Episode 172/
Women’s fiction author, Rachel Hanna shares about writing women’s fiction and branching out into direct sales using Shopify and Klaviyo.Author Website:
RachelHannaAuthor.com Store.RachelHannaAuthor.com💜 🎙 Become a supporter of the podcast! We can’t wait to give you a shoutout in a future episode. WishIdKnownForWriters.com/Support
Time Stamps:
0:06 Direct Sales and Writing Success 8:08 Lessons Learned in Self-Publishing 16:51 Starting and Growing as an Author 25:53 Authenticity for Authors 29:42 Mindset Blocks in Writing/Business 39:42 Creating a Successful Direct Sales Store 51:23 Tips for Successful Book MarketingOur Sponsor:
TryVellum.com/WishTranscript:
Sara Rosett: 0:25
Welcome to the Wish I’d Known Then Podcast. I’m Sara Rosett.
Jami Albright: 0:28
And I’m Jami Albright, and this week on the show we have Rachel Hanna. Yes, we do, and y’all, I know I’ve said this before, but you better buckle up because it is amazing. This woman is crazy.
Sara Rosett: 0:50
She’s doing really well with direct sales. That was why we were like come talk to us about direct sales. But we talk about a lot of other things in the interview, but I think that’s the thing that most people will be most interested in, and there’s like a whole story behind the recording of the interview. We had issues and she was kind enough to come back.
Jami Albright: 1:13
And we’re going to blame it on Zoom. That was not our fault, I’m sure. Of course, she was kind enough to come back in a few days. So we really appreciate it. Rachel, thank you very much. She’s a listener of the show and she’s in the Facebook group, but y’all, it’s great. There are a couple of times, if you could have seen it, it was the emoji of my head exploding. So, yeah, it was great.
Sara Rosett: 1:45
We both got some really good tips and ideas. So that’s coming up. We don’t have any new supporters this week because we’re recording a little bit early because I’m going to be out of town.
Jami Albright: 1:57
Yep, we’re at Inkerscon right now recording in our separate hotel rooms. I think we could have done it in the same hotel room, but we were afraid to set them up so we didn’t. No new supporters. I don’t really have any news, because we just recorded an intro not too long ago.
Sara Rosett: 2:21
S o we’re at Inker’s and we’re recording early, so we don’t have new subscribers, but I think this is a good match for this podcast, because the talk of the conference is direct sales, so this is working out well. But even though we don’t have new supporters, we’re appreciative for all the supporters who have continued to support us and we’re just so thankful that you’re here riding along with us on this riding journey. And we also have an industry sponsor this time, and that is Vellum, and we love Vellum. You can do a lot with Vellum. You can do your interiors, you can do some special things with your interiors. You can do customized links to the back of your books and you can also do large print, and they make it really easy.
Jami Albright: 3:11
Right, and you really have been taking advantage of the large print for a while because your audience is older. Yeah, and because libraries have loved your large print books And it makes it really easy to do it. Yes, I’ve used it for my large print books as well that I have going out to libraries, and it’s super easy. The only thing you need is a different. You just need to contact your cover designer and tell them it’s. You know, you have to get a different cover because your book is going to be longer, because you have the large print. But it was simple, it was literally click a button and it was so easy. So then you’re done, and that’s just another stream of income. You know, I mean because large print serves a different audience and it’s not just folks who are older and age and can’t see real well, you know, because of age. You know people who, with visual impairment, can make it accessible to them. And I think that’s fantastic. And that’s what I love about Vellum. They really kind of anticipate not only the author’s needs but the reader’s needs too, and I think that’s great.
Sara Rosett: 4:41
Yeah, I’ve been really happy with like it’s really easy to do the large print, and just having that extra addition makes your books look a little bit more professional. We’re really happy. I’m so thankful we have Vellum. So if you want to try it out, you can go in, you can upload your book, you can work with it and see what you can do. But you only pay when you’re ready to like export your book, and so you can try everything out and see how you like it. So if you want to give it a try, you can go to try. Vellum.com/wish. Yeah, and it’s only for Mac, though. Did we mention that?
Jami Albright: 5:17
We have in the past. But yeah, it is for Mac. So that is one, I guess, thing about it, but I feel like you know what, for me, it was almost worth getting a Mac just so that I could use Vellum.
Sara Rosett: 5:36
I can see that, yeah, and I know people who have bought Macs like they go find a used Mac so that they can use Vellum.
Jami Albright: 5:43
Well, I think that we have beat that horse, and so now it is time to get on with the interview with Rachel Hanna, and y’all, just get ready. It’s all I’m gonna say.
Sara Rosett: 5:58
Yeah, tell us, let us know what you’re doing with direct sales after you listen to this, because we’re curious how, what she inspires you to do. So, here is Rachel. Well, today we have Rachel Hanna with us. Hi Rachel, how are you?
Rachel Hanna: 6:16
I’m good. How are you?
Sara Rosett: 6:18
Great. We’re so glad to talk to you. We’ve had a little trouble with our recording, but hopefully this one will work great. So we’re going to jump in with your bio. Rachel is a Southern women’s fiction author who writes about strong women starting over. Her books are full of small town, clean romance and are set at the beach or in the mountains.
Jami Albright: 6:39
That’s awesome, yep, and
so tell us how you got into writing.
