This week on the podcast, we’re speaking with Lila Dubois and Jayne Rylon all about TikTok, and how they are using the platform to sell more books than ever before.
- We hear about Jayne and Lila’s author origin stories, as both had established careers before they published. Jayne explains how her corporate background helps her to sell books, and why she focuses on making an emotional connection to her readers – and how TikTok has helped them both make that connection.
- They explain how they first got into TikTok, and originally enjoyed connecting with others by talking about books – and how they first realized the impact that TikTok was having on book sales.
- They share what they know about the mysterious TikTok algorithm, and how they have learned to work with it and “train” the algorithm.
- Jayne and Lila talk about their course, TikTok Sells Books (and offer a discount to podcast listeners!)
Useful Links
Guest Biographies
Lila Dubois is a multi-published, bestselling author of erotic, paranormal and fantasy romance. Her books have been nominated for many awards including RT Book Reviews Erotic Novella for Undone Rebel and the Golden Flogger. Having spent extensive time in France, Egypt, Turkey, Ireland and England Lila speaks five languages, none of them (including English) fluently. Lila lives in California with her own Irish Farm Boy and loves receiving email from readers.
Jayne Rylon is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author, who has sold more than two million copies of her books. She has received numerous industry awards including the Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best Indie Erotic Romance and the Swirl Award, which recognizes excellence in diverse romance. She is an Honor Roll member of the Romance Writers of America. Her stories used to begin as daydreams in seemingly endless business meetings, but now she is a full time author, who employs the skills she learned from her straight-laced corporate existence in the business of writing. She lives in Ohio with her husband, the infamous Mr. Rylon, and kittens they foster for a rescue organization. When she can escape her purple office, she loves to travel the world, avoid speeding tickets in her beloved Sky, SCUBA dive, and–of course–read.
Episode Transcript
Transcription provided by Speechpad
Joni: Hi, writers, you’re listening to the Kobo Writing Life Podcast where we bring you insights and inspiration for growing your self-publishing business. We’re your hosts, I’m Joni, author relations manager at Kobo Writing Life.
Rachel: And I’m Rachel, promotion specialist at Kobo Writing Life.
Joni: On this week’s episode, we’re talking to Jayne Rylon and Lila Dubois about their writing careers, how they got their start in writing, how they became full-time authors, and how they’re using TikTok as a marketing strategy.
Rachel: Yeah, that’s a really fun and interesting conversation. If you listened to the podcast before, you know that Joni and I love TikTok, possibly an unhealthy amount, but it was fascinating to hear the data behind how much TikTok can sell books and…
Joni: I’m gonna be honest with you, I genuinely did not expect what they were telling us because I have always thought of TikTok as being more of a engagement platform. Like I love TikTok but I always thought it was more about keeping the conversation going, keeping a relationship with your readers. But it seems like, from what Jayne and Lila were saying, it really does translate to sales. So that was very interesting to me.
Rachel: Yeah, it was really interesting. And they had like the hard data to back it up, which was something that I was not expecting to hear. So, it was really cool. And they also shared a lot of tips for authors who are intimidated by the platform. They gave me more of an understanding of the TikTok algorithm than I have ever had and they did talk to us about their course that they have, TikTok Sells Books, and provided a promo code for Kobo Writing Life Podcast listeners, which we will share at the end of the episode.
Joni: Stay tuned, we hope you enjoy it. So, we are excited to talk today with Lila Dubois and Jayne Rylon. We’re going to be talking all about TikTok and their course TikTok Sells Books. Thank you so much for joining us.
Jayne: Thanks for having us.
Joni: We’re excited to chat to you. Would you be able to start by telling us a little bit about who you are and what you do?
Jayne: Sure. Lila, you wanna go first?
Lila: Sure. Well, I usually do our intro, so, I’ll go. Jayne and I are both full-time professional authors in that we both left our very good white-collar jobs in order to become full-time authors, 5 and 7 years ago respectively. And before we became full-time authors, Jayne was a financial analyst at a Fortune 500 company and I was an operations manager of a social-justice action research centre at a major top-30 university.
So, Jayne and I respectively are very analytical, on her side, and very research-oriented on my side. And we have been writing friends for a very very long time. And one of our approaches to being successful as authors is that we use the buddy system, “Stay safe everybody, pick a buddy.” And we use the buddy system in order to keep each other accountable for different things, and we decided to use that same buddy system when we decided to tackle TikTok. And because we researched it a lot, on my side, Jayne was very analytical about what was happening and what was working, that’s how we brought sort of what the focus and strategies that have allowed us to be successful as authors and brought that into this new social-media platform that we were looking at.
Rachel: And before we dive deep into TikTok, because that is exactly why we’re here, would you mind telling us a little bit about your writing journeys and how you went from those kind of corporate jobs and to becoming full-time authors?
Jayne: Sure. Yeah, I’ll tell you a little bit about this. This is Jayne. So, I have been writing since 2005-ish, and then Lila was actually published before I was, so…we both, at that time, were writing for digital-first publishers, and one of them was Samhain Publishing. And I met Lila in a, like, group for fans before my first book came out. And so, between her and I, I mean I don’t even know how many books we have out, now we stopped counting around…like we added them up, we had about 130 books together. So yeah, we’ve been doing this for quite a while.
And I write erotic romance, as does Lila, so, for us, even though Lila is exceptionally good at Facebook Ads, we rely a lot on our social media to get our message out, we’re sometimes hindered by the restrictions of different retailers.
So, for me, you know, like I first started writing because I love to read, I’m an avid reader. And I read a book one time, and my husband came through what was then our office and said, “Hey, have you ever considered writing?” And I’m sure that it was just like a random thought, he was off to make his pop-tart, or whatever he was doing, and I’m like, “I should do that,” and I started writing the very next day. So, it took me a year to write that first book. And then, when I was done, I entered that book in a competition and immediately from that competition I got a letter from one of the judges who gave it a perfect score, and she was an editor at Samhain.
And so, she said, you know, “I’d like to see the full book.” And then she rejected it but she gave me like a two-page letter of everything that I should concentrate on. Which is like unheard of, you know, I got such solid feedback. And later down the road they did end up buying that book but, in the meantime, I sold them like two or three while I was working on fixing that one. So, that’s how I kind of got started. Like when I finished that first book, I asked my husband if he would read it, and he was like, “I don’t really read romance, so, I’m not gonna like your book because I don’t like the genre as much,” he reads sci-fi. And he was like, you know, “Then it’s gonna hurt your feelings.” And that’s why I submitted to the contest in the first place because I didn’t wanna be that person like on “American Idol” who thinks that they know how to sing and then they get in there and people are like, “No, go home.” And that was one way for me to just look for objective feedback and it led me to publishing.
