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A short one today. And a little bonus.

The bonus is that I’m doing a FREE webinar today at 12.00. The theme is elevator pitches and specifically how to:

1. Build a pitch that fully expresses the DNA of your novel;
2. Use that insight to help your novel fully express the delicious idea at its heart;
3. Use that work when it comes to selling your book

I’ll give you a clue right now: Part C is the easy one.

If you're a Premium Member, you may already have done our Take Your Novel From Good to Great course. If so, you can ignore this offer as the content of the webinar is very similar to module one of that course. If you aren't a Premium Member and haven’t done that first lesson, then this is a good opportunity to scope it out! As I say, it’s completely free - just sign up here to register.

Now then...

Last week, I ended a long series of emails on selling with a question to you all, via Feedback Friday. Or four questions in fact:

• What matters to do you in writing?
• What do you want to get out of this?
• What do you think the biggest obstacles are?
• What would help?

It’s really worth taking a look at how people answered.

On the first two questions – what matters – people mostly agreed. “Just seeing my books out there in some form or other would be cool.” Entertaining readers was a near-universal goal. People often wanted to be able to sustain themselves by writing, but no one had dreams of vast wealth from it.

Other comments that spoke to me:

• A lot of people spoke about “the pure joy writing inspires, the fun we have putting pen to paper.” That’s true for me too. It has remained the one absolute constant through my career.
• “Recognition. The biggest buzz of all is when readers tell me they laughed or cried, or felt that constricted feeling in their throat — the feeling of something that *really* matters.” And yes, same here.
• “I want to be traditionally published and have a readership that likes my stories.” A lot of you were in that rough area, although I noted an increasing awareness of the various upsides of digital-first and sel-publishing options.
• “I’m already getting what I want out of this. It may sound crass, but all I ever wanted was to get my stuff out there. I’m achieving this now [via self-pub].”

And a special mention for this comment, which we can all relate to:

• "What matters to me in writing? I love it. Even when I hate it, I love it."

On obstacles

Comments that struck a chord were:

• “It is my first time writing, and turning a passion and an interest into something commercially marketable with no prior knowledge of the industry, standards, expectations, process, etc. – it’s terrifying.”
• “Second guessing every decision is really slowing things down and stopping me writing fresh stuff.”
• “Time. There is never enough time to write, to research the market, do the marketing, without all the things that Life throws at me.”
• “The system. Agents are the gatekeepers and agents are human. They pass certain things I would throw out. The publishers publish certain books I would never buy, but they regard as commercial. Thank goodness there are Indie Press and self-publishing routes.”

On what would help

Some really good feedback here:

• “A little marketing genie would be good.”
• “Time. Money … But also actionable advice, feedback, safe spaces to ask questions. Knowing I’m not alone … Community has been more of a help than I realistically ever thought it would be.”
• “Help would help. Much like people who climb Everest, I would really appreciate the help of a Sherpa. Someone who’s seen and done it all. Someone who knows the secrets and can guide my feet over the dangerous terrain. I’m happy to do the hard yards. I want to get to the peak and plant my flag. But I can’t do it alone.”
• “A guide on what makes a good story and how to slice and dice away nonsense.”
• “Blue skies and sunshine …Someone to do all the advertising. Marketing, promotional stuff.”
• “What do I think would help? A kick up the arse. I’ve had some wonderful feedback on my work from some lovely people here. I’m deeply grateful for their kind words. They inspire me enormously.”
• “Access to professionals at a reasonable cost to those of us who are struggling to find the spare cash. I think JW already do this with their [premium membership service].”

And look, we know where you're coming from.

We'll use your insights to shape Jericho Writers Premium Membership for the coming year. We have a strong sense of what you want, and will be making some really huge improvements in 2025. We won’t announce anything until we’re closer to launch, but we’re aiming high.

If you're not already a Premium Member, remember: today is Black Friday: a day of dark commercial magic, where we try to make your wishes come true! If you join us today, you’ll do so at the best price we’ve offered all year - and your writing, as well as your chances of publication WILL improve. We'd honestly love to welcome you, because this community gets better, the more voices it has.

*

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: An Especially Lovely One

And because it's a special Friday, let's have an especially lovely Feedback challenge.

So: I want a passage of yours (about 250 words) that you really love. Give us any context we need, and tell us why you love it. That's it.

Post yours here when you're ready.

***

My two daughters are, just possibly, turning into writers. They love starting novels – all called “Murder in the Stableyard”, or rough variants on that. Then they write a cast list, which involves perhaps half a dozen individuals, notably girls 2-3 years older than my two. Then they extend the cast list by adding about four horses. Then they ask me to praise them. Then they write a first sentence or two. Then … they start again with a new novel.

Some of you giving comments on Feedback Friday last week, noted that writerly procrastination did at least deliver a very clean house and a punctual approach to on-coming chores.

I have not noticed the same effect with my kids.

Till soon,

Harry

We've spent seven weeks thinking about how to sell books. In my last seven emails to you, we have reviewed: 

1. The split in the books market between ebook and print 
2. How print books are sold by publishers
3. How you can maximise your chances of success when working with a trad publisher
4. How to sell via Amazon
5. How to use book promo sites to sell your ebooks
6. How to use Facebook
7. How to build your mailing list. 

If you are confident you want to self-publish, you can probably afford to (mostly) ignore emails 2 and 3 from the list above.

If you are confident you want to be traditionally published (and are also confident that you’ll get the chance to do that) then emails 5 and 6 are less relevant to you – though email 7 is very relevant, and you’d be nuts not to properly absorb the lessons of email 4.

But I want to end with some thoughts on mindset. All that follows, but two things first. 

One, please can EVERYONE take a look at Feedback Friday this week. I'd love as much involvement as possible. 

And two: 

NOVEMBER ALERT!

It's November. This month, you can become a member for 30% off our normal prices. Members get: 

• An entire suite of video courses. On How to Write, on taking your novel From Good to Great, on Getting Published, on Self-Publishing – and more. You could easily spend well over £1,000 on individual courses and not get as much useful information as you do from these. 
• A huge collection of masterclasses. We have hundreds of hours of masterclasses: on craft, on finding agents, on working with publishers, on marketing your work – and much more. If you’ve got a concern about writing or getting published, we almost certainly have an expert to answer it. 
• A vast range of live events. From “Ask Us Anything” to themed months on Build Your Book and Getting Published, and now including an online Writers Retreat, we have a ton of events to keep you educated and motivated – and in community with other writers. 
• AgentMatch – a proprietary database of 1400+ agents, complete with detailed profiles and easy search / filter tools. 
• Feedback Friday and query letter reviews - plus discounts on our other services. And more! 

Most of all, you get to be in a community of expertise and passion. I was in an internal meeting the other day with three of my Jericho colleagues. And – I noticed that all of us, all four, were published authors. We’re in this business because we care about it – and know a heck of a lot about it. With Premium Membership, we aim to make that knowhow available to you. 

You can sign up today at 30% off our normal prices. Info here. I really hope you do. We love serious writers and that includes you. 

BACK TO MINDSET...

Right: mindset. 

Writing books is not easy. Many of you will therefore set the endpoint of your dreams to getting published: getting an agent, getting a book deal. After that, presumably, the whole show is in the hands of grown-ups who know what they’re doing, right? And you can kick back, and write more books, and let the adults do their thing.

