Welcome to your next step of the Self Publishing Mountain.

I'm Matilda Swift, author of Quintessentially British Cozy Mysteries.

And I'm Samantha Cummings, author of Young Adult Books About Magic, Myths and Monsters.

I've written the books, changed their covers, tweaked their blurbs, tried tools from a dozen ad courses, and I'm still not seeing success.

Now, we're working together to plot and plan our way from barely making ends meet to pulling in a living wage.

Join us on our journey where we'll be mastering the pen to snag that paycheck.

Hello and welcome to Pen to Paycheck Authors podcast.

I'm Samantha Cummings, here with my co-host Matilda Swift, and we're here to write our way to financial success.

We're two indie authors with over a dozen books between us, and still a long way to go towards the quit the day job dream.

If that sounds familiar, listen along for our Mastery Through Missteps Journey.

Each week, we cover a topic to help along the way, and this week's topic is financial planning.

And to talk about that, we're joined by a guest, Helen Golden.

She's the author of the Right World Cozy Investigation Series, a mystery series that's at 12 books and counting.

Helen, why don't you tell us a little about yourself and then share your win and or winch of the week?

Hi, thanks for asking me to come on your podcast.

I've been writing since 2022.

Like a lot of people, circumstances around COVID gave me an opportunity, which is how I like to think about it, to do something different.

I'd always wanted to write, but I've kind of reserved it as if I win the lottery, I might go and buy a cottage by the sea and write.

But this gave me a chance to do it.

So I'm giving it a go and hoping to make a full-time job from it in the near future.

My whinge of the week is I've just done a free bookse and I'm really, really disappointed at how poor it was compared to previous ones.

I don't know if there's something about the timing or it's just the wrong time of year.

I don't think it's the book because I've done this book before and it's had thousands of downloads.

I saw your book at number three in the Cozy Free Charts.

Do you think it's just time of year as in people?

Because if you get to number three, then that sounds like it's a lot compared to everyone else.

Yeah, but normally I'll get three, four, five thousand downloads and I've had like 1500 if that even.

I'm just quite surprised.

It's a little bit of a whinge.

Whether it'll have an impact on anything, I don't know.

As you say, it's always good to go up the charts, but it's just a bit disappointing.

My win, my win is a fingers crossed this will be a win.

I've just downloaded and signed up for Merch jar, which is Matilda knows a friend of ours has recommended and it looks after your Amazon ads for you.

And it makes changes to them.

It puts them on pause.

It does things with bidding.

And you can also set up to move things into different campaigns depending on rules.

So I'm hoping it's going to work.

It's expensive, but nowhere near as expensive as paying for someone to manage your ads for you.

So I'm hoping it's a win.

And that was recommended by a friend of the podcast, Lynn Morrison, who we talk about often here, who I feel like if she recommends something, I'm like, yeah, I'll do that.

That's gonna be, it's gonna be at least worth trying.

Yes, she gave a really good breakdown.

We talked a few times about the Cozy Mystery Clubhouse.

She gave a really good breakdown of her experience with it and the stats, and it sounded well worth it.

I would love to hear a follow up from you, Helen, about how it goes.

So fingers crossed that's good.

I'm gonna sneak in next and do my win because I'm concerned it's the same as Sam's and I want to get mine in first.

Curse you.

Mine is the Pen to Paycheck Discord, which is absolutely everything I want it to be.

We talked a few times recently, I've talked with Sam about this, I've talked with other friends about this recently, that I find that the more and more I dedicate myself to my writing and my publishing, the less easy it is to talk to friends about things that go on in my life.

And I did a trial yesterday, I sent my friend a voice note, it's like, can I see if you find this interesting?

Can you understand it?

And I tried to tell her about NetGalley.

And I've got a book on NetGalley, and I was really excited because someone who's a sort of cozy big person on social media had picked my book on NetGalley to read, and she normally only gets tried books.

And I was like, oh, that's exciting and interesting.

And I was trying to explain it to my friend, and I was like, it took like a five minute voice note.

And at the end of it, I was like, I'm not sure this is that interesting to you, or if you understand it.

She replied today, she's like, yeah, to sum up the book thing went well.

Yeah, I think she'd get it.

But I was like, it's so hard to really talk to friends that haven't given an enormous amount of context, like I have to explain the entire publishing industry to her, which is fine is something that I think I want to get better at sharing with friends, but it does mean that it puts a real barrier between you and and it's so nice to have other authors that I can share redirect with and the discord is absolutely giving that even to some extent, like it's just a space for me to articulate things and to track things.

So they think I work well, obviously even the podcast, I work well by talking to someone else about what I've been doing.

So we'll put the link in the show notes.

It's Pen to Paycheck Authors, Pen to Paycheck, can't remember what we call it now.

I've forgotten already.

Don't ask me, I forget what everything's called.

Exactly.

I think it's called Pen to Paycheck.

But in there, there's several people who joined us already, following Natspeak's podcast.

And I've started from the threads on my experience of NetGalley, on my current Facebook ads.

And I'm just putting in like, numbers updates on that.

And people aren't necessarily, you know, being able to say, oh, here's what you should change about your ad.

That's not what I'm looking for.

I'm not looking for coaching.

I'm looking for like friends you can chat to.

And it is delightful.

Also, the best thing about Discord is it's not actually that interesting.

So you can't get super distracted.

So it feels like productive without endless scrolling on Facebook.

And yeah, absolutely.

You could get distracted.

I've got a number of other servers on there, but I think it feels like I have shared what I want to share.

And now I can...

I'm still on my phone.

So obviously, I can chat myself if I want to, but it doesn't feel like a time suck.

So I'm absolutely loving that.

So I'm going to the week.

I've got no whinges because of that.

It's wonderful.

No whinges.

Oh my God.

Well, yeah, Discord definitely is one of my wins.

I'm loving my own Discord for the young adult indie fantasy writers.

That's not what it's called, but it's something like that.

And if anybody listening writes young adult fantasy, send me a DM on Instagram, I'll send you an invite.

