Have you signed up to be a DIY MFA Radio Insider yet? This is an exciting new monthly newsletter, especially for our podcast listeners. Every month, you’ll get an email from our podcast producer with recaps of the most recent episodes, a curated Listening List of episodes on a particular theme, and other fun goodies we only share via email. Best of all, it’s free to join! The theme for March is Magic, and you can become an insider by signing up with your email at diymfa.com/insiders.

In this episode Jeff Walker and I discuss:

• Why his first launch was the most important and the role his email list played.
• How writers of fiction and memoir can apply his Product Launch Formula to their lists.
• Strategies for determining what your assets are and how to maximize them.

Plus, his #1 tip for writers.

About Jeff Walker

Jeff Walker is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Launch. He teaches people how to launch online courses, products, services, and brands online.

Jeff started his first online business in 1996, and he pioneered the very idea of the online launch. His “Product Launch Formula” transformed the online marketing world from the day it was released in 2005… and Jeff and PLF have never slowed down. Now more than 14 years later, the Product Launch Formula brand is the gold standard in the online entrepreneurial training market. Jeff’s students and clients have done over a BILLION dollars in launches in hundreds of niches and markets… and dozens of countries around the world. 

Jeff lives in Durango, Colorado (because he can live anywhere)… and he loves to get outside for all kinds of adventures. He’s been married to his wife Mary for decades. He’s no longer quite as fast as his kids on skis or mountain bikes… but they still let him come along for the ride.

You can find them on his website or follow him on Facebook, Instagram, or Youtube.

Launch (Updated & Expanded Edition): How to Sell Almost Anything Online, Build a Business You Love, and Live the Life of Your Dreams

The revised and updated edition of the #1 New York Times bestseller Launch will build your business – fast. Whether you’ve already got an online business or you’re itching to start one, this is a recipe for getting more traction and a fast start.

Think about it: What if you could launch like Apple or the big Hollywood studios? What if your prospects eagerly counted down the days until they could buy your product? And you could do it no matter how humble your business or budget?

Since 1996, Jeff Walker has been creating hugely successful online launches. After bootstrapping his first Internet business from his basement, he quickly developed a process for launching new products and businesses with unprecedented success. And once he started teaching his formula to other entrepreneurs, the results were simply breathtaking. Tiny, home-based businesses started doing launches that brought in tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and even millions of dollars. Whether you have an existing business or you’re starting from scratch, this is how you start fast. This formula is how you engineer massive success.

Now the question is this: Do you want to start slow, and fade away from there? Or are you ready for a launch that will change the future of your business and your life?

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via this Amazon affiliate link, where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 401

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, or Google and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 401: Marketing Strategies to Help Launch Your Book – Interview with Jeff Walker appeared first on DIY MFA.

Have you signed up to be a DIY MFA Radio Insider yet? This is an exciting new monthly newsletter, especially for our podcast listeners. Every month, you’ll get an email from our podcast producer with recaps of the most recent episodes, a curated Listening List of episodes on a particular theme, and other fun goodies we only share via email. Best of all, it’s free to join! The theme for January is debut writers, and you can become an insider by signing up with your email at diymfa.com/insiders.

In this episode Sue Campbell and I discuss:

• False stories writers tell themselves about marketing and why it isn’t as scary as you think.
• How to shift your thoughts about marketing—Sue shares some exercises to help!
• Why getting hard feedback early on is actually advantageous for you later on.

Plus, her #1 tip for writers.

About Sue Campbell

As founder of Pages & Platforms, Sue Campbell is the mindset and book marketing coach writers look to when they are ready to honor their dreams, address the negative stories they’re telling themselves, and share their work with their ideal readers to maximize the impact of their words.

Sue has helped hundreds of writers, from newbies to bestsellers, transform their inhibitive mindset around marketing and realize their full potential as authors. Her clients have exponentially increased their email lists and book sales, landed articles in prestigious publications such as The New York Times, done guest spots on popular podcasts, and more.

Sue helps writers opt out of harmful stories they tell themselves and carve out the creative life they’ve always known they were meant to have.

You can find Sue on her website or follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Link to Episode 394

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, or Google and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 394: What Stories Are You Telling Yourself? Marketing Mindset Shifts for Writers – Interview with Sue Campbell appeared first on DIY MFA.

As a result, most authors are best off hiring a book cover designer, someone with the skills and experience to produce the perfect cover for your book. If this isn’t possible, the next best thing is knowing what to do yourself—and just as importantly, what not to do! There’s plenty of advice out there about what goes into a standout book cover, but today, let’s tackle potential sales-killing cover design mistakes and how to avoid them when designing your own cover.

Mistake #1: Using overly familiar stock elements

Most online book cover makers rely on stock photos and other premade design assets. You select the image, colorize it, slap on some title text, and presto! The cover is done. But while this approach is certainly cheap and easy, it has one huge drawback: the best stock photos have already been used by many other authors, resulting in a deluge of eerily similar covers.

