Brand Architect

Important Note:

I would like to start by reminding that the podcast is sponsored by the Author Marketing Institute. AMI wanted me to let you know that their next event for authors is coming up at the end of Jan. It's called Author Marketing Live and it's a virtual conference. That means you can attend from your home or office and see all the presentations via your computer or tablet. Grab a seat today to learn from best sellers like Steve Scott, Joel Comm, Lewis Howes and Peter Shankman, and more. You can grab a ticket to the event for only $99 if you use the coupon code "ani" during checkout. That's $49 off the regular ticket price. Just visit www.authormarketinglive.com to register.

And now let's get to my guest!

Heather Hart is an internationally best-selling and award winning author, book lover, author coach at TrainingAuthors.com and owner of BooklyBooks.com. Her desire is to help other authors successfully publish and market their books while continuing to author, contribute to, and market multiple book marketing and faith-based books herself - and to have fun doing it!

Below are the main highlights from the interview:

The biggest struggle newbie writers have is knowing what to do with their writing.

You can upload in Kindle and become published author in less than 24 hours with zero money down. But once it's on there it's not easy to sell. It is more than about just writing.

Things that absolutely have to be done before uploading to Amazon:

You have to get into marketing mindset to sell your book. Big part of that is learning who your audience is and what will convince them that your book is worth reading.

[spp-tweet "Readers don't need to hear "buy my book". They want you to convince them why they need your book"]

The most important thing is to take your time to connect to your readers. Let them know you're real person and you really care.

If you want to sell to readers continuously you have to build relationship with them. Building those relationships builds friends and fans - not just readers.

Just be yourself cause that's what readers wanna know anyway.

No matter where you're at you can always grow and improve. It's never finished. It's a journey. It's a lifestyle.

Being an author is part of who you are and it's part of what you do.

Important Note:

I would like to start by reminding that the podcast is sponsored by the Author Marketing Institute. AMI wanted me to let you know that their next event for authors is coming up at the end of Jan. It's called Author Marketing Live and it's a virtual conference. That means you can attend from your home or office and see all the presentations via your computer or tablet. Grab a seat today to learn from best sellers like Steve Scott, Joel Comm, Lewis Howes and Peter Shankman, and more. You can grab a ticket to the event for only $99 if you use the coupon code "ani" during checkout. That's $49 off the regular ticket price. Just visit www.authormarketinglive.com to register.

And now let's get to my guest!

Sean doesn't believe in skill and talent. He believes that there is a system and structure, and there is practice and you have to find out what mistakes you're making. He believes that with working on your skill, with doing it every day and practicing it a lot -anyone can become a writer.

Writing is as any other skill. There are components to it, but there are also applications. You have to understand the application. If you write for radio as you write for TV, for example - it just doesn't work.

[spp-tweet "Structure is important"]

Look at the works of people, who are very good. Figure out who are the great writers and what structure are they using. And when you do that you have to figure out what is the application. When you go through these steps you end up being a great writer.

[spp-tweet "With pretty much everything you have to practice."]

Many edit thrice or four times as much as they write. When you edit more than you write your confidence will be terrible.

If you want to have any kind of confidence then what you have to do is not set a deadline of the number of words you're gonna write. You seta  deadline of how much time you're gonna sit and write every day.

[spp-tweet "A lot of advice that is given on Internet is just rubbish!"]

It is important to know what mistakes are you making. When you reduce the mistakes - you become talented.

Most of the writers sit down at a computer and write - a BIG mistake! Your writing should all be done with a pen and with a paper. Not at your computer, not with your cell phone and not with the Internet.

The biggest time goes to outlining. You plan in advance then only you write. This is preparation time. Without outline it is like going to the supermarket without a list. To outline you can use mind maps and notes.

Copy the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th writer - mix up all those and come up with your style.

If you really want to be good at what you do, the you have to step off the nonsense that you're reading on Internet - which is: "this is how you make money", "this is how you do stuff".

What you have to do is you have to understand  why people enjoy the works of Michelangelo, or why they enjoy a good wine. this is all magic!

