no particular order.

1. Non-fiction books, blog posts, and news articles will be written by AI
2. Copyright law will be challenged as books are used to train AIs which then produce work in the voice of established authors
3. Voice synth technology will replace human narrators for mass market audiobook narration
4. Voice search will disrupt text-based SEO and if you don’t have voice content, you will be invisible.
5. Translation will be performed by AI — for books as well as other content
6. Content will explode exponentially, and AI discoverability and marketing tools will help navigate the tsunami
7. AI-augmented creativity will develop and more people will want to be writers
8. Print publishing will shift into a green, sustainable model with AI-assisted micro-print-on-demand
9. Expansion of mobile reading + micropayments enabled by 5G mobile and blockchain technology + four billion new people online = explosion of reading

Please do let me know your thoughts on these topics — but please do check the sources I mention before you rant as I am not making this stuff up

(1) Non-fiction books, blog posts, and news articles will be written by AI

This is already happening.

Text generation AI is already used for journalism including tools and companies like Automated Insights, Narrative Science, Bertie, and Heliograf [Forbes]

The first AI generated textbook was published in April 2019. “Writing in the introduction, Springer Nature’s Henning Schoenenberger (a human) says books like this have the potential to start “a new era in scientific publishing” by automating drudgery.” [The Verge]

This is surely just the beginning. The ‘write and publish faster’ model will soon be broken. You cannot write as fast as AI. It doesn’t get tired or burn out and it can consume millions of academic papers or books much faster than you can read.

Publishers are not charities and authors are basically content creators, writing products to be sold. An in-house proprietary creative AI will work constantly with no hand-holding and no need to be looked after in any way.

Of course, human editorial will be more important for choosing topics and shaping the direction of production, as well as editing the finished product, but expect far more content creation by AIs over time.

If you are a freelance writer doing work that does not have a personal stamp on it, check my thoughts below on doubling down on being human. 

(2) Copyright law will be challenged as books are used to train AIs which then produce work in the voice of established authors

AI has exploded in the last few years because of two main developments: deep learning and big data.

In that 2016 Go match, Deep Mind’s AI Alpha Go Zero beat Lee Sodol, the Go champion, with creative moves that went beyond the comprehension of Go masters [Wired]. 

Alpha Go Zero was not programmed with rules by humans. It learned by itself through playing the game, and then by playing its own previous iterations until it surpassed all human players.

That is the true shift behind the acceleration of AI since 2016. AI is no longer constrained by human programmers telling it what to do. Just give a deep learning algorithm enough data and let it train itself.

As Google Head of Decision Intelligence, Cassie Kozyrkov, said at the WIRED conference in London recently, “Optimize this objective on that dataset … Go!”

Of course, the problem then becomes the dataset you train it on, as we have already seen with the social media bots that end up spouting hate speech because they learn it from humans. Curation of the learning dataset is key, as well as the objective you set the AI.

For example, what if my objective is to write a bestselling horror novel — and what if I give the AI the entire Stephen King backlist to learn from?

Or the top 1000 bestselling horror novels from Amazon?

I could probably do a rudimentary version of that right now with AWS Amazon Comprehend (which discovers insight and relationships in text) and then utilize a Natural Language Generation [Wikipedia] tool like GPT2, considered so dangerous that it has not been released (OpenAI), but of course, many other such tools will be created.

The first movie has been created from a screenplay written by an AI [Ars Technica]. While the result might not be high art, it’s a first draft, and it took only a few minutes to create (after much deep learning from existing scripts). 

The first novel has been written by an AI [Singularity Hub], OpenAI’s MuseNet generates music at the click of a button [The Verge], Google’s AI is writing poetry [Futurism]; AI music is changing the way hits are made [The Verge]; The first piece of AI-generated art has been sold at Christie’s for $432,500 [Christies.com]

[For more on AI assisted creativity, see Sleepwalkers Podcast episode Chocolate Chicken Chicken Cake]

How long does it take a human to create a first draft? And how much more do you have to look after that human? Will big film and TV care if they use an AI for the next iteration of a superhero franchise?

This type of AI creative scenario is already being questioned for the music industry.

“Say an AI system is trained exclusively on Beyoncé’s music … If that system then makes music that sounds like Beyoncé, is Beyoncé owed anything? Several legal experts believe the answer is no.” [The Verge]

There is no doubt in my mind that something like this will be achieved and probably quite soon. Given how scammers love to scam [David Gaughran], and the plagiarism scandals seen in the author community [The Guardian], as well as those who continue to flood Kindle Unlimited with mass-produced books, someone will do this for books, so we have to consider the ramifications.

If I train an AI on the works of Stephen King and it writes a new book with no single sentence that is plagiarized, but is clearly in the ‘voice’ of King, who owns the copyright on that book?

King didn’t write it. The AI did.

Currently, the view is that non-humans can’t have copyright [Robotics Law Journal], but Stephen King didn’t write the book, so do I own it? Or does the company that created the AI tool?

I currently use tools like Scrivener and Vellum to write and publish my books, but no one is arguing that those ‘tools’ own the copyright to my books. So if I as an author use the Stephen King generator model to write a new book, can I own that copyright? Can I publish that book under my own name?

Personally, I think this is a form of plagiarism. It uses Stephen King’s hard work to train an AI for my own purposes. Since I love his work, I want King himself to be rewarded for it and continue to create, but many do not share the ethical boundaries that I do, and of course, ethics are not legality anyway.

[For more on ethics, check out the Ethical Author code by the Alliance of Independent Authors.]

As an author, I’m excited by these possibilities. I would love to build a natural language generation model based on my books. I’d use that to help me generate first drafts based on adding new ideas to the mix. Perhaps I would even license that model to others to write books and take a percentage of the income.

[Note: Deep learning needs a lot of data, so books by one author would not be enough to train a model, at least right now. It’s more likely that a genre-specific publisher with rights to a whole catalog could train a model based on their backlist.]

This might even spawn a new sub-genre of mash-up books, for example, in my model, I might use 30% Stephen King, 30% Dan Brown, and 40% J.F.Penn to create books with a new ‘voice.’

If I was Stephen King (or his publisher), I would be looking at licensing my backlist to an AI text generator model right now in order to own this space before anyone else.

(3) Voice synth technology will replace human narrators for mass market audio narration

You can already use Amazon Polly to read your audiobook and release it as a podcast. You can’t publish it on the audiobook retail platforms — yet — but it is only a matter of time until AI voices are indistinguishable from human narrators.

DeepZen.io promises to be one step closer with “sector-specific solutions that will eliminate the need to use studios and lengthy recording sessions by creating a human-like quality of speech with emotion that can be edited by using intuitive tools. “The company claims that it could reduce the time and cost to produce audiobooks by up to 90%.” [Digital Trends]

I listen to some non-fiction narrators right now and wonder if they are actually bots anyway! I also listen on 1.5x or 2x speed so the ‘quality’ is less important than the content. Given that the Audible app already has 3.5x speed available, it’s clear that many hardcore listeners are also more concerned with content than narration experience.

Of course, there will still be room for gorgeous audio productions by human narrators and performers — but these will be a lot more expensive to produce and to buy. It will be a treat, like going to the theatre, something you buy occasionally and as an experience, rather than for your daily audio consumption.

If the main platforms continue to reject AI narrated books, then a new subscription platform will emerge that only has AI narrated content and it will be a whole lot cheaper than the human-read versions. There may well be a new license for AI narration, a further extension of the audio copyright possibilities.

This will stratify the audiobook market into ‘mass consumption’ AI narrated audio content and books, and a layer of ‘artisanal’ audio, that is created and produced by humans. This is already starting to happen with the full cast productions that Audible is investing in now and I have bought a couple of those for the pleasure of the ‘experience,’ but it is the minority of my listening. 

As text-to-speech narration becomes indistinguishable from human narration, famous actors and narrators will license their voices to AI models so they can be paid for recognition but not have to do the work of narration. This will make it cheaper to have pro voices and accelerate audio even more.

Those actors may even sell their voices as some kind of trademark so they can narrate from beyond the grave, in the same way that Enid Blyton among others is still putting out books. 

I’ve had a podcast for ten years and in my small niche on the internet, I have a ‘voice brand.’ I’m now narrating my own audiobooks because of this development. I intend to develop my own AI voice model that you could license if you want me to narrate your book. Check out Lyrebird.ai to see the beginnings of this technology emerging already.

(4) Voice search will disrupt text-based SEO and if you don’t have voice content, you will be invisible

Audiobooks are the fastest growing segment in publishing [The Bookseller] and this growth will only continue as people try to reduce their screen time, interact with voice assistants, and increase their reading time through audio.

Once text-to-speech narration is indistinguishable from humans, or human voices are used with synth AIs, voice content will explode.

In recognition of the importance of voice, Google announced at their 2019 I/O conference that they will include podcasts in search results [MarketingProfs].

If you didn’t have a website in 1995, you could still have a business. But by 2005, most businesses had at least a static website. Now, even many individuals have a web presence, whether that is their own website or a social media page. The same acceleration will happen for voice, so if you don’t have audio content or your business is not voice-accessible by 2025, you will be invisible to the voice-first devices.

Four billion more people are coming online in the next 5-10 years [Singularity Hub]. Those will be mobile-first consumers of the internet on 4G-5G speeds. Many of those devices will be Android enabled by Google Assistant. If you ask Google, or Siri, or Alexa to find you a book, they default to audio content. If you search with voice, the reply is by voice.

If your audiobooks are only on the Amazon eco-system, they cannot be found by Google Assistant or Siri, who search in Google Play audio and Apple Books respectively. [Another reason to go wide with audio!]

Voice search has the potential to disrupt the existing search engine model that monetizes based on paid ads. The front page of Google is no longer enough when there is only one answer to a question.

In a voice-first world, we need to figure out ways to be discovered, for example, building Alexa Skills or other voice-enabled marketing. Otherwise, the publishing industry will continue to miss out of revenue – estimated to exceed $50 million in 2020 without changes [What’s New in Publishing].

More on voice first technologies in my interview with Bradley Metrock, and also on optimizing for voice search with Miral Sattar].

(5) Translation will be performed by AI — for books as well as other content

At Beijing Book Fair in August 2018, the Youdao AI Translator translated a 100,000-word non-fiction book from English to Mandarin in 30 seconds. It then took a human narrator a week to clean up the translation and it was ready for publishing. The comparison was six months for human translation alone. [The New Publishing Standard]

Deep learning has accelerated AI translation tools like Amazon Translate, Microsoft and Google, as well as companies like Lilt who use AI-powered translation and then humans to edit and polish. 

“within one to three years, neural machine technology (NMT) translators will carry out more than 50% of the work handled by the $40 billion market” [Forbes: Will Machine Learning AI Make Human Translators An Endangered Species?]

Indie authors have so far focused on licensing content to foreign markets, but if you can use AI translation, how will this change the way we publish — especially if we can use AI-powered marketing where we don’t need to know the language in order to reach readers?

That’s exciting but also consider it from another angle. What if Chinese authors publishing on their mobile platforms decided to translate their books into English and release them on the US and UK stores? When China Literature spoke at London Book Fair in 2018, I was stunned that so few people went to hear their representatives speak, because I see that possibility as a far greater threat.

How much more content will we have when translation is just as easy as publishing in your native language?

[If you are one of those who doubt AI translation will ever work for fiction, then just consider how much it will impact the publishing industry if only non-fiction was AI-translated.]

(6) Content will explode exponentially, and AI discoverability and marketing tools will navigate the tsunami

If content is produced by AI at a faster rate in every medium — and possibly with the addition of translated material — then the tsunami of content will soon bury us all.

Authors and publishers already have to pay for Amazon Advertising to even be seen in the Amazon stores right now and this model will soon be broken as ads become too expensive for most.

But this overwhelming amount of content will also drive the need for better discoverability tools.

I have been saying for years that the book itself should be metadata. Why do I need to select categories and keywords and run ads on other keywords or similar authors? Why can’t the algorithms determine the emotional promise of my books and match the content with the right readers who will enjoy it?

Distributor PublishDrive has started using their AI tool, Savant, for category determination, and is also moving to use more AI tools for authors in their portal.

The mass market is dead. Bestsellers are dead. Micro-niche will be everything and more granular discoverability will be better with AI, e.g. emotional resonance matching or specifics like I want a thriller set in Rome with a female protagonist who likes fast cars and Renaissance art.

We’re starting to see this with Amazon Advertising auto-targeted ads. They were pretty bad a year ago but now they are starting to become more effective.

I would anticipate better AI matching between readers and books, as well as publishers and books they want to take further, or content producers for film and TV and content they can license, like a super-sized version of PubMatch and Taleflick.

(7) AI-augmented creativity will develop and more people will want to be writers

One of the best segments of the Wired conference I attended recently was the performance of Reeps1, a beatboxer who created a visual sculpture with his voice live on stage. It was beautiful and far more engaging than listening to his voice alone. He talked about augmented relationships, where AI will take our creativity into new realms of possibility.

Reeps1 beatbox voice sculpture at Wired AI conference, London, June 2018

I see the rise of ‘centaur-publishing’ where there will be new forms of writing in collaboration with AI tools — perhaps even the virtual Stephen King AI that I mentioned above. There will be new prizes and competitions in the same way that there is now centaur-chess [TechCrunch].

Hopefully, we will embrace the new possibilities of AI-assisted creation in the same way as the Go industry has done.

“AlphaGo’s game last year transformed the industry of Go and its players. The way AlphaGo showed its level was far above our expectations and brought many new elements to the game.” – Shi Yue, 9 Dan Professional, World Champion on the Deep Mind blog.

There will always be purists, those who insist on human only creation, but I can bet you those people are still happy to use the internet when it suits them. Tools are tools, whichever way you look at them.

I hope we will embrace creative commons and remixing as mash-ups between human and AI become more accepted and celebrated for a new form of creativity.

I’m excited about the possibilities, for example, instead of writing stories for the ‘book’ container, what about writing your ideas for an interactive voice assistant like the Choose Your Own Adventure stories [The Verge], or writing an audiobook or audio drama first, or writing for an immersive augmented reality experience. The possibilities of transmedia become even more exciting with AI assistance, especially as an independent creator.

Looking at the broader impact of AI, many talk of the loss of jobs, the need for retraining, universal income of some kind so that people can afford to live, and so many basic tasks being done by AI that people will have more time to do the things they want to do — like write.

The human drive to create is innate within us all, and some of us want to express ourselves in writing. People will have more time, so people will consume more, but they will also create more.

Teaching writing has always been a part of the author business model [Alliance of Independent Authors] — so this will only become more applicable in a future with more creators. Expect to see a boom in books on writing, creative courses and particularly, in-person, human-led experiences like retreats, live events, and conferences.

(8) Print publishing will move to a greener, sustainable model with AI-assisted micro-print-on-demand

I absolutely believe in the future of print as a format that readers still want to buy — but not in the way that publishers currently produce print books.

Current publishing models are incredibly wasteful with huge print runs, returns, pulping and some books ending up in the landfill. Plus, many are printed a long way from the final store with the associated shipping and handling issues.

With the price of paper changing [Publishers Weekly] and the shift to green economics and ‘buy local’ in a world of climate change, I can’t see how this current publishing model will be allowed to continue. It’s possible that it is only accepted now because so few realize how wasteful and destructive it is.

Print-on-demand is the most sustainable option for print publishing. When a customer orders a book, one copy is printed and sent to them. No waste, no pulping, no returns. Just a happy customer with a print book.

Of course, right now, print on demand happens at specific hubs and is more expensive than bulk print runs but that could change if the model shifted.

AI-driven print-on-demand in micro-locations, maybe even in bookstores like the Espresso Book Machine, will enable bookstores to localize as well as react to fast-moving changes in news and social media. Something happens and people want a certain book. Bookstores print a copy in the back and put it out in the store and if customers want it, more are printed on site. This ties into the more localized model of bookstores that Mike Shatzkin talked about recently:

“… we need smaller stores with much more rapidly rotating title selection, probably driven algorithmically by sales signals and social media signals more rapidly than human buyers could arrive at answers poring over spreadsheets.” [Mike Shatzkin – Idealog]

I wrote several years ago about how VR and AR could change bookstores and still believe it could enhance the shopping experience by individualizing recommendations and enabling physical stores to have a better online presence, and also to offer more books in-store with AR displays. [FutureBook]

(9) Expansion of mobile reading + micropayments enabled by 5G mobile and blockchain technology = explosion in reading

This model is already happening in China with many people buying and reading within the WeChat eco-system paying with micro-payments [FutureBook].

Facebook is introducing its own cryptocurrency, Libra, and this may enable similar types of behavior on the mobile, social platforms used in the West. [TechCrunch]

I already sell my ebooks direct through PayHip as well as lots of other online stores, so I’d be happy to sell my books on Facebook directly, too.

By 2025, there will be another 4 billion people online and most of those will be accessing the internet through mobile devices. This is why Streetlib now has a publishing portal in every country, in every language, positioning themselves as the portal for the 2020s (and why I am now distributing on their platform as well as others).

The massive growth of digital book sales (ebook and audio) is not in the US, UK, Canada, or Australia. It’s everywhere else — and most of those countries don’t use Amazon to shop for books.

Micropayments for pages read through mobile platforms will suit the next generation of readers, and if creatives can use blockchain technology to tag intellectual property through the supply chain, then revenue through these new models could be truly exciting. If you own global rights to your IP of course, which makes the independent author model even more viable. [Alliance of Independent Authors – Blockchain for Books].

I hope this gives you a sense of the excitement I feel right now!

If even some of this is possible in the next ten years, what should we do in order to surf the change and take advantage of the creative possibilities?

(A) Embrace the tools, don’t fight them.

We are not looking at an artificial general AI in the near future. There will not be an AI just like me or you sitting at a laptop in a cafe creating stories and books and hoping to change the world.

But you can expect specific tools emerging from the new world of deep learning + big data, a bit like your phone is filled with apps that you use every day, even though back in 1995 you didn’t know you needed a mobile, and in 2005, you didn’t know you needed a smartphone with internet access.

Authors have always used tools. Even pen and paper augment your creative brain. Writers embraced the typewriter and then the word processor. We use dictation to write faster (and recently, I have switched to an AI transcription service, trint.com to transcribe my dictated files as it is faster and cheaper than human services).

I like writing in cafes. Pen and paper are still tools

In the last ten years, we have started using writing tools like Scrivener, formatting tools like Vellum, and publishing platforms like Amazon KDP or Kobo Writing Life, as well as print-on-demand platforms like IngramSpark and audio services like ACX and FindawayVoices. [More tips in free ebook, Successful Self-Publishing.] We use the internet to publish and market globally, and social media apps to connect with other authors and the reader community.

Authors and publishers who have embraced the ‘new’ tools of the last ten years have done very well indeed — and I, for one, intend to surf the wave of what’s coming next.

So how will you use the new generation of tools as they emerge?

(B) Double down on being human

Publishers are businesses. They will use whatever tools they can to bring down the costs of doing business and authors are just content creators at the end of the day. Yes, your editor may love you, but it’s the accountants who make the decisions.

You cannot win on speed when an AI can write a screenplay in two minutes, or generate a textbook, or translate a book faster than you can read this sentence.

But there is one thing that you can do that AI cannot — be you.

Move away from the ‘faster is better’ model to ‘artisan craftsmanship.’ Stand out by having a unique voice. Don’t write anything without giving it your own authentic stamp. Focus on local, imperfect, real connection with other humans.

Everything you do needs to be personal. Use your experience and your voice to connect in the written word, but also by moving into voice and even video if that’s your preferred medium.

This is why I am doubling down on voice technology — narrating my own audiobooks, creating Alexa Skills, writing a travel memoir in real time on my new show, Books and Travel, and helping people know, like, and trust me so they are interested in what I create over time.

I’m thinking about how I can do more artisanal creation, for example, limited edition hand-printed books on hand-made paper, as well as creating experiences, for example, join me for a creative weekend in Bath where I will show you the literary places that inspire me and help you write your own book.

In conclusion, I believe that the next ten years will bring an even bigger shift than we have seen so far as authors and publishers face the promise and the challenge of AI-enabled technology. I’m excited to surf the change and I hope you will join me on the journey!

Recommended Resources:

These are some of the blogs, books, and podcasts I recommend if you want to learn more about what’s going on with AI. I listened to most of the books in audio format and then bought the hardback editions as well. 

• WIRED magazine and The Verge blog for regular updates on the applications of AI. Tech-focused but not in tech-speak
  
• Sleepwalkers Podcast – AI is here already, it’s just not evenly distributed. This podcast is much broader than the publishing industry but it’s a must-listen show to get a sense of what is going on right now.
  
• AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order – Kai Fu Lee. China aims to overtake the US with AI technologies by 2025 and be the global leader by 2030. They have changed their school system to achieve that, and are changing society to take advantage of big data. A fascinating book that will make you question your assumptions. Blew my mind …
  
• Talk to Me: How Voice Computing will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think – James Vlahos. An overview of the history of voice technology as well as how voice tech is being adopted in different demographics, from talking Barbie to helping dementia patients, and the emotional resonance of voice. This book made me decide to double down on voice in my own business.
  