Except –

That’s not reality. Writing books is hard. Selling them? Also hard.

There are (estimated to be) well over 12,000,000 ebooks on Amazon. There are probably over 50,000,000 books of all varieties and formats on Amazon.

How many of those actually get sold? A minority. It’s probable that at least half of ebooks have made no sales at all. Not one. And if you set even a very low bar for acceptable sales – a few dozen, say – then well under 10% of books will ever reach even that hurdle.

Having a big publisher is certainly some sort of protection against these frosts. If you have a Big 5 publisher, you will sell some books, for sure, and not just in the low dozens.

But…

Print publishing is still a matter of 12 portly gentlemen running for the same door. On ground that’s slippery with rain, and in a high wind.

My first Fiona Griffiths book was published by one of the best editors, at one of the best imprints, at maybe the best publisher in New York. The book was a Crime Book of the Year in a couple of major US newspapers. It was positively reviewed in the NY Times. It got starred reviews in Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. It had a halo around it: it was destined to do well, no?

But it failed. The hardback didn’t do great, but the paperback was so shunned by retailers that it sold fewer than 1,000 copies across the entire United States. It was that failure which led me to buy the book back from the publishers and to self-publish instead. Buying the book back cost me $10,000 but within a short space of time, as a self-publisher, I had vastly expanded my readership and was making over 4 times the money I’d earned by way of advance from my trad publishing.

The moral of this story?

Not that self-pub is good and trad publishing is bad: they both have strengths and weaknesses, and the right choice for you depends very much on your book and your situation.

No. Rather, the moral is that you will always need to stay in control of your own sales destiny – or as much control as you can possibly retain. With that in mind, here is some final advice before I end this chain of emails and turn back to the happy busyness of the Writer’s Craft.

Mindset

Writers – myself included – tend to want to skip the boring bits.

Writing – that’s fun. Editing – well, I hope that’s fun, because it’s desperately important. Getting an agent and a publisher? Well, that’s fun and it’s glamorous and you get paid, so that’s a particularly good bit. And being published? Seeing your book on a shelf somewhere? Dropping the book in your mum’s kitchen waiting for her to go all pink and shiny with pride? Also good bits.

But to turn that book contract into sales success relies on lots more.

And yes, among other things it relies on luck. But focus on the parts you can control.

Ask yourself:

• Is your book cover good? Not just good in itself, but good in comparison with its immediate competitors? This issue is so important, I’ll revert to it in a moment.
• Is your blurb strong?
• Is the pricing of your ebook realistic?
• Does your Amazon book page look OK?
• Have you been sent a proof of your ebook? And is that ebook laid out in a way that will boost your mailing list and encourage sales of further books by you?
• If physical bookstores don’t take your book in any quantity, does your publisher have a meaningful Plan B – which would need to place Amazon and your ebook at the centre?
• Does everything – the cover, the blurb, the other marketing materials – line up with the pitch that you’ve spent so long thinking about and honing?
• Is there anything you can do to foster your relationships with booksellers, with retail buyers, with book bloggers, with reviewers, with festival organisers and so on?

One of the most professional authors I know used to visit bookstores in every town she went to. She introduced herself. She offered to sign books. She bought a coffee. She made nice.

She also never let her publisher send out proof copies without including a handwritten note from her.

She also wrote – always – to thank festival organisers and the like for events she’d attended. She made sure to know the names of book bloggers, and to find out about them, and to ask them about their children / dogs / pet iguanas the next time she saw them.

Her mindset was right. Every detail mattered. No detail would even add 1% to sales, but if you take care of enough details, these things start to add up.

You can have the right mindset and things can still go badly wrong – but your chances improve, and improve drastically. Don’t sit back. Don’t let the grown-ups take care of things, unsupervised. These are your books. You care more than they do.

Lean in.

Mailing list

I spoke in the last email about how to build your email list, but I didn’t say this:

Your mailing list is your strongest insurance against disaster.

If you have a robust mailing list, you kind of know that you can sell books and make money. (Not if the books are terrible. Not if you publish them unprofessionally. But if you do those things right.)

And that means, even if you are traditionally published and want to go on being traditionally published, you still need that list because of the protection it confers. It will be helpful if you (slightly) change genres. It will be invaluable if you switch publishers.

Build that list. Cherish it.

The book cover

It’s odd, but no one – including me – ever talks enough about book covers.

However, those covers are INSANELY important.

They matter in print publishing, because retail buyers are picking from a flipping catalogue. They are looking at one page of yadda about your book to see if they want to order it. The brightest, most attractive thing on that page is your book cover. They have essentially no text of yours to look at. The book cover (and your elevator pitch) matters hugely.

And in a bookstore: readers are hesitating over which book to pick up. They can’t yet see the back of your book. What else do they have to go on, aside from its cover?

On an Amazon selection page, the issue is even more devastating in a way. Users can’t even see a full cover, they can see a squashed-down icon of a cover. They see that, and book title, and price, and a summary of review ratings.

The cover is vastly influential at that first moment of choice – and a bad cover can easily crush your sales conversions here severalfold. A good cover (and title) can increase conversions severalfold.

And it’s not just that first moment of choice. It’s everything else, too. Your other visual marketing material will be (or should be) keying off that cover. You can’t, for example, create a good Facebook ad unless you have a strong cover. I mean, literally, you cannot do it. Because if you place the book cover on the ad, it looks weak, because the cover is weak, and you won’t get clicks. And if you don’t place the cover on the ad and use something more visually attractive instead, then you will get the clicks, but you won’t get the conversions when people land on your unattractive Amazon page.

So, your book cover matters.

If you’re an indie author, you sort of know that already and will have put proper time in to getting the cover right.

If you’re trad published, it’s very easy to be seduced by the grownups-know-best thing and to accept the cover you’re given. (And everyone will try to massage you into accepting that cover; publishers do not love having to redo something that’s been settled internally, even if they secretly know that the settled-internally option is not yet good enough.) So trad-published authors need to be on their guard. If that cover seems off to you, it is off. Fight for a better one.

Take your time 

When you’re writing and editing a novel, it’s almost a matter of pride amongst authors to boast about how many drafts they’ve done. How many times a paragraph gets re-written.

But with marketing, it’s often the other way around. We like to get a job done so we can move on to the next thing that’s calling – maybe, some damn paragraph that wants another rewrite.

Do not be like that.

I’ve found when I mock up (say) Facebook ads on Canva, that I do something, and I like it. Yes: I like it after trying this element here or there, and this colour or that one, and this font for another.

But I’m quick to like something.

If I come back to the same task again the next day, I’ll do something better.

And if I come back the next day, I’ll do better again. By this point, my first attempts don’t look amateurish exactly… just not quite good enough.

And, realistically, for a lot of tasks – and definitely Facebook ad creation – you don’t need one utterly professional looking ad, you need loads. One of those ads will outperform the rest, but you can’t tell which one it’ll be until you try ‘em out.

So take your time. Do multiple versions. Pick the best.

And – good luck. Writing is hard. Selling is hard. And I hope these emails have helped.

*

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

An odd one, this week, but a good one to do.

What matters to do you in writing? What do you want to get out of this? What do you think the biggest obstacles are? What would help? Let me know. I think it’ll be an amazing conversation.

