The Publishing Profits Podcast Show | Writing | Marketing | Books | eBooks | Audiobooks | Authors | Entrepreneurs

Regina Calcaterra is the New York Times best-selling author of Etched in Sand. It’s a true story memoir about five siblings who survived an unspeakable childhood on Long Island. Why She Wrote a Memoir Regina was inspired to write her own memoir in part because she read The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls when it was published in 2005. It was the first memoir Regina had read about someone wrote about a horrible tragedy without being a victim. Etched in Sand is Jeannette’s memoir about growing up in poverty with parents who are mentally ill. It tells the story of how she and her siblings coped and grew up in that environment. Jeannette’s memoir can be difficult to read because of what happens to her and her family. It struck Regina that Jeanette’s memoir was written without pity or victimization. How She Got a Memoir Published Once Regina had the idea to write her memoir it always stayed with her. She decided to take the plunge years later, and she signed up for a workshop put on by The Gotham Writers in New York. She took three classes on how to write a memoir. Over those three classes, she wrote the first four chapters of her book Etched in Sand. During the classes, she bonded with a group of writers who decided to meet every week at whole foods in Manhattan, keep writing and critique each other’s work. Critiquing the writing of her peers and getting critiques from them was the most important part of Regina’s learning process. Regina worked on the first four chapters of her book for years. In July 2011 a friend of hers set up a breakfast for her and three other women at Michael’s, a place in New York City where a lot of people in the world of traditional publishing go to eat. One of the women at that breakfast was Lisa Sharkey, the VP of strategic development for HarperCollins. Another lady at that breakfast was a book agent. During that breakfast, they went around the table and each woman told a little bit of her life story. The book agent told Regina that she wouldn’t be able to sell her story because she didn’t have a platform. The book agent didn’t believe Regina’s story would go anywhere. Lisa Sharkey told Regina to ignore the advice of the book agent. Lisa said that Regina had an important story that needed to be told. They set up a meeting to review Regina’s materials. Regina asked Lisa if it was okay if they meet in September of that year. The weeks from July to September to research the publishing industry and make the best first impression she could. In her research, Regina discovered the book How to Write a Book Proposal: The Insider’s Step-By-Step Guide to Proposals That Get You Published by Jody Rein and Michael Larsen. She read the book and spent two months of writing the best book proposal she could. How to Sell Your Author Platform Regina crafted a book proposal based on Michael Larsen’s book. She spent a lot of time describing her platform in her book proposal. Regina was well known in the New York area, and she’s done a number of cable news shows as a commentator. She really spent a lot of time thinking about every single constituency she could put into her book proposal. To describe your author platform in detail you have to know three things: The different groups of people who might be interested in your book. The size of the different groups of people who might be interested in your book. Why different groups of people might be interested in your book. When you can clearly and concisely describe those three elements, you’ll have a good handle on your platform. Marketing Tip: Find Comparable Books Another area Regina focused on when putting together her book proposal was her comparable books. Traditional publishers want a list of comparable books that did well, and they want to know why your book is going to do as well or better. “There are so many people out there who have a good story they want to write, but it really has to do with the marketability of the book. These are publicly traded companies. They’re responsible to their shareholders. So, if they’re going to put out any money, whether it’s to give you an advance or to have their staff spend time editing this and publishing your book. They want to make sure they get a return on the investment” – Regina Calcaterra Regina sees selling a book to a traditional publisher like being a contestant on Shark Tank. You have to be able to prove the value of the product you want to put on the market. You have to be able to show traditional publishers why they should give you money. After Regina detailed out her platform in her book proposal, she included the four chapters in the book she’d already written and an outline of the rest of the book. Lisa Sharkey was impressed with Regina’s book proposal but she was unable to win over the HarperCollins publishing committee at first. Lisa invited Regina to a meeting at HarperCollins offices to meet with one of their top publicists. When Regina told the publicist her story the

Ricardo Fayet is a cofounder of Reedsy, an online marketplace that connects authors with everything you need to succeed, from free educational courses, to a platform to help you find the best cover artists, book designers, and publishing support. Ricardo and a friend got the idea for Reedsy in business school. They approached developing Reedsy from a reader perspective. The Birth of Reedsy Ricardo and his friend were among the first early adopters of the Kindle device. They began thinking about how the device was changing the publishing industry for publishers and authors. They asked themselves several questions: What does it change for authors and publishers? How does it change how readers read books? Will there be more ebooks produced than paper books? After asking these questions, Ricardo began learning about self-publishing. At first, self-publishing was a fascinating market space. As Ricardo looked into self-publishing more deeply, he realized that there’s a lot that goes into publishing a book beyond simply hitting publish. You have to: Edit the book. Do cover design for the book. Market the book. That’s when Ricardo and his partners decided to create a marketplace for authors who were self-publishing, as well as the people who were leaving traditional publishing companies. When self-publishing started to take off, in the period from 2010 to 2011, a lot of people who had worked for traditional publishers decided to do freelance work instead. They like the freedom and flexibility of working as a freelance provider, and they also like the access to self-published authors. “It’s really a misnomer to call it self-publishing. No one does it by themselves. You have to have cover designers, book designers to do the layout, and usually marketing support and help. So there’s a big team that any self-published author needs to create in order to make a project really successful.” – Tom Corson Knowles How to Create the Best Team to Support Your Book “The most common advice out there is to ask your peers and other authors in your genre. On the one hand, I think it’s great advice, because obviously what worked for one author might work for you. But on the other hand, it depends a lot on your genre, for both cover design and editing. Editing depends a lot on your personality and writing style.” – Ricardo Fayet The most important factor that affects cover design is your genre or category. If you ask authors in your specific genre or category for advice on cover designers, that advice will probably work for you. The most important factor that affects your relationship with your editor is your personality and writing style. Because every writer is different, it’s less likely that one author’s advice about a good editor will translate into a good working experience for another author. When looking for an editor, it’s best to look for an editor who specializes in your genre. On Reedsy, the editors in the marketplace specialize in certain genres. As an editor: It’s simple to specialize in a genre. Simply choose to edit the books you like to read. Once you get some clients and do good work for them, they will recommend you to other authors who write in their genre. Then you can begin to build a portfolio as an editor. As an author: When you’re looking for an editor, reach out to three or four and see how they work. Send them a small sample of your work, about 3,000 words. This allows you to get a feel for the relationship before you commit to working together on the larger project. When you’re looking for a developmental editor, you definitely want someone who specializes in editing your genre. Ricardo recommends asking for a sample feedback letter that they wrote for another author. You can’t really ask them to look at a sample of your work because they need to see the whole book in order to give you good feedback. But by asking for a sample letter, you can get an idea of how they give feedback to authors. Some editors are very blunt. Some editors like to sugarcoat their feedback. By looking at an editor’s sample feedback letter, you can get a sense of the type of feedback you’re likely to receive from that editor, and you can decide whether or not that feedback will help you write a better book. When you hire an editor, it’s all about developing the right kind of relationship. That’s why it is important to reach out to several people, get several quotes, and get an idea of what type of feedback each editor will give you. Reedsy only accepts 3% of the freelancers who apply to be listed in the marketplace. They are very selective about the professionals they choose to offer to authors. Reedsy has never seen any freelancer abuse their access to the creative work of authors. A lot of the freelancers on Reedsy come from traditional publishing. They’re not going to compromise their good working relationship on Reedsy in order to publish some author’s idea under their own name. In many cases, they aren’t even authors themselves

Josh is the author of four books, including Writing Without Bullshit. He is frequently quoted in major publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. He’s also given keynote speeches at major conferences on television, music, marketing, and technology all over the world. Josh spent his whole life focusing on his two talents, math and writing. He wanted to make good money, so he put most of his emphasis on his math talents. But he was always interested in writing. When he became an analyst at Forrester Research about 20 years ago, he was able to combine his two talents. Then, 10 years ago, he convinced the CEO of Forrester Research to allow him to write a book on social media, Groundswell. Following the success of that book, Josh has defined himself as an author. For the last two and a half years, he has worked with indie authors and corporations on how to communicate clearly and powerfully. Clear Writing Principles After Josh washed out of the PhD program at MIT, he learned some critical skills that helped him become a successful and powerful communicator and writer. Write in the active voice. Avoid the passive voice whenever possible. Write as directly as possible. Use bulleted lists to break up the flow of your copy so that it’s easier to digest. State your arguments clearly. Break up your text with headings and subheadings. Be brief. Josh’s Top Communication Principles “You must treat the reader’s time as more important than your own. That sounds like something everyone would agree with, but every time we write an email, a memo, or a book chapter, people tend to do what’s easiest for them instead of thinking about what’s easiest for the reader.” – Josh Bernoff The #1 thing you can do to improve your writing is to be brief. Don’t spend a lot of time warming up. Just say what you need to say as clearly as possible. Eliminate any duplication. Next, you want to frontload your writing with the things your readers need to know. Often, people will warm up before they get to their point. They write emails with the idea that people will keep reading past the first two paragraphs. That’s not how it works. When you write an email, your subject line and the first two paragraphs you write need to be about what the reader needs to know. People will often give up on reading a longer email. 3 Elements of Toxic Prose 1. The Passive Voice When you write in the passive voice it hides what’s going on from the reader. 2. Weasel Words These are intensifiers and qualifiers that don’t mean anything. Some popular examples that Josh sees appearing everywhere right now include: huge, incredible, and insane. 3. Jargon Using jargon creates writing that only you can understand and no one else can make sense of. If you avoid these toxic prose elements, write as briefly as you can, and frontload your information so people are getting what they need to know at the beginning of your writing, you will communicate far more clearly and powerfully in a world where everyone reads on a screen all the time. How Josh Edits for Clients When Josh works with a client, he helps them organize their thoughts so that they can present them more clearly and usefully. Here’s how: Do an Idea Audit The first thing Josh does is an idea audit. He’ll ask the client to tell him their idea. He’ll usually say something like, “That’s boring,” or “that’s complicated,” or “I don’t understand.” By pushing on the idea like this, you have to explain it more and think more deeply about it. It’s difficult to defend your idea and go deeper, but when you do, you finally get to something that’s big, new and powerful. Something that people will read and take notice of. Once you have the idea right, you can structure the material that comes after that. Make Sure Your Ideas Flow Logically When Josh edits a particular passage for a client, the first thing he’ll do is look at the structure of the chapter that the passage is in. He wants to make sure that he has a clear idea of the beginning, middle, and end of the thought he’s currently reading. Do the ideas flow logically and make sense to readers? Cut Weasel Words and Repeated Ideas After the flow of ideas make sense, the next step is to delete things that don’t matter. People will often take one or two paragraphs to get warmed up to their subject. You’ll often find that the first paragraph of actual content is a perfect way to start your writing. Delete weasel words. Those words don’t matter and they don’t add to the knowledge of the reader. Delete repeated sentences or ideas, too. Make your point clearly the first time and you don’t need to repeat it again and again. The Benefits of Editing The benefits of this type of editing is that it goes beyond the qualitative. You’re not just deleting words—you are making your written commu

If you’ve ever been to a theme park like Disney World, chances are you’ve seen Steve Alcorn’s work. Steve is the CEO of Alcorn McBride, a company that designs products used in nearly all the world’s theme parks. He’s also the author of many books. He’s written historical fiction, romance, and young adult novels. He’s also written several nonfiction books, including, Build a Better Mouse, Theme Park Design, and How to Fix Your Novel. Steve fell into the field of theme park engineering because his wife always wanted to be a Disney Imagineer. Steve and his wife were in engineering school together, and when she graduated, she applied for exactly one job and got it. She became a Disney Imagineer and began working on the preliminary designs for Epcot Center. When it became clear that she was going to be in Florida for quite some time working on the installation of Epcot Center, Steve followed her into that industry and worked on the American Adventure at Epcot. After he was done working on American Adventure, Steve started a company that makes the types of things he wished he had when designing American Adventure. When he was working on that attraction, Steve and his team had to design everything from scratch. Alcorn and McBride makes products that theme parks can buy off the shelf to help them design and build their rides. If you’ve been to any of the Disney parks or Universal Studios, you’ve likely experienced some of Steve’s work. His products work behind the scenes to make sure the synchronized audio and video are running smoothly. Theme park design is a really fun field to be in because you get the inside scoop on attractions way before they open, and you get to help solve really sticky technical problems. Steve has always been interested in writing, and he’s always been interested in creative enterprises. That’s one of the reasons he became an engineer in a creative field. Steve is also a sculptor. In this interview, we talk about the importance of having a plan for your novel. We also talk about how to plan your novel, the three-act structure, and the scene/sequel method of building a novel. This is a great interview packed with information about how to think about planning your novel. How the Writing Academy Came to Be Steve decided to write his first novel when his daughter was little. They enjoyed reading together and he wanted to write something special for her. His first novel was based on his experiences growing up in a summer camp near Sequoia National Park. That turned into the novel A Matter of Justice. The novel ended up having a protagonist a lot like his daughter at the time. Through that process, and when researching a subsequent novel about the St. Francis dam, Steve met the screenwriter Doran William Cannon. Doran wrote for a lot of popular hits in the 1980s, including Dynasty and parts of The Godfather films. Steve and Doran really hit it off. Doran had an online class called Write Like a Pro and he suggested that Steve do a course on writing mysteries, because he wasn’t writing mysteries and didn’t have a class on it. So Steve developed a class on writing mysteries. In 2000, he teamed up with Doran to launch the online writing school Writing Academy. They have classes in novel writing, nonfiction writing, and writing your own memoir, among others. Steve has taught more than 30,000 aspiring writers how to structure their novels. In his house, he has an entire library filled with the signed novels of his students. Why Steve Decided to Teach Writing Steve has always wanted to help people. When he started his company, Alcorn and McCabe, he helped a lot of his clients use the products he created to build their theme park attractions. As the business grew, Steve assembled a large, competent engineering team around him, and they all encouraged him to go find something else to do with his time. He always loved writing, and he’s read just about every book there is on the craft. When he came across Doran’s work, it really connected with him. He became an evangelist for Doran’s teachings. They did several seminars together. At one point, Doran even said that Steve understood his techniques better than he did. The Difference between Plot and Story The first thing that writers need to understand is the distinction between plot and story. If you read a book that doesn’t feel quite right, it’s probably because the writer didn’t understand the distinction between story and plot. The plot consists of the events of the story. It’s everything that happens external to the viewpoint character. When we talk about story, we’re talking about everything that happens inside the protagonist’s head. We’re talking about the protagonist’s emotional journey. Those two things are very distinct. Even if you’re working on a screenplay or television production, you need both element

Emma Sumner is the author of The Fairies of Waterfall Island. She published the book in 2016 at the age of only eight years old. Today she’s 10 years old and just finishing up her second book, which is a prequel to the first. She was inspired to write her first book when she saw her dad publishing his second book on Amazon. Her dad told her that if she could write 150 words in her story that day, he would help her publish the book when it was complete. She began immediately outlining the book in a new notebook she’d recently gotten. When she showed the notebook to her father that night, Emma had 172 words in it, and he began helping her from there. In this podcast, we talked about what inspired Emma to write a book, Autism Speaks, and the importance of starting your novel. Emma has a unique story and a message the whole world needs to hear. How Emma Decided to Write a Book about Fairies Emma likes books about fairies. She’s a particular fan of Rainbow Magic and The Never Girls. She also likes mysteries; she enjoyed The Magic Treehouse. There was never any question in her mind what type of book she’d write. Emma’s Writing Process Emma is definitely a plotter, not a pantser. After Emma finished her outline, she began writing the rough draft. She would have a writing session every Saturday at Panera and post an update on Facebook about what she was doing. After Emma was done with her rough draft, she and her father hired an editor to go over the manuscript. The editor helped a lot because she found mistakes that Emma and her father missed. Emma revised the rough draft based on her editor’s suggestions, and then published the book. What Emma Learned from Working with an Editor There are a lot of lessons you can learn by working with skilled professionals who are able to give you a different perspective on your work. Emma learned that you can make your book better by focusing on the details. Before the editor helped Emma revise her work, there weren’t a lot of details about the world. She says it was really fun working out how fairy magic works. That kind of nuance adds depth to your fictional world and makes it easier for readers to fall in love with your story. How Emma Markets Her Book Emma’s aunt has been tremendously helpful in marketing her book. She helped Emma get several television interviews because of the unique story about how the book was created. Notably, Emma has been on Good Morning Sacramento and Fox 40. She’s also done interviews for magazines and newspapers. Emma recently started using Amazon ads to market her books. She targets books similar to hers on Amazon; her book is displayed every time someone looks at those product pages. Emma also made sure that her book was available in as many formats as possible. You can buy a Kindle version, a print version, or the audiobook version. What It’s Like to Be on Local TV Once you agree to do a television interview, you and the producer decide on a day and time. Then you go to the TV station and do the interview. Emma has had to miss school a couple of times for TV interviews. The experience was well worth the missed class time. Emma’s Spelling Bee Success Emma has traveled all the way to the National Spelling Bee two years in a row, when she was in the third and fourth grades. She’s also talented in math and science. She competed in the district math bowl in the first grade. Readings in Classrooms Teachers read Emma’s book in classrooms. She attends some of these readings and talks about the process of writing her book. There’s a lot of ways to get your book known if you simply look at opportunities within your own community. The Message of Emma’s Book “Part of the reason I wrote my book is that I wanted to teach kids of all ages that anything is possible. If I wrote my book at age 7, you can do it at any age, if you really want to.” – Emma Sumner The moral of the story is persistence is the key to success. You can’t just give up if things aren’t working for you the first time you try something. You have to make sure you work the process, and just keep going until you’ve accomplished what you set out to. The process of writing the book mirrored the story itself. There were times while Emma was writing her story that she couldn’t think of anything to write. But the message Emma wanted to put out in the world inspired her to continue writing until the book was done. “The best way to get over writer’s block is just write anything that comes into your mind.” – Emma Sumner The Importance of a Good Support Team Emma had a lot of people helping her during the book production process. Her dad was a constant source of inspiration and support. Her editor really helped bring her book to another level, and her aunt connected her to people who helped Emma promote her book. When Emma started her Facebook page to talk about and pr

Steven Spatz is a writer, marketer, and president of BookBaby, a distributor of ebooks and print books. He started his writing career at age 13 and worked for several major newspapers after graduating from university. Steven got a job as a sportswriter when he was 13. His journalistic heroes were Walter Cronkite and Howard Cosell. He did that for a little while and then went back to the family business, where he learned direct marketing. Steven’s family had a food catalog they grew to be one of the largest in the United States. Through that experience, he really learned about direct marketing, and bringing the right products and services to the right people at the right time. That’s what Steven has done with most of his career. He’s worked for Mattel and Hasbro Collectibles. About 15 years ago, Steven became interested in the music business. His parent company, CDBaby, still manufactures custom-made CDs and DVDs. Yes, there’s still a market for that! They also work in digital music. BookBaby started seven years ago. BookBaby’s mission is to help authors get their work out into the marketplace. The BookBaby motto is “We make the little guy look big.” Steven is using his talent for writing and his knowledge of direct marketing to help indie authors be successful in the marketplace. In this interview, we talked about the factors every indie author needs to consider, how BookBaby can help you achieve your goals, how the marketplace has changed in the last eight years, and the benefits of using BookBaby to help launch you onto the world stage. Starting Up BookBaby BookBaby grew out of CDBaby, which still sends a lot of music to iTunes, Amazon, and Spotify. Through these existing partnership, Steven had a great opportunity: when Apple created the iPad, they were looking for companies that could make ebooks. They knew CDBaby already created music files for them, so Apple asked if they could make ebooks. The people at CDBaby had to quickly learn how to make ebook files that would work on the iPad. Since then, the business has exploded. They added ebook distribution to Amazon, and now they’re in 59 other digital retail stores around the world. BookBaby quickly realized that if authors were going to succeed, they would need to give their readers the book in the format the reader wanted. That’s why they started offering print distribution. They began by partnering with a printer they knew. Two years ago, they started printing some books in house as a test, and now they print all their books in house. At this point, BookBaby is a one-stop shop for everything an indie author needs. They provide: Editing Ebook production Cover design Book formatting Print distribution Electronic distribution “Our goal has been to help authors not have to make many decisions. Authors need to spend time writing, and then hand over all the details about their books to experts. You used to have to go to many different places to get all of the services authors really need; now you can just come to BookBaby.” – Steven Spatz Five Things You Need to Consider as an Indie Author BookBaby offers a simple five-step guide to self-publishing. There are five decisions you need to make before you publish your book. 1. You have to decide the book is finished. You have to decide that you’re happy with your finished product, and that the book is the best you can make it right now. Understand that even though your book is as good as you can make it, it’s not going to be perfect. No book is perfect. You have to decide when it’s time to let go. Steven still talks to authors every month who have been working on their books for years. It’s important to do the best job you can with your book, and then get it out there. 2. You have to have your book edited. BookBaby runs an ad in industry magazines that says, “The only page that doesn’t need editing is blank.” It’s true. Even the best authors need a good editor. You put yourself at a real disadvantage if you don’t have a professional editor. (Hint: a pro editor does not mean your English teacher, or your mother-in-law who thinks she knows a few things about commas and semicolons.)   3. You have to decide what kind of physical product you’re going to introduce to your readers. Yes, books are a product—and that means you have to decide what formats and products matter to you and your readers. Are you going to produce an ebook? Are you going to produce only an ebook? Do you need help formatting the book? Are you going to format the ebook yourself or do you want help doing that? Are you going to produce printed books as well? What size and color will your book be? What is the trim size of the book going to be? 4. You have to decide what kind of distribution you need. Your book needs to get into readers’ hands—and that involves some knowledge of where they shop, and what benefits you can gain from being in

