Author Taking a Crack at Marketing

Hi all. I have been clicking around and reading on BHW for a few months now. Not a big poster.

I worked in Finance for 15 years. Never loved it. Over the last 3 years I wrote a really good book and moved from Langley, BC to Winnipeg, MB because of the lower cost of living. I also was good with my money and had a small enough reserve to leave my job and focus on editing and publishing the book. I also produced 4 songs inspired by the book in this time away from my desk job.

I am trying to go about it as white hat as possible. My content is real so I don't want to get too spammy on the marketing.

Here are the things I have learned so far:

- Be honest with your yourself
Don't lie to yourself because then no one will be there to correct the error

- Read, read, read
Thousands have come before you. Find threads of Facebook, Black Hat, Reddit. Read the guides. There is a path to success. There isn't a course. It's self-guided learning.

- You must set deadlines and goals
No one is going to hold you accountable except you. You have to make sure the progress is on track. You can move a deadline but stay hard on yourself otherwise you may never finish projects.

- Mentors are amazing
I have picked up some awesome mentors the last 6 months. I can't thank them enough! The only way to get them is through networking and showing them impressive work so you either do or don't have them. I am lucky I do have them.

- Outsource
You only know what you know. I can learn but sometimes I can't learn the skill fast enough. I outsourced the following on my journey so far: copy-editing, guitar and lyric recording, video creation.



Here are some of the tools I picked up:

1. Facebook Group 20 to 50K: lots of great tips for authors
2. Reddit: r/self-publish is more of the same
3. There is Twitter hack for follow-trains in the #writerlift trending tweets. It works really good for building up a following fast. I am over 5K followers in a few months. I do post unique content to so it's not just follow-backs.
4. GIMP is a free photoshop program that was been a huge piece of my platform
5. Kindle is a fairly easy to use platform for authors. They have plenty of guides. I did all the formatting, submission, eBook, and print book myself reading their guides and using Microsoft Word with Kindle Create.
6. I am experimenting with Kindle deals combo'ed with various SMM website promotions. Some are from Fiverr, some are from Black Hat World
7. Reviews are hard to get. You can pay for them but they are not cheap. I prefer honest reviews. I have been handing over free copies to selected people with a following but cracking the first few reviews is tough.
8. I like Wordpress for my website, it's cheap and easy
9. People will not find your content on their own, you need to push it in front of them. I released in April with the intention of it basically being a live beta. I barely got any traffic. That was good and bad. I used the time to continue to develop the platform so it looks cleaner now.
10. If you don't market something, it will just sit in silence. Nothing goes viral on its own.

I am lucky in that I have some good skills so here is where I saved lots of money:
- I put the cover together myself in GIMP off a painting my girlfriend made
- My editor worked for free essentially by taking backpay
- I am very quick to learn, I have pivoted careers a few times now (Finance, Payroll, Finance, Writer)
- I wrote the song lyrics and general idea for the melody so I am more creative then I give myself credit for sometimes...
- I am at times my own worst critic, I will over analyze my writing, my songs, my videos, I think that makes them good.
- My skills: good with Finance, advanced understanding of most business best practices, really good at evaluating people (great skill for picking contractors)

Now I am going into phase 2 of my journey. I have built my content and have most of my second book written. I am looking to get traffic and buys. My overall goal for Someone's Story was to use it to build a platform so when my second book comes out, it makes money. This first project is a loss leader.

If there is any interest in an author journey thread. I can get more detailed. I could probably write 5K words on the first 3 years of this journey. Then write 10K words on the last few months. Now I am trucking forwarding into the unknown.

Good luck on your journey! Looking forward to following this. Lot's of smart folks on this forum can help i'm sure. All the best.

Looks like this journey will be a good read, especially with your background

Good luck! I'll be following.

“Begin”


Anyone watch 13 Reasons Why? Gary Sinise says this near the end. Begin.


Every journey needs to start. You just have to begin. Take that first step. It can seem daunting but if you begin. Something will come.


Do I regret my time in the corporate world?


It’s complicated.


I struggled to connect with the executives at most jobs. Most of them fit into this template. Lighter versions of Donald Trump or Jeffrey Epstein. They made detached decisions that I didn’t like. They didn’t seem to value the time their staff was putting in. I HATED THE POLITICS. Drove me crazy. I tried to distance myself but they always crept in.


However, the skills I learned. Putting in my decade+. That is why I can do what I am doing right now. I am thankful for those skills. I have a strong and well-rounded business sense because I did play the game for so long.


Let’s roll back a little further so you can understand me. Out of high school, I loved films but knew that would be a rocky career choice. Plus I didn’t have the gift of story that I have now. My writing today comes from writing thousands of business emails, documenting multiple projects, and being forced to network. So being a confused teenager moving into adulthood, I took the path of least resistance. I decided to enroll at the closest college to my parent's house and selected Finance because I was good at numbers. I also landed a bookkeeping job after one semester of college.

I learned so much more on the job than I did in class. After a year, I didn’t see the value of staying in class and by my third year, I had dropped out. I didn’t have huge aspirations for my career and was making a decent living in a job I liked at first.

Me the person. I always struggled with my weight. Around the time I dropped out of college, I also started to eat more. I got close to 300 lbs and I am not a tall person. I kept the status quo going for a few years. I was living in my parent's basement. A total loser other than my job. Then something happened. My cousin introduced me to the Joe Rogan podcast. This podcast changed me. Rogan was almost like a mentor. I cleaned up my diet. Went back to school. I started using an elliptical. I could feel the drive. I was starting to change.

