Damon Courtney on Building Loyal Readers through Personalizing your Author Brand

327 / How do you show you’re human and connect with readers in a digital age? Damon Courtney, creator and CEO of Book Funnel, discusses evolving tools for indie authors and strategies for building strong reader relationships. 

✨ This week’s sponsor is Bookfunnel: https://bookfunnel.com

• Prioritizing ideas for authors with too many stories
• Personalizing your author brand
• Luck versus fortune in self publishing
• Trends in author marketing: newsletters, crowdfunding, direct sales
• The importance of authenticity, connection, and finding the right marketing tools for each individual author

💙 Become a supporter of the podcast https://wishidknownforwriters.com/support or https://wishidknownthenpodcast.substack.com/subscribe

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

⚡Links:

• Sponsor: Bookfunnel https://bookfunnel.com
• Ep 310: I'm a Real Human, Not AI: 20 Ways Authors Can Signal Humanity and Build Reader Trust https://www.buzzsprout.com/admin/2121723/episodes/18871647-i-m-a-real-human-not-ai-20-ways-authors-can-signal-humanity-and-build-reader-trust

Transcript

Jami 0:00

For those listeners who don't know, how did BookFunnel him come to be?

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Yes, my my villain origin story.

Jami 0:08

Welcome to the Wish I Know Men podcast. I'm Sarah Rosette. And I'm Jamie Albright. And this week on the show we have Damon Courtney. Yes, one of our faves.

Sara 0:18

Yes, we have not, we see Damon a lot, but we haven't talked to him on the podcast a lot. We see him at events, so this was a good catch-up.

Jami 0:26

Yeah, it was. It was. And I think you guys are gonna really like it. He talks a lot about Book Funnels' new features and just things he sees authors doing in the community that they think they have to, but they it it's not really producing results or things utilizing the things we have already, like our newsletters to further our business and stuff like that.

Sara 0:51

Yeah. I think the theme of it was finding your small niche of readers that came up several times and how to do that, how to show that you're human, like we talked about before in our other podcast. But yeah, it was really good. It was good to talk to him. And we should say BookFunnel is the sponsor of the podcast, just worked out this week. So we will talk a little bit more about Book Funnel, I guess, before the interview. But what have you been doing this week?

Jami 1:20

Oh I started the new book. I wrote one chapter and then I had to think. So I don't like that because with the last book, I sat down and I wrote every day, five days a week. I wrote. And so I'm a little worried that I'm thinking too much. This one is multiple POV, and I've never written I've written two POVs, but I've never written multiple same-sex POVs. It's not a romance, but and I'm not sure I know how. I'm not sure I have the ability to do that, but I'll figure it out. So it's just and for me, I can't really go forward if I can't get the first part of the first few chapters right. With the book I just put out, I had written it, and then going forward wasn't really hard because I knew I knew that story. But when I went back to edit it, I spent probably two weeks just on the first few chapters just to make sure they were exactly what I wanted. I feel like I'm doing that now. I know I should just write on, or I could just write on, but I want to make sure I nail down some things.

Sara 2:35

Yeah. But the other book you had had a long time to think about.

Jami 2:38

Oh, yeah, I had thought about it for a long time. Yeah.

Sara 2:40

This one is when you haven't had as much lead time, right?

Jami 2:43

No, I knew the story I'd like to tell. It's a mother-daughter sort of thing, and I really want to explore those relationships and stuff. But I just yeah, I hadn't really thought about it as much. Nor have I well, I can't say I haven't lived it. I have a mother and I have daughters, so I guess I have lived some of it, but yeah. Yeah, it takes a while to get into it for me too.

Sara 3:06

Yeah.

Jami 3:07

And my audiobook was a it's now with ACX being approved, so hopefully week after next. I don't know. It says 10 days, but in our clubhouse room, several people have said it's been taking longer than that. So I'm I'm just kind of waiting to see what happens there. I am gonna put the book in KU, but I want to wait until the book the audio book comes out to do that. So well, I finished the draft for me.

