KU publishing or Kindle Unlimited can be good for new authors but wide marketing is still the best way to go. You can your backlist first then go wide after so that you can reach more readers. Marketing is very important especially if you’re new to the game. Learn more about wide marketing, duet writing, and all things romance with Ella Barnard and her guest Courtney/Lyra Parish/Kennedy Fox. Courtney is a romance author with over 45 books self-published at this point, and she started with ZERO experience. She is behind such book series as the Roommate Duet and the Checkmate Duet series. Learn how she manages to make many different entry points for new readers to come jump in. This is very important when writing any series! Also, discover why it’s better to write with a partner that shares your same goals. Listen in!
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Going From KU To Wide Marketing With Courtney/Lyra Parish
We are here with Courtney. Courtney loves to write, glamp, and make YouTube videos. Glamping is “glamorous camping.” She makes YouTube videos about self-publishing in her spare time. When she isn’t busy writing under the USA TODAY bestselling pen name Kennedy Fox with her literary partner in crime, she can be found sipping various beverages from her drink buffet, binge-watching docu-series on Netflix or telling everyone how much he loves fall regardless of the current season. Courtney lives in Southeast Texas with her astronomer hubby and a black cat named Nibbler. She’s previously published under the pseudonym, Lyra Parish. Courtney, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me. I’m happy to be here.
People who read this show know that I am me. They don’t expect perfection, which is I set that bar pretty low when I started. I’m like, “I’m right in it now.”
I would rather someone be their true, authentic self online than try to play a part. I’m here for you 100%.
It’s low in professionalism but high in authenticity. Let’s start with how we always start. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your author’s journey?
I have been writing pretty much religiously since 2011. That’s a funny story about how that all happened. I am a Business major. I do not have any degree in English, Literary or any of that. My husband and I were hiking, and I read this historical marker. From that moment on, I felt like I need to be writing books. It was a signal from the universe. I don’t even know how to explain it. When we had a pop-up camper back then, I was like, “I’m going to write a book.” My husband was like, “You are not a writer.” I’m like, “That’s going to be the fun part.”
I do a lot of things in my life very impulsively, and writing was one of those things that one day I was like, “I’m going to do this.” I then started writing with zero experience. I published my first romance book in 2014 under the pen name Lyra Parish. In 2016, me and my writing partner, Brooke Cumberland, created the pen name, Kennedy Fox. We decided that we wanted to start co-writing together. Essentially, since 2016, Brooke and I have written 38 books together that have been published.
With my personal books that I wrote on my own and then the books that I with Brooke, I’m over 45 books self-published at this point. It has been an amazing journey. I was working a full-time corporate job for a decade while I was writing. In 2020, I quit my job. I put my two-week notice in on Valentine’s Day to write romance hallmark moment as that is. It was a super huge accomplishment. I have been doing this full-time since March 1st, 2020.
It’s better for someone to be their true authentic self online than try to play a part.
I had no idea that a pandemic was going to happen when I quit my job. I had all these dreams in my mind of how being a full-time author was going to be. I was going to travel and do all these things. I was essentially put into a situation where I had no control over what was going on. My bingo card did not have a pandemic. I have had to learn to navigate being a full-time author coming from the corporate world also while being isolated at home. I’m an extrovert. I feed off of people, I like talking, and all of that. It has been a weird but amazing journey in the last few years. It has been crazy.
I started writing, like the actual writing part, at the end of 2019 because I started a new thing. I was like, “I’m going to try this,” because I have been doing this show for a while and trying to coach people. I was like, “I’m going to start writing.” I started the actual writing part at the end. The first book published was a short story. I write short stories. They published it on January 31st, 2020. I started making money in March 2020. I was like, “I could travel. I can finally do things.” That did not happen. I’m in the midline. I’m an extrovert. I could go either way but I’m definitely an extrovert.
I was on a walk, and there’s a canal. I was walking along the canal, and there was a footpath on either side of the canal. There’s a guy walking his dog on the other side. It’s like a little Poodle Chihuahua mix thing. The dog looks at me across the canal like, “A person.” I’m dramatically reaching across the canal to the dog like, “It’s too far. I’m sorry.” The guy laughed, I laughed, and I felt good. I was like, “That’s what I missed.” It doesn’t even have to be a deep moment or lots of moments. It’s just a little bit of making somebody laugh.
A lot of introverts recharge by being in a completely quiet place. Introverts strived during the pandemic. That’s their dream.
My best friend is like, “This has been amazing. I love this.”
For me, I’m going to go crazy if I don’t talk to people. I have been doing a lot of live streams and stuff where I write just so I can have that human connection because I went from working in the same place with the same people for years. They were my family to be being stuck inside my house, ordering everything. It has been a wild time.
It’s still going. I’m in Idaho, where nobody is wearing masks. It has not changed for me because I have elderly relatives that I’m like, “I’m not going to be the one.” Enough about that because I have gone over that topic of bazillion times. I’m going to go back to your story. Everybody wants to know, and if you don’t remember or can’t share, that’s okay. What the heck was on that historical marker? It’s because you were like, “I’m going to be a writer because of this historical marker.” What’s on it?