I love it.

Same reasons.

It's nice to talk to people about writing, but everything around writing as well.

So and also that there's no time stuck for me.

I'm, as my whole family knows, I'm a terrible ghost when it comes to messaging people.

And Discord allows me to drop a message and then close the app and leave for like hours and hours.

I just send a message.

I think that's what it is.

I don't expect people to be there.

I don't get instant gratification from it.

And I really need that in my life because I have been, one of my wins slash winches is TikTok for this week.

We have been doing a TikTok challenge.

And I'm absolutely loving it because I do really enjoy the creative part of TikTok.

But as far as time sucks go, I am desperately every time I post something, going to look and see how many views it's had.

And I hate and I like I love the instant gratification because you get really instant views on TikTok, far more than you do on Instagram.

But I need to not do that.

I'm trying to edit a book and I need to not be looking at TikTok.

Yeah, so I think I'll take it because it helps you kind of articulate what you want to say about your books for ads.

Yeah, I have that's my other one the week.

I have this week started some Facebook ads because I was like, I'm spending so much time on TikTok.

I am so confident talking about my books, I'm promoting them, I am being a hilarious genius.

I could take the two minutes it would take to set a Facebook ad about these books and see where that goes as well.

So I've done that.

And then in fact, I have refined and started a new version and I feel like I am already a Kanads expert in a few days time.

It feels like it feels like very doable.

And I think the TikTok challenge has helped me get there.

Yeah, I'm glad.

Yeah, I think the TikTok challenge that we've been doing has been just one of those things where it's just made me think about something in a more fun way.

Like it's, I've seen it as a personal challenge.

Like I've gamified my marketing and yeah, I've really enjoyed that aspect.

And I have found hooks that I can see are working, which is nice and things that maybe I would have overthought way too much.

And I'm just kind of going off my fields.

I know I said that I won't be doing feeling based decisions, but on TikTok, like feeling based decisions is good because that is like, that's you're trying to get the feelings across on TikTok.

It all makes sense in my mind, but I just, I'm not very good at articulating it.

Up here in the head.

Yeah, I think you articulated it.

Yes, but today we do not have to be good at articulating things because we're talking about the thing that you and I are both bad at for different reasons, which is finance.

So one thing that Sam and I both struck with in the same way, we both have different financial backgrounds, different amounts of money for my salaries, but we both have salaries, which means that there is no pressure for us to make money from the books, which means that we can avoid the things we don't want to do.

And the thing we don't want to do partly is make a financial plan because that seems boring and scary and really taps into weaknesses of I don't know how to do it.

I feel like a little kid just making up and I don't even know how to start and I could just not start and then that's easier.

So today we, you know, we're kind of confronting the fact that we want to pick up the maybe dozen abandoned financial plans we've got between us and confront our fears and talk to Helen, who I have been on a writing retreat with.

And she told me recently, we were there, that she had a five year plan and that just seemed so enviable.

I wanted that it just seemed like exactly what I need.

And I want to find out how she does it.

So we're going to get our financial ducks in a row by talking to Helen.

We've got a few questions to talk through, but hopefully we'll just have a natural chat about it.

The first thing I wanted to ask about is, I know you have a background in finance.

What do you think that you brought to your publishing career from that?

I think there's a focus.

I think if you've got a financial focus, then you've got somewhere to go.

So I think it's great to have goals.

And I know you guys have talked about having those goals and setting plans just so that you know you're moving forward.

Well, I probably quantify that financially because that is my main driver for having a plan for the next five years.

And really that came around because I have an income at the moment from something else.

And I know that ends in five years time, or in fact, three years time.

Now it was five years time when I started.

I needed to be confident that in five years time, I would be able to replace that income because if I couldn't, then actually should I be looking for another job fundamentally.

And so that's an ongoing thing for me.

So now it's three years away and I need to make sure that by then, I've got sufficient income in order to not worry about the fact that I won't have this other income which I'm basically living off at the moment.

So it's really important to me.

So you're quite right, Matilda.

If that's not as important to you, because it's almost survival for me.

I mean, that sounds very dramatic, but ultimately, the ultimate success for me as a writer, is all of the nice things, readers, books that have responded well, etc.

But if I can't make it work financially, then this isn't a hobby for me.

This has to be my job going forward.

So I needed to be confident that that was something I could do.

But one of the things, like all financial systems is the information that comes out is only as good as the information that goes in.

So one of the things I did very early on, I based a lot of assumptions on where I was when I started.

And of course, I rapid released my first four books, which gave quite a different impression of where I might be in the future, had I have looked back at that 12 months later, 18 months later, because when you're rapid releasing, you get a much better and much smoother income coming through.

So I didn't really have sufficient information.

I still did a plan.

One of the things that I found, and again, you've just mentioned it Matilda, is a lot of it is down to advertising.

If you're not prepared to spend the money on advertising, it's going to be very, very difficult, unless you're incredibly lucky, or you go viral on TikTok or something like that, that you will be able to do where you want to be to earn sufficient money or sufficient profit for a full-time salary.

And again, it depends on what your full-time salary expectation is.

Without investing money in advertising, you're going to struggle to meet that, unless you're writing, you know, releasing a book a month or something.

And that has probably been my biggest fear and my biggest barrier, because I am naturally quite cautious financially.

So the thought of investing money in something that I'm not sure how that's going to go, has been quite frightening.

And when I looked back on my numbers for 2024, compared to where I wanted to be on my five-year plan, it was all down to, I hadn't invested anywhere near as much in advertising as I assumed that I would.

And so I've trying to take into account that I know I'm not massively brave about spending, upping a lot of money on advertising.

I've kind of come up with a kind of a halfway house of where I do a steady increase so I can see how it goes along the way.

But that really is my big challenge for this year, is to just bite the bullet and put money into advertising and time into advertising, which is also, you know, you can't write and learn how to do advertising at the same time.

That's probably, for most self-published authors, is the biggest balance is trying to get those two things right.

But I think I would struggle to do it without doing that advertising.

