015 - What's Up With Facebook Ads?

In this episode James & Cara discuss the latest tips and tricks with Meta Ads (Facebook & Instagram).

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Transcript

James (00:00)
Hello, this is the Indie Writers Club. name is James Blatch.

Cara (00:05)
Cara Clare You sounded a little bit confused there as to what we were supposed to be doing.

James (00:11)
You know, I've been watching. Do you know who the hawk tuha girl is?

Cara (00:16)
Yeah, vaguely. The TikTok girl.

James (00:19)
vaguely, a TikTok virality thing that happened last June. I remember it was June because it was the self-publishing show was around at the time. And she made a rather lewd comment, but she was full of Bonhomie or Joy of Life. She was smiley and funny and enjoying herself. And she was quite outrageous, but a little bit drunk. And it was all very nice.

part, you know, it wasn't clean.

Cara (00:48)
Yeah, was quite, it was a weirdly wholesome, lewd comment.

James (00:52)
Yes and her name's Hayley and she's turned out to be quite as exactly what you saw quite a wholesome family southern girl and she's gone a bit nuts since then obviously with with variety but kept you know just on one thing after another that's been fairly good and she's doing a podcast now she has people on chats to them about life in the south and stuff but there are these two men who do a parody

podcast that as if they are BBC Radio 4 or PBS in America, analyzing the hook to a podcast. So they're popping up on my my for you page and they're very good because they will say, we're seeing another side to Haley this week. And it's a real side. What we're seeing, I think is the way that we look into her soul and she looks at us.

Cara (01:40)
You're welcome.

James (01:41)
I think you're right, Brian. And for me, this is a relief because we haven't had hit me. No, they go on and on like that. And they're holding glasses of what's very obviously fizzy pop in wine glasses, swilling the round as they talk and they're very addictive. I'm I, I'm quite addicted to the way that they, the way if you listen to radio four in the UK or PBS in America, the way they talk like that. Hi, this is the indie writers club. I'm James Black. They're always talking as if it's one minute to midnight and you're a trucker.

Cara (01:47)
You

Yeah.

I can't wait for it. Yeah.

James (02:09)
alone on the on the A1 or I15.

Cara (02:14)
Yeah, prefer your normal, you know, joyous greeting.

James (02:18)
Yeah, no, it's going to be like this now. We're going to be talking about the soul.

Cara (02:22)
Okay, we'll see what that does to the downloads. About the soul, you didn't warn me, I'm not prepared. I think I do, yeah. Do I believe in souls? Yes, I do, yeah. Definitely do. Do you?

James (02:29)
Have you got, do you have a soul? You have a soul. Do you believe in souls?

Yes, I think I do actually. I think I do. We don't really talk religion in the UK. In America, no, no, no, that'll be it. That's as intimate as we get about religion. In America, everyone walks around saying, do you love Jesus and stuff like that. And in the UK, it's just not the done thing. We just don't talk about religion. We just do it.

Cara (02:41)
There we go. Any more in depth than that?

I was having a conversation earlier where I said that my women's fiction pen name, a lot of my American readers will sign off with things like praise Jesus and Jesus you and things like

James (03:06)
Yeah, very, very out there very open, sort of sort of become quite political in last few years of shaping up one side of that, which is unfair, because there's lots of I'm sure lots of millions of democrat voting Christians in America, but there's also this kind of feel that the more overtly religious I don't know, America gets a bit sort of strange to read at times, but

Cara (03:10)
Yeah.

Yeah, we're just British people. I don't know. We're just a bit too uptight. We're not really very inclusive in general, are we? Like when I went to Canada, I was so like pleasantly shocked and surprised at how friendly people were and just, you know, strangers saying, hi, how are you? And they kind of like genuinely mean it and they expect you to stop and have a conversation. We just don't do that here. Like why are you talking to me? What do you want? I know you.

James (03:32)
All right. Sherry.

It's shocking. Yeah, I know. I don't like it. Yeah. Why, why you talking to me? Canada is, is famous for its friendliness. That's their sort of differentiation in North America. They, and when we went to see Emily, the first year she was out there, which is a big deal for us, our baby girl going four and a half thousand miles away to work. And then we went over at Christmas in February, we could not wait to see her like viscerally needed to hug her.

Cara (04:00)
Yes.

I'm gonna that.

James (04:17)
and see her again. We were so pleased and we went into the big hotel in Lake Louise and had afternoon tea there and that is amazing. And the waitress was like, where are you guys from? And we told the little, you know, just so we would just come over and she goes, that's so cool. She went home, she came back and says, it's on us tonight. I know, because she was so taken that we just reunited with our daughter. And that was like our first five minutes in Canada, sitting down. yeah.

Cara (04:24)
I've been there, it's amazing.

Aww.

So lovely, yeah. Love it. Do we have any news items this week, James Black? We were sort of discussing this before, I'm not really sure.

James (04:48)
Very nice.

Well, there's not a huge amount. We did a lot of news last week. We are going to talk about Facebook advertising this week or meta advertising this week. Because I think there's a bit to talk about and it is a sort of changing platform. The platform itself is not changing dramatically, but the way we use it, I think is changing. So we're going to talk a bit about that. But there's a couple of things we could just mention in advance. I should say that this is going out on Wednesday, the 6th of December. And this is the day that Learn Self Publishing is...

Cara (04:57)
Thank

I'd try data six.

James (05:21)
Friday, sorry, Friday, it's Wednesday today. I'm easily confused. Yes. Friday the 6th is the day that Learn Self Publishing is sending out the pre-registration for the conference for SPS Live. And it's only going to people who've signed up to the wait list for this year or they attended a previous year. So those people, that block of people will get the first dibs on the £99 tickets for the main conference, which we expect to sell out.

Cara (05:24)
We're recording on Wednesday, the fourth is going out on Friday.

Thanks.

James (05:50)
if there are any, they'll go on sale on Wednesday, but you'll get your, you need to sign up for the pre-register, pre-sale, I should call it pre-sale, you sign up for that on Friday. Those people then get a link for them to sign up to buy a ticket next Wednesday. And following Friday, if there's any tickets left, they go on general sale. So you do want to be in that pre-registration link. It's probably not too late. The time this podcast goes out, if you listen to it on Friday morning, if you sign up to the,

indie writers club mailing list I'll make sure you're included in that pre-sale so indieritersclub.com get on there and yeah we're going to be June 25th 26th two-day conference but one day will be it'll be a one-day conference followed by one day workshop which will be smaller limited at 200 so that's going to be a bit more expensive but for people bit further down the line selling books the one-day workshop is for everybody new and veteran alike and that's going to be a big day

Cara (06:23)
So exciting!

