Book marketing is a source of frustration for many indie authors. BUT it’s also one of the most important things writers can do to expose their stories to a wider audience. We’ve heard this thousands of times, and yet nowadays it is increasingly more difficult to put our books in front of our readers. Is there a simple, straightforward way to share our books with the right audience? Or are we destined to wander in an increasingly noisy world where everything seems important, and yet nothing seems to work?
Join us as we chat with book marketing expert Fauzia Burke and she shares her unique formula: ‘design + engagement + visibility = marketing success’, a simple and yet powerful approach that helped her kickstart many authors’ careers and that can help you single out what you need to do now, what you can delay, and what you can delegate or simply ignore.
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Resources we mentioned in this episode
Books we mentioned in this episode
Connect with our special guest Fauzia Burke
Complete Episode Transcripts
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 034: Effective Book Marketing with Fauzia Burke
Crystal Hunt: Hey there, strategic authorpreneur, I’m Crystal Hunt.
Michele Amitrani: And I’m Michele Amitrani, we’re here to help you save time, money and energy as you level up your writing career.
Crystal Hunt: Welcome to episode 34 of the Strategic Authorpreneur podcast. On today’s show we are talking about book marketing for authors with Fauzia Burke, who is an expert on the subject, but first, what have we been working on this week?
What has happened since the last episode?
Michele Amitrani: This is one of the favorite parts of the podcast episode for me, because I get to suggest you a book of the day. So you probably saw this book a number of times on the podcast, please don’t kill me, but I’m going to recommend this again and this is because I actually have my copy here, The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide To Character Expression .
And we already spoke about this but actually ha and the time to go and deep dive into it. And I’m on the very first part, which is basically some suggestions that the authors are giving on common problems to writers, and, how to write non verbal expressions. And I know this guide by the way, by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi, it’s very famous for all the suggestions it gives you on expressions, but I am actually finding the first 25 to 30 pages to be really interesting if you want to go on the background of things, how to craft believable characters, how to pace the story.
So it’s not it’s not just a thesaurus, it’s much more than that, it’s really like a writer’s guide. And I just wanted to shout out and I wanted to let you know there is more than meets the eyes and, I’m finding a lot of value on that book. So definitely we have been recommending this guide and with Crystal, even other guides, the Occupational Thesaurus, and the one regarding the hole in the soul. So there are a number out there and, this one is super good and I’m sure all the others are also great. So really, I suggest you, if you have time, and you want to level up your writing do check it out. And regarding what I’ve been up to, after reading the Emotional Thesaurus, there are a couple of things that I’m working on.
I’ve been working on these things for the past couple of weeks actually. And, it’s a problem, a challenge that I’m having which is organizing my translation work with my writing work, I’m trying to basically harmonize the both of them without getting crazy, completely and utterly.
And I know that I can better at it, but I also know that I need to make this process a bit more clean and I need to make it a bit more, something that is viable longterm because I’m going to do this kind of thing, translation and writing. I write in English and then translate into Italian my stories. I need to do this for hopefully years and I need to manage to find the system that I can keep longterm. So it is a bit of a challenge at this moment I just finished translating a novella from English into Italian, took me 15 hours and, it’s like another book it’s just really like another book.
The process is the same. You have to translate it, then give it to betas, then edit it, you have to find the call for this book. It’s not just the translation, it’s so much more. I have to be aware of that. I’m seeing there is difficulties even with one and, I just need to take and give myself permission to be a mess at the beginning but after that, I need to give myself a system that I can follow because I need to make this scalable and you know that I have this plan of publishing at least, 12 different products in 2021. And I need to do that and keep myself healthy in the meantime. So that’s the challenge and that’s what I’m, I’m basically battling with.
And, I now want to know what Crystal has been battling in the last couple of weeks or in the last week.
Crystal: So Eileen Cook and I have been, co-writing a book called Full-Time Author: How to Build, Grow, and Maintain a Successful Writing Career That You Love. There’s also the week for the Surrey International Writers’ Conference.
So I have been prepping in honour of our book, Eileen and I are, co-teaching a masterclass for authors there on to make basically a business plan for your next year to level up some area of your career that you really want to focus on. And we are also, there’s a variety of other things going on. So there’s a panel as well that I’m going to be on social media for authors on how to connect with your readers and then teaching a session on multimedia marketing for authors as well. So how you can bring in things like podcasting or videos on YouTube, or sharing visual assets of your world, things like that. So really how do you branch out from just the typical social media newsletter kind of posts and really level it up?
All of those things have been making me think about my own business plan, because as I’m preparing to teach any of these things, I’m always looking for examples and of course, as I’m reminded of the most strategic way to do these things, it usually highlights things in our own method where we’re like, Oh, I should probably do that myself not just teach people that it’s a good thing to do. So the teaching is always a good opportunity to brush up on one’s own things. So those are all of the excitements in my world. And, I guess without further ado, we can dive into our conversation with Fazio Burke, which is a great look at marketing for authors and what you could and should be doing.
And some things to keep in mind to help you be successful as you do it. After the interview, as always, we will be back to chat a little bit about what we’ve heard.
Crystal Hunt: To get started. Maybe just, if you want to talk a little bit about how you came to be working with authors, because I am meeting you for the first time as well, just like our audiences.
About Fauzia Burke
Fauzia Burke: So nice to meet you Crystal. Thanks for having me. I got involved in publishing because I came out of college with an English degree and that’s what you do. I tell people, if you graduated with an English degree, you have to go get a low paying job in publishing. That’s sort of the style. So I started working in book publishing in New York City and then in ’95 I actually saw the internet for the first time I was working at Henry Holt at the time, part of McMillan. And I just thought the internet was going to change book marketing. I was in book marketing book publicity before then and you might know this already, but book publishing is a slow moving enterprise.
