In this episode of the Book Launch Show we chat to Valerie about the updates she has made to her website in the last week. She has been changing things up a bit and streamlining everything to better serve her work and direct her audience in fewer directions. We discuss functionality, tag lines, how best to house links and email signup spots. After a week of intensive work on the site Valerie has a few questions about when a section is done and she should move on to the next task and the message here is just to keep everything as practical and simple as possible, don’t waste amounts of time finessing the details! The discussion also covers auto-responders and email funnels, avoiding splitting your audience and how inspiring a completed task like your website can feel. We finish off with some thoughts from Tim on the place of marketing and web strategies for someone aiming for a life writing, so for all this and a bunch more, listen in!
Key Points From This Episode:
- Valerie’s thoughts on the current state of her website.
- Positives from Tim about how clear and functional the site is now.
- A few pointers about a name and tagline moving forward.
- People love to click on pictures!
- Adding another email signup link.
- Knowing when something is done and moving onto the next.
- Strategies for auto-responders.
- The three different emails in your initial funnel.
- Keeping it clear and simple and not splitting your audience.
- The great boost that finishing a website can give your creativity.
- The reality of writers having to market themselves.
- And much more!
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
Tim Grahl — https://booklaunch.com/
Tim on Twitter — https://twitter.com/timgrahl
Valerie Francis — https://valeriefrancis.ca/
Valerie on Twitter — https://twitter.com/valerie_francis
The Story Grid Editor Roundtable Podcast — https://valeriefrancis.ca/podcast/
Running Down a Dream — https://www.amazon.com/Running-Down-Dream-Winning-Creative/dp/1936891557
Masquerade — https://www.amazon.com/Masquerade-Part-Robin-St-Croix-ebook/dp/B01LYUZBZV
AWeber — https://www.aweber.com/
MailChimp — https://mailchimp.com/
ConvertKit — https://convertkit.com/
[0:00:00.3] TG: Hello, the book launch show, this is Tim Grahl. In this episode, we’re mainly going over Valerie’s website. We’re going to go through her website, look at how it could be a little bit better, how some things can be changed, But towards the end of the episode, we start talking about something and I kind of want to hit on it here. You might get a double dose of this topic.
You know, I talk a lot about marketing. I obviously think it’s important, my living for the past decade, helping authors build their platforms, connect with readers and sell more books. You’re listening to this podcast because you obviously want to learn how to launch and market your book.
One thing I think is important that I need to say from time to time is I understand as much as I talk about it and it’s so important and every author should be doing it and every author should be building an email list and all these kind of stuff. I understand that this is not the thing. You know, this is not why you got into all of this stuff. You want to be a writer, you want to publish a book that goes out into the world and sells a lot of copies.
I feel like it’s important for me to say from time to time that even thought this is all I talk about and it’s so important, I understand this isn’t a thing. This is not why you got into this, it’s just something you have to do in order to be a writer. Which is the marketing, whether you’re traditionally published, you’re self-published, the marketing onus is on you. That’s just how the world works.
I’m here to help you do that better and help you find success. I never sit around thinking like, the book marketing is the most important thing in the world. I’m a writer too, I have three books of my own. Working on two more. It’s about the writing. I want to write my next book, I want to write the best book I possibly can.
Then I do the marketing as a necessary thing as a writer nowadays. Talk a little bit about that and I just want to hit on that again as you think about the marketing and as you get into all this stuff, it can be time consuming, especially as you’re getting everything setup like your website. But the goal is to get it set up, get it working and then stop messing with it so you can do other things like outreach and writing your next book. Anyway, that’s the episode, that’s what we go over in this episode. So I think you’ll really like it.
This podcast is all about marketing, launching your book. But if you’re an author and you have a book, book coming out, book already out, you’re doing something special, you’re doing something that most people are afraid to do in my opinion. They’re actually going after that thing that they want. Everybody says they want to write a book, you’ve actually done it, you’re actually doing it, what that means is that you have a dream that you’re trying to accomplish.
