4 Key Strategies to ROCK IT in 2019!
I recently held a free webinar, designed to help you hit your author goals in 2019, and to start looking at your writing career as a BUSINESS!
I wanted to share the recording of that webinar, in case you missed it. This video will include:
My #1 tool for analyzing my book sales
How to set clear and attainable goals for 2019
What you need to create an action plan for achieving your goals
PLUS! The Q&A with Alessandra
Note: Since you weren’t a registered attendee, it won’t let you download the gifts associated with the webinar, but if you want them, just click here and watch the video through this link instead.
Want to really ROCK IT in 2019?
Join us at INKERS CON in Dallas, or via a digital ticket!
Full Transcript:
Hi everyone. It is just about actually it is nine. O'clock my time. 8:00 PM Central time. We are live and looks like the room is filling up. So we're go... Yep, a ton of people just entered. So hi everyone. I'm Alessandra. I'm going to dive right in. It's nine o'clock. This is... tonight's webinar make 2019 your best year yet. I'm going to be sharing four awesome strategies. And while you're coming in, there's a comment box. If you can pop in the comments, how many books you've written, if you've written any, if you're an aspiring author, then welcome. You're going to have a great time. I hope everybody have a great time. I need to load my slide presentation just a second. Okay. And we are good to go. We have a jam packed hour. This is going to last one hour. I'm going to get started right away.
First of all, this webinar is designed for authors. If you are here to make 2019 your best year yet in rollerblading, you better get out of here. Cause it can be a complete waste of your time. But if you are an author or an aspiring author, then welcome. It's great to have you here. My name is Alessandra. I'll tell you a little bit more about me in just a moment. Hey everybody. Let's go.
I like to always start webinars with the quote today's is from Benjamin Franklin and he says, "By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail" and that is a wordy quote. But the gist of it is, if you have not prepared for 2019 yet, then you are preparing to fail 2019. And when I say fail, what I mean by that is you are not going to make 2019 the best it can possibly be. You might have an amazing 2019, but if you have not prepared for it, it will not be as amazing as it could be. And we want obviously, for everything to be the best it can possibly be. So with that in mind, let's dive in.
A few things; if this is your first webinar, welcome. If you can see and hear me, then great, you're already doing a great job. It's going to last one hour and then I'm going to have you out of here. But if I can have your full attention during that hour, then that's really what I want. So if you can turn off distractions, put your phone on silent, shut the door. And this is going to work best if you're the only one on your wifi, or if you have a really powerful wifi. So if you have kids streaming Netflix also on the wifi, you might have a little bit of communication issues. So, that's just an FYI.
If you have your workbook. Awesome! Grab it. Our web webinar moderator tonight, Tracy, is going to pop a link in the comment section. If you want to go ahead and download and print it, but if you don't have it, don't worry, grab a pen and paper and and use that and you'd be good to go. If you have any questions or comments during this hour, I am going to do a Q and A at the very end. So if you have a question or comment, pop it in the comments box and Tracy is going to gather those for me and I'm going to answer as many as I can during the Q and A, but don't feel like you have to wait till the end. Just shout it out whenever it comes. And if you stay until the very end at the end of the Q and A, I have an awesome gift for you guys. I think you're really going to like it. I'm going to tell you more about it in just a little bit. Okay, so that's the housekeeping items. Let's go ahead and dive in.
Today, I will share, or tonight, I will share four strategies that will positively impact your 2019 book sales, earnings, and profits. So those are all very important things in these strategies address all of them. I'm going to discuss a hack that will help you know your money better. I'm going to tell you my personal tool for progress and the number one plan that 90% of authors skip. Lastly, I'm going to talk about where your focus should be in 2019.
Now, if you're not familiar with me, if you haven't attended a webinar or read my novels or not in my online courses, I am Alessandra Torre. I'm a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling author of 19 books. And this is just a collage showing the different things that have happened to me in the six years since I began in self-publishing, I am traditionally published with Harlequin and Hachette, but I'm also self-published. And every time I've hit the New York times list, which has been six or seven times now, it was all the self-published books. I'm a huge advocate of self publishing. And you can see here, I've had a movie made for my book. One of these photos is on the set of the movie. I've traveled around the world to signings. I've been very lucky and all of that success came.
My career took a giant leap forward when I began to look at my writing as a business. And it's not always do that when you're in your pajamas or your, you know, first of all, our job is so fun it's easy to forget that this is a business. We have a product books. We generate income by selling the books, hopefully, and we have a customer base. So we are a business in every aspect of the word, and today that's really going to be my focus. How can we increase book sales, increase your productivity and increase your profitability because it's one thing to sell more books, to get more income, but we also want to make sure we're actually making money and we're not spending every dollar that we're making on things that might not be working. And that's what we're going to talk about.
Four key strategies to raise all of those and to basically change your whole mindset and how you look at your books in your career. So first strategy out of four, write it down, know your numbers. I am part of a private Facebook group of extremely successful authors and every single one of them. It's a very small group. There's just 20 of us. Every single one of us have one thing in common. We know our numbers; front, backwards, sideways. That is very important. So we're going to jump off tonight with a quiz. This is going to be a lot of fun. It's a fun quiz. I'm going to ask you four questions and see how many you can answer. And when I say, can you answer this question? It's just a yes or no. Yes, I can answer it or no, I can't. I mean, can you answer it or find the answer within 60 seconds?
