Episode 170

We dug into the archives this week and pulled out one of our early episodes with David Gaughran, which is full of helpful and relevant advice.
David decodes Amazon and breaks down Bookbub ads for authors in addition to writing historical fiction and sci fi. David shares how his mistakes have shaped his decision to reboot his fiction and nonfiction books.

Author Website:

DavidGaughran.com
Starting From Zero Course

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Supporter chat Aug 27th at 3pm CST.

Time Stamps:

0:06 Author Success and Lessons Learned
11:05 Irish Authors and Writing Challenges
18:14 Storytelling’s Importance and Marketing Mistakes
27:14 Going Full-Time as an Author
30:59 Learn From Mistakes, Build Sustainable Audience
33:41 Improve Email Marketing Strategies, Learn From Mistakes
41:28 Writing Series and Changing Genres
45:49 Navigating Challenges and Success in Writing

Transcript:

Jami Albright [00:00:29]:
And I’m Jamie albright. And this week on the show, we.

Sara Rosett [00:00:34]:
Have David Gogren 2.0. And we had to reach way back into the archives to get this one. Do you know what episode number this was?

Jami Albright [00:00:43]:
Two.

Sara Rosett [00:00:44]:
No, it was eight. So we’re going way back.

Jami Albright [00:00:50]:
Right? I was on vacation. So we’re just going to do a rerun of this great David Gaughen interview, because David Gogren’s the man, he knows what he’s talking about. And we’ve had a few people ask to have him as a guest, and he’s already been a guest. So we’re going to rerun this.

Sara Rosett [00:01:10]:
Yes. And there will be a link in the show notes to his website. And since we did this, I think he started the free course he has since we in the time between we recorded this and now. And he has a course called Starting From Zero, and that link will also be in the show notes. So if you’re just getting started, this is a good place to start because it’s got some good information on how to get set up for your author business. But we talked a lot about lessons he had learned and how he was applying those going forward during this interview. So in a lot of the stuff he talks about, it was not time specific. It’s more general.

Jami Albright [00:01:48]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Sara Rosett [00:01:49]:
So that’s coming up.

Jami Albright [00:01:51]:
I just did a consultation with someone who hasn’t put out her first book yet, and she had taken David’s class, and she said it was fabulous, like, she learned so much. Yeah, he always does good information, which is $0 to take, which is good thing.

Sara Rosett [00:02:12]:
Yes. So we have two new supporters this week. Thank you.

Sara Rosett [00:02:20]:
So thank you to Jessica, who chose the crown, and CJ, who chose the Rocket Emoji. And we just appreciate you guys. Thank you so much to you and to all the other supporters who are consistently supporting us month in and month out. We really appreciate it.

Jami Albright [00:02:37]:
And speaking of supporters, we have a little announcement.

Sara Rosett [00:02:44]:
We will resume our supporter chats this month. We have one scheduled for August 27 at 03:00 P.m. Central Standard Time. And you just join us online on Zoom. And we just chat for about an hour and hang out and talk writing and answer questions, if you have any, and just kind of catch up a little bit.

Jami Albright [00:03:07]:
Yeah, it’s fun. It’s really fun. Yeah. You can see not my dirty house just behind me.

Sara Rosett [00:03:17]:
That’s right. No tours.

Jami Albright [00:03:20]:
You don’t get to see my desk, which is a wreck right now. But yeah. I’ve been writing. Yes. Tell us what you’ve been up to. I’ve been writing well, I was at the beach and just have known I wanted to write something. That an idea I had, and the idea just kind of laid out in front of me. And so I started writing. And I’ve now written almost two chapters. I mean, they’re short little chapters. They’re not very long, but the story is pretty complete in my head. In fact, it is complete in my head.

Sara Rosett [00:04:05]:
Good.

Jami Albright [00:04:07]:
Yeah. So it’s a little maybe different for me, but not too different. Maybe more women’s fiction than romance. But there probably will still be a little romance in it.

Sara Rosett [00:04:22]:
It will probably have the same elements that appeal to your readers. We’ll probably enjoy it.

Jami Albright [00:04:30]:
It’s going to be funny, but it will also be a little sad but hopeful. So that is what I was doing. And honestly, I don’t even know if anybody’s going to read it. It’s just something I feel like I need to write, so that’s what I’m doing. Thank you.

Sara Rosett [00:04:52]:
I’m glad. I know. It probably feels really good.

Jami Albright [00:04:55]:
It did. I wrote it on my phone. Oh, wow. That was fun. And I’m still doing consulting, so that’s going well. Again, I offer a discount for podcast listeners, so if you are interested, just go to my website. Jamialbright.com, authors. Yeah. How about you? What’s going on with you?

Sara Rosett [00:05:21]:
Well, this last week, last couple of days, I’ve been getting ready for the Kickstarter. I think I have a date. I think I’m getting everything in. I want to make sure I had everything before I set a date. I’m aiming for August 15 because I have jury duty on the 14th. So I thought that might not be the best plan to launch on a Monday and then have questions and stuff and be like, stuck at the courthouse or something. I know. Yeah. I would be the one person they’d be calling out for. Get off your phone, juror number two, right?

Sara Rosett [00:06:01]:
Yeah. I’ve got everything in. I got a map made. I found somebody to do a map for me and it’s very cool. And for one of my higher tiers, I’m doing a wooden puzzle. It’s a custom. So it’s got to have the COVID on it and I had to order one to make sure because I had tried something else and it wasn’t the right quality. So for the higher tier, you can get the hardcover, the wooden puzzle, and basically pretty much everything else in the Kickstarter you can get that because it’s pretty expensive. So I ordered one, got that in, and so I’ve been taking pictures and so I’ll have pictures to show what it looks like. So I did that and I’m getting excited about it. It is a lot of work and I was like, I do want to do it, but it’s less work now than it was the first time. And I know what I need and I want to do it in a way that conveys what is in there. And that just takes longer because you have to take pictures of everything and you have to order copies of your book and take pictures. But I think I’m almost there. So I’ve been working on that. And yeah, that’s about it. I kind of put the writing on hold so I could get this done. I’m more of a completion. I have to get this finished and off my plate. So it’s just been busy. It’s kind of like the summer is waning and super hot here, so I’m just staying indoors on my computer because it’s like 100 plus every day and miserable.

