SPS Live! 2023: The Final Line-Up - with Mark Dawson & James Blatch

Speaker 1: Want to sell more books? Make sure you are at the Self-Publishing Show Live this summer. Meet the biggest names in self-publishing at Europe's largest conference for independent authors. Enjoy two days packed with special guests, an exclusive networking event, and a digital ticket for watching the professionally filmed replay, including bonus sessions not included at the live show. Head over to self-publishing show.com/tickets and secure your spot. Now, the Self-Publishing Show Live is sponsored by Amazon k d p

Speaker 2: On this edition of The Self-Publishing Show.

James Blatch: I am keen to write Swallow. He's a knowledge-based detective. He's a bit of a maverick actually. You know, he's not afraid to break the law. I mean, for instance, if he needs to drive 35 in a 30 zone, if he needs to get somewhere quickly, he would do that.

Mark Dawson: I should add for non UK listeners at that's an Ana Parge reference

Speaker 2: Publishing is changing. No more gatekeepers, no more barriers. No one standing between you and your readers. Do you want to make a living from your writing? Join indie bestseller Mark Dawson and first time author James Blatch as they shine a light on the Secrets of Self-publishing success. This is the Self-Publishing Show. There's never been a better time to be a writer.

James Blatch: Hello. It's a self-publishing show with me, James Blatch

Mark Dawson: And me Mark Dawson.

James Blatch: We're really hoping, technically this is going to go well cause we made some changes. We've discovered as you, if you followed us last week, we discovered that we could switch our iPhones on to Zoom and and indeed the way we recorded, we got rid of the D S L R cameras and stuff. And hopefully it's all, it looks good to me. In fact, it looks scarily too. High definition. I can see my braces and everything. God, I hope this come off soon. We're rough. About 15 years . But I want American teeth mark as I get older.

Mark Dawson: Vanity,

James Blatch: Okay. We have an episode today packed with information about the conference that we will be holding in June in London, and hopefully other bits and pieces that are given of interest to you as well. We're going to tell you who's talking at the conference. We're going to tell you how it's going to be set up, what are the experiences going to be like or visitors for you if you're coming along to the conference and how to get the most outta it. That's what this episode is all about. We have a couple of talking points before there, and the first one I think we should mention Mark, is the expansion of Cobo Plus, which information of which dropped into our email boxes this week. And Cobo Plus for those of you don't know, is Cobos. They probably don't like the comparison, but is what it, it is what it is. It's an equivalent of a Amazon's Kindle Unlimited. Someone will probably email us now and tell us that Kobo Plus was first or something, but I don't know. Anyway.

Mark Dawson: No, no, it was, it wasn't first.

James Blatch: We know what KU is. It's a subscription service for readers and you as an author can either enroll your book in, in it or not. And the readers have a subscription can read it for inverter commerce free. Obviously the subscription pulls together and then is distributed to the readers based on the minutes. Is it minutes?

Mark Dawson: No pages read

James Blatch: Pages. That's right. Because Cobo is time and KU is pages read. And so that's one of the differences. I'll talk a little bit about how they divide up the money in a second, but the other major difference is that Cobo Plus is non-exclusive. So we know, don't we as authors, if we enrol in ku, you are prohibitive from distributing your ebook, the electronic version of your book anywhere else. Which actually is fairly limiting when it comes to things like promotions free giveaways and stuff like that. So you can't do that wide, and obviously you can't sell it on other platforms such as Kebo and, and Apple and so on. Nonetheless, KU is a, is a platform of choice for many of us. It is for me is for Fuse books actually. And I know I keep an eye on Jasper and me, and I know he is a big, big ku Jeoffrey books as well.

And Cobo Plus, I suppose, are coming into the market hoping to be a bit disruptive. So those two changes, mark. The other one is, is the payment structure is I'm going to use the word odd, but it's, it, it's paid per minute. But you have to have 300 minutes in order to qualify to get paid. 300 minutes is best part of a book. I mean, depending what speed you read, it seems to be an odd way of doing. I read really slowly, I'm a slow reader and I know my wife will rattle for a novel a day on holiday, sometimes more than a novel a day. And so that seems an odd sort of metric. But anyway that's what it is. So, see, do you think this is significant for us? This moment? I'm sorry, I should say the beginning. They haven't just invented Cobo plus, they've rolled it out to the two big markets, the UK and the us. It's been available in Canada for some time, I guess trialling it there, but it's now, now available in the UK and the US that that's the announcement this week.

