Lessons

Lesson Info

Creative Marketing + Connection System Overview

Well how are you doing today? I'm doing good I'm excited to be here and I'm excited to be here to talk about books for a couple of days because there's nothing I really like talking about more so fantastic will take it away so this course is called how to sell your first thousand books and this started for me a couple of years ago I started working with a guy named remi se t for his book launch and it went really well and I will tell that story in a little bit but that really just put me on this path of working with authors and figuring out how authors can really take advantage of this new world of publishing because everything's changing right you know amazon's kind of taking over book sales publishers or having trouble um and everything is changing and what's really changing is that more than ever authors have direct connections to their readers. You know, in the past how we did this has changes that you know, it used to be that authors would go in a cave somewhere right there book c...

ome out with the book and launch it and then they do their book tour and maybe get a publicist and go on some radio shows in some tv and then they're done and the books on the shelves somewhere and that's what sells the books and there's always this divide between them and their readers right, so it had to do ah lot mohr with just getting the book done and trusting the whole publishing process to actually get the book in front of readers, and if you get it on bookshelves, that's what you need to do well, that's changed, right? So everything's changed, and now everything's just kind of exploding. We were building this connection straight to our audience, and for the first time, this doesn't work anymore, where you just write and promote and write and promote and right promoting this kind of this cycle where you write for a while in your cave, and then you come out and see the light and meet people for a little bit and then go back in your cave and write a book. And so what I'm here to talk about is why this is a good thing and why this is an exciting time, you know, I've talked to a lot of people in publishing and a lot of authors that this isn't exciting to them. They want they think that everything is falling down around them, and what I think this is, is it's more exciting than ever because it gives you control, it gives you direct access to your readers, and it gives you a chance to actually build a community that you have direct connection to, and so that's what I'm that's what I do, I help authors build that connection and that's, what we're going to talk about for the next two days is how authors can directly build a build a platform where they can connect with readers and they can build an audience and sell a lot of books. And so I've worked with over one hundred authors now, and I've worked with authors across every genre, across every stripe of author, whether it's fiction nonfiction cookbooks, author is just getting there start all the way to authors that have many bestsellers and everything in between, and I've come and I've learned, and I'm bringing it back, and I'm going to tell you everything that I've learned and that's what I really think sets me apart and sets what we're going to talk about a part for the next couple days is that a lot of times when you see advice about writing it's from somebody that has a little bit of experience, you know, maybe it's an author, that's had a couple good books, and they kind of know how to market their books, but it's really hard to translate that into your own books, and so since I've worked with so many off theirs, I'm putting this together into a system that you'll be able to take, and it will work for any author. And so this is what we want to get away from we want to get away from this idea where we write a book and we launch it and we just sell a bunch of copies and then it drops off a cliff and then we have to go and write another book and come out with it again and really this is the graph that most books take eyes they come out, they sell a bunch of copies and then it drops off a cliff and their sales kind of peter out and they're left to write another book and in fact a lot of the best selling books you see a lot of the ones that hit the new york times list, this is what they look like a cz well is that they'll do a bunch of promotion right up front to sell a lot of books at once and then everything kind of drops off and they're left kind of scrambling to sell more books. And so what we want to get to is something more like this where you come out with a book, you sell a bunch of copies and then you have a system in place that continues to sell that book over and over and think about what this means, you know? You don't just have one book and you haven't probably several books in you and so imagine if you're in a position where every time you come out with the book, the sales actually looked like this graph instead and imagine once you stacked three or four or five books on top of this what that means for your revenue for how many readers you're connecting with and that's what we're really talking about is imagine a world where when you come out with a book you know it's going to sell in fact before you pin the first word you know you have a group of people that can't wait to read it and that's what we're talking about here you know why one of the clients I've worked with his pam slim and she's been with creative live before and she's coming out with a new book in a few months and before she brought the first word of that book she has a group of people that cannot wait to buy it and so that's what we're going to focus on is how do we come up with a system of platform where you're connected directly to your readers and they can't wait to buy your next book so before I move on I do have to talk about my own book so my book is your first thousand copies this step