Matthew J. Holmes on Building a Sustainable Author Business (Even If You Write Slowly)

295 / Curious how authors can build thriving, sustainable careers—even without rapid releases or a huge backlist? 

Matthew J. Holmes shares how he transformed his wife’s books into a six-figure business, the realities of book advertising, and the mindful strategies indie authors need now.

• Turning a single slow-release series into a profitable business
• Simplicity vs. complexity in book marketing and ads
• Importance of advertising platform focus
• Common mistakes in author advertising strategies

💙 Become a supporter of the podcast https://wishidknownforwriters.com/support

• Access to backlist of exclusive supporter episodes
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• Shoutout on a future episode

⚡Links:

• https://www.matthewjholmes.com/
• https://www.matthewjholmes.com/courses
• Sara’s Mysteries in the Mail letters: https://sararosettbooks.com/products/mysteries-in-the-mail
• Jami’s workshop: https://www.jamialbright.com/authorworkshops
• Joanna Penn’s podcast about Author Nation Lessons Learned: https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2025/11/17/lessons-learned-from-author-nation-2025-with-joanna-penn/

Transcript

Sara 0:03

Welcome to the Wish I Know Move Podcast. I'm Sarah Rosette and I'm Jamie Albright.

Jami 0:08

And this week on the show we have Matthew J. Holmes. What I like about Matt is he's not afraid to say either what I did didn't work or it used to work, but it doesn't work anymore. Now we got to do something different. And I really like that about him.

Sara 0:25

Yeah, and he has a great story, like how he got into ads and how they run ads, how he runs ads for his wife and her books. So it's a really good interview. So that's coming up. And it was a very long, extensive conversation with Matt. And so what we've done is we've split it up so that part of it is a supporter chat. We ask Matt about trends, AI, and ads, and how that's affecting ads. Jimmy asked all her personal questions to Matt about ad stuff, and they had a good discussion. So that is in that is a supporter chat that will come out on the same day as this episode. So if you want to hear that, you can become a supporter. You can go to wish I'd known then.com/slash support and you can sign up there and get access to that episode as well as all of our other backlist supporter chats and exclusive episodes.

Jami 1:14

So what have you been doing? Well, I have been working on this book, and uh I it's taken me a few days to figure out what I was gonna do with all the with the developmental edits and the feedback I got. And so I've started that and that's going well. And then I am working on a branding workshop, which I'm gonna hold on December 14th at 2 p.m. That's a Saturday. So hopefully a lot of people can be there, but you'll get the replay if you don't, and you can find that link in the show notes. But it's jamiealbright.com backslash author workshops. Perfect. Yep.

Sara 1:54

Nice and anything else? Nope, that's it. Okay. How about you? I have launched the letters, so those are live. I'll put a link in the show notes in case anyone wants to go look. So I'm excited to get those out. And I segmented my list and sent the information to the first part of the list, had a really good response, and then now I'm working on getting the word out to everybody else. Right. So it'll probably be live till first week of December, I think, and then we'll see how it's going then. Reassess if I'm gonna keep it open longer or not.

Jami 2:27

You're also gonna send it to your Kickstarter list. Yes.

Sara 2:30

Yes, it will go to the Kickstarter list. That's right. So yeah, so that's it. And that is really taking like all my time. The other thing I wanted to mention real quick is Joanna Penn has a podcast out about author nation. So if you want more information on some of the topics that were covered there, she does she talks about some of the sessions, and then she has a really good section where she talks about how to evaluate author services. She's very good at this. And I would say go listen to it, get her tips if you're trying to figure out if you want to work with somebody or not. So I will have a link to that in the show notes too.

Jami 3:03

And for those for the three people who don't know what Joanna's podcast name is, what is it? It'll be on the Creative Pen podcast. Thank you. We're recording this the Friday before Thanksgiving. So the Friday in one week, I will leave to go to New York because my son is getting married on that Saturday. And it is about time. And but we're looking forward to it. We're we're excited. So if you're in the U.S. and you're celebrating Thanksgiving, we just hope that you have a wonderful Thanksgiving and we should get on with the interview.

Sara 3:41

Today we are really excited to have Matt Matthew J. Holmes, who we call Matt, here today. How are you, Matt?

SPEAKER_00 3:47

Very good. Thank you, Sarah and Jamie. Thank you so much for having me.

Jami 3:49

Uh, we're very pleased you're here. This is exciting. Me too. Thank you.

Sara 3:53

All right, let me read your bio and we'll get into the questions. Matthew J. Holmes has helped transform thousands of author careers into sustainable five and six-figure successes. When COVID-19 ended his video production business in 2020, Matt mastered book marketing to support his family, building his wife's books into a six-figure business. He is now on a mission to help authors develop an advertising and marketing strategy that allows them to reach more readers and build thriving businesses that allow them to live life on their own terms.