See you there.

Til soon,

Harry

Good morning, everyone!

Welcome back to our Spotlight On interview series, where we uncover the day-to-day work of agents, what they’re looking for in submission packs, their thoughts on the publishing industry and much, much more. Looking to read more? All our Spotlight On interviews can be found right here on Townhouse: #JWSpotlightOnInterview.

This week, we’re speaking with Saskia Leach, junior agent at Kate Nash Literary Agency. Her clients include Anna Britton (Close to the Edge, published September 2024), Leonie Mack (In Italy For Love, published October 2024), Ally Wiegand (Going For Two, published October 2024) and A. J. Clack (Lie or Die, published March 2024) Authors on Saskia's list with upcoming books to look out for include Kerry Watts (Bury Your Secrets, coming November 2024) and Hannah Kingsley (Soul Hate, coming March 2025).

You can follow Saskia at @saskialeach_ for updates on her work, or view her agency profile here. Read highlights from our interview with Saskia below and view the full interview on her AgentMatch profile…

Hi Saskia, thanks for speaking with us today!

What brought you to agenting?

I always knew that I wanted to work in publishing. I was an avid reader right from when I was a child and I loved storytelling and writing. But as I went through secondary school and university, whenever publishing was spoken about as a career path, it was usually in the context of editorial work for a publishing house.

I graduated from university in 2020 just as we went into lockdown, which meant opportunities for work experience and internships had dried up. So, I signed up to as many virtual events as I could with places like the Society of Young Publishers, New Writing North and New Writing South. I joined the Spare Room Project - rebranded for 2020 as the Spare Zoom Project - which paired people who wanted to work in publishing with somebody already in the industry for a one-to-one call where they could learn more and get advice. I tried to have as many conversations as I could with people working in the industry, and this opened my eyes to the many different areas of publishing: editorial, sales, marketing, publicity, rights, production, scouting… and agenting.

When I heard about the role of a literary agent and found out a bit more about what that entails, it instantly appealed to me. I really liked the prospect of being able to work closely with the authors and being involved in the early formative stages of a book as opposed to the completed product. So, I started applying to formal vacancies that were being advertised for literary agency assistants and other entry-level roles. But I also decided to take matters into my own hands, and I drew up a list of all literary agencies based in the South East of England. I emailed each of these individually, explaining that I was a recent university graduate who was really keen to pursue a career as a literary agent, that I'm eager to learn, and that I'd be interested in any opportunities or experience that they were able to offer - whether that was a formal position, work experience, an internship, or even just some advice. I thought that the worst that could happen was that everybody said no or everybody ignored me, and that would just leave me in the same position that I was already in!

It was from this that I found a job with the wonderful team at Kate Nash Literary Agency. I originally joined as an agency trainee, where I learned about not only the agency and our authors, but what it is that a literary agent does and how the industry works in general. After six months, I was offered a permanent position as an agency assistant, and then after about two years as an assistant, I was promoted to junior agent.

What I would love to see more of in educational environments is coverage of all the different roles available to students who want to work in publishing. It’s not just about editing books; there are so many more ways to be involved in the journey a book takes from an idea to a finished product.

Could you tell us more about the difference between an agency assistant and an agent?

In the context of Kate Nash Literary Agency at the time, my time as an assistant was spent working with Kate and Justin on their client lists, helping with day-to-day admin work to support their authors.

But there were also wider agency responsibilities that came with being an assistant. Every agency does have a different setup and a different structure, but in my experience at Kate Nash Literary Agency, I worked a lot on our, at the time, centralised submissions inbox. I would review the material that was coming in, and would bring anything I thought was especially promising to our weekly submissions meeting and present it to the agents in the team. I also sent replies and rejections to submissions that weren't being taken forward. Other wider responsibilities included updating the agency website; the agency’s social media platforms; being a point of liaison with other contacts in the industry such as film and TV scouts; or day-to-day things such as a publisher asking if one of our authors would like to provide an endorsement quote for an upcoming book.

About a year into that, I started building a client list of my own, so my time was split between working with the client list I had at the time and helping other agents with their lists. Now that I'm a junior literary agent, the key difference has been that the majority of my time is now spent working on my own client list, rather than having a foot in each camp. As I made the transition from assistant to agent, more and more of those wider agency duties ended up being passed along to other people in the company so I could focus more on my clients.

How does a day in the life of an agent look for you?

This is quite a difficult question because one of the joys of agenting is that no two days are the same. Sometimes I’ll have a meeting-heavy day, whether that’s internal meetings or external meetings with publishers. I might be meeting with one of my authors to hear about their next idea, to give some advice if they've got multiple projects on the go, or to give feedback on their current work in progress. I might be meeting with an editor to pitch one of my author’s books to them or to hear about what they're looking to acquire.

Or, I might be having more of a desk day where I could be drafting pitches for any books ready to go out on submission. I could be negotiating a contract between one of my authors and a publishing house. Or I might be reading: the next book by an author on my list, some submissions I've received, or a manuscript that I've requested in full from a writer seeking representation.

Most of the time, it's a combination of the two. My day will typically be split between a couple of meetings and then some desk work, but no two days are the same, which is something that I really enjoy about the role.

What do you think makes for a good agent-author relationship?

Good communication, without a doubt. I think that's the backbone of any good working relationship really, and that's what builds trust on both sides. Certainly as an agent, it's really important to have an open and honest dialogue with the authors that you work with and to manage expectations. And I think that's something that works both ways.

When you're reading a query letter, what are some things that you'd like to see? Is there anything you prefer not to see?

Every agent will have their own preferences on what they like and dislike in a query letter, and this will often be outlined in their own agency’s submissions guidelines. If you're a querying writer, do take the time to read up on those guidelines so you can adjust your query letter accordingly.

For me personally, I recognise and really appreciate it when the author has personalised their query letter to the agent that they're querying. This could be as simple as referencing a Tweet that you've put out recently about a specific genre or specific theme that their book happens to explore. I like to see anything in the opening of a query letter that indicates the author has thought about why the book they've written is a good match for the agent they’re querying. I would advise authors against having one generic and unaltered query letter for every single literary agent in the country. Make sure you have checked how that particular agent or agency accepts submissions or which genres they're looking to represent. I do appreciate a tailored approach is more time-consuming, but I do believe that it will yield much better results.

In addition to having a short blurb about your book, I also really like it when the author includes a one-line hook or elevator pitch for their book. I like to see a bit of information about the author and what inspired the book, because it's often these stories that I remember a submission by. I'm always interested in hearing the anecdote or the life experience behind the book – it’s something I find really interesting and memorable.

How do you feel about synopses? Is there anything you'd like to see or anything you dislike?

I like synopses but I will often read the author’s writing sample ahead of the synopsis. When I'm making a decision on whether this is something that I'd like to read more of, or ultimately if it's something that I'd like to represent, it will almost always be the writing sample that this decision hinges on.

My #1 tip for a synopsis would be to give the agent all of the spoilers. Remember that when you're querying, the synopsis that you're writing is only for the eyes of your agent, and later on your editor. It’s not for the eyes of readers, so please don't hold back the key twists of your book to try and create jeopardy or tantalise the agent reading it. If it's a murder mystery, then include the solution: who did it and why? I'm going to need to make a judgement call on whether I think the plot works and whether the ending is satisfying, so it's really important that I'm given all of the facts I need about the plot.