I love history, museums, and read every little thing. It was a State Park in Louisiana. Back in the day, it was called Hodges Gardens. It was not taken care of, so the state ended up giving it back to the family. Now it’s private property, so the public can’t go there anymore. It was a lifetime thing. I can never go back to that spot and revisit it because it’s now private. It’s called the chestnut tree trail. On that trail, you walk to the end of the historical marker.
It told you about how there was this man who had this very large house in this area. In the front and backyard, he had chestnut trees brought in from Chicago on the train because we don’t have those in the South. We have pecans like crazy chestnuts that are not a thing here. He brought those trees. It was the early 1900s, like 1905. I don’t recall the exact date. One of the chestnut trees was still alive. It was the oldest chestnut tree in Louisiana.
It was all over the South because there was nothing down there.
It had its historical marker. It said that the family used to go to the park and have their family reunions at the chestnut tree every year because it was generations of whatever. I found it interesting. I was looking out at this area and could imagine this huge house with a chestnut tree in the backyard and a whole family sitting out there being together.
The way the trees lined in front of the house, you could tell that’s where they were riding their horses and stuff of that nature. It was this whole scene of this historical marker played out in my head. I was like, “What did this be cool if it was paranormal somehow?” It’s all these different scenarios. My husband and I had a little snack there because it was 1.5 miles there and 1.5 miles half back. We were walking back, and I couldn’t stop thinking about this. I was like, “I’m going to write a book. I’m going to do it.” It all worked out.
My high school English teacher one time brought me out in the hall and was like, “What are you going to do with your life?” I’m seventeen years old. I’m like, “Live. I don’t know, probably go to college? I have no idea what I’m going to do.” She’s like, “You should pursue writing and become an English major. You would be great at this. You can tell, some people have it, and some people don’t.” I was like, “I don’t want to be a teacher.” I went about my way. I loved theater in high school. If I were going to be a teacher, it would be a Theater teacher because that’s what I was passionate about at that point. I was like, “I don’t want to be a teacher. I know how it was but no. We are good.”
When I was in college, I had two different professors do the same exact thing to me. One of them was like, “What’s your degree?” I’m like, “I’m a Business major.” She’s like, “Have you ever thought about pursuing English?” I was like, “I don’t think so.” The seeds were planted but I didn’t get the memo until that moment, which was years later. I graduated from college in 2007 or 2008. It was years after that when I decided I was going to write a book. It did come from left field.
People are always amazed because they are like, “You went to college for writing.” I’m like, “No.” I didn’t even write my first book in chapters. I wrote 50,000 words of prose that was mindless room. I don’t even know. It was horrible but you learn. I’m proof that if you have a dream and a goal, stick with it, improve your craft, continue researching, and adapt your brand and books to the current market, you can be successful in this industry.
I am quite inspired. I’m pretty woo-woo. I love the stories about the moment, whatever it is. It’s different for everybody. I know I can, and I’m sure people reading can think of their own moments where something was like, “I’m going to do that.”
Book series sells more books. If you know when to cut them off and how to interconnect them, they sell the most.
A lot of people online, when they talk about like, “What made you start writing?” It’s like, “I knew since I was three years old in coloring trees and writing a story about a butterfly that I was going to be an author.” I was 26 or 27 years old. That’s when I was like, “I’ve got a real-life corporate job.” I was still doing community theater at that point. I was like, “I’m going to do this thing. If it works out, it works out. If not, I had been in the process.”
I like that energy. There’s nothing wrong with always having wanted to be a writer.
There’s nothing wrong with it. I know that I’m an outlier with that. A lot of people knew early on. They have been writing since they were a kid. When I was a teenager, I wrote in a diary every day because I am a very emotional person. I’m writing about my life like they are going to make a movie about it or whatever. I wrote emo poetry. That’s as far as that. I have had people who were in their 40s and 50s. They always wanted to write a book but like, “I’m too old for that.” I’m like, “You are never too old to go after something you want to do.”
Even if you don’t make a ton of money, at least when you are older and look back at life, you are like, “I wrote that book, and I put it out there. I took that chance and shared it with people.” Regardless if it’s 1 person or 5,000 people, you took a part of yourself, shared that with the world, and gave it to people. You are never too old to write a book. You are never too young to write a book. You could find that you were meant to be a writer when you were 60.
One of my favorite interviews was with the lady/friend Debbie Herbert. She’s lovely. She started writing after she retired. I found her before this happened. She’s a hybrid publisher. This was a few years ago but she, on the traditional side, ended up as one of the first prime picks, so people were able to get one of her books for free if they chose it. She was number one in the whole Amazon store at that time.
She started in her 60s. Since then, it has been one of my favorite things because I didn’t find my passions until I was older. It’s like, “You still have a lot of life left. It’s worth it.” Even if you don’t make money, it’s still good and worth it but you can make money. That’s a little bit of what I want to talk about. You started co-writing with Brooke. How did you go from writing by yourself to writing with Brooke? What was that process?