Rachel Hanna: 6:44
Well, I mean, initially I was in third grade. I don’t know that we necessarily need to go back that far, but that is where it started. I used to write little stories. And my third grade teacher, Mrs Ham, who was my favorite teacher she leaned down as she handed back one of my papers, and she said “ou’re going to be a great author one day” where the other kids couldn’t hear because I guess they weren’t going to be great authors, and so I took a long journey to get there. But I went to journalism school. I was in broadcast journalism, so I worked at CNN and Georgia Public Television. And I worked at newspapers and radio stations, and then I met my husband and ended up in real estate for 15 years, because it makes total sense. So in 2012, I heard about this thing called Kindle, and I was working from home as a ghost writer anyway, and I was doing internet marketing and affiliate marketing and all this different stuff. I heard about this Kindle And people were making money just writing stuff and putting it on this Kindle thing. And I was like, “well, i’ll try that. So I started out with some nonfiction, probably in 2011, writing just the goofiest little books. And then I heard people doing fiction, and I was like, “oh, I haven’t written fiction in a long time, so I think I can try that. So I just sort of jumped into it. I didn’t have any. Well, none of us did. None of us had any real plan or sense of what we were doing back then. It was truly the golden age of Kindle. You could just write a book and put it up there, and it would just be up at the top because there was not that much competition. It was really a special time. It was the Wild West, though, so yeah, so I started doing that in late fall of 2012. It was one of my first books. My first books are not still published because they are not my best work, but that’s when I first started And I was doing really well. After about three months, I was already making $5,000 a month, and I said “this looks interesting.”
Sara Rosett: 8:44
This has potential, right?
Rachel Hanna: 8:47
I was like “huh, this seems nice. But then I messed myself up And we’ll probably talk about that in a few minutes. But what I did was one of my biggest mistakes.
Sara Rosett: 8:58
OK, well, that is awesome. So you didn’t start out in romance, then. You started out in another genre and moved to romance later.
Rachel Hanna: 9:05
Well, I started out in nonfiction for a little bit, where I was just doing the craziest little recipe books and stuff. That’s what I’d been doing. We were writing a bunch of little nonfiction books, but when I started out, I actually started out in contemporary romance, which, looking back, that was one big mistake I made. It was just such a giant category. And back then none of us really talked about subgenres and sub-subgenres. And so nobody said those words. And so I said, oh, romance, OK, I’ll write a romance.” But there was nothing special about them at the time that made them like sports romance or small town romance. There was nothing like that. It was just a giant, you know contemporary romance kind of stuff. So that made it a much harder entry, because everybody was writing romance when they started on Kindle. And still it’s a hard category to break into generally if you’re not going to niche down some. That’s where I started.
Sara Rosett: 10:03
Yeah, well, what is your definition of success?
Rachel Hanna: 10:08
Freedom, whether it’s financial freedom or time freedom. Obviously the money is a good thing, but what it really buys you is just the freedom to make whatever choices you want to make. I mean, there’s been many years of my life before my author business took off, after doing it for eight years where money was always tight. And I remember what that felt like to have to check my bank balance all day long. Day like “oh, no, yeah, You know, or there’s a car repair or whatever. So having that freedom to not have to sit around and worry about that all the time and be able to enjoy life a little more, that is my definition of success.
Jami Albright: 10:52
That’s great. Because you’re about to travel, aren’t you? this week?
Rachel Hanna: 10:57
Well, we have a home in the Blue Ridge Mountains, so we live between two houses all the time. So I have to get back up there for a few days and back down here for a few days. So that’s the traveling. We also have a motor home, but we have not gone anywhere yet because we bought a mountain house. And now I’m like where am I going in this motor home?
Sara Rosett: 11:20
It’s a good problem to have, though.
Rachel Hanna: 11:23
Give me any choices.
Jami Albright: 11:25
So what do you wish you’d known about writing and craft?
Rachel Hanna: 11:29
I wish I had known that it was OK to do it my own way. And I tell people that now because even occasionally now, not so much as it used to be I will try to figure out how to outline. I’m not that person? But my readers love my books the way that they are. But if I try to outline, they’re much more flat because I know what’s going to happen, as opposed to me writing, which I’m typically typing along, and then I’ll go “oh Who’s that? I didn’t know she was going to do that. I’m constantly doing that. If I don’t write that way, they’re just not as good. But that was one of what I was mentioning earlier was I had after three months, I was making about $5,000 a month, and then I just psyched myself out because all the authors that I had met so far around me were plotting. And it made me feel like I wasn’t a real author. So I took seven months off trying to learn how to plot, and I didn’t write any books. And so I lost all my momentum, and I never really got it back for several years.
So, yeah, that’s the thing I think people have to understand. You have to figure out what makes you write the best. And it might not be what you want it to be Like, I would love to be that person that gets up in the morning and is like I write from 8 to 1, and then I do this, and then I just. No. I am a pantser in all parts of my life. I never know what’s going on that day, I don’t know where I’m going, I just everything’s by the seat of my pants. And I hate it sometimes. It works. So I think not fighting against the way that you write is so helpful. To just don’t waste time doing that. I mean, it’s fine to read craft books and get better at that, but don’t try to make yourself do it like somebody else does it.
Sara Rosett: 13:26
So important. And there is like this, it does sound great to be able to plan out your book, and to have a schedule where you’re going to write so many words a day, and at the end of this period of time you’ll have a draft. But it doesn’t always work like that.
Do you like work in bursts and take breaks, Or do you?
Rachel Hanna: 13:47
Yeah. I do what I call author math. You know where I sit down and like “I’ve got author math. Yeah, I need 60,000 words And if I do this many like it never works. It never works out ever.
Sara Rosett: 14:05
Jamie and I are both laughing because we feel that, so much.
Rachel Hanna: 14:10
I do it every time. I write in Scrivener and I always put in like project targets. So I will put in like the date I’d like to finish and how much I’d like for it. It’s funny I just did this yesterday on my current work in progress. I had it at a certain word count that I wanted to hit and then I just knocked it down by about 5,000 words. It was no better. I’m not going to hit that. I can already tell.
Jami Albright: 14:34
Oh my gosh.
Rachel Hanna: 14:36
I sprint with, you know, a lot of my writer friends and that helps me. I do that on Clubhouse, yeah, and usually we keep each other on track. It just depends on who’s in the room. Honestly. Sometimes I get distracted. And so I’ll say I’m going to write, and then they come back and everybody’s like what did you do? And I’m like I watched Designing Women or Judge Judy. I wandered into the kitchen and ate a jar of olives. l mean, I’m just all over the place what I do. I am one of those people who has to feel like the inspiration, and sometimes it does not come.
