Building Your Author Platform... the RIGHT way
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- Опубликовано: 8 июл 2024
- Your guide to building a real author platform - one which actually sells books.
❤️ [Subscribe] More videos coming soon: ruclips.net/user/davidgaughr...
🎁 [FREE BOOK] My weekly marketing newsletter for writers. Stalk me, and watch how my sign-ups work, the way I welcome readers, how I talk to them, what I say. You get a free copy of FOLLOWING as a sign-up bonus - my guide to building your author platform: davidgaughran.com/newsletter
🚀 [SALES] This video is about how to capture your existing readers onto your platform, but if you want a guide on how to sell books specifically, this is a monster resource: davidgaughran.com/how-to-sell...
And then some specific resources on the three main elements of a successful author platform:
🔧 [WEBSITE] How To Build Your Own Author HQ: davidgaughran.com/2019/02/21/...
📧 [EMAIL] The Power of Email Marketing: davidgaughran.com/2019/08/21/...
🐱👤 [NINJA TIPS] Becoming a Newsletter Ninja with this guide on Kindle: amzn.to/2zgXMrV
👍 [FACEBOOK] How To Make A Pretty Facebook Page: davidgaughran.com/2018/11/28/...
🚀 [CONTENT MARKETING] Top level guide to content marketing, the basic principles of which you can apply to whatever social network you decide to bolt on to this set-up: davidgaughran.com/2020/01/21/... 
Хобби
I'm seriously impressed that a fellow Paddy is taking the lead on the much-maligned subject of self-publishing. There's so much BS floating about this video is just a breath of fresh air. Bravo David.
*screams in potato*
You all probably dont care but does someone know of a trick to get back into an Instagram account??
I somehow forgot my password. I would love any tips you can offer me
@Gerald Tyler instablaster =)
@Gavin Blaze I really appreciate your reply. I got to the site thru google and Im in the hacking process now.
I see it takes a while so I will get back to you later when my account password hopefully is recovered.
@Gavin Blaze it worked and I now got access to my account again. I'm so happy!
Thanks so much, you saved my ass!
Learned more in 16 minutes than from a lot of 3-hour courses. I'm off now to put this superb advice into action.
Thanks Lee - I have a free book going into more detail on all of this which should be of interest: davidgaughran.com/books/following/
Great video to get authors focused on what REALLY works - no distractions, no fluff
3 Quality building blocks for a great platform. Thank you for the info.
My biggest issue is the email list. I am currently working on that. 200+ and growing
I'll definitely have a specific video on growing your list soon but if you want a book to read in the meantime, Newsletter Ninja by Tammi Labrecque is amazing.
Hello, David. I've peeked at you for years, but I'm finally full in reading your books, watching the vids, and visiting that fabulous resource called your website. Grateful for you and all that you share. And BTW, I'd fight you for that gorgeous white hair. Lovely. 🙂
Thank you for this, David! I had Twitter for 3 years and got some people to buy my book through marketing hardcore, but it was definitely not enough for me to keep it going into 2021.
David you just made my day! I've set up all 3 cornerstones and havent had time or energy to do much else. Thsnk you!
You see, this is the advantage of being a lazy git - you always want to optimize the process for the least effort
Hey David and community...has anyone ever sold a high-end offset-printed coffee table art/photo book online?...one that is NOT a digitally-printed Print-On-Demand book? ( CreateSpace, IngramSpark, etc. )
This is very useful! Thank you! 🙏🙂
Thank you for doing these videos. Love them!
Thank you!
What kind of content would you suggest posting on an FB page. I share updates about my writing progress, but would welcome any other ideas.
Hi Taylor - great question. If you check out the description above, the very last resource mentioned is a blog post about content marketing, which will give you a bunch of ideas, but I can tell you quickly too: just put your Reader hat on for this task, and think about the kind of content readers in your genre adore. SF readers might love spaceship schematics or Hubble pictures of Saturn or a video of Space X's latest launch or a review of Murderbot or Devs or Ad Astra. Thriller readers might like some true crime stories, or a recap of the latest episode of Serial, or a review of the new John Wick movie, and so on. It doesn't have to be about you or your books - in fact it's much better if most of the content is just about stuff in the genre you like which they should like too.
@@DavidGaughran Thank you. If you write multiple genres, I guess you could apply that advice across the board.I'll check out your link
The execution varies a lot between fiction and non-fiction, and then across different genres too. But the basic principles of content marketing etc. are pretty fundamental regardless of genre. Just try and view it from the reader's persepective, and share stuff that they will enjoy - and that you enjoy too as a fellow fan.