A lot of stuff that's available on Kindle is average. There is no magic there.

Magic is when someone buys your stuff and they can't put it down.

Unless you can get a "wow" from people - then it works!

Psychotactics.com

Just wanted to give you a quick update for 2015. I've officially taken on a sponsor/partner for the show. Jim Kukral of the Author Marketing Institute (or you may know better the Author Marketing Club) reached out and wondered if I'd be interested in being a part of the new podcast network for authors he's setting up. To quote Jim, "We love your podcast at AMI and we want to help you promote it through our network. Authors need more great content like this."

So welcome Jim and AMI to the podcast moving forward. To learn more about Jim and the Author Marketing Institute just go to www.authormarketinginstitute.com.

Let's get to my guest.

Chandler Bolt's a young hustling entrepreneur who ran $320k in businesses by age 20. He's written 3 book best selling books and he now works with aspiring entrepreneurs, speakers & coaches to help them go from book idea to bestseller in 3 months through his online program, Self-Publishing School.

Chandler Bolt considered himself a pretty horrible writer until he got started. He wrote a book with a friend and went from book idea to Amazon bestseller in 2,5 months.

The above-mentioned process helps writing quickly but in organized way.

When you go through the mind map process you realize how much you've got to say about the topic.

Try to involve people in the launch of the book before it is released. Chandler and his friend gave early pdf copies, they had people vote for the cover. The more people get involve the higher the possibility that they will help you out during the launch. Do personal reach outs, ask for reviews, set deadlines. Thank people for feedback.

Set goals (eg. we want x reviews by xxxx).

You can also build a pre-release list. Set up a simple landing page to capture e mails and inform them when the book is released and is free.

Free and paid charts are totally exclusive. But what you do have is a 3 hour time window, when your book switched from free to paid. That is the money time. That is the time, when your book shows on the top of the free charts but it is actually paid. It takes couple of hours for Amazon to switch your book over. So if you do your job really well and have your book high up the charts that can help your transition into paid.

What many people do is they let Amazon to automatically switch your book over to paid.That happens at the 12PM Pacific, which is at night for other US areas. We don't want that to happen in the middle of the night when no one buys books. That is why it is advised to stop it manually at more convenient time.

Chandler sets his book's price to 0.99 after the free period. He suggests keeping that price for about a week.

[spp-tweet "If you do few things really well you can screw up a lot of other stuff and your book will still do well."]

Pick the right category. Pick a topic that sells and be specific!

So it is crucial to get into those 3 spots. How? Choose keywords that have been searched often and that aren't very competitive. Make sure you have 5-10 reviews on the book launch day.

Book is not just a book. It is a key that can unlock a lot of other things.

Don's focus on the book royalties, focus on building a business off of it instead.

A book is a tool - you can leverage your book to grow your business like crazy.

A book is like a full-time salesman that you have on staff.

The biggest mistakes is try to do everything. Keep it simple. You know what you're good at, so stick to that.

Just put it out there. Just hit publish.

[spp-tweet "Don't try to perfect the product, just finish the process!"]

Self Publishing Course

Chandler Bolt's Amazon author page

First of all, I’d like to wish you a Merry Christmas. I wish you love, success and many new experiences. I wish new achieved goals, new written books, new reasons to smile and many new things to love the life for!

Today I wanted to talk to you about something I think is very important. If you have been listening to this podcast you mot probably know why I launched and what I wanted to accomplish. For those who don’t know, I’d like to say that I truly believe that everyone has a story to tell.  And my passion is inspiring and encouraging writers to share the book they have inside them with the world. I feel really bad when I meet people, who love writing, who create art, who write books… and then… then nothing happens. Maybe that is because I know how it feels.

I know how difficult it is to share what you have created – especially the first time. In this episode I share with you my story, which I wrote in this post few weeks ago.

Please, if you have a minute leave a review for me on iTunes.

Matt Stone, also known as "Buck Flogging," is the founder of Buck Books and co-founder of Archangel Ink. Matt has been earning a full-time income as an author since 2010, has self-published 20 books, and has written two traditionally-published books as well. He's most notable for the creation of Buck Books at the end of May, 2014, which has quickly grown to become the 2nd largest book promotion website on earth.