Jami Albright [00:07:35]:
Yeah, it’s awful. It wasn’t too bad at the beach because we were under a canopy and we were at the beach here in Texas and there was a breeze. So what really wasn’t too bad at the beach, but if you went outside, it was terrible. I mean, it’s just terrible. It was gross. We’ve been in the pool since we got home with our grandson and it hasn’t gotten too too warm. I mean, it’s not cold, but as far as the water goes. But it’s just gross out. I mean, last night at 11:00 no, it’s 10:00. I let my dog in and when I opened the door, it was like opening an oven door. That’s what it felt like. Glasses fog up and stuff. It was the same thing. It’s just miserable.

Sara Rosett [00:08:33]:
Yeah. Six weeks to go until it begins to cool off in quotation marks. Got about six weeks.

Jami Albright [00:08:40]:
I’ll believe it when I see it. Yeah, that’s about Halloween, where we’re in shorts and tank tops.

Sara Rosett [00:08:51]:
That’s true. Sometimes Thanksgiving, too.

Sara Rosett [00:08:56]:
But I do have one other thing I wanted to mention, actually. Two things. The Inkers Con Digital Conference is going on now, so there will be a link for that in the Show Notes, if you all are interested in that. We did an episode on Inkers, our takeaways from the in person conference, so that’ll be in the Show Notes. And then I’m also setting up a Historical Mystery Day book funnel promo that will happen in September, so that is open. And if you have a historical mystery, it has to be historical. Has to be. Not paranormal, not contemporary, all that. If you fit that category, go to the link in the Show Notes in your app and sign up and join us because we’re going to try and have about 20 to 25 authors and we’d love to have you. So that will be in there. It’s SaraRosett.com/HMD23.

Jami Albright [00:09:51]:
Great. Yes. That’s awesome. All right, well, let’s get on with this episode because David is amazing.

Sara Rosett [00:09:59]:
All right. Here’s David. We’re excited to have David Gaughran with us here today. Hey, David.

David Gaughran [00:10:04]:
Hello. How are you doing? And welcome, everyone, to a six hour special of this podcast where we go through all the mistakes that I’ve made in my career. We’ll have to trim a few to fit it in the 6 hours.

Sara Rosett [00:10:16]:
We could all do multiple part episodes, but we’ll just hit the high points this time. A little bit about yourself and

How you got into writing.

David Gaughran [00:10:24]:
Well, I’m Irish, but I’m actually living in Portugal at the moment. And how did I get into writing? I think all Irish people naturally are storytellers. I think it’s deep in our DNA. I think historically our culture was kind of suppressed and we had this very strong oral tradition to kind of preserve all our stories and histories and things like that. And so everyone in the country is a storyteller. You get into a taxi with an Irish taxi driver or you walk into a shop and even the way we greet each other, we don’t say, how are you doing? We say, what’s the story? And we actually expect a story in response rather than a monosyllobic answer or something. So I think a lot of us then progress to actually writing the things down, I think. I remember there was some Irish author once who said that Ireland’s a nation of 4 million writers and three literary agents, which probably isn’t that far from the truth. I think genuinely, I think everyone in Ireland probably fancies the idea of writing a book at some point, and then probably a lot of people will have a stab at it, but most people won’t actually end up finishing the book or trying to get it out there. They fall by the wayside. But I think yeah, everyone in Ireland loves telling think, you know, conversation in Ireland, especially in the pub, it’s almost like a combat sport. Everyone constantly trying to outdo each other online or you kind of get sharpened by that as you grow up.

Jami Albright [00:11:41]:
That sounds like my family.

David Gaughran [00:11:43]:
Yeah.

Jami Albright [00:11:46]:

What genres do you write?

Because you write fiction and nonfiction, correct?

David Gaughran [00:11:52]:
Yeah. Well, you’re diving straight into one of the first mistakes that I made, because the first four things that I released, I think the first thing I released was, like a very kind of literary short story. And the second thing was straight up science fiction. Third thing was nonfiction. Fourth thing was historical fiction, and then the fifth was arguably action adventure rather than historical fiction. So, yeah, I was all over the map, and I still kind of am. I’m just getting a bit more organized now. So essentially my big project this year, which I finally started doing after talking about it for a couple of years, is I’m splitting myself into three names this year. One for historical fiction, one for nonfiction, and one for science fiction.

Jami Albright [00:12:32]:
Oh, really?

David Gaughran [00:12:33]:
Yeah.

Jami Albright [00:12:33]:
That’s a big undertaking.

David Gaughran [00:12:35]:
Yeah, it is. I should have got a Groupon on domain names or something. So many of them now. But yeah, I know it doesn’t really work for everyone, but for me personally, I think writing everything under one name was a huge mistake. And if I could change one thing out of my whole career, it would probably be that. So I finally, eight years later, owning up to the mistake and actually doing something about it.

Jami Albright [00:13:02]:
That’s great. So now you’ve told us about your mistake,

But tell us about your first big success.