Same question for the opening pages of a manuscript. Is there anything that tends to stand out to you in those pages?

I love it when an author opens with a bang and drops me straight into the middle of a high-stakes moment. Or if they open with a moment where everything changes for the main character, that's something that really catches my attention.

Something that I sometimes see in submissions is a chapter or two of preamble before the event that kickstarts the story. This is quite natural for an early draft of the book - but before you start querying agents, ask yourself whether your story could start with that ‘Chapter 3 moment’, or whether Chapters 1 and 2 could be cut completely with the story still making complete sense. If the answer to either of those is yes, that's perhaps an indication that your story needs to start in a different place.

Outside of the world of books, do you have any hobbies or passions that you'd like to share?

Yes, my two biggest loves outside of reading are musical theatre and football. I'm a lifelong supporter of Brighton and Hove Albion. I absolutely love musical theatre, both as a performer and a viewer. I'm a member of my local amateur dramatic society and I love getting up to the West End, seeing touring productions or watching local musical theatre productions.

Any last pieces of advice for authors in the querying process?

When querying, build your village. Make sure you have a support network who will be there through the highs and lows of querying, and can celebrate the wins with you, both big and little.

If an agent comes back to you with some personalised feedback saying something like: “I liked X, Y and Z about your book but I sadly won't be offering representation because…” I think that can sometimes be taken as a negative or upsetting piece of news. But something I’d really like to demystify is that if an agent has taken the time to come back to you with personalised feedback, that's usually a real compliment! It shows that the agent has seen something promising in your work and has decided to take time out of their day to help you get one step closer to that offer of representation. So please do take that feedback on board and know that it’s a positive sign.

Check out Saskia's AgentMatch profile for the full interview.

If you’re struggling with your query letter and synopsis, do check out our free resources on our website. We have lots of info to help you on your way. Or, better still, if you’re a Premium Member, our lovely Writers Support team will be happy to offer you a free query letter review once per year of membership! Finally, we have plenty of fantastic agents offering Agent One-to-One Sessions in November only – book your session now to hear their feedback on your submission pack.

It’s a fact: 

A racing catamaran can sail faster than the wind – over twice as fast, indeed, under perfect conditions. (Don’t believe me? And yet it’s true, I tell you, true!) 

Something like the same effect – only better – is achievable via mailing lists. Still better: this email is just as important to trad-publishing types as it is to indies. Almost more so: this is the one part of your marketing destiny that you can, and really must, control. 

So: 

Let’s say that you hustle and bustle your way to 1,000 names on your mailing list. You’d be pretty pleased with yourself if you did that, no? 

And let’s also say – fantasy land, here – that you put out a book launch email which secured a 50% success rate. That is, half of all those you emailed went out and bought your book. (That’s not impossible, but it would be very good. Anything 30% or better would be excellent.) 

So, you’ve just sold 500 books. Let’s say you’re offering a launch promo price of $2.99 for the ebook, which means your royalties are (roughly) $2, so you’ve just earned $1,000 from your 1,000-name strong mailing list. 

I mean, that’s good, right? No one hates $1,000. But you’ve had to go to a lot of effort to secure it. Maybe your time and energy could have been better spent elsewhere? 

Not so, my furry friend

But that’s not so. In an earlier email, I told you that Amazon responds quickly and powerfully to signals which tell it that a certain product is selling well. 

Now the beauty of email is not especially the volume of sales that you can generate. The beauty is that you can generate those almost precisely when you want. A launch-type email will generate essentially all its sales within 24 hours and, honestly, within about 6-12 hours of sending. 

So, the way to think about those 500 sales is that they allow you to manipulate the visibility of your book on Amazon’s system. If you generated all those sales within 2 hours, you might lift your overall bestseller rank on Amazon.com to perhaps 200. (In the UK, you’d do even better, with a peak rank of under 50.) 

Now, as I told you in that earlier email, you don’t want to do that. You want to space your sales out over 4-7 days. So, for example, you might send your launch email out in waves, aiming to secure roughly 100 sales/day over 5 days. That will give you a lower peak rank, but will send a much strong signal to Amazon. Your email will get Amazon’s bots active on your behalf, and they’ll take over the marketing for you. 

The result of your email to 1,000 eager readers could easily be sales of well over 5,000 copies over the next 1-4 months. 

Phooey to catamarans. You and your mailing list can sale much faster than the wind. 

None of this is theoretical. The summer when my wife and I had our second set of twins, I was due to launch a book. Our first set of twins was not yet two and my wife and I… were pressed for time. 

So, my launch strategy – the whole thing, not withholding a single thing – was: 

1. Send an email 

That was it. There is no ‘2’. I didn’t tweet. I didn’t blog. I didn’t flap around on Facebook. I didn’t float zeppelins over New York or hire PR people at $1500 an hour. 

I sent an email, that was it. And to about 1,000 people at that. 

But those people liked my book and bought it. And my visibility rose. And Amazon saw my book happily a-selling and marketed it further. Over the next few months, I sold over 5,000 copies. My mailing list more than tripled. The other books in the series also sold much more than before. 

I’m not saying this was a good, rational, well-planned launch – it was not. But it worked. Indeed, it was the success of that spectacularly lazy campaign which told me just how much power there could be in self-publishing. 

How to build your list 

The basic way to build your emal list is: 

1. Sell your ebook – via promo sites (covered here) or Facebook (covered here)
2. In the front and back of those ebooks, you place a call to action, which says, “please join my readers’ club”. (You will never say, “please subscribe to my newsletter” unless you truly don’t want anyone to sign up.) 
3. Now, nice people don’t especially want to sign up to a readers’ club unless they get some kind of reward. So, you offer the reward that this particular group of people most wants: namely, another story, written by you, and involving the same world and group of characters that they’ve just enjoyed. 
4. Naturally, people then sign up to your reading list, which they do by heading over to your website. 
5. Once they’ve signed up, you need to give them the book that you’ve promised. You simply automate that process using an automated email system (I use MailerLite) and Bookfunnel, a firm which solves the problem of how to get your ebook onto someone else’s device. 

A helping hand 

Now, yes, there is something circular about my telling you to build an email list to sell books… but you need to sell books to stock your list. 

I hope that the emails on promo sites and Facebook ads covers that issue, at least a bit. (This is a flywheel. It’s hard to get it to start spinning. But once it’s going, it’s hard to stop. The first 250 names on your list are the hardest.) 

Additionally, though, there are sites whose purpose is specifically to help seed those lists. You can check the various options for yourself, but the current champ in this area is BookSweeps. The emails you’ll get from that source won’t be as good as genuine organic signups from people who have bought and read a full-length novel of yours, but they’re not bad – and a darn site better than nothing. 

Some specifics 

One email isn’t sufficient to outline how to build and use a list – there are whole books that cover the territory in detail. But here are some starting points: 

First, offer plenty of opportunities in the front and back of the ebook to sign up to your list. That’s not being shouty – it’s being appropriately helpful to your readers. Just like if you were building a website, you wouldn’t place just one link to a key page. You’d pop that link anywhere that users might find it helpful. You need to follow the same logic in your ebook. 

