Joshua Pearson - October 3, 2019Today our hosts interviewed popular fantasy fairy tale author K. M. Shea about how to consistently sell books and build a loyal fan base. K.M. Shea has been writing and publishing about four novels a year for several years and has learned a lot along the way. She is currently exclusive with Amazon, and you can check out her books there.
Here are some of the questions our hosts asked her:
Lindsay: Tell us about how you got started and what you write.
Lindsay: You seemed to find the fantasy/fairy tale niche early and do well. Did it help that it’s less competitive than some of the other fantasy subgenres?
Lindsay: We talk about hitting tropes and writing to market, but with fairy tales, I imagine there’s a lot of rigidity in what people expect. How much do you worry about that and try to make sure to please the reader?
Jo: For fairy tale fantasy, are readers mostly interested in direct re-tellings of known fairytales? How do you differentiate yourself from other tellings of the same story?
Jo: You’re not a book a month, but you’re consistent. How often do you publish?
Lindsay: What are some of the things you did early on to find success?
Lindsay: Have things changed a lot for you over the years, as far as what’s required to sell books, are there tried and true things that are still working for you?
Lindsay: I know you have assistants that work with you or did at one point. At what point did you decide to take on help, and what do they do?
Jo: Do you use a mailing list? What is your balance between organically growing it versus actively growing it? Do you keep tabs on list growth/do you prune the list periodically?
Lindsay: Are there any marketing things you’re trying this year that seem promising?
Lindsay: It looks like you’re all-in with Kindle Unlimited. Have you tinkered with wide at all?
Lindsay: As a career author who does this for a living, does it make you nervous to rely so heavily on Amazon? Is there anything you do to diversify your income with paperbacks or audiobooks?
Jo: How closely do you watch your earnings? Are you proactive or reactive when it comes to dips in income?
Lindsay: You mentioned in your email that you do some interesting things to connect with your readers. Could you talk about that?
Thank you for listening, and we hope you enjoyed the show. We’d like to thank Joshua Pearson for helping us produce the show and Stephanie Neilan for putting the show notes together. Please consider posting a review to iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. To ask a question for a future show or to leave a comment, visit 6figureauthors.com. We’d love to hear from you!
Monica Leonelle’s book on marketing plans: Get Your Book Selling: Jumpstart Your Sales With a Simple Plan That Just Works
There was a marketing book recommended but it wasn’t listed in the show notes (unless I missed it, my bad!). What was the book c alled? It was all about different types of marketing strategies?
Thanks you! Love the podcast 🙂
Thanks for listening, Jakob! Oh boy, we actually recorded that interview in April, so I don’t remember. I’ll try to be more on the ball with listing resources as we go forward.
I just ran into it and remembered seeing your question, Jakob, so I copied down the name/link. It’s called Get Your Book Selling: Jumpstart Your Sales With a Simple Plan That Just Works. Here’s the link to it: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0723CX5MR/
Just started listing to the backlist of episodes, so a little late at this point, and no idea if this was an option back when you recorded or not, but it was mentioned in this episode that you aren’t willing to give access to your Amazon account for advertising because you don’t want people to access everything at Amazon in that one account…but you can actually add users (using their own account) to your advertising account so they can login and manage your ads for you.
Granted, the actual sales data is useless inside of the advertising dashboard at Amazon, and you can’t add a separate user to your account to access that, but you could at least have somebody setting up ads and managing ad spend and having a not-entirely-accurate view of the sales numbers. (Hey, if it looks profitable in the ads dashboard, you’ve definitely made that much and more, right?)
Thanks, Blaine. I did not know that!
Yup, it’s relatively straightforward, here’s a screenshot:
https://www.evernote.com/l/ALvO5ic484VGNoxXsLTiyn70cO0I0S69gSIB/image.png