The Slow Business of Audience Creation
It’s slow but steady, and I’m excited!
Hello again! For those of you playing along at home, I’m a self-published author and I’m building my audience in public. Along the way, I’ll be sharing with you what I’m trying and how it turns out. It’s been just on two weeks since our last update, so let’s see how it’s going.
Last stats
Mailing list subscribers — 100
Facebook page follows — 15
Current stats
Mailing list subscribers — 146
Facebook page follows — 18
Social media
As you can see, in two weeks I’ve managed to gain 46 subscribers and a whopping 3 Facebook followers!
I’m not upset with the Facebook situation. I’m still pretty terrible at social media (always have been) and haven’t yet lifted my game with regular posting. Which is largely because whenever I think to create some posts, I have no idea what to post! So I’m fairly certain that my 3 new followers are other businesses in the self-publishing world looking for work. But I’ll happily take their follows!
Email list and group promos
I’m also happy with my list growth. Same as last time, my main effort for list growth is through BookFunnel group promos. During this two weeks, the promos I was a part of ended and I joined three new ones that have been running for almost a week now. I joined Clean Fantasy Short Stories, Free Science Fiction & Fantasy eBooks, and FREE Urban Fantasy. The links are there if you want to have a look — either to see what group promos look like, or to pick up a few free books! Just be aware that you’ll be taken to an external page, and to get any of the books, you need to sign up to the author’s email list.
I’ve only had about another 4 people unsubscribe, and looking at the stats, it appears that again, they signed up to get the book and then signed off. No shade — hopefully they liked the book!
What I learned from the last promos
So overall, the two promos that I joined netted me 109 downloads of my book. Some of those people stayed on my list, a few did not, but overall, in one month, 109 downloads seems good to me. Let’s face it, I’m still learning marketing and I’m not yet social media-ing well, so it’s a far better result than I likely would have achieved on my own.
When you join a group promo on BookFunnel, you select the book you’re giving away for free — for me, this is Regent, the prequel novella to my series that will launch in a couple of weeks — and you request to join.
So far the only prerequisites have been about how raunchy your book is, and so I’ve been fine there (there are no half naked men on my book covers!). Then you pick what date you’re going to plug the promo to your audience, and after you share the link with your email list, it’s really up to you how much marketing you do with it.
I’ve shared the links with my newsletter subscribers and shared them on Facebook. Since I’m not exactly a Facebook influencer at this point, I have opted to boost my posts about the promos. I gave each a budget of $5 and ran them for 5 days. Not anything outrageous, but I did get a few of my Facebook followers through inviting people who interacted with the posts.
Overall, I’ve found these promos to be a great, low drag option for not only growing my list, but getting my writing out there and in front of people.
Next steps
In a little over two weeks, my first novel, Royal, will go live on Amazon. So in the short-term, I’m going to be learning about Amazon ads and testing them out. I have books 2 and 3 in the pipeline, with the aim to have all out by the end of the year, and so I want to maximise my advertising budget once all are available.
So that means that I can experiment a little with finding what works and what doesn’t with my first release.
I’m also going to plan out a social media schedule. I’m going to try and do this away from the computer, just on a bit of paper. That way I won’t get distracted trying to build the posts while I’m meant to be spitballing ideas.
Then I will put some time aside to create them, and then I can schedule them ready to go. Multi-tasking here will be key. For instance, I can brainstorm ideas when I’m on the exercise bike, or walking my dogs. I can look for images while watching tv, or when I’m on hold.
That way, when I sit down to create the posts, I have everything I need, and can put them together relatively quickly.
Back to the writing
All of my planning for the marketing side will free up more time to write. I have a whole new series underway, but I’ve put that to the side for the moment as I’m writing a bonus chapter (bonus story really) that will follow the last book in the series. There’s a character whose outcome is unknown at the conclusion, and so this story will tie things up in terms of what happened to them. The link will be in the back of book 3, and serve as another way to try and encourage subscribers to join my list!
And I really should get back to writing it if I want it done in time 😊
Cheers, K.T.