I don't want you to go finding answers. Just let me know, yes, I could answer this question within 60 seconds or no, I can't and that will let me know how well you know your numbers. So, I'm going to ask the question and then just say yes or no in the comment section, you don't have to share your personal information. So question number one, what percentage of 2018 income came from your backlist? By backlist I mean a book that was not released in 2018. What percentage of this year's income has come from your backlist? This is a great question you should be continually aware of and asking yourself because your backlist can really be your workhorse. You like your backlist ideally in my opinion, to be 60 to 75% of your annual income.
And what that does is gives us the freedom to not live and die by our releases where we are just so dependent on a release being successful in order to pay our mortgage or debt or a car payment. So this is a great question to continually ask yourself. It looks like a lot of you can and a lot of you can't and some of you, it looks like are not applicable. So if you are a debut author, this answer is going to be really easy for you to answer because you don't have a backlist. All right, question number two. What percentage of this year's income 2018 has come from international sales? So by international, I mean non-US. If you are an Australian author, I am still referring to Australia as international. And the reason why this question is important is because if you look at your numbers and 15% of your annual income comes from Germany, maybe you should look at, or you should definitely look at contacting German publishers, letting them sharing that information with them, or self-publishing your books, translating your books into German on your own and publishing them, so it's great to keep an eye on that.
Or if you have a huge, if you might be a rockstar in Canada and you don't even know it, and maybe you should be running Amazon ads and Facebook ads to Canadian readers, because your name is really big there, and maybe you should plan a signing there. You know? So this is a great question to ask yourself. All right, question number three. What is your current breakdown of income by retailer? If you were in Kindle Unlimited or KDP Select, this question is going to be super easy for you, a hundred percent Amazon. But if you are wide, you should always know where your money is coming from, which retailer it's coming from, what that breakdown is because you might be wide and 95% of your income is coming from Amazon, and if that's the case might be good to crunch numbers and consider trying going exclusive to Amazon for a period of time.
And again, if you are a debut author, these questions are not going to apply to you but just stay with me. Okay. And last question, number four, compared to 2017, are you earning more per title in 2018 or per release? You can ask this question a bunch of different ways. What about overall; overall, are you earning more money this year than you were last year? And if you're not, where are you at? What is that break down? So I love this question because a lot of times I'll be like, gosh, you know, my new releases aren't doing what they used to, the market's not the same, blah, blah, blah. Then I actually crunched numbers down and I said, "Hey, I'm actually ahead of where I was last year and I still have a release left." So it really changed my mindset from being like, gosh, the market stinks to wow, I'm doing really good. So, it's a great question to ask yourself, and I'm loving seeing all the yeses. A lot of you guys really know your numbers, and if I'm willing to bet the next little secret I'm going to share with you, you already know.
So we're going to do a quick poll, chime in and vote. Out of the four questions, how many were you able to answer yes to? I'd love to see that results now so I have an idea of where you're at and it looks like... it's coming in so I'll let them roll in. While those roll in, let me share my hack with you. A hack is basically shortcut. Use a data analyzer. Don't try to crunch numbers yourself. Don't waste time crunching numbers when there are so many great tools, not so many. There are two great tools for doing it for you and they are well worth the time and money.
It looks like about a quarter of you were able to answer all four questions, so you guys are awesome. Everyone else, and a lot of you can answer a lot of these questions, but if you have a data analyzer, which is a program that takes all that information from Amazon or from Nook or from Apple Books and puts it in an easy format where you can search and find the answer to any of these questions like that within 15 seconds, I can answer any of those questions. I could answer back in 2013, how much did book XYZ make in the UK? You know, I mean, I can answer that question like that. So, that's a data analyzer. There's really only two games in town. First is book report, second is Book Trackr and these website URLs are super easy, like getbookreport and booktrackr.com. That was a question I had in the earlier webinars.
So first let me just tell you about the two of them so you know which one would be better for you. Book Report is only Amazon. If you're a wide author, it's probably not best for you. It's $19 a month, or it's free if you earn less than a thousand dollars a month. It is beautiful. It's easy to read. It's easy to operate. And it instantly updates from Amazon all the time. You don't have to import reports. You don't have to do anything. It pulls all the data for you. And this is a screenshot showing... I logged in, I picked a period of time, and I could see the top earners during that period. That's an order of earnings and I can see a chart showing earnings per month or per day or per week, however I want to look at it.
Here's another screenshot. This is just when I log in what I see instantly. My earnings by marketplace, I can see 81% was US, amazon.com, 4% was in the UK, 2% Canada, et cetera. And also by books, I can see earnings for whatever time period was I came here. Sales and pages, and what's really great if you're in Kindle unlimited, is that it will calculate your page read income. It gives you the best guess that either based on last months average payout or you can set it where it's going to be more conservative or more risky. So that is great because it gives you some sort of an idea of what all those thousands of pages actually mean. The second data analyzer is Book Trackr. Book Trackr does all of the outlets. So if you're on Smashwords, Direct Digital, Nook, Kobo, whatever you're on, it will do.