We were both in a multilevel marketing company. We were part of the hunbots. We were very anti-MLM now but we were under the same team together. Back then, I didn’t tell people my name was Courtney. I was Lyra Parish. I was in that Team Facebook as Courtney Young. They wanted you to show pictures of yourself, so I reached out to her. I was like, “We had been acquaintances but we didn’t run with the same group of people. We both wrote romance. We had both gone to some of the same signings, and that’s about as far as our connection went.”
I messaged her and was like, “I want to let you know that this person who has my face is actually me. I have several identities on the internet, and I don’t want you to be thinking that somebody is still in photos of me or whatever. I want you to know that this is me.” That created a friendship between us because we were both romance writers. We were both slinging leggings. She was more into it than I. I never had a team or anything.
There was a point where I was like, “I’m done with this. I’m not passionate about it.” I was doing it, so I could make enough money to quit my job. I could write more but it’s taken over my life. I was like, “I’m behind on my own deadlines. I can’t do this anymore. I’m not happy. This is my own personal health.” She had a large team of 30-something people under her. She was like, “I want to go back to writing as well.” We kept talking about it.
I was like, “I’m going to start over. I’m going to create another pen name and see if I can use the knowledge that I have now to start at a higher step than what I started on under Lyra.” I made a lot of mistakes. I talk about those a lot online. I’m not ashamed of it. Everybody has to make them rise up. She was like, “I want to do it too. We should try co-writing together.” That changed the entire trajectory of my life. I was like, “Let’s do it.”
She had this story in mind that she had been working on for two years. She wanted to write it but never had time in her schedule. She sent me the 1st chapter, I wrote the 2nd chapter, and then she read the 3rd chapter. We went back and forth with the book. When we’ve got halfway through it, we were like, “We can’t make this one book. There’s too much story to tell.” It became a duet series. It ended up going from 1 book to 6 books. We wrote a four-book series. From there, we kept going. It was like, “Do you want to do this thing?” I was like, “Let’s do it. I don’t have anything going on. I’m miserable in an MLM.”
We started Kennedy Fox. We planned everything before we published our first book. We had our website, name, and everything ready to go. Brooke was very successful before she started writing with me. She had made USA TODAY several times. I did not hit a list. We both have knowledge. I have made a lot of mistakes. She’s made some mistakes. The internet wasn’t like it was now back in 2013 and 2014. Your authors have an advantage because they have so much information. We would have to scrounge the internet to find stuff.
The problem now is there’s an abundance of information, so you don’t know what’s legitimate. We knew that we had made mistakes. We knew that when we started Kennedy Fox, we wanted to be well-branded. We wanted to stick with our brand, go forth, and conquer. We started with zero. We didn’t tell anybody who we were. We didn’t reach out to our bloggers who had supported us on our individual books. We created a whole new team and a whole new thing. It was very liberating to be able to write with somebody who had the same goal in mind and who worked just as hard. Brooke and I have the same work ethic, so we worked together well.
The 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th book of that series made USA TODAY. We knew at that point that we had something bigger than just, “Let’s get together.” It was a real thing. It was making real money. People try to emulate that. They are like, “This new author started at this high point.” The reality is we have taken all of our past mistakes into account. We didn’t have connections because we didn’t use them but we did have a solid foundation of what we needed to do to launch properly.
I was talking to one of the ladies that I have coached. She was in a moment when we finished coaching because I didn’t want to continue coaching. I want people to walk away from working with me knowing enough to keep going. She was getting bummed because she was starting as a new sci-fi romance author.
She saw this other new sci-fi romance author come out at about the same time or a little after, and that person was doing a lot better. She ended up connecting with that person, and that person was doing as you had done. She would have previous pen names. She had learned a lot of stuff and was able to take that. Even though my coachee had been coaching from me, there’s still so much that you have to learn by doing it.
I always tell people that mistakes hurt. They are not fun. There are a lot of people who can’t handle it. I have seen people come and go over the years. The only way I know that they were real is because I have their books on my shelf. They have disappeared off the internet. Mistakes are going to happen. You have to learn from that and put that into your author toolbox.
When writing a trilogy, the second book is always the hardest to get right.
The next time you do something, remember all those little mistakes because they are going to bring you to the next level. Sometimes you have to fall down 10 times but as long as you stand up that 11th time or 12th time, or however many times it takes you, you will raise to the next level, sell more books, find new readers, and be successful. It took me ten years.
I want to talk a little bit about this. Let’s touch on some of the things that maybe you didn’t do before that you are doing now. You had mentioned one of those before we started I asked for, which is a series. You also mentioned about series. It started as 1, and then it was 2, then it was 6. I have found the same that series are awesome.
In fact, I also co-wrote. We separate now but we co-write together. One of our best sets of series is two different series. The 1st four of the 1st series are one set of brothers. The 2nd four of the 1st series are a different set but then something happens in the end, and book 8 of that 1st series leads into book 1 of the Motorcycle Club series.
