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This site contains affiliate links to products that we have used and love, and that we think may be of help to you on your authorpreneur journey. We may receive a commission on sales of these products, which is how this podcast stays independent and free of advertising. Thanks for your support! Click here for a full list of recommended tools and resources.
Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 021: Data Driven Decision Making for Authors
Crystal: Hey there, strategic authorpreneur. I’m Crystal Hunt
Michele: And I’m Michele Amitrani. We are here to help you save time, money and energy. As you level up your writing career.
Crystal: Welcome to episode 21 of the strategic authorpreneur podcast. On today’s show, we’re going to be talking about how to use data or data, depending on where you’re from to make smart decisions in your writing life. First though, we’re going to talk a little bit about what we have been up to in the past week, since we last spoke with you all.
What has happened since the last episode?
Michele: As you all know, by this point, reading is very important to me. So I’m going to suggest you again, uh, one book. And I’m going to show it to you.
And then I’m going to say the Title. It’s ‘Eats, Shoots and Leaves’, Lynne Truss. I hope I’m not butchering the name again. And probably you already heard, uh, the title and the content, but for me it was a completely new kind of thing. So, it’s something that it’s useful for those pesky small things that sometimes we don’t know exactly how to use in sentences. So colons, semicolons so like that kind of things. And I’m finding it particularly useful, uh, to get my commas straight. Yeah. And my period straights, uh, or full stops because I now know that there are two ways to say that. And I find this book to be also like funny and witty.
I would highly suggested if you know, sometimes you can distinguish your it’s from, its like with apostrophe and without that, and again, there are so many nice examples and at the same time, the author … she’s giving everything very lightly and very funny, so Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, it’s a really a good companion for, If you’re interested in crafting a more grammatically correct kind of sentences. So that’s what I, what I’ve been reading in the past week and then writing-wise, I try to do as much as I can also on the writing side. I’m now currently writing the first draft of my sixth, 12 by 20 story.
And I’m going to send it today if everything goes well, to my first beta reader. So I’m very excited about that because this basically Crystal would basically mark a turning stone or something like that, because it’s going to be the 50% of the challenge. Can you believe it? A milestones. Yeah. Um, so I’m very excited and that this is probably going to be the longest story of the sixth so this is another new thing that I’m going to add them. And the third thing is that it’s going to be a sequence of one of the stories that I wrote, which is another new thing that I never tried before. And as you know, I’m trying to do different things every single time. So I’m 20 times as much excited as usual to see the story go, in the real world.
And, the other good thing, I guess is that all the discussion that we’ve been doing the past few months now about authorpreneurship and strategic thinking really led me to another milestone as Crystal calls it, which is probably in the next few weeks, I’ll be able to, reach a four digit number for my, newsletter.
For my English author name. So I’m excited about that, but in some way, I’m more excited about the six story, because I just want to see like what people think about that. And, uh, yeah, so basically that’s what I’ve been up to. And now it’s your turn to rock our world.
Crystal: Well, I had a fantastic week because my husband and I took a staycation week and we both were off work, whatever that means when you’re a creative person. But, we were off of all of our other teaching commitments and his day job and everything else. And so I got to spend a whole week fully immersed in my story world. He was designing a game and I was working on writing a new lead into the Rivers End world, which is going to be a newsletter cookie when it’s done.
Whoops. So I’m super excited about that. And as part of all that fully creative time, we took it as a little bit of a retreat time and looked at, how was our workspace working for us now that we’re both working from home and his work from home got extended for another few months. So we had to make some decisions of some of the things we’d set up were kind of temporary and one of the side effects of making all of these adjustments was that I ended up with a standing desks. So now I have a desk that can go up and down that he was using, but has discarded in favor of more monitor space on his desk. So for me, that is fantastic cause it means I can switch between sitting and standing while writing and part of strategy and a longer term career focus as an author is that you have to keep your body functioning.
And what I’m finding is I love what I’m doing so much I can’t tear myself away and that’s really hard because your body starts to suffer. So having the ability to alternate between sitting and standing, and then I also have a giant foamy bean bag chair thing, which I can then I like to write cross-legged and it just works for my creative process and it makes me feel comfortable.
And I tap away on my little keyboard, which is great, but I do have to switch positions. I am not 20 anymore. And I can’t like just sit cross-legged for 14 hours at a time with no consequence hunched over my computer. So anyway, for me, it was a lot about rearranging my physical space and also rereading and revisiting. I re-read every book that I have written. And made sure I cataloged all of my characters in my world properly into my spreadsheets. Some things, when we get going, we get all wrapped up in our storytelling and processed and we forget to then, you know, if we added in a few characters here and there, we forget to put them back into our tracking stuff, which means you end up with like three Kales and two Kelseys.
And, you know, that’s not ideal when the names start to overlap. Um, so I did have to go back through and just really document all of that and remind myself what my voice is. When you take a bit of a break from writing fiction, you, I think a lot of people find that you do need to sort of remind yourself of how you write, especially in a series when you’re looking for continuity, it’s important to go back and do that.
