Episode 89 of the KWL Podcast includes on location interviews with 7 different authors conducted by Mark Lefebvre, Director of Author Relations at Kobo during the 2017 Romance Writers of America (RWA) Annual conference.

Barbara Freethy

Sharing the enjoyment she gets connecting with fellow writers at RWA, Barbara also shares info about a new romantic suspense series (a spin-off of her Storm trilogy) that she was releasing during the week of RWA, as well as a collaboration with 6 other authors called “Seven Brides for Seven Soldiers” that will be launching in the fall.

Chris Keniston

Chris discusses the strategy she used for her Faraday Country series (currently 8 books out with books 9 and 10 up for pre-order at the time of the interview), including stock-piling the first 4 books before beginning to release the series.

She also talks about how she used a permanently free Book One in the series to help propel sales of the rest of the books in this clean and wholesome romance series.

The combined effect of this stock-piling and a permanently free first book in the series has helped her triple her sales numbers.

Carrie Ann Ryan

Fresh on the heals of the recent releases of Inked Expressions and Hope Restored, Carrie Ann shares the “tree-trunk” manner by which she connects the various series books together in a cohesive whole and the multiple points of entry this creates for readers.

She also shares the combined multi-author launch of the Bad Boy Homecoming Romance connected novels as well as the slightly different branding that she uses when switching between paranormal romance and contemporary romance.

M.L. Buchman

How M.L. (Matt), who writes in 11 different series (publishing 8 books a year and at least 13 short stories, including two that appear in Fiction River #4 and Fiction River #23), doesn’t engage in social media in any significant way, but uses his newsletter to create a great value for his fans. Matt provides a free short story for his newsletter fans every single month.

Matt also shares a bit about his important book Estate Planning for Authors: Your Final Letter (and Why You Need to Write it Now)

Ember Casey & Renna Peak

Ember and Renna talk about the collaborative contemporary royalty romance series that they’ve been writing for the past 3 years (3 6 part serials that are all connected) and the way they split the writing (Ember writes the guy parts, Renna writes the girl parts).

They also share the aggressive “every 2 week” release schedule that they developed and the success of creating a large reader funnel by making the first 2 books in the original series free.

Mark Dawson

Mark talks about some of the strategies that he has used for Facebook ads, particularly the ads placed for 8 book box sets targeting Kobo customers, particularly customers in Canada and Australia. Much of Mark's shared wisdom can be found on his website SelfPublishingFormula.com

He also talks about the importance of not getting details wrong, in particular the use of weapons (which one of his most popular characters, John Milton, uses) and shares the fact that, later that same day, he was heading off to a shooting range to try various weapons first hands as the ultimate research.

At the end of the podcast, Mark Lefebvre points out a recent article that was posted on both the Kobo Writing Life website and the Kobo Writing Life Community that outlines the 5 most common reasons why a book might be rejected in the publishing process.

He shares that these posts are created specifically to help authors with finding information about particular details related to publishing on Kobo and encourages authors to take advantage of that information.