You have this idea, the kind of writer you want to be, the kind of life you want to live, the kind of artist you want to be. I wrote my book Running Down a Dream: Your Roadmap to Winning Creative Battles for people just like you. Based on my last decade of overcoming my creative battles of being stuck in the mud, stuck feeling like I’m always going to be a failure, stuff feeling like this thing that I want is stupid and never going to happen.
I wrote this book to share the true journey of what this looks like, a lot of self-help books, a lot of books about creativity, they kind of share, “Ah, what was really hard and then look at all the awesome stuff I learned”. This book is different. It will walk you through what I think the real story of running down a dream really looks like. I put everything in there and on top of that, I put the tools I learned along the way. If you know anything about me and my work, you know I can’t help but be practical.
I took that story of running down my dream, of chasing what I wanted in life of overcoming creative battles and I broke it down into really practical tools that you can apply to overcome your own creative demons. Running Down a Dream is out now to Amazon and all the other different places that you can buy books. It’s available on audiobook, ebook and paperback.
Check it out, buy a copy, share it with a friend and it’s a great way to support this show, thanks.
[INTRO]
[0:04:33.1] ANNOUNCER: Welcometo the Book Launch Podcast, helping authors launch and market their books.
[EPISODE]
[0:04:42.6] VF: Hello Tim.
[0:04:44.5] TG: Hello Valerie.
[0:04:45.3] VF: How are you?
[0:04:46.9] TG: I am hanging in there, we had our school canceled here in Nashville for probably less than a half inch of snow.
[0:04:55.0] VF: You amateurs.
[0:04:58.2] TG: I’m sure it just drives people like you crazy.
[0:05:01.6] VF: Yes, yes it does. I am a little bit jealous though all the same. Okay, my homework last week was to finish my website because I had just started revising last week and also, to do some research on podcasts. I spent most of the week on the website, it was a big project. First, let’s look at that, how is it looking, what needs to still be done, does it look okay?
[0:05:35.0] TG: How do you feel about it?
[0:05:37.6] VF: I like it. I think it’s clean, I think people can see the information easily, it’s obviously a novelist’s website. I didn’t put an about tab on the top so the tabs across the top of our home, books, for writers and contact. Because it seemed redundant. I do have on my editing page, a CV, kind of a CV, that I came up with based on the types of questions that clients would ask before they hired me, things they wanted to know my experience and so on.
Also, my media kit is a really high level ‘about’. Just down in the footer, you can see under the footer there’s a bunch of tabs. Under media, there is an about tab and – or an about option, that actually points to my media kit because that’s – I mean, you know. How many times do I need to have it on my site?
I think it’s fine, I have a couple of sub menus which I think keep it clean while still making it easy for people to find what they’re looking for. I’ve got a books tab and under that I have the four genres that I’m writing in.
Love stories for busy women, middle grade fantasy thrillers and books for writers. Then I have a ‘for writers’ tab so that would be where my clients would go or people interested in becoming clients and under that, I have a tab for ‘editing’, there’s the ‘client portal’, there are articles and ‘books for writers’. That book’s for writers is the same page that is under the books tab.
[0:07:12.1] TG: Okay.
[0:07:12.6] VF: What do you think about that?
[0:07:15.0] TG: I think overall, it looks really good, there’s a couple – the way that I look at websites is I’m just very practical. I don’t really care how it looks, I’m not really going to aesthetically tweak it or anything, I think most of the time, that’s a waste of time. I think it looks fine. That’s not me saying like it looks horrible but I’m not going to say anything, I think it looks fine. Mainly when I’m looking, because my thing is that there’s a lot of really successful websites that look like shit.
The idea that everything has to be beautiful, the only people I ever hear really say that are like designers and stuff. I focus mainly on is it accomplishing the goals that we needed to accomplish? Overall, I think it looks really good, I like that you have the banner with the books at the top. I like that you have the email signup very clear, the email signups on every page, you know.
I think most of the home page was already there when we looked at it last. I think the top is very clean with the new navigation, you have four options instead of, I think, eight or nine so I think that’s really good, you know, the footer looks great, overall, I think it looks great. Two things I think it’s missing. One is, you don’t have your name or anything in the top header, you just have like the logo.
[0:08:52.7] VF: Right.