Mark Dawson: Yeah, so you told me, you said, I suppose you didn't even mention that before you went, started recording. So thank thanks for that. You lost that. Think about what I was going to say. Do I I think it's a big moment. Not really. I think it's, it's great. I mean, I love Cobo. I love all, all, all the retailers. But I mean, realistically, Cobo Plus is a fairly small market and compared to to ku it's, it's, it's not large. But on the other hand I think all competition is good. And anything that keeps Amazon on its toes has gotta be seen as, as a positive thing because you know, we all benefit from that. So. Good, you know, good for Cobra Irving is a, it's a fantastic move. Do I think you'll move the needle? Not hugely, but you know, let's, you know, let's wish them all the best.

James Blatch: Yeah, so the, the charge of you all to join Cobo Plus is $7 99 a month to read $9 99 the month includes audio books and $7 99 if you just want Cobo plus listen.

Mark Dawson: Yeah, it's a, it's a good deal for readers. Definitely.

James Blatch: Yeah. No time limit. It says here in the, in the publicity, which I think I guess refers to the 90 days, you are obliged to remain in, in 90 day chunks in, in Kindle Unlimited. Which is a bit limiting. So I'm thinking about putting my third book my, which should eventually, I think be a freebee. It's actually done pretty well in sales. I'm keeping it priced at the moment and I'm thinking about putting into KU now. But that is a 90 day commitment before I can then do anything within terms of wide. But so yeah, being able to bring it in and out if that's what that means by no time limit says there's no time requirement with cobo Plus you can try submitting your whole catalogue, just some of your back list or maybe just the first books in your series to see what works best for you and no exclusivity.

Yeah. Okay. So we're interested, I mean, if you've tried Cobo plus if you're in Canada, you already have experience of it, just let us know the comments or post on our Facebook group. So let's get a discussion going and share experiences on that. And like you say, you know, we wish Cobo well there no important players more important than some countries, than other others. And competition is good and healthy. And Amazon has done such an amazing job of occupying that market. It's not a bad thing for them to be kept on. We'll actually be kept honest, don't mean Mark.

Mark Dawson: It certainly helps. Yeah, absolutely. Good for, I mean, actually we, I was supposed to be in the, supposed to record the podcast for cobo last night and it was in my diary and I have just forgotten about it. Cause we, we sat there I like six months ago and it just went past. Anyway, I'm going to I've been in touch with them and I'll, I'll I'll be on at some point in the future. But yeah, Cobo great. I'm a big fans of Cobo.

James Blatch: I didn't forget to do a webinar last night, bug brush, which was also my calendar for a long time, so yay me. Very good. I had really great fan that shit last night. And they do it slightly differently. They use z like a Zoom meeting, so you see everybody and you. I was playing clips expecting people to laugh from Mar I was just watching too. If they were laughing, they were. Okay. Good. Right. Mar, we're going to talk about the the conference. So this will be our third conference. It should have been our third annual conference, but COVID intervened or one year, 2020. We did do it in 21, I think. Yes. I no, no,

Mark Dawson: No. 2020 was

James Blatch: The, that was 2020. Amazingly.

Mark Dawson: That was Covid, wasn't it?

James Blatch: That was the covid year. So we missed 21, then we came back in 22.

Yeah, the venue will remain the same, which is the Southbank Centre London sort of cultural artistic centre south of the of the rivers very centrally.

You can wander across your in Parliament Square and you know, the iconic centre of London very quickly. And it's a great place to be. We, in year one, we just rented the theatre, the Queen Elizabeth, or, which is a lovely theatre, brilliant lighting. Feels a little bit different for the other conferences we go to bit more theatrical, I think. All the people are in one room for each session, so there's no competition in sessions and they have a good sort of communal feel to it. Last year we decided to rent the whole thing despite the eye watering cost, which gave us the freedom to have the lobby, including in the evening, no members of the public.