Sara 3:37

That's my update. I'm so happy the draft is done. Yeah. So now the for me it's much less stressful to to edit it, but it does feel like a slog because you've got such a big piece of content to refine and figure out. So this is gonna be a while, but I do feel relieved to get that done. Yeah, so that is pretty much all I've been working on.

Jami 4:02

That's a good thing. That's a good thing to be working on.

Sara 4:04

Yeah, I'm gonna have to get back into my email and answer a few things. And there were a couple things that I was like, I like Damon today, he talks about newsletters, and I need to send out a newsletter, but I was like, I'm gonna focus on getting this draft done. So get back into doing some of that stuff.

Jami 4:19

We leave we leave on Sunday to go on vacation, so I don't really foresee working on the book. I might be able to in the mornings because we're going with my daughter and her family and her in-laws, but we have a separate little they call it a carriage house, but a place in the mornings, I could probably take an hour and work on the book. And I will try because I have learned with this book that I just put out, you can get a lot done in an hour if you really focus. Yeah, so that's where I'm at. I'm just trying to plug along and not panic if I feel like I'm stuck. That's always my big thing. If when I get stuck, I panic and I don't want to do that.

Sara 5:01

So okay. We don't have any new supporters this week, but thank you to all our continuing supporters. And thanks to BookFunnel for sponsoring the podcast this week's corporate sponsor. I think one of the most amazing things they have is human customer support, which we talked a little bit about that today in the interview because that's very much frustrating when you can't get a person.

Jami 5:26

Yeah. And in the world of AI, that's becoming harder and harder to do to is to get a person on the line to help you with your problem. And if you could figure it out yourself, you wouldn't be calling them. So you need some help. Yeah. So I think it's good.

Sara 5:42

Yeah, yeah. That's one of the things that they have done from the beginning. They've always had a person, a real human, answering email. And that is one of the things that does set them apart from not just author services, but just so many companies in the world. You just can't talk to a person anymore. Right. And it's just very frustrating. So yeah, and that is a huge relief for authors to know that we don't have to handle the some of the customer service things. A lot of those things, BookFunnel just takes care of for us. So it's just really good. So you can find them if you want more information about them at bookfunnel.com. And if you want to support the podcast, you can go to wish I known for writers.com slash support, and you'll get access to 20 plus subscriber episodes. Those are on your podcast app and on Substack if you subscribe over there. And yeah, that's I think we've covered it all for this week. Yeah, I think so too. So let's get on with the interview because it's great. Today we're really excited to have Damon Courtney here. Hi, Damon. How are you?

SPEAKER_00 6:44

Hey, it's great to be back after I guess it's been a while. It's been a hot minute.

Sara 6:50

Since 2020.

SPEAKER_00 6:51

So that's a long while in self-publishing time. That's an eternity, right?

Jami 6:55

Eternity, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:56

Dog years.

Jami 6:57

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

Sara 7:01

Yes, we are. We have seen you in between at conferences and events and things. So it's we we've kept up with you, but not actually on the podcast. So it's glad we're glad to have you back.

SPEAKER_00 7:10

Good. I'm glad to come back and talk a little bit more about BookFunnel and everything that we've had going on in the last six years.

Sara 7:18

So let me read your bio and then we'll jump into the questions. Yeah. Damon Courtney is the creator and CEO of BookFunnel, an ebook and audiobook delivery service for authors and publishers. As a lifelong software engineer, Damon is an expert in just about everything technical and can offer unique insight on publishing as it relates to software and technology. He is also a self-published author of his very own fantasy trilogy, which continues to spin stories in his head, but he hopes to someday get around to writing.