Ethan Jones is the bestselling author of more than 20 books, including the best-selling Justin Hall Spy Thriller Series. Ethan always wanted to be a writer. He started writing novels seriously in 2008, but ever since he was a kid, Ethan would watch TV shows and movies and imagine future adventures for the heroes he loved. He doesn’t have a favorite spy movie, although Salt, The Bourne Identity, and the James Bond films rank fairly high with him. In 2008, he began carving out extra time to schedule to write his own stories. He always loved TV shows and movies that had to do with spies, so he figured that writing spy thrillers would be right up his alley. It turns out his audience agrees with him. In this episode, we talked about Ethan’s author journey, his writing process, and the importance of treating your writing like a business. We also talked about Ethan’s marketing strategies, his daily routine, and some mistakes Ethan made early in his career you can learn from. This was a fast-paced interview jam-packed with information. Ethan’s Turning Point Ethan decided to write his first novel after he read a spy novel that wasn’t very good. He thought for sure that he could write something at least as good as the book he’d just finished reading. That was the beginning of his writing adventure. It took Ethan one year to write his first book. The first book is always the hardest to finish. He wanted to write something a little different than the standard spy story. So the story takes place in Canada and his hero is a member of the Canadian special forces. Usually in spy fiction, the hero is a member of some sort of US government agency, whether that be the CIA or FBI or another alphabet soup agency. How Ethan Developed His Writing Process Ethan developed his writing process by writing books. He wrote his first book completely by the seat of his pants. There were one or two places where he wrote himself into a corner, and he had to spend a few days figuring out how the story was going to work out. These days, Ethan has an idea of where the story is going to end. He doesn’t have a detailed outline, but he has some idea of what the major plot points are and roughly where they occur. He’s not so tied to his outline that he won’t let the story change as he writes it. He allows his characters the flexibility to discover the story as they’re living through it. Having an ending firmly in mind has been helpful for Ethan when writing his books, even if the ending might change as he produces the manuscript. Why Pantsing Works for Ethan Ethan tried to plot a couple of his novels in detail. He found it was difficult for him to force the story on to the path he wanted it to take. It broke his creative flow. Ethan is much more productive with a loose idea of where the story is going and the flexibility to allow his characters to react naturally. Most of his stories are about spying and spycraft. So his characters have a lot of trust issues, and it’s very easy for him to manipulate the mood of a character to make them more suspicious, then gently nudge the story where he wants it to go. Writing mostly by the seat of his pants just works best for Ethan. How Ethan Comes up with His Story Ideas To develop his stories, Ethan does a lot of research. He pays attention to international news, and specifically news about the region where he’s going to set his next book. Recently, Ethan decided to write a book where ISIS featured prominently. He watched a lot of documentaries by journalists about the group. For Ethan, research is essential in coming up with his ideas and making sure his book seems like something that might actually happen. Write in a Genre You’re Passionate about Some time ago, Ethan tried his hand at romantic suspense. There was less research involved, but his heart wasn’t really in it. Those books took much longer to write because he wasn’t as passionate about the genre. “Writing good spy thrillers does involve a lot of research, but when you’re doing something you really enjoy, it doesn’t sound like work.” – Ethan Jones Ethan’s Publishing Journey Ethan wrote Arctic Wargame: A Justin Hall Spy Thriller back in 2008. At first, he tried to get a traditional publishing deal. Self-publishing wasn’t as popular back then as it is now, and a traditional publishing deal seemed like the way to go. In Canada, the book market is smaller, so you don’t necessarily need an agent to have your book traditionally published. Ethan tried submitting his book to agents and publishers. Some of the people he submitted to requested a partial manuscript, and he got good feedback from them, but he couldn’t secure a book deal. In 2011, a friend suggested that he self-publish his manuscript. Before diving in, he took some time figuring out how self-publishing works. He was able to publish the first book in the Justin Ha

Dorie Clark is an adjunct professor at the Duke University School of Business. She’s the author of Entrepreneurial You, Reinventing You, and Stand Out (named the #1 leadership book of 2015 by Inc. magazine). She’s a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review, and she regularly consults and speaks for clients such as Microsoft, Google, and The World Bank. Dorie’s first job out of graduate school was as a political reporter. When she was laid off from that job, she began the process of reinventing herself. She tried a lot of different things, not all of which worked out. She worked in two unsuccessful political campaigns and then turned her talents to running a nonprofit. After two years of doing that, Dorie realized that running a nonprofit is exactly like running your own business. So…Dorie decided to start running her own business. For the past 11 years, she’s run her own marketing and consulting company. She’s done all kinds of activities to help build her brand and the brands of her clients, including: Writing books Giving speeches Doing executive coaching Launching online courses In this interview, we talked about what a personal brand is and how to build yours. We took a deep dive into social networking, how to do it, and why it’s essential to building your personal brand. Why Dorie Decided to Start Her Own Business Dorie was the head of a small nonprofit for two years. She decided to start her own business because running the nonprofit and being responsible for the livelihood of three other employees was super stressful. Also, she didn’t get paid very much. Working for herself and being responsible only for her own income and needs seemed like a move toward a more stable, less stressful life. Dorie’s time as the head of that nonprofit was an incredibly valuable learning experience. Running the nonprofit taught her what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur. To be a successful entrepreneur, you have to be a jack of all trades, because you’re responsible for everything that happens in your business. “You have complete independence. Yeah, you might have to solve problems yourself, but you don’t have to answer to anyone, you don’t have to answer to a boss, nobody’s telling you what to do. Everything is more fulfilling because you are making the choice to do it.” – Dorie Clark Why Dorie Decided to Write Her First Book Dorie made a New Year’s resolution in 2009 to publish a book that year. She’d always wanted to write a book. She thought it would be cool, and she also thought it would raise her company’s profile and demonstrate thought leadership in her field. All of that turned out to be true. What Dorie didn’t count on is how difficult it would be to actually publish her first book. In the first six months of 2009, Dorie wrote three book proposals. They were all turned down because she didn’t have a big enough author platform. So she went back to the drawing board and figured out how to build that essential author platform. She was able to do it primarily through blogging. Dorie signed her first book deal with Harvard Review Press in 2011 and her first book came out in 2013. Why Dorie Chose Blogging to Build Her Author Platform Blogging was a natural choice for Dorie because of her experience as a print journalist. Also, audio and video were much more expensive and complicated to jump into back in 2009. Audio and video are much more accessible to new people now than they were back then. How to Become a Recognized Expert in Your Field Becoming a recognized expert involves three key components. 1. Creating Quality Content Content creation is the linchpin of becoming a recognized expert. You can’t be known for your ideas unless you share your ideas publicly. You have to share your ideas, and you have to share your ideas a lot to break through the noise today. The biggest mistake Dorie sees in the marketplace today is people not creating enough content. So many bloggers think that posting one blog post a month is enough. The truth is, Dorie spent three years posting 50 to 100 blog posts a year before she saw any measurable uptick in inquiries about her work. “You have to do a lot more than you might otherwise suspect you have to do, that’s the truth. The good news is most people won’t last that long. Most people will not keep it up, and if you do, you are far more likely to succeed, because the field has thinned.” – Dorie Clark 2. Social Proof Social proof is your credibility. What is it about you that is going to get people to take you seriously? How can you demonstrate that you know what you’re talking about and that your suggestions will work? 3. Your Network Your network is who you surround yourself with. The world judges you by your associations. Your network can also be the early ambassadors for your ideas. How to Create Multiple Revenue Streams without Sp

Jeff Goins is the bestselling author of five books, including Real Artists Don’t Starve. His blog, goinswriter.com, is one of the most-read blogs for writers and creative folks. Jeff has always been a creative person who likes to make things. As a kid, he drew his own Garfield fan comics with a friend. Jeff’s dad taught him how to play guitar when he got older. He was in a number of bands that played really bad songs. It was in high school that Jeff started to write stories for fun. He also acted in plays during his high school career. Jeff gained more experience with writing as a writing tutor. After he graduated college, he toured with the band for a year. The most fun Jeff had during that year was writing weekly blog posts about the touring experience. After a year, he quit the band and moved to Nashville, where he was hired as a copywriter by a nonprofit. He eventually became their director of marketing, and learned quite a bit about traditional and online marketing. That’s when Jeff had the idea to use the brand-building strategies he learned at the nonprofit to build his own personal brand as a writer. Today, goinswriter.com is Jeff’s ninth blog. The first eight blogs he wrote for failed. goinswriter.com succeeded because Jeff took the right steps and didn’t quit. Jeff’s successful blog allowed him and his wife to quit their day jobs and do this full-time. Jeff’s Author Journey: Defining Moments and Small Steps Forward Jeff’s success has been made up of both huge defining moments and small, consistent steps forward. When Jeff was 27 years old, his boss enrolled him in a coaching program for professional development. Early on in those meetings, someone asked him what his dream was. Jeff had seen many of his friends quit their day jobs to pursue their dream—only to be back at a day job within six months. He didn’t think he had a dream. So he replied, “I don’t have a dream—I have a job, I have a family. I don’t need a dream.” Jeff’s coaching buddy replied, “That’s funny. I get the sense that your dream is to be a writer.” That resonated with Jeff and he said, “Yeah. I guess that is my dream, to be a writer someday. But that will never happen.” Jeff’s coaching buddy pointed out, “Jeff, you don’t have to wait to be a writer. You just have to write.” Jeff published a 500-word blog post the next day. Every day for a year, he published a blog post between 500 and 1,000 words long. Throughout that year, when he met new people and they asked him what he did, he told them, “I’m a writer.” This wasn’t a case of “faking it until he made it.” Jeff believed he was a writer. Then he took small consistent actions until he became a professional writer. “People won’t take you seriously until you do.” – Jeff Goins Jeff developed a system for creating daily blog content that allowed him to write and edit a post before publishing it to his blog. Want to learn from his experience? There’s a link to his three-bucket content system in the links section of the show notes. How to Deal with Fear “Fear is what happens to us when we hesitate to do the things we know we need to do. Fear is what happens when we wait. ” – Jeff Goins When you act quickly, there’s no time for fear to creep in. Children have very little fear. Fear is something we learn as a result of watching the consequences of certain actions. We think, “Oh, if I do this I will get hurt.” Because Jeff was producing daily content for his blog, he didn’t have much time to feel fear. He knew his content wasn’t necessarily that good. But this was his writing practice. He was just practicing in public. Jeff knew that if he wrote on his blog long enough, some people might notice. But that wasn’t the point. The point was to practice his art to improve his skill. There’s something interesting that happens when you put yourself into a daily practice: It doesn’t allow you a lot of time to feel afraid. Most people feel fear and stop what they’re doing. When Jeff studied other successful people, he came to realize successful people also feel fear. The difference is successful people feel fear and yet still do what they’re afraid of. “I began to see fear as a friendly reminder that I’m moving in the right direction.” – Jeff Goins From Blogger to Author Six months after Jeff started regularly blogging, he was approached by a traditional publisher who asked him if he was planning to write a book. He signed a deal for a small book contract. That gave Jeff the confidence to keep going. He also began to notice that readers of his blog were asking questions he couldn’t answer in a long blog post. “I don’t think you write a nonfiction book because you want to. I think you write a nonfict

Mimika Cooney is an international award-winning photographer and the author of Photographing Newborns. She was nominated by the Huffington Post as one of the 50 women entrepreneurs to follow in 2017. Mimika is a multi-passionate creative. Born and raised in South Africa, Mimika and her husband left in 2000 and emigrated to England. In 2006, they immigrated to the US. She is currently based in Charlotte, North Carolina. She’s had a very interesting journey both creatively and in the realm of business and marketing. Photography was originally a hobby for Mimika. She’s had an entrepreneurial mindset since she was a child, and she always looks for ways to make money with anything she does. She loves the creative outlet of photography. Mimika started her photography business in England, and continued it when she moved to the United States. She decided to write her books about newborn photography to answer all the questions she was getting while speaking at photography conferences; writing was a natural progression for her because she’s been writing in journals since she was a child. Mimika is passionate about teaching people how she learned from her own mistakes in business. She credits that skill more than any other as the reason for her level of success today. Changes to the Writing World Mimika is taking an entirely different approach to writing her third book than she did with her first two. “I made the mistake of thinking after I wrote my first book, my job was done. It wasn’t.” – Mimika Cooney In today’s world, publishers expect you to do all the marketing for your own books. Writing is only the beginning of your author journey. What Has Changed in Online Marketing over the Last 20 Years Marketing has become so saturated, the number of offerings in the marketplace is overwhelming. There are a lot more platforms and apps available for business people to directly connect with customers. There are many more places to promote yourself. That’s a double-edged sword, because the internet and social media have led to information overload for almost everyone. Video marketing has become prevalent, when just two years ago very few people were doing it. Successful marketing tactics change about every six months. You can’t rely on one platform for all your marketing. The internet landscape changes so quickly, you have to focus on evergreen tactics that will bring customers into your business. When you’re an author, you are a business person. You have to pay attention to that reality, and spend the time, money, and effort needed to build your brand. One benefit of a market oversaturated with marketing channels is that it lowers the price of marketing yourself. When Mimika started her online TV show MimikaTV, it used to cost her $350 an episode to produce. Now she is able to produce it free using the YouTube platform. “It’s the easiest it’s ever been to start a business venture or project, but it’s also the most competitive.” – Mimika Cooney   Succeeding in business today is all about figuring out what marketing channels work for your audience and how you can put the pieces together to make your business successful. Video Marketing Is Evergreen “Video is the best way, other than meeting you in person, to get to know you. Reading your body language, hearing what you sound like, getting an idea what you sound like—it’s almost like meeting you in person.” – Mimika Cooney You can write blog posts and you can post on social media, but nothing translates better than a video to captivate your audience and get them to understand who you are and what you’re trying to do. Video is the easiest way for people to get to know, like, and trust you. How a Beginner Should Get Started in Video As writers, it can be hard to transition from writing behind a computer screen to going on camera. But it’s important you get over yourself. One thing you can do to get used to being recorded on video is to record yourself on your cell phone. Just get used to the actions necessary to go through the recording process. Put your phone in selfie mode, turn it around, and start talking to it like you’re talking to a friend. At the end of the day, all you have to do is take baby steps. You don’t have to jump in with both feet, guns blazing. The great thing about video is you can record and delete it if you really hate it. Learning to publish and distribute videos is very much like learning how to write. The first few times are going to be difficult. As you get more used to the mechanics of what you’re doing, things will come easier and you’ll have more fun doing video. When it comes to video marketing, starting is the biggest hurdle. After you’ve started, you want to keep your video marketing efforts consistent. Use Facebook to Launch Your Video Marketing Efforts The first thing beginner video marketers shoul

AJ Cosmo is the bestselling author of The Monster that Ate My Socks and more than 20 other fun children’s picture books. His stories are crafted to help parents teach children lessons in a fun and engaging way. Six years ago, AJ was at his day job searching for ways to make money online. One of the ideas in a writer’s forum was to write books and put them up on Kindle because, as the poster said, “Kindle is a gold mine!” The group of writers AJ eventually joined were publishing two types of content: adult fiction, and children’s books. Some years ago, AJ moved out to Hollywood to try his hand at being a screenwriter. The first books he tried to publish and sell on Amazon were adapted from screenplays. When he got the suggestion to try publishing children’s books, it interested him because it was something he felt he had a talent for, because he’s able to draw and be a little goofy. AJ wasn’t interested in writing adult content. When AJ wrote his first children’s book, he didn’t know anything about the different grade levels or reader expectations. He just wanted to tell a funny story and do some illustrations. It took three or four books before AJ saw any kind of return on investment with his writing. His fourth book was The Monster that Ate My Socks. That book took off and allowed AJ to make a career from publishing children’s books on Kindle. It took off on its own, and ever since then AJ has been trying to reverse-engineer its success. Six years later, AJ has published more than 40 books. And he’s doing this full time to earn a living. The Success of The Monster that Ate My Socks AJ still doesn’t understand exactly why The Monster that Ate My Socks became such a huge success. One thing that contributed to its success, as far as AJ can tell, is that it’s short. The book is about 3,000 words, and 20 pages in print. The book has six illustrations. There isn’t a magic number when it comes to the number of illustrations in a children’s picture book—you use the number you need to get the story across. In fact, the book actually goes against the traditional wisdom regarding the number of images you need in a children’s picture book. The Monster that Ate My Socks is technically a chapter book, but it’s much lengthier than a typical chapter book for very young children…and yet the language is much simpler than books published for middle-grade readers. The book carved out its own little niche in the children’s book world. If AJ had known the rules of writing children’s books, he never would have written The Monster that Ate My Socks. Parents have told AJ that besides being entertaining and funny, the book actually solved the monster problem for them with their kids. It humanized monsters, and allowed children to relate to them so they were no longer afraid of turning off the bedroom light and going to sleep. Marketing Considerations for Children’s Books “Children’s books [like nonfiction books] can have meaning and purpose beyond just entertainment.” – AJ Cosmo “When you’re selling children’s books, you’re not actually selling to children—you’re selling to the avatars of children: their parents or their teachers. You have to communicate something to the parents, that your book is beyond mindless entertainment.” – AJ Cosmo Parents expect a children’s book to be entertaining by default. What they want to know is, beyond entertainment, what can this book do for them or their children? There are thousands of children’s books published every year. So in order to differentiate your children’s book from other books for children, you have to consider what lesson your book can teach your audience. You have to walk a fine line. If your lesson is too serious, your target audience will zone out and their parents won’t buy your next book. But if it’s got too little lesson in it, the parents won’t think it’s valuable enough to buy your next book, either. The lesson your book teaches is a marketing point. It’s something you have to consider, but always remember the age of the audience you’re aiming your book at. There’s nothing wrong with creating a book that’s entertaining. There’s nothing wrong with creating a book that specifically designed to make children laugh. AJ is currently working on The Giggle Game, a book designed to do exactly that. But even The Giggle Game has a point to it. The book is designed as a wind-down game for children before they go to bed. Giving your books a reason to exist beyond entertainment is a major selling point in the children’s book marketplace. What’s Your Book’s Purpose? This lesson can be extended to other genres of fiction. If you’re writing a romance novel, what is the extra that the audience is getting besides the romance? Are you showing them an

Jesper Schmidt is a fantasy novelist and the author of Twitter for Authors. He’s here to talk about his journey as an author, and how he used Twitter to gather an audience of raving fan readers from all over the world. Jesper always thought in the back of his mind that when he retired, he’d write a book. But on one of his annual family vacations to Finland, Jesper had an insight that changed his life. He asked himself: “Why do we have to wait to do the things we want to do?” The next morning, he began writing his first book. Jesper has always loved fantasy. There was never a question of what genre he would choose to publish in. He’s currently working on his third book in a fantasy trilogy now. “80% of people want to write a book and never do. Just do it if you want to do it!” — Jesper Schmidt Jesper’s Journey to Successful Novelist After Jesper’s flash of insight, he began writing his first book immediately—literally the next day. It took him six months to write 50,000 words. But in the end, he scrapped that novel because it made no sense. Jesper took the next 12 months to study what other successful writers were doing and incorporate that into his own process. After he began plotting, writing his next novel was much easier. Jesper was frustrated when he had to scrap his first attempt at writing a novel. He’s worked in project management most of his adult life, and the first thing he learned there was that you have to plan ahead. The fact that he didn’t apply what he knew about project management to writing his novel bothered him, but he just started over after learning his hard lesson. Plotting is what really made the difference for Jesper, and allowed him to successfully publish the books he’s written so far. He brings the same project management checklist mentality to systematically managing his Twitter account. Jesper started using Twitter in 2012 as a recreational tool, three years before he started writing. Twitter is a great platform to have fun on. But if you want to use it as a professional tool to grow your audience, you have to use it in a systematic way to attract and engage with the right types of followers. How Jesper Developed His Twitter System Jesper did a bunch of research into what other authors were doing to build their Twitter profiles. He took a bunch of notes, then tested everything. He used what worked and dumped what didn’t. He documented everything he did. Now he has a system of checklists that he goes through on a weekly basis to help him grow his Twitter audience and maintain his engagement level with his followers. Jesper documented his entire process in Twitter for Authors. Each chapter has action steps and checklists that allow you to easily adopt Jesper’s system. He also did a number of video tutorials to supplement the material in his book. Everybody who buys Twitter for Authors also gets access to those videos. Why Choose Twitter as a Marketing Platform? When Jesper decided to become a professional indie publisher, he took a very analytical approach to the marketing side of things. The first thing he did was decide on three social media platforms he would focus his marketing efforts on. Jesper knew he could manage three social media accounts and consistently update them with content to build strong connections with his fans. He decided on: Facebook: The advertising opportunities on Facebook for authors are tremendous. That was a no-brainer. YouTube: Doing videos was easier for him than writing blog posts. Jesper’s not a native English speaker, and he didn’t want to have to spend all of his time worrying about grammar when writing for his blog. Twitter: This turned out to be Jesper’s best medium for connecting with fans, because he enjoys it so much. “At the end of the day, you have to like Twitter as a social media platform; otherwise you’re wasting your time.” – Jesper Schmidt “Facebook ads are great, but it’s the kind of thing where every month, you have to be testing your ad copy, testing new images and testing new ads, changing your bids, and targeting. If you don’t love it, eventually you’re just going to burn out and stop doing it, and you won’t get the same great results with it.” – Tom Corson Knowles Major Changes with Twitter in 2017 In November 2017, Twitter did a major update to its terms of service and increased the character limit on tweets from 140 characters to 280 characters. A lot of Twitter users complained about the changes. Jesper believes all the complaints will calm down, and people will go back to using Twitter the way they always have. How Jesper Uses Twitter to Grow His Fan Base and Sell More Books If you want to use Twitter in your book marketing process, you have to think of it as a professional tool. That means you have to spend some time to build up your systems. “Most people are more excited about resul

