Episode 233 - Data-Driven Publishing with Pamela Fagan Hutchins
April 9, 2024
"It's all been very interesting, their data versus my data, and where in the end this will have us all end up, But teaching my readers to start to shop outside of brand to get me has been interesting. I changed all my covers. I changed some of my descriptions, I mean, fonts, everything. I changed my website. I changed my pricing. All trying to signal, it's okay, we're all the same. This is the whole Pamela." —Pamela Fagan Hutchins
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Matty Dalrymple talks with Pamela Fagan Hutchins about DATA-DRIVEN PUBLISHING, including business and creative collaboration with a publisher; the rise of "super indie / alt traditional”; changing one's genre or plotting approach based on the data; battling imposter syndrome; the danger of violating reader expectations and the power of targeting the enthusiastic sub-genre fan; and the value of writing between bright lines. If one of those topics piques your interest, you can easily jump to that section on YouTube by clicking on the flagged timestamps in the description.
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Pamela Fagan Hutchins is a USA Today bestselling and Amazon All Star mystery / thriller / suspense author who believes in soulmates, loves to laugh, and lives out the adventures in her books at a rustic lake camp at Maine’s Mooselook Lake and in an off-the-grid lodge on the face of Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains with her husband, sled dogs, and draft horses. She was also a guest on an installment of my video series What I Learned, when we talked about her book HER LAST CRY.
Links
Pamela's Links:
https://pamelafaganhutchins.com
https://www.facebook.com/pamela.fagan.hutchins.author
https://www.instagram.com/pamela_fagan_hutchins/
https://www.youtube.com/pamelafaganhutchins
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
https://pamelafaganhutchins.com
https://www.facebook.com/pamela.fagan.hutchins.author
https://www.instagram.com/pamela_fagan_hutchins/
https://www.youtube.com/pamelafaganhutchins
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Pamela! How do you think you’d react to a publisher making the kinds of requests of you that Bookouture made of her?
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AI-generated Summary
In this episode of The Indy Author Podcast, host Matty Dalrymple and Pamela Fagan Hutchins, a bestselling mystery thriller/suspense author. The discussion focuses on Pamela's transition from being an independent ("indie") author to signing a contract with Bookouture, a digital publishing imprint of Hachette UK. Pamela describes Bookouture as a "super indie/alt-traditional" publisher that is highly data-driven in their approach.
One significant change Pamela discussed was Bookouture asking her to write a police procedural genre instead of her previous amateur sleuth and legal thriller books. Pamela was initially hesitant due to impostor syndrome, as she had no direct experience as a police officer. However, she embraced the challenge, seeking guidance from subject matter experts like police chiefs and sheriffs to ensure authenticity and accuracy.
Another critical shift was in Pamela's plotting approach. Her previous method was more organic, while Bookouture pushed her to adopt a structured five-act structure with a strong midpoint at around 49-51% of the book. This midpoint was meant to provide a significant revelation or plot twist to propel the reader towards the conclusion. Pamela acknowledged that incorporating this structural change was initially difficult but improved with each book, as her editor at Bookouture provided guidance.
Interestingly, Pamela mentioned that Bookouture was willing to change book covers if the initial designs were not performing well, something traditional publishers are often reluctant to do. This flexibility allowed for quick pivots and adjustments based on data and reader feedback.
Pamela also discussed the data-driven nature of Bookouture's decision-making. Their data suggested that readers preferred police procedurals with law enforcement protagonists, leading them to request that change from Pamela. While Pamela did not have direct access to Bookouture's data, she acknowledged that their decisions were informed by insights into reader preferences and buying patterns.
A notable challenge Pamela faced was introducing her existing indie readers to her new Bookouture books, which had a slightly different branding and style. She made efforts to align her indie branding and pricing with Bookouture's to signal continuity to her readers. Bookouture was supportive of these efforts, encouraging Pamela to maintain her independent success while collaborating with them.
Pamela highlighted the value of adaptability and writing within specific guidelines, which, though initially restrictive, can focus an author's attention and improve their craft. She emphasized the importance of understanding one's motivations for writing – whether for personal expression or commercial success – and tailoring one's approach accordingly.
In conclusion, the transcript provides valuable insights into the collaborative relationship between an author and a data-driven digital publisher. It highlights the potential benefits of such partnerships, including access to broader reader insights, structured guidance on plotting and genre choices, and the flexibility to make quick adjustments based on data. However, it also underscores the challenges of balancing creative freedom with commercial considerations and effectively introducing a new audience to an established author's work.
One significant change Pamela discussed was Bookouture asking her to write a police procedural genre instead of her previous amateur sleuth and legal thriller books. Pamela was initially hesitant due to impostor syndrome, as she had no direct experience as a police officer. However, she embraced the challenge, seeking guidance from subject matter experts like police chiefs and sheriffs to ensure authenticity and accuracy.
Another critical shift was in Pamela's plotting approach. Her previous method was more organic, while Bookouture pushed her to adopt a structured five-act structure with a strong midpoint at around 49-51% of the book. This midpoint was meant to provide a significant revelation or plot twist to propel the reader towards the conclusion. Pamela acknowledged that incorporating this structural change was initially difficult but improved with each book, as her editor at Bookouture provided guidance.
Interestingly, Pamela mentioned that Bookouture was willing to change book covers if the initial designs were not performing well, something traditional publishers are often reluctant to do. This flexibility allowed for quick pivots and adjustments based on data and reader feedback.
Pamela also discussed the data-driven nature of Bookouture's decision-making. Their data suggested that readers preferred police procedurals with law enforcement protagonists, leading them to request that change from Pamela. While Pamela did not have direct access to Bookouture's data, she acknowledged that their decisions were informed by insights into reader preferences and buying patterns.
A notable challenge Pamela faced was introducing her existing indie readers to her new Bookouture books, which had a slightly different branding and style. She made efforts to align her indie branding and pricing with Bookouture's to signal continuity to her readers. Bookouture was supportive of these efforts, encouraging Pamela to maintain her independent success while collaborating with them.
Pamela highlighted the value of adaptability and writing within specific guidelines, which, though initially restrictive, can focus an author's attention and improve their craft. She emphasized the importance of understanding one's motivations for writing – whether for personal expression or commercial success – and tailoring one's approach accordingly.
In conclusion, the transcript provides valuable insights into the collaborative relationship between an author and a data-driven digital publisher. It highlights the potential benefits of such partnerships, including access to broader reader insights, structured guidance on plotting and genre choices, and the flexibility to make quick adjustments based on data. However, it also underscores the challenges of balancing creative freedom with commercial considerations and effectively introducing a new audience to an established author's work.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Pamela Fagan Hutchins. Hey, Pamela, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Pamela: Hi, Matty. I'm great. How are you?
[00:00:08] Matty: I'm doing great also.
Meet Pamela Fagan Hutchins
[00:00:09] Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Pamela Fagan Hutchins is a USA Today bestselling and Amazon All-Star Mystery Thriller suspense author who believes in soulmates, loves to laugh, and lives out the adventures in her books at a rustic lake camp in Maine's Mooselook Lake. And if you watched an earlier video, you'll know why I'm emphasizing Maine. And in an off-the-grid lodge in the face of Wyoming's Bighorn Mountains with her husband, sled dogs, and draft horses. She was also recently a guest on my video series, "What I Learned," where we talked about her book, "Her Last Cry," and there I accidentally identified Mooselook Lake as in Minnesota. So, apologies to Maine, one of my favorite states, for making that mistake.
[00:00:43] Pamela: At least looking at such a small community, you offended very few people. A hundred at most.
[00:00:53] Matty: Well, still, I don't want to offend anyone in Maine as my second adoptive home there.
So it was actually our conversation about "Her Last Cry" that led me to invite Pamela to the podcast because we started talking about some changes to her publishing approach that I'm going to ask her to describe in a moment. And we wanted to talk about data-driven book creation.
What is "super indie/alt traditional"?
[00:01:14] Matty: Pamela, I thought it would be useful to start right out having you describe for our listeners what that big change recently happened in your publishing approach.