So in ’95, when I thought the internet was going yo change the world everybody was like, It’s fine. It’s not, it’s going to go away. So I resigned and I started FSP Associates. So now this year we actually celebrate our 25th anniversary and my company, basically what we’re known best for is digital marketing, so I’ve been working with, and just for authors. So I’ve pretty much been working with authors my entire career. So that’s how I got involved in it and I love it. I love being able to talk to authors everyday, like yourself.
Crystal Hunt: And you wrote a book about it too.
Fauzia Burke: I did, yes. So I wrote a book called Online Marketing for Busy Authors.
And I wrote it because every author I talked to started off with Oh my God, I hate marketing. I’m so busy. I have a job. I’m writing my book. I have my family. Now I’m supposed to find time to do marketing. So I wrote a book that I thought would get them to where they needed to be without making a 300 page book that, authors don’t really want to know that much about marketing.
They just want to know how much they need to get done to get away with it. So that’s why I wrote it. I think it’s just me helping them figure out what’s the best strategies for themselves.
Crystal Hunt: And that is definitely a common and recurring theme with all of our listeners and everyone that we work with over the years is: okay but seriously, like how much do I have to do? When we’re talking about not more but less is definitely more in this one area on that. I think everyone can agree. And I would love to hear a little bit more about what you tell them when they ask you that. What is your answer? What little can we get away with?
Fauzia Burke: So I always tell authors that, there’s a certain amount that you have to do. You don’t have to do every single platform. You don’t have to blog every single day, but you do need to build a relationship with your readers. That, there’s no way to get out of that one. So how can we figure that out?
So I have this formula that I use with my clients. It’s called: design plus engagement plus visibility equals marketing success. And what that means is that design is how we look online. For me it means the website, the mailing list, social media, how all of that looks together, simple things like making sure you’re claiming your Amazon author page, making sure your photo it’s not pixelated and out of focus and hopefully matches everything else. Simple things that authors you’re like, Oh, I could do that. I could figure that out. So that’s our step one. And then we move on to engagement, which is how often do you want to blog? How often do we want to send out a newsletter?
How often do you want to post on social media? Which social media platforms work best for you and your audience? And then we build on that with visibility in terms of publicity, podcasting, advertising, anything. So what I tell authors is that they focus on. The things that are important first, like in order of priority, I think it works better.
So a lot of times they come to me and they’re throwing everything out at me at the same time. I need to promote my book. I need to do that advertising. I could do something about my Facebook page. What do I do about my website? And a lot of times it’s because they’ve heard things from their nephew’s cousin, their neighbour, the Uber driver, or their best friend.
And so I just have to strip all that out and say, okay, let’s prioritize, let’s calm down. Let’s work on the first thing, which is your website. The second, most important thing is your mailing list. Then let’s pick the social media that you’re comfortable with, that you enjoy doing. And then we’ll build on that.
So if they come to me with what do I do about publicity? I’m like, we’re so not ready for publicity. So just hold that thought, and I think that helps people authors to just say, okay. And I give homework, which authors love, believe it or not, they love. So that helps a little bit to just channel them and, reduce the anxiety and just give them like step by step, what we need to do.
Crystal Hunt: Yeah, I think that’s the most common problem people have is that there are, like you said, everyone has opinion on what you should be doing and slightly different everywhere you read it. And when you add up all those different things, it’s a million things and it’s completely overwhelming. So somebody being able to tell you right, do this next is actually very freeing and you’d think it would be restrictive, but it’s actually the opposite. It’s Oh, thank goodness. I have permission to concentrate on this one thing, and I’m going to do this thing. And that’s great. Cause I can handle one thing. You brought up something I think is really important to clarify for our readers, which is some people think marketing and publicity and advertising are the same thing. And I think maybe they’re not. So if you could do a little elaborating on that.
Differences between marketing, publicity and advertising
Fauzia Burke: That’s such a good question because so many people really do talk about them interchangeably and they’re not the same thing. So I definitely want to talk to authors about that.
So think about, I hope this is not going to geek people out, but think about it in three terms, which is it’s in the media environment, there is owned media, there is earned media and there’s paid media. So in your marketing plan, your owned media is actually all of the media that you own: your website, your blog, your podcast, all the things you control, and you can basically come on them every day and say: I’m the greatest author that ever lived.
It’s you! You own it. Go for it. Then the next one is earned media, is people talking about you and your book without you being able to pay them or influence them in any way. So it’s earned. It’s earned because you’ve earned it with writing a good book or being a good citizen or being a good person on social media, whatever it is that has made it possible for what people to want to promote you that’s called earned media, that’s publicity. Cause you can’t pay for it. You have to earn it. And then the third piece is paid media, which is advertising. So advertising is where you can pay someone and say, Hey, I want you to run this banner ad. I want to sponsor your podcast. You have a lot of control over when it runs and the messaging and all of that together is marketing.
So when you think about marketing, people just think, they can say any of those things, but that’s how you think about them separately. And if you think about them separately also, again, I’m much, I’m about separating things out for people so they can focus on it. So when we think about these three aspects, you think, okay, here’s what I own. What’s my timeline for this? What can I, when can I blog? When can I send a newsletter? This is how I control the content and the timing. Publicity you control, not the timing at all. It’s up to the producer, the editor, the blogger to post something for your book. You can ask them to post it around publication date.
You can hope that it will be a good review. No control. Either way, but it has higher degree of integrity and it gives you more credibility. So you have no control, but high credibility and then advertising, you have all the control in the world some credibility, cause of course you can say on the greatest author that ever lived. So that’s how you have to decide. And if you think about them that way, then you can think about it timeline as well as your budget, as well as what happens when, but that’s, I hope that helps. Cause I feel like that sort of makes people go, Oh, now I get that.