A little time passed. I had received my Finance diploma and started specializing in payroll. Landed a better job. I moved out and rented a townhouse with some friends. Roommates are a challenge. Everything was trending well though. I was two years into this job when they changed owners. Right around that time I bought a condo. Sadly, the new owners had different plans for the head office and they slowly started moving positions to the United States from Canada. This was my first taste of corporate bureaucracy.

Here is where I made a mistake too. For the first time in my life, I had a ton of mortgage debt. I jumped into the first job that came my way. Within 6 weeks I regretted it. I hated that job. I hated the owner. He was one of the worst bosses I had ever had. He took cheap to the next level. Two things about him really bothered me. He constantly changed the goals. You would have a meeting with him and he would give you a task or project. A week later, he would change his mind. I hated how wasteful he was with time. The other story I vividly remember is when a manager came to me complaining the building was dark. I investigated and upwards of 7 overhead lights were burnt out. When I approached the owner, he said he wasn’t interested in replacing the bulbs because he did them all 6 or 7 years ago. I did some math and figured the lights were almost always on. It wasn’t unreasonable that the bulbs had met the end of their life. It also seemed to me like most of the bulbs were probably destined to go out shortly. His outright denial of the issue made me so frustrated. I started talking to other staff members more about him and the general consensus was he was not a good owner. His neglect for the needs of the staff was driving turnover. Again I tried to bring it up but he was adamant he knew what he was doing. I stayed at that job for a year. Hating almost every minute of it. How can you be so cheap with a lightbulb and then so wasteful of a minute. It just didn’t make sense to me. I used jogging to cop with it though instead of food which was my previous stress reliever. I started jogging 3-4 times a week. Got down to 160 lbs. Almost halved my weight!

Around the time I quit, I also received my CPM designation but I was jaded on the corporate world coming off two bad experiences. I took a little break and decided to move into the gig economy. I worked payroll and projects in the corporate world for about 2 years. I also did a little weekend pizza driving. In the downtime, I also took up an online film school because it had always been a passion of mine. I never did finish film school as I still didn’t have my stories to tell and again the pay in film versus the pay on a corporate gig just made the gigs look so much better.

This was a huge moment in my career. I stuck it out in this gig economy, picking up an extremely strong skill set. I did 3 system implementations. I helped 2 companies reorganize departments. I designed jobs. I did all this in addition to running some aspect of a Finance system, Finance team, and/or a payroll task. I also went back and consulted on my first job. I boomeranged on purpose to prove to myself just how much I had grown. What I learned in those 2 years post CPM is irreplaceable. I also didn’t mind the gig economy. My jobs weren’t subject to the office politics. I came in. Ran my project. I did my tasks. Made some friends and mentors. Always knew that each of these gigs was going to be just a few months. Maybe one of them could have kept me with a 6 figure offer but it didn’t happen and I wasn’t interested in playing office politics at a middle manager's salary.

I am going to leave it here. The next thing that happened is what triggered my decision to start writing. It changed me to the core. I was a different human before and after this event. Next post…

You have certainly come to the right place being bhw, thanks for giving us the back story.

I got my start after leaving my corporate job. I hated my job so much that after working full time I would put in an extra 4-6hours after work on this forum trying a bunch of methods because I couldn't stand it anymore. I would bounce from method to method looking for quick money at first which didn't get me far. The real progress was when I began to understand why the methods I was trying were not going to work and focusing on quality and the long game vs short term by adding my own twists on the posted methods. If someone is giving out a method it's for multiple reasons, but they get saturated as fuck on here. Applying your own twists and sticking it out learning from the failures is the goal.

This turned out to be the best decision of my life and I am very grateful I found this place. If you have a hard work ethic and a high threshold of failure then you will succeed, this place has allot!!! of amazing information but also spammers and whiny people looking for free handouts on methods. You are an educated person so weeding out the bad actors will be easy for you. Absorb as much as you can from here and don't be afraid to ask lot's of questions. Looking forward to more on this journey.

cl0zed said:

You have certainly come to the right place being bhw, thanks for giving us the back story.

I got my start after leaving my corporate job. I hated my job so much that after working full time I would put in an extra 4-6hours after work on this forum trying a bunch of methods because I couldn't stand it anymore. I would bounce from method to method looking for quick money at first which didn't get me far. The real progress was when I began to understand why the methods I was trying were not going to work and focusing on quality and the long game vs short term by adding my own twists on the posted methods. If someone is giving out a method it's for multiple reasons, but they get saturated as fuck on here. Applying your own twists and sticking it out learning from the failures is the goal.

This turned out to be the best decision of my life and I am very grateful I found this place. If you have a hard work ethic and a high threshold of failure then you will succeed, this place has allot!!! of amazing information but also spammers and whiny people looking for free handouts on methods. You are an educated person so weeding out the bad actors will be easy for you. Absorb as much as you can from here and don't be afraid to ask lot's of questions. Looking forward to more on this journey.

Click to expand...

Corporate jobs are a terrific motivator to get you to freedom. I know the feeling.

Sadness is an emotion I got used to feeling…it became my normal for a year.


This is a continuation of my previous post. The story behind my inspiration to take a journey.


My best friend of a decade. He had his struggles. We were both quiet people. Our friendship was mainly out of convenience but we did have common hobbies. We would go to the movies. Play video games. Call of Duty. Starcraft. Civilization. We played MTG and poker. We watched sports, UFC and hockey mainly. We had been friends since high school. For awhile we moved apart but we still talked every few weeks usually and would get together every couple of months.

He had been living on his own but wasn’t working and was looking for a way to stretch his money. He had some family money so working wasn’t his top priority. I knew this. I was looking to grow myself so the opportunity to have roommates that I knew while saving money seemed like the way to leave home. It wasn’t like I just packed up my bag and left my parents. I actually only moved a few blocks away, and I did it with 2 people I knew fairly well already.