That can be a big problem. So then I get myself to the finish line and I’m like, “oh crap, i need to write 15,000 words by. It’s like two days from now. Yeah. Then I’m under and I did that even in school and college. I was always a preparer and did my best to work under pressure. But that gets a lot harder as you get older and I don’t like it now, but I still keep doing it. So I do write in a lot of bursts. I do a lot of I type when I first start a story, especially if it’s a new, like cast of characters. But as soon as I know the people, I start dictating as much as I can. So it’s more editing, but it just gets better words, better dialogue and stuff like that. So I have kind of a disjointed process.
Sara Rosett: 15:54
Well, but that’s the thing. If it’s working and you’re producing books and your readers love them, then that’s the most important thing, right? So I think that’s great, and it clearly works for you, yeah. Well, what about marketing?
What do you wish you’d known about marketing?
Rachel Hanna: 16:11
I mean, I run ads all over the place, so I think one of the things when I first started, there was no paid marketing, really. There were no. I know it’s hard for the newer authors to realize we didn’t have Facebook ads, and we didn’t have Amazon ads.
And so we just sort of wrote it and hoped Amazon liked it enough to show it to somebody. But I think if I were starting now, I would immediately start advertising. I think you’re going to have almost an impossible time really getting anywhere without doing some paid marketing. And so, and I think you know, never stop learning it. You know, I still, honestly, the marketing is my favorite part. I know as an author you’re supposed to say the writing is your favorite part, but me and the writing don’t get along a lot. You know we kind of have this disfunctional marriage, and so I love the marketing. Like I can just play in Canva all day. You know and just make graphics and adjust ads. And then I’m like “I just have a book done And so you know I love that part of it. I love socializing with my readers and chatting in my reader group, all that kind of stuff. So I think you know, one thing I wish I had done initially and I honestly didn’t do this for a couple of years was set up a mailing list. I didn’t do that when I first started. Nobody ever talked about it. I was with a company called Aweber for my emails back then, which I don’t know if anybody uses any more much from our like profession. But I wish I had done that sooner. You know, I wish I had really taken that more seriously at the time. But I think I’ve always been pretty. You know, once I had marketing avenues available to me, i’ve always taken advantage of those. So, yeah, but I think if you’re starting out, you got to stay consistent with it. Open your Facebook reader group the moment that you start publishing, like, really start trying to build it. A lot of people get dejected because they’re like I have zero people. We’ve all had zero people.
Jami Albright: 18:15
Exactly.
Rachel Hanna: 18:16
You know, I did not come into this with a silver author spoon in my mouth. I had to start at zero, like everybody else. So you have to start it to get you know to where you’re going.
Jami Albright: 18:28
Right, and how many people do you have now?
Rachel Hanna: 18:31
On my mailing list?
Jami Albright: 18:33
Mailing list and your Facebook group.
Rachel Hanna: 18:36
My Facebook group has, I think, just under 15,000 people in it. And my MailerLite, which was my original big mailing list, has somewhere around 40,000. And then I’ve just built a new mailing list with my direct store which has about 25,000 people.
Sara Rosett: 18:52
Fantastic, that’s fantastic, yeah Yeah. And there’s something to be said for longevity that like, if you go like you said, go ahead and start your group and your mailing list. And even because we’ve had people in our Facebook group ask, you know, it seems like it’s not worth it because it’s so slow, but if it’s there it will build over time.
Rachel Hanna: 19:12
You just have to, you have to tell people about it, you have to put it in the back matter. You have to put it in, you know anywhere that you can. Yeah, in your newsletters And every newsletter that goes out in my MailerLite, I have a template that I created. At the bottom of that one, there’s a yellow box that’s Join my reader group. It’s in every email; it’s there.Choice of what to do. I would add those words right, yeah, yeah, five to six. Yeah, five to seven. Yeah, i would ask you to type in your 這 eight to seven. So that’s where I get all of my advanced readers for each book, because I change teams with every book, so people can’t get on my reader team if they don’t join my group. And I make sure to tell them that so that more people join, you know, as often as possible. I’ll do certain giveaways in there that I don’t do anywhere else, or I’ll do cover reveals in there and not do it anywhere else, so it gets people to come in there and have a reason to be there.
Jami Albright: 20:17
Right. Well, I love that. And you know, i did start a newsletter before I put out the first book. But I did not start a reader group, for it was about a year, maybe a year and a half, until after, and I missed a lot of people that way. You know, I wish I had done it sooner, because what’s that quote? start like you want to finish? So you should. I mean, I think a lot of us think, well, you know, I’m not really big enough to do this, or I’m not big enough to do that. Well, plan to be that way. You know, at some point you are going to be that way, so start it now and let it build.
Rachel Hanna: 20:59
Yeah, think you have to kind of behave your way to success with that because, like I I , was in this for eight years and I did, I was doing OK, but I was not getting very far. Like my highest was like $11,000, which would be a lot to some people, but in eight years that was not a lot for me. And when I wrote the Beach House in late 2019, and it just took off like a rocket and dragged everything along with it that I’d written and everything since. You know, I did that, I was very specific about how I did that. Like I at the time was running an eBay business to try to make ends meet. I’d been doing that off and on for 20 years. I just got very frustrated one day, and I was like “I don’t want to do this anymore. I told my husband and my son. I was like take everything out of this eBay room, which was like a could have been on an episode of Hoarders. I mean it was awful. And I said, “hrow it in the basement. I don’t want to see it, i don’t want to deal with it. I am an author full time. Nothing else as of right now, today.” And so I redid the whole office and everything that I looked at was something to do with author or money or success or what I was just surrounding myself. And I stayed in that room writing and I turned on certain music. I mean I really just focused on it. And it was so crazy how fast that took off for me when I finally just committed to “his is all that I’m doing And I’m going to act like a successful author every day.” I’m going to do the things that I think a successful author would do, and I think you really have to do that. I think you have to just act your way there, because at the beginning you aren’t a successful author. No, you’re not, but you’ve got to pay your dues. We all have. So you don’t have to pay any longer.