So I had a really fun week, just fully immersed in that which was fantastic. So I am back in the story groove and excited to be writing what is called Home, and it will likely be available by the time this episode comes out, but only to my newsletter subscribers. So if you want that story, you’re going to have to come to cjhuntromance.com and get on my mailing list.
See it wasn’t that promoting?
Michele: Yeah. It was amazing.
How to use data
Crystal: I’m learning, I’m learning. All right. But today we are going to be talking about data. I call it data. I don’t know what the difference between data and data is, but, somebody out there I’m sure can inform me. So in the comments, if you know the difference between those two things, feel free to share illuminate all of us.
And we often find as authors. I think that there’s a lot of information that is available to us. There’s a lot of statistics and numbers that come with all these different things we have. Right? And so there are sales numbers through Amazon or through any platform you’re selling through. There’s looking at how many people downloaded your stories or how many page reads do you have in KU know, what is your read through on your books? Which means. You know, what percentage of readers are starting with one and then continuing through your series to the end. What is your return on investment for advertising? So there’s some more numbers and there’s lots of ads associated data. So cost per click. There is numbers of impressions, which is how many times people got to see your stuff.
And that’s, before you get into all the things like newsletter, open rates and delivery statistics, and, all the market research information as well. So there is just a flood of numbers that start coming at you once you get into the published author world and we are writers so I’m good when they go out on a limb here and say, not all of us are good, there’ll be number wizards as well.
And in love with things like spreadsheets. Yeah, we got hands up here of all of us who are not, not primarily data fans, but it is such an important piece of being able to be a strategic entrepreneur and being able to leverage from hobby status as a writer into career status. As a writer, you have to understand what those numbers mean, and they are powerful you can make them work for you, but only if you understand what some of them do and you know, where you can go and find some dependable information and you know what to ignore in this giant mess of stuff that’s coming at us. So today we’re going to be talking a little bit about some of the, the different types of information that there is to be had.
And also some of the information that we have found to be helpful and it just a few tips and strategies of how you can kind of learn what to attend to and what to ignore so that you can make smart decisions as you’re deciding on your next steps, whether it’s advertising or growing your list, or even your release schedules and publications and launch strategies, all should be including a certain amount of that data analysis.
So you need to know what to track. So first step Michele, what are some of the I guess opportunities and challenges that you’ve come across in terms of different types of data that come into your world.
Michele: There was one thing that you just said, that I think is going to make all of this way more meaningful.
You just said there is a point in which you have to turn this writing thing from a hobby to something that is specifically entrepreneurship. And I think most of the rider do not realize that point. Like they really have to jump from one point of the mountain to the other. It’s, the jump is daunting.
I think, since I am on the, in the process of doing that, I think I can speak a bit more about this. It’s more, I can compare it with the process of starting a book. It’s like really daunting because you know that there is so much to do, but you don’t see the words on the page, you don’t see the sentences or the paragraph you see the whole book, which crushes you. So you see that then you really are paralyzed because it’s too many things to do.
Same thing for today’s subject, the data driving decisions that you have to take from all those numbers. Now, I’m going to tell you what is the way I’m surviving, this discovering. Okay?
That’s just, my 5 cents, that’s my experience, brought to you by the last five months that I’ve been doing this seriously on a, on a daily basis. What kind of data are available to us as authors in 2020? A lot. One would say even too many and too much stuff it’s out there and it’s asking for our attention, what I will argue is the following. What you need is to know the vocabulary, but not to know every single thing, because if you go dig everything, you’re going to be dead and you’re going to lose too much time from the writing process to the harnessing of data. So I think what you should invest your time is in understanding which data is important for you.
Example: it is paramount for me now to understand at this stage, what kind of things my readers like of my stories. That’s the whole point of 12 by 20 challenge that I am in, I need to learn. So what is the data I’m using? It’s the feedback from readers. There is not one time that I don’t ask a feedback from the readers when I send out a free story.
And as a result of that, I got now almost, over 100 separate different feedbacks. And this came from social media from newsletter, from Amazon reviews, like really the channels are a lot. But what I’m saying to you now is data doesn’t have to be necessarily numbers, but it does have to mean something that translates into number afterwards.
So continuing the example, I now learned that there are some things that I can do with my writing style, but some things that I can’t, so bear with me because this is very important. I do know that one of the things I can do now is to write fast, short stories. And by short story, I also mean novelettes and novellas.
How is this knowledge going to drive the future decision that I will take based on this data. It’s gonna affect it in the following way. Since I know that I can publish on a steady pace, shorter stories, I would concentrate on that after 2020 is finished, because I know I can do that. And on that, I can build longer story, maybe a very long novella or a very short novel.
I know I can do that because the data, the feedback provided me with that answer. So what kind of data are available to authors? Many in many shapes, but the one question I urge you to ask yourself is which one is important to you at the point you are in, because I’m sure Crystal what I’m learning from my, uh, challenge and my year it’s not something necessarily useful to you because you are at different point in your author career and people that are responding to us, will be at different point. Like if you are starting out right now, like you have not published a single book. What do you want to learn is a bit more, something on the craft of writing.
So like you can substantially write more things and once you know that, you know, what is the, the amount of words you can put on that, on that paper you might be making it a longer term plan about your publishing. And that’s something that I’m starting building now, because I know that I can forge one short story per month with some leisure time for, uh, editing and, advertising it if you will.