• The Creativity Code: How AI is Learning to Write, Paint and Think – Marcus du Sautoy. Can AI really be creative? And what does it mean for us if it can? You can listen to my interview with Marcus on The Creativity Code here.
  
• The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity – Amy Webb. I am on the positive happy side of AI, so it was good to read this book and learn more about what could go wrong if we don’t engage with the changes ahead. This is exactly why people of all kinds need to learn about AI and get involved — including those of us who are not techy, as well as people from diverse backgrounds. #weneeddiverseAI
  
• Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence – Max Tegmark. An overview of the development of AI and how it impacts society now and into the future. 
• Exponential Wisdom Podcast with Peter Diamandis and Dan Sullivan. The next billion-dollar markets are about to take off. A positive podcast on the opportunities of exponential technologies.
  
• The New Silk Roads – Peter Frankopan. Plus The Future is Asian by Parag Khanna. Both of these books are more about the growing dominance of Asia, where a lot of AI development is happening. So much of our news is siloed and focused on domestic issues that we have missed the incredible developments going on elsewhere.
  
• Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow – Yuval Noah Harari. How the world will stratify into those who can use and work with new technologies and those who can’t. We need to be in the group who can use it. Do not be one of the ‘useless class.’
• The Inevitable: Understanding the Twelve Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future – Kevin Kelly. A framework for looking at the world and the changes to come with the positive slant that Kelly always brings to his work — and why I have listened to this several times!
• AI For Everyone – Andrew Ng. Free multimedia course on Coursera. Very useful for understanding the language around AI and also its applications right now and in the future. He includes translation and text-to-speech as some of the things that AI does well.

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Live events can be a part of every author’s marketing strategy. But how do we make the most of those events? John Sibley Williams shares seven tips for doing just that.

As any publicist will tell you, in-person events are crucial to networking and meeting new readers. There’s nothing so intimate as a cozy bookstore, library, or other literary space for strangers to first encounter your work.

They have the opportunity to not just read but feel your words, and they have the rare treat of asking the author questions. And you never know who may be in an audience: other authors, bookstore owners, local media, bloggers.

Events are as much about giving a real human voice to your work as forging social connections.

But the book sales from an event, especially a festival or conference, don’t always cover your costs. Events can be pricey when you add up the books, travel, meals, swag, rented table, and anything else the event requires.

Also, there’s the issue of competition: there may be dozens or even hundreds of authors at a book festival. All are vying for attention and doing everything possible to stand out. So finding inexpensive and unique ways to reach your audience and sell books is essential.

Here are some tips on specific sales strategies to garner attention and sales.

1. Publicize your event

Although the venue will likely provide a certain amount of event publicity, likely including social media posts and in-store signage or, if a festival, a brief write-up in their brochure, don’t leave all publicity in their hands.

Send a press release to all local media, from newspapers to radio, and submit your event to local media calendars (the online component to most newspapers have one). Create a Facebook event and invite local friends. Ask your friends to spread the word, sharing your link.

Research local literary organizations and send them a personal invitation. Build up to the event on social media by consistently posting pictures, excerpts, blurbs, and videos that highlight your book, ensuring the event details are always clearly labeled.

2. Make purchasing easy

Have you ever wanted to purchase a book at an event but the author only accepted cash? Nowadays authors have a wealth of selling options with Square, PayPal, and other devices that can allow you to take credit cards.

Do make sure that you’re ready with change in case folks want to pay with cash, but also carry a remote card reader, or your phone with a point-of-sale app installed. Whatever you do, make it easy to buy your book!

3. Bring swag

Always have professional author business cards on hand everywhere you go. But what else can your bring to catch reader interest? Bookmarks, postcards, well-designed posters and signage are all common, perhaps even expected.

But think outside the box too. What about pens or small notebooks with your name blazoned upon them? And think about your themes, setting, and characters. Are there extra special freebies you can offer that directly connect to your book’s content? The more unique, the more likely new readers will want them.

4. Price your book to sell

Must you always sell your book at retail price? Although bookstores often require sales be full price, it’s common for authors at other venues to provide an event discount.

I find a round number like $10 or $15 makes a purchaser more comfortable. And don’t forget to include the discount on your signage so readers know they’re receiving something special.

5. Collect names and contact information

Always have a newsletter sign-up sheet at your event table, allowing new contacts and readers to volunteer to receive your regular e-newsletters. To further entice them, you can offer a small gift for those who sign up. If you don’t already have a newsletter associated with your website, create one now!

[Note from Joanna: Don’t forget about GDPR regulations; make sure to follow the guidelines and in this instance, where people are signing up to your newsletter list offline, be sure they understand what they are signing up for. You can find more help with GDPR here.]

6. Provide free copies

Don’t be shy of gifting copies of your new book to other authors, media, bookstore owners, or anyone who may be able to assist your publicity in the future. If this isn’t your first book, include with purchase of your new book a free older title. If this isn’t economically feasible, have cards on hand with a code for readers to acquire a free ebook.

7. Follow up with your network

So the event is over. Now what?

Contact the person who hosted you expressing your gratitude. Although you should do so in person too, a well-placed thank you goes a long way towards securing future events and leaving a kind impression.

Also, email people who signed up for your newsletter thanking them for attending. Include any pertinent personal remarks about conversations you had with them, and if they forgot to purchase your book in person remember to extend to them the same discounted event rate.

What strategies do you use to sell more books at live events? Please leave your thoughts below and join the conversation.

John Sibley Williams is the author of As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize, 2019), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press, 2019), Disinheritance, and Controlled Hallucinations. A nineteen-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Philip Booth Award, American Literary Review Poetry Contest, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, Confrontation Poetry Prize, and Laux/Millar Prize.

He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and works as an educator and literary agent. Previous publishing credits include: The Yale Review, Midwest Quarterly, Southern Review, Sycamore Review, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, Saranac Review, Atlanta Review, TriQuarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, Poetry Northwest, and Third Coast.

His upcoming book, As One Fire Consumes Another, is available for preorder at Orison Books.
For more information, visit his website.

[iPhone image courtesy Sara Kurfeb and Unsplash. Books table image courtesy Freddie Marriage and Unsplash.]

Audiobooks are the fastest growing segment in publishing and voice-first technologies like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, Cortana, and others mean that voice content will become even more popular.

But audiobook production is still expensive, so should you try narrating your own audiobooks? If you fancy expanding your creative into the realm of voice, as I am,  you’ll find today’s interview with Lorelei King super useful.

Today’s podcast sponsor is Findaway Voices, which gives you access to the world’s largest network of audiobook sellers and everything you need to create and sell professional audiobooks. Take back your freedom. Choose your price, choose how you sell, choose how you distribute audio. Check it out at FindawayVoices.com.

Lorelei King is an actress multi-award-winning audiobook narrator, writer, script editor, and creative entrepreneur. She is the co-author and narrator of Storyteller: How to be an Audio Book Narrator, along with Ali Muirden, and is one of the first inductees into the Audible narrator Hall of Fame.

You can listen above or on iTunes or your favorite podcast app, read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and full transcript below.

Show Notes

• Changes in the audiobook industry since Lorelei started

• Tips for narrating your own work, including breath tips

• To use accents or not when narrating?

• Why being in the moment matters for good narration

• Learning the lingo and techniques of narrating and recording

• The challenges of narrating non-fiction

• On the stamina and energy required to narrate

• Foods to eat, and ones to avoid, when you’re narrating

• On the future of voice and narration with the rise of AI

You can find Lorelei King at LoreleiKing.com and on Twitter @LoreleiKing

Transcript of Interview with Lorelei King

Joanna: Hello, creatives. I’m Joanna Penn from TheCreativePenn.com. And today I’m here with Lorelei King. Hi Lorelei.

Lorelei: Hi Joanna. How are you?

Joanna: I’m good. Thanks for coming on this show. Just a little introduction.

Lorelei is an actress multi-award-winning audiobook narrator, writer, script editor, and creative entrepreneur. She is the co-author and narrator of Storyteller: How to be an Audio Book Narrator, along with Ali Muirden, and is one of the first inductees into the Audible narrator Hall of Fame.

I’m so excited to have you here today.

Lorelei: Oh it’s fun to be here. Thanks so much for that lovely introduction.

Joanna: Well I loved this book and I jumped on it as soon as I heard about it on Audible and I just got it.

How did you get into audio narration in the first place?

Lorelei: The first book I ever did was because I was in animation. The director had another job. He had this book of short stories and he needed an American female voice. It was just a matter of being right place, right time, right accent.

He was very nervous about using me because I hadn’t done it before. But I just kind of discovered I had a knack for it. And he was really happy. He booked a whole day in the studio but we finished it in the morning. So he took me to lunch and we had a very boozy lunch as I recall.

I learned that after that that wasn’t necessarily how the business works. And after that, I mean I’ve always loved reading. So it wasn’t a hardship. I thought this is a good gig.

I served a kind of apprenticeship I guess you’d call it at the RNIB, the Royal National Institute for the Blind. In those days and I think still now had volunteer readers. You had to audition. They were quite strict about what they wanted and you would go in and do half day sessions.

I learned so much because you took whatever they gave you. So you had not just crime fiction or some was nonfiction all kinds of things. Book of rather elegant pornography by Anis Nin.

Joanna: Oh wonderful. I love that book.

Lorelei: I spent some years doing that. And I think that really prepared me to move into audiobooks. And when Shivers, which used to be in Bath, which I think is where you’re based, then became BBC audio books they did the same thing. They had a lot of studios and it was like a little factory. We were little chickens pushing out little audio book eggs and stuff and that really solidified my body of work.

Joanna: Most of my audience are probably not going to be doing full-time narration like you do, but many authors are interested in narrating either their own books or potentially some in the same genre.

How has the audiobook industry changed while you’ve been doing it and are there more opportunities now?

Lorelei: That’s a big question because there have been technical changes certainly. Just simply the way we record has changed.

It used to be tape reel to reel. You literally had to roll back if you made a mistake. Digital changed everything not just in this technique but also in the opportunities because audio then was so expensive.

It was normally only libraries who could have unabridged audio. They would tend to abridge books for the mass market, which ultimately a lot of people don’t like. It’s not satisfying not to hear an author’s whole work. So digital brought the price down made it much more accessible for people to own than download again.

Completely changed everything as to opportunities. And that has led I think to more opportunities because people want audio. It’s people want to do it. Maybe while they’re doing other stuff. That’s how they want to consume books. That’s how they want to read.

Publishers are starting to look at their back lists and how to get that done. New writers are wanting their books done in audio. Self-published writers are wanting, as you say, to have their books done fiction and nonfiction and audio. So I think it’s opened up a field because there’s a big demand for narrators. And I think someone who really is determined and has even a little bit of talent to develop can have a real go at it.

Joanna: And so why this book, Storyteller, now? Is that was related to the changes?

Lorelei: No one’s ever asked me that. It’s a good question because I was clearing up an old laptop and I was going through some e-mails from ten years ago. I was pitching this idea to my business partner 10 years ago. I think I even pitched it to Audible in America ten years ago and at the time it just didn’t feel right.

Ali said, “I’m not sure there’s going to be the demand” and that kind of thing and I think she was right on reflection because digital hadn’t really taken off the way it had.

But it never left me, this desire to share what I know. And as time goes on and I still do narrate a lot but also I do want to pass on some of my tricks and tips and just help people become narrators. So the time seemed right and we did it.

Joanna: I think the time is totally right. In fact, I think you’re at the beginning of what is a huge boom. We both were at London Book Fair and we saw audiobooks are the fastest growing publishing segment. And of course, you can’t narrate all the books in the world. So you have to train some of the people.

Lorelei: Well and I’m not right for every book in the world either. This is the thing; there’s room for all kinds of voices and all kinds of styles.

Joanna: And actually that’s a good question to start with. So the right narrator is a really difficult question. It’s a hard question for an author who knows their own book in their own voice in their head.

How do we know who is the right narrator?

Lorelei: I think normally a traditionally a publisher will decide. Authors traditionally actually don’t have a big say. Maybe a huge author would have a say as to who would narrate.

And the publishers have a lot of experience; it’ll be the kind of book, the accent that’s required, whether it’s male or female. They break it down like that and they tend to go to a pool of narrators that they know or actors that they know.

It is hard to break into that for an author who has the ability to decide their own narrator. I feel for them in a way because they’re hearing the voice in their heads and it’s never going to be that. But I think those kind of authors will know better than anyone who they want or are the kind of voice they want.

If you’re asking how would they find one, they could go listen to a lot of samples of voices. On Audible you can listen to tons of free samples and a voice might click that you think oh this is the perfect person to narrate my book.

Joanna: And actually you do a great thing in Storyteller where you give examples because you’re a very experienced narrator and you give these examples of different notes and you change your voice, which is amazing

I wondered, from your experience, have you ever felt like this type of book is not my thing or I prefer this type of book?

Lorelei: Yes. There are books where I have thought I wasn’t the right narrator and I’m just trying to think if there’s an example.

This happened recently actually, I think I was the right narrator for part of a series, but for the rest of the series I thought it might require a British Isles narrator and I’m happy to say that I’m not going to be precious about it. It was one book. It still haunts me. It was many years ago and I do not believe it is available in any form and I can’t remember the name every character.

The last third of the book was an American woman so it made sense they hire an American narrator. The first two-thirds of the book were set in South Africa in the 19th century with 57 male Scottish characters. That was one of the books where I cried. I ended up crying. I just found it too difficult and I’m still not convinced I was ultimately the right narrator for that book.

Joanna: Which brings me to another question and this is a totally selfish question around my own narration. You’re an actress. You have pedigree in acting and many famous voices, Miriam Margulies in Britain would be a good example, do all the accents amazingly and you yourself as well.

But what about straight reads? There are some authors – Neil Gaiman, Stephen King has done some where it’s more of a straight read. There are some narrators who do a straight read without accents.

What are your thoughts on that difference between the accent style vs. straight read?

Lorelei: You’re talking about fiction, but for fiction specifically I think if you have someone like Neil Gaiman or Stephen King reading their own work that that brings with it something special in that they know what they wrote and they know how to interpret it. And I think that’s one case.

To be honest I think generally speaking in the UK they like a bigger read, a more accented read, a more characterized read. My experiences in America is that generally speaking they prefer something slightly lower level, slightly flatter. That sounds wrong, but you know what I mean.

I think there’s room for both and it depends on the style. Unless it’s a comic novel when anything goes, although you don’t want to sound like you’re making fun of an accent. I think the suggestion of an accent is better because otherwise, it’s distracting. But I like a performance.

So for my personal taste, I do like defined characters. Also, you have to be able to – this is crucially important and one of the reasons to do it. The ultimate goal is clarity for the listener is the listener has to know who’s speaking. Otherwise, they’re going to be pulled out of the story. Like what? Who said that? So that’s often easier to do if you’ve chosen a very characterized voice.

Joanna: Which is really interesting and brings me to another question.

I’ve been adapting my own work for my own narration and that’s what I’ve done when I’ve read a line and there isn’t clarity and I know I can’t do an accent. I’ve rewritten the line. Cheeky! And that’s not what an audiobook narrator can do. For example, commas are something that editors remove

Are their other tips for authors who want to do the best thing for their narrator?

Lorelei: Oh commas. Well, there are things you could do. Probably one of my most well-known series is Janet Evanovich, which is the Stephanie Plum series. Now, for example, she writes brilliant dialogue. It is so good, so strong.

I said to her once, “Your dialogue is just amazing. Where does that come from?” She said, “I went took a drama class, an improvisation class, to learn about dialogue and to learn what works.” She did that specifically to inform her writing. And it worked.

So that’s a tip from Janet Evanovich. It’s not from me.

I think just technically things they could do to help. You mentioned commas. If you have long meandering sentences maybe read it out loud yourself and see are there places where people can breathe. Because that can be a real challenge.

I quite like that challenge, to be honest. I like to find a way through a sentence that can be fun but that helps punctuation.

The one that is almost impossible to solve is parenthetical remarks. By this I mean because something that works on the printed page won’t work in voice. Where it breaks if you said something like: He saw the car. It was red. Not the red of an apple, not the red of a postbox. More the red of a broken vein. Car.

They work on the page but to do that book is impossible. You’ve got to make it sound in any way graceful or elegant. So maybe at least thinking about those parenthetical remarks.

Joanna: What about when a character is saying something out loud but then there might be something in their head that they’re not saying? And maybe sometimes it’s in italics as in it’s in their thoughts and it doesn’t say ‘she thought’ it just has it kind of in italics.

Do you just kind of change the pitch of your voice?

Lorelei: You have to have several voices when you’re reading, even if it’s first person. Maybe that would be you have to have your narrator’s voice for your reading, “Hey what am I talking about. She couldn’t believe she said that out loud.”

You need three voices: you need your narrator’s voice, your dialogue voice, and your inner voice. And that’s just practice. Thinking about how you’re going to do that. But those can be tricky.

This is where the art comes in of it. And the where the craft of it more than the art. The technique becomes so important.

Joanna: Coming back to the reading, then, because many authors think that a narrator just reads their work. Like you say, I think it’s more an interpretation.

Why is narration an adaptation and a performance?

Lorelei: I think it’s like a play. A playwright writes the play and delivers it to the hands of the actors who then interpret it and that interpretation becomes an art. And it’s not just read.

Shall I give you an example?

Joanna: Yes.

Lorelei: So if I just read, “She had to calm down. With a superhuman effort, she gradually steadied and slowed her breathing. Why then did she still hear it? Ragged and fast. Oh, it wasn’t her breath she was hearing. It was her killers”

Ok, I read that. I’ve got the information.

Joanna: Yes.

Lorelei: If I were to perform it, you have to be in the moment. It’s like, “She had to calm down. With a superhuman effort she gradually steadied and slowed her breathing. Why then did she still hear it? Ragged and fast. Well, it wasn’t her breath she was hearing it was her killers.”

So it’s different. You’re going to be more engaged with the second read I think.

Joanna: It’s just so fantastic. You have this acting training. I think this is where many authors who want to do their own work.

But this is also why author events are often so terrible. Like book launches. It’s like here read a chapter and the poor author is just terrified, trying to read out loud. But as you’re showing it’s more about inhabiting the moment.

When you’re scanning a book, when you’re preparing a book, how are you preparing yourself to be in that moment to perform?

Lorelei: I think when I’m prepping a book for narration I don’t think you can prepare for being in the moment. You can prepare to help yourself in the moment by marking any peculiar stresses or and deciding your character voices and perhaps marking a breath of it’s a long passage.

But being in the moment, this is a personal thing. For me, it’s almost like being in a state of grace. Once you’ve prepared as much as you can the words know how they want it to be said. And I think you just kind of let it go. That’s all you can do and not be self-conscious.

I think this is a big problem with people who are inexperienced actors or narrators is that they feel a little self-conscious and things maybe sound really big to them. Because I’ve worked with people who’ve not narrated before who are not actors. And they’ll deliver something and I’ll be like no more, further. And it’s like oh my.

But in there you’re thinking it sounds like some big clown performance but it doesn’t. You’d be amazed. It’s big in their heads. But it’s actually just right if they hit it very hard. And that’s just practice really and taping yourself and listening.

You mentioned writers at their own events. I always feel for them too because then it’s nerves as well. I find that nerve-wracking.

Joanna: Yes. Another thing I think many people even coming on a podcast like this, people always say they don’t like their own voice. And I’m sure it’s been awhile since you felt that.

Any tips for kind of getting used to that feeling? Does it ever go away?

Lorelei: I think it does go away. It’s funny you mentioned that. I remember the very first time I ever heard my own voice when I was young on a tape recorder. It was such a shock because we don’t hear ourselves like other people do. If you put your hands behind your ears and push your ears forward you will hear yourself a little bit like other people hear you but otherwise you never will never.

The only way I think to get used to it is to listen to it. And that entails taping yourself. It can just be on your phone or something like that, or your laptop, and listen and get used to it so that you don’t feel self-conscious.

Joanna: I’ve been podcasting now for 10 years so I’m kind of used to my own voice. But I also wondered about mouth noise because again you do some great noise effects on Storyteller, on the audio version.

I’ve got this clicky jaw thing that seems to happen and I think it’s related to being dehydrated or something. And then also people feel like oh I just messed up a sentence. What do I do now?

What are some of your thoughts on not being perfect and the editing process?

Lorelei: Editing can help. If you’re talking about noise, some people don’t make so much noise just because of the way their face is. Ali says that I’m lucky because I don’t have a noisy build. Some people are very smacky.

Hydration is key. Hydration is everything. Every couple of pages sip and slush.

You mentioned a cracking jaw. That’s interesting. There’s another thing too they call it a nose knock. I think some people have a slight sinus noise and there’s nothing you can do to fix it and that’s where you have to hope the editor can edit out extraneous clicks and all that.

But it depends on what kind of book. I don’t think any book is ever absolutely perfect. There’s always going to be a little bit of noise that slips through.

Joanna: And what about just getting the line wrong? And again you have some great bloopers in the audio.

But what happens if you mess up a line?

Lorelei: It depends on the technique that you’re using in the studio. I like fluff and repeat.

