SFFMP 86: Improving to a Full-Time Income, Organizing Group Promos, and Succeeding at Publishing Wide with Patty Jansen
We chatted with return-guest Patty Jansen this week, a science fiction and fantasy author who’s gone from a part-time income to a full-time income since we interviewed her in 2015. She’s also started running some very popular group promotions for SF&F authors, and we asked about the nuts and bolts of that, as well as if it’s been useful for improving her bottom line and selling more of her own books.
Here’s a little more of what we covered:
- The challenges of splitting focus between multiple series and genres
- Planning ahead (how far) and committing to publishing installments in series
- Wrapping up series that aren’t huge sellers and focusing on ones that show more potential
- How Patty’s big SF/F promo has evolved to have more than 500 authors and 4500 reader newsletter subscribers
- The nuts and bolts of how her promos work
- Curating a big promo and keeping it a good value for both readers and writers
- Some of the pitfalls of trying KU, especially as an Australian author, and why Patty is staying wide for now
- Whether new covers on older books are worth it
- Staggering a launch to try and make a book sticky on Amazon
- Trying to target less frequently targeted countries with Facebook advertising
You can check out Patty’s work on her website and sign up for the group promos here: http://pattyjansen.com/promo/.
If you want to try one of her books, you can grab the links to the various stores on her site. Here’s the information for her Ambassador series and you can also check out her new fantasy release on Amazon.
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Another great episode! Thanks for having Patty on, and thank you, Patty, for being on. This will be one I’ll listen to again. Some great marketing tips. Patty’s two “rules/principles” of consistency and honesty are great insights, especially for a writer like me who isn’t the write to tropes sort 🙂
Also appreciated Patty’s thoughts on KU. I’d been going back and forth about being exclusive with them, but this, along with the recent KDP account suspensions I’ve heard about because of some sort of KU click bot shenanigans, have put me back to being wide.
Thanks again, Lindsay, Jeff and Joe for putting these out!
Thanks, Dale! It’s nice to get the perspective from people who are doing the write to market thing and people who are also doing well without doing it. I know I suck at writing anything to market. 😉
IMO you can do two things: you can try to write what you think will sell (and sometimes fail miserably at it) or you can write in a solid genre (i.e. not something terribly niche) and attract people to your work by having attractive books, write them in series and market them. The first would make me incredibly unhappy for all the flip-flopping it would entail. I hate chasing my own tail.