So, since then I’ve never gone back, I’ve published everything I’ve written. I think I just finished my 76th book and I was in the process of writing while I was still working that corporate job that Lila was telling you about. So, I was the manager of financial planning and analysis. And that is not a 40-hour-a-week job. So, there came a point where…I’d already hit “The New York Times” twice and “USA Today” maybe five times before I finally felt confident enough to say like, “I’ll let go of my other job,” which I also enjoyed and learned a lot about how to run a business from. So, I actually worked for L Brands, which is the parent company or was at that time of Victoria’s Secret Bath & Body Works, which are all about how to make an emotional connection with your customer and how important that is to building your brand. And so, I think those experiences kind of helped me build up my author brand and understand how to run it as a business, as opposed to some authors who, you know, are so good at the craft but don’t necessarily have a business background. So, that’s kind of how I came to it and, eventually, you know, came to a point where I couldn’t do both anymore and I was starting to, you know, get sick and not have enough time to do anything. And my husband was like, “That’s it, it’s time to quit,” and I cried every single day. But it’s been 8 years now and I’m still doing it, so, I guess it’s okay.
Joni: That’s an amazing origin story. And, Lila, what about you?
Lila: So, mine is a little bit different. So, I wrote my first book my senior year of college. And one of the things that has always gotten me through, like, you know, my emotional safe place escapism has always been romance novels. I am the daughter of an avid romance reader. My mother is like an old-school genre defender, she used to write papers and articles about how, you know, the romance genre was saving, at that time, small bookstores, which were in a better place than they are even now. So, romance has always been my go-to place.
And in college, of course, you know, you move every year, you switch dorms, and it was so hard to take books with me, new books, it was hard to get new books. Right? And lo and behold, around 2003, I stumbled across this weird thing where you could buy a PDF of a romance novel, and I was buying Ellora’s Cave books back when it was Jaid Black herself essentially emailing you a PDF file, long before there was any mechanization to any of this. And I read those for a couple of years, I thought this was amazing, this was so great, you know, like it was perfect for that college lifestyle. And then, as I approached graduation and that transition in my life, my stress level reached the point that I had to jump from reading to actually writing a romance novel.
So, the first book I ever wrote was a book that was very much something that had been in my mind, which was a erotic high fantasy, because I read all genres but I love high fantasy. And for me, I felt like so many high-fantasy stories had these incredible sexy scenarios and setups and zero payoff. Like it was either the sex was punishment or it just wasn’t there, like nobody ever enjoyed anything. It made me crazy. So, that’s what I wrote originally. And I wrote it my senior year of college and it was published late 2006, 200…
Jayne: We’re old, we’re like officially old, we’ve been doing this for so long now.
Lila: So long. And the bio in the back of my very first book, because I knew what author bios should say, right, it should say where I lived and that I was married and how many pets I had and all that kind of stuff, and the bio in that first book was like, “Well, Lila’s not married but her roommate has goldfish,” that was literally it because I was living that post-college life. And I still have, you know, print copies of that original book with that original bio. And being an author, given how long I’ve been published, it took me a long time to become professional. And part of that was that my life was happening. I had a job, I had my life happening, and authoring was kind of this thing I did because I loved it and any money I made from it or attending conferences, all that, that was just about fun. It took a long time before I treated it like the profession that it is. And a huge credit to people like Jayne in my life who kind of, you know, grabbed me and shook me and said, you know, “This is a job and you can do this full time if you pay enough attention to it and you take it seriously.” But writing had to take a back burner to dating and then getting married and then having a kid and moving and, you know, all those things that have happened in my life.
And I also, you guys will appreciate the story, my husband actually met Lila, which is my pen name, this is not my real name, met Lila before he met me as a person. Because we were hooked up to be travel buddies, I was traveling to London alone, and, you know, sent that email you send, “Hey, does anybody know anyone in London? I’m gonna be traveling alone and I’m trying not to be murdered,” you know, “I don’t want a dateline special.” And, at the time, my very first editor knew my then husband sort of by degrees of connection and, since, you know, we exchanged emails, but she gave him my pen-name email. It was like an added level of security if I didn’t actually want to meet up with this person. So, my husband has always known what I’ve done because he met my authorself before he met real me. And I ended up this, you know, California girl went to London, met a literal Irish farm boy. And, at the time, he was like, “Nora Roberts? Are you writing this? Fun.”
So, my publishing journey took a little bit longer but it really began…it was a progression of my love for the genre and really, you know, finding out that there was a way for me to put books outside of that. Because I hadn’t seen, at the time, high fantasy that was very female-centered and where sex was not either a political pawn or punishment or off-screen or whatever it was. And so, it had never occurred to me that there would be a place for that until I came across ebooks really in like 2003 or so. And that sort of started it for me, and I’ve loved every minute of it.
Rachel: So, you both have been doing this for a while. And the publishing landscape has, obviously, changed a lot, as have marketing tools. And marketing erotica, as you alluded to, has always been a challenge. How have your marketing strategies kind of evolved throughout your career?
Jayne: I would say that we both have always been very involved. So, we were with digital-first publishers before self-publishing was a thing, like there was vanity publishing but there was no like KDP publishing, that didn’t exist. So, we were with small-press pubs that were kind of like hybrid publishers. And so, we always had a very strong hand in our marketing. You know, like both Lila and I have been there, you know, printing off postcards and signing them like thousands at a time and mailing them out to conferences, like very grassroots kind of stuff.
So, I don’t think like too much has changed, from that perspective, I’ve always been very aware of the need for me to like control the data for myself, like coming back to analytics, right, so, like I’ve always had like a strong inclination towards having my own newsletter list and relying on that as my core, a strong website, again, where I control the information. And then using these various social-media platforms, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. They come and go, right, you know, how many people remember like Trello and like all those weird ones that have been in the middle? You know, we try them all but, honestly, we haven’t changed, I would say, that much our fundamental approach, which is to always be the one driving the marketing effort. Because we care the most and, you know, like this method of business is a lot about us making a connection with our readers. So, going back to those lessons that I learned, working for the larger corporations, about making an emotional connection, like our product makes it very easy to do that. If you write a book and you haven’t made an emotional connection with your customer, you did it wrong. Right? You didn’t do it right.