I hate rolling back as they say, which means if you mess up a line you just stop, leave a brief editing break and then the editor can do it clean. You have to say it exactly as you said it though, so it will cut together. That’s important.

Some studios use what they call rock and roll, in this country. Punching in, they call it in America. And that means if you make a mistake, you stop the roll back, probably to the end of a sentence so that it’s clean. You’ll hear yourself say the previous line and then you just say the line again. So there are those techniques.

Oh I’ll tell you a little thing. I was so proud about our book. There’s an author called Kristy Shen and she sent an e-mail. She’s written a book called Quit Like A Millionaire. I think she’s going to be narrating her own book and my business partner Ali is producing her.

She got our book and so she wrote to Ali and Ali said it was fantastic. She got all these really intelligent questions, saying what are we going to be doing? Are we rock and rolling or are we doing this? And she said having read it she felt really prepared, more prepared to go into the studio.

That made me so happy because that was one of the things we wrote the book for was for people to whom it’s a mystery and who might be a little intimidated or not know what to expect. So that was great.

Joanna: I learned so much. And actually, I’ve listened to it twice already and I’ve obviously getting the hard copy as well at some point. It’s very exciting.

I want to ask you about non-fiction because obviously Storyteller is nonfiction. You do fiction and nonfiction and I’ve asked about accents and things for fiction but some people think nonfiction is “easier” because there’s no accents.

What are your thoughts on emotional resonance and feeling in nonfiction that makes it come alive?

Lorelei: I think nonfiction is harder. It has different kinds of difficulty like keeping it sounding fresh and not sounding tired. And as you say, if you’re narrating your own work, something you’ve written, non-fiction than I think you bring to it your own passion which is really useful if you’re narrating someone else’s non-fiction.

That’s the challenge, even though it’s not your subject, not your words, is to keep it alive and warm and keep the tone engaged so that it isn’t just flat information. I think that’s one of the challenges.

You can have the problem of deciding what to do with accents. Sometimes if you are quoting people or if it’s historical, you talk about historical figures and it’s like what do you do? And I think it’s a personal choice.

I wouldn’t go for a full-blown JFK, for example, but you might want to give just a hint of something or use a quote voice. I have a quote voice, which I prefer to use when I’m saying something in quotes. I give it more like it’s a quote. So you can use those kind of tricks but I think the main thing with nonfiction is stamina.

Joanna: Which is really my next question because the most surprising thing to me when I did my first book a few years ago and it put me off. I thought there was something wrong with me because I came out and I was exhausted. I was like I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Why can’t I do this?

Talk about why is it so tiring and what can we do about that.

Lorelei: That is like the number one thing. I’m not going to mention any names but a certain fiction author I was hired to do a book of hers and she said she wanted to narrate herself. And then she phoned me again a half-day later and said, “Can you come back and do it anyway?” because she had no idea. It’s nothing against her, it’s just she had no idea what it took.

I don’t know why it is. I suppose it’s the level of concentration and it’s intense. It’s a really intense experience to narrate an audiobook. It is physically tiring and mentally tiring and your eyes get tired as well.

The important solutions are taking breaks little breaks. Don’t eat up too much studio time but even just it’s like a change. You need to change something. Stand up, change your posture, go up look at the light, go up breathe some air. I’m just going to the loo sometimes if it’s not convenient take a break. If you say, “I’m really sorry I just have to.”

Hydration, of course. Drink, drink, drink, which gives you that loo excuse more often. And eat. You have to keep up your blood sugar. That’s why in studios they have a lot of bananas. Bananas are great because they’re not very noisy as you digest them. So eat little and often eat to keep up your blood sugar.

And that’s the only thing I can suggest.

And you have to be conscious: don’t let it drop. And that takes will. I do have a trick I use when I get really tired, if I can’t take a break, you can, if you need a boost, pretend to read to someone and I think it works if it’s someone you really fancy.

Just imagine you’re just reading this next section just for them because you’re going to want to impress them. It will help bring it a little bit alive. And I also read to my grandma. My grandma is long gone but sometimes I read to her. It just gives a little focus to that section and that can help.

Joanna: You can’t see, but I’ve just built an audio booth in the corner of my office because of this reason because I’ve tried hiring a studio but I can’t do like more than a couple of hours without feeling so tired.

I’m not doing it like professionally like you as a job. So I thought well, if I have a studio at home I can do. I can get up do an hour or two and then I don’t have to keep popping in to a studio. That’s one option I guess.

I think the sound equipment has got a lot better, hasn’t it?

Lorelei: Yes I think so. A lot of people are using home studios now. I haven’t gone down that route. I still prefer a dedicated, professional studio. But I agree with you. I think it’s counterproductive to read for more than three or four hours in and if I have the choice I will only do those kind of sessions, I’ll do a shorter session.

So I think it’s smart, especially if you buy a home studio. You do an hour and then go do another hour that way if you can control it so much the better because it is tiring. At BBC Audiobooks we used to do ten to five, a full day’s work and a lot of places work that way and it’s hard.

Joanna: That’s amazing. You mentioned drinking and eating, so when I went to the studio, the first one, I drank a lot of black coffee and I ate peanut butter. Milky coffee and peanut butter.

Why is that a really bad idea?

Lorelei: Do I look like a scientist? I couldn’t tell you why, but for some reason milk and coffee … and peanut butter I’m not sure but that makes sense in a way.

Joanna: It’s quite a bit clunky.

Lorelei: Yes and that’s the same with milk and coffee. I love coffee but I try not to have it. I have it in the morning before I go to work and then don’t have it during the day.

I’ve had to barter with narrators. I directed a book recently where he just loved his coffee and it was like we had to make deals where he could have a coffee and then he couldn’t have milk and he had to have it black and they need to rinse his mouth out. Those kind of things you do have to avoid. If you keep drinking lots of water and cleaning your mouth out with water it should be should be okay.

Joanna: This is now the audiobook narrator diet: water and bananas.

Lorelei: Chocolate’s not good either.

Joanna: What about 85 percent dark chocolate?

Lorelei: I don’t know why but it’s another thing that really makes for clagg.

Joanna: I just want to come back on the tired voice thing, because as soon as your energy drops, as you say, you use the word drop and I know what you mean but some people listening might not know what that means.

How nuanced can people hear? Do you really have to be on it or can we fake being on it?

How do we stop our voice dropping in that way?

Lorelei: To answer the first part of your question, I think people do. It’s such an intimate medium and people tend to listen through earphones so they’re they hear everything and the voice shows everything.

And sometimes shoot, it is faking it. I mean the best thing to do is not to fake it. It is to find somewhere in yourself, something that’ll keep you going. The trick about reading to someone or just having a quick break. And because it does matter and it will show and it’s not nice to hear.

Essentially when it becomes kind of flat, where someone maybe has lost the passion for what they’re doing and also harder for the listener to pick out the sense.

Another thing you could do, especially with nonfiction, this is a good trick, is if you pretend even if you’ve written it you can pretend that this section you’re going to have to teach it to someone in 20 minutes. So it just means you really pay attention to what’s there. And you try to learn it, you’re trying almost to memorize it. And I think that can help. It’s just finding all those little ways through. I think it is important.

Joanna: And then just on natural voices: I sound like me, you sound like you, and that’s part of who we are. And are there any bad voices so people can use some of your tricks in the book to make the best of what they’ve got.

Are there ever times when people just don’t have a voice for narration?

Lorelei: I have two feelings about this. I shouldn’t say that some voices don’t seem to naturally lend themselves but I do feel very strongly about the importance of the individual voice. There are some things that are just bad habits.

If your voice is very nasal, for example, that’s a habit. That’s not a natural voice and you might need professional help but you can engage someone to teach you not to do that.

Or people who talk on creak, like a lot of young people do today, that’s just laziness and that’s a habit that can be corrected. Those kind of incredibly irritating habits should be gotten rid of I think.

But we are all unique. We have a unique voice and I think it’s important to make the best of it, as you say make the best of what you’ve got, but don’t be afraid of it or ashamed of it. It’s your voice.

I know you’re a writer as well as a narrator now and so the way you write, that’s your voice. And the way you narrate, that’s your voice. It’s just as important to be true to your own sound and your own style and your own self.

Joanna: The last question I wanted to ask you is more of a futurist question, because I’ve already had a company ask about my voice and training AIs with my voice. And as a lot of your voice is out there, that could be used to train A.I.

We’re seeing the rise of A.I. Amazon Polly for narration and lyre bird A.I. is something I’ve had to look at for sort of voice synth.

What are your thoughts on the next five to ten years when this type of technology becomes more common? What do you see?

Will there be a stratification, an A.I. narrated very cheap version, and then an artisan narration? What do you think is going to happen?

Lorelei: For narrators it’s a worry. I think it is going to continue to develop. You mentioned lyre bird, something like that, I think it’s incredibly useful for that. The way they use it for people who have motor neuron disease and that kind of thing to synthesize their own voices. I think that’s a terrific use of it.

I’ve heard it’s getting better. It still doesn’t sound quite right to me. And I think ultimately will it be stratified. I don’t know.

I think there’s a place for it perhaps in things that where it isn’t cost effective to have a human narrator, like textbooks or certain types of nonfiction. There might be a place where they can live side by side when it comes to fiction.

Can AI have comic timing? Can I understand nuance? Can they really be artists? I don’t know.

I think art requires human intent and I think there’s something about the human voice that will always put this in and that can’t be synthesized, so I don’t know. I’m watching this space that’s for sure.

Joanna: I agree with you. And also I think people will want a person. For example, for your book, I want to pay for you to narrate it. But maybe there’s an ultra cheap version I can get. Or if it’s someone I don’t care so much about their work, I might just want to consume something.

So I see at the different levels where there might be a cheap Polly version and then a human narration and because there’s so much content in the world that’s not narrated.

Lorelei: And that’s the trick. This is why I think at the same time there’s room for a lot of narrators. I think there’s room for more of us because there is so much content. But audio is very expensive to produce and not all books will where a lot of books might only get one hundred downloads because it’s very specific niche content. In that case it’s better it’s available. So it will have its place I agree.

Joanna: Great. If people want to check out Storyteller: How to be an Audiobook Narrator.

We’ve talked about a lot of things but anything else that’s covered in the book that you want to mention?

Lorelei: I think it’s just the thing about this book it’s very strongly structured. I structured it to take you through the journey about preparation about what to expect and I think it gives you a good strong overview.

We’ve had really nice feedback about it. I’d love to hear what people have to say about it. It’s available from all digital retailers, Audible as well as Kobo and all the others who are doing it.

And with a little push from you, I have to say, we just published the companion script because a lot of people were asking for a transcript. It’s a direct transcript and it’s best used in conjunction with the audiobook where you get the demonstrations. That’s something that can’t be done in print.

We have a web page, howtobeanaudiobooknarrator.com. Creative Content Digital, our publishing company, has it. LoreleiKing.com has it.

And you can always find me on Twitter @LoreleiKing and ask me. I like talking audio.

Joanna: Fantastic. And as I said I love it. I think it’s fantastic. And I was so pleased to have you on the show because I think this is such an interesting point in history and I think you’ve hit the nail on the head with this book.

I totally encourage people to go and get it. And thanks so much for coming on the show Lorelei.

Lorelei: I really enjoyed it. Thanks so much for your support. It means a lot. And I’m just very glad to have connected with you. I certainly see you. I’ve seen you on the Twitter beach for some time now but it’s nice to meet you face to face.

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Your author website is an important part of the marketing for your books. Rachel McCollin walks us through the different types of WordPress websites and how to set one up.

Author websites: they fill some of us with inspiration, while others want to run for the hills. But it’s difficult to be a successful author in the current climate without your own website.

You’ve probably read articles and heard podcasts with advice on the different website platforms you can use. Some are too limited, while others are too complicated.

Where to start?

I’ve been helping people create websites with WordPress since 2010 and I strongly believe that you don’t have to be a techie or hire a developer to get yourself a great WordPress author website.

In fact, I believe you can create a gorgeous website that helps you get mailing list signups without spending more than a few dollars a month and without writing any code.

In this post, I’ll help you understand the difference between the two WordPress platforms and give you some tips to help you get started creating your own. This is something you can do yourself if you have minimal technical skills – no coding required!

What is WordPress?

WordPress is what’s known as a Content Management System or CMS. It comes in two forms: WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress, sometimes referred to as WordPress.org.

Here are the main differences between them.

WordPress.com:

• Hosted by WordPress – so your site doesn’t belong to you
• Plans ranging from free to different premium levels
• If you want your own domain name and extra plugins, you’ll need a premium account
• Limited newsletter signup plugins
• Limited themes unless you sign up for a premium account, but many of the free ones can be customised
• Gives you access to a community of other bloggers using WordPress.com

Self-hosted WordPress:

• Hosted on server space you rent from a hosting provider from as little as a few dollars a month (generally you pay more for better support)
• The site belongs to you and you can move it or make changes to it as you see fit
• Access to hundreds of thousands of free themes and plugins
• Free plugins for all the main mailing list providers
• Option to install premium themes and plugins you buy elsewhere (but make sure it’s a reputable source)
• Option to install the free Jetpack plugin which gives you all the same features as a WordPress.com site (e.g., the community)
• You need to keep your version of WordPress updated (or you have this happen automatically)

Neither platform requires you to have coding skills, despite what you may have been told about self-hosted WordPress.

WordPress.com is easier and cheaper if you have next to no technical skills. But in the long run, self-hosted WordPress can wind up cheaper as your hosting will probably be less than a WordPress.com premium plan.

If you’re comfortable setting up Facebook ads or uploading a book to the publishing platforms, then I believe you have the technical skills to create either kind of WordPress site.

The good news is that WordPress has an importer tool built in – so if you decide to switch between platforms at some point in the future, you can. And all of the themes on WordPress.com are also available for a self-hosted site.

How to Get a WordPress Site

So, you’ve decided to get a WordPress site. Here’s how to do it.

For a WordPress.com site:

1. Sign up for an account at WordPress.com
2. Decide if you need a premium plan and pay for it if you do
3. Buy a domain name from a domain registrar and link to your WordPress site
4. Choose and customise your theme and plugins
5. Start creating content!

Creating a self-hosted WordPress site isn’t all that different:

1. Sign up for hosting with a hosting provider – they normally include a domain name for free.
2. Install WordPress – you can either do this manually or using the installer your hosting company will provide.
3. Choose and customise your theme and plugins
4. Start creating content!

As you can see, setting up a self-hosted site isn’t much more complicated than a WordPress.com site. And it gives you access to thousands more free themes and plugins.

[Note from Joanna: Click here for my tutorial on how to set up your WordPress self-hosted website.]

Finding a Theme for Your Site

I’m often asked if there are WordPress themes designed specifically for authors. While there are a few (including some premium ones), you really don’t need a theme that’s designed for authors. You just need one that reflects your author brand.

When choosing a theme, consider:

• Is it customizable? Can you change the color scheme, for example?
• Can you add a banner image to the home page with a link to the page where people sign up to your mailing list?
• Are the fonts and layout consistent with your brand? Take some time looking at other author sites in your genre, especially indie authors.
• Is there a sidebar widget area where you can add a mailing list signup form and a list of your test posts or books?
• Is it kept up to date and is it compatible with the latest version of WordPress?
• Is it responsive, i.e., does it resize for smaller screens? You’ll find that most of your visitors are on mobile.

Take some time experimenting with some of the themes and seeing which you like best. You can always change your theme if you change your mind. You won’t lose any of your content but you will have to copy your widgets to the widget areas in the new theme.

[Note from Joanna: Click here for my tutorial on setting up the AuthorPro theme in WordPress.]

Installing Plugins

Once you’ve got your theme activated, you’ll need to add some plugins. Below are the five free plugins that I think every self-hosted author site should have.

• A mailing list plugin like MailChimp or ConvertKit. All the major mailing list providers have their own plugin.
• The UpdraftPlus backup plugin. Keeping your site backed up regularly is essential.
• The All In One SEO Pack plugin for SEO. This will help you rank higher in search engine listings
• The Defender security plugin, which will help protect your site from attacks and monitor it for you.
• Jetpack for all of the features of wordpress.com – social media sharing and lots more.

The first four of these are features you can add to a WordPress.com site with a premium account. And Jetpack’s features come baked-in.

For more on these plugins and why they’re important, you can read my blog post on the top five author website plugins.

Making Your Site Work Hard For You

Once you’ve got your site set up, you’re not done. Far from it! Now it’s time for the fun bit: creating content.

If you’re a nonfiction author, your website will be an important source of new readers for you. Use your blog to demonstrate your expertise, share tips and whet people’s appetites for your books. Make sure you tweak your SEO settings so you’re getting a good search engine rankings for the things your readers are searching for,

But an author website can also be a great tool for fiction authors.

Think of the kind of content your ideal reader would want to read. That might be book recommendations or reviews, photos, and notes from your book research, book excerpts or stories, and updates on your writing. The kind of content you might put in your newsletter, you can also add to your blog, although you may want to give it a different tone.

Make sure you include links to your website in all of your books, on your Amazon author page, on your social media channels, your business cards: everywhere. The more people visit your site, the more will sign up to your mailing list. And then you can keep in touch with them.

The important thing is never to let your site go stale. Keep it fresh and interesting and it will avoid dropping in the search engine rankings and be interesting for your readers.

Good luck with your site!

Resources

Here are some resources to help you get started with your WordPress author website:

• WordPress.com (signup page)
• Recommended hosting providers for self-hosted WordPress (on my blog)
• Top 5 WordPress Plugins for Author Websites (on my blog)
• How to Build a WordPress Author Website and Use it Build a Mailing List – and Why You Should (via the Alliance of Independent Authors)
• How to Install WordPress – The Famous WordPress 5-Minute Install Made Simple (by me for Winning WP)
• How to Build Your Author Website in 30 Minutes – by Joanna Penn
• Moving Your Blogger / Tumblr / LiveJournal / Movable Type Blog to WordPress (by me for WPMU DEV)
• WordPress for Writers: Create an Awesome Author Website That Helps You Sell Books (my book)

Is your author website set up to your satisfaction? Please leave your thoughts below and join the conversation.

Rachel McCollin has been helping people at all levels of technical expertise use WordPress since 2010. Whenever she goes to a writing event, she finds herself answering questions about author websites, so she’s decided to distill all that information into a book. WordPress for Writers is available now.

You can find out more about the book, get tips on author websites and other writing-related topics and download a free author website blueprint at her website RachelMcWrites.com.

In a world full of distractions, how do we make our books unskippable? 

We are more distracted than ever, but once we find content we love, we binge it and become dedicated fans, so how do we become one of those trusted voices? I discuss this and more in today’s episode with Jim Kukral. 

In the intro, The Hotsheet discusses the purchase of Barnes and Noble by the activist hedge fund, Elliott Management, the same company that owns Waterstones in the UK, and gives some thoughts on the possible disruption ahead. Plus, Penguin Random House buys the publishing assets of bankrupt F&W Media which includes Writers Digest imprint [Publishing Perspectives].

In the futurist segment, check out the Zuckerberg deep fake, and I also recommend Sleepwalkers Podcast if you want to get a glimpse of coming technologies. Plus, on a personal note, why I am stopping my YouTube channel, and why my Mum’s Penny Appleton sweet romance books are going into KU.

Today’s show is sponsored by IngramSpark, who I use to print and distribute my print-on-demand books to 39,000 retailers including independent bookstores, schools and universities, libraries and more. It’s your content – do more with it through IngramSpark.com.

Jim Kukral is the author of 14 non-fiction books, an international professional speaker consultant and co-host of the Sell More Book Show podcast. His latest book is Your Journey to Becoming Unskippable in Your Business, Life, and Career.

You can listen above or on iTunes or your favorite podcast app, read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and full transcript below.

Show Notes

• How being elected to public office changed Jim’s mindset

• On how readers are seeking honesty and transparency from authors

• How do you get someone to pay attention to you in such a complex world?

• What else makes an author unskippable?

• The rise of audio as technology improves

• The value of a non-fiction book in a business ecosystem

You can find Jim Kukral at JimKukral.com and on Twitter @JimKukral

Transcript of Interview with Jim Kukral

Joanna: Hi everyone. I’m Joanna Penn from TheCreativePenn.com. And today I’m back with Jim Kukral. Hi Jim.

Jim: Hey, how you doing Joanna.

Joanna: I’m good. Just a little introduction.

Jim Kukral is the author of 14 non-fiction books, an international professional speaker consultant and co-host of the Sell More Book Show podcast.

His latest book is Your Journey to Becoming Unskippable in your Business, Life, and Career, which is fantastic and I’ve just read it myself.

Jim, I wanted to ask you: you’ve written a lot of books over the years and I have been following you since, Attention! This Book Will Make You Money back in 2010.

You’re a successful entrepreneur. Why this book now?

Jim: It’s funny because I don’t think I could have written this book even two years ago because of some experiences I had in my life and just a mental place that I’m at. Because this book right now is more of a mindset book than Attention! Attention! was more marketing and business stuff and this has elements of that in it.

But I try to work in a lot of stuff about mindset and where you want to be in your life and try to weave all those things together, which is why I think it’s applicable for authors as well as plumbers.