Jami Albright: 22:40
In weird orders. You know. So it’s very interesting.
Well, what assumptions did you make at the beginning of your writing career, and, looking back, did they turn out to be right or wrong?
Rachel Hanna: 22:52
Oh gosh, that was a long time ago. I think I probably assumed that it was easier than it turned out to be. Because I really I mean, this is a thing that you’re not supposed to admit out loud, but I wasn’t much of a reader. I like to read, but I like to read nonfiction. I like to read business and health and mindset and stuff. I didn’t like to read fiction. So my idea was well, I’m going to write this fiction stuff, so I’m going to take a weekend and I’m going to read like two, three books and then I’ll be ready. And that’s what I did. I literally just picked like a couple of books from well-known authors in the romance category. I sat there reading them. I was like I think I could do this. You know, I was like whatever, and that’s kind of how I started. So I think I was very naive. And really, now, looking back, knowing what really goes into the business and just the craft of it and the editing, I mean, gosh, those first books, I didn’t get them edited at all. I was the only one who did them And you don’t see your own errors.
Jami Albright: 23:56
No, no, no, Never me either.
Rachel Hanna: 23:58
Yeah. So I think I just you know you go into it and you don’t. I think it is one of the things that slips people up. They come in wanting to be a writer. And then they come in and they’re like, oh, I have to do these 500 other things or else my books just go into oblivion, you know. So I think I was probably pretty naive about that And, you know, would tell people if you’re going to do this, figure out. If you’re doing it for love, that’s fine, but if you’re doing it for money, you’re going to have to learn this other stuff and be good with doing it too.
Jami Albright: 24:29
Right, mean, you can not love it, but you got to learn to do it. if you’re doing it for money, if you’re doing it for longevity, if you’re doing it, you know, but you have to learn it. Yeah, and I think that’s that’s what holds a lot of people up. You know, you can learn it as you go, like you don’t have to know it ahead of time, you can learn on the job. But you do have to kind of commit to that part of it too.
Rachel Hanna: 24:58
I think you also have to be OK with failure. I’m one of those people who’s like let me fail faster, let me see how bad I can fail. You know, like it doesn’t scare me or bother me or anything. I’m just like, ok, well, that didn’t work, you know. And then I just get up and go on. I’m not somebody; I don’t take risks in life, like I’m not going to get on a roller coaster or jump out of a perfectly good airplane. I will throw so much money at Facebook ads with absolutely no idea if they’re going to work. It doesn’t bother me at all. So I think you have to, you can’t really, in this business, be risk averse. If you want to be successful, you’re going to have to do some off the wall, outside of the box kind of things that you might be like, oh, I’m scared to death to do. But you have to do those things to if you want to get to certain levels.
Sara Rosett: 25:46
Well, that is a good lead into our next question is
What’s the most important thing you’ve learned?
Rachel Hanna: 25:53
I have learned that I am the only person who can write the way I write, and I am not in competition with other authors. And I have learned that my readers really, really wanted me to be a real person and be a friend, like, be like a friend to them. And so that that alone has helped me develop so many super fans. Because the first eight years, I mean my this is my pen name, so the first eight years I hid my face, I didn’t do video, I didn’t do anything, which I think really hurt me because they couldn’t connect with me. And I used the pen name because I didn’t want my family to know what I was writing. I write clean now, but at the beginning I had some steamy stuff And my mama would have not liked that at all. Southern Baptist Mamas are not. And I wasn’t good at it. I thought, dear Lord, I would sit there and just hate writing that stuff. And so I didn’t do it for long. But you know, I just hid behind it and it inhibited me too because like I felt like I couldn’t really connect with people. I came out of the shadows after the beach house because I had people contacting me that knew me. And they’re like “Somebody is using your photo on their author page on this paperback I bought or I got from the library, like I hadn’t talked to in years, were like “they’re stealing your photo and pretending as I was like no, that’s actually me. So I had to come out and be like. “everybody. This is me, you know, because there was no way of hiding it. But it has made things so much easier and so much better and has allowed my business to just grow like crazy. Because you know we all have our own personality, we all have our own gifts. You know, minus humor and talking, I can do that all day long, you know. So it helps me interact and connect with my readers a lot better. And so I think that really has made a big difference. And if I had it to do over again, i wouldn’t have. I would have had a pen name just to have a pen name, but I wouldn’t have, I wouldn’t have hidden myself.
Sara Rosett: 28:10
Yeah, yeah, that’s great. So you still. You still have the pen name, right, but it’s just not a secret pen name, right? Is that how that works.
Rachel Hanna: 28:17
It’s just not. It’s just not secret, but it is funny because some of my books I would write real things in from my life. And then my mom doesn’t normally read, but now she needs to read, so, reading stuff, she’ll probably listen to this too. She’s reading stuff and she’ll go. I know that’s me. I know that when that that’s me and it’s always the bad characters is the annoying mother, or Or I remember when this happened. That is not exactly how that happened. I’m like I’m writing fiction.
Jami Albright: 28:46
Ok, that’s right, that’s right, and my family says the same thing, yeah.
Sara Rosett: 28:52
Yeah, so you take a little bit of real life and then you kind of work it a little bit like you kneed it like dough.
Rachel Hanna: 28:59
Well, I wrote some of my books not thinking anybody I knew was ever going to read.
Jami Albright: 29:04
I know, And then I think, anybody was going to read it.
Well, what’s the biggest change you’ve made in in your thinking over the years?