Crystal Hunt: Yeah, I think that helps a lot. And you’ll hear often people talk about digital sharecropping or the idea of on someone else’s land, which is if your only online presence is in other people, platforms like Facebook or land you don’t own, that is not owned media.
Like even though you think as your Facebook page, it really. Isn’t yours because it could change or go or get shut down at any moment. So you really don’t control that. So I think that’s super helpful for people to think about what category their pieces fit into and how many eggs are in each basket?
Are you building into that? And I think the point you made earlier about saying to someone you’re not ready for publicity yet is like, Yeah. If there’s, if you’re rolling the dice on the publicity side and they don’t have to give you a positive review and they don’t have to say nice things about you, then you do need to make sure you are as polished and ready and setting yourself up for success in that way, as you possibly can.
Fauzia Burke: One hundred percent.
And so I think it’s really important for people to… For authors to not, sometimes they get offended. If someone says, listen, this is not the right project for me. You should thank that person because they’re saving you money, because if your book jacket looks amateurish, right? If your book hasn’t been edited, then you’re going to get out there and people are like, will do nothing for you. They’re to not, they’re just going to ignore you, or they’re going to say this was terrible, the book needed editing, the book needed a better book jacket and all of that. So it’s really important to make sure that when you’re stepping into that arena, you are putting your best foot forward and don’t send out half backed stuff.
For sure. That’s not gonna work at all.
Crystal Hunt: Yes. That one chance to make a first impression thing is not wrong. So make it count. And what do you think are some of the key pieces, if someone’s trying to polish up their online presence, what would you have them take a look at first before they dive in.
Fauzia Burke: So the website, I think, of course the book jacket is really important cause that’s your ambassador out there in the world.
You don’t control it. It’s just gone. So you want to make sure you start off with a really good professional book jacket and then the next step, in my opinion is in a really important, is the website. Cause that’s your home base. I know that authors sometimes feel like, I have the Facebook page, but as you said very smartly you do not own that page. They can take it down any time. And so you’ve built a whole enterprise around something you don’t own. So making sure that you have a website that you not only can update yourself, which I think is really important for authors now, those days have gone where you sent an update to a webmaster and waited three days before they updated it.
You’ve got to be able to do it yourself. So a website is really important. The second piece for me is your mailing list. It’s slow growing. It’s not as glamorous, but you own those people and they have given you permission to show up in their inbox, which is a huge thing, huge commitment for them to make.
So please make sure that you’re paying attention to that and that people can sign up for your mailing list on your website. So those two things go hand in hand and in all honesty are probably the most important. And then we spend, authors spend a lot of time talking, but social media it’s the sexy topic.
But I think that it’s important for artists to pick maybe two platforms where they can fully commit and enjoy and participate in the community rather than trying to everywhere and barely covering the basics. So that’s where I think it’s really important for them to think about priorities and, I often tell authors, where do you see yourself five years from now? So don’t just think about this book launch because that’s what they do. Two weeks before … I have had authors write to me and say, I’ve been on Twitter for two weeks now, and I don’t see a change in my Amazon ranking. You know, if it was a sales channel, it would be great, but it’s not.
So I think it’s really important to think about what you want to do longterm, have the tools in place that you enjoy using that you can use yourself. You can certainly have assistant. You can certainly have help from other people, but you need to have a little bit more power in how you can do things.
And things are pretty easy now, tools are pretty easy to use now. So I would say that’s probably. The single most important thing is to just have a platform that you control and have consistency. I think maybe you said that in one of your interviews, consistency is just so important.
Crystal Hunt: And you got to like it because, or at the very least not hate it, because if you’re going to be spending lots of time somewhere, and really you’re trying to engage with your audience, but if you are just doing it because you have to (there’s air quotes in there for those of you listening to the audio) you’re not going to want to do it, and that’s going to make the consistency hard and you’re going to feel like you’re being punished, which is not going to make you want to dig right in and then do that. And I think timeline is an important thing to talk about because as you said, a lot of people think: Oh yeah, this should be working already and it just isn’t. And What do you think is a realistic timeline? If somebody is looking at platform building, how long do you think that takes? I know it’s really hard to answer.
Fauzia Burke: It’s not hard. It’s just a tough thing to tell people because they’re like, no, don’t tell me that. It takes, in my opinion, between a year to 18 months to really see the impact of what you’re doing consistently.
So the problem is in the big name, it is one way. You’re putting stuff out and you’re just one of the bazillion people putting things out. So there is no connection. It takes a while for people to say, wow, this guy or gal shows up pretty regularly, they do this pretty regularly. Or I’ve seen this. This has been funny.
It takes a while to build on that. And then when people start following you responding, following back, all of that takes a long time. You’re basically building trust. How long did it take you to build trust with your best friend? How long did it take you to build trust with your employees or your staff or anywhere where we are building trust?
It takes a while. It’s not overnight, you have to pay the dues and all. So it’s really like how you would build trust in real life, it’s how you build trust online. The only thing is in real life, we can connect with people on a, on an energetic level. And within a second, you feel like you’ve met your best friend, right?
We’ve all had that experience. It’s harder online because there’s so much noise and there’s that disconnect in terms of, I can’t read your energy. I don’t know if you’re being funny or sarcastic or, all of that takes awhile to get the rhythm of other people and yourself. So it takes, I think it takes 18 months.
Which I know most authors don’t like hearing, which is why I was cringing. Oh, I have to tell them!
Crystal Hunt: And I usually say 18 months to two years, because I think you’re also trying to write in the meantime, you’re trying to do all these other things and especially if you’re starting from zero and you don’t have a lot of products or a lot of community already to be talking about, I do think it’s really important for people to understand, this is not a sprint. this is a lifestyle
Fauzia Burke: That’s correct.