James Blatch is a former BBC defense reporter. He reported on the UK military from Kuwait, the Arctic Circle, and during the Kosovo conflict in 1999, among many other crazy war zones and places. Today he is the director of The Self-Publishing Formula Course. He’s an online course provider for independent authors. He also cohosts the weekly SPF podcast. James took the lazy way into journalism. He did nothing to build a professional career until about the age of 25. He started by going into computers. In the late 80s, you didn’t need any qualifications to go into computers. But James realized quickly that he hated the field. Pursuing His Dream At some point in his 20s, he had a moment where he realized he wanted to achieve different things in life—he wanted to achieve his childhood dreams. One of those dreams was to work for the BBC. He started knocking on doors and eventually convinced someone to let him make tea for the sports coverage team on the weekends. Then he started reading the cricket results. From there he started covering other sports, like soccer and ice hockey. He got a staff job at the BBC after a year and a half of hard work. His regular BBC job started as a radio production job along with some on-air time. He slowly but surely wormed his way into the newsroom because the newsroom was a more exciting place to be. It’s always good in a newsroom to have a specialty, and having the defense beat made sense for James because he was always an aviation geek and he came from a military family. So he had some idea of how the military operated, which wasn’t the case for most of the people in the newsroom. James’s favorite part about being a reporter was being out in the field and doing stories. A lot of his colleagues wanted to be behind the desk reading news copy, and he never understood why that was more appealing to them. James got to do a lot of cool stuff as a reporter: He got to fly in fast jets. He got to travel to the Arctic Circle. He got to ride in Formula One race cars. As a member of the press, you are given unparalleled access because being covered is very valuable to people. James mostly covered the Royal Air Force. “The RAF generally fought their wars from four-star hotels about 1,000 miles away from the danger.” – James Blatch During the Kosovo conflict in 1998, James was with the RAF in Italy eating gourmet cuisine while friends of his were with the relief convoy on the ground near the border, set to go in after the violence ended. The most excitement James had as a military correspondent were the two times he was embedded on an aircraft carrier. James also enjoyed the travel associated with his journalism career, for the most part. Because he started his career 10 years later than everyone else, he was traveling quite a lot when he had little children at home. That’s when he decided to shift careers again. The moment in James’s 20s when he decided to be an action-taker has led him to change careers every 10 years or so. He worked for the BBC for about 10 years. In his mid-30s, he decided he wanted to be around his family more. He could’ve continued with the BBC at a desk job, but he decided he wanted to pursue another childhood obsession and become a film classifier. James was 10 when his father took him to see Star Wars in 1977. That was a real turning point in his life because it was the first time he was exposed to the idea that an ordinary person can be the hero of the story. From that point on, James always wanted to work for the BBFC. The entire job of the BBFC is to sit around and watch films and TV shows and give them ratings like PG-13, like the MPAA does in the United States. James began to target the BBFC in the same way he targeted the BBC 10 years before. The BBFC was a much harder organization to break his way into because of the limited number of slots available and the number of people who want to do that job. When James worked at the BBFC, he would go to work and watch 350 minutes of video a day. If he was unlucky, he would get something he wasn’t particularly interested in, like wrestling. Quite often, he would get to watch a series that he really liked. One of the problems he ran into with that job is he would often watch episodes of TV shows he was watching at home, before they were broadcast to the general public. Quite often, those shows would be spoiled for him. James worked at the BBFC from 2007 to 2013. It was during those six years that he met John Dyer and Mark Dawson, who were also working there. At the end of his tenure at the BBFC, James decided to join forces with John and start a video production business. James enjoyed video production. He enjoyed traveling the world again. The problem with his video production business is that it wasn’t scalable. That’s when John and James decided to start looking at other opportunities to make videos that they could sell multiple copies of,

Jamie Davis is the author of more than a dozen novels including Accidental Thief. He’s also a registered nurse, a nationally recognized medical educator, and host of The Nursing Show. How Jamie Became a Fiction Writer Jamie got started as a novelist on a dare. He’s been a nurse and a medical educator for quite some time and has several nonfiction books available. In 2014, a friend of his dared him to write a novel for NaNoWriMo. He finished his novel during November and then it sat on the file for eight months. Writing that first fiction novel stoked a creative fire in Jamie. He’s always considered himself a very creative person, and writing fiction gave him a different creative outlet than his nonfiction books or his podcast business. He decided to release what would become the first book in his Extreme Medical Services series. It was very well received by listeners in Jamie’s podcast community, as well as fans of the urban fantasy genre. The Extreme Medical Services series started as an idea for an educational web series that Jamie turned into a novel. Jamie is involved with seven podcasts and he writes for several blogs. He’s always writing. And ever since NaNoWriMo 2014, Jamie has always had a fiction project in process. It never occurred to Jamie to go the traditional publishing route. He’s always been an entrepreneur. He was aware of self-publishing and the opportunities available to him to market to the audience of his choosing, rather than relying on an editor or publisher to decide where his book fit in the marketplace. How to Build an Audience as a Fiction Writer Jamie has several tips for how to build an author as an indie fiction writer. 1. Build an Email List Jamie enjoys the process of fiction writing. He also enjoys building a community and an audience that he can have conversations with. It’s really important for every author to have a platform and an email list. Being an indie author today is no different than running any other online business. “If you have any kind of business at all you need an email list, especially if you’re in an online setting.” – Jamie Davis For an author, having an email list is important because you need to have your readers be your readers, not Amazon’s readers, who they occasionally market your book to. You need to build a community separate from any of the online book sellers. You need to build an email list and communicate with it regularly. Remember: “regularly” can be every couple of weeks. You just want to keep yourself in the front of their mind. You want to keep your fans apprised of what you’re up to, and you always want to be asking them questions. You want to have a continuous conversation with your audience. This builds individual relationships with your audience members. You’ll gain invaluable insight into what they’re looking for in your fiction, and they’ll become invested in your success. 2. Do Newsletter Swaps with Authors in Your Genre Another tactic Jamie uses is to connect with authors in his genre on Facebook, look at what they’re currently working on, and ask them if they’d be interested in doing a newsletter swap. In a newsletter swap, Jamie offers to promote one of their books if they’ll promote one of his. Generally, he has them promote the first in one of his series. You can also sign up for a newsletter swap organized by TCK Publishing! 3. Use Book Marketing Sites Another way to build your email list is to use book marketing sites, with BookBub being the biggest of them all. There’s also FreeBooksy, Book Barbarian, and Kindle Nation Daily. Links are available in the resources section at the bottom of this page. The best way to get success with the different book promotion sites is to run promotions that overlap one another. How to Build an Email List as a Fiction Author When Jamie started writing fiction, he built his email list organically. The first thing you want to do as a new author is put a link to your email list in the back of every book you write. “If you’ve written a good book, your readers are going to want to hear from you when the next book comes out.” – Jamie Davis If you have more than one book out, you can do a number of things to entice people to sign up for your email list. If you’ve written a series, you can: Offer your readers the second book in the series for free and let them know when the third book will be available. Write a reader magnet, which is a side story to your main plot. How Newsletter Swaps Work for Authors When you want to set up a newsletter swap, the first thing to do is look at authors in your genre who have books that directly target the same audience. You’ll want to approach authors who are writing in the same genre as you, who have on their lists the same types of readers you want on your list. You want to become friends with 5 to 10 authors if you can. A newsle

Evan Marshall is a literary agent and owner of the Evan Marshall Agency. He’s also a multi-published novelist and a nonfiction author, and the creator of The Marshall Plan novel writing software. Evan was born in Massachusetts. His first job was with the Big Five publisher Houghton Mifflin in Boston. Then he moved to New York and worked with Signet Books and a small company called Everest House, which is no longer in business. He also worked for a very famous old company, Dodd Mead, known for publishing Agatha Christie. After working with these traditional publishers, Evan became a literary agent. He started working for another well-known agent, Sterling Lord. Evan started his own literary agency in 1987. What’s Changed in the Publishing Industry over the Last 30 Years When Evan started in the publishing industry, there were many more publishers than there are today. There were many small independent publishers that were actually considered major industry players, typically based in New York City. Over time, the small independent publishers engulfed and devoured each other so that now there are just the Big Five traditional publishers. Macmillan Penguin Random House HarperCollins Hachette Simon & Schuster Most of the publishing companies that existed when Evan started in the business are either now imprints of one of these five publishers or they don’t exist anymore. What this means for agents and traditionally published authors is that now there are fewer places to sell books. Very often, Evan will submit projects to different imprints within a publishing company, but when he does, he has to tell each of the editors that he’s already submitted to that company, because the individual imprints of the publishing company can’t bid against themselves. That’s very different than the old days, when Evan could submit to truly separate publishing houses, and get more and higher bids. Publishing is no longer a “gentleman’s business.” There are no more midlist authors. Midlist books were books that were bigger than so-called category books, but not “top of the list books” as they would say in the industry. Basically, a midlist book is a book that has the potential to perform solidly in the market, earning a good living for its author, but isn’t going to be a massive bestseller. These were the books authors built their careers on, putting out a reliable stream of books and getting a reliable, if not massive, income in return. Today there is no room for books like that. A book has to be a solid genre category, or has to be able to go out on its own in a big way. In the past, there used to be midlist thrillers that had modest sales projections. If the book hit those projections, that was great. In order for a thriller to be successful today, it really has to sell in big numbers or, more than likely, that author will be canceled. Publishing is a much more hard-nosed business today than it was 30 years ago. Another example of how the publishing industry has changed is that bookstores very rarely want to do signings anymore, unless you are a big brand-name author. There used to be signings practically every week at local Barnes & Nobles and Waldenbooks, all the brick-and-mortar bookstores that used to exist. Now, many brick-and-mortar stores say it’s not worth their time to have a book signing unless you’re a big brand-name author, like Oprah. Some small bookstores will hold signings for local authors, but these events often don’t sell many books. One positive development in the publishing industry are the new independent publishing companies like TCK Publishing. Small publishing companies like TCK Publishing make it possible for projects that don’t have a home with one of the Big Five traditional publishers to be put out in the marketplace, so they can find readers. Most editors have to play it safe. They’re looking for reasons to say no. They have to buy something they know will work because they know their jobs are on the line. Ironically, many times the Big Five publishers will try to swoop in and sign an author who has done well with a smaller publisher like TCK Publishing. And yet, when authors are asked if they want to switch to one of the Big Five publishers the answer is often no. What Are Traditional Publishers Afraid of? Basically, traditional publishers are afraid they’re going to buy a book that won’t sell very well, and then people higher up in the company will fire them. Every editor at one of the Big Five publishing companies has a cost-benefit analysis done of them as part of a regular review process. The publishing companies compare: What the editor bought Whether the projects they bought were profitable How profitable those projects were as compared to the editor’s salary If the books the editor bought don’t make more money (usually a lot more money) than the editor is paid by the pub

Rachel Starr Thomson is a bestselling author with more than 50 published books, including The Seventh World Trilogy. She is also a freelance editor, publishing consultant, and founder of Independent Publishing Solutions. From a very young age, Rachel spent her time sitting in nature and making up stories in her head. Rachel was homeschooled. Her parents encouraged a lot of reading and a lot of independent study. Rachel read hundreds of books growing up. Her dad had a library of thousands of books. She loved books and reading. That translated very easily into writing for her. She finished her first book, Theodore Pharris Saves the Universe, at the age of 13 and has been writing ever since. Prior to her first novel, Rachel was writing a bunch of Lord of the Rings knockoff-type stuff that she was never able to finish. She was able to finish Theodore Pharris Saves the Universe because it was funny and she was being quirky and writing with humor. As a teenager, Rachel dreamed of being a famous writer. As she grew up, her life took a different path. She was heavily involved in humanitarian work in her early 20s, when she realized that she could combine her love of writing with advancing the worldviews she believed in. That’s when she started working on her writing as a profession. How Rachel Found Her Writer Voice Rachel writes Christian sci-fi and fantasy novels. She has a Christian worldview, but her books aren’t preachy. (In fact, she’s gotten some negative customer feedback saying that her books aren’t Christian enough.) In the beginning of her author career, Rachel tried to appeal to a wider audience. It was only after she “embraced her weird” that her author career started taking off. She stopped trying to appeal to everyone and started looking for people that her fiction already appealed to, which was a much easier task. “If you really have no idea who you’re writing for, you can’t market to them effectively.” – Rachel Starr Thomson Rachel’s Marketing Strategies and Tips for Indie Authors Rachel uses email marketing along with Amazon and Facebook ads to market to her audience. Because Rachel’s niche is so small, just focusing on ranking on Amazon isn’t enough. Rachel could be number one in every category that applies to her and she wouldn’t be able to make a living as an indie author. As soon as Rachel got on Facebook and found there were a million people who wanted to read her books, that changed everything. How Rachel Uses Facebook Ads Rachel found authors who wrote books similar to hers. Then she advertised to their audiences on Facebook; she offered a free copy of the first book in one of her series to everyone who signed up to her email list from Facebook. From there, those customers were funneled into an autoresponder sequence that introduced Rachel and the kinds of books she writes. She ran the ads for about five months. On average, she was spending about $1 to get a subscriber. Towards the end of her Facebook advertising experiment, she spent $5,000 (Canadian) on Facebook ads. That may seem like a lot of money, but now she has an email list of around 30K subscribers, which allows her to write full time. Rachel credits really knowing her target audience as the main reason she was able to succeed with Facebook ads. Rachel made the difficult decision to shut down her Facebook ads because of cash flow issues. When you run a Facebook ad, you essentially pay for the ad the same day you run it. When you make a sale on Amazon, you get paid 60 to 90 days after the sale takes place. Rachel just got to a point where that cash flow situation was untenable. How Rachel Uses Her Email List as a Marketing Tool Now that Rachel has a sizable list, she does some sort of promotion for her list every two months. She either promotes her paperback books or her ebooks. Because her books deal with spirituality, Rachel has been able to successfully market courses and nonfiction books to her audience as well. Rachel has also done BookBub-style promotion emails on different book promotion sites, and she has a newsletter sign-up link in every ebook she publishes. Rachel’s primary online marketing channel is her email list, and the majority of her marketing efforts have been to build that email list. How to Serve Your List as a Fiction Author The key to serving your list as a fiction author is to develop personal connections with the people on your list. In Rachel’s case, because her fiction is about her faith, she uses her faith as a way to connect on a more personal level with each member of her audience. Rachel shares her own personal experiences and her own faith journey with her audience. She also invites them to share their journeys with her. One thing she does is invite her audience to send her prayer requests, and she prays for them. Prayer requests are something that will probably only work with a very religious audience, but that

Ricci Wolman is the founder and CEO of Written Word Media. You may not have heard of Written Word Media before, but I’m sure you’ve heard of some of their brands, including Free Booksy, Bargain Booksy, and Red Feather Romance, all of which are very popular book promotion websites. Ricci has more than 10 years of experience building online audiences using data-driven customer acquisition techniques, and she has an MBA from Harvard University. Ricci’s background is in online marketing, and specifically the part of online marketing that is data-driven. She is an expert at running ads and figuring out the ROI (Return on Investment) or figuring out how much it costs to acquire a customer, whether that’s getting a customer to give you their email address or getting them to buy something at your online store. Ricci actually got her start with The Body Shop, a natural beauty company, working with their e-commerce division at headquarters. After helping build their e-commerce division and working for a couple other companies, Ricci decided to start her own consulting firm. She specialized in helping medium-sized companies acquire new customers. When she started working in the online marketing space 11 years ago, everything was new. Facebook was new! Ricci remembers when Facebook came out with its first ad product, allowing people to pay for customers to like their Facebook page. She’s seen how sophisticated online marketing has become over the last decade, and she’s helped several businesses navigate the online marketing space. The Birth of FreeBooksy While she was running her consulting company, Edge on Marketing Group, Ricci’s mom published a book. Her mom asked for her help getting that book onto Amazon. Once it was live on Amazon, though, it didn’t sell any copies, and her mother was very disappointed. This was around the time that Amazon launched their exclusivity program, KDP Select. In the original incarnation of KDP Select, you could opt for exclusivity with Amazon and have the ability to give your book away for free for 5 days out of every 90-day period. Ricci convinced her mom to opt into KDP Select and offer the book for free. The book still didn’t sell any copies. Ricci was confused. She expected her mom to see at least some activity when the book was offered for free. So she dug into the data to figure out what went wrong. She discovered that on the days her mother’s book was free, so were 5,000 other books on Amazon. Her mom’s book had a real discoverability problem, both when the book was priced and when it was free. That’s when she decided to start FreeBooksy. Originally, FreeBooksy was a blog that picked 5 to 10 free books on Amazon every month and helped them gain exposure. Ricci also featured her mother’s book when it was free to try and give it some exposure. FreeBooksy: From Hobby to Side Project FreeBooksy started as a hobby and a way for Ricci to help her mom. It quickly became a side project because she used FreeBooksy as a sandbox to test out online marketing techniques for her consulting business. She used FreeBooksy to test all of the major social media ad platforms as they came out. Because Ricci spent the time testing ad platforms with the FreeBooksy brand, she began to build an audience. When the social media platforms first started running ads, they were very inexpensive. Facebook’s first ad platform allowed you to run ads for a penny apiece. So you could end up spending $10 in a day and literally get hundreds of likes. After Ricci built an audience, authors began to approach her, offering money to have their book featured on her Facebook Page and blog. That’s when FreeBooksy turned into a side business. Ricci decided to focus on FreeBooksy and build Written Word Media three-and-a-half years ago, after the business grew to the point where it became her primary focus. How Book Promotion Sites Actually Work FreeBooksy has two types of customers: readers and authors. How FreeBooksy Works for Readers FreeBooksy gives readers an easy way to discover new books. There are literally thousands of books free every day on Amazon and it’s really overwhelming for a reader to wade through all of that and discover something they might like. When a reader signs up for FreeBooksy, they give FreeBooksy two pieces of information: What genres the reader likes. What device the reader likes to read them on. With these two pieces of information, FreeBooksy is able to come up with a highly personalized experience for the reader. Every single day, FreeBooksy sends an email to its subscribers with a list of books that meet their criteria. FreeBooksy subscribers are highly engaged because the emails give them a unique customer experience tailored to each individual. FreeBooksy is able to help authors get their books in front of readers who will be interested in reading them. The fact that FreeBooksy’s reader audience is hig

Tyler Basu is the content marketing genius at Thinkific, one of the fastest-growing online course platforms. In episode 48, we talked with Tyler Basu about how to create a lifestyle business and live your dream life. He had just launched Lifestyle Business Blueprint. Since then, Tyler has gotten on board with Thinkific as their content manager. Thinkific helps entrepreneurs easily create and distribute online courses to their audience. Why Is the Online Course Market Growing so Quickly? The online course market is growing quickly because online learning is so attractive. People want to learn specific skills outside traditional learning environments. They want to have the flexibility to learn at home, and to learn on their own schedule. Plus, there are a lot of topics that you can learn online that you don’t learn in school. That’s a huge part of it. The demand for online courses has gone up significantly in recent years, and in response to that, entrepreneurs are creating online courses to serve their customers. In 2017, the e-learning industry will reach $255 billion in total sales from people buying online courses. The traditional book industry is between $80 billion and $100 billion—which makes the e-learning industry 2.5 times the size of the book industry globally! The major reason for this is that the price point for online courses is much higher than for a book. The e-learning industry has a range of price points. There are online course marketplaces like Udemy where you can buy a course for as little as $10, and there are private courses hosted on entrepreneurs’ websites that can go for more than $1,000. Another factor in the growth of the e-learning industry is that the cost of attending a college or university has skyrocketed in the past few years, making taking courses online a much more affordable option for most people. On top of that, people are beginning to question the value of a traditional college degree. There are certainly specialized fields that require a traditional degree to enter, but there are a lot of professions, especially in business, where you don’t need the degree—you just need the skill set. Online courses are perfect for jobs like those. Online courses provide skills at a price point much lower than that of traditional education. The number-one value of online courses is that they can give you skill sets that you can use in your career. In the internet age, there’s information available on every topic you can imagine, whenever you want it. If you decide you wanted to design a logo, and you went to Google and typed in “how to design a logo,” you’d have no problem finding information that would help you in designing your logo. But the best online courses go beyond just giving you information. The instructors go a step further and make sure their students are implementing the information they are given to develop skill sets that make their students more valuable in the marketplace. That’s the difference a good online course can make. The value for the student of any online course is actually implementing the lessons that you learn. Design Your Course So Your Students Implement What They Are Learning Before you create a course with your information, and maybe even before you write a book about it, you should test out your system and approach to solving a particular problem with other people. Before you put it out in the marketplace, your system should work for more people than just yourself. Maybe put up a free video on your YouTube channel. Maybe offer to coach some clients for free. Before you put anything up in the marketplace, you need to be able to prove that it works for different kinds of people. You are not your audience. After you can prove that the information or system that you have is transferable to another person and that it worked for them, the next thing you have to consider is how to create a course that will cause your student to actually go through the material and implement it. Create Short Lessons The first thing you can do to increase engagement and implementation of your information is create short, actionable lessons. You want to create a lesson that doesn’t take a long time to consume. Give Your Students Action Steps After each lesson, you might want to give your students action steps they can do to implement what they’ve learned so far, immediately after learning it. The more your students get in the habit of taking action, the more likely they are to successfully implement your course’s lessons in the long run. Give Students Worksheets or Quizzes about Your Lessons Another good tactic to use involves giving your students a quiz about the lesson they just took, or a worksheet that helps them implement something they’ve been taught by guiding them through the train of thought that leads to action taking place. Allow your students to get quick wins. Don’t give them a ton of content wi