unknown 7:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:46

That is true. All of that is I wrote that bio probably six or eight years ago, and it's still true today. I do, I do keep so the hard part is, and I think that authors probably run into this if you are fortunate enough to have books that are successful, that are out there that people really love, or you have a series that you're working on that you're writing in that is that sells really well, and it's oh, I have this great idea for this new thing. And it's I could do that new thing, and it would be, I think it would be awesome, but it's a big chance. Will audiences find it? Will they like it? Will they want to do it? Or I could write the next book in this really successful series that I know is gonna sell and I know that people are gonna love, and I don't have to think too hard about that. And so I have a notebook, a note file that I keep all of these stories. I write fantasy, so dragons and wizards and all that sort of stuff. And I will say I get my I do get my fix. I'm a lifelong Dungeons and Dragons player. I am what is in the parlance, the forever dungeon master, meaning like the group that I play with, I am the dungeon master and have been for 35 years now. And so I still play with the same my my best friends from high school, and I am still the dungeon master of 35 years. So I get to spin stories and I get to because that's what the dungeon master does. It's really just an interactive storyteller. So I I get that little bit of the fix, but yes, I have all these stories in my head. I take all these notes. I don't know when I'll ever get to them because when I want to sit down and write a story, it's like I could do that, but there are these bugs over on book funnel, or there's this brand new feature that I really want to work on too. But it's not for some for a lot of authors, writing is their one like true passion. I can truthfully say I love writing code, like I love solving problems, I love creating things, I love putting things out into the world. And especially, like I said, I love putting things out there into the world that I know people are going to enjoy. And so I could write a new book series, I might be able to sell it, like I might be able to put it out there into the world and find new readers for it and everything. And we can talk about how to find readers and all the things that we as authors have to do. But I know if I go build some cool book funnel thing that tens of thousands of people are gonna get joy out of it and be able to use it.

Jami 9:54

Yeah, I think that's great. And it just depends on where you want to put your creative energy.

SPEAKER_00 10:00

Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, and and everybody has to make that so often at BookFunnel that we spend so many hours in a month talking about what are we gonna do next. So, especially as we launch some new feature or some new product, we put it out there and then it goes, okay, cool, great. That one's out there. We're doing the marketing churn and we're doing blog posts and we're signing up for podcasts and things like that. But what do we work on next? And I think that every author has the same thing. Sometimes there's a very clear path of oh, I wrote book two, so now book three is the obvious next book. Other times you've got multiple series going on, and it's which one am I gonna dedicate my time to? Where am I gonna put my focus? Because we every author I've ever met has the same problem that every software engineer has or every entrepreneur has, which is I have ideas, I have a list of ideas a mile long, and I have about this much, but I have about an inch of bandwidth that I can somehow fit all that into. So, how do I prioritize those ideas and actually work on the thing that is that I want to work on, but also the Venn diagram crosses over into things that readers and customers actually want.

Jami 11:09

Yeah, along that line, Damon, I guess, do we want to talk about how you got into yeah? Tell us how Book Funnel came to be. Tell us how for those of the for those listeners who don't know, how did BookFunnel him come to be?

SPEAKER_00 11:22

Yes, my my villain origin story. It started from I had saw I self-published a fantasy trilogy. This was many years ago, and this is where I was saying I haven't really got back to writing ever since, but I had published a fantasy trilogy. I had written a short story and wanted to just give it away for free. I was like, hey, join my newsletter and I'll give you this. Actually, I tried to write a short story and it ended up a novella because I'm a fantasy writer and you just can't shut up. And so I'd written this novella and I wanted to give it away, and that's really what everybody was advising at the time, all the biggest authors in the business. And so I was like, okay, that that sounds great, I'll do that. So I signed up for like all of their mailing lists because I had this sort of that's a good idea. How do you deliver it? How do they deliver it? And it turned out at the time they would just attach an EPUB and a Mobi file to an email and say, Good luck.

Sara 12:10

And you know, there's a lot of problems with that, right?

SPEAKER_00 12:13

Yeah, yeah. I'm a pretty techie guy, and so for me, it was fine, I could do that, but I really had this distinct thought that oh, I don't think my mother could do this, I don't think that she could actually get this book onto her Kindle. And so I set about making that process easier. How could I make that process easier? And once I started to build it and I was making it easier and figuring out all these things and doing it for myself, I thought, oh, I bet other authors would really find this useful too. And so I made it into BookFunnel. I thought it would be a fun little side business that people would that authors would enjoy using. And here we are, 10 years we passed 10 years last year. We're on year 11 as of October this year, and it's a whole lot bigger than I ever imagined that it could be. Um, but it really book funnel absolutely came out of the need that I had as an independent author. And since then, all the features that we've built in the 10 years that we've been here, every feature has been driven by our audience, right? The authors email us and they say, Hey, you know what would be really cool is if BookFunnel did this. And sometimes we go, No, that's the terrible idea. And other times we most of the time we go, Oh, that is a really good idea. Is that a space we want to be in? And if so, how could we build that the best that we could so that authors could be able to take it and run with it? Our goal is always to build tools so that the indies are out there. And when you have an idea and you're like, Oh, man, I had this great idea. We're gonna do this thing, and I'm gonna give away free books at a farmer's market every time I sell a watermelon and you go and you look, and it's a whole book funnel does that, right? The goal is that every time you guys come up with an idea, we're already there to meet you.