Just because it's traditionally published it doesn't mean that it's gonna sell.

Traditional publishers are not better at selling books than indie authors are.

It is impossible to have a successful book run on a self-publishing book if you don't have at least a little bit of a launch platform built in.

If you have a launch platform built up (no matter how big it is) that still does not guarantee that the book will be a bestseller but you can definitely give it a good chance.

The success of each book can almost directly be linked and co-related to the number of downloads it got in the first 24 hours.

Many authors do everything by themselves and as a result can't make a professional product.

99 cent releases and promotions are really powerful.

Author's time is best spent on writing and publishing more books.

Buck Books was created to come up with the marketing solution for published books. The service is free and they don't charge authors. The books they are looking to promote should be:

Buck Books also promoted books, which are doing their free promotion.

Soon Buck Book will have a new service for fiction books.

Blogging takes too much time and does not work very well for authors (especially fiction authors). Instead you could try:

Matt's Amazon Author Page

Archangel Ink

Buck Books

GoodReads

Pat Flynn's Kindle Publishing Facebook Group

Keep writing and stay in touch.

Please feel free to connect with me and other Write 2B Read listeners in the closed Facebook Group.

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Ron G Holland is a seasoned entrepreneur with over 40 years experience in the business mentoring, personal development and self-help industry. He has been written up as Britain’s Leading Motivational Speaker, Top Biz Guru and the Entrepreneur’s Entrepreneur. He gives numerous seminars and presentations and has been interviewed by TV, radio and the press on four continents. He specialises in raising equity funding for early stage and start-up companies.

Ron Holland has been at the bleeding edge of personal development and self-help for over thirty years. He is the author of many business books, manuals and audio programs.

When Ron was 20, he decided to do what he was passionate about and opened a motorcycle shop. Later on he had chain of shops all over London. But after that Ron ended up with massive financial trouble. Luckily for him, he met an old Irishman, who came along and helped him turn around his mini empire. Eventually they made a fortune. Ron enjoyed the turnaround so much that he decided to write about it. So he wrote his first book Debt Free with Financial Kung Fu  in 1977. That first book had massive success and led Ron to being an author and entrepreneur. Since then he is writing business books and books about mind power.

on making things happen

[spp-tweet "By hustling and trying to get your foot in the door you make things happen."]

Don't be afraid of failures. Don't be afraid to knock on the doors.

Get much more proactive in trying to make things happen to yourself.

Engage your mind power. Engage your subconscious mind.

Keep trying and experimenting.

Stop being so frightened of life. Stop being so conservative!

on dealing with rejections, criticism and people who don't like your book

Absolutely, completely ignore it and get yourself very busy.

on writing

Don't wait for the inspiration to come but start doing the hard work.

You have to get the inspiration from people who've done it and then run with it yourself and don't hang up on the small things like failures.

on life

Stop kidding yourself and start dreaming!

[spp-tweet "Whatever the mind of man conceive and believe - it can achieve"]

Direct 5% of your mental & physical effort on writing and 95% of your mental & physical effort on marketing.

Ron Holland's website

Free copy of Turbo Success

Ron's Kindle Books

Ron's Twitter 

Today was one of those days…

I procrastinated for a long time before I sat down to write. I didn’t even have to look for excuses – there were so many.

There were many other things to do… But were those things as important as writing? Couldn’t they wait? “No” to the first question and “yes, of course” to the second one…

Then I finally sat down and opened a blank file. My fingers were ready to hit the keyboard, but my mind was not.

I could not hear my thoughts. My mind was completely blank. The silence was so loud that it scared me…

The next stage was the panic.

Staring at the blank screen I panicked – “I can’t write!”. “The mighty power is gone”. “I’ve become an ordinary person”. “Someone has stolen the words fro me…”.

I breathed and tried to relax. Of course I can write. I have written 3 books. I have written many blog posts. I’ve done it so many times… I’m a writer.

Writer’s block exists in our mind. I think that it is yet another excuse we hide behind. We have created that myth and feed it with different theories.