For me, I'm not a big Book Trackr fan. It's not as user-friendly. For me, it takes longer to set up. I just wasn't a big fan of it, but if you're wide, it's the way to go. It's anywhere from two to $10 a month, based on how many titles you have. A lot of people just during the 1.99 category. If you have like over a hundred or 150 titles, it's going to be more than $10 a month. But for majority of you all, it's probably going to be 4.99, and this is a screenshot of it. It does have some really nice features you can sort by series and stuff like that. But it's really a question of, are you wide, if so, go with Book Trackr, if you're not, go with Book Report. Both Book Report and Book Tracker have a free two week trials. There's no reason not to dive in right now. In fact, that is the action item I'm attaching to this strategy. This week, download the free trial of one of those and try it out so that you can start to understand how well you should know your numbers and then really make use of it.
I assume Kate, Amazon is improving their service where you might not need this, but for now you do. So strategy one, know your numbers. Your homework assignment or action item is to download the free trial of Book Report or Book Trackr, write that down, do it, and hopefully you listen a lot better than my husband does. If I told him that, he just rolled his eyes, keep on with his day. Okay, strategy two, track your progress. So what I mean by that is keep track of three things each month. This is going to take 15 minutes at the end of every month, and it's going to make your world and your life so much better.
Three things you're going to track. First thing, income. You need to know where your income's coming, how it's changing from month to month, whether you're making projections and whether you're hitting those projections. That's what I mean by projections versus actual, and factors that affect that. If in October you had a spike in backlist income. Why? What caused that? Or if you had a dip in income, what caused that so that you can continue doing the things that are making you money and stop doing the things that might be hurting your money. So in the back of this screen, you can see this is my personal spreadsheet that I use to keep track of my income. And you can see under income; I break it down by backlist, new release, audiobook, paperbacks, so that I can see month to month how that is, and that can help me start to kind of budget and know what I can invest.
I also include affiliate income, paperbacks I might sell on my website, publisher royalties, so that's how I break it down, and it totals that all at the end of the year. So, it makes taxes a breeze. The second thing you want to keep track of is your expenses, how much you're spending, where you're spending, how does it vary from month to month and the percentage of your income? So I've had a book release where I made $40,000 the week it released. But when I looked at the numbers, I spent $32,000 on advertising that book and promoting it. That's not what I want to do. I want to make $40,000 on release week and only spend $10,000 or $5,000. But it's easy to forget four years later when I look back at that book and I go, wow, Moonshot made, you know, 40 grand on release week. If I didn't have a spreadsheet that I could look back and realize how much I actually spent on that book, it's really easy to forget those things. So that's why this... that's one of the reasons why this is so important. And again, this is my personal spreadsheet and it'll break down also this last thing, which is the third thing, you want to keep track of. How much you're actually making your profit at the end of every month, and your return on investment what we call the business world ROI, which is what percentage of expenses versus income? So you want to have as low of... well, you want to have as high of a return on investment as possible.
Now, I showed you my spreadsheet for a reason; as part of this webinar, I want to give it to you. If you want to use it by all means, go out, create your own spreadsheet and set it up however you want. But mine is to specifically set up for authors. I use it, I love it, and it has a lot of formulas that pull from different places, so it can put it all together for you. So at the end of this webinar, we're going to give you a link where you can download it, and that's the action I'm attached to. Just download my spreadsheet, or create your own, but either way, make projections for December. And then at the end of this month, at the end of December, go and see how you did, and the spreadsheet is in Excel.
I just saw a quick question. Can you get past information from these? Book Report and Book Trackr go back forever, forever and ever. I think on Book Trackr you have to manually update old reports, which is one of the reasons why I don't like it. But if you hook up with Book Report, I can immediately go back and see as far back as I've been publishing, which is 2012 and see detailed information from them, it's just one of the reasons why I absolutely love it.
Okay, strategy three; write your business plan. So business plan is the type of word that make authors go, "eek", you know, but this is what you are. You are the head of your own company and treat it like such and give it the best chance for success. And part of that is being a business person and writing a business plan. What is a business plan? It's a document setting out a business's future objectives and strategies achieving them. That's the short answer. Figure out your goals and then figure out how you're going to reach those goals. And it's giving you a roadmap versus success.
So again, you are business, you have a product, you have revenue, you have a customer base, let's make everything better, sell more books, increase your profits, grow your customer base. Those are my three objectives on my business plan. That is what I want to focus on. And a business plan is your first and best step to achieving those objectives. Whatever yours are, like I said, it's a roadmap for success. Now, I understand business plans can be daunting. If you look at a traditional business plan, narrowed down for authors, and this is what it looks like. And we're actually at Inkers Con in Dallas in May, we're doing a full workshop. You leave there within an hour and you have a business plan in hand that includes all of these for your business.
A typical business plan like this; you have a description of your brand, a list and description of your products, your novels, and anything else you might sell. Pricing strategies, a financial plan, a production schedule, which is fancy words for writing and release schedule in our world. Market study, you figure out who your audience is and then how you're going to target them. Your promotion plan, marketing and advertising, as well as short and long-term goals. That's a full plan. Right now, I'm going to give you a quick and easy solution that you can get in 15 or 30 minutes. You don't have to do that full plan right now. Anything is better than nothing, but I will tell you the more time you spend and thought that goes into your business plan, the more successful it's going to be for you, the more it's going to help you out all year long.
