Selling Books Live On Social Media With Adam Beswick

Welcome to the Creative Pen podcast. I'm Joanna Penn, thriller author and creative entrepreneur, bringing you interviews, inspiration, and information on writing, craft, and creative business. You can find the episode show notes, your free author blueprint, and lots more at the creativepen. com. And that's pen with a double N. And here's the show. Hello creatives. I'm Joanna Penn and this is episode number 847 of the podcast and it is Friday the 23rd of January 2026 as I record this. In today's show I'm talking with Adam Bezwick about selling books live on social media. Yes, I know going live on social is not a new thing but going live with the intent of selling books rather than going live and doing other things. Uh, live selling is definitely a new trend with social media in the book industry for sure and it fits into the double down on being human element rather than the more polished AI style videos that are emerging and will only get better. So really interesting and that is coming up in the interview section. in writing and publishing. Well, on the self-publishing with Ally podcast, new takes on marketing with Horna Ross has some great framing around fundamentals. So, first of all, distinguish between marketing and promotion. Marketing is described as an evergreen everyday process that encompasses your promise to the reader, your author platform, your book descriptions, metadata, things that keep working for you every day. In contrast, promotion is short-term, typically focused on driving sales for a specific book over defined periods such as through ad boosts or email blasts. And yeah, I mean, for me, this podcast is marketing. It's also an income stream, but it is marketing, too. I mean, it's just ongoing year after year. Brings people in, they find me, find my books, and maybe some [clears throat] people buy them. Maybe you have bought one. Thank you very much. But yes, so marketing is this kind of ongoing stuff. And then promotion. Yes, doing an ad campaign for a specific launch period or doing Kickstarter where you do promotion to drive people to the campaign. And in the podcast, Ora says it's good to have general marketing systems and processes established before attempting the kind of spike promotion. Otherwise, people run around doing all these things and spending money without necessarily achieving sustainable results. And I think this is a really good point because I feel like I get so many emails that say, "Oh, I've got this book launch. Can you tell me what to do in the sort of week of book launch or month of book launch? " And I'm like, "Well, I focus on long-term marketing to be honest. " Sure, I send some emails, do some social media, but mainly I focus on long-term marketing. And I'm sure you will have heard that most authors and most publishers make more money from the backlist. So, that kind of ongoing book marketing is what drives income. And in case you don't know, the back list is kind of all your books that are not the current book. So there's the book that you've just put out or you're about to put out. That's your front list. And then your back list is everything else. So also in that episode this idea of identifying your specific publisher type because many of the tips and of course you're going to hear from Adam today and you've heard from many people on this show and the sort of overwhelm that can come from trying to do too much especially if you don't know what suits you. So uh talks about three different kinds of publishers. First are the engagement publishers who thrive on community social media. They like crowdfunding events and maintain close contacts with readers. Then there's the craft publishers who prioritize the quality of the writing, the book as an object, and their marketing focuses on reviews, awards, festivals, and pitching to influencers, literary influencers, rather than driving social media. And volume publishers who focus more on rapid release algorithms, paid ads, driving visibility and sales, but not necessarily the long-term engagement. And this talks about the fact that you can't really do everything. You need to choose one. I would say that I well I'm definitely not a volume publisher. I do some paid ads, but I'm definitely a craft publisher. I want to have the best book possible and I really like doing highquality physical objects now. And also I'm a bit of an engagement publisher. I guess I much prefer the kind of community we have through the show and through the Patreon and going to events and I like Kickstarter because it's more close proximity rather than mass market. But yeah, whatever suits you. There's no good or bad. It's just

understanding who you are is important. So, lots more tips in that at the Self-Publishing with Ally podcast. And also on that feed is my recent episode with Ora from last week. We discuss trends for 2026, agentic AI for marketing and more. And another podcast recommendation, David Senra interviews Toby Lutka. So Senrise is SEN R and that is his podcast. Uh interviews Toby Lutka who is the CEO and co-founder of Shopify. Many of us have Shopify stores. I have two creativepenbooks. com and jfpenbooks. com. So why is this important and interesting to kind of listen to certain founders? Well, back in November, I talked about the importance of discernment when it comes to the companies we work with, the people we listen to, the opinions we consider to be important versus those we can ignore. And it's funny that it brings up something for me recently. Somebody gave me some feedback and it riled me up quite considerably and Jonathan said to me, "Why do you care about this person's feedback? " And the words had riled me up and then I kind of thought about it and thought, "You know what? No, I don't actually care about that person's feedback. They're not somebody who I need to consider. " Like, I take it very seriously when some people give me feedback, but not everyone. Anyway, back to this interview. So, I think it's important if you decide to work with a company long-term, I did the same with WordPress back in the day, Matt Mullenweg and everybody over there, I was like, I think this company will be around for a long time, so I'm happy to build my platform on it. Blueberry, the host for this show, same thing. I met the founder, who actually only recently died, and I was like, I am impressed. I love their vision. So I think it's really important to find companies that we want to work with long term. And so when I looked at the longevity of building stuff on Shopify, I looked at Toby Luca. And this interview is a good discussion about business. So even if you're not interested in Shopify, just in general, it has some great insights for authors. First of all, I love that Toby loves books. He views books. I mean, he's a coder, right? He's a coder. He's a founder. and he views books as the ultimate tool for acquiring knowledge, describing them as cheat codes for real life. So all the people listening to this interview are being advised to read. He argues that if you do not read, you only live one lifetime, but if you read, you access the entire learnings of someone else's career in a few hours. Totally agree. Obviously, he's talking about non-fiction. This is why I think non-fiction readers like myself, especially in this academic phase I'm in, I'm buying books that are actually pretty expensive and then I get them and I realize they're not expensive. They're extremely useful, in-depth books, compressing decades of experience into something that allows me to learn and to think. So yeah, I love that Toby is just encouraging reading reading and actually reading books. And also I know sometimes all the media shares this stuff about attention spans dropping and maybe we should just give up on books and people just aren't reading. It's not true. Of course, some people are not reading, but many people are. And at the end of the day, we write books for people who do actually read. — [laughter and gasps] — I'm not going to turn my books into some, I don't know, series of flashcards for people who don't want to read it. So yeah, anyway, that was the first thing. I thought that was brilliant. We need more people going on podcast, big podcasts like David Senra saying you need to read. They also in the interview, they discuss the mindset of constant improvement, referencing James Dyson's habit of looking at a finished product and immediately asking how it can be better, then putting it down and doing it again. Lutka writes hit pieces on his past work, critiquing what he previously built to avoid resting on his laurels. And I certainly am impressed by how they keep improving Shopify. And for authors, we can really take this approach to editing and our backlist instead of going, "Oh, well that book was amazing and just doing the same thing. " Always looking to improve in a different way. And at the same time, I think keeping perspective on our past work. I was reminded during this sort of reflecting on this about the museum of Picasso in Malaga in southern Spain. Now Picasso was born in Malaga and you so you get his very early pieces and quite frankly they are terrible. They would be what I could do. I mean it's so funny. You're like oh I could do that. And the fact is that is where people start. they start doing