Second, the webpage (on your website) where readers sign up to your club is very important. The key thing is to make it unbelievably obvious what you want your reader to do and that means removing all distractions. My own signup page is here: note the complete lack of a top menu or, really, anything to do on the page except sign up. 

Your free gift needs to be a nicely produced ebook. It doesn’t need to be long – anywhere from 7,500 words to 15 or 20,000 words seems about right to me. But apart from length, in every other way the gift should be first rate. A proper cover. Proper editing. A proper story – and one that comes straight from the world of the characters your reader has just enjoyed. 

(If you happen to enjoy crime stories, and would like to experience the whole sign up procedure, then be my guest. It’s that process which you are going to replicate.) 

Third, you mustn’t think of your mailing as a way to take stuff from your readers. The mailing list is a way to build relationships. Once you’ve done that then, yes, around launch, it’s perfectly natural to say, “Hey, do you want to buy my latest?” But put relationships first, then asking second. 

So, the first email that goes out to readers on my list offers the free gift (as promised), but the second one offers a second free gift – a pure surprise. I also tell readers a bit about myself. I tell them roughly what to expect in terms of emails from me. Hopefully, by that point, readers like my books that little bit more than they did before and – admittedly only in a tiny way – they feel like they have a teensy bit of relationship with me. Fostering that relationship is THE most important thing in your authorial career… beyond – of course, of course – writing quite excellent novels. 

And fourth, you do, I’m afraid, need to kill people – and surprisingly often. Every email list will, over time, fill up with people who NO LONGER OPEN YOUR EMAILS! That shows shockingly poor taste, I agree, but it will happen. And you need to get rid of those people. Murder is one route. Simply removing their emails from your list is another. (All email list providers have simple tools to enable this.) The more dead wood you have on your list, the more likely your emails are to get dumped into Junk email or similar. You must avoid that fate. A small, highly engaged list is better than a large but baggy one every time. 

Big Publishing and mailing lists 

I’m not going to get into a huge digression here, but suffice to say that it is a Foolish Writer who gives up control of their mailing list to Big Publishing. I have seen some ugly car crashes take place under those circumstances. Even if you plan to be a bestselling writer working under the care of Big Publishing – especially then, in fact, you need to own and operate your list yourself. Aside from your books themselves, that’ll be the biggest asset you have. Don’t give it away. 

And that’s it 

You sell books. 

People sign up to your list, get their free gift, get some welcome emails, experience the joy of a relationship with you… and are fully primed to buy your next book when it comes out. 

Amazon will notice that burst of sales, and will reward you for them in the multiple – feeding your pocket and building your list in the one and same sweet process. 

That’s the joy of the list – and the thrill of sailing faster than the wind. 

Next week 

This series of emails comes to a close next week, with thoughts about mindset… and plumbing. 

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Query Letters

We’ll keep things simple this week as well. Any chunk involving physical action – a fight, a car crash, a fall, an accident. Anything like that. 250 words please. And exciting, of course. 

Pop your excerpt here.

Till soon,

Harry

PS: This email has been running faster than the wind on Townhouse here. It’s pretty sure it can see its own backside looming up in the windshield.

PPS: Oh you silly billies. It’s November. It’s time to become a member of Jericho Writers at 30% off the normal price. How can that not be a good, wise, rational thing to do? You get: 

• All our member courses – HOW TO WRITE, GOOD TO GREAT, GETTING PUBLISHED and many more. These are big, properly produced courses any one of which would often sell for more than the price of membership. 
• All our masterclasses – hundreds of hours of them on every topic you can imagine 
• Live events – everything from Critique Club, to agent panels, to live editing, Build Your Book, and so much more. 
• AgentMatch – our proprietary database of 1400+ agents, with detailed profiles and all easy to search and filter 
• A Query Letter review – totally free, of course 
• The joy of Feedback Friday 
• And the knowledge that we have your back. Got a query? Ask us. We’ll either know the answer or we’ll know someone who does. We’re here for our members. 

Joining information is here. And honestly? We’d love to have you. Please come. 

Last week, we dealt with the cheap and unglamorous world of book promo sites.

This week, we go to Madison Avenue, or at least to Silicon Valley. We’re talking digital advertising and, specifically, advertising on Facebook.

Now, before we go any further, I need to tell you that this is a complicated subject and small errors can quickly become costly. One email is not enough to fully explain the ins and outs.

Also, while I’m a more than competent Facebook advertiser, I’m not a seasoned expert. For both of those reasons, you should use this email as an introduction only – a first step. I’ve put some further reading in the PSes.

Please use it; it’ll be expensive if you don’t.

What is a Facebook ad?

A Facebook ad looks something like this:

The various components of the ad are as follows:

• Sponsor identifier: You’re the sponsor of the ad so it’ll be your name (or writer-pseudonym) in the top left.
• Primary text: That’s the bit of text that sits above the image. “6,000 5-star reviews…” The position of the text will vary depending exactly where in FB’s ecosystem the ad is shown.
• The image: That’s the picture, obviously. (Andjust so you know, the sale ISN’T running, so don’t bomb over to Amazon to find it.)
• Destination URL: The ad won’t send people to Amazon’s home page, it’ll send them to my book series page. But you want to show a tidied up version of the URL, just to keep the ad looking pretty.
• The headline. This is the text right at the bottom. (“Save over 50% …”) I always think it’s weird that the headline sits at the very bottom, but I don’t make the rules.
• The Call-To-Action (CTA): That’s the “Shop Now” button, in this example.

This email is going to offer a very swift overview of how to use these various elements – but, again, please think of this as a quick orientation only.

What you’re aiming to create

A good ad is sexy, spare, focused – and repellent.

It’s sexy, in that it should attract the eye, and arouse reader-lust in the right group of readers.

It needs to be spare, because you don’t have a lot of text to play with and you need to make sure that you give the essential messages fast and unmistakably.

It has to be focused, because your ad needs to tell people what it’s advertising. In the example I’ve given, it should be clear that I’m offering (a) a crime series, (b) it’s on sale [except, it’s not – this is just an example], and (c) what I’m offering is ebooks on Amazon.

This is also why the ad also has to be repellent. I actively don’t want ad-clicks from people who want to watch TV crime, or only buy print, or only use Apple as their bookstore. Those clicks will cost money and destroy returns. To those people, the ad has to say, very clearly, “this ad is not for you.”

How to build a persuasive creative

In terms of primary text, the basic rule is that you need your tagline followed by an explicit statement of what you want the user to do next. In my example, the tagline spends two lines pitching Fiona’s unique quality and reader reactions, followed by half a line which tells the user what to do next. (And you’ll note, I’m explicit about “download on Amazon”: I don’t want clicks from non-Kindle users.)

Don’t use more than 125 characters for all this, or your text will be cut off. It’s best to come up with several (three?) variants for primary text. One variant might emphasise a price discount, another might emphasise social proof (“X number of 5-star reviews!”), a third might pick out some key property of the book. Facebook will be able to test which variant works best for you, so give it some options.

Your ad image matters immensely. The basic rule here is that you use the cover art (without text) as a background and overlay a book cover on that art. You might think that sticking a book cover on top of the artwork is not exactly a way to make the artwork look its best, and it’s not. But again, your ad has to say: “I am selling books, nothing else.” You can get cheaper clicks if you don’t include a book cover… but your conversions are likely to suffer.

