What We Learned as Authors in 2021 (Branding)

For many people 2021 was a difficult year. For Chris and Gena as writers and entrepreneurs, it held several lessons they’ve grown from – and that you will find insightful when it comes to branding for authors.

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episode 7 Transcription:

[00:00:14].030] - Gena
Hi, everybody. Hey, welcome to the Writing Momentum Podcast. This is episode seven. Chris. And I know I'm excited to be here. How are you doing today?

[00:00:24].460] - Chris
I'm doing good. I'm excited. I am really enjoying recording these podcasts. You always want to be giving back when you've learned things. And we've learned a lot of things over the past few decades. So it's really good to be able to give back and just kind of share what we're learning and what we're going through and that sort of thing.

[00:00:44].320] - Gena
Well, and I think that is a natural lead into what we're talking about today. We're talking about what we learned last year in 2021.

[00:00:53].390] - Chris
See how I served that up for you.

[00:00:54].910] - Gena
I know I appreciate that. Well, and this seems like maybe a tad later than what we normally would have done. But I think it comes at a good time because hopefully people know a little bit more about us if they've listened to the first few episodes and they will hear what we say and filter it through an understanding of who we are and what we're about and what our writing is about.

[00:01:19].670] - Chris
It's still February. So it's technically still the New year. I think we can comfortably say it's still just 2022.

[00:01:25].630] - Gena
I guess so. But you know what? 2021 was a really big year for us. And when I say big, it was a big learning year for us.

[00:01:34].750] - Chris
Yeah, we learned a lot. I mean, think about that. We've been doing this for, like I said, several decades now we're getting into our third decade, and we are still learning a lot because even though we spent many years learning to write and learning to edit and then learning to get published traditionally and then learning self publishing, we are still learning, especially some things to do with our branding. And I think that's a lot of what we're covering today.

[00:01:59].960] - Gena
I think so. And I think 2021 was the year when we really started to ask the question of what is Writing Momentum really about. We had been an editorial services company, and we have clients that we ghostwrite for, clients that we market for that kind of thing on that business to business level. But we really started to question, what are we going to do in the future and where is Writing Momentum going in the future?

[00:02:27].850] - Chris
Yeah, that's right. And even when it came to our clients, this is probably the first thing we learned was that we kind of thought we had one particular kind of client. This is the kind of person who might contact us. And we discovered that there was actually multiple kinds of clients because we have had so many different services. One of our clients, for instance, would be our readers, right? Those who enjoy, for me, children's books that could be considered a brand, a client, an avatar is what you call it, right? What does the person look like? We'll talk to another episode about creating your own avatar. And when we saw that, we said, okay, well, that's one. Okay. That's our avatar. And they thought, Well, no, that's not our avatar, because that's just one of them, because we also do things like format books and ghostwriting books and edit books and articles and all that sort of thing. So that led us to more, wouldn't you say?

[00:03:20].700] - Gena
I would say so. We really started to deep dive into our avatars. And when we looked at them, we really started questioning, not only who are these people, but going even deeper and asking those questions of, what do these people need? What do they want and what do they need from us? And what are they looking forward to in the future? There are different people. Like you've mentioned, we've got people that we ghostwriting for. That's one type of client that we work for, people who many of them are speakers, and they have what they've spoken, and they've prepared their messages, that kind of thing. But they need someone to take that and turn it into articles or books or blogs or emails. But then we discovered there's another type of person, and this was our friends or people that we meet who are writers. These are people who are in the business. They have their content, and they're good writers on their own. But they needed help scaling their business. They needed help with their websites. They needed help understanding, maybe social media or understanding how to get the word out about their work. And so that became another type of avatar.

[00:04:44].510] - Chris
Yeah. Even in this modern world, a lot of them have been traditionally published, and they realized, I want to self publish some things. So that means I have to have the book formatted. And how do you do that? So we were able to help them with that. We've been helping other authors with their branding. And so that's, like a whole another thing, helping set up websites and branding. The takeaway from this for anyone listening is that if you are a freelancer, you need to identify who are your clients because your website then needs to reflect that all your paperwork, even your logo and your tagline. All of that needs to reflect that client and how you can meet their needs. Likewise, if you're a fiction writer or a nonfiction writer, you have to figure out who's reading your book, and then again, your website, all your logo and everything and what you deliver for them needs to be able to reflect what they need in their life so that you can deliver that to them effectively and ultimately sell them your book. Right. Because if you're barking up the wrong tree, you may not sell any books.