something that anyone can do. And then with all the many thousands of works that Picasso did over his very long life, it's just encouraging to see that in a body of work, in a lifetime of work, you can improve. Keep writing, keep creating, improve what you have. So hopefully that reflection might help you as well. It is definitely frustrating when we feel like a book is beyond us, that we [snorts] feel like perhaps it's a stretch to try and write that, but you can get there. It just takes time. They also talk about the sunk cost fallacy. Lutka advises aggressively pruning the decision tree. So if you go down a certain route and if something changes that changes the game and makes this route no longer viable, you must prune back the decision tree all the way and then go forward rather than just keep on flogging that dead horse and trying to make the old plan work. And I see this a lot at the moment. People are trying to just resurrect things that might have worked a few years ago but don't work anymore and rather than moving on. So kind of taking things back to first principles and then going forward. He does warn that humans are reflexively scared of change and often choose a miserable known environment over a new path. And overcoming the sunk cost fallacy is essential for making good choices. This can happen in our writing work as well. In fact, with Bones of the Deep last week, I which is the thriller I'm writing at the moment, I really had to strip it back. I was quite far along in the story and then I was like oh no this is I this is not how it ends and as I'm a discovery writer I have been struggling to see how it ended and then as I was editing and I edit by hand I've been at the cafe every morning and I was like oh okay this needs to go back all the way back to here and then I need to move forward again. So I redid kind of the last six seven chapters which is part of the course for a discovery writer for sure. So yeah, that is on David Senro's podcast and he has some interesting interviews, especially if you're into entrepreneurship, business. His is not specifically on writing. It's just I think Toby Luca sits at the cusp, I guess, of writing, entrepreneurship, and Shopify becoming an increasingly important source of revenue for many authors with mature author businesses, let's say. And I think that will only continue with their partnership with OpenAI, with Google, and the way Agentic Shopping is going to go. So yeah, something to consider. Then in terms of other founders who I rate, Chris Banks from Proriting Aid, who sponsored the show, in fact, they sponsor today's show, but this bit has nothing to do with that. But Chris is writing a book on mindset, the writer's mind. Now, if you think about proriting, I've been with Proriting for years now. I use it for editing and Chris is a writer and originally programmed proriting a to help him with [clears throat] writing a book. And so he is now writing another book and it is called the writer's mind and it's about the mental challenges of writing. And what he says is 35% of writers say they have seriously considered giving up writing because it's too mentally challenging. And those are the writers who are still here. Many have given up. So he wants to get into this and in fact he is doing a survey. I've done the survey myself. I think it's really important that we learn more about mindset. I obviously have my book the successful author mindset which Chris has read which was very nice. But you can do the short survey that is at proriting. com/mindservey all one word proriting a. com/mindservey and I'll put the link in the show notes. So yeah, if you do that survey and help Chris with writing that book, I believe it's out in um next year. I was going to say 1997 then. Let's try 2027, shall we? It should be out in 2027, but that is proriting a. com/mindservey. In personal news, I did, as I was mentioning, I did finish the major edits for Bones of the Deep. I have printed it out one more time. This is my third full edit. Not full draft because I didn't reddraft everything. But yeah, I'm going to read through again end to end, do the final light edits, which are the line edits basically before sending to Kristen, my editor, and also two beta readers, an oceanographer and a sailor who has experience on tall ships. This is the only kind of beta reading I use which is sort of experts in domains to make sure I haven't really messed up any of the research. I don't use beta readers for story or anything like that. That's why I work with a professional editor. But I am really happy with the book now. And

this is the moment we all long for, right? When everything falls into place and there's that sense that yes, this is the story I wanted to tell. And that's where I got to this week thankfully because this one has been bubbling for a really long time. So, I did this original tall ship journey from Fiji to Vanuatu in 1999. And I've thought about it over the years. I've mentioned it a number of times. I had the setting and I had the journey. That was always going to be the background, but I needed the right themes, the right characters, the right plot to make it into a story. And finally, I found that. And this degree has helped. And yeah, I'm really happy with it. Now, of course, the happiness level with our books changes over time, but for now, I'm really happy. And it does echo part of my degree, which is really good because I've put my degree on the business, and my accountant will want to know how the expense brings me income. This book is part of it. In fact, this book may even pay for my master's degree. And I am now back into the term. I have a theology module, a philosophy of death module, and then a death in other religions module. Very interesting work. So, I'm back into that. And I also wanted to encourage anyone who is struggling with their novel. I completely get it. I do feel like this one has been some wrangling and also extremely tiring. And writing fiction I find a lot more tiring than non-fiction. mainly because you have to make so many decisions and editing is intensive because you make so many decisions about words. I can only really edit I don't know maybe 25 pages 30 pages a day because it's just deep work. I don't know how people can do it for longer. the wet wear, i. e. your brain gets tired and yeah, so just to encourage you if you're like, "Oh, why am I so tired? I'm writing this novel. " Well, that's why you have a lot of decisions to make. So yes, once Bones of the Deep is with Kristen and the proofreaders, I will get back to the marketing stuff for the Kickstarter, but I don't find the marketing stuff, the visual stuff, the I've got some ideas for the custom end papers that I'm quite excited about, so I want to get into that. But yes, more at jfpen. com/bones if it sounds like your kind of story. I also when this goes out I will have finished the last business for authors webinar and I've been really enjoying the live sessions. So I'm definitely going to do more. I might do a webinar on Kickstarter and certainly another