It’s also tempting to overcrowd your image. You’ve got some great reader quotes! You’ve got how many 5-star reviews? And wouldn’t it be nice to cram a bit of your blurb on there as well?

But radical minimalism tends to work best. A few words to convey whatever it is you want a reader to hear and retain. And a price alert. That’s it.

The colours you choose to do all this should, almost always, be either black text on yellow (like wasps) or white text on red (like danger signs). Using other combinations steps away from the tools used by generations of marketers. That’s probably not a good idea.

One positive in all this: you don’t need a designer or any fancy software to create these images for you. I made this image on the free version of Canva in well under an hour. The image above is 1080x1080 pixels. A letterbox format is also possible but tends to work less well. You can try both, but make sure you’re working to the standard FB formats.

Your headline is the only other element that truly matters. You have 45 characters to play with here, but shorter is often better. Pick the thing you want to emphasise (“Sale, now 50% off”, for example) and keep it short.

Your call-to-action button won’t make a huge difference, but on the whole you want to tell users what you’re expecting: so “Shop now” rather than “Learn more”.

No, but really: how to build a persuasive creative

What I’ve just told you is not the law; it’s a set of guidelines that works for most ads and most authors most times.

But you need to test. Testing is the only route to excellence. You need to generate multiple bits of text. You need to generate multiple images. You need to refine those, by eye, the very best you can. Then you feed them to FB and let it test what works. And that, in the end, is how you perfect the ads. You build several great variants, then test. Then you do it again. And then again.

Where do you want to show your ads?

Facebook will offer you a million different placement options, across its whole sprawl of websites. Many of those placements will offer much lower cost clicks than the Facebook Feed placement, but they tend to come with lower conversion rates too. So you need to test. Try (a) letting Facebook do its stuff, and (b) restricting placement to the FB Feed only. Remember, you’re not looking to see which option delivers a better cost per click. You’re only concerned about sales. There are good indie authors who favour approach (a) and others who favour (b). All that matters to you is what works for your readers.

Who do you want to show your ads to?

A big question, this.

A few years back, I’d have been encouraging you to go and ferret out your audience by targeting the readerships of comparable authors, and TV shows that chime with your work, and figuring out the demographic niche that works best for you.

These days, Facebook’s AI can essentially figure this all out by itself. On the whole, I think you need to tell FB:

• What country to target
• That you want people who read books on Kindle
• That’s it.

There are highly successful marketers who don’t even restrict by Kindle usage, which somewhat puzzles me, but again: you can test with and without that restriction. And remember, Facebook’s AI is very effective, but it needs data. You can’t spend $20 and hope to have found your optimal targeting. It doesn’t work like that!

What results are you looking for?

When you’re setting up your ad, Facebook will ask you what you want to achieve. Do you want engagement (clicks and likes and so on)? Or website traffic? Or sales?

Now, of course you want sales – but you have a problem, because the sales are being made on Amazon, a website you probably don’t own. Since Amazon won’t tell Facebook which user has or has not bought your book, that route is simply closed.

You therefore have to ask Facebook to optimise for “website traffic”, and Facebook will duly oblige. It will report its success or failure in terms of CPC, or cost-per-click. And yes, this metric is important. But in practice what matters most is cost-per-sale, and Facebook can’t tell you, because it doesn’t know.

You can solve this problem in one of two ways, and they’re both fine.

One is: you just average out your baseline sales before you start advertising. Then you advertise and see how much above baseline you achieve.

The second (and my preferred) approach is to use the Amazon Ads attribution tool to figure out precisely what sales come from what campaigns. I’ve put a link in the PSes to some useful resources.

But whichever way you approach this, the arithmetic is little muddy. What counts as success?

The obvious way to think about things is:

1. How much have I spent in terms of ad-spend?
2. How much money have I earned in royalties as a direct result?

Except –

Directly boosting the sales of Title #1 by advertising will also increase its sales indirectly by lifting its visibility on Amazon and thereby attracting more organic sales.

And that visibility lift will have some afterlife – if you engage in an intense promo, you may feel the effects of it some 30 days after a promo ends.

And if you’re writing a series (as you kind of need to be for this kind of approach to work), then you should in principle be happy to pay, say, $0.10 to get a reader into #1 of your series, if you have a high degree of confidence that a sufficient proportion of readers will go on to buy #2, #3, #4 and so on.

So the benefit of a sale is very likely worth more than that one sale… you just don’t know how much.

As a result, it’s hard to say what an adequate cost-per-sale is. It genuinely does depend on your objectives and what you have to sell. You need to figure this out for yourself, based on the data you have in front of you.

How much do you want to spend?

I’ve told you to generate multiple versions of your text, and multiple images, and to test them all. I’ve said to test placements and audiences. I’ve said that estimation of actual success is somewhat muddy. Furthermore, Facebook’s ability to snuffle out the right traffic for you has become impressive – but it needs data to work with, and those early clicks cost money.

Unfortunately, all that says that you can’t really engage intelligently in a Facebook campaign without being willing to plonk down a significant sum of money, which you are very likely to lose. I’d say that you probably need to commit $150-200 just to get your feet wet: that is, to get your testing to a point at which you might start making (or at least stop losing) money. And that would actually be a good result. You’ll only achieve that if your images, your text, your campaign set up, and your Amazon books page itself are all excellent.

When and if you think you have a successful campaign, you’ll probably want to run that at no less than $10 a day, and perhaps more like $20/day. Just go carefully – and watch that data!

When and how to use Facebook ads

The book promo sites, which we looked at last week, can certainly add a chunk of low-cost, fair-quality traffic on demand – but you can’t scale up, or not beyond a point.

Amazon ads have a huge potential audience, but – even for really proficient advertisers – it’s hard to get scale and it’s essentially impossible to support a surge-marketing campaign.

Facebook, on the other hand? If you want to surge market via FB, it’ll be more than happy to take your cash – and deliver your ads in potentially huge volumes. That quality of scalability is vital to most seasoned book marketers. It’s going to be an element of any large-scale, professional digital marketing campaign for books.

That said, it is NOT likely that you can earn money by marketing a single book: you probably want to have a decently performing series of three books first. (Decently performing? That means good evidence that a good proportion of Book #1 readers will end up buying Books #2 and #3.) As I say, Facebook is not a newbie-type technique.

In short…

Facebook ads are powerful – potentially career-altering – but also dangerous. It’s easy to overspend and lose money. People who lose are more common than those who win.

And again: please don’t forget the qualifiers that have studded this series of emails. You can’t sensibly market bad books. You can’t sensibly market books whose packaging (covers, blurb, and the rest) are subpar. You are competing – literally, not metaphorically – against the best authors and book-marketers in the world. So match those standards.

Next week

Next week, we’re going to talk about mailing lists – and a ship that can sail faster than the wind.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Query Letters

It’s been a while since we’ve looked at Query Letters on Feedback Friday, so let’s go for it today. 

Your task: simply this – present your draft query letter. Post yours here when you're ready to share it.

Simple, right? 

Till soon 

Harry 

So, you’re ready to get serious about your creative writing ambitions. Keen to hone your craft. Committed to writing more words, more consistently than you ever have before. Maybe you’re finally feeling brave enough to share your work with others: a nerve-wracking step that (in my experience) is far less scary, and far more helpful, than it’s possible to imagine upfront. 