Crystal Hunt: You’re committing to—now a lot of people want to know, is there a difference between fiction and nonfiction authors or books when you’re looking at platform building and how you approach that?
Platform building with fiction and non-fiction
Fauzia Burke: Yeah. Oh, for sure. Building a platform for nonfiction is easier.
You have a specialty, you have a topic that you are… have studied in, have done research. You’ve written a book about it. You’re an expert in it. And so you don’t have to really think about what else you can be talking about because you have a focus. And that helps really a lot because that’s your primary audience building way of building the primary audience, but also primary topic.
You have a primary topic. You can talk about other things on social media and your blogs and your newsletter, but you’ve got a primary interest. The problem with fiction is I’ve had agents who call me and say something like, that’s just another novel. And then you have to go, yes, that’s right. It’s just another novel. So how do we make the novel, the novelist, really stand out? How do we make that be a different thing? And then I think sometimes authors will look at the nonfiction hooks in their books and sometimes they work. If you’ve written a book about, I don’t know, whatever their main thing is, I’m trying to be politically correct.
Anything that comes up
Crystal Hunt: Flower arranging, the book is about flower arranging.
Fauzia Burke: Yes. And hopefully you’ve done a little bit of your legwork in terms of what flowers are available, what brides like in their flowers, whatever it is. There’s a little bit of an expertise that you gained from making that the first, making that a topic of your novel.
There’s a theme there, but I’ve had authors who’ve told me: can you promote my book two sushi websites, because the main character really likes sushi. Yeah, that’s not a hook that is not a hook. That is not how it’s going to go. So it’s really important for novelists to be practical about what hooks are legitimate, almost all authors think their books are for everyone. There’s tons of things that you can pick out. One time I had an author, this was nonfiction, but yeah, it was funny. Basically a cardiologists, smart person wrote this book and I said, we were talking about audiences and I thought that was a pretty straightforward audience and he said to me, no, it’s for everyone because everyone has a heart. And I thought that is true. Not how publicity works, but it is a true statement. So that’s the thing to think about is that it’s not just what is a true statement. Yes, your main character likes sushi, true statement, but what is a media hook?
That’s different than themes in your book. What are the themes that will attract a media person? And then also one of the issues with novels you have to be careful about is that, you may have written a book where the main character is a florist, so you’re talking about flower arranging, but then there are entire nonfiction books that are just about flower arrangement.
So you’re going after people who are like, no, I don’t cover novels. We cover nonfiction book, but so it’s really difficult to think about media hooks in that way. So for novelists, it’s so important, so important to build a … first of all, to write a really good book, cause there’s a lot of competition, so you’ve got to make sure that you’ve written a good book.
And then the second thing is to really have a relationship with your readers. It takes longer to build, they need to learn and like your style and want to follow you, follow your style. And so I think all of those things make for a longer period for a novelist and a nonfiction person, but sometimes even more gratifying, because you have a much more … at some people say with fiction, it’s a very intimate relationship between the reader and the book.
It’s every reader is going to take something else away from it. And I think that’s a very intimate experience versus nonfiction, which is Oh, we all learn flower arranging from this book. So I think there are pros and cons on both sides, but it takes longer on novel side for sure.
Crystal Hunt: Let’s do a little digging into, a couple of different things. So you mentioned some newer tools for authors, and so I’m always curious what is coming? What is new? What is fresh or hot? What is the cutting edge kind of stuff? So what … can you give us a little glimpse into the future here? What are … what should we be watching for?
New tools and software
Fauzia Burke: So I love tools and I think I’m always in the lookout for the new stuff, but that’s my job. I tell my clients, you don’t have to be on the cutting edge of tools because you could learn something. Cause everything you have to learn, You learn something and then it doesn’t quite work out it fizzles or whatever.
So for authors, it’s important to have tools that they can trust and they can use and are established. For people like us, probably more geeky people, we like tools, right? I spend a lot time saying: wait, what is this thing? So I think for that reason some of those tools are really important for us, but I think for authors, it’s probably important to think about not feeling overwhelmed, not feeling like: Oh my God, there’s 4 million tools out there.
But so there’s two different things: I can talk about what I think recommend for authors and then I can talk about what I recommend for playing around and fooling around. So for authors, I think that, having a platform for website development that you like and that you can enjoy working on and that scales with you it’s really important for a mailing list there’s so many good tools out there. I think whatever feels comfortable because they’re all good at this point. I, we happen to use, for websites, we use Pub-site, obviously, cause we’re biased. But we’ve used everything before that. And then we use MailChimp for newsletters, but again, there’s Constant Contact, Mailerlite, whatever you like and you enjoy and works for your budget is fine. We just happen to like MailChimp and they’ve done nothing to get us off of that train. That’s our trade. And then for graphics we love Canva, I have a lot of other programs. I think Adobe is doing some good stuff there, but Canva is great, it’s simple, it’s easy. They’re growing. So once you build that, I think that’s a really good one. For, scheduling posts on social media, obviously Hootsuite, Buffer. Yeah. Any of those are really good. There’s an, there’s a relatively unknown one that I use just because we manage so many different feeds.
So you wouldn’t need to do it if you were just managing yourself. But we use Promo Republic, which I like a lot. And Promo Republic allows you to post to all your feeds and multiple channels. So it does help us when we’re managing our clients, social media, our own, we have so many of our own, so it just helps us do that and it’s got the graphics piece built in. So it’s the graphics, plus the schedule are built in one, which helps us. So that’s the tools that I feel are must for authors. These are things that they absolutely need to learn and be able to use.
Crystal Hunt: My accountant thinks that I’m a software developer because of how many tools and software that I buy. I have not been able to convince him in 15 years that I am actually an author who writes books. He does not get it. I’m all about the tools. And the fun so much. So if we want to totally geek out, I’m curious, have you tried BookBrush before on the visual side?