I don't know if I answered your question, but hopefully that was useful anyway.

I think the big question I've got coming out of that is, and the thing that I think is my big obstacle is like 10 steps back is the assumptions.

And a big thing I worked on last year was mindset.

And I would not at the start of this journey, but I would sit down and say, okay, so I'll write books people want to read, and then I'll make ads that people want to click on.

Like none of that felt doable.

What do you do to prepare to get a good set of assumptions in place so that you could kind of not pluck numbers out of the air?

I think for me, it's been looking at my numbers on a regular basis, my actual numbers of what's happening.

And therefore, I've got proper information to look at.

So I said that first time I did a five-year plan, I only had about six months worth of information to look at.

And it was therefore quite skewed.

But now I've been looking at my numbers.

I actually look at them daily, but only some very, very basic numbers, which then I translate into monthly, which then becomes yearly.

And then I'm able to look at those numbers.

And then those assumptions don't have to be complicated.

They can be just as simple as, I know every time I bring out a book, I get a spike of this amount over the month that I release and the month afterwards, and then it dies down.

I know a book that's over a year old is bringing me in roughly this.

My first in series is bringing me in roughly that.

I know how much I'm making on my current advertising spend.

I know how much revenue I'm making per pound I'm spending on advertising.

So I can extrapolate that over in the future.

So I can say if I'm releasing four books next year, and I'm releasing them in March, June, September, December, I can work out based on that history of how much each of my books should make me.

And that's my kind of base.

If I just bring out books and I carry on doing the advertising I'm doing now, then that will get me here.

If I then up my advertising, I know that will up my revenue by roughly this amount.

And therefore, if I want to increase that number, then I need to increase my advertising spend.

So I kind of look at them as a baseline.

And then what do I need to do to push it to where I need to be?

So you're kind of going, well, if I want to get to here, I'm reverse engineering it.

How much do I need to spend in advertising?

Almost.

Bearing in mind, I'm also bringing out books.

So it's not, perhaps it doesn't sound complicated to me because that's the kind of brain that I've got, but it doesn't have to be lots of formulas and all this.

It's really just knowing where you are now.

And so for me, as I said, the key is, I monitor where I am on a daily basis.

But I only look at my royalties every day.

I look at my orders that I've sold, my KDP reads, because I'm in Kindle Unlimited.

I convert them knowing my page reads, average page reads for all my books into orders.

That then tells me things like how much revenue I can expect per order.

Per book that I sell or per order equivalent, if you like.

And then I just look at my Amazon advertising costs, my Facebook advertising costs.

I look at my clicks so I can see roughly what kind of overall cost per click I'm paying.

And then I also am able to look at how many clicks I have to do to get a sale.

That fluctuates, but if it starts to dive or it starts to improve, then sometimes you can say, well, that's because I did this or I did that.

So for me, they're really useful information.

And that's all I record on a daily basis, which then just runs into a month.

And then I take the month's numbers and I put them into each month and that becomes a year.

And over a year, then I can look at averages.

I can look at roughly if I spent X amount on advertising, how much revenue did I earn?

Therefore, for every pound of advertising, I'm earning, I don't know, one pound sixty or one pound seventy or whatever it may be.

That then helps you go, well, if I spend X more on advertising, then could I expect to get one point five, one point six, one point seven more in revenue?

It's not overly complicated.

How accurate it is, we'll see.

But certainly, it's a process that I'm feeling a bit more confident with now because I've got some good data to look at.

Yeah.

And I think you've also got a number of things that are working and it sounds like they're working quite quickly.

Did you have contingency plans like saying, oh, say I release books that they just, it's not the right series.

It doesn't take off, nothing happens.

My plan is that I switch and do this or things like I run ads and they just become less and less successful over time.

Do you have contingencies or do you just assume that everything will go well?

Because I think a lot of other people who are listening will be thinking, yeah, if I release books that people wanted to buy in numbers that would give me reliable data, and if I could just run an ad and it would make money, I'd be golden.

So how do you, yeah, did you consider things not working and did you have to factor that into the plan?

No.

And that's the two reasons.

One is I knew nothing about this business when I started.

So I almost knew so little about it.

I was completely naive and just assumed that if I just followed the advice everyone had given me, it would all work.

And actually, to an extent, some of the basic like writing to market, and I think I do write to market.

My books all consistently sell every day.

So I don't think I've got a duff book in my series.

I can see my, I put pre-orders up quite, normally about three, four months, sometimes even six months ahead, because I always like to have the next book up for pre-order.

And sometimes the one after that.

I can see the pre-orders.

So I can see that people are still buying the series.

And Matilda is aware of this because I had a bit of a wobble, because last year I was actually planning on bringing out a new series.

And I'd written a short story to support it and it had been edited.

And then I had a massive wobble.

We had a chat in Clubhouse, which we've talked about.

And people were saying, but if your current series is doing okay, and you've got pre-orders, and your readers are saying, you know, we love your series, we don't want it to end, why not just carry on?

Because financially, that makes so much more sense than starting something that may or may not hit the spot.

So I've put that on hold for the moment, and I've told my readers, I am bringing out at least another four books in this series, and I've had a good response to that.

So I've only got the one series.

Maybe the next one won't be quite so good.

Maybe it'll be better, who knows?

I think I'm a better writer now than I was when I started.

But I don't think I ever really had much, I wouldn't say doubt, because that makes it sound like, I didn't know, I just had to assume everything would be fine, because I was following the rules.

And I did quite a lot of research beforehand about how to set out a story and breaking things down into acts and hitting all those story beats.

I've always read a lot of Cozy, so I felt like I was quite familiar with the rhythm of them and what was expected.

So I think I just did that and went, this is what I'm going to do.

And maybe sometimes that that kind of naivety pushes you through with a confidence that actually...

I'm not sure you even caught naivety, right?

It's professionalism.

You were like, I'm going to make this business and here's how you do it.

And I think it's interesting.

I think there's people coming from two sides, right?