And so, we already have that baked in, and then just expanding that to be us as a representation of our brand, I think that’s really been the approach all along. It takes a little different format every now and then when some new tool comes along but, fundamentally, I think that’s been the plan all along. What do you think, Lila?
Lila: Jayne is obviously a little bit more analytical about it all. In the early days of my writing, I relied a lot on the individual personal connections made, especially at reader-centered events. You know, I was attending sort of part of the heyday of like the Romantic Times convention when that was an amazing place to meet readers and readers who loved reading so much and were such avid readers that they would be willing to take a chance on this author they had never heard of, that wasn’t traditionally published, because they had met me in person or because they had seen me or they had seen my name enough at some thing in person.
So, that was the foundation of how I met and developed a reader base and have sort of had one of those careers where I have like a small sort of very loyal core of readers. I joke that like one of my series that I co-authored with someone, we have very much sort of like a cult situation going on because, if you love it, you absolutely love it and you’ll tell everybody about it.
And then, so, based on that, I have been a little bit more hesitant about trying to use avenues that are a little bit larger, in part because of what I do right. I think that there can be I think sometimes a misconception that people who write erotic romance or explicit romance in any way are trying to game a system, when like that’s never what I’ve wanted. The last thing I ever want is for my book to accidentally show up in front of, you know, a young adult looking for young-adult fiction. So, that’s one of the situations where sometimes I am hesitant but I do think that there are beautiful avenues for being able to target but, admittedly, it is simply more restricted if you write explicit content. Which is fair enough, I’m not mad at that, like that is fine. But because of that, it’s one of the reasons that I do still rely heavily on sort of making a personal connection even if it’s no longer actually directly in-person.
Jayne: And I think one thing you said that like, you know, is important to me, like one of our underlying philosophies is that, you know, like we’re not household names. Like people don’t know who we are. Like if I was just going down the street and they’d be like, “Oh, you’re Jayne Rylon?” Like no. I mean that did one time happen to me when I was randomly in Australia at like some way out of the way thing on a tour and somebody ran up and was like, “You’re Jayne Rylon,” and I was literally shocked. Like, you know, halfway around the world, I almost died. Like that doesn’t happen. That was definitely a fluke, you know. But like our goal has never been…I mean we’d love to be household names, of course, but like we’re also very clear like, when we now are showing people the kinds of things we do and the careers we’ve built, that that’s not necessary in order to be successful.
And so, we’ve always just kind of worked from the bottom up. And, you know, both Lila and I quit six-figure jobs in order to write, which, you know, we did because it was more successful. So, and we’ve been doing this, like we said, for a long time. I think that I’ve been probably at that level with my writing for almost 15 years now. So, you know, you don’t have to be, you know, a household name in order to make a very nice living and to do something that you love, like to hang out in your pajamas and talk to imaginary people all day. And so, I think that’s been one of our like tenants that we kind of hold to ourselves on like ways we know to make this work, if that makes any sense.
Joni: So, that kind of ties back I think to something I wanted to ask about TikTok generally as a platform. Do you find that you’re using it to sell books or is it really more about making that connection and engaging an audience in a different way?
Lila: I’m gonna [inaudible 00:18:25]…
Jayne: It’s been [inaudible 00:18:25]. So, Lila and I do, if you haven’t guessed by now, we do things very differently. And I always say this, and Lila hates this example, because the tortoise always wins. But I’m the tortoise and she’s the hare. And so, we approach things totally differently but we get to the same place in the end. Almost always we’re lock-step on TikTok. And so, Lila, why don’t you talk about your approach first?
Lila: So, my approach both to TikTok and things in general is a little bit more sort of like immediate excitement, I’m just gonna dive in and get super into this. And that’s what I did with TikTok. And I was just so excited to get back to a place where I could talk to other readers about books. One of probably most distressing things about a lot of the book world is that, once you identify as an author, and especially if you are a full-time professional author where this is your job and you need to remember that it is your job, you are kind of then locked out of talking about books, despite the fact that you are a reader first. I cannot think of an author I know who was not a reader first and will not be a reader after they retire. You know, like the reader identity holds more weight for me than my author identity because that came first for me.
But you kind of get locked out, and there is a lot of back end where authors are talking about, “You know what, you don’t really talk about books you’re reading, unless you’re reading a book by a friend and you’ve pre-discussed what it is you’re going to say and it ties in with their marketing plan,” and all these kinds of things. But that was happening a lot less on TikTok, so, I was just so excited to talk about any book on that platform because I felt like I had been locked out of having a conversation as a reader, you know, on a place where I could also then admit that I was an author. You know, so, like, for example, I don’t go on Goodreads and, even though I would love to, I don’t do that, unless I were to set up a completely separate account from Lila. And I feel like that would be a little bit dishonest, so, I don’t do that.
So, I jumped in, and I was just so excited and like talking about other people’s books, my books, all of it, and then kind of sort of looked at Jayne and I was like, “Hey, I talked about my book on this TikTok and look at my KDP graph,” or, “look at my Kobo graph,” like, “what do you think that is?” And Jayne’s over there like banging her head against the wall and she’s like, “All right, let’s break it down. What day did you post the video? How many views did it have? What’s the exact correlation?” So, I was just…enthusiasm jumped in, dragged Jayne onto TikTok with me, and then Jayne really came in and forced us to become very analytical and really looking at it.
And there’s a reason that our class is called “TikTok Sells Books,” as opposed to just being an author on TikTok. And it’s because we saw that, and I think that that is…I mean, for authors, right, like if you’re going to invest time in something, and it’s not just because like me you’re just so excited to talk about books on another platform, that really is important. So, for me, I was very lucky that I had a friend, in this case, my buddy, my safety buddy who was able to be very analytical and bring that beautiful analytical approach to something where I can just dove in with more enthusiasm than sense.
Jayne: Yeah, she’s being like super polite. So, what she’s really saying is like…I was like, “Hey, we should like figure out TikTok, we should like read some articles, do this,” and she’s like, “I made a video. I made a video.” And I’m like, “Wait, wait, we are not ready yet,” like, “we have to do…” You know, again, I’m the tortoise, right? So, I was very curmudgeonly and I was like, “I am not getting on here. I’m not setting up an account if it is not worth my time, not doing it.” And she drugged me kicking and screaming onto the platform because I started to see results really quickly that I couldn’t deny.
There’s no platform that has organic conversion to sales like TikTok. So, I mean we literally have graphs that we could show you of videos we posted with views everywhere from 600 views, which is nothing, like that’s what you should expect as a beginner, personally, our experience goes up to like 250,000 views, and then we have people in our class who’ve achieved millions of views even within the class period, 10-day class period.