I even have the impression that some people are proud of having writer’s block. Maybe that’s because its presence proves that they are writers? I don’t know...

What is it then?

Well I have my own theory.

We are not typing machines. We are human beings and being writers we are a moody ones. We can’t be super productive and write masterpieces every time our fingers hit the keyboard.

Sometimes our mind rebels. It needs break. And when we refuse that it takes a break whenever it wants. Like today, when I finally sat down to write.

So, suppose I am wrong and it is a writer’s block… Is it fatal? Is there a way to fight it back?

Of course…

Try different things and see which works best for you.

Stop thinking about your writing deadlines… Forget about your today’s word count. Get away from the computer. Go and walk in fresh air. Unplug and relax. Do something you like. Get back home and take a shower… or a bath with candles and music. Drink whatever you like. Eat chocolate…

Give yourself that mini-vacation. Let your mind get what it wants.

It will restart with fresh energy and bring back all those thoughts you could not hear anymore.

And what happens now?

Now writer’s block is the one who’s taking a break… or maybe it is paying a visit to another writer…

If that other writer is you, please don’t panic!

Remember writer’s block is only in your mind. It came because your mind was not happy and needed a break.

Give it a break and send that writer’s block to somewhere else .

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I would like to start this pos by saying that I am very excited to let you know that The Ani Alexander Collection of all my 3 fiction books is already available on Amazon for pre-orders. You can check it out at http://bit.ly/aaacollection

I basically combined my books Highfall, Emotional Moments and DreamDown.

I am experimenting with Amazon’s pre-order feature to see how it works. So far things went quite smooth. If you want to put up a book for a preorder. You basically go through the same steps you usually follow to self-publish a book on Amazon. The only difference is that you select the release date and may upload not the final version of the book, but the draft document. When you select the release date Amazon tells you when is the deadline by which you will have to submit the final version of your book. Of course that is days before the release. Meanwhile, people see your book’s page on Amazon and can pre-order it with one click. As soon as the book goes live they receive it in their Kindles. In case you don’t submit your final book document by the deadline, Amazon will penalize you and you will not be able to use the feature for at least year, I think.

Unfortunately Amazon does not allow you to bundle individual books through their ASINs or in some other way. After talking to many writers I understood that the only way to do this is create a new book, which has all the books in one file. So you basically combine all the books files together and make one Kindle book file out of it. And then you upload that as a new book – with a new title and a new cover. Now, when the bundle is for series, it is easy – you can create a box showing the books inside the series next to each other in that box. Then you can put a title of your series and say something like volumes 1-6. Or the entire and whichever your series name is.

In my case, I had a challenge because I had 3 separate books. From which 2 novels and 1 book of short stories. So I had the concern that if I put those in a box, people may get confused and think that all three are part of the same story, which is not the case. That is why I approached the cover differently. I created a simple flat cover, which features all the 3 covers of my books. So far I am getting positive feedback about that and it seems to work. And again if you visit my collection’s Amazon page at bit.ly/aaacollection you can see it yourself.

As to book’s landing page.. well I am still debating with myself about whether I needed one or not. Since for me it does not take a long time to create a landing page I created one… but I am not sure, which is best – to drive people to the landing page or directly to book’s Amazon page. The thing I am not comfortable with is that when people go to your book’s landing page they eventually click and are directed to the Amazon sales page. This means that they have to make one more extra click, which I am not sure is good. You can check out my book's landing page here.

So let me explain what I did with the bit.ly/aaacollection url, which takes you to my my collections’ Amazon sales page. I found this really nice website at http://authl.it/ where you can fill in your books ASIN and it will create a link, which will take your reader’s to their respective countries Amazon book sales page. Let me explain. What I mean is – if one uses the Amazon.com link but is from the UK he usually ends up on your book’s Amazon.com sales page which says that you can’t buy the book through this website from your country and directs you to the Amazon UK page. Which sounds fine… but there is a problem. The problem here is that it takes you to the Amazon Uk homepage and not your book’s page. So the person will have to search for your book again, which may not happen if that person is not a die-hard fan of yours. So what the http://authl.it/ link does is take everyone to their respective country’s sales page of your book… which is pretty cool I think! And as a final touch I created a url through bit.ly so I can track how many people clicked at the link. This will help me see the conversion rate.