I’m not saying it’s impossible to create a unique, professional cover from a stock photo—only that you should do your own research instead of choosing from a cover maker’s image gallery. There are some amazing stock photo sites out there, some of which are relatively unknown, and you’ll discover a much wider range of possibilities than you would with a cover maker. Though you might struggle if you’re aiming for a more abstract cover, remember that you can do wonders with close-ups of “natural” images like water, land, and sky.

Stock photos aren’t the only amateurish cover design element to avoid—there’s also the matter of overly familiar fonts. The title is most crucial to get right, but your author name and a pull quote or two may also appear on the cover, and you don’t want any of them to remind readers of Microsoft Word! To that end, try to choose a font family you’ve never heard of before; when in doubt, stick to simple sans-serif typefaces that look good in all-caps.

Mistake #2: Failing to signal the genre

Now that we’ve covered those specific design sins, let’s move onto an equally grave error that can manifest in different ways. This would be the failure to signal your book’s genre, and it’s one of the most common—and dire—sales-killing cover design mistakes among first-time authors.

One frequent culprit here is the generic book cover, which is so bland that it’s impossible to glean any context about the book itself. This happens more often than you’d think: it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the more neutral your book appears, the wider an audience it can attract. Alas, an empty void of a cover won’t appeal to readers of any genre. To quote another publishing adage, “If you’re marketing to everyone, you’re really marketing to no one.”

The other version of this mistake is when a book’s cover indicates a different genre than what it actually is. Again, this is more likely than you think—you might look at books in many genres for inspiration, and accidentally end up favoring a design that points to another genre. You might even think that it doesn’t matter what readers think they’re getting, so long as your book is good. But if your pink, frothy cover implies a romance and you’ve actually written hard-hitting domestic fiction, readers are not going to be happy.

Luckily, there’s a simple way to ensure your cover stays on-brand: make an effort to emulate covers that are in your genre, as they’ll typically share signature colors, images, and various other aspects of design. Though you’ll have to strike a balance between “recognizably related” and “virtually identical” (again, steer clear of stock photos you see on other covers!), it’s better to err on the side of similar than to risk a cover that’s totally disconnected from your genre.

Mistake #3: Disregarding the thumbnail

Throughout the design process, authors tend to picture their cover in its final, full-size form—the roughly 625 x 1,000-pixel file they’ll upload to retailers, or even the cover of their physical book. But this makes it easy to forget about another critical sales factor: the thumbnail.

When people find your book on Google, Amazon, and anywhere else online, they’ll almost always see the thumbnail first. This means that even the sized-down version of your cover must look professional and, ideally, placeable within your genre. While it’s okay if readers can’t tell exactly what’s on your cover, the overall aesthetic (colors, shapes, text) should give them a clue.

And on the “professional” note, keep in mind that some design mistakes only reveal themselves in thumbnail form! For example, your title might turn out to be slightly off-center or too small to read in the thumbnail. Worse yet, you might have a complex design that appears dynamic and exciting in the full-size image, but totally chaotic and overwhelming in the thumbnail.

Again, the good news is that if you’re aware of this issue, it’s easy to avoid. Just keep checking your design to ensure it works as a thumbnail—after adding each new element, zoom out and see how it looks at roughly 150 x 200 pixels, then adjust anything that looks “off”. These extra few minutes could save you hours of frantic redesigning down the line!

Mistake #4: Inconsistent covers within a series

Finally, a common mistake among series writers is having inconsistent covers between books—that is, covers that differ in style, with one cover’s “signature” elements missing from the other. Yes, this can happen even when both covers are genre-indicative; imagine a photo-based romance cover and an illustrated romance cover in the same series. Though you’d likely be able to tell they’re both romances, you wouldn’t otherwise connect the two at first glance.

This is why you should consider not only what would look good, but also what would look cohesive across multiple covers. If you’re working with photos, try to source them all from the same photographer, and use the same title font each time (though different colors and other small, distinctive accents are encouraged!). And if you’ve gotten the first book illustrated, plan to hire an illustrator for later books as well—ideally the same professional, who will be uniquely qualified to craft a sequel cover that both stands out from and ties into your first cover.

One more thing: if you happen to be printing your series, don’t underestimate the power of dimension consistency. Having all your books be 6 x 9, with a cover to match, isn’t quite as important as what’s on that cover, but it’s definitely something readers will notice—and if BookTok is any indication, they may care more than you think.

And there you have it: all the major sales-killing cover design mistakes to avoid when designing your own book cover. Though hiring a professional is preferable, I know it’s not possible for every author; this way, at least you’ll know where the hurdles are and how high to jump. Happy designing!

Tell us in the comments below: What are some steps you plan to take to avoid these sales-killing cover design mistakes?