Sara 13:51

Yeah. I love how you categorize the way you think through things because I think that's what authors should do too. I love this idea. Is this a good idea? It is. Can I do it? Do I want to do it? Is it something I need to do? I think that's prioritization and thinking through things is something that we all need to do more of, probably, because it's a running with whatever's new.

SPEAKER_00 14:14

And even with an even as an author, I'll give you a great example. I had this fantastic idea. So again, I write fantasy, right? Like wizards and dragons, and that's it's I am a lifelong lover and reader of epic fantasy ever since I read The Hobbit in fifth grade, right? That's just that's that's a lot of fantasy readers, village and origin stories begins with Tolkien.

Jami 14:35

The Hobbit Hobbit.

SPEAKER_00 14:36

And I had this fantastic, but I but back in the day, I had this fantastic idea for an urban fantasy, such a great idea. I wrote down, I took notes and notes, I spent days writing up a whole trilogy, like plotting it out, and it really was a great idea. And then I sat down, I wrote one chapter, and I went, I'm not interested in this. I'm not your guy for writing urban fantasy. I just I even though I had a great idea, I didn't want to write it because I don't like I because it didn't have dragons and it didn't have knights on horseback, and it did like it didn't have the things that make me happy as an author. And so many times, especially in the very beginning, you guys know back in the Kboard days, and you'd always see you'd always see invariably it was some dude would come in and be like, romance is stupid, it's easy to write. I could totally write a romance and make millions of dollars. And then he'd go and write a romance and be like, Nobody's buying my romance. What's wrong? And so and smell insincerity, and your romance sucks because you're not a romance writer. So we all have to think about the ideas and really parse through the ideas and go, that's a good idea. Do I actually want to be in that business? Do I want to do that? Is and because you know, the thing that you the thing that I forgot about software, so I'd written my books, and at that point in time, I really was thinking, oh, I'm gonna make a go of this. I really want to be a writer. Then I had the idea for a book funnel, and that took off, and it was really hard to say no to that. And again, I do love what I do, but the thing that I forgot about software as opposed to books is when you write a book, you can be done. You're still marketing and you're advertising and you're doing more with that book, but you don't have you can if you want to, but generally you don't go back to that book and rewrite it over and over again. Software is never done, right? I like book funnel, I will never be like, and that's the final feature of book funnel. Good night, everybody. Thank you very much. No, I will be doing this forever.

Sara 16:27

And so you really on that on that topic, tell us some of the new things that you have done lately because you always are having new things come out. So tell us some of the new things BookFunnel has done.