Will there be a party? That's my question.

James (06:49)
There is not going to be a one organized by us. We're not going to do that again, just because you know, it's because we're not doing the conference in two days. We don't get that evening space and to hire it separately is the entire cost of the conference again. So we'd end up having to charge people a hundred pounds to have a couple of glasses of warm wine and a beer in the evening. And we were charging.

Cara (06:52)
Okay.

Yeah, and I think a lot of people, if they're staying around, will organise their own things or naturally go off and do something anyway, won't they?

James (07:12)
Yeah.

There'll be stuff. mean, I'll have a conversation with a couple of the service providers as well, because they may want to host some stuff here and there and we'll help them. So if there's maybe three, maybe, I don't know, Dan, Ricardo and us get together, we could put something on for people. also, it's about networking, right? It's about going to the pub with people you've just met. And so we want that to happen as well. So there'll be lots of networking. We're building in more networking time during the day, more time to...

Cara (07:37)
Yeah, definitely.

James (07:44)
visit the trade stores as well. So people more of a trade fair, more of a fair than a conference as well. So we want all of that to

Cara (07:51)
That's good. And the networking part, you know, everybody always says those conversations in the foyer, that time to grab a coffee and have chats with people, those are sometimes the most valuable parts. So that's, that's good. I'm excited about that.

James (08:04)
Definitely. I'm excited about it. Okay, well that was my one thing. I you've been playing with a TikTok automator.

Cara (08:12)
Yeah, it was, it's called booktok.ai, the website that you go to. And so you feed your manuscript in and the idea is it pulls out hooks for you, analyzes your manuscript. So first of all, sorry, it pulls out scenes. So I think it gives you up to 10 key scenes that it has, you know, that the AI has pinpointed as being scenes that you could use in your marketing for.

whatever reason. And it gives you a little summary of why it's chosen these scenes. And then you pick one of those. And then it generates several different, I think there was about five different versions of slideshow text that you could use. On the free version, I think you get five slides, but if you pay, you can choose to have like 10 slides, 30 slides, whatever.

And then as you go through, can edit them yourself. You can move them around. You can, you know, delete them. and then on the next, phase, it generates images for you. If you go right the way through to the end, you can obviously either download the slides or I haven't tried this out yet because I haven't got that far. You can link it to your TikTok and upload from there. Not sure how that works because previously when I've tried to do that via like the TikTok desktop thing, it hasn't worked particularly well.

but I'd say

James (09:35)
So you can't, mean, it works on your phone, doesn't it? could cap cut or load into your TikTok from your phone. Okay.

Cara (09:39)
Yeah, yeah, and this was on the desktop that I was trying it. So I'd say it's worth having a go at if you're somebody who's struggling to get started and you want to give slideshows a go. Personally, because I've been doing it so long, I looked at it and I thought I would have made so many edits and changes to the hooks that it came up with and the text that it came up with. It wasn't time saving for me. But that's because I've been doing TikTok a long time now. I know what works and I can very quickly put a slideshow.

together. But I think if you're just getting started and you're looking for, you know, some material that will get you started on TikTok, doing slideshows for your books, it's a good thing to have a little play around with. The free version you can play with and it will, you know, give you some ideas at least.

James (10:26)
Did you try the version that did find the hooks for auto-detect pivotal scenes in your novel, which is premium? Yeah.

Cara (10:33)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the first thing it does is pull out the pivotal scenes. And then when you decide which one you want to work on, then it pulls out the actual, you know, text or creates text for a slideshow. And it gives you sort of five different versions of that. And then those ones, you can edit them. And then the next one, it generates images for you.

James (10:37)
Okay.

Yep.

Okay, I'll have a play with it as well. mean the diff

Cara (10:58)
Yeah, it's worth playing with. think at the moment it's not particularly useful, but it's one to keep an eye on because I'm sure that it will develop and grow. you know, I think marketing is the thing, we'll obviously get onto this when we talk about the Facebook ads, that most people are most excited about in terms of how AI can help us. Because I know that marketing is the thing that takes up the most of my time.

James (11:01)
Ahem.

Cara (11:21)
when I would really like to be writing. So if there are things that we can use AI for to streamline processes and to do things that normally would take us forever, then I am all for that.

James (11:35)
Yeah, authorscale.com seems to be I mean, booktok.ai is one of their sites, but authorscale seems to be the name of the company.

Cara (11:40)
Yeah, I think if you put in booktop.ai it redirects to the other thing, I think. Yeah.

James (11:43)
Yeah, yeah. Okay, I'll give it a go. I mean, my problem is because I write historical techno thrillers, the images have to be right. I send it in AI often produces aircraft that just don't really exist in real life. My, my readers don't like that. get grumpy men commenting on it. But I'll give it a go. I'll give it a go and see what it's like. Good.

Cara (12:05)
Yeah, give it a try.

James (12:09)
Yeah so it is the end of November as well and we are going to give a shout out to our heroes who completed NaNoWriMo and or at least attempted it at the end of the episode because they deserve it.

Cara (12:19)
I don't know how I did to be honest my life just went completely haywire because I ended up moving house so I've got absolutely no clue how many words I wrote in November I definitely don't think I achieved 50,000 but I know I was writing I was writing and I didn't stop writing I just didn't necessarily do the amount of words that I aimed for

James (12:43)
Well, very impressive nonetheless. And then, excitingly, are, what are we, something like 16 days away from our drunk recording in the pub in Cambridge. And we're gonna record a Christmas Day episode. It'll be our Christmas Day release episode. We're gonna wear Christmas jumpers. we're not gonna wear Christmas jumpers, because I've got a present for you. And I've already sent this out to Kitty, who's probably wearing one already. She's trying it, so we have.

Cara (12:53)
I'm so excited for this.

god.

my god, I'm not wearing that. Is anyone watching on YouTube? my god, I'm not wearing that. You are not wearing that to the pub, are you?

James (13:12)
If you're watching on YouTube...

You're wearing it.

Cara (13:25)
And so for all those not watching, James is holding up an enormous t-shirt with mine and his faces on it.

James (13:30)
It's not in our work. well. Hang on, I've got various sizes. This might be enormous, this one. I did buy some XL. This is, be fair, this is XL.

Cara (13:37)
Yeah, it's not the size of the t-shirt I have. I'm taking a shoe with it. It's the fact that it's got me and you on it. You're not going to make me wear that. It's a Christmas episode.