[00:01:23] Pamela: Well, I've gone from being a dyed-in-the-wool, rebellious, you can't control me indie for the last 12 years to signing a contract with Bookouture, they're with Hachette UK, and I think of them as, these are my words, not theirs, but what attracted me to them was I think of them as super indie or alt-traditional as a digital publisher that is extremely driven by learning from data.
[00:01:51] Matty: Yeah, I'm kind of a student of Bookouture, and one of the things that has led to is that I'm kind of struggling with a different way of representing indie versus traditional because I don't think that's the case anymore. I just think that professional indies have learned so much from the good stuff that the traditional publishing world has to offer. And the traditional publishers are starting to learn from what the indies are doing well. And I think Bookouture is a great example of an organization that's kind of tapping into the best of both worlds. So it's definitely a spectrum. It's not an either/or if it ever was. And I just think it's a fascinating company to follow. And you must have too.
[00:02:31] Pamela: I do too, and a mutual friend of ours is who I really got interested in originally, because of Lisa Regan, and she was so happy with them. We started chatting and I thought, "Wow, that sounds really smart." It sounded smart to me because it's what I've been trying to do in a smaller way on my own for 12 years. And all of a sudden, here was someone doing it bigger on behalf of a large number of authors with some very successful books. And I just salivated after all that data. How can you not want to be part of using good data to its highest possibility? I only have a small amount of data compared to them. I want their data. And I don't get their data, but I get the use of their data. I get to learn from their data.
And the other thing I really liked about them is, first of all, they embrace authors from the indie space because they don't have any snobbery to it, right? There's no "Oh, you're indie, you're dirty, we won't touch you." It's "Can you write? Can you sell books? Okay, we can do something with that. I think that falls in what we do. So cool, let's all play together." And they encourage you to continue whatever is working for you outside their space as well. Whether it's multiple publishers, indie career, keep those going. Just don't step on each other's toes. We put together schedules and things that honor that with each other.
The Value of Adaptability
[00:03:55] Matty: One of the things that I've really been impressed with, from what I've heard and read about Bookouture, is its willingness to pivot. And I think because it is digital-only, there are things they can do like changing up a cover if the first one isn't working, as opposed to having 50,000 copies of a print book in a warehouse somewhere. That's the cover that people are going to be seeing for the next decade, which I'm a big fan of.
[00:04:22] Pamela: Exactly. I think it's wonderful. A friend of mine early on told me, "Oh, think twice about Bookouture because they'll change your cover on you at the last second." And I was like, "Wait, that's what I like about them." I like that they're willing to say, "We were wrong, and we're going to do better in the long run by changing now than just letting this title not work after all the work that went into it." Letting it not work as a vehicle to reach readers because of some antiquated notion that "that's the cover, forever, we will never change it because we shipped it from China with 48,000 of its friends on a boat."
[00:05:03] Matty: I'm surprised at that reaction. Was that reaction about "watch out for them because they'll change your cover at the last minute," did you have a sense of what was driving that reaction?
[00:05:12] Pamela: That it ruins publicity. That you have these moments to publicize, and the cover reveal is one of them. Here you've done the cover reveal, you've created the impressions, and now you're changing it out on people. But frankly, as an indie, I've changed some of my book covers five times. I just keep playing with them and testing them through ads until I find what's working best right now, usually a series lead, right? The rest of them don't matter as much. I want to hook them on that first book, and so with "Saving Grace," which is the very first book in my "What Doesn't Kill You" super series, first book in the Katie Connell series within that, and "Switchback," which is my lead in my Patrick Blintz books, I've changed those covers over and over. I don't have anything tied to an identity with it or anything else. It's about what's working now. What makes someone say, "That's the book I want to read," when they hit that page. And we get it wrong, which is one of the reasons I wanted to work with somebody else, frankly. I felt like I was too emotionally invested in things like titles, descriptions, covers. That was my weakness. I felt like I could write well enough anyway, and that was my weakness. I was the one calling those shots, and maybe that needed to be a more data-driven decision.
Changing One's Genre Based on the Data
[00:06:32] Matty: There were a couple of things that we talked about earlier that were places where your writer life changed as a result of partnering up with Bookouture. And I'm going to throw them out, and we can take this conversation wherever. But one of the things that you had mentioned that was very interesting is not only does an author obviously get tied to their cover and description and so on, but also their genre. And so one of the things that Bookouture asked you to do was to write a police procedural. Could you describe a little bit about where that request came from and what your reaction to it was?
[00:07:05] Pamela: I had all these long, lovely conversations with the woman who is my editor now, before I'd signed with them. She'd say, "Great, we want to work with you, and we love this book, but we'd like you to change it from X to Y,” from what it is now to a police procedural. And I kept saying no, I don't think so. At one point, I literally said to them, "You know what? I'm going to go away for a year and we can talk again later, but I'm going to go ahead and write more books in this series because I believe in this book and I'm going to do it now." And they were like, "Wait, wait, wait, wait. Let's talk again." And I thought we'd reached a point where it was going to be amateur sleuth again because it was really an unconventional sleuth, not a cozy. I'm not a cozy writer, but an unconventional sleuth, meaning non-police.
And somehow we ended up again with, I was going to start immediately and start a police procedural. At which point, my husband and I, who collaborate closely on both our careers—I am his other half in his career, he's my other half in mine—we said, "If we're going to do this, let's just do it. You want to learn from them, you want to break yourself free of things that may be holding you back by working with them, just go ahead and do it." And so I said yes, and immediately called our dear friend who's a police chief and said, "Help me!" And he has.
[00:08:21] Matty: So, what was it specifically that was deterring you from pursuing a police procedural?
[00:08:28] Pamela: That impostor syndrome, feeling like a fraud. I had been the things that were often at the helm or the protagonist's main career or avocation. Whatever it was that stood out as their identity, I could identify with, in my other books, either through a close family member or myself, I felt I could write them with authority. And authenticity is really important to me, getting things right. I had never been a cop. I'd been a private investigator; I'd been a lawyer, but I'd never been a cop, and I was scared. It turned out that with the help of others, I could handle that just as well as I did any of those other fields.
[00:09:09] Matty: And did your publisher provide any help in terms of getting you the information that you felt you needed, or was that really on you as the author to find the subject matter experts to tap into?
[00:09:20] Pamela: I never asked them to help me, so they might have, but I did it on my own, and I told them what I was doing. I actually reached out to the sheriff and the undersheriff in our county. The sheriff was wonderful, but it ended up I relied on the police chief more heavily even though I was writing something that was more rural and was a sheriff's department.
But I found that the law enforcement people, most of them found it fun. Some were nervous. Some were like, "Oh, don't tie my name to that." But I found just the right guy, one who's ready for me to crow his name and find him lots of writers to work with.
[00:09:53] Matty: Yeah, as I often say on the podcast, it is fun to find those subject matter experts who know inside and out what happens in real life but are willing to say, "Well, yeah, that normally wouldn't happen, but you could make it work if this." Like, "Oh, I love you. Yes."
[00:10:07] Pamela: There's nothing worse than the expert who says, "But it just wouldn't happen." And you're like, "Hmm, can't or wouldn't?" Wouldn't is good. Wouldn't is exactly where we're pushing to. We want something that is more exciting than every day.
[00:10:21] Matty: Yes, if the books were all about what happens every day, then nobody would be reading them.
[00:10:24] Pamela: Exactly. Yeah. So, that was different for me, but I've enjoyed it. I'm on the fourth book in the series right now, and I'm feeling more confident about trusting my instincts and knowing we can fix it later, and saving some of my questions for Travis, my consultant, until we're down the road.
[00:10:43] Matty: And we can fix it later is related to the details that you put in about--
[00:10:49] Pamela: Yeah, and I want to strike a balance between my details being correct and not burdening a book with details. And I found that one of the things that's good about me never having been a cop is I am not, I don't feel burdened by the details. I want as little as possible so that we can keep the pace of the book up. And I'm not constrained by needing to include all this background and all this detail, etc. Because to me, it's meaningless. I really think of it more like a reader. How do we get from point A to point B, while doing it correctly, but on the edge of vigilantism, and not getting thrown in jail.
