SPI 413: The Secrets of Publishing for Profit (Both Fiction and Non-Fiction), with Mark Dawson

SPI 413 The Secrets of Publishing for Profit (Both Fiction and Non-Fiction) with Mark Dawson

Pat Flynn:
Books. You probably read them. Maybe you’ve written them before. I personally have written three books, Let Go, Will It Fly, and more recently, SuperFans My gosh, it is a chore, but also one of the most fulfilling things I’ve ever done. Big thank you to all of you who have read and/or listened to any of my books. We’re talking more about books today, specifically about the business and the process and how a book integrates into this amazing potentially passive income opportunity, whether it’s a fiction book or a non-fiction book.

Pat:
Today we’re going to be speaking with a tremendously successful self-published author, previously traditionally published. He’s going to tell a story about how he started there, failed, and then started his own thing, publishing on his own, and the secrets and the formulas for making that happen. You can actually find him at selfpublishingformula.com, but don’t go there yet because I want you to be convinced that this person knows exactly what he’s talking about, and more than that, you can find his very, very successful fiction series, actually he has multiple series of books, and I actually get quite selfish here in this particular podcast episode because one day I would love to publish a fiction book, and he’s given me—and all of you out there who are interested in that as well some tips—and then marketing tips, no matter what kind of book you have. I’m speaking with today none other than markjdawson.com, and you’ll hear all about his books, his origin story, his failures, his successes and tips that we can all use, no matter what stage we’re at today. Mark J. Dawson, but first the intro.

Announcer:
Welcome to the Smart Passive Income podcast, where it’s all about working hard now so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. Now your host, ask him about his food truck idea the next time you see him, Pat Flynn.

Pat:
Hey, hey, what’s up everybody? Welcome to session 413 of the Smart Passive Income podcast. My name is Pat Flynn, here to help you make more money, save more time and help more people too. Writing books is definitely one of those things that can help you make money and can help you get your message, your words, both on text, paperback, hard cover or even on audio like Audible in front of more people, but it’s a lot of work. There’s some secrets that a lot of well-known very, very influential people, like today’s guest, Mark J. Dawson, who are just so generous in sharing their information. I came out of this interview with just such energy and such excitement for diving into my next book which I’ve just started to put on paper. I haven’t yet quite finished the outline, but it’s coming. It’s coming. I’m just very thankful that I had this conversation before publishing it, because it’s definitely going to save me a lot of time and help me make more money, and I’m hopeful that this will do the same for you.

Pat:
Like I said, and like I shared earlier, today we’re speaking with Mark J. Dawson. You can check him out at markjdawson.comto see his works there. We have some other stuff for you later on that we’ll point you toward. For right now, let’s just dive into the interview. Here he is, Mark J. Dawson. Mr. Mark Dawson, thank you so much for coming on the Smart Passive Income podcast today. Thank you so much for being here.

Mark Dawson:
Thanks, Pat. It’s a pleasure to be here. I’m a long-time listener. I’ve learned an awful lot from you over the years, so it’s a real pleasure to come on and maybe give a little bit back

Pat:
Oh, you’re going to give a whole lot back because Mark, you’ve just become this amazing powerhouse in the world of what you do, which is writing books. You’ve taught several, many, people how to write books, but I just want to talk about your books a little bit. You’re known for a number of series. Tell us a little bit about the books that you currently have. Tell us about your work.

Mark:
All right. Originally I was traditionally published all the way back in ’99, 2000. I had a deal with a big publisher in London, one of the big ones. I think they gave me an advance of about 50,000 pounds, which was not a huge amount in those days, but it would be quite a lot today. I was a lawyer at the time, not a particularly good lawyer, and certainly not a happy one. I thought this was the way I was going to get out. This was the career I always wanted to do and this was how I was going to do it, and this was going to be the start. It didn’t really turn out that way.

Mark:
The books, they’re not the best books in the world, first off. That’s being generous. They’re pretty bad books—so that didn’t help. Then the publisher didn’t do that much in terms of promotion that I could see, and marketing. I remember going into a bookstore in my lunch break. I went down to the bookstore and had a look and expected to find them in prime position, but instead of eye level on the shelves which is where I wanted them to be, kind of face out, they were all the way out at the bottom, spine out, very difficult to see. Browsers wouldn’t notice them. Anyway, I kind of rearranged the shelves to put them back into the order that I thought they should be in.

Pat:
I’ve done that. I’ve done that.