The year together went fine. I was working, going back to school, and trying to lose weight so I was busy 60-80 hours per week between the work and the budding exercise hobby. I never wanted to rent. I did it as a means to save money while building wealth from work. I also viewed it as a growth opportunity. Near the end of that first year, my career was in a great place and the other of our 2 roommates was starting to have trouble paying his way. I was flexible and picked up some slack but knew I wanted to get my own place just from an equity building standpoint. The search began. I was picky. Viewed lots. This was in the Lower Mainland in BC. One of the most expensive places on the planet to buy. I was patient and after 2 months and about 10 viewings, I had found a really good deal. The real estate was still down from the mortgage scandal in the US. It was a perfect time to buy.

I also bought my friend along as a roommate. Going back to the other story. I closed this deal right around the time my employer was sold to a US buyer. Within a few weeks of getting the keys, I was not working anymore. Now I did get EI so I wasn’t panicked and I did have a small float to pay the bills. I also live super cheaply.

Within a few weeks I took that job I ended up hating. I got pretty depressed myself. Even though I had a roommate, I spent tons of my time working, jogging, and going back to school for my certification still so the time was flying. This roommate, he was still unemployed, going on a few years. His nest egg was depleting. I didn’t know how much money he had, I just knew it was a large amount but at the time I had no perspective. A few thousand dollars seemed like a large amount. He had more than that.

I just thought maybe he had so much money, he would never have to work again. That was naive of me. Oh well. He also started hanging around with a few people from our past. People I knew a little but wasn’t a huge fan of. A few of them I liked and would call acquaintances but none of them were really good friends. These people liked to party and I preferred a night in after a long week on the job and studying. They weren’t around my place often so I really only got second-hand stories. They were all early twenties and had a little money. Most of them worked in labour. They would go clubbing. I heard stories that troubled me like blackout drunk. Throwing up in a limo. Coke. Now my friend was a little bit square like me. He didn’t partake as hard but they say your friends influence you and this is so true. I saw a change. He started to lose his governor a little. He got a little too lose with his spending. Sometimes a little too adventurous with his free time.

The actual change was slow, over the course of a few months, but the trouble was fast. A few weeks. He started to not sleep. Do weird things like dishes at 6 AM. Cooking at weird times. His schedule fell off the rails. The biggest troubling events were when he said he needed a break. I was like a break from what? You don’t work and you spend 50-60 hours per week playing games and watching anime. Your life is a perpetual break. From that, he left town for a few days. I was like fine. You do you but it was troubling because I could tell he was trying to escape something he didn’t want to talk about. From the break he was okay for a few weeks, then he started to slip again. Forgetting to do things like clean up after himself and going back into his weird pattern.

It all came to a head over one week. I had started consulting around this time. I was really busy, working a job that was about an hour of driving each way and taking some tough meetings with executives at the company. I was coming home exhausted and this guy was banging dishes around in the early hours of the morning. I can tolerate that. It’s frustrating but I will chuck plugs in and move on. Then a few events happened:

He parked in my parking spot in the underground parkade, he had never done this before

He took my dog on a walk that was way too late for my liking. I wanted to go to bed and he still had my dog. He was gone for hours. I was texting him asking when he was coming home. Getting brief weird answers.

When he came home the dog was wet. I grabbed the dog and went to bed. We didn’t talk a ton. My memories a little foggy here because these days were a blur. I was trying to go to an office and take executive meetings but I was worried my dog was going to get released to the wild and never come back. I was also worried about his health.

I brought it up the last few weeks with my parents, brother, and sister-in-law. They all thought I was overreacting a little but they were thinking he was that person they knew from the decade before. I told them he wasn’t. Of course, we all decided that we would ask him and support him in any way.

The biggest flag of all, he was late on rent for the first time. He had always paid his way the whole time until now. This terrified me the most. I confronted him with an ultimatum. Ask for help. We will support you. Admit there is a problem. Admit you need support. Or leave. This isn’t healthy or working for me.

His answer broke my heart. He decided to keep his pattern going. I packed a suitcase and my dog. Then I moved back into my parent's house. I left him alone in the condo I owned. I got him to sign a notice saying he would be out by the end of the month. It was a few weeks. He actually didn’t have to sign that. I could have been living with my parents for months. Once I had that signature though. I just went about my business. I used my brother as an intermediary between us. He started smoking pot in the condo. He detached the smoke detector. His car was in rough shape.

Once the time was up. I had my brother go change the locks and I refunded my old best friend a good chunk of the last 2 months of rent. I don’t even remember the amount. My going away gift for the guy I used to know even though he wasn’t there anymore.

My grandma had passed away in the same few months. That didn’t help. It was sad. There were a few people that spoke during her funeral but I gave a very impassioned eulogy. It was a combination of new emotions in my career and home, put to the page. I actually enjoyed writing it. Honouring her. No one event puts you on a path but that eulogy combined with 6 or 7 other life events were the factors.

I was broken to the core. I used work as my escape. I dug in so deep. I was all in. Everything I had on my consulting gigs. I poured myself. I also became aware this wasn’t the healthiest way to live life. I was isolated. Disconnected. Unsatisfied. I decided that I wanted to move again. This time it was going to be somewhere cheap. A new city. I had been thinking about it for a while. After about another year of keeping this pattern of working extremely hard and procrastinating about the future, I pulled the trigger. I sold my condo which had rebounded nicely. Moved back to my parents again. Just for a little bit. Put most of my stuff in a storage locker. I had a trip planned with my dad. My brother was getting married. This is around the time I thought about film school hard again. I wasn’t going to just up and leave without seeing through a few more social obligations to my family.

That is when I started writing. It was a new form of therapy. A way for me to process what had happened. I wrote a few short films for the course. I started to develop a few of them a little more.