[0:08:53.9] TG: Am I seeing that right? I honestly wondered if maybe I was like I hadn’t loaded a new style sheet or something but is that right?
[0:09:00.6] VF: That’s right because that’s a new logo and so he sent that over to me and as soon as I uploaded it, I said, my name isn’t there. He’s actually doing a version of that with my name.
[0:09:10.3] TG: Okay and are you putting anything under your name like almost like a tag line?
[0:09:14.4] VF: No, what I had last time, I mean, I can just type it in on the site but it just kind of floats in space up there. That’s why he was going to make it part of the logo. What I had last time was ‘author and certified story grid editor’. But I didn’t have like author of love stories for busy women or anything like that. What kind of tag line were you thinking?
[0:09:35.6] TG: Something like that. Because that was my second critique was this doesn’t say what you do.
[0:09:41.8] VF: Right, the love stories for busy women, like on my desktop anyway, I have to scroll to get to that part.
[0:09:47.7] TG: Right. The problem is too, if I randomly find myself on like your media kit —
[0:09:56.1] VF: Yeah.
[0:09:56.5] TG: I have no idea what this site is about, right? I agree, I think it would all be solved if next to the logo it said Valerie Francis in big letters and then right underneath it, you know, have your designer add it to the image so it’s all one image, a little tag line that says author, what did you say?
[0:10:18.7] VF: Author of love stories for busy women.
[0:10:20.5] TG: Yeah. Just have that underneath, that way, no matter what page I land on, no matter where I’m at, with your site, that header stays there if I scroll. I’ll always like immediately know what website I’m at, I’m at the website of Valerie Francis who writes love stories for women in a hurry.
[0:10:39.4] VF: Okay.
[0:10:41.5] TG: My only two critiques are really, you need your name on here and you need the tag line and that will solve both of those.
[0:10:48.9] VF: Okay.
[0:10:50.3] TG: I think overall, it’s really good. I mean, there’s other little things like if I click on the banner for Masquerade, I don’t think it goes anywhere.
[0:10:58.8] VF: No it doesn’t.
[0:10:59.4] TG: I don’t think that’s a link. People love to click on pictures.
[0:11:03.5] VF: Okay.
[0:11:05.2] TG: We actually did a test early on when we were first kind of doing a lot of author websites and people click pictures. You know, in the side bar where you might have like a headshot and like the start of a bio and read more. People will ignore the read more, ignore the author name and just click on the picture assuming that’s what they need to click on.
[0:11:27.1] VF: Okay.
[0:11:28.4] TG: People don’t really tend to read websites, they tend to just kind of scan them and randomly click on things and the most likely thing for them to click on is an image. The image for Masquerade needs to go to whatever the Masquerade is.
[0:11:46.9] VF: To buy it?
[0:11:48.0] TG: Well, do you have a page on your website for that book?
[0:11:50.5] VF: I do, if you go to under books, tab, if you hit love stories for busy women.
[0:11:55.9] TG: Yeah, you should just take it to this page.
[0:11:58.1] VF: Okay.
[0:12:00.4] TG: The first thing people – if they’re interested in that, they’re going to click on the picture and then wonder why it doesn’t take them where they need to go.
[0:12:09.2] VF: Okay.
[0:12:09.9] TG: One other – I keep saying it’s fine and then there’s one more thing. One other thing I’d say is on ‘the love stories for busy women’ page. You have everything there. I would put just like particularly on this page, an email signup for the first part.
[0:12:36.4] VF: Okay, it’s in the footer. You think it should be up higher?
[0:12:39.7] TG: It is, it should be up higher because they’re on the page for the book.
[0:12:43.8] VF: okay.
[0:12:44.3] TG: You could say hey, the first book in the series were free by clicking here and then, or like filling this out or something. I would put it under where it says Masquerade is a love story in 12 parts, each part is a length of a glass of wine, a soak in the tub or commute home.
Just put it right underneath there. Immediately download part one for free by joining the email list or something like that.
[0:13:09.2] VF: Okay.
[0:13:10.6] TG: That way, because I like that they can click on them and then it goes to that bookstoread.com that Mark talked about. I think that’s great for each one but if you can get them on the email list, I think that would be good.