SPEAKER_00 16:40

So the big the trend that we are seeing from our authors at BookFunnel, right? Any anytime I talk about data or I talk about trends, I'm speaking not from my personal experience as Damon Courtney. I am speaking from the tens of thousands of authors that are using BookFunnel every day. And we are, we pay attention to what they're doing. What are they out there doing in the world? What we're seeing from more and more authors is a very tailored approach to their readers. So rather than this mass shotgun approach, how do I get 50,000 readers to buy my book? It's how do I get 2,000 really loyal readers to back my Kickstarter andor my crowdfunding campaign? How do I get them to buy my special edition that's $80 and beautiful foiled edges and all of that sort of stuff? How do I get them to come to my store and buy from my website? How do I do all of these things? Right. And so in the last couple of years, especially as that trend has gotten bigger and bigger, again, authors email us and say, Hey, we would love it if BookFunnel did this. And then as a team, we look at all of those things that are incoming and try to say, where do we want to be and which features do we want to work on? So, newest features, like newest. Last month we launched four new sales platform integrations. So, if you're not aware, for those who aren't aware, BookFunnel does delivery of ebooks and audiobooks if you're selling direct from your website or from your subscription service or whatever, but we don't actually do the selling. We so you set your store up on Shopify or WooCommerce or PayHip or one of those others. We added four new platforms because more and more authors are moving into this, and everybody has a different opinion about what they want to use. Some people want to use Stripe. Okay, we integrated with Stripe. People were like, hey, we really use we like to use SAM card. Great, we created a SAM card integration. A lot of authors like to build their store, we'll build their website over on Wix. Great, we added a Wix integration. We want again, we want to be where you are when you get there. So when you decide that you're ready to set up a store and you generally go and do all that first, and then you think about how am I going to deliver this? And then you go to BookFunnels. Oh, great, book funnels already got an integration with the platform that I've chosen. So that was a big new feature. We announced last just last month, we announced an integration, a direct integration with Backer Kit. So the other thing that we see is authors, a big trend with authors is doing special editions, doing crowdfunding campaigns and things like that. And right now, the process is basically do your campaign, offer everybody the ebook, the audio book, the paperback, the hard the beautiful hardcover, the all the different formats, right? You do your campaign, everybody goes and backs your campaign, and then you copy and paste all those email addresses out of backer kit, and then you bring them over to BookFunnel and you drop them in, and then BookFunnel delivers them all. And it's not a difficult process, but anytime you have copy paste or what we call copy pasta, anytime you're doing copy pasta in software, there is a margin of error. Like somebody could paste the wrong thing, they grab the wrong email addresses and they paste those in. And then some now readers are going, Where's my book? And it's oh, it went to your old AOL.com email address somehow, right? So by integrating directly with BackerKit, BackerKit can simply send via an API, which is just a fancy a way computers talk to each other, way services talk to each other. They reach out to BookFunnel's API and say, Hey, here's this email address, and here's the book we want to deliver, go deliver it. And then BookFunnel just handles the delivery of all of it. That's a really neat thing. As authors are doing crowdfunding more and more. Now you can just hook up your ebooks, your audiobooks. If you were delivering six ebooks, like if you offered as part of your campaign a whole series, right? You don't have to worry about some of that stuff now. You can just go drop it in and boom, like BackerKit will reach out to BookFunnel, do the communication, and then everything just gets automatically delivered. They did that for their instant rewards, which I think is a cool thing that BackerKit does. And it basically is like, hey, if you back my campaign, the campaign and the special edition and all that groovy stuff, that won't deliver for six to nine months because I'm getting the book shipped from China and that, right? But if you back the campaign, you'll get the ebook immediately right now, as soon as you back the campaign. That's what BackerKit calls instant rewards. And that's really cool because readers are impatient for what we've seen from authors that sell like that sell like print books on their website, but then connect it to their ebook and basically offer it as a bundle. Then it's hey, you get this really special signed copy that I sell directly from my website, but the ebook will show up in your mailbox, your in your inbox, as soon as you complete the purchase. And so then, like, as long as I get to read the book, they're willing to wait for the special edition that's not gonna come in the mail for maybe a couple of weeks because we're all doing printing and nobody's as fast as Amazon. But there's a little bit more of that willingness to wait because well, like, hey, you're gonna get the ebook instantly. So those are just like just in the last month, some features that we've launched at BookFunnel.

Jami 21:40

I'm really excited to see that you guys integrated with Curios because I used Curios before before my last launch to get some books to my newsletter readers. So yeah, that was very great.

SPEAKER_00 21:52

Yeah, Curios is a really neat new platform, and like again, this is one of those where we want to meet authors where. They're at. And so Curios, a lot of authors were experimenting, were putting up books on putting up ebooks and audio books. And of course, now they're working on a book fault integration to integrate paperbacks as well. They were already doing the sales part. And then, but those authors wanted the book funnel delivery part. So we got with the people over at Curios, we worked hand in hand with them to create that integration so that it was instant. The minute you complete your purchase on Curios, if the products that they've bought are connected to BookFunnel, they instantly show up in their book funnel library. So the beautiful thing about that is that if they already have the book funnel app installed, which millions of readers already do, I pulled a refresh, bam, everything I just bought is instantly in my app and I can just tap and start reading. So it's it's as close as you can get to an Amazon experience without giving Amazon all the money. But for as far as readers are concerned, boom, the books just magically appear. And then of course they get an email that says, here's your books, in case they don't use the BookFunnel app. But as I said, millions of readers already do. And so the books just magically appear.