one on AI for authors but I'm not sure of the timing yet because of my college work is back at full speed. And after this term I'll then be doing a dissertation which will actually be around AI and death in some form. But of course, I do have my live Patreon office hours and I will also be speaking at the Alliance of Independent Authors Indie Author Lab at London Bookf Fair on the 11th of March, 2026. You can get tickets at self-publishingadvice. org/indyauthor lab. So, links in the show notes on that. There are only limited tickets cuz it's much more hands-on day. It's not like a sit there and listen day. It's much more handson. So, please leave a comment on the podcast show notes at the creativepen. com or on the YouTube channel. Email me, send me your thoughts, pictures of where you're listening or your favorite cemetery, crypt or death culture place somewhere where you think I would like to see Joannapen. com. Joanna creativepen. com. And I've had some more emails from people who say they're getting more spam with my name on it. Well, that's not me. So, sorry about that, but I can't do anything about it. If the email is from joanna@thecreativepen. com, then it is me. But I love to hear from you. It makes this more of a conversation. Today's show is sponsored by Proriting Aid because however you choose to publish, whether you go indie or you want a traditional deal, you need to make your book the best it can be. Proriting aid is one of my absolutely must-use tools in my writing process for fiction, non-fiction, short stories, everything. And in fact, this ad is great timing as I will, as I mentioned, be using it this week. Once I finished a draft, I use proriting aid to fix up issues. And then I fix them up into Scrivener. I use it with Scrivener, but you can use it with loads of things. And then I do it again before I send it to Kristen, my human editor. Proriting aid knows all the rules of editing and helps you apply them. And of course, you can choose not to make the changes as you like. It can make your writing more active, find repeated words, find words and sentences you could improve. You can add sensory detail. It will fix sentence structure, grammar, punctuation, typos, spacing, and more. I tell you what, I often do find spacing things. You know, when you've added extra spaces, it

finds those. That's super useful. There is also now a manuscript analysis developmental editing tool and a beta reader report so you can get an editorial analysis of your whole manuscript. So won't an editor do all this? Well, yes, of course they can. But I'd rather pay my editor to fix the things the software can't. And in fact, what's nice about these reports and the various things you can do now with proriting aid is I can make the book the best I it can be until I cannot do anymore, until the machine can't do anymore. And then I send it to Kristen, my editor, and she finds a whole load more things. So for me, it's about doing all the things that are possible before a human editor can then fix the things the software can't, the kind of bigger issues and the things that only humans find in a human read. So, I use Proriting Aid as my essential editing tool before working with humans. So, check out the free edition or get 15% off the premium edition by using my link proriting. com/jo proritinga. com/janna. So, this type of corporate sponsorship pays for the hosting, transcription, and editing, but my time in creating the show is sponsored by my community at patreon. com/thecreativepen. Thanks to the 15 new patrons who've joined this week, and thanks to everyone who's been supporting for months and years. If you join the community, you get access to all my backlist videos and audio covering writing, craft, author, business, AI tutorials, and more. This week I shared a tutorial on Claude Co-work for Amazon ads and A+ content and that was I guess more of a mindset futurist thing because Claude Co-work is one of these agentic systems that can actually do work for you. So I wanted to share that. It only came out last week so it's really brand new. The Patreon is a monthly subscription, the equivalent of buying me a black coffee a month or a couple of coffees if you're feeling generous. So, if you get value from the show and you want more, come on over and join us at patreon. com p a t r e o n. com/thecreative pen. Right, let's get into the interview. Adam Bezwick is a best-selling fantasy author and an expert in Tik Tok marketing for authors. A former NHS mental health nurse, Adam went full-time as an indie author in 2023 and now runs AP Bezwick Publications. Welcome back to the show, Adam. — Hi there, and thank you for having me back. — Oh, I'm super excited to talk to you today. Now, you were last on the show in May 2024, so just under two years, and you had gone full-time as an author the year before that. So, just tell us like what's changed for you in the last couple of years. What does your author business look like now? — That is terrifying to hear that it was that long ago because it genuinely feels like it was a couple of months ago. So things have certainly been turbocharged since we last spoke. Last time we spoke, I'd had a big focus on going into direct sales. And I think if I recall correctly, we were just about to release a book by Alexis Brookke, which was the first book in a series that we had worked with another author on, which was the first time we were doing that. Since then, we now have six authors on our books with a range of full agreements or print only deals. with that focus of direct selling. We have expanded our Tik Tok shop. So in 2024, I kind of stepped back from Tik Tok shop just because of constraints around my own time. We took Tik Tok shop seriously again in 2025 and scaled that to a six figure revenue stream throughout 2025. effectively starting from scratch. Which means we have had to go from having a office pod in the garden to my wife who's now left her career as a structural engineer to join the business because there was too much for me to manage to a small office space to now we have the biggest office space in our office block because we organize our own print runs and do all our distribution worldwide from APHQ as we call it. — And you don't print books but you have a warehouse. Yeah, we have a warehouse. We work with different printers to order books in. So, we print quite large scale uh well large scale to me uh volumes of books and then we have them order to here and then we will sign them all and distribute everything from here. — Sarah, your wife being a structural engineer, it seems like she would have be a real help in organizing a business of warehousing and all of that. Has that been great? you know, because I worked with my husband for a while and we decided to stop doing that. — Well, we're still married, so I'm taking a win. And funny enough, we don't

actually fall out so much at work, and when we do, it's more about me being quite chaotic with how I work, but also quite I'm I can at times be quite inflexible about how I want things to be done. But what Sarah's fantastic at is the organization, the analytics, the she so she runs all the logistical side of things. So when we moved into the bigger office space, she insisted on us having different offices and she's literally shoved me on the other side of the building so I'm out the way so I can just come in and write, come and do my bit to sign the books and then she can just get on with organizing the orders and getting those packed and sent out to readers. She manages all the tracking, the customs, all the stuff that would really bog me down. She I wouldn't say she ne ne ne ne ne cessarily enjoys it when she's ne necessarily getting some cranky emails from people whose books might have gone missing or have been held up at customs, but she's really good at that side and she's really helped bring systems in place to make sure the fulfillment side is as smooth as possible. I think this is so important and I want everyone to hear you on this because you're at heart you're the creative, you're a writer and sure you're building this business, but I feel like one of the biggest mistakes that creative first authors make is not