Assuming the above isn’t too wide of the mark, you’re probably considering a creative writing course. I found myself in just that position five years ago, and I maintain that participating in one made a crucial difference to my motivation and self-belief. I’ve since written four completed books, three of which have been traditionally published. The fourth is due out next year.  

But how do you know which are the best online creative writing courses? 

The short answer is, it’s not easy! Picking the right course is a challenge: there’s a huge array of options out there. One size does not fit all, and it’s important to ensure that, whatever sum you invest, it yields the help and support you need. 

In this blog post, I’m going to share my thoughts on 10 important things to look for, to identify the best online creative writing courses before you make your decision. 

1. Reviews and testimonials

Positive feedback from previous students is a sure sign that a creative writing course is worth considering. Think not only about the number of starred reviews a course gets; read detailed testimonials if they’re available, so you can get a clear sense of individuals’ experiences and what the course has helped them achieve.  

Ask yourself: what does this course promise, and what does it deliver for the people who participate? If those two things match up, you could be onto a winner. If not, it makes sense to look elsewhere.

2. Reputable instructors

When you put yourself – and your beloved novel idea! – into the hands of experts who promise to help you, it’s important to make sure they really are experts. You need to feel confident that the people teaching on your creative writing course are credible. What publishing experience do they have? How many years does it go back? Have they won awards or prizes? Have their previous students found success? 

Just as importantly, you should look at the kind of writing a tutor or mentor works with and assess whether they’re a good fit for you. If you’re a committed fantasy writer, for example, it’s important for you to work with someone who both understands and enjoys your chosen genre. The Jericho Writers Ultimate Novel Writing Course tutors have a wide variety of specialisms, and we aim to match these as closely as possible to the projects of the individuals they work with.  

Another thing to consider is how well you feel you’ll gel with whoever will be teaching your course. Sharing your writing with anyone means making yourself vulnerable, and trust is a key component of the relationship you’ll forge with any creative writing tutor.

3. Flexibility

It’s important to think about how a creative writing course will fit into your life. The best course for you is always the one you will actually participate in.  

No matter what its merits or how much money you’ve put into it, if a course is structured in a way that makes it impossible for you to commit – perhaps because the schedule is rigid and you’re already dealing with work, domestic and family pressures – you won’t reap its full benefits. 

Online creative writing courses offer more flexibility than in-person options, but they don’t all work in the same way. Take a close look at how any course you’re considering works in practice, so you can decide whether you’ll be able to participate on terms that work for you. 

At the same time, don’t be afraid to decide that now is the moment to start carving out space on your calendar for writing. The trick is balancing this determination with a dash of realism. In my experience, both are important ingredients if you intend to bake a whole book. 

4. High quality course content

Don’t be shy about digging through the full syllabus of any creative writing course you’re considering. What, exactly, does it cover? What are the key topics you’ll study? How relevant do you feel they are for you and your project?  

Personally, I’m a fan of the blended approach – one that covers the craft of writing, plus how the publishing industry works. The beauty of an online course like the Ultimate Novel Writing Course is that it offers the best of both worlds: a focus on the nitty-gritty of characterisation and plotting (such as you’d find on a creative writing MA course), plus additional support with understanding how to get your work published.

5. One-to-one mentoring

Working with a mentor can make all the difference to your self-confidence, as well as the quality of your story. While some creative writing courses offer regular one-to-one sessions with a tutor, others don’t – and it’s important to know at the outset how much individual attention you’ll get from whoever is teaching you. 

We offer two versions of the Ultimate Novel Writing Course, and our FULL package includes monthly one-to-one mentoring with your tutor, as well as two one-to-one sessions with a literary agent at the end of the course.  

Students who choose our CORE package get a single session with a literary agent and have the option to book one-to-one mentoring with their course tutor should they wish to upgrade.

6. Detailed, personalised feedback

Actionable feedback on your writing is among the most important things you should look for in a creative writing course, whether you’re studying online or IRL. Good questions to think about include: how much of your novel-in-progress will your tutor read? Note that, in some cases, it won’t be your full manuscript. Will you receive a written report on your work? If so, how much detailed advice will it contain? 

In my view, a tutor who can look at big-picture stuff (such as your character arcs and overall plot structure) as well as how skilfully you craft individual scenes and dialogue, is definitely worth having in your corner.  

Students who opt for the FULL Ultimate Novel Writing Course package get a complete manuscript assessment as part of the course. This means their tutor will read their full novel (up to 100,000 words) and deliver a report of up to 4,000 words on its strengths and development areas, as well as how to perfect it.  

7. Publishing industry insight

This links back to the credibility of your course tutors, but I think it’s important enough to merit a specific mention. The publishing industry is complicated, competitive and constantly changing. Whether your ambition is to self-publish or submit to literary agents and hope for a traditional deal, it’s vital to understand how everything works.  

Look for a creative writing course that will support your understanding of the various ways to publish, as well as their pros and cons. Ideally, find one that’s taught by people who’ve been there and done it – and who still have their fingers on the pulse.

8. Opportunities for discovery

Imagine: you’ve shown up consistently and grafted hard to write your novel. You’ve taken on board your tutor’s feedback and edited your work, fine-tuning it so it’s finally ready to be shared more widely.  

What’s next? Ideally, if your creative writing course has got you this far, it will help you get your work out there, too – probably by helping you put it in front of literary agents. 

Many creative writing courses offer students the opportunity to have their work featured in a collection that’s shared with agencies, but make sure you know precisely what’s on offer before signing up.  

All students on the Ultimate Novel Writing Course are offered the opportunity to submit their work for our anthology, and will also receive feedback from our agency partners on their novels’ commercial potential. CORE students get a single one-to-one session with an agent, while FULL package students get two. 

9. Ongoing support

Writing is joyful, but it also has its difficult, dispiriting and lonely moments. No author is immune, whether they’ve produced one book or twenty, and no matter how much publishing success they may have had.  

That’s why a creative writing course that offers ongoing support – from the provider, and / or from your fellow students – is well worth thinking about. I finished my creative writing course in 2019 but, like many Jericho Writers alumni, I’m still in touch with several of my classmates. It’s a pleasure to be able to review and help promote one another’s books, and half a decade on we’re still celebrating each other’s successes.  

All Ultimate Novel Writing Course students retain access to their course materials for life, so they can revisit key lessons at any time. I also think it’s great that the FULL Ultimate Novel Writing Course package includes two years of Premium Membership to Jericho Writers. The best authors never stop learning, and accessing live masterclasses and video courses is a great way to keep pushing yourself. 

10. Value for money

Finally, you need to consider how much you’re able and willing to spend on your creative writing course before you commit. Prices vary hugely, but so does what providers include – so I’d urge you to think carefully about a course’s long-term benefits and whether it offers value for money, as well as its upfront cost.  

Spending a few hundred pounds on a short course that kick-starts your creativity may well be the best choice for you right now. Conversely, you might be ready to invest a bigger sum, and significantly more time, in developing yourself as an author.  

We’ve designed the Ultimate Novel Writing Course to offer everything we think beginner and intermediate writers need to complete high quality, publishable novels and prepare to seek publishing deals. However, we also offer a host of other writing courses and editorial services – and if you’d like some help with working out what’s right for you, you can book a free consultation with a member of our team. Honesty is one of our core values, so you can rest assured that if we don’t think the Ultimate Novel Writing Course is right for you, we’ll say so. We’ll also suggest a more suitable alternative if we can. 