James (13:51)
I want you to wear that and nothing else for our sexy podcast recording we're doing in the pub. I know we should wear sparkles and be all dressed up. I tell you what we'll do. We can wear them to start with for a photograph and we can give them out to our audience who come up with good questions or something. We'll throw them at the audience.

Cara (13:57)
I wanted to wear sparkles and be all dressed up.

What were those to start with and then take them off?

That is a good idea. That's a brilliant idea.

James (14:15)
So and who does not want that kitty was very excited to receive her as I did give her a large one because I thought probably not going to wear this outside the house. It's sweet feels like a kind of yeah, that's what I felt kind of sleep in loungewear type thing.

Cara (14:22)
I would wear that to sleep in there. But you stole my idea, that's what I was going get you for Christmas. Are we going to do Secret Santa? That's what I'd like to say. We should do a Secret Santa gift for each other, shouldn't we?

James (14:33)
We should do Secret Santa. Yes, we should definitely do Secret Santa. We'll do that. We'll do Secret Santa. We're going to do our scenes and we'll...

Cara (14:43)
I want to, I need to ask you a very important sex scene question. Am I giving you, no, no. So am I giving you a group scene to read or am I going to be kind to you and try and find one that's not too...

James (14:46)
Okay, what now or when we're doing it?

I think you should give, mean, I don't, genuinely, I have read a couple of spicy romance novels, but I'm unusual in thriller writing. And I suspect our friends who write thrillers or other books like Robin who writes non-fiction have not read much spicy romance, if any, but we talk about it all the time. So I think a typical spice scene. we get an idea of what people are reading these days, what people want in their books. So I think, yeah.

Cara (15:27)
Okay, you asked for it. That's what she said jokes are going to get out of control.

James (15:32)
and we can learn something we can learn about each other's what I should really what I should really do is you

that's fine that's fine. Really you should be reading a flying scene from my book shouldn't you? I'll do that. I'm going to bring my sexting because it needs at some point to leave my laptop and see the real world but I'll get a flying scene together for you which you'll enjoy.

Cara (15:45)
I should be? Yeah, let's do that.

So good.

Do you?

Okay, but most importantly, we'll be drinking. There'll be some drinks before this happens.

James (16:05)
Christmas Day episodes. Good.

Cara (16:08)
Yeah. And we've got some of lovely Cambridge writers coming along to watch us film or record the episode. So there'll be some maybe audience participation at some point. Heckling.

James (16:20)
Yeah, should we talk, should we mention what we're thinking about doing between the conference and Rare? We're just thinking about it. So.

Cara (16:26)
And I feel like you have to mention it now. I might just tease everyone.

James (16:31)
The date to the conference, the 25th and 26th of June, and Rare, which is one of the romance readers events, which are quite big in London, I quite a American authors are coming over for that. So they're coming to our conference, it's perfect timing for them. But they've got kind of a week in between. And I've had a couple of people emailing me saying, do I know of any writers retreats taking place?

that week so Kara and I are thinking we might do an independent indie writers club retreat in between SPS live and rare. So I'll tell you what, let us know if that's the sort of thing you might be interested in. We'll probably do it in Cambridge in the UK because it's a beautiful medieval city so Americans will enjoy I think coming there. We'll probably do it in some college, a historic college, something like that and we'll have mainly

Cara (16:58)
Mmm.

Yeah.

James (17:18)
retreat time to write and be together in quiet surroundings, but we'll put a couple of events on and maybe do a little bit of teaching as well while we're there. So two or three nights, something like that.

Cara (17:28)
Yeah, and the colleges at that time of year are empty, aren't they? Because the students are all headed off for the term. So it's a really good time of year to do it in one of the colleges. I think it'd be beautiful. And such good timing for people who are coming over from America or Australia or wherever, because a lot of authors come over for so many. So to have something relaxing as well. After the busyness of the conference, and Rare is full on.

James (17:32)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Cara (17:54)
So to have like a week where we can focus on writing and kind of recalibrate a little bit would be fantastic.

James (18:00)
So we are no details yet, but let us know if you're interested and that was yeah, that was spurs on. I have been thinking about it for a little while, but yeah. Yeah.

Cara (18:03)
I mean we literally discussed this yesterday. Well we'd sort of been, we mentioned it a couple of times didn't we, right from the beginning of when we started to plan this is one of the things that we'd like to do eventually but those two things seem to tie in quite well together timing wise.

James (18:18)
Yeah.

Wearing this t-shirt will be mandatory on the retreats for everybody.

Cara (18:25)
I was just going to say you're not going to be forced to the t-shirt. I didn't even get approval on what photograph you used. All the ones that we have, that's my least favourite.

James (18:29)
absolutely forced.

I know it's a great photograph. We should get some views on the YouTube channel this week anyway people wanting to see to see that.

Cara (18:39)
Excellent. Donnie, good. It's me holding a giant chilli pepper if anyone's interested.

James (18:44)
Yeah. Okay, let's talk about Facebook advertising or meta ads. Because I think first first thing to say is it's been a bit of a roller coaster year. We had a blip in February, I don't really know still what happened. It looked kind of normal in the dashboard for a bit, then it's quite clear that ads weren't serving. And we took we took a hit on our profit. Some of our book sales went down. I noticed this personally and in Vinci.

Then it came back and actually was really good in the spring and middle of summer, June, July was really good. And I think maybe Facebook sort of made up, they never, can't, we had this conversation probably back in the summer. I don't think Meta could say, we didn't serve any of those ads. So we owe you the $10 million a minute that gets put into Meta ads or whatever back. So, what they did do is on the quiet, they probably just doubled up on the amount of exposure your ads got.

Cara (19:28)
Yeah.

James (19:37)
because they certainly were very good. And I've got a lot of, a lot of authors. I've seen this, this little dip in February back up in the middle of summer. Then it started to tail off and this has been a tough autumn. It's been, I found it really tough. I absolutely peaked in the middle of summer. I had my best month ever, which I mentioned, I think 2,200, 1,700 pounds profit. I've only got two and a half books. So that was amazing for me. And this month I have made 238 pounds and I've actually stopped advertising. Well, not this month, last month, November.

Cara (19:57)
Yeah, that's what you said.

James (20:07)
I mean you're in competition with Black Friday, you're in competition with the election, billions of dollars going into Metta. Black Friday is insane, Cyber Monday, Ruby Tuesday, whatever.

