My Self-Publishing Journey
Building An Audience
Time For An Update
Hi everyone! If you’ve been following along, I’m documenting my beginnings as a self-published author. It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve updated my statistics so let’s have a look.
As I said last time, at the moment my focus is building my email list through group promos on BookFunnel. I’m not currently advertising on Facebook — I’m still posting, but probably not as often as I should. All my marketing efforts at the moment are aimed at driving people to my free prequel novella, Regent, which I’m using as a reader magnet to encourage mailing list sign up. I do have my first book, Royal, available for pre-order, but I haven’t been pushing that yet.
So, with just the group promos as the driving force, in the last week and a half my mailing list has grown from 23 to 73! That’s a pretty big jump!
Let’s have a closer look at some of the numbers
Now, full disclosure, numbers are not my friends. And as I switch from one platform to the other, some of the numbers don’t add up. I did manage to find someone on my ‘bounced’ list, but there are two I just can’t find at all.
But let’s give it a go. According to BookFunnel, 60 people have downloaded my novella from the two promos I’m in. 41 came from FREE Fantasy eBooks, and 19 from New Worlds — Fantasy Prequels (I’ve linked them both here in case you want to look at the promos — the links will take you away from Medium and onto the BookFunnel site).
Now, switching to MailerLite, I can see that I have 47 subscribers who have come from the BookFunnel promos. On MailerLite, you can sort your subscribers into different groups as they come onto your list. This way you can track what’s working, and also ensure you point them to the right welcome email automation sequence. (Assuming you don’t mess it up like I did here. Whoops!)
Looking at my unsubscribe list, there are 10 people who signed on to get the book and then signed right off again. I can see from the time stamps that there’s only a few minutes between them signing on and clicking unsubscribe. I’m not mad about that, I don’t want to be emailing people who don’t want to hear from me. I just hope they enjoy the book! I also have one person on the ‘bounce’ list, which means my emails couldn’t be delivered (perhaps they made a typo when entering their address).
For those of you better at math than me, you’ll have noticed we’re short two people — if I ever find out where they went, I’ll write an update! But for now, let’s crack on.
Sure, they’re subscribers, but are they the ‘good’ kind?
Of the 47 people who have joined and remained on my list, only 22 have actually opened any of my emails. Some of that could be that I’ve wound up in the spam folder (or ‘promotions’ in Gmail), or it could be that they just wanted the book and haven’t gotten around to unsubscribing. Or maybe one day, they’ll open their promotions folder and enter a wonderland of emails from me. Lucky them!
But that’s a little under half, which again, as a new author, I’m pretty happy with. If I can keep a high rate of people downloading my book, then as they filter through the funnel of unsubscribes and being inactive, I should also retain a healthy number of active readers.
At any rate, there’s still over two weeks left on those promotions and I’m pretty stoked about how they’ve done so far. In fact, I’ve just signed up for three more!
What’s Next?
Because I am the queen of procrastination, over the last week and a bit I took a brief sojourn into the internet rabbit hole of low content book publishing. It wasn’t my fault, there was an article and then a YouTube video and then it was, like, a week later.
I’ll write an article about what I discovered and what I got up to later, but for now let’s just say that I have managed to heave myself back out of the void, and have readjusted my priorities.
Priority one is to write more books. It’s simple, and I’ve even said it before in one of my articles here, but somehow I find it so easy to get distracted away from it. Marketing is something that’s going to take me a while to learn and get good at. And if I managed to crack the nut and figure it out, but don’t have a bunch of books to sell, then I’ve wasted an opportunity. So writing first, then marketing.
On the marketing side, while I’m personally really happy about the size of my mailing list, I know in reality, it’s not that big. So my primary focus is still on pushing Regent and trying to build my audience.
I’ve not yet done much of anything to push Royal — book one in my series. Royal is currently available for pre-order and is due out towards the end of October. The reason it’s not out right now is that book two of the series is with my editor (and book three is about to be sent to her) and so releasing Royal in October should align with the completion of the other books, to allow for release dates about a month apart.
My current plan is to essentially do ‘marketing light’ (or read ‘marketing cheap’) for books one and two when they’re released and then do a bigger push for the series to line up with book three. I’m hoping that will give me better bang for my buck because if I find people who like book one, they can snap up the rest of them before they find other books and forget about me!
That said, I’m thinking I should start pushing Royal soon. Which means a return to Facebook posts and ads. I’m sure Canva has missed my creative flair! This week, I’m going to set aside some time to try and craft a couple of ads. I want some that focus on Royal, but I also want to see if I can make one that promotes both the pre-order, and the free novella.
I’ll let you know how it goes — and share the results of my incredible design abilities!
Cheers, K.T.
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