Jami 4:22

I love that. And I've I've heard you speak, and it's your story's just very sweet and moving, and I just I love it. So tell us how you got started working with writers.

SPEAKER_00 4:32

Sure. So as Sarah alluded to there, I did I've been I was running a video production company for many years. From I started at BBC working as a cameraman, the camera operator and director, and then I moved into running my own video production company, and that went well for about 10 years, and then COVID hit hit the UK, and suddenly the business completely dried up. And that business was supporting myself and my wife, and it happened two months before our first children were born, they were twin boys. Suddenly we were left with no income and no business, and we had these soon from a soon-to-be family of four, and we didn't know what to do. So it was a bit of it, well, a bit it was a very terrifying situation to be in. And Lori had been writing her books in the background. We done we tried self-publishing back in 2016, 2017, somewhere around there, and it completely flopped. So then we went the traditional publishing route and we got a traditional publishing deal, but then six months in that fell through. So we thought, what on earth do we do now? So nothing happened for a couple of years while Lori just kept writing because she enjoyed it. And then when COVID hit, and I suddenly had a lot of time on my hands because I had no clients, I couldn't go out and film, we were all stuck at home, and I had to figure something out for my family because I had no way to support them and no idea what to do. So we thought, well, we've got Lori's books sitting here, and I've got time on my hands. I've got two months before the twins land, so I may as well learn something new. So I just took Lori's books and we we had in the sort of early 2020, we'd been sort of planning on launching them. We weren't quite sure when or how or anything like that. So we'd had new covers done, we'd written new blurbs, so we've been tinkering but never really took it seriously. It was more of a hobby more than anything else. But suddenly we were forced to take something seriously. We were sort of stuck between a Brock and a hard place and had to figure something out quick. So I just dove into figuring out Facebook ads for advertising books. And to cut a long story short, we in we launched on April 19th, 2020, her book one. Book two was ready, so we launched that a week or so later. And then she'd written a companion novel to book two that was pretty much there, and we launched that a few months later. And then I think it took us about eight months to get to five figures. Sorry, four figures a month. Well, no, it took two months to get to four figures, sorry. So we got to just over a thousand in a couple of months, and then eight months we got to about five thousand. And then it was, I think it was about 17, 18 months later, we hit we had our first five figure month. And Lori is a very slow writer. She writes one book a year. So she's very slow. She can take a whole, you know, three or four whole writing session, which for her is about three or four hours, to do one paragraph. So she's very, very slow. And it's sort of this sort of what's the word? The the sort of stuff we've been reading about online was you can't make a living as an author if you don't publish lots of books a year. So that really we were scared because we thought all we'd read was you have to have lots of books. And Lori said, I cannot write that many books. I just can't do it. So we thought we'll give it a go, but we're not really sure how to how this is going to turn out. So it did work out, fortunately for us. And yeah, so she's done, she's done well with her books. But yeah, so that's how I sort of got into the world of self-publishing. And it was from Lori's success that Laurie started getting emails from other authors who were seeing her books on Amazon and asking how she was doing so well. And that's when she said, What's my husband doing it for me? So then she passed on details from these authors to me who said, Well, can you with my stuff? So that's sort of how I got started. I mean, it was just out of the blue, really, just by people asking me. And then I wrote a few guest posts for Kindlepreneur and some other ones. And that suddenly just sort of led to an influx of authors wanting to work with me one-on-one, doing coaching and consulting. And then after a while, I had I had people approach me, authors approach me saying, I can't afford your your rates for one-on-one. Have you ever thought about doing a course? So I can I can learn from you that way. And I thought, well, I've no, I've never thought about it. Um so I thought, okay, that's that's an idea. Okay. So and it sort of made sense because I thought, well, I can help a lot more people with a course than I can one-on-one. There's only so much time I can give. I'm only one person, I can't, I can't serve thousands of people one-on-one. It's just not possible. But a course is a way to do that, to help a lot of authors do that. So that's how the the courses I run began. And then I have a newsletter that goes out each week. So it all sort of it's all evolved, but um over time, as as businesses do. But that's sort of uh I try to keep that short. It's how it all sort of came about in the first place.

Sara 9:14

It's a fantastic story. Yeah, thank you. That's a great story. And it is very encouraging because you do hear a lot that you have to have, you know, a huge backlist or you have to be able to write really quickly. And you've shown that you don't have to have either one of those things. And I like the way your philosophy seems to be to tailor things to help people wherever what whatever sort of career or writing thing they want to do, like whatever path they want to take, right?