Cara (20:18)
Yeah, Black Friday, 5 Monday, the run up to Christmas. It's all, but I've done really well at this time of year before. So I do think this year for whatever reason, it is harder. I mean, I turned off my ads in September because I had a viral TikTok and this is kind of what I tend to do is if I've got, if I have a TikTok go viral, I'll then reduce my ad spend for a bit just to try and, you know, claw back some ad spend. And I just,

set them back up again, literally at the beginning of this week on Monday. I set up an A-B test on Facebook and I hadn't been through the system of setting up a new ad since they'd made quite a lot of changes with their AI and the interface and stuff, so that was interesting. But I also set up a boosted Instagram post.

because for my genre, I've heard a lot of mumbling and people saying that boosting an Instagram post is doing better than actual Facebook ads for them. Because if you think about the reverse harem readership, not that many of them are still on Facebook. It's a lot of younger people who are primarily on Instagram. And the way that the Instagram boost serves is that it just says, do you want us to work out the audience?

and it's based on your followers, the people who follow your Instagram page. So I've set up attribution links via Amazon. They're not massively accurate, but they give you some kind of idea. And so far, the Instagram ad is outperforming the Facebook ads. We're only four days in, but I'm only spending half the amount on Instagram. So I'm gonna, my usual reaction with ads is I get frustrated after like a week because I'm not really seeing any results. And so I get, throw,

James (21:57)
Wow.

Cara (22:06)
throw my toys out the pram, turn them off and just go back to TikTok. But I'm determined this time to leave them, let them run for a month because I'm not spending mega money and actually try to be a bit more strategic about it. But it's hard for me.

James (22:18)
that's really interesting, particularly for romance. mean, the boosting had a bad reputation because in the early days you had very, very good targeting on Facebook and everyone was on Facebook five, six years ago. And why would you boost? Because it was very generalist and it didn't really work and who it was going to.

Cara (22:38)
Yeah, and boosting Facebook post was always just a bit weird. just, but a while ago actually at SPS, actually, I, met an author who, you know, when you meet someone and you think, my God, finally I found someone who's the same as me. We write the same, we binge write the same. We both write reverse harem. We'd even both studied at Oxford Brooks at one point. And we just kind of had this crazy energy and we're talking about all sorts of things. and she is mega, mega successful. The only thing she does are Instagram post boosts and TikTok.

James (22:41)
Yes.

Cara (23:08)
And so that it was already kind of in the back of my mind, but I was a bit like, it's probably one of those things where somebody says it works, but maybe it's not going to work for me. And I tried it a couple of months ago, but I didn't do the attribution thing. So I thought anecdotally that it was working, but I didn't have the actual data to back it up. So this time I made myself sit down and do it properly with attribution links so that I can make an informed decision. Yeah.

James (23:33)
we'll talk about attribution links in a moment, but it makes sense to me that this works better. I I mentioned earlier in the year that I went to Meta before I went out to Vegas in London. They gave us a presentation of what's coming down the pipeline for on the ads platform. But the big takeaway from the day was, as far as they're concerned, interest targeting is gone. So let's think there are basically three ways of targeting on Facebook, I think.

One is interest targeting. So you can select comparable authors like James Patterson in my case, or I don't know who it'd be for you. And we've been talking, actually, we've been talking about your women's fiction books today, kind of clean and wholesome. So maybe it's Debbie McCumber or whatever.

Cara (24:10)
Yeah, so like Brendan Ovek, Marianne Keys, those sort of people.

James (24:15)
So that's interest targeting. The other way is for you to upload your audience or for you to ask Facebook to look at your page and then create a lookalike audience or an audience based on that. So that's called retargeting the old, old parlance. And the third way is AI targeting, which is called Advantage Plus in Facebook.

It sort of felt to me like they were saying, don't worry about interest targeting or even retargeting, they're dead. It's all AI now. AI will do your targeting for you, which is great, but you don't have to worry about all that anymore. Now, I don't think that's quite true because I'm seeing a lot of results from a lot of campaigns in Vinci books and I can see that some specific targeting on authors and lookalike lists from authors mainly are working. But at the same time,

Sometimes and so maybe it's only for a week or so, but the AI targeting is absolutely working as well So what they were saying was your emphasis now as an as a creator should be on the creative So that's what you alter to find a new audience because the AI looks you're creative It could even like I said before can go off to to Amazon and look at the putt You know scrape the data off there probably not admitting this but they'll look at where you're sending people and build an audience around that

Cara (25:27)
Yeah.

James (25:28)
which we can't really do as easily. So it doesn't surprise me to hear that Boosting is working on Instagram because that's using that technology which is far advanced of where it was five or six years ago.

Cara (25:36)
Yeah.

Yeah, and obviously I have way more followers on Instagram than Facebook. Like my Facebook page has maybe two followers. People just, you know, my audience just don't hang out on Facebook in that way anymore. They hang out in groups, like the spicy book top group or whatever, but there's no way to target those. You can't target groups on Facebook. So no, does, it makes sense in my head that it would work for my demographic, for Instagram to be more successful than Facebook ads.

But the Facebook has, I've tried it, I've tried the AI targeting, I didn't give it any direction, I've just let it choose. Because it came up with a message actually when I was setting up which said, if you're very clear about who your target audience is, then basically allow us to do it. If you're not sure, then it could help to nudge us in the right direction. And I've heard a couple of authors say that they still just select quite broad categories. So they might just tell Facebook, Kindle and Paranormal Romance.

because it just gives them that like nudge. But at the end of the day, like you said, our copy and our image really should be doing all of that, really should be pointing it in the right direction. And if you've got those wrong, it's that Swiss cheese thing again. Then Facebook's not gonna know where to send people.

James (26:54)
Yes, the Swiss cheese.

Yeah, I mean, is almost impossible to use that type the old targeting anyway, because you always have that advantage by sitting above saying this is, as you say, this is a suggestion for us if you put Debbie McCumber and whatever that's suggestion for them, but they're not going to slavishly serve to that audience, which is sort of

Cara (27:06)
Thank

James (27:19)
Good in one way because if you take the big authors, the sort of Lee Child, James Patterson, everybody who writes a thriller targets that one audience. So woe betide you if you've ever liked Lee Child page or anything on Facebook in the past, you must be inundated with thriller ads for the rest of your life. But that's a finer audience, whereas you'd hope the AI looks at the four and a half billion, whatever they are now active users of Facebook and spreads the load a bit better. So.