Fauzia Burke: So I have, yes. So we’ve tried it a little bit.
I haven’t needed it quite as much because we don’t do a lot of ads and I feel like a lot of their graphics have been more ad oriented. We’re more publicity people, so it hasn’t really come up as much, but we have it. We, we haven’t used it quite as much, but I think it’s great. It’s fabulous. I love the fact that you can do the three jackets that helps a lot.
So it makes it a lot easier. Cause I think it’s hard to do the 3-D without having a big, program that you can use.
Crystal Hunt: And I think you mentioned Promo Republic, which I bought as well off of AppSumo. So I’m going to give a shout out for anybody who’s watching that it doesn’t necessarily matter which tool you have, it matters that you have a tool that works for you.
It’s affordable. In the show notes, there’s going to be a link to AppSumo. Social Bee is another one that I bought off AppSumo that’s a social media, a management tool. There’s a bunch that do similar things and they’re similar for video as well. So check the show notes. You can click through and go cruising on there, be warned, it is a tool buyers dream, and also nightmare at the same time, because I will want to buy everything.
But if you have a list for yourself of which tools you think you’re going to help you with the next stage of things, then that will get you started. And I want to talk more about your Pub-Site tool because authors struggle so much with professional looking websites.
And I remember the first time I got a quote for a website and this is 15 years ago and the guy quoted me $10,000 for an author website. And I had two children’s books at the time. And I was like, okay, I guess I’m learning to be a web designer because I can’t afford that. So I know that you have a better solution and I would love for our listeners to also know about that.
Fauzia Burke: Yes, I would love to tell you about it. So we’ve been doing websites for 20 years. In fact, I think my company was the first company to do an author website. We did a website for Sue Grafton in ’97, which I think literally was the first author website. The New York Times covered it as like things authors are doing now. Whoa!
So it was, it’s been with, I had a long journey with author websites and we’ve done websites with big time authors and first time authors and all of that. And we’ve used WordPress we’ve used, other tools, we’ve used lots of different ways to build websites. And then what we realized is that, when Squarespace and Wix and Weebly came on the market, which is about 10 years ago now, we thought, okay, this is great because this will help.
This is not a primary business for us. It was never a primary business. We did it to help authors to help our clients. So we thought, okay, great these tools are going to solve all these problems. Done. As you’re laughing, I think you know they did not solve all the problems. And the thing is a lot of these tools are phenomenal, they are amazing, and they’re, really a feat of engineering. They’re so good. However, we have a small little window of people we serve. They’re authors, that’s it. It’s not event planners. It’s not photographers. It’s not restaurants. It’s authors. And the things that authors need on their website are so specific that none of the other platforms have any reason to build that.
But authors really need it. So what happens is, and I think you’ve probably seen this, a lot of the platforms, the themes that authors are now using for their websites from those platforms are very graphic oriented. Huge, big graphics. In my opinion, they’re just stock photos, so they don’t have any kind of appeal for me.
I had one author and she was working on a website and it was a novel, basically based in the American South. And it was a very interesting story. I went to her website and she had a graphic on top that was Chinese lanterns that were swaying, cause it was a graphic that was moving. And I asked her, I said why?
And she said, Oh, it’s so pretty. And I said yes, but it has nothing to do with your book, plus not only does it have nothing to do with your book it’s now downloading really slowly. It’s a nightmare on your phone, what is happening here? So some of those things just bugged me that the things that worked really well for a restaurant, like having a big image of what the restaurant looks like would be really appealing to someone going to eat, or food pictures, food porn, or something like that.
But how is that helping authors? We’re word people. So a lot of those website teams are so graphic oriented with very little text, like literally 10 words about something, very little text and we’re all texts people, who read books, they want to read long bio. They want to read an excerpt.
They want, they need content. So we’ve realized that those platforms are not really serving the needs of our authors, or we’re really frustrated by it. There was spending a lot of times with dragging and dropping, which would make the page alignment off. And then they were trying to figure out how to spending a lot of time on it for no reason.
So we created actually a platform from scratch called Pub-Site, it’s pub hyphen site.com. It’s just for authors. It’s just for books. It’s made actually with a very robust database in the backend. So you can scale from one book to a hundred books without ever changing the platform, changing the design, it all kind of scales and grows with you.
So you can add things to the site as you grow into it. If you have a book tour, there’s a book tour tool. You can take it off when you don’t need it. When it’s over, put it in when you need it, add the blog, take the blog off. It makes life really easy for authors to change how they want to express themselves.
The themes are all because everything is in a database, it’s very easy to switch themes. So you can actually change the themes, change the colors. You can actually change it almost as you were your Facebook cover image. It’s that simple. So just having a lot of flexibility with it, makes it much easier.
And it’s very fast. That was a big thing for me. It’s a lot of the Weebly, Squarespace, Wix websites tend to be very, programming heavy. So they just hang. And I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but sometimes you can get to a website and just hangs there. It’s trying to download all of that software program behind the scenes plus the visuals.
So it just hangs on. People don’t have a lot of time. So I tell authors, I want a simple website where you can get in, get to a bookseller as quickly as possible. So you’re not having to figure out how to buy a book. That’s the purpose of your website, make sure that there is a bio that they can read.
There’s a sign up for a mailing list and they can follow you on social media. Like that needs to happen almost immediately. Where are you social media links? Like, where are they in terms of your website yet? So all the way on the bottom, that’s the themes, but that’s not what we want. You want the to be uptown, cause that’s a crucial part of building your platform, but you have to literally go through these teams that, there’s a big image and then there’s a little bit of description that there’s these three blog posts, and then there’s like your services. And then all the way at the bottom is sign up for your mailing list and your social media, which from a marketing perspective, I’m like, are you going to get everyone all the way to the bottom?
