In this episode, we look at what it means to do a book sales makeover and what is involved. What elements do we look at? Titles, content, marketing materials, covers, calls to action and more. Where do you start first so that you don’t get overwhelmed? What does it mean to start at the end and then work your way back? What is the most challenging part of this process, and how do you tackle this?

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Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 015: How to do a Book Sales Makeover

Crystal: Hey there, strategic authorpreneurs I’m Crystal Hunt.

Michele: and I am Michele Amitrani. We’re here to help you save time, money and energy, as you level up your writing career.

Crystal: Welcome to episode 15 of the strategic authorpreneur podcast. On today’s show, we’re going to walk you through the process of doing a book sales makeover. But first, what have you been up to this past week to Michele?

What has happened since the last episode?

Michele: Reading as most of the time I like to brag about that. Can I say that I brag a lot about being able to, you know, reading a lot of stuff? And sure enough, I do have another book recommendation for you today. And this is from a good friend of mine.

The name is Eileen Cook and she was one of the guests of this podcast. And the title of the book is Build Better Characters and I am half way throw it. And I have to say it is really great. We have, as authors, I found at least that’s, that’s something that happens to me. There’s a lot of problem when it comes to creating a characters

And I would say the science of creating characters. And this book really is about all the background work that there is in creating a believable character, and there are so many good suggestions on how to make your main character, your, secondary characters. Every single person in your book stands out, look, feels like it’s more like a person you can talk to.

And there are so many things like, like for example, emotional intelligence and stuff like that, that I didn’t know about. And, if you are interested in really crafting more believable characters, go deep into the psychology of each and every one of them and to really craft the backstory that will make you, I would say, know them better.

I do suggest this book it’s really, really I think you would say it knocks it out of the park. Yes. It’s really, it’s really that good. It’s really that great. An the fact that Eileen also did work in this field in psychology field for us, people that, went to like catastrophic injuries or some major mental things, makes this book even more interesting because she can offer so many examples of what happened to her. And some of them are so vivid and every single time I rethink of them. I now know. Okay. So that’s must be one of the reasons why, the ability that she has to building characters, whi is so good and so strong.

So definitely a recommendation. That’s something I have definitely been a dedicating a lot of time. Build Better characters by Eileen Cook. Please do read it. It’s really good.

Crystal: And what are you writing right now? Since I’m your accountability buddy I’m just throwing that out there.

Michele: We’re going to have a discussion after this live thing. I am writing at this moment the fifth story of my 12 by 20 challenge. And it’s given me a lot of problems as a, probably what Crystal just said might hint. I am sure 100% that I’m going to be done with it by the end of the week. And the reason is because I asked Crystal to kick my ‘bip’ ass if I do not do it. So I’m having some challenges on that, on that side.

But at the same time, I’m also having a lot of fun. Because as writers we are  people who enjoy feeling pain. So me keeping my head on the wall multiple times a day, it’s fun. It’s a good thing. How do you call that? That kind of person? Like a masochist. I’m that guy. That is basically what I have been up to. What have you been up to?

Crystal: Ah, well, I’ve been doing a couple of things. I have been reading the War of Art, which we have talked about before, but I am currently working on a book called Write More Books. That’s actually the next one that’s coming out in the creative Academy for writers guide series. And it is partly about productivity, but in a really different way.

So what I’m working on is how do I blend in the psychology stuff as a health psychologist by background, and looking at some of the deeper reasons? I mean, yes, there are some tips, some tricks, some habits, some things that you can do to really boost your productivity. But a lot of the time it does come down to some of those more ethereal things like fear and resistance and procrastination and making excuses and all of those lovely things with which I am intimately familiar and on a first name basis. And so I am reading this partly for me because I’m diving back into writing after a bit of a gap, actually, I’ve been really working on the business side of things.