There's people coming up from, you know, I've secretly written under the covers and I want to write a book and I'm not quite sure when it crosses genres and I don't know what it's going to be, but hopefully someone will love it.

And there's people who come from the business side who are like, okay, this is what sells and I'm going to write the book I like that sells.

And yeah, those people are always doing far better than the right under the cover people because you're almost trying to reverse engineer the concept of running a business.

And you come at it from the right side and I, I think that probably most people who listen to this podcast are coming at it from the right side just like, by I wrote the book and I don't want to do now.

Yeah, and it's it feels so refreshing to have someone, especially recently, right?

Not someone who came in in like 2016.

Someone come in and say, I wrote books to market and I'm you know, not in a derogatory way of wrote books, I knew people would like and they're based on books that I liked.

And I set up a business and then I run my business.

It's like, oh, it's just that simple.

Yeah, because it took us, it took us like a whole first year of podcasting to like convince ourselves that we were trying to run a business.

Well, like we talked about it at the start of last year, but it has taken me a long time to actually get that into my mind that, that I am running a business.

It's not just the idea of a business, but the fact that you started it knowing before you even started, you're like, okay, I'm setting this business up.

This is what you do when you set a business up.

Like I know that makes sense.

I just did not do that.

But also, so again, my background, my background is finance.

I was a CFO, financial director of a group of companies.

I've always had a business background.

So this was always going to be a business for me because I knew that it had to be.

And so in some respects, it's become a business through necessity.

If I was doing this because this was a hobby, then that necessity isn't there.

And so maybe sometimes focus isn't there, or that attention isn't there.

I don't know.

I've had no choice.

It had to work for me or else I was going to have to do something else.

Having said all of that, what I love about it is I'm actually doing something I thoroughly enjoy.

So it's not just being about a business.

I don't sit and write my book and think, oh, how much money is this going to make for me?

It's a much more, it is a business, and I do need it to be successful.

But if I didn't enjoy it or I didn't get satisfaction out of it, I wouldn't do it because it's a tough business, I think, to be in compared to just going out and earning money.

It's a tough business to be in.

It's very up and down.

You're dependent on algorithms for your advertising and world events that can suddenly mean that people buy lots more books or don't buy any books.

So it's not something you would choose to do, I think, if you don't really feel passionate about it.

So I think I felt passionate about it because my dream job would be to do something I love and that to be able to support me.

And also, I've met some fantastic people, you guys included, and particularly Matilda, who have been massively supportive.

And all of that means that you feel like you're not just pulling things out of the air and going, this may work or this won't work.

You talk to people, people go, well, yes, that worked for me.

And so there's a lot more to it.

But yes, you're right.

I guess I came from a business point of view because A, that's my background, and B, that was my reality.

It's built from necessity really.

I think it's so lovely to hear it just like, I think people overcomplicate it, myself included.

I think people overcomplicate it.

And it's so lovely to hear that like you wrote the books, you made a plan and you fulfilled that plan.

So I know you've talked about the kind of ongoing monitoring and you know, just daily checks and the add up and that's how you kind of get your business.

Can we just talk a little bit about when you sit down and make a plan?

What were the major things that you put in?

And if we can maybe focus on the things that you think, what's the bare minimum that someone should be doing when they're looking at a financial plan?

I think, so to start with, it won't mean anything to you if you're not committed to following it.

So it's a plan, it's like any other plan.

The fact it's financial, if you're not interested in having a plan and that's not important to you because you're writing books because you just love writing books, then you don't have to have a plan.

But we are talking obviously about wanting to go from writing into a paycheck that is sufficient to allow us to do it full time.

So for me, it's about understanding your business and your numbers.

If not, your plan is going to be something that you have to monitor and constantly change.

So I have a budget for 2025, but I also will gradually update that as I do each of my months.

So if I don't feel I'm on top of things, then my advertising budget or I might change my plan depends on what's the most important thing.

And sometimes things happen that you just can't control.

But for me, for example, let me just give you a quick example.

On my daily sheet, I have a little box in the corner that tells me what my budget is saying, my average revenue should be on a day to hit my target for that month.

So every day I'm looking at my royalties, I'm going, have I hit my daily target?

If I haven't, then I'll look at my daily advertising spend target and say, is it because I haven't done enough advertising, or is there something else that's happened?

Can I catch this up?

If I can't catch up, what have I done that made me think I could get there and clearly I can't for whatever reason?

So, you know, you plan on launching a book this month and it didn't happen, or you had a promotion in there, you made an assumption about how much money that would bring in and it didn't.

But they're all learning experiences.

So for me, it's all very organic.

So if I've tried this and it hasn't worked, then I can change my plan.

But you need to understand why you're changing your plan.

You're not just changing it because it's getting difficult.

So it's not...

Do you understand what I'm saying in terms of...

You can change your plan at any time, but it's more about understanding what you've said you're going to do and then why you may or may not have done it.

So I like having that little number up there because every day I'm going, okay, am I on track?

Am I on track?

If I'm not on track, then why not?

Is it just a bad day?

And we all have them, you know, you have a day where suddenly you sell loads of books and another day when you haven't sold any and you think, well, something's not right.

And it probably just means that Amazon's had a bit of a head fit and you have a big catch up a couple of days later.

So that's fine.

But it's just, but is it because, and as I said, one of my big things last year was I just didn't spend enough money on advertising and I could see that.

So now I'm also got this advertising plan, which is I'm also looking, am I spending as much as I said I would?

Because I know if I don't, I probably won't make my revenue number.

And if I'm certainly not making my revenue number, the first thing I'm looking at is my advertising.

Because I know when my books are coming out, so unless I change that, I know roughly from previous two years, what that means in financial terms, depending on pre-orders and everything.

So I'm not overly concerned about that side.

For me, it's all about, am I doing enough advertising?

And that's difficult because you can throw money at advertising and it doesn't necessarily give you the results.

So it needs to be good advertising as well.

And that's always difficult.

So are you doing like where are you running ads?

You just on Amazon or you doing Facebook ads?

Where do you find works best for you?

I'm doing both.