So If there’s one thing that you take away from what I said here is that again, the data, outside there it’s, it’s like a mammoth it’s like huge, there is so many things, but depending on the point you are at that, you should focus on the one thing that is going to drive you on from point a to point B the fastest, without you like getting crazy in the process.
Because one of the other things we’re gonna talk about is, what are like good source of data. So, and again, the answer is: now in 2020? Billions, and they’re free. You can pay for them. They’re in the video format, podcast blog. Stop me because I just so many things here, I don’t even know where to begin.
Crystal: Yeah. Well, I think, and that’s a good point is that is most people’s reactions to seeing a dashboard at the back end of your publishing account, or seeing a dashboard in the backend of your ads account and just feeling that sort of panic. And this case come up at office hours a few times, actually over the last couple of weeks inside The Creative Academy of just people struggling with too much information.
And I think your point of dialing it back to where are you at is a really important thing. So the first step in understanding data or making any decisions about what you should be paying attention to, you have to know what your goal is for right now. So for you right now, your goal is growing your newsletter list and producing stories to help you do that.
You’re also analyzing your capacity for production in terms of, if you’re committing to a publication schedule, what is realistic? What can you plan in terms of a business plan for your coming year? And you’re using this year as experimentation to get a sense of what you’re capable of and to improve those skills along the way as well.
So, while, you’re tracking word count and the amount of time it takes you to do each stage for each of these stories, you’re also tracking, you know, the number of people signing up for your newsletter list with each of the things that you do with each new story. So you’ve got to know, okay my goal is to get from here to there in this area.
And then you ask yourself what information would help me get there. So that usually means actually forming questions, it’s just like science class back in elementary school, you need a research question, you need some sort of question to answer with your experiments, because what we’re doing in our author businesses is effectively do it, we’re doing experiments with words and books and, and various types of promotional activities, right? And so we need a research question in order to know which things we’re going to keep track of to see whether or not that worked the thing that we were doing. Right? And to have measurable progress as we go.
How to understand data
So if you can, so let’s say for me, my next goal is to, um, my next goal is to get my AMS ad spends to be increasing, but also to have the revenues be increasing from them. So I, I need more impressions, right? I need more, purchases through that. And I need to analyze whether or not my book makeover is doing what it should.
So I have new book covers. I have some updated bits and pieces of interior stuff that lead to the new newsletter cookie. So that is my next stage is to increase my newsletter size by increasing the number of people, finding it, which is going to be done by increasing my ads effectiveness and ad spends to reach a larger audience.
And so the questions I need to formulate to know whether or not that’s working is how many people are seeing my ads, how many people are clicking on my ads. So I need to know impressions and I need to know number of clicks and I need to know number of sales to figure out if those are going up, are they going in the right direction?
So I do need to be tracking that information. I also need to know, because it’s book one in a series that people will be pushed to there. How many of those people that read that first book are signing up for my mailing list to get the exclusive one for free. And so that question can be answered from my BookFunnel account.
Right? I don’t care about anything else, except that inside my BookFunnel account, it’s going to tell me how many people looked at that page and how many downloaded, so that data is useful. Right? And then once people are on my list, I need to know, are they opening things and are they responding? And are they staying on my list, so not unsubscribing. So I need to know how many people signed up in each time period. So I can see are those numbers going up? I need to know, are they getting an opening my emails because I’m not reaching them. If they’re not actually getting the emails and then I need to be analyzing, are they staying engaged?
So what is the open rate on the ongoing emails? So that sounds like a lot, but it’s really, it’s about 10 numbers in total, I think, or 12 numbers, which isn’t too bad when you think of a spreadsheet, you know, and when you think of all of the things you could be tracking from each of those dashboards. So for me, that’s sort of a custom crafted set of things that I want a record of over the next few months as I go through this process
Michele: And I think as for every single thing like you, the first time is going to be daunting and it’s going to be difficult but the second time you already learn a bit more about, for example, you mentioned AMS dashboard, I can tell you because I, it happened a few weeks ago, the first time that I seen it, I was like: what is this? And how am I going to navigate it? And the first time I was like, there is no way I can understand how it is work. Like write stuff. Like, I don’t know, like how this impression influenced like the flakes or if there is any relations, what’s this ACOS kind of thing, percentage, I don’t know. But then what I did was what I do every single time, if I don’t feel like writing. I just sit then I write because I know part of my routine. So I made it part of my routine. And the second time still that Amazon AMS dashboard was daunting, but I now knew where to find at least with a click the impressions, how to change the data.
So, so it was a small change, but my brain was more familiar with that. So Crystal just said, you’re going to have to tackle like 12, even 15 different kinds of numbers. And if you’re thinking of that now, again, it’s scary, but think of this, like you’re approaching your book for the very first time when you’re approaching your book for the 150 times, you already have chapters there that sustains you right?
Then you already have a draft probably, you know, how you got there and you know where you want to go. So now it has been around the two months that I’ve been using AMS ads regularly, consistently. And I’m faster in understanding what I want to do, make an advertisement that it’s slightly different.