[0:13:22.8] VF: Okay.
[0:13:23.9] TG: Really, it looks great, it’s such a step forward, it’s so much more clear. I like that you still have this stuff about adding on there but it doesn’t seem so overwhelming.
[0:13:33.9] VF: Right, well last time it was an editing website.
[0:13:38.1] TG: Right. I think – now, you just have one site that you’re maintaining, one site that you’re promoting, you know, every promotion you do, you can just send people to Valeriefrancis.ca. Even if you’re doing a promotion for your editing, you just send them to the same website and say, click on four writers. It will just make your life so much easier to have one website where everything is.
[0:14:02.6] VF: I have a question. If we go to the back to the books page, we just did ‘love stories for busy women’, if you go to the middle grade fantasy, should I set that page up then the way you just suggested I do it for the love stories?
Because I also have, there’s a prequel teaser for the series that people can download for free and the option to do that again is at the bottom of the page, underneath the tag line.
[0:14:30.3] TG: Yeah, I would do it at the top, yeah. Right there at the top. I really like these covers by the way, I think they look great.
[0:14:36.9] VF: Thank you. This is all part of it, I got new covers for everything. I’ve been working, I’ve been busy bee behind the scenes.
[0:14:44.1] TG: Yeah, it looks great. I just keep thinking, this is going to make your life easier, not having a pen name, you know? Having one website to maintain because really, I mean, the goal is once the website’s done, you just don’t mess with it anymore.
[0:15:01.0] VF: Right.
[0:15:02.5] TG: Your job now is to promote it.
[0:15:03.9] VF: Right. Then the other two pages, ‘thriller’ and ‘books for writers’. These both have books on them that I am still working on. Them that I’m still working on, right? Like the books for writer for example. My Story Grid guide which is not out yet. And the thriller is, well, the thriller that I’m writing on.
On those two pages, again, at the bottom, I have like on the thriller page, tell me when the book’s published. Now, I don’t like that as a hook. I would one, like your thoughts on it and two, I assume I will do the same as I just did for the other two pages which is at have an option for them to stay up to date on everything, write under the tag line, right?
[0:15:50.2] TG: Yes.
[0:15:50.4] VF: Okay.
[0:15:52.7] TG: But do it quickly, I mean, you’re not going to get a ton of people coming to this page and signing up to be notified when the thriller’s available unless like, you have some particular promotion about this thing. Does that make sense?
[0:16:06.6] VF: Right, well I have templates now created for this site so it’s just a matter of loading the template in, thank God. These types of changes are I can do in an evening, it’s no big deal.
[0:16:19.6] TG: Yeah, I love how you made the banner across the top of each page match the page. Again, I think this looks really good.
[0:16:28.7] VF: Awesome. What do you think about that line, ‘tell me when the book is published’?
[0:16:32.6] TG: I think just you know, something like you know, maybe you could say, ‘be the first to read it’ or I don’t’ know, I mean, Ii don’t hate that it says notify when published but I think if you had something that’s like, really, I don’t think it matters.
[0:16:54.2] VF: Okay.
TG: I feel like whatever you want to put there, I don’t think it’s a big deal because at this point, you know, people are really digging in to what you’re doing if they get to this page and they want to sign up to be notified about what you’re working on with the thriller.
[0:17:13.1] VF: Well, this is a really interesting point because obviously I’ve been deep into this for the whole week. There were times when I was thinking, okay, is this fine now? Am I going too far? Do I let it go and move on to the next thing?
Because it’s really hard to know that sometimes when you start to become a perfectionist and look at every little thing. That’s why when I typed that, I just sort of stuck it in there as a place holder. I thought, I don’t know, maybe it’s fine, maybe it’s not, I’ll just ask Tim. I’ll just see what he thinks.
[0:17:48.5] TG: I know how that feels, I mean, I do that to myself all the time. Usually it’s not this stuff, it’s other stupid useless stuff but yeah. I think, I would never think this one, just stick whatever in there that matters. Just think about, if you went in and looked at your analytics a month from now, you know, probably half a percent of the people that came to the site ended up on this page.
Once you’re digging in deep into a site like that, I just don’t worry too much about if everything’s perfect.