They are all interconnected in a way. Readers love that, especially people who are super fans and readers. They enjoy those nods to, “I started here. I have read fourteen books, and I still feel like I’m in the same world with the same people.” I did a five-hour live stream on my YouTube channel where I talked to different authors who have been around at different periods and are at different points in their careers.
One of the things that we discussed heavily was series because I’m a firm believer that book series sells more books if you know when to cut them off and how to interconnect them. It doesn’t matter if it’s a 6 book series or a 15-book series. I like to tell people that you need to have different entry points for new readers to be able to join you and your books essentially. For us, we’ve got our duet series. They are all 6 books but only 2 books followed by 1 couple.
When you are looking at our Checkmate Duet Series, we learned a lot from that. It was highly successful but we did make mistakes on it. People may not know that but we know that, and we learned from that. We fixed that in our other duets. When you write with different entry points, you are not forcing a reader to start at the beginning of a twenty-book series because a lot of people don’t want to commit. They get overwhelmed by so many books in the series, especially long ones. For example, in our Checkmate Duet Series, you can start with books 1, 3 or 5. We gained new readers for that series all throughout there.
If they started at book five and read that couple, they may have seen the other couple and want to go back to the beginning. They usually do. We also write interconnected standalone series. It’s all in the same world and a big family. We can gain new readers at any point with every book in that series that we released, which is a nine-book series. It would be better if you started from the beginning but you don’t have to. If someone finds a trope that we are writing that they love, they will go back and read the rest of them.
When authors think about their books, series, and the longevity of their backlist, you have to give different entry points throughout the series and not make it so long that it’s overwhelming to read fifteen books at once. We wrote Checkmate. It was six books. It’s like enemies to lovers, then there are friends to lovers, and then there’s amnesia type situation in the last one. After we were done with that, we decided that we were going to write a Southern romance because there was a character in our books. Her brother was introduced, and our readers loved him.
It was the shortest scene in which they fell in love. Every day, they are like, “Are you going to write a book about Jackson? Are you going to write a book about her brother? Are you all going to do this?” It was so overwhelming that everybody wanted this character that we were like, “We could. Maybe we should.” I talked about this on Instagram but I struggled with that decision for a very long time because we were known for our fast-paced duet series. We finished Checkmate on this total high. Everyone loves it. It’s selling tons of copies. It did well.
When you switched from these duets that have cliffhangers in between the two couples to an interconnected, small-town Southern romance, a standalone series, it was four books. We released the first book, and I was like, “Did we make a mistake?” I’m going through all the thoughts in my head like, “When I was writing under Lyra, I did these things that were mistakes. I should have avoided that. Did we just make another mistake? It’s going to be a hard lesson to learn.” We had already promised four books.
Brooke and I both have books under our individual names that we have not written, that we promised for years that are probably never going to happen. Our goal at Kennedy Fox is never to promise books that we are not going to write. If we say we are going to write a book, it’s going to get written. We were like, “We have already committed to four books. We have to stick with this.” It was an entire year of writing this Bishop Brothers Series. We were in Kindle Unlimited. That’s a whole other story for a whole other day. I could probably talk about that for five years. I don’t think the show has enough time for me to talk about it.
We were in KU. It was a very hard year. Kindle Unlimited almost killed our career. I say that 100%. It doesn’t work for Kennedy Fox. It works for some authors. I’m not KU shaming or any of that. Don’t get it twisted. We wrote these Bishop Brothers. We put them wide, and people started reading them. We started seeing through like, “The series is done. Now people are reading it. Maybe it wasn’t a mistake but we should probably move back to duets because those did better.” We moved back to duets but then now everybody wants small-town Southern romance.
We ended up doing a spin-off 2nd generation of those 4 brothers. That’s what we are still writing now. People love it. It’s a family saga. I talked about when I was hiking down that trail. That one moment changed the trajectory of my life. Brooke asked me to co-write with her changed the trajectory of my life. Adding this one small character into this duet series that was highly successful changed everything.
I struggled with it for a long time, but now, as the second-gen is selling like hotcakes, I’m like, “Okay.” For years, I thought maybe it was a mistake, but now, it’s a part of our brand. We stuck with it and continued to give readers what they wanted and give different entry points so we could find new readers for our stories. Now it’s taken off. We stuck with it. That was a good decision. Sometimes you have to let little decisions that you think might be a mistake permeate before you dump them because you might be dumping them too soon. It’s knowing like, “Is this an actual mistake or has it just not caught on yet because I haven’t given it enough time to permeate?”
It’s all such good stuff but we all want to follow up. I want to follow up on certain things. I have my own curiosity about duets versus standalones. I have read romance for my whole life but a duet is not something like a long series. It’s usually a fantasy or why a fantasy that has the main romance, and then it’s a series.
Typically, romances for me are standalone. You have read one book, and by the end of the book, it might be a series. I have written a series of couples, brothers or a family series. Nora Roberts that did these Three Sisters, and each of them gets their own book but duets are different. They are not like that. What are the pros and cons of duets versus standalones in a series from your experience? It won’t be for everybody but in your experience.
A lot of first-time authors throw everything at the kitchen sink and then readers don’t even know what to expect from them.