There’s a lot of different things in this book. So the ‘why?’ was really because I made a really dumb mistake in my life.

A couple of years ago I decided to run for political office in the United States of America right about the time when social media had reached this pinnacle of divisiveness. And everyone was so negative and angry and it became something that almost ruined my businesses. It almost ruined my marriage, almost ruined my health, almost ruined my relationships with my friends and my family. To the point where it almost completely broke me, being elected, and I had to change the way I think.

But I also learned a lot about people because marketing yourself to people when they vote for you, they’re buying you.

It’s like that steak sauce right. If you market steak sauce. If people don’t buy your steak sauce, they just don’t buy it. But when you lose an election and when people come at you and don’t buy you, it’s a much bigger hit on your ego to feel like people are mad.

They hate me. They didn’t vote for me. So I won the first election, lost the second one and I’ve been slowly climbing out of this hole for a couple of years and that’s when the idea for Unskippable book came about.

Joanna: It’s so interesting and a couple of questions about that. You’ve obviously written a lot of nonfiction, and there’s a ton of nonfiction books out there on all kinds of topics.

But your personal story and your honesty and transparency in your experience there, which I didn’t know about. I had some inkling of it, but it was fascinating to read your story more than anything.

How important is this kind of authenticity and honesty in writing nonfiction now and where do you draw the line?

Jim: Joanna, you and I both know, we monitor what’s selling and selling books is a business. So you can see the trends of what genres are hot and what books are selling.

If you look back at the last couple years, you will see that there are certain types of books in the nonfiction space that are doing really well and they’re like I hate to call them self-help books but there are books that are motivational inspirational self-help type of books. Girl, Wash Your Face. You are a badass at whatever.

Those types of books right now are resonating with people where they didn’t used to be as much because there’s just been a mindset change in how people think and react to other people and businesses.

And that’s really what Unskippable is about. It’s about understanding what people are looking for in today’s day and age because everything changed overnight.

It’s not like it used to be.

People are thinking differently they used to be. They want to support businesses that share social causes with them and they want to ban companies that they disagree with. And that’s really what this book is all about is understanding how everything has changed and that goes for you as an author as well.

And to back to your original question the transparency and authenticity is so important nowadays. When you look at authors like Cecilia Mecca who has a wonderful Instagram account and she shares her life on there and she builds this tribe of people who really care about her, not just her books.

And Joanna you’ve been doing this forever. You’ve been podcasting about this industry longer than I have. And I’ve been doing it over five years. You understand that people want to get in and see who the real person is. So that makes a lot of sense to me and that’s what people want nowadays.

Joanna: I totally agree and in fact, that’s what we remember. We remember those personal stories and it makes you a real person more than anything else.

Let’s get into the book then because the word Unskippable is an interesting choice.

I’d like you to start by talking about how has the world become skippable and why does that matter for authors.

Jim: The world has become skippable.

DVRs allow us to fast forward through the commercials when you’re watching a show on Netflix or Amazon Prime. As soon as the show ends they give you like five seconds where you can click the button to start the next show because who can wait five seconds for the next show to start.

We’re being bombarded more than ever with ads and content marketing, which I still content marketing still ads as far as I’m concerned. And we’re just being hit every single moment of the day and we’re more distracted than ever.

My first book, Attention!, which is nine years old now, was really about that topic. So I try not to cover too much of that. We don’t really have an attention problem nowadays. We just have a problem with trying to decipher through all of the content that’s being thrown at us and then figuring out which ones we want to pay attention to.

So in this really complex world how do you get someone to pay attention to you?

Did you know that most college students and younger people watch television or Netflix, I just put Netflix in with television, they watch it with the closed captioning.

Joanna: I did know that. And that was really interesting. And also the double screen thing. I do this myself. I’ve heard you talk about this and you say let your kids do this. I do this. I sit watching Netflix and I sit with my phone in my hand.

Jim: That’s exactly right. And the reason they watch it with captioning is not because they say they can retain more of the information. I make this case in the book; it’s like be honest with yourself. When was the last time you sat down and watched a show or something and you didn’t have your phone or your tablet on your lap that you checked while you were watching it? That’s the world we’re living in now.

And that’s why you have to learn how to become unskippable because our minds are just being distracted by so much stuff.

Here’s what’s interesting about that though.

We are distracted more than ever. However, once we find content that we love, we will consume it voraciously.

So once we’re into it, once we get past that pushing the stone over the hill and we get somebody into our content, which is why it’s so important for authors because this is a show about authors, which is why it’s so important.

And to have multiple books because if you only have one book and somebody reads it and then they’re like oh OK well now what. When you finish a show on Netflix and it’s over and you’re like, “That was amazing”, you’re depressed. You’re like oh my gosh what am I going to watch.

And so you go to social media and you’re like Hey well I just finished watching this show. What do you guys recommend? You see that post every single day on Twitter and Facebook and the same thing happens with authors.

They start to read the book and then there’s nothing they’re after. And they’re like OK now what do I read. So they try to go find somebody else. It’s very important to have multiple books.

Joanna: I think that’s part of the binge culture idea and in fact Game of Thrones is a good example. We didn’t watch it live but we were so happy to watch it in a binge over two nights. We just binged the whole of the final series of Game of Thrones. And actually, it was far more satisfying to just watch it in that binge way. And it’s the same with books as you say.

So apart from having multiple books what are some of the other ways that authors can become unskippable?

Jim: I mentioned a little bit here but unskippable people ship product and skipping people perfect. This is a business. This is the author business. And when you can put out good quality content consistently you’re going to have a much better time of being successful than people who are only getting a couple of done a year because they’re sitting around and they’re perfecting.

I understand it’s very difficult to write really great content over and over at a fast pace. But if you really look at the authors that are doing really well you’re going to see that they’re finding ways to do that.

So finding a way to get that content out and have a book launch every two months or every month in some cases. We just did a story on our my podcast with Bryan the other day about somebody who’s putting out a book every single month.

Jamie Albright’s another great author. She can’t write fast but she’s putting it out consistently in a model that works and she’s putting out good quality work. So shipping your product instead of perfecting your product definitely makes you unskippable.

The second thing for authors that I really think is a huge thing is the cover to market strategy. And you know this Joanna. I can’t tell you how many authors I run into who just want to try and do a different cover. They’re writing a legal thriller so they think, Oh well everybody has a gavel and the scales of justice on it and a silhouetted protagonist so I’m going to go do something different.

That line of thinking doesn’t usually work, because if you love legal thrillers and you read them voraciously and then you start to go look for the next one and you find a cover that doesn’t look like the other ones you’re your brain says to you, Oh well that’s really not like the one I just read which I love. So I’m just going to skip it.

So resist the urge to try and do something different. It does work every once in a while but in a general sense if you’re not doing a cover to market strategy I think that’s going to hurt your long run.

Joanna: It’s interesting you say that and this is something I’ve gone on about for years is that we should be able to upload different covers for different markets. Because if you compare an American book cover even to a British one, let alone to a cover that works in India, for example, or Asia, where the covers are very different.

We should be able to have the same book but different covers per market in the same way, back on Netflix, they actually show different images depending on who you are. So you might see a series with a male protagonist on the screen and I might see the main female character. It’s convincing us that it’s maybe a slightly different thing.

But isn’t that interesting that this perception, as you say, is so fast that there has to be an image that portrays what people are looking for.

Jim: That’s what this book is about: the distraction that everybody has. We spend an average of three hours a day looking at our phones, not talking on them.

These are little devices that are sitting in our pockets or persons or on our countertops that we don’t use as phones we use them as browsers, we use them as text. These little devices make it more and more difficult to get the attention of people.

Most of the mobile browsing or most of the browsing that people use on social media like 80 percent is on a phone. How do you get through to those people and especially a little tiny thumbnail on Amazon for your book cover and things like that.

You have to be able to do something different and the cover is like one of those little things. But in terms of an author you know being unskippable, obviously writing great content and producing it more quickly is something that’s going to make you more unskippable.

Joanna: Let’s come to audio because I must admit to being attached to my phone. It is right here in my hand right now. I have it right by me but I don’t talk on the phone to hardly ever except to my mom like once a week. But today I listened to almost an hour of audio.

I listened to a podcast and I listened to an audiobook as I walked around town and did some chores and things like that. So for me even though I skipped some things I am deep diving on audio.

You and I’ve been podcasting for years. You have an A.I. assisted audio business.

How can voice and audio help authors become unskippable?

Jim: Absolutely it’s the fastest growing market in publishing and the audio market. The problem,, as you and I both know and have spoken privately about, is that it’s cost prohibitive and time prohibitive to produce audio.

Until the technology catches up where it’s easy to create a high-powered audio that’s closer to a human narration we’re still going to have these problems. There will be a time when that comes and you’ll see, in my estimation, through the research I’ve done, 1 to 3 percent of all books on the Internet are in audio. 1 to 3 percent. That’s it. And it’s probably closer to the 1 percent.

So think about that. Let’s say there are 10 million or 20 million books online, that’s not a lot of audio books because it takes forever to produce them. So that is absolutely the future.

And that is absolutely where people are going to go. The thing about audio though is that there are people listening to this right now who are listening to this at two times speed.

This goes back to my original point; just because it’s audio, it’s still another piece of content. People want to find ways to skip things. Their brain says, I’m busy, I’ve got other things to do, I’ve got to go do this, I need to find a way to skip that. And one of those ways is they’ll turn the speed up on this podcast two times.

I know it’s going to make them sound like chipmunks but I’m going to get through this content faster because I have other things to do. And probably while they’re listening to this, they’re probably checking e-mail, checking Instagram, whatever else they’re doing. Rarely does anyone sit and listen to a piece of content or read a piece of content all just at that one time like I was talking about.

Joanna: I disagree on that as someone who’s in Europe. I think we walk a lot more than Americans. That is a massive topic, but Americans have a lot of cars. A lot of Americans are listening to audio while driving. And while I think a lot of the emails I get and a lot of tweets about people listening to this show people are at the gym they are walking or they are doing chores. So they are doing something physical, say with their hands or with their legs, so that they can’t necessarily skip.

I agree with you on the speed because I listen on 1.5 speed for both audio and audio books and podcasting but I didn’t think that skippable. I think that’s just because my brain can go that fast and over time you can move it up.

I know someone who listens on a much faster speed and I have a friend who’s blind who listens at a speed that you and I couldn’t even understand. So I think that’s not the same as being on skippable.

I think that is just a way of consuming.

Jim: Absolutely. But I would push back a little bit and say how much are you really retaining if you’re speeding things up. And let’s face it even if you’re at the gym there’s 30 screens on the television of different news channels and sports that you’re seeing.

It’s not like it used to be where we would sit down and consume a piece of content. We’d sit in front of the TV set at 8:00 to watch the show because there was nothing else to distract us. In a general sense.

There aren’t a lot of people in the world who can really retain information as much as they want to with all of these different things coming that’s kind. So I agree with you and disagree with you.

Joanna: We’ll leave it with that.

I do want to ask about book marketing with audio because my feeling is, again this is the type of consumer I am; I don’t read blog posts anymore. I read books and I listen to audiobooks and I listen to podcasts.

Most of my nonfiction book recommendations come from podcasts. For me that voice is not just content production as such, it’s also book marketing.

I wonder, with unskippable, what are you doing for book marketing? How much are you focusing on podcasting and how much should authors think about that?

Jim: I’ve got a podcast that it’s associated with. I launched it a couple of months ago and I’m going to retool it now.

But the audio is going to be a big part of the book marketing for this. I’m recording my own audiobook. I’m going to use Findaway Voices for that and I’m going to go wide.

I know you recommend people that go wide. I’m going to try and go wide with the audiobook at first and not get stuck into like a seven-year contract with Audible and do it on my own.

The problem with book marketing and audio is since Audible controls that space, they give you such limited ability to promote your book. I think they give you 20 coupon codes or something like that. Maybe it’s 10. I don’t even know.

And of course, they control the price. And there are so many things that you can’t do to market your book in audio form because you’re stuck in an ACX contract and that’s why I’m going to go with Findaway Voices, so I have way more control.

Joanna: Let’s talk about the business angle because you and I both believe in multiple streams of income and there is an ecosystem that you can build around the book.

I wondered what is the ecosystem you’re going to build around on Skippable, which may include speaking, for example.

Jim: Yes, speaking is definitely what I’m focusing on for this. I had younger kids in the last 10 years and I didn’t want to be away from them. So I stopped going on the road and now I’m back to the point where they’re in high school. One’s going to graduate next year and I’m like, all right I want to get back on the road.

This book is really about getting myself back on the road and using it as a business card. I want to go out to inspire and teach people and help them to think differently and help them to build better businesses and become entrepreneurs and things like that. So this is absolutely a speaking thing.

I model myself after a speaker by the name of Andrew Davis who was an amazing keynote speaker. The best I’ve ever seen and he’s doing three to four gigs a month he’s traveling all around the world. He was in Prague last week. He’s all over the place and he really has I think three books.

Books used to be the biggest thing you needed to be a professional speaker. Now you can get away with having a book as an add on to that. But it used to be such a big thing. Like if you didn’t have a book you couldn’t be a speaker.

Nowadays if you’re a great speaker you don’t have to have a book. So I’m really going to use this book as a business card to get myself back out on the road and speak. So I.

Joanna; So really interesting that because speaking can be the way to make the most money when you’re a non-fiction author. Is that the plan for Unskippable, like you said a business card or are you also looking to do consulting or that other product.

How is the ecosystem going to work with all your other business ventures because you’re a busy guy.

Jim: I still get leads from Attention!. the book I wrote nine years ago.

I’ll tell you a story about a lead I got from that book. A couple of years ago somebody read the book, like seven years after it came out, and at the end of the book they got to my back matter and they saw that they could contact me through my Web site. They contacted me we had a conversation.

I ended up going into their office, talking with the CEO of the company. They booked me to speak for an hour. They booked me to do a workshop after then I ended up getting a six-month consulting contract. That was five thousand dollars a month.

So I don’t need to sell Seth Godin amount of books or Mark Dawson or Joanna Penn level amount of books because my business is getting in and getting speaking gigs and consulting from the books. I make more money doing it that way in nonfiction indirectly from the books the business around the book.

Joanna: And we both agree on that. I think a lot of the times the nonfiction ecosystem is what makes it so powerful, whether that’s products or affiliate income or consulting or all these other things.

I didn’t ask you about speaking. You spoke at the Sell More Books summit, which was your and Bryan’s conference this year. And you mentioned that you’ve got a really good response to a 10-minute talk now.

This is really interesting to me because I’ve been doing speaking for years and generally I only do really long talks. Like I’ll do a full day. I struggle to go from a full day to 10 minutes.

What is the key to going from a content speaker, like a teacher, to being a keynote speaker, which I presume is what you are now doing.

Jim: The keynote speakers are the ones who get paid in the business of speaking. The people who get paid are the entertainers the people who don’t normally get paid are the ones who do the 30-minute sets that where they have the top 10 tips to something. The educational stuff. They don’t really pay those speakers.

Nowadays the people who make like Andrew Davis who probably makes twenty-five thousand dollars a keynote. He’s informing people but he’s entertaining people. So if you want to make money as a speaker you have to be a keynote speaker, which is where you actually entertain people, make them laugh, you draw, all of those things. It’s different.

If you just want to be on the road and do conferences and trade shows and stuff like that in today’s speaking world, they normally don’t give you any money for that kind of stuff anymore. There are two different types of speakers; there are paid speakers and then there are people who just do it for the fun of it and just do it for leads for their business which are both great.

But I eventually want to be Andrew Davies. I want to be the guy who they bring in for the final closing keynote that people are wowed by, but that takes years.

It’s like being a standup comic. You have to spend so much time and effort honing your craft and having that perfect talk, just like writing a great book. You can’t just mail it in. It takes years of practice but it can be very lucrative if you could do it. I’m going to try to get there eventually.

Joanna: And if you enjoy it as well, which I think is the interesting part. You have to love doing that.

In the book, you talk about joyful experiences as highlights for being unskippable And I will be joining you, I’m very excited, at the Career Author Summit in Nashville in May 2020, when I will be doing a content talk and I hope you’re going to pay me.

What are some of the reasons that authors should consider in-person events?

Jim: Attending them, even if they are introverts. I write about this in the book. It says there’s a poll that says the average American hasn’t made a real friend in five years. But we have all of these Facebook friends.

And what we’ve done now is we have replaced our social media friendships with real friendships, at least here in the United States according to this poll. Of course, this is not true for every single person but in a general sense.

These people did a study a seventy-five-year study on people and they said that friendships are really what makes us happy. So when we think about where we’re at this vicious circle now where we’re all we have friends and social media and friends on Twitter these aren’t really our real friends. They’re people we may associate with and things like that but they’re not the person you call when you get put into a Tijuana jail at 4:00 in the morning and somebody needs to come and bail you out.

So we’ve gotten to this vicious circle of replacing our friends, our real friendships, with these virtual friends and getting back to the joyful experiences. Joyful experiences are really powerful.

Banks are a great example. I’m 47 years old, so I grew up in an age – I don’t know how it is in Europe – but in the United States when you walk into a bank it’s like walking into a secure vault. There are lines and there’s a security guard standing at the door and you feel intimidated when you walk into a bank. But that’s again that’s all changing.

Capital One is completely redesigning all of their banks. Instead of it being like the old version of a bank with the big columns and the security guards it’s like a coffee shop you walk in now and there are free Wi-Fi and couches and friendly people at the counter. Because they understand that it’s about the joyful experience for somebody.

If you’re a twenty-five-year-old ready to choose a bank that you’re probably going to bank with for the rest of your life. Are you going to your parents’ bank or you going to the one that’s more like the coffee shop where people are friendly and they make it easy and I can sign up online?

It’s this whole thing; joyful experiences are what drives people. When we don’t have things to look forward to we get depressed. And if you are running a business and you are creating friction and you’re not creating joy with people during your process or your email sign up or whatever else you do, if you’re bothering them, they’re not going to pay attention to you. They’re not going to become lifetime loyal customers if you are not creating joy with them.

And that’s something that I think I need. I want to try to get through to every single person who reads this book is you really need to think about how you’re interacting and what joyful experiences you’re creating for your readers.

Joanna: That emotional resonance actually goes back to the keynote speaking as well. It’s often I looked at my notes after a talk that I thought was amazing and didn’t write anything down or over one ridiculous phrase down. But I felt good that people remember that emotion. It was amazing, maybe the best speaker even, because of how they felt and afterward.

I did want to come back on banking because here in Europe certainly I’m sure it’s the same in America the biggest growth in banking is online apps. People don’t even go into a bank anymore. I know the banks are closing.

Jim: I write about that in the book too. People don’t want to leave their house anymore. There’s a reason why car dealerships are going to be on the wayside in the future because companies like Carvana, you go online, you find the car you want, you order it online, you get the financing online, and then they deliver it to like this big vending machine near your house. You walk up, you put your token in and your car comes out and you drive it home.

Why? Because a joyful experience is not having to deal with a dealership. Walking in and spending three hours on a Saturday talking to a car salesperson who has to go check with the manager and maybe I can get you a better deal. And then they put some extra fees on it. People don’t even want to leave their houses anymore.

There’s a company called Enjoy Technologies and what they do is if you want to order an iPhone you can go to Apple store and wait in line and make an appointment or you can go to the AT&T store or whatever. Or you can order it online or you can have Enjoy Technologies order it online. They’ll send somebody to your house.

They come into your house, set up your phone, transfer all your files and show you how to use the phone and unpack it for you in your house. Oh and by the way it’s completely free.

That is a joyful experience. That is the expectation that the new consumer has moving forward from 2019. And that is why you see companies like Payless Shoe Source here in the United States closing because nobody wants to get in a car drive to the store. And more when they have so many options in so many ways to save themselves time and effort and money where they don’t have to do anything.

It’s sad but that’s really the world we’re living in now. That’s all these companies are skippable. And what makes these new companies that are disrupting that process unstoppable.

I want to go back to this joyful experience thing. Did you ever hear of the KonMari method?

Joanna: Oh yeah I love her. She’s amazing. Marie Kondo

Jim: Yeah. So there was a bestselling book that it was made into a Netflix show and the entire concept and I’ll summarize it here just for the Cliff Note version is if you are going through your material possessions in your life, if they do not bring you joy, get rid of it.

And that mindset is taking hold and all kinds of people, not just younger people. All throughout the world that’s the phenomena. That’s the disruption that’s happening. People don’t have time, and don’t want to put the effort into things that do not provide them joy any longer and they are looking for the substitute to that.

And when you’re running a business, if you first understand how people think then you understand that that’s why they think the way they do. Then you can change your business and change the way you interact with your customers or your readers and you’re going to have much more success going that method of creating joyful experiences. Get rid of that friction that people don’t want to have because that’s skippable.

Joanna: Very true. Okay, so where can people find you. And Unskippable and all your books and everything you do online.

Jim: Just go to JimKukral.com.

Or actually, if it’s easier to remember, just go to be Beunskippable.com. That’ll take you right to my website and you can grab a copy of it.

I’m really excited about this one. This is the best book I’ve written since Attention! It’s different.