Rachel Hanna: 29:18
Um, when I, when I finally, you know, threw all my stuff in the basement that day. My mindset I just got you know, I just had one of those come to Jesus meetings with myself. During that time I had a friend who was had released something and we had started together years ago and I was like asking her I’m like, how much are you making? You know, she was telling me how she was making per month. I was like no, that’s not possible, because I’d never thought that, because I had these like mindset blocks.
Jami Albright: 29:50
Yeah, yeah.
Rachel Hanna: 29:51
Uh, and so once I realized that one person can do it, then I realized that I could do it. And so that’s just sort of the way I look at everything now is if you know if somebody else is doing it, just like with the direct sales, if somebody else is doing it and they’re making this much money, then that means that I can do it and make this much money And so I think you really have to like work on your mindset blocks and there’s lots of, i’m sure, youtube videos and books and everything about that, but you have to figure out what it is. One of my blocks for a long time was I don’t want to make a lot of money, because then I’ll have to deal with taxes, and I don’t deal with taxes. And a lot of people have that one, and so I had to work through that. You know I had to sit and write and journal and do things to try to work through that, and so I intentionally work through mindset blocks. If I feel anything coming up that feels negative to me about money or business or anything, I immediately stop what I’m doing and I go start working on that, because they hold people back, not just for years, but some people for their entire lives. You know, y’all probably know people who are in their late years of their life and they still have these blocks and they could have done things with their lives that they wanted to do. So I really make time to go through those things if I feel anything kind of bubbling up. Because selling on Amazon can mess with your mind. Let me tell you right now all this category stuff. I have three books in my list, ten book series. One of them is in. It was in stacking chairs. I was number one.
Jami Albright: 31:23
One in stacking chairs. y’all.
Sara Rosett: 31:25
Congratulations.
Rachel Hanna: 31:29
I was very excited. But then they moved me to office sofas and furniture or something like that. So now I’m like number 58 there, and then two other books are in address books and lesson planners, and so I’m trying to work through it. So that could drive me crazy, right. Yeah, but you just have to laugh at it.
Yeah, And get in touch with my rep over there and talk to them and be like hello, But that having a store now takes that pressure off of having to worry about everything. But yeah, so you have to. I mean, you’re going to have mindset issues anytime you’re working with Amazon or any big company to have your money and future in their hands. Right.
Sara Rosett: 32:14
Yeah, Yeah. So we’re going to talk about direct sales in a little bit, So we’ll come back to that. But we always also like to ask you’ve mentioned a little bit of this,
If you were starting over today, what would you do differently?
Like you talked about how you’d go ahead and run ads right away, because you know there wasn’t. You didn’t have that when you started, But is there anything else?
Rachel Hanna: 32:36
Like I said, when I started, I started in romance And I really it took me a few years to realize that what I really wanted to write wasn’t necessarily romance. It was women’s fiction, more with the romance in it, but more about the woman and her journey, whether it’s through friendships or family relationships or whatever. And it took me years to kind of even figure out what that was called, because I wasn’t a creator And so I didn’t do it And I looked in the in the top 100 several times throughout the years. I’m like there’s no indie authors in here writing this fiction, they’re all writing romance. That must mean somebody’s tried it already and it didn’t work. And so I didn’t pursue it for years for eight years when I could have started that way earlier and really had a foothold, you know, in that genre.
So you know, I would say, if something’s nagging at you that you want to take a chance on and you’re like, I really want to write, you know, clean and wholesome dragon romance. And it’s stupid because nobody’s doing it. And if you’re feeling that like kind of a thing, then try it, even if you have to get another pen name, like go try it and see what happens. But I wish I had back then known it was. You know it was okay for me to just take these big chances, you know, but I was following the crowd. So I think when you follow the crowd you’re just going to end up, you know, the same way as the rest of the crowd.
Jami Albright: 33:56
Yeah, one in a million. I mean, you know, part of the millions instead of one in a million Yeah.
Rachel Hanna: 34:02
I mean, unfortunately the stats are there that you know most authors don’t make that much money. I think what the average is like $10,000 a year or something. So I don’t follow the crowd anymore And I do sometimes get advice from my author friends about why I would do this or what do that. But in the end it’s still my business. I just do what feels right, and sometimes I just go a totally different direction. And so yeah. it’s worked out for me. But yeah, I would take more chances in areas like that. I would start my newsletter list. UnHide my face. Unleash my personality. Le the chips fall where they may.
Jami Albright: 34:41
Exactly. So now you’re writing women’s fiction. And you touched on it a minute ago, but you talked about it’s more about the women, the woman’s journey. Can you tell us a little bit more about that and the difference between that and romance clean and/or I hate the word clean, you know what I’m saying or steamy romance, not dirty. Yeah I hate that. Anyway, yeah, but can you just sort of tell our listeners the difference?
Rachel Hanna: 35:20
Yeah, I mean the way I look at it. women’s fiction, first of all, is a very broad category.
Jami Albright: 35:25
Yeah.