That’s so easy to answer. When I was writing on my own, I wrote in a trilogy format. It followed the same characters throughout the trilogy, so you needed to start a book 1 to read book 2 and then book 3. I found that when I was writing trilogies, the second book was always very hard to get right. It was always hard where we’ve got the middle point essentially if you are taking an entire series and putting beats to it, going to an upward climb to the end, and then resolving itself for each book and the series as a whole.
I found that I would get so stuck in that middle book that I felt like I couldn’t do it justice. I can’t finish it. You don’t have that problem with duets because you have two books to tell the full story. With a duet, you can end it on the climax with a cliffhanger, which is what you want to do to keep people reading the second book. I don’t care what readers say. They may complain.
That was my next question. Do people get mad?
We say it’s a two-book series, so you know that it’s going to continue on before you start. We don’t hide that there’s a cliffhanger. If it’s a duet, there’s going to be a cliffhanger. Our readers know that now. When we first started, they were all shocked by this cliffhanger. It’s a pretty hard cliff. You end that first book on a high note. In the cliffhanger, you have them gasping and get to resolve all the drama you mixed up in the first book. You get to resolve that and give them their happy happily ever after in the second book. It makes it easier to write because you don’t have to try to fill everything for that second book. You can have a very fast-paced in the first one, end it with a cliff, and then resolve it all in the second book.
I’m going to get specific here. Do you make them longer or shorter? If you were to put them into one, would it be like one long book like 100,000-word romance?
It depends. With the Checkmate Duet Series, it goes between 80,000 to 95,000 words per book. To read the whole thing, you are going to read close to 200,000 words. In our Roommate Duet Series, each of those books is over 100,000 words for a duet. To read the couple, you are going to read 220,000 words. We have our Lawton Ridge Duet Series. Those come in at about 65,000 to 70,000 words.
You aren’t taking a regular 70,000-word book and splitting it in half. You are giving their full length. The reader gets to spend time with them for a long time.
People still complain that it’s not long enough. I’m like, “We published 130,000 words.” That’s long enough. If we were trying to cash grab, people say, “Those others are cash grabbing with those duets.” Some people may want to but I’m intimidated if I hear a book is 220,000 words long.
There are not that many Outlanders. There’s one Outlander. You don’t see Outlander everywhere because it’s a lot.
If it was a cash grab, then we would have made it a four-book series, “It’s 65,000 words. Let me cut it off here.” We could have made it into 4 different books but we are giving it to you in 2.
You are writing more primarily the standalones in this new Southern world you are in now. Do you see yourself going back or is it a completely financial decision like, “These are going well?” I don’t even know what I’m asking. What happened?
We are known for our duets and standalones. We have several interconnected standalone series. We’ve got the Love in Isolation Series, which we will finish this 2022, along with the Circle B Ranch Series. The reason why we are writing all these standalones is because we want to finish the books that we have promised our readers. It’s not necessarily, “We are not doing duets anymore.” It’s that we need to finish these so we can start new stuff.
We are going back to the duets. We are going to release a dark romance duet series. We do not write dark. We are strictly contemporary romance authors but we are established now, so we can move into that sub-genre. A lot of newbies are like, “I want to write fantasy. I want to write romance. I want to write thrillers. I’m going to write this.” When you do that, you are confusing your readers. They don’t know what to expect from you.
You need to pick a genre, stick with it, establish yourself, gain a reader base, and then decide to write your passion projects if you want to write fantasy, thriller, or whatever it is. In the beginning, that’s one of the things that so many people mess up with. They throw everything at the kitchen sink, and then readers don’t even know what to expect from them. They don’t gain the reader base.
I have said that exact same advice multiple times. I’m like, “Start with one.” I have had people email me, and they are like, “It’s good that you can do it.” I’m like, “You can write in multiple genres eventually but start with one, grow it enough, and start making money, so that way, you can quit your job. With the extra time you have since you have quit your job, you can start dabbling on the side.”
Some readers read all genres, so you never know who’s going to follow you over to that other thing. You don’t have to create a whole new pen name if you are in the same genre, just writing different sub-genres. Branding tells a story. It has to be a very clear story about what you are doing.
Going KU is a great place to start, get your bearings, and know how publishing works.
I have a bunch of questions written down. We are not going to get to all of them. You hinted at going from KU to wide, which we don’t have to get into in-depth but I am curious about how your marketing changed going from KU to wide. What do you do to market in wide successfully? What works for you?
Our biggest advantage of being on all platforms is we have a very large backlist. Everybody on my YouTube channel knows that I am anti-KU. I have been pretty vocal about it. I don’t hide it. I have friends who were in the program, and it’s completely changed their lives. They have made a lot of money. For newbies, it’s a great place to start. It’s a great place to get your bearings, know how publishing works, change covers, check blurbs, make all the mistakes, build your backlist, and then go wide. There are more readers on all platforms.