I wouldn't say any of them work brilliantly, if I'm honest.

I think it's it's.

I've just so we talked about wins.

I've just signed up for Merch jar.

Merch jar does something that I know I should be doing, but I just haven't had time to do.

If you're going to do Amazon ads, you get so much information.

If you're really good at it, it can be very, very productive.

And I genuinely believe that, but in order to do it, you've got to find those right keywords and you've got to get the right bids in and you've got to be constantly monitoring.

So in effect, what you should be doing is going, these are my campaigns that are giving me keywords that people respond to.

I'm now going to take them over here because I know that they're good keywords and I'm going to hone them down and I'm going to put some money in them and I'm going to see what happens.

So I'm kind of testing them.

And once I've been testing them, the ones that are working, then I can hone them down even further and put them into another ad and put my money in there.

And that's where I'll upscale because I know those keywords are working.

But in order to do that, you've got to analyze loads of words and numbers and bits and pieces.

And you've got campaigns going on.

And I don't know about you guys, but I panic when they're spending lots of money.

So I just switch them off and pause them by having to remind myself that I won't get good results if I don't look at them and I give them time to settle in.

So MerchDar automates a lot of that for you.

You set up all the rules.

You say, if I've not had, if I've had this many clicks, but I've not had any sales, then turn off after a certain number of clicks.

It also says, if I've not had any clicks, but I'm getting impressions, then do I need to up my bid?

So it does all that kind of fiddling around for you.

It can also do that kind of feed to process that I've said.

So it will take your auto ads, look at the keywords, the ones that are working, you can move them into a test campaign, which will then test them and see if they're really working properly.

And then if they are, you can move them into a performance campaign.

And then all of those rules that you've got based through everything else can then say, well, if these keywords are getting a good A cost, then you can up your bids or you can put more money into them.

So it should do all of that for you.

Fingers crossed, it will.

And that to me will be Amazon ads working really well.

Facebook, I mean, so I've tried writing wives, I've tried Matthew J.

Holmes, Nicholas Erickson, and the Irish guy, David Gorgon, or whatever his name is.

Gorgon, yeah.

That's it.

And they've all got a different method.

They've all say, do this, do that.

Let it run audience advantage.

Don't let it run audience advantage, whatever.

So I've tried each of them.

At the moment, the ones that are working for me are the writing wives ones.

They just seem to be working.

But the minute I try and upscale them, they don't do as well.

So all I can do is just keep testing.

So again, we talked about numbers and knowing your numbers.

Every Sunday, I sit down with my campaigns, and I look back two weeks from the Wednesday, because you need to have, if you did two weeks from the Sunday, you would get days where you've got to spend, but Amazon hasn't caught up with your attribution.

So I go back two weeks on a Wednesday.

And I'll look at how much I've spent.

I'll convert it into dollars, the American ones, because all your Amazon information, attribution information is in dollars.

And then I'll go in and I'll look at my Amazon attribution, and I'll look at my sales.

I'll look at my KDP page reads.

I'll work that into a sales number, and then I'll end up with a cost per sale.

And that cost per sale, I have a target for.

And I have to be a bit flexible, because sometimes if an ad's quite new, you have to be prepared to accept a slightly higher cost of sale.

But if you know your read through, so IE for every first book you sell, you can expect, I don't know, 10, 11, 12 pound of read through through your series.

If you know what that is, you can set your target, four pound, five pound, whatever works for you.

And if an ad is not running like that, then you have to be brutal and switch it off.

Because sometimes you get a lot of clicks, but they're not converting in to sales.

Because for me, I've got a cute dog in my advertising.

People buy, oh, cute dog, cute dog, cute dog, but they don't buy my book.

So I've had to change my advertising around that.

So again, that's about knowing your numbers.

Very, very simple to do to work those numbers out.

But it's about monitoring them.

And so you try something else.

And it is just a process of testing.

And I'd love to know how to scale Facebook ads up better.

But I think from what, again, from what Lynn Morrison said, she tends to just duplicate the ads rather than upscale an individual ad.

So I'm hoping I will get to that point.

But at the moment, they're my two forms.

I've tried Book Bub, not had much luck with it.

But I know other people that have, so it might be something I'll try in the future.

But at the moment, if I could just nail these two down, I'd feel a little bit happier.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think it's very small margins on Book Bub.

It's difficult.

I think people tend to use it for like auto-bots manipulation.

It's a nice platform, and you get enough creative control that you can make something that you think is kind of, it's easy to run, but you get to make something yourself.

But it's expensive.

And also, I think the difficulty is like, you want to target people who are similar to you.

And there's just often not that many people, like they don't often have that many people associated on Book Bub.

So yeah, I think it's worth running and trialing and kind of seeing how it works and maybe using it strategically.

So David Gogran's got good information on that.

And he talks about using it, you know, around sales and around launches and things like that.

And yeah, some people do make it work.

But I think you have to really, a bit like I'm using that, like really be on it.

And it doesn't, who needs another ad platform?

And you've already got several to work on.

Yeah.

I am aware I've asked lots of questions, but I, Sam and I have thought with them together.

So I'm just, I'm the one talking tonight.

That's fine.

Yeah, yeah.

I hope it's as good as about.

Are there things that you wish had done differently?

So you talked about wishing you'd spent more previously.

Just generally, when you were looking at your plan at the beginning, is there anything you think, oh, I worked on that too much, or I put not enough work into that part, or of this part, I didn't need to later?

What have you learned from the process?

I think what I'm trying to do is go back to basics.

So, and again, I know you guys have talked about this in the past.

I did get very distracted last year because I was saying earlier, I agreed that I would step back a little bit because I launched a lot of books in a relatively short period of time, and people were demanding my attentions and worried that I would burn out, which I didn't worry, but other people did.

So I said, okay, fine, I'll step back a bit.

I spent a lot of time feeling like I wasn't really focusing on the basics, which I think having looked at my numbers is releasing books and advertising.

So I don't have a website.

I spent quite a lot of time trying to sort one out.