I’m a gold miner. I love gold mining. I have never actually gold mined but the analogy is I’ve written this book. It’s got a lot of different thoughts in it and I guarantee you that even if you’re an author who writes romance or legal thrillers or whatever you’re going to get inspired by this book.

You’re going to get at least one nugget of information. I guarantee you that you’re going to go, Wow, I think I could change the way I write or the change the way I run my business from this book and that’s what this book is all about.

Joanna: Fantastic. Thanks so much for your time Jim. That was great.

Jim: Thank you, Joanna, it’s always a pleasure to be on your wonderful show and thank you for continuing to lead the way in the publishing space. You are an inspiration to everyone and I can’t wait to see you in Nashville.

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Connecting with other writers and authors is a great way to battle the isolation that can sometimes come with the writing life. But what if you’re an introvert who hates crowds and gets overstimulated easily? Cat Rose shares nine tips for making the most of conferences without exhausting yourself.

Let’s imagine your industry’s biggest conference is coming up. Three days of back-to-back presentations, workshops, and panels, with endless opportunities to network, pitch influential people and evenings spent keeping the party going…

If you’re an introvert, this may sound about as appealing as a punch in the ribs. Unfortunately, conferences are generally not designed for the quiet-seeking, introspective and highly sensitive type.

Which happens to be a great many of us writers and creatives.

Conferences are designed for the many, not the few. If a quiet meeting over tea with a friend is pole fishing, conferences are ocean-floor scraping. They prioritize mass engagement, not one-to-one connections.

Highly sensitive introverts have it even harder. A highly sensitive person tends to feel overstimulated with bright lights, lots of noise, lots of action and before long they burn out.

If you’ve ever been to a conference and felt like you’ve been run over for days afterward, you’ll know how this feels.

If you haven’t attended a conference yet – don’t let this put you off! Regardless of your conference experience to date, I want to show you the simple strategies you can put into place that can make any conference manageable, valuable and maybe even… enjoyable.

1. Add padding. Before and after.

By padding, I mean put time aside that doesn’t contain any energy-zapping activities. You might consider traveling to the hotel or wherever you are staying a day or two early. That way, the travel part is separate from the conference itself, and you have time to get your bearings and settle into your temporary home.

Similarly, after the conference, put time aside in your calendar that will allow you to really process the experience and allow a much speedier recovery, if you need it.

If this is difficult to schedule, consider taking a shorter visit to the conference. If it’s three days long, stay for one or two. Don’t sacrifice the rest of your life

2. Pack your comfort items.

I don’t know what your comfort items are, but mine are: an Aeropress coffee maker (just in case the hotel’s isn’t up to scratch), earplugs (the silicone type work wonders for light sleepers) and a foldable yoga mat (especially if I’ve traveled far and need a stretch.)

Whatever you need to add a bit of home comfort while you’re away is going to make a surprising amount of difference to your overall quality of experience.

I’ve heard about people packing their own pillows for a hotel stay, because of the extra chance of a good night’s sleep a pillow makes. Have a think about your daily life, and list the little things that bring you comfort, and which of them you could travel with (sorry, usually pets aren’t allowed!).

3. Pack your comfort routine.

In addition to physical items, have a think about your daily routine. Which parts bring you comfort? I protect my morning time with my life because I know that this is the guaranteed peace that will help me set myself up for the day.

I see it as my warm-up as if I was an athlete (very far stretch of the imagination.) If I drop it when I’m away from home, I usually feel rushed and stressed as I get plunged into my day.

Your routine might be as simple as sitting in your hotel room with some tea or coffee, reading before going to the conference. It might be journaling before bed or taking some time to meditate or go for a run.

Just because you’re away from home, you don’t have to be in ‘conference mode’ all day and all night. Take your routine with you.

4. Be selective.

Most conferences I see these days are attempting to pack in as many speakers and events as possible, many of them overlapping.

FOMO alert! The fear of missing out at a conference is all too real and can be quite triggering for the easily-overstimulated and over-thinking minds.

Long before you pack your bags, try to whittle down the speakers you really want to see. Ask yourself: if I just saw these people, would I feel like I made the most of my time?

You might leave room for spontaneity on the day, but ideally, you want to be in a place that lets you feel peace.

5. Prep your side dish.

Now you’re at the conference, how do you manage the first awkward moments of conversation? For the most part, introverts aren’t usually fans of small talk. We like to go deep. But side dishes allow us to start conventional and work our way into the deeper, more interesting territories – without freaking anyone out.

Your side dish has nothing to do with food; this is how you answer a typical question like, ‘Have you been on holiday recently?’

Sure, you could answer this with a straightforward ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and pretty much kill the conversation there.

Instead, always have a ‘side dish’ prepared. ‘Yes – Portugal. It was beautiful – the food, in particular, was worth the trip alone!’ The side dish is your commentary on the food.

The trickier follow up when your answer must be a negative: for instance, you haven’t been on holiday. Rather than an abrupt ‘No’, which can really shut down a conversation, you could try elaborating with a positive spin: ‘Not at the moment, but I’d love to travel more. Have you been anywhere recently?’

You can make just about any ‘No’ a bit more interesting by adding (1) an opinion (ideally positive) and (2) a question, to turn it back on them.

Start preparing yourself for typical small talk questions, and a handful of side dishes (opinions, facts or questions) to tag on to your answers.

6. Go with a friend.

Ever notice how hard it is to talk about what you do, but it’s so easy to talk about what a friend or someone you admire does? The best form of marketing is still word of mouth, and having a friend there to talk you up (and you them) isn’t just less awkward, it’s also incredibly powerful.

You don’t have to come with someone you know well, you could reach out to an attendee online in advance, and get to know them. If you hit it off, you can be each other’s number one promoters.

7. Practice slow networking.

Slow networking means you don’t have to ‘work the room’ or collect business cards like it’s your job. In fact, you don’t even have to pitch anyone if you’re not feeling comfortable with it.

Your connections can be made at the event, but you can save the business end of things for when you get home. My standard strategy at nearly any event I go to, big or small, is focussing my attention on who I’m speaking to during the event. I soak everything they say up like a sponge, and I don’t pressure myself to sell or convince them of my own offerings then and there.

It’s after the event that I make my move. And this may be an email, letting them know I enjoyed our chat and maybe asking to chat again. Other times, it might be an even slower process: just connecting on social media and putting a date in my calendar to reach out again in the future.

This is a slow, steady, low-pressure way to network, that usually works a lot better than a scattergun, high-pressure approach, regardless of whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert.

8. Or don’t network at all.

What if you just went to this conference to get some inspiration? To see your favorite author in action? There’s no reason to put a load of pressure on yourself to make something happen, especially if it could detract from your enjoyment of the experience.

9. When you’ve had enough, admit it.

Similarly, there’s no point in prolonging your experience past the line of enjoyment. If you’re feeling yourself flag after a few hours, take a time out. Or call it quits altogether.

Most of the time, an hour alone usually recharges me for another stint, but I’m a stickler for early bedtimes. The important part is remembering to check in with how you’re feeling – and to not berate yourself for tapping out before others.

As much as a hermit-like introvert I am, I can’t deny the importance of conferences when it comes to leveling up your creative career. Meeting people face-to-face is very different from dropping a comment on a blog post, or chatting on Twitter.

In my experience, no amount of online interactions come close to matching the strength of the connections made at these events. If you attend with an open mind and pay attention to your own needs and your own introverted strengths, I have no doubt you can get the same – if not more – value as an extrovert would, from your next conference

What are your favorite survival tips when attending conferences? Please leave your thoughts below and join the conversation.

Cat Rose helps creative introverts show their work and get the exposure they deserve. She does this through the League of Creative Introverts online community, as well as one-to-one coaching and her podcast, The Creative Introvert.

Her aim in life is to help all her clients do what they love and realize their dreams while honoring their personality type and preferences.

You can connect with Cat online or in person at a conference! Find out more at: TheCreativeIntrovert.com

[Airplane image courtesy Amarnath Tade and Unsplash. Portugal image courtesy Ricardo Resende and Unsplash. Sloth image courtesy Sebastian Molinares and Unsplash.]

It’s possible for indie authors to go beyond thinking of selling our books just at online retailers. Libraries are another potential channel for book sales and another stream of income! Eric Simmons shares how he’s gotten his books into some of the largest libraries in the US.

In December 2017, as I was thinking about my 2018 business goals for my self-published Memoir, Not Far From The Tree, which was the first book I had ever written, I knew I wanted to establish near irrefutable credibility around the book with potential purchasers.

Ultimately, I decided to focus on libraries as a strategic market segment due in large part to the trustworthiness people tend to associate with these facilities, and because they have what’s called a “Collection Development Policy.”

Per the New Orleans Public Library, which is now one of my customers:

“The Collection Development Policy is designed to support the Library’s Mission statement and serves as a guide for the selection, acquisition, maintenance, and retention of materials.”

Having a book in a library helps establish credibility with readers, in my view, because the book has been vetted and passed a litmus test, so to speak, to be considered for purchase and placement within the library.

Also, libraries are highly referenceable customers, especially with other libraries. If you can get one library to buy your book, the odds are likely others will follow. I call this the domino effect, and it has been working for me.

To illustrate, after initiating my “Library Campaign” in January 2018, sixty-eight (68) libraries (21 Academic, 46 Public, and 1 Library Services company) have purchased my now two books (see, https://www.esetomes.com/library-customers). Of these, five are amongst the twenty-five largest Public Libraries in the U.S. and one is in the top twenty largest Academic Libraries.

Each time a new library purchases one of my books, I add them to my “Reference List,” and I share the list with prospective libraries during my marketing campaigns. One clear benefit I am beginning to see from my Reference List usage is a shorter time to sales closure, particularly with Public libraries, which for me is down from six months to three months on average. Lately, however, I’ve been seeing Public libraries purchase within a month!

The Library Market

Per data on the Online Computer Library Center’s (OCLC) website under, “Global Library Statistics,” there are 336,841 libraries worldwide (45,028 Academic and 291,813 Public). In the U.S., the site lists 3,793 Academic and 9,042 Public libraries.

Per the American Library Association (ALA), the total number of libraries in the U.S. is 116,867, the preponderance of which are Public and Private school libraries.

Note, the OCLC’s number for Public Libraries in the U.S. doesn’t include the total number of buildings which ALA lists as 16,568. I use this number for my Public library opportunity.

If you are targeting millennials for your books, they are more likely than older generations to say libraries help them find trustworthy information, learn new things, and make informed decisions, per a 2016 Pew Research Center survey.

Downloadable image courtesy of Pew Research Center

On February 22, 2017, Reedsy published an article which stated, ” … 92% of librarians surveyed between May 2016 – July 2016 by New Shelves stated that they regularly buy books from self-published authors and small presses. The article goes on to say, “Once one library has your book and the check-out rates start showing up on reports, other librarians will start ordering your book. The growth and spread of your book’s sales and popularity will start happening while you are not even looking!”

The Challenge

You will find some Librarians still rely heavily on book reviews. As evidence, one Librarian sent me the following in an email last year, “New library materials are considered for purchase using a variety of selection criteria including favorable reviews in standard library review media (Library Journal, Kirkus, Booklist) anticipated demand for the material, local interest, and space and budgetary considerations.”

Personally, I struggle mightily with book reviews. Here’s why. Per Kirkus’ website, the charge for a “Traditional Review” is $425 U.S. and you can expect a 250-300 word review back in 7-9 weeks. If you want the review expedited, the cost is $575.

A second option is an “Expanded Review” that can be received in 7-9 weeks at the cost of $575, and the expedited cost is $725. At a royalty rate of let’s say, $3.00 U.S. for a paperback book, one would have to sell roughly 142 books to break even on the “Traditional Review.” That’s like giving 142 libraries a book for free!

At this juncture, I prefer not to pay to play to get into libraries. Thanks, but no thanks!! I do realize however my stubbornness could be costing me revenue. Let’s assume a Kirkus “Traditional Review” yielded me, 1,000 new library customers. Using the previous $3.00 royalty rate, I might be missing out on a net revenue gain of $2,575 ($3,000-$425). Due to my current marketing budget, however, I’m staying pat for now on paying for a book review.

Getting Started Marketing to Libraries

If like me, you’ve discounted paying for book reviews, for now at least, as a means for getting your book into libraries, you’ll have to roll up your sleeves and contact libraries directly. To get started, you’ll need to get answers to two key questions.

1. Who are the primary decision-makers in the libraries you’ll be contacting; and
2. Where do these libraries go to purchase their books?

1. Key Decision Makers in a Library

Depending on the size of a library, the key decision-makers will have titles such as Head Librarian, Director, or in the case of Academic libraries, perhaps Dean. Other vital titles are Collection Development Librarian or Acquisitions Librarian.

If it’s a large library, don’t be surprised if the Collection Development Librarian has the latitude to make the final decision on a book purchase. This individual carries a lot of weight, and often the Head Librarian will refer you to the Collections Development Librarian.

You should also look for potential influencers in a library. If an individual has responsibility for say, children’s books, and you’ve written one, that person needs to be on your contact list. So, genre responsibility is essential as well.

Do sell top-down, i.e., to the highest titled person in the library. The rationale here is the “boss” can override a subordinate’s decision – if you catch my drift. For most of my libraries, I try to have at least two contacts, and for some, I have as many as six because individual Librarians may decide to make a personal purchase.

2. Where Do Libraries Go to Purchase Their Books?

Baker & Taylor (B&T) seems to be the preferred vendor of many Librarians, but in my case, most of my library customers have purchased the paperback version of my memoir from IngramSpark. I anticipate my B&T sales will begin to pick up dramatically now that a snafu has been corrected following the absorption of CreateSpace by Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP).

To make a long story short, B&T dropped my book by mistake when the absorption above occurred and to complicate matters KDP was not doing business with B&T at the time, and may still not be as of this writing. Note, although Ingram distributes through B&T, Ingram states on its website, “Since B&T targets libraries they may decide to not to carry a specific title– regardless of the printer or publisher–if they feel it won’t generate interest from their target audience. We cannot *make* B&T carry a title. It is completely at the discretion of B&T.”

Note: If B&T doesn’t pick up your self-published title through Ingram, you may want to reach out to B&T directly, or you may have to get a library to request your book.

To date, my paperback library sales through Amazon’s Expanded Distribution offering and Brodart, another company you may hear Librarians mention, have been minimal.

As for eBooks, I’ve had sales to the Los Angeles Public Library (the U.S.’ 5th largest Public Library) and others through OverDrive, a service that allows customers to borrow digital content for free.

My Overdrive sales have come through Draft2Digital (D2D), Smashwords, and StreetLib. Last year, D2D began working with Bibliotheca, a library management solutions company, and unlike with Overdrive, you can get a royalty payment when your eBook is checked out.

D2D calls this option Cost Per Checkout (CPC) which they describe as “CPC allows libraries to have access to the same title for more than one user. Instead of a fixed price, libraries gain access to your books and pay 1/10 of the book’s full purchase price, each time it is loaned out.” I’ve received several small royalty payments under this option and wish something similar was available when OverDrive related book checkouts occur.

Building Your Library Contact Database

I built my Library Contact Database with Microsoft Excel. This souped-up spreadsheet is sortable and now contains 2,187 libraries with 2,046 Academic library contacts and 1,069 Public library contacts which equates to 1.4 contacts per library.

I keep separate tabs for my Academic and Public libraries because this makes it easier for me when I do a mass mailing targeted at either sector.

My field headings are Library Type (i.e., Public or Academic), Library Link (i.e., URL), First Name, Last Name, Salutation (example Mary, or Dr. Smith), Email Address, Date Contacted, Library Name, and Notes. I’m in the process of adding a State heading under which I will list the two-letter abbreviation for a State for sortability by state.

To populate my database, I perform a Google search. I’ll use the State of North Carolina as an example since this was my most recently “targeted” library State.

When I Googled, “libraries in North Carolina,” near the top of the results list appears, “Library Directory | State Library of North Carolina.” Incredibly, every Academic and Public Library in the State of North Carolina with the Head Librarian is listed, and there’s a downloadable spreadsheet to boot!

Now, before you get overly excited, this is more of an exception than the norm. For most of the libraries in my database, I had to manually load each one at a rate of about 12 libraries an hour.

The primary tool I’ve been using to identify Public Libraries is, LibWeb, Library Servers via WWW. You click on a particular U.S. State, and you’ll be directed to Public Libraries within the State.

Next, you click on a library’s link and you will be directed to the library’s home page. Now, you will have to search the site to identify the primary decision-maker(s). In many cases, the decision makers can be found under “About Us,” “Staff Directory” or similar. LibWeb also lists Academic libraries in the same manner.

Create a Mail Merge Document

After loading information into my database, I created a mail merge document using Microsoft Word and the “Step-by-Step Mail Merge Wizard” function. If you are unfamiliar with how to do a Word mail merge Google, “Mail merge using an Excel spreadsheet – Word – Office Support,” and Microsoft has videos that will show you how.

Through mail merge, I can customize my campaign letters so that they look tailored for the specific individual versus having a mass email look. I can insert the Librarian’s first name or title and the Library’s name in the body of the document if I like.

I learned the hard way that Microsoft has a limit, under my Office 365 subscription, of 300 emails per day. I tried to do a mailing recently of over 300, and I was locked out of my account. So, depending upon your email service, be sure to look into the daily email limits if there are any.

Which Libraries Should You Target First?

I suggest you target your local Public and Academic libraries first, especially the ones close to where you live. Many Librarians are receptive, I’ve found, to helping local authors. Also, you may get invited to speak about your book which is what happened to me with my local public library.

When’s the Best Time to Sell to Libraries?

Libraries tend to buy year round, but by and large, I’ve found the briskest selling times to be during their Fiscal Year End/Fiscal Year Begin or FYE/FYB. It varies, but most of the libraries I’ve contacted seem to have their FYE/FYB between April and July.

As an example, the State of North Carolina’s Fiscal Year runs from July 1 to June 30. The two months leading up to FYE, the month of FYB and the month following are good times to approach Librarians because they will be spending both remaining and new funds.

Reference Your Successes in “Library Campaigns”

In mid-April, I started a North Carolina Library Campaign, because of their upcoming FYE, which has resulted in six book sales thus far. One of which was a purchase by a Public Library System for five copies of my latest book, #HTSP – How to Self-Publish which is based on the steps I undertook to successfully, self-publish my Memoir.

I made sure to mention in my mailing my memoir was an Amazon bestseller in January and March under the Single Parent category, so be sure to tout your book’s successes in your email campaigns to Librarians.

Consider Using Multiple Email Addresses

Consider using multiple email addresses for contacting Librarians. I use three different email addresses. Why? 1) To avoid the appearance of bombarding the email recipient and 2) As a backup plan in case my email gets put in a “junk email” list.

Purchase a Library Mailing List

For this article, I did some research to see if there were library mailing lists that you could purchase and located one provided by Lists You Can Afford.

The site lists library contacts ranging from 900 to 23,000 with prices from $39 to $99. If you’re looking for a vetted list that is generating proven results for a self-publisher, I’ve decided to make my Library Contact Database available to The Creative Penn followers for $19.97. My North Carolina Library Campaign shell letter is also included to give you an idea of the type of information I provide Librarians.

My sincere thanks to each of you for your time and interest today. Hopefully, you will find the information provided beneficial. A special thanks also to Joanna Penn for being such a beacon of hope and inspiration for self-publishers worldwide!

Here’s wishing each of you the best of luck in selling to libraries. Feel free to reach out to me with questions, or if I can be of assistance, at my book website.

Have you made attempts to get your books into libraries? Please leave your thoughts below and join the conversation.

Eric Otis Simmons is the owner of ESE, Inc., a website development firm specializing in creating sites for High School Athletes to aid them in getting recruited, Authors, Poets and others seeking to present their “Personal Brand” on the Internet. A former college athlete, Eric enjoys sports and public speaking. The first two books he’s ever written, which were self-published, have recently been added to the prestigious Collection of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Every aspect of your book is part of its marketing. Rob Eagar walks us through three essential elements that, if done right, will help you sell more books.

What if you could increase your book sales without spending more money on advertising, publicity, or promotions?

It is possible when you understand the power of language at your disposal.

We live in an era where technology influences every aspect of our lives, including the Internet, social media, computers, Alexa, and e-reader devices. But, concluding that technology rules the day leads to a misconception that can prevent many authors from reaching their full sales potential.

Language drives the book sale, not technology.

People do not buy books because computers bombard us with offers to purchase.

Readers decide to purchase based upon the word of mouth they hear, the customer reviews they see, and the marketing copy they read. Technology simply delivers those words to potential readers in more ways than ever before.

Therefore, you can master technology and still struggle at selling books. Authors are supposed to be the masters of words. But, have you learned how to master marketing words?

If not, let’s fix that problem here and now. There are three types of persuasive marketing copy that every author has the complete control to create:

1. Book title
2. Book description
3. Book accolades

Let’s examine each type of language in more detail to help your book capture as many sales as possible:

1. Book Title

You’re probably familiar with the adage, “Never judge a book by its cover.” That notion may be true about book covers, but it doesn’t apply to book titles. Every day, people judge whether to buy a book based on the title.