Then in the evening we had a wonderful party and people like El James wandered along to the party in the evening as well. It was a really good sort of moment of indie office in Europe getting together. And it is, without question, the biggest indie conference in Europe. I'm going to one immediately after our conference in Madrid, 20 books. I know the Seville's probably happening at the moment, I think might start tomorrow. 20 books, Seville which I'm not going to. But yeah. So smaller than 20 bucks. Vegas probably bigger than n Yeah, I think bigger than n and a growing a, growing, growing in importance, I think in Europe and certainly Amazon. K d p have once again the third year, asked if they could be our major sponsor for the conference. I think that says a lot about it's a tribute to the conference that we've built, mark, that Amazon want to be front and centre in it. Cause obvious they value a moment to get together with, with Lindy authors.

Mark Dawson: Yeah, it's great John. So then to, to meet authors in, obviously they'll be at London Book Fair, as we would call this in about three weeks time. And I'll, I'll be there as well. I'm doing a i i a panel on the Thursday of Lbf this year. But that's, yeah, for people who've been to a book show like that, it's not dedicated, dedicated specifically to indie authors. It's, it's a bit of everything really. So although it's, I think they see value in going to that show. They're going to meet more indie authors, our ours, I would think. So yeah, we are, we are very grateful for them being there. And there'll be lots of Amazonians coming up in having phone calls that see who they're going to be bringing. So I think, you know, Darren Hardy from the UK will be there, plus I think his regional counterparts from from the European markets probably will also be there as well with Smothers too. So it's a really good chance to, to, to meet our staff from Amazon, which is, is is a valuable thing.

James Blatch: Always worth having somebody seeing you from Amazon in your contacts book.

Okay, let's talk about the speaker schedule then.

So we have released that this week. It's two days text place on June the 20th and 21st as I said here in London. And we will start at nine 15 with a, a brief opening from Mark and I on stage. I don't think I'm going to dress up this year. I think I'll just be me and this is me. But after that we have a I think probably a, a bit of a good headline session to start off with. And that is Bella, Andre, mark.

Mark Dawson: Yeah, so Bella is is a, is a worldwide bestselling author. I think she sold about 10 million books. Writes romance. Hannah's been doing it for a long time before me. Certainly she was a, a fixture, places like cables and with people like Hugh Howie. So she's very experienced. She's very prolific. And we are going to be talking to her about something specific, which is the way that she has been able to take her catalogue and start to sell it very successfully in non-English languages. So we're going to be talking about translation and marketing in other markets. So she's, she's done one in Germany and Germany is one that I can also talk about if anyone is interested. I, I've, I'm, you know, Germany's a very, very solid third market for me now, but Bella has had success in markets.

I haven't been a, been able to crack yet with we're specifically looking at France, Italy, Spain, places like that. So she's going to be talking about what she's done to make that possible in terms of how does she get them translated what the markets are like, what they're looking for, how she markets, how she advertises, all of that kind of stuff. So we are, we're definitely looking forward to that and I think that'll be something that I will learn from too. And in anticipation of that, I signed contracts today for, actually yesterday for the first two Milton books to be translated into French. So we're going to be seeing if I can replicate a fraction of the sucess I've had in Germany in the French market. And then if that works, you know, we'll go around the rest of Europe,

James Blatch: Trak. Okay. Before we move on to session two I should say that even if you can't make the conference in person in June, everything is recorded professionally. It will be packaged together and released at the beginning of August. You can sign up for that package before the conference. It's just 75 bucks and you get not only everything that took place in the conference, but this year we are beefing that up with additional sessions, webinar style, teaching sessions, and some of the leading lights in the indie world around the globe. All of that released at the beginning of August. So if you want to sign up, if you can't make it in per in person, which is definitely the best thing to do, but if you can't, second best thing to do will be to enjoy these videos afterwards, in your own time.

And you can go to self-publishing formula.com/digital D I G I T A L to sign up for that. Okay. Session 2, 10 15 on day one. The 20th of June is going to be Damon Courtney. Now Damon is the founder and owner of BookFunnel, which began life just as a problem solving app for authors. So we didn't have to use spreadsheets to keep a note of people who signed up for our free books and send them out. It automated that process and it's one of the first go-to services that we always recommend for new authors, but actually book funnels expanded and is a key part of a lot of authors marketing now. And that place is Damon in a unique position, I think, to talk about marketing, different strategies of marketing, of giveaways, of collaborations mailing list, growing and so on has become a one stop shop for that.