People argue that with me all the time. Amazon is not in every country. The marketing is different because when you are in Kindle Unlimited, you want to get your readers who are on that platform. It’s smart to use AMS ads if you’re a KU reader. You’re targeting the exact people who are going to download your books. TikTok was not around when we were in Kindle Unlimited. It’s a different climate for KU authors because they can make a TikTok, let it go viral, and be number ten in the store very easily.
For us, we use our backlist to our advantage. We are consistently releasing to add more to our frontlist. We are doing sells on our backlist to bring people through the series. We have so many different entry points for our series to loop back around to what we discussed that we could do BookBub on books 1, 3, and 5 of every duet series we have. We can do a BookBub on every interconnected standalone we have. We can do a BookBub on any nine books in the Circle B Ranch Series, any of the six books that are in Love In Isolation because they are interconnected standalones. You don’t have to rate them in order.
Having that and setting up our books for success as far as finding new readers has been one of our greatest advantages. We are not afraid to give away books for free. Some authors cringe. They are like, “I need to at least make $0.99.” When you take out the 70% royalty rate, you are making $0.30. A lot of people will download free books. The argument is, “They are not going to read it because they are not financially invested.” That’s not true.
We have built ourselves on Apple, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, and all of that because we are not afraid to give away books and rotate them in and out for free. We don’t typically do perma-freebies but we have one book that has been free for years. It’s the first book in our Bishop Brothers Series. That’s a four-book series. Once you’re in that, they want the kids too because those kids are born in those books.
They want to know what happens to the family. The family feels like home to them. One of our biggest struggles is that people are so connected to this family but we have skipped timelines hard that the grandma was 84 or 85 years old. She can’t live forever. We can’t kill her off. That’s something that Brooke and I discuss a lot. We can’t show that, ever. It would be devastating to write.
I agree about giving books away. It’s not money that you are spending. It’s money that you are not getting, which is a great cost for marketing.
If you are writing in a series, you should always know what your read-through rate is. When you give away a free book, you should know that, “I’ve got a 25% read-through rate of my entire series from the front to back. I have had 5,000 free downloads on this thing. I should have 25% of those people continue through the series.” Once you do that, you see a read-through.
What do you do on those free days? What do you do to get in front of people on those free days?
We usually do BookBub. That’s the Holy Grail. Everybody knows BookBub is the Holy Grail but sometimes we don’t get them. If we don’t get them, we’ll newsletter stack with other romance newsletters that are like BookBub. There’s Robin Reed and a million other ones for different genres. We will newsletter stack. Also, we are direct on all platforms. Kobo and Barnes & Noble have promotional opportunities in the back office. You can apply for those. The Barnes & Noble ones are free. You don’t pay any money for that.
The Kobo ones are cheaper. They were $10 to $80. You get on Carousell, get on a banner, and they send it out to their newsletter. We will apply for all the promos that we possibly can. We use Facebook ads because you reach a wider audience using Facebook ads. We are not concerned with our rank on Amazon because you all know that it’s weighted differently if you are exclusive to them. Rank is an ego metric that we would rather make money. I don’t care if my rank is 1,500 in the store but I made $10,000 on a release day. I don’t care what my rank is.
I agree. I will take screenshots when I hit number one of my categories and I’m like, “Look at that,” but I’m not married to it. I like looking at my bank account more, I’m like, “This is what really makes me happy and motivated.’
Celebrate all the successes that you can because as authors, especially new authors, I feel a lot of times that they were like, “I’m number one in my category but I don’t want to share that because it means nothing to everybody else.” You have to look at your own journey and be proud of all the small steps that it takes you to get to where you want to go, even if that is being number one in your category or breaking into the top 5,000 in the overall Amazon store that you have never done before or beating your previous pre-order amounts, even if it was 100 hundred books.
Celebrate that stuff and document it. I tell so many people, “Write this stuff down, put it on your blog, and document it because one day, I promise you, you will look back at that. You will be like, ‘I was so adorable. Look how much I have accomplished. I have come so far.'” You have to be happy with what you are doing and not compare yourself to other people because you can’t compare your beginning to someone else’s middle. You can’t do that. It will put you in a funk and bad headspace. It doesn’t solve anything.
There’s no benefit from doing that. There’s no benefit from comparing, to you, the other person or anything. I have another question for you because as we were talking like, “We do this and this,” and talking about all the things that you do, and I had a moment because even co-writing and doing this full-time, that’s a lot of stuff. You could do Kobo promos, Barnes & Noble, BookBub, writing the books, and all these things.
We have two assistants. Brooke and I work on this every spare minute that we do. We have assistants who help us with doing stuff like putting spreadsheets together for our agent because we have a Cyber Rights management agent who sells some of our Foreign Rights and gamification and all of that. We have specific tasks that take us a long time to do, and we need to be doing all of this other stuff. Brooke and I were usually uploading and formatting all of our books and applying for all the promotional opportunities. We are doing most of the marketing.
The easy tasks that you can pass off to someone else if you can afford to do, do it. It will give you more time. Is it worth my time to spend three hours to compile this spreadsheet? Is my time worth that? No. I would rather pay someone to do that so I can look at our calendar and decide, “What’s a good release date for this book? What are we going to work on next?” When we are editing and getting ready to release, we are super busy. It’s constantly on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and all these different places. I did not mention that we use our newsletter like crazy.