David Gaughran [00:13:09]:
Yeah, first big success was completely accidental. It was let’s Get Digital, which was a book for authors about how to self publish. And I didn’t even mean to properly publish it. I was writing a blog about how to find editors and cover designers and all the little things that we have to do to get our books out there. And one of my readers asked me to put it together in a PDF so he could download it and print it out while he was following the steps himself. And when I started compiling that, I realized I was actually writing a book, so I should do it properly. So then I actually fleshed it out and wrote a proper book. And I was really surprised to see, I think, quite frankly, a lot of it was, look, I was in the right place, the right time. There wasn’t a huge amount of resources out there at that time for authors who wanted to publish their own books. Now there’s hundreds of books and blogs and courses and everything out there, but back then there was very little. And I got very lucky in that. I think Joe Conrath mentioned me on his blog. And then at the time there was a very influential website called Pixel of Inc, which I think is still going, but at the time it was like the book bub of its time. That and e reader news today were the two biggest sites for getting your books into the charts. And they gave it a hugely glowing review, which was a lovely surprise and all that just the book just took off after that and started selling more. This is back when you didn’t have to advertise or anything like that. And the book just took on a life of its own. Every month it was just selling more and more and more and you kind of think something like that’s going to go on forever, which sadly, it doesn’t. But it was nice while it lasted, for sure.

Jami Albright [00:14:41]:
Yeah, that is great. You’re actually the second person today I’ve heard talk about Pixel of Ink that kind of catapulted them into notoriety. I hadn’t heard of them; I came in after that.

David Gaughran [00:14:55]:
Well, the market back in 2011 was so much smaller, like, so fewer readers had Kindles and it didn’t take. I think these days, if you’re coming from a cold start, you might need to sell 1000 books or something to hit the top hundred on Amazon, but back then, it was a lot less than that. I don’t know, 100 or 200 sales or something like that. So a nice mid sized blog mentioning your book could have that power back then. Now, of course, you would need ten or 20 such such mentions and probably a few ads as well to have that kind of impact. But back then, yeah, a surprise review somewhere could just throw your book into the charts. You’d wake up one day and you’d see your book in the charts, and you’d try and desperately figure out what happens and who you need to send a muffin basket to.

Sara Rosett [00:15:46]:
Back in the good old days. So you kind of sort of became an accidental nonfiction writer, it sounds like like you sort of fell into that.

David Gaughran [00:15:51]:
Pretty much so, yeah. If I’m brutally honest about it, if I was ever standing up giving one of these Oscar speeches, you know, when they stand up and say, hello, I’d like to thank all the people that believed in me. Well, the honest truth is nobody believed in me. I didn’t even believe in me myself. The only reason I had any kind of success is that I’m actually 99% powered by spite. And I remember somebody saying, well, there was two people. There was one person said I’d never make it as a writer, and that really annoyed me, and I wanted to prove them wrong. And the other person said that I was arguing with somewhere said that a self publisher without a backlist or an audience from traditional publishing could never make it in self publishing. And so those two people basically are the most responsible for any success that I’ve had in my life. So I’d like to thank them very much.

Sara Rosett [00:16:37]:
So you should dedicate a book to them?

David Gaughran [00:16:39]:
I should.

Sara Rosett [00:16:42]:
I actually did that for my high school English teacher. I dedicated a book to her, and I didn’t put her name in there. I said, but to my high school English teacher who didn’t think I could write, and to my college English professor who thought I could.

David Gaughran [00:16:57]:
And which was more motivating for you?

Sara Rosett [00:17:00]:
Actually, it was the English professor. So it’s like, for me, I needed that encouragement. But it sounds like you thrive on.

David Gaughran [00:17:09]:
Yeah, no, I’m a very contrary person. So all I need now is someone is to say that I’ll never make the New York Times bestseller list, and then you can start the countdown clock.

Sara Rosett [00:17:17]:
There you go. Well, so switching back sort of to writing and craft so

Is there anything that you wish you had known about writing and craft when you got started?

David Gaughran [00:17:30]:
Yeah, I’ve had to unlearn a lot of stuff, a lot of stupid assumptions that I had coming into my career. Certainly the biggest one, just in terms of basic craft stuff, was I would have valued the skill of writing a pretty sentence, much more than constructing a satisfying story. And worse than that, I used to assume that storytelling was the easy part and writing a pretty sentence was the hard part. And so that’s where I focused all my energies and I was completely, 100% wrong about that. Anybody can learn to write a pretty sentence constructing a story, especially one that’s going to resonate wildly with a lot of people. That is the biggest challenge of all. And I think you can spend your whole life trying to master that skill, and you’ll probably never fully do it. There’s always some new aspect of storytelling to learn and readers value, of course, especially outside of literary fiction. But even in literary fiction, I think as well, like, readers value a story more than simply a pretty sentence. And you can have 100,000 words of the prettiest sentences that have ever been written, and it’ll be unreadable unless it’s crafted into an actual story that resonates with people emotionally and has a certain arc and all those things that we try and do. Yeah, that’s a fairly big mistake to make.

Jami Albright [00:18:43]:
Yeah, well, it’s so true, though. And a lot of times I’ll get readers that will say, oh, I love this, and it’s just a sentence. It’s not my pretty sentence. Nobody even talks about that. It’s just a sentence that meant something to them. So, yeah.

David Gaughran [00:19:00]:
It’s a lot the one that gave them the feels. So if you go and look at again, outside of literary fiction, which is kind of its own thing in genre fiction, if you go to a book that is selling like crazy, and if you look at the highlights on Kindle, they’re always really interesting because they aren’t like, necessarily the best sentences you can think of. And you might be wondering, like, why the hell is this sentence highlighted so much? But then you go to the actual book, or if you read the actual book, it’s just at the moment when there’s a big character reveal or a breakup scene or something emotionally important, usually in the story. So that’s what readers value most. And I think a lot of people make the mistake that I made, that sometimes you might look at a book that’s selling well. Like, everyone has their author, they love to hate the one, the success that they sneer at or whatever. But I think it’s an interesting intellectual exercise to look at any book that’s selling well, especially if you don’t think it’s well written in terms of pretty sentences, maybe. And look at why is it selling, why is it resonating with readers? Like, for me, it’s always Dan Brown, something about his prose, just like, I know people are huge fans of his, but when I read his books, they drive me crazy, but I read them really fast. I can’t put them down. There’s something in there. It’s like there’s some crack in the glue or something. There’s something there’s this adhesive in there, this propulsion. I think it’s useful breaking that down and trying to get some of that inside your own work.