[00:05:49].910] - Chris
As of, for instance, some people think if you write children's books that your target market is, for instance, boys who are eight years old? Well, that's true to a degree, you need to be writing for that group. But you need to realize that who you're selling to is not the eight year old because the eight year old is not buying the book you are selling to the mother, usually who wants to find some good books for their child. And so in that case, you have to figure out, how do you create messaging that directly goes to that person.

[00:06:21].620] - Gena
And I think this really gets into branding. This gets into asking those tough questions about who are you marketing to, but even beyond that, on the top level, you may be thinking, Well, I'm reaching mothers of eight year old boys, but then you might question, okay, where do they live? Are these urban mothers? Are these country rural living mothers? What age are they? Are they young mothers in their 20s? Are they moms who were in their 40s? Are they moms with lots of kids, or are they single parents? Do they have one child? Are they single parent homes? And in that case, then you can ask yourself, when are they reading? Are they giving these books to their kids to read by themselves? Is this going to be a family event that they're going to read before they go to bed? These kind of questions that you can really get into? And what are those parents looking for in books? Are they looking for a good moral message? Are they looking for maybe they're looking for just straight up adventure because they've got a reluctant reader, and they're just trying desperately to get that child interested in reading.

[00:07:34].570] - Chris
Yeah. I remember as we were going through this ourselves, you had created a worksheet that you filled out for us to do, and then we've made that available. That's on our website. We just put it on a blog. So I will link that blog in the show notes here. So if you go writingmomentum.com/podcast, you will find all of these podcasts on there. And I'll have the direct link for that. So if you want to download that worksheet and kind of figure out who your branding is for, you can do that.

[00:08:02].940] - Gena
And that's the ideal reader.

[00:08:04].810] - Chris
Yeah. The ideal reader worksheet is what it's called. But that works not only for readers, but also for clients. So as we got into our branding, I think one of the big eye opening moments we had was that our newsletter was not written for the people we were trying to reach. Right. We were creating this newsletter that was like, full of curated content that we'd found around the web. And as we looked at that, we said, Well, wait a second. That's not who's reading our books. It's not who our clients are. They don't want this stuff. And so it completely changed the way we wrote our newsletters. And that was one of our big things that we learned this year was that all the work we were putting into our newsletters was kind of just not needed. We could save so much time instead by changing up the way the newsletter was. And so what do we do, Gena?

[00:09:00].530] - Gena
Well, the first thing we did is we really analyzed our voice. What kind of voice did we want to have in our newsletter?

[00:09:07].420] - Chris
And then we really so many people know us from our humor in that. And we weren't putting any humor into the thing. We were as dry as the bone doing that. And we realized, okay, why are we doing that? Why aren't we just being ourselves that's kind of a big lesson?

[00:09:23].010] - Gena
Yeah. And then the other thing we did is we just simplified it. We simplified our newsletter, and we're going to talk about this more in another podcast of just some of what we have learned not only through our experience, but also through the studies that we've done. We're going to be talking more about newsletter and why a simple newsletter is better. And I think one of the biggest things that we found is not only did the tone of the newsletter change because we wanted it to more reflect our personalities, but we also simplified so that people feel like you're talking to them so that when they get your newsletter, they're not just opening an e-zine, they're actually opening up a personal letter to them.

[00:10:10].960] - Chris
Yeah. And we deep dive into that just a couple of episodes ago in episode five. So if you haven't listened to that one, and it's how we tripled our email open rates. And I really think you'll find that beneficial because that was one of the big lessons we went from having about a 15% open rate to now. Now we're getting regularly over 50%, which really goes to show that people are much more interested in what we have to say than they were before because we changed what we were doing. And the open rate is important because that's how you communicate with people. And if they're not even opening what you're writing to them, then what's the point, right?

[00:10:45].370] - Gena
Definitely. And I would say the last thing that we learned last year in 2021 was some hard lessons about social media. Do you want to get into this, Chris?

[00:10:57].050] - Chris
Well, every author knows that they and every freelance writer knows that they need to be active on social media. Right. This is how everyone seems to be communicating now or reading your stuff. And it seems like, okay, this is where you should be advertising or this is where you should have regular posts. And so we took another deep dive ourselves into social media. And really we revamped all our social media pages as well as our website, for that matter. And the website was, well, worth it. But after we revamped our Facebook and our Instagram and Twitter and our Pinterest, then we just made sure we had all these posts out there, and we were communicating with people, and it was all good. But what we discovered is that we weren't really getting almost any kind of return on investment from it. Right. And now you might say, well, it takes time. Well, it does take time. But you have to understand that between all these social media channels, we've been on them for a long time, and we have tens of thousands of followers on social media. And what we discovered is that speaking to them on social media was not giving us a return on investment.