And this is sort of to help kick start me back into the writing and also to help with writing the chapter on fear and resistance that is going in the Write More Books book. So that is one piece. And the other thing I’ve been reading is in my fiction side of things, I have not had a new book for quite a long time it’s actually been over a year because I went all in on the nonfiction. So this book is Strangers to Superfans by David Gaughran. And I am in the process of just making a list for myself of all of the things that I want to do to refresh my books before I really reinvigorate my fiction, writing identity with a bunch of new releases in the fall.

So what we’re talking about today, really, it kind of hits home in terms of what we are both doing actually at the moment with our own books. And I think is also going to be helpful for other people who are looking at kind of, how do you transform rejuvenate what you already have and make sure that it’s working as hard as it possibly can for you while also forging ahead with new stuff.

So maybe what is, what is a book sales make-over?

What is a books sales make-over?

Michele: So it might not be surprising for you but the first thing that I did, to hopefully provide as much value as possible, I went to Google and ask Google, what is a ‘makeover’ definition? And the definition is simple, but I think it’s a good starting for this conversation. A makeover, for out friend Google, is a complete transformation or remodelling of something.

So this is beautiful because it can be book, can be your book set. It can be your author business. It can be your video course. It can be anything, but because we’re talking about books I thought this was an interesting way of presenting today’s subject anything really easy to like, , you don’t have to spend too many words in what it is a makeover. It’s really rethinking of something that you already did and something that you already in this case wrote and published. The problem comes when you asked to give your own definition of makeover on, uh, in this case, a book.

So when you’re thinking of a book, you are not just thinking of the story. You’re thinking of several different pieces that moves together. And so we spoke previously in other episodes, but when you’re saying book or novel, you’re saying title, you’re saying book description, you’re seeing price, you’re saying keywords, you’re saying front and back matter your’s saying pricing, you’re saying also bought.

And you go down a rabbit hole that I can get you potentially crazy. So it is important to know what is the most important thing to focus first, as always. Crystal. We always discuss about what you have to focus on the thing that is going to, propel you to the farthest point with the least effort, right? You can call it 80 by 20 Pareto’s principle, whatever you want to call it.

I do believe with the bookmaker, where is except with the same thing, and I’m going to give you, I’m going to tell you a story and I’m going to give you a  very true example of something that is happening to me. So I’ve been working with Crystal for a few weeks on a project, which can be defined as a book make-over.

I am on the process of remodeling, if you wish transforming, a series that I have written and published in Italy years ago. We’re talking about five to six years ago. It’s one of the very first thing that I did as a self-publisher. And, as most of the time, right. I didn’t know where to begin.

It’s a good thing to start from the definition. So a complete transformation or remodeling of something. Now you remember when I said that a book is different parts together, like a dozen different things. If you have a series, in my case four books, you have to add to each of them something more.

So it’s X four things. So what I’m trying to say here is that the process can paralyze a person and it did that for me, for some time. Writing a book is daunting, but having to doing a makeover it might elicit a similar feeling because, your brain in my case was like: okay, that’s something that I did, I don’t have to think about that anymore. Wrong, very wrong. And why is that Crystal? It’s because we need to invent ourselves and why we do that we need to bring the books that we had in our past with us. So that story brings us to today and to today’s episode, the example that I wanted to give you was what I’m doing now to successfully making over, if you will allow me to the verb of my science fiction series, Omnilogos, in Italian. So the most important thing that I need to do is, I need to make sure that I start. this make-over this remodelling this transformation at the very specific point. You have to start at the end and then work your way back so that, when you’re up, basically pulling people into this, we can call it like a funnel so that, as Crystal said once, the chances of them making it so all the way are higher. And this is something that you have to, maybe you have to experience different things and try different things. But the thing is, if you have a series, you have to take it piece by piece.

Bird by bird. This is basically my experience as a starting point with my definition of a book make-over and how am I using it for my box set.

All these different parts that I’ve mentioned: book, back matter, front matter, pricing and things, I believe that you should sit down and have a list of the things that are the most important and most urgent, they take you the least time to do and then apply them maybe one day. And then the other day, that means to lay down the plan on what to do first and want to do last.