Jami Albright [00:20:27]:
Yeah, I agree. For a romance, it’s 50 Shades and Twilight. People love to hate those books, but I’ll tell you right now, you cannot argue with the fact that they hit an emotional chord with thousands and thousands and thousands of readers and you have to go back and look at why that is.

David Gaughran [00:20:45]:
Exactly. And maybe it’s a sign, if you can’t see that straight away, maybe it’s a sign that you’re sometimes focusing on the wrong things. And I certainly was. I was being dismissive of his powers of description. All the sentences are like the tall man walked into the long room, but I was focusing on the wrong things. And if I’m brutally honest, his pacing is amazing. He’s one of the best pacing out there. And the kind of intrigue and the cogs within cogs that he constructs and different things like that, that I wasn’t valuing enough. And then when I start to value that stuff more, then my own writing becomes stronger.

Jami Albright [00:21:17]:
I think that’s awesome.

So what do you wish you’d known about marketing when you first started marketing?

Because initially you didn’t have to.

David Gaughran [00:21:26]:
Yeah, well, yeah you did, but it was a different kind of marketing. Maybe these days you need so much more critical mass in terms of sales to hit the charts and visibility in the stores is harder to get and harder to hold onto as well. It’s kind of slippier. So you need a much more complicated marketing plan with different aspects to it. The funny thing is because I was pretty slow to jump on the ad, know, Facebook ads and all this and I kind of ignored them when they first started coming up because and this is particularly unforgivable mistake to make, but you don’t get to choose your mistakes, unfortunately. But I might have chosen a different no, because I used to work in marketing and digital advertising in particular. I used to work when it was called Google AdWords and we used to see all sorts of people and publishers trying to sell books with Google AdWords and it never really worked. Nobody could really get it to work. I think partly because they were just little text ads without the book cover. And it’s hard to sell a book without the book cover. That’s really the primary sales device for any book. So when Facebook ads started, I just made the assumption that they’re not going to work to sell books. It’s a waste of time and energy and money and I just ignored it. I made a number of critical assumptions that were completely false. So even though I had the skill set and the experience, I completely ignored ads and missed something that could have given me a real edge around then. And that was around the time when I had a lull in my own production of work and so then my own sales were kind of falling. So it would have been the perfect tonic at the time to actually jump on that trend, but I just ignored it and that was a huge mistake.

Jami Albright [00:23:10]:
It’s good to know.

Sara Rosett [00:23:12]:
Yeah, and I think that’s a lot of writers do that because we love the writing part and the marketing part often seems like a distraction, but if you can get them both working together, it’s so much better.

David Gaughran [00:23:26]:
Yeah, I think it’s just good to always question your assumptions. I was making a huge assumption there that Facebook ads work the same as Google ads. One thing I’ve learned know now learning how to use Facebook ads and bookbub ads and other platforms, that they’re all very different and it can be really dangerous and expensive mistake to make to make those assumptions that they will carry from one platform or one marketing strategy into another.

Jami Albright [00:23:52]:
Yeah, that’s exactly true.

Sara Rosett [00:23:54]:
Yeah. Well we were going to ask you what assumptions did you make, but you kind of just talked about it. So we’ll just go on to the next question.

What do you look back on and think, that wasn’t a good use of my time?

David Gaughran [00:24:09]:
Well this is something well yeah, there’s a few things. I think when I first started blogging and became an accidental nonfiction author, I think I was getting into a bit of number chasing in terms of just trying to get as many Twitter followers as possible, as many blog readers as possible. And I wasn’t being very targeted in thinking deeply about who my reader is and what is the best use of my time. Chasing Twitter followers is probably the worst possible use of your time, especially when all your followers are just other authors and you’re not building an audience, which I ultimately was planning to do was build an audience for my fiction. I think I spent too much time building up a non fiction profile just because it was easier for me to get a response there, because I had that kind of free boost at the start of my career, and I devoted too much time to that, when really the smarter long term play would have been writing more novels than nonfiction books. Growing that audience. Yeah, I think it’s easy to look back and say these kind of things, but it’s also important to kind of recognize where you made mistakes and that’s what helps you kind of learn for the future.

Jami Albright [00:25:19]:
Yeah, that’s true.

So would you say you’re risk averse or are you not very risk averse?

David Gaughran [00:25:27]:
Yeah, I don’t know. It probably swings wildly with my mood. I think like a lot of authors, I think I veer between overconfidence in my work or my career and underconfidence. So it depends on what day.

Sara Rosett [00:25:44]:
That is true.

David Gaughran [00:25:46]:
And you can make huge mistakes depending on either. Like if you’re overconfident, sometimes you can do things like not kill an ad, which you really should have killed a long time ago, or you can make all sorts of mistakes from being confident just as you can from being unconfident.

Jami Albright [00:26:02]:

So what would you say the biggest gamble you’ve taken in your writing career has been?