I can check it against another one. I can do an AB testing. So all of these things that I’m saying, and that we’re saying it’s a vocabulary that you have to learn. But you don’t learn it in one day, you learn it with trying and failing and trying again. And this is true with writing and with data gathering.
So I think what you said Crystal, it is doble more important because you really have to do your homework. That’s basically what we’re saying here, and it’s not going to be easy at the beginning, but we want to let you know that we got your back in the sense that we’ve been there. We know that, and at the beginning is going to be difficult, but it’s going to pay out, in the long run, especially if you want to do this seriously you think this is going to be something that can become a side job.
A passive stream of revenue, even though like another thing that I learned, there’s nothing passive in the way we are making money with books because you always have to be around and do your things, right Crystal? You have to check again, data is one of the things. Um, and one of the, the things that I think it’s important to mention is you were mentioning the kind of data that we are looking at, right?
So review is a kind of data, sales, download, you were mentioning BookFunnel in that case, like the download of a specific story. It’s important because my example again, now I have five stories, short stories on BookFunnel. I know which one of them is the most downloaded. And what do you think I understand from that? I understand that the description of that book is more interesting for people so they click more on that. The cover is made better. Um, there is one thing that I just did the promo book with two of my books on the same genre, exactly the same thing. So the price is the same because it’s zero and it’s in BookFunnel.
The author is the same. It’s me. The genre the same, but I’m clearly seeing one is way more downloaded than the other. So I will take a decision based on that when I’m ready to publish the book on a similar genre. I can see that, that’s data that does not lie. Those clicks are made by people that I don’t know.
And in a previous episode Crystal, we discussed about the importance of not taking this personally, right. Um, so like a bunch of number and it’s a bunch of strangers, giving you a suggestion without them even know that they are giving you suggestion, so it doesn’t really matter the kind of data you’re gathering, but it’s important the kind of answer you’re giving to your questions. And so one thing that I want to ask you, because I think your answer is going to be different from mine, if you don’t have anything else to add on, on this is, once you have all this information, how do you process them? Like. Okay. We, we told them that basically there is data, and then you have to ask yourself questions, but once you have the numbers, like what’s the strategy, like what’s the long term plan?
What do you do?
Crystal: I think partly having somewhere where you record the information is really important. A lot of this stuff it’s really easy to see in your dashboard of your various accounts on kind of a weekly or monthly basis, but it’s not always so easy over time. So if you want to have an ongoing record of this, because you might ask a different question later that you’re not asking today, then it is important to have somewhere that you’re keeping track and recording these things. Now we have actually made a couple of different templates, spreadsheets for Michele and I have some for myself as well. And so I’m happy to share those as templates. So we’re going to put a couple of links on strategicauthorpreneur.com with this episode’s show notes and also in the resources section on the website so that it’s easy to find. So if you go to strategic authorpreneur.com, look for the resources around and data gathering and tracking or some things there. And I think that the type of data that you’re gathering is going to make a really big difference. So we talked about there being different types of information.
Now in research, there is qualitative data, which is when you dive deep into things and you get words and sentences and feedback and more expanded answers, and then there’s quantitative data, which gives you numbers. Right? And that is about volumes of things. And you’re looking for patterns overall, but it’s not usually digging into the why of things very much.
So the numbers answer questions, like how many, how much, what is the capacity of something or, you know, what direction are things growing or shrinking, which is useful? What it doesn’t tell you is why was this book the favorite of you know, 80% of the people who chose between your two books. So we really do need to collect both kinds of data at different times to answer different kinds of questions, but they’re stored in very different ways and processed in very different ways.
So for some of the feedback type things that come in, like I will, when I, my what’s in my research question is: what additional keywords should I be adding to my ads in order to get a good fit with the right kinds of readers being attracted, which will help then up the number of people who are becoming fans, as opposed to just reading one free downloaded story.
So if that’s my research question, then I need to know from my readers, what are other authors who they think, write like me, right? That they like. And so I can’t just that from going to Amazon somewhere, that is a personal interpretation. That’s a why kind of question. And it isn’t a yes or no kind of a click this check box thing, because if I gave them four options of authors and ask them just to click a check box of the ones that they thought, write like me, I’m missing the opportunity to learn things that are not already in my experience. And so that creates a kind of a research bias. So it’s useful to just ask your readers in an open ended question, you know, what are some of your other favourite authors who you think write stories like mine or that have stories that remind you of mine?
And when that information comes back in, you would want to store it as a list in a word document or a chart, maybe you might list out the names and put numbers beside it, because it is useful to know if 200 of your readers gave you the same name that is useful to know, versus just making a list of all the single names, but not having any numbers assigned to it.
It’s always going to be a little more work to actually go the extra mile and record that information and store it in a way that you can retrieve it from later usefully, but it’s very, very much worth it because it takes a lot of the guesswork about what you’re doing as you make those decisions in your career.
Did that, I mean, it’s hard to apply a general answer to something that is so situationally specific, but I think for the numbers that come up on a regular basis, you can take screenshots and file those, but then you have to go through them all again, to really look at things at a glance.