I gave up in the end because it just was a mind-fueling and I just got to a point where it was just taking so much time.

I could get someone to write one, but at the moment, it's just not a priority.

I would like to do some stuff with it in the future.

But again, I think direct sales are very hard and they're very time-consuming.

And at the moment, I just want to concentrate on the basics.

So I wish I'd spent less time last year doing that and maybe more time, even if I wasn't writing, just spending a bit more time on thinking about new series and new writing projects rather than just being completely distracted by new shiny things.

So I think that's probably my big wish I'd done differently.

So if I do it again this year, you have my permission to slap me because I've already said I don't want to do it again.

So if I do it, please, Matilda, when you next see me go, no, you said you're not going to, I'm like, oh my god, I found out this new shiny thing over here.

We should all try it.

You've got to just say, if it's not really, it's not that you, it's not that you were thinking about having, you know, you were looking at new series, they weren't off target.

They were just like, you do want new points of entry as well.

So I think there are the benefits.

Then there's been there's too many things to do, basically, I think is a problem with with this business.

You could do all of them are great, but you picked the thing and your thing is continuing the series, at least for the end of this year.

So both Sam and I, in fact, we'll see you in September.

We're all joining a retreat together.

So we'll gang up on you.

If by September you do something different.

Yeah.

Well, by September, I will need to be thinking about my next series because I'm not sure having, with a four more books in this series, I think I really will need to start a new series, but I'm trying to do, I'm trying to think of a spinoffy type thing.

So I will definitely be running that past year, probably before then in fairness, but at some stage.

Well, hopefully we'll see you in summer as well because we're going to Espieza.

So yes, we'll have many chances this year to talk about it.

And also, it's always just as always good to have more writer friends that you're chatting to regularly, like we were saying before.

I think that has been the thing that made the biggest difference for me last year was, I don't know, I was, I mean, it's the pandemic.

It was a pandemic before.

I don't know why I'm wondering what was happening.

It was a pandemic and I moved from overseas and didn't really have enough writing community.

And that has really made a huge difference.

I've got a couple of sort of finishing up questions.

So Sam, before we get on to those, do you have anything else you wanted to ask from what we talked about?

The way that my brain is kind of like interpreting all this information is really like, what I want to ask is, how do you decide or have you, what is your calculation for what your spend is versus what you're willing to spend, what your earnings are versus what you're willing to spend on ads?

What is your calculation for that?

Because that's the hardest thing for me to try and figure out.

I could just throw so much money at ads, but just from my own pocket rather than from like a business point of view.

And that's really where my brain is trying to kind of figure out what's the best.

What do you find has worked best for you in terms of like making those rules for yourself?

I think it's finding, it's looking back at history and saying, I spent this much on advertising and this is the amount of revenue I got.

So for every pound of advertising, I can expect.

If everything stays the same, about the same.

Now, obviously, if you're bringing new books out, then you hope that that revenue will go up exponentially without having to spend more money on advertising.

You've got launch costs and stuff, or you can increase your advertising and maybe it will become more efficient.

But there are wins.

So as far as I'm concerned, I'm always looking at the worst case scenario really.

So I've looked back at last year and the previous year and done some averaging and said, okay, for every pound I spend on advertising, I'm roughly making, I can't remember what it is now, one pound seventy, let's say, of revenue.

So if I want to get to this number over here, I want to be a six-figure author by the end of next year.

What do I have to do to make that happen?

You just reverse engineer it.

How much money do I need to spend on advertising to get that amount of revenue?

Also, as I said, taking into account if you've got new books coming out.

So it's the combination of those two things.

Therefore, it's working out, well, if I just do what I've always done, what do I know is going to happen?

And then when I do these new things, is that going to make it better or worse?

If it's going to make it better, you can factor that in, or you could just leave it at worst case scenario, and then you can review that as the year goes on.

So that's what I said about knowing what my daily revenue needs to be to get me where I want to go.

If I'm hitting that and I'm under my advertising spend, then that's great.

I'm not necessarily going to increase my advertising spend if I don't feel comfortable about doing it.

But if I'm not hitting my revenue target and I'm under my advertising target, then I can understand why I'm not getting the revenue.

So I'm looking at it, certainly on a monthly basis, almost on a daily basis as well to see what I'm doing.

And so that's my kind of way of managing it.

So they're quite simple numbers, but they seem to be giving me something that I can work on and I'll refine that process as I go along.

Yeah, I like that.

That is not like a super complex calculation.

You don't have like a spreadsheet that works out things for you.

That's quite, that's quite nice to hear because I'm so used to it.

Because I've come, I have worked in finance.

I say that in loose terms.

I've worked in pensions for a long time.

And every calculation is so complex that anytime I think about life finance, like what I have to figure out for myself, my brain automatically thinks, oh, well, this calculation is going to be so complex and difficult and I don't have the bandwidth for it when I get home to be thinking about more numbers.

But that's like a nice, simple way to think about it.

Because it's about relationships between your revenue and your costs.

And once you can see what those relationships are, then that puts you in a position to be able to forecast where you go or target where you want to go.

So you can either say, if I carry on like this, this is where I will be in 12 months' time.

Or actually, if I do this to this particular aspect of it, then this will change and then I can get even further.

So it's understanding those relationships, I think.

And I said, I've just narrowed it down to advertising and releasing books.

And they're the two things I'm looking at now.

Really basic understanding of what they are.

But I've got two years' data to work on.

So I appreciate that if you're starting from scratch, you'll have to be a bit more scrappy about it.

Look at it more frequently and change those, as those relationships change, understand what they are and what that means for the future.

So again, if it's not urgent, then I would say get some decent data before you start doing it.

If like you've got to be confident that you can get somewhere with it, then you have to just keep refining it until it feels like it's a bit more accurate and authentic.

So what's your motivation is probably the first question you need to ask yourself.

Oh, that's a deep one, isn't it?

That was a big one to throw out.

Yeah, like, oh my god, what's wrong?

And there's lots of software that can help you understand your numbers.

One of the things that I use, and I don't know if anyone's talked about this before, but it's called Author Help Suite.