I also took a trip across Western Canada. I saw Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Regina, Winnipeg, and Toronto. I also saw tons of small cities. Did camping. It was a really good trip. I relaxed. I started to take that writing hobby and turn into into a journal. The journal started to gain momentum and become a story. I thought long and hard. I settled on Winnipeg. I didn’t have a date yet but I wasn’t worried about it. I had a decent amount of proceeds from the condo sale and the support of my parents.

I did a few vacations. I also was writing lots in secret. This was really my first career break in years. I had spent a decade in a rabbit hole. My brother’s wedding was fun but I wasn’t in a great headspace. I partied a little too hard. I could have been a better support for him, but at that time I just wanted to disappear. It wasn’t the right time to support someone else in any way. I also didn’t want to decline the opportunity. It was a tremendous honour to help him.

The next event. You want sadness. You want to hurt. You want to watch life crash into itself. My sister-in-law is a good friend of mine. We worked together. We have a bond. She had just become family. I liked her. She taught me how to open up. She is really important to my journey. What happened to her hurt me to the core way more than what happened to my old best friend and roommate.

Her mother choked on a piece of steak. That isn’t something you would get too worried about…

I was with my brother when the call came in. We were watching something on TV. He left immediately because he had to get to intensive care. We talked the next day and he said it was bad. I thought, no. It’s just choking on steak. She will be fine. He was like, man, I have never seen tubes like that.

They moved her from one hospital to another. A few days later we were invited to view her. She was on life support and hadn’t shown much of anything.

This all happened around the same time as my dad and I are supposed to go to Oregon to view the eclipse. We talked it over as a family. We almost cancelled. The decision was made to keep the life support going with the hope maybe she would recover. We still took our trip.

The energy was weird. I spent a few days on the road with my dad, driving from BC to Oregon. That trip was something I will never forget. The situation around it. My financial independence. The sheer mesmerizing scope of a solar eclipse. The amount of traffic. I was broken and free at the same time.

I will never forget that year. So much happened.

When we got back, it wasn’t long until the decision was made to take the life support away. Her mother passed away leaving behind an autistic son and a sea of debt. Her father was a mess. It changed my sister-in-law so much. She was forced into this situation where she had to grow up overnight. Her dad is a drug addict. Useless. I always hated him. Her mom was one of her best friends and now she was gone.

I stuck it out with my plan. I was going to move to Winnipeg…

I was going to do something crazy…

I was burning inside. Alive. All the pain. All the knowledge. Coming together. Alone...but...free...

To be continued…

Now I want to be clear, this is a journey thread. I am going to show you how I self-published. Give you tons of knowledge. Currently, I don’t even have much in terms of sales so each week, everything is growing.

I hope to make this a Monday habit. Every Monday I will give an update on the week. These first few posts are stage setters. I am giving you backstory so you can understand the motivation and drive. Get into my head a little. Welcome to the mind that wrote Someone’s Story. Welcome to the mind that is writing Pulse. Welcome to my crazy-making.

This week I am running one of my biggest pushes. I going to discount my book using my Amazon Countdown deal. I am going to partner with 4-5 book websites to drive clicks. My platform is going to be in front of hundreds of new people this weekend for the first time.

Currently, I have moved around 30 copies sold. Most of them are to family and friends. I also gifted around 400 copies of my ebook and ordered 200 copies of my print book, most of which will be promotional.

This weekend I hope to actually sell 50+ copies for the first time to strangers. Monday I will post the method and result.

A fresh start.

I came to Winnipeg, MB with some cash in the bank, my dog, a car, and a trunk full of belongings. My dad’s side of the family was from St. Claude, MB, but I wasn’t very close with them. Only a few family gatherings.

My first obstacle was to find housing. I had prearranged a few tours of rental units. Settled on one that was a split upstairs and downstairs. There was another tenant downstairs and the downstairs rental wasn’t a full suite. We shared some of the facilities. This was fine for me as I didn’t have much in terms of stuff, and my dog would run protection. The room was super cheap and I viewed it as temporary housing.

After I signed that lease, I had another week to burn. I packed up from Winnipeg and took a trip to Toronto. I wanted to see Niagra Falls and the CN Tower. I had never seen them before. On that mini trip is where I wrote about 10,000 words reflecting back on the previous year. It felt so good. This was where most of the meat and potatoes from my book came from. This one trip. I was free finally.

I didn’t have a job yet so once I settled in, I started to outline my book more. This journal was going to turn into something. I moved the setting to a high school and reorganized my thoughts so they were all happening in the same year. It was a decent outline and start for a story. I plucked away at it for a few more months until I found a job.

Next time I will talk about that job and what happened there to motivate me to try and elevate my project from concept idea to published work.




Now for some metrics! Finally…

I had sold 18 units before this weekend.

Then this weekend I added another 6. Yup. 6. This is going to be a long journey…but everyone starts at zero.



My platform is about as green as you can get in terms of sales however it does look good. Professional. Well developed. I am ready to start sharing it.

I ran Amazon and Bookbub targeted ads for the first time. Here are the results:


Amazon

Exposures: 67K

Clicks: 52

Sales: $0

Spend: $29.46

Main Hits: Harry Potter, Young Adult, Sarah Dessen, John Green, 13 Reasons Why




Bookbub

Exposures: 7K

Clicks: 10

Sales: Unknown

Spend: $64.05

Main Hits: Unknown? Not familiar with how to use Bookbub platform yet

The concern here would be knowing if the clicks converted to sales or not.




Neither of them generated much of anything but there could be some trickle sales in the next week or so. At its simplest, mastering the art of these two platforms is how you generate profit. These platforms will get you decent exposure and audience at a fairly low price. I intend to keep tinkering on these two platforms for the next few months finding trending keywords. I don’t mind spending a couple of hundred dollars in trial and error.