So we're going to have a session from Damon for 45 minutes at 10 15 on day one. Now 11 o'clock is a break and I've gotta mention the break because they're very important in these conferences. And we've, we've been really protective over the breaks when we've done the, the schedule this year. Cause we weren't last year, we yet into them with some time. Cause there's always pressure on the schedule. And one of the feedback notes we got from people afterwards is they wanted more time to network and meet each other in the foyer. So there'll be a half hour break at 11 o'clock on day one before our third session mark, which is up your street making a killing with regional crime.

Mark Dawson: Yes. So we're going to be joined by Richard McClain J M w, Simon McCleave and Tim Sullivan. And the panel's going to be moderated by Jasper Joffey from Joffey books. And we're going to be looking at a very popular genre, a very profitable genre with all of those authors having a lot of success writing crime books and mysteries that have a very strong geographical setting. It's very popular in the UK at the moment. And I mean, I do it too with Atticus based around Salisbury and, and Wilshire. So definitely something that I think will be interesting in terms of the size of that market, how they're building their readership and why they think that might be such a popular genre at the moment.

James Blatch: I'm keen to write Swallow, he's a knowledge based detective. He's a bit of a maverick actually. You know, he's not afraid to break the law. I mean, for instance, if he needs to drive 35 in a 30 zone, if he needs to get somewhere quickly, he would do that.

Mark Dawson: I should add for non UK re listeners that, that's Alan Pie's reference as basically whenever James says something you don't understand, it's probably an Alan Pie's reference. So yes, I, I'm, I'm here for Swallow. Definitely. Yeah,

James Blatch: Swallow could be, could be the one we are looking for. Okay. So after that session Making Killing, we have the five step formula to perfecting your story structure. This is Christina, Stan, excuse me, from fiction.co. And Christina is one of these enthusiastic editors who has a teeth deep into what makes stories work. And it's such a key part of our writing process. The story's not there. People would turn the page same as the characters, but equally important. And that session is going to be a five step formage to help us craft the story that's going to sell our books. Then an hour for lunch, again, we are making sure we are protective over that.

So lunch isn't providing the conference here. Cater is colossally expensive, or not even 20 books provides lunch. And it literally would add like 40 or 50,000 pounds on, we said we have lunch, lunch each but we are in a fabulous part of town. You can wander out literally a few hundred yard, the sign, you've got a range of some pret a manger or Starbucks and so on, as well as little independent cafes. We'd recommend the one in the bfi theatre, which is about a hundred yards away cause that's where SPF F was born over a cappuccino in that very coffee room.

Mark Dawson: It was, yes. And today we come back and Dave Chessen is joining us from the States and Dave well known from Publisher Rocket and kindle Pannu and, and things like that. Dave's going to be talking about constructing the perfect Amazon sales page using some of the data that he has amassed over, over the year. So there should be an interesting session. And then immediately after that, Craig Martel from 20 Books will be with us, and he's going to be talking about what he calls the Perfection Paradox. So looking at I think from what I've, I've chatted with Craig is going to be imposter syndrome and, and making sure that, you know, we, we are confident in our own writing and just doing, staying in our lane, doing our own thing, being confident about it. So a a motivational session from Craig to bring us to around about three o'clock when we will be joined by Kate Pickford.

James Blatch: Yeah, so Kate Pickford was on the podcast recently and Kate is one of those speakers. Whenever you're at a conference and people come out of a session, they're buzzing about it and we get kept on the should saying, you've gotta have Kate on your podcast, you've gotta have her in your show. She came on and she just has this ability, I think, to speak in really clear terms cut throughs some of the fluff that goes around the way that we write our productivity and the way we market books. And so she's going to be talking about that. And if you follow Kate's, you'll become a better writer and a better operator of the writing business. She's actually British caper. She lives in Oregon, I think in the States now. Maybe not Oregon, but she lives in the States for certain. And yeah, a really good person to listen to. I think you'll love that session. And also, of course, because you're at the conference, if you're there live rather than digitally, you get a chance to have a speak. Have a chat with Kate as well. Another break at three 10 and again, half an hour for you to catch up and meet new friends.