So it used to be called Reader's Links, I think.

It does all sorts of really fancy stuff, but I use it in quite a basic way.

It links through to Amazon and it links through to Facebook.

So every day, I go and do a download of my revenue from Amazon, which is just literally, it's a bookmark.

You press a button and it goes and does it for you.

And it links to Facebook, so it uploads all my Facebook data.

And then I run my Amazon advertising reports and just download them and upload them into Author Help Suite.

You set up all your books and link everything through.

And then it means every day, I'm looking at my revenue and I'm looking at how much I spent on Amazon, how much I spent on Facebook, but I can also look at it by book, I can look at it by country.

So I generally, again, simplifying last year, I was advertising in Canada and Australia and Germany, stopped all of that because it just doesn't seem to be working.

It was costing me money that I would rather be spending on the UK and the US.

So I simplified it.

But I can see, for example, I can see my US revenue against my US costs, all converted into sterling because that's you set where you want it to, what you want to report.

So you can have it in dollars or sterling, I have it in sterling and it does some calculations for you.

It uploads the KDP rates, so they're always fairly accurate.

And I can see that my US advertising is doing better than my UK advertising is.

I'm making more margin on my US than I am on my UK.

Probably a good business decision sometimes would be just to not bother with the UK, but as a UK author, I'm not prepared to do that.

So I'm always trying to refine what I can do with that.

But I've often turned off things because I can just see that my revenue is not working from a UK point of view.

And also if one particular type of ad starts to take off, so let's say I spend some more money on Facebook, I can see what that relationship is to my revenue.

So if I've spent more money and my revenue has gone up, but my Amazon ads have stayed the same, then I can make an assumption that it's to do with Facebook.

So I find that really useful.

So that's where I get my numbers to put in my spreadsheet, but it's also nice to be able to look at it.

And particularly if you're advertising in more countries.

When I was doing Canada and Australia, I could see that I wasn't making much money on that advertising, because I could see my income and I could see how much I was spending on advertising.

So again, it helped me focus on what I needed to do.

Costs about, I think I pay about 20 pounds a month for it, but it seems to me a really good spend because I get a lot of good information.

And once you've started uploading, it keeps all your history.

So because I've been using it now for over a year, I can go back and look at a year, you know, et cetera, et cetera.

So when you first upload it, you can go back so many days because you download an Amazon KDP report, I think a 90 day report.

I think it only goes seven days on Facebook.

And then you can upload as much of the Amazon ad costs as you want.

But again, it's worked for me.

I'm sure it does lots of really fancy things.

But it will also give you a good indication of your read through because you've got all your books in the series there, as long as you've got them in the right order.

So you can look at it and quite quickly see your read through is £10, £11, £12, whatever it may be, depending on how many books you've got.

So that's a very good matrix to look at as well.

Because as I said earlier, when you're setting your advertising cost per sale, you want to know roughly what that is, so you can make a decision about what your cutoff point is going to be for advertising.

So that was one of the things that I would think about, or something similar, because doing it manually and doing all the exchange rates and everything is just a real pain in the back.

It was interesting, you mentioned to me that platform before, and I've just thought, oh, that's another way to track data I'm never going to look at, or to use something that I'm only going to use for a month, and then I'll just abandon all my ad concepts and be like, never mind, it's not for me, I can't make it work in five minutes.

Just listening to this now at the end of this conversation makes me feel like, oh, I absolutely see why I'd use it.

And it's like, I don't have the data, I don't have that.

I'm so inconsistent with my ads and even with my release in the past, because I just didn't have to be like in any way professional.

And I've had like, you know, life events come up, you think, well, so you know, I've got a salary, I can, I can not even consciously say I'm going to put my business on the back burner, but like, I don't rely on it for my income.

So why add the extra stress of basically have two jobs in a time when I don't have time to have two jobs.

And so when I'm doing really well, you know, and focus like right now, I'm basically having two jobs, and that's fine.

But it's something I have to give sometimes.

And it just means I've got I've got really inconsistent data.

And it means I feel like I don't have the power to make a financial plan because I don't have the data for it.

But if I just sit down and say, I'm going to spend a quarter gathering data deliberately and paying a very reasonable sounding charge to to put that somewhere and to be able to analyze it.

Even just having that data for 90 days, I'm like, okay, now I can decide what to do, make a plan going forwards rather than here's some numbers.

And then I never look at them again.

Here's I've got so many spreadsheets I never look at.

That sounds so individual.

And my last question was going to be, do you have any other resources to recommend?

So I'll put the link to that in the show notes.

I'm going to save for Merch, are there anything else you'd like to recommend to people?

I mean, I use lots of different software, but not necessarily for financial stuff.

So I think find the right sort of thing for you.

But for me, certainly what we'll see about Merch, child, I don't know whether it's going to work.

I can see it's making changes already in terms of you can go in and look at history.

And I know it's been fiddling around with my ads.

So that will be good to see over a period of time how that works.

But certainly, that would be my big tip would be, would be author helps group.

Or I think if you're wide, people use, is it side scribe count?

I think it does a similar kind of, it pulls your revenue from all different places.

This one works for me because I'm only ever pulling from Facebook and from Amazon.

And it's quite well linked to those two.

You can use it, I think if you've got a website, you can use it to monitor clicks on your links and all sorts of things.

It does all sorts of fancy things that quite frankly, I've never bothered to do.

You can allocate ads to books as well.

I tend to just allocate my ads to my series because certainly with my Facebook ads, I advertise my whole series rather than just an individual book.

And my links go to my series page rather than my individual books.

But with Amazon, one of the things that Merch Jar recommends, and Lynne also, I had a conversation with her, is that you advertise to your first in service, in series.

So you can set it up.

Every time you have a new ad and it uploads a new ad on to Authors Suite, you can allocate it or assign it to a book or a series or however you want to do it.

So if you're advertising on different books in different series, then that would be really useful because you could see your advertising split by book or by series.

At the moment, I haven't got one series, so it's fine.