Sara 23:00

I think we've reached a point where readers are familiar with BookFunnel. A lot of readers are. And I've had people email me and say, Hey, I haven't received my link from BookFunnel yet for direct sales. So I think readers are not everyone knows about it, but there there is a significant number of readers now who feel comfortable with it. And I even had someone tell me they had were having trouble finding audiobooks. And she messaged me and she said, I know the book that I bought from you on your Kickstarter is safe in my BookFunnel library, but I can't find these that were supposedly she got through Audible or something. Yeah. And so I just helped her find everything. But that's how they feel. It's safe because that it's never going to go away.

SPEAKER_00 23:42

The other thing is that the what readers have learned, so the readers who have been through BookFunnel, which at this point is tens of millions that have been through our platform, what they have learned is BookFunnel always answers their emails. And and Amazon does not, and Audible does not. We get crazy emails. Obviously, we get the where's my book? And then we teach them how we say, Oh, it's over in your library, and that sort of stuff. But we also get the my Kindle died, and I'm looking at getting a new e-reader. What do you guys think I should get? We get really weird questions sometimes that have almost nothing to do with book funnel delivery, but readers trust us. And more than that, they know readers have learned in a world where AI is becoming increasingly proliferated around the world, BookFunnel still answers every email with a real human being. And that's one of the things that I don't I as long as I'm at BookFunnel, that we won't compromise on because the the people that know how to do this stuff, right? If you give me an EPUB, I know how to get it to my Kindle, I know how to put it on my Cobo. I'm not your, I'm not the audience. I am the audience for I want all my books to just show up instantly and I don't want to have to work for it, but I don't need assistance, right? I know how to do that. So the people that do contact us for assistance are no offense to any particular demographic, but little old ladies who are who have bought their books and they're now they're not sure how to proceed, right? Because they haven't done this before. Those people are reaching out to ask for help. The worst thing they could possibly run into at that moment is a chat bot who just says, Hi, I see you're having trouble with your Kindle. Did you power it off and power it back on? No, that's terrible. That's the worst customer experience. And so I always tell people the biggest value that we get that you get with BookFunnel is not we have great tools and we have all kinds of amazing features that you can use. The number one thing is that all of those features at the end of the road, when they get down to it, deliver the thing. And if a reader has any problems at all, they can reach out to our customer support and we are there 365 days a year, even on Christmas. So you don't have to be your support team. If you want to go on vacation, don't worry about it. BookFunnel is going to take care of your readers when they need help.

Jami 25:53

I love that. That's so good. And it's such a great, it's a great selling point for all of us. Yeah. It's invaluable. It really is. It really is. What do you see authors doing that they do because they think they have to, but they aren't really giving them results?