So, we have a lot of information we’ve gathered now, and we have videos that perform as well as 1 conversion per 80 views on TikTok. So, when you’re talking about…like I have 1 that we use as a class example that had 30,000 views on a book that I was holding up where I wasn’t even talking about the book, I was just holding it while I was making a TikTok about something. Because that’s kind of my schtick on TikTok, I’m usually standing in front of my bookcase holding one of my books, either reacting to another video in a duet or, you know, lip syncing to a sound but putting a book spin on it, something like that. So, in this case, it was just, “If you’re scrolling through TikTok right now when you should be doing something else, we should be friends,” and I happen to be holding one of my books. That video got 30,000 views and it led to a 5 to 6 times increase of my average daily sales for the 30 days before that, that lasted 6 to 8 weeks after. So, to put that in perspective, that made that book perform the same as my latest release, which was supported by Facebook Ads at that time. And this is a backlist book.
So, when we started seeing results like that, we were like, “Okay, maybe we should take it seriously.” I was like, “Fine, I’ll make videos.” You know, really I wasn’t that into it at first but it didn’t take me very long…and, honestly, inspired by the fact that it does sell books so well before I started like getting more into it. And now I’m 100% addicted not only for that. So, like I don’t think, if you just came on and that was your only goal, you probably wouldn’t be super successful. It very quickly sucked me into the ecosystem and I spend a lot of time on there watching videos and enjoying everyone else’s content and, you know, seeing people like Lila sharing genuinely what they enjoy. And, you know, now I’m addicted. So…
Rachel: Lila, you kind of touched on this that, outside of TikTok, there are author spaces and there are reader spaces and they rarely meet in the middle but TikTok is different. But do you find there’s a different audience for authors on TikTok versus the more like traditional, air quote, “BookTok” of people recommending books or are the audiences similar?
Lila: The way we usually describe it is that BookTok is a top level or umbrella and then, underneath BookTok, there are lots of sub-BookTok things, such as AuthorTok So, I would say that AuthorTok is a subset of BookTok itself. But then you also have like, you know, spicy BookTok, which would be like what Jayne and I write, each of the genres has its own Tok, even some of the tropes have their own Tok. There are a lot of different subcategories underneath BookTok.
Now, I do think that, for authors, some authors do make the mistake, which Jayne and I made early on, of constantly pulling themselves down into author talk and staying there and ending up in a place where they’re only talking to the other authors and treating it like an office space, which is not bad if that is what you want to do. Part of the problem with TikTok is when you think about like, “What do I want to say? What do I want to talk about?” especially if you’re holding on to that, “I’m an author, I really shouldn’t talk about what I’m reading because I don’t know, is that okay for me to talk about that with that other author?” or, you know, I’ve heard people be like, “I don’t wanna promote somebody else’s book,” which, get out of here with that attitude. But, you know what I mean, like, if you’re like, “Oh, I don’t know if I wanna,” like, “will that other author be okay if I’m talking about their book?” so, people who come in with that worry end up over here on AuthorTok, just talking to the other authors, because what they end up talking about is their job, which is writing.
And it’s very easy to end up talking about your job but then you end up talking craft or business or all those things. Which is not a problem but Jayne and I saw that happening and saw ourselves doing it, and buddy system, we yanked ourselves out and said, “Okay, remember, you want to be on main BookTok. So, you are an author on BookTok but that means that you are also a reader, you are also an avid reader. Participate as a reader.” And the other thing that we are very intentional about, and it’s something that we push push push in our class, is that, to be effective on the platform, as Jayne mentioned, if you just come on saying, “I’m only here to sell books,” maybe it will work, but it probably won’t. Because you need to authentically engage the platform.
And unfortunately, that’s hard, right, because you’re saying like, “Listen, you if you’re gonna TikTok, you need to actually do it, you need to participate. You need to be genuinely creating content that entertains or informs or inspires.” You know, Jayne has a whole presentation she does about like, “You have to hit one of those three things in order to be effective.” So, you need to be putting out authentic content in order to really be engaging in book talk in a way that the TikTok algorithm will respond to and those videos will find traction. And then that also means that your videos where you’re talking about your own book will find some kind of traction.
And it’s really important for multiple reasons, not only because that means you’re being like a good participant; you’re not just taking, you’re putting in as much as you’re getting out from the platform, but also, authors, almost universally we become really freaking awkward the minute we talk about our own books. Like I could talk about somebody else’s book all day long, I could rattle off about Jayne’s books and be totally calm, cool, collected. When I started talking about my books, I’m like…there are words…
Jayne: Like it probably doesn’t suck, you should try it.
Lila: Yeah, I mean like but you don’t have to. I mean, you know what, honestly, actually I changed my mind, don’t read it, don’t read it, don’t read it. I don’t know, I don’t know. Like, you know, so, you become awkward like that. And so, making sure that you are making content where you’re not just being super awkward and weird because you’re only talking about your own book is incredibly important. I am much more authentically myself and engaging.
Jayne: I feel like one thing that we’ve kind of learned through this process is maybe we held misconceptions all along. Like, you know, Lila’s…the series that she does on TikTok, which is pure genius, it’s hysterical, if you haven’t seen it, it’s called “Character Protective Services,” and she runs like a hotline where people can call in and report authors for being mean to characters. And so, she like, you know, be like, “Character protective services,” and then she starts going into her routine, and you can figure out what book it is, you know. And she’s picking universal standard books that everyone will know. And, you know, to her surprise, she’s had some of the authors of these very big books duet her, like come back and not only personally message her, which might happen on other social-media things, to say, “Hey, thanks for promoting my book,” or, “that was really funny,” but to actually then come back on and do a duet live with her and be like so excited so you can see.
And, you know, when you think about that from like being an author and what would my response be if someone posted up a review of my book, I would be excited. But for some reason, we don’t think that, as authors, you know, we are very careful about talking about each other’s work. But you can see it, and that’s like part of what makes TikTok so powerful is it is very easy to make that personal connection face-to-face with someone. You see their expression, you see like their natural way of reacting. And it also is like providing content. So, as other people review my books and then I respond, it’s like giving me free content, you know what I mean, like it just is like this symbiotic relationship, I guess.