Authors, if you don’t have a newsletter, please sign up for one now. Everyone needs one. Facebook could shut down tomorrow. Instagram could kick you out. I have seen all these people getting hacked and losing their Instagram accounts. You need to have your own website and newsletter so you can have your home on the internet and have control of that list. We have over 50,000 people subscribed to our newsletter. We have a 50% open rate.
I feel like in all my interviews, towards the end of the interview was some of the best stuff, even though the whole interview was good. It’s not the best stuff but it’s always towards the end that I’m like, “I hope everybody reads all the way. I hope they don’t miss this good stuff at the end.” In every interview I do, I’m like, “Why did we save that to the end but the beginning was good.” How often are you sending your newsletter? You said it all the time. How did you get it to 50,000?
We send a newsletter every time we have an announcement. We will send a newsletter once a week with a reminder if we need to. I know that some people are like, “I only send it once a month because what if they don’t want to hear from me?” Let them unsubscribe. This is your property. This is your house. You are opening the door and letting them in. They said, “We want to hear from you,” then send them the newsletter. That’s your reader who wants to hear from you. If they don’t want to hear from you, they can unsub.
One thing that I’m sure you are doing is if you are putting a book for free, the best person to tell that you have a book for free is the people who’ve already subscribed and loved you just because they are on your newsletter doesn’t mean that they have read all of your books.
We will have a freebie. We will tell our newsletter first. You can see our rank drop on all the platforms based on our newsletter before BookBub is even a hit because people are like, “I didn’t catch that book. I didn’t grab that book yet.” We will do Facebook ads for a free book. They are usually cheaper because it’s not a cost. They convert well. People will download it there. We had had our newsletter since before we started writing. We were very specific with how we use that newsletter list. In the beginning, we put it in the back of all of our books. We reminded people to subscribe to our newsletter.
We have done some newsletter swaps with groups of authors, where they share our book, and we share their book. People download it through a book funnel link, and we get that subscriber information. The key with that is that you need to have automation set up because if you just subscribe all these people to your newsletter, not introducing yourself, and send one every three months, they are going to be like, “Spam. Who are you? I don’t know who you are.” A book that I like to recommend to people to read is Newsletter Ninja. Read it and devour it. It’s like the newsletter Bible. It will change a lot of people’s attitudes toward my newsletter, how much to send, what you should send, and all of that.
I’m very proving newsletter because it took me a while to shift my marketing mindset from being like, “Do people want to hear from me?” to like, “Yes, they do. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have signed up.” It took me a long time to believe that people wanted to hear from me even though they gave me their email addresses and were like, “I want to hear from you.” I was like, “Are you sure?”
You can see a direct correlation when we have pre-orders, release a snippet of the book we are about to release, and they all read it. You instantly see the pre-order spike that day. The only thing that pushed that was our newsletter and the snippet that Brooke put in there to share with our readers who have subscribed to us. That’s it.
In 2016, when you guys started writing together, that’s when you started building your newsletter. You have been building it for years. Is it like an invitation at the back of the book on your website? Do you have like some kind of something?
We share that link everywhere.
Do you have an opt-in? Do you have something like, “Get this,” and exchange?
We have different opt-ins, depending on where the person signs up from. If it’s a book funnel where they downloaded one of our free books, there’s a different list for that. We’ve got everything segregated into different lists underneath.
Do you have a variety of things?
There’s a variety of things. If you go to our website, KennedyFoxBooks.com, the first thing that you are going to get is a pop-up to join our newsletter. If you exit out, it’s probably going to come back up one more time, just in case you forget. We also have a page on our website that talks about free books. You sign up for that, get on our newsletter, and then get free books delivered to you. We are not afraid to give away books. We sometimes plan to make books perma-free. We have two series starters that are perma-free that we give away all the time. They are free everywhere. We will give them in newsletters.
At the back of all of our releases, we are like, “Did you like this couple? Do you want to keep in touch and know what’s coming next? Do you want to get insider info? Sign up here.” We share stuff that is not publicly anywhere. It’s in our newsletter. With these snippets that people are getting of books that we are writing, we have done an entire book where Brooke and I wrote it for our newsletter specifically. Every week, they’ve got a new chapter. We then had it edited and published, and it’s free but they‘ve got to read it before everybody else. They were warmed up to that world and those characters.
That’s part of having a shared world. The benefit of the shared world is like, “Do you want to know what’s coming up for our next couple? Join the newsletter.” They get advanced notice. I had done a lot of bonus epilogues but if you do something like that, and it’s all shared world, and they know who’s coming next, you don’t have to write a bonus epilogue. You could be like, “We will give you a sneak peek without having to do any extra work,” except copying and pasting a sneak peek of what you have already written.