And here's my quick and easy. I did this at the end of last year, this time last year. For 2018, it took me literally 10 or 15 minutes, so I'm going to tell you right now how to do this. If you have your workbook and it says, what does your business plan need? We're about to cover that. We start with two easy questions. If you can answer these two questions; you have half of your quick and easy business plan light done. So question one, how many books do you plan to write and publish in 2019? I'd love to hear your answers in the comments section.
So this is the first question you want to ask yourself, because part of that business plan is your production schedule. So what are you going to write this year? And when are you going to publish it? You might write things in 2019 that you don't publish till 2020, but how many books do you plan to write? And how many do you plan to publish in 2019? The second question is what goals, other than writing those books and publishing them, which are huge goals in themselves? What other goals do you have for 2019? So I ideally, here's the thing about your goals. You want them to be feasible and attainable, which I want you to dream as big as you can, but let's make sure we have a strategy to get them. And I like to keep it to three goals. And that has a specific number chosen for a purpose. If you have seven or 10 goals, it's really hard to make those happen and focus on 10 things at one time. Okay, if you have three, we can focus and we can make that happen in 2019. So that's my goal for you is to make your goals happen.
Goals I've had in the past; increase my newsletter subscribers, my social media followers, increase my backlist sales, produce my own audio book, that was my goal back in 2014, learn Goodreads, increase paperback sales, which is goal I'm still working on now. Your job, when you create this, write down each of your goals and then write down how you were going to achieve them. It is almost useless to make a goal if you don't give yourself the steps and the action items needed to reach that goal. And it's a fun thing to do. You have an entire year to accomplish these. Let's look at an example. In 2018, my three goals were to publish four books, hold two free webinars, which you're in one right now. Thank you for coming. And my third goal was to increase backlist revenue by 20%. So let's look at that very first goal, published four books. When I made that goal and wrote it down on paper, I did a number of things.
Okay, so the strategies to release that goal; first, I made sure it was feasibly possible. I pulled out a calendar, I looked at what my average daily word count that I could write was, how many days a week I would write how long it would take me to write each book. And then I put in time for editing for proofreading, for waiting on my editor, for recovering, from writing a book, for release time for each of these books, I really crunched the dates and, and made a plan to make it happen. And then I established deadlines with every single one of those so that I knew what I had to meet in order to actually make that goal. I also looked at my current writing schedule, and under my current writing schedule that I had back at the end of 2017 when I wrote this, there was no way that I could publish four books... wasn't going to happen, so I had to make strategies in order for that to happen.
I decided to have a dedicated schedule four days a week when I would write, which is going to be 7:00 AM to 10:00 AM. I told my family about that. I said, this is protected time; you don't call me, you don't knock on the door, you don't interrupt me unless there's a fire or someone is definitely ill; leave me alone. I put my phone on airplane mode during that time, when that didn't work, because I would cheat and take it off airplane mode, I started unplugging my router, so I did nothing but write during that time. So that was a strategy I had in order to meet that goal. And I'm able to meet it. I'm publishing my fourth book in two days, so I have met my goal. Thank goodness.
The third strategy I had was to increase my writing speed. I typically wrote 2000 words a day and I needed to bump that bad boy up. So I read books, I took an online course, I studied and try different things and was able to increase my writing speed, where I can now write three to 4,000 words in a writing session if I have this three hours of uninterrupted time. So this is an example of how you make one of your three goals and then find ways to make that goal happen. And if you can't find ways right now on paper to make that happen, tweak your goal accordingly. You know, we want you to achieve your goals.
Talk about different goals, like a common goal among them which is traditionally published. You want to become traditionally published; two strategies. You need to get an agent and you need to have a polished manuscript, but this is an example of you need to take it one step further with action items because if I just say, okay, I need to get an age of this year. I'm not going to get an agent this year. I'm not going to get an agent this year, unless I have a plan in place. And that plan would include things like researching and formulas to candidates, creating an inquiry letter. Maybe I don't know how to write a query letter, so I need to learn how to write query letters, write drafts of query letters. I could not say query letters as many times. So this is just an example, look through these. With each goal determined strategies and steps for you to achieve that goal.
So your action item attached to this, strategy three, write a business plan, and the action item is to create a business plan. It can either be an in-depth beautiful full business plan like I showed you that whole list, like we're going to do at Inkers Con in May, or it can be my short and easy decide how many books you're going to publish and when, and pick three goals and create steps to achieve those goals. Either one, I don't care, but please, before January 1st have a business plan in hand, you are going to thank me for it at the end of the year when you have killed all your goals and you're a superstar.
Okay, last arm yourself with knowledge. And this is the last, but certainly not least, I'm very passionate about the strategy, and I'm going to tell you why. The biggest gap in author marketing today is lack of knowledge. Authors complained to me all the time because their book sales aren't where they need to be, or their Facebook ads aren't working or things like that. And my first question is always, what have you done to learn? Where are you at? What is your level of knowledge about what you're complaining about? Because for so many of us, me included, me, number one, I was thrown into this industry with absolutely no training in it. And we all just kind of flounder around in the water until we try to find out how to swim and what we should be doing is learning continually.