Mark:
Everyone’s done that. Then of course I went back the next day and the staff had done their jobs and correctly returned them to the basement level again. I stopped writing after that. I had a couple published. None of them were particularly good, as I said, and they didn’t sell very much. I didn’t earn the advance back, so that’s kind of a black mark on my name when it comes to getting a third deal. I kind of gave up. I changed jobs; did something I enjoyed a bit more in the film industry. Then a friend of mine, around about 2010 I think it would have been, had a Kindle, and I was very, very slow to adopt the Kindle and never thought I’d want to read on a device. He told me that he had published something himself and he was getting contact from readers, which is something I never got. Also he was getting money from Amazon.

Mark:
I don’t know about you, Pat, but the way that my relationship with Mr. Bezos works is normally, at least up until that point, money went from my account into his. My friend was telling me he was getting checks from Amazon. So I started digging into what was possible and started to write. First of all, published a kind of noir-ish thriller called “The Black Mile.” Since then I’ve branched out into … I write espionage thrillers now, books that are quite like Lee Charles and Jack Leitch, that kind of thing, James Patterson. I’ve got a couple, two or three series, some spinoffs, and I’ve been a full time writer for over five years now. I don’t mind sharing numbers too much. I cleared $1.5 million last year in terms of book sales, which if you’d said to me that was possible when I was trying to rearrange those bookshelves all those years ago, I would have said you were nuts. It is possible, and it’s a pretty cool way to make a living.

Pat:
$1.5 million last year alone from self-published books.

Mark:
Yes. That’s just income on KDP. That’s the platform that Amazon has to enable you to publish. It doesn’t take into account audio books and deals I have with Thomas and Mercer, an Amazon imprint, so more like a traditional imprint. They publish some of my stuff as well. All in, it’s probably nearer to … it’s a pretty significant income. Not all profit, of course, there’s costs in there.

Pat:
Of course. That’s incredible, Mark. Congratulations on that, and thank you for briefing us on the story. Now you teach several other people how to write self published books and you have very unique strategies and sort of a formula, if you will, for doing that. Can you give us a little insight on your approach to—for any writers that are listening or anybody who’s thinking about writing—how might we better think about the approach to position ourselves for success when writing books? A lot of people have written books and they’ve just gone nowhere.

Mark:
The way I look at it is we have a website, another business called Self Publishing Formula, which is probably the worst name I could possibly come up with. It sounds a little bit snake oily, that there’s a formula to follow, which is not the case. It’s more of a mindset thing. The way I look at it when I’m publishing things is that I’m creating assets, intellectual property assets. In the first instance it’s a story which is expressed by way of a book. That’s one way that you can take advantage or monetize that asset. There are other ways that you can split off and make money too, from audio books to film and TV to print, licensing translation, foreign rights. All of these kinds of things can all make money for you, passive income.

Mark:
The way I try to look at it, is I approach it as professionally as I can. I will put out the best product that I possibly can. That means that I have an editorial process that my books go through, which is at least as good as the experience I had when I was traditionally published. I have a pro cover designer. I can’t. I’m terrible with Photoshop. I just would not know what to do. Although I could do a cover, it wouldn’t be a very wise thing for me to do, so I hire a designer who used to do covers for Tolkien and John McCarry and Stephen King, people like that. He, Douglas [Stewart Base, 00:09:19], he does all my covers and has done for about five years now. When you look on the store, when you go to Amazon and you’re browsing for a new thriller to read, my intention is that you would not be able to tell from either looking at the cover or the blurb, or opening up the Look Inside to look at the first few pages, you wouldn’t be able to tell that there’s anything different in the way that that book was published between the way I’ve done it and the way Lee Charles’ publisher has done it. That’s something that not all indies get their heads around, but I think it’s quite important to keep that in mind.

Pat:
That makes sense. It’s really a mental approach that you’re taking that establishes the groundwork for something that becomes much bigger than just the book itself. I think a lot of us don’t think of it in that way. For those of us who are now interested in also the fiction side of things, I know there’s a lot of non-fiction authors who are listening. I’m curious just for the fiction authors out there and those interested in that, including myself, what makes a story that sells? There’s so many books that get published, stories that I’m sure the authors thought they were great, but they go nowhere. Why?

Mark:
I think I’ve got a bit of experience in this. When I was originally published, I decided my third book was going to be one that I would write with one eye very closely on what I thought the market wanted. My editor at the time had just published this Australian thriller writer who writes action and adventure, men’s adventure I suppose you’d call it, kind of Indiana Jones style books. I thought that’s easy. I bet I could do that really, really easily and I’ll make lots of money, which was a really arrogant thing for me to say, and also just completely unrealistic. This author wrote very fast paced addictive thrillers. That’s why he was successful. There’s a real skill to do that, and I didn’t read those books and I wasn’t therefore very good at writing them.