Rachel Hanna: 35:26
Women’s paranormal fiction and all kinds of things, right. So it’s a broad category, but to me the focus is on the woman. And so, like, there’s can be romance in it, and that’s how my books are. There’s there’s romance, kind of, I guess, subplots, and they are important in the book, and I don’t even know that my readers of my newer stuff would look at it as one or the other. I don’t think they care, you know. But the way I look at it is that it’s following the woman’s journey and her growth from who she is at the beginning of the book to who she is at the end of the book. Whether that’s through showing her starting a new career, starting over after divorce or spouse dying, starting over in a new town, you know, and dealing with family relationships or friendships. So that’s what I focus on. And then in there I always have romance, because I know my readers love romance and I like to write romance. So I think for me, what I’ve tried to really do in the last few years because I do still have books that are just straight romance from earlier, but as of 2019, everything else has been women’s fiction with romance in it. Because, like my earlier books were straight romance, the whole plot was about the romance. There might have been a mom or a sister or something just hanging out on the side, but the whole point was the romance. But now what I really try to do is just give my readers the Rachel Hanna experience with every book. So something that they can, they know. This is how I’m going to feel. This is what the book’s like. This is how the phone’s going to be. I can trust that it’s not going to have like my. I have a lot of older readers. They don’t want bad language, they don’t want sex scenes, they don’t want that stuff. So I know what they want now, and I just aim to give them that over and over again. If I veer from that. And there’s sometimes that, like I’m like I should write, you know, like a psychological thriller. And I know I’m not, I can’t do that, I’m not smart enough. Okay, I’m not smart enough to write stuff like that. But I think you know, ooh, that would be fun to try something totally different. And I think, once you know it would be kind of like Chick-fil-A tomorrow deciding well, we’re tired of selling chicken, we’re going to sell hamburgers. Like, stay in your lane and you do what you do really well and you give the same experience. You know, every Chick-fil-A you go to, it’s basically going to be the same experience. So that’s kind of what I do with with my books. Or I try to do is give them that same experience so they can trust that if they pay for one of my books, they’re going to get that same feeling and they’re going to get the warm fuzzies or whatever it is that they get. And that’s what I just aim to deliver to them each time. So, whether it’s a romance or a women’s fiction, you know, I’m still able to kind of put that touch on it. And that’s what I was saying earlier. Everybody’s in their own way that nobody else can copy you. Even AI is not going to be able to copy that part of it, you know. So, like, own that, hone that, whatever it is. Ask readers how they feel when they. I poll my readers all the time. How do you feel when you read my book? You know, how do you feel when this, how do you feel when that? and I take those words and I use them in ads so that you know if they use feel good or heartwarming, or what I use in ads, because that’s who I’m trying to bring in, people who want that experience. And then it just starts to snowball.
Sara Rosett: 38:35
Yeah, I think that’s wonderful.
So let’s get back to direct sales,
because I know our listeners will have a lot of questions about that and we want to hear about your direct sales. So, Jami, tell about the post that you saw in the Facebook group that brought all this up.
Jami Albright: 38:48
Right. So I did a post about you know what’s going on, what’s working for y’all, what’s not working for y’all? And Rachel, she posted that her direct sales were all you know. if they kept going, they would outpace her Amazon sales, and I was just flabbergasted, and so I immediately messaged Sara and said we need to get Rachel on the podcast and then I reached out to Rachel. So, Rachel, tell us about your direct sales. I am just fascinated by the whole thing.
Rachel Hanna: 39:24
What was so funny about that is I think I asked you why you invited me specifically about direct sales, and you’re like you posted your answer. I was like I’m on Facebook too much. I don’t even remember commenting. It was only like a few days. I need to get my head examined. So when the whole Amazon category debacle started last fall, I noticed it before anybody I knew noticed it. I didn’t know what it was, but I started saying something’s wrong. Something’s wrong at the end of August. And I was running these ads called AMG ads that you can run through Amazon directly, like with an account manager, And those weren’t working and they had been working for like two years. And I was like yelling at them, going, you need to change the keywords. And everything on their end looked fine. And I’m like something is wrong. So I started telling my friends I’m like check your stuff, Is something wrong with yours? And then finally about a week passed and then everybody started going. I was screaming all through the community And right after that a friend of mine told me about this direct sales course that wasn’t widely known in the author community at that point. It was kind of an expensive course. And so I was like, yeah, sign me up for that, because I don’t like this. I had been out of KU for years because I didn’t like being exclusive to anybody, So I went wide and that’s been been good. But I was like I want to go even further. I want to be that if Amazon, you know, they’re known for shutting down accounts and things sometimes. And so I wanted it to be just me, to be able to not worry about that anymore, because it is a worry, I know, we all kind of have it in the back of our minds all the time. And so I started going through this training and I just immediately was like, oh yeah, this is something I think I can do Now. That being said, it was very technical the way that this particular training I went through was set up and there was a lot of testing and all kinds of things. I won’t go into all that, But I was banging my head on the table regularly. I mean, I was just losing my mind. But it took me a few months and I finally got my store up the way I wanted it and everything. So I’ve officially opened, I guess you would say, in January and. I think I made $5.99 that month. So I retired, obviously, so I was like, but I knew I could do it. The main thing I’ve learned is the training, especially if you’re older readers, training them on using BookFunnel. It has been a challenge. it’s still some days. it’s still a little bit of a challenge and I’ve worked around it, but the more of us that do this and have direct stores, the easier it’s going to be for all of us, because the readers will then understand how to use BookFunnel and get them on to their Kindle, whatever it is. I only sell eBooks and audio on my store right now because I haven’t found a good paperback option for me yet that I’d want to do. I don’t want to self-fulfill because I’ve been in eBay for years and I have PTSD about mailing things.
Jami Albright: 42:34
Right, let me stop you right there real quick. She is probably going to outpace her Amazon sales just with eBooks and audiobooks.
Sara Rosett: 42:45
Just in the United States right, you said.
Jami Albright: 42:51
How? Yeah, That’s just amazing. Continue please.
Rachel Hanna: 42:56
Yeah, So last month. So I’m a six figure a month earner on Amazon, And last this past month I was almost at half of what I make on Amazon per month in my store as well. And then, you know, you add in all your audio and your libraries and your life. So it adds up. So, yeah, it’s been month over month. It just gets better and better and better, and during that I’ve been able to build a whole different, separate mailing list, and that mailing list is people who are e-commerce buyers and they operate very differently than your MailerLite people who clicked on a link in the back of your book or whatever. This is a very different group of people. They’re there to buy, they’re there to buy from you, and so, yeah, it’s just been. I’ve got some merch that I sell through Printify. I don’t make very much on that. I did it mainly just for my readers, because they wanted shirts and smugs and stuff like that. But yeah, e-books and audiobooks all done through BookFunnel And BookFunnel has got a great. their app is great for audio. It operates just like Audible. And all they have to do is download the free app and then you know, bookfunnel sends them the code and they put it in and there’s their audio books. So just training, you know, my readers on how those things operate and you know doing little videos to show them how easy it is, and that sort of thing. But yeah, I’m very, very encouraged by it. It’s addicting. It’s kind of like gambling or something, because like all day I hear chaching, chaching on the shopify app. I’m so distracted by it, you know I’m like, ooh, you know, then I have to go look where did they come from and did they buy an upsell, and like I’m just all over the place. So it’s been a distraction for sure. I should be writing this book. I have to. But it has been really good. I’ve really enjoyed it and I’m glad that I did it when I did.