I've been in this industry six years. I just really started learning two or three years ago. It wasn't really until I started making and creating courses that I dove into learning, so I knew what I was talking about. And my happiness productivity level and results have been enormous since then. The beauty about learning about knowledge is it's available everywhere and at all budgets. The internet is a huge source of free knowledge. Unfortunately, it's also a huge source of incorrect knowledge. So that's the only negative about the free information on the internet is you have to vet it out, but if you have money to invest and I highly suggest you invest in knowledge, you know, there are courses at every budget, there's $10 courses, there's $3,000 courses and online courses I absolutely love.
My challenge to you is start learning. You can read amazing books on non-fiction. I'm going to shoot you an email in a day or two with three books that I really love that have helped me in my career and my writing. Learn from others, attend author con conferences; they're my absolute favorite. If you can't travel, then get involved in online groups, look in your own town, meet other authors, learn from them, ask questions. Even if you're not friends with someone, follow them online and learn from their successes and failures. When a book succeeds, figure out why... watch it. So, definitely learn from others. Take courses; I mentioned that earlier, this is my how to market your novel course there. You don't need to take my courses, but just take it. There are courses in everything. If you need to learn how to write a query letter, because you wanted to become traditionally published; there's a course for that. There is a course for everything. If you want to know Google ads inside and out; there's a course for that. So, online courses could be your best friend.
And I know for most of you all you're sitting here you're to me, I am probably preaching to the choir, but so first of all, thank you for being here. Chances are, you guys are already out there doing everything you can to learn, and I appreciate that. The last thing; learn the market, watch Amazon top 100 list, books that are succeeding figure out why. Is there common theme among covers or pricing or book descriptions? Are they all in first person point of view, book descriptions? Are the books themselves in third person point of view? Look at your genre and see what is selling and what readers are buying. That's really the same thing, I don't know why I said it twice, and just never stopped learning.
Honestly, I hated school more than anybody, but when I'm learning about this industry about how to write better or how to market better, it is so interesting to me because I'm immediately learning something. I can turn around and use tomorrow to make me more money, make my books more successful. I love that. I get super excited whenever I do that. We're going to look at one more example, and that is looking back at my goals for 2018, one of them was to increase backlist revenue by 20%. If I combine that with strategy four, which is learn as much as you can, arm yourself with knowledge; how I did that, my strategy was to become well-versed in digital advertising and make it a major part of my marketing strategy.
So my goal was to increase backlist revenue and the way I was going to do it was... one of the ways I was going to do it was to learn about digital advertising. So in 2019, I read two books on Facebook ads. I read one on AMS ads. I took online courses in both Facebook and Amazon ads. I got a Facebook ad rep and had over 20 meetings with her to learn about ads and tweak my own ads and see what works and what doesn't, and also learn Google ads and really dove into AMS ads. So that sounds like a lot of things to do, but the beauty is you have an entire year, okay. So don't stress, feel free to make detailed action item plans. That might seem like a lot of steps, but you have a whole year to accomplish that. So maybe February, you want to make the month of Instagram.
February, you were going to learn everything can possibly learn about Instagram and try different things and see if you can increase your followers by a certain amount in February. So you have 12 months, you have a lots of time, and I am starting out 2019 in so much of a better intelligence space than I started 2018. I can't wait to see how I am at the end of this year when I start 2020.
The end of the action, the action item for this strategy; strategy four, arm yourself with knowledge. I challenge you to make a big move this week towards learning something about craft, marketing, or business. Those are really the three pillars to our success rests on having great well-written books, marketing them well, and being intelligent about our business and our business practices. So I don't care if that big move is getting a library card. So you can go to the library, checkout competitor's books and business knob; that worked for me. I have another really great big move I'm going to talk to you about in just a minute, but do something this week, big step towards learning something that will improve your business and your profits.
Okay. Let's recap. Four strategies I gave you. Number one, invest in your numbers. The action plan item for that was to download the free trial. It's not even download. Sign up for the free trial of Book Report or Book Trackr, and try it out and start using it. Number two, track your progress. Either use the spreadsheet that I'm going to give you in just a little bit, or create your own, but start keeping track of your income and expenses so that you can know where your money's coming from and where it's going, and so hopefully, you can do a better job of increasing your profitability. Number three, write a business plan, either a full in-depth business plan like we're going to do at Inkers Con or the quick and easy 15 minute outline that I gave you tonight, but write a business plan. And number four, arm yourself with knowledge. Be continually learning. Your action item this week, make a big move towards learning, and you're going to be so happy. You can love it. I swear.
All right, to wrap up. I want to go back to when I first introduced myself. This is me now, but let's look at what I was doing before I became an author. Because I mentioned earlier, I had no training when I was given into this job. And before I wrote, I was a stablehand, babysitter, a restaurant hostess, I delivered flowers. I thought for a long time, six years of my life, I dedicated to the hospitality industry because I thought I was going to run hotels around the world. I ran a trucking company, which I don't suggest to anybody because I got calls at 3:00 AM from semi-truck drivers in Omaha that were broke down. And then I was an administrative assistant, both for real estate developer and for real estate company. So all of those jobs along with my degree in business gave me absolutely no training for what this career entails. It really didn't.
