The Brief
Indie author Briar Black came to us looking for a digital marketing agency for authors. And since our founder happens to be an author, that worked out well. Briar had a vision for a Romance novel writing empire. She was bubbling with book ideas, and clearly a talented fiction writer, but had neither the time nor expertise to market herself as an author. As a copywriter by trade, Briar had been in the marketing world long enough to know what was needed, and came to us with a clear brief: build her a website, teach her what kind of content to blog about, when, and how to build a social media presence on Instagram and TikTok.
Briar also wanted help creating a coherent visual brand identity. An aesthetic she could use across all her marketing, and even her book design. A ‘look’ that was instantly recognisable as Briar Black. We were more than happy to help with this, and being able to get in right and the start and shape everything from scratch was a real treat. Once Briar’s first novel was ‘done’ we also project managed the editing and publication process for her, arranging an editor, designing the cover, and formatting everything for launch.
The Project
Briar’s project consisted of several steps, the last of which is ongoing. The first was coming up with an aesthetic and a coherent brand image that she loved. Briar was very keen for her major presence to be on Instagram. She’s a huge Bookstagram fan and wanted to build herself a successful Bookstagram account. This was largely to use as a platform to market her books, but also because she genuinely just loves books. So we crafted an Insta-worthy aesthetic that reflects Briar’s personality and passions. Once we’d settled on that, we went about writing, designing and building a fully optimised website to showcase her books. A copy of Divine Blogging along with some help tailoring the method to her audience kickstarted her blogging efforts. That covered all the marketing Briar asked for. Of course, the benefit of working with a digital marketing agency for authors, entrepreneurs, and other creative types, is that we know how to go that bit extra.
To Briar’s original brief we added the need to build an email list, rather than relying on social media followers. An engaged list of loyal readers is an author’s best friend. To build that list we suggested Briar write a short novella prequel to her debut novel, Bane, which could be released as a free lead magnet. We are now working on building her list through PPC social media campaigns, while she focuses on writing, reviewing books on her romance blog, and taking pretty photos for the ‘gram! As an extra bonus, we also set Briar up with an Amazon affiliate account (so she earns money if anyone buys her book recommendations), and print-on-demand products featuring artwork and quotes from her books. This added two passive income streams to her site, in addition to book sales!
The Results
Email List Growth
Briar penned a brief (but brilliant) novella telling the story of what happened before her debut novel. Eve Was Framed is a fantastic, feminist tale and we leveraged it as a lead magnet to drive list signups. As you can see, it’s proven immensely popular and we currently average over 1K signups per month, on a PPC budget of £10 per day. We also encouraged Briar to publish the book on Amazon, and it’s available for free on Kindle Unlimited as well as in paperback. So, while we’re working on building her list, Amazon sales are generating passive income to help cover the costs!
Website Rankings
We always advise clients when we build them a site that regular updates and patience are needed to get it to start ranking. 6-12 months is the usual timeframe before results start to kick in. We launched Briar’s site in August 2023, with slow results (as anticipated) for the first few months. You can tell when it starts to kick in! Briar’s rankings now steadily increase month-on-month, along with her organic traffic. Doing particularly well is the About page we created and optimised for keywords relating to ‘mystery romance writer‘ (which, if you hadn’t guessed, is Briar’s main genre niche!).
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The Aesthetic
We developed an aesthetic for Briar’s brand, including a logo design, colour palette, and a distinctive ‘look’ for all her photography. We put together a brand pack including props, a background, and guidelines to follow for the creation of her social media content. We also curated several outfits for her to wear in photos to keep her on-brand, and did a photoshoot to get all the images needed for the website, and to give her some featuring herself to use sporadically when she felt like it. Briar’s favourite colour is sage green, so we used this shade and a bright pink to add a colour pop. Style-wise we created a slightly dreamy, floaty, romantic vibe with an edge of cottage core. We also created some LightRoom pre-sets and taught Briar how to use them, so she could add a filter to all her images and keep her Instagram feed consistent. The final piece of the visual puzzle was the design of her book covers, which all feature original illustrations by our very own Tim Faulkner. The illustrations were so fab, we’ve put them on merch!