In episode 7, we talked to Rob Archangel about audiobook publishing. In the last three years, Rob has built one of the most successful self-publishing services companies out there. I brought Rob back to talk about what he’s doing now and the lessons he’s learned over the last few years. Selling Books Directly from Your Website It’s helpful if you can think laterally about how you can use your book to grow your business. Not everybody wants to go the bestseller route. There are lots of ways to publish your book and make a profit without selling a ton of copies. The Kindle store is very competitive. It’s very difficult to stand out in the marketplace when there’s literally millions of books available. There is a big emphasis on price as a way to compete in the marketplace. If you pour your heart and soul into a book and work on it for years, it can be hard to turn around and sell that book at just $0.99 or even $2.99. But the entire Kindle business model is designed around encouraging authors to sell their books between $2.99 and $9.99. More and more people are selling their books directly on their websites so they can charge what the book is actually worth. Having a book on your topic of expertise establishes you as an expert in your field and gives you credibility. If you sell your book directly on your website, you have direct control over every aspect of your product and distribution. Selling your book directly from your website works really well when your book is on a small niche topic that doesn’t have wide market appeal. Again, you have the ability to price the book at its true value, and if you work on your website and search engine authorization properly, you can find a market for your very specialized book. You may have seen websites in high-end markets like investing and business selling specialized reports for $100 or $197. Depending on the report and what it can do for you, those price points make a lot of sense. In contrast, it doesn’t make sense to put those kind of reports on Amazon and lose 70% of the profit, because the market is so specific—you aren’t going to get many more customers on Amazon than you do just by selling on your own website, and you’ll make far less money. Rob has been in touch with an author who takes the “sell direct from your website” business model to an extreme. He sells his books for more than $1,000! Obviously, you’re probably not going to sell a million copies at the price point of $1,000. On the other hand, at that price, it doesn’t take so much to make a decent living selling to leads you’ve already cultivated through your network. Trade-Offs The trade-off of selling books directly from your website at very high price points is that you have to find an audience for your material. Finding the audience for whom the book is worth premium pricing is the real work of this business model. The benefit of selling your book on Amazon is that you have a potentially huge audience to market your book to. When you look at how to market your book, you have to look at how specific your market niche is, the actual value of the book that you’re offering, and its value to the audience you are gathering (or have already gathered). It’s best to think broadly when considering your marketing strategy. At Archangel Ink, Rob and his team can advise you on the best way to use your book to grow your brand and your business. Use Your Book as a Lead Generation Tool Jay Campbell is another client of Rob’s. Jay published the book, The Definitive Testosterone Replacement Therapy MANual: How to Optimize Your Testosterone for Lifelong Health and Happiness. It’s available on Amazon for $9.99 on Kindle and $15.36 in paperback. He also has it available on his website using a free plus shipping offer (where you give the customer the book for just the cost of shipping.) Jay offers the book for the cost of shipping so that he can build his email list. He has a bunch of ancillary offers that he makes money from, so the free plus shipping offer is a moneymaking proposition. One offer that is a particularly high-value item is Jay’s long-distance coaching. Jay also partners with a long-distance concierge medical practice. This service allows you to have in-home blood tests to determine your unique hormone levels, then lets you consult with doctors to figure out the best treatment for you. He also partners with a supplement company and emails his qualified list of leads their offers. That’s an additional income stream for him. Jay also has a podcast and YouTube channel. Jay estimates that he receives $100,000 more in sales per year thanks to publishing his book, and due to the authority status that book gives him as an expert in the industry. When Jay published his new book, Burn Fat with the Metabolic Blowtorch Diet: The Ultimate Guide for Optimizing Intermittent Fasting: Burn Fat, Preserve Muscle, Enhance Focus

Brian David Crane is a serial entrepreneur. He sold his first company at age 24. He has helped launch six different million-dollar brands, including Archives.com, which was bought for $100 million three years after launch. Brian has been a digital nomad since 2014 and he’s here to talk about the downsides of the digital nomad lifestyle, and why you might want to rethink selling everything you own and traveling around the world. Brian has had an entrepreneurial streak since he was a teenager. His first business was a lawnmowing company that he started at the age of 14. When he was 17, he started a recycling business with his mother that helped him pay his way through college. He sold that business after he graduated from college at 24. Brian decided to travel the world to find himself. He was supposed to see 25 different countries during his 25th year. He canceled the trip three countries in, because it had no purpose and it didn’t seem to be helping him much. He lost all his money in the financial crisis of 2008. Brian says that’s one of the best things that ever happened to him, because he was a little too big for his britches at that point. A friend got Brian a job out in Silicon Valley. Over the next three years, he learned how to build and launch digital brands and built up a number of e-commerce brands. Then he decided to strike out on his own and build the CallerSmart app, which helps you identify blocked and anonymous callers on your cell phone. What Is the Digital Nomad Lifestyle? Brian considers himself more of an expatriate than a digital nomad. He travels to a place, lives there for 3 to 5 months, and uses where he’s living as a base from which to explore. He has several bases around the world. He has lived in: Bali Hong Kong Vietnam Poland One of the major downsides to being a digital nomad is the fact that you move around all the time. People who are contemplating this lifestyle massively underestimate the time it takes to ramp up and ramp down from traveling. It undercuts your productivity quite a bit. It’s very hard to build consistent habits as a digital nomad. It’s nearly impossible to create a routine if you’re always moving around. Dealing with the Double-Edged Sword of Envy and Perception As a digital nomad, you want to show people your lifestyle. But if you’re too open on social media, your boss and the people your boss works for will see it, and they may begin to question your work product. There’s a real danger to your income if you’re too transparent about your lifestyle. The Digital Nomad Ponzi Scheme There are a lot of digital nomads who travel the world because they convince other people who want to live that lifestyle to hire them as a coach. Instead of providing value and great insights, they make their money and support their lifestyle by telling you how you can do the same. It’s a Ponzi scheme, plain and simple. How to Find a Quality Coach Who Will Actually Help You Improve Your Skills Starting about a year and a half ago, there were a lot of Facebook ads targeting people who wanted to be coaches. These coaches would coach people on how to coach coaches. If you’re searching for a coach to help you improve a skill set, the best thing to do is search for a coach who has achieved what you want to achieve in life. You want to look for a coach who is successful and makes their income from something other than just being your coach. The best coaches are people who are reluctant to take on new clients. They are busy, successful people who don’t need to make money from coaching clients. Stay Away from Gurus There are three levels of teaching. A teacher can teach a skill without being a master at it. There are plenty of teachers who teach physics who aren’t master physicists. A mentor is someone who has mastered the skill. Mentors are people you can model to achieve success. A guru is someone who has mastered the skill and uses their mastery in one area of their life to convince people to follow them in every area of their life. Gurus can be dangerous, because everyone is unique and gurus want everyone to follow their systems regardless of your individual strengths and personality. The Real Key to Success “Become so good in your field that they can’t ignore you. Become so good that the marketplace demands more of what you’re doing.” – Brian David Crane   The real key to success in anything you attempt is to become so good at what you’re doing that people can’t ignore you. You want the marketplace to demand more of what you’re selling. To develop that kind of expert skill level requires focus. You can’t be focused if you’re always traveling everywhere. When you’re constantly traveling, your brain is wired to always think about what’s happening next. If that’s all you’re thinking about, you can’t possibly live in the moment

Penny Sansevieri is the author of several books, including How to Sell Books by the Truckload on Amazon. She’s also the founder of Author Marketing Experts. We interviewed Penny back in Episode 22: Getting Red-Hot Internet Publicity for Your Book, where we talked a lot about how to get online publicity for your books. I wanted to bring her back again to continue our discussion about how to get publicity for your books online, and especially on Amazon, the largest retailer in the world. In this fantastic interview, we talk about how to use keywords to increase your sales, the importance of gathering a street team, and how to get reviews to help boost your sales. Amazon Is a Search Engine for Consumers Amazon is not just a bookstore. It’s a search engine for consumers. There are two important things you can do to boost your ranking within Amazon. Get a consistent stream of reviews for your book. Reviews are like updates to your website or blog. Google likes to see regular updates to websites when it does its ranking. Amazon is the same way. The more regular reviews you have for your products, the more customers are interacting with your product, and so the higher you will rank, all other things being equal. Choose the right keywords. A lot of indie authors will pick single keywords when they choose the keywords for their book. It’s better to select longer keyword strings if you can. Studies have shown that longer keyword strings—or longtail keywords—end up being the keywords people use before they buy something. No matter what type of book you’re writing, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, you want to choose the keywords that your audience is most frequently typing in to find the type of book you’re working on.   Keywords have within them the intent of the reader. The more specific the reader is about what they’re searching for, the more likely their intent is to buy. – Tom Corson Knowles   How to Find the Keywords Your Audience Is Searching for Penny recommends doing all the keyword research yourself. What you want to do is: Go to the Amazon Kindle store. Enter a search string that relates to your book. Judge the competitiveness of that keyword string based on the number of results that come up, and the sales rank of those results. The more books that rank for a particular keyword phrase, and the higher the sales rank of the books on the first page of search results, the more competitive a particular keyword phrase is. After you search the keyword phrases that come naturally to your mind, you can use the Amazon suggested searches that show up as you type. However, there will be times when Amazon’s suggested keyword searches aren’t relevant to the book that you are trying to rank. Be careful of that. Penny has found it’s better to do this kind of keyword research manually because Amazon is changing all the time and every piece of software she’s tested isn’t as accurate as she would like.   How to Use the Keyword Strings You Find to Improve Your Sales Penny likes to find 15 keyword strings that she can use to help her audience find her books. Amazon allows you to directly input seven keyword strings into your metadata to help customers find your book. But there are other places keywords can go that will still help your readers find you. You can also put keywords: In the title of your book In the subtitle of your book On your book description page On your Amazon Author Central page   It’s very important that you use the keyword strings you find naturally. You should not engage in any sort of keyword stuffing behavior, because that may get your book pulled from Amazon. Penny likes to find 15 keyword strings, because you will often find that a particular keyword phrase stops working to attract readers to your book. Having 15 gives you a lot of backup options. How to Tell If a Keyword Phrase Is Working for You You can see if a keyword phrase is working for you by whether a particular book rises or falls in sales ranking if you change a keyword phrase. Penny likes to test her keyword phrases one at a time, especially if she’s in a crowded market, like dieting or dating. To change your keyword strings: Go into your Author Dashboard. Select the book that you want to modify. Go to the keywords field and change the keyword string you want to test. Monitor your results. Typically, within 48 hours, you’ll be able to tell whether or not a book is rising or falling in the Amazon rankings. You can also edit your book description to include the keyword you want to test. Amazon scans all the book description pages on its site and picks up on keywords used in them. Tips for Getting More Sales from Keywords Test your keywords. Look at your keywords every three months. Things change on Amazon quickly and you need to adjust. Check your Author Central page. If you go to the book details section, there are a lot of places you can add keywords organical

Dustin Mathews is the founder of Speaking Empire, which teaches entrepreneurs how to scale up their business by selling from presentations and stages. Speaking Empire is the company behind some of the biggest speakers out there, including Kevin Harrington, Russell Brunson, and Jairek Robbins. Dustin began his professional journey after he read Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money that the Poor and Middle Class Do Not! by Robert Kiyosaki. Dustin thought he was going to be the next real estate investing millionaire. He found a local investing club and met his business partner, Dave. He offered to work for Dave for free if Dave would teach him how to buy houses. One day, Dave told Dustin he would have to fill in for him at a speaking engagement if they wanted to continue to work together. Dustin was terrified, but he really wanted to continue working with Dave. Very quickly, Dustin realized the audience didn’t care about him. They only cared about the specialized knowledge he had to share. That’s when a light bulb went off for him. In this interview, we dive deep on the topic of presentations. We talk about the five steps every presentation needs to have and about how to research the objections of your ideal customer. Finally, we discuss how to maximize your profit from every webinar you do. You Have Limitless Opportunities to Deliver a Presentation The first thing you have to realize is that every social media platform gives you the opportunity to make a presentation. There are a number of different channels where you can put your message out: Facebook Live Periscope YouTube Snapchat Podcasting All these different channels allow you to make a presentation to your audience. The Essential Five Steps to Every Presentation Every successful presentation, no matter the format or platform, has a few key steps in common. 1. The Introduction Celebrities, famous people, and influencers are always introduced by other people. The president of the United States is always introduced by someone. So is the queen of England. So are professional athletes at every professional sporting event in the world. Being introduced elevates your status with your audience—it says you’re important enough for someone to announce your presence. You can either have someone introduce you or leverage an introduction video. For an example of how an intro video works, check out Dustin’s here: www.speakingempire.com/introvideo. 2. The Story After you’re introduced, you need to have a transformational story. People engage with stories more deeply than with simple facts presented in a straightforward way—we remember stories and get emotionally attached to them. So it’s critical to present your information as part of a narrative. Every transformational story starts with a character in a dark place. Then they discover something in the darkness that turns their life around. You need to link your transformational story to the product you’re selling, or link to you as the solution to their problem. If you don’t link your transformational story to the product you’re selling, or you as the solution, the story will distract from the sale you’re trying to make. 3. The Offer In every presentation you do, you have to make people aware of the pain point you’re discussing. You have to show them statistics, or press clippings, or video of how life is really difficult. You have to make your audience realize the problem and the pain associated with it. Then you have to offer them the solution. Offering the solution doesn’t mean that you tell people to buy your products right then and there. This is not the time to sell to your audience. This is the point in the presentation where you describe the process, methodology, or secret that you’ve discovered that can help them solve the problem you’ve just made them aware of. Throughout your presentation, there’s going to be an ebb and flow between pain and pleasure. During the offer phase, you want to turn up the pain by making your audience acutely aware of the problem. At the end of the offer phase, you alleviate that pain somewhat by telling your audience you have the solution to the problem that they are now keenly aware of. 4. The Body This is where you explain your solution. The first thing you want to do is to break your solution into a process that takes 3 to 6 steps. People like processes. They like to check things off a list. And a list of 3 to 6 items is the easiest to remember. Next, you want to name your solution something memorable. People buy processes and systems with a memorable name. If you aren’t feeling particularly creative, use your last name in the title of your solution. That way, people will connect the solution to you. It’s fantastic for brand building. After you come up with the title of your process, the first thing you want to do is get it trademarked, so no one can steal it from you. When you deli

Heath Armstrong is a serial creative entrepreneur. He is the author of The Sweet Ass Journal to Develop Your Happiness Muscle in 100 Days. By adopting the habits of 100+ creative entrepreneurs, he was able to pay off $20,000 in debt, quit his job, sell all of his belongings, travel the world, and scale his e-commerce startup to over $600,000 in revenue in 2016. In this stellar interview, we talk about Heath’s journey and what you can learn from his mistakes. We talk about the importance of meditation and gift-giving. We also talk about how to tackle large goals by choosing small daily “freedom actions.” Finally, we discuss how to develop lifelong success habits. Heath met the turning point in his life when he woke up in his garage with a bloody nose, a bottle of whiskey in his hand, and his car running on his lawn. He didn’t know how he got there. In that moment, Heath made a decision that he was going to transition to a better life. The first person Heath reached out to was Amber Ludwig-Vilhauer, founder of No Guts No Glory Enterprises. She introduced him to Paul Kemp and Hal Elrod. Hal helped Heath develop a morning routine. Shortly after that, Heath started a podcast where he interviewed successful people. Over the course of conducting 100 interviews, he began to slowly reframe his habits. Personal and Business Habits Are Connected In order to be successful in business, you have to create a personal foundation first. You have to be able to control the voices in your head telling you what you can and can’t do. You have to be able to set goals and work towards them. The key to success is to develop habits that lead to success. If you’re a writer, you want to write every single day. If you want to run an Amazon store, you have to work on that every single day and study the metrics that lead to success. Heath hired a financial coach to help him develop good money habits. That expense—and the expert’s insights—helped him pay off his debts in short order. In the process of developing those financial habits, Heath took a minimalist challenge and sold almost all of his possessions. Minimalism became an obsession for Heath. He sold his house and is location independent. Heath met a mentor who taught him how to open a store on Amazon. Heath saw the potential there and created an automated business that supports his lifestyle. Heath is planning a month of travels completely paid for by his automated Amazon store. None of it would’ve been possible without his focus on personal change and building a personal foundation. The Importance of Having a Personal Foundation for Success Heath tried several different things before focusing on his personal development and habits. Every business opportunity Heath jumped into before building a personal foundation of disipline didn’t work. You have to be disciplined, methodical, and committed to doing what it takes to succeed if you want to achieve success. You have to know what success means to you. You have to know what you’re aiming for, and you have to go after it every single day. That’s the only sure way to succeed. Learn from Heath’s Mistakes When Heath was younger, he started a WordPress website business with a friend from high school without putting too much thought into it. Heath and his friend were able to secure a website contract with a Holiday Inn location. The Holiday Inn paid them $8,000 for the website, half of which was Heath’s. He quit his 9-to-5 job after landing that first big contract and allowed his bank account to dwindle. Even though he knew he should try to find more clients, he spent his time going out and having fun. One day, he woke up to find the business bank account was empty. After talking with the banks, Heath found out that his partner had withdrawn all of the funds through ATM withdrawals for personal use. He realized he made a mistake in opening the business with a friend without considering the trust levels. Heath’s mistake was believing that his 9-to-5 job held him back from realizing his true potential. “When you have a job, it is your platform that allows you to support yourself while you create something that helps you shine a little brighter.” – Heath Armstrong Everything you do and learn in life is connected to everything else. If you sit down and make a list of everything you’ve learned or experienced in your life, you will quickly see that everything you thought of as negative is connected to something positive. Tom’s Timeline Exercise Another way to do this is to create a timeline of your life. Write down all the important events you’ve experienced. I have different timelines for different areas of my life. I have a timeline for: Health Relationships Finances Hobbies Social life When you do this exercise, it gives you perspective. You can look at the past and see how life is full of ups and downs. So if you’re at a low point right now, you can see that things are bound to shift to an upward trajectory bas

Charlie Gilkey is the author of The Small Business Lifecycle, a business book that helps creative people focus on the actions that will significantly grow their businesses. He’s also the founder of Productive Flourishing, a website that helps change makers finish the projects that really matter. In this great interview, we talk about how to build a platform organically as a nonfiction author. We also discuss how to finish the projects that matter, how to be successful as an author whether you write fiction or nonfiction, and what makes certain nonfiction book stand out. Charlie Gilkey got started as an author and ended up in the business world. He was pursuing a career as an Army Joint Forces military logistics coordinator while at the same time pursuing a PhD in philosophy. On top of that, he had just bought a house. He was spinning a lot of plates and he had to develop systems to be successful because no one had taught him those systems Charlie is a teacher at heart, so when he began learning about project management systems, he began writing and teaching about the subject as well. That writing turned into a business when people came to him asking for help with their specific situations. They asked for coaching, consulting, and training that you can only provide in a one-on-one environment. Charlie still considers himself a writer, but he’s a writer who loves teaching. How Charlie Gilkey Built His Platform Charlie began blogging in an effort to solve the problems of his students and junior sergeants. All of his early blog posts started as a result of conversations about somebody he knew having a problem. “Never solve a public problem in private.” —Chris Brogan Charlie built a fan base by writing about the problems of people he knew. His fans shared those problems and found a path forward in the solutions he suggested. If you can take real problems of real people and solve them in public, you can build a genuine platform and help people at the same time. “Whatever got the ‘aha’ yesterday will get the ‘aha’ today.” – Charlie Gilkey Using Emotion to Create Content for Your Nonfiction Audience Creating content for your nonfiction audience is not difficult at all. If you have clients or friends who have problems, and you help them solve their problem, that solution can be content for your brand. Granted, you may have to massage the content a little bit so that you anonymize the event, and turn it into “book style” written English rather than a conversation. But it’s not as hard as people like to believe. You don’t have to put on a “writer hat.” Just be yourself. Find something that frustrates you. Maybe look online and find a person who posts something that makes you angry. Look for your reasoned response to what upset you. That will get you far more traction than stewing on Facebook or just staying angry. When we think about writing as writers, we go into our knowledge base and we worry about the things that we’re told to worry about: I have to write a great headline. I have to be grammatically correct. My ideas have to have a logical flow. All these things are true. But those are concerns for the editing phase of the writing process. Another truth about writing is that it’s more art than science. The main purpose of writing is to move or affect your audience. The only way you can do that is if you’re writing about subjects that you have an emotional investment in. If you’re not writing with emotion, emotion won’t appear on the page and you won’t be able to reach your readers. They won’t pick up any spark from you. You’ll just be like every other writer on the topic, and easy to put down. Writing about the problems and situations that affect you emotionally can lead to transformational moments for people in your audience. The most successful people on the internet with the largest audiences are the people you can connect with emotionally. They don’t necessarily have the best information on the topic—they’re just the most relatable. In order to finish a project, you have to write something that moves you emotionally. That’s the only way you will get over the inevitable obstacles that will appear when you’re trying to finish your book. “It takes discipline and grit to finish a book. But if that’s all you have, it’s going to be a very tough slog.” – Charlie Gilkey “When you’re in the right space, there is a sense of creative pregnancy.” – Charlie Gilkey   Write what you’re passionate about. Write what won’t let you sleep at night. How to Finish Writing that Article, Blog Post, or Book When it comes to a writing project, whether it’s a blog post, article, or book, there are certain principles you can follow that will make it easier for you to finish that project. 1. Start with the end in mind. In the brainstorming outline/phase, start wi

Gabriela Pereira is the founder of DIYMFA.com, the do-it-yourself alternative to a master’s degree in writing. She teaches at conferences and online, and she’s helped hundreds of writers get the MFA experience without having to go to an expensive school. In this fantastic interview, we talk about the value of an MFA degree, but we also talk about how to develop the skills that you get from an MFA program without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars. Finally, we talk about how to iterate and optimize your writing process. Gabriela likes to say that she didn’t found DIYMFA.com, it found her. When she got her MFA degree, she expected to be granted some sort of special status, or at least feel like a “real writer.” That didn’t happen. Instead, she began thinking about all her writer friends who didn’t have the advantages she did. When Gabriela pursued her MFA in writing, she had the support of her husband, a practicing lawyer. She was able to go back to school for two years and devote herself to learning the craft of writing without having to worry about working a 9 to 5 job while getting her degree. The skills Gabriela learned in order to earn her MFA were incredibly important. But she realized that you don’t need a formal degree to learn those skills. Writing isn’t rocket science or brain surgery. That realization was the start of her journey. She wanted to repackage the concepts she learned in school so she could make them available to people who can’t afford the time and tuition fees it would take to get a formal degree. When Gabriela had this flash of inspiration, the first thing she did was blog about it. At the time, her blog had 12 followers. She expected it to go nowhere. Instead, she woke up to 25 comments on the blog post and several emails in her inbox. That’s when she realized the idea had legs. That germ of an idea started the journey that became DIYMFA.com. Is an MFA Degree Worth It? An MFA degree in writing costs about $100,000 when you factor in all the levels of schooling you need. Most people who get an MFA degree will not recoup their investment. The difference between and MFA degree and other advanced degrees such as a law degree, a medical degree, or even a PhD is that other advanced degrees have a professional career path that leads to recouping your investment. In contrast, an MFA in writing simply does not have any set professional path. If you want to have a career as a writer, there are no rules you have to follow in order to be successful, especially in the age of indie publishing. The truth is, most creative vocations don’t have set rules you absolutely have to follow to be successful. If you’re talented and persistent, you can find a way to make money with whatever art you pursue. You certainly don’t need a formal degree to pursue your artistic endeavors. What You Learn in the DIYMFA Program When Gabriela got serious about the idea of creating an online DIY MFA program, she studied the traditional MFA programs and what they offered. Quickly, she realized there are three major components: You write a lot. You learn the craft of writing by practicing writing. This shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone. You learn writing through writing. You read a lot. Most major MFA programs have a specific curriculum of books that they want their students to read. There’s a community aspect. In traditional schools, they invite writers to read their work for students to listen to. They also invite writers to lecture about certain aspects of craft. Sometimes they have panels of experts speak on the business of publishing. Gabriela replicated those three areas of a traditional MFA program on the DIYMFA website. There is a flagship course with modules in the areas of: Writing Reading Community She also has columnists that blog about those specific areas as well. How Reading Can Help You Improve Your Writing If you went to a traditional MFA program, the school would choose your reading list and assign it to you. Gabriela sees little value in that. She believes reading is important, but it should be project specific. You should read books that help you write your current project. There are four categories of books that can help authors improve the project they’re writing now. 1. Read Competitive Books Competitive books are known as “comps” in the publishing industry. These are the books that you might think of as your competitors in the marketplace. These are the books most similar to yours. Basically, these are the books that you might see in an Amazon “also bought” section. These books are important because you want to know how other people are tackling your subject or genre. You want to read competitive books so that you know you aren’t rehashing ground that has already been well tread. 2. Read Contextual Books Contextual books put your project in context. For instance, Gabriela was wri