Savannah Cordova is a writer and content creator at Reedsy, a marketplace that connects authors with the best editors, designers, and marketers in the business. In her spare time, Savannah enjoys reading contemporary fiction and low fantasy, as well as writing the occasional short story. She’s here to pull back the curtain on publishing so that every author can have the greatest possible chance at success.

The post Sales-Killing Cover Design Mistakes to Avoid appeared first on DIY MFA.

If no one’s said it to you before, building an email list is vital to your author business. Your email list is digital real estate. You own your list and can’t have it taken from you, unlike your social media followers.

Sure, it can be great to have 10K+ followers on your Instagram account. But if something happens and you get kicked off the platform, or worse, you get hacked and suddenly lose access, guess what…that’s it for you. If you lose access to your account, you lose access to your followers.

This means you lose access to your shmoney! Don’t let anybody’s social platform interfere with you getting your bag. 

You don’t own your followers because you don’t own the social platform. While it’s great to have a ton of followers and influence, you need to make sure you get all of those individuals on your email list.

Not sure where to start? Here’s a few ways to get started.

1. Make your email list an exchange of value.

While I don’t advocate for giving anything away for free, I do in fact believe in an exchange of value. What’s the difference? 

The former is the act of you working hard and giving away the precious commodity of your time away, without any respect for the value it withholds. The latter is a reflection of your understanding that you’re not simply giving something away, but you’re providing gratuitous value in return for something just as precious: someone’s email address.

This exchange can include a variety of things. You can offer a sample of your novel. You can offer an entire novel. Or perhaps a novella or short story. You can offer a pronunciation guide. Or a map of the world. Deleted scenes. Bonus content. A discount on a bundle of books.

Anything you value can be offered in this exchange for an email address. Your reader will be more than happy to join your community when incentivized with digital chocolate in the form of something exclusive no one else but your tribe gets.

2. Host a book giveaway for your email list.

Nothing makes readers happier than getting books for free. And while a book giveaway can be done through an endless amount of ways, one that works well for authors is social media giveaways done by partnering with influencers.

For example: You could partner with one (or several) influencers in the Bookstagram community to set up a giveaway of your novel. Doing this allots for several benefits: you would now be able to get visibility through their platforms; you would see a huge spike in followers on your account; and you would get a flood of subscribers on your email list.

Each influencer has their own rules, boundaries, and advice you should take notes from, but it’s most often for the best benefit of the author. I highly recommend a social media book giveaway to see a boost in newsletter subscribers.

3. Partner up for a book box giveaway.

Much like a book giveaway, you can partner with social media influencers to do a book box giveaway. 

If you don’t know what a book box is, they’re book subscription companies. These companies ship out a book each month to their subscribers. These are usually highly popular books that are globally beloved and distributed. The boxes often contain goods like bookmarks, book sleeves, character art, candles, mugs, tshirts, and other fun swag as well.

You could partner with an influencer to have them promote your valued offer for an exchange of their email address while gifting one lucky winner a book subscription, whether for one month or several.

Note: Do your research before you choose this option. I’ve done this kind of giveaway and while it’s an awesome treat for the readers, the process can be a pain depending on where the reader lives. You’ll want to check with the book box company first to see when their next shipment is going out and how long the box will take to arrive to readers, especially if they’re international. Count the cost, the time, and determine if this route is a fiscally responsible one for you at this time.

4. Newsletter swaps with authors in your genre

Newsletter swaps are mostly common amongst self-published authors. This strategy is quite the effective one. Not only does it allow you to make new friends, it also gives you access to the platforms of authors who write in the same genre as you.

This is almost a slam dunk for your books. If an author is promoting your book to their email list, by default the assumption is that they trust your book is good and know their audience will read it. It also compels their audience. Readers will instinctively believe your book is similar to that of the author promoting it. This means there’s a high chance they’ll like your book and inevitably opt in to have it for themselves. 

Note: This means the book you’d be offering for the newsletter swap would be one you’re offering for free. Not selling.

Newsletter swaps are one of the best ways to perform an exchange of value while using a trusted platform to increase your subscribers and readership. Authors swap with authors they trust. Not to mention, if you swap with an author once, you can swap with them again.

Building an email list is as easy as it is difficult. And getting readers on your list is only the first part of the process. You also have to keep your readers engaged with your emails so they stay primed for when you publish your next release. It requires an investment of time and effort on your part, but trust me, this kind of work is worth it.

Tell us in the comments: do you have an email list? What do you do to keep it active?

Stephanie BwaBwa is a Jesus-centered Fantasy Fabricator. She’s a YA Fantasy Author, Entrepreneur, creator of the fantasy universe Elledelle, and Co-Host of the Indie Author Lifestyle Show, who’s enjoying building a legacy through the lens of story. You can usually catch her going for a walk through a park, or simply binging Disney+ with too many snacks. Get in contact with Stephanie directly at: stephaniebwabwa.com.

The post Grow Your Email List (and Your Influence) appeared first on DIY MFA.