getting somebody else to help them. And it doesn't have to be a spouse, right? It can also be another professional person like Sasha Black's got various people working for her. But I think you just can't do it alone, right? You can't. — Yeah, absolutely not. I would have drowned long before now. So when Sarah joined the team, it was very much I was at a position there where I'd said to her, "Look, I need to look at bringing someone in cuz I'm drowning. " And it was only when she took a look at where her career was and she'd kind of done everything she wanted to do. She was a senior engineer, she'd kind of achieved she'd completed all the big projects. I mean, this is a woman who's designed football stands in across the UK and some of the biggest barn conversions and school conversions and things like that. So, she'd done everything professionally that she'd wanted to and was perhaps losing that passion that she once had. So, she said she was interesting. So we just said look why don't you come and spend a bit of time working with me within the business see whether it works for you see if we can find an area that works for you not you working for the business working for you that we maintain that family that work life balance and then if it doesn't we're in a position where we can set you up to start working for yourself as an engineer again but under your own terms and then yeah we just kind of went from strength to strength we made it through the first year where and well done. — I think we made it through the first year without any arguments and she we she's now been full-time in the business for two years. So — I think that's great. Really good, really great to hear that cuz when I met you properly, I think in Seville I did I was like you're going to hit some difficulty because I could see that if you were going to scale as fast as you were aiming to. There are problems of scale, right? There's a reasons why lots of us don't want a blooming warehouse. — Yeah, absolutely. And I mean I think it's twofold. I am an author at heart. That's my passion. But I'm also a businessman and a creative as in from the from a marketing point of view. So I always see writing is the passion the business side and the creating of content. It that's the work that so I never see writing as work. So I'm always when I was a nurse I was the nurse that was always put on the wards where no one else wanted to work because that's where I thrived. I thrive in the chaos. So put me with people who were really had really challenging behavior or who were really unwell and needed that really intense support and displayed quite often problematic behaviors and I would thrive in those environments because I'd always like to prove that you can get the best out of anyone and I very much work in that man manner now. So the more chaotic the more pressure charged the situation is the better that I thrive in that. So if I was just sat writing a book and that was it, I'd probably get less done because I get bored and I wouldn't feel like I was challenging myself. As you said, the flip side of that is that risk of burnout is very, very real and I have come very, very close. But as a former mental health nurse, I am very good at spotting my own signs of when I'm not taking good care of myself and if I don't, my Sarah sure as hell does. — No, I think that's great. Really, really good to hear. Okay. So, you talked there about creating the content is work and you have driven your success. I would say what almost entirely driven your success with Tik Tok. Would that be right that it's really driven? — Well, no. I' I'd kind of come back to push back on that just to say it isn't just Tik Tok. I would say definitely organic marketing, but not just Tik Tok.

I I'm always quick to pivot if something isn't working or that, you know, there's a dip in sales and I'm always looking at how we can not necessarily keep growing, but it's about sustaining what you've built so that we can carry on doing this. If the business stops earning money, I can't keep doing what I love doing and me and my wife can't keep supporting our family with an a stable income, which is what we have now. So, I would say Tik Tok is what started it all. But I did the same as having all my books on Amazon, which is why I switched to doing wide and direct sales is I didn't want all my eggs in one basket. So I was always exploring what platforms I can use to best utilize organic marketing to the point where my author Tik Tok channel is probably my third lowest avenue for directing traffic to my store at the moment. I have a separate channel for my Tik Tok shop which generates great traffic but that's a separate thing because I treat my Tik Tok shop as a separate audience because that only goes out to a UK audience whereas my main Tik Tok channel goes out to a worldwide audience. — Okay, we are going to get into Tik Toks. I do want to talk about that but you said Tik Tok shop UK and then you mentioned organic marketing. What do you mean by that? — Yes. So when I say organic marketing, I mean marketing your books in a way that is a detriment to your bank balance. So what to break that down further is you can be paying for say for example you set up a Facebook ad and you are paying5 a day just for a testing phase for an ad that potentially isn't going to work. You potentially have to run five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 ads at5 a day to find one out that works that will make your book profitable. So there's a lot of testing, a lot of money that goes into that. So with organic marketing, it's using video marketing or slideshows or carousels on Tik Tok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, wherever you want to put it to find the content that does resonate with your readers that generate sales and it doesn't cost you anything. So you I can create a video on Tik Tok, put it out there, and it reaches three 400 people. That hasn't cost me any money at all. So those three 400 people have seen my contact content. That's not Tik Tok's job for that to generate sales. That's my job to convert those views into sales. And if it doesn't, I just need to look at the content, say, well, that hasn't hit my audience or if it has, it hasn't resonated. So, what do I need to do with my content to make it resonate and then transition into sales? And then once you find something that works, it's just a case of rinse and repeat. Keep tweaking it, keep changing or using variants of that content that you've that's working to generate sales. And if you manage to do that consistently, you've already got content that you know that works. So when you've built up consistent sales and you're perhaps earning, you know, a few, it could be a few, thousand pounds a month, it could be five figures a month. You've then got a pool of money that you've generated that you can then use to invest into paid ads using the content you've already created organically and tested organically for what your audience is going to interact with. — Okay. So I think because I'm old like old school from the old days, we would have called that content marketing. But I feel like the difference of what you're doing and what Tik Tok I think the type of behavior Tik Tok has driven is the actual sales, the conversion into sales. So for example, this interview, right, my podcast is content marketing. It go puts our words out in the world and some people find us and some people buy stuff from us and so it's content marketing but it's not the way you're analyzing content that actually drives sales like based on that content that there's no way of tracking any sales that come from this interview. We're just never going to know. Right. So, I think that's that feels to me the big difference between what you're doing with content versus what I and many other I guess older creators have done, which is we put stuff out there for free, hope that some people might find us and some of those people might buy. It's quite different. — I would still argue that it is organic marketing because you you've got a podcast that people don't have to pay to listen to that they get enjoyment from and a byproduct of that is you generate some income passively through that. Now if you if you think of your podcast as one product and your video content is the same or you know these social media platforms you don't just post your podcast on one platform. You will utilize as many platforms as you can unless you have a brand agreement where a platform is paying you to solely use their platform because you yourself are the driver for the audience there. So I would say a podcast is a form of organic marketing. I could start a podcast about um video reading. And then the idea being is you build up an audience and then when you