@@DavidGaughran Makes sense. I've got it down with my nonfic crowd, so its just a mater of translating to the fic crowd. Thank you!
Hey David, since Amazon likes to keep readers from seeing your back material, is it acceptable to place a newsletter CTA in the middle of the book. I’ve only seen it once-it was a Celia Kyle novel-but it seemed brilliant.
I remember reading some really really hammy pulp detective novel from the fifties where the hero got on a plane and spotted someone reading another book by the author and then went on a lengthy aside abou how this multi-million selling author was really turning out fine work these days and that his latest release was among his finest. He nearly got away with it too! But I don't advise this, it will jerk readers out of the narrative and ruin the story for some. I put an image about my reader magnet with a sign-up link just before Chapter 1 and right after the end, and then mention the sign-up a third time in the About the Author section. Amazon only does that annoying end-matter interruption thing some of the time anyway, so this seems to work for me.
Hi. New author here. My 1st book and all books that will follow are under a pen name. So then my FB page is under the pen name I'm assumimg?
A fine video, mr. Gaughran 😄 You mentioned that you do reviews of books. Is that something you can recommend?
Not necessarily reviews specifically. I recommend you spend some time to come up with a content plan for your Facebook Page (and your email list also). Put your reader hat on and take the time to think about the kind of content your target audience would enjoy, and share that, regularly. You don't want to be talking about yourself or your books the entire time - or even most of the time. Which is good because that's awkward for you anyway and a turn-off for them. More on that here: davidgaughran.com/2020/01/21/content-marketing-for-writers-authors-fiction-non-fiction/
David Gaughran thank you, I will definitely keep that in mind 🙂
When should someone start their platforms if they are in the early stages of writing their first book? I’ve just began the development process of my first book and I’m trying to learn everything I need to know to be successful but I feel like right now maybe isn’t the right time to develop my platform? Should I wait until my first book is done and published and build a following before I release it?
Right now, your focus should be on writing the best book you possibly can. Later on in the process you can start dipping your toe in some of the information around publishing and marketing but writing a good book is a hard enough challenge that requires most of your focus. When you are well underway, you can perhaps start looking at the Kindle Store and how it is broken down. Try and identify which sub-categories are a good fit for your work, taking note on how they are packaged - the covers, the titles, the style that the blurb is written in. This will give you a headstart when putting your own book packaging together. And then in the run up to publication, you can start on the basics of your author platform: #1 priority is setting up your mailing list, so you can have a sign-up link in the back of your book during launch week. A website and a Facebook Page would be good also, but the mailing list is the most important. You don't necessarily need to develop your author platform before you first publish, but you should have some basic infrastructure in place so you can capture reader interest from Day 1.
@@DavidGaughran thank you so much for the detailed response! It’s a relief to hear this because I really wasn’t sure what to do and the whole thing is really overwhelming. I will keep my book as the main focus for now!
Do you think that creating a Facebook team/"community" for your readers works fiction writers? I can't fathom what my readers would stay engaged with. Maybe if I were pumping out a few books a year?
Others will give you a different answer, I'm sure, but I'm not wild about Facebook Groups personally, and I think a lot of the things people do like about them are going to erode over time as Facebook (presumably) throttles the good organic reach they currently have. I much prefer putting the energy into my mailing list instead and I think that's much more valuable for authors too. I prefer using Facebook in a much less time intensive way and just post little bits of relevant content to my Page now and then and let it slowly collect readers for me. But always with the aim of moving them onto my list as that's something I own and can access whenever I like, without having to pay Facebook large sums of money.
@@DavidGaughran Totally agree about handing the power to a platform that wants you to pay to interact. Where you from in Ireland? I have family in Coleraine, NI.
@@christygill7334 Dublin. As Ronnie drew used to say: born, bred, and buttered!
@@DavidGaughran Did you make more money as a fiction writer or nonfiction writer? I feel like a lot of fiction writers are trying to peddle nonfiction because it's so hard to get fiction to sell well these days. And I wonder if I'm wasting my time just trying to sell fiction when the real success might be a hybrid fiction/nonfiction career.
@Christy Gill It changes dramatically depending on what I'm currently focused on 0 and I'm just after releasing several non-fiction books back-to-back so those sales are much higher right now. But I'm just switching back to fiction for a stretch so the pendulum will swing the other way. But if you want my advice, stick to fiction. Ceiling is much much higher in terms of what you can earn, and the books are far more evergreen - non-fiction requires updating regularly. Plus the marketing techniques needed to sell non-fiction (like content marketing) are WAY more time consuming. My plan is to slowly transition to spending eighty percent of my time on the fiction side of the business because that's the smarter long term play.