So we don't get fired or thrown in jail today; it's roughly what a cop could and would do, and yet we get there fast enough to satisfy a reader who wants to read a thriller.
[00:11:36] Matty: Yeah, I think that, the idea of what details do you leave out, I was at a talk that James McCrone gave at the Brandywine Valley Writers Group meeting last night, and I think he was quoting Keith Richards, or maybe about songwriting, but it was, "You're not done when you have nothing else to say, you're done when you've taken out everything you can." Something to that effect, but I thought it was great words to live by for authors.
[00:12:04] Pamela: I think that's fantastic. It's one of the things I find challenging when I write books that are written more by people who are subject matter experts, is that it's harder for them. The ones that have that expertise and can leave out enough are spectacular. That's what I want to aim toward.
Changing one's plotting approach
[00:12:24] Matty: Absolutely. Genre is obviously a pretty central thing that you were asked to change, but another really important thing that you were asked to change was your plotting approach. So can you describe what your plotting approach was before, what your publisher asked you to change it to, and how that change went for you?
[00:12:41] Pamela: My plotting approach was pretty much "throw it all to the wall until it sticks" and get there somehow. And I roughly was embracing a three-act structure, really it's a five-act structure, with an inciting incident somewhere at, say, 15 to 20 percent of the way into the book, then three major acts, and then an act five, which is your ending, your denouement. That's how I looked at it. I did a lot of work on these in the past. I would print all my pages out, in a two-page book format, tape them to the floor, go through with highlighters, and look for continuity issues, see if I was dividing the acts up correctly. But in dividing the acts up correctly, what I wasn't thinking about was the midpoint of the book.
The midpoint of the book is the midpoint of the middle act. I was thinking about the beginnings and ends of acts and how do you get between those. So when my first draft came in, they said, "We really need a midpoint." And I'm like, "Talk to me about this midpoint." So they had me read a book called "Into the Woods" by John Yorke. So I read "Into the Woods," and for the most part, I was going, "Yeah, yeah, this is what I do," until I got to the part about the midpoint, which basically was, this is the point at which you move from what you didn't know towards having some kind of explosion of knowledge or a change point that leads to, at the end, your acceptance of what you've discovered, your reawakening, your endpoint.
And that your big moment of key discovery is right there at the end, between 49 and 51 percent, hit it right on the nose, Pamela. And I went through and, sure enough, for a crime thriller, I did not have that huge key discovery, which in a crime thriller, one would expect also to come with some whiz-bang, right? You want something at risk so that the protagonist is pushed forward into the second half of the book, resolving whatever it is they've now discovered and can't avoid resolving.
I'd always thought of it more as an inciting incident, and then you have an act, and an act, and an act, and an ending, and that whiz-bang in the middle was missing. So I did that. The first structural edit was just awful. But then the second was good.
And by the time we got to "Her Last Cry," the third book in the series, my editor gave it a kiss and a hug and said, "By George, I think you've got it." And now I'm writing book four. And literally last night, that's what I was doing, was looking at what I'd written so far, realizing I'd crested what I intend to be the midpoint, and that I needed to revisit it before I moved on, because my key discovery was there, but I didn't have enough whizbang. So anyway, I went back, and that's what I did this morning, was worked on my midpoint, because to me now, I really think of the book in two halves, as the biggest structure, and then I obviously also think of it in all those little micro pieces as well.
[00:15:56] Matty: I want to loop back to the same question for genre because I realized I kind of lost the thread of the data-driven thing. But talking about the structure, did you ever get a sense of what data your publisher or editor had that was leading them to push you so forcefully toward this structural approach?
[00:16:16] Pamela: No, I don't really know, from a data perspective, what they have that pushes them toward that point, other than it is their predominant theory of how you structure books and that they sell a lot of books. And when you master that, they feel it pushes their readers through the book and into buy-through, if they're buying the books, or read-through if it's on Kindle Unlimited.
My suspicion, and it's a question I didn't actually ask them, was that their data came from series writing and moving on to the next book. Someone can buy your book and stop at 47 percent because it wasn't satisfying, or they can stop at 75 percent because you didn't show them a compelling enough reason to be pushed from this key discovery towards the inevitable ending. That was my feeling.
The genre issue was much clearer. They were saying their data shows that their readers prefer police procedural or crime fiction that has a law enforcement detective, usually, as the protagonist. This isn't all readers; it's the readers they can reach, their data, specific to them and who they have reached in the past, and as a result, keep expanding into selling more too. For this particular portion of their business, because they have multiple genres, but for crime fiction, their data showed that they didn't do as well with Amateur Sleuth, except in the cozy space. They didn't do as well with what I was writing when I came to them, which was more of a legal thriller. That just didn't translate to series that took off and were worth sticking around for a few more books.
[00:18:02] Matty: It's interesting that this can be extrapolated on a micro level for an individual indie author. I don't think anybody has a favorite publishing imprint, but Bookouture books are very distinctive looking. You can run through a montage of the top 100 Kindle books or top 100 selling eBooks, and you can kind of pick out which ones are Bookouture books. They're very heavily color-saturated with a natural scene with an object in it, like a barn or a boat. You can see them and know, "Oh, that's a book like this other book that I read and really liked." I can imagine they're using data because you have a sense of what readers everywhere are looking for, and you home in on that. Or you kind of create your own data because if they've now trained Bookouture readers to recognize the books, and then to expect that between 49 and 51 percent there's going to be that midpoint moment, then you're satisfying a reader expectation that you've created. A publisher can create an expectation among a pool of readers in a way that maybe an indie author over many books can do, but you're exponentially expanding the expectation setting if you're doing it through a publisher.
The danger of violating reader expectations
[00:19:22] Pamela: But I think that's a really good point. When I reached books 12 through 15 in my "What Doesn't Kill You?" super series, which as I wrote it was probably 9 through 11, but I pushed them to the end of the series because they didn't perform well. I'm convinced the reason they didn't perform well is because I moved out of what I had set reader expectations to be.
I took a character that I, one of my favorite characters, and I personally think the books are great. I think the books are great, but they were not what readers had come to expect from my protagonist in my first few times giving protagonists their turns at bat, and the sales showed that.
And to take that another step further, by doing this with Bookouture, I've taken a two-year chunk out of what I'm doing, right, because I'm on books four through six with them right now. And I'm not meeting reader expectations because I was writing amateur sleuths. My covers looked like my covers. There were no serial killers, or there were, but they didn't get a point of view. This is a very big difference in this genre they asked me to write versus what I was writing. I still had multiple murders in my books; people are dying left and right, but I never did the antagonist, the nasty bad guy point of view in my books. Bookouture's brands their crime fiction towards what their data shows them is the way to brand it that will reach the most readers, their readers and hopefully additional readers. That brand doesn't necessarily match what reaches mine.
So it's been a struggle for my readers to realize that these are A, my books, and B, they should be their books. Even though when you open them, they're still Pamela Fagan Hutchins books. Very character-driven, you're going to fall in love with this kick-ass protagonist, and there's no glorification of serial killers, and people aren't getting mutilated on the page. But that isn't so clear to them from the brand, so it's all been very interesting, their data versus my data, and where in the end this will have us all end up, right?
But teaching my readers to shop outside of the brand to get me has been interesting. I changed all my covers, some of my descriptions, fonts, everything. I changed my website, I changed my pricing, all trying to signal, "It's okay, we're all the same. This is the still Pamela." But it was an interesting shift and we're not there yet.
[00:22:11] Matty: Did you alert your publisher that you were making changes in your independently published books to make them visually more similar to theirs? Were they concerned about that at all?
[00:22:23] Pamela: No, what they want is for those over 3 million books that I have out there in people's hands to bring those readers with me while also wanting their readers to embrace me. What they didn't want, which is contractually prohibited, is for me to release books 45 days before or after they release one of my books so that our advertising doesn't overlap. Our major advertising pushes can't completely avoid overlap because you always have to be doing something for your indie books, or they'll die, and you'll never get it back. But they were like, "Whatever you can do to bring your people along."