If you manage to promote the ore-order well, then by the time the book is released it will already have pretty high rankings as a starting point. Which will help enormously.

Obviously readers should be encouraged to but the book bundle by a much lower price, compared to if they bought the books separately. More they will save, more attractive the bundle will be.

From those 3 books in the bundle I have 2 that are selling at 3,99 and 1 is selling at 2,99. With the bundle readers are saving over 60% of that and paying for all the 3 books only 3,99. So basically it is 3 books for the price of 1. So to see all I told you and to check out the book please go to http://bit.ly/aaacollection

That was all I had to share with you.

Keep writing and stay in touch.

Please feel free to connect with me and other Write 2B Read listeners in the closed Facebook Group.

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Today I will be talking to Tim Castleman. He did something amazing. He wrote two 8k words in under 8 hours. Both books became Amazon bestsellers and ended up generating him over $3k in royalties in just 2 months from the launch + hundreds of glowing reviews!

Tim's Story

been doing online marketing since 2009. He found a partner with whom he worked for a year. And then, when they parted he had his lowest times of his life. He almost quit and was already thinking of going back to 9-5 job.

That was when his friend contacted him telling about the Amazon self-publishing. So Tim decided to do it.

He hired a ghostwriter for his non-fiction book. But when he received the text he realized that he could not release it under his name. It was not his voice and was not written well. So Tim had to write the book in 48 hours because he had a deadline. He wrote his book, which was over 8k words in just 4 hours. Now that book is an Amazon bestseller for 90+ days. And being frank with he Tim admits that he did not expect such good results in the beginning.

Q: Once you finished the book and it was ready, did you do anything with the marketing of the book?

A: I mentioned already that I am Internet marketer and I do have a customer list. Some people will turn immediately off and say “Oh that’s how he made all his sales”. Let me tell you I actually tracked with software the sales that actually came from customers that were on my list vs. social media. And for my last book the clicks from my customers and the clicks from my social media were between 200-300 of each other. Meaning that if you don’t have a list you can to do what I will share with you via social media. The key is you need to find a group of people, that you’re talking to and they actively involved. My first book is called “The creativity Checklist”. That’s a checklist that I use to create products and services for my market. So I’ve already been in several Facebook groups and several forums. I’ve already made my presence known there by being useful and active contributor. So I didn’t just show up by saying Hey everybody here is my book buy it. I showed up I said hey let me help this person. Let me get my name known. And then when it was my turn I said hey guys I have this book out. It is limited for 3 days if you be so kind please purchase it and enjoy the discount. And it’s really all I had to do to get that initial push. I really think when it comes to sales and marketing Amazon looks at 2 things. Your sales obviously initially but then they look at your reviews as well. And the best way I can describe this is imagine you have this friend. And you want to introduce this friend to all your other friends. If Amazon sees that you are making lot of sales and people are leaving positive reviews, then they will show your book to other people. Because Amazon does the majority of marketing for me now. They e mail out their customers, they tell people about my book. And all I had to do was get the initial burst of sales and reviews and Amazon takes from there.

Q: Do you know how many books were sold to have that initial push in the beginning?

It’s always gonna depend on your niche and your genre and your industry, but I would say if you could do 10+ sales initially you’re gonna at least get that initial momentum. Cause what happens is you get those sales Amazon puts you in a ranking category, so let’s say you’re the 5th most popular book on writing. They also put you in the Hot New Release list. So Amazon puts it in front of the customers, they start buying it and it basically just becomes a big snowball

Q: Did you launch the book at 0.99 cents?

 A: It was 99 cents. Here is how I do all my launches. I do 99 cents at the very beginning for 3 days. I tell everyone hey it’s for 3 days and then from 99 cents I bump it up to $2,99.

The 99 cents is meant to get sales and get reviews at cheapest price possible.

Q: You have big amount of reviews for your books. Were they organic reviews or you did something to get them?

