Last month I profiled several authors who decided to take the plunge and self-publish a book. Some were successful, others less so. But there was one stand-out success story. British author, Mark Dawson, makes hundreds of thousands a year from his self-published novels. Now, the second entry of a three-part series, Dawson explains how he cracked the self-publishing industry.
When Dawson and I sit down for a chat, he’s clearly brimming with advice. You don’t achieve this unique level of success without having learnt a thing or two. Unsurprisingly, Dawson’s success is down to his marketing prowess, a self-taught skill that has propelled his sales into the hundreds of thousands.
Where some authors (or anyone who’s looking to market their work) might allocate a marketing budget to some adverts and hope for the best, Dawson spends hours reading analysing, building relationships with readers and fully immersing himself in his marketing techniques. He tells me that he spent months reading about advertising and listening to marketing podcasts before he properly dived in.
He also runs a training course for budding authors looking to emulate his success, and, in some cases, they do even better than him having employed his techniques. You may remember from my previous article that Dawson spends $370 a day on Facebook advertising and makes double back in sales. One of his students, who writes romance-focussed novels, makes a stunning 500% return on investment.
Facebook is central to Dawson’s marketing strategy. The social network is, as he describes it “the most powerful ad platform I'm using right now”. But there’s a lot more to marketing your work on Facebook than simply uploading the ad and hoping for the best. As he quickly discovered, you need to have an understanding of traditional marketing disciplines.
“You have to get the copy right and the image right. That taps in to traditional advertising disciplines. Can you write compelling, punchy copy that makes people want to click on the ad?” Dawson explained.
READ: Amazon Pays $450,000 A Year To This Self-Published Writer
He continued. “You have to think about where you're sending the traffic. Normally if I'm using a Facebook campaign, I'm trying to get more subscribers to my mailing list, which is a page I own and control completely. There's one simple thing for them to do and that's to sign-up to the list and nothing else.”
“If you send people directly to your Amazon book page, you have limited control of what you can disclose. You're presented with what Amazon gives you. So your cover has to be spot on and your blurb has to be compelling. Everything also needs to sync with the ads, you don’t want to tempt someone from the ad on-to Amazon and they get distracted by something completely different.”
In particular, Facebook targeting has served as a useful tool for finding readers that Dawson writes for.
“The really cool thing about Facebook advertising is the targeting you can do. If you're writing a romance book and you're frequently compared to Nora Roberts - who's a big romance writer - you can target your ads so they land in the news feeds of someone who like Roberts’ Facebook page. That's quite broad, you can be even more broad than that. You can specify things like ‘I just want people in the US who have done this or that’ or ‘I just want people who use iOS.”
Facebook can range from being extremely broad to extremely targeted. Brian Swichkow - founder of mysocialsherpa.com - did just that with his campaign to make his room-mate paranoid with personal adverts directed at him. Dawson’s research and targeting has paid off because he currently enjoys a clickthrough rate (CTR) of between 2-4%. Facebook adverts related to publishing typically achieve less than 1% CTR.
On the next page, Dawson's secret weapon...
Building a community
Dawson’s secret weapon is his Facebook group and mailing list, through which he builds repeat customers and personal relationships with readers.
“It’s essential to have a mailing list, it’s the most powerful form of marketing you can get. I’m currently adding 150 new people a day to mine. I’ve also got a Facebook ad that runs and offers free books if you sign up to my list, that brings in 30-40 a day. My Amazon page has a link to the mailing list too." He explains.
“A subscriber is more important to me than a sale because I know that I can offer them lots of books, rather than one. I want to get into a position that I can market to them directly. Even though it's a bit archaic, it's still the most personal and powerful form of advertising. My books also have live links to the mailing list on the back of the book if you're reading on an Apple iPad or a Kindle Fire, then you can press the link and go straight there.”
As it stands, Dawson has 20,000 people on his mailing list, which he started in late 2013. Each one of those people buys, on average, five of his books. Although, it's not just about selling, but building a community Dawson says.
“It's not all about sell, sell, sell. There's an interesting book by Gary Vaynerchuk called 'Jab, Jab, Jab Right Hook' - he's saying that the right hook is when you're trying to sell to someone. But first you soften them up with jabs.
“I'm very personal with my social media platforms. On Thursdays I have a throwback Thursday , which will be a picture of me as a kid - basically taking the piss out of myself. That goes quite well, I get lots of engagement on that. On Fridays I ask people what they're doing on the weekend and I'll respond to every comment. I want people to feel like they're part of what I'm doing because it's not just about 'buy my books', it's - and I hate to use the word journey - about taking the journey with me. I share my success and share my failures because it makes people feel like they’re invested.”
The community engagement is clearly an essential part of Dawson’s marketing strategy. His insistence on spending an hour a day responding to all messages and emails repays him in multiple sales per reader. The fact that each subscriber buys on average 5 of his books is a decent indicator how loyal his readership is. Dawson credits this and his in-depth Facebook advertising strategy as the key to his success as a self-published author.
In the final part of the series, I’ll be looking at international translation rights and turning your book into a movie. Be sure to subscribe to my page for email updates.