My biggest platform problem right now is a lack of reviews. I am hopeful all the free eBooks from last month will generate a few reviews in the coming weeks to make my Amazon ad look better. I am also planning a Blog Tour soon that should really kick up the clicks and SEO.

The biggest positives. I gained knowledge and I did generate website traffic.

No story this week. I have been busy. I will post some insight into what I did though. I refocused my marketing. I am approaching 90 days. Lots of learning. Lots of trial and error.

I am not interested in paying for data. This gives me limited tools but I am also barely selling anything so paying for advanced data seems wasteful, I need more volume before I consider it. Wordpress does have an okay system though to give you some idea of the things working.

This is my week to week:

• Early April was when my site was officially live
• The mid-May spike was to do with the release of a song
• June 15th was a paid marketing campaign
• This week was me over social media

Now, what does it mean?

Everything is learning. So my marketing and advertising up until now has been rather ineffective. I think I made a small breakthrough though. I am targetting the Bookstagram community and the YouTube BookTuber community. Nothing is paid yet. This is primarily me posting, DM’ing, and following readers of interest. They are clicking which is fantastic. Got 2 organic sales from it as well but the real fruit is in a few weeks when these people I am connecting with finish reading.

Here are my June sources for traffic:

• I am Canadian so I primarily want North American exposure (that is happening)
• Instagram was the most effective tool to get clicks to my website
• My blog has actually been doing okay
• The PDF of my critique is being downloaded (it is a very good review) and that is a great sign, I am hooking people into clicking that link when I do drive them to my site

I am planning a free book giveaway soon. Been looking at Rafflecopter as a tool to help drive people to me when I make my book free. Waiting for the timing to feel right. It could be 2 weeks. It could be longer. What I am hoping is that I can generate more reviews because my strategies so far have not been effective. When I get passed 25 reviews, I will do something though.

I have had quite a lot of success with kindle in a similar niche primarily in the us market.

A few years back you could make an absolute killing, then amazon moved the goal posts, so it is a lot more difficult now. The key is building a fanbase you can remarket to. But good luck.

Looks like your journey will be a great sucess. Good luck!

Continuing my story…

I found myself getting stuck and bored with my book idea. Having no background in creative arts, I still doubted whether I could write a book and I turned back to Finance. After a few months, a temporary job offer came. The break from writing was good. This contract ended around Christmas. Some time passed. They offered me a permanent role. I took it. It would start near the end of January.

At that time I still had only partially moved. I decided to go home and get my stuff from a storage locker in Langley, BC after the Christmas break. I flew home and surprised my parents/brother. Then my dad came with me and packed up the locker into a Uhaul. Thankful he took a week off work to help me. We made a drive through the Rocky Mountains in the dead of winter during a storm. We actually got stuck when we stopped for gas in Revelstoke. A few kind strangers helped us get out by jumping up and down on the rear bumper to give us extra traction. Then we had to run a stop sign to ensure we had enough merge momentum as the gas station was a little down from the highway. Once we got back on the road, I drove all night long because I knew stopping might mean getting stuck again. We pulled into Calgary around 4 AM. Took a small break and made our way to Winnipeg by around 7 PM.

That drive was memorable and this job was one of the best decisions of my life. I took on some major projects in a leadership role with direct report employees. I was working 60 hours per week. It was lots, but I love learning and I was learning so much.

A few months later I made the decision to try and buy a house. I had some wealth from BC. Enough for a small down payment in Winnipeg. I found an agent and a place I liked. We made the offer. Everything appeared to be going fine. I gave notice on my rental. Then late into the deal, we found a lien against the property for an unapproved renovation. They ultimately refused to reduce the price to a spot where I was comfortable buying still. I walked. This meant I was homeless in a few weeks as my landlord had already made arrangements. My real estate agent hooked me up with a month-to-month lease. We unwound the first deal. Got my down payment back. Started a small claim for the failure to disclose and started looking again. It took a few more months.

The skills I learned going through the court system to get my money back, buying two houses in 3 months, entering into and breaking 2 leases, and then running some big projects at work. They are invaluable and are why I am able to do the things I am doing today.

Next time I will talk about the last few months before I decided to transition into writing full-time. Before that I have a question:


What is the value of a brand influencer?

As I grow I am getting offers for people to read/post a review. Being a first-time author I have no idea what the value of these posts is.

My sales are pretty garbage so for now, I have developed a system of evaluation that looks at potential exposure:

• Where is the person located (bonus points for Canada, where I live)?
• How many followers do they have and how many platforms are they on?
• What kind of engagement do they have? Are their posts generating real comments?
• Do I think this post could lead to bigger bloggers or an agent/publisher?

Generally, I would say that getting a review to Goodreads is worth a few hours of a person's time so I am inclined to pay up to $25 or so depending on 15 minutes answering the above questions. After that, it becomes an exercise in trusting your gut.

I got my biggest offer yet. $700. 50K followers. In my market and real. That is lots of money. That is a manuscript development. Basically half the cost of R&D on my next book. I am torn. It would get me in front of hundreds of people for the first time. It is also the kind of opportunity that some people never get. However, it is way over budget.

Does anyone have any idea on this? Where would you draw the line on paying for a brand influencer? Remember my platform is so new, I barely have Amazon reviews. I don’t anticipate much more than 20 or so sales, which means I am losing upwards of $600…is the exposure worth it?

wow this is quit the story !! can't wait for the rest

KingBryan said:

My sales are pretty garbage so for now, I have developed a system of evaluation that looks at potential exposure:

• Where is the person located (bonus points for Canada, where I live)?
• How many followers do they have and how many platforms are they on?
• What kind of engagement do they have? Are their posts generating real comments?
• Do I think this post could lead to bigger bloggers or an agent/publisher?

