Chapter 9 The Making of 'JOAN' - Bryan Cohen's Ad School Challenge

Bryan Cohen's Ad School Challenge

... nd every three months

Well here we are again. I thought I had it all in the bag and knew what I was doing and where I was going, but I couldn't have been further from the truth!

Sales of books, once friends and family had done their part, came to a standstill.  I was so fed up... I wanted to pack it all in. What do I do now? Where do I go? Who do I ask for help? 

I hadn't got money to waste and there's a lot of vultures out there just waiting for newbie indie authors to join their social media pages. Yes - many of those social media pages where authors are encouraged to join 'to meet and be able to interact with other authors' ha! They're a breeding ground for vultures. Gathering their prey into safe 'private groups' where they can find potential clients and DM them. Social media seemed a great idea until you realise that most of them aren't open to the public and let's face it, the public are the readers, not other authors, and certainly not the vultures marketing companies that swoop down onto their wannabe prey!

As you can tell, I got pretty disillusioned.

I watched video's, I sat through webinars that I'd heard of on social media sites, and they all gave just a little bit of good advice before swooping in with their sales pitch! Every time!

I tried doing amazon advertising. You have to place a 'bid' ie a price that you're prepared to pay per click and they vary for every 'keyword' you choose to use, and yes, I got burned... almost £100 later and no sales in two weeks I gave up! 

THEN a few months later, I saw Bryan Cohen's Amazon Ads Profit Challenge! My first reaction was 'oh yeah here we go again' but what had I to lose but my time? So I did the 2-week challenge. Followed through with the homework they set, watched the video's they suggested I watched and... no change! Not within those first two weeks.

Bryan Cohen does these profit challenges every three months. Authors at any stage of their career, solitary books, multiple books any size of authorship are all welcome and for two whole weeks they can ask Bryan's team ANY QUESTION THEY WANT! And the offer is genuine! I thought WOW! This is a rareness in itself!

I joined in the next time. There had been a nibble or two since the previous time and, because his  method of bidding for ad space is not to throw money at ads, but to take the zen lemur approach and take it slowly, I was able to afford to advertise for longer. People were getting to see my book on the amazon book shelves at least - that was a good step in the right direction. What's the point of writing a book then sticking it on a shelf and not showing it to readers? My book was at least getting seen and we all know how advertising works... people see something often enough, they wonder what it's all about and eventually they want to give it a try! 

Ad School sounded interesting. The support offered sounded interesting, but I couldn't afford it.  But they still invite you to join them again the next time and they will still give their advice totally free for two weeks every three months... you can't argue with that!

As it turned out, I won a place with ad school... Me? I never win anything! I couldn't believe it! I've been with them ever since and it's not plain sailing I have to admit, but their support, their advice... I'm glad they're there.  I'll keep you informed of when I become a famous author, but in the meantime, it's on with writing my next book.

Joan-put on a happy face is the first of a series - so watch this space :-)

Joan: Put on a Happy face (a fascinating tale of history and fiction) eBook : Mottershead, Carol M: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store

If you want to ask questions or just keep in touch email me at carol.m.mottershead@gmail.com

Happy reading!

Chapter 8 The Making of 'Joan' - Marketing my book

Marketing my book 

When you've published your book with Kindle Direct Publishing the next thing they expect you to do is advertise on the Amazon sites. The initial sales page set up is like their publishing - totally free until you get a sale. Even then, I think they're pretty reasonable giving the author 60% royalties less print costs for paperback and hardcover and 70% on eBooks - wow! Compared to traditional publishing and vanity publishing, they're great.

Unfortunately, marketing of a book is the hardest part of all! With traditional publishers they do all the marketing for you, the hard work, the social media, the emails, all done by themselves - at a cost of course! Nothing is totally free when marketing.

It's all well and good publishing a book and putting it on the shop floor ie in this instance the Amazon sales page, but that doesn't make people pick it out of the millions of other books and buy a copy. A sad fact indeed. That's where the cost comes into it. 

Amazon will have you paying the highest prices for bids on advertising your book, believe me, I tried it their way and lost a lot of money (well a lot of money to me lol!)

Bryan Cohen's Ads Profit Challenge was like a breath of fresh air. He showed me how to spend less to be able to advertise more until the sales started to come in. 'The Profit Challenge' is exactly that - a challenge!

For me, the only sales still seemed to be from word of mouth and eventually mouths stop spreading the word lol! I didn't know what was wrong with my book. Why didn't anyone want to buy a copy to read?

Bryan Cohen's Ad School helped me identify where the problems could lie... The first port of call was getting the correct genres - a nightmare for me, it felt, because my book covers so many tropes.

Tropes are storylines for example, in 'Joan put on a happy face' you have tropes such as:

A young girl loses her mother at an impressionable age

A young girl marries an older man, a vagrant, an actor, against her fathers wishes.

A young wife and mother battles with post-natal depression while her husband works all the time.

A young mother uses play therapy to help her young son express himself

A young girl with poor self esteem fights her way into the world of adults, becomes an a travelling performer and a learns to become forceful woman, a woman to reckon with

A wife whose husband turns to drink and drugs and becomes lazy and irresponsible

A wife who is struck by her husband and left to die in hospital, taking their son with him.

A husband who kills his best friend and suffers with depression bordering on madness out of guilt

A husband who suffers post traumatic stress after leading his troupe of actors through wars and death as an immortal who wants to but cannot die!

The tropes go on... I had to start somewhere.

After that, they taught me how to look for other reasons for lack of sales and we looked at my book cover to begin with. This...

eventually became this...

Which do you like best? Let me know in the comments...

In the meantime, til next time, here's another link to the paperback

'Joan - put on a happy face' by Carol M Mottershead

Happy Reading!