So it's got the capability to do some great stuff if you've got...

But I think, again, I know I keep saying it, but you only need to do this if it's important to you.

I wouldn't ever say do all these numbers if it's not going to do anything, but I know it's stress you out or it's not important.

Because I think there are a lot of people who write as a part-time thing.

They have a job and then they write as well because they enjoy writing and it gives them some extra money.

And as you say, I think, Matilda, that gives you a different mindset.

But don't feel that you have to have my mindset if you're not in my position.

Because I have to have this mindset because it's about survival for me.

But for anyone else, you don't have to worry about it.

It's good to do it.

It's good to set yourself plans and to be focused.

But always remember what's the most important thing to you.

And don't overcomplicate it if you don't need to.

Yeah, I think that's a great net to end on and that feels like very relaxing.

Like I feel very reassured, but also like I now know what to do.

This is exactly what I wanted to say.

So thank you so much, Helen, for coming to give us the time.

I think Sam is going to tell us, are you, about what's next week?

I can't miss you and me.

It's me, yes.

And next week, we are making budgets for production and marketing.

So it's a nice follow on from this episode.

We will be diving into everything that we've learned today and trying to do something with it.

Have you got any thoughts on this already, Matilda?

Yes, I have done budgets.

And I did like a life budget thinking about how much money I need to bring in if, you know, I'm looking at bringing in full time money from my books and where I spend money and how I put in different pots.

And I put nothing in that budget for ads.

I realized that too late.

I was like, oh, nothing at all.

And then I added it in afterwards and made a new account.

And then I have lived it for a while.

So I've been trying to live within that budget because it's less money than I bring in for my salary.

Because I also want to save money for my salary.

And it's been really useful to kind of see the real experience of that.

I definitely need to go back and redo it.

And I think I plucked my ads budget from the air with no data.

So now I know, oh, I can put some data on this.

This will be fantastic.

Yeah.

Yeah, I have not thought of it in like such broad terms.

I like, I wouldn't have thought to look at my like life budget.

But I suppose I could.

I'm not looking forward to it.

It takes me a long time to like, when I think about numbers and money, it takes me a long time to kind of filter it through the internal computer in my brain.

I'm basically using an abacus instead of calculator.

So inside my head, there were just like these beads going backwards and forwards and I'm trying to count things up.

But I think that by, yeah, I think after this episode, I feel so much more educated on what I should be doing.

And like I've really found this really helpful.

I feel like some links have been made in my brain.

So I'm really looking forward to putting those down onto paper.

Can I ask you both a quick question?

Oh yeah.

Yes.

You have a separate bank account for all your authoring stuff.

And do you look at that?

Do you look at the money you're spending and somehow account for it?

Yes.

Yeah, I definitely didn't used to.

And I was worth it.

The past because I was inconsistent with like, I would maybe need a cover and then the guard put a cover out of my account.

And I didn't have to account for it because it was my salary.

But part of our kind of getting more professional last year was accounting for that, because I've also always had a weird salary situation.

I've always had to have an accountant and really look at that.

But there's no consequence to it because it's not my income.

One thing I want to actually sort of reach the end is you mentioned kind of only needing to account for things as much as you have to.

And one fascinating thing that I think came up in SPS a few times from the panels of people who've gone full time was the number of people who'd gone full time within a short period of time.

Almost all of them, they had to write, they lost their job, or they had a significant life change where they needed to.

And I think we have talked about support.

Like there's a cushion you get from having a full time job already, or you know, a part time job.

There's a cushion you get from having a salary or not needing the money.

There's various people I know who they're supported by partners, and they just don't have the need to do things that are unpleasant.

And in your head, I think in my head, I think financial things that's just it's not unpleasant.

I promise you.

Well, I think you've made it feel today.

Like really, yes.

And I think it's one of the things where you build up in your mind, you think about like, running a business, I'm thinking in my head of like, the amount of effort of running Coca Cola.

And to be fair, like a lot of my day job, I run several arms of my company's business, and I have to deal with kind of that side of it for that.

But I don't have to do all the finance things.

But I, I do various kind of organizing business things outside.

And it maybe sort of feels like day job work to me.

So I get really put off it.

And I think I don't even want to think about how to do it.

Talking to you today has really made it seem A doable, but B, like I'm in control.

And his previous he felt really like something I just was like subjected to, like the whims of Metam.

Like, you know, I'm just going to learn it.

But it's fine.

I'll set up this program and I'll just learn that and be glad on it.

I can do it.

Why not?

That's how I started.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think that's how everyone should, like everyone should be working on my inset this year.

And it is so beneficial to not just try and like professionalize how you think about yourself, but also give yourself the allowance and the space to try different things.

So with that, me and Matilda talked about that this year, we really want to try different things and not be scared to like to fail.

As much as we want to obviously win, win, win.

You can't always win, win, win, if you don't try the things that you don't know how to do.

So I think...

So it's not failure, I don't think, if you learn something from it.

So I prefer to call it testing rather than failing.

I've been testing some things and I know what works and what doesn't work.

But again, that's a bit of a mindset.

It's important to do those things so that you know what does work.

And that's why that process of testing, looking at the results and making decisions based on that, if you keep that process rolling and keep refining it, then that becomes really powerful, I think.

Yeah, agreed.

Anyone who's joining us in Discord, we will be talking about our five-year plans, or even just one-year plans, potentially making plans.

Anything to do with financial planning, we'll be talking about that this week.

So do pop in, Sam and I will be newly enlightened, and we will have all our ducks know by the time we hop in the Discord and talk to you about it.

Yes, we will.

Yes, thank you very much for being here.

Thank you for joining us, Helen.

And everybody who's listening, please make sure to subscribe, and we will see you next week.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

You've been listening to Pen to Paycheck Authors.

Stay tuned for our next episode, and don't forget to subscribe to learn how to write your way to financial success.

Samantha Cummings

S02E02: What Financial Plans Should Look Like

S02E03: What Money Mindset Means For Budgets

S02E01: What A Real Life Act Two Means