Mark Dawson Shares His Secret Facebook Ads Strategy

Mark Dawson Shares His Secret Facebook Ads Strategy Facebook Ads for Authors (with Mark Dawson) Last updated: 04/11/2018Most authors in the self-publishing game will know Mark Dawson’s name. As the author of the highly successful John Milton thrillers, Mark has become one of the most successful indie novelists working today - in large part thanks to his keen understanding of book marketing and Facebook Advertising in particular.Based on an interview with Reedsy (that you can watch below), this post will show you how Mark has used Facebook ads as a tool to build his career as a novelist (as well as his mailing list) - and how you can do the same. What is Facebook Advertising?Facebook Advertising is the core business of the world’s most popular social network. Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t make any money when you post pictures of your cat. He does, however, make a fortune allowing advertisers to target audiences in a very focused way, thanks to the enormous amount of data they have on their users.How can authors best use Facebook Ads?At the most basic level, authors can use Facebook ads to find readers who have an interest in books similar to theirs. Finding and leveraging comparable authors has long been at the center of Mark’s strategy.â€Å"My books are often compared in their genre to Lee Child, so one of the things that I do on Facebook is to serve ads just to people who know or like Lee Child - fans of his fan page, fans of the Jack Reacher fan page, and so on.â€Å"You want to find a similar author in your genre like that who you can use to make sure that your ads are shown to people who are likely to like your books.†One of the benefits of using Facebook ads is the ability to test audience sets. For as little as $5 a day, you can deliver your ads to different ‘sets’ of audiences so you can see whether your ad appeals more to readers of Robin Hobb or Terry Brooks; to followers of Tony Robbins, or Gary Vaynerchuk. â€Å"I can typically make most days a 100% return on investment (ROI). I’m spending around $300-$350 in Facebook ads every day, and I make around $600-$700 a day from it.†Naturally, your ability to continually reach new readers this way is limited by the size of the audience your targeting.â€Å"There are some authors in other genres - romance is particularly good for this, as it is for just about everything else - who are also encountering huge success with this. There’s one author in particular who was selling $200 worth of her box set every month, and last month sold $1500. Obviously, you’ve got to invest in the ads, but she is making a 500% ROI: pay $1 get $5.†But beyond creating a simple ad that urges readers to buy your product, Mark uses a couple of ‘intermediate’ techniques for boosting direct sales with Facebook ads:1. Generate a ‘lookalike’ audienceâ€Å"For those who don’t know what one is, you can im port your mailing list into Facebook and then tell them: ‘please, generate a lookalike audience based on this mailing list.’ Facebook will then try to assess what the people have in common in your mailing list, and algorithmically search for people matching the same interests, demographics, etc.â€Å"The results of these ‘lookalike’ campaigns are sometimes better than the ones based on audiences with a shared interest. My best sales ad for one of the boxed sets I have on sale is a 2.2M list of people based in the United States defined as a ‘lookalike’ of my mailing list. I optimize the ads for clicks and typically generate a 50-100% ROI every day.†2. Advertise to people on your mailing listOne thing that Facebook allows you to do is to import the email addresses from your mailing list and match these email addresses with Facebook accounts (provided that these people have one). You can then serve ads to these people as well.â€Å"Some pe ople might ask why I’m saying the same thing twice. ‘You’re already sending them an email asking them to buy the book.’â€Å"Well, not all emails are opened (50% is already a very high open rate), and it’s a standard advertising theory that it takes more than one touch for someone to make a buying decision. So that kind of joined-up campaign is going to be more effective than just an email blast or just a Facebook campaign.Some marketers reckon that ‘effective frequency’ - or number of times a customer has to see an advertising message for it to take hold - can be as high as 10 (or more). So instead of emailing subscribers ten times and getting dumped in the spam folder, you can ensure that your book rises to the top of their mind.†These are some of the techniques Mark has used to become a publishing titan - but their execution requires a bit of finesse and self-education. You can join the waiting list for Mark Dawson’s Advertising for Authors, a paid course that is the best on offer, in our opinion. Or as an alternative, check out Reedsy Learning’s Facebook Ads for Authors course - which is free. (Disclosure: if you end up registering for any of Mark's courses, Reedsy may receive a small affiliate payment.)If you have any questions or thoughts on using Facebook ads to market your book, drop us a message in the comments below.