SPEAKER_00 26:09

So I still, so from what I see from the authors who really commit to it, a newsletter is still one of the most valuable tools that you have. What I see is authors who are either A not willing to put the effort into it, meaning they're they we see this all the time where they come on book funnel, you use tools like that we have like group promos and author swaps, and you build up a list, and you've got 800 people on your list, and then you never ever email them, either because you just don't want to, or you can you're not very good at it, and you and we which also means you don't want to. And so the problem that I see is that the newsletter is an extremely powerful tool if you're using it and if you like it. But I always say not every single avenue is for every single author. I know authors who just like, I don't do Amazon ads, I burned a bunch of money, I don't understand them, and I don't want to use them. Great, but you that means you're gonna need to find some other way to bring readers in. If you're not doing, oh, I don't want to do Facebook ads, I don't like those. They confuse me. Okay, great, but you're gonna have to do something, you're gonna have to work on something. The days of just flopping a book out there, and then Amazon magically sends you readers and says, That's gone, that's long gone. It's been gone for five, 10 years now. You are gonna have to find a way, but you really are gonna have to find the things that you're good at. I oh, the best example that I see is as book talk was blowing up, I saw so many authors who basically did one, maybe two videos, and immediately said, No, this is terrible. I hate this, and that's okay. You the problem is that we see what other authors are doing, and we go, Oh my god, that's brilliant! They sold 10,000 books on book talk. I need to get on book talk, but we're not all built to do all of those things, so you have to point your bandwidth at what are the things that you are really good at. Lucy Score is uh, you guys know who Lucy is, but for anybody listening who doesn't know, fantastic romance author, one of the biggest in the world right now. If you want to know how to do a newsletter, go join hers because her newsletter, I'm I read her newsletter and I don't read romance, but she's funny, she's personable, she's sincere. Everything she does about her emails is perfect. Now, you may not be the kind of author who wants to send a weekly email, and that just sounds like, oh God, that sounds like the worst nightmare. Then don't do that. But the worst thing that you can do is build a newsletter and then discover that you don't want to write newsletters. Don't do that. Do something else, figure out another way that works for you. And maybe it's as simple as I gather my followers on Book Bub or Amazon where I don't have to email them or do anything, but they do get notified when new books come out.

Sara 29:00

We've talked a little bit about Lucy Score. She's super successful and uses her newsletter very well. And you see so many authors. What qualities do you see in the authors that are successful? Are there any similarities that you can pinpoint?

