Lindsay - September 16, 2021For this week’s show, successful romantic suspense author Cami Checketts joins the guys. A USA Today bestseller and award winner, Cami has published over one hundred books. She was not an overnight success but wrote a lot and persevered and has grown to become a very steady seller in a competitive genre.
Here are some of the questions Jo, Andrea, and Lindsay asked her:
- Can you tell us about your writing and publishing journey?
- Have you ever considered splitting your romance subgenres and writing under a pen name?
- As someone with a fairly substantial backlist, I’m always curious what other authors do to keep older titles selling. Do you run ads/sales? Send out newsletters promoting them in addition to the new releases? Anything else? (Cami mentioned that the ad agency she uses is Disruptive Advertising.)
- Folks who don’t have a large backlist, or a backlist that goes back a number of years, tend not to be aware of some of the complications it can introduce to a career. Applying corrections to wipe out lingering typos, or going back and updating back matter to link to newer titles, can eat up a lot of time. Do you keep your back list up to date, or at some point do you let them stabilize?
- How do you prevent burnout?
- A lot goes into publishing a book besides writing it. Even if you’re a prolific writer, you can hit stumbling blocks when it comes to juggling the aspects of publishing that aren’t directly in your control. How do you handle the scheduling of cover art and editing slots? What other things do you do to make sure titles don’t get held up in the pipeline?
- What does a launch look like for you? What do you do to gain traction in these very competitive romance subgenres?
- What sorts of things do you do to help you remember which tropes you’ve written? Do you plan your series out far in advance? If so, what do you keep track of and figure out ahead of time?
- We’ve had other folks on the podcast underscore that romance readers in particular have some pretty strict expectations for a book’s content. (Happily Ever After/Happily For Now, etc). How do you balance checking all of the boxes with keeping the stories fresh and interesting? How much slack is there in the romance formula for innovation?
- Have you had any breakaway successes or has it been more of a gradual upswing?
- What do you recommend new authors do to have success in clean romance and romantic suspense?
- What qualifies a book as clean romance? Does a clean romance book have to be structured differently to produce a satisfying result, or can you edit down a more steamy romance to produce a clean one?
- What role does marketing play in your success?
- It looks like you’ve got a mix of wide and Amazon exclusive titles. What’s your reasoning there, and how do your marketing tactics change for each?
- What do you do to entice readers onto your newsletter?
- Do you have much insight into the comparative cost of advertising for different genres? I know the bids can get very high for popular genres/keywords. Do you spend much time picking targets to try to keep the price down?
- Different advertising platforms tend to have different results and different learning curves. Is there a platform you would recommend for someone who was just starting, or someone who hoped to focus on a single platform?
Please visit Cami’s website to learn more about her books, or look her up on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, and other bookstores.
Thanks for listening, and thanks to Joshua Pearson for producing the show. If you haven’t joined, you can interact with us and other authors at Facebook group (Six Figure Authors).
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