Latest / The Two Authors’ Podcast / The Andromeda Strain with Gerald M. Kilby

Transcript

The Andromeda Strain with Gerald M. Kilby · The Two Authors’ Podcast

• 0:00
  That way I can write one book a year instead of trying to write one book a month, I think.
• 0:04
  Yeah, yeah. I want to be you when I grow up.
• 0:07
  So...
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  [LAUGHTER]
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  And...
• 0:10
  [MUSIC]
• 0:13
  Welcome to the Two Authors podcast, an entertaining chat show hosted by bestselling mystery and
• 0:18
  thriller authors Douglas Pratt and Nicholas Harvey in lively, humorous and informative
• 0:24
  conversation with distinguished guests who share their thoughts and experience about
• 0:29
  a successful author career.
• 0:34
  Hello everyone and welcome to the Two Authors podcast with myself and the amazing Douglas
• 0:41
  Pratt. Amazing, I don't know about that but thank you so much or how are you today?
• 0:46
  Good, we were saying off air it's been a while, it's been a minute.
• 0:49
  No, we had a couple of weeks where we haven't had any recordings, I hadn't had a chance to chat
• 0:53
  with you. You went to Killer Nashville? Yeah, I went to Killer Nashville, hung out with a couple
• 0:58
  of a cool-- - A buddy Franklin.
• 1:01
  - Franklin and Mary Stone there.
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  I got to hang out with a few,
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  our DP Lau was there.
• 1:06
  He was asking about, yeah, he asked about you.
• 1:09
  - Very cool.
• 1:10
  - A lot of listeners came up to me and said,
• 1:11
  "Hey, you know, we've been listening."
• 1:13
  So it was kind of cool.
• 1:14
  - Both of them came up to you and said,
• 1:16
  "Hi." - No, we had a lot more
• 1:17
  than that, actually.
• 1:17
  A several of them came up and were like,
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  "Hey, I finished up a couple of panels
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  and I had some people come up and go,
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  "Love listening to your show, you guys are hilarious."
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  What they really said was,
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  you're really hilarious, Nick's just kind of okay.
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  That's fair.
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  That's fair.
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  Yeah.
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  Yeah.
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  No, they really did.
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  We did get some really cool talking to listeners and stuff like that.
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  That's cool.
• 1:38
  That's great.
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  You got to hang out with Mary Stone.
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  So my news is our backer kit promo for the anthology for "Authonation,"
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  which is a thriller anthology.
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  I have a story in and Mary Stone and JD Barker are heading.
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  It's out there.
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  It's running.
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  It's already funded in nine hours.
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  That's pretty impressive.
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  So yeah, she don't wait to kind of celebrate with her.
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  Yeah, so that was kind of awesome.
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  - I'm really excited about it.
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  Yeah, and I'm following up with the backer kit of my own.
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  Backer kit is like Kickstarter, same kind of thing.
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  And I'm doing my own.
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  - You're doing a board game too, aren't you?
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  - I got an AJ Bailey adventure board game
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  that I came up with and did all the, built the whole thing.
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  Yeah, it's really cool.
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  And it's a pro in a box, you know, proper board game.
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  It's really, really cool.
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  And it's available now and this airs,
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  it's the backer kit is up.
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  And so you can go check that out.
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  And then I'm doing my first special edition of my Kat Cromwell book one.
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  So it's a hardback, foiled, end paper, spray, spray, spray, it's got a super cool
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  sprayed edge.
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  And the end paper, when you, when you open is, is pretty fricking sexy too.
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  So head over to back kit.
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  You can check that out.
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  And oh, and I have all the other ones, Nora Summer.
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  If anyone knows of my Nora Summer character, you know, she's got a very dry wit.
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  So it's a desk calendar, 52 week desk calendar with a norahism on every page.
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  A norahism.
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  Yeah, so every week you get a new norahism taken from the book.
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  Oh, you should put those in the show notes.
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  Put those in the show notes so people can talk.
• 3:07
  Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.
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  I'll put a link.
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  Put a link.
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  Put a link.
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  All right.
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  Big thanks to our supporter and good friends at Vellum, the fantastic Vellum.
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  You know, and I was thinking of something to talk about with Vellum this week.
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  And you know, the basic that we've skipped over
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  is their preview feature.
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  So when you're in Vellum, you can look at your book
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  and see how it's gonna look in the print form.
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  You can look at it, how it's gonna look
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  in all the different electronic devices.
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  - No, iPad, Kindle, you can look on a nook.
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  You could probably go back and look on an old Nokia phone
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  if you wanted to.
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  They probably have that set up, I'm sure.
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  - Yeah, so you can see, you know, stupid things.
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  Like if you have your, the beginning of a chapter,
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  If you've got, you know, some people put it further down the page, we'll see how that
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  looks when it actually comes up on a Newark or a Kindle or something opposed to the print
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  page.
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  So really cool.
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  Yeah, that's pretty awesome.
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  Also a big thank you to our Patreon supporters.
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  We're accumulating such a huge amount of extra stuff.
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  Oh, tons of stuff, yes.
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  Every single guest we have on the show, we do an extra bonus and it goes in for the
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  Patreon there.
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  $3 a month, folks.
• 4:16
  $3 a month, that's it.
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  Not $3 a show, $3 a month.
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  You get all of that extra stuff.
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  So if you're interested in that, link to the show notes.
• 4:22
  Even get a coffee for $3 a month right now.
• 4:25
  Ah, there are even more than that.
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  All right, we're going to move on because our guest today is a superb guy.
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  We met him at SPS London this year, earlier this year, and he did a talk on Facebook ads.
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  We're going to talk to him a whole bunch about that.
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  He's the best-selling sci-fi author Gerald M. Kilby, and we'll chat with him shortly.
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  But first, to listen to a question from our recent guest, lovely Jen Graybill.
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  - Well, thank you, Jen Graybill,
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  for coming back to ask us our listener question this week.
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  It's so exciting to have you back again.
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  So what have you got for us?
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  - So my question for you guys,
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  you know, a lot of times authors spend most of their time
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  sitting alone in their room
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  and getting all those words on the page,
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  but every once in a while, we have to come out of the cave.
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  So if you are gonna do an author event
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  and you have to walk out on a stage,
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  What is your walk out song?
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  - Ooh.
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  - AC/DC, Back in Black.
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  - Oh!
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  I love that you had it ready.
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  - Not bad, see I was--
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  - I love that you were ready to do that.
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  - I was gonna go either the Beatles paperback writer
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  or Elvis Costello as I write the book,
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  and that way you can kind of go with the most.
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  - I like the Elvis Costello one.
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  Yeah, mine was easy because it was the song we used
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  at the beginning of our wedding, so.
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  - Back in black.
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  (laughing)
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  - Dead.
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  I rode in on a motorcycle and they played back in black.
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  - Wow. - Oh, that's fantastic.
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  That was a party that, oh my goodness.
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  - I have to tell you that I really missed
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  that I didn't get to meet young Nick.
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  (laughing)
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  - Should have been a joke, should have been a joke.
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  - It was carefree and just like ready to go.
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  Yeah, oh wow.
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  - Oh, that's fantastic.
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  - Wait, what does Cheryl come in on?
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  I want to know because she was already there looking gorgeous standing by the lake.
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  I could see her like parachuting him.
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  That would have been awesome.
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  So yeah, she could have.
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  She could have.
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  No, me and my best man rode in on a 750 Suzuki motorcycle.
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  That's awesome.
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  I love it.
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  I absolutely love it.
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  I absolutely love it.
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  What would be yours, Jen?
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  Yeah, what would be your song?
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  Yeah, what's your song?
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  Let's get the party started.
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  Oh, good one.
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  Good one.
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  Big fan of pink.
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  big fan of pink that is always one that is,
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  that makes me get up and gets me dancing.
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  And I absolutely love going to see her in concert.
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  So.
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  - Very cool.
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  Very cool.
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  Great question.
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  Thank you so much, Jen, for a superb question.
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  - Absolutely.
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  You guys have a wonderful rest of your day.
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  (upbeat music)
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  - Jerry Kilby, all the way from Ireland.
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  Thank you so much for joining us.
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  How are you?
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  - I'm very well.
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  Very well indeed, on yourself.
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  - Outstanding, outstanding.
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  Better for seeing you.
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  It's, we met for the first time.
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  I'd seen your name through the mastermind chat and stuff,
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  but we met for the first time at SPS in London,
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  where you gave a fantastic talk,
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  which we'll get to in a little bit.
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  So it's, it is great to see you again.
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  So kick it off with a little bit of background
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  on how you first got into writing
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  and when you were first published.
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  - Yeah, I mean, I came to writing quite late.
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  I mean, I started when I was in my fifties.
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  So that's five years from now, Jerry.
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  - That's, that's, yeah, that was last year.
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  (laughing)
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  It was bizarre, I just took an ocean one day
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  to write a novel.
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  Don't ask me why I just decided I was gonna give it a go.
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  I know it's strange, it's so strange.
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  I was out with a bunch of mates having a few pints
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  and I was talking about it. - There it goes now.
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  We're getting to the root of it.
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  And once you said it, half licked in front of all your mates,
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  you couldn't go back on it.
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  - Well, I didn't say I was writing.
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  I had an idea floating around in my head.
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  I was talking, and I was one of my friends,
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  a psychologist, who was talking character with him,
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  and he assumed I was writing this.
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  And I said, "No, no."
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  And he said, "Well, you should give it a go."
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  So I said, "Fine, I'll give it a go."
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  And literally, I came home that night,
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  on that evening, it wasn't that late,
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  maybe at 10 o'clock or something,
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  and opened my laptop, and I started to write.
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  And it was the first fiction I had ever written,
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  apart from school essays.
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  And the strange thing about it was,
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  I mean straight away it was straight into imposter syndrome.