Compelling titles attract interest and stimulate a purchase, while dull titles cause people’s eyes to glaze over and lose interest. You have direct control over creating a title that will work in your favor.

There is no perfect way to create a book title. However, there are proven principles you can follow to ensure that your title is a marketing asset, rather than a liability.

The ultimate purpose of your book title is to tease, not to teach.

Never confuse your title as a teaching tool. Instead, it’s a teasing tool. Your title’s primary job is to draw readers to your book, not teach readers what you know.

Without reader interest, there is no book sale. For example, notice how these fiction and nonfiction titles tease you to want more information about the book:

Fiction examples:

• The President is Missing
• A Killer’s Mind
• Something in the Water
• The Other Woman

Nonfiction examples:

• • The Truth About Men
  • The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up
  • Born a Crime
  • The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Effective titles use the power of persuasive language to drive book sales by engaging readers in the following ways:

• Attract attention and generate curiosity
• Suggest how a book’s content will entertain or educate the reader
• Imply the results or benefits the reader will enjoy from a book

There is no perfect titling method. There is also no perfect word count, although shorter titles are easier for people to remember. Plus, you cannot expect everybody to like your title.

However, you can always follow this rule of thumb: Never settle for a bland title.

Lackluster titles are obvious. They typically occur because frustrated authors rush the process. I teach my bestselling clients to always create numerous title options. Don’t put unrealistic expectations on yourself to demand a finished title during a quick brainstorming session.

Instead, create various options and let them percolate in your mind for a few weeks. Also, ask beta readers to provide input on their favorite option.

Your title is within your control. Take your time, use solid principles, and develop a winning title that is provocative and memorable.

2. Book Description

After people see a title that attracts their attention, their interest usually leads them to read the book description.

The description isn’t the only reason readers buy books. Word of mouth, advertising, and author reputation play a large role in convincing people to purchase.

However, your book description is one area where you have total sway over what people see. While you can’t control other marketing factors, you get to determine the book description that shoppers view.

Thus, your book description offers a golden opportunity to directly influence a reader’s decision-making process. It’s where your language gets to crystallize into one cohesive summary.

Plus, your book description appears in several pivotal places throughout the book-selling process, including:

• Back cover copy on a printed book
• Book detail page on Amazon and over 100 other online retailers
• Publisher and distributor catalog copy
• Publisher website
• Author website

Based on all of the places where people may see your book description, you need to think seriously about the book description that you create. You usually get 150 – 300 words capture the reader’s interest, so your words must count.

When written well, great marketing copy can close a lot of book sales by itself.

Whenever I train authors or help my top clients create a winning book description, I refer to these excellent examples to follow:

Fiction: The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

Nonfiction: Getting Past No by William Ury

If you write novels, you can create a persuasive book description or “synopsis” using this three-step template:

1. Start with a one-sentence “hook” that arrests the reader’s attention.
2. Next, describe your main character wrestling the primary conflict in your story.
3. Close with a suspenseful cliffhanger that makes readers wonder what happens.

In order for a non-fiction book description to be successful, the marketing language must resonate with the reader in two key ways:

1. Show that you understand how the reader feels
2. Show that you understand what the reader wants

When people consider buying a non-fiction book, they are usually motivated by an internal desire to solve a problem, learn something new, or feel inspired.

Logic makes people think, but emotion makes them act. If you can identify the feeling that is motivating the reader, then you create an emotional connection that makes the reader infer, “This author understands me.”

Wring the maximum value out of writing a great book description. Display it everywhere that your book is for sale.

People never tire of compelling language. Never get tired of using it.

3. Book Accolades

Besides your book title and description, there is another type of persuasive marketing language that you control: the accolades or achievements that your book receives.

Readers respond to accolades because they prefer books that have a satisfying reputation. That’s why you see books touting “New York Times bestseller” or authors proclaiming to be a USA Today or Wall Street Journal bestseller.

Accolades signal that your book should be perceived as a high-quality item that shoppers should value.

Currently, there are over 1,000,000 new books published each year. What chance does your book stand at competing against millions of other titles? One word: Differentiation

If your book has achieved an extra level of credibility, you would be remiss to withhold that influential language. Display any and all legitimate accolades on your bio, website, Amazon sales page, etc. (By the way, telling people your book is an “Amazon bestseller” is not a legitimate accolade.)

Displaying accolades for the world to see will help you close more book sales for free. Here are five types of honors that you should exhibit once they occur:

1. National bestseller status
2. Endorsements from well-known people
3. Major sales milestones (i.e. – over 100,000 copies sold)
4. Reviews from high-profile media outlets
5. Literary awards

These types of honors raise a question that worries some authors, “What if I don’t have any accolades?” For instance, you may be a first-time author who is just starting out with no awards or sales history. That’s normal.

Here are three options you can pursue and display as they transpire:

• Highlight the accomplishment of “Over 100 positive Amazon reviews”
• Display any local or regional awards
• List endorsements from notable leaders you know

Any author can strive for these types of achievements to help differentiate their book within a crowded genre. But, an accolade won’t increase your book sales unless you display it for readers to see.

Language is the power of the book sale. Fortunately, language is within your complete control as an author.

Your title, book description, and accolades have the power to help close more book sales without spending more money. And, if you spend money on advertising, displaying powerful language on your ads will make them even more profitable.

What if you could sell more books for free? Now you know how. Take control over your marketing language and enjoy wielding the power of words.

Do you think that your book title, description and accolades are doing their job to sell your book? Please leave your thoughts below and join the conversation.

Rob Eagar is one of the rare marketing consultants to help both fiction and nonfiction books hit the New York Times bestsellers list. He even helped a 23-year-old backlist book become a New York Times bestseller.

Rob has coached over 600 authors and is creator of The Author’s Guide series, a collection of books that teaches writers how to increase their book sales. Get 3 FREE e-books to jumpstart your book sales as a gift from Rob at his website.

Self-editing can be painstaking and difficult for authors, but it’s a critical part of the writing process. It helps us improve our craft, while also providing a cleaner manuscript for a developmental or copy editor, which saves us money. Here are tips on using ProWriting Aid to make the most of your self-editing time.

For a lot of writers, the fun part is creating new worlds and putting characters in dire situations only to have them rescue themselves later. Once you’re in the flow, it just spews from your fingertips, right?

Then there’s the dreaded self-edit. How do you make your prose—that which you vomited on the page—sound better and make sense?

Every writer must become his or her best editor. No one understands what you’re trying to achieve better than yourself, right? So it makes sense that you should be your first—and best—editor. Here are a few suggestions to help you learn to love self-editing.

Step 1: Change your mindset

Perhaps you haven’t yet realized that self-editing is one of the most powerful tools in your writing arsenal. It’s easy to put words down on paper or screen. Making them sound more than gauche is a skill you can cultivate.

This is not to say you don’t need a professional editor. Rather, it sets responsibility squarely on your shoulders for creating the best manuscript possible before you send it off to an editor. It’s not your editor’s responsibility to turn your sloppy writing into a masterpiece.

Before you start your thorough self-edit, turn to the next step.

Step 2: Get some distance

There’s a reason why you keep reading this sage advice everywhere you turn. It’s essential. You’re too close to your work to give it the impartial review it needs. Here are a few tricks to help put some unbiased distance between you and your manuscript.

Stick it the back of a lower desk drawer

We all have lower desk drawers that become repositories for all kinds of stuff. Make better use of that dark space by parking your manuscript in it for several weeks, maybe even months. The more time you can afford to give yourself, the better. You want to come back to your work with fresh eyes to analyze it carefully.

Print it out in a different font

You’re used to seeing your manuscript on the screen, or if you’ve been printing it out for review, you’re used to seeing it in a specific font on paper.

When you print it out in a different font, you can trick your mind into believing it’s something new that you need to read carefully. You’re less likely to skim-read and more likely to pay attention to words, phrases, punctuation, grammar, spelling, and more.

Use read-aloud software

A great trick for self-editing is to use the read-aloud capabilities in your favorite word processing software. Or, if your platform isn’t able to read your work out loud, copy and paste it into a Google Doc and go to the “Speak” option. Then sit back and listen to the ebb and flow of your writing.

Consider pacing and sentence variety. Also, listen for instances where your brain stumbles as the program reads your work aloud. Rework parts that don’t sound coherent or those bits that made sense when you typed them but sound ridiculous hearing them back.

Read your manuscript out of order

Finally, read your manuscript in reverse order from the last sentence to the first one. This helps you focus to make sure your spelling, punctuation, word choice, and grammar are impeccable.

Since you’re reading from the back to the front, you’re not worried so much about narrative or character arcs at this point as you are making sure your manuscript is technically sound.

Step 3: Apply the KISS method

You’ve heard of KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid). It couldn’t be more applicable than to your manuscript. Whether you’re into cutting, chopping, or killing your darlings, it’s up to you to be ruthless with your writing. If it doesn’t move your story forward or contribute to character development, it must go.

Fewer words are better

Many beginning writers think it’s all about word count. The more you have, the better a writer you must be. Rather, it’s about economy. Using the fewest number of words to evoke a full-color, three-dimensional picture in the reader’s mind is key to writing well.

Most writers have read Hemingway’s shortest story:

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

He said more in six words than others say in six pages. Learn to cut your writing to its bare minimum.

Eliminate entrance exam words

If your favorite student is studying for college entrance exams, they’re no doubt learning ten-dollar words. How often do you say “prescient” in your conversations with friends? Rarely, I would bet, but someone studying a thesaurus and trying to impress might trot that word out when writing.

Albert Einstein said: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

In other words, if an average individual with a middle-school education can’t understand what you’re saying, you’ve created more confusion than comprehension.

When reading, it’s all about comprehension. You want your readers to understand your meaning without working too hard. In fact, using common words keeps the author in the background and makes his or her ideas stand out instead.

If you have a tendency to overdo it a bit with your vocabulary, use readability stats to keep tabs on yourself. I ran a recent blog post through ProWritingAid and found a few paragraphs that needed to be simplified:

Take out most dialogue tags

Next, target dialogue tags. Again, those wanting to sound creative and witty come up with many ways to write “said” or “asked,” like “she sputtered” or “he enquired.” Don’t do this.

Flowery dialogue tags tell readers what you want them to think and feel instead of showing those emotions through narrative.

Here’s a perfect example of someone trying too hard to use dialogue tags to tell readers how characters feel:

In the above screenshot, all dialogue is highlighted with blue and all dialogue tags are in purple. In the top section, the writer is depending on the dialogue tags to express emotions.

In the rewrite below, the writer has used action and description to get the emotions across. You can feel the emotions of the characters when you read the second version.

“Actions speak louder than words” is an often-spouted phrase that nevertheless gets to the heart of the issue. Show your characters’ actions instead of telling your readers what they should see, think, and feel.

Step 4: Take advantage of editing technology

Editing technology is an effective step in the writing process of many writers today. People often talk about how editing tools use Artificial Intelligence; rather, I prefer to think of it as Intelligent Assistance. You still need to do the self-edit yourself, but technology can help you do it more efficiently and effectively.

Here’s what editing tools are good—and bad—at doing for you.

What editing tools are great for

Everyone makes technical and stylistic gaffes in their work. An editing tool makes it easy to find errors like misused words, inconsistencies, vague or abstract words, and much more that your eyes too easily overlook.

In addition to finding spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors beyond those found in other spell checkers, an editing tool helps you learn how to refine your prose so you offer your best manuscript to your editor or publisher.

What editing tools are terrible for

An editing tool can never take the place of a developmental editor. No tool available can help you patch up plot holes, shore up weak character arcs, or create believable and relatable worlds for your characters to live and interact in.

The key to using an editing tool wisely is to let it point out where you can improve your manuscript technically and stylistically so your editor can focus solely on your story and characters. Not only will your editor appreciate a polished manuscript, but you’ll save money in editing costs.

Here are a few of our favorite editing tool reports:

The Style Report

The Style Report looks for readability issues. These are issues that are not necessarily incorrect, but they are signs of amateur writing, like passive voice, overdependence on adverbs, awkward constructions, etc.

For example, sometimes when drafting, you’ll throw in a few adverbs to shore up a weak verb because you can’t think of a stronger verb and you don’t want to interrupt your flow. An editing tool can point out every adverb in your manuscript to let you decide which to keep and which to change. Take a look at this example:

In this case, I probably should replace “walk quickly” with “hurry.” It feels more urgent. It’s up to you to decide if the adverbs are warranted or if you need to finder stronger verbs.

There are thousands of style and readability issues that inexperienced writers need to watch out for. Editing technology can help flag them so that you, the writer, can decide whether you need to strengthen your words.

The Sticky Sentences Check

Do you know what glue words are? They’re the 200+ most common words in the English language that add nothing to your meaning.

A little glue goes a long way. In fact, statistics show that published texts have a low percentage of glue words compared to working words. That’s because experienced writers edit their work so it contains as few unessential words as possible.

A good rule of thumb is to aim for less than 40% glue words per sentence. If your sentence contains more than 40%, you should probably re-write it to increase clarity.

Here is a prime example of a sticky sentence with way too many glue words:

Let’s look at an example I used in the screenshot above:

Sticky: There is a lake out in the middle of the woods where locals go to get away from the tourists who come take over all of the village’s restaurants and shops in the summer.

Glue Index: 70.4%

Rewrite: Fleeing the summer tourist season, locals escape to Monehan Lake.

Glue Index: 22.2%

The rewrite saves 24 words and contains a much smaller percentage of glue words. Not only is it more succinct, it provides more specific information than that meandering sticky sentence.

Of course, use your judgment as the author. Sometimes a sentence will be sticky and it’s the only way it works. That’s fine. Just think of it as a flag indicating you should give it a second look to make sure it can’t be rewritten in a simpler way.

The Repeats Check

Another great report is the one that checks your manuscript for repeats or echoes that crop up when you’re drafting your novel. The following screenshot shows how, in the span of two sentences, the writer used the same phrase:

The nice thing about an editing tool is it makes suggestions on how to improve your prose by eliminating repetitive words you might not catch during a self-edit.

These are just a few of the more than 20 writing reports offered by the ProWritingAid editing tool. Other reports focus on overused words, diction, sentence structure and length, transitions, pronouns, clichés, consistency and more.

It’s still up to you to decide what changes to make to your manuscript until it’s ready for your editor or publisher to see.

Step 5: Avoid the rabbit hole

Endless self-edits become a rabbit hole. Much like the never-ending links on web pages that lead you deeper and steal your precious time, you can waste hours chasing the elusive “perfect” prose. At some point, you must say, “Enough is enough. It will never be perfect.”

Writers chase perfection. Maybe it’s in our genes or part of what we think encapsulates a “professional” writer. If you’re to be as good as [insert favorite author’s name], you must be perfect.

The truth is… no one is perfect. Not even the authors you deify like gods. Margaret Atwood? Joyce Carole Oats? David Foster Wallace? None have ever been perfect. But their books have certainly been good enough. So that’s what you need to aim for.

The writing part is easy—intuitive for many; some would even say fun. It’s the self-editing that gets serious. Writing puts your thoughts down on paper; editing makes them sound better.

One thing every single writer can do is use an editing tool to help them identify gaffes like those above—plus many more. A robust tool like ProWritingAid can find dozens of technical and stylistic gaffes that make you sound like an amateur. If you want to learn how to self-edit the easy way, use an editing tool and study the changes to learn what strengthens your writing.

Ultimately, writing is the fuel. But editing creates the masterpiece.

Think ProWritingAid could help you? Click here to get 25% off ProWritingAid Premium.

Hayley Milliman is a former teacher turned writer. She is currently a content ninja for ProWritingAid and has just completed her first novel. She is the author of Museum Hack’s Guide to History’s Fiercest Females and How to Build Your Author Platform on a Shoestring.

How can you effectively use image-based social media to reach readers and sell more books?

How can you avoid time-wasting but still build a community? I discuss these questions and more with Frances Caballo in today’s interview.

In the intro, I mention my personal update and how I organize and batch my time, as well as Things app.

Plus, if you’re unhappy with the changes at Mailchimp, check out my tutorial on how to set up ConvertKit for your author mailing list.

Today’s show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, where you can get free ebook formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Get your free Author Marketing Guide at www.draft2digital.com/penn

Frances Caballo is the author of Social Media Just for Writers as well as Avoid Social Media Time Suck, which is super important, and other books on blogging and social media. She provides coaching and social media management for writers.

You can listen above or on iTunes or your favorite podcast app or watch the video here, read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and full transcript below.

Show Notes

• On the changes in social media in the past 5 years

• The continued importance of visual images on social media

• The importance of Instagram Stories if you’re using Instagram

• How to find hashtags to use with Instagram

• Using Pinterest to drive traffic to a website

• How Pinterest differs from Instagram in terms of marketing vs. brand awareness

• Why the scattergun approach to social media doesn’t work

You can find Frances Caballo at FrancesCaballo.com and on Twitter @CaballoFrances

Transcript of Interview with Frances Caballo

Joanna: Hi, everyone. I’m Joanna Penn from thecreativepenn.com. And today, I’m here with Frances Caballo. Hi, Frances.

Frances: Hi, Joanna.

Joanna: It’s been ages, and we’ll get into that. But just for an introduction for anyone who doesn’t know you:

Frances is the author of ‘Social Media Just for Writers’ as well as ‘Avoid Social Media Time Suck’, which is super important, and other books on blogging and social media. She provides coaching and social media management for writers.

Frances, it was 2014 when you came on the show talking about social media, as we just said. It feels like so much has changed but it also feels like not much has changed because we’re still talking about social media.

What do you think has changed since 2014? In the last five years, what’s the shift in the social media environment?

Frances: The interest in Facebook has dropped about five percentage points. I have friends who have dropped Facebook for Instagram. I, personally, don’t use my Facebook page account very much anymore. I am going to be focusing more on Instagram.

I still use Twitter. I think Twitter is still important for authors. It’s a great news site but it’s also a great way to connect with colleagues who write in your same genre and to help authors in your genre share their posts, share their books and meet readers. There are a lot of readers, a lot of librarians on Twitter.

Twitter is among the top six most popular social media networks, but we don’t need to forget about it and it is going through some revamping. So that’s good. And now you can do 280 characters whereas 5 years ago you could only use 140 characters. But it’s better not to use the 280 characters because text-heavy posts don’t really work on Twitter.

On Facebook, even though Facebook started out as a pretty much a text-only app just like Twitter did, you should never post anything to Facebook without an image or a video. Now, with the exception that sometimes text-only posts do work on Facebook.

On my Facebook profile, I wrote a pretty text-heavy post about a German Shepherd dog that came after me barking and snarling. I wrote about that experience on Facebook and I got huge engagement. But that’s the exception.

What happens on social media, in general, and we’re going to exclude Instagram and Pinterest from this conversation just for this one point, is that you have to use images. Images are what attract the eye. The brain can process images 60,000 times faster than text.

People remember text in images better than they remember what’s said in a text post. So images are really important.

On a blog post, they’re really important. You have to have at least one image for every blog post. Multiple images are good on a blog post provided that they’re not all stock images. So there’s that.

Early on, back in 2010, I was taking a lot of social media workshops from this one person, I forget her name now. And so, she said, ‘You should always allocate one social media as your fun site.’ And so, for a long time, Pinterest was my fun site.

And then, that became more important for my business, so then I made Instagram my fun account. Well, now I’m revamping my Instagram account. In fact, it’s filled mostly with Black Labs, so I’ve given my Black Lab an Instagram account. And I just started her account on Friday and she already has I think almost 50 followers. So she’s doing really well.

But I’m always taking social media courses, even though I specialize in social media and I read a lot of social media posts. And I realize I’m not giving you any opportunity to ask any questions, Joanna. But I like to take courses.

I’ve signed up for two courses, one is through Social Media Examiner, it’s their society, and I’m taking a course from Kay Coroy. She’s British and she’s an Instagram teacher. What she focuses on for Instagram, is your sole brand essence and finding what your brand colors are and sticking to those colors on Instagram. So that’s why my dog now has its own Instagram account because I’ll be focusing on my brand colors. So, all right, it’s time for questions.

Joanna: We’ll be circling back on Instagram and images.

But just sticking with what’s changed, so I think your point about continuing to learn is also important because, as we know, these sites change all the time. They change their functions. They change what’s available.

But just going back to Facebook, because this is really interesting, and I just wondered what your thoughts were on why Facebook is dropping. So, when we think back to Myspace, before Facebook, that was taken over. Everyone did that and then it was Facebook and Myspace went back to being very niche.

Is that just the natural trajectory of a social media site? And then, of course, Facebook might’ve seen that coming because they bought Instagram. So is it a natural progression or is it a backlash against the privacy issues and the big tech issues that Facebook is facing? Because, of course, authors use Facebook for advertising. It’s very important to a lot of businesses.

What are your thoughts on what’s happening with Facebook?

Frances: I think one of the things was the way the Russians were able to affect the outcome of the election of Donald Trump in this country, and how sites were able to use custom audiences that were really horrible in controlling the advertising for that election. I think that had a lot to do with the backlash against Facebook.