Cara (27:33)
haha

Yeah. And I think it was always the case that in some genres, like say for my spicy stuff, I really struggled to find comp authors to actually target because they needed to have a certain size Facebook page in order to show up as an interest or a target that you could choose. So I always struggled to find, re you know, actually relevant people to target. I don't think you can target the Zodiac Academy sisters or fourth or any of those things on Facebook. It's all the kind of,

James (28:11)
No.

Cara (28:15)
you

James (28:15)
Which is weird, when you think how many books Sarah Jo Mas, Caroline and Suzanne have sold between them, why can't you target them? Well, that is also potentially because Facebook is an older audience. That's the other thing, is we get in romance books now, spicy romance, whatever. Probably not going to be doing much on Facebook advertising for them. Somebody comes in with a...

Cara (28:18)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes, it does.

James (28:34)
clean and wholesome mystery set in the snowy landscaping in Colorado. That's 100 % Facebook because you're gonna get women age 65 plus who devour those books and that's the audience. The audience does skew older on Facebook for sure. It's fine for me, thriller writing as well.

Cara (28:51)
Yeah, and I think what tends to happen with mine on Facebook, because it's, again, this is just me, you know, making suppositions, but I think that older readers will click on the book because they you know, they like the blurb that I've put up there. And it says that it's spicy, but they don't necessarily understand how spicy or that it's reverse harm until they've because I have to be careful how much I say in the Facebook ad because otherwise it won't serve. And then they don't convert as well. So I'm getting the clicks and they're, you know, a good CPC.

but I'm not necessarily getting the conversion from Facebook because they're just not the right demographic. So my hunch is that after the experiment is done, I'll end up choosing Instagram and putting more money into Instagram.

James (29:26)
Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, TikTok obviously skews young and that has been very good, but very good organically. think the ads platform each time I try it is dismal or in a really dismal. can't first of all, it's quite complex to use over overly complex to use. And then even when you've done everything you think, right, it just does not produce results. I don't think I've had a single conversion.

Cara (29:52)
Yeah, I mean, you're just paying for views that you can get anyway.

James (29:56)
Yeah, I guess it's they do that they're at that stage where Twitter ads were years ago where where they suddenly realized they can't really prove to anyone that the ads will sell anything because they don't but they can sell it to big companies as brand awareness.

Cara (30:08)
Yes.

Yes.

James (30:12)
And all year we've got millions of impressions for you. And everyone goes around telling the boss, we've got 10 billion impressions in August. And he sends an email to everyone saying, congratulations to the team for getting 10 billion impressions. No clue about that. So I think TikTok ads is like that. And part of me, cause there's this thing going on in America, a constant threat about TikTok being closed down. I get an email from someone every week saying, it's going to another month to go. Well, for two years, I've been telling, telling me it's going to be closed down in America. I guess it will or it won't. But.

Cara (30:18)
Yeah.

Yeah.

James (30:41)
Part of me kind of wishes, I know this would be generally unpopular that Meta took over TikTok because they have a really advanced, mature advertising system. And in TikTok, you've got this young, vibrant audience. So as long as they don't muck it up too much, but I don't really like the way TikTok's going at the moment. I mean, I'm thinking about doing a screen flow on this the other day of how many times you have to scroll past paid placement content now.

Cara (30:45)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, even if you're on somebody's profile now, who you follow or who you're interested in, and you're scrolling through their videos, you'll watch maybe two or three and then an ad comes up. And I'm like, hang on, I'm actually looking at this person who I'm interested in.

James (31:13)
Yep.

But worse, than that. For the main for you page, can have you can have a pay an actual ad says ad, followed by somebody saying, I mean, anybody who starts a post saying I'm always being asked, no, you're not. Nobody's asking you about this potato peeler. I'm always being asked, where do you get this? No, no, Yeah, exactly. Yeah, all that. So you get you get an all I'm always being asked. And it says at the bottom commission paid, followed by a comedian with bottom page commission paid.

Cara (31:33)
Why is being us? Why are my teeth so white? I happen to have a product here.

James (31:45)
And then maybe your fourth one is what you're there for, which is an organic for you page post. And then that cycle starts again, that for me, that balance is wrong. And that's, that's kidding the platform. And I'll be, I'll be surprised if their watch times are as strong as they were a year ago, when it was a much more interesting place to be. So I would like someone else to take. Yeah.

Cara (31:53)
Yeah.

Yeah, I think creators are migrating back to YouTube actually, because they're going to put time and effort into creating interesting content. They're going to do it on a platform where they can monetize it a bit better because TikTok is just pushing TikTok shop so hard now. If you're not pushing TikTok shop on your profile, it's getting really hard to find the views. And actually this was interesting. Emily Rath, who's a massive author, she wrote the...

I it was Pucking Around, the ice hockey series that went absolutely crazy. She's amazing. She's absolutely amazing. She has an unbelievably huge following. And she posted on TikTok this week saying that she is starting a Patreon page, or Patreon, how do you pronounce it? Because she hasn't been able to reach her readers. She's really struggling. She said she's had people say they had no idea that the second and third books in her series were out. Her TikTok posts just aren't reaching people.

James (32:55)
Right.

Cara (32:59)
They're not reaching the people that they used to and same with Instagram. She was like I just feel like I'm shouting into a void if I do things organically and so she's trying to kind of take that audience and move it to somewhere where You can actually reach people who are interested in hearing from you and I kind of made me feel a little bit better actually because I was like She's got millions of followers if she's struggling Then it proves that it's not just us people with I mean, I think I've got 17,000 followers on tik-tok

James (33:21)
Yeah.

Cara (33:30)
don't see my stuff, the people who are actually interested in it don't see it anymore. So I'm just going to tilt my screen slightly so you can see that I've just got a dog standing literally. He's ghosting Amber, shall I? He's been stupid the whole time.

James (33:31)
Mmm. If you're-

there's night who shy they've gone off his walked off out of shots. He said I didn't said I didn't sign a release form. I'm not in this video. And bless him. Yeah, so I think I mean, I don't know. I can only imagine everything that's going on in the States that even had this very patient Singaporean CEO being grilled by Congress a couple years ago. And he was basically being asked by old men who didn't understand anything about the platform.

Cara (33:48)
You

And we go, did you see some of it? was things like, so wait, wait, wait, are you telling me that TikTok connects to the internet? And the guy's like, yes, it does connect to the internet. And it's like, my God, this isn't gonna go well, is it?

James (34:12)
Yes, and he said, Yes, we have to. Yeah. And that did not go well. But I can only imagine that's a massive distraction for the company and that is they're finding it hard to sort of plot their way forward. I hope they don't ruin what has been a good thing. But back to meta, which is what we should be talking about. So yeah, so content is king and content is the new targeting. That's kind of what they're saying. So you really focus on your

Cara (34:31)
Yeah.