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  What are you doing?
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  You're crazy.
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  You can't write.
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  You've never written.
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  Who do you think you are?
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  The, you know, all that, you know, loud and clear megaphone in my head.
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  And how I got past it was I just started writing ghost thoughts down.
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  I just said, you know, you're an idiot.
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  You're never going to do this.
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  This is stupid.
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  And once I sort of got all out of my head and down on the page, so to speak, I was going,
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  Okay, well, what's next?
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  So what am I gonna write about?
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  And then it's gonna, when I have this idea,
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  and then when I finished writing that,
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  I said, okay, well, let's write the first sentence.
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  And once I wrote the first sentence, I was off.
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  And I honestly was amazed.
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  I think if people have never written before,
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  think that they can't,
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  well, I am living proof that you can't,
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  because there's a strange thing that happens.
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  - Oh, there's three of us here, I think.
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  - I was saying. - There's been a convalesion.
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  There is this really strange thing that happens,
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  and I don't know where it comes from,
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  but you may have a picture in your mind
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  of the scene that you're going to write,
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  but as soon as you start to write it,
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  all sorts of other stuff comes in.
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  I don't know where it comes from,
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  it comes in from the ether.
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  - I believe there's a gate that we open up.
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  - Yeah, of course.
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  - I think that we sit down and I start to work,
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  and then somewhere there's a little guy
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  who opens a little, like, the sluice.
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  And all of a sudden I get these thoughts
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  and then they just come in and I'm like,
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  "Oh, wait a minute, I need to go do this."
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  - So, I mean, I wrote away like a mad thing
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  till like two o'clock in the morning or something like that
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  and then went to bed.
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  And then the next morning, when I sobered up,
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  (both laughing)
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  maybe I should go and read this and see.
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  And I read through it and I was expecting, you know,
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  something really awful.
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  And as I read through it, 'cause I'm a big reader,
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  I read a lot and I read very widely.
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  I was reading through it and I was going,
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  you know, I have read worse than this.
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  This is not at all.
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  - That's a good start right there.
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  I've read worse than this.
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  - You know, honestly, that should be a inspirational
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  postage you have on the set.
• 10:43
  - I was gonna say every show we come up with a new T-shirt.
• 10:46
  Oh, Doug, that's on new T-shirt.
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  - I've read worse than this.
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  - Yeah, so I wrote a bit more and then I passed it
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  around a few people that would give it to me straight, you know?
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  I gave it to my wife, again, she's a big reader, my wife.
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  I gave her about three chapters and she flicked at the end of the last chapter and went, "Where's
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  the rest of it?"
• 11:04
  Yeah, well, it comes next.
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  Don't give it to me.
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  I want to read the whole story.
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  And then a few other people said, "No, you keep going."
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  So I finished that book.
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  It was a techno thriller in the style of, at least I thought, in the style of Michael
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  Crichton.
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  And part of the reason I suppose I came to write it was that there was no Michael Crichton
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  books anymore. And there was no books that really were technical thrillers. And it was
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  that period where indie authors really, the whole indie world hadn't really taken off.
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  I mean, it had taken off, but it wasn't. I still got my books, you know, in the book
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  shop. And when I got out to the book shop, the science fiction shelf would get smaller
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  and smaller and smaller. And then horror of horrors, they started putting fantasy into
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  the science fiction shelf.
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  Ah, and that was it.
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  because they didn't know where else to put it.
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  - Yeah.
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  So anyway, that's part of the reason.
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  So when I finished it, I went, what do I do with this?
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  And I looked at kind of the traditional routes.
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  So you can't just go to a publisher.
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  You'd have to get an agent.
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  So we'll look at the agents and then the whole thing's,
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  and then you have to do a pitch letter
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  and then you have to wait for 100 rejection letters.
• 12:14
  And I was going, well, that's just seems
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  like a complete waste of time to me.
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  But so I'll just put it up on Amazon.
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  And I have a technical background.
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  I know a lot kind of stuff. So I took it up there. But the one thing that really inspired
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  me, I think that changed me as a writer was I think the first time I got a five star review
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  on that book from somebody on the far side of the world that I didn't know who they were.
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  And they said, "Love the book, you know, great book." And I went, "Wow." You know, so for
• 12:44
  me that was completely unbiased, you know, review of my book.
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  I think one of mine was when I got the first like random email from somebody that was a
• 12:53
  reader and I was like, what?
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  Somebody asked me, like, I'd seen some reviews and I thought, okay, well, people review,
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  but when somebody was like, I got to take the time to review, to email you.
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  And I was like, oh, I remember getting the email and I was like, holy shit, somebody
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  actually read my book, you know, they tracked you down.
• 13:06
  They tracked you down.
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  I don't change when you start getting those.
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  You go, whoa, why me?
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  What about my name?
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  I'm not worthy.
• 13:12
  I'm not worthy.
• 13:14
  Yeah.
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  And then now like tons of them come in every day.
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  I just ignore them.
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  I'm like, whatever.
• 13:20
  (laughing)
• 13:21
  - I try not to, I try and apply to the bubble.
• 13:23
  - No, I do the same.
• 13:25
  - And that first book was,
• 13:27
  am I right in saying about 10 years ago?
• 13:29
  - That was about 10 years ago, yeah.
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  It was called "Chain Reaction."
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  I rewrote it since.
• 13:34
  And then I gave me the confidence to write a book
• 13:37
  called "Colony One Mars," which is sci-fi,
• 13:39
  which I could really want to write sci-fi,
• 13:41
  but it kind of had the confidence to write it.
• 13:44
  Hard sci-fi, specifically sci-fi,
• 13:47
  that's kind of based on science fact, relatively speaking, near future.
• 13:51
  You know, so it's not aliens and vast and light or generation starships.
• 13:55
  It's not space opera in that sense.
• 13:58
  More like the Martian that sort of style.
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  So I wrote a book called Conley one Mars and that just blew up.
• 14:03
  That just became massive bestseller.
• 14:05
  And then I wrote a whole series of books, you know, Conley two, Conley two,
• 14:09
  so on, I wrote about seven books in that series.
• 14:12
  And that became huge big bestseller.
• 14:15
  And that book still is my best selling book to this day.
• 14:19
  I think I checked yesterday and it's like ranked 4000 in the Amazon store, which if anyone
• 14:25
  doesn't know, when there's 20 million books on there, 4000 is pretty fricking strong for
• 14:30
  a 10 year old book.
• 14:31
  It's got about 10,000 reviews on it now at this stage, and maybe it's 11.
• 14:34
  I don't have a lost count.
• 14:35
  It was over 10, yeah, when I looked at it, yeah.
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  So yeah, so that book did really, really well.
• 14:41
  And then I wrote a space opera set in kind of like the expanse.
• 14:45
  So, set in the solar system.
• 14:47
  Very like the expanse, actually.
• 14:49
  Only better.
• 14:50
  Only better, of course.
• 14:52
  Absolutely.
• 14:52
  Absolutely.
• 14:52
  So, yeah.
• 14:53
  Of course.
• 14:54
  So, that classic, you know, bunch of guys and girls, guys and gals in a spaceship on
• 15:00
  an adventure to the solar system.
• 15:02
  Very like Firefly.
• 15:03
  That's sort of vibe to it.
• 15:04
  That did really well.
• 15:06
  Over the 10 years, like how has your writing process evolved now?
• 15:10
  You're not just going to sit down in the middle of the night and bang out a story at two in
• 15:13
  the morning, right?
• 15:13
  So, or what is your process at this point?
• 15:18
  Well, my process kind of evolved to, I mean, I got an idea that rattles around in my head
• 15:22
  for a while.
• 15:23
  I don't take notes.
• 15:23
  I don't write down ideas as they come to me during the day, right?
• 15:27
  And I thought I just, I followed kind of Stephen's Kings vibe where the good ideas will stay
• 15:33
  in your head.
• 15:34
  So I get an idea and it rattles around.
• 15:36
  I go, "Well, that's the one I'm going to write."
• 15:38
  And then I'll think about that for a while and gather bits to it.
• 15:43
  And then eventually I'll sit down and start writing notes to myself,
• 15:47
  which they're all over the place.
• 15:48
  Like a mind map.
• 15:49
  It's just a mishmash of ideas and bits of things that come together.
• 15:53
  And then after a while, I'll start to structure that
• 15:57
  when I think I have the basis of the story.
• 15:59
  And I'll apply, because I essentially write in a thriller structure.
• 16:03
  So all my books, even their sci-fi or technical tools, they're all essentially in that thriller
• 16:09
  structure. You start with a big bang and it's hell for leather through the book. I have very
• 16:16
  fast-paced work as well. So I'll craft all that into a basic plus, usually chapter by chapter,
• 16:23
  a couple of lines per chapter. And then I start writing. I get to about chapter three and then
• 16:28
  And then I changed my mind.
• 16:31
  [laughter]
• 16:32
  I go, "Oh, I have a better idea."
• 16:36
  I also like how your good ideas stay in your head and that explains a whole lot about
• 16:41
  why my head feels like it rattles around empty.
• 16:44
  So that's it.
• 16:47
  Well, there are things you keep coming back to, you know?
• 16:49
  And then generally speaking, when I get to, I mean, I type and I'm very slow, and I think
• 16:54
  a lot about what I'm writing and as I'm writing, but as you're writing and you get to about
• 16:57
  halfway through the book. Now you've lived it for a month or two and you know the characters
• 17:02
  and as you're going through the world you're gathering all sorts of other ideas that come
• 17:06
  into you and start applying them to the book. Then by then I'm re-organising the entire
• 17:14
  second half plot or even just writing notes back to myself about how to change it. But
• 17:18
  I write kind of then until I get the first draft finished and it's rough. It's really
• 17:22
  rough my first drafts, but I have my story and I know my character's motivations. If
• 17:28
  I'm really lucky, I might even have a theme to run through the book.