SPEAKER_00 9:43

Whatever stage they're at.

Sara 9:44

Well, do you have any aspirations to write yourself? You you do newsletters, you do blog posts, do you have any aspirations to write fiction or anything like that?

SPEAKER_00 9:52

Fiction, I wouldn't know how to start. No, I've written nonfiction books, but only on what I know about appetizing. But writing a story, I take my hats off to every single fiction author out there. I do not know how it to come up with those sort of worlds and characters and storylines, and it's way beyond me. I I I tried at school and failed miserably. So, since those experiences, I haven't even tried since. I'll stick to nonfiction, I think.

Jami 10:15

I there are days I agree with you. Yeah, I'll I'll do it then. What do you wish authors knew about your field, about running ads and getting into ads and things like that?

SPEAKER_00 10:25

Lots of things. I've learned a lot over the years and you know, we tried and failed a lot of things. But if I could, yeah, if I could go back to myself for 2020 and authors who are are getting into this field for the first time today, I'd say, well, there's a few things I'd say. The first one is it's not about complexity, it's about consistency. And you know, it getting complex with lots of different funnels, lots of different, you know, social media and different advertising platforms. And it can get very, very complex very, very quickly. And you can get you can really dive into the weeds of many different app platforms and become mediocre at lots of stuff, but not very good at one thing. And that has an impact on your results as a whole as well, because you're getting mediocre results from everything rather than really good results from one thing, and that all that and that overwhelms uh can overwhelm a lot of people. And being uh my wife Laurie, she's in a very fortunate position in that she doesn't have to think about marketing. I do all that for her. Whereas a lot of well, most authors out there, there's a few husband and wife teams out there, which is fantastic, but a lot of authors are have to do context switching between the world of writing writing their books, and then they've got to switch out to doing the marketing, the advertising, looking at data, and that sort of thing. So they're two very different sides of the brain. And you've got enough to do thinking about writing your book, let alone making your whole business very complex. So simplicity is one thing I would say you keep your business as simple as you possibly can. Don't try and make things more complicated than they need to be, because that will have a negative impact on your your business as a whole, but also from your enjoyment as well, yeah. Uh of running a part of the business, it can really have an impact on that and make you can almost dread getting up in the morning because you're just so overwhelmed with all the things you've got to do, and you you just want to write. Yeah. So I find also that time blocking is something I wish I'd done in the beginning. So yeah, and having like theme days during the week. So one day would be perhaps Facebook ads, for example, another day would be obviously you've got to get writing in each day as well. But from a from a business running perspective, one day might be Facebook ads, another day might be email marketing, you might have another day that's about learning, and you can sort of theme your days accordingly based on your goals. And based on goals, let's just talk about goals actually, having some sort of goal, having some sort of direction of where you want to go with your business is going to be a huge win for you because if you don't know where you're going, you don't know which way to turn the rudder. You know, in terms of if you're out in the sea, you don't know where you're going. So when you know where you're going, you know what you want to achieve, then you can take the steps backwards from that. You're thinking, okay, this month I need to get to this, I need to get this done, sorry. And then you can work that back a from from this month. Okay, I need to do this this week. Next week I need to do that. And suddenly things become a lot clearer, the path becomes a lot clearer from where you are, you where you want to go. I'm not saying you need to plan out where you're going to be in five years' time. That's probably too far out, really. But 12 months' time, where do you want to be? Two years. I won't go any more than two years out from where you want to be. And then you can plan the things that need to be in place in order to get there.

SPEAKER_02 13:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:32

And okay, so that's that's one thing. And then another thing is just speaking to advertising platforms and marketing, all advertising platforms or advertising platforms aren't created equal. So Facebook ads is very different to Amazon ads in terms of how you run them. Pub ads, again, is very different to how you run Facebook ads and Amazon ads. So they're all very different, they've all got their own nuances, which is why trying to learn all three at once or even two at once is a massive undertaking, as well as everything else you've got to do in your business and write, et cetera. And this is why I recommend to authors that you stick with one advertising platform for 90 days and go all in on that advertising platform. Because if you're trying to learn three, two or three at once, your things are going to start getting messed up in your head because you're getting things confused with between Facebook and Amazon or BookBub. Right. So if you can go all in on one and get really good at that, which can happen in three months, it really can happen if you if you dedicate yourself and commit yourself to one advertising platform and not get sidetracked with shiny object syndrome and think, oh, there's this new thing over here that authors are talking about. I must go and try that. The latest TikTok viral strategy or whatever it is. No, no, stay stay in your lane, if you like, for where you are at the moment, and that will pay you dividends moving forwards. Another thing that I struggled with, particularly in the beginning, was seeing the spend we're putting out, the money we were putting into Facebook ads as an expense. It took a while, but gradually I changed my mindset around that to no, this is an investment. It's an investment in data, it's an investment in our future. That's how I see advertising spend rather than an expense. On paper, yes, it is an expense. But the way you think about it and the way you decide to spend it, how much to spend, it's an investment. Um if you spend it right, you spend it smartly, it will pay you dividends moving forwards. And another thing is I know it it's it's been around the last sort of year or so a lot, which is AI. And AI is scaring a lot of authors, understandably. But the way I see it, from a business and marketing perspective, I'm not talking about the writing of the books. I don't condone that at all. But from a marketing, business running perspective, yeah, I find it an incredible assistant. I don't see it as a replacement.