And I challenge you; what is your background? And did it give you any training for what we are doing now for the many hats that we wear? Has it prepared you for marketing, promotion, advertising, creating a product, setting pricing? Because for me, it didn't. And like I mentioned earlier, we are all kind of thrown into the deep end and have to find our way. Be kind to yourself, if you make mistakes, keep going. Because again, we are all working to learn and to become better. So I want to just remind you, it's okay to not know everything. What is important is that you take initiative and to learn and grow your business because you are truly the CEO of your own business and you are the sole decision-maker in everything. And that is a huge responsibility to take on, so we want to arm ourselves with the knowledge to make the right decisions. I know I gave you a lot of action on state, but I really want you to start looking at your writing as a business and take initiative to learn and grow as that business.
And with those two thoughts in mind, I want to formally invite you to Inkers Con, okay. Inkers Con is this May in Dallas, Texas. I would absolutely love to see you there. It was created… it's a two day conference for authors. It was created for three reasons. First, a networking environment. I wanted a place where authors could get to know each other and find friendships and learn from each other in one place. The second and one of my favorite main reasons for creating Inker Con was I wanted to have unique instruction on topics specific to improving your business. I have attended a ton of authors conferences, and I really wanted unique topics we hadn't heard before that directly addressed our profitability, our book sales, and our productivity. Sorry, I had trouble with that word. And third, I wanted to inject enthusiasm, inspiration, and fun back in this career. We have the greatest job in the world we really do, but it's easy to forget that it is a very lonely job. First of all, we don't have much interaction, and there is so much stress and pressure on us. So, it's easy to forget how great this job can really be.
And when you hit an environment that's full of synergy and great opportunities and great information, it can really make you. I want you to leave Inkers Con enthusiastic and inspired to go out and just really kick butt for the rest of 2019. So quickly, what is going to be covered at Inkers Con? I divided this into four sections, first section marketing. I'm bringing in top book publicists, talk about what can make or break your book launch. We're going to teach secrets of a successful backlist, how to increase those backless revenue and get closer to 60 to 75% of your income, widening your sales, increasing your sales on Apple Books, Nooks, things like that. Or if you're in Kindle Unlimited, we have a specific class just in Kindle Unlimited marketing strategies.
Also everything you don't know about Goodreads, which I'm teaching. I'm super excited about. I love Goodreads and how to really nail your newsletter and make it work hard for you. The second section or second block of classes is all on craft, helping to make your books better. If your book, if you have a well-written book with an attractive cover, you will sell copies. You might not sell a hundred thousand copies, but you will sell copies and it will eventually, you know, sell enough where you can have some money to invest more in it. So absolutely never forget how important craft is. We have five ways to improve your story; we have a live blurb workshop. Editing yourself is all about the top plot fails and mistakes that self-published authors make. It's taught by editors. Outlining for pantsers, which I am, so I need to get way better at outlining, how to use humor in your story and develop your characters using Hollywood actor techniques.
The third section is advertising on Amazon and Facebook beginner, and advanced classes in advertising and digital marketing. And then finally, last but not least, business classes. So, as I mentioned before, the creating your business plan workshop, we also have an attorney coming in who's teaching legal issues for authors. We talked about doubling your pub rate is all about increasing your word outlay so you can write more and publish more, which is always great, and then, the 2080 rule for authors. So that's the thought that 20% of your actions create 80% of your sales. What is that 20%? Because that's what we need to focus on, and we need to stop wasting time on things that don't work.
So what does it cost? It all depends on how you attend Inkers Con. There's Three different ways to attend Inkers Con; there's the bootcamp, which is for aspiring authors. There's Inkers live, which is that two day conference that we just went over everything, and then we had the digital component. So if you do not want to go to Dallas or May 4th and 5th doesn't work for you; you can access everything I just told you, watch the videos and get the workbooks and participate in the Facebook group all from the comfort of your home. And that is one month after the live conference; it's going to take us a month to edit all of that footage, June 8th and ninth. So everything... I'm going to talk about Inkers Live and Inkers Digital really quickly because that's what that whole... all of those classes were all for those two items and share that pricing. Inkers Live, it's the 2-day conference May 4th and 5th in Dallas, Texas.
It has over a dozen speakers, a ton of New York Times and bestselling authors and experts in the business field. It’s 18 classes and a ton of interactive and networking opportunities. So normally, it will be 695; that's the full price admission. But right now we're an early registration, you're going to save $200. It's 495 a ticket. Early registration will last until those early registration tickets sell out. So I don't know how long that could be. It could be later tonight. It could be next week. But then that price is going to go back up to 695. So I would suggest grabbing it now while you can save $200.