And it could be time for us in the proceedings to talk about these genre, geography of the foyer. Mark.

Mark Dawson: Yeah, we, we listened to people last year and one thing that was requested by several people was it was more, it was easier for people to find other writers in their genres. So we are going to put some signage up and make it really clear that this is where, for example, romance writers can hang out, fancy writers, sci-fi filler, whatever. It'll be a chance for you to meet your tribe. And also we're going to be having some badges provided by our friends at Reedsy that you can add to your Land Landy yard that will also identify you in terms of genre. So a good opportunity to, to make some good context of writers who are writing the kinds of things that you are writing. So very useful, new innovation and also proves that we listened some of the time. Anyway, after that we are going to be coming back for a session.

Had to have something on this cause it's a, it's a hot topic at the moment on AI for authors help or hindrance. And that is going to be a panel with Stuart Bass who is is a, an illustrator, was cover designer, but also has some experience in programming now and, and has been involved in building a chat G p T application. And Hannah Lynn, who's been using AI in in her process as well, might also have going to try and get another speaker to join that panel. And it'll might even be, I might even moderate that myself. Cause I think that's going to be quite an interesting one to, to dig into. So that brings us up to the close of the first day. And then we'll have a party in the evening. So as, as you mentioned, we clear the foyer and may or may not have a band but there'll be some music and Jazz a have a beer have or, or lots of wine or whatever, be fancy. And you know, that was, that was pretty good fun last year. And I, if we get good weather as we did last year, that tends to spill out onto the onto the South Bank and was a very pleasant, very pleasant evening. Thoroughly enjoyed it last year. So hopefully we'll have take it similar again.

James Blatch: Yeah, it was really good, lovely evening, and it was nice to relax and and catch up with people, as you say, June in London, usually pretty good. So hopefully that'll be a nice evening. Not guaranteed though in London. And then day two, hopefully not too hungover. We start at nine o'clock in the morning with a panel of Kindle Storyteller Award winners. These are the UK Kindle Storyteller Awards. This is run obviously by Amazon, K D P here in the uk. It's a very simple process to enter, just you change one of your keywords. And we've had a really interesting varied nicks of authors over the years and travel authors to regional crime to fantasy. And we have a good panels, Anna mcnuff, Ian Saintsbury, Peter Gibbons, who's this year's winner. Hannah Lynn again, who is you'll know from the AI session the day before David ledbeta and Rachel McClain. Yes, I'm not saying whether I'm bitter or angry that I may, may not have entered the keyword to be long listed, but didn't get the phone call from Darren.

Mark Dawson: No. Well and that's, that's not just a, a winner or the collect selection of winners, that's all the winners they've ever had. So it's all of the winners. So it'll be interesting to see how things have progressed with their careers. People, people that Rachel we know now has gone from not selling many to doing really, really well. Ian too. We have some experience with Ian working with him on some Fuse book. So really an interesting session with Darren Hardy from Amazon moderating. Following that we will go into a session with TikTok. So we're going to have two members of the TikTok team from London Patrick Hunter and Matthew Perry. Not, not that Matthew Perry. Listen, I think it's that Matthew Perry could be, you know, he's, he's been quiet so it is cant rule it out. But they'll be coming on to talk about TikTok shop, I think James,

James Blatch: Yes, TikTok shop and also TikTok generally. So talk about what they call social marketing, which is using a social media platform for marketing books. We know that TikTok is a platform that's very, very significant for the publishing industry. It's grown up in probably 18 months to the height it's at now, to the point where e the big traditional publishers are nervous about the possibility of the app being banned with some of those those chats from Congress last week, just because it is being a sign, you know, as I say, a very significant driver of book sales and that certainly works for indies as well. So we'll hear from TikTok sales, delighted that they are going to be here. And the UK is in the vanguard, actually, they released TikTok shop for authors in the UK first that will be spreading to America in time.