SPEAKER_02 15:40

No.

SPEAKER_00 15:40

I see it as a way to help us see our books from different angles from an advertising perspective, looking at ways how we how can we present our books to readers in different ways than we may not have thought of on our own, or it'd take months for us to think of on our own. And if we can write our ads in different ways, use different emotional triggers, then we can appeal to lots of different readers who may not have come across our books in the first place if we hadn't written it a particular way. So I find it very useful for writing ad copy. It's not something I take verbatim from AI and put into a Facebook ad, nothing like that. But it's a starting point. It's because when I started running Facebook ads, I literally had a blank Google Doc. That was it. And that's daunting. When you've never written a word of ad copy before, having a blank page and a blinking cursive is very scary. So if you can have some sort of a starting point to know, okay, this is how I can potentially present my book, you've you've got the forming of a statue there, if you like, a stone statue. And your job as the author, as the advertiser, is to chip away at that statue and mold it into something that you are happy with, you're happy to put out into the world. And it AI helps us to to it helps us with the grunt work, if you like, the heavy lifting, so that you have more creativity and energy and enthusiasm when it comes to to the writing of your books, because your books are your products. Your books are everything, because no amount of advertising will sell a bad book. And you've see all traffic, all advertising is going to do is amplify what you already have. So if you're if you're amplifying a bad book, it's you're just amplifying bad stuff. We want to really use advertising to make the right people aware of our books, but we need to have a good product in place first before we do that. And then one thing that we've touched on already is that one book per year can outperform rapid release, potentially. I'm not saying always does, and it doesn't work for some authors, and that's fine, that's not the way some authors work. But if there's an author listening to this who is terrified, like we were, that we have to pump out so many books a year and thinking, how can earth can I sustain that for the next 20, 30 years, whatever long you want to be in this world, and that's putting you off even starting, don't let it, is what I would say. And build your business on your terms. Don't let society and all these other all these other sort of opinions out there form how you want to run your business.

unknown 18:04

Right.

SPEAKER_00 18:04

That's what I would say on that. So build it on your terms and build it how you want to. If you want to wake up in a year's time, how would you want to spend your perfect day? I'm not saying every day is going to be perfect, but you can at least build towards that. So you've got a much better chance of building business that that you love and you're enthusiastic about, you're excited about getting up for in the morning compared to the one that you're dread going into.

Sara 18:26

Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's like almost like writing in a genre you don't love because it's hot genre and you write in that genre, and then if your book's take off, then you're stuck writing that type of book, even though you maybe don't want to, we'll probably also need to consider do I want to keep up this pattern that I'm in for the next 10 years, or is that going to run me into the ground?

SPEAKER_00 18:46

Very much so. Yeah, absolutely.

Sara 18:48

And some people they they can't go slow, they want to go fast. And so for them, that's you know, that's great. But for other people, we have to think about it a little bit differently, I think.

SPEAKER_00 18:59

Yep, exactly. Because your business is there to serve you, you're not there to serve it. That's the way I see it.

Jami 19:04

And as someone who released slowly a book a year and was making four and five figures for the beginning, it's because of ads. Ads sustained my business. Now, I think things are different now because I haven't released a book in four years. Please don't say that too loud. But when I was, I knew if I put in this much money, I would get out this much money because I I focused on one thing. Facebook ads is what it was, and I knew how to run those Facebook ads. Again, things have changed in the last four years, but it was that is the reason. I wrote the best book I could.

SPEAKER_02 19:43

Yep.

Jami 19:44

Did all the other stuff that to set it up, but it was the ads that sustained those months in between when I had a release.

SPEAKER_00 19:52

Yes, exactly. Focus and consistency.

Jami 19:55

Yeah. And what's interesting is what overcomplicates me and my mind and my business may not overcomplicate someone else's mind and business. We all just have different levels. Well, I say we all have a different amount of brain cells, and mine are being eaten away every day by my grandchildren and general. And so, yeah, so it and that changes too. There are times when you you can handle more things, and there are other times you can't, and so you just have to peel things back and get down to kind of the basics of what you can handle and keeping writing the books as the focus because exactly that's right.