If the digital appeals to you, it's normally 249, but in early registration, it bumps it down to 195. You're going to have full access to every video workshop. We have a tech library, you'll have access to every single thing that's in the live event, but all accessible through the website. And it releases June 8th and 9th over those two days, but you're going to have access to all of those videos for a full year. And if you register for the live conference that $495 ticket, you get a free ticket to the digital. So you, as a live attendee will also have full access to the video recordings for an entire year, and that is the digital ticket. Again, its 195 and that will last until we sell out of early registration tickets and then it's going to increase 50 bucks to the 249. So that's the digital, it's a great, I love that. That was designed for our international audience, but also a lot of people don't want to travel and that's perfectly fine. I don't really like to travel, but I love seeing people, so it's catch 22.
All right, let me tell you about bootcamp. If you are an aspiring author and a lot of you were aspiring or new authors; bootcamp is designed specifically for someone who is writing their first book. It's an immersive experience. It's three days. It's May 1st through third, right before Inkers Con. It's limited to 50 students; that's why ticket prices higher. You're going to get personalized instruction on how to write your first novel, writing scenes, dialogue, everything involved in writing your first novel, and also everything involved in marketing a debut novel. And it will be 1495, as early registration its 1295, that's the early registration price. So there are payment plans available for all of these. So when you click there's a link that pops up. If you click read more; you'll be able to see the payment plan options, you'll be able to click and see our speaker lists, the full itinerary descriptions of every class, the hotel, any details you could possibly want is on that website. So feel free to check it out.
And before we dive in with Q and A, quick question, do you know your 2019 goals? If you have them in mind, take that list and look at the Inkers Con itinerary because I guarantee you there is going to be a class that will help you achieve those goals. Whether it's sell more books, increase your profit, grow your customer base, or if it's improve your writing, make friends in the author community, or learn about advertising. There is going to be a fit for that. So, that's it. We are good on time it looks like; we're going to answer as many questions. I don't know who I'm saying we, I have an invisible friend. I am going to answer as many questions in the Q and A as I can. And then in about seven or eight minutes, Tracy is going to provide the link to download my author spreadsheet, track your progress spreadsheet. So thank you all for coming. Let me dive right into the questions. Let's see. Okay.
Page Hill said, do you have any tips for balancing a family, a demanding full-time job and a business? Wow. Okay. So Page, you were in a position that a lot of people in this room are, and we have hundreds of people watching right now. So in terms of tips; first of all, the best tip I can give you is, there's a book called 2k to 10K, which is it's by Rachel Aaron, and I will send a link to it. It's one of the books I was going to recommend, so I will send you a link to it and your email, but what I would suggest is really focused on being super productive when you write and allocating dedicated writing time, where you have no internet, and you can really focus on your novels during that. And that for me, when I had a full-time job, my writing time was like five to 7:00 AM or 10 to midnight. That was my writing time, and I did two hour slots.
Also, I'd suggest staying away from Facebook and social media as much as you can. So you do not need to really be super involved online in order to be successful; there's other places. And if you have a full-time job and if you have some extra money to invest in advertising, you don't... Facebook and social media can be a huge time suck. So unless it's bringing you joy, really just focus on your books and that time, and when it is not that time, like, let's say you work nine to midnight every night and nine to 10, you do social media and emails and 10 to 12, you write, do not work on author stuffs other than that. Don't check email, dedicate the rest of your life to your family and your job so that you can stay sane.
And don't rush into becoming a full-time author. Honestly, I see so many people rush into quitting their day jobs so they can become a full-time author and it takes all the joy out of writing for them because suddenly that book, which they were like, "Yay, I'm successful now." It's like the next book has to be successful or else I cannot pay my bills. So do not feel like you need to rush into becoming an author. There is nothing wrong with having an amazing hobby that you love that generates enough income for you to take a vacation every year, or to pay off your debt or pay off your car. That is great. That's a great win-win for everybody. Okay, do not asked did Google ads work for you? Heck no. And I have a blog post about it where I wasted $2,400 on a release on Google ads that generated like 14 sales. I calculate... it was $88 per sale, so Google ads did not work for me. That being said, we have a digital advertising expert. He's going to be at Inkers Con and you better believe my butt is going to be in that seat. I'm going to be listening to every word she has to say, because I'm willing to give anything a chance, but next time I'm going to pay so much closer attention because I waited way too long to look at the results of those Google ads.
If you have a short backlist less than five, how does that affect your advertising strategy? It's not a bad thing to have a short backlist, honestly, because it means that you can dedicate more attention to that. My backlist right now is 18 books steep. It's really hard. I completely ignore some books in my backlist, and that is not what I should be doing, but that's just the way the cookie crumbles. So having five or less, you said less than five, it's hard when you have two books in a backlist, because can't do as much with that. If you have five books in the backlist, that is a great link to backlist, so just don't forget about them. Continually plan one sale per backlist book per year, and that's four sales a year, maybe five sales a year, and just don't give up on them. Continually post, continually share, continue to send out free copies to reviewers, you know, just keep working that backlist.
Aaron said, how much time do you set aside for social media? So I'm in a unique situation because I have students and I have the Inkers group. And so, it can easily become a full-time job, but I try to limit social media usage to two hours a day. That being said, I'd honestly like to reduce it to less, but where I might be able to have a PA handle some social media; that can't work with my author stuff. So that's how much I've narrow it down to two hours a day. For anyone who's not a full-time author, that is way too much time. If you are not a full-time author, I would try to limit it to 30 minutes or an hour a day. I'd like to reduce it to 30 minutes to an hour a day also.