A: I did something and then they started to come organically. So here is what I did. I basically sent to my list and my social media contacts “hey if you buy the book just do me a favor and leave a review. And if you leave a review and send me a copy of the review to my e-mail address then I’ll send you either another book or a bonus video or something along those lines. They key there you obviously can’t tell to leave a 5 star review so if you get 1 star review you still have to send the book. But the whole goal is to get those reviews initially up there. So I would say 2/3 of my reviews came from the initial push. What is amazing to see is those books continue to get reviews that are what I would call organic reviews. That is you see a book you read it and like it so much that you leave a review of it.

Q: Can we say that if you launch the book successfully and get the initial push and reach the momentum, later on there is much less to do?

A: Right, exactly. Like I haven’t done anything with either of my 2 books probably in the last 35 days as far as advertising, promotion, sales, discounts, etc and I still make thousands of dollars out of them.

Q: The problem with Amazon is that you don’t get the contacts of your readers. How do you deal with that? Do you have an opt-in form in the books? How do you engage people, who have bought your book?

A: I have an opt-in form right at the very beginning of my book. I think it’s the first or second page or the third. They see the title, they see the table of content and right there I give them a free gift for signing up. The key is to be successful you have to be a frequent publisher, so you have to be producing content on regular basis. No fewer than every 60 days. You have to build a list of your buyers. There is so much information out there that the only way you can get to them is to have their e mail addresses. And then frequent promotion. KDP days, Kindle Unlimited, you can bundle your books… there are many things you can do to increase your availability and ability to make more sales.

Q: You mentioned that every 60 days one has to come up with a new book. Why 60 days?

A: Here is my belief and this is untested but it is based on my own experience.

Q: Do you send your e-mail list anything before your new book comes out?

A: You can send out a survey with possible book subjects, which they choose. I also make teasing by telling that my book is almost finished. Then I send e-mail the day it goes to Amazon. Then the day it launches I send them the e-mail that it is live and priced 0.99 for three days. Then I ask for a review and offer them a free book for the review.

Tip 1: Come up with your hook or angle before you even start to write your book

Tip 2: Come up with the outline

Tip 3: Come up with a system or process that works well and then trust that process

Bonus Tip: [spp-tweet " Done is better than perfect!"]

Tim's website

8 Hour Bestseller

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Cathy Presland is from the UK. She is former economic advisor to government around the world. Now Cathy is a speaker, trainer and writer. She helps people write, publish and market their non-fiction books. I found her through the How to Publish an eBook on Kindle - eBook Publishing  Udemy course, which I took when I was just starting my self-publishing journey. Unlike many others, who left their jobs because they did not like it,  Cathy really enjoyed what she was doing. Simply at some point she decided to look for a different lifestyle. She started working with entrepreneurs first. Later, she focused on working specifically with writers.

It is a self-development process and it massively boosts your self-esteem and confidence. It's always a learning curve.

Those have both advantages and disadvantages. The main advantage, especially for the first time writer is that they take away the burden of formatting, uploading, etc. The biggest disadvantage of using the service is that you don't have control over the marketing. The best thing you can do as first time writer is just get your book out there, see how it goes, learn some lessons and produce more content.

1. Most people say that they don't have time to write We make time for the things that are priority for us. We all can make time. The issue is not that we don't have time. The issue is something else... and it usually falls into two things - you have too many ideas and no structure  Solution: Structure your writing. Make a plan. Outline. Write down the chapters and sections. Choose a particular section and write it up. That way it will be easier - there is emotional component to writing your own story. It is about exposing ourselves and feeling vulnerable. Solution: None except - you will have to write despite it. You have to write anyway, because you want to. Keep in mind all those readers, whom you will help with your book and who will appreciate your book.

The lot more books you have there are more things that you can do. Build your portfolio of your books. [spp-tweet "Don't keep caught up at what people are saying about your book - just keep creating!"]

Cathy Presland's website Cathy Presland on Facebook Cathy Presland's Udemy Courses

Please feel free to connect with me and other Write 2B Read listeners in the closed Facebook Group.