And so, that’s one of the things that’s super exciting about it is that maybe we’re learning that, all along these other platforms, because of the limitations of a flat image or just text that can be read the wrong way didn’t give us all the information that we’re somehow getting from these TikToks, which have proven, as a format, that they do well because then they can be applied even to other platforms like Instagram reels, or Facebook stories, YouTube shorts, and then they perform as well on those platforms as well. So, it’s like the actual format does something that’s kind of magical. But we do tend to like [inaudible 00:30:54] people, we’re not like…we don’t go lower than that.
Lila: I was gonna say one example that we give a lot is the difference between making a Facebook post that says, “Hi, everyone, I’m really looking for a book to read. Have you read any good books lately? Please post a recommendation in the comments,” like that is a dead post. That might get a couple of comments but that’s dead and it feels like slightly boring marketing for engagement. As opposed to me in person looking at you via the camera, saying, “Okay, so, I really need a book to read, I have nothing. You guys hit me with some book recs, I want a really really good book rec. What are you reading? What is everybody reading? What are you reading right now?” Like you can hear the tone and the inflection that is lost in other things.
And I think that, as authors, a lot of times we assume a mastery of words that would translate to Facebook. But remember, when we’re writing our books, we can describe the characters’ tone and their body language and all those things that would get across the same emotion that we can put into a live video. Whereas something like a Facebook post or an Instagram caption, we cannot convey the tone and the emotion the way we would in our own writing. So, I think that’s why the same question, the exact same question on Facebook versus on TikTok, will have much better engagement on TikTok because people can tell whether or not I’m actually asking for book recommendations.
Joni: That’s a great point. One thing that you touched on that is one of the kind of most magical things about TikTok is the algorithm and the way that it works as in none of us know. But if you are new to TikTok, like the algorithm shows you exactly what you want to see, and everybody is very very different, and, as a creator, how do you work with that? Like you don’t have a lot of control over it, right? So, do you find it’s effective to use certain hashtags or sounds? Or what is your solution to mastering it?
Jayne: Okay. So, first of all, like the algorithm, like you said, we’re relying on a lot of anecdotal evidence because nobody knows, other than a few things that were leaked to like “The New York Times” around Christmas time, nobody really knows exactly how it works but your gut can tell you when something seems right and when it doesn’t. After seeing lots and lots and lots of examples of this, so, Lila and I have worked with over 300 people now, getting their TikTok accounts up and running, we have a lot of data to pull from. And I’m analytical, so…the way the algorithm works, and like you said, it shows you what you are interested in, so, it starts to narrow down, narrow down, narrow down but there comes a point where it can’t narrow any further. Because, if you think about it, what TikTok cares about most is watch time. It wants you on that app as long as possible, to see ads. And this is only gonna get more over time, right, as we move from organic to paid, same as other platforms, that aspect will increase over time. So, they want you on the app as long as possible.
And so, the algorithm can narrow and show you, “Oh yes, they like this kind of content, they watch it all the way through, they comment on it,” they’re gonna start to show you more and more. But if it got too specific, you’d start to see like your same top five people over and over and then you’d get bored and your watch time actually decreases. So, I’ve seen a lot of like theories lately, and this is like ringing way true with my gut, that there comes a point at which, and maybe it happens every day, they reset some portion of the database so that it introduces variety. Because sometimes you’ll be flipping through and you’ll see book talk, book talk, book talk, and then you’re like, “Oh, refrigerator organization,” which is one of Lila’s favorite things to watch, or like, you know, glitter mixing, which I sometimes watch or, you know, whatever. It will throw random stuff in there. That is also part of the algorithm, it’s part of how it is designed to work.
And so, I see people get frustrated sometimes, they’d be going along, making great content, having, you know, consistent results, and then one day they’re like, “I got like 50 views today. What happened?” And you’ll go through this rocky period before things pick up again. My gut feel says that those people are correct and there is some portion of the database that is getting reset maybe every single day or also maybe because something unfortunate happens, like you get a community guidelines violation, and that resets your account. And so, from that point, it’s really important that people who follow you start to like keep interacting with your content and then you’re introduced to a new audience. Which is, ideally, what we want. I don’t want to meet the same readers over and over. I mean I love them but I want to meet new people. I need to introduce my books to new people.
So, it actually is in our favor, as long as you can get through that frustration of, “I’m producing quality content but sometimes it has different results than what I expect,” when you understand why that might be. And so, that really rings true to me, that there’s an intentional reset. And so, kind of one of the things that we were talking about with the series, like Lila’s “Character Protective Services,” and I do one called “Hero Material” that has over 100 episodes, they are linked together on purpose, the reason we do that is because we’re hoping that, when we go through these reset periods, that we’re encouraging people to come to us. They’re like, “Hey,” you know, “where’s that new ‘Character Protective’ series episode? Where’s the new ‘Hero Material?'” And they come to us.
So, we’re not relying entirely on the algorithm all the time, or at least we try not to, right, we’re giving people reasons to come looking for our content, and then maybe they’re like, “Oh, I haven’t seen this in like 10 posts,” and they scroll through and they’ll watch all of them. And we can see that, you know, like, when you open your profile, you can see, “So-and-so liked this video, liked this video, liked this video,” and you’ll see them go through 10 or 15 in a row. So, it does work. And that’s like the importance of your followers, at that point, so, that’s why it’s important to keep building your followers up. And yeah, you just have to live with the fact that it is bot-driven, it’s too big to be policed by a real person, so, you’re gonna be at the mercy of bots, and there has to be some integrated reset in the algorithm in order to make people stay interested. So, once you can get past that, it’s not as scary as it seems.
Lila: And for anybody who has no idea what Jayne just said because they are brand new to TikTok and they don’t even know what we’re talking about with the algorithm, here’s a very quick overview of how it works. Basically, TikTok, when you first sign up, throws a little bit of everything at you. And that means a lot of people, when they first get on TikTok, like that first scrolling session, they see a bunch of content they don’t like and they assume that it’s the entirety of TikTok and they are out. “I’m out, I don’t want this. I don’t wanna see like 13 year olds doing bad lip sync and stupid dances,” so, they’re gone. But you have to remember like TikTok just met you, they don’t know what you’re into. Okay? You gotta pre-negotiate the scene.
So, you have to teach TikTok, teach the algorithm where you’re supposed to be. And the way that you do that is by who you follow and what you watch. Basically, top level, who you follow and what you watch. So, you follow book-talk accounts, accounts that have already been firmly established in the algorithm as being book talk. And remember, book talk is not an official designation, you can’t check a box that says “Show me book talk content only,” this is simply a term that we use to describe the community and generally this group of content. But you have to follow people who are already firmly established book talkers and you need to watch and engage with content that has books and is by book talkers.