SPEAKER_00 20:36

Because we all go through different seasons of life as well. Absolutely, absolutely.

Sara 20:39

Well, is there anything you wish you wish you'd known about indie publishing specifically with working with authors?

SPEAKER_00 20:46

I mean, look, speaking to to people in my audience, authors in my audience, and a lot of this is what we felt as as well is that overwhelm is is massive, it's everywhere. So that a lot of people who I speak to, a lot of authors who I speak to, are they understand the information but don't know how to implement it. Understand what to do, but until they actually get into it, they don't really know how to do it. This is why even today, I still dedicate at least an hour a week to learning, learning something new. Even like five years down the line, I'm still learning is still I still learn something every single week because I I I have dedicated learning time each week. I still read books to learn new things. So learning is something that I I I wish I'd started in earnest a lot earlier, to be honest. And I also find yeah, life gets in the way, that's probably one of the biggest barriers as well. And more so than the technical skills and the money. It's more about managing our time more effectively, is a big thing. And I think a lot of authors nowadays, the ones I speak to, are are fed up with the sort of the complexity of how complex things have got. And that they want simplicity, complex strategies and and Lots and lots of data and oodles of data and spreadsheet, things like that. Yes, it can be useful, but it can also be way too overwhelming for many authors. And then something also I wish I'd known earlier is how rapidly the industry changes. Not just the publishing industry, but the advertising platforms. I didn't realize quite how fast things evolve, readers' taste change. What the messaging you use in an ad that worked six months ago just completely flops today. The styles of images that worked a year ago don't work today. And things change so so quick, which is why I like to test quite regularly now. Yeah, almost every week, sometimes every other week. But most I'm most weeks I'm testing something new because things are just changing so quickly.

Jami 22:47

Yeah, yeah, they are. It is a rapid change. And actually, I saw you speak at Inchers two years ago, I think. And something had changed with Facebook ads just a six weeks or so before you gave your talk, and you had to change everything in your talk. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, big changes. Well, what do you see authors doing that they do because they think they have to, but they're not producing results?

SPEAKER_00 23:14

One of them is what we talked about the rapid release pressure, if you like. That's one thing. I think another thing is it's is following marketing trends and shiny optic syndrome and getting a lot of FOMO and things like that. I've been guilty of that myself very much. When things aren't, if we have like a bad few weeks of Facebook catalogs, for example, I've been known to jump and go in, oh, let's go and explore Pinterest ads, let's go and explore X ads. You know, I've done it, I've been there myself. Actually, you know, what I should have done, no, let's continue down the lane we were. This is just a this is just a blip. We've got to get through it, we've got to keep pushing through it, rather than keep jumping ship and keep changing strategies.

SPEAKER_02 23:52

Right.

SPEAKER_00 23:53

Um, another thing, if we were speaking about ads specifically, boosted posts over uh proper ad, you know, proper ads, if you like. Um posts are quick, they're easy. It's a great way to to get or to spend money with was a great way to do it without much return for it. I in I've I've done it, we did it in we did it in the beginning when pre-2020 when we were messing around with lawyers books and we did, oh yeah, boosted posts, that's quick, that's easy, it's 10 pounds. What you can do, and it has like zero impact. So instead of that that 10 pounds, that 20 pound, whatever you're gonna spend on a on a boosted post, save that for a proper Facebook ad and it just invest the time in learning how to run a proper Facebook ad, the the the traditional way if you like. And I think another thing is jumping ship too quickly, jumping sort of strategy to strategy, not following through on one thing. If it doesn't work within two weeks, think, oh no, that's not working, let's go and try something else. Where in that actual fact, it could take three months, it could take a few thousand dollars before you figure something out in an advertising platform. It can it can take that much. If you spend $200 and well, nothing's worked, well, that's not really enough data to make a decision that our entire platform doesn't work. So I think we need to stick to things longer and stop jumping ships so quickly. Another thing is social media. And I'm not against social media, I just don't use it myself. But a lot of authors feel that they need to do it in order to see success. And it can work, don't get me wrong, it can work, and some authors see great results from it. But if you're not social media inclined, so to speak, you're not particularly excited about writing posts on multiple platforms or even one platform every day, you don't don't feel you have to do it. My wife, Lori, she hasn't written a post on Facebook since 2022, I don't think it was, and even then it was sporadic. And you don't need to do it, you really don't need to do it. And the way I see it is we have two forms of currency. We can invest time or we can invest money. And we can always make more money. We can never make more time. And I want to spend the time doing the things I enjoy doing, and also with in terms of the money you put into advertising, there's a much better chance you'll get some, hopefully all and more back from that. Whereas a social media post, it may have a lifespan of a day or two and then it's gone, pretty much. Whereas an ad can run for weeks, months, even over a year sometimes, some ads, and you can get a lot more from that. You can gather a lot more data as well to understand what your audience likes and what it doesn't like by spending you know $100, $50 on an ad, and you think, well, they don't like that. Okay, I won't do that again. If you do have use social media, that's fantastic. What you can do is you can look at the social media posts that have worked well for you, and then you can turn those into ads and run out, run, put money behind those good performing social media posts. If social media is part of your strategy, you enjoy doing it, you enjoy engaging with your readers, etc., great. But don't just let it sit there on your feed and do nothing with it. It's worth spending a couple of hours going through the stats of your posts, if it particularly on Facebook. And if even if you're on Instagram, you could you could turn that into a post potentially or recreate it as a Facebook ad, something like that. You could look at the images that have worked well in your social media posts, whether whatever platform that's on, and turn it into a Facebook ad or a book bub ad or anything like that. But what I'm saying is those are assets there that you have that could potentially be turned into ads that you could then put money behind to drive sales. I'm not saying everyone's going to turn into a winner, but you've got some data there. You you if you see that a social media post has got significantly more engagement than any of the others or than a lot of others, if there's a big spike, then that's telling you something that this is something potentially your readers like. Obviously, it's as long as it's not some sort of clickbaity thing, and that's why it's got lots of attention and things like that. But all things being equal, then that could potentially be a good you could turn that into a post.