We coordinate on newsletters—I have a list of 15,000—and how do I bring them along? What does it look like for authors with medium to big lists when we coordinate with what you're sending out? Coordinating on advertising, when they're advertising, what do I do, etc.
All of that, we've been trying to signal to my readers that it's okay, these serial killers aren't going to get you. They've been really cooperative with that and very open when they think they don't want me to do something, asking me please not to do X or Y.
They may not love everything that I do, but I know that they do have some of us, because some of us bridge indie and this new world of digital publishing, which is quasi-indie or alt-traditional, whatever you want to call it. We get way more into their business on this than their other authors do. The ones that come from traditional are like, "Okay, you take care of it," and I'm like, "What were the numbers like?" I literally woke up last night because there's a price promo running on book two in the series, and the rank tanked for 24 hours, so I wrote a letter to my editor asking what happened, what didn't scale, and expressing concern about not being able to pivot very fast. Then I didn't send it because I know they're aware. But it's my first inclination. If it were me controlling this advertising campaign and the spend increased but the rank went in the wrong direction, I'd say I had the wrong audience, but I've already told them that, so they know.
[00:24:49] Matty: So when you, in other circumstances where maybe you've sent the email or you've talked through it with them, have there been other circumstances and how does that interaction with them work where they have one group of authors who are saying "you take care of it" and the other, a second group of probably indie authors who want to be more involved in it? What has been your experience with how they receive that?
Business and creative collaboration with a publisher
[00:25:10] Pamela: They're so polite, first of all, because they're British, so I'm not really sure what they really think of me. But when I say, "I'm so sorry, I know that I care a whole lot about this, maybe more than your other authors, and here's why," they've actually invited me to give them more feedback, and I've caught them in some boo-boos. They're not perfect, they're humans. We had some things that on the first promo they did didn't go real well. And when they finished it, they said, "What would you have done differently?" And they literally got on the phone with me and said, "What is it that you see that may have gone wrong here? What can we learn from this? Because you're right, this didn't go like we expected." And it was nice to have that conversation.
Yeah, the second one is going better. Notwithstanding me wanting to send that email this morning. But going much better. I think they were having like a 35 percent conversion rate on people who clicked on the ad, and they were really excited about that, that was 10 points better than their normal conversion.
So, I think that when you do work together, especially when you're trying to combine audiences, if you will, they want my audience, I want theirs, or they want my readers, I want theirs. Audience is probably the wrong word. I'm thinking in terms of ads, which is audience, but at the end of the day, those are readers. And when we're trying to strategize on how to find the readers that are going to love this book out of their readers and my readers and the whole world of readers and collaborate on it, that's been nice. I didn't expect it.
They also changed my covers when I didn't think that they were going to work. And I was told never to expect that they would ever change a cover. And they changed all three of them. I wasn't ugly or anything. I was just like, "Those are barns in Kansas. And these books are set in Wyoming. And honestly, those aren't the same places, you know?" And they were like, "Okay, you're right. We really looked at this too much from an 'America is America' perspective and not what really shows the ruggedness of these books." So they changed them all. I thought that was cool.
[00:27:13] Matty: Any publisher is probably going to have more data than any individual independent author. Did you feel that the areas where you were able to bring more value in terms of maybe correcting some misdirection were more personal or because of reader interaction? You're not tapping into a giant database. So where did you have the edge in those conversations?
[00:27:37] Pamela: I have a lot of engagement with readers. And while you can't take what any one person says, a lot of times, if you get a couple of people saying something in different places, they're representing a large number of people; they're just the ones that spoke up. So if I get a couple of data points spread out over different platforms, I start to think they're saying something here and I should listen.
I started getting people saying, "I'm so glad I read your book. I really was afraid that it was a serial killer book. And I was really afraid to read it." Bookouture was saying, "Your pre-orders were fantastic. They were the best we've had in a very long time for a new series. And then we didn't get the sales we thought we'd get once the books launched. Do you have a feeling for why?" And I said, "I don't think my readers are coming to the party. And I don't think they're coming because of something that I don't think you're going to change. But it's the description of the book. It doesn't read like what they're used to reading."
They're trying to please the hardcore crime thriller readers, and my readers are trying to move to crime thriller from where I had them. You open the book, and it's a combination of crime thriller and Pamela Fagan Hutchins, and my readers are happy, but some of them are scared. So, I think we're getting late adopters.
We're trying to figure out how to bring my people along at the same time as we bring the world along with it. It's going to be hit or miss. The conversation was very much about what I would be doing differently, how I would adjust the audience. We were talking ads, basically. What would you be looking for?
I was able to come back to them a day later and say, "That feeling I had, that the ads weren't reaching the right readers when you did the 99-cent price promo with heavy Facebook advertising. They were using their proprietary ad groups, and the day after the promo finished, all my also-boughts on the series were British-based crime drama. That's not who's going to ultimately fan me. I'm more like C.J. Box, Craig Johnson, Jeff Carson, D.K. Hood, the people that write Mountain West, rural, rugged, etc. Amazon is telling me these are the people who responded to your ads, and that says that's who received your ads. If I was looking at what to do differently, I'd be thinking long term, which is, are these going to be devoted fans of these books? And you haven't convinced me that the answer is yes yet. So that's what I'd be looking at: Are we reaching the right people?"
[00:30:24] Matty: That's interesting because that's data that anybody can have access to. You don't need a giant corporate database to do that.
[00:30:29] Pamela: Exactly. Look at your also-boughts the day after you run a promo, you've got more data than you're ever going to have, but a lot of it disappears very quickly, right? Those change every single day, so it's a matter of looking at your own data while it's hot. It's there because it's going to go away. I mean, I look at things like rank every single day for my top six books, my series leads, and my new releases just because it's an indicator of what's happening. But looking at those also-boughts right after a big promo, that tells you who bought your book. It's the closest you're ever going to get to knowing with Amazon.
Targeting the enthusiastic sub-genre fan
[00:31:11] Matty: Any conversation about reader targeting that I've ever heard assumes that if you're writing cozies, you're finding the people who read all cozies all the time. If you have a very niche romance, you're looking for those people. But I've got to believe that there are a lot of readers out there like me, who one day are reading chick-lit, the next nonfiction history, then a sci-fi series, then a police procedural. I feel like a successful publisher with access to all this data is almost incented to target the enthusiasts of a specific sub-genre, like readers of C.J. Box but not Liane Moriarty, whereas in reality, I think there's a lot more overlap in real life than any publisher, indie or traditional, is allowing for. Do you agree with my assessment, and do you think an indie author or a publisher is better positioned to tap into readers who have a wider interest?
[00:32:34] Pamela: I think that for an indie author who's been at it for a while, you potentially have a better ability to tap into that wider interest because you're doing it specifically for your books, as opposed to a group of books where you're getting more granular. You're grouping the books and readers together.
I do agree that people read broadly, but with advertising, your best conversion comes from targeting your best converter. You're looking for someone that sees your image and your copy and immediately thinks, "This is for me!" So when planning my advertising, I'm looking for the superfans of the genre, the superfans of what I write, and then hoping that through their recommendations and their reviews, they bring other people along with them.
But I'm looking for the most efficient use of my spend. So, I agree with you, and when targeting, I would really focus on those superfans.
[00:33:41] Matty: It's always tough to distinguish the marketing targeting from the creative process because I know that I limit my own ability to reach readers because I have to write the things that are of interest to me, not necessarily the things that I think will do best in the market. And so, if I could train my creative brain to be more disciplined in that way, I'd probably be doing better. But on the other hand, I probably wouldn't be writing books. Kind of doesn't matter.
[00:34:06] Pamela: I do the same thing. When I sat down to write this series for Bookouture, I first wanted to make the protagonist an MMA fighter. I wanted her to be really badass and it just interested me at the time. And they were like, "Our data says that women who actually physically fight in an organized fashion are a turnoff. She can still kick some ass if she wants to, but it needs to not be in an official capacity." At first, I had my feelings hurt, and then I realized I had other things that interested me. But had I been writing that book on my own, I might have just run with that. It interested me right now.