Nick Loper is an author, entrepreneur, and founder of sidehustlenation.com, a growing community and resource for aspiring and part-time entrepreneurs. As the host of the top-rated Side Hustle Show Podcast, Nick explores a different business idea every single week and helps listeners discover the path to new job-free income streams. Nick’s original side hustle was a footwear comparison shopping site. Back in the day before you could just go to Amazon and search for what you want to buy, you’d go a site like Pricegrabber or Nextag. These are comparison-shopping sites that allow you to search for a product and find the best price on the web. Nick’s idea was to create a comparison shopping site specifically for footwear. It was a good business for quite a while, but eventually Nick had to shut it down. However, this first side hustle allowed him to quit his job after working three years of nights and weekends to make that happen. Nick calls the experience his “trial by fire” initiation into online marketing and online business. The online footwear comparison-shopping engine that Nick designed played in the margins between the cost of traffic and the amount of commission that you could get from a sale on his site. He never got a lot of organic Google traffic. His primary traffic source was Google ads. By 2014, the amount of money that he could make per sale wasn’t enough to cover the cost of the traffic coming into his site. So he had to shut it down. However, by that point, Nick had two other successful side hustle ventures. He has failed much more than he has succeeded online, but his story shows the successes are all that matter. This is a great interview. We dive deep into online business and what it takes to succeed. We talk about how to manage online business failure. Finally, we discuss how to convert a potential audience member from a stranger to a true fan. How to Deal with a Failing Online Business The first thing Nick did to help keep his footwear comparison-shopping business afloat was to take a look at what products and activities got the best results using the 80/20 rule. The 80/20 Rule Vilfredo Pareto was an Italian economist who discovered that 20% of the people in Switzerland owned 80% of the land. This was later expanded into the Pareto principle, which states that roughly 80% of results come from 20% of actions. This is even true in nature, where 80% of a crop comes from 20% of the land being cultivated. With this in mind, Nick took a deep dive into his business and figured out which 20% of his actions led to 80% of his profits. He was able to cut his ad spend at Google significantly by focusing on the brands that people were searching for. He also focused on the brands people were buying the most. Sometimes, there’s nothing you can do to save a business long-term. That’s when you have to look for other income streams to replace the one that you are losing. Fortunately for Nick, he had systems in place that allowed him to work on other projects before he had to close down his website. The main lesson from Nick’s experience is to always be looking for another income stream. If you have multiple income streams, losing one is not a problem. The day after Nick quit his traditional job, he got an email from Google saying his account no longer met their quality guidelines. It took them three months to reinstate his Google Adwords account. That really hammered home the point for Nick that he needed diversity of traffic sources and diversity of income streams. Nick thought he had solved that problem by having 40 advertisers on his shoe comparison shopping site. His problem was that 80% of its traffic came from Google, so when the cost of that traffic became too expensive, his business was no longer sustainable. How to Diversify Traffic So Your Online Business Is Sustainable in the Long Term Nick learned his lesson. His current primary side hustle, The Side Hustle Podcast Show, isn’t reliant on Google Adwords. It has several different traffic sources. About half the traffic comes through Google (although not Google Adwords). A lot of traffic comes through email. Some traffic comes through doing podcast interviews like this. He also gets traffic from social media channels. Sidehustlenation.com has become a brand itself, so there’s a small amount of people who type in the website directly without going through another channel. The podcast has a much more solid foundation then the shoe comparison shopping site ever did. Should You Focus on Your Strengths or Diversify Your Portfolio of Income Streams? As an entrepreneur, you should try to strike a balance between following your strengths and diversifying your income streams. It’s essential to have more than one income stream—although on the other hand, you don’t want to spread your efforts so thin that you don’t get anywhere. Nick has seen entrepreneurs become successful by

A few bloggers have cracked the code to making money from blogging, and Crystal Paine is one of them. She is a New York Times bestselling author, and she’s the founder of the incredibly successful blog MoneySavingMom.com, where she teaches moms how to save and earn more. In this interview, we talk about how Crystal became a professional blogger, how to make a profit from your blog in 2017, and the importance of building real, genuine relationships with your audience. How to Make Money With a Blog Crystal never thought she was going to be a blogger full-time. Her journey began because she and her husband wanted to remain debt-free while he went to law school. She was doing fine working a number of part-time jobs until she got sick one day and found out she was pregnant. She eventually had to quit her jobs because of her pregnancy. That’s when she began to research making money online from home. She tried a lot of different things and discovered blogging. In 20014, she took the plunge and started a blog about being a mom. One day, she wrote a blog post about how she bought a week’s worth of groceries for her family for $17. That post went viral and got a lot of attention. She decided to launch MoneySavingMom.com in 2007 to focus exclusively on money matters. Within a year, she was making a full-time income from her blog. The key to making money online is paying attention to what resonates with your audience. With all the social media channels we have these days, it’s really easy to figure out what people are engaging with. Once you learn how to create your blog, it’s time to start learning how to monetize it. Making Money from Affiliate Marketing on Your Blog When Crystal started MoneySavingMom.com, she had two years of blogging experience to draw upon. She understood different ways she could monetize her blog and she was hopeful that she could make a part-time income from it. One of the first things she did was to look at what affiliate marketing opportunities would work for the blog that she was writing. Very quickly, she found coupon sites that would pay her for each coupon printed from her website. When she started MoneySavingMom.com, very few people were using coupon printing as an affiliate marketing income source, so she was able to make quite a good living by giving people coupons they could print from their computers. With the advent of so many social media channels, the landscape of blogging has dramatically changed in the last five years. It’s still possible to make a living blogging, but you have to use different strategies than worked in the past. For instance, Crystal writes a lot more about online deals then she used to because people are shopping online a lot more than they did 10 years ago. What Is Affiliate Marketing and How Does It Work? To become an affiliate marketer, you have to: Go to a site that offers an affiliate program. (Amazon is a great place to start.) Sign up for their affiliate program. Get approved to be an affiliate by the company that runs the program. Once you’re approved as an affiliate, you get a special link for people to buy something from that online retailer. When people buy through your special link, you get a percentage of that sale. Amazon has a particularly good affiliate marketing program because it pays you a percentage of anything that people buy for a certain period of time on Amazon after they’ve clicked your affiliate link. Adding Value with Affiliate Links If you decide you want to make money through affiliate marketing, one of the most important things you need to consider before you make a post on your blog is, “Is this going to be a win for my readers?” As long as you put your readers first and only promote things that will actually benefit them, you will build an audience that appreciates and respects you. Your audience will grow organically because you’re actually adding value to their lives and the marketplace. Using Facebook Live to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing Beyond writing blog posts, you can use Facebook Live to demonstrate for your audience what they will receive when they buy something you’re an affiliate for. Consider recording short videos explaining products that you like, demonstrating how they work or what value they’ll add to your readers’ lives. Unboxing videos, product demos, and tips and tricks are great ways to engage readers while also getting new affiliate marketing sales. How to Get Traffic to Your Blog in 2017 If you want to get traffic to your blog in 2017, the first thing you have to consider is your content. You shouldn’t create a blog just to make money. If making money is the primary motivation for building a blog, you’re going to burn out very quickly. Building a quality blog that adds value to the community is a lot of work. If you create a blog based on your passion, you are much more likely to be successful because you’ll be willin

The results of Rachel’s latest book marketing experiments will surprise you. Rachel Aaron is a bestselling traditionally published novelist and author of several books including the Eli Monpress series, as well as one of my absolute favorite nonfiction books on writing: 2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love. We talk about how her writing has changed since our last interview, and her latest experiments with book marketing. We also talk about the importance of writing quality books and what types of marketing work (and don’t work) when you’re just starting to build an author platform. Note: Rachel’s been on the show before: in Episode 36, we talked about how to write faster, better, and love what you do. We talked a lot about plotting, as well as Rachel’s writing process. It’s worth going back for a listen just so you can get the full scope of what Rachel’s talking about—and how it might work for you! Writing is Marketing Since our last interview, Rachel has studied a lot about story structure and what really goes into a good story. She focuses a lot more on characters than she used to. Characters are what drive the story forward, and your audience only experiences your story through the five senses, thoughts, and opinions of your characters. That means you have to write great characters if you want readers to love your story and share it with others. Tips for Populating Your Story with Great Characters A novel is going to have more than one antagonist, and every antagonist is the hero of his or her own story. Don’t forget to make your antagonists people, too! Give your character a motivation, something they want. Then give them something they need. Put what they want and what they need in conflict. This is how you create a character arc and write a really interesting story. When you’re just starting out as a fiction writer, focus on giving your characters one major motivation. When you focus on just one motivation, it helps clearly define your character for your audience and makes your job as a writer simpler.If you think about characters, their motivations, and how the decisions they make will bring them into conflict with other characters, you will end up with a much better story. You should give your character a flaw that needs to be overcome in order to get what they need. Human beings are flawed and we can more easily identify with a protagonist who isn’t perfect. You should be willing to beat up on your characters. How a person reacts to hardship reveals their true character. The same thing is true of fictional people: the more you beat up on them the more they reveal their true selves.Beating up on your characters works especially well if their reactions change from the beginning of the story to the end of the story. Showing your character reacting differently at the end of the story than they did at the beginning illustrates their character arc and really brings home for your reader how they have changed. More on Character Motivation The clearer you can be about your characters’ motivation, the more impact you can have as a storyteller. That’s why Rachel likes to focus on one motivation per character. When you limit yourself to one character motivation, that motivation serves to define the character and it really helps make everything clear to the reader so that they can truly identify with where the character is coming from. When introducing characters, you want to tell your readers who that character is, what they want, and why the reader should care about them. Being unclear is the kiss of death in many stories. Make Every Book the Best Do everything you can to make the story you’re writing right now the best story it can be. If you’re writing a series, don’t hold back something cool in Book 1 just so you can put it in Book 2 or 3. Use the cool stuff now! There will be more cool stuff later. Besides, if you save the good stuff for later, your readers may leave—and then they’ll never read all that cool stuff you were holding back. Your reader is coming into your story blank. It’s your job to fill in the blank in the most beautiful and interesting way possible. —Rachel Aaron Book Marketing Experiments Rachel admits that, after trying every social media marketing strategy she could find, she just doesn’t like to use social media to promote her books. She doesn’t like Facebook at all. She enjoys Twitter, but just as a citizen—not as a “platform author.” She has just over 4,000 followers, and she might mention when a new release comes out, but she doesn’t use her Twitter feed to push her books on anyone. Everything I have to say about my books is in my books. If you want to know what I think, read my books. —Rachel Aaron Rachel knows authors who are very successful at using Facebook ads and other paid advertising. It’s just not her thing. Rachel has done three things to build

Jonah Berger is a marketing professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and the bestselling author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On and Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior. This was a great interview. We talk about what makes things go viral and how authors can create a word-of-mouth campaign to sell more books. Jonah’s undergraduate research focus was in human decision-making. He went on to earn a PhD in marketing. He’s always been interested in why people do what they do and what influences the decisions they make. His academic career allows him to study these questions deeply. He wrote his first book Contagious: Why Things Catch On after he taught a course on the subject. A lot of people sent requests for the course materials even though they were unable to actually attend the class. That’s when he came up with the idea of bringing together academic research on the subject of why things go viral, then collecting that research into a book accessible to a mass audience. Jonah’s Publishing Journey Jonah went the traditional publishing route when he decided to write his first book. He got an agent by connecting with friends who had already published popular academic books like his. After he got an agent, he wrote a proposal that was submitted to publishing houses. He estimates it took him about three years from coming up with the idea to having a published book available in stores. Most of that time was taken up in the back-and-forth of the editing process. The 2 Things You Need to Know If You Want Your Book to Sell Well Who is your audience? Why are you writing this book for them? If you have a good handle on these two questions, it can really help focus your writing efforts. Thinking of your audience during the planning, writing, and marketing phases helps to ensure you’re going to provide them with massive value—which is key to gaining traction, building a fan base, and selling lots of copies. The STEPS You Can Take to Start a Word-Of-Mouth Marketing Campaign for Your Book The secret to creating a word-of-mouth marketing campaign is to identify your audience and convert them from consumers to advocates for your work. There are six reasons people will share content on the internet. Any one of these factors can make something shareable. The more factors you can stack, the more likely it is that your idea/book will go viral. Remember: Only 7–10% of word-of-mouth communication happens online. The majority of word-of-mouth communication happens face-to-face. Social media can be a powerful tool to get your message out there, but the channel the information comes through is far less important than the psychology behind what makes people share things. Take these STEPS to ensure that you’re creating sharable, potentially viral content: Social Currency The better something makes you look—the better it reflects on you—the more likely you are to share it. How can you make your reader look smart, special, and in the know for sharing your book with others? If you’re a nonfiction author, what piece of information is going to make your reader look smart or clever at a cocktail party? If you’re writing a fiction book, what are the snippets that are going to make your reader look smart, sophisticated, and well read if they pass them on? Triggers The more something is “top of mind,” the more likely it is to be on the tip of your tongue. In other words, if it’s the first thing someone thinks of when asked a given question or in a given situation, they’re likely to share it. People often talk about the weather to fill conversational space. They don’t usually talk about it because the weather is particularly interesting, but because weather is a topic we all experience frequently. It’s something we all have in common. What are the hooks in your book that relate to things going on in popular culture? What are the things in your book that are time of year-specific? (Think holidays. How many stories about Christmas come out around Christmastime?) Crafting triggers is about finding links to things in the environment that can remind people of your book. When considering triggers for your book, try to find ones that happen regularly. The more often a trigger occurs in the environment, the better it’s going to be for your word-of-mouth campaign. The Four Key Elements of Triggers Who do you want to be triggered? Who is your target audience? When do you want them triggered? What time should you trigger them so they’re most likely to take action appropriately? If your book is a summer read, you want your audience to buy your book in the summer. If your book is a gifting book, you want your audience to take action around gift-giving holidays like Christmas. What is around that time? After you’ve identified the time that you want your trigger to take place, you have to think about situations and events that occur around t

Mike Rohde is the bestselling author of The Sketchnote Handbook and The Sketchnote Workbook. He presents sketchnoting workshops around the world that encourage people to use visual thinking skills to generate, capture, and share ideas more effectively. In this awesome interview, we talk about sketchnoting, including what it is and how to do it. And we talk about Mike’s traditional publishing journey and how he was able to make his book a success. Visual Thinking Benefits Visual thinking isn’t just a skill that’s important for right-brain, ultra-creative designers. In fact, visualization and visual thinking evolved to help our ancestors better survive, and it’s a key aspect of human intelligence. Even if you tend to be a very poor visual thinker, practicing with sketchnoting and drawing can make a big difference in your creative output and ability to solve problems. There are huge benefits to using visual and spatial thinking. It can boost your creativity, activate differents parts of your brain, and help you come up with new and unique ideas that you never would have come up with otherwise. So don’t worry if you can’t draw, find it almost impossible to visualize, or scored poorly on visual or IQ tests. You don’t need to be a genius to benefit from the fun and creative insights that can come from a little visual thinking. And one of the best and easiest ways to get started is with sketchnoting. What Is Sketchnoting? Sketchnoting is a visual way of taking notes. Normally, notes are text-based. But there’s a problem with that: text-based notetaking limits the type and amount of information that you can record and remember. Text-based notetaking relies on just that one mode of taking notes. The human brain processes text-based notes one way and image-based notes in a different way. Sketchnoting allows us to capture more data and use more areas of our brain, increasing the likelihood that we’re going to remember that data. Using the sketchnoting technique allows you to process information visually. Human beings are very visual people, and we’re becoming more so in the Internet Age, especially now that smartphones are everywhere. Just think about how you react to image posts on Facebook or Instagram, in contrast to long text posts. Pictures get your attention! The Four Components of Sketchnoting There are four main things elements involved in sketchnoting: 1. Drawing This is exactly what it sounds like. You’re drawing images related to what you’re taking notes on. 2. Lettering Here, you draw the letter rather than print it—you’re using your visual brain and your drawing and handwriting skills to process information differently so you remember it better. 3. Writing Your drawn and hand-lettered notes aren’t the only way to remember things. In sketchnoting, you also add text-based notes to accompany your drawings, giving you multiple ways to process, record, and remember information so that you use all parts of your brain. 4. Selection You don’t have to write down every word you hear. Record the really important stuff, whatever jumps out at you about the topic you’re taking notes on. You’ll remember more if you don’t try to remember everything, but pick out the important bits. Handwritten Notes vs. Notes Typed on a Computer Scientific studies have shown that people who write handwritten notes recall the subject matter much better than people who use a laptop to type what they’re hearing word for word. When the scientists looked into the results more deeply, they discovered that actually using pen and paper to record notes forced the people who were doing it to analyze what they were hearing and condense it. Writing by hand means you have to think about the subject matter actively in order to take notes. In contrast, the people who were typing acted like stenographers and were unable to recall the material as well because they didn’t actively engage with the material when they took notes—the words flowed onto the page without actually getting processed, so they lost out on a valuable part of the learning and memory process. How to Use Sketchnoting You can use sketchnoting to: Take notes in a meeting Capture processes Capture experiences Check out Mike’s sketchnote about a latte art competition at a café! Sketchnoting Is for Everyone You might feel like sketchnoting is something you can’t do because you aren’t good at drawing. But that’s not true! Sketchnoting is for everyone in the same way that writing and typing are for everyone. Sketchnoting is about capturing ideas visually. You’re taking notes for yourself. If you draw something that captures the idea that you want to remember, that’s all you need to do. It doesn’t have to be a museum-worthy art piece. It just has to capture the idea you want to recall and use later, in whatever way works for you. And by adding a little extra visual element to your notes, you ca

Dave Kusek is the author of The Future of Music, which has sold more than 50,000 copies. He’s a pioneer in the music industry, and he teaches artists how to thrive and prosper in our high-tech digital society. This is a great interview. We talk about how to have a music career in the digital age. But it’s not just about music: we talk about setting career goals, the paths you need to consider based on what your goals are, and how to attract an audience with your web presence. Authors can use the same strategies we talk about for musicians to build an audience online. Dave grew up as a musician. He was a member of several bands in high school. When he went to college, he began working at one of the first synthesizer companies. He was fortunate to meet many musicians who worked with the company he worked for. While he was working for the synthesizer company, he decided that he would prefer a role on the business side of the music industry. He spent a lot of time developing software for musicians to record, play back, and edit music. Dave got involved in creating MIDI files, which allow computers to recreate the sounds of many instruments. MIDI files set the stage for digital music to take off, and laid the foundation for the digital music revolution. Dave has spent the last 14 years developing an online school for the Berklee College of Music. Throughout that time, he’s helped hundreds of independent musicians build their careers and navigate the changes in the music marketplace. What Is Your Definition of Success? Being able to be successful depends on being able to define what success means for you. If you want to play gigs a few weekends a month as a supplement to your day job, that type of career is very easy to create. If you want a music career that earns you $200,000 a year, where music is your full-time job, it’s possible in today’s world—but much harder to achieve. Once you understand what your personal goals are, then you can put a plan in place to achieve them. Major Industry Shifts The major shift in the music industry over the last 15 years is a shift away from the mega-superstars that used to drive the industry to a larger number of people who perform music semi-professionally. The same is true of the book industry—there are still mega-stars who sell millions of copies of every book, but now there are more and more people who earn a good living writing a couple books and enjoy steady, sustainable (but not blockbuster) success. Three Major Career Paths for Musicians If you’re willing to travel and work hard on the road, you can make a decent living touring around the world. If you plan to make music for movies or commercials, you can make a decent living licensing your music for the use of others. If you are a really good songwriter and you’re willing to network your way into Nashville, New York, and LA, you can also make good money that way.   Build a Team As you grow your career, focus on building a team that’s aligned with your vision. The first thing you have to do as an independent artist is launch your own career. Almost everyone has to do this as an independent artist, because when you’re just starting out, nobody knows who you are and you don’t have the resources to build a team around you. When you start on your own, you become very efficient in how you use money because you have to be. This skill will pay dividends later in life. The next step is when you realize you can’t do it all on your own. That’s when you have to attract a team to help you achieve your goals. The major challenge of building a team at this point in your career is that you’re probably not able to pay them. That’s when you have to find ways to motivate people to help you. One way you can motivate people is if you’re very clear about your goals and can get other people excited about them, too. Infecting your team with passion for your vision of the future is an effective motivational tool. As you’re building your team, consider a few key points: What types of things need to be done to advance your career? What are you good at? Delegate tasks that you aren’t good at or don’t like to do to people on your team. Go Where the Market Is It’s much easier to be successful as a musician if you go where the market is. That means you have to move to LA, New York, or Nashville, depending on what you want to do and what market your music appeals to. You can achieve a moderate level of success without living in these places, but in order to do that, you have to be really good at building a web presence and social media to attract an audience to you. It’s also easier to grow your brand and business if you live in the community you want to be a part of.     How to Attract an Audience Online The best way to attract an audience online is to leverage your social networks. YouTube is a big part of any online music su