Jami 27:44

Right.

SPEAKER_00 27:45

It's really playing to your strengths, I suppose, is what I say here. And knowing what you what you what you enjoy doing and what you don't enjoy doing, and things that you feel you have to do don't necessarily have to be done. Or at the very least, they don't have to be done by you. That's another thing. So when you get to a stage in your business that you can afford to outsource some work, then you could potentially do that as well. That's another option, but it's not something you have to do. So again, it all comes back to building your business on your terms. Yeah.

Jami 28:13

Yeah, social media weird, like TikTok in particular. I mean, I enjoy TikTok just as a user, and I mostly am a user. They're the dealer, I'm the user. But I do post a lot, and but what I find frustrating is I see a lot of authors on there just giving it their all and nothing is happening. And frankly, for me either. I mean, if I get a thousand views on a post and a little interaction, I'm like, whoo, that was a good post. I mean, I don't get big numbers, but I see people getting really frustrating and putting tons of effort in it. And the fact is that social media is such a roulette wheel that you cannot, there is no predicting. There is there are people teaching classes about strategies and things like that. And sure, if you want to take them, but there is no guarantee that what worked for them will work for you, and because social media is so fickled and we don't have any control over it. The same probably could be said about ads, but for me, yeah, yeah. For me, ads feels like I have a they feel like I have a little more control because I can target some people, but yeah, I it's just hard. And like I saw somebody yesterday and she she made a post. It was kind of a funny post, but it was like when you see somebody hit number one bestseller and they said they did no advertising, and and it was like womp kind of thing. And I was like, I I went in and said, they are lying. If they tell you they've hit number one and they this book is taken off with nothing, they are lying. This is not a market that can support that. And if they're on if they're on TikTok and have a lot of engagement, that's marketing. It may not have really adds, but that's marketing. And so they have, and she was like, Do you really think so? I'm like, Yes, I've seen millions of you know, tons of authors over the last five years on this podcast. I know not one of them that was successful has come on here and said, Wait, I just didn't do anything, I just put it up. Not one, one that's not it's not possible, and it's certainly not possible today.

SPEAKER_00 30:24

It's not even possible back in 2010, 2013.

Jami 30:27

Maybe 2010.

SPEAKER_00 30:28

Maybe it's definitely a long shot.

Sara 30:32

Yeah. But I was thinking of when you were talking about falling through and staying the course and keeping going, I thought it's almost like the stock market. Like if you buy a stock and it goes down and then you sell it immediately, if you just hold it maybe another month or two, you'll be okay. Or it it may go up, you know, you have no guarantees. Kind of the same thing. Like if you're if you're spending money on ads and it doesn't seem to be going well, if you have in your mind, okay, I'm going to do it for this time period, then it's easier to watch the dips, you know, and just keep going. Right.

SPEAKER_00 31:05

Yeah, that's right. And if you can say, right, for the next 90 days, I'm I'm committed to a thousand dollars or whatever that figure is. You say, right, that's what I want to spend, that's maximum I'm going with. That's the much as most I can afford to lose, and we'll see how we get. And at least you've got rather than as like an open checkbook, yeah, yeah. A money pick, yeah. At least you've got some sort of budget in mind to work with. And that definitely helps with the mindset as well.