The value of writing between bright lines
[00:34:41] Pamela: I'm going to see what I can do with a really, really badass woman. Instead, I went a different direction. It's been interesting to me because it's trained me to work a little bit more between some pretty bright lines, whereas before, my lines were pretty dim and fuzzy and wherever I wanted them to be. And if I wanted to write a series of books that did terrible, which I've done before, then I can do that, and I can waste two years. So, yeah. It's never a waste, right? We always get better. Somebody loves those books. They become the body of work.
[00:35:17] Matty: And I don't think there's that much difference between an exercise, well, except for the time you're spending on it. There's not that much time between an exercise where you're saying, "I'm going to write a really great story in 150 words." That's a really interesting and intriguing exercise. Maybe I don't want to spend a year writing the 80,000-word version of that, but those guidelines can be restricting, but they can also be sort of empowering in the sense that it's focusing your attention in a way it otherwise wouldn't be focused.
[00:35:50] Pamela: Yeah. I agree with that. And at some point, you have to decide why you're writing. And what I mean by that is if you're writing for yourself, then you should write whatever you want all the time. If you're trying to sell your books, then you need some kind of idea of who you're writing to and what they like to read, and thus that creates some guideposts for you. It may be that you are unconscious of them, and you aim toward it just out of affinity with your readers, and that's fantastic, but they're still there. If you are writing towards it being a commercial venture as opposed to, "I'm doing this for me, and I don't care if it sells. I just love it. I live to write.”
I'm trying to make money. I mean, I'll be honest, because I gave up my day job. You know, I'm trying to make money. So, at first, it felt a little bit limiting, and then I embraced it because I embrace data. It's like, 'This is a learning experiment, and it either works out or it doesn't, but either way, I'm better for it,' you know, having gone down this road.
And that's really how I look at it. If it all ends tomorrow and I don't write another word for them, I'm a better author, an indie author, and businessperson in the world of publishing than I was before because I've been exposed to a new way to do it and have that to consider and potentially inculcate into what I do."
Matty: I actually could think of other questions, but that is such a nice wrap-up. I think that I'm going to go with that. Pamela, it is always so much fun to talk with you, and I appreciate so much you sharing the kind of behind-the-scenes inside scoop of what your experience has been making this transition. So please let the listeners and the viewers know where they can go to find all your books, regardless of who publishes them, online.
Pamela: All right, I can do that. PamelaFaganHutchins.com will point you in the right direction. My Bookouture books, the new series, Detective Delaney Pace, are only available in Kindle eBook form on Amazon, although the paperback and audio versions are available anywhere that you can order your books. Bookouture is a digital-only company. They do partner with print providers that stock bookstores and things like that, but anywhere online. My books are available everywhere online. We're not exclusive to Amazon with those anymore, so you can get them anywhere. And the best place to interact with me, and I encourage you to do it, talk books, whatever, talk publishing, dogs, is Facebook. I have a Facebook page and a Facebook group, and that's where I'm really most active.
Matty: You do have a super fun Facebook feed, so I'll just put another plug in for that.
Pamela: It's always nice to see Matty come up on there.
Matty: Well, Pamela, thank you so much. It's been so much fun to talk with you.
Pamela: You too. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:06] Pamela: Hi, Matty. I'm great. How are you?
[00:00:08] Matty: I'm doing great also.
Meet Pamela Fagan Hutchins
[00:00:09] Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Pamela Fagan Hutchins is a USA Today bestselling and Amazon All-Star Mystery Thriller suspense author who believes in soulmates, loves to laugh, and lives out the adventures in her books at a rustic lake camp in Maine's Mooselook Lake. And if you watched an earlier video, you'll know why I'm emphasizing Maine. And in an off-the-grid lodge in the face of Wyoming's Bighorn Mountains with her husband, sled dogs, and draft horses. She was also recently a guest on my video series, "What I Learned," where we talked about her book, "Her Last Cry," and there I accidentally identified Mooselook Lake as in Minnesota. So, apologies to Maine, one of my favorite states, for making that mistake.
[00:00:43] Pamela: At least looking at such a small community, you offended very few people. A hundred at most.
[00:00:53] Matty: Well, still, I don't want to offend anyone in Maine as my second adoptive home there.
So it was actually our conversation about "Her Last Cry" that led me to invite Pamela to the podcast because we started talking about some changes to her publishing approach that I'm going to ask her to describe in a moment. And we wanted to talk about data-driven book creation.
What is "super indie/alt traditional"?
[00:01:14] Matty: Pamela, I thought it would be useful to start right out having you describe for our listeners what that big change recently happened in your publishing approach.
[00:01:23] Pamela: Well, I've gone from being a dyed-in-the-wool, rebellious, you can't control me indie for the last 12 years to signing a contract with Bookouture, they're with Hachette UK, and I think of them as, these are my words, not theirs, but what attracted me to them was I think of them as super indie or alt-traditional as a digital publisher that is extremely driven by learning from data.
[00:01:51] Matty: Yeah, I'm kind of a student of Bookouture, and one of the things that has led to is that I'm kind of struggling with a different way of representing indie versus traditional because I don't think that's the case anymore. I just think that professional indies have learned so much from the good stuff that the traditional publishing world has to offer. And the traditional publishers are starting to learn from what the indies are doing well. And I think Bookouture is a great example of an organization that's kind of tapping into the best of both worlds. So it's definitely a spectrum. It's not an either/or if it ever was. And I just think it's a fascinating company to follow. And you must have too.
[00:02:31] Pamela: I do too, and a mutual friend of ours is who I really got interested in originally, because of Lisa Regan, and she was so happy with them. We started chatting and I thought, "Wow, that sounds really smart." It sounded smart to me because it's what I've been trying to do in a smaller way on my own for 12 years. And all of a sudden, here was someone doing it bigger on behalf of a large number of authors with some very successful books. And I just salivated after all that data. How can you not want to be part of using good data to its highest possibility? I only have a small amount of data compared to them. I want their data. And I don't get their data, but I get the use of their data. I get to learn from their data.
And the other thing I really liked about them is, first of all, they embrace authors from the indie space because they don't have any snobbery to it, right? There's no "Oh, you're indie, you're dirty, we won't touch you." It's "Can you write? Can you sell books? Okay, we can do something with that. I think that falls in what we do. So cool, let's all play together." And they encourage you to continue whatever is working for you outside their space as well. Whether it's multiple publishers, indie career, keep those going. Just don't step on each other's toes. We put together schedules and things that honor that with each other.
The Value of Adaptability
[00:03:55] Matty: One of the things that I've really been impressed with, from what I've heard and read about Bookouture, is its willingness to pivot. And I think because it is digital-only, there are things they can do like changing up a cover if the first one isn't working, as opposed to having 50,000 copies of a print book in a warehouse somewhere. That's the cover that people are going to be seeing for the next decade, which I'm a big fan of.
[00:04:22] Pamela: Exactly. I think it's wonderful. A friend of mine early on told me, "Oh, think twice about Bookouture because they'll change your cover on you at the last second." And I was like, "Wait, that's what I like about them." I like that they're willing to say, "We were wrong, and we're going to do better in the long run by changing now than just letting this title not work after all the work that went into it." Letting it not work as a vehicle to reach readers because of some antiquated notion that "that's the cover, forever, we will never change it because we shipped it from China with 48,000 of its friends on a boat."
[00:05:03] Matty: I'm surprised at that reaction. Was that reaction about "watch out for them because they'll change your cover at the last minute," did you have a sense of what was driving that reaction?