In our class, we tell people, “Listen, you set up your account, you get on TikTok, and that first session any video, a person’s got a book in their hand, they got a book case behind them, you like that video. It’s not your exact genre? Fantastic, I don’t care right now, like that video. You need to get yourself narrowed from the massive billions of people…” or the billion?
Jayne: It’s over a billion, yeah.
Lila: It’s over a billion. On TikTok, you need to tell the algorithm, “I want to be on book talk,” because there are a million different communities. So, you have to talk to the algorithm before it will start serving you the content that you want. And no matter what you do, as Jayne said, TikTok will always throw a little bit of random stuff at you, especially if you hit one of those reset periods. In part it’s because TikTok’s going to sort of, essentially, say, “I don’t know, you might like this. What do you think? I’m gonna slide this over. Do you like this? Are you into this?” like, “let’s see.” Because they want to be able to keep you, as Jayne said, on that platform, and one of the ways they can do that is by getting you into multiple things. Right? Like, now, book talk is massive, so, there’s a lot of content for book talk, but let’s say you were into some sort of smaller talk community. I was gonna say “knitting talk” but I actually looked at knitting talk, it’s huge. Let’s say it was knitting talk and there wasn’t as much knitting-talk content, TikTok would constantly be sort of sliding you other things, especially things that it knows other people who are in knitting talk enjoy.
So, you will always see a little bit of stuff that you haven’t exactly opted for. But that’s okay, you tell the algorithm you don’t want it by simply scrolling past. Within the first couple of seconds, you’re like, “Nope, not into this,” scroll past, you just told the algorithm, “I don’t want that.” But if you see a book, you see a bookcase, you watch it, watch it all the way through, drop a heart. Even if it’s not exactly the book content that you’re looking for, like they’re talking about a genre you don’t particularly love, that’s fine, you need to just get inside that book-talk umbrella, or underneath that book-talk umbrella, and then you can narrow it down.
Jayne: That’s like one mistake we see people make frequently is they just wanna come on and drop their videos and run away. You can’t do that with TikTok, you have to watch it. You’re never gonna identify a trend if you’re not flipping through book talk, you’re never gonna get to book talk if you don’t watch enough videos that TikTok knows that’s what you want to make. And there is a correlation between what you watch and what you post. It’s not like, “Okay, if Lila and I watch refrigeration organization for a little bit, it’s gonna forget that we like books,” no, it’s smarter than that. But there is a correlation and I know it because every single time that Lila and I run our class we are constantly on the app like re-watching the students’ videos, we give them one-on-one feedback on every video they post during the 10 days of the class. It’s extremely time-consuming, it takes us about 20 minutes to analyze each video. And so, during that whole time, the video is looping, playing over and over and over again. We comment on it, we share it with each other, we fully engage with it, and we’re going through all the comments and talking back and forth. Right?
So, after we’ve done that for 10 solid days with every person who posts an assignment in our class, Lila and I both always have exceptional performance on our own videos during the class period. The first couple times that happened, we were like, “Wow, that’s kind of weird,” and now it’s like, “for sure.” I mean Lila had 1 video that went to like 300 views, and I had ones that go to like between 50,000 and 75,000, where my normal would be between like 2,000 and 10,000 views. So, it’s greatly magnified during those periods of high engagement that we have. So, there is a correlation between like…it’s not as simple as just saying, “I’m gonna use #booktalk,” like I know people want that to be the answer but that’s not it. It’s smarter than that.
Joni: So, just to clarify, do you think this is because all of your students are looking at your TikTok videos or do you actually think it’s just that you’re so active on it that the algorithm or whatever is showing more people your videos?
Jayne: Yeah, I think it’s a little of both. Somebody asked us that in the last class too that they think it’s because other people are looking at our videos. But we don’t post assignment videos during that time, we’re just posting like our regular content, so, they don’t have necessarily a reason to go to our page other than just curiosity and look. I think it is coming primarily from the engagement, from us being active members of the community.
Joni: That’s interesting. That actually does make sense that it would reward that though.
Rachel: Yeah, the algorithm is truly wild, how it works. And like the reset thing, that you said, makes a lot of sense because it would explain how I ended up on potato TikTok for a little. Like I love complex carbs but not enough to watch videos about it. Without giving away your like entire course, like TikTok is a lot and there’s a lot of information, what is the one piece of advice you would give an author who is about to create their first TikTok.
Jayne: Okay, here’s my advice. So, my advice is TikTok is not Instagram, TikTok is not Facebook, you do not have to be perfect on TikTok. It is much better to post something than to post nothing because you’re afraid that you’re not posting the right thing. You know, both Lila and I like adore Colleen Hoover because of TikTok. Like, you know, there have been days…like it’s okay, and I’m not saying this about her in general, but it’s okay to come on and be a hot mess if that’s how your life is at that moment. It’s not like Instagram where you’re searching for one perfect beautiful picture and it’s gonna look one way and everybody’s gonna think you have this ideal life, that is not it. So, my piece of advice for somebody coming on is be yourself and be honest. And if that is a hot mess, that’s okay. That’s totally acceptable in book-talk culture.
Lila: And I think my piece of advice would actually be to remember that you are a reader too. So, bring your passion about books probably, the same passion that made you an avid reader, that probably turned you into an author, bring that passion to this space. Because it’s the same enthusiasm and passion for books that I think is driving book talk and making book talk such an important piece of the book world conversation that the Scholastic Book Fair, running right now at my daughter’s school, like the headline of the Virtual Book Fair is seen on book talk at the Scholastic Book Fair. And I think it’s that passion.
So, don’t let yourself get caught in the trap of, “I am a professional author and I must look professional and behave professionally,” and that that professionalism somehow must negate enthusiasm because…and I think this is particularly a toxic thing that romance authors do because a lot of times we’re fighting an uphill battle, as far as being taken seriously as a genre, as authors, whatever, never mind that like, objectively, the genre has all the metrics and sells all the books and makes all the money, right, but we still feel this little bit of…we’re still a little bit defensive and feel like we have to, you know, come across extra professional to be taken seriously. And I think that that…I’ve seen other romance authors and other genres, I think women who write high fantasy also fall into this a little bit, that they have to be a certain way to be taken seriously and that comes across very stiff when you’re looking at something at like TikTok. So, bring your reader enthusiasm to the platform.