Sara Rosett: 44:53
Well, it’s obviously been worthwhile to take a little break to set that up. So I know people will be curious. So you said you’re using Shopify, right? Yes, so tell us about like. Like. What I learned about Shopify is you can set up your store however you want. So, like, what’s your philosophy like? Do you have bundles? Do you have all your products duplicated, like everything you’d have in a retailer? Do you also have it on your store? How do you have your store set up?
Rachel Hanna: 45:19
Yeah, so I have all my individual products, and then I also have bundles and the bundles are what I advertise, because it’s very hard to make a profit with Facebook ads. If you’re going to sell something for $5.99 or $9.99, you really need a bigger, bigger, more expensive bundle to get that worthwhile, because just the cost of Facebook ads. So, yeah, i have it set up with individual products. I have upsells, i have different apps that you know bundle things together and give them a little discount or whatever. And I will say one of the biggest things that I have my mailing list for my stores called Clavio. That’s what a lot of Shopify people use And Clavio has these things called flows or just automated flows, but they are very, very powerful And my if you look at my last 30 days, i always make about 30% of my income through those automated flows. So it’s just constant churning people in and out of different flows that I’ve created or that I’ve gotten from Clavio And it’s just selling in the background for me. You know every day. So that’s a big, important part of it too, i think, for success that a lot of people miss. They think, oh, i’ll just make a welcome flow. I probably have 20 flows going on. They’re pulling them in and out because what will happen is like if somebody purchases, they go into the purchaser flow and they’re going to get two or three emails over the course of you know, a week or two, but then, let’s say, they don’t buy anything for a certain period of time. Well, now they’re going to go into a different flow, that’s to try to reengage them and give them a coupon, and then they go through that flow. Nope, they’re back on the purchasers flow again. So it’s just, they go in and out of all of these flows all the time And it just happens in the background and it’s super powerful.
Sara Rosett: 47:03
And so you can set those up on your own, but with Clavio, a lot of them are pre-made for you, right?
Rachel Hanna: 47:09
Yeah, they’ve got a ton of pre-made ones and then you just go in and edit them, you know, with your header and your information. And then I have a few that are just my own flows that I’ve created based on what they purchased, because Clavio has got all these filters and you can make all these segments where it’s like they purchased the Beach House but they haven’t purchased SweetTBMB. Therefore, i’m going to make this flow where they’re going to learn all about SweetTBMB. So it’s stuff like that that you can create specific to your own products. You know they purchased more than 60 days ago but they haven’t purchased anything since. I think I’ll send these people a coupon So you can have that just set up in their dynamic. So it’s constantly being updated.
Jami Albright: 47:58
That’s crazy. That’s amazing. And I think I heard you say on Clubhouse that your ads are not only running people. I mean, they’re designed to run people to your store, but people are actually going to Amazon and buying too. Like you’re some uptake in your Amazon sales because of it.
Rachel Hanna: 48:20
Yeah, quite a big percentage up from. what’s funny is, the series that I bundle is an old series. I wrote it in like 2015, 2016. It’s what I would consider kind of a dead series, which is why I was okay bundling it for a good price to get people in. It’s kind of like a loss leader and I didn’t think it was going to do anything. Now that series is selling like crazy on Amazon, including the first book, which on one of my landing pages, people get free every day but they, instead of putting in their email to get it free, they go to Amazon and they buy it for $5 or $6. So that book makes me like 125 a day by itself, when they can get free on my landing page. But the ads with Facebook, the most important thing to remember is like we’re all trained to use traffic ads. What I learned when I started doing the store traffic ads are what Facebook has declared that those people are people who are likely to click but they are not likely to buy. And that’s the problem. That’s how we waste so much money as authors sending traffic to Amazon. because you’re just sending clickers, people who are just curious about your ad. they click, they go over, they’re probably not going to be likely to buy. When you do a store, though, you install a pixel on your site and you will use Facebook purchase conversion ads. Well, those are the people that Facebook has deemed as buyers. They know those people buy stuff. So you get the best quality traffic like the best quality audience, i guess I would say on Facebook, when you do those kind of ads and you can’t do those and send them to Amazon, because Amazon doesn’t talk back to the pixel. So, that is one of the biggest perks of the store is that my ads are going to purchasers, people who are known to buy over and over from Facebook And, yeah, maybe they look at it and they don’t buy from my site and they don’t get the good deal because that’s the only place they can get it. So you know, like my January co series that I use has 10 books and two novellas for $25.99. People buy that all day long on my store, but some people won’t or they didn’t like books or whatever. They’ll go buy them all individually for $6 a piece on Amazon. That’s how you end up getting more sales on Amazon too. With just the one kind of ad I don’t run any traffic ads to Amazon anymore.
Sara Rosett: 50:44
Well, this is. It’s fascinating and I’m so happy for you that it’s working so well. But I’m thinking about people who are listening, who are like they haven’t started a store, or they’ve just started a store and it all sounds kind of overwhelming because it’s like you got to set up the store and the flows and the ads.
So what would you recommend for somebody who’s fairly new but wants to start doing this?