[0:18:28.7] VF: Okay.
[0:18:29.4] TG: You know, you got the home page locked down, you know, you got your books page locked down, we got your love story page locked down. Now, once you come out with the book, you want to dial it in, if you’re doing specific promotion for the book but for now I think it’s fine.
[0:18:43.3] VF: Yeah, that won’t happen this year. I’m still writing it this year, so I don’t have to worry about that now. Okay, the only thing, once I make those few little changes, the only thing left for me to do is to update my auto responders because if someone subscribes right now, they’ll get an email back from Robin St. Croix.
I remember when I was writing the auto responders. I really did not know what to put in those messages. Somewhere along the line in your material, I don’t know where it came from because I just sort of printed it of a long time ago and put it in with my materials. You had outlined a strategy for auto responders. Can you walk through that with me now?
[0:19:29.5] TG: Yeah. When we think about auto responders, again, you know, let’s back up and look at what we’re trying to accomplish with them. First of all, for people that don’t know, auto responders are emails that automatically get sent when somebody takes in action. I think I start getting caught up in my own head because it’s changed over the years because our capabilities of what we can do but in general, the idea here is, when somebody signs up for your email list, you send them a series of emails to kind of welcome them to the email list.
There’s two basic types of emails, you know, one would be a campaign or a broadcast email where you send it once and it goes out to everybody on your list at that time. If I’m your list, I get it, if I’m not on your list at that point, I don’t get it, right? If you send an email today, I sign up for your list tomorrow, I never see that email.
Auto responders are different, they get sent automatically based on when people sign up for the email list. If I sign up today, I get the first email today, maybe the second email tomorrow, the third email, the next day. But if I sign up two days from now, I get the first one that day then the next day and the next day.
The idea here is, we do auto responders because we want to welcome people to the email list and kind of get them up to speed on who you are and what you’re doing. Because people could have randomly googled something to find your website. They may be heard you on a podcast but don’t really know who you are and what you do and now they’re on your website.
Or maybe they just – somebody recommended your book and they ended up on your website and now, they don’t really know who you are but they wanted the free book so they signed up. You can’t assume that because somebody’s on your email list, they know who you are or even remember who you are. Somebody joins your email list, they never hear from you and then in three months, you send them an email, they will not even remember who you are that they signed up for your email list.
The idea here is to welcome people to the email list and get them up to speed on who you are and what you do. I recommend you start, there’s a couple of different things. I recommend you start with three emails and they’re accomplishing three different things. The first email is delivering on the promise. Whatever you promised them when they signed up for your email list, right?
In your case, it would be part one of Masquerade but if it’s a PDF, if it’s a free book, if it’s a video series, whatever, the first thing you have to do is follow through on the premise. In the first email, you say, here’s your download, right? You would say, okay, here is the first part of the masquerade series, you can read it here.
Then, the second email and we can talk more about what goes into each one but the goal of each email. The first email, they should get it as soon as they sign up for your email list, as soon as they subscribe to your email list, they immediately get an email from you with the link to download the free book. Then two days later, send in the second email, the goal of this email is to introduce them to you some more about you and your work.
This is where I like to put in three links. The first link would be your website, “Hey, there’s more stuff on my website, you can read more about me here.” The second would be some sort of social media connection. Hey, you can you know, join my Facebook groups here, you can follow me on Twitter here, you can sign up for my Instagram here.
Again, it’s not so much getting social media followers because we’ve talked adnauseum about that. It’s more of like hey, I’m a human, I do a lot of stuff, here’s more ways to see stuff that I do. That’s the first two links, website, social media and then the third one I like to link to something I’ve done that’s not on my own website.
You could link to a podcast interview you’ve done, you could link to a review of your books, you could link to a guest post, you could link to an interview as a blog post for if you did a written interview somewhere, something where it shows that you’re doing something other than just on your own website.
Again, the goal of this email is to just let them get to know you a little bit more and ground you in their mind a little bit more about the fact that who you are, why they signed up for the email list, that sort of thing. Go ahead, do you have a question?
[0:24:16.2] VF: Should that something, since they signed up for a work of fiction, that something should be in the realm of fiction. Other things I’m doing in fiction, right? Not any of the editing stuff.