So things simple, things like that, just making sure that the website platform is really easy to use. And then we’ve created a kind of a workflow. So if you just fill in the blanks, if you go from tab to tab and fill in the blanks, you get a website, so you don’t have to worry, but what goes on?
What page? How, what should be on my website? How do I do this? It’s literally fill out the forms and you get a website. So it’s really easy to use for authors. I think it’s very empowering for them because not everybody’s a graphic genius. So a lot of the graphical websites are really hard, intimidating for them to use.
This is a very straightforward website. You can add graphics if you want, but it really is about your book jacket, showcase your book jackets. And we got lucky because we launched it two years ago and we already have people like Tom Clancy and Robin Cook and Reader’s Digest Trade Publishing, the publishing company has used … is using our platform because it’s so scalable because it’s so easy to enter 10 more books without having to create 10 more pages on your website. So for that reason, I think for people who have, career ahead of them, it’s a good platform to use. It’s not for everyone.
I always tell people it’s one of the options. Just there’s so many different options out there, but we like it.
Crystal Hunt: And I think it is really important, like there are different kinds of people and yes. I find it totally fascinating to spend hours digging in code in the backend of a website, but that’s not most authors preference.
And so if you just want to get it done and check that box and have it looking polished and not be trying to learn how to be a graphic designer on a web designer and all of these other things at the same time, then it’s perfect to find a solution that is scalable and will take care of everything for you, then I think that is absolutely fantastic. And I think the key thing is that when you go and you find all these other solutions that are made for small businesses, most small business works the opposite way that authors do. All they want is to sell you the first thing, because then then they build a relationship from there and we’re the other way around.
You’re trying to sell them on a relationship and you’ve got books that are going to come out over a period pf potentially decades. And so one person with a real relationship to you is a completely different ball game from a lifetime purchasing perspective. You’re not just depending on that product to convert them although you do have to write a good enough book to keep them coming back for more. But it is, I think why a lot of the standard templates and things that are out there really don’t, they’re not made for authors. And so that’s, what’s always cool is when stuff is created from a place of somebody who’s inside the industry, then I think any tool you get that’s built from the inside out is always going to be giving you exponential returns on your value. So that is fantastic.
Fauzia Burke: Yeah. I think one of the things you said, that’s really important is that, small business or restaurant or whatever is selling that one thing, right? We’re selling maybe 10 books, maybe like yourself, many books in many genres, you selling a lot of different things.
So it’s not easy to … it’s just, if you have a lot of product, so you’ve got to make sure that you can, organize them in a way that people can get to them, that they know what’s available, how much, how different each one is there. You’re really having to pitch differently because you have more things.
The other thing would Pub-Site side that we built in is that you can add bookseller links of course you can in any platform, but on our platform, you can actually have bookseller links from around the world. So the platform is for English speaking countries. So there are links for Australian booksellers and,Canadian booksellers and UK booksellers, and obviously US sellers, lots of options that you just put in the link to the page and the button appears exactly where it’s supposed to be, you don’t have to drag and drop it. It just, just appears and then even for the follow buttons, of course we have social media follow buttons, like all of the platform, but we also have follow buttons for BookBub Goodreads, Amazon. So those things are so specific to our industry that who would think to have that?
So I think that’s really important and it’s not a one page site. This is not a landing page. This is a full on robust website where you can have a photo gallery, you can have a blog, you can have your, all sorts. It’s a very robust site and people are using it in ways that’s really fun and you can actually also do e-commerce on it, that’s built in as well. So some of my clients have been selling cards that kind of match the book, or some illustrators have been doing bookmarks and things like that. So pins, some people are selling. So it’s just fun to see people using it as a real business tool.
Crystal Hunt: And I think now as the bookstore opportunities to do in person signings and things like that are not available at the moment that is extra important. If you have somewhere that your readers can buy a signed copy, that you can send them, that’s not hard on the bottom line and it’s also really nice to be able to offer a personalized connection that way.
Fauzia Burke: That’s exactly right.
Crystal Hunt: Especially for wide authors who are looking to just be in as many places as you possibly can. You’ve ignored the exclusivity option for a reason, and which means take advantage of everything that’s out there, basically. And I know Fauzia has also created a fantastic resources page on her website because I was doing a little digging around for my own before today.
And so we will put the link in the show notes, but you should definitely check that out. I saw some branding guides and some workbooks and some tip sheets and all kinds of stuff to help you through this process and making yourself a plan and figuring out how to roll this out. Not to mention all the blog articles, and there was quite a wealth of those.
Fauzia Burke: Yes. And nothing is you have to sign up to get them just, they’re all available. You don’t have to sign up for my mailing list if you don’t want to. But, I just always find those kinds of things more cheesy than anything else. So everything is available, everything is, and then it’s useful. So I hope that people will take advantage of it.
Crystal Hunt: I think they will as long as you tell us the domain they should be going to.
Fauzia Burke: Yes that’s FauziaBurke.com, that’s F A U Z I A B U R K E. And they can get the information there and my website has done on Pub_site. So you can see what I’ve done on it.
Crystal Hunt: Perfect. And what are your favorite social media platforms? If people want to connect online with you, where should they be looking?
Fauzia Burke: I’m, I’m on everything obviously, but I really love Twitter because I was one of the, the early, I know people hate Twitter, but it’s still one of my favorite tools, one of my favorite platforms, I have Facebook, author page as well and Instagram, of course, but I think I probably communicate more and have more fun on Twitter. Everything is just FauziaBurke.com
Crystal Hunt: Excellent. All right. we know where to find you and I have no doubt that people will. We will also put all of that contact info in the show notes so people can follow up and, you can find all the goodies on there and take Pub-Site for a spin, maybe if you’re in the market for an author website.