And I'm finding it really amazing. You can sell your books cheaper than you can sell them on Amazon, actually, the physical versions, even if you're buying them as Amazon author copies. And you can send a post out and just have links to the bottom people, almost a couple of clicks and they've bought a book off you. So yeah, very significant needle moving opportunity there. So that's TikTok 9 45 to 10 30, then we have a break at again, half an hour, 10 30 to 11 on day two before Mark the big indie author data

Mark Dawson: Drop. Yeah, so that's something that we are doing with the Alliance of Independent authors. So honour Ross and Ally have put together a survey looking at various interesting pieces of data as it pertains to independent authors, including things like how much money the average author makes and independently of that, before I learned they were doing that, I, I'd reached out to the body in the UK that did the ALCS survey that was trailed in the press about how the average author was only making 8,000 pounds a year. And then the, you know, the slew of negative press coverage that fact and, and say that there's no point in being a writer because you can't make any money. I knew, I knew that wasn't the case in, in our section of the market. So I wanted to get something kind of data driven that would demonstrate that turns out that how we're doing that anyway.

But what we've done is we've kind of worked together and we are both sponsoring a report based on the allied data and also looking at a comparison with the A L C S data. And we're hoping to pull out some trends that will have us feeling a little bit better about what we've chosen to do in terms of how we publish. So that will be coming up and if you can hear whining in the background, that's my dog. He's trying to get out, out of the door. So we'll just ignore him for the moment. After that session, we are going to go to mark Relow, who was a very popular speaker last year. And Mark will be talking about work less and more. So something that we can all benefit from, I think. And yeah, mark is, is infectious speaker, very entertaining and we think that's perfect for the hour before lunch to, to close with a bit of German gush.

James Blatch: Have an hour for lunch on day two, one o'clock till two o'clock. Again we're not quite your final chance for networking. A bit of, little chance at the end of the day there. And if you want to go repair to a local host distillery, as we say in the uk you can do that afterwards. But we do have our final afternoon with two sessions. The first one is from Brit Andrews who is actually an SPF F Foundation winner and has grown into somebody who's done, has built a fantastic empire, mainly around engaging with her readers. So that's what she's going to talk about, it's called Building a Fandom. So she'll explain how over two years she's cultivated a group of loyal super fans and seen that annual earnings hit multiple six figures. We couldn't be more proud of Brit and, what she's achieved than a couple of years. So very happy to have her on stage in the afternoon. And then a final session Mark, which you can talk about your specialist subject Facebook ads.

Mark Dawson: Yeah, we're going to have a session on Facebook ads presented by Blake Hudson, who is the husband of Stephanie Hudson who is a very successful Pamela Romance author fantasy author, that kind of stuff. So Blake runs her ads and does, does a lot of the business in the background. So we're going to ask him to give us some tips as the, the some things that he's doing. And I've seen some, he's done some interesting things with TikTok too with driving Facebook traffic to TikTok, which is quite interesting. So again, that'll be it. That'll be a good one.

James Blatch: Yeah, very interesting. I, I love if you're watching on YouTube, mark keeps coming and going. I guess he's looking after various family members. 4, 4, 4, four-legged family friends. Okay, so that is the,

Mark Dawson: And two-legged.

James Blatch: And two-legged, okay, that is the last sort of proper session. Then there's 15 minutes to the end where Mark John and I will do a dance song and dance routine that we haven't fully perfected yet. We'll started, but we'll start working on that soon. Maybe we'll do even roller skates this year just to to know, move things up a bit. Okay then that's it, that's the end of day two and the, the physical conference. But what happens on those breaks when you go into the foyer is not only will you have those genre areas that Mark talked about so you can meet up with other author. It's a very important thing to try and find some writing buddies and other people to keep you accountable. Maybe some editing buddies as well in the future. But we also will have sponsorship people who will help from the trade and the industry with services who will set up in the foyer give you a chance.

Now a lot of these people you will probably already be using and be familiar with, but you can also meet people with services you might not have thought about yet. So let's have a quick look at who's going to be there. I've gotta make sure I've got this list in order so that we know who is actually got a store. So we know that drafted digital, we'll be there with downward and you say kts coming as well, Kevin Tomlinson. So draught to digital aggregator, if you're going wide in particular, send your book outs everywhere. You can have a chat with those guys. Ryan will be here from Plotter, which is a really good plotting software. Stuart Grant, who put his order book filled up last year at the conference will be there. Stuart does author websites, I think it's called The Digital Author's Toolkit is his company.