• 17:33
  Fancy.
• 17:35
  Yeah, yeah, fancy. I'll go down.
• 17:36
  Got a theme.
• 17:38
  Well, themes are really good if you can nail them. I wrote Shadow of Elysium, the one
• 17:44
  I wrote last year, which was the seventh book in that Colony Morris series. So I am, he's
• 17:51
  gone out to my fans. But again, I mean, I got down to the team level with that. And once
• 17:56
  I had a team, you know, it's easy then to try and imbue each of the characters with
• 18:00
  that team. So there's a kind of commonality. So the whole thing kind of comes, everybody
• 18:05
  has the same dilemma in a sense. So the whole book essentially. So I don't know if people
• 18:14
  realized that in the book. Then for my second draft, it's really when I get into the actual
• 18:18
  crafting the kind of structure.
• 18:21
  And now a quick word from this episode sponsor.
• 18:24
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• 18:27
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• 18:29
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• 18:33
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• 18:39
  And now back to the show.
• 18:42
  Your process is far more like most traditional published
• 18:46
  writers do more than the most indies that we talk to. You plan it all out, you kind of run
• 18:54
  through it, plan it all out, and then you go back and then do another run, run through the whole
• 18:57
  thing. I mean, there's a lot of writers that work that way, but it does tend to be, the indies tend
• 19:01
  to be, the first draft is a pretty, you know, is 90% of what it's going to be.
• 19:07
  Yeah, I think, and part of the reason I think they do that is because Indie tends to reward very
• 19:13
  fast-paced book release. So the more you can get out there, the better. Because I rely
• 19:20
  so much on Facebook and advertising that, I write one book a year. That's what I do.
• 19:25
  So I can spend a bit of time thinking about it. But that's just the way I write. I've
• 19:32
  written 20 books now. So I've tried all sorts of different ways of doing it. And I've tried
• 19:36
  that real fast, get it all the detail down. But the same thing happens to me once I get
• 19:41
  to halfway through the book, I've changed my mind a bit.
• 19:45
  Yeah. I got a better idea about this. Yeah. One of the things that helps me is I type so slowly.
• 19:51
  There's plenty of time to think about what I'm writing while I'm typing. I tend to retype the
• 19:57
  same line and then the same paragraph and then I sort of self edit as I go. So I write quite
• 20:03
  relatively slowly, but it tends to be a more filled out.
• 20:06
  By the time Nick finishes the paragraph, he's rechanged the entire story three times.
• 20:11
  So he's ready.
• 20:12
  You know yourself when you go to conferences and you hear all these things and you come
• 20:16
  back and you've got your full of ideas.
• 20:17
  Well, I came back from the SBS conference with Tom Donnelly and Tony Lee in my ear about
• 20:24
  doing dictations that I would change me.
• 20:26
  And I said, "Okay, fine.
• 20:28
  I'm going to do this."
• 20:28
  And it was a book I was going to write and I kind of stopped it.
• 20:31
  And I said, "Okay, I'm going to go back to that book.
• 20:33
  I'm going to finish it.
• 20:33
  I'm going to dictate it."
• 20:35
  But the same thing, yeah, I was really, the words were just pouring out of me and I got
• 20:41
  about halfway and I went, "Whoa, I got to stop."
• 20:46
  It's way too fast.
• 20:49
  I have to slow down here and really think about it.
• 20:51
  So it forced me to go back and really work out the plot in absolute detail as much as
• 20:55
  I possibly could.
• 20:56
  And it was a complicated book plot-wise.
• 21:00
  And I came to that middle chapter and I had to stop the dictation and just go back to
• 21:04
  typing it because it's the only way I could tease this particular chapter out because
• 21:08
  there was too much going on. It was a midpoint. A midpoint in the thriller is always the point
• 21:13
  where the protagonist stops running and starts taking action. And that's usually because new
• 21:20
  information has come to light. They know a thing or two that they didn't know. It doesn't necessarily
• 21:24
  mean it's right, but now they're often anew. So that's that middle chapter. And I needed to really
• 21:29
  try and tease that because the book flips on that chapter. But I could only do it by
• 21:34
  sitting down typing it. And then eventually I got it structured. But again, it's first
• 21:39
  draft's going to be rough. The second draft, I'll tidy all that up. And then the third
• 21:44
  draft is usually when I get into the crafting of sentences. So I'll really polish the sentences
• 21:50
  and get into the rhythm of the story, get into the rhythm of the read. Because I always
• 21:54
  think that reading, if you can get the rhythm to the words, then it makes that reading process
• 22:00
  so much easier and the reader can run through the book. So that's kind of how I write.
• 22:06
  Got you. Cool. Hey, so you touched on that you've built your business a lot around using
• 22:13
  Meta Facebook ads. And that was the talk that you gave at SPS London, which was really
• 22:20
  brilliant. There were several things that I really liked about it. One was you did an
• 22:24
  example, you built a campaign on the screen, on your computer live.
• 22:29
  That was very helpful.
• 22:30
  And so it showed the dashboard as you see it and went through, which was really, really
• 22:34
  good and is available, I believe, those replays you can buy from SPS and get to see it if
• 22:40
  you want to see this whole thing.
• 22:42
  And the other thing was you said, "This is some stuff I've done and it's done some work
• 22:47
  for me."
• 22:47
  It works for me.
• 22:48
  It works for me.
• 22:49
  Yeah.
• 22:50
  My mileage may vary, right?
• 22:52
  This is this is kind of what has worked for me, which I thought was was really really good
• 22:57
  And it was very actionable
• 22:59
  So we'll hit you up here and get you to talk about a little bit of those major points that you brought up in the
• 23:05
  Talk and the first one was you were very honest in the fact that you said my Facebook ads were doing
• 23:10
  Superbly well, and then they brought out andromeda and then my ad started really sucking and I think you told us that was about the time
• 23:17
  James asked you would you talk at SPS London?
• 23:19
  - Oh, shit.
• 23:21
  Now I've got to fix this before I give a year old talk.
• 23:24
  So talk about the Andromeda change
• 23:26
  and what that meant to us as authors trying to advertise.
• 23:30
  - So if you flip your brain and put yourself
• 23:33
  in the head of Metta, okay, of Facebook.
• 23:36
  - Good luck with that.
• 23:37
  - Yeah, good luck with that.
• 23:39
  But their problem, and this is partly a problem of AI.
• 23:42
  I mean, they had the same problem of AI slot, I suppose.
• 23:45
  So they have millions and millions of creative ads
• 23:48
  been created because of the proliferation of AI. You can now generate marketing copy
• 23:54
  content. You can generate images. You can generate videos. You can generate fake influencers.
• 23:59
  You can generate so much of this stuff. So all this stuff is piling into Facebook. How
• 24:03
  do they sift through all of that and pick out what needs to be sent, what should be
• 24:08
  sent to a buyer, a potential buyer, a customer or user? Okay. So they invested heavily in
• 24:15
  AI to solve the problem of all this other AI that's coming through.
• 24:18
  So you have to also remember that Facebook is a platform.
• 24:21
  It's a neat commerce platform.
• 24:22
  It's a neat commerce marketing platform.
• 24:25
  Okay.
• 24:25
  So, so us, indie authors, even traditional authors, we're a very small little tiny sector
• 24:31
  in that.
• 24:33
  So Facebook ads and Instagram ads.
• 24:35
  And it's never really been built for, we've utilized it for selling our books, but it's
• 24:39
  not really built for selling items like that.
• 24:42
  Yeah.
• 24:43
  Yeah, we have products, our products are books, but the Facebook platform itself is built for
• 24:49
  e-commerce, selling all sorts of products and services and whatnot. So what Facebook are really
• 24:56
  trying to do then is they're trying to ensure that what they send to their user is giving them a
• 25:01
  good experience. So they're giving them the right ad at the right time in the right order.
• 25:08
  And they built their AI platform to sit through these billions of new creatives that are being
• 25:13
  shoved in there, whatever. So that essentially is what Andromeda is trying to deal with.
• 25:22
  And the second thing they're doing is they are taking the approach that it's not simply one
• 25:28
  ad that we're serving to a customer. We met a, we'll try and bring that customer down a funnel.
• 25:37
  Okay, so the classic sales funnel. So most of us don't buy something at first contact with it,
• 25:44
  unless it's really low cost, low value. But really, really shiny sometimes. Really shiny.
• 25:53
  Which is a very different concept for the female audience than the general male audience.
• 25:58
  What we consider shiny. It's a spur of shoes.
• 26:02
  Yeah, so, but even still, you know, most people, you won't, you have to be brought down this funnel.
• 26:09
  So, what Facebook are trying to do is create a platform, and again, this is coming back to Andromeda,
• 26:13
  they're creating a platform that brings customers down a sales funnel. Okay, they're cold, you're
• 26:22
  giving them some information about it and go, "Oh, yeah, that's, I might be interested in that,"
• 26:26
  seeing how they react and then giving them another type of ad. That's maybe a bit more formative,
• 26:31
  giving them more information about the product, you go, "Yeah, okay, I'm a couple you really
• 26:35
  interested in that." And then giving them another ad that says, "Buy now," type stuff.
• 26:40
  And you're bringing those to people. So this is also a kind of a way we have to think about it
• 26:45
  as writers now. So when we're creating, when we used to create our Facebook ads, once you kind of
• 26:51
  got your targeting and your kind of image and maybe a quote, best book I've ever read, type stuff,
• 26:59
  You could test a whole bunch of those out. One would probably do well. You'd kill the worst
• 27:03
  ones and keep the good ones, good one, throw money on it and that worked really well.