Mark:
The thing I’ve learned since then, is that what you want to try and do is you need to write something that you want to read, a genre that you like and that you have some experience in. That’s the first thing. The second thing is you need to find something that you think will sell. If you think of a Venn diagram, so you’ve got two circles. On the one hand you’ve got what you like, on the other hand you’ve got what you think the audience will like. Where those two circles intersect, that’s what you should be aiming for. For me, I love Lee Charles, I love David Baldacci, I love those kinds of addictive, pacey, compelling thrillers. It was very obvious to me when I did a little bit of research, almost no research, it was that obvious, that there was a very hungry market for those kinds of books. That was a real sweet spot for me.

Mark:
It doesn’t have to be that kind of big genre. I’ve taught authors, one in particular comes to mind, who I think she’s got some kind of academic qualification in Scandinavian history, and she likes writing romances. Her niche is Scandinavian historical romances set in the 1700s. She found that was the one circle. The other circle was she found an audience that was very hungry for those books because they just weren’t getting served with any at all. She took one of our courses on using advertising to boost sales, and I think she went from something like $800 a month to she cleared $35,000, and this was a while ago. She’s a solid six figure a month author now. It’s by approaching those kinds of … marrying the art with the business side of things and then making a decision based on that. That’s where you can find success.

Pat:
Yeah. I love that. I think what you’ve just shared with me about one of your students is a big problem that a lot of people are having. Maybe they have a great story or have a great book that just isn’t getting found. It sounds like, to me, you do teach how to use Facebook ads. Is that the answer to getting found, or are there other ways that we authors can have more eyeballs on our books?

Mark:
Yeah, there are loads of ways. Things have changed in Kindle over the last 10 years or so. When I started, it was almost possible to upload a book and maybe make it free for a weekend, juice it with some promotions, some sites that it would send out emails to readers who were looking for those kinds of books. You could do quite well with that and make decent money. There was much less competition. If you were even a little bit professional, your books would immediately stand out from the crowd. Amazon was more organic, algorithmic marketing, at least that’s what it appeared was happening when it came to Amazon.

Mark:
If you scroll forwards now to 2020, there are something like eight million books on the Kindle store in the U.S. at the moment. When you upload your book, you’re immediately throwing it out there into this sea of competing content, and it’s very, very difficult for readers to find that book. It’s not really a luxury anymore to advertise. It used to be, about four or five years ago, you didn’t have to advertise, but it was still a good thing to do.

Mark:
It’s getting to the point now that in order to be successful, and of course there’s different definitions of success. There’s a commercial success, there’s creative success, all kinds of things, but if you want to make enough money to take this seriously as a career, it’s almost obligatory now that you need to advertise. It could be Facebook ads. They’re still very powerful. Amazon is making a concerted push into the advertising space, and Amazon ads for books are really, really powerful right now. There are other companies as well, Bookbub, that you might have heard of, that’s very powerful with the ads that it allows authors to place to find new readers. It is getting to the point now that you do need—unless you’ve got a big audience you do need to be prepared to advertise in order to find those new readers.

Pat:
How much are we talking here? Do we need a bank roll of $5,000 to be seen? What are we talking about?

Mark:
Again, it depends on, as I say, I did about 1.6 on the Kindle store last year. I was in Seattle to meet various Amazonians towards the end of last year, and one of the meetings I had was with my rep from a company called Amazon Media Group. It’s like an agency, an in-house agency that places ads on Amazon. I’d known I’d been spending quite a lot of money with those guys. We sat down for the yearly review, and they said, first of all, the first slide, you’ve spent half a million dollars with us this year. I almost fell off my chair because when it’s expressed that way, it was like that’s quite a lot of money.

Mark:
That’s fairly extreme, so not everyone will be able to spend that, nor should they. When I started out five years ago advertising, I started out with a five dollar Facebook ad. I took that five dollars. Maybe for the first week or two I lost money because I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I invested that five dollars and eventually figured it out. Then maybe I made six dollars. Then the next day I spent six, put it all back in again. Maybe the next time I made 10. Within two or three months I was spending between $100 and $200 a month. I wasn’t rich at that stage, I didn’t have a big bank roll. That was just with building up slowly, steadily and slowly and as carefully as I could, and then reinvesting the money that I’d made to buy more ads, and then doing the same thing again.