It’s why I do like spreadsheets or charts, because if you’ve got a really clear visual on things, then you can also actually pull that information at a moment’s notice, or you can have the computer add it all up for you. Because at first, when you’re only dealing with three months of information, it’s not that big a deal to just manually add things up, but you have to fast forward and think that when you are three years in to your career or when those numbers start to get really big and you have a lot more sources of information coming in you want it to be manageable in a way that you could actually do something with down the line. Now, there are some programs like Reader Links is good for processing data in a way that makes sense because Amazon’s dashboard historically has been kind of terrible in terms of understanding patterns and your royalties and which markets are providing the most of your readers and which of your books is selling the most over time, we have this thing called the recency effect, which is anything that’s more recent in your memory is going to feel more important or bigger and kind of take over.
So it’s really good to have data to prove to you that yeah, the last two months in a row, that one book sold more, but over time, it’s actually the other books that really added up to the extra revenue. So something like Reader Links, where it takes the data and turns it into a picture it’s basically a, bar charts or a pie graph, right? Where it’s like a circle is broken out with little percentages and colours to break it all down for you. Something that makes it very visual, like that is really helpful. And Amazon’s, the KTP beta dashboard, which it really would be great if it defaulted to that, but yeah, there’s a teeny little line at the top of your KDP dashboard and it’ll say, want to try the KDP beta dashboard.
You do! Trust us. You really do. So if you click on that, it opens this wonderful, wonderful world of colourful graphs and charts and pictures that are actually useful. And you can set your time periods down the left hand side, and you can see your page rates translated into money, not just pages and, that one’s free. Reader Link is paid service, and there are other things like Book Reports and DataSprouts that will be free up to, I think, a thousand dollars and then once you’re making more than a thousand dollars a month, you get charged for the service. But, um, what is built in to KDP now is actually much more functional, but it is not what they show you by default.
So you have to collect the little beta button at the top to open the magical box of colourful wonderfulness.
Michele: Yeah. I don’t know why they do that. Like now I can’t just look at the default setting. I was like, Just give me the hard data, give me the good stuff. And so, but there is something definitely, you said like basically what, what Crystal has said is set yourself up for success, right?
So you maybe now are selling one or two books per day or one or two books per month, and so maybe you’re thinking as I was thinking, so I’m going to come with, Google spreadsheet and I’m going to put the number here and this row is going to be for the month and stuff. And then I show it to Crystal and she was like, yeah, this is good now, but, what happen when people are going to read thousands of page reads per day or per month. So like, this is not something viable. This is not something you can carry with you, until your grave. And so one of the things that she probably, we will, we share, it’s like, it’s something that is useful to you and that you can track the change on a month by month basis.
And now this is something that completely changed revolutionize the way I see at datas. When I now look at my, my Amazon report, I don’t just look at the royalties. I look at how much I spent. And I go into my AMS dashboard and then all of this data at the end of each month. And so are not doing that every day, just at the end of each month, I’m going to pull the data in this beautiful, lovely spreadsheet and then from that point on, I can see, I can compare data now the amount of data, the data there that I have now, it’s basically nonexistent. It’s like one month and a half, almost two months. It’s not enough. I know that. But I’m thinking ahead here, I’m thinking 2022, and I’m thinking 2025, is this system sustainable and the way Crystal set it up is the answer is yes.
I can do this, and I can leverage this, not only for my Italian books, which is something I’m doing now, but in case in the future, I’m going to sell more books in the English market. I can transfer this. It’s something that you can transfer from one point to the other. So I would say the take away here is,, build something evergreen, and build something that it’s good for you. Because the amount of things that I’m doing for my data gathering would I’m sure be pretty useless for that for Crystal, because she’s doing a completely different kind of things. She’s at a different moment in their author career. So again, build the system that works for you as Crystal was mentioning and make sure it’s something that you can build upon, right Crystal? Something that you can build that you can make bigger, but at the same time, It stays the core, the hub, it stays the same. You just it’s like you have an apartment and then you became a bit more rich and you got a townhouse and then you can be from the townhouse a mansion, and then I’m dreaming big here.
That’s basically what we’re doing here. We’re dreaming with data, but evergreen system it’s super important. And again, follow what works for you now, and I think this relates to the question also of asking question of the data and the kind of answers that you get from them, are different from author to author.
And, when we think of both building our own system, we realize now that every system is different because every author is different the genre, he or she is writing is different. So I’m curious of something here, Crystal. Let’s say that you, one of the people that are listening to us, he or she, is asking you this question: So I understand data is important and understand I have to build my own system, but for a person that starting from scratch what would you say is the most important thing they have to do now before even the data gathering is starting.
It’s like thinking of what’s important or sitting down and have a plan trying to understand what kind of data is really important for them. What is step number one?
How to make decisions based on the data
Crystal: Step number one is really formulating well, first absolute step number one is deciding what your next goal is, that is very important is where are you trying to head, just so that you’re not tracking a whole bunch of things that don’t relate to, that you don’t need to track everything you need to track what is going to help you in moving forward towards your goal. Um, but I think knowing the questions that you want, that data to answer is the most important thing.