And it’s basically the same process as when you’re writing a book from scratch. But, instead of writing the books from scratch, you have just to concentrate on the packaging of the product, if you will. And that’s basically what I’m doing for my Italian science fiction series. I’m starting from the very beginning, but, and this comes to like the different, the different things that I’m doing.

And hopefully all this thing that I’m saying is going to close and make sense at this point. The way I’m trying to understand if my box set worked is by running some adds on it. So I’m running some ads on the first book of the series and the book set, and I did change something based on the feedback that I got from strangers that don’t know anything about me, which is translated for customers.

No relations, no nothing, but two things I did differently studying the behavior of the people that see my ad on Amazon and if they are clicking or if they are seeing it or if they’re buying it. So one of the things that I did was changing the way the book set; and this was like also thanks to Crystal, the way the box set was shown.

So before it was shown as a flat cover. Now I wanted the customers to see that this box set was actually a box set. So I’ve asked Crystal to help me on that and so she made a three dimensional version of the same book set, and guess what? People started to clicking and to buy that box set because this part of the make over made the costumer and more aware that what they were buying was not the a book, it was four of them. This is one of the things that I learned: you have to make the life of the customer as easy as possible. And this is a part of the make over of the book cover.

The other thing that I did differently was, after a few weeks of judging what the people that we’re watching the adds were doing, I basically realized that the description of the book wasn’t really working. So, I’ve seen that Amazon was showing the ads to lots of, lots of people, lots of people were critiquing the ads.

And so the cover was okay once they landed on that page, with the product or my product. They were not buying it. And I realized why, because like description was made five years ago, with my understanding of blurb and stuff like that based on that time. So I changed it completely. I took a couple of afternoons to change the box set description and the description of the first book.

And guess what happened? More people started buying the book. So these are just two examples and I’m sure Crystal is going to give you way more than those, but they’re powerful in a way that, like tweaking some things, sometimes. So when you think o make over, you don’t necessarily have to think of like developing and headache.

You can start from small things and see how they go. And that’s what I did. What would you say about, this kind of process that I did? Like, maybe it’s kind of weird because it’s like a circle. You wait for the feedback of people that you don’t know and then see actions. I do know that other people like, just think like, okay, it’s been like five years.

I need to rebrand myself or I need to, maybe they have other ways, but my way, Michele Amitrani’s way was letting the costumers telling me what wasn’t working.

Crystal: Absolutely. And I think I’ve done that same process. I think three times now, since 2014 and often little branding, tweaks or updates. And sometimes I actually change what’s in the books, or make an adjustment there because of feedback from the readers. And one of the reasons I love the Strangers to Superfans book is because it’s really focused on the reader’s journey. And I think when you’re doing a book sales, make-over ultimately that’s the part that matters is what is the reader’s journey.

And so when we look at evaluating what needs to make over which parts of your books can you transform which parts of your sales experience can you transform? It really does come back to what is the experience of a reader who is finding you in your books, and then walking through that process from beginning to end and the way that David Gauhran talks about it is like you have a pipe that is delivering water from one place to another, and there are going to be holes all along that pipe and water is going to escape.

So really what you’re looking for is the holes that you can plug along that reader journey to make sure as many people as possible read all the way to the end of reading one of your books and buying another one, or if you have a series read all the way through. And when we talk about good read-through that’s part of the process, but the experience of the customer in navigating from book to book to book is just as important, if not even more important than the actual story, because if there are any blockages or speed bumps or hiccups along the way, you might lose them at that point.

Right? So you’re really wanting to remove barriers and you’re also, in some cases wanting to put up barriers, and this it’s very counterintuitive so stay with me for a minute, but let’s say you have an ad and a cover that are converting great. And you are sucking in tons of readers. What if they’re not the right readers?

