Overview

Ann attributes a lot of her success to her marketing. She isn't talking about only advertising. This is a great discussion from an author making a living with their writing. Gain insight into what she does to keep her books flying off the shelves.

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Transcript

[00:00:48] Stephen: great. And you've been writing for a while. You're not brand new which I think is great. What have you learned that you do different now than you used to do? Or what are some [00:01:00] things that have changed that you're looking at different or however, in the whole publishing writing thing?

[00:01:06] Ann: Biggest thing that changed. It used to be yearly, but now it seems like every six months is marketing and the way I market, which is unfortunately. Marketing is a huge part of this business. If you want to, if you want to make money at this, you have to learn how to do some of the marketing things and you can adjust it to your own style.

So it doesn't, maybe I'm on, social media more than you feel comfortable. That's fine. But you've got to find another way to get yourself out there and be heard above all the noise. And I don't mean just other books and other authors. Telephone. Like we were talking, there's so many different options now that you can sit in front of the TV and just go away for days and days.

How do I get them to look away from the TV and read my books and give that a try or listen? Cause I am on audio for all of my books as well. So marketing is so important. And I can tell you [00:02:00] back, like I told you, in an earlier in 2011, I did the Kindle unlimited free and it went huge way bigger than it does now, but that's because it was new and not a lot of authors were doing it yet.

The market wasn't as saturated. I can't even remember how many books now you are on Amazon. It's millions. Yeah. And back then, I think there was, when I started, it was like 800,000 books were on Amazon, so it was much easier to be heard and seen and get yourself out there. So that is something that it's constantly changing.

And I have to rethink my plan every year on what I'm going to do. For example, Facebook, which was so big for so long is really starting to fade and I can see it. I can feel it. And I know. Instagram's got, has some people, but that's even, take talk is now the thing. And if you're 20 or 15, like my kids in their teens, [00:03:00] they just go, yeah, just do this.

But my old getting the older brain just keeps going. What? That's changed. And then my writing over the years, I've written, I think now 32 stories that I have. And I don't want to ever have someone come up to me and say, that book felt the exact same as the one before it. And the one before it, I don't want them to feel like, what are you doing?

You're not even trying anything new anymore. So one of the things that I really work on with every story even novellas, I wish I could just sit down and, put out a story really quick, but I have to have a theme. There has to be a reason. There has to be something behind the story that makes it, why my brain even wants to tell it.

And so I've really worked over the, especially the last five years on, on learning different ways to build the structure of a story. Writers know you've got a skeleton behind it, all that you're building and how you do that. So I've worked with different themes. I've [00:04:00] tried.

Pacing things for different books. For example, book nine of my Deadwood mystery series is called gone hunting ha...