What do you need to know to help you make a better decision? So if your next goal is to launch your new book, well, you need to figure out, okay, what’s going to help me do that. Is it, which were the better of the three, promotion services you tried last time you launched a book is right. Which, which ones resulted in actual downloads and changes and things.
Maybe you are trying to decide which tool for book layouts, you are going to purchase and you mean, you need to know your budget numbers, and you need to know how many books you’re likely to write and publish in the next couple of years to know, is it worth it to pay somebody versus do that? That’s all data, right?
That’s all information that we’re processing. Uh, you need to know if your Amazon ad is working well enough that you should keep it running. So then you need to know, are you seeing a return on your investment? Are your page reads going up? Is your cost per click worth it? All of those things are worth looking at.
So, you know, really you need to decide what is your goal, and then what do you need to know to help you take the next step smartly towards that goal? And then you can get started with knowing what you need to track and how you need to track it and what kind of time periods you’re looking at.
So there is some, there’s some other piece of that that we haven’t really talked about, which is it’s one thing to track numbers, which are an outcome measure, but you also need to know why those numbers changed, which means tracking your behavior. Right? What did you do that resulted in a change in those numbers?
And so I think that’s something that we often forget, we collect the data, which is the outcome, but we forget to keep a journal or a log or a sheet of what actions we took. And then when we look back, we think, Oh, look, you know, on, on that week of February 12th, to whatever my numbers jumped, like, whew, great.
But now it’s six months later and you’re like, why, what did that do? I, did I, do, did you run a promo? Did you release a new book? Did you, you know, boost your mailing list with some kind of cross promotion effort with a bunch of other authors? Were you in a box that like what happens to actually cause that change?
And I think we forget our actions as the instigator of whatever those efforts were. You think you’re going to remember, and I can tell you from experience a hundred percent, you’re not going to remember you can’t there’s too much going on there too much changing, and you don’t even know yet the timescale of the, of you looking back on this or when you’re going to need to reflect on this information.
So I think it’s really, really helpful too… and I have two ways that I have done this in the past. I use physical, like I just started bullet journaling, but I use physical notebooks and I just make notes of some of the main things that I do and what I was doing before, which actually I found really worked well, is that in my spreadsheet that I have all of my things that I track the front page of that spreadsheet is actually just like a, a log entry. So it will have a date, and then it will have notes about what I did on that date. So ran a promo on BookFunnel in this group. Or, you know, started running this ad or I released a new book that day and this is the three actions I took to promote it, whatever it is then I have something to look back when I noticed an interesting pattern in the data I can say, Oh yeah. Okay. Well now I go back to my sheet and I see this is what I’ve done. It also has the really nice effect of showing you visually the steps you have taken and the progress that you have made, because sometimes it takes a while for those numbers to reflect the effort you’ve been putting in on the work side of things.
And when I say a while, I’m going to can take years for that to pay off and to start really seeing that progress. So at the beginning, every little step that you take is a win, it is progress it is data about your behavior and it helps to reinforce for you that you are being really active in growing this thing.
And it, it lets you then analyze, okay, some of these actions, maybe they didn’t really help sales. Maybe they even hurt sales, you know, certain ways that you handle things or different ways you roll out a new book and you need that information you need for that reflection stage that we talk about when we talk about being a Kareful author, right?
Knowledge, action, reflection, and evolution, you can’t do the reflect and evolve parts of that if you don’t have anything to reflect on. If you don’t have clear enough memories of what took place. So I think that is really important to think about how are you going to track your own sort of behaviors and so word count logs and, just a journal of what actions you took writing down, what promotions you do.
All of those things are super important in terms of giving you something to interpret your data from, it gives you a bit of a lens or a filter. So I think one more thing we didn’t talk about really was there is some industry-wide data that’s also very useful and interesting to make sure you’re paying attention to, because sometimes it can be super frustrating and you might see a different sales and you’re feeling like you’ve done something wrong and everything is off the rails.
You might have nothing to do with you. It might actually be a change in the market. It might be that Amazon, you know, eliminated also boughts or something else happened. And it might be that everyone is seeing these same patterns, but if you don’t know what the pattern is, you don’t really know how to understand where you fit in that larger context.
So what are some of the sources where you get industry wide data from?
Sources you can collect data from
Michele: So there are a couple, one of the things that, I think it’s important to notice that compared with like 10 years ago, we have way more people that know their stuff about self-publishing and datas. And, one thing that I personally make sure, I personally had made sure that I did since the beginning of this, being serious about my author businesses. Uh, I went out there and I was looking for people that I really liked in the industry that were providing a lot of value. Now I want to tell you three names, but I don’t want you to think like, these are the only people that are worth following.
These are the people I follow because I like the voice, because I like the, the amount of value that they provide, because I like the resources that they give up for free. And because I find them to be funny, and like, they are more similar to my, my character, I would say. So one of the, the people that I really follow is Nicholas Erik, uh, which is a young self-published author from the United States, is, uh, most, known from his urban fantasy books.
He’s a USA Today best selling author and, one thing that he really does well is he’s a nonfiction side of things, his business. So he built a massive amount of resources for free that indie authors can use them and he spent thousands of dollars testing, different kinds of things. So the promo site, we know work and even people like David Gaughran,, this giant like shout out to Nicholas Erik on his book, Strangers to Superfans to let you understand how important is this guy? I think like the value that Nicholas Erik provides is he gives you data and then he let you ask yourself the question he just said, and he needs is a newsletter he’s extremely upfront.