David Gaughran [00:26:09]:
Good question. I think I decided a couple of years ago that I was going to completely reboot everything, both my fiction and nonfiction. And even though what I ultimately wanted to do was spend more time and energy building up a fiction audience, I figured what would give me the financial runway to do that and the freedom to do that was to do that first with the nonfiction side. So I decided even though what I wanted to do most of all was to write more novels, I said, okay, I’m going to pause that for two years and I’m going to completely reboot the nonfiction side. Well, it was either that or go and get a job, which I definitely didn’t want to do. I think I’m pretty much unemployable at this point. I think once you’ve been in the woods for five years, I think that’s it, you got to make it work somehow, but you burned all your bridges. So I decided to reboot everything and I made a couple of decisions which I think are going to stand to me over the course of my career, because I always try and think of career and try and plot out a career the next twelve months or whatever. So I said, okay, I’ll spend well, the original plan was to spend a year rebooting the nonfiction side and then move to fiction, but it ended up taking a couple of years, but I’m okay with that. And then get some stability on that side and kind of set it up so that it’s nearly automated so that my audience is stable and self sustaining. And then I can move on to fiction without any pressure. Because when I originally went full time as an author and this is, I think, mistake number 56, we’re up. I did it very early because I had that initial early success. I think I was only self publishing for less than a year and a half when I went full time, and I just moved to London, which is pretty expensive place to live, and I took on a little nixer on the side. I think I was doing some copywriting work for a tech company and I think I finished my last gig with them in December 2012. And I said, okay, do you know what? I’m going to make the leap now. It’s just perfect. I finished up my last contract. I don’t really feel like going, hustling for another one. I’ll just go now. I’ll go full time. And it was too early. I didn’t build up three months or six months of savings like you’re supposed to do, and no kind of padding. I had. Nothing. I was looking at the trend lines of sales, and I was like, yeah, if current trends continue, I’ll be in a yacht by summer, be in Portugal. Yeah, we took eight more years. So I was thinking, yeah, this is all looking good. Let’s just take the leap. And I really should have waited three months or six months, because I was thinking, okay, if this is what I’m producing work wise with, working on publishing and writing with half of my time, how much can I do without when I’m not working? I can easily double this. But it doesn’t work like that. And I totally froze up. Production ground to a halt. The pressure of having book sales has been the only thing that’s going to put food on the table. And I’ve heard this happen to other writers. I didn’t talk about it to anyone at the time because I thought there was just something wrong with me. But I’ve heard this happen to a lot of people. They go full time, and then the pressure is on, and then they freeze up. It’s not just a sideline gig anymore. It’s your full time gig. And now you’re like, oh, no, what am I going to do now? And if you have one bad day or one bad writing session, then it can just snowball in your head. And that’s what happened. I ended up working less, writing less, and yeah, I really should have waited, like, three months or six months before doing that.

Sara Rosett [00:29:34]:
Yeah, I think that’s really common, though. I think that’s really common, and people just haven’t talked about it. I think it happens a lot.

David Gaughran [00:29:44]:
I’ve only started talking about this to people in the last kind of, I think, last year or so. And it’s amazing amount of people that have said the same thing, because nobody really does talk about it. Once you’ve gone full time, that’s it. You’re on the success train now.

Sara Rosett [00:29:57]:
Everything’s roses and rainbows, and it’s all wonderful.

David Gaughran [00:30:02]:
When people were giving out that advice, older hands were saying, do have a nest egg. Make sure you got all your bills covered for the next whatever amount of months before you do it. I was just like, who’s going to listen to them? They don’t know what they’re talking about.

Jami Albright [00:30:15]:
They don’t know me.

David Gaughran [00:30:16]:
Yeah, because no one talked about that actual psychological side of it. I was like, okay, if it’s just about money, okay, fine. If I have to go out there and take another copywriting gig or something, I can do that. But it’s about more than the money. There’s a psychological shift as well that’s sometimes difficult to handle.

Jami Albright [00:30:32]:
When I came home, I was like, got to write. I’ve got to write. This is my job. I’ve got to write. I’ve got to write. And three months later, I’ve told the story. I was sprawled in the living room floor watching the ceiling fan rotate telling my story to my dog, thinking I got to get out of here. Like I was so depressed because it was just tons of pressure and I felt like I wasn’t really accomplishing anything. Exact same thing.

David Gaughran [00:30:57]:
Sometimes our brains are our own worst enemy, but because I’d went through that experience then I was able to learn from it a little spent. I spent a few years living in Prague where expenses were low. And even though sales took a bit of a dip because I’d stopped kind of releasing at the same pace and then I had a couple of launches. That I screwed up in a couple of different ways. We might get to in a minute if we don’t run out of time to cover all of my mistakes so. And then we moved to Dublin, which again, I think it’s like the cost of living is three or four times what it is in the Czech Republic. And I was like, OK, sales are a bit low at the moment, should I take a job here? And I kind of know, will I take a job? Will I take a sideline gig? Will I do some kind of hustle on the side? And then I was like, no, let’s just reboot everything and get this working for me properly because I should just be working for myself, I shouldn’t be working for anyone else. I won’t be satisfied if I went back to Copywriting now or anything like that, even if someone would hire me. So then I just took a very strategic look at everything and how can I set this up to be more evergreen and not have things where I have to update them every twelve months or some kind of system? And switching my whole approach to email was probably the biggest thing that I did in terms of building a sustainable audience and one that stays with you and doesn’t forget about you in case you go six months without releasing a book.

Sara Rosett [00:32:24]:
Let’s talk about that a little bit because you’ve kind of totally changed your point of view about email, right? Because used to only email when you had a new release and that’s how I was and I didn’t want to bother people.

So can you kind of talk about how your mindset changed on that?

David Gaughran [00:32:43]:
Yeah, well, I read a brilliant book called Newsletter Ninja by Tammy Lebrech, which some of you may have heard of, which was phenomenal and I realized that I was doing absolutely everything wrong. Like she had a list of all the don’ts and I was like ticking everything.

Jami Albright [00:32:56]:
Your picture was next to each one.