by step guide to marketing your book and for the two days of this course it's free online amazon dot com so you can either go to that leak or just go to amazon and you know, search tim girl or something near the book covered in a pop up and it's the kindle version is free so it's just for these two days of the workshop and go ahead and download it and also it's if you don't have a kindle it's fine that you can still read it online but go ahead and get a copy because after this you know I have to actually sell it so I could make some money on it so but just for these two days for everybody listening and I mentioned it a couple times but I recommend you go ahead and do it and don't put it off because we'll forget so in the past in the publishing world we were in this position where like I talked about everything was write a book and then kind of feed your book into this publishing system and it would kind of take care of itself right even if you wanted to do something, there wasn't a lot you could do well that's changed right now there's lots of things to do right now we there's lots of ways to promote what you're doing there is blogging you can you can start a blogger and actually wordpress just celebrated its ten year anniversary so blogging has been around for about ten years and what was so exciting about blogging was for the first time in history you didn't need a nerd between you and the internet, right? You didn't have to learn how to write code you could just write something and hit publishing its online and that was pretty cool, so everybody started jumping on blogging and now we have lots of social media platforms we have twitter, we have facebook, we have google plus and we have podcasting you can start your own radio show, right? So lots of lots of options in fact we're running out of room and so we also have commenting on blawg post or commenting on forums you khun do webinars you can talk informs you, khun do pinterest you khun du pr you khun do block towards there's tons of stuff to do and that's really the problem now, right? There's all of this advice out there just swirling around about all the ways that you need to be marketing what you do in all the ways that you could get the word out and it's really, really overwhelming, right? We've all been there, so we've all been in a situation like this. I'm going to tell you a little story and tell me if you see yourself in this story, okay? So I'm an author and I hear about how every author should be on twitter and they should be out there marketing themselves on twitter so it's like I got to get on twitter so I go to google and I say how dowe I market on twitter and I read five tips over here in eight tips over here and I read on mashable and I read about techcrunch and I read about all this stuff and it seems like everybody's really jumping on this twitter thing this is how all through sell books now their own twitter right? So I signed up, I start following people, I start tweeting, I start putting some stuff out and then a couple weeks go by and not a lot happening, but I'm going to keep with it, I'm going to keep, you know, trying to get people to follow me put stuff out there, then a month goes by and two months go by and you realize it's been a complete waste of time and it's been really frustrating and so what do we do? Right? So is are you doing something wrong? Eyes? Does twitter just not work for me? And so now I want to hear from you what have you've been frustrated with? Have you ever run into this? Whether it's blogging or twitter tell me tell me something that that you've tried that just hasn't seemed like it worked, you know I'm a tech junkie, so I assume it's something shows up, I jump on it and see what it is and so you spend time learning about it and trying to figure it out especially if it's new and it gets frustrating because nothing takes foot nothing takes hold unless you're somebody who already had some name or something like that it just it's just a process where like they just like that you keep showing up new things show up all the time then you're kind of drawn to that you're like what do I stop where do I start and you're kind of in this in between space of not knowing what to do yeah yeah anybody else started blogging that then it worked yeah I have a story about not a story but you know blogging I've always wanted to do it saul started blogging and and then I'll not know okay, how many times did I block it or should I block every day or so they'd like it once a week or once a month and then I'm like I don't know if I'm going to get any followers like this or should I be following blog's too so very confusing and I think quite frustrating yeah yeah and every time you google something or you like read about blogging it's like sometimes competing advice like well you should post every day would know you shouldn't post every day you should post once a month and it's like I don't know what to do just go ahead so in my case, my target is college students, primarily on dh, so I did email campaigns, he didn't faculty at all these colleges, and I think basically what I became was a spam input instead of getting responses, yeah, um, any any online? Yeah, we have, for instance, dream life is agreeing there's too much to keep up with between pinterest and facebook and twitter, and with everything coming in new, you'd be saying the same thing they're saying it's overwhelming, onda snapping gourmet, saying, yes, it's just too much and social media that social media overload. Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, just the ones that have been named, so we have twitter we have facebook, we have pinterest, we have google plus, am I missing some that linked in stumble upon good roots? Yeah, and you can you can jump online and find articles that say you have to be on google plus, you have to be on linked in for all these reasons, so and of course you're not gonna be able to do them all perfectly, you know? And we've got genji who says it is frustrating not knowing where your audience really interact most tow focus on yeah, and we're going to talk about that, too, so yeah, so that michelle okay, so to frustrations, oneness, I find facebook to be utterly not intuitive, and maybe it's, just because I don't, you know, I wasn't born and raised on social media and, you know, it's not like what I want to do, primarily on dh two just the the immediacy of it all, you know, it is a book author, I kind of like being able to sit back and and be thoughtful and edit and re edited and kind of finesse and and with the social media stuff it's so much more immediate, and you've gotta get it out there super fast and there's a comfort zone that kind of gets crossed with that with, you know, not necessarily having an editor to look at it first kind of be a filter and go, well, you don't want to say that, or you don't want to write that you're gonna get yourself into trouble with that. So that kind of is is a frustration as well, because it's ah it's kind of like hold you back from what you might on the state lines. Holly true says, sometimes I don't think I'm worthy enough to keep people interested with twitter thinks I'm in that I'm in that crowd people to start overwhelmed by the number of options they also intimidated by it. Well, exactly and into that point to you know, I've worked with a lot of journalists, and I know you have a journalism background that's what they feel like because they're used to like, I get my writing assignment and I go off and I do my research, I do my interviews or I travel and get the information, and then I sit down in my cave and I write it out and I put it out to the world once it's gone through and editor and everything else and this idea of, like, you're supposed to put it out immediately, and then you know, what if I put something out hugely offensive and, uh sorry? Go ahead, she doesn't say a lot of this focuses on, like, getting traffic, but no one talks about how, if it's the right traffic or what to do with it right now, and we'll talk a lot about that over the next couple days. Yeah, steve, you and I have had this conversation, and the biggest frustration that I've had in this whole area of social media is in order to even get in the game, and I'm not I'm involved in a lot of these, but google plus, for example, I'm not, uh, in order for me to even test this it's a huge investment of time, yeah I mean, just to get up and scale up, and if we're talking about twitter, how do you reach whatever critical mass? How do you get to that point where you have enough people where you're you're reaching anyone? Yeah, and and then, like, once you say you get to that critical mass, what do you want with it? Like, you know, and we're going to talk a lot about and so what I want when I want to get you thinking about here is all of these things, all these things I put on the board, plus all of the other things out there, is there just tools in the toolbox? And sometimes we forget this, right? You know, I if I goto some home improvement store, I don't like find some weird tool that looks interesting and buy it and then go home and say, now I need something to build with this and I'm going to use it no matter what the hell is going on, I want to find something to beat on this beat beat with this tool on, and we don't do that right? And in fact, you know, michelle, if you went toe home improvement store and you, I bought all the tools that I needed to build a house and you put him in this giant tool box and you came to my house and you dropped him off on the front porch and and then somebody dropped up all the wood I needed. Would I be ready to build a house? Because I have all the tools. What I what I what I need expertise if I have all the materials and all the tools what I actually need cause if I just start grabbing materials and hammer and putting stuff together, I'm gonna have a shack, right? Nothing worth living in. What I need is a plan like, I actually need to know I need a blueprint. What what am I actually building? So before I reach in the toolbox and I pull out any tools and before I reach out and I grab any of the materials to build anything with actually need to start with, what am I trying to build? Right? And a lot of times we see that all of this stuff happening, all of this stuff was social media and blogging and even having a website, they're just tools, and we kind of get focused on them and like, well, we have to use this because it seems like everybody else is using them and obviously everybody's using them to this great success, and we don't really start with any kind of plan of like, well, what are we going to do with this? And how does it fit into everything else I'm doing? And how do we even know it's working like a lot of times, we're doing this stuff in a way where we don't even know what the end goal is, it's mostly about what everybody's on here doing this, and they're kind of addictive and they're kind of fun, and so well, I'm going to do this and call it marketing, and we don't really have an overarching plan and that's, what I want to give you over the next two days is an actual plan, like how all of this stuff actually works together and how to think about all of it. So when you come across something new because new stuff's going to keep coming at us, where does it fit and how are we going to use it? And so when we look at all of these things, that's, what I really want us to be filtering it through is, why are we using it? Were what are we doing with it? Where does it fit in an overall plan again? I don't just pick up tools, I don't just pick up twitter because twitter is supposedly a marketing tool, and then just start using it and have really no idea what it's for and a lot of times that we kind of lose track of that, right? Because we see it. It seems new. It seems exciting, but we don't really know what to do with it.