[00:05:12] Pamela: That it ruins publicity. That you have these moments to publicize, and the cover reveal is one of them. Here you've done the cover reveal, you've created the impressions, and now you're changing it out on people. But frankly, as an indie, I've changed some of my book covers five times. I just keep playing with them and testing them through ads until I find what's working best right now, usually a series lead, right? The rest of them don't matter as much. I want to hook them on that first book, and so with "Saving Grace," which is the very first book in my "What Doesn't Kill You" super series, first book in the Katie Connell series within that, and "Switchback," which is my lead in my Patrick Blintz books, I've changed those covers over and over. I don't have anything tied to an identity with it or anything else. It's about what's working now. What makes someone say, "That's the book I want to read," when they hit that page. And we get it wrong, which is one of the reasons I wanted to work with somebody else, frankly. I felt like I was too emotionally invested in things like titles, descriptions, covers. That was my weakness. I felt like I could write well enough anyway, and that was my weakness. I was the one calling those shots, and maybe that needed to be a more data-driven decision.
Changing One's Genre Based on the Data
[00:06:32] Matty: There were a couple of things that we talked about earlier that were places where your writer life changed as a result of partnering up with Bookouture. And I'm going to throw them out, and we can take this conversation wherever. But one of the things that you had mentioned that was very interesting is not only does an author obviously get tied to their cover and description and so on, but also their genre. And so one of the things that Bookouture asked you to do was to write a police procedural. Could you describe a little bit about where that request came from and what your reaction to it was?
[00:07:05] Pamela: I had all these long, lovely conversations with the woman who is my editor now, before I'd signed with them. She'd say, "Great, we want to work with you, and we love this book, but we'd like you to change it from X to Y,” from what it is now to a police procedural. And I kept saying no, I don't think so. At one point, I literally said to them, "You know what? I'm going to go away for a year and we can talk again later, but I'm going to go ahead and write more books in this series because I believe in this book and I'm going to do it now." And they were like, "Wait, wait, wait, wait. Let's talk again." And I thought we'd reached a point where it was going to be amateur sleuth again because it was really an unconventional sleuth, not a cozy. I'm not a cozy writer, but an unconventional sleuth, meaning non-police.
And somehow we ended up again with, I was going to start immediately and start a police procedural. At which point, my husband and I, who collaborate closely on both our careers—I am his other half in his career, he's my other half in mine—we said, "If we're going to do this, let's just do it. You want to learn from them, you want to break yourself free of things that may be holding you back by working with them, just go ahead and do it." And so I said yes, and immediately called our dear friend who's a police chief and said, "Help me!" And he has.
[00:08:21] Matty: So, what was it specifically that was deterring you from pursuing a police procedural?
[00:08:28] Pamela: That impostor syndrome, feeling like a fraud. I had been the things that were often at the helm or the protagonist's main career or avocation. Whatever it was that stood out as their identity, I could identify with, in my other books, either through a close family member or myself, I felt I could write them with authority. And authenticity is really important to me, getting things right. I had never been a cop. I'd been a private investigator; I'd been a lawyer, but I'd never been a cop, and I was scared. It turned out that with the help of others, I could handle that just as well as I did any of those other fields.
[00:09:09] Matty: And did your publisher provide any help in terms of getting you the information that you felt you needed, or was that really on you as the author to find the subject matter experts to tap into?
[00:09:20] Pamela: I never asked them to help me, so they might have, but I did it on my own, and I told them what I was doing. I actually reached out to the sheriff and the undersheriff in our county. The sheriff was wonderful, but it ended up I relied on the police chief more heavily even though I was writing something that was more rural and was a sheriff's department.
But I found that the law enforcement people, most of them found it fun. Some were nervous. Some were like, "Oh, don't tie my name to that." But I found just the right guy, one who's ready for me to crow his name and find him lots of writers to work with.
[00:09:53] Matty: Yeah, as I often say on the podcast, it is fun to find those subject matter experts who know inside and out what happens in real life but are willing to say, "Well, yeah, that normally wouldn't happen, but you could make it work if this." Like, "Oh, I love you. Yes."
[00:10:07] Pamela: There's nothing worse than the expert who says, "But it just wouldn't happen." And you're like, "Hmm, can't or wouldn't?" Wouldn't is good. Wouldn't is exactly where we're pushing to. We want something that is more exciting than every day.
[00:10:21] Matty: Yes, if the books were all about what happens every day, then nobody would be reading them.
[00:10:24] Pamela: Exactly. Yeah. So, that was different for me, but I've enjoyed it. I'm on the fourth book in the series right now, and I'm feeling more confident about trusting my instincts and knowing we can fix it later, and saving some of my questions for Travis, my consultant, until we're down the road.
[00:10:43] Matty: And we can fix it later is related to the details that you put in about--
[00:10:49] Pamela: Yeah, and I want to strike a balance between my details being correct and not burdening a book with details. And I found that one of the things that's good about me never having been a cop is I am not, I don't feel burdened by the details. I want as little as possible so that we can keep the pace of the book up. And I'm not constrained by needing to include all this background and all this detail, etc. Because to me, it's meaningless. I really think of it more like a reader. How do we get from point A to point B, while doing it correctly, but on the edge of vigilantism, and not getting thrown in jail.
So we don't get fired or thrown in jail today; it's roughly what a cop could and would do, and yet we get there fast enough to satisfy a reader who wants to read a thriller.
[00:11:36] Matty: Yeah, I think that, the idea of what details do you leave out, I was at a talk that James McCrone gave at the Brandywine Valley Writers Group meeting last night, and I think he was quoting Keith Richards, or maybe about songwriting, but it was, "You're not done when you have nothing else to say, you're done when you've taken out everything you can." Something to that effect, but I thought it was great words to live by for authors.
[00:12:04] Pamela: I think that's fantastic. It's one of the things I find challenging when I write books that are written more by people who are subject matter experts, is that it's harder for them. The ones that have that expertise and can leave out enough are spectacular. That's what I want to aim toward.
Changing one's plotting approach
[00:12:24] Matty: Absolutely. Genre is obviously a pretty central thing that you were asked to change, but another really important thing that you were asked to change was your plotting approach. So can you describe what your plotting approach was before, what your publisher asked you to change it to, and how that change went for you?
[00:12:41] Pamela: My plotting approach was pretty much "throw it all to the wall until it sticks" and get there somehow. And I roughly was embracing a three-act structure, really it's a five-act structure, with an inciting incident somewhere at, say, 15 to 20 percent of the way into the book, then three major acts, and then an act five, which is your ending, your denouement. That's how I looked at it. I did a lot of work on these in the past. I would print all my pages out, in a two-page book format, tape them to the floor, go through with highlighters, and look for continuity issues, see if I was dividing the acts up correctly. But in dividing the acts up correctly, what I wasn't thinking about was the midpoint of the book.
The midpoint of the book is the midpoint of the middle act. I was thinking about the beginnings and ends of acts and how do you get between those. So when my first draft came in, they said, "We really need a midpoint." And I'm like, "Talk to me about this midpoint." So they had me read a book called "Into the Woods" by John Yorke. So I read "Into the Woods," and for the most part, I was going, "Yeah, yeah, this is what I do," until I got to the part about the midpoint, which basically was, this is the point at which you move from what you didn't know towards having some kind of explosion of knowledge or a change point that leads to, at the end, your acceptance of what you've discovered, your reawakening, your endpoint.
And that your big moment of key discovery is right there at the end, between 49 and 51 percent, hit it right on the nose, Pamela. And I went through and, sure enough, for a crime thriller, I did not have that huge key discovery, which in a crime thriller, one would expect also to come with some whiz-bang, right? You want something at risk so that the protagonist is pushed forward into the second half of the book, resolving whatever it is they've now discovered and can't avoid resolving.
I'd always thought of it more as an inciting incident, and then you have an act, and an act, and an act, and an ending, and that whiz-bang in the middle was missing. So I did that. The first structural edit was just awful. But then the second was good.
And by the time we got to "Her Last Cry," the third book in the series, my editor gave it a kiss and a hug and said, "By George, I think you've got it." And now I'm writing book four. And literally last night, that's what I was doing, was looking at what I'd written so far, realizing I'd crested what I intend to be the midpoint, and that I needed to revisit it before I moved on, because my key discovery was there, but I didn't have enough whizbang. So anyway, I went back, and that's what I did this morning, was worked on my midpoint, because to me now, I really think of the book in two halves, as the biggest structure, and then I obviously also think of it in all those little micro pieces as well.