Rachel Hanna: 51:05
Yeah, i mean, it’s hard when you don’t really the main thing you need, i think, is something that you can bundle up. That’s a good enough price. So it may not be the best thing for somebody who’s brand new to be doing, unless you just don’t want to run ads to it and you just want to, you know, just have it there and start kind of building it. I think if you don’t have some kind of a bundle, you’re going to have a hard time. That’s what I’ve seen with some of my author friends who don’t have very many books yet or they’re trying to sell just one book or something like that. It’s going to be really hard to be profitable running at any kind of Facebook ads when it’s just one book, but that doesn’t mean you can’t start building it, you know you can’t start getting a domain and setting everything up and just learning and studying so that when you do have enough, you know that that will be something that you can do. I started this in November working on it and it took me until a good February before I started to really like get some momentum. So it’s going to take a while. Usually, if you’re doing it yourself, some people will hire it out and that’s fine. But I think I’m glad I did it myself and I’m glad I banged my head on the table because I learned so much in the process of the why. Why am I doing this? Why do I need to run these kind of ads? Why do I need to test my headline? Why do I need to change my font on this page? Like there was a lot of that that I had to do, but in the end it has made my just my knowledge base is so much bigger and it’s only growing every day. I work on this every day. I mastermind with other direct authors all the time, like I stay on top of it, just like I do my regular author business, because I want to always be improving. So, yeah, I mean I started at zero too in November. I didn’t have anything like this and I was literally saying I don’t think I want to do this. Yeah, I just really was trying to talk myself out of it. You know I was frustrated for quite some time, but I think you know, if you want something to pay off, you got to put in the work and you just got to put blinders on and don’t pay attention to what I’m doing. Don’t pay attention to what anybody else is doing. Just start getting it done. But I would say you know you need some books that you can bundle. I think that’s important. And you need to make sure those covers are really on point, because I see a lot of people running these ads having stores and their covers are not on par with what they need them to be to get the clicks.
Jami Albright: 53:28
Right.
Rachel Hanna: 53:29
So you really need to make sure all of that is something else you can be working on in the background, and all my covers for several series now have been redesigned because I wanted them to convert better and they did. They have converted way better. So I think you know working on those sorts of things in the meantime is also something you can do.
Sara Rosett: 53:47
But yeah, And one other question about that that I was thinking about.
Rachel Hanna: 53:59
My goal is to use ads more. I want more cold people coming into my funnel. I don’t market my store a lot to my MailerLight list because I mean they know about it and I tell them occasionally hey, if you do want to buy my store, you know, here you go. I bring it to my e-commerce list multiple times a week because they’re a different type of list And I’m churning them around and I invite them to leave. You know, if you want to leave, you can leave. That’s fine, because I don’t want to pay for them, but they aren’t there to keep buying from me, they need to leave. So in fact, i had somebody the other day that emailed me and she was on both of my lists And that particular day I had sent out the same email to both lists about something. I don’t normally do that, but it was an announcement about something. And she was like, hey, i’m a big fan, but I got the same email like two times within 15 minutes and should, is there something wrong? And I was like, well, you’re on both my lists And I tried to explain to her. She’s like, well, should I get off of my? so? well, if, okay, on MailerLite you’re just going to get like general me stuff, you know, and occasional new release announcements, but it’s going to be me talking about my dogs. You know stuff like that. And if you’re on this list over here you’re going to find out about, like, all of my sales in my store, my special bundles and the coupons. And she goes, you know what? I’ll just stay on both.
Sara Rosett: 55:17
All sounds good.
Rachel Hanna: 55:19
So you want to hear all the crazy stuff that I do. So you know you will have. You know some of that. But the Klaviyo in the background of course is selling on its own. But I tried as best I can to bring in as many new people a day through ads as I can, because you know it just adds them to that list, puts them in those boxes, and they keep going.
Jami Albright: 55:41
That’s amazing. So good, So good. I’m so happy for you and so glad that it’s working so well And it’s really kind of inspiring because you know, maybe it’ll be the thing that gets people off the bench and lights a fire to get their store going. So yeah, I hope it is.
Rachel Hanna: 56:08
I really think for many years I did not really interact with other authors. There weren’t a lot of opportunities to do that. We had forums. You know back in the day. We didn’t even have Facebook groups. We had forums, we could go on. Because I was behind a pen name and I didn’t want people knowing who I was, and I kind of had this idea that people were going to copy me, which they do. But you know, now it’s like I don’t really, whatever you can do what you want to do. But back then I was so afraid that people are like steal my ideas or steal my this or that, and it was a totally different mindset that I don’t have now. But when I started interacting with more authors and masterminding and chatting every day and sprinting, I think that really has has helped a lot because I feel like I’m not working alone. And I can bounce ideas and we can talk about, you know, we can vent or show each other stuff if we’re confused about how to do stuff. So I think that has has been something that has really helped me And, like I said before, just showing who I really am to my readers; they can either love me or not. Either one’s fine with me. It just it does help me to connect with them and it’s made a huge difference in my Facebook group and they are my. They bring me the most sales when I have a release or something in my Facebook group. So they, I think, just showing people who you are and being consistent about it. You know that has been a huge help to me since I kind of switched gears in 2019.
Sara Rosett: 57:37
Yeah, that is wonderful. Well, I think this has been like we’ve gotten so many good tips for people, even if they don’t want to start a store. Lots of the stuff you talked about earlier. I think it’ll all be really helpful. So, thank you for coming on and doing this and sharing what you’ve been doing.
Where can people find out more about you and your store?
Rachel Hanna: 57:58
Well, you can go to my website, which is just Rachel Hanna without the H on the end Rachel Hanna author.com, and store is store.rachelhannaauthorcom, because I’m original. And you’ll see me around in groups and stuff because I like to procrastinate on doing my writing. If you see me just say Rachel, go home.
Sara Rosett: 58:25
We’ll have all those links in the show notes and they will be at wishidknownthen podcast.com. And thanks to Alexa Lahrberg for editing and producing the podcast and to Adriel Wiggins for doing the admin. Thanks, everybody, we’ll see you next week.
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