Pat:
Okay. That’s good. Then you could start small and scale up. What were the ads pointing to, because I know, for example, a lot of people who are in my podcasting course go, “Pat, I want to use ads to promote people to my podcast, but that just doesn’t work.” I’m curious, does that work with books? Here, go buy the book, or is there some special mechanism or campaign or way to go about getting people on Facebook who are there not to go buy books, to go buy a book?

Mark:
Yeah, that is the trick. The two main ad platforms are Amazon and Facebook. For Facebook, people are not necessarily looking to buy something when they’re on Facebook. They’re probably scrolling idly through their newsfeed, looking for updates on what their friends are doing, pictures of what their friends were eating, all the kind of stuff that we love about Facebook. They’re not really looking to buy a book. Your trick or the feat that you have to pull off is to get them out of that mindset and into the state of mind that they’re thinking actually, I’m not so interested in what I was doing. I’m going to go and click this link. I’m going to go to Amazon and I’m going to buy this book. It’s tricky, but it’s not impossible.

Mark:
There are some, possibly beyond what we’ve got time for to talk about this evening, but you can do things like running engagement campaigns to build up an engagement audience on Facebook so that you know the people who have engaged with a certain type of ad at the top of the funnel. (I hate to use marketing terms, but I’m sure your audience will know what I’m talking about.) You get them to engage with the ad. Then Facebook allows you to serve them with a retargeting ad, so something slightly different in terms of the copy and the image, but at that point you know that they have, at the very least, they’re interested in the kind of books that you’re writing, and they have engaged with your ad before. If you build up that kind of audience, then it’s a much warmer audience, much more conducive to clicking over to Amazon and then making that purchase.

Mark:
Now on Amazon, of course, and this is why Amazon ads are so powerful, is people are looking for a book. That’s why they’re on Amazon in that part of the store. They’re looking for a book. If they want one of your books, Pat, then you want to make sure that if they’ve typed your name into the search bar, you want to be absolutely sure that the results reflect the books that you’re offering them. What you don’t want to find is that a Gary Vaynerchuck ad pops up.

Pat:
We don’t want that guy in there.

Mark:
We don’t want that guy.

Pat:
I love you, Gary.

Mark:
We don’t want those guys popping up and sniping your readers before they get the chance to buy your book. That’s the thing with Amazon is it’s a much different experience, because people are actually looking for the books, and they can buy them with a couple of clicks after seeing your ad. Different kinds of mindsets, different price considerations. Facebook’s targeting is incredible, Amazon’s not quite so much, but easier to get people to buy on Amazon than it is on Facebook. It swings around about really.

Pat:
That’s super helpful. Thank you for that. I’m on your website markjdawson.com right now. You use these beautiful images. You were talking about the person who does your photoshopping stuff. It’s really compelling and it really highlights your books here. I see a John Milton series, Beatrix Rose series, Isabella Rose series, series, series, series, and then you have one link for stand alone books. Tell me the strategy behind series and what that’s done for you as you’ve built your business.

Mark:
Yeah, that’s been a fundamental success point. It’s not one that I necessarily engineered. I think I lucked into it a bit, but if you think about how you consume books as a reader … Who’s your favorite fiction author, Pat?

Pat:
Geez, I want to say all of them. Orwell?

Mark:
Orwell. Okay. Good one. Let’s say Orwell was writing today and you read, here’s where I’m going to share my terrible ignorance. Let’s say that you’ve read “1984.” You really enjoyed it. You got to the end of “1984” and you’re thinking, I’d really like to read another book in that series. Let’s just say he wrote “1985” after “1984.” What we’ve got there is, we call that [inaudible 00:20:49]. If someone gets to the end of one of my books, for example, they get to the end of “The Cleaner,” which is the first Milton book. I know at that point that they are interested in me as an author and my characters and the way that I tell stories. I can do lots of things at that point. I can get them onto my mailing list, which is a fairly standard internet marketing practice these days, is to build a list so that you can contact your customers directly. I can also persuade them to go over to Amazon and buy the second book in the series. You can start to see that.

Mark:
If you compare graphs over time, you can see it’s like a wave. If you’ve sent lots of readers to the first book, after a couple of weeks, which about the time, on average, it would take to read that first book, you’ll start to see readers go to the second book. Not as many, probably about half. Then you’ll start to see maybe 7% to 12% of those going to book three. Now when you bear all that in mind, what it enables you to do is to make decisions on your advertising that will tell you how much you can afford to spend to get someone to buy book one.