Click to expand...

This is just me taking a stab but amazon is king when it comes to books, I know you probably don't want to do paid reviews to start as the devalues your tegrity. I think the road is going to take a bit of time and need to happen organically, but it seems you are starting to build some momentum here.

I would be interested to what others have to say on this topic.

Corporate jobs…I have a complex relationship with them. I usually enjoy them for a while. A year or two. Then I sour on the company culture.

There is one person in particular that drives me crazy…

The person that is in a management role and has been there for over 5 years, but doesn’t even understand their own company. They struggle to comprehend the system. They are in a bubble and generally unaware of what the job function of other employees in the company is. Some will even struggle with utilizing talent in their department.

These are people that got their jobs through being the most qualified person available at the time. It may have been an understaffed department. Perhaps they were just the best candidate from a poor pool. Or they got the job through “networking” and connections.

A say “networking” because most of modern networking has digressed to fibbing about what it is you do and then making an awesome looking social profile. I am an introvert so networking doesn’t come naturally. I have to work at it. In fact, I have worked really hard at it because it is a weakness of mine. Now I can see “fake” networkers pretty fast. My business knowledge is vast and I never constrained myself to one department. When someone is working in a department and then I find my way into what I think is a simple problem, I can tell quickly if the person on the other end is qualified to do their job and I don’t piss away time so I will address it with someone who can action my requests.

Tenured employees seem to be the worst. They talk a big game about what it is they do, but I poke holes in their story after a couple of weeks on a project with them. I was never really motivated by money. I liked what I was doing outside of the social side of the job. I also got lucky in money and never lived paycheque to paycheque. When I see one of these tenured employees who in unqualified and stuck in their job, it drives me crazy. They are slaves to paycheque and environment. They can’t make a clear decision because their judgement is clouded by having to cover their own ass and protect their pay. I am the kind of guy that just always is poking at my weaknesses to make myself stronger. These mediocre employees are killing the corporate world by purposefully holding everyone else around them back.

To get specific, I want to bring you onto one of my last projects. I was running/supporting an implementation for a payment collection system. This required input for multiple departments. One of the first things about project management. If a project gets approved it is because the executive team saw the value and all agreed to move forward. So when I come into a project, I assume everyone wants the product/service we are implementing. Generally speaking, I was getting good traction with almost everyone, except one group. When I brought it up with my managers, they brushed the issue off. I continued on but then I started bringing my managers into some of these meetings so they could see the stupidity first hand. Not having knowledge of our own products. Not understanding what some of the employees in their own department are doing. Not being able to provide action items in the timeframes given. Not supporting the project that was already approved for implementation. Giving no feedback and not voicing any concerns.

Where I start to go insane, is when my manager gets defensive about trying to address the problem. That mediocrity of accepting poor performance makes my blood boil. I can’t perform if I don’t get proper input and adoption My reaction is to just start documenting all the mistakes I have seen. I prove my theory with a month of examples and data. The answer I get is to work with that department more. I was floored. What did they think I had been doing the last 2 months. 10+ meetings and countless calls and emails. All the other departments are pulling their weight. How can this be the answer? That isn’t how it works in a corporation. Every department has a say. If a department isn’t working, it is an issue to discuss amongst all the other department heads. Don’t just sweep the issue under the rug. When I get answers like that, I start questioning the workplace culture. Is everyone just coming to work and twiddling their thumbs?

This all came to a head when one particular person started to no show the meetings. I would arrange 5-8 people on a call. Time and time again the same person would either not show at all, or show and be distracted/unresponsive. After a few of the no shows, I went to the executive from my department and demanded action. I had all my proof. My point was that if I did the same thing to someone else's meetings, I would end up fired in a few weeks. How is this behaviour acceptable? What is the point of me even trying to do this project if other departments are not buying in and supporting it? When a project launches, it was selected because my managers deemed it to be a value add for the business and they are supposed to be the champions who endorse the project. Instead, they became further obstacles to try and complete the task. I honestly felt like I was working alone. No one seemed to care about the issues I was presenting. They just wanted the problem to go away without doing any work. That isn’t how life works!

I could only take this for so long and eventually just walked away from the job. It left me so disappointed in myself. I felt like a loser…and a quitter…I still feel like I could have done more or done things differently.

The positive is that coming out of that job, I have a fire that burns in me. I will work until my nose is bleeding from stress. My eyes are burning from fatigue. My ass hurts from sitting. My toenails are falling off from jogging. My fingers are cramped from writing. I will do anything to not have to go back to that mediocrity. I refuse to be a part of a system that rewards shady behaviour and poor performance.

My first book largely exists because of the way I left that job. I put the finishing touches on it in the few months that followed my exit. My fire to overcome obstacles is on the pages. Right now I am in this really interesting position where I have a huge amount of business knowledge and could go make a decent middle manager salary but I would rather make minimum wage without stress and spend my time on passion projects. I just don’t want to deal with unproductive people and office politics. I can remove both of those variables from my own project. At the end of the day, my work is about one thing and one thing only. Best idea wins. Always.

Next time I do a story I will post about some of the techniques I learned over the first few months after I left that job. Below is my weekly update.


I have a digital book tour starting today that should last about 2 weeks. It will involve 10 blog posts, 10+ Bookstragrammars posting about my content over Instagram, and some BookTuber partnerships.

Overall, my platform is good and my reviews are good, but I still lack exposure. I don’t want to pay for “fake” exposure. My early Amazon and Bookbub ads were generally not worth the money. I was getting very few clicks and next to nothing for sales. The lack of reviews is probably the thing holding this back the most. I still don’t want to buy reviews but am considering promotional options.

