In celebration of the launch of this podcast, all of Andrea Pearson’s book marketing courses are available at 50% off. Enter PODCASTLAUNCH – one word – at checkout. This deal expires March 24, 2018 at midnight. Go to selfpublishstrongcourses.com for information on currently available courses. Thank you.

Transcription:

Andrea: Hi, everyone! Welcome to the Self-Publish Strong podcast. I’m your host Andrea Pearson. I’m joined today by my husband.

Nolan: Hi, this is Nolan.

Andrea: Today we’re going to be finishing up talking about Star Wars. That’s the plan anyway. Hopefully we’ll get through all of our notes.

Nolan: Well, if we go at the same rate we’ve been going, we’ll talk about the movie longer than it is.

Andrea: Yes. That’s a good point. We had a discussion yesterday. We actually recorded that last episode yesterday. Today is February 17, 2018, but we were talking yesterday about how it’s like we’re summarizing things. We’re trying to refocus and not summarize so much as, you know, explain why something would work well as writing or wouldn’t work well for writing.

Nolan: To sum it up, you’re summarizing what we’re about to talk about, but, yeah. I don’t want to do… I feel like maybe we’re doing too much of that.

Andrea: Yeah. And if you have any comments. These are our first few episodes. Once we go live, just email me at [email protected] and we will tweak and, you know, make things work, so that our listeners, the people who we are actually doing this for, will be happy with how we’re doing things.

Nolan: Yeah, this is our fifth episode?

Andrea: Yeah, our fifth episode.

Nolan: This is our fifth episode. And, like, some of them we do, like, back to back so we don’t get a lot of chance to reflect.

Andrea: Yeah, exactly. So, it won’t be like that for future episodes. We will be splitting things up and it’ll be a week between recording so we’ll have to find a good system for how to remember where we were. We might have to record them back to back anyway, just so we don’t forget the movie in between.

Nolan: Yeah, and we try to, like… beside my comments I have, like, the time in the movie written so that we don’t skip over each other and have to, like, go back and explain things.

Andrea: You mean like in Sleepless in Seattle?

Nolan: That one was really complicated. Anyway, it was really, really different. This one is pretty linear.

Andrea: Yeah, that’s true. A lot of scenes take place in the same setting, same area, so it’s kind of hard to be like, “Back in the kitchen. Wait, I’m still in the kitchen from the scene three scenes earlier.”

Nolan: Yeah. We talked a lot about how different and challenging the structure of that movie was anyway, so…

Andrea: Yeah. Anyway, you have any updates?

Nolan: Not since yesterday.

Andrea: Are you feeling any better? Yesterday he wasn’t feeling great. He had a horrible tickle in his throat that made talking hard.

Nolan: I feel about the same.

Andrea: Okay. Well, we’ll try to go easy on you today.

Nolan: Sounds good! You should do that everyday.

Andrea: No. No, no no. All right, so our quote today is by Albert Einstein and he says, “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.” Why did you like this one?

Nolan: Why did I like that one? It was one of the shorter ones. I like the punchy, short ones. This one… I don’t know. It’s pretty self explanatory. I mean, you never get anywhere unless you keep going, so…

Andrea: Yeah. And one of my favorite quotes is from John C. Maxwell. He says… this is not the official quote for the day. But, he says momentum is created an

In celebration of the launch of this podcast, all of Andrea Pearson’s book marketing courses are available at 50% off. Enter PODCASTLAUNCH – one word – at checkout. This deal expires March 24, 2018 at midnight. Go to selfpublishstrongcourses.com for information on currently available courses. Thank you.

Transcription:

Andrea: Hi everyone! Welcome to the Self-Publish Strong podcast. I’m your host Andrea Pearson. I’m joined today by my husband.

Nolan: Hi, this is Nolan.

Andrea: We’re going to be discussing Star Wars: A New Hope today, but first we’ve got a quote for you and a continuation on our automation sequences tips. The quote is by Winston Churchill and it is, “Kites rise highest against the wind, not with it.” Do you have any thoughts on that since you picked it?

Nolan: It sounds cool.

Andrea: It does sound cool. So opposition in all things?

Nolan: Opposition, yeah.

Andrea: Yeah, when something is easy… I don’t know.

Nolan: If it were easy everyone would do it.

Andrea: Yeah, if it were easy, everyone would do it and… what is the quote? Something about men and rivers are made crooked by following the path of least resistance or whatever that is. Oh, the path of least resistance leads to crooked rivers and crooked men. Something like that. Basically, if it’s easy, everyone would be doing it, number one. And number two, it doesn’t make you grow which leads to success. When you’re forcing yourself to grow, then you’re more likely to be successful.