[00:15:56] Matty: I want to loop back to the same question for genre because I realized I kind of lost the thread of the data-driven thing. But talking about the structure, did you ever get a sense of what data your publisher or editor had that was leading them to push you so forcefully toward this structural approach?
[00:16:16] Pamela: No, I don't really know, from a data perspective, what they have that pushes them toward that point, other than it is their predominant theory of how you structure books and that they sell a lot of books. And when you master that, they feel it pushes their readers through the book and into buy-through, if they're buying the books, or read-through if it's on Kindle Unlimited.
My suspicion, and it's a question I didn't actually ask them, was that their data came from series writing and moving on to the next book. Someone can buy your book and stop at 47 percent because it wasn't satisfying, or they can stop at 75 percent because you didn't show them a compelling enough reason to be pushed from this key discovery towards the inevitable ending. That was my feeling.
The genre issue was much clearer. They were saying their data shows that their readers prefer police procedural or crime fiction that has a law enforcement detective, usually, as the protagonist. This isn't all readers; it's the readers they can reach, their data, specific to them and who they have reached in the past, and as a result, keep expanding into selling more too. For this particular portion of their business, because they have multiple genres, but for crime fiction, their data showed that they didn't do as well with Amateur Sleuth, except in the cozy space. They didn't do as well with what I was writing when I came to them, which was more of a legal thriller. That just didn't translate to series that took off and were worth sticking around for a few more books.
[00:18:02] Matty: It's interesting that this can be extrapolated on a micro level for an individual indie author. I don't think anybody has a favorite publishing imprint, but Bookouture books are very distinctive looking. You can run through a montage of the top 100 Kindle books or top 100 selling eBooks, and you can kind of pick out which ones are Bookouture books. They're very heavily color-saturated with a natural scene with an object in it, like a barn or a boat. You can see them and know, "Oh, that's a book like this other book that I read and really liked." I can imagine they're using data because you have a sense of what readers everywhere are looking for, and you home in on that. Or you kind of create your own data because if they've now trained Bookouture readers to recognize the books, and then to expect that between 49 and 51 percent there's going to be that midpoint moment, then you're satisfying a reader expectation that you've created. A publisher can create an expectation among a pool of readers in a way that maybe an indie author over many books can do, but you're exponentially expanding the expectation setting if you're doing it through a publisher.
The danger of violating reader expectations
[00:19:22] Pamela: But I think that's a really good point. When I reached books 12 through 15 in my "What Doesn't Kill You?" super series, which as I wrote it was probably 9 through 11, but I pushed them to the end of the series because they didn't perform well. I'm convinced the reason they didn't perform well is because I moved out of what I had set reader expectations to be.
I took a character that I, one of my favorite characters, and I personally think the books are great. I think the books are great, but they were not what readers had come to expect from my protagonist in my first few times giving protagonists their turns at bat, and the sales showed that.
And to take that another step further, by doing this with Bookouture, I've taken a two-year chunk out of what I'm doing, right, because I'm on books four through six with them right now. And I'm not meeting reader expectations because I was writing amateur sleuths. My covers looked like my covers. There were no serial killers, or there were, but they didn't get a point of view. This is a very big difference in this genre they asked me to write versus what I was writing. I still had multiple murders in my books; people are dying left and right, but I never did the antagonist, the nasty bad guy point of view in my books. Bookouture's brands their crime fiction towards what their data shows them is the way to brand it that will reach the most readers, their readers and hopefully additional readers. That brand doesn't necessarily match what reaches mine.
So it's been a struggle for my readers to realize that these are A, my books, and B, they should be their books. Even though when you open them, they're still Pamela Fagan Hutchins books. Very character-driven, you're going to fall in love with this kick-ass protagonist, and there's no glorification of serial killers, and people aren't getting mutilated on the page. But that isn't so clear to them from the brand, so it's all been very interesting, their data versus my data, and where in the end this will have us all end up, right?
But teaching my readers to shop outside of the brand to get me has been interesting. I changed all my covers, some of my descriptions, fonts, everything. I changed my website, I changed my pricing, all trying to signal, "It's okay, we're all the same. This is the still Pamela." But it was an interesting shift and we're not there yet.
[00:22:11] Matty: Did you alert your publisher that you were making changes in your independently published books to make them visually more similar to theirs? Were they concerned about that at all?
[00:22:23] Pamela: No, what they want is for those over 3 million books that I have out there in people's hands to bring those readers with me while also wanting their readers to embrace me. What they didn't want, which is contractually prohibited, is for me to release books 45 days before or after they release one of my books so that our advertising doesn't overlap. Our major advertising pushes can't completely avoid overlap because you always have to be doing something for your indie books, or they'll die, and you'll never get it back. But they were like, "Whatever you can do to bring your people along."
We coordinate on newsletters—I have a list of 15,000—and how do I bring them along? What does it look like for authors with medium to big lists when we coordinate with what you're sending out? Coordinating on advertising, when they're advertising, what do I do, etc.
All of that, we've been trying to signal to my readers that it's okay, these serial killers aren't going to get you. They've been really cooperative with that and very open when they think they don't want me to do something, asking me please not to do X or Y.
They may not love everything that I do, but I know that they do have some of us, because some of us bridge indie and this new world of digital publishing, which is quasi-indie or alt-traditional, whatever you want to call it. We get way more into their business on this than their other authors do. The ones that come from traditional are like, "Okay, you take care of it," and I'm like, "What were the numbers like?" I literally woke up last night because there's a price promo running on book two in the series, and the rank tanked for 24 hours, so I wrote a letter to my editor asking what happened, what didn't scale, and expressing concern about not being able to pivot very fast. Then I didn't send it because I know they're aware. But it's my first inclination. If it were me controlling this advertising campaign and the spend increased but the rank went in the wrong direction, I'd say I had the wrong audience, but I've already told them that, so they know.
[00:24:49] Matty: So when you, in other circumstances where maybe you've sent the email or you've talked through it with them, have there been other circumstances and how does that interaction with them work where they have one group of authors who are saying "you take care of it" and the other, a second group of probably indie authors who want to be more involved in it? What has been your experience with how they receive that?
Business and creative collaboration with a publisher
[00:25:10] Pamela: They're so polite, first of all, because they're British, so I'm not really sure what they really think of me. But when I say, "I'm so sorry, I know that I care a whole lot about this, maybe more than your other authors, and here's why," they've actually invited me to give them more feedback, and I've caught them in some boo-boos. They're not perfect, they're humans. We had some things that on the first promo they did didn't go real well. And when they finished it, they said, "What would you have done differently?" And they literally got on the phone with me and said, "What is it that you see that may have gone wrong here? What can we learn from this? Because you're right, this didn't go like we expected." And it was nice to have that conversation.
Yeah, the second one is going better. Notwithstanding me wanting to send that email this morning. But going much better. I think they were having like a 35 percent conversion rate on people who clicked on the ad, and they were really excited about that, that was 10 points better than their normal conversion.
So, I think that when you do work together, especially when you're trying to combine audiences, if you will, they want my audience, I want theirs, or they want my readers, I want theirs. Audience is probably the wrong word. I'm thinking in terms of ads, which is audience, but at the end of the day, those are readers. And when we're trying to strategize on how to find the readers that are going to love this book out of their readers and my readers and the whole world of readers and collaborate on it, that's been nice. I didn't expect it.
They also changed my covers when I didn't think that they were going to work. And I was told never to expect that they would ever change a cover. And they changed all three of them. I wasn't ugly or anything. I was just like, "Those are barns in Kansas. And these books are set in Wyoming. And honestly, those aren't the same places, you know?" And they were like, "Okay, you're right. We really looked at this too much from an 'America is America' perspective and not what really shows the ruggedness of these books." So they changed them all. I thought that was cool.
[00:27:13] Matty: Any publisher is probably going to have more data than any individual independent author. Did you feel that the areas where you were able to bring more value in terms of maybe correcting some misdirection were more personal or because of reader interaction? You're not tapping into a giant database. So where did you have the edge in those conversations?