Sarah Lynn said; when you transitioned from traditional to self-publishing, what were the most important things you had to learn? Sarah Lynn, I actually started in self-publishing and I was successful enough that I then was contacted by agents and ended up going into traditional publishing then. I will tell you this, I love social media, self-publishing so much more than traditional publishing. So, I actually had to transition the opposite way. I went from having a hundred percent control over my books and my marketing and my strategies to having absolutely none in terms of traditional publishing. So, it was a very hard transition for me. I was very happy to get back, but if I was going to give advice to a traditional author who is moving into self-publishing; there, you can easily become overwhelmed by all that there is to learn. And I just want to let you know, you have plenty of time, and what is important is you just take it day by day and not to toot my own horn, but I had a how to publish your book course. There are online courses and how to publish your book. It is super easy once you learn how to do it, the marketing is the hard part. But you just take it day by day and do the best you can.
Sarah said, how do I go about hiring a successful narrator? Ooh, quick before we did that. Let me give you your free gift really fast. It'll pop up the spreadsheet. In the spreadsheet, a lot of the columns and cells have formulas in them and pull from other parts, so please read the notes that I have scattered. You're going to see them on each tab as spreadsheet. Explore the spreadsheet before you just dive into data entry. Okay. Sarah said, how do I go about hiring a successful narrator even though they are expensive and I have never done it before? It is very easy. If you have a narrator, you want just reach out to them. If it's Sebastian York, reach out to him. If you have trouble reaching out to a certain narrator, feel free to reach out to me, I might have a contact for them and can help get you in the door.
Amazon has a platform called ACX, audio, I don't know what the C and the X stand for, but that is the platform that you will use to produce your audio book. And if you're in my "How to publish" class, I have a lesson on it. If you need help, just shoot me an email, I'll do whatever I can do to help you. Let's see. Goodness, we have a lot of questions. Okay. Fiona said, what was the strategy that helps push your backlist the most? That is easy to answer, and that is advertising. I wish I had a free answer. If you are on a very limited budget, I would suggest continually sending out review copies of your book to continually get people posting and talking about it. If you have money though, ads is the easiest way. And I tried ads on several different books and some books really took off with ads and some books didn't. It's really odd. I don't know why, but if you have multiple backlist books, start with one book, give it a week, see how it goes. If it doesn't work, if no one's buying it, if you have no change; move to another book.
But keep in mind that book, that didn't work because you might need to change something about it, either the price, the cover, or the book description, or maybe the sample that they're not liking. Why are people clicking on the ad and not buying the book? So ads have worked really well for me for backlist books, but again, some books sell on ads some don't, some backlist books sell on ads, some don't and I really can't find the blind reason. Some backlist books do great on Amazon ads, but they don't do well on Facebook ads and vice versa, so it's that.
Ada said when you write a series...? Oh gosh, where'd it go? Okay. Would you always just advertise the first book? I struggled with finding which book to promo. I don't know if you're talking about a cliffhanger series where it's, you know, the books have to be read in order or not. If you were talking about a cliffhanger series, then by all means just advertise the first book. Even if you have a brand new release, just advertise the first book, unless you were advertising the new release to say a specific audience that you know has already read the entire series, but keep pushing, keep pushing that new book. If you're talking about spinoff series where you know each book is a different member of the band or something like that, then promote the newest release or promote whichever book sells the best off ads; that would be my suggestion.
Okay. Let me look…. any that I missed. How am I doing on time? Okay, we just have a minute left. Tracy said, do you feel there's a good return on investment on Goodread giveaways? Absolutely I do. That being said; go and click and scroll through the Goodreads giveaways and see, because some books don't have a lot of entries, so I'm not sure which book. For me personally, I just recently did the more expensive Goodreads giveaway. Before, I always did the $199 or $119 Goodreads giveaway. And for me, my goal with every release is to have 5,000. It used to be 3000, but 5,000 people add it to their Goodreads list, because if you have over three or 4,000 people add it to their Goodreads list by the time it releases, you have a very strong chance of making the good reads monthly newsletter in that genre. So that's why always, always, always push getting people to add it to their good reads list.
I recently did the bigger Goodreads giveaway, and I went from having typically two to 3000 people enter the giveaway to, I think I'm almost at 4,000 people entering the giveaway and that emails, every single person who entered the giveaway a customized email. So ask me that question a couple of days, and I'll tell you if the additional $400 was worth it. I don't know the answer to that yet, but by all means for $119, it's a great investment, absolutely, I highly suggest that. Okay, and we are out of time, so if I missed your question and you're dying to know the answer, feel free to pop in the Inkers group or email it to me directly, I'll be sending you an email with the replay link and also a link to download the spreadsheet if it didn't work for you. Or if you are watching this on a phone and you don't have a way of downloading it I'm going to send you an email in seven hours or so with a link where you can watch this again, if you want to, or, and also download the spreadsheet. So feel free to reply to that email with any questions that I didn't have a chance to answer. Thank you all for attending tonight. It was great to see you. And I hope to see you guys in May at Inkers Con or in the digital release or in the Inkers group. Either way it's great to have you all here; I hope you have a great night.