The end goal is to use this first book as a learning experience for my second book, which could be ready by the end of the year. My development cycle is already quite different the second time around. Here are some of the changes I have made:

• Engaged a structural editor much earlier (6 months out)
• Started thinking about cover, release reviews, and beta earlier (6 months out)
• My formatting is vastly improved from going through the Kindle Create guide (saving me edit time)
• My V2 should be the version I send to early beta (last time I didn’t ever really do a proper beta and published my V4, I may never have a V4 of the second book)
• I already have my social platform built and have begun to tease my second book

The biggest difference is I hope to pitch the second book for an agent. Which will require about a 3-month cycle to get through, but I am factoring that into the release plans.

Some keys to attracting an agent:

• Write an amazing first few pages, the best you have ever written, so when you do get that maybe, they pick up your manuscript and are hooked instantly!
• Write a two-paragraph elevator pitch that holds up against the classics in my genre
• Sell your past accomplishments (awards, milestones, etc…)
• Show your business drive and entrepreneurship
• Find agents specific to your genre, research the individual agents, and add a few lines to each pitch about why this project is a fit

I want an agent because they have those sales channels indies just can’t get to. Everything I do today is about prepping my platform for that day the publisher and agent come and look because they have the connections to get my book in front of those reviewers and awards I am looking at!!! The sad truth is that most book awards are reserved for traditionally published books. I made the decision to make my book free to try and drum up a large number of downloads/reviews during this tour and use that number in my pitch for my second book.

KingBryan said:

They are in a bubble and generally unaware of what the job function of other employees in the company is. Some will even struggle with utilizing talent in their department.

Click to expand...

The struggle for talent utilization is often associated to a short term thinker with a large ego who has fears of being replaced by new talent. Would be nice if those types of people would just learn and adapt instead of fucking someone over.

KingBryan said:

I could only take this for so long and eventually just walked away from the job. It left me so disappointed in myself. I felt like a loser…and a quitter…I still feel like I could have done more or done things differently.

Click to expand...

This is the best choice you could of made, it's a hard path till you hit traction but when you do nothing feels better, the satisfaction and validation that your hard work has let you live the life you wanted supported by your own creative content which you are passionate about. Not many people get to this level. See the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs - https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html

KingBryan said:

Right now I am in this really interesting position where I have a huge amount of business knowledge and could go make a decent middle manager salary but I would rather make minimum wage without stress and spend my time on passion projects.

Click to expand...

Very wise choice, worst case scenario you get a Joe job to temporarily pay the bills but find one where you can still have time to keep doing your thing ideally if you can do some of it while working the Job double dip.

KingBryan said:

Some keys to attracting an agent:

Click to expand...

Anyone here on BHW know any really good agents?

Book Tour Summary:

I posted one blog post per day and 1-2 social posts on each platform per day. I then paid to promote the day 1 social posts to see if I could hook people into my book and blog. My tour focus was very Instagram heavy. I also ended the tour with a bang because I released a new song and teased my second book.

Budget here was about $500 and a week of my time. I didn’t have a book launch back in April. This was my real book launch.

How did Twitter Do?
$70
Original Post Impressions: 10K
Original Post Engagements: 511
Profile Clicks: 153
Link Clicks: 32
Follower growth: From 5K to 5K (no significant change)

How did Instagram Do?
$50
Original Post Impressions: 2,808
Original Post Engagements: 272
Profile Clicks: 8
Follower growth: From 300 to 1,200
Note I also paid for 4-5 reviews and collaborated on 4-5 more so there is more happening then just me blogging and my $50.

How did Facebook Do?
$60
Original Post Reach: 26,513
Original Post Engagements: N/A
Original Post Clicks: 89
Follower growth: From 0 to 36


How did my Website Do?
This is where all the social backlinks and blogging collects. Instagram and Linktr.ee, the newest additions did very well. Brought 100 people over to my site. Facebook did okay at 41. Twitter sucked!!!


How did Smashwords do?
Started at zero downloads and finished the week at over 90.


How did Goodreads do?
12 Reviews were added in the last 3 weeks as part of the tour planning and the ripple from the first few days.

The rest of the money went to PumpUpYourBooks and then some of the reviewers charged small fees (average about $20).


Going Forward:
BookBubs
$3 per day.
Targeted YA readers by sending them to my Book Tour. Already got 3 clicks the first night.
This is my third crack at BookBubs and I am confident this will generate a few clicks daily.


YouTube Ads
$12/Day placed in Trendy North American cities (4 Adds at $3/Each)
$0.08 every time they go over 0:30 seconds
Targeted “Goodbye” at YA Readers who like specific Dance Music (chillstep, Adventure Club)
Then running a mirror ad on Gone (a folk song) targeted at YA Readers who like Folk Music (Mumford and Sons, Reuben and the Dark, City and Colour, Passenger)
Then running a mirror ad on Livin' On A Prayer (targeted on Bon Jovi fans who read)
Then running a similar ad on my book trailer targeted at BookTubers!!!
This is my first crack at YouTube ads. Playing it small out of the gate. If it gets steam and my website sees YouTube clicks we up the budget


Google Adwords
$3/Day
Targeted at YA readers in Trendy North American cities


$18 per day to automate my tour. Hope to see a few clicks cycle through over the next week or so. Planning to add a $3/Day Amazon campaign later this week but I am having issues with KDP backend pricing and needed to go through support before I can do it. Will monitor these all for a few weeks and turn some of them off, increasing others, etc...


In Conclusion:
I am really proud of my digital tour. It established my Instagram account and generated tons of downloads in the reading community which could ripple for months. My self-run tour is way better than the tour I am getting from Pump Up Your Books. I am not surprised by that though. I booked them for a reason. I wanted to set aside the time to focus on a tour and I wanted to lean on them for some structure. They also did a little graphic design. My content is infinitely better than what they are doing though. It's their idea repurposed onto the Instagram platform and with some next-level creative content coming from my end.

