Book Marketing For Authors Blog 2- Making Money

Making Money

 

To make money with a side-hustle or even the main-hustle of being an Indie Author, we have to consider what Stephen Covey said about starting with the end in mind. We can’t just wander around this field of Self-Authorship aimlessly as if it was just a hobby. Hobbies are fun, but they usually don’t make us any money. Yet, many of us authors treat our authoring business as if it was just a hobby. Then we wonder why we’re not making any money soon after the elation of being published wears off. “Why don’t they like me and my book?” we begin to wonder.

Let me give you an example of what Stephen Covey means by starting with the end in mind that every one of us can understand. The truth is that we all already innately and deeply understand how to begin with the end in mind, even if we don’t know it yet…

Remember when we were little kids, and we were sitting in a booth at a restaurant with our parents? Do you recall how we sipped our drink waiting for our food to come? Our parents reminded us not to drink all of our drink before the food arrived. Or we wouldn’t have anything to drink with our dinner? I’m pretty sure your memory just drifted back to doodling on those little table placemats at restaurants. We all played crossword puzzles. We did tic-tack-toe with our family. And we twisted and turned our way through those little mazes on those small placemats to kill time while waiting for our food.

Guess what? This is where our inner genius came into play all those years ago though those little mazes. We probably looked at the starting point on the maze. Then we looked at the finishing point. Then we most likely started our maze journey right there at the end and worked our way back to the beginning. It was just easier to do it that way, wasn’t it? Hey, I’m telling you right now, we haven’t lost that skill to work backwards. We can still start at the end as adult Indie Authors. We can still start at the end with our little side-hustle in making money in the self-publishing world.

One obvious place where we adult authors are failing to start at the end is our websites. We have way too many goals with our website. When people land on our site, they don’t know what to do next. And even worse, many times we don’t know exactly what they should do next, either. Yeah, we can say we want them to do, A, B, C, and D. As in, we want them to order books. Hire us to give a speech. We want to coach them. We want to be a consultant. And our list goes on and on, and on. It’s too much for the typical person. They will be overwhelmed, and they won’t know what to do next. They will most likely leave our websites and maybe never come back.

One way to start with the end in mind, like Stephen Covey preaches, is to use a landing page for our website. A landing page will bring traffic to our website with only one goal in mind. Depending which offer engaged them, once they click on that link, the landing page will bring them to only one specific spot on our websites. This landing page will ask them to do only one thing. It will give them information on that one thing, and then ask them to click on just one thing. This solves the problem of people being overwhelmed and thus doing nothing by starting with the end in mind, so hopefully, we’ll have a better chance of making some money.

To make money in this profession and to guard ourselves from falling back into that hobby trap where we don’t make money, we need to keep the end in mind. What are we trying to accomplish whenever we’re writing our books, articles, blogs, speeches, videos, webinars, and everything else we will eventually do? If we don’t think about this? Then what we do is a fun hobby, but not really a business where we can make any real money… We need to always ask “WHY” when we are about to invest more of our time into something.

If this writing endeavor is a business rather than a hobby for us, then we have to make money. Companies make money, or they fail. Business success is about more than just looking good and patting ourselves on the back. It’s also about more than others patting us on the back and winning a few awards. Businesses make money, or they stop existing. Their end goal is in some way tied to making money. Is ours? Is yours?

Don’t get all noble on me because you’re an author who writes for the love of writing. If businesses don’t make money, then they can’t keep providing the services for people that they help. If we, as authors, don’t make money, then the ability we have to serve others through our books and services is limited, too. Our time is running out as writing hobbyist. We won’t be able to do this for free forever. And then we also, as authors, who make the world a better place, will cease to exist. How sad… don’t you agree?

Now, find a way to go make some money you noble author who is also now a businessman or businesswoman! We’re not just writers. We’re authorpreneurs!

*Watch this FREE video lesson on this chapter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlrhLS0_5Tk

 

             

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