David Gaughran [00:33:01]:
Pretty much. But yeah, no, it’s bad enough to only email people, and I realize, I think she might have said something like this in the book, that you think you’re doing somebody a favor by only emailing them when you have a new release, but really what you’re doing is you’re only contacting them when you want something from them. Because we think of a new release as a give. That’s us giving something to our audience or giving them a new book, but it’s not. It’s an ask. We’re asking them for money, and so you’re only turning up at their house when you want something from them, which is not the basis for any good relationship. And combine that with someone who’s slowed down production and slowed down releases, and then you get a huge problem. So this mailing list that I spent so much effort building up, I was killing it in a couple of different ways. And not only that, I had all my fiction and nonfiction mixed together on the same list. So half the emails that were going out to people they didn’t care about, so everyone basically, then over time would stop having any interest in opening emails because they’d hear from me very infrequently, and then half the time the content would have no value to them whatsoever. Yeah, so then after reading Newsletter Ninja, I changed it completely. I split up my list into fiction and nonfiction. I started my nonfiction, I started emailing them every week and just making sure that I was just giving in every email, just giving, giving. And then every so often you would ask for something, whether it was you launching a book or needing a review on something or whatever else, and then the response, aside from the list growing like 600% over a year and a half once I switched to this. Aside from that, the response from when I do ask for something, when I do launch a book or when I need a review on something or whatever is just so much better now. And the response in terms of people actually replying to the emails and actually engaging the engagement, it feels like I’ve built a little community now that I actually have a community with my readers. Whereas before, I think by the time I released, I think, my third historical novel in 2016, that was probably the lowest point when I knew something was deeply wrong with how I was running my business. The response rate on that email, and it was the best book, it was the best book I’d written. And I put it out there and nobody opened the email, and the people that did, nobody clicked on it. And those who clicked on it, great, few of them bought it. And it was crushing. I was like, okay, my craft is better than it ever been, and the response is the worst it has been. So something is deeply wrong here. But it took me about a year of thinking about that and then going to conferences and listening to a couple of people talk about email and then coming along to Tammy’s. I think she launched a course first in December 2017, which was great timing because I was just about to release a book the following month. So it was just in time to save me from probably making another huge mistake.

Jami Albright [00:35:50]:
Yeah, well, people who aren’t on David’s nonfiction email list, They should get on really great information. You do give a lot of good information.

Sara Rosett [00:36:00]:
Yeah, that’s just what I was going to say because I was going to say your emails, I actually save them in my I have a little folder and I just put them in there so that I can refer back to them because they’re so information dense and they’re just excellent, so highly recommended. So that’s quite a change for your mindset on email.

So another one of our questions is have you ever made a mistake that turned out to be a good thing?

David Gaughran [00:36:29]:
Yeah, I think not using pen names was a huge mistake, but I think ultimately, that might again, if I take the big career long view, it might end up being a blessing in disguise in that, because I messed it up so badly the first time around, and it took me so long to recognize that mistake and then to buy myself the space to kind of figure it out and do it properly and relaunch everything. Which I’m just going through that process now, but because now I’m eight years older and wiser, more experienced, I have more skills in terms of the marketing side of things and the craft is a little better and my email game is a lot better. So now I’m getting to relaunch all these books and kind of start again in historical fiction and I’m launching a new pen name in science fiction. I’m doing that with all the experience that I’ve accrued over the last eight years. So I’ve just spent the last couple of weeks building like a six month long onboarder for my email to keep the readers busy until the next book comes out. And not only that, but actually I’m building up a Facebook page, getting great engagement on it. Different pieces of content being used in different ways because I now know with a piece of content what channel that should go in and how I can recycle that in another way and just basically making the hours I put into work pay out for me in much better ways. So that’s all something that I learned especially over the last couple of years when I sat down to kind of reboot my career. I started thinking about all this tail chasing I was doing. I was active on forums and on Twitter and on Facebook, and here, there, and everywhere. And I was kind of reinventing the wheel every time and just typing out fresh content constantly. And I started thinking, well, I could be a lot smarter with how I kind of recycle content. So something that might start off as a series of emails to my readers might then turn into a talk at a conference or it might go the other way. I might do a talk at a conference and then tease that idea out over five or six emails. And then I see from the response this can actually be turned into a book, or it can be turned into a blog post to get people to sign up to my mailing list. And I’m constantly thinking of different ways to take one piece of work and make it work for me in five or six different ways. And I’m much more strategic about that now, which means I can get a lot more done. It might look like a lot of work to write ten or eleven emails to my list, 2000 words long each, about Facebook ads, and it is. But that ultimately is going to become a book at some point. And this way I’m getting to beta test it with 10,000 people in my target audience. I’m actually just doing that at the moment with Amazon Decoded, which was a free reader magnet I gave out, started giving out two years ago to my list. I’ve had feedback. Well, I haven’t had feedback from 10,000 people, but 10,000 people have read that book and lots of them have given me feedback on it. So I know which bits worked really well. What could do it more fleshing out as I turn that into a full length book, which is probably going to come out in the next month or two. All that time I put in writing that book and then responding to emails of people is all invested in this book that will now end up making me money as well.

Sara Rosett [00:39:35]:
I was going to say it’s almost like you’re crowdsourcing a lot of stuff like your feedback, you’re sending information out, getting feedback, processing it, it’s really smart.

David Gaughran [00:39:44]:
And from people who are right central to my target audience. So there’s lots of ways that you can take pieces of work and make it work for you in several different ways. And I’m getting to apply all that knowledge now as I relaunch my historical fiction. I can see that, for example, before I used to run a said American History blog and writing a blog post for nonfiction audience or for a marketing audience is one thing, but writing a word article on the history of colonial Spanish empire in Peru or something, that’s an incredible amount of work. And I realized after writing 5678 of these blog posts, that’s almost a book’s worth of research there. So that’s a terrible use of my time. But now that content is, I’m able to use that content in onboarders and in guest posts in another way. So I’m getting smarter about how I invest my time and how I can make that payout.

Jami Albright [00:40:39]:
That is really smart. I need to be smarter about that myself.

So what is one thing you thought was a great idea but turned out not to be such a great idea?