[00:12:05].700] - Chris
It was helping us speak into people and maybe throw some things before them that they might like. But we weren't really getting a lot of leads. We weren't getting a lot of interaction. And some of that may have been to the tone of our posts in that. But ultimately, with the amount of time that we were putting into it, it wasn't returning on that investment of time. It wasn't making us enough to say, is this where we should be putting most of our eggs? Because that's what you have to do if you're going to spend a lot of time with it. And so instead, the takeaway we had was, you know what? We're still going to use social media to let people know what we're doing. So those who are following us can find out, for instance, when a new podcast post. But instead of spending a lot of time on that, we're going to spend more time on producing just good content like this podcast and some other things that we're doing so that we're actually putting something out there, that when people hear like this podcast, then they can come and they can trade their email for a free PDF, for instance, that we have on our website.

[00:13:12].320] - Chris
They can really help them out, and that we can then continue to provide good value into their lives. And so if you're looking at social media yourself and thinking, man, this thing seems like a waste of time. Don't be afraid to ask yourself if maybe it really is right. Well, sometimes it is.

[00:13:30].830] - Gena
Sometimes I think also it has forced us to really question what social media do we need to be on? What channels do we need to be on? Not all channels are created the same. Not all channels have the same readership or viewership. So we're even now and we're going to be launching some new social media strategy, a new social media strategy this year. But we found that it was much more beneficial to put the effort into our newsletter and into a podcast where we could not just give people a quick image or a quick video on TikTok or something, but that we could really deep dive into some of these answering questions and really sharing the behind the scenes of what it looks like to be a full time professional writer.

[00:14:28].170] - Chris
Yeah. And this goes back to who our avatars are, right? Who are our clients? And what we discover is that most of our clients just weren't on Instagram. Right. And so why are we spending so much time on Instagram? But do you know where they are is on Pinterest? And so that helped us push more of a push onto Pinterest. And with Pinterest is really less of a social media platform as a search engine. And so that has worked out much better for us. And so that's what we're really pursuing this year. And I guess we'll know at the end of the year how well it's done. But that has been a big lesson.

[00:15:05].200] - Gena
Yes. So if you're interested in seeing what we are doing on social media, check out our Pinterest site for Writing Momentum, and we're going to be ramping that up in 2022. And so I'm looking forward to seeing what that does. I think we're going to have much better return on investment with the effort that we put into Pinterest than we do some of these what are just kind of quick and forget type channels.

[00:15:32].950] - Chris
Yes. Hopefully this has been beneficial to anyone listening to hear what we've learned. And maybe you can apply some of this to your life, too. Let me just give a quick recap. First of all, we learned that we had to identify who our readers and who our client ultimately was. And we identified what they call our avatars, and we identified who those clients are. And then we took a deep dive into branding. We changed our website and social media and everything to more reflect who we are. We put a lot more humor into it. We put just more the way we would actually do things instead of being as formal. Then we changed our newsletters based on that, too, as well as we took another look at social media and changed the channels that we were on to make sure that we get a return on investment on those things instead of just putting stuff out there for no reason at all.

[00:16:23].170] - Gena
Well, we just want to thank you guys for tuning into this podcast. We hope that you'll be back next time and that you'll check out any of our previous podcasts if you haven't seen them or haven't heard them, and be sure to rate and review and subscribe and subscribe. Yeah, we'd love to have you back. And if you haven't signed up for our newsletter yet, please do we really promise not to spam you. But we put a lot of effort into making sure that we're just providing good content to help your writing have momentum.

[00:16:53].730] - Chris
And we do offer a lot of free stuff a lot of times in there, we'll take some of our courses that we sell on our website. Sometimes we'll give those away. We just gave them away over Christmas. And so if you like stuff like that, if you're looking for more training and just some good stuff, go ahead and sign up for that. You can get it writingmomentum.com/getnoticed and then be sure to tune in next week because next week we're going to have a Q and A. So if you have some questions for us, go ahead and put them on Twitter. That's one of the best ways you can just flag us with #WritingMomentum or write it to at Writing Momentum and we'll see if we can answer some good questions and we're going to be looking for some more too.