James (34:39)
your content and be prepared to change it up and to test it a lot. So, you very typically what I'll do for my books is I'll take, I'll generate say three or four new images out of AI. I'll think about, depending on how they look, I'll think about running just that image with the copy above and below on the advert. Then I'll do a version with, with the book, book packs, you know, from book brush or camera, whatever I use book brush in the bottom right-hand corner.

just that and then I'll move the main subject of the image down a little bit, have the pack shop there, have five stars and a quote from one of my five star reviews at the top of the kind of more busy looking one. But I'll test all three of those times three, that's nine new images to go into a campaign. And I'll do that quite often. you know, that's typically how I'll approach it. And I think that's what you've got to do these days, you've got to really put your time and effort into creation.

Cara (35:29)
It's just so time intensive.

James (35:32)
Not as intensive as writing books, which you I know. I know, but you you want to stay ahead of the game, right? And the targeting that we used to have is less effective. I mean, that's the thing about what basically they were saying to me in London was that, you know, you put down James Paterson and Lee Child, you're not really getting to them anymore because that stuff's out of date. We can't gather that information on people anymore. We can't

Cara (35:34)
I know but I'd rather be writing the book, that's the thing.

Okay.

James (35:59)
Well, we can't, we do gather that information on it, but we can't let you access that. So it's old data, which is probably another reason there might be younger people on Facebook, but not through that interest targeting, which is why you really need to be mixing it up with AI at the very least and thinking about your, your images and look at the results, do dynamic creative and look at what people are clicking on. And if they're not clicking on the, the ones with the review quote, look at the review quote, change it up.

Cara (36:03)
Yeah.

Yeah.

James (36:29)
Don't use a review quote if you're starting, that's always how Facebook advertising has worked. It does reward that sequence of changes, optimizations until you get to the point where it's actually working, giving you profit and you can scale up and you have a good month and then that starts to stare out and that cycle starts again. I know this sounds tedious and boring to people, but that's kind of what you have to be prepared to do to make meta-ads work. that those fundamentals haven't changed. It's just what you're putting the effort into has changed.

Cara (36:50)
See ya.

So how many hours, how much time a week do you think realistically, do you think doing it once a week? Like say on a Monday, I'm gonna look at my ads and I'm gonna sit and do the new versions. Is that enough? Because how long do you need to run it for to get an idea of whether it needs tweaking and?

James (37:10)
So I...

I have a minimum of three complete days. So if I do something today and launch the campaigns this afternoon, that'll be Thursday, Friday, Saturday. So I can check them on Sunday at the very earliest, but I'm a bit more relaxed. And if I spend another 60 quid, I'm doing sort of 30 quid a day and I spent 60 quid because I didn't check them until Tuesday. It's not the end of the world. Now for our Vintry authors, we're a publisher. You absolutely need to be on top of that. You don't want them running a few days if the campaigns. So we do...

Cara (37:26)
Okay.

James (37:43)
do that. And then having said that, there's some campaigns where we feel much more confident about we'll leave if you've made small changes to leave to run for longer. And how long does it take to do the work? I mean, I did an author this morning and then I did some Facebook ads after that. It's getting in early. And I took about two and a half hours of creating the ads for her.

Cara (38:02)
Hahaha

Okay.

James (38:11)
And that was based on me familiarizing myself with the book, actually sending a couple of emails because I think we want to make some changes to the blurbs. And so that's the sort of, one thing leads to another when you're looking at a book package. But I don't think it's unreasonable to think you're going to spend a couple of hours, two to three hours a week on creatives in the future.

Cara (38:22)
Yeah.

Yeah. Which really, suppose, if that's your main form of marketing, that's not a huge amount of time to spend, is it? A couple of hours a week optimizing your Facebook ads.

James (38:43)
No, I mean, we've always said right in the morning market in the afternoon, how you divide that time up, that's basically 50 50. So you have in theory half the week available to you to market. Now if you have you you have quite a complex setup, because you have multiple series in multiple genres, you do Kickstarter, you do direct selling. So you've got a lot of stuff to juggle. So when I say to you, you need to spend two, three hours doing Facebook ads, that means something different to you than someone listening to the podcast who has

Cara (38:58)
Yes. Yeah.

James (39:11)
three books in one series and they're running Facebook ads, they are going to this shouldn't be so onerous for them. It should fit into the way that they are approaching their marketing and it will pay dividends as long as you test and check and pivot and make those adjustments.

Cara (39:23)
Yes.

And another reason to check is with the AI, if it reaches the wrong audience accidentally, and that audience starts interacting, then it will start serving to that audience. So one of my spicy book ads a few months ago accidentally ended up in front of somebody who was very religious and told me to burn in hell. And because they commented, obviously...

Meta's AI sort of went, that's the sort of person who wants to see this. So then just kept pushing out in front of more people. And then there was all these comments. So I had to nip that one in the bud quite quickly because you don't want it getting the wrong idea of, of who you're actually trying to reach.

James (40:14)
The lowest cost per click I got this year was on a broken link. So I think people were mashing it. They were mashing, why can't I get through to Amazon? So each person who wanted to click clicked about 10 times. It was like paying two cents a click on that for one.

Cara (40:17)
Because everyone said the link is broken.

Hahaha

Maybe that's the trick. Put a mistake in your ad to get people to comment.

James (40:32)
Yes, but not that mistake. I do know honestly, you joke I'm 100 % certain that is a good tactic to actually put a mistake and people I see people doing If you pose an easy question that everyone knows the answer to on tik tok you get massive engages I've been my sphere like military Aviation if someone says anyone know what type of plane this is and it's like a really obvious thing to us people like us like an f16 he's going to get 10 000 comments on that And he's it deliberately

Cara (40:38)
I think it is. know people who make mistakes in their videos.

James (41:02)
Or he'll say, I love the F15 with a picture of an F16. That's another way of doing it. But I think if you do put mistakes in, you do attract engagement and it does probably lead to higher numbers of views on your product page and ultimately more sales. So tricky.

Cara (41:05)
I'm

Yeah, I've seen like spicy authors before leave like an accidental sex toy or something in in the background of a video. So that people are like, my god, did you know you left that behind you? And it's like, shocking. No, I did not know. So many tricks, so many tricks.

James (41:25)
Clever.

Interesting.

can't really do that in my sphere, I've got an accidental F15 in the background. That would get some engagement. might send the wrong signal to my audience. No, so that's basically, that's a good discussion around where we are with Meta at the moment. I'm really keen to spend a bit more time on Instagram, because I think Instagram is in a good place at the moment. It's very much...

