Courses continue to be the focus, as I streamline the production to maintain output of my regular publishing. Shifting off finding fiction readers and onto leveraging non-fiction topsellers…
“See the challenges in your life as fuel to fire you up. Look around, and you’ll find opportunities silently waiting for you to recognize them.” ~ Les Brown
Metrics
Under study…
Books (pre-)published:
Courses in Progress:
- NEW: Author Freedom Guide (in beta – upgraded)
- NEW: Backwards Book Publishing (in beta – upgrading)
- NEW: Get Your Self Scam Free (back into beta – upgraded)
- Becoming a Wealthy Writer – overall program (pre-alpha)
- NEW: Writing Non Fiction (alpha)
- “PMA: Science of Success” (now in beta, 2nd revision)
- “Strangest Secret” (now in beta),
- “Get Everything You Want Out of Life”, (now in beta)
- “If You Can Count to Four…” (now in beta),
- “Completely Change Your Life in 30 Seconds” – still in alpha.
- And some more that I already recorded for podcasts…
Analysis
OK, it’s December and I have some three weeks left – but we’re missing reports… (sigh.)
I shut off Instafreebie and down-graded my email service as well. Because I just don’t need the freebie-seeking fiction readers. I do consider that I need to promote through Bookbub, and run 99-cent promotions, since those will be paid buyers (through Kobo). I think Draft2Digital will help me with promotional pricing. Not something to get going on instantly. As a pure test on fiction, that would be nice, but I’d be better working through non-fiction as that would get me opt-in’s to my books and courses.
But there are other promotional outlets, as well as pre-recorded webinars to create…
And that brings up a key point: I’ve long said that writers should read daily and write daily. This is how they learn their craft and build their backlist. There is a third point that they should promote daily. One point that “Chicken Soup for the Soul” co-author Jack Canfield says is to do three promotion actions daily.
So you can imagine my astonishment when I realized that I was only dealing with one-half of what Joe Pulizzi talked about in his “Content Inc.” He was pushing “content marketing” – but all I was dealing with was the content half.
At this point, I already have audiences for these routinely top-selling books of mine. So my work would to develop the courses for these and revise them, promote and leverage them. Key point is that the audience who’s been buying my books isn’t necessarily part of my email list.
Courses
Started in on upgrading PMA: SOS Introduction, and wound up getting the last third of “Becoming A Wealthy Writer” up as a mini-course. Because I am/should be working on getting the base there for my backend. With the simple basics up, I can then build depending on demand.
That course isn’t posted as I write this, but will be shortly. Then I go through and solve both assigning memberships to those courses and also working out how to accept payments for them. After that, I’ll need to take the key mini-courses and port them to the four viable marketplaces for them (Udemy, Skillshare, Leanpub, and TabletWise). That gives me the needed feeder routes (self-liquidating offers).
Podcasts
PMA: SOS itself will be worked up as podcasts, with three lessons per chapter so that the entire course can take a year to run – or having three podcasts scheduled per week and repeating these three times a year. This has been successful with my other perennial podcasts that have been running for around 5 years now. The video’s will simply need ads front and back, edited through a video editor into a new version. The audio is TTS on these, but the boilerplate ads will be live speech (by yours truly.)
This becomes a testing model for other courses.
Other Stuff
Not much else going on. I’m continuing to push out PD anthologies of space opera classics, with the idea of building a big library of these for both entertainment and study. Gutenberg is now cranking these Planet Stories out, so they are giving me plenty of material to convert. The added value is being able to find these anthologies through the various online marketplaces. These are aggregated through Streetlib to go over to places that don’t mind PD works.
But I’ll probably be working on my backend this coming week, once I get these latest lessons posted to the site.
THIS JUST IN – Breathrough…
Something came to me early this morning – and it’s one of those DUH moments. I was working up this whole scene about teaching authors to be productive and wealthy, which are very good things. But at the same time, I was ignoring my money-making books – the routine top-selling books of mine. All of which are non-fiction.
The obvious scene then – and I’ve done this before – is to pull all the data down and see what’s selling best, and what has continually sold well over the last few years. Since I’ve published through many aggregators and many more individual booksellers directly, I’ll need to pull all this data down.
But the logical plan is to take the top three and then rebuild the site around these, making routes from the book to the site directly to the courses and library that they most want. Of course, I still have all this fiction material around, but it doesn’t have to be prominent. And this probably means building weekly newsletters for each, since they aren’t all that inter-related (Nightingale’s Completely Change Your Life talks do lead to PMA: SOS, Breakthrough Copywriter needs to lead to other marketing books, Rational Grazing books are on their own.)
This then sorts out the mailing list I have according to these, and changes my newsletter. Of course, I have the overall newsletter that addresses fiction readers, and Nightingale already has a second one, so working up one on copywriting and another on grazing shouldn’t be hard. It might be, like Nightingale, that I can create a set of newsletters that are evergreen, with about 80 or so emails in them that can simply be re-sent. (Although I’m going to be adding to Nightingale, as I have a lot of audio to build out for his stuff – a podcast that probably runs some 250 episodes per year.)
All great stuff. Still lots to do. But it shortens the amount of courses I need to create by quite a bit.
Consider this a heads-up. And the Challenge for next year is “The Great Syndication Challenge” – as I simply need to get all the versions of every top-selling book syndicated broadly through all possible marketplaces.
Last week’s to-do’s:
- Sun: This analysis & emails – Yup
- Publish at least another Golden Age anthology in series – Yup.
- Continue cranking through courses – Yup
This week’s to-do’s:
- Sun: This analysis & emails
- Publish at least another Golden Age anthology in series
- Revise my plan by verifying top-sellers in print and ebook, then align these by category.
- Keep the farm running by priorities.