Mark:
It took me a long while to realize this, but if book one is selling for $2.99 at 70% on Amazon, I get $1.50, $1.60 in terms of a royalty. For a long time, the longest time, I wouldn’t spend more than that $1.60 profit that I was making because I thought I would immediately be making a loss. Now by doing that, not taking into account the subsequent books that a lot of those readers would then go on to buy, I was switching off ads that were probably very profitable. That’s something that I’m very aware of now. It is the reason that I write in series, because it’s so much easier to sell series and to make a decent return on series because you will get readers just chewing through all of them.

Mark:
One of my favorite emails, I get quite a few of them, which is lovely, but readers saying, “I read The Cleaner three weeks ago. I’ve read all 16 books in the Milton series in the last three weeks and I’ve never done that with another writer.” That’s incredibly flattering creatively. It’s also cool from the business side because I know that instead of the $2.99 that they may have spent, they’ve probably spent 20 or 25 bucks on those books, and I’m getting 70% of that, which, when you aggregate it with thousands of readers, before you know it you can have a fairly successful business.

Pat:
Yeah, that’s incredible. I was also thinking about Ernest Cline, author of Ready Player One.

Mark:
Oh, good one. Yeah.

Pat:
You had talked about the other assets available. That obviously turned into a movie and all this merchandise and all this other stuff, really cool things happened as a result. Then his next book came out, called Armada, and it was in a different world, different setting, and it still did well because he did very popular, but you don’t go from Ready Player One to Armada as easily as if it was Ready Player One to Ready Player Two or Ready Player Three.

Mark:
Exactly.

Pat:
I’m like, oh, there should be a … I’d be all over Ready Player Two if it existed, something like that.

Mark:
Me too. Also there was quite a long gap between those books. He’s not prolific. Not that there’s anything wrong with taking your time, but the way Amazon works, it does reward authors who are able to provide their readers with a reasonably fast experience in terms of new content. I think with Cline, I think it was maybe a few years between those books. I could be wrong, but I have a feeling it was.

Pat:
How long does it take you to write a new book?

Mark:
Well, my best year, 2014, I live in Salisbury in the UK, so not too far from Stonehenge, and I was working in the film industry, so I was commuting to and from London, which is about 90 minutes on the train each way. I had two small kids—one kid and my wife was pregnant on maternity leave. Also adding into that, I was starting to get some success, so I started to get readers buying the books, emailing me, telling me how much they liked it. In that year, I wrote almost all on the train, maybe a little bit whilst I was at work. Don’t tell my boss at the time. I wrote about a million words in terms of published fiction, so around about, I think I published six books that year. I’ve never hit that again. Even though I’m full time now, I’ve never got near that because I don’t know, I think it’s one of those things that you do kind of expand to fit the time you have to do them. I think last year I wrote three or four books, and this year I’m aiming to do four or five, so I can hit that reasonably comfortably. That’s my thing. I would do it anyway if I wasn’t being paid for it. I love writing.

Pat:
That’s amazing. I really want to write a fiction book one day, and it’s just so inspiring. Do you as a fiction author dream about your characters?

Mark:
Yeah.

Pat:
Do you think about them all the time?

Mark:
Yeah. My wife has a thing. When we started seeing each other, I was just starting to get back to writing. She used to say I had this kind of look. I’d go into a far away space where I wasn’t really in the room. My eyes would glaze over and she’d be like, you’re thinking about your books again, aren’t you? I’m like, yeah, sorry, I am. That happens. I find I get loads of great ideas when I’m walking. I have a dog so we walk in the countryside around here. That’s the best place I have for riffing on ideas and solving plot problems. Also in the shower in the morning, which just goes to show that your mind’s never really shut off. I’ll often have good ideas when I’m in the shower, which must have been brewing whilst I was sleeping, I guess. Are you in that situation too?

Pat:
Yeah. I mean for me, I even have not written a fiction book yet, yet I still can imagine characters and I’m thinking about story lines and plots and things like that. I was just curious for a professional writer, it must be just exponentially much, much more. For me, my best ideas come in the car or on the walks, on a run, during a row or definitely also on a commute. Yeah.

Mark:
Yeah. Yeah, exercise is great because it’s a different part of your mind gets switched on, I think. It’s kind of more meditative. I feel the same way about running. You just kind of do something different. You’re not really thinking in any kind of focused way, but you seem to be able to access parts of your brain where the good stuff brews, and that’s something I’ve definitely found.