David Gaughran [00:40:55]:
Yeah, well, this is another huge mistake was I prefer reading Standalones, especially when it comes to historical fiction. I prefer reading standalones. I like a big meaty book and just one and done and get the whole story from start to finish. So naturally, that’s what I leaned towards writing when I started out. But it’s such a huge mistake. It’s so much easier to sell a series to market a series. Readers respond to them much more and it’s just much an easier way to make money. So it seemed like a good idea at the time to write the kind of book you want to read. I think that is generally good advice. But you also have to temper it a little bit with some realism when it comes to the marketplace. And realistically speaking, it’s very difficult, especially in genre fiction, to make a living writing just standalone books. And I think you have to meet the market halfway and be a little bit humble about that and just accept that. And you know what, this is another false assumption I made. I just assumed I wouldn’t enjoy it as much. I wouldn’t enjoy writing a series as much because I didn’t enjoy reading them as much. But actually, the intellectual challenge of trying to write a series is another level again, from writing a Standalone, because you don’t just have the arc and the story you’re writing, of course, but then you have like a series arc. You have to think of all sorts of things like, what condition am I leaving my protagonist in at the end of this book? And how am I going to start again and have them face further challenges without it seeming like a retread? And all those things were really interesting challenges that really kind of got my creativity going. So I wouldn’t necessarily assume make that assumption. I think it’s dangerous to assume that you wouldn’t enjoy writing something that you don’t necessarily enjoy reading. Your reading preferences don’t necessarily reflect in your writing preferences.

Jami Albright [00:42:47]:
Well, great answer.

Sara Rosett [00:42:50]:
I was going to say the series thing. See, I come from mysteries. Almost every mystery is in a series just because that’s what readers expect. So I’ve just finished writing a nonfiction book about how to write a series because that was like a whole new concept to me because it’s taken me a while to figure out that that some series they have, the protagonist has a huge arc and there’s a big change. And then other series, like the Sherlock Holmes or, you know, Jack Reacher, they’re more flatline characters and they don’t have a big change. So once I kind of figured all that out, I was like, oh, this is interesting. And it’s like, you can do a whole lot with a series that I didn’t realize when I first started writing as well. I was like, there’s so many options and variables you can play with. It’s challenging, I think. So I think it’s very cool.

David Gaughran [00:43:43]:
I was reading Libby Hawker’s amazing book, the take off your pants. And one thing that really resonated with me a lot is when she said a great character has a great flaw and a great novel is when you take that character’s flaw and you keep hitting them over the head with it repeatedly. And the resolution, the big battle at the end doesn’t have to be a battle per se, but it’s a battle. It’s usually something, an external obstacle that the hero is overcoming, but also the internal one, them addressing their own flaw or coming to terms with it or fixing it in some way. And I was like, okay, so what do you do in book two? Right. Then it came to me. Sometimes the answer is just so simple that you’re wondering how you didn’t think of it in the first place. And well, a character can have more than one flaw, right?

Sara Rosett [00:44:28]:
Right. Or you play it out over the series and they think they’ve conquered it, but maybe they haven’t and it comes back. Or it changes.

David Gaughran [00:44:39]:
Or sometimes the solution causes another problem to a problem. There’s a few different ways to tackle it, but yeah, it’s fun once you start getting into that stuff.

Sara Rosett [00:44:48]:

Yeah, well, so what changes have you seen in your genre over the course of your career?

Either nonfiction or fiction, whichever you’d like to talk about.

David Gaughran [00:44:57]:
Historical fiction is probably the most obvious one. And I’m not entirely sure if this is a change in the genre per se, or me just actually noticing stuff for the first time. And this is not because I’m an idiot well, I am, but for other reasons. But I think there’s a big difference between historical fiction readers tastes in the UK and the US. And if you look at the UK charts in historical fiction, it’s a lot more kind of war men stuff, basically. I think the readership is more male, basically in the UK. Or it’s more 50 50, whereas in the US. It’s more like 70 30 female. So if you look at the Amazon charts, the top hundred in the UK and the US. It’s totally different. In the UK. You’ll see like a lot of Ken Follip, Bernard Cornwell, this kind of like medieval King Arthur, a lot of war stuff. And if you look at the US charts, sometimes I think I clicked on the wrong chart. It’s this women’s fiction. Honestly, it is. It’s like historical women’s fitting fiction with a historical setting. And a lot of it is basically like sad romance, if you want another word for it, where they don’t get together yet or someone gets cancer or something, but set in the 50s or in the 1890s or whatever. And so that has been hard for me to grapple with because it’s not the kind of stuff I read and I don’t know if it’s the kind of stuff I can write, but then you’re trying to think, okay, again, can I meet the market halfway here? So then I was like, okay, with my next series, I’m going to put a really strong romantic thread in it. I can do that, I think. I hope. And maybe a few more viewpoint characters that are female, maybe even a female protagonist one day I’ll have a stab at. But these are all things I should be doing with my writing anyway, and I should have been doing from the start. But I think if I look at the diet of books I was fed growing up, it was all very pale, male and stale, as they say. So these things are good. You can run away from these challenges. And I did, quite frankly. I was like, Well, I don’t want to write that kind of stuff, so I’ll go and write some science fiction short stories, or I’ll go and write another book on marketing or something. And I was like, okay, well, hold on. Is there a way that I can meet this halfway? Is there a way that I can do it that I find satisfying and that I’ll be good at as well? And then, yeah, I was like, okay, I found a cool romantic thread that I can layer through this whole series, and it kind of challenged me as a writer, kind of pushed me into a new area. And I think that’s good.

Jami Albright [00:47:20]:
Yeah. Ultimately, that’s what we want. I think that’s what we should want anyway, to get better and to reach more people. You’re going to reach a whole different audience with something like that than you would your other books.

Sara Rosett [00:47:38]:
And we don’t want to be bored either when we’re writing. We don’t want it to be like, oh, yeah, I don’t want to write that again.