Sara 31:27

Yeah. Well, have you noticed any similarities in writers who've been successful doing this over the long haul? Because you work with a lot of different authors from different genres.

SPEAKER_00 31:37

Yeah. So I think the biggest one I see is it's a shift I see, like an almost like an identity shift as I I see in authors where they start treating their books as a business, not a hobby, which is how how how we were really. We started just playing around with it, and suddenly we were okay, we're in a unique position where we were forced to start thinking of it as a business rather than a hobby. But that's that that's the shift that I see it in in clients I work with when they suddenly go from thinking that this is just a pastime thing, really. And we'll see what we'll see, we'll put some books out, then see what happens, into no, no, no, no, I'm committed to this, right? Tell me what I need to do, and I will do it. And that's probably the one of the big things I see in in the successful authors that I work with. And then another one is is what we've covered, really, is that really focusing on one app platform first before layering on another one, and also it's not getting so attached to particular ads. So it's about making decisions based on data and not based on emotion. That's one of the big things.

Jami 32:42

So, because you can think, oh, this ad is all right, just stop right there, Matt. No, I'm kidding. Thank you all for joining us. Matt has the lead now.

SPEAKER_00 32:50

No, go ahead. I'm sorry. No, no, no. Yep. Yeah. So that's probably one of the biggest things is from an advertising perspective, is seeing seeing first of all, seeing ads as an investment, as we covered earlier, but from an actual individual ad point, you can think, well, this ad is so good, why is it not converting? Instead of just forcing money into it, follow the data. If it's not converting, it's not converting. So try something new. Yeah, don't force money into it just because you think it's my it might work one day. Like if it's not working, you know, within a couple of weeks, it's probably not gonna work ever. That particular ad. So just try something new. Um, don't sort of drag it out for the sake of it just because you think it might work one day.

Sara 33:28

Kill your darings, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:29

Yep, absolutely, yep. Very much. Yep, well said. So it was just another one was about a similar sort of vein to the ads, but in in in the books in a series. So you some series just don't work with advertising. Some books just don't work with advertising. So as much, and again, as much as you love them, sometimes they just or yeah, they they just won't share well with a particular audience with a particular advertising platform, but you still need to give it time. You still need to give it at least three months, I would say, before you declare that an advertising platform doesn't work for this series. And and also it's about building assets, not just books. So things like email lists is a big thing, building an audience there, building relationships with your readers and nurturing those relationships, and then also sustainable systems as well in your business. Because at the end of the day, this is this is a business that you're running. And if you can have several sort of systems in place so that a lot of it can be automated these days, particularly around the email side of things. Once you have systems in place for that, that can sort of look after itself almost. I'm not saying it's a set-in-forget, but you can update it and adjust it. And based on the data again that you see in terms of open rates and click-through rates, that sort of thing with emails, that can be adjusted, but you can have systems in place for various different aspects of your business. Another thing is thinking long-term. So thinking one, two, three, five, 10 years down the line. I'm not saying we've set goals for 10 years, but at least we've set it for one or two years, but we've got some sort of destination in place that definitely helps. And you when you say, Well, I'm gonna still be here in 10 years' time, so let's build a business that's still gonna be here in 10 years' time. And you can start by doing that today. And then also a lot another thing is is embracing simplicity over complexity, as we've covered before as well.

Jami 35:10

Yeah, that's great. You've mentioned some things, so I don't know if you have an answer for this, but what are some of the common mistakes you see around ads and mentality around ads and things like that?

SPEAKER_00 35:21

Okay. So one of the things is analysis paralysis, if you like, too much stuff going on in the business and not knowing where to start. So you sit down at your desk on a Monday morning and you think, well, I've got all these things to do. Where on earth do I start? And the way I get around that, because I've definitely been there, is on a Friday when I when I finish, or maybe a Sunday evening when the kids are in bed, then I'll just spend 10 or 15 minutes just planning out what I'm gonna do this week. And I just time block it in in the calendar. So I know what I'm doing, I know what calls I've got, I know what I'm doing with Laurie's ads. Okay, Facebook ads, we've got this to test this week. I want to increase the budgets from this campaign. And so you know I've got all that sort of mapped out. I know what I'm doing when I sit down, and it's all mapped out in the diary. It doesn't always work out because when you've got kids, things happen.

unknown 36:02

Right.