Pat:
How do you manage your fans? Obviously many of my listeners here know I’ve written about super fans, and you’ve said yourself you’ve had people reach out to you and they’re fans. Tell me about your fans. How are the great and how are they crazy?

Mark:
They’re almost all great, actually. The numbers game, I’ve bound to have had a few slightly unusual fan interactions, but generally speaking, it’s all fantastic. I’ll give you a couple of examples of how things have changed over time. When I was traditionally published, I never had an email from a reader or a letter, nothing, which is really disappointing because that was one of the things I thought would be fun, would be to have a conversation with someone who’d read my stuff.

Mark:
I remember one time I went to a dinner party for a friend. She said, “I’ve got something really cool for you, Mark. Just wait there.” She went into another room, came back with one of my books. She said, “I was in a charity shop,” so of course my ego is immediately crushed. She said, “I found this.” It was being sold for one pound or something. She bought it and she opened it up, and inside was this letter. The second book was called “Pina Colada.” I was a lawyer so it was a satire about law. Lots of legal stuff in there, and this reader, who obviously knew more about law than I did, had gone through the book and had corrected all of the things I’d got wrong. These days, she would have emailed me with that, probably, and I would have been able to email back and say, “Thank you very much. You are completely correct. I am a very bad lawyer and I appreciate the time and effort that you’ve put into this and I hope the things I got wrong didn’t detract from your enjoyment.” Maybe she would have been or would have become a big fan. I couldn’t do that because there was no way to get in touch with her.

Mark:
Now scrolling forwards to how things are now, I’ve actually got on my desk right now a $20 note. If I look over to my shelves on the other side of the room, I’ve got another three $20 notes that I’ve framed. Every Christmas for the last four years, there’s a guy I call Bob Walsh who lives in Washington in the States, and he sends me Christmas cards. The first one, I was kind of not for six when he sent it to me. He said he hadn’t been into reading, or he’d kind of had a lapse of reading for 40 years, and he read one of my Milton books and that had revived his love of literature. To thank me, he sent me a $20 bill and he asked me to go and buy a gin and tonic because he knows that’s what I like to drink, as his way of thanking me, which was incredible. Then he’s done it for the next three years.

Mark:
Now, I haven’t spent any of those. As I say, I framed them. The reason I’ve done that is in the moments where I’m not confident that my stuff is as good as it needs to be—and like any other writer, I have moments of doubt and thinking I’m a fraud and I can’t write and all of that kind of stuff—I just need to look over at those framed 20s from Bob and think I’ve actually had an effect on someone and he enjoys my stuff enough to have found my address out and to have sent four Christmas cards from the States to the UK with $20 in it. Maybe $20 is a lot of money to him, I don’t know, but it’s just a really lovely experience to have that.

Mark:
I’m thankful to say and both fortunate to be able to say that’s not the only example of that kind of interaction that I’ve had with readers, which is all I ever really wanted. I mean the money is nice, but to be able to provide someone with a bit of escape is fun. I’ve had readers in hospices who are at the last stages of their lives, and they’ve found some peace and some enjoyment from my stuff or from readers like Bob who haven’t read for ages. You can’t really put a price on that. It’s really nice.

Pat:
That’s really amazing, Mark. Thank you for sharing that. How do you communicate with your super fans now that we are in the internet age? What do you choose to use, if anything, for just connecting en masse to your people?

Mark:
I’m kind of agnostic on the platform that I use to do it, but my philosophy is the same across all platforms. I respond to every single email, and I respond, as far as I can, to every single Facebook message or comment. That might just be liking a comment that someone may have left or a reply, but I try to at least let them know that I have noticed them and I appreciate the time they’ve spent in doing what they’ve done. Emails I will always reply to. I remember when I was starting out. I used to love [inaudible 00:31:47] and Martin Amos over here in the UK. If I had written a letter to them and they replied to me, that would have made my year, probably, to be able to have that kind of correspondence with a writer that I admired. Although I’m not comparing myself to either of those writers, it is possible that I can have that effect on readers too.

Mark:
Then kind of going beyond that, and it’s a bit more commercial, but it’s worth bearing in mind. If those readers then know that I am responsive, and I listen and I appreciate the time that they spend in communicating with me, there’s a very good chance that they will then go and tell their friends, and that cycle can begin again. Word of mouth is the most powerful form of advertising. We can’t manufacture it, but what we can do is encourage it. That is how you do it, at least it’s how I do it. I think just being there for readers and replying and being appreciative is really important.

