At the beginning of August, my wife and I decided we were going to move the authoring business into a higher gear, rely on it for paying us back some of the treasure we’d already given the business, and to start focusing on making more money than we have just publishing one book a year.
We’ve done well since 2011, but we felt it was time to put more on the earning potentials and refocus our marketing and business insight from publishing books to building our email list and direct contact with fans.
That doesn’t seem like a major change, but it is. There’s a sense in the indie publishing community that the more and faster you write and publish the more you will make. In a sense, that does have some merit. You will earn exponentially more with two books than with one. Three more than with two. But, there’s no scale to that growth. I have found that with four five distinct novels out and a box set, I do earn more than I did two years ago, but it is painfully slow growth and I rarely see it scale well.
What we have done is this: bought a premium course from an indie author and marketer Nick Stephenson, moved our blog site from WordPress.com to a WordPress.org hosted site with SiteGround.com, upgraded my MailChimp account to paid to get the mail automations, and built out a domain with email services, DNS, and ability to host landing pages for collecting email sign ups.
There is a good change in thinking involved with this. I’ve spent the last month and a quarter building out all of this (still working on other pieces of the puzzle) and have not done as much on the publishing front. I released the murder mystery and have another two books in the process of final editing.
It has run a little counterintuitive to not spend more time writing at the moment. Yet, I do understand that the time I’m spending now on getting my platform and branding going will pay off later.
Here is the link that started this all. I’ll post more as I go along and get into how I’ve made some changes, where they were made, and other things as I go along. These videos are free and a good look at a process that focuses on your best direct contact with fans and ones that will buy each book you write.
Full disclosure, this is the course my wife and I decided to buy.