If he did something wrong, he will tell you. And I actually know because he tells stories about the time that he failed miserably. And that’s another thing that I really like of these author. Uh, he will not sugar cake the things like when something goes bad, he says that to his newsletter. So that’s something I really like about Nicholas Erik.
He just came up with a marketing guide on self-publishing, which is very good. And I’m still waiting for the paperback version I asked Nicholas I think four times via email and said it’s coming, it’s coming. Uh, I think like he thinks of me as a stalker, but yeah. Yeah. It’s a, your stalker from Italy.
It’s valuable stuff and his website is again, field with,, free, stuff. You will find them. There’s lots of interesting resources on Facebook ads, on Amazon adds, on BookBub ads, the promo sites, like when I had to use the strategy for a promo sites for my Lord of Time, that’s basically what was my get go place.
So Nicholas Erik is useful to me for his newsletter, [eriodically sending it and for the value he provides on the authorprener side of things. The second person that I follow is David Gaughran, is the guy we mentioned so many times he should pay us Crystal. He’s the author of Stranger to Superfans. And I like David because he’s outgoing, he’s funny. He recently created a YouTube channel, uh, which I just wish she uploaded more content faster. I mean, like he just came out with a video on how to get legitimate reviews without Amazon banning you. And that’s gold. I think I watched that video three times. There is so much value in… and you know, like, you know, when he speaks, he knows his stuff, like, like hands down. He worked with authors who made 6 digit numbers, he followed this people. So he followed these people. He knows Amazon inside out. One of the reasons why he published Amazon Decoded, another one of his books, and he’s coming up with the second, by the way, I’m on the go the two. It’s interesting. Like he knows what he’s talking about, and, um, sometimes see you, he will also provide discounts on some services.
He just came out with a coupon for a BookSweeps, which is a service for growing your mailing list, which I used. So it’s valuabe for that reason too. And that, and then there is Dave Chesson and he’s probably one of the, indie that is more, I would say is he has a stronger platform. I mean, he’s everywhere is on YouTube is on social media, his newsletter is great.
He has a free, Amazon course, Amazon AMS course that I devoured and I didn’t have to pay anything for this. Um, and he’s a one person that he doesn’t only provide the value, his blogs has so many interesting things that happen to into him that really make me want following.
So there is this one, one time that he got sued. Sorry, his Amazon account was closed because one person said that, he was copying another author. And then you explains why that moment in time, which it was so destroying for him, made him realize he had to build a business out of it.
His lawyer said look, an eventually was able to, come up ahead, then his Kindle account was reinstated, but the lawyer was like, this guy could gone for your house and stuff, so you need to protect yourself. And so he said, that’s the story of how I became a business. So you see how many things are important to me. I’m learning every single time, people are providing value. This is one of the things following the people that I genuinely respect and that I sent emails to because I, I sent messages or emails to each and every one of these people, because when I had to ask a question or I want you to find that point out something every single time, there was an answer and they were very receptive.
They are great people, and I will recommend you to follow them. I have another person that I follow. It’s Crystal, but don’t tell her, uh, or her head will get huge like a balloon. So don’t tell her that. Uh, so she’s the number four after the three guys, it makes balance things up a bit. And the second thing is now, there are places on the internet where you will find data for free, and places where you will find that source of data that might be useful for your author business, and you have to pay for that, I personally find that, that, uh, asking to inform them or social media questions to people that seems to me at your same level authorpreneur, career wise, it’s useful.
But there are also, uh, resources and I think Crystal for made me aware that they exist, uh, like, K-Lytics Is that how you pronounce that? Okay. I thank you for that. If you want something super specifically like into the genre jungle kind of things, and probably Crystal is going to tell you a bit more about those things, but there are some kind of things they are useful if you are writing a specific genre, understand what’s selling, what are the niches or the sales, what is the keywords that people are using on Amazon? And so I find that throughout these two kinds of resources that I use real human beings, with newsletters and videos and stuff, but also hard data and K-Lytics exists is one of the things that, I wanted to point out because I think it’s valuable.
I think it’s something that people that are really, really serious about this should definitely check out. What do you think Crystal.
Crystal: Yeahm that’s, that’s one of the sources that I definitely do use. I think the value in the information that comes from K-Lytics and what it is, Alex Newton is the founder at K-Lytics.
And so he prepares these reports that are super, super in depth of what sales numbers are like and the breakdowns of what do all the covers look like in sub-genre, and what are the trends in that sub-genre, what, what is the sort of opportunity for you there and what are the things you need to know about that market in order to do well in it?
They look at KU versus not KU and all of those things. And so what I’ve found to be really helpful is just getting on the mailing list by downloading one of the free resources that he has on the site. And then just watching and you’ll get an email every time there’s a new report and you don’t need to get all of them.
Like it is the kind of thing where you can buy a membership and have access to everything. But unless you’re writing in a ton of genres, It can be a bit overwhelming, cause there’s so much interesting information it becomes a black hole and you just get sucked right into it. Never to be seen again in the writing world.