They used to have terrible custom audiences like Jew haters. It’s a terrible custom audience to have for advertising on Facebook. Facebook has gotten rid of a lot of those custom audiences and has really worked on that.

The other thing against Facebook is its algorithm, especially for businesses. And authors may not see themselves as businesses but if you have a Facebook author page, you have a Facebook business page, and so the algorithm for business pages is such that only 2% of what you post on your Facebook business page will actually penetrate the News Feed, unless you buy advertising.

Facebook has to monetize itself. The way it monetizes itself is through advertising. So if you want to do well on your Facebook author page, which is a Facebook business page, you have to advertise.

And I think people are upset about that. People like Toyota and Mercedes, big brands, that’s just part of their marketing budgets. With a lot of especially indie authors, that’s difficult to do.

Mark Dawson has a fabulous Facebook advertising course, and I recommend that all authors take this course, but you can’t do much with a Facebook author page unless you advertise and unless you know how to use Facebook advertising well. So that’s difficult.

I used to say that every author had to have a Facebook business page. Now I don’t.

Joanna: Well, that’s interesting. A question about news sites. I have not used Snapchat, now called Snap, and I have not used TikTok, which I only really heard about when I was in London last, and the whole underground was plastered with signs for TikTok.

And then I’ve heard that it is a music video or something like that. Anyway, I have not tried either of these things. Many authors do not want to get on another social media site.

What are your thoughts on the new emerging sites?

Frances: Snap is really popular among the youth and millennials. The author of ‘Wool’, I think it’s Hugh Howey, he was able to increase his emailing list by galvanizing this following on Snap by adding 11,000 people to his email account.

So if you’re a YA author and you want to galvanize your readers on Snap, then that’s a site to use but to know how to use it well because your posts disappear once people read them. And that was my issue with Instagram Stories.

I didn’t think they were a viable issue for authors because you work on creating an Instagram Story and then it vanishes within 24 hours. But now you can archive them, so now I like Instagram Stories.

TikTok I just looked at this morning and it’s videos and it’s music and it’s all young adults. So I didn’t see anything else, so that would be a place for YA authors. But I’m not yet sure how they could use it but they could definitely use Snap. Hugh Howey is great at using social media but he’s great at using Snap also.

Joanna: How did you find out about Hugh and Snap?

Frances: It was on his blog years ago. Probably two years ago.

Joanna: I’ll see if I can link to that in the show notes. Let’s circle back on Instagram because I, like you, have not really used Facebook on my personal side for years mainly because my mom’s there. My mother-in-law is there. It’s kind of a thing where I’m not necessarily sharing so much.

I’ve started using Instagram and I really love it too, and kind of like you, I’ve started to go, ‘Oh, maybe I should be using it more like a business, but how do I do that?’

If people have an Instagram account and they have done what you’ve done like, ‘Here’s a few a few personal things,’ how have you been revamping Instagram for business use?

Frances: I haven’t yet but I’m going to, but I do manage accounts for other people. And what I do is I create Instagram Stories.

If you’re going to be serious about using Instagram for business, you have to use Instagram Stories. They don’t appear in the News Feed. They appear on top of the News Feed and they are the circles. And what you can do is you can highlight an Instagram Story and it stays right beneath your bio. And so, I recommend that you use Instagram Stories. They’re just really powerful.

Joanna: Give us an example of what is an Instagram Story, if people don’t know.

Frances: Some people think it’s a story and you have to do a lot of writing because we think of stories as writers, right? But it’s not. You can use Canva.

Canva has a template for Instagram Stories. You can use multiple pages in your Instagram Story, but I don’t recommend that you do that because the first page has to pass, and then the second one comes up and people usually don’t wait that long.

It’s just an image with text on it but you want to have the text low enough so it doesn’t get caught up in the Instagram type. And you could say, ‘This book is on sale for two days,’ or, ‘This book is free now, come to my website.’

You can do an Instagram Story about, ‘This is my favorite place to walk. This is my favorite place to write.’ Whereas Instagram images are these block images, these square images, Instagram Stories are the length of your smartphone, and so you have more visibility, a bigger place to write.

Joanna: I like using the images. I understand that. I’m doing that quite well now, sharing my images. I’m doing some hashtags. But Stories I really haven’t got the hang of.

I don’t really know what is a story and what is an image on the page. And also, I think, we don’t want to always be saying, ‘Here’s my book. Here’s my book.’ So give us some ideas of what are the other things that we put in a story if we are just living a normal life?

I don’t really have as much of a story to tell today. So what do we put there?

Frances: It doesn’t have to be this big thing. It could be your husband taking a picture of you writing. It could be somebody taking a picture of you riding your bike through Bath.

The story is simply, ‘I’m working on my next book,’ or, ‘This is where I like to ride my bike.’ They’re just images about your life or about other authors.

You may be holding a book and reading it and it’s by another author, and you could say, ‘I love this book by…’ And so, it’s just a larger image that gets more visibility. It could also be a video.

It doesn’t have to be a static image. It can be a video. And they’re important because they get greater visibility. People don’t have to thumb through their News Feed to see them. They’ll see them at the top of the News Feed. So you just have greater visibility. So I’d say they’re for things that you really want to get out there.

Joanna: I think still that we haven’t really tackled the big thing in the room which people wonder how social media sells books, and Instagram feels even harder. So Twitter, when I share a tweet, I can put a direct link to a bookstore on Twitter and I can like, ‘Here’s me with my new book. And here’s the buy link.’

But on Instagram, you can’t even put a link in the image or the text.

How do we go from doing a nice image and a story to actually someone being able to buy the book?

Frances: Right. So you change the link in your bio. On your bio, it may say ‘thecreativepenn.com’ or it could be ‘jfpenn.com.’ But if it’s for a specific book, you would say ‘jfpenn.com/’ and the name of a book. And so you would say, ‘Go to my bio and download.’

Joanna: And you only need to get one link. I’ve been using Linktree, which is you can put multiple links. It’s premium so you pay like $6 a month, I think, and it pops up and it has multiple links on. And, of course, I’m @jfpennauthor on Instagram so people can go and see Linktree. So that’s something I use for those multiple links.

Probably the other thing that stopped me with Instagram is I don’t know how to schedule it. I’ve heard of some things that people are using. I don’t like to sit on social media all the time.

Do you know of any good scheduling tools for Instagram that would make it easier for me?

Frances: You could use Buffer. You could use Later. I like Later. You could also use Hootsuite. And I think there’s Schedugram.

Joanna: Okay. You can use Buffer because I have Buffer. Maybe I just haven’t looked at it properly.

Frances: You have to have a paid account for Buffer?

Joanna: Okay, because at one point, you couldn’t schedule things I think on Instagram, I think when it first came out. So if we’re going to schedule, like you talked there about a color palette.

Any other tips on how you curate your account?

Frances: It doesn’t have to be all about you. It could be author quotes. It could be writing quotes. My philosophy about social media is that, for example, I don’t have competitors on social media, I have colleagues.

Rachel Thompson does what I do, and she includes me on her blog, I include her on my blog. I promote her events, I promote her chats. She invites me onto her chats. So we do the same thing for the same demographic, but we’re colleagues. I refer people to her, she refers people to me.

So it’s sort of a philosophy, ‘Don’t look at social media as you’re up against your competition. You have all these colleagues on social media.’ And that’s the beauty about social media, I think. At least that’s my perspective about social media. I think about it in terms of colleagues.

Joanna: I think the same thing. It’s always like the coopetition is what I’ve always said, the cooperating with your so-called competition. And, on Instagram…see, on Twitter, again, I just say from, you know, @Caballo_Frances because I know your handle on Twitter.

On Instagram, we tag people who we want to tag, right?

Frances: Yes. On Instagram, you can use up to 30 hashtags. You should use at least 11 because hashtags are keywords and the more keywords you have, then the more likely people will find you. And there’s a trick to adding more hashtags, if you want to, and that’s to put an ampersand in front of the second-to-the-last hashtag. And then, you can add more hashtags.

Joanna: Ooh, a little trick there.

Frances: For my clients, I try to use a minimum of 25 hashtags.

Joanna: How do we find those hashtags?

Frances: One of my clients is a psychologist who’s writing a book. If it’s about depression, I will look up hashtags on Instagram for depression.

Or you can type in ‘Depression’ on the search bar on Instagram, and then look at posts and see what they’re using. And if you have an Instagram business account, which you can only have if you have a Facebook business account, then you can see which hashtags are performing well and which aren’t.

And then, you can get rid of the hashtags that aren’t performing well and keep the ones that are performing well.

Joanna: That’s an interesting thing because I’ve seen some people say you should go back into your account and, say, delete some posts, change up the hashtags, that type of thing. Which seems to me a lot of work.

Frances: I wouldn’t.

Joanna: So because it’s a feed, so you could pick up a photo that you had a year ago and then repost it.

What about reusing photos?

Frances: I will look at your analytics and see which photos have done well in the past, and then reuse those, definitely.

Joanna: Because that’s the other thing. I take a lot of photos but still there are some that I’d like…say, if I’m talking about, ‘Oh, I have a sale on a book that features Rome,’ I want to go back and find my Rome pictures and kind of post them again.

Frances: Right. Yeah.

Joanna: Okay. Just one more thing on images. It’s fine when you’re using your own images, but what about, like you mentioned, Canva has a template, how do we know that we can use an image? I think there’s a misunderstanding of images on the Internet. What about intellectual property around images?

How do people know that they can use an image if it’s not their own?

Frances: Right. Well, when I said ‘template on Instagram,’ I meant that they have the template for the correct size of a post but they also have canned images. And Canva will tell you if they’re free or if they’re not free.

You can also buy images on Canva. I subscribe to a service called Freepik, and it’s, I don’t know, $60 a year. And some of the images are pretty goofy and I would never use them but some of them are really nice so I do use the nice ones.

I don’t use the ones that scream ‘Stock photo, stock photo, stock photo.’ So what I don’t do is download images from Pinterest because those have been taken by people. But I do use photos that I get from my service and I do use photos that I can buy on Canva.

Joanna: Actually, just on Canva, I think they’ve just introduced an Easy button that helps you resize everything. Because this is the problem with social media, right? Twitter has one size, Facebook has another size, Instagram has two different sizes. It’s ridiculous. But I think there’s now an Easy button. I think it’s in their premium section.

Frances: Yes, it is.

Joanna: I just thought I’d mention that to people because it’s very annoying. Okay, so yes, watch out for intellectual property on images.

You mentioned Pinterest and I wanted to talk about Pinterest particularly. You have a little book on Pinterest which people can get from your website.

What are the differences between Instagram and Pinterest?

Frances: It’s an excellent question. Pinterest versus our discussion five years ago or four years ago, whenever it was, you can now use hashtags. And so, it’s important to use hashtags on your images. Instagram doesn’t have pin boards, virtual pin boards.

Pinterest has virtual pin boards so you can develop pin boards on Pinterest around the book you’re writing, the books you have written, the books you plan to write, favorite places to go to, certain social media accounts, great book stores, great libraries, author quotes.

At first, it was Black Labs, I have a Black Lab one. So, at first, I was using Pinterest as my fun account. I really built it up with social media pin boards, with my blog pin board, and author quotes, and bookstores. And then it went on Barcelona and hairstyles, that kind of thing.

But I only use Pinterest now to drive traffic to my website. With every Monday blog post, because my Monday blog posts are about social media, in some way, I always create the top image which is for social media, and then at the bottom I put a Pinterest graphic.

It used to be ‘Pin an image,’ now I like an image to my pin board on Pinterest for my blog. And then, on Fridays, I do a roundup of the week’s best posts and on that one I do a quote of the week and I create a Pinterest graphic with an author quote. And then, I like that image and I like it onto my pin board on author quotes.

Twitter is the number one referral source to my website. Pinterest is the number two referral site to my website. So I use it for website traffic.

Joanna: This is interesting to me because how I use Pinterest very much is for images with no text on, and the same with Instagram. And what I’m getting the sense from you is that, for marketing purposes, adding text onto the image to get traffic is really important because on Pinterest you might not see any other text. You might only see the image, right?

Frances: Right.

Joanna: Are we still having image dominance with a quote, or are we just having a quote on a plain background?

Frances: On Pinterest?

Joanna: Yes.

Frances: Well, you see a lot of images without quotes on them. My images always have quotes on them. So Fridays, it’s author quotes. Mondays, it’s the topic quote, topic headline or something.

But you see both on Pinterest. The fun side of my Pinterest account is about dogs, so I look for quotes with dogs in them. And then, what I pin to Pinterest always has writing on it.

But, as I look at Pinterest, there are a lot of images without any writing on it. So you can do it both ways. I don’t think there’s a correct way to do it.

Joanna: It’s interesting because I’ve started much more clicking through…what I like about Pinterest, as opposed to Instagram, is I will go on Pinterest, find something I like, and click through to read the website.

So this, to me, seems why Pinterest would be better at traffic generation because I can actually click it. I’ve got a new website since we talked last, called ‘Books and Travel.’

Frances: Oh, that’s right. I know about that.

Joanna: booksandtravel.page, in case anyone’s interested. But there, I’m going in and pinning all the pictures and people will, hopefully, find them and like and click through to my website. Now, it’s brand new so I don’t really have any data yet.

But I’m struggling with Instagram. My feeling is that Instagram is better for brand awareness, whereas Pinterest might be better for traffic.

Frances: Exactly. The founders of Pinterest say that it’s not a social media app. It’s a browser.

Joanna: Ah, that’s interesting. Because I use it for research, so I might go in there and say…I wanted to find the place where they did ‘Avatar’. It’s a place in China. It’s a national park with these amazing landscapes.

I went in and just typed, ‘China, National Park, Avatar,’ and got all the images that I wanted to look at and write about in my novel. So, yeah, I used it as a browser. Totally.

Frances: Absolutely.

Joanna: Fantastic. That definitely gives me a clue.

The other thing I’d heard about Pinterest is from Social Media Examiner, which is a great site, that Pinterest drives purchases more than other social media.

Frances: It does.

Joanna: Should we have prices on there?

There is a business Pinterest, isn’t there, where you can put prices and things?

Frances: Everyone should have a Pinterest business account. Every author should because then you get free analytics with your business account and you can put prices on your images.

Joanna: I still have a personal Pinterest account. I haven’t gone the business route. And this is what’s so interesting…and for people listening, you and I have known each other online for 10 years, I think, since Twitter back in the day. I think that’s how we met originally.

And it feels like I still haven’t got a handle on everything and I know there are people listening who feel quite overwhelmed with all of this. So this is your other superpower, your book ‘Avoid Social Media Time Suck.’ So now we’ve done lots of technical things.

Tell us how do we avoid social media time suck with all of this going on?

Frances: It’s really easy. The first step is to know who your reading demographic is. So if it’s YA, you know that they’re most likely not going to be on Facebook, so don’t bother with a Facebook author page and just keep it personal and that’s fine. Definitely use Instagram. If you’re brave, use Snap.

Supposedly, YA readers are on Twitter. I have a hard time believing that, but they might be. But definitely use Instagram.

If you are a romance author you have to be on Facebook and I would say you have to be on Pinterest and Instagram. So what I’m saying is don’t use everything. Don’t use Facebook, Snap, LinkedIn. Google+ doesn’t exist anymore. I mean, just don’t use everything. Focus and start with one account or one application that you know that your reading demographic is on and learn it.

And then, maybe add a second one. And then just stick to those two. You don’t have to be on everything. You don’t have time in a day to be on everything and you don’t have the resources to pay someone to be on everything. And so, even I don’t focus on everything. I only focus on certain social media brands. So don’t be on everything.

And then, the next step is to know that 80% of what you post should not be about you, 20% can be about you, and to use a scheduling application, whether it’s Hootsuite or it’s Buffer or whatever you choose, use it.

You should probably get the paid account. I think with Buffer it’s $10 a month. This is not very much.

Schedule everything in the morning and then you can just walk away from it. Spend like 15 minutes scheduling, and then go back to your writing. Go back to your day job. Go back to walking your dog. Whatever you do, do that.

And then what I do is at the end of the day, I’ll go back and I’ll look at what’s happening on social media because social media is social. You can’t just post things and then never interact with anybody. It won’t get anywhere.

Interact with people, answer questions, ask questions, follow people in your niche or in your genre that you look up to. Go to Facebook, comment on other people’s stuff, retweet other people’s stuff. Look at Instagram, like things, share things, comment.

Joanna: Be sociable. I think my tip would be, like you said, you need to time block this. So, for example, what you could say is on a Sunday afternoon you fancy doing some images or you schedule like, ‘Two hours, I’m going to get all my images together,’ for the whole month.

And then you could do even 15 minutes a day checking and responding, right?

Frances: Right. And I always like Joanna’s term which is social karma. It always comes back to you. And the thing about social media is it’s important to be authentic and to retweet, reshare, leave comments on Instagram.

Because people thought that all you had to do to do well on Instagram was post images and use hashtags. Well, no. You need to do more than that. And you need to do Instagram Stories but you also need to go through your News Feed, like and leave comments, and follow other people.

Joanna: And the other thing I was going to say is, and we’re talking about a business perspective here, selling books. So we’re not just doing this for no reason. We have a good bio that goes to a good author website.

We need the functionality in place for it to actually achieve something, or e-mail sign-up list or something.

There’s no point having a hundred million followers if you’re not achieving your goals with it.

Frances: Right. And the other thing about Instagram is that your URL or your website link doesn’t have to be static. Change it. Change it with the different goals that you have each day on Instagram. If you’re trying to sell something or you’re trying to give something away, then just say, ‘Go to the link,’ and have a different URL. So change it up.

Joanna: That’s a good tip actually because, again, you kind of think like once you’ve set it up, that’s it. But you can actually change it up.

I feel like we’ve covered lots of different things but you have, on your website, lots of super blog posts, details and tips and things. So tell people where they can find you and all your books online.

Frances: Right. So you can find me at socialmediajustforwriters.com. And I have a free email-based social media course, and with that you’ll get a free e-book on Twitter. And then I sell my Pinterest e-book, I think, for $5. And there are links on my website to all my books on Amazon and elsewhere.

Joanna: Fantastic. And all your social media links are on your website as well.

Frances: Yes.

Joanna: Is there any one particular one you like to be contacted on that you’d wanna tell us?

Frances: Instagram.

Joanna: Which is?

Frances: Frances_Caballo.

Joanna: Ah, there we go. Fantastic. Well, look, thank you so much for your time, Frances. That was great.

Frances: Thank you, Joanna. I really appreciate it.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

How can you effectively use image-based social media to reach readers and sell more books?

How can you avoid time-wasting but still build a community? I discuss these questions and more with Frances Caballo in today’s interview.

In the intro, I mention my personal update and how I organize and batch my time, as well as Things app.

Plus, if you’re unhappy with the changes at Mailchimp, check out my tutorial on how to set up ConvertKit for your author mailing list.

Today’s show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, where you can get free ebook formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Get your free Author Marketing Guide at www.draft2digital.com/penn

Frances Caballo is the author of Social Media Just for Writers as well as Avoid Social Media Time Suck, which is super important, and other books on blogging and social media. She provides coaching and social media management for writers.

You can listen above or on iTunes or your favorite podcast app or watch the video here, read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and full transcript below.

Show Notes

• On the changes in social media in the past 5 years

• The continued importance of visual images on social media

• The importance of Instagram Stories if you’re using Instagram

• How to find hashtags to use with Instagram

• Using Pinterest to drive traffic to a website

• How Pinterest differs from Instagram in terms of marketing vs. brand awareness

• Why the scattergun approach to social media doesn’t work

You can find Frances Caballo at FrancesCaballo.com and on Twitter @CaballoFrances

Transcript of Interview with Frances Caballo

Joanna: Hi, everyone. I’m Joanna Penn from thecreativepenn.com. And today, I’m here with Frances Caballo. Hi, Frances.

Frances: Hi, Joanna.

Joanna: It’s been ages, and we’ll get into that. But just for an introduction for anyone who doesn’t know you:

Frances is the author of ‘Social Media Just for Writers’ as well as ‘Avoid Social Media Time Suck’, which is super important, and other books on blogging and social media. She provides coaching and social media management for writers.

Frances, it was 2014 when you came on the show talking about social media, as we just said. It feels like so much has changed but it also feels like not much has changed because we’re still talking about social media.

What do you think has changed since 2014? In the last five years, what’s the shift in the social media environment?

Frances: The interest in Facebook has dropped about five percentage points. I have friends who have dropped Facebook for Instagram. I, personally, don’t use my Facebook page account very much anymore. I am going to be focusing more on Instagram.

I still use Twitter. I think Twitter is still important for authors. It’s a great news site but it’s also a great way to connect with colleagues who write in your same genre and to help authors in your genre share their posts, share their books and meet readers. There are a lot of readers, a lot of librarians on Twitter.

Twitter is among the top six most popular social media networks, but we don’t need to forget about it and it is going through some revamping. So that’s good. And now you can do 280 characters whereas 5 years ago you could only use 140 characters. But it’s better not to use the 280 characters because text-heavy posts don’t really work on Twitter.

On Facebook, even though Facebook started out as a pretty much a text-only app just like Twitter did, you should never post anything to Facebook without an image or a video. Now, with the exception that sometimes text-only posts do work on Facebook.