Joni: Yeah, and I definitely reiterate what you said before about spending time on the app yourself and exploring it and getting to know, like that was something that Rachel and I talked about before this was that sometimes people come from other platforms, they don’t know how TikTok works, and like being a YouTuber doesn’t translate and, like you said, you won’t know how to engage with it if you haven’t had some time. And also done the thing where you scroll through on your first scroll and it’s all garbage that you don’t wanna see. Because I remember that, I was like, “I don’t understand what the big deal about this platform is, it’s so dumb.” And then, you know, it does get to know you. So yeah, I think that’s a really important point that you made as well, that people new to it should definitely spend some time exploring. Who are your favorite creators? It doesn’t have to be book talk. Anyone?
Jayne: Oh, I love Roddy Reads. So, Roddy Reads on TikTok is fantastic, Lorena Pages, Stacey Reads. Like, oh my gosh, there’s so many, I can’t even tell you. Hannah-Bob is great. Who else, Lila? I mean Lila and I probably send each other more videos than anyone would care to look at in their lifetimes.
Lila: Jayne and I can also actually have an entire conversation based just on using TikTok [inaudible 00:48:07] to speak to one another, it’s really bad. Like if she goes, “I’m not gonna do it,” I’m just like, “oh, Jayne’s about to do it.”
Jayne: I [inaudible 00:48:17] send her [inaudible 00:48:18] like I’m just thinking about it and she’s like, “What are you doing? Don’t do it,” and I cut my hair, I literally [inaudible 00:48:25].
Lila: Yeah, next picture it was just a chunk of hair. Also Easy Cat, [SP] what’s his actual name? I always forget, his username is Easy Cat, he’s one of the first people that I remember seeing. And I love him because he reads like all genres, there’s so many…who’s the lady in Australia, Jayne?
Jayne: Stacey Reads.
Lila: Stacey. Yeah, who I particularly love because she is now writing her first book, or she was writing her second one at this point, and she’s a reader who is just so funny and clever that book talk kind of collectively bullied her into writing a book.
Jayne: There’s Carrie Elks…
Lila: AK Mulford. Yeah.
Jayne: …student in our class. I was gonna say AK too, yeah. Carrie is like…
Lila: AK Mulford, absolutely.
Jayne: …a student in our class who kicked it out of the park. I love the videos that she creates, they’re amazing. So, Carrie Elks for sure, and then AK Mulford who was also a debut author, who launched her career on TikTok. And we invited her to come to our class. We did an interview with her, we have an interview series as part of the class. So, we invited her to come and join the group. And she was like, “Thanks but I don’t really use Facebook.” And then Lila and I were like, “Oh my god, we’re so old.” So, there are people out there today who are launching their careers on TikTok and doing extraordinarily well. Her book has performed very well.
And, you know, these aren’t like a spike and then go away, this is like prolonged success. We’re talking about like success with longevity. And, you know, that’s across book talk in general. So, we saw reports come out from NPD last year where they said, for the first time in their entire history, they named organic exposure on a social-media platform as a driver of market performance. So, they were saying that most of print-book sales for the entire market for last year were down in double digits but because of adult fiction, and they primarily identified Colleen Hoover who sold 770,000 copies of “It Ends With Us,” that adult-fiction market was up double digits and drew up the entire market. There were others, it wasn’t just hers, there was Adam Silvera, there were all the big ones you see, right, Akitar, Sarah J. Maas. All those people contributed to moving the needle and they directly attributed it to book talk.
So, you don’t see that. You know, like you don’t go into like my local Barnes & Noble and see a Facebook table but you see four book-talk tables. So, those are the kind of like prolonged success stories that we like to hear about. So, yeah, definitely AK Mulford was one of those, Carrie Elks is definitely one of those. So, I love to watch all those people and see their success and, yeah, to be in the TikTok tradition, you know, “Go, best friend.” Every single TikTok [inaudible 00:51:07], all of them for those people.
Lila: And one thing I want to…cause I don’t think we’ve touched on it as much, but I want to…like there’s so many huge success stories, right, like that book talk regularly makes news for the book world. Which is wild. But, but you can’t control that level of virality. You cannot make that happen. However, one of the things that Jayne and I are out here trying to push and make everyone believe is that you do not need a 100,000, 200,000 followers and to go mega viral. And yes, would that be a great thing? Fantastic, of course, right, but for small authors, for midlist authors, for brand new authors TikTok is a platform for those people too because book talk is massive. There are so many readers, there are so many people who are genuinely looking for a book to love. And that I think is amazing. And I hope that stays for book talk forever, that people are genuinely there looking for great books.
So, small authors, midlist authors, you can reach readers who want to read your book, who want to buy and read your book. And you can move the needle for yourself, even if it’s just a little bit. Including, this is my favorite example, I did not bother to put the majority of my books into print because I have been a digital-first author my whole career, it was never worth it, the only time I ever put books in print was if I was going to a signing and I knew my super fan readers would be there and they would be interested in buying a print copy of the book because I would sign it, right, I put books into print because of book talk. Originally, it was just so I could have the stupid book to hold up because there is a print aesthetic on the platform. Basically, it’s like Belle’s library bookshelf porn, that’s a big aesthetic on TikTok, just like people with these…I mean like arrange your books by rainbow color of the spine, like fantastic, I love it, I didn’t know we were doing that. Great, like let me participate. But, as an author, I started putting my books into print and I was like, “Whatever, just so I can buy a copy or two and hold it up on book talk.”
And I started to see print sales. For the first time in my career print sales actually are on my radar in any way. And I mean I write erotica, absolutely erotic romance and erotica really traditionally is not a big print mover. And for me to then see print sales 100% contributed to book talk because it’s literally I’ve never talked about the print books on any other platform. So, Jayne regularly just gets screenshots of my numbers where I say, “Jayne, am I crazy? Is this…”
Jayne: I mean like it’s so blatant though, like I think sometimes it’s hard for us to believe if you look at your own numbers. But like you posted that one of packing orders the other day and then you got $600 or $700 of print book order that day and the next day. There’s literally no other place that we’re talking about this, you know. And I know for a fact that this is the case because we both have direct shops where we sell autographed print books and our own ebooks and audiobooks, all that stuff. And I’ve made videos where I left a coupon code in the video. And that’s the only place where I talk to…one specific video led to over $700 of print book sales on my website in a weekend from one particular video I posted on TikTok.