• 27:07
  And I think that made us a bit lazy because we really hadn't thought about why
• 27:14
  people respond to this and don't respond to the others. So now the key thing with Facebook is
• 27:20
  really you have to think about the actual ad, what it is you're selling to, who you're selling to,
• 27:25
  Who's your customer what message you want to give your customer that's going to speak to them and what your offer is what are you offering the three things and it be for selling anything it's who is going to what is saying.
• 27:35
  What the offer is okay so we have to approach it from that that perspective we have to take more professional sales and marketing attitude to face book ads so what does i mean in reality.
• 27:49
  So what it means in reality is that the creative when i say creative i'm talking about the art i mean it could be the copy could be video could be immature that's just the creative the creative aspect is is king is absolutely king now.
• 28:03
  You can have a real if you have a really good creative.
• 28:06
  Then it will compensate for a lot of bad targeting if you're targeting the wrong audience or you haven't switched this on or switch that off on facebook okay the creative is king absolutely.
• 28:17
  And it's not just the creative, it's giving Facebook enough creative options that it can bring people down a sales funnel.
• 28:26
  So what does that look like in practice? What it looks like a practice is the one thing I gave at that talk was I said I had a,
• 28:36
  I wrote a quick and dirty blog prompt to go and read my good reads reviews from my series.
• 28:47
  Okay.
• 28:48
  That was a great tip, by the way.
• 28:50
  Let me just add that Claude can't scrape Amazon or can't scrape it properly, but he
• 28:57
  can scrape through Goodreads.
• 29:00
  He can read Goodreads.
• 29:01
  Yeah.
• 29:02
  What do you mean you could take?
• 29:03
  You could take, I mean, you could later, you just go onto your Amazon and just cut
• 29:08
  and paste all the reviews, a whole bunch of them into a text document and use that if
• 29:14
  you want.
• 29:16
  But the reason being is that most of the things that people like about your books and why
• 29:21
  they buy them will be reiterated somewhere in your four and five-star reviews.
• 29:27
  Now, generally, four and five, three can be useful, and ones are, ones and twos are probably
• 29:32
  useless.
• 29:33
  There's no real information to be gained out of a one and two, but a three, actually, if
• 29:37
  you're just from a writing point of view, you're going to decide it can point out some
• 29:42
  criticisms.
• 29:43
  But the ones you're interested in are four and fives, and they'll tell you what they
• 29:45
  like about your book, books, what you are like as an author. This guy, Jail down
• 29:50
  Kilby is like, you know, Michael Crichton, I wish, but you know, they will tell you.
• 29:57
  You're alive, you got one up on him. If they say it online, it must be true.
• 30:01
  It must be true. I mean, I've been careful to say things like, you know, this book is better than
• 30:04
  The Martian, but I would never use that because that's, once I use it, then it's my opinion.
• 30:11
  If they have none, if they have none online, that's fine.
• 30:15
  So, and they'll also tell you what your book is like.
• 30:17
  So this book is like the Martian.
• 30:20
  This book is like the expanse.
• 30:21
  This book is like whatever.
• 30:23
  So from that, then you can get an idea of what it is you need to be putting into your ads.
• 30:28
  Okay. So I kind of break down the type of people who are out there buying books.
• 30:34
  There's kind of hot, warm and cold.
• 30:38
  Hot readers are really your super fans.
• 30:39
  So a lot of the time when you're doing Facebook, when people do Facebook ads, Facebook kind
• 30:43
  of has an idea.
• 30:44
  If you've done a few of them, it has an idea of who your hot readers are, who's going
• 30:48
  to interact, react to your ad.
• 30:51
  They'll send it out to your hot readers and you do really well.
• 30:53
  You just sell loads of books and then a couple of days later it's all gone and it dies.
• 30:57
  Okay?
• 30:57
  This is classic.
• 30:58
  Loads of people see this on Facebook.
• 31:00
  So what you need to do is you need to think about the cold readers and warm readers and
• 31:04
  cold readers.
• 31:05
  a warm reader, I classify as somebody who knows you. They may even have read one of your books
• 31:12
  or maybe one in a series, but they certainly know of you. You've been hovering around their
• 31:17
  KDP, their Amazon, also bots. That's a kind of warm reader because they're reading in your genre
• 31:26
  and they're reading close by what you write. And then cold readers are people who don't know you,
• 31:33
  but also read in your genre. Like I'm not going to sell a hard sci-fi book to somebody who's into
• 31:41
  romanticism, you know, or cozy mystery. It's just too hard to sell. Okay, but I will sell to somebody
• 31:46
  who likes techno thrillers and likes hard sci-fi, likes sci-fi in general, or speculative fiction.
• 31:52
  That's what I classify those three. So the cold readers would be genre, warm readers would be
• 31:59
  other authors that are similar to you, authors of books and hot readers that will buy anything.
• 32:03
  So you don't have to worry about hot readers because they will respond to any ads. The two
• 32:08
  types of ads you need to focus on are the warm readers and hot readers. You're talking genre
• 32:14
  and you're talking authors. So classic ad would be if you like Michael Crichton, then you like
• 32:22
  jailed and killed me okay that'd be kind of classic or you can describe the book you know in terms of
• 32:31
  it's it's it's the martian meets michael cryton or it's the expands meets something else you know
• 32:38
  see your and these are classic kind of lines that we used in hollywood when you're making a pitch
• 32:44
  or you're using a publisher when you're making a pitch for a book so straight away when somebody
• 32:48
  is on their phone and they're looking through facebook or instagram and they go oh that's an
• 32:52
  image. And there's a big thing that says, "The Martian Meets Michael Crichton." They go,
• 32:58
  "Ooh, I could be interested in that." Okay, you've got them. Straight away, you've got them.
• 33:04
  And then your actual sales copy, your primary text, drags them in a bit more and gets them to
• 33:14
  click. So, are you doing sales and traffic ads? So, let's talk about campaign level. Then we'll
• 33:18
  we'll go to AdSet and AdSet to get a little bit more detail.
• 33:22
  Yeah.
• 33:23
  Well, since that talk, I mean, I have moved exclusively to sales ads.
• 33:27
  I don't do, I do traffic ads, but I do them to the European market and their legacy, they've
• 33:34
  always kind of worked quite well and they still work quite well, so I leave them alone
• 33:37
  and they don't mess with them.
• 33:39
  But for US and UK, I've moved exclusively to sales ads.
• 33:44
  Before you go too far, could you kind of like, what would be the main difference for some
• 33:48
  who's a dumbass like me, like between a sales and a traffic ad, you know, because some people
• 33:53
  are like, "Oh, what's really the..."
• 33:56
  Okay, so a traffic ad is you put your ad up, you click the button by now and it goes straight
• 34:01
  to Amazon. Okay, go straight to your book sales page on Amazon. Facebook has no information,
• 34:07
  no feedback from that other than they clicked that button and it went to Amazon. They don't
• 34:12
  know if you bought, they don't know anything else about you. Okay, so what they will try and do
• 34:17
  Facebook will try and get you as many people who are going to click that button as possible.
• 34:23
  That's really what they're after. But you've no way of telling it how many of those bought
• 34:28
  and which ones that did buy. I want to find more of them. That's the downside of traffic
• 34:34
  ads. They are cheaper, but that's the downside of them.
• 34:37
  Sales ads, on the other hand, and I'm not talking about sending people to where you
• 34:43
  You can buy a book on your website now.
• 34:44
  I'm just talking about putting a page in between the Facebook ad and the Amazon landing page.
• 34:51
  That page is on your website.
• 34:53
  When they click the ad, they land on a page on your website, which reiterates basically
• 34:59
  what's on your Facebook ad.
• 35:01
  Then they click it, and then they go to Amazon sales page.
• 35:06
  When they've clicked on that Facebook or your website page, you're sending an ad to cart
• 35:11
  message to Facebook. Okay, so you're giving Facebook information of the type of people
• 35:17
  that clicked the button, okay, to go to your Amazon page. And that's probably half the
• 35:22
  people that actually landed on the page. Okay, but it's better information for Facebook,
• 35:26
  because Facebook now has an idea. It says, "Okay, I sent all these people here, and of
• 35:31
  those people, these 50% are the ones that this client is interested in. I'm going to
• 35:36
  find them more of those. It's a better class of traffic, better quality traffic if you
• 35:42
  want to call it that.
• 35:43
  Right. And it's not a buyer, but it's much closer to a buyer than someone clicking on
• 35:47
  the ad.
• 35:48
  Not a buyer, but it's not much closer. I haven't tried it as a purchase. So with Facebook,
• 35:55
  you can have several types of actions. So this page view is obviously the land on your
• 36:01
  page. That's a page view. That's really meaningless. And then, of course, we're into e-commerce,
• 36:05
  So you're into people who add to cart.
• 36:07
  I mean, these people are interested in buying something
• 36:09
  that they haven't quite gotten the full nine yards.
• 36:12
  And then the next will be purchase,
• 36:13
  which would be an actual purchase.
• 36:15
  Now, that's fine if you're running an e-commerce site,
• 36:17
  but we're not, we're sending it to Amazon.
• 36:19
  It's the best thing we can use.
• 36:21
  So far, I've tried is add to cart.
• 36:23
  Okay, so basically saying to Facebook,
• 36:25
  get me more people that are more likely
• 36:27
  to click the add to cart button
• 36:28
  than simply just click on the add.
• 36:30
  So that's the difference between the two.
• 36:33
  So what I found is that, again, coming back to this whole update
• 36:37
  and the way Facebook are going, and I was saying this at the talk,
• 36:41
  my feeling is the direction of travel with Meta
• 36:45
  is that they want to create a fully automated marketing machine.
• 36:49
  You just give them your products, you give them your budget,
• 36:52
  and they only want to find the people for you.
• 36:54
  OK?