drop in those releases, that audience then go and buy that product. So, for example, if you've got a self-help author book coming out that if you drop that into your podcast, chances are you're going to get a lot of sales from your a lot more sales from your audience that are here to listen to you as the inspirational storyteller that you are from a business point of view than what you would if you announced that you had a new crime novel coming out or a horror story coming out that you've written. because your audience within here is an is generally an author audience who are looking to refine their craft and either whether that be the writing or to selling of the books or living the dream of being a full-time author. So yeah, I would say I think it's more a terminology thing. — Well, let's talk about why I wanted to talk to you. So, a friend of ours told me that you're doing really well with live sales. And I was like, this was just before Christmas, I think. And I was like, live sales? Like, what does that even mean? And then I saw that Kim Kardashian was doing live sales on Tik Tok and did this Kimmus thing and Snoop Dogg was there and it was like this sort of massive event where they were selling and I was like oh it's like TV sales the TV sales channel where you show things and then people buy immediately and I was like wait is Adam like the Kim Kardashian of the indie authors tell us about this live sale thing. — I won't go that far as to say that I am the Kim Kardashian. What it is that I'm passionate about learning but also sharing what's working for me so that other authors can succeed and do that without what I'm sharing being stuck behind a payw wall. It's a big gripe of mine that you get all these courses and all these things you can do and everything has to be behind a payw wall when if I've got the time I'll just share. Hence why you know we were in Vegas doing the presentations for Author Nation which I think had you have been in my talk Joe you would have heard me talking about the lifestyling. Oh, I missed it. I'll have to get the replay. — So, no, I only covered a short section of it, but what I actually said within that talk is for me, live selling is going to be the next big thing. So, if you are not live selling your books at the moment, and you are not paying attention to it, start paying attention to it. I started paying attention about six months ago and I have seen constant growth to a point where I've had to post less content because doing one live stream a week was making more money than what me posting content and burning myself out every single day for the Tik Tok shop was doing. So I did a live stream at the beginning of Christmas for example. Bit of prep work went into it. We had a whole Christmas Eve setup and within that one live stream we generated three and a half thousand pounds of book organic book sales. — So obviously that isn't something that happened overnight. That took me doing a regular Friday stream from September all the way through to December to build up to that moment. In fact I think that was Black Friday sorry where we did that. But what I looked at I was like right I haven't got the bandwidth because of all the plates I was spinning to go live 5 days a week. However, I can commit to a Friday morning and because that is the day when Sarah isn't in the office and I can I'm it's my day to pack the orders. So, I've already got I thought I'll go live whilst I'm packing the orders and just hang out and chat. And I slowly started to find on average I was earning between three400 pounds doing that, packing orders that I already had to pack. I've just found a way to monetize it and engage with a new audience whilst doing that. And that's the thing that's key is it is a new audience. You have a you have people who like to consume their content through short form content or long form content. Then you have people who like to consume content with human interaction on a live and it's a completely different ballgame — because what Tik Tok is enabling us to do on other platforms. I am looking at other platforms for live selling that you can engage with an audience but because on Tik Tok you can upload your products people can buy the products direct whilst you are live on that platform and you for that you will pay a small fee to Tik Tok which is absolutely worth it and is part of the reason we've been able to scale to having a six foot six figure business within Tik Tok shop itself as one revenue stream. — Okay. So a few things you mentioned there the integration with Tik Tok shop as I've said many times I'm not on Tik Tok I am on Instagram. So on and on Instagram you can incorporate your meta catalog to Shopify. — Y — so do you think the same principle applies to Instagram or YouTube as well I think has an integration right with Shopify. So do you think the same thing would work that way? — Um I think it's possible. Yeah absolutely. It's as long as people can click and buy that product from whatever content they are working. But usually what it will have to do is redirect them to your store and you still got all the conversion metrics

that have to kick in. They have to be happy with the shipping. product description or stuff like that. With Tik Tok shop is very much a one-stop shop. People click on the product. They can still be watching the video, click to buy something — and not leave the stream. So the stream's on and then so let's say you're packing one of your books. Does that product link just pop up and then people can buy that book that as you're packing it? — So we've got lots and lots of products on our store now. So we have I always have a product in that has all our products listed and I always keep all of the bundles towards the top because they generate more income than a single book sale. So what'll happen is I can showcase a book. I can then just I'll just tap the screen to show what product it is that I'm packing and then I'll just talk about it and then if people want it, they just click that click the product link and then they can just buy it straight away. What people get a lot of enjoyment about, which I never expected in a million years, is watching people pack their order there and then. So, as an author, we're not just selling a generic product. We're selling a book that we have written, that we have put our heart and soul into. And people love that. and that it's a way of letting them into a bit of you. Give them a bit of information. Talk to them. Show them how human you are. If you're on that live stream being an absolute ass and not very nice, people aren't going to buy your books. But if you're being welcoming, you're chatting, you're talking to everyone, you're interacting, you're showcasing books, and then if what we do is if someone orders on the live stream, we throw some extra stuff in. So they don't just get the books, they'll get some art prints included, they'll get some bookmarks thrown in. And then we've got merch that we'll throw in as a little thank you. Now, it's all stuff that is low cost to us because actually we're acquiring a customer in that moment that I've got people that have then come on, they come on to every single Friday live stream that I do now. They have bought every single product in our catalog and they are harassing me for when the next release is out because they want more before they even know what that is. They want it because it's — being produced by us. Yeah. Because of our brand. So actually with the lives what I found is the branding has become really important and we're at a stage where we're being asked because I'm quite well known for