[0:24:28.7] TG: Right, I mean, I go back to you know, we’ve decided that for the time being, you’re going to really focus in on building an audience around women or fiction for women in a hurry.
[0:24:41.9] VF: Right.
[0:24:44.6] TG: Everything is pointed towards that. Now, what you may want to do and again, this is one of those things, in the future, you could have something where you have a separate list on your for writer’s section where people could sign up and then they might get a separate auto responder series.
[0:25:02.7] VF: Right.
[0:25:03.5] TG: But we are talking about your main website auto responder series and as far as they are concerned, the only thing you do is write fiction for women in a hurry.
[0:25:15.7] VF: Okay.
[0:25:17.7] TG: And that’s really important that that becomes who you are publicly and everything you do is pointed towards that. Because you don’t want to split your own audience and again, this is why when I started the Story Grid Podcast, I forgot how – it was almost a year I think before I talked about the fact that I did other things, you know what I mean? Because when I am on – and I never mentioned, I forget, it was a very long time before I mentioned the Story Grid Podcast on my book marketing stuff.
And when I went public like if I was on a podcast or speaking somewhere, I never talked about the Story Grid stuff. Because I didn’t want people to get confused about who I am. Now I am completely falling apart right now in that area of my life but I am actually working on fixing it. I made some decisions to fix it because it is causing me trouble.
If you do three different things then according to everybody listening, you do nothing. So yeah, absolutely it should be somewhere where you were interviewed as the author, as the fiction author. If you don’t have something specific to women’s fiction, it needs to be something about your writing — your writing not your editing or anything like that.
[0:26:44.7] VF: Okay.
[0:26:45.5] TG: So that’s the second email and then the third email is when you actually get them to buy something. So this is where like for you specifically, it is like, “Hey I sent you that first part of the book. I really hoped you like it. You know here is the link to go buy the second part.” Or here is the link to go buy the whole series and specifically ask them to buy a copy of the book. So a lot of times we get trapped in this idea because we are scared of marketing.
That we need to give them a lot of free stuff for a really long time before we ever ask them to buy anything and unfortunately, it just doesn’t work that way and I know this from personal experience because I did that for much too long and it just doesn’t work that way. One of the examples I use is like, you know when you walk into Walmart, they don’t try to be really nice to you and give you a bunch of stuff so that maybe in a couple of weeks, you will come back and buy something.
You know now it is a little different because you have years and years of branding that we know what we are getting but that is not how business is done. It is like, “Hey, buy this thing,” you know what I mean?
[0:28:03.5] VF: Right.
[0:28:04.5] TG: So it is really important that because now within four days you have asked them to buy something or within five days I think. Go ahead.
[0:28:13.4] VF: So the third email then is another two days? So you send –
[0:28:17.4] TG: Yeah.
[0:28:18.2] VF: Okay, email one is the day they sign up plus two days is email two, plus four days is email three.
[0:28:24.8] TG: Correct.
[0:28:25.8] VF: All right, now how do you ask them to buy? “Here is the link to book two, you can go get it now.” I don’t know.
[0:28:35.8] TG: Yeah again, I would just keep it really conversational: “Hi Valerie. A few days ago, you signed up for my email list, you downloaded the first part of my series, Masquerade. I really hope you enjoyed it.
If you want the next part, I have that available now. I think you should go buy a copy right now. Click here to buy it at Amazon. Click here to buy it here. I really hope you enjoy it. I would love to hear what you think of it,” or ask them.
You know whatever it is, just keep it very conversational but you know, “I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, here is how to get the next part.”
[0:29:16.6] VF: Okay, all right. That sounds easy enough.
[0:29:19.6] TG: Yeah and so now with any – you know you are on AWeber, right?
[0:29:26.3] VF: I am, yes.
[0:29:27.3] TG: Right, so they have auto responders but those are whether you are MailChimp, whether you are using ConvertKit, whatever it is they all have the technology and you can just go to the support files for you particular one and set those up but yeah, so the first one immediately. Deliver on the promise, “Hey, thanks for signing up. Here is the download.” And usually on the second email, I’d also put the link to the download.