• 36:55
  And obviously, to do that well, they
• 36:57
  need to have a Facebook pixel running so
• 36:59
  they can get some information about who's buying the product
• 37:02
  ultimately, okay, once they go through the hole, you know, down the funnel, finally at
• 37:07
  the other end, they have some information, what type of person is actually buying, and
• 37:10
  then they go and find you more of those.
• 37:12
  So I think that's why the sales are beginning to work better, actually much better for me
• 37:19
  than traffic ads at the moment.
• 37:21
  The other reason, because I have noticed that as it progresses over the week or two weeks,
• 37:27
  the cost of sale goes down, meaning that they're finding better people, better people all the
• 37:32
  time. And the number of sales I'm getting rises from the same ad and the same spend.
• 37:38
  The other thing I think, and this is just me speculating now why I think it works better
• 37:42
  in some ways, is that because we are now generating so many different types of images and graphics
• 37:49
  and messages on our ads, it could be a multitude of stuff we're using and that there's a bit
• 37:53
  of a churn because you have to keep doing it every couple of weeks and every month.
• 37:56
  Then invariably, we rarely use our book cover.
• 37:59
  Okay?
• 38:00
  Unless you want to look at a few people to have a book cover, that is just amazing.
• 38:05
  But in general, most people don't use their book covers because it doesn't really work
• 38:07
  very well.
• 38:08
  I also think if you use a book cover, you're basically saying, "This is a book," whereas
• 38:13
  what you're trying to sell is not the book.
• 38:17
  You're trying to sell the experience of reading the book.
• 38:20
  Classic sales, okay?
• 38:23
  You're not buying the car.
• 38:24
  buying the lifestyle.
• 38:27
  Right, but you're filtering, when you do your audience, you're filtering it by like
• 38:31
  Kindle and Kindle Store and stuff.
• 38:33
  So it's already somewhat guided there, right?
• 38:37
  Yeah, yeah.
• 38:38
  I've stopped that as well.
• 38:40
  I start that to test it out.
• 38:41
  Okay, what I want to try and do is get rid of all the, get control of everything so
• 38:45
  I can see where it's going wrong.
• 38:47
  So I'm going to narrow it down by location, so it's just the US or UK.
• 38:51
  And then I narrow it down by interest.
• 38:52
  So I'd say I'm just interested in people who are interested in science fiction movies,
• 38:58
  magazines, whatever.
• 39:00
  And also people who are interested in Amazon Kindle and Kindle Store.
• 39:04
  So you've narrowed it down to people who are interested in science fiction or interested
• 39:07
  in reading.
• 39:07
  That's a pretty good audience.
• 39:10
  So now, and then I'm narrowing it down by placement, although that's kind of changing
• 39:14
  that at the moment.
• 39:15
  So when I have that out of the way, then I'm focusing on the ad.
• 39:17
  I'm trying to find the best ad that's going to engage.
• 39:20
  And if it's not working, I know it's more likely to be my ad than it is to be the audience,
• 39:27
  the placement.
• 39:28
  So that's why I was doing that.
• 39:29
  And then once I kind of got to grips with understanding the ad structure and what sort
• 39:34
  of messages I was sending out, what sort of readers I was trying to target, then I started
• 39:40
  going back to full open just everybody in the US, everybody in the UK.
• 39:45
  Really?
• 39:46
  Just that wide and just sending it out to everyone?
• 39:48
  Why I was suggesting that at the SPS conference is just for people to just kind of close everything
• 39:54
  down, you know, get rid of the things that are the problem and then concentrate on your
• 39:59
  ads and find out where the issues are.
• 40:01
  Once you get your ad right, then great happy days.
• 40:03
  You can then open it up to the world type of thing.
• 40:05
  But if you do it the other way around, then you're going, "Is it my targeting?
• 40:09
  Is it placement?
• 40:10
  Is it, you know, you don't really know.
• 40:11
  Is it the ad?
• 40:12
  You don't really know."
• 40:13
  Process of elimination.
• 40:15
  And now, a quick word from this episode's sponsor.
• 40:18
  Hey, it's Jamie Davis back here with you, the show manager from Author Nation.
• 40:22
  You know, the whole Author Nation team is pulling together all the last bits and pieces
• 40:27
  to bring you a great event coming up here soon.
• 40:29
  I hope you're going to be there too.
• 40:31
  And while I'm at it, you know why libraries are always causing trouble?
• 40:36
  Well, because that's the place where shh happens.
• 40:40
  And now, back to the show.
• 40:43
  What's the metric you're really using to tell whether an ad is working?
• 40:48
  Because attribution links have really...
• 40:50
  Because you can use attribution links both when you're talking about a landing page,
• 40:54
  you're sending the pixel back from the click of the button out of the landing page, but
• 40:57
  then you've got an attribution link that then if you're on Amazon and you're selling to
• 41:01
  Amazon, if you're selling to Apple, then this is a different ballgame.
• 41:04
  But if you're going to Amazon, you've got an attribution link.
• 41:06
  If you're doing a traffic egg, you've got an attribution link.
• 41:08
  But the attribution links have been...
• 41:11
  There's all kinds of problems, right?
• 41:13
  In the word either word you're looking for is is they don't work for shit
• 41:16
  So that's that's a kind way of putting it
• 41:18
  Well a big problem is right if they're doing it on their phone like an iPhone will not send them to the Amazon app
• 41:25
  It did diverts them to the website and blows up, but it doesn't use the pixel
• 41:28
  So you're getting a lot of bogus information. So so what's your metric that you're really going by much abuse links?
• 41:39
  So we've established
• 41:41
  They don't work with a dam
• 41:43
  But Jerry's using them. Okay. Talk to me. How do how how are you using it? You're using it as a point of reference
• 41:50
  Well, well, you're not wrong. They are shit. Okay, but so so people don't know what an attribution link is an attribution link is
• 41:56
  Is it you can use it on Amazon so you you can create a link?
• 42:01
  That'll track people coming on to your Amazon sales page. Okay, and it'll also track whether they buy
• 42:07
  Make a purchase and it'll also track if they buy page reads Kindle page reads. Okay, so it's it's a it's a metric
• 42:15
  You can use so X number of people land on your page from whatever you add you've clicked they've clicked
• 42:21
  X number of people buy a book X X number page reads of a card, okay
• 42:25
  Then you can cross reference that with how much I spent so I do it on the seven-day rolling
• 42:29
  So I look at seven days how much have I spent on this ad on?
• 42:37
  Facebook
• 42:37
  Okay, remember not selling one book. I'm getting you into the series. This doesn't work for
• 42:43
  somebody who's selling one book. This is only works for people who are selling a series,
• 42:47
  okay? Because you get them into first book and then you have a whole lot of books for
• 42:50
  them to buy and the margin of that is much higher. So it's $20, $30 depending on size
• 42:55
  of the book and so on. So I'm looking over seven day and I say, how much have I spent
• 42:59
  on this ad over those seven days? Okay. And then I look at my Facebook, my attribution
• 43:05
  links which haven't really fully caught up because it takes two, three days before they
• 43:09
  cut up.
• 43:10
  But I get a general idea.
• 43:11
  Let's say how many book ones has that attribution shown for the last seven days?
• 43:18
  Okay, let's say it's 20.
• 43:20
  Just divide one by the other and that gives me a cost of sale for book one, okay, which
• 43:26
  I know because attribution links are shit that it's under reporting.
• 43:31
  So I'll double that because we've probably sold 40 books.
• 43:35
  Okay, because after a while you get a feel for how, but the general consensus that I've
• 43:40
  talked with all the authors, it's about 100 reports by about 50%.
• 43:45
  Okay, so if it says 10, it's probably 20.
• 43:48
  If it says 100, it's probably 200.
• 43:50
  And that gives me a cost of sale.
• 43:52
  And I say, well, for every book one that I've sold in the last seven days, it has cost me $5.
• 43:58
  Okay, and I know I have calculated how much a series is worth to me.
• 44:03
  Okay, I know how much getting somebody into that series is worse.
• 44:06
  And let's say it's worth $20 or $25.
• 44:08
  I've made $20 in the fullness of time.
• 44:13
  I haven't made it today, probably not tomorrow, but over a couple of weeks,
• 44:17
  a couple of months, I will make that $20.
• 44:19
  I know because I've looked back at all my stats and I can see that, you know,
• 44:24
  or a period if I take a 30 day period.
• 44:27
  So you should do this, take a 30 day period of a series and take all the income
• 44:31
  for the series, take the eBooks, the print books, the page reads. Don't worry about audio,
• 44:39
  but just look at the income from that series over that 30-day period. And then divide that
• 44:43
  income by the number of book ones, eBook ones that have been sold. Okay? And you'll get a
• 44:49
  figure. Okay? I'll say $20. See, you can roughly say with reasonable accuracy that a sale of
• 44:57
  book one e-book is worth $20 to you. Okay, if you think about it, okay? Now, people will
• 45:03
  say, "Well, you know what about this one? Don't worry about them. Don't overthink this."
• 45:08
  Okay? Simple. If you go back...
• 45:11
  Don't worry. I never overthink anything, so don't worry.
• 45:14
  Don't have to think it.
• 45:15
  Yeah.
• 45:16
  Just like, if you go back to the previous 30 days and do the same calculation, you'll
• 45:19
  find it's remarkably similar. It's a very accurate figure. Okay? Even if you go to a
• 45:23
  30 days where it's half the income, it'll still be half the number of bookworms in your
• 45:27
  soul.
• 45:27
  So roughly speaking, you're just saying, "Okay, I know if I sell a bookworm, it's worth $20
• 45:31
  to me."
• 45:32
  That's how I can calculate using attribution links.
• 45:35
  So you basically say, "How much have I spent on ads this week?
• 45:38
  How many bookworms has the attribution told me I've sold?