wearing beanie hats and stuff on live streams or video content that people are like when are you going to release some beanie hats you know when next time we say every now and again Sarah will drop some AP branded merch so it'll be like beer coasters with like the AP logo on or a tote bag with and people it's not stuff that we sell at this stage, but people we give them away. So like the more money people spend, the more stuff we put in — and people are like, "No, no, you need to add these to the store because we want to buy them. " So there's a that it's actually the brand itself is growing, not just the book sales. So that's becoming better known. We've got we're at Pacifyon in April and there's so many people on that live stream that have bought tickets to meet us in person at this conference in April, which is amazing. So there's so much going on and because — it's Tik Tok. Tik Tok shop only works in the country where you are based. So it only goes out to a UK audience which is why I keep it separate from my main channel which means we're tapping into a completely new audience because up until last year I'd always targeted America because that's where my biggest readership was. — Yeah. Wow. There's so much to this. Okay. But first of all most people are not going to have their own warehouse. be packing live. So for authors who are selling on, let's just say people are selling on Amazon. Can live sales still work for them? As in, could they still go live at a regular time every week and talk about a book and see if that drives sales even if it's at Amazon? — Yeah, absolutely. I would test that because ultimately you're creating a brand. You're putting yourself out there and you're consistently showing up. So you can have people that have never heard of you that just stumble across your live think oh what they doing there and they're bit curious so they might ask some questions they might not they might see some other interactions there's a million and one things you can do on that live to generate conversation I've done it where I've just I've had 150 books to sign so I've just lined up the books stood in front of the camera and just switched the camera on while I'm signing the books and just chatted away to people without any product links and people will come back and be like oh I've just been to your store and bought your Levantia series and stuff like that. So, absolutely that can work. The key is putting in the work and setting it up. I started out by getting five copies of one book, signing them and selling them on Tik Tok shop. I sold them in a day and then that built up to um effectively what we have now. I switched that got my eyes open for direct selling. So when I was working with Bookvault and they were integrated with my store and so they orders came to me but then they went to Bookvault they printed and distributed but we got to a point scaling wise where we're like if

we want to take this to the ne next level we need to take on distribution ourselves because the profit lines are better the margins are bigger. So that's why we started doing it ourselves, but only once we a proven track record of sales spanning 18 months to two years and had the confidence. It was actually myself and Sasha that we kind of set up at the same time and egged each other on. I think I was just a tiny bit ahead of it with setting up a warehouse and then as you've seen Sasha's gone from strength to strength. It doesn't come without its trigger warnings in the sense of it isn't an easy thing to do. I think you have to have a certain skill set for live selling, mindset for the physicality that comes with, you know, when we've had a delivery of two and a half thousand books and we've got to bring them up to the first floor where the office is. I don't have a massive team of people. It's myself and Sarah and every now and again we get a dad in to help us cuz he's retired now. So, he'll just come in and we'll give him a bottle of wine as a thank you. But that's it. — You need to give him some more wine. I think you've got to be able to roll your sleeves up and do the work. But I think if you've got the work ethic and that drive to succeed, then there's absolutely anyone can do. There's nothing special about my books in that sense. You know, I I've got a group called Novel Gains where I've actually started a monthly challenge yesterday and we've got like two and a half nearly nearing two and a half thousand people in the group now. And the group has never been more active because it's really energized and charged and people are seeing the success stories and people are going on lives who never thought that it would work for them and the Lee Manford he put a post up yesterday um on the first day of this challenge just to say look a year ago I was where you were when Adam did the last challenge and thought I can't do organic marketing I can't get myself on camera organic marketing and lifestying is now equating to 50% of his income — that's coming in and — and he doesn't have a warehouse. — He well he's scaled up to it now. So he's got two lockups because he scaled up. He ordered — he started off small then he to he thought right I'm going to go for it and he ordered a print run of a few of his books I think 300 copies of three books bundled them up sold them out within a few months and then has just scaled from there because he has seen by creating the content by doing the lives that it's just creating a revenue stream that he wasn't tapping into. But you can see like last January when we did the challenge he was really engaged throughout the process. He was really analytical with the results he was getting. But he didn't stop at after 30 days when that challenge finished. He went away behind the scenes for the next 11 months and has continued to grow and he's absolutely thriving now. And him and his wife, a husband and wife team, his wife is also an author and they've now added her spicy books to their Tik Tok shop and they're just selling straight away because he's built up the audience. He's built up that connection. — No, I think that's great. And I love hearing this because I was all I built my business on what I've called content marketing and you calling or organic marketing. I think that's it's really good to know that it's still possible. It's just a different kind. Now I just want to get some specifics. So one, where can people find your Novel Gains stuff? — So Novel Gains is a online community on Facebook. As I said, there's no website, there's no fancy website, there's no paid course or anything. is just people holding themselves accountable and listening to my ramblings every now and again when I try and share pearls of wisdom to try and motivate and inspire and I also ask other successful authors to drop organic marketing that like their stories on there to again to get people fired up and show what can be achieved. — Okay, that's on Facebook. So then let's talk about the setup. So I think a lot of the time I get concerned about video because I think I everything has to be on my phone. So, how are you setting this up technically? So, you can both get filmed film and also see comments and all of this kind of stuff — just with my phone. — It is just on your phone. — Yeah. So, I don't use any fancy camera tricks or anything. I literally just set up my phone and hit record when I'm doing — You set it up on a tripod or something. — So, I'll have a tripod. I don't do any fancy lighting or anything like that because I want the content to seem as real as possible. So, I'll set up the camera at an angle that shows whatever task I'm doing. So, for example, if I'm packing orders and I can see the screen, so comments as they're coming up. So, it's close enough to me to interact. At Christmas, we did have a bit of a it did look like a QVC channel. I'm not going to lie. I was at the back. There was a table in front of me with products on. We had mystery book bags. We had a Christmas tree. We had a big banner behind me and in front of me. The camera was on the other side of the room. and but I just had my laptop next to me that was logged into Tik Tok so I was watching the live stream so I could see any comments coming up.

