There’s an old adage that says you have to spend money to make money. Up until now I’ve been cautious about how I spend my marketing budget, because there’s never any guarantee on what will actually work (and I didn’t have much money to spend!). Then back in January, I had amazing success with a BookBub ad and I have to admit I liked the feeling of making the equivalent of a full-time income. Since then, my sales have steadily decreased, although they are still much higher than they were pre-BookBub.
So when I saw an advert about Mark Dawson’s Ads for Authors course, I took a second – and then a third look. I’d considered doing the course about 18 months ago, but that was before I had indie-published any books, and Mark
recommended that the course might not be as useful to me. Now however, I had no excuse.
The course is $749 which seems like a big investment to me, when last year I was earning much less than that a month. But since my BookBub bonanza, I have the money. And I had to ask myself, am I willing to invest in myself, in my writing business?
Of course there are no guarantees that I will get any return on investment, but I have heard a number of examples of people who have. I sat down and had a good hard look at what was being offered. And I looked at what I spent on other things. Each year I spend close to $2000 to attend the Romance Writers of Australia conference, and I was willing to spend $372 on a single Bookbub ad – so really the cost is the equivalent of 2 BookBub ads, but I’ll be able to use the knowledge for many more ads.
But the expense isn’t just the course, I need to spend money on running Facebook Ads and Amazon Ads as well.
I procrastinated for some time, until I looked at my business plan. Right there in black and white I have the goals of building my reader group (and if you haven’t joined yet, make sure you do!) and increasing my sales. This course offers ways of doing both.
In the end I convinced myself to take the plunge. I am worth investing in and this is one way that people have seen a lot of success. So I signed up for the course this morning. Since then, I’ve started the modules and I’m only in the overview stage – a lot of which I already know. But I have picked up a few tips and my plan is to finish the training this week and start to implement what I’ve learnt.
I’ll post my results as I go, so you can see how my risk pays off. But right now, I’m feeling good about believing in myself and my business enough to invest in it.