Pat:
In terms of fiction specifically, have you ever had any readers or fans try to … I can imagine them getting really tied to the individual characters that you’re writing about, and access to the author to understand more about their favorite character, or even help influence or determine what’s going to happen next, perhaps before the next book comes out. Has that ever happened to you?

Mark:
Yeah. I’ve got people … I mean generally speaking, thinking of you’re edging towards the Kathy Bates “Misery” territory there with super fans kidnapping the writer and forcing them to write in a certain way, which is that kind of thing that’s never happened to me, thankfully.

Pat:
Yeah, we don’t want that.

Mark:
Generally speaking I’m quite fond of my ankles. I don’t want them broken any time soon. They’re pretty good. It’s not an issue as such, but something I’ve become aware of, is I find it quite hard to end the book sometimes. I think it’s because I devour … I used to work in the film and TV industry. I’ve watched a lot of TV and a lot of film and if you look at binge TV these days, so “Game of Thrones” things like that, all the episodes end on a cliffhanger because they want you to come back to the next show. I think that has been something that’s influenced me. Cliffhangers are very tricky because if you get someone who’s invested 10 hours of their reading time reading one of your books and then you don’t tie up all of the plot points at the end of the book, you’re going to piss off some readers. It’s just going to happen.

Mark:
On the other hand, they will all buy the next book. Even though they’ll tell you that they won’t, they will go and buy it. It’s one of those things. You’ve kind of got to respect them. In leaving really awful cliffhangers, I’ve done this before actually in one of my books. I left the heroine in a position of considerable danger. Honestly the response to that, the reviews were really aggressively negative. I generally get good reviews, but this one was getting one stars all the time, to the extent that I pulled the book down, re-edited it and uploaded it again with a slightly different ending. I still find myself kind of treading that quite carefully, the line between wanting to have something that’s addictive and will lead people onto the next book, and also providing them with the closure that they need for the book that they’ve just read. I’m still kind of working on getting better at that. That’s not one of my strengths, and occasionally they will write in and tell me that.

Pat:
For those of us listening who are in the middle of writing books or who are about to, and maybe we just keep putting it off and putting it off and it’s a scary thing to us, from a seasoned author like yourself, what are your best tips for us to just get writing and have that flow state that we need to crank these out?

Mark:
The first thing is, the best advice is ask and check. You have to sit down and you have to write. Then beyond that, if you look at something, and I remember this from the first time I finished a novel. I tried to finish lots and never got there because it gets to a point where you can be a little bit daunted by the fact that it’s 100,000 words. How am I ever going to get there? If you break it down a bit … I can probably, I think today I did about 4,000 words, which is a good day for me. Normally I hit about 2,000. If you break it down, maybe you’ve got a full time job or you’ve got two kids or you’ve got three kids and time is precious. If you maybe can carve out 10 or 15 minutes in your day, maybe half an hour, perhaps you commute on the train. Maybe you get an hour. You can spend that time writing. Maybe you can do 500 words in the time that you have, or even 100 words.

Mark:
If you aggregate that over time, over the course of a year, by the end of the year you will have enough words to have at least a first draft of a novel that you can then go forwards with. I think it’s getting into that habit of actually getting your fingers on the keyboard and just telling a little bit more of the story, just working out where you want to go. There’s nothing wrong with getting lost. There’s nothing wrong in writing yourself into a corner and then having to reverse back and go in a different direction, because every word that you write is making you better as a writer technically, and it’s also teaching you to avoid those mistakes in the future.

Mark:
Also, you have to love it. If you don’t love writing fiction, it’s probably not the thing that you have been put here to do. If you do enjoy it, if you get a buzz, if you find yourself thinking about fiction ideas when you think you should be thinking about something else, then maybe that’s an itch that you need to scratch. Just sit down when you can, get some words down and then do it again the next day, and then repeat.

Pat:
My final question for you, and thank you for this, Mark. This has been incredibly inspiring and very helpful for myself, and I know everybody else listening. When writing anything really, non-fiction or fiction, but for me I’m thinking about myself selfishly here when I had once tried to sit down and write a fiction thing. I would write something based on an idea I had, and then I would look at it again. What I thought this was a great idea, I’d go that’s dumb, that’s not going to work. Then I just kept going back to the drawing board and trying something again that I thought was a good idea. Then I’d see it and I’d be like, no, nobody’s going to like that. I kept fighting these demons in my head that what I was writing just wasn’t good. How do you commit to the words that you write when we’re so easily dissuaded by those voices in our head that something’s not good?