SPEAKER_00 29:13

So, in new authors, it really a lot of it comes down to luck. I heard this great another an author friend of mine, Dakota Kraut. I I was at LitRPGCon this last weekend. So for those of you who don't know, litrpg is like game lit. And he's one of the biggest in your genre. And somebody said on a panel that I was moderating, somebody said, Oh, there's a lot of luck involved. And there is. And Dakota commented and he says, he says, I don't like the word luck. I like the word fortune. And fortune is putting everything in the right path so that luck has the best chance to hit you. And I like that. I like because it is there is a lot of luck. When you look at some of these authors, let's look at Lucy, right? Who's way up here now? She's giant. But when she started, she seemingly did everything wrong. She did not write romance, she writes romance, which is not wrong. You want to know where all the readers are, they're in romance. So if you love romance and you want to write romance, you should absolutely, that's a great place to go. But for Lucy, she did not write in series, she wrote standalones. They were like 150,000 words, which every romance, like all the other romance authors, are going, no, no, that's not how you make it in romance. And she herself would tell you, I don't know why that she didn't know why her first and then second book really took off. And it was so that's that luck part, right? First of all, she wrote darn good books, right? This is the fortune part. She wrote great books, she wrote the books that she wanted to read. I tell authors this all the time because everybody thinks that they're trying to write. I like the idea of right to market, but I really like the better idea of write to your market, right? I write fantasy, but why my fantasy over someone else's? What do I do? Or what is it about my books that you're going to find particularly engaging where you might not have found some other fantasy author as engaging? So I'm writing to the market of epic fantasy, but I'm also targeting a smaller market within that, which is people that are gonna like my books, and why do they want your books? And so she, when everybody else was saying, No, you can't do that, those are the wrong things to do. She wrote the books that she wanted to read, and then the audience went, Oh, hey, I want to read these books too, right? So she was already there. The trends that we see the most are, like I said, the bigger trends are more engagement with your readers, which I know for you introverts listening, that sounds like hell. But there are great ways that you can engage with your readers that don't actually require you to invest a lot of time or do like you don't have to be some wacky book talker, right? If that's not your thing, if you can do that, it's great. I know lots of authors are doing very well selling directly on TikTok and using TikTok shop and shipping books and doing all of that. But if that's not something that you could do, can you record a video of yourself, not live, and then post it in your Facebook group for everybody to be able to watch it? In other words, the thought of doing this and sitting on a call with a bunch of people sounds oh, I don't want to do that. But can you record something and then just put out a message for all of your readers? All of those things can be can make a real connection with your readers, and that is what we're seeing more and more. The trends are in publishing that more and more books are coming out every year, and that has been true since the advent of self-publishing. Every book, every year, more and more books are coming out, and now with I'm not demonizing anything, but as AI has become more proliferated, we are seeing even more books come out every year, and so as an author, but and yet what we're broadly seeing from readers is they still want real human authors writing books that they love. And so, number one is make that connection, just be as human as you can. Sometimes we have this idea that we need to be super professional, right? We need you go to my website, not my website, but like you go to someone, you go to an author's website, and everything to me super slick and personal or super slick and professional and fade in, and the cover fades in, and it does all this sort of stuff. And sometimes the best thing you could possibly do is put a video right on the front page that's of you sitting at your desk and going, Hi, I'm Jamie Albright, and I write romantic comedies that are heavy on the comedy and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. And it's just you and it's not cut and it's not fancy, and it's you sitting at your desk, and it's and I write right here, and you pull the camera down. We've seen authors actually use that to great effect because somebody lands on your website and the first thing they see is an actual real person who writes these books, and whether you conscious whether they consciously realize it or not, there's a part of their brain that goes, I like that Jamie Albright, he looks like somebody I could trust. I should buy her books. Also, she's funny. I know you're funny, but I say this like I I've known Sarah and Jamie both for years and years, and we're having this conversation, but like they have been good friends for a very long time. So I know that Jamie is hilarious, and putting that in a video lets people see you. And the minute they do, they're like, How many times have you met an author? And then you meet them and you're like, I like this author. I bet I would like their books, I bet their books are right. So more and more we see authors kind of lean, it sounds corny, but like leaning into their humanity because that is what readers are looking for. They everybody in this world is looking for some kind of connection. I know when I meet an author in person, I'm far more likely to buy their book. And if I bought it from them in person, I don't read paper, so hopefully they sell ebooks, but I am far more likely to read it when I get home because I met that person. I'm like, oh, that person was they were really fun. I really like their personality. I'm gonna check out their book. So many of the books that I have read in the last several years have been because I met the author, because now I go to author conferences and reader conferences in all kinds of places. Brandon Sanderson is one of my favorite authors, and he's now way up here. He's Brandon Sanderson. He's like one of the biggest, he is the biggest fantasy author in the world right now. But what people forget is that for 15 years, he showed up at every conference and hand sold books across a table. He put them into people's hands, he shook their hands and said, Hi, I'm Brandon. And not a single person you could, nobody you'll meet who has met him would be like, I met Brandon Sanders. That guy's a jerk. Everybody will tell you what a nice guy he is, how personal. And like he really made me feel like he cared. And BookFunnel went to his conference in last December. Dragon Steel Nexus is the conference that he runs, and it's all about his books and his world, the Cosmere and all this sort of stuff. I'm a Brandon Sanders super fan, by the way. I back all of his campaigns, I buy those special edition books. I am a super fan. I back every I will buy everything that Brandon puts out. But we went as Book Funnel, we had a table at Dragon Steel, which is massive. Like it fills up an entire two football fields worth of a convention center, right? Brandon personally came to every single table, every single booth in the vendor hall, and said, Hey, thank you for being here. I'm so glad that you guys came. You really helped make Dragon Steel an amazing experience for the readers. Every single table, the biggest fantasy author in the world still in 2025 came to everybody's table to say thank you for coming. That's how you make yourself stand out to readers. Yeah.

Jami 36:57

I think that's a great, that's a great place for us to end because I think that really we couldn't have said it better. I agree 100%. I think leaning into our humanity and who we are. And plus, if people believe that you care about them, they're gonna care about you. That's just human nature. Absolutely. We appreciate tell people where they can find out about more about bookfunnel.

SPEAKER_00 37:19

Bookfunnel.com. We don't try to be too clever.

Jami 37:21

Not complicated.

SPEAKER_00 37:22

Yep.

Sara 37:24

All right, and BookFunnel is also a sponsor of the podcast. So we have to say we will have the links in the show notes, and you can find those there. And don't forget to check out BookFunnel, as we say. So thanks for being here.

SPEAKER_00 37:38

Thank you guys for having me.

Sara 37:40

Bye, everybody. Bye.