The other cool thing is the ADVERTISING can be repeated!!! I can go back to Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to run targeted ads showcasing my tour whenever I feel like it. So for example, I produce music. When my second song from this album releases, guess what I am going to do??? Go back to this digital tour and highlight the day 1 post in that new music release. Then promote that new music exactly how I promoted this. That backlink to Day 1 of the tour is invaluable as a book/platform pitch because I can use my digital tour for the next few months over and over again. The reader can find me and take the Digital Tour whenever they want. In whatever country they want. It is scalable in every sense! Perfect automation!!! THE BENEFITS OF A DIGITAL BOOK TOUR!!!

Paying $20/Day for a small YouTube/BookBub marketing campaign is just fine. I look at is as an extension of the tour. These ads are as good as me going around spamming people over social media. My time is worth way more than $20/Hour so this is my solution to how to automate my marketing.

Remember my goal here is to build a platform to pitch an Agent or Publisher on picking up my second book. The growth of my website, social media, and reviews are all points I will include in that pitch.

Any White Hat ideas?

• I want to automate more of my social media. Whenever someone follows me for the first time, I want to automate my book tour link to them via a DM. When is the time to pay for that? How much does it cost?
• What about spamming to tons of email lists? Where do you get them?
• What about growing my blog followers?
• This book tour link is digital gold...how do I use it?
• Where do you take a link when it gives 6+ hours of entertainment for free?

I might take a blogging break next week because this last week was lots of work.

Something different today. Some professional development. Brendan Kane is a viral marketing expert and authored a book: One Million Followers: How I built a Massive Social Following in 30 Days

He has been a guest on tons of podcasts. Our plan is much smaller...5K followers in 60 days...we can pull strategy from here though and our goal is very realistic. The goal isn't always revenue. Sometimes the goal is something like "get me 1,000,000 followers so I can leverage that into an agent". This is not so different from the pitch we are making now. I have completely abandoned revenue in the short-term and moved our goals to easier to target viral goals rallied around free content. There are some really good quotes from the podcast I listened too. This guy has worked with the best of the best and knows his way around social media marketing.

Here are my podcast notes:

"I am of the mindset that I constantly want to try things, learn and experiment."

"How can I apply my top tier corporate ideas used for Microsoft, MTV, Taylor Swift, to someone starting from zero"

"Brand credibility. What is your long-term play? Is your platform achieving this?"

• To build an audience we can leverage into an agent
• To ensure Someone's Story and Pulse sell for years to come

"The idea of creating content is overwhelming to most people. If you are doing it, you are already in front of the herd."

"I hate social media. What do I do? Learn it but then don't do it. Outsource it."

How to use LinkedIn for cold outreaches...
similar to what we are doing on Instagram now...and what I will do for agents in a few months...don't sell, provide value...what is the person on the other side of the table trying to get out of this? This is just common sense. Who is this person? What do they need? How can I craft a message to them? This works at a high-level but how do you do this at a micro-level when you don't have time. Try to craft a message that gives the person on the other end value. For out platform, the value right now is we are giving a free book. 5 or so hours of entertainment. The pitch I give to agents, partners, creators, is way different than the pitch I give to a regular person. The regular person basically gets spam pitch. I try to make it a little personal buy including the person you connected us though. The bigger pitch is to go into the person's history. Look at what they have done. Highlight 2-3 successes and spin why you can add value to their platform.

"Are you moving them emotionally? Is there social currency? Is the product so good that you compel them to share it? Early people you share it with feel like they discovered you, and they feel good to get the message out."

His core 3 steps:

1.) "Define your Why?"
#bookstagram
#mentalhealth
#covid-19???
#Canadian
#author

2.) Competitive Analysis
"Who is in your market? Who is successfully reaching their audience? Who isn't? What is the difference between a person failing and a person succeeding? Where do you fall between them? What can you do differently?"
I believe we are ahead of the indie author pack already with our recent bookstagram success. We are behind the top-level authors and bookstagrammers because we are still immature and spammy on our platform. I think we need to remain spammy for a few more weeks to grow the platform more, then pivot to be more like the A+ accounts we are targeting (John Green, Jennifer Niven, & 50K follower Bookstagrammers)

3.) Test
Always learn and change. Adapt. Put things out there that are different to gauge the different reactions. Constantly pay attention to what the top posters are doing. Evolve your platform every 2-3 weeks.

"How do you do this from a small business perspective? I don't have the resources to do this myself. Learn as much as you can on your own before you outsource. How do you know if the person helping you is doing a good job if you don't understand the platform yourself? How do you set goals if you don't understand the how? As someone providing this service, how are you helping the person on the other side of the table get to their goal?"

"What metrics should you use? Follows, likes, comments, shares"
The more people that engage with your post, the more reach you get. The social feed is the holy grail of all these companies. You need to rank in the first 30 minutes to get the preferential treatment. Tag people. Respond to all comments. Ask a question to spark a response. DM known fans to get them to post. Sometimes it is as simple as asking the right question. It doesn't have to be fancy. One good question with 10-20 quick comments could start the spread.

"Content is king. There is a preference towards video but if you are an amazing writer, you have to write. If you are an amazing photographer, take pictures." If you are not good on camera, it won't work so stick to what you are best at. Don't waste time forcing yourself to do something you are not great at because the content will be bad. Keep putting out amazing content and try to grow yourself on a secondary channel/account for these other soft skills."

I will be checking out the podcast, always good to brush up on the skills and always open to different approaches. Congrats on your platform it looks like you are getting traction slowly.