SPEAKER_00 36:03

But I've I've got I've got a bit of a plan for the week, and that really helps me get over the analysis paralysis effect, if you like. Another sort of mistake, I suppose I see, is is jumping ship, as we've covered previously, and saying, right, Facebook ads doesn't work. Okay, let's jump to BookBub. Oh, let's jump to Amazon because bookbup doesn't work. Or I'm trying this approach with Facebook ads this week, and then you see a video on YouTube that can have a completely different strategy, so you scrap everything and start that one. And you just sort of constantly switching and never giving anything time to really build up and get momentum, get traction, and collect some real statistically significant data and anything. And then if we're just speaking about advertising, uh, which is something I did in the beginning, I was so focused on which authors to target or which genres to target, and I never put any, I did put a bit, but not as much as I do now, thought into the ad creative itself, the actual ads that people are seeing on their newsfeed, because that's what's really gonna have an impact, much more so than the targeting itself. It's the actual content of the ad. So what's in the image, how are you displaying the image, what's the composition looking like, how are you writing the headlines, how are you writing the primary text, what are you structuring, what are you revealing in the primary text? How are you pitching, if you like, your book, what angles you are you going after in the primary text, what emotional triggers are you going after? So it's it's really neglecting the the creative side of things and focusing more on the sort of nuts and bolts of Facebook ads is is another thing. Another one is impatience with data and sort of making changes before campaigns have had enough data to be meaningful. And just on if we're sending traffic from Facebook ads to Amazon and we've got Amazon attribution, there's a horrible data like on Amazon attribution that horrible, yeah. Horrible that everyone's very frustrating. But and I know that Amazon attribution isn't 100% accurate, but the way I see it, it's much better than having zero data. So I I I do put quite a lot of reliance on the Amazon attribution data, it just takes time to come in. And if you're making decisions on ads before that data is fully populated, you could be killing off an ad that is potentially very, very good.

Jami 38:10

How long do you normally wait?

SPEAKER_00 38:12

How long do you normally wait? At least a week. At least a week minimum. Yeah. Any less than that is not really enough. There's exceptions to that. So what I find is if we're running a promotion or anything like that, then and we're spending a few hundred dollars a day on Facebook ads, for example, then I find the data comes in the next day. Not all of it, but you get enough data to see, okay, there was 90 sales on this ad, but only 20 on this one and 30 on that one. Then I can you can you can generally see that in within a day, I find. But then over the course of the promotion, then that data fills up even more. But even within a day, you've got more, you've got more data. So if you spend more and send more traffic to Amazon, I find the data comes in quicker. So whether that's something that's built into their system or not, I'm not sure. But it's just something something I've seen. But generally, for just ongoing evergreen ads, then at least a week. But if I'm starting ads on a on a Monday and I'm coming in the following Monday to look at the ads, then what I'll do is I'll I'll ignore the previous couple of days. So on a Monday, I'll ignore the Sunday and Saturday attribution data and just look at the Monday to Friday from the week before. So I'm looking at essentially five days worth of data rather than seven, because the data from Saturday and Sunday, the two days previously to the day I'm doing the actual tracking, won't have populated. I mean, even the Monday to Friday from the week before won't have fully populated, but we'll get a bit of an idea. And Amazon say that sales can take up to seven days to fully populate and page reads up to 14 days. So it can take time for it all to come in. And there's been plenty of cases where I've turned off an ad thinking, well, I've got a bit of data there and it's not, I've got five days worth of data, but it's not, but it's not great, so I'm gonna turn it off. And a few days later, loads more data comes into that ad that you turned off. Oh, I better turn that one back on then. Yeah, that's definitely happened. Yeah. So yeah, sometimes you can be a little bit too impatient with the data and make making changes before it's fully populated. And then yeah, the other one which I've gotten noted down here is is we've already covered is treating advertising as an expense rather than an investment. And it's understanding that you're buying data that will that once you've got that data, you can use it to improve the performance going forward. So that's investment rather than expense.

Sara 40:25

Yeah, I like that. You're buying data. Yeah, it feels like you're at least getting something for it instead of like just losing money, just throwing it out the window. You are getting a return on it.

SPEAKER_00 40:34

Exactly. At least you know what doesn't work as well as what does work.

Sara 40:37

So this has been great, and some great, very specific tips and some great mindset tips. So tell people where they can find out more about you and your courses and what you do online.

unknown 40:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 40:46

Sure, thank you. So, yeah, my my home online, if you like, is uh Matthewjhomes.com. And on there I have a newsletter that goes out every Saturday with tips and insights about marketing, author businesses, and advertising, things like that. Very good. And yeah, so that's that's where people can find me and find out about my courses and working with me one-on-one as well through there.

Sara 41:06

Perfect. Okay, thank you for being here. And we will have all those links in the show notes, and you can find those at wishheadnum for writers.com. And if you want to support the podcast, you can go to that same link slash support. We'll see everybody next week.

Jami 41:19

Bye.