• 45:43
  Divide one by the other, you get a sales figure.
• 45:45
  It's costing me $5, $6, $10, whatever it is."
• 45:49
  I know in my head that series is worth $20, $25, $30 to me.
• 45:54
  Okay, so I know I'm gonna make that money.
• 45:55
  I'm not gonna make it today or tomorrow or the next day.
• 45:59
  I'll make it over the next couple of weeks
• 46:00
  or a couple of months and I won't get paid
• 46:01
  for another 60, 90 days.
• 46:03
  Okay, so it's a cash flow problem you're dealing with.
• 46:07
  So you're saying to yourself,
• 46:08
  "Okay, I'm gonna spend all this money
• 46:09
  in Facebook ads now, but I know I'll get that money back
• 46:13
  further down the line."
• 46:15
  - Okay, cool.
• 46:16
  So audience-wise we touched on it.
• 46:18
  when you're starting off and trying to figure out your creative and what creative is really
• 46:21
  working, then gate it as best you can. They've taken away so many of the targets now, but
• 46:28
  there are still broader ones that you can use.
• 46:32
  You can try open. Just remember that if you do.
• 46:36
  Put your guess in, right?
• 46:38
  Yeah. I think the thing with Facebook arts that people need to take away is that the
• 46:44
  creative is king now. Okay? The top number one thing you should be concerning yourself
• 46:49
  with is how am I going to craft the best possible ad?
• 46:53
  That's your picture, your texture, everything that's in there.
• 46:56
  Yeah. That is the absolute king. Everything else really, whether it's open, whether you're
• 47:02
  nailing it down by interest groups, doesn't matter a whole lot. The reason why I was
• 47:07
  suggesting that in the first place was to give you some breathing rooms so you could
• 47:10
  find the right kind of creative. Okay. So nail your target down to some people that,
• 47:15
  "Yeah, kind of now I really like this sort of stuff." Okay. And it gives you some breathing
• 47:21
  room to try and find the best creative that's going to work for you.
• 47:25
  All right. Let's talk about the dreaded Advantage Plus.
• 47:28
  Yeah.
• 47:29
  Oh boy. So if you haven't been on the Facebook dashboard lately or you're new to it, prepare
• 47:39
  yourself, maybe a stiff drink alongside you when you go in there.
• 47:42
  It changes almost daily and they are pushing the Advantage Plus stuff so heavily they really
• 47:51
  hide the ways of getting around it.
• 47:53
  But currently you still can avoid almost all of it, can you not?
• 47:58
  Yeah, no you can.
• 47:59
  You can.
• 48:00
  You can avoid almost all of it if you click the right buttons and you can avoid almost
• 48:05
  all of it if you know what it is you're trying to find.
• 48:08
  The problem with new people who are coming into Facebook now is they don't know what
• 48:10
  they're trying to find unless they do a course or somebody shows.
• 48:14
  But what's happening is this is Facebook, this is Matter pushing you towards this fully
• 48:20
  automated marketing machine.
• 48:22
  Don't worry about the audience, we'll find it for you.
• 48:24
  Don't worry about placement, we'll do that for you.
• 48:26
  Don't worry about this, we'll do all that.
• 48:27
  Don't worry about creatives, we'll create the creatives for you.
• 48:31
  We'll generate all the images and text copy and movies.
• 48:34
  Yeah, yeah.
• 48:36
  Oh, there's some doozies they come up with.
• 48:38
  My lovely protagonist, female 30-year-old protagonist, looked like a 50-year-old wrestler,
• 48:46
  a male, in one of them they came up with.
• 48:49
  It was amazing.
• 48:51
  Well, you should have tried.
• 48:52
  You should have tried that one to see if it worked.
• 48:56
  It probably would have been like, "Well, that thing took off."
• 48:59
  And I'm like, "Hey."
• 49:01
  Yeah.
• 49:02
  - Go on, Tim and he read throughs the book too.
• 49:05
  - Yeah, well you think it's a good image.
• 49:07
  I mean, Tom Donnelly sent me images going,
• 49:09
  "Why doesn't this work?
• 49:10
  "You're not going to get a great image."
• 49:11
  But you have to be agnostic about these things.
• 49:15
  So what is critically important for people to understand,
• 49:18
  and I think this is a good place to start,
• 49:21
  is to know who it is you're trying to sell to.
• 49:23
  So for me, for example,
• 49:24
  one of my target demographics would be kind of older male
• 49:29
  who have read a lot of classic sci-fi, you know,
• 49:32
  Arthur C. Clarke and that sort of stuff.
• 49:35
  So I can say, I'm going on target them.
• 49:37
  What is the message I'm going to craft
• 49:39
  that's going to reach them?
• 49:40
  So, you know, what problem does my book solve for them?
• 49:43
  The problem my book solves for them
• 49:45
  is that there is no more Arthur C. Clarke.
• 49:47
  (laughing)
• 49:48
  Same as the Michael Criken problem.
• 49:51
  And you know, if you love Arthur C. Clarke
• 49:53
  or if you like such and such, such and such,
• 49:56
  then you love Geraldette Killie.
• 49:58
  Okay, so I'm crafting a message that's targeting to them.
• 50:01
  And then I'm bringing them,
• 50:02
  I want to get back to the sales,
• 50:03
  because I think it's very important.
• 50:06
  Why I think sales ads work better than traffic ads.
• 50:10
  And why I think people, it is the direction of travel.
• 50:13
  And why I think people should be kind of trying,
• 50:16
  trying it out at least.
• 50:17
  So I've created my image, I've crafted my message,
• 50:20
  I've targeted my person, I think it's going to be interested
• 50:24
  in this with the message.
• 50:25
  They click on that, well, a traffic guide, they could click on that and they land on
• 50:29
  my Amazon sales page.
• 50:31
  But the image is different.
• 50:33
  Okay?
• 50:33
  I'm using one image on the ad and then suddenly there's my book cover and they're going, "What
• 50:37
  is this?
• 50:37
  Is this the same thing?"
• 50:39
  And the text is obviously different because I have my blurb.
• 50:41
  I can't change my blurb on my book every 10 minutes.
• 50:45
  I have to stick with one blurb, but the text on the ad is completely different.
• 50:49
  Again, you're selling what it's like to read this book, not the actual book.
• 50:55
  not selling them the plot of the book, that's selling features. You don't sell features,
• 50:59
  you sell the benefits. So there's a bit of a mismatch between what's on the ad and what's
• 51:06
  on your Amazon sales page with the traffic ad. So I think why sales ads, this intermediate
• 51:12
  page between Facebook and Amazon works well is because you can make that bridge. You can
• 51:20
  have exactly the same text you have on, so they click on the ad, they see a certain text,
• 51:24
  to go to your landing page.
• 51:25
  That is exactly the same text, probably in the same font
• 51:29
  and everything else to make sure they make that connection.
• 51:33
  Then you can introduce the book cover.
• 51:34
  Okay, so they're going, yeah, this is the same thing.
• 51:37
  And then they click on it, go to your Amazon page
• 51:39
  and the book covers match,
• 51:41
  even though the text doesn't match.
• 51:43
  So I think it's a better transition visually for people.
• 51:48
  And the third thing I think there's a kind of side benefit
• 51:50
  to it as well is that it helps Amazon's algorithm.
• 51:54
  So if you're sending very qualified traffic
• 51:56
  to your Amazon sales page, okay, Amazon is going,
• 52:00
  "Hey, this guy looks great,
• 52:02
  "because one in 10 people buy a book."
• 52:04
  And then it's much better,
• 52:05
  these other people over here are one in 100,
• 52:07
  one in 200 buy a book, okay?
• 52:10
  So a bit of a side benefit from doing that as well.
• 52:13
  So, and the third thing is that I think
• 52:18
  the whole Facebook, see it's not just,
• 52:21
  people talk about Facebook pixels,
• 52:22
  not just Facebook, Pixel, there's a Facebook
• 52:25
  conversions application interface,
• 52:27
  which sends an awful lot of data,
• 52:28
  not just clicks and stuff back to Facebook.
• 52:31
  It overcomes a lot of the kind of iOS 14 update
• 52:35
  when it killed a lot of pixel data and stuff like that.
• 52:38
  So there's an awful lot of information that goes back
• 52:40
  to Facebook about the type of people
• 52:41
  that are clicking on your ad and what they're doing.
• 52:43
  Okay, particularly if you want to get people
• 52:45
  who are going to click that add to cart button.
• 52:46
  So I think it does really, really help.
• 52:48
  And as the more of that you do,
• 52:49
  the more Facebook has a better idea
• 52:51
  what it is, who it is you're trying to target and who you're trying to sell to.
• 52:54
  One of the things that, and I've been aware of this, very aware of this for a few years
• 53:01
  now, and you're reiterating it strongly again, is what is your book?
• 53:07
  And one of the things we should always be asking ourselves, and this is one of the things
• 53:11
  we preach when we talk to new authors just getting started that have this great idea
• 53:16
  about this book and over here and they've go, "Okay, describe it by telling me what
• 53:20
  it's like. And do that to yourself. And as authors, we go into this long-winded explanation
• 53:26
  of, "Well, it's sort of got a bit of this and it's a bit of that and everything." Try
• 53:30
  and put that in ad copy. You can't. So the most successful ads, Doug's got a great one.
• 53:36
  Here's his Reacher on a Boat. That's his Chase Gordon series. It's Jack Reacher on a Boat.
• 53:40
  What more do you need to know? It's a beefy guy, big stud guy that's going to beat the
• 53:44
  shit out of loads of people and he's on a boat. So it says everything. I think it's absolutely
• 53:49
  So he's off to a great start.
• 53:50
  One of my biggest problems that I have is that of my three series, I've only got one
• 53:55
  that I can go, "It's like this."