Cara (41:38)
I mean you could! You could, I definitely would get some views. I'm not sure it would be the right call though.

James (42:01)
The Chosens, it's taken over, I think, from Facebook for everyday use of engaging with each other and seeing some nice images and stuff, whereas Facebook used to be that for years ago.

Cara (42:05)
Yes.

Yeah, I think for the kind of, you know, probably my age group, my demographic, Instagram has taken over, I think it's that middle ground between TikTok and Facebook and reels and things like that. I know a lot of people doing so well with Instagram. So that's going to be my focus. So I can definitely feed back on how the post boosting does. But so what if someone is just going to start out testing some Facebook ads this week, what is a realistic budget?

per day for them to get results that mean something. Is five pounds a day actually going to be feasible? Does it need to be more like 10?

James (42:48)
It needs to be more like 10. Unfortunately, I'd love five pounds a day to give you the working data you need to then start making even if you are happy because you need to basically be happy to lose your first few campaigns lose on them profit wise because you're discovering you'll make mistakes for start which might work. You're discovering how what images were what colors were what text works with you. So it's a bit of investment but I just don't think you get five pounds a day, five dollars a day is just not enough.

audience for data unfortunately so I would say a minimum is 10 a day. What you can do you can do that three four days so you're going to end up paying you know maybe less than 50 bucks 50 pounds because you have a bit of one day at the beginning and end but three complete days in the middle that will give you I think enough data for you then to look at

Cara (43:18)
Yeah.

James (43:39)
breaking down, seeing which images have got the clicks, the cost per clicks and the click through rate. So the two things I look at are click through rate and CPC. Then my main two metrics I look at obviously sales is the only one that really matters. But in terms of the dashboard and Facebook, so I'd rather have a higher click through rate and a lower CPC to be honest, because that means that the

Cara (43:58)
Let's see.

James (44:00)
the ad is landing correctly and is getting that first. From the first 100,000 people who see it, want a thousand people at least to then engage with your ad, something like that. So 10 % is a really good click rate.

Cara (44:12)
So do you use the Amazon attribution links?

James (44:18)
So Amazon Attribution, my god, you know, I so want that. When that was announced, I can remember for years talking to Amazon every time we interviewed Amazon, say, can we get something because the affiliate program was being closed off to everyone and the affiliate program, you could do this. You could have an affiliate link and...

Cara (44:19)
Hahaha!

Yeah, so it used to be that you could sort of sneakily do it. weren't supposed to, but by using the affiliate link program, you could put that into your Facebook ads and use that as a way to track your conversion. And it was reasonably accurate, not great, but it gave you an idea.

James (44:38)
Night.

and you made some money sometimes. I remember, yeah, or Rolex or something. Yeah, you got a load of money. So then they launched Amazon attribution. So basically what this is, is you create the link in Amazon ads platform. It's under reporting, I think. Click on Amazon attribution. So you create the link, give it a name. It's a link that goes to your product page, to your book.

Cara (44:53)
Yeah. Yeah. Because if somebody bought a TV or something after clicking on link, you've got a bit of

James (45:17)
That's the link you use in your Facebook advert. So when people click on it and they go through, you can go into your Amazon ads platform and see did they buy the book. But unfortunately, it's got an attribution period of about 14 days. People often buy a book, if they're page reads, they don't show at all. Even your ads platform actually is pretty poor on page reads because people will perhaps download the book to their Kindle and not read it for a month, in which case you're never going to know that that was a result of your ad because outside the attribution period.

Cara (45:44)
you

James (45:46)
The attribution links themselves. think, I mean, I speak to, I spoke to one of them this week actually about it and she was saying she uses it for DPV, which is the product view. And she doesn't really pay attention to self because she knows that that under reports or for some reason is very, very cautious and actually showing you a sales or result of an ad. And maybe, and maybe what's behind this is that the way.

You know, people say to me, I've got friends who don't live in this world at all. And they say, well, I never buy anything on Facebook. I don't know. I can't understand how that works. And I'm thinking, yeah, you probably do buy stuff on Facebook, but you don't. I understand what they're saying. They don't click on Facebook and go through and buy it. What happens is the Facebook ad hits them two or three times, then they walk past John Lewis or the Sears and they see a poster for that same product. And then a third friend mentions it. And that's the point at which they go and buy it. So the Facebook ad has worked in that part of that process. And maybe that's what happened.

Cara (46:40)
Or they just didn't want to use the Facebook browser. I find it quite irritating sometimes to click on a link within the Facebook app because the browser opens and then I haven't got my card details in there, whatever. I'll go, and then open up Google Chrome or the Amazon app and look for it separately.

James (46:50)
Yeah, so you'd rather make a mental note of it and go off and yeah. Yeah. So I think that maybe happens with our ads on Facebook quite a lot, which is maybe why we don't see we know the campaign's working because we started running it and our sales have gone up and that is the basic metric that we need to live by. But we're not seeing any results in Amazon Attribution. But if you're looking at the click through rate and the DPV of the product view, if they're going up,

Cara (47:00)
Yeah.

Yeah.

James (47:19)
your ads working. Now, if people ultimately you don't see sales going up, you know you've got a problem with your products. There's some reason why there's some mismatch. The Swiss cheese model, listen to episodes 007 and 008. People have got through the first part of that process, they've hit the product page. There's a reason why it's not connected to their expectations at that point. So that tells you that. So I think Amazon Attribution useful.

But in the future, it was a good conversation actually this week and I learned something from that is don't worry about sales, which is why I've always stopped using them in the past. It just seemed like a dismal point at purpose.

Cara (47:48)
Yeah. Yeah. Because it feels like you feel exactly like you said, you feel like, my sales are going up. So I know I must be, but this is telling me that I'm not. And then you feel like you need to shut off the ads. but so I think it's a good idea to have a

James (48:05)
Yes, benchmarking.

Cara (48:17)
because you're not going to know which one is leading to the increase. If you're going to start Facebook ads, do that and do that exclusively until you've got a handle on how much you're spending and how much that's generating. And then do the TikTok thing and then do the promo stacking or whatever else you want to try. Don't do them all at once because you're going, I'm really excited. I'm going to do all these things for my book. That's great. But then you don't know which one's worked.

So you kind of need to, it's hard for me in Clifton Strength Speaks, number one activator. I want to do all the things all at once, get them all done, get the results. It's painful for me. But it is a case of taking it slowly and testing.