— Yeah, that's the thing. So you can have a different screen with the comments because that's what I'm concerned. I might just be the eyesight thing but I'm like I just can't literally do everything on the phone. — Yeah. So you can do like Tik Tok has a studio that it's like Tik Tok studio that you can download and then you can you get all your data and analytics in there for your live streams. But also you can literally like at the moment I'll just tap the screen to like add a new product or put pin a new product. You can do all that from your computer on this studio where you can say right um showcasing this product now click on it and it'll come up onto the live stream. You just have to link the two together. — Yeah I'm really thinking about this. So one I think partly this is great because my other concern with Tik Tok and all these video channels is how much can be done by AI now and also Tik Tok has its own AI generation stuff you know so much of it is a lot of it's amazing I'm not saying it's bad quality I'm saying it's amazing quality but what it can't do is the live stuff like you just can't I mean imagine you can fake it but you can't — well you'd be surprised so I've seen live streams where it's like an avatar on the screen and it's basically there is someone talking and then the avatar is moving in live as that person's talking. — Right? — So I've seen that where it's animals. I've seen it where it's like a 3D person. Really popular stream at the minute that is just it's a cartoon cat on the stream and whenever you send gifts it starts singing whoever sent it a name and that's a system that someone has somehow I have no idea how they've set it up but they're literally not doing it. That's like that can run 24 hours a day. So if you and there's always hundreds and hundreds of people on it sending kits to hear this cat sing with an AI voice their name. So yes AI will work and it will work for different things. But I think with us and with book with our books people want that human connection more than ever because of AI. — So use that to your advantage. — Yeah. Okay. So then also the other thing I like about this idea is you're doing this live sales and then you're looking at the amount you've sold, but are you making changes to it or you're only tweaking the content on your kind of pre-recorded stuff? Because your live is so natural, how are you going to change it up, I guess? — So I am always testing what is working, what's not working. So for example, I collect I'm a big nerd at heart and I collect Pokémon cards. Now that I'm older, I can afford some of the more rare stuff. And me and my daughter have a lot of enjoyment doing collecting Pokemon cards together. So, we follow channels, we watch stuff on YouTube, and I was looking at what streamers do with Pokémon cards and how they sell like mystery products on an app or whatnot. And I was like, how can I apply this to books — and came up with the idea of doing mystery book bags? So people pay 20 pounds, they get uh some goodies, some carefully curated goodies as we say that Mrs. Bez has put together. So on stream I never give the audience Sarah's name. It's always Mrs. Bez. So Mrs. Bez has like built up her own brand within the stream like they go feral for her when she comes on camera to say hi. Um but then there's some goodies in there. So that could be some like uh tote socks, a tote bag, cup holders, page holders, metal pins, things like that. But then inside that, I'll pull out a thing that will say what book they're getting from our product catalog. And what I made clear is that could be anything from our product catalog. So that could be from a single book. It could be six books. It could be a threebook bundle. There's all sorts that people can get. It could be a deluxe special edition. And people love that and they'll tend to buy it if because there's so much choice and they might be struggling with, right, I don't know what to get. So, you know what? I'll buy one of them mystery book bags. And I only do them when I'm live. So, I've done streams where the camera's on me. I've done a top down stream where you can only see my hands in these mystery book bags. And every time someone orders one, I'm just opening it live and showcasing whatever product they get from the stream. And people love it to the point where every stream I do, they're like, "When you're doing the next mystery book bags, when ones. " — So if I So if we were on live now and I click to buy, you see the order with my name and you just write Joe on it and then you — labels there and then, which I'll do if I'm live packing them. I'm not going to lie, when I'm set up properly, I don't have time to pack them because — Exactly. Yeah. — the orders are coming in that thick and fast. All I do is have a post-it note next to me and I'll write down their username and then I'll stick that on to I'll collect everything, showcase what they're getting, — the extra goodies that they're getting with their order and then I'll stick the poster on and put that to one side. So to put that into context as something that works through testing different things for something that you know works consistently, we started off doing

60 book bags. So 30 of them were spicy book bags, 30 were general fantasy which had my books and a couple of our authors that haven't got spice in their books and the aim was to sell them within a month. We sold them within one stream. So 60 book bags at 20 a pop. But what that also generated is people then buying other products while we're doing it. But it also meant that like there literally we were coming I was doing it I'd do it all on a Friday and we come in on a Monday and we'd start the week with like 40 50 60 orders to pack regardless of what's coming from the Shopify store. So the level of orders is honestly it's obscene but it's about we've continuously learned how best to manage this. So, we learned right actually if you showcase the order and stick a post-it on when we print the shipping labels, it takes us 5 minutes to just put all the shipping labels with everyone's orders and then we can just fire through packing everything up because I've already everything's already bundled together. It literally just needs putting in a box, — right? Okay. So, there's so much we could talk about, but hopefully people will look into this more. So, I went to look to go watch a video. I thought, "Oh, well, I'll just go watch Adam do this. I'm sure there's a recording. " And then I couldn't find one. So, tell me about that. Does it just disappear or what? — Yeah, it does. It It's live for a reason. You can download it afterwards if you want and then you've got content to repurpose. So, if I was in fact, you've just given me an idea there. So, like I've done a live today. I could download that clip that's an hour and 20 minutes long. Some of it I'm just rambling, but some of it's got some content that I could absolutely use because I'm engaging with people, but I've showcased books throughout it because I've been packing orders. I had an hour window before this podcast and I had a handful of orders to pack. So, I've just jumped live on a live and I made like 250 pounds whil doing a job that I would already be having to do. I could download that video, put it in Opus Clip, and that will then generate short form content for me of the intera meaningful interaction through that based on the parameters that I give it. So that's absolutely something you could do and you in fact I'm probably going to do it now that you've idea. — I mean even if it was on another channel like you could put that on YouTube wherever you want. Yeah. It's not what doesn't have a watermark on it. — No. So what did you say? Opus clip. — Opus clip. Yeah. — Opus L. Okay. — Yeah. So you can literally if you do long form content of any kind, you can put that in and then it'll pull out meaningful content that loads of like 20 30 short form content video clips that you can use. It's brilliant piece of software if you use it the right way. — Okay. Well, I want you to repurpose that because I want to watch you in action, but I'm not going to turn up for your lives. Although now I'm like, "Oh, I really must. " But um so does that also mean you said it's UK only because the Tik Tok shop is linked to the UK. Um so people in America can't even see. — So sometimes they do pop in. But