So, you know, going back to what Lila’s saying, like you can move the needle for yourself. You don’t have to be, what we call, true virality is where you’re having lots of book talkers making videos about your book, whatever. That’s lovely. Like that’s great, hooray for all the people that it happens to. We can’t do that for ourselves, we can’t replicate that. But you don’t have to to make this worth your time. There’s no cost to this, this isn’t running a Facebook ad where you’re paying for exposure. This is like me making a video, something I’m doing anyway, signing books that I’m gonna mail out, and people are like, “Oh, I [inaudible 00:55:27].” And then, all of a sudden, you know, your order spiked the next day and you have $1,000 of orders. Like that was worth the 15 minutes it might have taken you to record a clip, put on some text, add music, pop it up, you know.
Joni: I gotta say like I went into this conversation not knowing how direct the link was. Because we know those stories, we’ve talked about the stories about books that go viral, but I really didn’t expect what you have told us about the data on how book talk is actually selling books. So, that’s really cool and interesting.
Jayne: And again, though it does…like I don’t wanna also just tell you…so, exactly coming back to a point you were making before, you cannot take an image that you made in Canva or Book Brush that has a static image of your cover and you write “99-cent sale” and stick some music on it, that is not gonna connect with people. So, you have to understand the book-talk culture, you have to…you know, and that’s really what our class does, right, is teach people how to make high converting videos. You can’t post anything and hope for those results, it has to be a high converting video and it has to tap into book-talk culture, it has to tap into those three things we talked about, educating, inspiring, or entertaining. It has to do all of those things and be high performing in order to have those results. So, yeah. And then you have to have a little luck too with the algorithm.
Rachel: And you have a course coming up in April, is that right?
Jayne: Yes, that’s correct. So, our course is called “TikTok Sells Books” and our website is tiktoksellsbooks.com. And we actually have a coupon code for your listeners, if they would like it, is T-T-S-B-K-O-B-O-5-0. And that will give people $50 off. The course is super intense, Lila and I give a lot of one-on-one feedback. So, we aren’t able to let that many people in every time, we’ve sold out every time we’ve offered the class. And we have about 30 spots. So, it’s not that many but, if people wanna get in, I would suggest doing that as soon as possible.
Rachel: Fantastic, we’ll make sure we share that with listeners. Is it full-time, is it 10 days of full-time course work, or is it something people can fit in around other things?
Lila: We encourage people to participate during those 10 days because Jayne and I do not write or edit or do…like our job becomes the class during those 10 days. But people can do it at their own pace, we will provide feedback on people’s…basically, we give people eight assignments, basically assignments to make the kind of videos…some of it’s to learn the skills you need to learn in order to do book talk correctly, like how to Stitch, how to Duet, how to use the timer so that you can, you know, create videos that sync to those complicated sounds, etc. But also then we ask people to make the kind of videos we know convert, the kind of specific types of videos that are important on book talk. And when you do that, we give you feedback on all of those. But you are able to do them at any time.
And also, because we run the class multiple times, people who…for example, we had some people in our February class who…you know, they signed up in December and it turns out they were on deadline in February, so, they weren’t able to do it. They’re gonna be jumping on and doing the assignments in time with the April class because we do have a private Facebook group, which we use to run this, which is also then a really great resource. We have a lot of great authors on there and we use that…you know, Jayne and I have talked about data, because it’s a nice private group, we share a lot of data and information. And that’s how we’re kind of amassing more and more knowledge around TikTok. So, we do encourage people to participate during the official period of the class but it is all tutorials and everything that people can access whenever they actually have time and are able to do it.
Jayne: Yeah, the only part of the course that happens live only is office hours. So, Lila and I do this, like we are with you, we’re on Zoom for 10 hours during that class, 2 hours a day every other day. And people can come on, ask questions. Lila hooks her phone up, we can walk people through on the actual app if they’re getting stuck with something. And we have kept up that, people like them so much, and that we do that in the off hours or the off months when we don’t have classes, we still have office hours. And then everyone from previous classes is also welcome to join those in the future.
So, they really can’t get rid of us once they’re in the class. The group is very active, you know, things change constantly on TikTok. People would be saying like, “Did somebody see hiccups with the algorithm today? Is this a new feature? Is something broken? My button moved, where’d it go?” So, the group is super active at all times. So yeah, we do encourage people to do it during the 10 days just because everybody…it also keeps you motivated when you see people struggling with the same things you are and progressing together. But you don’t have to, you can do it whenever you want.
Joni: Amazing. Well, this has been really really great. Thank you so much for talking to us. We need…
Jayne: [inaudible 01:00:20] talk to fellow book-talk people.
Joni: Yes, yeah. And we’ll definitely be following you on TikTok.
Rachel: Before we let you go though, drop your TikTok handles so listeners can follow you, please.
Jayne: Sure. My TikTok username is @JayneRylon, and it’s spelled J-A-Y-N-E-R-Y-L-O-N.
Lila: And mine is Lila Dubois Books, L-I-L-A-D-U-B-O-I-S-B-O-O-K-S.
Rachel: Awesome, thank you so much, guys.
Jayne: Thanks for having us.
Lila: Thank you for letting us come and be enthusiastic about TikTok.
Rachel: Thanks.
Lila: I know it’s a lot, I hope no one who’s listening who isn’t on the platform yet feels totally overwhelmed. It is a process to get yourself on and make sure that you’re oriented correctly so you start seeing book content. But please believe us, no matter where you are in your author career, no matter who you are, what genre you write, don’t come at me with, “My genre’s not on TikTok,” yes it is, you just haven’t seen them yet. It is a really really valuable tool for authors, but more than that it’s a great book community. And that is just so exciting.
Jayne: It’s super fun, it really is.
Rachel: Thank you for listening to the Kobo Writing Life Podcast. If you are interested in enrolling in the April, 2022, TikTok Sells Books Course, use the promo code T-T-S-B-K-O-B-O-5-0 to get $50 off your enrollment. And we will be sure to include links to the course, as well to Jayne and Lila’s books and TikToks in our show notes.
If you are enjoying this podcast, please, be sure to rate, review, and subscribe. And if you’re looking for more tips on growing your self-publishing business, you can find us at kobowritinglife.com. And be sure you are following us on socials, we are @KoboWritingLife on Facebook and Twitter and @kobo.writing.life on Instagram. And we have yet to make our TikTok debut but please join me in peer pressuring Joni to make this happen.
Joni: I’m into it, we’ll do this. Stay tuned. This episode was produced by Joni Di Placido and Rachel Warden. Editing is by Kelly Rowbotham. Our theme music gets composed by Tear Jerker. And a huge thank you to Jayne and Lila for being our guests today.
If you’re ready to start your self-publishing journey, sign up today at kobo.com/writinglife. Until next time, happy writing.