So I am like, “Hey, you signed up for my email list a couple of days ago. I sent you that first part. If you missed it, click here to download it. Also I wanted to let you know how you can find out a little bit more about my writing” or whatever, “Here’s three links that I think you’ll love,” you know website, social media, interview somewhere else, “Thanks again for being a part of the list. I’ll talk to you soon.”
And then the last email is, “Hey, a few days ago you signed up for it. I sent you the download. If you missed that here it is. I really hope you are enjoying it and if you want to jump into the next part of the series, you can buy that now here, here and here. Thanks so much let me know what you think about the book once you read it. I will talk to you soon.”
And then after that, I just put them in my big bucket of email list subscribers that if you are doing the send an email every two weeks or whatever, they’ll just start getting that email.
[0:30:54.4] VF: Okay. Okay that makes sense.
[0:30:58.0] TG: So straight forward simple and what I think is really important is within the first week of them joining your email list, you ask them to buy something. You know you gave them the thing you promised. You followed up to give them more content and then you ask them to buy something.
[0:31:15.4] VF: Okay that is pretty straight forward. I can do that.
[0:31:19.1] TG: Okay.
[0:31:19.5] VF: Yay, I am going to be so happy when this site is finished.
[0:31:22.3] TG: Yeah because then you get to do fun stuff that I feel like doing this kind of stuff gets you to neutral, right?
[0:31:30.4] VF: Exactly. Well I had such a hodgepodge of stuff when we started that sort of step one for me was getting focused, getting a strategy and getting all of the content that I had currently organized. So now that that’s just about done, I can now start going out and working on the outreach.
[0:31:55.7] TG: Yeah, you know I feel like one, having all that stuff be so random creates this mental overhead that you avoid working on it which we’ve talked about and the other thing that it does once it’s done is it like you can’t now fiddle with your website to distract yourself from doing something actually useful, right?
Because your website is done, there is nothing else to do. You could fiddle with it but you know you are just wasting time because the website is done and it’s fine. So now that whole thing of like, “Well I need to work on my website.” It’s like no, you don’t because it is done and it’s fine.
[0:32:41.0] VF: All week I have been thinking to myself, “I just want to get this site done so I can get back to writing.” Because this took me away from my writing and I mean I don’t dislike working on the website but it is not my favorite. You know I prefer to write. Yeah, exactly. I didn’t want to be a website designer, I want to be a writer okay.
[0:32:59.4] TG: Yeah and I think it that is important too because it is like, just what you said that in a perfect world, you would have a publisher that publishes your books and markets them for you and because I actually – I don’t know if we have talked about this but I believe that authors should not have to market their own work. I feel like that’s the publisher’s job.
The publisher should be filling that role for their authors. But, long ago, they abdicated that so you’re stuck. You’ve got to do it yourself whether you’re traditionally publish, you’re self-published, the marketing is on your shoulders. Now, when we do the marketing, even though I talk so much about marketing, it’s how I make a living, all this kind of stuff.
I still understand it is not the thing. The writing is the thing. That’s why, that’s another reason why get it done, get it good enough and then stop screwing with it because you have other things to do.
[0:34:06.2] VF: That’s right. This will be done before I go to bed tonight. I am telling you. I will be very happy when it’s finished.
[0:34:13.2] TG: Good.
[0:34:12.7] VF: Okay. Then why don’t we leave our conversation for the podcasts for next week because that’s a whole other topic and it will be great to focus in on that next week.
[0:34:25.0] TG: That sounds good.
[0:34:25.9] VF: All right, thank you so much Tim, I really appreciate this.
[0:34:29.1] TG: Yup, thanks Valerie.
[END OF EPISODE]
[0:34:30.4] TG: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Book Launch Show. For all the past episodes, the show notes, or to connect with me, you can go to booklaunchshow.com. I have dozens of free book marketing resources and articles that you can access at my website booklaunch.com.
Lastly, if you like to support the show, you can do that by telling another author about the show and by visiting us on Apple Podcast and leaving a rating and review. Thanks for subscribing and being a part of our work here at booklaunch.com. We will see you next week.
[END]
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