Fauzia Burke: Yeah. It’s 14 day free trial.
Crystal Hunt: Oh, excellent. There you go. You can literally take it for a test run.
Fauzia Burke: Yes you literally can. Thank you Crystal.
Post interview discussion
Michele Amitrani: So we’re back, and I found what Fauzia said about marketing and building your own basically platform, that’s what she was hinting at, very interesting. Her point of view, when it comes to the formula that she speaks about in the first part of the interview, I found it to be very interesting and very refreshing Crystal.
Particularly she used a formula, which is composed by three parts, the design, the engagement and the visibility. I found that to be like a refreshing view of what I try to apply in my other business. And I know you do something similar for yours. And basically what she’s trying to say is with design plus engagement and plus visibility, equal marketing success.
And she did some times to explain each and every single one of these elements. She says, design is basically how we look online. So the website, our website, the mailing list, the social medias that we control, our author even our photographs. That is something that is, it’s something that makes visibility out there.
And then there is the engagement, which is for example, how often do we blog or, how often do we send the newsletter? And it’s also I think big part of our brand because there are people that, and I knew these people that send like a newsletter every week, other people every day and other people every month.
But if it’s okay with your public, with your audience, is fine, if it’s part of your brand. So this is engagement and also how often you post on social media. So this is another strategic kind of decision you will have to take as an authorpreneur. And then there is a visibility. I think like this, what we are doing now, Crystal is an example of visibility.
Podcasting can be an example of that. Advertising is another thing that she mentioned. But there are so many things and, I think one of the most important takeaway is that you should do what matters first. So do the important things before everything else. And what are these most important things? A website is king, mailing list is queen probably, and then we have social media and all the other use, even with social media Fauzia basically gives, first suggestion: don’t concentrate on too many the first time, maybe on one, two to try to understand them, try to see if they work with you, but basically the bottom line on what she’s trying to explain what her formula is. Again, design plus engagement plus visibility equal a marketing success.
It’s really something that depends on your moment in time in your author career and on who you are. I, Michele Amitrani, am at the different stage compared with Crystal, in different regards. But I think I can apply that formula as she can apply if she found that, useful in that moment in any single aspect of our career.
And I would really like to ask you Crystal you find that this formula can be applied in different cases, and also, what do you think of that marketing success? Because like she speaks about marketing success, but it’s a broader element, what do you think of that element? How is it important for all authors?
Crystal Hunt: I think play in a few different ways, but the formula itself is effectively what we’ve talked about I think a number of times where you’re going to build the pieces consistently with your brand and in a way that will connect with your readers. And then you’re going to figure out what channels those pieces are going to go on too. So you’re going to send them out and use them to connect with people. And then you’re going to try to raise the visibility, so increased number of newsletter, followers, and number of social media followers, and slowly amplify that message through additional channels with each new thing that you add into the mix.
But I think if we go all the way back in the podcast with our first guests, who was Lisa Palmer talking about not trying to boil the ocean, so not trying to do everything. And if you haven’t listened to that episode yet now would be a good time to go back and just revisit the social media for authors conversation that we had, I think there was a lot of really interesting things in that one.
And it is, I think really important as we are reconfiguring our business plans and retargeting, we’re both making a switch to going wide in the near future here. And that means cultivating a different pool of readers in a slightly different way. And I think updating and changing some of our messaging just to make sure that we are totally maximizing everything about how we’re reaching out and also going wide, it involves a lot more platforms that involves a lot more things to track and look after. So I think it’s really important that we only dedicate our time to the marketing things that we know, are re going to have an impact.
And also that we really focus on just the minimum, right? The 80/20 rule is that you’re going to get 80% of your results from the 20% of the things that you do. And if you can cut out the other 80% that are just costing you time, not really giving you a lot of return on that investment, you’ll have a lot more time for actually writing your books and for the part of marketing and things that is that amplification.
Finding podcasts to go be on, finding other authors to do newsletter swaps with, being part of a box set whatever that is how you’re going to reach additional readers, learning how to run your ads, platforms properly. All of those things are going to take a lot of time. So I think really that focusing in on just one or two things is the key message out of all of that. And then of course, consistency and authenticity across your brand and across all the ways that you’re connecting with your readers are always going to be key elements of any successful marketing plan and I think none of it happens overnight.
It all takes time to build. And it’s really important to remember that you’re in this for the long haul. It really is just gathering one or two fans at a time. You’re always working towards those thousand true fans, right?
Michele Amitrani: Yeah. I think like the concept that you explain about time, timing, that’s something that, she also spoke a lot in the interview and there’s actually something that she says about time, which made me pause, and, she’s been working with a lot of authors. So she’s been doing this for a very long time. She was relating when, I think the story was in ’96 or ’97 when the internet was really coming along and they were like, she was like, I can see that there is potential in this, even for the book world, but the people that work in the industry, some of them were like: no, it’s not gonna last. Well, guess what? It’s 2020 it’s lasting. It’s not going anywhere. So it changed the book publishing and the business, but it was nice that she went through that. And now she has a business based on that. She’s helping a lot of authors. So one of the things she underlines is that, the time. It’s huge. So what I mean about time is that she said it takes one year to 18 months to really see the impact on what you’re doing as an author, consistently.
So that doesn’t mean that you publish one book every two years and that after 18 months you see a result, you have to be consistent in what you’re doing. And we spoke about the concept more than once Crystal in podcasts about consistency, getting to understand what’s working, using an elemental, like the 80/20 rule, the Pareto approach.
You’re basically building trust. That’s what she’s saying. And that requires time. She said again, How long did it take to build trust with your friend? Or your best friend? You’re building that kind of stuff, especially, I would say, I would venture if you’re writing fiction, because that’s even as slower burner that non-fiction, she spoke a bit about that.