• 53:57
  The other two, they're not like other things and it's completely my fault.
• 54:02
  Yeah, but did you take that prompt I did at the London Conference and run it through
• 54:07
  you, the reviews for that series?
• 54:10
  And there's got to be something in there.
• 54:12
  I can run you through it off, actually.
• 54:14
  the people, but I did a remarkable job of creating two series that are slightly unlike
• 54:20
  anything. And the comps they are like are just wrong enough where it's hard to use.
• 54:28
  You know, you could say they're on a, you know, they're both on a Caribbean island,
• 54:31
  right? So you could use Death in Paradise, which is, you know, very big in the UK. Well,
• 54:36
  they change them every five minutes. So the
• 54:39
  (laughing)
• 54:41
  - The whole new show.
• 54:41
  - Got a death in paradise for nothing.
• 54:43
  - Exactly.
• 54:44
  (laughing)
• 54:45
  - Who's death was that?
• 54:46
  (laughing)
• 54:47
  - Wait, wait, they just changed the cast again
• 54:50
  right now while we're doing it.
• 54:51
  - Right, exactly.
• 54:52
  So it places a police procedural type thing
• 54:55
  in a Caribbean island, which is great.
• 54:57
  That's one of mine certainly.
• 54:59
  But it's completely the wrong vibe.
• 55:00
  They're not comedic like that at all.
• 55:03
  So it's tricky.
• 55:04
  It's really, really tricky.
• 55:06
  But what I'm saying to you is, and reiterating your point.
• 55:10
  - Well, it's police procedural, then.
• 55:11
  It's police procedural in the Caribbean.
• 55:14
  - Well, that's not very exciting to read, is it?
• 55:15
  It's like across the top of the text of your copy.
• 55:19
  (laughing)
• 55:21
  - Police procedural with sun.
• 55:24
  - With sun, yeah, with a sun tan.
• 55:25
  - Oh, no, blue blood, yeah, blue blood.
• 55:27
  - It's police procedural when I had the warm beer.
• 55:30
  There we go.
• 55:31
  (laughing)
• 55:31
  With that warm beer, yeah, good.
• 55:33
  - In a bikini.
• 55:34
  - It's a, yeah.
• 55:35
  Time's not gonna be a kidney.
• 55:37
  - I'm in, okay.
• 55:38
  - You're so there.
• 55:39
  You're a cheap click.
• 55:41
  So what I'm trying to reiterate, Jerry,
• 55:45
  is for those of you out there trying to figure out
• 55:48
  how to do your creative,
• 55:49
  that's the number one first question to ask yourselves.
• 55:53
  How do you describe your book in a short enough sentence
• 55:56
  that you can fit it on the top of a graphic
• 55:58
  that's gonna go in your Facebook ad?
• 56:00
  If you can't do that, start from square one.
• 56:03
  I'm not saying write your whole series over.
• 56:05
  I got 18 books in one of the series.
• 56:07
  My horse is bolted, man.
• 56:08
  I gotta still try and find a way to do it.
• 56:11
  So, but what you can do is do your Goodreads scrape
• 56:14
  or look through if you wanna just manually look
• 56:16
  through your reviews.
• 56:18
  That's a brilliant system of coming up with.
• 56:20
  I did all that when I came back from the talk actually
• 56:23
  and went through it all.
• 56:24
  And it did give me some--
• 56:25
  - And then you went, oh no, this is worse than I thought.
• 56:28
  - Yeah, it pretty much went, well, I'm fucked,
• 56:30
  But it was a good exercise.
• 56:34
  - Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 56:37
  You should try it again.
• 56:40
  You know, I mean, you could craft your own prompts,
• 56:43
  you know, 'cause that's just a quick prompt I put together.
• 56:47
  But you could craft your own prompt
• 56:48
  to get some better information
• 56:50
  to kind of focus in on what it is you're trying to get at.
• 56:53
  So you're trying to say, look, I want to try and figure out
• 56:57
  what it is about my book that these readers really like
• 56:59
  that I could use in a Facebook ad.
• 57:01
  It could be obviously, you could say that.
• 57:03
  - Yeah, and other books, movies, TV shows,
• 57:07
  anything's game, right?
• 57:08
  - Yeah, and it'll, so 'cause that's what you're interested
• 57:10
  in finding out, you know, and seeing what it comes back with
• 57:13
  and that might spark some ideas.
• 57:15
  - And to reiterate your point once again,
• 57:16
  is out of my three series, the one set of Facebook ads
• 57:20
  that are really doing quite well,
• 57:22
  that I built post your talk is the one
• 57:24
  where I can really identify that trope, you know,
• 57:27
  and those are working, so.
• 57:29
  - So, Jared, can you kind of give us an idea?
• 57:32
  Like, one of the things that we've talked about before,
• 57:34
  like the whole idea, well, I guess,
• 57:36
  what is your ratio as a good start of like,
• 57:39
  failed ads to successful ads?
• 57:41
  Like, how often do you have to go,
• 57:42
  well, this ad's not working and we cut it off and--
• 57:44
  - It's hard to say.
• 57:45
  I can usually tell within a day or two that it's not working.
• 57:50
  Like, I've done so many, I kind of look at it and go,
• 57:52
  well, that's not what I expect to happen
• 57:54
  and I just kill it and start again.
• 57:56
  Once I kill an ad, I try and figure out what it is about it that didn't work.
• 58:03
  Usually, I can kind of identify, well, maybe it's my messaging that's not working.
• 58:10
  That's nearly always the reason my ad doesn't work.
• 58:13
  It's not the right messaging.
• 58:16
  It's not speaking to a specific demographic with the right message.
• 58:21
  So I start a whole new kind of idea, a message say, "Well, I'm not going to target books.
• 58:26
  Maybe I'll target authors."
• 58:28
  I'll change it around a bit and see if I can find something.
• 58:31
  But usually, one or two, I'm pretty much get it there.
• 58:36
  You'll find that an ad will, generally speaking, depending on the budget, you need to understand
• 58:41
  how meta works once you put an ad live, depending on your budget.
• 58:45
  So it goes, "Right, our friend here is sending out a new ad."
• 58:50
  I know pretty much the type of people are going to be interested in buying his books,
• 58:53
  because you've done lots of stuff before.
• 58:54
  I'm going to send this to them.
• 58:56
  And you usually get a bit of a bump.
• 58:57
  Your click price is low, and then a couple of days later it just dies, because it now
• 59:02
  has no more people or that group of people has spent, it's burnt out.
• 59:07
  Yeah, it sent it to the low hanging fruit, right?
• 59:10
  And it's gone through that.
• 59:12
  Yeah.
• 59:12
  So, a good ad is one that you can scale.
• 59:16
  That's the definition of a good ad.
• 59:18
  A good ad is one that you can spend $100, $200, $300 a day on.
• 59:22
  Okay, and it still makes a return for you.
• 59:24
  They're hard to find.
• 59:26
  - Yep.
• 59:28
  - But it doesn't necessarily mean
• 59:29
  that you can't get a half decent ad,
• 59:31
  and you can spend $20 or $30 a day on it over a year,
• 59:35
  and it will keep returning.
• 59:37
  Okay, but a really good ad is one that you can scale.
• 59:39
  And the reason being is because once you up the budget,
• 59:42
  Facebook has to go and find other people.
• 59:44
  They're not your hot readers.
• 59:45
  Now you're into the warm readers.
• 59:47
  They might have heard of you.
• 59:48
  Okay.
• 59:49
  And then if you increase the budget again, they go, well, we've run out of one readers.
• 59:51
  Now we have to go cold readers.
• 59:53
  These people have never heard of you, but reading your genre.
• 59:55
  Okay.
• 59:56
  So that's why you need to kind of think about the message for those readers in your ad.
• 1:00:01
  Okay.
• 1:00:01
  Because if you can get that right, then you can scale your ad.
• 1:00:04
  You can spend $100, $200 a day on it until still return.
• 1:00:09
  Okay.
• 1:00:09
  Because it's going to a much broader audience.
• 1:00:13
  Someone once described it to me as like dropping the pebble in the center of a still pond.
• 1:00:18
  It's the first ring that goes out as you're low hanging fruit, the people that follow your
• 1:00:22
  Facebook pages, the Metagraphs.
• 1:00:24
  Then each ring that goes out a little wider is getting colder and colder and colder across
• 1:00:29
  the pond.
• 1:00:29
  So at some point, sometimes they break.
• 1:00:32
  It's also why you could run exactly the same campaign at everything.
• 1:00:37
  then if you ran exactly the same thing separately, the two will perform differently because the
• 1:00:45
  rings never go out the same way twice. In theory, they should, if they're both good,
• 1:00:51
  it should overcome it at some point. But it cannot work that way because they're never
• 1:00:57
  the same twice because it's never the same group of people that are looking at their
• 1:01:00
  phones at the same time as the rest. And you start blowing that up over hundreds and thousands
• 1:01:05
  of people, then it takes a different route, right, and can go a different way.
• 1:01:09
  I'm not pointing, I mean, it could be the reason sales ads work for me is because maybe
• 1:01:13
  Facebook is targeting a completely different group of people because it's a sales ad and
• 1:01:17
  not a traffic ad. I don't know. It's a possibility.
• 1:01:21
  I had a curiosity. Like, what is it that you consider like a good number of ads? How many
• 1:01:25
  ads do you have running at any one time? And how often do you go into killing them?
• 1:01:30
  Okay, well, I need to kind of define the sort campaigns. Okay, so a campaign is I am targeting
• 1:01:39
  a particular series. Okay, let's say Colin Mara series or the belt series or Moon based
• 1:01:43
  Delta, whatever it is, to a specific country, US UK, Australia, Canada, usually US UK, that's a
• 1:01:49
  campaign. And then within that campaign, I have an ad set and that ad set, it says, you know,
• 1:01:56
  place this ad here and target these people that's the ad set level and the ad itself i have one ad
• 1:02:02
  but within that i will have about ten six to ten different images and about two or three different
• 1:02:08
  ad copies primary text and then the headline will have some sort of call to action and facebook can
• 1:02:14
  then mix and match those and try them out different ways okay that to me is an ad.