And Stewart's a fabulous spoke to talk to about websites, even if you are not going to use his services. He's a generous guy and we'll talk to you about what will work for you with your website and as well. So again, have a chat with him. Haley will be here from Pro Writing Aid. You may or may not use Pro Writing aid at the moment. A lot of people find incredibly useful for their books. Get the books as clean as possible before they go to copy and, and proofedit comes up with lots of suggestions and there's AI feeding into that as well as to pro writing more than just a spell checker. It will start to talk to you about sentence length and lots of suggestions of tightening sentences and making them more readable so you have a more readable script. So pricing is a really excellent product and Hailey will be there.

You can talk to her. We'll of course have our friends from readsy, the agency for services to Indie authors. If you use re readsy or perhaps you want to be on Reedsey offering services, you can have a chat with Ricardo and his team. We talked about Damon Cordy, of course, he'll be here with Book Funnel and we are going to have book volt Curtis Robert Agra will be here from book volt book Rockstar Van Dyke Marketing Company. What a fun, fabulous name are on Aaron. Aaron, I think that'll be Aaron Vandyke will be here from them. And finally confirmed with the store will be Fiction. And we talked about Christina Stanley Earlys giving a session. You can find out what fictionary does. So it's a software service to help you with your novel to help you with your pacing and your story structure. And Christina is both a development editor and a bit of a software geek.

So she's been perfect positioned to come up with something like that. Book won't be there in person. No, I think this year unfortunately, but are going to be a part of the conference. Obviously some signed out around the place, but I think the other booth that we're going to have there for certain is Ally, the Alliance of Independent Authors, which is sort of like a trade union body here in the uk Actually it sounds global, isn't it, ally? Is it Global? yeah, it's global. So they sort of do the punching necessary on behalf of the indie community and you'll see we as Mark said, have collaborated with them over the the survey. Also going to be there, Google, SPF f of course, find out about our courses Hello Books, which is our book service. And then maybe something special to announce with Hello books at conference time. And finally, I think we're expecting WF House. Who are the audio book company? Do they own Tan Wf House Own Tan? No, they're, they're both owned by somebody else. They're okay. Statistics companies. Okay. Alright. So they're basically in the foyer. Even if you don't speak to other authors, you'll have your hands for talking to the people, providing services to the industry. A bit of a little trade fair, trying to replicate what you, you might experience in Vegas at 20 bucks if you go there.

Okay. mark,

the only other thing I think to talk about before we go is the digital conference.

So, as I said earlier, not only will you get everything recorded, professionally recorded, not sort of livestream recording, but professional recording cameras and we'll, you know, well everyone's micd up, so you've got good sound as well from the conference itself. But we also adding some extra sessions. I'm just going to talk about the extra sessions we'll get from that. I talked about Stuart Grant doing websites. He's going to do a webinar called a Website in an Hour. You'll get that with your digital package. You're also going to get a session from Steve Hicks. Steve is a powerhouse in productivity and running business as an indie author. So making millions with marketing question mark from Steve Hicks will be added in there. Book Bub going to do a session on promoting any book without book bub, sorry, with Bub ads not without them.

We have Kate Nash, who's going to be talking about selling and protecting your rights. Very important subject book brush. You're going to do a session on animation and ads. Isabel Knight is going to do a session on how to create your author brand story. Book Barb again, another session with them on how to boost new release sales with Book Bub or how to leverage the deals that you get from Book Bub. And there's a question mark on this one, but we'll have another speaker called Lana Johnson. We may not have exactly what she's going to talk on yet, but all of that on top of every session from the conference. Okay, we may have lost the visual, but I'm wrapping up now. So I was going to say, if you, if you're coming to the conference, you do not have to buy a separate digital ticket.

All of this will be in sent to you as part of your attendance ticket. But if you just want to come if you just want the digital ticket, as I said at self-publishing formula.com/digital, and if you want to come to the conference not too late to pick up a ticket, we have a few left self-publishing formula.com/sps live. Can't wait until June. Can't wait to see you all there in person and hear from our speakers. And hat is the end of quite a mammoth podcast recording. Sorry that we disappeared from fishing at the end there. Mark all the remains we'd say it is a goodbye from me.

Mark Dawson: and a goodbye from him.

James Blatch: Goodbye. Goodbye.

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