again, that's why I have a separate channel for my main author account. When I go live on that, anyone from around the world can come in. But if I've got shoppable links in, chances are the algorithm is just going to put that to out to a UK audience because that's where — Tik Tok will then make money. If I want to hit my US audience, I'll jump on Instagram because that's where I've got my biggest following. So, I'll jump on Instagram and go live over there at a time that I know will be appropriate for an American — Americans. Yeah. Okay. So, we could talk forever, but I do have just a question about Tik Tok itself because all of these platforms seem to follow a sort of a way of things where at the beginning it's much easier to get reach. It's it is truly organic. It's really amazing. And then they start putting on various breaks like Facebook added groups and then you couldn't reach people in your had to pay to play. And then in the US of course we've got a sale that has been signed. Who knows what will happen there but what are your thoughts on how Tik Tok has changed and also what might be going to what might go on this year and how are you preparing? So I think as a businessman and an author who wants to reach readers, I use the platforms for what I can get out of them and without having to spend a stupid amount of money. So if those platforms stop working for me, I'll stop using them and find one that does it. It's not. So with organic reach on Tik Tok, I think you'll always have a level of that. Is it harder now? Yes. Does that mean it's not achievable? Absolutely not. If your content isn't reaching people or you're not getting the engagement that you want or you find fulfilling, you need to look at yourself and the content you're putting out. You're in control of that. There's elements of like this takeover in America. Again, I've got zero control over that. So, I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. I'll focus on areas that are making a difference. As I said, Tik Tok isn't the biggest earner for my

business. It doesn't generate. My author channel's been absolutely diet for a good six months or so. But I but it means I get stagnant with the content I'm creating. So the challenge I'm doing at the minute, I'm taking part to create fresh content every day to recharge myself. But I use I've got Instagram and Facebook that generate high volumes of traffic every single day. And usually if they stop, Tik Tok starts to work. So any algorithm changes, you know, things will change when it changes hands in America, but primarily it still wants to make money. It's a business. So it, if anything, it might make it harder for us to reach America because it'll want to focus on it reaching an American audience for the people that are buying Tik Tok shop. But they want it because they want the Tik Tok shop because of the amount of money that it is generating. And it's gone from a small amount of people making money to large volumes of businesses across the entire USA like over here now that are reaching an audience that previously you had to have deep pockets to be able to reach them to get your business set up. Now you've got all these businesses popping up that starting from scratch because they're reaching people. They've got a product that's marketable that people want to enjoy. They want to be part of that growth. So I think that will still happen. It might just be a few of the parameters change like Facebook does all the time. — Things will always change. That is key. But we should also say by selling direct, you've built presumably a very big email list of buyers as well. — Yes. So we've I've actually got a trophy that Shopify sent me because we hit 10,000 sales, 10,000 customers. So yeah, I think we're nearing 16,000 sales on there now. We've got all that customer data. We don't get that on TikTok. We haven't got the customer data. — Oh, that's interesting. — So, you can do that like when we uh — How do you not though? Oh, cuz what did they link it with if you link it with your Shopify and you do all your shipping direct the customer data has to come to your Shopify otherwise you can't ship when Tik Tok ship it for you. So, I print the shipping labels but they organize the couriers. All the customer data is blotted out. It's like red so you don't see it. So ah that's see that is in itself a cheeky move. — Yeah. So but if it's linked to your Shopify you get all that data and your Shopify is your store. So your Shopify will keep that data. — So but they kept things the gremlins kept affecting how the in how I extracted the shipping labels and stuff like that just kept making life really difficult. So I just switched it back. But I think like Saf has found an app that works really well for correlating the two. — Yeah. But this is a really big deal. You know, we carp on about it all the time, but if you sell direct and you do get the customer data, you're building an email list of actual buyers as opposed to freebie seekers, which a lot of people have. — Absolutely. And that's the same for you. If you send a poor product out or your customer has a poor experience, they're not going to come back and order from you again. If your customer has a really good experience and opens the product and sees all this extra care that's gone in and all the books assigned and they've not had to pay extra, there was a Kickstarter. I'm not going to name which author it was, but it was a author whose book I was quite excited to back the Kickstarter and they had these special editions they've done, but you had to buy a special edition for an extra 30 quid if you wanted it signed. So, I was like, absolutely not. like with these people putting the hands in the pockets for these deluxe special editions that you know if you're a bigname author it's certainly not them that have anything to do with it they just have other companies do it all for them whereas we're curating everything you know our way of saying thank you to everyone is by saying well we'll sign this book — I love that you're still so enthusiastic about it and that it seems to be going really well so we're almost out of time but just quickly tell people a bit more about the books that they can find in your stores and where people can find them. — Yes. So, we publish predominantly fantasy and we have moved into the spicy fantasy world. We have a few series there. So, you can check out APZwickpubations. com where you will see our full product catalog and all of my books. And on Tik Tok shop, we are under APwick Publications. That's the best place to see where I go live. Short form content. I'll post spicy books on there, but lives I showcase everything. And I also have Fantasy Books UK where that's where you'll see the videos or product links for the non-spicy fantasy books. — Um, what time do you go live in the UK? — So, I go live 800 a. m. every Friday morning. — Wow. Okay. I might even have to check that out. This has been so great, Adam. Thanks so much for your time. — Well, thank you for having me. — So, I hope you found the interview with Adam interesting. And even if you don't want to do live social selling, I think it's a fascinating look into the idea of what's old is new again because selling by hand is the oldest way to sell. And now it's back in a new format. So I

really like this. As you could probably tell from my interest, I don't think it's something I'll be doing uh just because I'm not really a social media person, but I think it is fascinating. So let me know what you think. Please leave a comment on the podcast show notes at the creativepen. com or on the YouTube channel or email me joanna@thecreatpen. com. Also, please send me pictures of where you're listening or your favorite cemetery or churchyard. Next Monday, I'm talking to Melissa Addie about what indie authors can learn from the rigor of academic research as well as some of the challenges with academic publishing. In the meantime, happy writing and I'll see you next time. Thanks for listening today. I hope you found it helpful. You can find the backlist episodes and show notes at the creativepen. com/mpodcast. And you can get your free author blueprint at therecreaten. com/bloopprint. If you'd like to connect, you can find me on Facebook and X at the creative pen or on Instagram and Facebook @ jfpenauthor. Happy writing and I'll see you next time.