David Gaughran [00:47:45]:
Yeah. And you can’t roll against the tide completely. If I was looking at the historical fiction charts in particular, the other trend that I’d see there is well, obviously there’s always the trend for the orphan stories, the Holocaust stories. That’s massive. That’s been going on for years. It started with the orphan train. It’s just been going and going and going. That’s not something that massively interests me. And the other big one is like, World War II books. I’m like world War II has never really grabbed me. I don’t know why. It’s not the history that I’m interested in. I’m more interested in kind of 19th century stuff. But then I start thinking, well, what was happening in South America during World War II? And now I’m excited. There’s always a way, I think, that you can kind of meet the market halfway. You just overcome your initial kind of urge to just run away from an idea and just play with it a little bit and see if you can find some overlap there between what you like and what’s selling.

Jami Albright [00:48:39]:
That’s really wise advice. Really good.

So what’s the best thing you’ve done to set yourself up for success?

Because while you’re self deprecating, you are successful. I mean, you’ve done really well, especially with your nonfiction stuff.

David Gaughran [00:48:53]:
I think having a circle of friends is absolutely crucial in so many different ways because it’s important while times are good and what times are bad. I remember the first I think, let’s see, 2011, 12, 13, 14 every year my sales were tripling quadrupling just on this line, like growing with the market basically. And then I hit a wall in 2015, 16, 17, things went down and then 2018 jumped back up again and things are going a lot better now. But you really need those friendships in good times and bad times. You need a circle of people around you because this business is crazy making. There’s all sorts of challenges just mentally, spiritually. I think it’s important to have people you can trust, people you can bounce ideas off. And also just in terms of just more hard nose stuff, like people you can do email swaps with, people who you can get a sense of what’s trending in the market. You can give each other like a leg up too, because especially among self publishers, I think we’re very good at recognizing that we’re not really in competition with each other and that we can actually pool audiences and grow together rather than trying to grab readers off each other, we can actually grow together. And I think those connections that you make, especially in your own genre, can be really lucrative over time too.

Jami Albright [00:50:14]:
Yeah, I agree completely.

Sara Rosett [00:50:17]:
This business is crazy. You need some backup and some friends.

David Gaughran [00:50:22]:
Yeah, some bodyguards.

Jami Albright [00:50:27]:
Mental bodyguards. That’s where I need them a lot of the time because my thoughts do just start to spiral sometimes if things don’t go the way I want or the way I think they should. And it’s good to have those friends to kind of reel you back in or listen to you and then reel you back in.

David Gaughran [00:50:43]:
Yeah. Sometimes you need a friend to give you some real talk as well.

Jami Albright [00:50:46]:
Yes, exactly.

David Gaughran [00:50:47]:
I can sometimes get carried away know, thinking like, okay, now I’m going to set up like a six month onboarder for my new list and then that’s going to feed into a remarketing Facebook campaign and I can get excited about all this stuff and then a friend will start coughing and just maybe get back to work on the next book. Okay. And then when I am, when I’m in the zone with writing, then I’m not even checking sales reports or thinking about the marketing stuff, but I sometimes need to get nudge back into it.

Sara Rosett [00:51:14]:
That’s true. Sometimes you need somebody to talk you off the ledge and sometimes you need somebody to kind of push you out the window, push you over and get you to do that thing you’re scared to do. Sometimes you need that.

David Gaughran [00:51:24]:
Yeah, totally.

Sara Rosett [00:51:25]:
So where can people find out more about you for your nonfiction and your fiction.

David Gaughran [00:51:30]:
Davidgaughran.com was the home for all my nonfiction stuff, and they can sign up to my mailing list there or check out information about my books. I definitely recommend signing up to the list because you get a free copy of Amazon Decoded, and that’s not going to be available for too much longer because it’s getting pulled down and turned into a full length book. So this is your last chance to get it for free. And then my fiction is under Davidgaughranbooks.com, and you can check that out if you’re interested in historical fiction. And the science fiction is super top secret. That’s under a pen name at the moment, and I haven’t actually released anything in it yet, so you won’t even be able to snoop it out. But I’ll probably keep that under wraps for quite a bit until I pull the mask off at some point. But it’s kind of both a literary and a marketing experiment and I want to keep it just totally kind of safe for my existing audiences and pure and just gives me a bit of freedom on the writing side to be a bit wider. Like today, I probably shouldn’t do this halfway into a novel, but I’ve just said I think this will work better in first person. I’ve never even written a short story or anything in first person, so this will be a first for me. And if I was releasing that to readers that had read some of my stuff before, I might be quite a bit nervous about that. But no one’s going to know who I am. So if it’s a total disaster, then I can know. Never fess up to you.

Sara Rosett [00:52:58]:
It gives you a lot of freedom.

David Gaughran [00:52:59]:
So I’m going to try it. I’m going to try rewriting it now because I was hitting a bit of a wall with it halfway through the book. And you just hit that wall and you’re like, I’m not sure if this is any good. Is there something missing here? And I was like, is it the world building? Is it the character? And I didn’t know what it was. And it was just today I was reading a brilliant book. It was Murderbot by Martha Wells, which is really great science fiction novella. And it was in first person. And I was just like, do you know what? First person could be the way to go for this. And again, I usually hate reading first person stuff. I definitely hate writing it. But again, question your assumptions and see where it takes you.

Sara Rosett [00:53:33]:
Yes. Well, if you should ever decide that you want to reveal your new Pen name, we’d love to have you back and talk about that if you want to, about how it went and everything.

David Gaughran [00:53:43]:
Yeah, well, hopefully it won’t be a giant mistake that I’ll be sharing with your audience.

Sara Rosett [00:53:47]:
I doubt that.

David Gaughran [00:53:50]:
Thank you for having me on.

Jami Albright [00:53:51]:
Love. Having you. Thank you, David.

David Gaughran on Using Lessons Learned to Reboot Fiction and Nonfiction (Reair)