Writing Fast, Building An Audience And Facebook Advertising for Authors With Mark Dawson

http://www.thecreativepenn.com/ads Recently, Forbes ran an article about Mark Dawson with the headline: Amazon pays $450,000 a year to this self-published writer. Today, I interview Mark about how he writes fast, the empowerment of being indie, Facebook advertising and email list marketing. Mark Dawson is an internationally bestselling thriller author with the John Milton and Beatrix Rose series. He also shares his knowledge with authors at SelfPublishingFormula.com and has a new course about Facebook marketing here. How Mark got started in writing back in the late 90s. Traditional publishing didn't quite go how he expected, despite a great advance. Dispirited, Mark stopped writing for a number of years. When he heard about the Kindle and self-publishing, he began to write again, starting slow but then writing nearly a million words in 2014. The number of quality books he produced catapulted him into sales success and then he began to grow his email list at the same time. In Nov 2011, Mark left his job to write full time. A comparison of traditional publishing vs self-publishing. The change in mindset Mark has had to go through. The empowerment of going indie. The author can't just write – you have to take control of your marketing and your business as well. The indie way is not for everyone though – it takes a certain personality type. john miltonHow to speed up your writing. Mark's first self-published novel, The Black Mile, took 14 months to write but he began to speed up. His early books were heavy on research in physical locations, but in order to speed up, he started writing the John Milton series which could be researched purely on the internet. Mark was fueled by a huge jolt of enthusiasm based on feedback – both through monthly income and emails from readers that encouraged him to write more, faster. Use Scrivener to roughly outline with key story beats and then just write between them. Don't write to the market – write what you love to read. You can't tell what the zeitgeist will be in 6 months – or even years ahead. We're in this for the long term. Discipline and productivity through repeated routine. Growing your audience with email lists and Facebook advertising. We refer back to the interview with Nick Stephenson around Reader Magnets and also Nick's self publishing formulacourse, YourFirst10KReaders.com. Mark talks about how he uses Facebook ads to get new signups to his list every day, and also to drive sales to his boxsets. He covers how you can do this yourself in his new course about Facebook marketing at SelfPublishingFormula. We talk about how great FB ads can be but also how much testing you have to do in order to optimize your ads. It's a real commitment and you have to be really careful around cashflow. Mark also gives advice on what to email the list once readers are acquired and how to keep the list warm, as well as how to build a street team and what to ask them for. You can find Mark's fiction at MarkJDawson.com and his course on Facebook marketing here: http://www.thecreativepenn.com/facebook