Farnoosh Brock is the bestselling author of several books, including the Healthy Smoothie Bible, which has more than 450 reviews on Amazon. She works with professionals who are in a mid-career crisis to help them navigate the corporate landscape or start their own profitable businesses. In this fantastic interview, we dive deep into what it means to be successful. We talk about how to run a successful coaching business. Finally, we talk about the attributes of a calm leader and why it’s so important to develop the skills of calm leadership. Hint: Whether you work for yourself or in a larger company, practicing calm leadership adds to your bottom line. Farnoosh worked at a corporate job for 13 years. She’d always wanted to do something different and stumbled into blogging. She found that she really enjoyed blogging as a hobby because she loved writing. That’s when she decided to start her own business. She began self-publishing books because she enjoyed the process of writing them and putting them on the market. From there, a publisher found her work and contacted her about working with her to put more content out. That’s how her juicing and smoothie books came to be. Farnoosh decided to switch gears and become a coach after her smoothie books became a success. She likes coaching because she feels it utilizes more of her gifts and allows her to create the greatest impact in someone’s life. If You Want to Be Truly Successful, Follow Your Passion There are many paths to creating a six-figure business. What you have to do is figure out what you’re willing to do day in and day out that doesn’t feel like work for you. That’s the only way you can be sure of creating a business that consistently gives you the success you deserve. In order to be successful, you need a consistent commitment to doing the things necessary in order to succeed. Doing something you’re passionate about will make that commitment effortless. How to Build an Audience with Your Blog “You have to learn the rules and then break them.” — unknown When Farnoosh started her blog, she began following the best blogging practices. She observed other blogs in her market and emulated them. She never liked following templates, though. She began finding more success when she just wrote what she wanted to write. Farnoosh writes in a way that is natural for her. She uses her own unique writing voice to convey what she has to say, and she says that’s the key to her success. Being authentic gives you the best chance of being able to move your audience to take the action that you want them to take. Writing about what moves you, inspires you, or makes you feel something is the best way to stay true to your authentic self. Find the Passion in Your Marketing Farnoosh runs a coaching business that she doesn’t do any marketing for. All of her clients come from relationships and referrals. When she wrote her smoothie book, she did all the marketing for it. She was passionate about the content and the message of her book. So marketing did not seem like a chore to her, because she was focused on helping her audience. The Secret to Success: Be Really Good at What You Do It seems simple, but the only way to give yourself the best chance to be successful is being really good at what you do. That takes practice, experience, and study. What is it you do? Who do you help in the marketplace? How can you be the best at what you do? You have to invest in yourself and do the work. That’s the only way you’re going to get good enough to justify charging the prices you deserve to receive. How to Ask for Referrals Sometimes your clients won’t know that you work with referrals, so it’s a matter of educating them. The best time to ask for a referral is after you’ve massively helped someone. You want to ask them when you know they’re going to be receptive to giving you a referral. How to Find out If a Coaching Client Is Right for You The only way to figure out if someone would make a good client for you is to have a conversation. In this conversation, you need to figure out what they expect from you and what results they are looking for. From there, you can decide whether or not you’re going to be able to help them (or if you want to help them.) When Farnoosh decides that a potential client isn’t the best fit right now, she does one of the following things: Refers them to someone in her network she thinks can help them Refers them to one of her products Refers them to a resource that she thinks can move them forward How to Stay Focused in Client Conversations When coaching clients, you have to lead the conversation. You have to be personable enough to allow your clients to go on a little bit and allow them to get stuff off their chest, but you have to move the conversation forward. One phrase that works well for Farnoosh is: “I want to hear what you

Chris Brogan is a New York Times bestselling author. He has written nine books, including Find Your Writing Voice—which is, naturally, about how to find your unique writing voice. He’s also the CEO of Owner Media Group, where he teaches strategy and skills for modern businesses. This is a great interview. We talked about how to find your writing voice and what it means to be an entrepreneur. Chris has a unique take you’ve never heard before. Chris started blogging in 1998 when it was called journaling and nobody was on the internet looking for blogs. It took him eight years to get his first 100 readers. What Chris likes about blogging is that there are no gatekeepers. You can write whatever you want, and that’s exactly what he did. He says, “I wrote garbage for a long time until I learned to write something that might be appealing to humans who have interests and needs.” How to Find Your Author Voice In order to find your author voice, you have to do two things: You have to write a lot. You have to read a lot. In Chris’s experience, people do either one or the other—but you need to do both. People who read a lot and never write usually end up mimicking other writers that they read. When most of what you are doing is copying other writers’ catchphrases, you become a poor clone of work that’s already out there. Beginning writers often write from their feeling of being afraid of what people are going to think about them. So they use words that aren’t normally in their vocabulary to impress some imaginary brilliant professor or CEO who’s reading their work. If you write in a style and with a vocabulary that isn’t comfortable to you, it will show. Be authentic! Let your personality shine through and you’ll start to find your place as a writer. Why Entrepreneurs Should Be Writers We live in a world where everyone is using their phone to look stuff up all the time. Good content will get you more attention. If you have a bunch of good content on your website about your industry while your competitor has a bunch of ads, you’re going to look better by comparison. You want to write about how your customers can best use your product. You want to make it easier for the customer to understand what your product does—and specifically how they can use your product to solve their problem. Creating content allows you to create a channel where people can find you. The more content you create on your website, the more likely it is that people will find you in a Google search. Creating content also allows you to introduce yourself to people and let them know what you think about things. Consumers are more likely to buy from people they like. Your content allows you to develop a deeper relationship with your audience. How to Make Your Blog Stand Out There are several reasons a business or a blog would stand out in our minds. It stands out because: We like it more. We have an experience with it. We have a personal experience that it was the right product or the right service to solve our problem. Everyone has restaurants they love and hate. A lot of people hate McDonald’s. But McDonald’s has a very specific brand strategy. You know that if you go to McDonald’s: The restaurant will be clean. The restaurant will serve your food fast. The taste of the food will be the same everywhere. A Big Mac in Indiana will taste the same as a Big Mac in Tokyo. It’s those kinds of things that you build a brand on. Building a brand is about finding the specific details you want your business to be known for. When it comes to writing, the key is to find what makes your writing different. You need to make your writing different in order to make it clear to your audience how you see the world. What Makes Your Business Different? If you think your business isn’t different, you simply haven’t figured out how you solve your customers’ problems in a unique way. In order to figure out what makes your business different, think of your ideal customer and the problem they are trying to solve: what are you going to help them with? Then think of a solution that is interesting to you. Make that product and put it on the market. Market Research Is a Way to Procrastinate Chris doesn’t believe in traditional market research. He says it’s simply a way to procrastinate on releasing your product. Chris believes the best market research involves releasing your product and then looking at your results. If people aren’t buying your product, try to figure out why. If a lot of people are buying your product…try to figure out why! To Chris, traditional market research is just studying other people’s results and their unique circumstances, then trying to copy those results—but your circumstances are completely different than their circumstances. Chris succeeds because he’ll take 100 shots at creating a product. Out of those 100 attempts, two will usually be

Ashley Scott Meyers is a screenplay writer, producer, and director. He’s also the creator of SellingYourScreenplay.com, where he teaches screenwriters how to sell their screenplay and get a great deal. This was an interesting interview. We talked about how to sell your screenplay and the importance of building relationships in Hollywood. Ashley grew up in Annapolis, Maryland. He didn’t know any writers or artists and had no connections in the entertainment industry. But he loved movies. He started writing in college and wrote a few scripts. He wasn’t a particularly good student and didn’t have any job prospects coming out of college, but he kept thinking about working in film. After he graduated college, Ashley and a friend drove across the country and settled in Los Angeles to start making their way as filmmakers. He tried everything he could think of to break in to Hollywood. He submitted to script writing contests and wrote a lot of scripts. When Ashley arrived in Hollywood in the 1990s, small-budget movie producers would put ads into trade magazines looking for screenwriters. He wrote scripts and submitted to the producers who put out these ads. Eventually, Ashley and his friend wrote a script called Dish Dogs about two guys who worked as dishwashers. That script was optioned and became Ashley’s first screen credit. It took about two years for Ashley to see any tangible result as he pursued his dream of becoming a screenwriter. Dogged persistence is what paid off for him. Dish Dogs was drastically rewritten after it was optioned and the movie didn’t turn out very good. In fact, Ashley found it harder to sell his second script than it was to sell his first, probably because that first screen credit seemed like it was for an iffy movie that wasn’t even the script he really wrote. All the business that Ashley has done in Hollywood has come without having an agent or manager. The idea that you need an agent and manager to do business in Hollywood as a screenwriter is a huge misconception. You can find many producers willing to read scripts from new writers. Producers of low-budget movies are especially happy to work with new writers who aren’t represented by agents because it removes a layer of complexity for low-budget productions. Two Pathways to Becoming a Successful Screenwriter in Hollywood In general, there are two pathways to success for a Hollywood screenwriter: 1. Write your first screenplay, submit it to contests, and get on the Hollywood radar that way. Winning one of these contests will help you gain industry attention. A minority of screenwriters become studio screenwriters this way. 2. Write for low-budget independent genre production companies that produce low-budget genre films. This is what Ashley is doing right now. It is comparatively easier to sell a low-budget genre script than it is to get the green light at a major movie studio. There are many writers who started out writing these low-budget genre movies and worked their way up the Hollywood ranks to become major studio players. James Gunn, who wrote the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, is one example; James Cameron is another. Christopher Nolan also got his start doing low-budget genre films. Market Research in Hollywood: Why It’s Important and How to Do It Market research is as important in Hollywood as any other place you’re trying to sell your story. It’s much easier to sell a story when you know what your audience wants—that way, you can give it to them. Market research is about understanding what your customer wants. In this case, your customer is a Hollywood producer. When you’re just starting out in Hollywood, you’re most likely going to sell your script to a low-budget Hollywood producer of genre films. The first step of your market research needs to involve finding these low-budget films and their scripts. Study them. See what the producers of the film want for stories. Then take the common elements and write your own script. Making It in Hollywood Is All about Building Relationships There will be many times in your career, especially in the beginning, when you query producers and they don’t buy your script. Selling your script is only one outcome. More often than not, querying producers is not about selling: it’s about beginning to build relationships with the people who can turn your scripts into movies on the big screen. There will be times when a producer that you’ve begun to build a relationship with will come back to you and ask you to write for them. Sometimes it will be a paid gig; sometimes they’ll ask you to do it for free. Sometimes it’s worth doing the free gig to build the relationship and get experience. It’s a truism in Hollywood that “becoming an overnight success takes 10 years.” Success in Hollywood is about taking the long-term view. Luck is not a business plan. You never know what relationships will bear f

Yaro Starak is a professional blogger and serial Internet entrepreneur. As the founder of Entrepreneurs-Journey.com, he teaches others how to build a sustainable online business through blogging, selling digital products, and more. Yaro began blogging in 2004 in an effort to get traffic to his essay editing business. At the time, he didn’t know anything about blogging—and he isn’t even an editor himself. These two factors made those early days challenging. He remembers those early days of blogging being like school: he had to write blog posts about things he didn’t really care about. Yaro soon realized he preferred to write about entrepreneurship and so he began to pivot the original blog. He wrote more about how the business was going and less about the subject of editing itself. Soon he realized that this wasn’t the best way to use his editing business blog. That’s when Yaro decided to start www.entrepreneurs-journey.com as a place to tell stories and explore blogging. He never intended for it to be his primary business; Entrepreneur’s Journey was supposed to be a hobby and a way for him to discuss what he was doing with his business. Even back in 2004, Yaro had years of experience selling different things online. Before his essay editing business, he had an online store selling collectible cards. So he had a wealth of stories to draw from when blogging at Entrepreneur’s Journey. In 2007, after a few years of blogging and talking about entrepreneurship, Yaro produced a membership site that was really a course on blogging. He was one of the first people to actually use a blog to sell his own product. Today, his business focuses on helping people learn the art of blogging and build an email list to sell digital products. How to Turn Your Hobby Blog into a Business Yaro has a lot of experience with blogging, both for business and for fun. The best thing you can do, of course, is to make sure that you love your topic, even if you’re blogging for business—that passion shows through. If you started a blog for fun and now want to make money from it, there’s a few things you can do to make the switch. Phase 1: Get Clear on Your Topic and Your Strategy Be very clear on what your topic is. What strategy are you going to use to cover that topic? What problem are you helping to solve for your audience? And how are you helping them solve it? Phase 2: Gather Your Audience and Give Them Value In order to succeed online, you have to build an audience. You have to get visitors to your content and you have to give them reasons to keep coming back. Use case studies related to your topic to gain traffic and credibility. Success stories are some of the most shared stories on the internet. Show people how someone else was successful at solving a problem they are having—a lot of people will be interested in that, as it shows them that success is possible. Use real-life stories and objective verifiable data. This will set your blog apart in the marketplace in terms of quality. If you’re going to start a blog and be the main content creator, you have to figure out where you’re going to pull value from. Where will you get your ideas? How will you develop stories? If you don’t have a success story of your own to tell, you can report the success stories of others. You can also do research and gather statistics and data to help your audience. Phase 3: Get Your Audience into a Funnel Once you’ve gathered an audience, the next step is to build an email list to help you connect with that audience outside of the blog itself. Every new subscriber should be taken through a sequence of emails that leads them to an opportunity to buy something from you. Remember: You want to sell solutions to problems your readers are having. Simple Questions You Need to Answer to Have a Successful Blogging Business Who is my target audience? What problems do they need help solving? What emotions do they have surrounding those problems? Can you solve their problems with your stories and case studies? What products could you promote and sell to help them solve their problems? A Simple Product Funnel System Once you’re clear on who your target audience is and what their problems are, you can set up a simple funnel system that will allow them to give you money for the value you provide. Here are the steps to set up your funnel: Decide on your target audience and the problem you are going to help them solve. Decide how you are going to help them solve their problem. Are you going to use personal stories? Case studies? Well-researched articles? Once you’ve identified a target audience and a problem you can help them solve, think about your first 10 blog posts. These blog posts will go into your first autoresponder sequence. The end of that autoresponder sequence will lead to a product you are promoting or selling yourself, so that you make money when they buy it. Evergreen Funnels and Passive Income When

Jane Friedman has 20 years of experience in the publishing industry. Her expertise is in digital media strategy for authors and publishers. She is the founder of the award-winning blog JaneFriedman.com and cofounder of the industry-leading newsletter The Hot Sheet with Porter Anderson. We covered a ton of ground in this interview. We talked about the history of the publishing industry, as well as what traditional publishers and indie publishers can learn from one another. We also talked about how to be successful in today’s marketplace, and about how to market cross-genre books as an indie publisher. Jane has always had a passion for reading and writing. She was editor of her middle school newspaper, and the trend continued through college. She got an internship with a publishing company in her junior year of college, and after she graduated, she was hired to work there full time. She worked in the corporate publishing industry until 2010. How the Publishing Industry Has Changed Over the Last 20 Years The internet has transformed the publishing industry in the last 20 years. People go online to buy books and get information. The fact that the internet has given customers a more direct line to the producers of the content they’re reading has shaken up the industry. Add to that social media and its power to magnify word-of-mouth, and the publishing landscape in the 21st century is drastically different from what it was even just a few decades ago. Changes in the Nonfiction Marketplace from 2006 to 2010 When Jane started her career in publishing, book clubs were a big deal. The publishing company she worked at operated several of them. They used their book clubs as distribution channels, and to help build up buzz for their books. By 2010, every single one of those book clubs had shut down. People weren’t using book clubs as a way to find new books anymore. Instead, they were using online communities and social media to figure out what books they should be buying next. The Monthly Subscription Model Survives in the 21st Century Even though fewer people are members of a Book-of-the-Month type of service, there are several clubs that bill you monthly for various goods. There are: Shaving clubs where you get razors on a monthly basis Loot Crate, where you can get collectibles and merchandise on a monthly basis Clothing clubs that send you coordinated outfits on a regular basis Cooking clubs that send you pre-portioned ingredients and recipes Book clubs associated with local bookstores are succeeding in this new world. Many people want to feel like they’re supporting their local community and these book clubs have really helped foster a connection between the community and the independent bookstores themselves. Book clubs have also been successful in the children’s market because parents are always looking for new books for their children to read. Although a few of these specialty book clubs still remain, there just isn’t the demand in the marketplace for these kinds of clubs anymore. Kindle Unlimited vs. the Mass-Market Paperback Kindle Unlimited is filling a need for avid readers. Twenty years ago, these readers would go to the library and/or used bookstores to buy tons of mass-market paperbacks. Today, Kindle Unlimited allows eager readers to read as many books as they want for one low price. Libraries Aren’t Just about Books Anymore Libraries provide many services that aren’t related to books: Services for children Services for families Space for communities to get together Free Internet for their community Often, you find the least privileged members of society relying on libraries for their needs. Libraries are just as relevant and important today as they’ve ever been, but their focus has shifted with the times. The Future of Publishing There has been a conflict between traditional publishers and indie publishers for many years, ever since the internet (and Amazon in particular) made it so much easier for authors to distribute their work directly to readers. The truth is, both sides can learn from each other and it doesn’t make any sense to pit authors against each other. Jane doesn’t think print books are going to die anytime soon. The type of book you should provide to your customer depends on the market you are in, and on what you’re trying to accomplish. There are times when a print book makes sense and there are times when an electronic version makes sense. It’s not a matter of one being better than the other, it’s a matter of which version of your book best serves the customer. What Traditional Publishers Can Learn from Indie Publishers Indie authors can teach a lot of tricks to traditional publishers, who may be set in their ways after decades of doing it the same old way every time: Flexibility in how to promote new titles. Traditional publishing companies aren’t good at targeting specific groups of readers. They tend

This is an information-packed interview. We talk about the 4P’s of Author Success, and we dive deep into how to promote your book offline. There’s also a lot of information on pricing and selling paperback versions of your book. Alinka Rutkowska is a multi-award-winning, internationally bestselling author and coach. She is also the founder and CEO of LibraryBub, which connects librarians with award-winning and bestselling books from independent authors and publishers. Alinka published Read Me: I Am Magical; Open Me and I Will Reveal 12 Secrets to Love, Happiness, and Personal Power, As You Leaf through Me and See How Remarkable You Feel in 2010, while she was working at her corporate job. She wrote the book because she felt that she had something to contribute to the world. She then decided to quit her job when the sales of the book were double her corporate salary. Alinka’s first book was massively successful in part because she crafted a keyword-rich subtitle. The 4P’s of Author Success 1. Product Your product is your book. Alinka divides your book-as-product into two parts: the manuscript itself, and the book packaging. The packaging includes the cover (whether print or ebook) and the product description. 2. Place This is wherever your book is sold. Examples include: Amazon Barnes & Noble iTunes store Your local independent bookstore 3. Price Pretty self-explanatory: this is the price you charge for your product. 4. Promotion The final “P” is everything you do to let people know that you have a book out. Each of these elements work together to make a successful book launch. If you neglect any one of these areas, you won’t achieve the success that you want. The Two Types of Books Authors Write Broadly speaking, authors write two types of books. 1. A heart book This is a passion project. Authors write this book because they have a story inside them that needs to get out. 2. A commercial book This is a book written for a market. Authors write this type of book because they have an audience in mind that they want to please. Alinka recommends you write a commercial book. Find an audience of readers that want a certain type of product that you can deliver. Write the best book you can, then publish it. This is the fastest way to be a successful author. The key to writing a successful commercial book is to find a market of books that excite you. If you’re passionate about the material, writing the book will be easier and your passion will come through in the writing. Book Market Research Advice The best way to give yourself a chance to be successful is to do market research. If you have an idea of the type of book you want to write: Go to Amazon and look for the five titles you aspire to compete with. You could also think of the titles as the titles you would like to see in your “also bought” section on your product page.If those titles are selling well, that’s a good sign that your idea has a chance to do well in the marketplace. Next, look at the reviews of these titles. The reviews will give you valuable insight into what the readers of these books liked and didn’t like about them. Pay special attention to what reviewers said was missing in the books that you’re researching. If you can identify a gap in the market that you can fill, that is one of the quickest ways to become successful. Creating a Book Readers Want to Read After you’ve identified the type of book that your readers want to read, it’s time to create and refine that book. Once you’ve written the best first draft you can based on the preferences of your audience, the next step you might want to consider is a critique group. Critique groups give you valuable feedback because you’re getting input from people who actually read your work. Members of critique groups have a different perspective on your work and they can see things that you, as the creator, are blind to because you’ve been working so closely with your manuscript. The next stage in Alinka’s creation process is to find a small group of beta readers. Beta readers are just another set of eyes on your material. If you’re a fiction author, you might want to hire a developmental editor to help you, particularly if the feedback you get from your critique group and beta readers is something you don’t know how to fix. Both fiction and nonfiction authors need a copy editor to catch typos and grammatical errors, as well as places where your book is unclear. Set Up a Landing Page before Your Book Is Published To get ready for your book’s release, you should: Set up a landing page before you publish a book. Include a place for people to give you their email address. Have a link to your landing page in the front and back of your book. Give people something when they sign up for your email list. If you have a second book in the series, that can be a good thing to give away. A lot of authors have had suc