Our tip today is a continuation, like I said, of the automation sequences tip. We’ll be talking a little bit about the first email that you’ll send, and we’ll talk later about reader magnets, but the purpose of this first email is to get them their freebie. So if you offer a free book in exchange for sign up, and I definitely recommend doing that because it doubled or tripled our subscriptions pretty quickly once I started doing it. We’ll talk about those later and best ways to, you know, have good results with that, the best things to give away.

But you want your first email of your automation sequence to be set up to send out immediately and the very first thing you want to have is basically a “Hi, and here’s a link to your freebie.” It’s a welcome email and it introduces you to them, but it should be a very, very, very brief introduction, if any introduction at all. At this point, readers are most likely more interested in getting their freebie than hearing about you, so keep the email short and to the point. You can basically tell them a little bit about yourself in it. For example, how often they’ll hear from you, if you swear, if you use too many smiley faces, which is something I am definitely not ever… I’ve never been accused of. Anyway, I do use smiley faces quite a bit. Yeah, it’s just basically a way to get your foot in the door so to speak, to let them get a feel for who you are in just a very, very little bit of a way. Anyway, I talk quite a bit more of this about this in-depth in my automation sequences course, but basically, every single sequence I’ve ever set up has been based off of this one that I’m going to be sharing with you over the next few episodes. By the time all these go live, you’ll have all of them, all the tips in order, so you will be able to listen to them all quickly. We are recording this in February. What’s the date today?

Nolan: The 16th.

Andrea: Yeah, February 16th, 2018. So this week, I’ve been working on… I finished the book cover for the fourth book in my Koven Chronicles. It’s Crimson Hollow. I also finished the cover for the third book in that same series. I wanted to get into editing the third book, but my brain’s been… we’ve been all over the place this wee

In celebration of the launch of this podcast, all of Andrea Pearson’s book marketing courses are available at 50% off. Enter PODCASTLAUNCH – one word – at checkout. This deal expires March 24, 2018 at midnight. Go to selfpublishstrongcourses.com for information on currently available courses. Thank you.

Transcription:

Andrea: Hi, everyone! Welcome to the Self-Publish Strong podcast. I’m your host, Andrea Pearson. I’m joined by my husband.

Nolan: I am Nolan.

Andrea: Today is – we’re still recording a bunch of episodes ahead of time before we’re going to release them. But, today is February 5, I think?

Nolan: Sixth.

Andrea: February 6, 2018. Do you have any updates for this week?

Nolan: Work stuff that is not applicable.

Andrea: Work stuff that is not applicable. My updates are I finally started dictating the rest of The Temple of Fire, which is the third book in my Koven Chronicles series. It’s an urban fantasy series that I started, I don’t know, about a year ago and released the first book in December because the first book was part of a box set for a while. Anyway, I’m very excited about it. It’s been one of our best selling series so far, even though it’s only been out for just over a month. I’ve got the first two books out and I’m excited to get back to writing. I’ve been spending a lot of time focusing on nonfiction lately, and my body is aching for stories to be told.

Nolan: Oh, my.

Andrea: By the way, I have to tell you something funny, and our listeners might appreciate this. My mom was lamenting to a friend today that my books are so scary and she said, “I don’t know how Andrea tolerates it. They’re so scary.” I was like, “Mom, I’m the one who writes them. I know how it’s going to end up. They’re not scary to me.” Anyway, she’s been reading a lot of my books lately, trying to get caught up while she and my dad volunteer at the prison. They can’t take tablets or phones to the prison, so she brings print books instead, and it’s been fun for her, and I say that in a loose way – fun.

All right, so the motivational quote for today is by Dave Ramsey and it says, “You are the captain of your ship. Steer it.” I’ve been thinking a little bit about that. Ships move around with the water. The water takes them where the water wants it to go. Whether you are taking control or not, and, basically, you have to take control, you have to give your ship and your business purpose and direction. So take your career into your own hands. Tell your career where you want it to go, rather than being caught off guard by where you end up. Do you have any thoughts about it?

Nolan: The movie we’re going to review has a boat in it.

Andrea: It definitely does. It has a bunch of airplanes in it, too. The quote can be said about airplanes as well.

All right, so, our marketing and self-publishing tip for today. I’m actually going to talk about automation sequences. I’ll just give you the basics about them right now and then we’ll delve into each email over the next few episodes. So, an automation sequence is also called a drip campaign, an auto responder, a welcome sequence. Basically, what the purpose of it is, well, it’s what subscribers are sent when they sign up for your list. So, for the most part, they’re triggered, or it’s when you import them or add them. The majority of newsletter services provide automation and MailChimp’s is free and it’s powerful and I absolutely love it. I’ve never had any problems with it. I definitely recommend using MailChimp, but I do know that other services are just as good, especially ConvertKit and AWeber. I know – let’s see, what is it called? – MailerLite has been working on their automation to get it more