[00:27:37] Pamela: I have a lot of engagement with readers. And while you can't take what any one person says, a lot of times, if you get a couple of people saying something in different places, they're representing a large number of people; they're just the ones that spoke up. So if I get a couple of data points spread out over different platforms, I start to think they're saying something here and I should listen.
I started getting people saying, "I'm so glad I read your book. I really was afraid that it was a serial killer book. And I was really afraid to read it." Bookouture was saying, "Your pre-orders were fantastic. They were the best we've had in a very long time for a new series. And then we didn't get the sales we thought we'd get once the books launched. Do you have a feeling for why?" And I said, "I don't think my readers are coming to the party. And I don't think they're coming because of something that I don't think you're going to change. But it's the description of the book. It doesn't read like what they're used to reading."
They're trying to please the hardcore crime thriller readers, and my readers are trying to move to crime thriller from where I had them. You open the book, and it's a combination of crime thriller and Pamela Fagan Hutchins, and my readers are happy, but some of them are scared. So, I think we're getting late adopters.
We're trying to figure out how to bring my people along at the same time as we bring the world along with it. It's going to be hit or miss. The conversation was very much about what I would be doing differently, how I would adjust the audience. We were talking ads, basically. What would you be looking for?
I was able to come back to them a day later and say, "That feeling I had, that the ads weren't reaching the right readers when you did the 99-cent price promo with heavy Facebook advertising. They were using their proprietary ad groups, and the day after the promo finished, all my also-boughts on the series were British-based crime drama. That's not who's going to ultimately fan me. I'm more like C.J. Box, Craig Johnson, Jeff Carson, D.K. Hood, the people that write Mountain West, rural, rugged, etc. Amazon is telling me these are the people who responded to your ads, and that says that's who received your ads. If I was looking at what to do differently, I'd be thinking long term, which is, are these going to be devoted fans of these books? And you haven't convinced me that the answer is yes yet. So that's what I'd be looking at: Are we reaching the right people?"
[00:30:24] Matty: That's interesting because that's data that anybody can have access to. You don't need a giant corporate database to do that.
[00:30:29] Pamela: Exactly. Look at your also-boughts the day after you run a promo, you've got more data than you're ever going to have, but a lot of it disappears very quickly, right? Those change every single day, so it's a matter of looking at your own data while it's hot. It's there because it's going to go away. I mean, I look at things like rank every single day for my top six books, my series leads, and my new releases just because it's an indicator of what's happening. But looking at those also-boughts right after a big promo, that tells you who bought your book. It's the closest you're ever going to get to knowing with Amazon.
Targeting the enthusiastic sub-genre fan
[00:31:11] Matty: Any conversation about reader targeting that I've ever heard assumes that if you're writing cozies, you're finding the people who read all cozies all the time. If you have a very niche romance, you're looking for those people. But I've got to believe that there are a lot of readers out there like me, who one day are reading chick-lit, the next nonfiction history, then a sci-fi series, then a police procedural. I feel like a successful publisher with access to all this data is almost incented to target the enthusiasts of a specific sub-genre, like readers of C.J. Box but not Liane Moriarty, whereas in reality, I think there's a lot more overlap in real life than any publisher, indie or traditional, is allowing for. Do you agree with my assessment, and do you think an indie author or a publisher is better positioned to tap into readers who have a wider interest?
[00:32:34] Pamela: I think that for an indie author who's been at it for a while, you potentially have a better ability to tap into that wider interest because you're doing it specifically for your books, as opposed to a group of books where you're getting more granular. You're grouping the books and readers together.
I do agree that people read broadly, but with advertising, your best conversion comes from targeting your best converter. You're looking for someone that sees your image and your copy and immediately thinks, "This is for me!" So when planning my advertising, I'm looking for the superfans of the genre, the superfans of what I write, and then hoping that through their recommendations and their reviews, they bring other people along with them.
But I'm looking for the most efficient use of my spend. So, I agree with you, and when targeting, I would really focus on those superfans.
[00:33:41] Matty: It's always tough to distinguish the marketing targeting from the creative process because I know that I limit my own ability to reach readers because I have to write the things that are of interest to me, not necessarily the things that I think will do best in the market. And so, if I could train my creative brain to be more disciplined in that way, I'd probably be doing better. But on the other hand, I probably wouldn't be writing books. Kind of doesn't matter.
[00:34:06] Pamela: I do the same thing. When I sat down to write this series for Bookouture, I first wanted to make the protagonist an MMA fighter. I wanted her to be really badass and it just interested me at the time. And they were like, "Our data says that women who actually physically fight in an organized fashion are a turnoff. She can still kick some ass if she wants to, but it needs to not be in an official capacity." At first, I had my feelings hurt, and then I realized I had other things that interested me. But had I been writing that book on my own, I might have just run with that. It interested me right now.
The value of writing between bright lines
[00:34:41] Pamela: I'm going to see what I can do with a really, really badass woman. Instead, I went a different direction. It's been interesting to me because it's trained me to work a little bit more between some pretty bright lines, whereas before, my lines were pretty dim and fuzzy and wherever I wanted them to be. And if I wanted to write a series of books that did terrible, which I've done before, then I can do that, and I can waste two years. So, yeah. It's never a waste, right? We always get better. Somebody loves those books. They become the body of work.
[00:35:17] Matty: And I don't think there's that much difference between an exercise, well, except for the time you're spending on it. There's not that much time between an exercise where you're saying, "I'm going to write a really great story in 150 words." That's a really interesting and intriguing exercise. Maybe I don't want to spend a year writing the 80,000-word version of that, but those guidelines can be restricting, but they can also be sort of empowering in the sense that it's focusing your attention in a way it otherwise wouldn't be focused.
[00:35:50] Pamela: Yeah. I agree with that. And at some point, you have to decide why you're writing. And what I mean by that is if you're writing for yourself, then you should write whatever you want all the time. If you're trying to sell your books, then you need some kind of idea of who you're writing to and what they like to read, and thus that creates some guideposts for you. It may be that you are unconscious of them, and you aim toward it just out of affinity with your readers, and that's fantastic, but they're still there. If you are writing towards it being a commercial venture as opposed to, "I'm doing this for me, and I don't care if it sells. I just love it. I live to write.”
I'm trying to make money. I mean, I'll be honest, because I gave up my day job. You know, I'm trying to make money. So, at first, it felt a little bit limiting, and then I embraced it because I embrace data. It's like, 'This is a learning experiment, and it either works out or it doesn't, but either way, I'm better for it,' you know, having gone down this road.
And that's really how I look at it. If it all ends tomorrow and I don't write another word for them, I'm a better author, an indie author, and businessperson in the world of publishing than I was before because I've been exposed to a new way to do it and have that to consider and potentially inculcate into what I do."
Matty: I actually could think of other questions, but that is such a nice wrap-up. I think that I'm going to go with that. Pamela, it is always so much fun to talk with you, and I appreciate so much you sharing the kind of behind-the-scenes inside scoop of what your experience has been making this transition. So please let the listeners and the viewers know where they can go to find all your books, regardless of who publishes them, online.
Pamela: All right, I can do that. PamelaFaganHutchins.com will point you in the right direction. My Bookouture books, the new series, Detective Delaney Pace, are only available in Kindle eBook form on Amazon, although the paperback and audio versions are available anywhere that you can order your books. Bookouture is a digital-only company. They do partner with print providers that stock bookstores and things like that, but anywhere online. My books are available everywhere online. We're not exclusive to Amazon with those anymore, so you can get them anywhere. And the best place to interact with me, and I encourage you to do it, talk books, whatever, talk publishing, dogs, is Facebook. I have a Facebook page and a Facebook group, and that's where I'm really most active.
Matty: You do have a super fun Facebook feed, so I'll just put another plug in for that.
Pamela: It's always nice to see Matty come up on there.
Matty: Well, Pamela, thank you so much. It's been so much fun to talk with you.
Pamela: You too. Thanks for having me.