So there you have it! My quick (ish...) 10 point guide to figuring out which are the best online creative courses out there.  

You can find out more about the Ultimate Novel Writing Course, and download the full course brochure, right here on our website.

Last week, I explained that the trick of selling on Amazon is to achieve steadily growing traffic and sales over 4-7 days. In effect, you’re priming Amazon’s own algorithms to take over the task of marketing your book for you … and Amazon turns out to be rather good at doing just that.

But how do you get your traffic in the first place? We’re going to look in turn at promo sites, Facebook ads, and mailing lists. Today, we’ll look at the simplest and easiest tool of all – namely, the promo site.

These sites aren’t just useful to newbies – they’re nigh on essential. They bring the readership that you don’t yet have. Plus, they’re cheap. Plus (with one exception) access is easy.

The Beast

The biggest, best-known book promo site is Bookbub. It promises readers that it will help them get ‘Amazing deals on bestselling ebooks’, and that’s just what it does. (And, to be clear, the site is all about ebooks. Now, of course, you can happily sell print books on Amazon… you’ll just find yourself selling 10 or 20 times as many ebooks, so that’s what this email will focus on.)

In effect, Bookbub runs a massive mailing list – the biggest in this sector, by far. That mailing list is divided up into genres. So if you join Bookbub as a reader, it’ll ask you what books you’re interested in. In your specific case, you’ll tell it you like Literary Fiction, Crime Fiction, and Swamp Monster Steamy Romance. Bookbub will then send out regular emails which will notify you of selected books in those categories when they are on special offer. So, a book that might normally sell at $9.99 as an ebook could be available, for one day only, at $0.99.

Bookbub is offered a LOT of books. The books that are chosen for the emails are editorially selected and standards are high. Unsurpisingly, if you like your steamy swamp monster romances, and you find a classy and bestselling title sold at a fraction of its normal price – you’re likely to jump on it. Loads of your fellow readers will do the same.

For an author, this is bookselling gold… just relatively expensive gold. If you’re in a major category – like crime, for example – a Bookbub Featured Deal will cost you upwards of $1,000. You might think that’s pretty dear for a promotion of this sort… but on the three occasions I’ve had a Featured Deal with my books in North America, I’ve repaid the money by tea-time in the UK, which means barely midday in New York, and not-even-properly-woken-up time in California. The deal lasts all day, and the effects of the deal last even longer.

So: if you can get a Bookbub deal, then do. And really, a disciplined author should put in for a deal at least 5-6 times a year. There’s no harm in knocking.

In fact, the only real problem with Bookbub is that you have no guarantee at all of being accepted – and the odds are against you. (They used to say they take no more than 1 in 5 books offered. I think that ratio has gone down and is, in any event, increasingly biased towards authors with a well-established following.)

That means, it’s good to know how The Beast works. It’s good to apply for promos. But it’s also good to have a back-up. And that’s why we need to get to know…

The little sisters

There are literally dozens of book promo sites, many of which are simply useless. But there are still a good few sites with meaningful email lists and a meaningful capacity to drive sales for you.

The best sites do change from time to time, so I always check out the latest information from David Gaughran and Nicholas Erik. Both of those guys are in the market a lot, for their own books and for campaigns they manage on behalf of other authors. I basically trust them to know the good sites and make honest recommendations to others.

Be aware that the various sites do have their differences. Freebooksy, for example, will only handle books that are being promoted at $0.00. Bargainbooksy will handle promotions of $0.99 and similar. There are also sites that handle only specific genres. And so on. Prices are relatively affordable and should certainly be within your budget.

Crucially, these sites are essentially non-selective. That means, if you’re a newbie author without a huge pre-existing following, you can still use these services. Indeed: not just “can”, but “bloody well ought to”. It should be the very first layer of your promotional campaign.

Promo stacking

You’ll hear indie authors use the phase ‘Promo stacking’ – and it’s what I recommend. But the phrase is just a little misleading. A stack is a set of things piled vertically, right? A stack of books, a stack or ironing.

And that tends to suggest that if your overall book promotion campaign is going to run Monday to Friday, that you should ‘stack’ all your promo sites on (say) the Monday. And that’s not right.

Promo stacking means using multiple different promo sites, but spaced out so you can add traffic throughout your promotional period. BargainBooksy for Monday, RobinReads for Tuesday, Fussy Librarian for Wednesday, and so on.

For under $200 you can build a five-day promotional campaign that will get your book out in front of thousands and thousands of readers. You shouldn’t leave things there – we’ll talk about more powerful strategies in subsequent emails – but even pro marketers working on big campaigns for authors making seven figures a year will start with the basics: bookings on promo sites running through the term of the campaign.

It's easy. It’s low cost. And it works.

Don’t forget the basics

All that said, please don’t forget the basics.

By far the biggest marketing failure made by newbie authors is to hurtle through to the very end of the selling process – booking promo campaigns, designing Facebook ads – when the preceding plumbing is woefully leaking.

So:

• Is your book actually good, or is it just you and your mum who thinks so? If it’s just you and your mum, there is no amount of marketing that will make that turkey fly. You MUST get your book to the kind of standards required by high quality digital-first publishers. If that means investing in writing courses and professional editorial feedback, then spend that money. (Preferably with us! We’re very good.) If readers don’t like your book, Amazon will figure this out, you’ll get lousy reviews, and the more money you spend advertising the book, the more money you’ll lose. Write. A. Good. Book.
• Is your cover actually good, or is it just you and Dorky Phil who did the Photoshop work for you who think it is? Again: there’s no compromise here. Your book cover must look like something that could adorn a book put out by Penguin Random House or any of the other big boys. That also means that your pitch and your genre have to be visually assimilable – and quickly – from the thumbnail of cover and title. Here too, there can be no compromise.
• Is your blurb good? Do you have good reviews coming in? Is your pricing sane? Is your website up to scratch? Is your mailing list set up and do you have a proper welcome automation in place?

If you allow any of these things to be sub-par, you will struggle. You are up against the best writers and the best publishers on the planet, so don’t think some lowlier standard applies to you. It doesn’t.

Next week: a tool that’s more powerful and more scalable than anything else out there. It’s also a tool that will spend your money with glee and won’t in any way guarantee results. In short, we’re riding the bronco that is Facebook ads – and don’t tell me you’re not ad-curious. I know you are.

See you next week.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Single Sentence Summaries

Because we're now at the end of Build Your Book Month, we ought to look at what you've accomplished. So, I'd like: 

• A one sentence summary of your book, please. Just a quick explanation of what kind of book you're talking about.
• 250 words or so of plot outline - which will include giving away the ending. You're not blurbing the book; you're summarising. 

Ideally, I want to see a nice tidy sense of shape. I want to feel the point of the book and the forward thrust. It's really not easy summarising in this way, and you can write a good book and a lousy summary - but still. Let's give it a go. When you're ready, post yours here.

I have just noticed: I have many children. And they're still here. Oh yikes. They made pumpkin soup today, and I saw an actual footprint, in soup, on my kitchen floor. 

Till soon,

Harry