TCK Publishing has published more than 400 books, and many of them have become #1 international bestsellers. In this podcast and blog post, I’m going to share what I’ve learned about book market research that can help you achieve your goals of becoming a bestselling author and making a serious impact with your message and story. 3 Keys to Book Market Research There are three crucial things you must do in order to create a book that readers will buy and recommend to their friends. Understand who your ideal reader is. Understand what your ideal reader wants. Give your readers what they want. Market research is about creating a product that serves your customers better. If you know who they are and what they want, you can make better decisions about what to put in your book and how you position your market in the marketplace. You can use this market research process to help you make better decisions when it comes to writing the book, branding the book, choosing the book title, designing the book cover, writing the book description and marketing copy, and marketing the book. The reason you’re doing market research is because you want to provide more value to your readers.—Tom Corson Knowles As an author, you want to serve your readers better than anyone else. That’s how you become a #1 bestselling author and stay at number one year after year. Six Steps to Book Market Research Follow these 6 steps for effective book market analysis and research. 1. Find Comparable Bestselling Titles Finding comparable titles, or “comps,” means you want to find similar books that are already published and selling well in your market. You want to find the bestselling books in your market so you can learn from them. After you find comparable books in your market, you’re going to want to make a list in a program like Excel or Google Sheets that includes the book title and a link to that book’s Amazon page so you can easily keep track and do further research in the future. Two Ways to Find Your Comparable Titles You can go to Amazon and search keywords related to the book you’re writing. So if you’re writing a vampire romance, you would go to Amazon.com and type in the keywords “vampire romance.” You’ll then find comparable books in the search results. You can use Amazon’s bestseller lists. Simply go to Amazon’s Kindle Store Categories, find your genre, and drill down until you get to the most specific category you can. The more specifically you can identify your niche or subgenre, the more likely you are to be successful, because specific categories have less competition and more targeted readers. If you want to save time, you can sign up for Bestseller Ranking Pro, the proprietary web-based software we developed that can help you search Amazon’s 42,000+ bestseller categories in just a few minutes. An Amazon category is simply a virtual bookshelf in Amazon’s store. All you’re doing when you choose a category is telling Amazon what bookshelf to put your book on. So which bookshelf should your book appear on? And how will your book stand out from your competitors on that bookshelf? 2. Analyze Bestselling Book Covers Your book cover is a crucial piece of branding for your book. The more you can make your book cover look similar to other books in your category, the more likely your target readers are to click on your book and read your product page. This gets you one step closer to the sale. This is where your list of comparable book titles comes in handy. You’re going to look at the covers of the books on your list of comps. What you’ll notice is that a lot of these books have similar covers. That’s not an accident. Book covers should be designed to get your readers to click on your book and buy it. The best book covers speak to your readers on an emotional or subconscious level. For example, romance book covers often feature sexy images of male or female models while books about business success often feature images of money or successful lifestyles. When you look at the book covers in your market, pay special attention to: The colors The fonts The images The size and placement of text on the book cover The emotion(s) that the cover makes you feel You want your book to look like it belongs in the category you put it in. If your romance book cover makes it look like a business book, or your self help cover looks depressing, you’re not going to attract your ideal readers. People buy books primarily based on emotion, so you have to make sure you understand who your readers are and which emotion(s) your cover should elicit in order to get them to pay attention and click on your book. Book Market Research Tip: Never miss an opportunity to have an actual conversation with readers of your genre. You can learn so much from just talking to people about why they read the books they do. 3. Analyze Bestselling Book Titles The title of your

Larry Becht has been a digital marketing expert for the last decade and is a Click Funnels certified partner. His company, the Expert Media Group, helps you turn your products and ideas into profit. Today, Larry is going to share with us how authors can use Click Funnels to build an e-mail list, establish a deeper connection with your audience, and create multiple ways to promote your books automatically. Larry has been an entrepreneur for the last 25 years. He started studying internet marketing with Dan Kennedy 10 years ago. It was through Dan that Larry was exposed to Russell Brunson and Click Funnels. When Larry saw the amazing potential of the Click Funnels technology, he became one of the first people in the world to register and become certified as a Click Funnels partner. Larry has also studied with and become certified by Ryan Deiss of Digital Marketer. His company, Expert Media Group, has helped hundreds of clients promote their books and ideas. How to Use Click Funnels to Start Making Money Online In the past, if you wanted to set up a sales funnel online, you needed a whole team of people, including website designers, copywriters, graphic artists, and specialists on the different platforms you were using to set up your sales funnel. Now with Click Funnels, you can set up everything in your sales funnel through one hub. Click Funnels can handle: Your website Your autoresponder system Your CRM autoresponder system Your entire sales funnel process You can use your own graphics, write your own copy, and design your own pages easily. Finding Your Purpose The first thing you have to know in order to get the most out of Click Funnels is what you’re going to use the system for. Click Funnels has several different funnel templates you can use depending on what you want to do. You can: Create an opt-in page funnel where you collect people’s email addresses. This is a simple process involving two pages and can be set up in as little as 24 hours. Create a sales funnel to sell your product. Create a webinar funnel. Create a membership website Click Funnels offers a range of options to cover whatever kind of flow you want to create. What you need to know in the beginning is what you want your end result to be. Click Funnels Is a Self-Contained Service Click Funnels is a self-contained service. That means that when you subscribe to Click Funnels, you don’t need to have an autoresponder. However, if you already have an autoresponder that works well for you, Click Funnels can integrate with them and be a backup in case your autoresponder loses data. Click Funnels for Authors Several of Click Funnels’ features are particularly useful for authors looking to grow their audience or make more sales. Collecting Email Addresses The most important thing you can do as an indie author is to build an email list. The standard way of collecting someone’s email address is by using a squeeze page. A squeeze page is a simple page where visitors have two choices. They can either: Give you their email address and get whatever list incentive you’ve set up to build your list. Leave your page. In general, there are two windows of opportunity to collect someone’s email address: You can collect someone’s email after they buy your book by creating bonus content and putting a link in the book. The link to your bonus content would drive people to a squeeze page where they have to give you their email address to receive their bonus content. You can also get someone’s email before they buy your book if you’re using Facebook Ads or some other ad platform. The ad would link to a squeeze page with bonus content that promotes your book. The bonus you offer when somebody signs up for your list before they buy your book should be inexpensive to produce and offer high value, because there’s a chance someone might sign up for your list and not buy your book. One tactic that has been particularly successful for nonfiction authors is to have a short video series around the content of your nonfiction book that primes your audience for the content of the book. You want to set up two separate email lists depending on whether a person joins your list before they purchase the book or after. This allows you to communicate more specifically to different segments of your audience. You’ll also want to have different bonus content in case people want to join both lists. It’s important to separate or segment your list based on the traffic sources for sign-up. This way, you can tailor future email campaigns based on your audience and where they came from. In the internet age, personal connection is a premium value. The more you can connect with specific segments of your audience, the more value they will get from you—and the more money you will eventually make. Using Click Funnels to Segment Your Email Lists Click Funnels has some very robust emerging technology that allows you to segment y

Sarah Barbour is a book coach and editor who helps entrepreneurs write books they can brag about. She can help you craft your content, plan a manuscript you can be proud of, and navigate the world of self-publishing so that you can put your book in the hands of people who need it. She recognizes that her clients have businesses to run, so Sarah’s goal as a book coach is to save you tons of time and frustration by making the publishing process as painless and efficient as possible. Sarah began her self-publishing journey as an editor. Her first major editing job came when she was living in Japan. She edited books written by Japanese scientists that were going to be sold in English-language markets. When she moved back to the United States, Sarah got a part-time job as an editor for the University of Illinois Press. Later on, she got a full-time job managing a library of documentary films about Asia. Managing the library came with the responsibility of editing a website and newsletter. Eventually she quit that job to be a stay-at-home mom. In 2011, she decided to put her skills on the market as a freelance editor. She was able to get quite a few clients because of the explosion of self-publishing around that time. Sarah has worked in the industry ever since. She noticed that there’s quite a bit of information for people who want to become full-time authors…as long as they produce books on a regular basis. There isn’t a lot of information out there for people who just want to write one book to support their clients and help build their business. Sarah stepped in to fill that gap. How to Be a Successful Author The most important step to achieving success as an author is defining what success means for you. Everyone is different. We all have a different vision for what success as an author looks like. The clearer you can be about your vision and your end goal, the more likely you are to achieve it. Put another way: What do you want your book to do for you? Knowing the answer to that question in advance will help you plan strategies to achieve your goal. How to Write Consistently The key to writing consistently is to make writing part of the routine of your life. It’s not something special that you’re doing; it’s something you do every day as part of a daily routine. The first step is to get some sort of writing tracker. The easiest thing to do here is to print off a calendar for the month if you don’t already have one. Then you simply mark off in some way every day that you write. It’s important that you put this writing tracker somewhere that’s easily visible in your daily life. As you see the chain of writing days mount up, it will be added motivation for you to continue. When you’re just starting to develop your writing habit, it’s important that you not be too concerned with how much you’re writing every day. The important thing is to write something every day so that you establish the habit. How to Install Your Writing Habit: CARP To build your writing habit successfully, use the CARP method: Cues, Action, Rewards, Preparation. Cues Establish a set of habits that lead into your writing. The best thing to do is to establish a time and place to write. It’s easiest if you can write at the same time in the same place every day. Action Set up as many positive associations with your writing as you can. You want to put yourself in as pleasant a situation as you can and still be writing. You should do things that set your writing time apart as something special. Maybe you can wear comfortable clothing, drink tea or coffee, and turn the heat up or down (depending on what makes you comfortable). You want writing to be something you can train yourself to look forward to. —Sarah Barbour Rewards One of the most important elements of establishing a writing habit is to acknowledge the completion of the session. You can decide what triggers the completion of the session. You can write for a certain amount of time. You can write until you make your daily word count. You can write until you’ve hit a predetermined time trigger (like your kids have gotten up for the day.) Whatever causes your session to end, you have to acknowledge successful completion so your writing habit can be hardwired into your mental programming. It’s also important to celebrate milestones in the process. You might want to share your streak on Facebook or other social media. You can also set up a series of rewards for the entire process. You should make your rewards proportional to the size of the goal you achieved. So if you’ve been writing for a week straight, you might go out for coffee with a friend. If you hit publish on your book, you might get a massage or go out to dinner. Do whatever feels like a reward to you. So often, people make the progress they say they want to make, yet subconsciously they don’t feel like it’s enough…so they beat

Jen Berson is the founder of Jeneration PR, a boutique public relations firm that specializes in beauty, baby, and lifestyle brands. She’s a regularly featured PR and social media expert on the American Express OPEN forum for small business. She’s also been featured in the New York Times, Entrepreneur Magazine, and PR Week, among many others. Jen’s first career was as a civil litigation attorney. She practiced law for four years before deciding that she wanted to go in a different direction. She started promoting a brand on the side, and her business grew from there. What Jen loves about the PR industry is that the results of her work are tangible and immediate. You can quickly see the benefit that a proper public relations strategy has for business and in people’s lives. This was a great interview. We talked about how to develop a PR strategy from scratch. We also talked about how to leverage social media, the benefit of creating a content release schedule, and the benefit of batching your social media content creation. How to Develop a PR Strategy for Your Brand In order to come up with a good PR plan, you have to ask yourself some key questions: Who are you planning to help? What problem are you planning to help them solve? What is your message? What is your point of differentiation in the marketplace? What about your solution is unique? What do you want to be known for? Once you have your audience and message clear in your mind, it’s time to mine your past for stories, nuggets, and gems of wisdom you can share with the media. Mining Your Experience for Pitch Angles Jen gets media exposure for her business using several different stories from her past. Her first media angle was her career transition story. She was able to use that story to get featured on Business Insider and Yahoo! Finance and to get interviewed on the CEO on Fire podcast. For those initial media stories, she focused on how she was able to transition from lawyer to PR expert and why the transition was so important to her. The interesting thing about PR is that there’s a kind of snowball effect. Being featured in those places led to other opportunities. Another angle Jen has used is the fact that she is a mom and an active entrepreneur. Balancing business and family for entrepreneur mothers is a very hot topic these days. So Jen has been able to get media attention by sharing her opinions on that subject. Recently, Jen had to part ways with her first paying client. But since then, her sales have tripled and she’s brought in two billion-dollar clients. She’s learned a lot that has changed her business because of this situation. And now she uses this learning experience as another angle to gain media attention. The secret to finding stories to share with the media is search your history for moments when you learned something, or moments where you’ve been through a journey that other people want to go on. How to Find Your Stories A simple way to pinpoint the stories you can use to get media attention is to have somebody you know interview you. Having other people ask you questions in a conversational way is a great method for discovering the kinds of stories that make good pitch angles for the media. Some questions to get your interview going: How did you get started? How did you come up with the idea for your book? Where did the idea for your book initially hit you? What do you have to share from your process? What lessons have you learned from your journey? What do you do for fun? What do you do on the weekends? Tell me about your personal life. Start thinking about how your personal interests and passions informed the creation of your book, product, or business. It’s in connecting your personal and business lives that you begin to find your own story that positions you as unique in the marketplace. How to Develop a PR Plan for Beginners When developing a PR plan, you should focus on three things: What media sites do I like to read? What podcasts do I like to listen to? Where would my content be a good fit? If you’re just starting out, understand that you’re not going to be able to get booked on a national television show like Good Morning America overnight. You have to start where you are and find media channels that will listen to you. Every media placement will help you gain credibility and exposure so that you can get more media placements that reach larger audiences. One successful path Jen has used is to start with Facebook Live and podcasts. From there, you pitch local TV and radio segments. This begins to build up your reel, so that shows with larger audiences have something to look at so they can get comfortable with you. How to Maximize Your Impact from Media and PR Exposure Leveraging your PR wins is a very important step in the process. When you have an article published somewhere or get an interview on a podcast, radio show, or television show, tell your

Rob is the best-selling author of Life after Debt and the founder of Bestseller Publishing. He’s been featured on ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and in the Wall Street Journal and on many other media sites. Rob teaches entrepreneurs, coaches, and consultants how to stop hunting for clients and instead position yourself as the hunted. Rob got started in real estate at 18. He owned three very successful real estate companies that made more than $100 million a year—right up until the real estate market collapsed in 2008. He shut down those companies in 2008 and searched for a different way to generate income. He decided he wanted to pivot to financial services. He was a member of two mastermind groups at the time and he asked them what they would do in his position. Two different people told him he should write a book. This made a lot of sense to Rob because everybody he considered an expert had a book out on their area of expertise. That’s when he decided to write Life after Debt. He used the book to position himself as an expert in the personal finance field. Within just a year, he was making seven figures from his business, and one year after, that he was making multiple seven figures. After he became a success in the financial services market, people kept asking him how he was able to be successful during the economic downturn. He explained that he built his business by establishing his expertise through a book. When people heard that, they asked for his help in launching their own books. He started Bestseller Publishing and the rest is history. How to Build a Business around Your Book With traditional publishing, the book is the end of the story. But if you are using a book to build a business based on your expertise, the book is the beginning of your story. You should be using your book to: Establish your credibility Establish your expertise Grow your authority Grow your PR Track audience needs Do speaking engagements Publish, Promote, Profit: The Three Phases of Building Your Expert Business 1. Publish In this phase, you write and publish the best book you can, focusing on your area of expertise. This establishes you as an expert in the field and allows potential clients to find you going forward. 2. Promote This is where you promote the book to let people in your audience know that you exist and that you can help them with their problem. 3. Profit This is the last and longest phase of building your expert business. In this phase, you use your book to get interviews, build media exposure, and generate leads for your other revenue streams. Once you position yourself as the expert, you can use your book to attract high-paying clients. Build Revenue Streams around Your Strengths When considering what additional revenue streams to build into your expert business, it’s important to consider your financial goals and what you like to do. Rob has clients who really love speaking. While speaking can be very profitable, it’s also a time-intensive thing—you have to be there to give the speech. That’s why for people who love speaking, Rob suggests adding in coaching or consulting because it allows for more flexibility, and you might be able to charge more for your services. It’s also possible that you already have high-end clients in your business, and all you need to do is find more prospects. A book is great for that! So when figuring out how to structure your expert business, look at: Your current situation Your vision for what you want the book to do for you How much money you want to make Use Your Book to Get Leads for Your Business Your book is the entry point for your client. It gives them the information they need to decide whether or not you’re the type of person they want to help them solve their problems. When Rob was first getting started, he would send copies of his book to local radio stations along with a brief letter explaining his expertise and offering to do a short segment on the radio show. But the giveaways didn’t end there. Give Away Free Books to Build Your Business On the radio show, he would offer a free copy of his book to anyone who wanted one. They could order one either by calling the radio show or ordering through his website. Generally speaking, a book funnel for an expert business works like this: First, you give away the book for free to anybody who might be interested in your topic. In the book, you have a low-cost item that people can buy to get more information, or the same information delivered a different way. For instance, Russell Brunson gives away his book Expert Secrets in a free-plus-shipping offer. Then he offers the audiobook on CD, delivered to his customer for around $30. From there, the products get more and more expensive. He even has a $997 offer. One of the best ways to learn the book funnel process is to actually go through one as a customer and observe the different upsells that you get exposed to as you move up product level. Rob s

Kylie Stewart is the author of Set in Stone, the first book in the Legend series, a contemporary romance story based on the legends of King Arthur and published by TCK Publishing. She is also an audiobook narrator and has produced more than 50 audiobooks. Kylie got a master’s degree in equine industry and worked with race horses for a short time fresh out of college. It didn’t take very long for her to realize that wasn’t what she wanted to do with her life. That’s when she decided to move from Kentucky to Tennessee and give writing a try. Kylie has always loved to read, write, and read stories out loud. Her nickname growing up was Belle, because like Belle from Beauty and the Beast, she always had a book in her hands. The legend of King Arthur has always fascinated her. So when Kylie decided to write a book, Set in Stone was her natural first choice. Kylie got started in audiobook narration when one of her mentors Eric Stewart recommended that she look into it because she liked reading so much. She had always preferred reading paperbacks, so she had no idea there was a high demand for audiobooks and that she could make a living from reading! After working on her commercial CD with Eric Stewart, she investigated Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX), an audiobook production site with a lot of resources for audio creators, authors, and others. Within two weeks of signing up for ACX, she had been accepted to work on seven audiobooks. Recently, Kylie had her first $10,000 month from narrating audiobooks. She dual-narrates a number of audiobooks with her husband Eric Rolon. They are currently working on creating a production company for dual narration. Changes in the Audiobook Industry In the past, narrators usually read audiobooks in a staccato fashion, reading to the listener rather than allowing the listener to experience the story through their performance, more like an actor. Kylie has seen major success because she reads audiobooks smoothly and really tries to evoke the emotion she sees on the page. By enabling more people to become involved in the industry, ACX has opened up the world of audiobooks and allowed audiobook consumers to have many more choices of narrator than they did in the past. How to Get Started as an Audiobook Narrator If you want to get into audiobook narrating, you have to love to read. This may seem obvious, but if you don’t love reading, it’s going to show up in your performances, and you’re going to burn out on the profession pretty fast. Beyond that, there are some technical considerations to think about. Get the Right Equipment If you want to get started narrating audiobooks, it’s important that you buy a good microphone. Kylie recommends either the Blue Yeti or Blue Yeti Pro. Listen to Audiobooks One of the best things you can do as you start your narrating career is to listen to a lot of audiobooks. Listen to a wide variety of people: listen to the top-selling narrators and to the poorly reviewed narrators. Figure out the style of narration that works best for you. The cool thing about the world of narration right now is there’s room for every type of voice that you can imagine. Remember to Slow Down If you’re a fast talker, you’re going to have to learn to slow down when you narrate audiobooks. This is important for two reasons: The audience listening to your audiobook probably can’t see the words on the page. They’re only experiencing the story through your voice, so you have to read slowly enough so that they can visualize the story in their mind as you’re reading. If you’re getting paid per finished hour, the slower you read, the more money you make. This isn’t to say that you should read so slowly that it’s uncomfortable to listen to. But the best audiobook narration speed is somewhat slower than spoken conversation. Buy an audiobook and the Kindle version of the book and read along. Notice the pace at which the narrator reads the words on your screen. Choose the Right Location When you narrate audiobooks, it’s important to read in an acoustically clear environment. Most places in your house (or anywhere else you go) have ambient sounds that our brains naturally filter out—but microphones pick up everything. You want as much dead air around you as possible when narrating audiobooks. Dead air is simply air that isn’t carrying any ambient sound. To help dampen sound while recording, Kylie built a “portabooth” with her husband using a plastic tub from Wal-Mart and mattress foam. Read on a Tablet Kylie has found it’s easier to read on a tablet. You just download the book and read aloud naturally, remembering to slow down for your audience. Three Ways to Get Paid as an Audiobook Narrator There are three ways to get paid for your audio performance through ACX. Royalty split: This is where you split the royalties 50/50 with the author. That means every time the audiobook

Ryan Stewman is the best-selling author of several books including Elevator to the Top. He’s also the founder of Hardcore Closer, a company that teaches sales skills to people who are ready and willing to tear up their list of excuses and close more sales. Ryan started working at eight years old, mowing lawns for a carwash chain that his stepfather owned. As he got older, he transitioned to washing cars and vacuuming them out. He hated washing cars. So at 13, Ryan convinced his stepfather to let him sell car washes to people instead of actually washing the cars. Over the next seven years, Ryan became an expert at pitching through massive repetition. Some Saturdays, the carwash would wash as many as 1,500 cars. That’s 1,500 customers that he was pitching in one day! The experience taught him to keep things short and simple. Ryan took a job selling mortgages when a customer at the carwash noticed his sales skills. Within a year of taking that job, he was a mortgage sales manager with his own branch office. Ryan transitioned out of mortgage sales in 2010 after the economy’s real estate sector collapsed. Drawing on all his experience, he began selling his services as a social media manager. Just setting up this business gave him a new wealth of experience to draw from, because back in 2010, you had to convince somebody they needed a social media manager. How to Overcome Your Fear of Selling If you’re scared to sell things, your problem is you’re not confident in what you’re selling. You don’t need self-confidence to be a good salesperson—you just need to be confident in the product you’re selling. You need to be confident that your product will help your customer solve their problem. Confidence in your product removes the fear from selling. If you have a product you know will help your audience, why wouldn’t you want to sell it and make their lives better? Selling and Breaking through Customer Resistance Most people live a life of bad decisions. So when they make a bad decision, they feel comfortable with it because that’s what they’re familiar with. When you give somebody the opportunity to make a good decision, it doesn’t feel right to them because it’s not what they’re used to. Also, in general, human beings have a lot of baggage. We have a lot of excuses and negative beliefs surrounding what we believe we deserve. So when you give somebody the opportunity to make their life better, more often than not, you’re going to get resistance. They’re scared to make a change from what they know and they’re held back by ingrained beliefs about what they’re worth or what they need. The way to break through that resistance is to keep asking your customer questions that will help them understand the proper way to look at the situation. Questions that Help You Sell More “What are you going to do if this doesn’t happen?” “What are you going to do if you wake up tomorrow and this same problem still exists?” “Who are you going to get to help you with this problem?” “How is this affecting your life?” “How’s that working for you?” “Why did you decide to reach out to me?” When you ask these questions and they answer, you get a real picture of what’s going on in the life of your customer. This will help you understand what kind of solutions they’re looking for, and what kind of solutions will be best for them. When people feel like you understand what they’re experiencing, they are far more likely to buy your solution to their problem. Using questions allows your customer to open up to you. It also builds a bond of trust and friendship with your customer. Everybody loves when somebody listens to them, especially when they’re talking about their problems. How to Build Your Personal Brand Matthew Motil has been working with Ryan for the last nine months. Two months ago, he published his book, Man on Fire: Confessions of a Perpetual Burnout, about how to use low-cost rental property to retire early from your career. Matthew is a real estate agent who isn’t particularly passionate about real estate. He has a PhD and he went to Ryan to learn how to build a brand that he could be excited about. The first thing Ryan told him to do was to emphasize his PhD. After that, they came up with the concept for helping people achieve financial independence through rental income. Next, Ryan and his team helped Matthew’s book become an Amazon bestseller. Last month, because of the service Matthew offers on the back end, he had his first six-figure month. The book functions as a business card for Matthew. It establishes him as an expert in his industry and provides a way for him to build an email list of potential customers. Once people figure out that they want to buy low-cost rental real estate to create additional income streams, Matthew is able to help the