How It Feels to Be Colored Me, by Zora Neale Hurston

How It Feels to Be Colored Me, by Zora Neale Hurston Zora Neal Hurston was an author that was widely acclaimed. A genius of the South, novelist, folklorist, anthropologist- those are the words that Alice Walker had inscribed on the tombstone of Zora Neale Hurston. In this personal  essay (first published in The World Tomorrow, May 1928), the acclaimed author of Their Eyes Were Watching God explores her own sense of identity through a series of memorable examples and striking metaphors. As  Sharon L. Jones has observed, Hurstons essay challenges the reader to consider race and ethnicity as fluid, evolving, and dynamic rather than static and unchanging -Critical Companion to Zora Neale Hurston, 2009 How It Feels to Be Colored Me by Zora Neale Hurston 1 I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mothers side was not an Indian chief. 2 I remember the very day that I became colored. Up to my thirteenth year I lived in the little Negro town of Eatonville, Florida. It is exclusively a colored town. The only white people I knew passed through the town going to or coming from Orlando. The native whites rode dusty horses, the Northern tourists chugged down the sandy village road in automobiles. The town knew the Southerners and never stopped cane chewing when they passed. But the Northerners were something else again. They were peered at cautiously from behind curtains by the timid. The more venturesome would come out on the porch to watch them go past and got just as much pleasure out of the tourists as the tourists got out of the village. 3 The front porch might seem a daring place for the rest of the town, but it was a gallery seat for me. My favorite place was atop the gatepost. Proscenium box for a born first-nighter. Not only did I enjoy the show, but I didnt mind the actors knowing that I liked it. I usually spoke to them in passing. Id wave at them and when they returned my salute, I would say something like this: Howdy-do-well-I-thank-you-where-you-goin? Usually, automobile or the horse paused at this, and after a queer exchange of compliments, I would probably go a piece of the way with them, as we say in farthest Florida. If one of my family happened to come to the front in time to see me, of course, negotiations would be rudely broken off. But even so, it is clear that I was the first welcome-to-our-state Floridian, and I hope the Miami Chamber of Commerce will please take notice. 4 During this period, white people differed from colored to me only in that they rode through town and never lived there. They liked to hear me speak pieces and sing and wanted to see me dance the parse-me-la, and gave me generously of their small silver for doing these things, which seemed strange to me for I wanted to do them so much that I needed bribing to stop, only they didnt know it. The colored people gave no dimes. They deplored any joyful tendencies in me, but I was their Zora nevertheless. I belonged to them, to the nearby hotels, to the county- everybodys Zora. 5 But changes came in the family when I was thirteen, and I was sent to school in Jacksonville. I left Eatonville, the town of the oleanders, a Zora. When I disembarked from the riverboat at Jacksonville, she was no more. It seemed that I had suffered a sea change. I was not Zora of Orange County anymore, I was now a little colored girl. I found it out in certain ways. In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown- warranted not to rub nor run. 6 But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all but about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more of less. No, I do not weep at the world- I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife. 7 Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a potential slave said On the line! The Reconstruction said Get set! and the generation before said Go! I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep. Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and the choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure and worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it. No one on earth ever had a greater chance for glory. The world to be won and nothing to be lost. It is thrilling to think- to know that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame. It is quite exciting to hold the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or to weep. 8 The position of my white neighbor is much more difficult. No brown specter pulls up a chair beside me when I sit down to eat. No dark ghost thrusts its leg against mine in bed. The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting. 9 I do not always feel colored. Even now I often achieve the unconscious Zora of Eatonville before the Hegira. I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background. 10 For instance at Barnard. Beside the waters of the Hudson I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again. 11 Sometimes it is the other way around. A white person is set down in our midst, but the contrast is just as sharp for me. For instance, when I sit in the drafty basement that is The New World Cabaret with a white person, my color comes. We enter chatting about any little nothing that we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen- follow them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter something- give pain, give death to what, I do not know. But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly. 12 Good music they have here, he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips. 13 Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored. 14 At certain times I have no race, I am me. When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as snooty as the lions in front of the Forty-Second Street Library, for instance. So far as my feelings are concerned, Peggy Hopkins Joyce on the Boule Mich with her gorgeous raiment, stately carriage, knees knocking together in a most aristocratic manner, has nothing on me. The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads. 15 I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong. 16 Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? Its beyond me. 17 But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small things priceless and worthless. A first-water diamond, an empty spool, bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since crumbled away, a rusty knife-blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two still a little fragrant. In your hand is the brown bag. On the ground before you is the jumble it held- so much like the jumble in the bags, could they be emptied, that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place- who knows?