Something I don't quite fully understand. You suggest posting material on our fb page to gain likes/followers 'organically' but if the only people who can see those posts are already members, how do new people see me without 'Boosting' the page?!!
I go into this in a lot more detail in my free course (and my free book Following) but the short version is... in two ways:
1. You will be sending traffic to your Facebook Page from the back of your books and your site and your newsletter and so on. If you don't have content already there on your page which your readers will enjoy, you won't get so many following your Page. But if you have lots of interesting content there, the hit rate, if you like, on that traffic will improve greatly.
2. Social media is, well, social and you see the various things your friends are up to and so on, and you will pick up Likes/Follows now and then from friends of your Likes who see the content their friends are interacted with. Facebook will also help this along a little by suggesting your page to some people it thinks might enjoy the content.
Second one can be a slow burn until your page really starts to grow, and the first will depend on how successful you are in sending traffic to your Page (and the quality of the content posted), but you can help this process along by boosting some posts or otherwise turning them into ads - and, really, you can get a lot of visibility on a very small budget (like, really small) if the content and ads are well targeted.
If that last point in particular is of interest I show some examples on-screen in my free course for both my fiction and non-fiction readerships.
@@DavidGaughran great, thanks! I just couldn't understand, other than via links at the back of my books and posting the link to my page in other groups, how else people might see it. I wondered if there was some secret fb 'trick'! Thanks, again. I'll go through the course again and make some notes!
@@justinboote5815 Also keep in mind one of the key features of social media and Facebook particularly is that share button. If you post content fans love they will share it with others who might love it too - and you can get quite a few followers that way.
@@DavidGaughran what I was thinking, too. Excellent. I've only just set it up but have started making lists of what-to-post-and-share so I'll get on it! Thanks again!
What do you think about private groups? I'm in nonfiction and i have a page and a private group. Website links to page, book links to group is how I have it set up.
I know some authors absolutely love their Facebook Group but I've never been so keen to set one up. While they do benefit from some additional organic reach, I've always felt that was just "free/extra" reach which Facebook was doleing out to encourage people to try Groups and that would eventally be rolled back - and it looks like that move is imminent. My thinking was that this energy and reader engagement (and work on your side) was better channeled towards your list, and once the shoe drops on that I think a few people might regret not doing that. I know some authors now are scrambling to move all those superfans onto their list instead.
@@DavidGaughran Another benefit of using an Author Page vs creating a Group is that a Page can join and interact in a Group, and thus gain more followers.
Does it apply to all genres? I've had several conversations with another author swears up and down that having a mailing list kills the followers/readers in a specific genre. I disagreee but then I don't write in that genre.
Eh... what? Unless you are talking about writing for younger children - where marketing is a different ball game for obvious reasons - I can't think of one single genre or niche or category of book where it wouldn't be very useful to have a mailing list, and indeed where it would be your most powerful marketing tool, if used correctly. And I certainly don't understand how having one could be a negative in the manner this author suggests, unless you do everything backwards I guess. Can you explain where they were coming from? Because I honestly don't understand their position at all and it seems more than a little ridiculous to me.
@@DavidGaughran From what I understand (and again I do not write in the genre and only got the feedback from an author who spoke to another author) they found that their following and sales declined to nothing when the author(s) had a newsletter in that genre.
I'm going to assume that author had the best intentions and is just misguided (and doesn't know how to operate an email list). But I'm also going to be very frank here because this is so important: please don't listen to that author.
A mailing list is the most effective marketing tool available to almost any author (and the only exceptions I know of are children's authors because they are in the unusual position of having their readers be different to the actual book purchaser, and you can't sign up kids to your list, of course).
I am a very experienced marketer and I'm comfortable with advanced strategies and big budget campaigns. I've worked in digital advertising and online marketing for seventeen years. I used to work for one of the biggest tech companies in the world. And I still believe that your email list is much more important than any of that other stuff.
I don't want to insult that other author but I want to be absolutely clear on this point: don't listen to them, it's really terrible advice. Having a mailing list is the one marketing essential.
I've seen many videos that say mailing lists are useless with YA genre, that people under thirty 1) despise mailing lists, which may be why that author said you can sabotage yourself with one (I am one such "young person who quickly gets annoyed at mailing lists and unsubscribe within a month"), 2) are far less active on Facebook even though they may have an account to keep up with distant family, and 3) are more visual and so they prefer platforms like Instagram or RUclips videos. So while having a mailing list works for many genres, narrow down your focus to the social media where your target audience will be. You can also cross-platform, connect your Instagram to your Facebook and Twitter, which also posts onto your website. If you can make a single post that publishes onto all the social media platforms, life is easier and you have more time to write.