James (48:57)
everything if we were older once. Wasn't that film last year? I think so. Wasn't very good apparently, but it was it. Okay. Well, look, it 50 minutes. Yeah. I've enjoyed it. It's my therapy talking through stuff like that. So I've enjoyed it. I'm going to get a bit more into my, my own books advertising. As I build up to launching book four, which I haven't actually dared put a launch date on yet.

Cara (48:59)
That's it.

That was helpful. It was helpful for me.

I'm

Yeah.

James (49:26)
But I think that's one thing that we'll talk about this. Perhaps this might be next week's episode. I need to get more into AI writing, which I know is a hugely controversial area, but I think I need to understand better how to use AI to help me in the writing process.

Cara (49:40)
It is. I think there's some did we talk we talked about it last week, didn't we the the chat GPT canvas thing. And there's so many things Claude this week now has is integrating with Google Docs. So there's a new novel crafter. Yes. Yeah, I saw another author post about that on Facebook got massively excited because it's a bit like any of the other you know, Scrivener or whatever that you write into.

James (49:46)
Yeah there's another one I was told today

Yes, and there's something called novel crafter which I've been told about

Cara (50:08)
But while you're writing it will create your series Bible for you and that's to me sounded like But when I downloaded it and opened it, it was really confusing and beyond my technical I didn't know what I was looking at. So I need to watch some of the tutorials and stuff

James (50:12)
Yes.

Well, I had a conversation with an author today who swears by and absolutely loves it and says it's the integration with Claude. think he uses, you can choose your AI integration has worked.

Cara (50:34)
Yeah, that was the thing that I got stuck on. That was as far as I got. I'm just, I'm not very, things like this scare me the first time I see them. So I need to be careful. Will you hold my hand and sort it out for me?

James (50:42)
Uncle James will come around and sort out. mean I do tech support for my dad. can do it for you. Yeah I'll come around and sort that out for you. Yes okay yeah let's do that. Let's give a shout out to people who've managed to work their way through.

Cara (50:48)
Okay, thank you. Okay, I've got to go on the school run in a minute. So should we do the word?

Yeah, to everybody who stuck with it throughout November, because we got a bit chaotic. didn't, we didn't read everyone out last week. think the doorbell rang or something, didn't it? At one point midway through reading them.

James (51:10)
we can do that we can do the total so Rachel Morton writes a Vicki Smith writes as Rachel Morton got 70,000 words and I know she's been pretty poorly as well so she's done a really good job well done Vicki for that J.A Mortimer 60,556 congratulations we have our little bell we should ring or hooter Lin in a spin Lin in Spain 50,039 and that's that's

Cara (51:31)
you

James (51:34)
I know Lin and I are quite similar. I did not manage to do NaNoWriMo or even the half I was hoping to do this year, I did with that question. It's got me back into it, which is great. So it serves that purpose, but 50,039 is exactly what I would have done if I was doing NaNoWriMo. Like literally finished that sentence and got over it. You can do a few now. On the nail.

Cara (51:40)
You did probably write more than you see.

Exactly.

Christine, 50,000 bang on. Yeah, Musing, 30,678. Susie Fleming, 27,000. Lovely Kitty, 26,000. Do you wanna do a couple more?

James (52:07)
I'm kidding. Yeah, Katherine Walker 25,000, Suzy Q 11,156. And then we've got a few people who don't have a NaNoWriMo total but have been setting themselves targets or new words they've done this week. So Miroslav Kochera 14,446, which is excellent.

Cara (52:28)
Oof. Well done.

Sheridan 11,439 Louise 7,396 Melissa 7,049 Moreland we always get your name wrong and I'm sorry we were told at one point how to pronounce it and forgot 66,086 and what else 44,000

James (52:45)
Yeah.

Mark our friend Mark who will be there on the 19th. We'll have to have a chat with Mark on the 19th

Cara (52:57)
We will. Yeah, he's absolutely wonderful human. 40, 44,000. No, 4,428, which is fantastic because I know that he was just sort of getting back into the words and stuff recently. So that's great.

James (53:09)
And he said he's had family and weddings and stuff. Deborah Kulish, 13,000 edited words. Well done, Deborah. Tommy Tree, written a lot of words lately, haven't counted any. Doesn't matter, as long as you've written them. But he does want to celebrate two of the words that he wrote. The end. Well done, Tommy.

Cara (53:22)
Same here, same here to me.

We didn't really have an operation or was in hospital or something, so he's done really well.

James (53:33)
He's done really well done. Jackie has set a goal of 10,000 for the next week and our friend Thad from Florida has joined our discord. noticed that Thad and his wife would come down and see us every year in Ninc and have a beer and is great fun. Thad is a former firefighter.

Cara (53:47)
I don't know that. You'll have to introduce me.

James (53:51)
handsome devil and now writes thrillers and is a great guy so I'm really pleased to see that in our community. K.A. Dempsey as well crashed and burned but that's okay closing down from manufacturing. yes a lot of stuff going on in K.A. Dempsey's life but there will be some words to come.

Cara (53:52)
Yeah.

December will have to be my November. Well, there you go. There's always another month, isn't there? There's always another month. And I think this one is going to be, you know, that we're on the kind of run into Christmas now. It's going to be chaotic for everybody. Like I've had two Nativity things to go to this week, another carol concert on Friday. There's an elf run, there's panto trips, just everything. So any words that anyone is managing right now, well done.

James (54:09)
There you go.

Yeah, lot of two towels on heads in your house over there for the older Nativity play. Yeah, very good. Okay, look that.

Cara (54:36)
You

Yes, yes, he was a shepherd, yeah was a shepherd. And my nephew was a cow, but unfortunately, it was so cute actually, my son and my nephew were in the same nativity, they were adorable, but my nephew was a little bit sad because he had a sore throat and they'd been, they'd practiced so much, I'm not surprised, but it was very cute to see them together.

James (55:01)
Very good. Okay, excellent. Thank you very much, Kara. What fun it's been. We're going to be talking AI writing next week, which is not AI writing and generating a book. If you want to do that, that's fine. But it's about us as writers using technology side by side, just to make our writing cleaner. So it needs less editing and speedier and more focused and to take away the blank page when we have those little moments of being stuck. So we'll talk about that.

Cara (55:04)
Thanks for today.

Yeah, and I think that's the thing, it's getting rid of that misconception that when writers talk about using AI to write a book, we mean we've just gone Claude, will you

James (55:37)
No.

Absolutely. Okay, that's it. See you next week. Bye.