On my Facebook profile, I wrote a pretty text-heavy post about a German Shepherd dog that came after me barking and snarling. I wrote about that experience on Facebook and I got huge engagement. But that’s the exception.

What happens on social media, in general, and we’re going to exclude Instagram and Pinterest from this conversation just for this one point, is that you have to use images. Images are what attract the eye. The brain can process images 60,000 times faster than text.

People remember text in images better than they remember what’s said in a text post. So images are really important.

On a blog post, they’re really important. You have to have at least one image for every blog post. Multiple images are good on a blog post provided that they’re not all stock images. So there’s that.

Early on, back in 2010, I was taking a lot of social media workshops from this one person, I forget her name now. And so, she said, ‘You should always allocate one social media as your fun site.’ And so, for a long time, Pinterest was my fun site.

And then, that became more important for my business, so then I made Instagram my fun account. Well, now I’m revamping my Instagram account. In fact, it’s filled mostly with Black Labs, so I’ve given my Black Lab an Instagram account. And I just started her account on Friday and she already has I think almost 50 followers. So she’s doing really well.

But I’m always taking social media courses, even though I specialize in social media and I read a lot of social media posts. And I realize I’m not giving you any opportunity to ask any questions, Joanna. But I like to take courses.

I’ve signed up for two courses, one is through Social Media Examiner, it’s their society, and I’m taking a course from Kay Coroy. She’s British and she’s an Instagram teacher. What she focuses on for Instagram, is your sole brand essence and finding what your brand colors are and sticking to those colors on Instagram. So that’s why my dog now has its own Instagram account because I’ll be focusing on my brand colors. So, all right, it’s time for questions.

Joanna: We’ll be circling back on Instagram and images.

But just sticking with what’s changed, so I think your point about continuing to learn is also important because, as we know, these sites change all the time. They change their functions. They change what’s available.

But just going back to Facebook, because this is really interesting, and I just wondered what your thoughts were on why Facebook is dropping. So, when we think back to Myspace, before Facebook, that was taken over. Everyone did that and then it was Facebook and Myspace went back to being very niche.

Is that just the natural trajectory of a social media site? And then, of course, Facebook might’ve seen that coming because they bought Instagram. So is it a natural progression or is it a backlash against the privacy issues and the big tech issues that Facebook is facing? Because, of course, authors use Facebook for advertising. It’s very important to a lot of businesses.

What are your thoughts on what’s happening with Facebook?

Frances: I think one of the things was the way the Russians were able to affect the outcome of the election of Donald Trump in this country, and how sites were able to use custom audiences that were really horrible in controlling the advertising for that election. I think that had a lot to do with the backlash against Facebook.

They used to have terrible custom audiences like Jew haters. It’s a terrible custom audience to have for advertising on Facebook. Facebook has gotten rid of a lot of those custom audiences and has really worked on that.

The other thing against Facebook is its algorithm, especially for businesses. And authors may not see themselves as businesses but if you have a Facebook author page, you have a Facebook business page, and so the algorithm for business pages is such that only 2% of what you post on your Facebook business page will actually penetrate the News Feed, unless you buy advertising.

Facebook has to monetize itself. The way it monetizes itself is through advertising. So if you want to do well on your Facebook author page, which is a Facebook business page, you have to advertise.

And I think people are upset about that. People like Toyota and Mercedes, big brands, that’s just part of their marketing budgets. With a lot of especially indie authors, that’s difficult to do.

Mark Dawson has a fabulous Facebook advertising course, and I recommend that all authors take this course, but you can’t do much with a Facebook author page unless you advertise and unless you know how to use Facebook advertising well. So that’s difficult.

I used to say that every author had to have a Facebook business page. Now I don’t.

Joanna: Well, that’s interesting. A question about news sites. I have not used Snapchat, now called Snap, and I have not used TikTok, which I only really heard about when I was in London last, and the whole underground was plastered with signs for TikTok.

And then I’ve heard that it is a music video or something like that. Anyway, I have not tried either of these things. Many authors do not want to get on another social media site.

What are your thoughts on the new emerging sites?

Frances: Snap is really popular among the youth and millennials. The author of ‘Wool’, I think it’s Hugh Howey, he was able to increase his emailing list by galvanizing this following on Snap by adding 11,000 people to his email account.

So if you’re a YA author and you want to galvanize your readers on Snap, then that’s a site to use but to know how to use it well because your posts disappear once people read them. And that was my issue with Instagram Stories.

I didn’t think they were a viable issue for authors because you work on creating an Instagram Story and then it vanishes within 24 hours. But now you can archive them, so now I like Instagram Stories.

TikTok I just looked at this morning and it’s videos and it’s music and it’s all young adults. So I didn’t see anything else, so that would be a place for YA authors. But I’m not yet sure how they could use it but they could definitely use Snap. Hugh Howey is great at using social media but he’s great at using Snap also.

Joanna: How did you find out about Hugh and Snap?

Frances: It was on his blog years ago. Probably two years ago.

Joanna: I’ll see if I can link to that in the show notes. Let’s circle back on Instagram because I, like you, have not really used Facebook on my personal side for years mainly because my mom’s there. My mother-in-law is there. It’s kind of a thing where I’m not necessarily sharing so much.

I’ve started using Instagram and I really love it too, and kind of like you, I’ve started to go, ‘Oh, maybe I should be using it more like a business, but how do I do that?’

If people have an Instagram account and they have done what you’ve done like, ‘Here’s a few a few personal things,’ how have you been revamping Instagram for business use?

Frances: I haven’t yet but I’m going to, but I do manage accounts for other people. And what I do is I create Instagram Stories.

If you’re going to be serious about using Instagram for business, you have to use Instagram Stories. They don’t appear in the News Feed. They appear on top of the News Feed and they are the circles. And what you can do is you can highlight an Instagram Story and it stays right beneath your bio. And so, I recommend that you use Instagram Stories. They’re just really powerful.

Joanna: Give us an example of what is an Instagram Story, if people don’t know.

Frances: Some people think it’s a story and you have to do a lot of writing because we think of stories as writers, right? But it’s not. You can use Canva.

Canva has a template for Instagram Stories. You can use multiple pages in your Instagram Story, but I don’t recommend that you do that because the first page has to pass, and then the second one comes up and people usually don’t wait that long.

It’s just an image with text on it but you want to have the text low enough so it doesn’t get caught up in the Instagram type. And you could say, ‘This book is on sale for two days,’ or, ‘This book is free now, come to my website.’

You can do an Instagram Story about, ‘This is my favorite place to walk. This is my favorite place to write.’ Whereas Instagram images are these block images, these square images, Instagram Stories are the length of your smartphone, and so you have more visibility, a bigger place to write.

Joanna: I like using the images. I understand that. I’m doing that quite well now, sharing my images. I’m doing some hashtags. But Stories I really haven’t got the hang of.

I don’t really know what is a story and what is an image on the page. And also, I think, we don’t want to always be saying, ‘Here’s my book. Here’s my book.’ So give us some ideas of what are the other things that we put in a story if we are just living a normal life?

I don’t really have as much of a story to tell today. So what do we put there?

Frances: It doesn’t have to be this big thing. It could be your husband taking a picture of you writing. It could be somebody taking a picture of you riding your bike through Bath.

The story is simply, ‘I’m working on my next book,’ or, ‘This is where I like to ride my bike.’ They’re just images about your life or about other authors.

You may be holding a book and reading it and it’s by another author, and you could say, ‘I love this book by…’ And so, it’s just a larger image that gets more visibility. It could also be a video.

It doesn’t have to be a static image. It can be a video. And they’re important because they get greater visibility. People don’t have to thumb through their News Feed to see them. They’ll see them at the top of the News Feed. So you just have greater visibility. So I’d say they’re for things that you really want to get out there.

Joanna: I think still that we haven’t really tackled the big thing in the room which people wonder how social media sells books, and Instagram feels even harder. So Twitter, when I share a tweet, I can put a direct link to a bookstore on Twitter and I can like, ‘Here’s me with my new book. And here’s the buy link.’

But on Instagram, you can’t even put a link in the image or the text.

How do we go from doing a nice image and a story to actually someone being able to buy the book?

Frances: Right. So you change the link in your bio. On your bio, it may say ‘thecreativepenn.com’ or it could be ‘jfpenn.com.’ But if it’s for a specific book, you would say ‘jfpenn.com/’ and the name of a book. And so you would say, ‘Go to my bio and download.’

Joanna: And you only need to get one link. I’ve been using Linktree, which is you can put multiple links. It’s premium so you pay like $6 a month, I think, and it pops up and it has multiple links on. And, of course, I’m @jfpennauthor on Instagram so people can go and see Linktree. So that’s something I use for those multiple links.

Probably the other thing that stopped me with Instagram is I don’t know how to schedule it. I’ve heard of some things that people are using. I don’t like to sit on social media all the time.

Do you know of any good scheduling tools for Instagram that would make it easier for me?

Frances: You could use Buffer. You could use Later. I like Later. You could also use Hootsuite. And I think there’s Schedugram.

Joanna: Okay. You can use Buffer because I have Buffer. Maybe I just haven’t looked at it properly.

Frances: You have to have a paid account for Buffer?

Joanna: Okay, because at one point, you couldn’t schedule things I think on Instagram, I think when it first came out. So if we’re going to schedule, like you talked there about a color palette.

Any other tips on how you curate your account?

Frances: It doesn’t have to be all about you. It could be author quotes. It could be writing quotes. My philosophy about social media is that, for example, I don’t have competitors on social media, I have colleagues.

Rachel Thompson does what I do, and she includes me on her blog, I include her on my blog. I promote her events, I promote her chats. She invites me onto her chats. So we do the same thing for the same demographic, but we’re colleagues. I refer people to her, she refers people to me.

So it’s sort of a philosophy, ‘Don’t look at social media as you’re up against your competition. You have all these colleagues on social media.’ And that’s the beauty about social media, I think. At least that’s my perspective about social media. I think about it in terms of colleagues.

Joanna: I think the same thing. It’s always like the coopetition is what I’ve always said, the cooperating with your so-called competition. And, on Instagram…see, on Twitter, again, I just say from, you know, @Caballo_Frances because I know your handle on Twitter.

On Instagram, we tag people who we want to tag, right?

Frances: Yes. On Instagram, you can use up to 30 hashtags. You should use at least 11 because hashtags are keywords and the more keywords you have, then the more likely people will find you. And there’s a trick to adding more hashtags, if you want to, and that’s to put an ampersand in front of the second-to-the-last hashtag. And then, you can add more hashtags.

Joanna: Ooh, a little trick there.

Frances: For my clients, I try to use a minimum of 25 hashtags.

Joanna: How do we find those hashtags?

Frances: One of my clients is a psychologist who’s writing a book. If it’s about depression, I will look up hashtags on Instagram for depression.

Or you can type in ‘Depression’ on the search bar on Instagram, and then look at posts and see what they’re using. And if you have an Instagram business account, which you can only have if you have a Facebook business account, then you can see which hashtags are performing well and which aren’t.

And then, you can get rid of the hashtags that aren’t performing well and keep the ones that are performing well.

Joanna: That’s an interesting thing because I’ve seen some people say you should go back into your account and, say, delete some posts, change up the hashtags, that type of thing. Which seems to me a lot of work.

Frances: I wouldn’t.

Joanna: So because it’s a feed, so you could pick up a photo that you had a year ago and then repost it.

What about reusing photos?

Frances: I will look at your analytics and see which photos have done well in the past, and then reuse those, definitely.

Joanna: Because that’s the other thing. I take a lot of photos but still there are some that I’d like…say, if I’m talking about, ‘Oh, I have a sale on a book that features Rome,’ I want to go back and find my Rome pictures and kind of post them again.

Frances: Right. Yeah.

Joanna: Okay. Just one more thing on images. It’s fine when you’re using your own images, but what about, like you mentioned, Canva has a template, how do we know that we can use an image? I think there’s a misunderstanding of images on the Internet. What about intellectual property around images?

How do people know that they can use an image if it’s not their own?

Frances: Right. Well, when I said ‘template on Instagram,’ I meant that they have the template for the correct size of a post but they also have canned images. And Canva will tell you if they’re free or if they’re not free.

You can also buy images on Canva. I subscribe to a service called Freepik, and it’s, I don’t know, $60 a year. And some of the images are pretty goofy and I would never use them but some of them are really nice so I do use the nice ones.

I don’t use the ones that scream ‘Stock photo, stock photo, stock photo.’ So what I don’t do is download images from Pinterest because those have been taken by people. But I do use photos that I get from my service and I do use photos that I can buy on Canva.

Joanna: Actually, just on Canva, I think they’ve just introduced an Easy button that helps you resize everything. Because this is the problem with social media, right? Twitter has one size, Facebook has another size, Instagram has two different sizes. It’s ridiculous. But I think there’s now an Easy button. I think it’s in their premium section.

Frances: Yes, it is.

Joanna: I just thought I’d mention that to people because it’s very annoying. Okay, so yes, watch out for intellectual property on images.

You mentioned Pinterest and I wanted to talk about Pinterest particularly. You have a little book on Pinterest which people can get from your website.

What are the differences between Instagram and Pinterest?

Frances: It’s an excellent question. Pinterest versus our discussion five years ago or four years ago, whenever it was, you can now use hashtags. And so, it’s important to use hashtags on your images. Instagram doesn’t have pin boards, virtual pin boards.

Pinterest has virtual pin boards so you can develop pin boards on Pinterest around the book you’re writing, the books you have written, the books you plan to write, favorite places to go to, certain social media accounts, great book stores, great libraries, author quotes.

At first, it was Black Labs, I have a Black Lab one. So, at first, I was using Pinterest as my fun account. I really built it up with social media pin boards, with my blog pin board, and author quotes, and bookstores. And then it went on Barcelona and hairstyles, that kind of thing.

But I only use Pinterest now to drive traffic to my website. With every Monday blog post, because my Monday blog posts are about social media, in some way, I always create the top image which is for social media, and then at the bottom I put a Pinterest graphic.

It used to be ‘Pin an image,’ now I like an image to my pin board on Pinterest for my blog. And then, on Fridays, I do a roundup of the week’s best posts and on that one I do a quote of the week and I create a Pinterest graphic with an author quote. And then, I like that image and I like it onto my pin board on author quotes.

Twitter is the number one referral source to my website. Pinterest is the number two referral site to my website. So I use it for website traffic.

Joanna: This is interesting to me because how I use Pinterest very much is for images with no text on, and the same with Instagram. And what I’m getting the sense from you is that, for marketing purposes, adding text onto the image to get traffic is really important because on Pinterest you might not see any other text. You might only see the image, right?

Frances: Right.

Joanna: Are we still having image dominance with a quote, or are we just having a quote on a plain background?

Frances: On Pinterest?

Joanna: Yes.

Frances: Well, you see a lot of images without quotes on them. My images always have quotes on them. So Fridays, it’s author quotes. Mondays, it’s the topic quote, topic headline or something.

But you see both on Pinterest. The fun side of my Pinterest account is about dogs, so I look for quotes with dogs in them. And then, what I pin to Pinterest always has writing on it.

But, as I look at Pinterest, there are a lot of images without any writing on it. So you can do it both ways. I don’t think there’s a correct way to do it.

Joanna: It’s interesting because I’ve started much more clicking through…what I like about Pinterest, as opposed to Instagram, is I will go on Pinterest, find something I like, and click through to read the website.

So this, to me, seems why Pinterest would be better at traffic generation because I can actually click it. I’ve got a new website since we talked last, called ‘Books and Travel.’

Frances: Oh, that’s right. I know about that.

Joanna: booksandtravel.page, in case anyone’s interested. But there, I’m going in and pinning all the pictures and people will, hopefully, find them and like and click through to my website. Now, it’s brand new so I don’t really have any data yet.

But I’m struggling with Instagram. My feeling is that Instagram is better for brand awareness, whereas Pinterest might be better for traffic.

Frances: Exactly. The founders of Pinterest say that it’s not a social media app. It’s a browser.

Joanna: Ah, that’s interesting. Because I use it for research, so I might go in there and say…I wanted to find the place where they did ‘Avatar’. It’s a place in China. It’s a national park with these amazing landscapes.

I went in and just typed, ‘China, National Park, Avatar,’ and got all the images that I wanted to look at and write about in my novel. So, yeah, I used it as a browser. Totally.

Frances: Absolutely.

Joanna: Fantastic. That definitely gives me a clue.

The other thing I’d heard about Pinterest is from Social Media Examiner, which is a great site, that Pinterest drives purchases more than other social media.

Frances: It does.

Joanna: Should we have prices on there?

There is a business Pinterest, isn’t there, where you can put prices and things?

Frances: Everyone should have a Pinterest business account. Every author should because then you get free analytics with your business account and you can put prices on your images.

Joanna: I still have a personal Pinterest account. I haven’t gone the business route. And this is what’s so interesting…and for people listening, you and I have known each other online for 10 years, I think, since Twitter back in the day. I think that’s how we met originally.

And it feels like I still haven’t got a handle on everything and I know there are people listening who feel quite overwhelmed with all of this. So this is your other superpower, your book ‘Avoid Social Media Time Suck.’ So now we’ve done lots of technical things.

Tell us how do we avoid social media time suck with all of this going on?

Frances: It’s really easy. The first step is to know who your reading demographic is. So if it’s YA, you know that they’re most likely not going to be on Facebook, so don’t bother with a Facebook author page and just keep it personal and that’s fine. Definitely use Instagram. If you’re brave, use Snap.

Supposedly, YA readers are on Twitter. I have a hard time believing that, but they might be. But definitely use Instagram.

If you are a romance author you have to be on Facebook and I would say you have to be on Pinterest and Instagram. So what I’m saying is don’t use everything. Don’t use Facebook, Snap, LinkedIn. Google+ doesn’t exist anymore. I mean, just don’t use everything. Focus and start with one account or one application that you know that your reading demographic is on and learn it.

And then, maybe add a second one. And then just stick to those two. You don’t have to be on everything. You don’t have time in a day to be on everything and you don’t have the resources to pay someone to be on everything. And so, even I don’t focus on everything. I only focus on certain social media brands. So don’t be on everything.

And then, the next step is to know that 80% of what you post should not be about you, 20% can be about you, and to use a scheduling application, whether it’s Hootsuite or it’s Buffer or whatever you choose, use it.

You should probably get the paid account. I think with Buffer it’s $10 a month. This is not very much.

Schedule everything in the morning and then you can just walk away from it. Spend like 15 minutes scheduling, and then go back to your writing. Go back to your day job. Go back to walking your dog. Whatever you do, do that.

And then what I do is at the end of the day, I’ll go back and I’ll look at what’s happening on social media because social media is social. You can’t just post things and then never interact with anybody. It won’t get anywhere.

Interact with people, answer questions, ask questions, follow people in your niche or in your genre that you look up to. Go to Facebook, comment on other people’s stuff, retweet other people’s stuff. Look at Instagram, like things, share things, comment.

Joanna: Be sociable. I think my tip would be, like you said, you need to time block this. So, for example, what you could say is on a Sunday afternoon you fancy doing some images or you schedule like, ‘Two hours, I’m going to get all my images together,’ for the whole month.

And then you could do even 15 minutes a day checking and responding, right?

Frances: Right. And I always like Joanna’s term which is social karma. It always comes back to you. And the thing about social media is it’s important to be authentic and to retweet, reshare, leave comments on Instagram.

Because people thought that all you had to do to do well on Instagram was post images and use hashtags. Well, no. You need to do more than that. And you need to do Instagram Stories but you also need to go through your News Feed, like and leave comments, and follow other people.

Joanna: And the other thing I was going to say is, and we’re talking about a business perspective here, selling books. So we’re not just doing this for no reason. We have a good bio that goes to a good author website.

We need the functionality in place for it to actually achieve something, or e-mail sign-up list or something.

There’s no point having a hundred million followers if you’re not achieving your goals with it.

Frances: Right. And the other thing about Instagram is that your URL or your website link doesn’t have to be static. Change it. Change it with the different goals that you have each day on Instagram. If you’re trying to sell something or you’re trying to give something away, then just say, ‘Go to the link,’ and have a different URL. So change it up.

Joanna: That’s a good tip actually because, again, you kind of think like once you’ve set it up, that’s it. But you can actually change it up.

I feel like we’ve covered lots of different things but you have, on your website, lots of super blog posts, details and tips and things. So tell people where they can find you and all your books online.

Frances: Right. So you can find me at socialmediajustforwriters.com. And I have a free email-based social media course, and with that you’ll get a free e-book on Twitter. And then I sell my Pinterest e-book, I think, for $5. And there are links on my website to all my books on Amazon and elsewhere.

Joanna: Fantastic. And all your social media links are on your website as well.

Frances: Yes.

Joanna: Is there any one particular one you like to be contacted on that you’d wanna tell us?

Frances: Instagram.

Joanna: Which is?

Frances: Frances_Caballo.

Joanna: Ah, there we go. Fantastic. Well, look, thank you so much for your time, Frances. That was great.

Frances: Thank you, Joanna. I really appreciate it.

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