So, I find if I just identify okay for me, I write contemporary romance and I have some with paranormal elements, some are sweeter, some are steamier. There were, they did a Christmas romance report. So I think I bought about five different ones reports over the last three years. That are very, very specific to my sub genres that I’m writing in so that I can get super in depth information that’s really, really relevant.
There was another one I bought that was short fiction actually, because well, writing shorts, that was a really good way to just see what is the market potential here. You know, are people really making money at this? How many things would happen to sell, to rank well, in my categories, what is the competition like? What are covers like? How does that work? And so I think it is a good way to get a really good handle on the market that you are going to be in. If you can get one of those really specific reports, that’s niched right down to what you’re writing in, then that’s really helpful. I do also follow David Gaugran and Dave Chesson both, I followed for years and really enjoy their newsletters, read the whole thing.
Joanna Penn often has some really interesting stats as well. But one of the things I think people overlook a lot of the times is the data that comes from the tools companies that we use, and so I published my audio books through Find a way voices, and I make sure that I get their newsletters because they are very invested in understanding the audio book industry.
And they send out roundups of information on a monthly basis to their newsletter, but is kind of what’s going on in the audio book scene and that data information coming from somebody who has access to everyone’s information, right? Like it’s, if you’ve got a central company that can give you those bigger industry trends, that’s really helpful.
Ingram Spark is another one that I follow because they will often send out, Hey, here’s what’s selling and they are the ones printing and shipping. All of those print books. So they have a really good idea. I followed the KDP newsletter will often have trends and reports and things like that. And there are some annual reviews reports that come out from those companies, as well as the monthly or quarterly reviews, which will give you a lot of information about what’s going on overall.
So that’s really helpful. And I think any industry you are in will have something like that. And then you can also check things like the Alliance of Independence Authors will often share statistic type stuff about the industry as a whole as well, which is very valuable.
What is your mission statement for your life?
Now. The time has come. The walrus said to talk of many things. Yeah. A little bit. I’ve been, you know, I’ve been working on that. I’m curious jar is here. I may have rearranged my office. I did not get rid of the jar and it has questions for us. So, you know, the drill. Tell me when to stop.
Michele: Go on. Stop. Green.
Crystal: Green
Michele: like a Vulcan’s blood.
Crystal: Yes. Much like that. Oh, wow. What is your mission statement for your life?
Michele: Oh shit.
Crystal: What is your mission statement for your life?
Michele: What is your mission statement? This is probably one of the most… pain in the ass kind of question that we got, I think we have a winner. It’s great. And I just want to say whoever wrote this question you’re amazing. But at the same time you’re giving us probably look, she’s sweating. I’m sweating. Yeah.
Crystal: I, well, you know what, and I’ve done this because we.
We do retreats on the regular, usually every quarter and I used to do it with my team. When I was running my consulting company, we would have these retreats and we, we did, do this as an exercise and you actually had to write one. And now I’m trying to remember which one.
Michele: So you should be like the most, flex the most to use to these kinds of things. This is a question with a capital Q. I’m telling you. Okay. I got, I got it. I got it. Are you ready for this? To build believable worlds you can live in. That’s it. If I can do that and you believe you are in a world, in my world, I can die happy. That’s what I got.
Crystal: Okay. I’m just writing it down because I have a hard time actually doing things verbally. So my mission statement for my life would be. And I’m going to tailor this. This is my mission statement for my writing life, because I do have a very clear mission statement for my life, which is slightly different, but to connect with people through stories and make sure everyone has somewhere to come home to.
Michele: That’s amazing. You see, that’s why you give 35 second to your partner. So I got your back and you set my own fire.
Crystal: Oh yeah. I was trying to think of how do I distill. Well, what I’m trying to do with Rivers End is… I mean, the tagline is come home to represent and fall in love. And that’s, that’s what I want.
I want to give people a safe place to come anytime they want to escape from their lives. And, and to make that a place where people want to be, you know, populated with good, interesting complex people and make it so everybody wants to move there. Basically we can all go there together in our imaginations.
So that is my story, writing mission in life.
Michele: Love it. And you have to find out who wrote that question. Okay. We have to corner this person. Okay. And we have to talk with her or him.
Crystal: If you want to tell us, what is your mission statement for your life or your writing life? We would love to hear that and you get the benefit of not doing it live.
On the air. So you can go ahead and think about that a little bit and you can drop it in the comments under the YouTube video, or you can come and find us as strategicauthorepreneur.com and leave that on our current episodes comment section.
Michele: And if you’re interested on show notes, links to the resources that we mentioned, or the people that we mentioned today for coupons and discounts on the tools we love you can visit us at strategicauthorepreneur.com. You can also subscribe to the newsletter and each week as always, we’ll email you just one thing that we think will help you on your own authorpreneur journey and a link to our latest episode.
Crystal: And you’ll get a gold star and a million bonus points in the game of life if you leave a review for us, wherever you listen to this podcast. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy life to get to know us and be sure to subscribe. So you don’t miss out on our next episode where we’ll be talking about writing collaboratively with special guests Pam Withers.
Thank you.