Mark:
What you’ve just described there is every single writer in the world ever. I get that. Imposter syndrome. I might be reading something that I love and I’ll then come back to my stuff and I’m like, “geez, I’m not as good as that guy.” It’s insidious and it can get in your head, and if you let it, you’ll find an excuse to stop and then maybe you won’t write for six months. Then you try again and the same thing happens. The thing you have to do is you’ve just got to block it out. You are the worst person to judge how good your writing is or how good your ideas are. You could not find a worse judge of the quality of a story than the writer. You need to push on. You’ve got to maybe just finish a short story. Maybe take something from the idea that you have, split it off, write a short story which of course you could then use as, again, to use another internet marketing term, you could use as a lead magnet in ads to start to build your audience, a fiction audience. Once you’ve done that and you start to get readers, and a key thing here is readers who are not related to you. You could give your book to your wife and she might say, I love this, Pat. It’s amazing.

Pat:
She wouldn’t say that. I’m just kidding. She would, she would.

Mark:
In the back of your head, if she did say that, you’ll be thinking, yeah, of course you’re saying that because you’re my wife. I had that. For a long time I couldn’t find any judge that I thought … friends were the same. They’re saying that because they want to flatter my ego. Eventually you have to put your big boy pants on and just put it out in the world. Amazon’s pretty good for that. It’s very democratic. The book goes out there. You’ll get reviews from people who have never heard of you before.

Mark:
I remember very, very vividly the first five star review I had. I remember the first person joining my mailing list who was not related to me. It’s an amazing feeling, because someone that you have no connection with, you don’t know who they are, you don’t know anything about their life, but you have something in common. You’ve written something and they’ve read it and they enjoyed it, they got something out of that experience enough to have reviewed it or joined your list or whatever it was. If you get enough of those kind of affirmations, before you know it you feel a bit more confident about your writing. I don’t get that too much these days. Now and again I do, but when I do I can look over at that $60 in the frame on the wall over there and think, yeah I can. I’ve got this. I can do this. That’s just a lot of practice. Everyone gets that but you can get over it.

Pat:
Thank you for that, Mark. Where can people go to learn more about you? Where should they follow up?

Mark:
Well, I’m actually going to give you two websites. If people are interested in reading my fiction, if you like addictive, compulsive books, thrillers, you can go to markjdawson.com and I have two free books that you can grab if you want to test me out by signing up to my mailing list. If you’re a writer and it’s non-fiction or fiction, we kind of cater to both, I have some courses on how to self publish and then how to use ads to help you to self publish, and some more stuff coming down the tube as well. That is at selfpublishingformula. We have a podcast on Friday as well, which is not anywhere near as good as yours, Pat, but we have fun doing it, so it’s a good laugh. Yes, those are the two places I’d recommend people check us out.

Pat:
Awesome, Mark. You’re amazing. Thank you so much for coming on and spending time with us today. All the best on your next books.

Mark:
It’s a real pleasure to be here, Pat. Thanks very much.

Pat:
Wow, just wow. Mark, thank you so much for coming on. I know you listen to the show. I’m thankful to have featured you here on the show today. I hope that this is inspiring to others, those of you listening, as it is inspiring to me. Two resources for you, markjdawson.com and selfpublishingformula.com. As you can tell, Mark’s the real deal. He goes through the same struggles and I think his advice is just spot on, and I’m definitely going to take that with me moving forward, and I hope you do as well.

Pat:
If you’d like to get the links in a much easier fashion and also check out some of the other resources mentioned here in this episode, all you have to do is go to smartpassiveincome.com/session413. Smartpassiveincome.com/session413. You can check all those things out there. Thanks in advance for those of you who are going to leave a review after this. I just appreciate you so much. That helps energize me to keep going and it helps other people who are not quite sure what to expect when they listen to the show, that this is legit, and I hope you feel this is legit too.

Pat:
I appreciate you so much, and just want to say make sure you hit subscribe because we’ve got a lot of great stuff coming your way. I cannot wait to hear what you think about the upcoming episodes on the docket, and I’m not even going to spoil it for you because it’s going to be a surprise. Make sure you hit subscribe, and I look forward to serving you next week. New episodes coming out every single Wednesday. That’s how it’s been and I’m looking forward to serving you next week, and you can dive into the archives if you’re hungry for more already. Cheers, thanks so much, and as always, Team Flynn, you’re amazing. #teamflynnforthewin. Peace.

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