Jim Heskett is the author of the new book The Juggling Author: How To Write Four Books a Year While Balancing Family, Friends, and a Full-Time Job. He fell in love with writing at the age of fourteen thanks to a copy of Stephen King’s The Shining. Poetry became his first outlet for teen angst, then later some screenplays, and eventually, short fiction and long fiction (12 novels to date); he also writes in the video game industry. Jim started writing poetry to woo women. In his 20s, he wrote screenplays because he wanted to tell stories. For a while, he thought he wanted to break into Hollywood. After he realized what a difficult proposition that would be, he changed course and decided to try to become a traditionally published novelist. He abandoned that plan when he realized how much easier it would be to publish as a indie author. Jim has been publishing his own books for about two years now. For him, the greatest benefit of indie publishing is the ability to control everything from content to packaging. He also likes the control he has over when he publishes his work. In 2016, Jim published 325,000 words while working a 40 hour per week day job and helping to raise his child, who was 1 1/2 at the beginning of that year. To manage this heavy load, he developed a method for writing, editing, and publishing a book in under three months. Because he’s a father with a full-time day job, he has only one to two hours a day he can focus on his publishing business. He relies heavily on deadlines and benchmarks to help him be his most productive. Jim’s Method For Writing Stories Quickly Outlining Jim writes his book in three drafts. The first draft functions as an outline and is written completely in creative voice without any editing. This is where he makes the story up. He doesn’t make any effort to differentiate between the characters other than by giving them different names. In this draft, he keeps most character details in his head. The first draft is usually about half the size of the finished manuscript. Second Draft The second draft is usually the longest part of the process for Jim. This is where he’ll go back and make the outline more like the story he really wants to tell. In the second draft, he makes sure to differentiate the characters, making them unique and memorable. He’ll try to make sure the story doesn’t have any plot holes. Basically, he makes the best minimum viable product he can so that he can send it to beta readers. After he finishes his second draft, Jim makes contact with beta readers. He finds these beta readers using social media. Jim is a big believer in using social media to be social. So he’ll contact potential beta readers and ask them if they are interested in helping him with his project. If he’s built enough space in his schedule, he’ll often let the project rest for a month between second draft and third draft. This allows him to “get fresh eyes on it” when he returns to the product later. During that month, Jim writes the first draft of another project. That month is also when beta readers are reading the book. Third Draft After the beta readers return their feedback, he’ll write a third draft. When that’s done to his liking, the final thing he does before sending it to an editor is to have his computer read the book back to him. He uses a Mac, which can read his books back to him using built-in text-to-speech software. He has it set at the slowest speed he can stand, so he’s forced to pay attention to every word on the page. After he fixes any errors or awkward phrases, he sends it to a copy editor (Jim doesn’t use a developmental editor). While the editor is working on this project, Jim’s working on writing another project. Tracking for Productivity Jim tracks his writing sessions over time. He’ll start a timer and then write for a specific, limited amount of time. When he’s done with that session, he makes note of: How long it was. How many words he typed and how many words per minute he typed. What time of day he’s working. He keeps track of his averages over time so that he can observe patterns and figure out when he’s most productive. Jim relies heavily on deadlines and benchmarks in his work. He knows what he wants his final outcome to be and then works backwards from where he wants to be to where he is now. Thinking about timing in advance allows you to save time because you can contact people such as editors and cover designers who will help you get your book to a professional quality. For Jim, deadlines are motivational. If he doesn’t have a deadline and there’s no urgency to get any part of the project done, then it doesn’t get done. Deadlines are like checkpoints for him. They allow him to celebrate when he’s met them. And they also indicate when he’s off track, letting him see if he hasn’t done what he set out to d

Monica Leonelle is a best-selling author and entrepreneur empowering writers to take charge of their careers through efficient and inspired marketing. Her recent release, Prosperous Creation, focuses on making art and money while overcoming the mental blocks that hold us back from reaching our goals. Monica‘s expertise comes from authoring and marketing more than 20 books of fiction across multiple pen names. She writes about indie publishing at ProseOnFire.com. Engineering Artistic Success This interview yielded so many great insights for authors. We talked about the difference between fiction and nonfiction in the marketplace and dove deep into marketing. Monica’s first career was as a software engineer. She published her first book on social media marketing back in 2009, before Amazon sold eBooks. She published that first book via print-on-demand and used it to change careers from software engineer to a social media marketer. The book established her as an authority and allowed her to get two marketing management positions. Monica has led digital marketing efforts at Inc. 100 companies like Hansen’s Natural and Braintree, written copy for A-list bloggers, and trained with some of the world’s foremost thought leaders on the topics of virality and word-of-mouth marketing. Monica has always loved fiction. With the success of her first nonfiction book, she decided to write fiction shortly after Amazon made eBook publishing available. Fiction vs. Nonfiction Nonfiction is easier to market because you have an audience who is searching for a solution to their problem. That makes it really easy to reverse-engineer a product that meets their needs. Nonfiction allows you to identify a niche of customers that you can really focus on quickly. Focusing on nonfiction also allows you to create products and courses that you can sell to your audience on the back end, expanding on what you’ve built with your books. Fiction is an exciting market because it’s a larger marketplace with readers who like to read more books. So it gives you the ability to build an audience based on a genre or a series of books. Because the markets are so different, it’s good to have both types of books in your inventory. Marketing Your Art Good art always has a larger message behind it. Marketing your art is about finding the audience who wants or needs to hear that message. Most people who create a work of art are trying to express something and connect with the world around them. Marketing is about getting that unique expression in front of the right people. Three Categories of Buying Triggers 1. The X factors: These are things that position you above your audience as a thought leader in your industry. Examples include: Being a thought leader Being consistent in anything you do Having a celebrity factor (for example, being featured on respected mainstream news sites). Being featured in big-name magazines or on high-traffic blogs like Forbes, Inc., or Huffington Post can give you authority and position you as someone your audience should listen to. 2. Connection deepeners: These triggers put you on the same level as your audience. Examples include: Telling good stories (like the rags to riches story) Reciprocity: if you give your audience something of value, they are going to want to reward you by giving you something in return Interacting with customers and building a community Demonstrating authenticity and vulnerability 3. The button pushers: These things help you connect with your audience on a subconscious level. Examples include: Scarcity Social proof Exclusivity Having a deadline Controversy Common enemy Mystery Secret Surprise These triggers get people to take action more consistently. The more triggers you can stack in your marketing efforts, the more people you will get to take action. Three Ways to Make Your Marketing Efforts More Manageable 1. If you don’t have a lot of money, Monica has found that it’s easier to have one promotion that you put a lot of energy into, rather than having smaller promotions throughout the year. 2. Another thing you can do to make your marketing efforts more efficient and effective is to focus on creating evergreen content that you can repurpose over many marketing channels. 3. Finally, if you want to simplify the marketing process, get as specific as possible about your audience and find one or two triggers that really move that audience to action. Marketing for Fiction Authors 1. Use emotional language to get your audience invested in your story. 2. Give your viewpoint character a familiar arc that people can identify with and connect to (i.e. the rags to riches story) 3. Build a community around your stories. You can use Facebook, your personal blog, forum software, and wherever people gather online to build communities around the stories you’re telling. Communities are powerful because when your fans connect with each other abo

Mark Lefebvre is an author and editor; he serves as the director of self-publishing and author relations at Kobo, one of the top eBook retailers in the world. This fantastic interview covers a wide range of topics. We talked about traditional publishing and self-publishing and the true value of both. We also discussed emerging global markets for eBooks and how to take advantage of them, plus the difference between Amazon and other online retailers. Finally, we talked about the steps any author can take to sell more books. Mark’s first love was his mother’s Underwood typewriter. He found it in her closet when he was 13 and made his first attempt at writing a novel that summer. That was when he caught the writing bug. From that first attempt, Mark continued working on his craft, going on to publish short stories published in science fiction, fantasy, and horror magazines.These limited-edition magazines were hard to find and they limited his audience-building efforts. In 1992, Mark decided to change that. His first self-published book was One Hand Screaming, a collection of short stories he self-published through Ingram Spark so that he could do book signings and have his work distributed worldwide. Mark is a hybrid author. He is traditionally published through some small publishing houses, but has self-published other books. Kobo hired him in 2011 to come up with a solution for self-published authors who wanted to put their work on Kobo’s platform. Mark launched Kobo Writing Life, Kobo’s answer to Amazon’s KDP Select program without the exclusivity clauses. Self-Publishing vs. Traditional Publishing: The Stigmas Mark’s job (and his writing career) puts him in between the worlds of traditional publishing and self-publishing. There are two damaging stigmas he sees coming from both sides, and they both deal with not recognizing the value of the different marketplaces. Traditional publishing views indie-published works in the same sort of “vanity press” light they have for the last 60 to 70 years. Indie publishers fail to recognize that traditional publishers still offer tremendous value propositions, especially when it comes to the print market. Benefits and Drawbacks of Publishing with KDP Select If you sign up with KDP Select, you are guaranteed to have access to Amazon’s customers. You aren’t guaranteed to make any money, but you’ll have special access to Amazon’s customer base in several ways. 1. Á la carte customers These are people who just browse Amazon and buy your book. 2. Kindle Unlimited These are the customers who have signed up for Kindle Unlimited and want to read books for free. The major drawback if you sign up for KDP Select is that you are guaranteed to have no visibility beyond Amazon’s ecosystem. If you’re an American author, you may not even realize that there are other stores where eBooks are sold. The Benefits of Dealing with Kobo Kobo is the number one seller of eBooks and e-readers in Canada. But its reach doesn’t stop there: Kobo is partnered with the American Booksellers Association, an organization of 600 independent booksellers in the United States. You can buy eBooks on those booksellers’ websites and Kobo handles the distribution and delivery. If a customer decides to buy directly from Kobo, the independent bookseller that sent them the customer in the first place will continue to get payments based on the customer’s purchases. Kobo is not as well known in the US, but it is known very well around the world. Kobo has partners in quite a few countries and is often the first stop when customers globally are looking for eBooks. The major benefit to publishing with Kobo is that you can find audiences that would never have read your work if it was only on Amazon. Some Kobo Stats 51% of all indie-published sales on Kobo come from Canada. This makes sense: Kobo was founded in Canada and it’s partners with Canada’s largest book retailer, Chapters Indigo. The next biggest markets for indie-published eBooks on Kobo are Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, and the United States. These countries all speak English, and eBooks gained popularity in America first. So it’s no surprise that these are some of the biggest markets for indie-published books on Kobo. Non-English Markets for Kobo France is the biggest non-English market for Kobo right now. It just recently overtook New Zealand in total eBook sales. Italy is another big market for Kobo. The Netherlands, Germany, and Spain are where Mark expects to see the largest growth in the next year. Kobo just launched Kobo Plus for the Netherlands, which is a program similar to Kindle Unlimited, except that you don’t have to be exclusive to Kobo to take part in it. The company realized that in the Netherlands, there is a large market of people who want an all-you-can-read model. If the program does well, it could expand to oth

Bryan Cohen is the author of Ted Saves the World, the first book in a new YA sci-fi/fantasy series, and a collection of creative writing prompts books. His books have been downloaded over 400,000 times. Bryan has always been interested in writing. He started his indie publishing journey by writing a blog about writing inspiration. Google kept sending him traffic from “writing prompts” keywords. That’s when he decided to release books filled with writing prompts on Amazon, starting in 2010. After five years of success inspiring others to write, Bryan decided to start publishing his own fiction. Fiction had always been Bryan’s real passion. But writing nonfiction comes more easily to him. He wrote five or six fiction projects, none of which he published, before he decided to release his books of writing prompts. He credits his nonfiction work with helping complete his fiction work. Even though writing fiction and writing nonfiction are very distinct art forms, studying and practicing both are complementary to one another. Productivity habits and routines that writers get into can translate between these art forms. Here are several ways you can cross over between types of writing to improve both. Copywriting for Fiction Authors Copywriting encompasses all the words that go outside your book. So it includes anything on your back cover, anything on your Amazon product page, the words that go in any advertisements you use (Facebook, BookBub, Amazon ads, etc.), and so on. When you’re trying to get people who don’t know you to trust you enough to buy your book or to sign up for your email list, you need the words outside your book to be convincing. The most important piece of copywriting for authors is the first line of your book description. 80% of customers stop reading after the first line. So you need a first line that is clear and that entices them to keep reading. The second most important thing for authors to remember about copywriting is the importance of a call to action. At the end of every piece of sales copy you write, you should have a call to action that tells your audience exactly what you want them to do. On your Amazon product page, you should tell people to click and buy your book. If you’re asking people to subscribe to your mailing list or something else, you should clearly state that at the end of your copy. In today’s world, people have information attacking them every second. A call to action makes it as clear as possible what you want someone reading your copy to do. If you communicate clearly and succinctly, you’ll get much better results. Writing a Good Headline for Your Book Description A good headline needs to have four key qualities: 1. It’s short. Bryan had a situation where he didn’t realize the headline he was using on Amazon was getting cut off because it was too long. If your headlines are too long, you run the risk of losing people. 2. It’s interesting. Headlines should be compelling. Your headline’s primary job is to make people want to read the next line. You should write a headline that intrigues them and makes them want to read further. 3. It’s genre-specific. If you’re writing a thriller, you shouldn’t emphasize the romance part of your story in your headline. The headline should be crafted to emphasize those parts of your story that your target readers want to hear about. 4. It makes sense. The best way to think about this is to ask yourself, “Will most people who read this headline understand what I’m talking about?” How to Come up with a Headline After you’ve written your book, sit down with a pad of paper or an open word processing document and write down at least 20 different ideas for your headline. The goal here is not to come up with a good headline but to simply write down as many ideas as you can think of. After you’ve come up with at least 20 ideas for your headline, share them with your beta readers, with any author groups you’re a part of, and with friends and family. Get as many different opinions about these headlines as you can. From the list of 20 headlines, you should narrow it down to four or five that might work, then edit those headlines. Pro Tip: Sometimes the best ideas will come to you after you’ve done your initial brainstorming session. So don’t just think that your work is done after a single brainstorming session! How to Write a Book Description for a Nonfiction Book A good book description has several sections: 1. The headline The purpose of the headline is to make the audience read further into your book description. You want it to be short, eye-catching and interesting. 2. Expertise In this section, you want to explain to people why they should listen to you. 3. Benefits In this section, you want to clearly explain the benefits your audience will receive from reading this book. 4. The selling paragraph I

Kevin Tumlinson is a thriller and speculative fiction author. He’s also the Director of Marketing at Draft2Digital, one of the leading automated self-publishing services companies. Kevin wrote his first book at the age of five. The reaction he got for it sparked a lifelong interest in writing. By age 12 he was writing professionally for local papers. He published his first book in 2008 and has been working in the self-publishing industry ever since. Indie Publishing Strategies for Long-Term Success This was a great interview. We talked about the benefits of indie publishing, indie publishing strategy, how to use indie publishing to get a traditional book contract (if you want), and the importance of changing your strategy if it’s not achieving your goals. Kevin got into self-publishing after realizing that his traditional publishing contract would cause him to lose money. So he pulled back from that situation, lost the rights to that book for four years, and decided to publish another one instead. He looked at self-publishing options because he wanted more control over his work. The sales for his first book were pretty low because people hadn’t yet adopted the ebook as something they could read. Kevin actually got more print sales for his book then ebook sales. When Kevin first explored self-publishing he was working in television, and his dream was to create a book that could be turned into a movie or TV show. Because he lost the rights to the first book he worked on, he didn’t want to put himself in a position where he could lose those rights again, especially if what he was writing got sold to Hollywood. The Benefits of Self-Publishing Kevin really liked the idea that once he created his book and self published it, he would have complete control over what he did with the book itself. In particular, he liked the idea that he could control the price, and distribute the book in any way that made sense to him. One of the benefits of self-publishing is that 100% of the book’s success rests on your shoulders. Once you accept that 100% of your success is up to you, you’re much more likely to succeed because you understand the level of commitment you need, and you’re mentally prepared to take the right actions in the right quantities to assure your success. Another benefit of indie publishing is that you come to understand the value of what the publishing company is truly offering. Understanding the value of the different elements that a publishing company brings to the table gives you a better negotiating position because you’re more informed. Indie publishing also teaches authors the value of marketing. Marketing is a very valuable skill. It separates successful authors from unsuccessful ones. When you go the indie publishing route you learn more faster. You’re also able to adjust marketing strategies more easily because you don’t have to check with anyone. Traditional Publishing Vs. Indie Publishing When you sign a traditional publishing contract you give away the rights to your story in order to get the book distributed. That means the publishing company has at least some say in what you do with the content you’ve written in the future. It also means that the publisher is most likely entitled to some sort of cut if your story is made into a TV show or movie. The theory behind getting traditionally published is that the publishing company will help you with some overhead in terms of creating and marketing of the book once it’s done. The truth is that a publishing company will help you with some initial overhead and might help you with the marketing, but in the end the author is responsible for most of the marketing activity anyway. And as an author’s career goes on, the publishing company takes less and less responsibility for helping the author with promoting the book. So if you’re going to be doing the majority of work anyway it makes sense that you get the majority of the profit and keep your rights intact. How to Use Indie Publishing to Get a Traditional Publishing Contract If you really want a traditional publishing contract you can still pursue that in this new world. It’s often easier for someone to get a traditional book contract if they’ve built an author platform by indie publishing their work and getting readers, before they approach agents and publishers. Publishers really only care about the bottom line. If you can prove to them that you already have an audience to sell to they’ll be much more interested in buying your book because you’ve proven that you have an audience to sell to. Indie Publishing and the Power of the Minimum Viable Product When self-publishing, what you want to do is create your minimum viable product. A Minimum viable product means you get your book to your audience as quickly as possible while making it the highest quality product you can using the resources you have.

Gregory has lived and worked in 50 countries and continues to help others along the path of self-fulfillment through exploration. Gregory’s books, Brand Identity Breakthrough and Travel As Transformation, are Amazon bestsellers, and his company Identity Publications helps authors grow their business with books, videos, and courses. Gregory published Brand Identity Breakthrough 10 months ago. Initially, he paid someone $5,000 to help him create the book and market it on Amazon. She took his money and did very little of what she promised him she would. That’s when he decided to approach as if someone hired him to create and promote his book. That mindset shift allowed him to come up with a marketing plan as he created the book. Gregory’s Marketing Strategy For Brand Identity Breakthrough When Gregory Published Brand Identity Breakthrough he was an unknown author. The first thing he did to market the book was recruit a team of beta readers. He realized he needed beta readers because he has a unique writing style that readers either love or hate, and he didn’t want any bad reviews as a new author to negatively impact his success. He built his team by going to people he already knew and by recruiting from business forums. He gave his beta readers credit in his book as well as sharing with them the process he went through to create and publish the book His beta readers really helped him clarify and organize his message so that it would be better understood by his target audience. “A finished book is more than the ingredients that go into it, it’s the way things are arranged as well.” — Gregory Diehl Gregory got the book to #1 in Amazon’s Public Relations category by putting it on preorder on Amazon and pricing it at 99 cents. He used his beta readers as his street team and got them to order and review the book. Then he sent a link to his preorder page to any blogger or podcaster who might like the book. Being ranked #1 in Public Relations on Amazon on the day of launch really helped the book find a bigger audience. Things to Consider When Designing a Book Cover 1. Who is your target audience? What are they looking for? People interested in business and nonfiction how- to books are going to expect a very different type of cover than say a romance or sciencn fiction reader. 2. Are there any common elements in the book covers of the top selling books in your category? How can you emulate them? 3. What images might provoke a reader to click on a book cover when browsing amazon? How to Split Test Your Book Cover Over the last 10 months Gregory has done a lot of tweaking to make sure his book packaging was optimized for sales. When he first published Brand Identity Breakthrough Gregory went with the cover provided by the woman he spent $5,000 on. The cover wasn’t bad but it wasn’t great either. After two months selling on Amazon he paid a team of graphic designers to come up with 6 different color schemes for the cover. And he manually uploaded a different cover every week. He left everything else the same and found that the red book cover he designed far outperformed his other options. Things to Remember When Split Testing for Sales Conversion 1. Start with a good product. Gregory did everything he could to be sure he was releasing a good product on the market. He recruited beta readers, clarified his message, and reorganized his material so that it made sense. Producing a quality product is the most important thing you can do as an author. A good product is your best marketing tool. 2. Establish a baseline. Gregory waited two months after his book went on sale before changing anything. This allowed him to develop a decent baseline to measure against. 3. Change one thing about your sales page and book packaging. If you try to change more than one thing, you won’t understand which change you made affected your sales. How to Use Beta Readers Get the Most Book Sales If you want to become a best selling author you really do need to pay attention to the marketing and sales strategy for your book. The most important person when it comes to marketing and sales is the customer. If customers who buy your book don’t like it, it’s impossible to get your book to stay a best seller because you’ll be lacking crucial word of mouth sales. The best way to prevent that from happening is to use beta readers. Beta readers are people who you think are like your target audience. You give them a copy of your book to read and they give you honest feedback about what they thought of the book. It’s best to use several beta readers so you can look for consensus viewpoints. If you use 10 beta readers and they all think something is confusing it might be worth revising. If they all like a particular point or section of the book, you might want to consider emphasizing that section in your book. If only one or two out of ten people don’t like something a