Brooke is the one who runs our newsletter. She’s the one who puts it all together and stuff. She does an amazing job of teasing people. We always put free books at the bottom of our newsletter. People know that, and they are not even our free books. We will be like, “This person has given away this.” A couple of months ago, we shared pictures of ourselves at the first signing that we ever went to. Not together but ourselves individually. They get insider-peeks of stuff that you can’t find. You are either in the club or you are not. If you are not, you are missing out.
That’s the attitude. I want everybody reading to have around their newsletter. It has been a lot, and I still have things on my list that we aren’t going to touch on. We will have to go to Courtney’s YouTube channel. Before we go and talk about that, what is your best piece of advice for authors who are at the beginning of their author career?
My best piece of advice is to not give up. Know your why. It’s one of the big things for me like, “Why do you want to write? Are you doing it to make money?” That’s cool. There’s no shame in that. If you want to make some money, there’s a big old bag of money out there for everybody. It’s unlimited, for real. If you want to do it because you love to write and it’s a hobby, there’s no shame in that either.
Knowing the reason why you are doing what you are doing will give you a roadmap of where you are trying to go. If you are doing this to make money, you need to be very brand-focused. You need to have all the social media together. You need to do those things. Be active online. I don’t tell people they have to show their faces. That’s not necessary but you need to be present in your space. If it’s a hobby, write all the different genres and put the crappy covers on your books. Who cares if the blurb is catchy? That’s the thing.
You have to differentiate if it’s a business or a hobby. From there, make your decisions based on that. Don’t forget your why. It could change. If it’s a hobby, you could make a lot of money, and then you are like, “I could turn this into a career.” If you get to a point where you are like, “This is so hard. I’m struggling. I’m not being seen,” sometimes you have to have hard conversations with yourself and reevaluate what you are doing. It’s okay to start over. I did, and zero regrets.
Take those mistakes that you made with you, learn from those, and keep going. I truly believe anyone who is resilient like me, who had no experience writing books, and that can quit their corporate job to write 45 books in however many years, I’m a perfect example of that. I was resilient. I refuse to give up. I was adaptable. I adapted to current markets. You have to be willing to change and listen to people. You don’t know it all, and I don’t know at all.
There are things sometimes that shock me, and I’m like, “I had no idea that was a thing.” I’m always learning. I always want to add more information to my toolbox so I can go up to the next level because there’s never a finish line. There’s never a point when you go, “I made that list. I’m good. We are done.” You don’t. You keep writing more books. Sometimes, they are not as successful as the previous ones but you keep going and move on to the next one.
I have said this a billion times when I’m like, “I have said that before too,” so I’m going to let you say it. Where is the best place for people to find you for you as an author Kennedy Fox and talking about all this stuff if people would know more about going from KU to wide and stuff like that or whatever questions they have about series, etc.? Where are the best places to find you?
You can find Kennedy Fox at KennedyFoxBooks.com/social. It’s got all of our stuff there, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Facebook groups, newsletters, all of that. If you want to, check out our website and see what we’ve got going on there. It’s a pretty cool site. I built it, so I’m a little biased. If you want to find me, I’m Lyra Parish everywhere online. On YouTube, I am The Courtney Project. I am pretty passionate about self-publishing. This is what I talk about all the time on my YouTube channel. I talk about my mistakes. I try to have upper-level authors come on and share information with newbies. I live writing streams. YouTube is a good place to find me.
Thank you for being so generous. It’s one of the things that I love about this industry. The quality of people and the generosity in the publishing is amazing. Thank you.
You are so welcome.
Thank you for being here because this is part of it.
I’m so happy. As I said, I love talking about this. I’m passionate about self-publishing and putting it out there for people who want to do this but are scared. I’m not a special unicorn. I don’t have any hardcore connections. I was just some girl from Texas who walked down a trail and decided to write a book. That’s as far as it goes.
Thank you for being here and sharing your expertise with us. Thank you, everybody, for reading. Hugs and happy authoring here at Author Like a Boss.
Important Links
- Courtney
- Debbie Herbert – Previous Episode
- YouTube – 8000 Subscriber Celebration | April 9th from 1 PM – 6 PM CST
- Checkmate Duet Series
- Bishop Brothers Series
- Kindle Unlimited – Bishop Brothers
- Motorcycle Club
- Three Sisters
- Roommate Duet Series
- Lawton Ridge Duet Series
- Love in Isolation Series
- Circle B Ranch Series
- Newsletter
- Newsletter Ninja
- Free books
- KennedyFoxBooks.com/social
- TikTok – Kennedy Fox Books
- Instagram – Kennedy Fox Duo
- Facebook – Kennedy Fox
- Facebook groups – Kennedy Fox
- The Courtney Project – YouTube
About Courtney/Lyra Parish
Courtney loves to write, glamp (glamorous camp), and make YouTube videos about self-publishing in her spare time. When she isn’t busy writing under the USA TODAY Bestselling pen name Kennedy Fox with her literary partner-in-crime, she can be found—sipping various beverages from her drink buffet, binge watching docuseries on Netflix, or telling everyone how much she loves fall regardless of the current season. Courtney lives in South East Texas with her astronomer hubby and black cat named Nibbler, and previously published under the pseudonym Lyra Parish.