• 1:02:19
  So I'd have maybe so in campaigns I have maybe seven, eight, nine campaigns, but they're all
• 1:02:26
  targeting one series. One series, one country. One series, one country. Okay. So theoretically,
• 1:02:33
  I could have at any one time three different campaigns because I have three different series
• 1:02:38
  to each country. If you want to add in, so that's kind of the structure. Okay. If you want to add
• 1:02:44
  in more expand your ad or add in more creative into a campaign. So I am targeting this series
• 1:02:50
  in this country. I have one ad in there that is saying, "If you like the Martian, you like
• 1:02:56
  Company Mars." But I might add another ad in there that's targeting, say, something like,
• 1:03:04
  "If you like a blend of Weir and Heinlein." Cacada Steel speaks to that same group, but it's a
• 1:03:10
  a different message. Okay. And if my budget is on the campaign, then I'll let Facebook
• 1:03:15
  decide where it wants to spend that money. So you can create, you can create an ad, group
• 1:03:19
  an ad within each ad set, within one ad set. And that, but each ad has to have a specific
• 1:03:25
  message. So think of it this way, this ad is targeting this demographic with this message.
• 1:03:29
  Okay. And then another out below that is targeting maybe the same demographic with a different
• 1:03:34
  message. Okay. And you can have a third one if you want. And you get all those built,
• 1:03:39
  They're all kind of stacked inside that one little campaign.
• 1:03:42
  So, okay.
• 1:03:42
  Yeah.
• 1:03:43
  And then Facebook has loads of things to play with to see what way it can bring people in
• 1:03:47
  and what they're responding to.
• 1:03:49
  Okay.
• 1:03:49
  And I don't kill any of it.
• 1:03:51
  It's not a question of you're trying to find the winning ad because it doesn't work that
• 1:03:54
  way anymore.
• 1:03:55
  It's not a winning ad.
• 1:03:56
  It's a winning campaign where you've got, you're bringing them down the funnel.
• 1:04:01
  So there's no point in going in and saying, "Hey, it's spending all the money on that
• 1:04:03
  one.
• 1:04:03
  It's not spending on this one.
• 1:04:04
  Let's kill this one."
• 1:04:06
  you've just killed might be the one that's closing the deal. Okay?
• 1:04:11
  Right, right, right, right. There's less people there. But, you know,
• 1:04:14
  it's a vital part of the campaign. I mean, obviously, it's spending money on the
• 1:04:19
  cold readers trying to get them down the funnel.
• 1:04:21
  Wow, this has been amazing, Jerry. We've got plenty long here and we could keep you another
• 1:04:27
  half a day going through this stuff and drilling down into more detail. But thank you so much
• 1:04:31
  for giving us this much time. And a couple of questions we always wrap up the show with.
• 1:04:36
  So let's jump back to you, put your author hat back on instead of your marketing hat.
• 1:04:39
  And what is your author's superpower?
• 1:04:42
  Oh, that's a good one.
• 1:04:43
  Running Facebook ads seems to be a fairly strong author superpower.
• 1:04:48
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it does.
• 1:04:51
  But I do, to be fair, I do write a very specific type of book that isn't, you know, it's a
• 1:04:58
  fairly niche market I write into.
• 1:05:00
  So hard sci-fi, fast pace, thriller structured, hard sci-fi, that's what I...
• 1:05:06
  I don't have a lot of competition.
• 1:05:09
  There isn't like 200, 300 different authors that I'm competing with.
• 1:05:13
  That's kind of my superpower really is because I'm able to write that sort of book and I
• 1:05:17
  really enjoy writing that sort of book.
• 1:05:20
  And I'm also acutely aware that if I'm to stay in the game, I need to be learning how
• 1:05:25
  to do Facebook ads.
• 1:05:27
  way I can write one book a year instead of trying to write one book a month or so.
• 1:05:31
  Yeah, yeah. I want to be you when I grow up. So this has been fantastic. You've brought
• 1:05:39
  some real insight into the other authors out there trying to run these ads. So last thing
• 1:05:44
  we got for you, we're going to spin the wheel of questions.
• 1:05:46
  Our wheel of questions.
• 1:05:49
  Don't believe.
• 1:05:51
  You literally have a wheel here.
• 1:05:53
  You have a wheel.
• 1:05:56
  And it's spinning.
• 1:05:57
  And I don't believe the jackpot.
• 1:05:59
  This isn't cut right through, Jerry.
• 1:06:01
  That's right, no. This is weird.
• 1:06:03
  The real deal here.
• 1:06:05
  So, okay, what is an achievement
• 1:06:08
  or something maybe on your bucket list,
• 1:06:10
  something you want to do in the next five years?
• 1:06:13
  Oh, gosh.
• 1:06:15
  That's a good one.
• 1:06:16
  Yeah, can it be anything? Does it have to be right or related?
• 1:06:19
  Anything. Oh, don't you think?
• 1:06:20
  Anything. Yeah.
• 1:06:22
  Yeah, banjo playing, monocycle.
• 1:06:24
  Yeah, I let you into a secret. I have a hankering to go and buy myself an analog synth.
• 1:06:35
  Okay. Okay. Are you do you have a music background already?
• 1:06:41
  Yes. Yeah, back in the day. And I've just I love I've been getting back into listening to a lot
• 1:06:47
  of kind of ambient and 80s, tangering dream stuff and I'm going and then I'm going maybe maybe I
• 1:06:54
  (laughing)
• 1:06:55
  - Or five, or six.
• 1:06:57
  So yeah, maybe that's my,
• 1:06:59
  what I want to try to do in the next, you know,
• 1:07:01
  is get into that.
• 1:07:04
  - Love it.
• 1:07:05
  That's brilliant.
• 1:07:06
  - All right, Nick, what about you, sir?
• 1:07:07
  - Me?
• 1:07:08
  - Oh yeah, you get the answer too.
• 1:07:10
  - My goal is to make fucking Facebook ads work.
• 1:07:13
  (laughing)
• 1:07:16
  So we're gonna have--
• 1:07:17
  - So you can go and buy the sit.
• 1:07:19
  - So I can go learn to play my freaking ukulele
• 1:07:23
  that I have that has been sitting there.
• 1:07:25
  - The ukulele, cool.
• 1:07:25
  - Oh man, we get you and him on the synth.
• 1:07:29
  - Ambient ukulele sounds.
• 1:07:31
  - We've got a cover band for next year in London.
• 1:07:35
  - If Ambient sounds the cat's dying,
• 1:07:37
  then yes, I would be Ambient sounds.
• 1:07:39
  That's my ability.
• 1:07:40
  Doug, what do you got?
• 1:07:41
  What's your dream for the five years?
• 1:07:43
  - It won't be musical
• 1:07:44
  'cause I could only play the radio.
• 1:07:46
  So I definitely think, well, getting Facebook guys to work,
• 1:07:50
  but there's some travel.
• 1:07:52
  I love traveling, so there's a huge couple places
• 1:07:54
  I just wanna hit on the other side of the world
• 1:07:56
  that I need to get to, so.
• 1:07:58
  I wanna go everywhere, kinda like Johnny Cash,
• 1:08:00
  I wanna go everywhere, so.
• 1:08:02
  - All right, Jerry, thank you so much for joining us.
• 1:08:04
  We really appreciate it.
• 1:08:05
  - No problem, anytime, guys.
• 1:08:07
  (upbeat music)
• 1:08:13
  - Well, that didn't disappoint, did it?
• 1:08:15
  - Not at all.
• 1:08:16
  I don't know about you, but I was taking notes
• 1:08:18
  pretty furious that I was out here.
• 1:08:21
  - Yeah, I'm gonna really listen to it,
• 1:08:22
  just to pick up on a couple of things.
• 1:08:25
  - I have to, just to understand some of it.
• 1:08:27
  I was like, wow, I was like, yeah,
• 1:08:28
  it was just trying to keep up with it.
• 1:08:30
  - And we kept on going afterwards.
• 1:08:31
  I mean, his bonus stuff for our Patreon subscribers
• 1:08:34
  was brilliant too.
• 1:08:35
  So yeah, a little plug for our Patreon there,
• 1:08:37
  if you wanna check that stuff out,
• 1:08:39
  it's $3 a month meant for to support the show.
• 1:08:42
  And you can get some gems over there from every guest.
• 1:08:46
  - Some good stuff over there, yeah.
• 1:08:47
  - This was a really good one.
• 1:08:48
  Big thanks to our friends at Felham
• 1:08:49
  for all their support, the show, go to trivellum.com/twoauthors to find out more. Everything's in
• 1:08:56
  the show notes, links to Jerry's stuff. And I'm going to tell you right now, no, Jerry
• 1:09:02
  Kilby does not run ads for anyone else. Before you inundate him.
• 1:09:08
  Don't bother him.
• 1:09:09
  Yeah.
• 1:09:09
  He does not.
• 1:09:10
  Before you inundate him with emails. You're welcome to send him an email that says, "Hey,
• 1:09:12
  enjoyed you on the Two Authors podcast." But please don't go after him running your
• 1:09:18
  ads for you. So great guy, great guy. All right. Until next time, be cool to each other.
• 1:09:23
  Fair wins and follow-up scenes.
• 1:09:24
  You've been listening to the Two Authors podcast with Nicholas Harvey and Douglas Pratt.
• 1:09:31
  Subscribe on your favourite platform for new shows coming every week.
• 1:09:35
  (upbeat music)