The difference between the two approaches. I think it’s super, iper, extra important consider that the patience going on the long game, really taking your time to understand what’s the strategy that is best for you. What you can do with the resources that you have, time and energy and money. I will never think that I can write three epic fantasy per year because I don’t have the time and I don’t have the skills.
But I can definitely write a novella every two to three months. I can do that. So I think that’s important, Crystal. And that’s why I brought up that point. It’s because time is of the essence. And you shouldn’t expect a result that is coming immediately again, Fauzia gives us the example of the lovely author she was following and that he, If I’m not mistaken was a gentleman and he was calling her and say, Hey, I’ve been my I’ve been working on my Twitter account for two weeks, but I don’t see any results in sales. And she was like, really? So we have to be very careful in considering what is timeframe, what is a long period for me, it’s like at least a year, you have to see and gather the data.
Or the data, before taking a decision. But I think this is something fundamentally important for us as authors to understand. You’re not going to see any result in two months or in three months, especially if you’re working, building your platform, or if you’re starting out. Me and Crystal probably are on the similar path on that point of view.
We are basically starting out Crystal. We are going wider. We are taking the plunge, if you will, we are risking, but I think before making an assumption or even before really understanding if our plan worked or not, we have to wait and be consistent for a while. The time we are waiting. And I would like to know what you think of this one year to 18 months, if you have a different timeframe, what do you think of what she said about this?
Crystal Hunt: I think that’s really accurate. And as I said in the interview, I think it actually even takes longer than that for a lot of people, partly because of a lack of consistency, when you’re first getting started with something, you’re just learning how to use a platform and you don’t really get how it works.
I think a year of something consistently once you’ve figured it out is a good testing period, but I think that if you are half-heartedly learning it in, blending it in with your other tasks and just figuring it out, you often need to add at least another six months on the front end of that, of you just learning how things work, because probably most of what you do in the first few months on a new platform is not very effective because you are just learning your way around and you should be lurking in bed and seeing how other people are using it successfully. and getting a sense of what might work in that specific space. A lot of people jump into it platform and just bring all the content they’ve made for somewhere else and just throw it out there on the new place form. And it’s really easy to tell when something is not made … if you take a Facebook post and you just throw it up on Twitter.
No, I’m shaking my head here. No, for the people who are on video, you can’t hear me doing that. It doesn’t work because you haven’t tailored things to be optimized for that particular platform. So that’s part of why that don’t try to do all the things is so important is because you won’t be doing it well. Yes, there are plugins and bots and programs that will blast the same thing out everywhere on every channel, but you don’t usually do yourself a lot of favors by doing that because people don’t ever truly engage because they know that’s what you’ve done. It doesn’t feel like it belongs on that channel.
So I think just really important to remember optimize everything. We always talk about optimizing things and being strategic with your keywords and the categories you choose and social media and connecting with your marketing is no different. You want to know your readers and really tailor everything you’re doing to the way that you connect with those people on that platform.
Speaking of connections. This is one of my favorite parts of the episode where we bust out the curious jar and we get to rifle around in it and find a question from the random ones that have been sent to us to answer. So Michele, tell me when to stop.
What is your favourite day in the week?
Michele Amitrani: You can stop now.
Crystal Hunt: There’s two: blue or orange? They’re attached.
Michele Amitrani: Blue. I just took the prompt one.
Crystal Hunt: Okay. Here we go: Interesting. What is your favourite day in the week?
Michele Amitrani: My answer to that is: is there any difference? Because I don’t know, is there any difference between those? I think Monday is my favorite day of the week. So if I feel like, okay, this week was a bit of a, I didn’t do a lot, I can start over. It’s basically the promise that the universe is giving to me. Okay. You messed up, you can do it again, retry and retry. So there are a number of movies that are basically rotating around the idea of the day start over. I actually found it as a possibility to learn if I did something not right in a week, I can start over on Monday and if I need something okay, I can double in the next week, so I’ll be even more excited. That’s my answer to the question of the favorite day of the week, which again, if I didn’t have my calendar, I wouldn’t be able to distinguish between one day and the other. Yeah. That’s part of the, also your answer. I want to know what to do with the week, Crystal.
Crystal Hunt: Currently it’s Sunday because Sunday is my book nothing day. And so the deal is I get to follow the energy and do whatever I want all day. And so often that actually does result in … I might be writing, I might be working on something for mapping, for my characters. I might be like watching a show and collecting information on whatever career I’m currently working on.
I do often end up working, in quotation marks here, but because I don’t have to, it’s not on the schedule it feels really different. And so I will do some other kinds of crafty stuff like collaging, some things and, Yeah. There’s whatever feels like fun. And so I really do love that. Just gentler pace and just floating through the day. So I’m working towards making most of my week more like Sundays actually. So I’m getting there, but for the moment that is the one that I’ve been able to protect like crazy. So it is my current favorite.
All right. We would love to hear your answer to the curious jar question.
So you can share that with us in the comments below wherever you are listening to or watching this episode. And we would also love if you want to send us any questions. So you can email ideas@strategicauthorpreneur.com and we will add your question to the curious jar.
Michele Amitrani: For show notes and links to resources that we mentioned in this episode, and for coupons and discounts, please@strategicauthorepreneur.com.
Also, if you’re thinking that you’re liking what you’re seeing or what you’re listening, please do review our podcast in any of the platform you’re listening it to, please. We are relatively new, not even a year old, so we do need your support on that regard. We really appreciate that.
Crystal Hunt: Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out on our next episode because we’ll be talking about plotting, pantsing and everything in between and locking down your creative process as we get prepped for NaNoWriMo, which is coming up in November. Until then we’ll see you next week and a happy writing.
Michele Amitrani: Bye. Thank you.