What if your cover is a little bit off market or a little bit off a genre? And you’re attracting readers from a couple of different types of places. Like let’s say I had a paranormal romance, but I was attracting some kind of fantasy readers who didn’t really read romance. They might not enjoy how that story progresses.

And then you end up with negative reviews and then that actually hurts your chances of selling more books to more people down the line. So one of the things that’s really important to look at is alignment, like how well are each of the pieces in your reader journey doing what they are supposed to do?

And because I’m in the middle of the evaluation stage, and I think this is a situation where we can really use that Kareful author thing where we talk about. K is for knowledge A is for action, R is for reflection and E is for evolution. So, you know, I think I’ve got a checklist which I will share, there will be a link in the show notes to the checklist for you to download, to kind of guide you through doing this process yourself.

But if you have. .You sit down, you take a good, hard look at, your books and your various pieces in your reader journey and then you evaluate before you change anything. You’re going to take a hard look at what are the pieces that need updating. So maybe you sit down and you take a look at your cover and you ask yourself, okay, is this cover genre specific, genre relevant? Is it totally obvious to readers when they look at this? What genre the book is? Am I in the right categories or subcategories on Amazon that matched with what that cover and its branding say, right? Is that, is that the good match for readers who are looking for a specific thing you want to know how does my cover compare to the top a hundred covers in that genre on Amazon? Are you competitive in the market if you are different, why are you different? Is it on purpose because it indicates something about your books and your writing, or is it because you just didn’t quite hit it when you went to do your design stuff?

We all make choices as we’re going along about our cover design and what we can afford and who we can afford and how it comes together. And your covers will be something that evolves with you. You know, when I started out, I was doing a lot of shorter stories and I was doing all the design myself cause I couldn’t afford to pay anybody.

And eventually I hired somebody to help with bits and pieces and eventually I may pay somebody else to do it completely. I’m lucky in that I have some design background. But I made very deliberate choices sometimes to be slightly off market with my covers. And I know that that hurts my sales and it was a very conscious decision for a number of reasons.

But if you are in a position to upscale that or to adjust that a little later after you’ve seen that a story is getting good reviews and it’s selling, but it’s not selling as well as it could if more people realized what type of book was from the cover. So there are some questions that will help guide you through a bit of an analysis with your cover.

And yes, you will have some homework and need to dig a little to see where your cover fits with others, but it will help talk you through that process. And as Michele said, when you are getting people seeing your book listings, what is it that’s stopping them from buying that. And I think your book description is a huge part of that.

And as you mentioned, you learn as you go and with each consecutive book and with each bit of knowledge you gather along your author journey, you learn more about how to write a good book description. And so, you know, it might be that that needs a little bit of a tweak again, to make sure that it’s totally targeted to what the market is doing now.

Trends change over time, cover trends, change the way we write a book description changes over time. So it’s really important to make sure that you might have been totally on point 5 years ago when that book came out, but it might need a little bit of an update to stay current.

Your reviews are also a huge thing in terms of people choosing to actually click that buy button. So how many reviews do you have? You know, what is your star rating overall? What are the things people are saying in those reviews? And your reviews can be a really good clue to exactly what’s going on in terms of readers being happy or not happy with different elements of your books. And sometimes it could be as simple as you’re not in the right category or your cover is bringing you the wrong readers and your reviews will help give you clues about that. The pricing asalso another piece to the puzzle of if people are clicking, buy, not buy.

And again, this is not a static thing, right? Prices and average prices in the marketplace fluctuate. Your prices are chosen not just of what is affordable for people, but where are you positioning your brand? Some people purposely don’t discount things. They only sell their books at full price and their full price might be a little bit higher because that’s what they’re setting up as an expectation for their books.

Other people will use the promotional periods for different things and we’ll use price as a way to navigate and negotiate a temporary changes in the volume of their sales and to position themselves differently in the market. So you need to be aware pricing-wise of what the averages are in your genre.

And how is your current pricing stacking up to what’s going on? Your pricing needs to be sensitive to real world events. So. For right now is as an example, we have, COVID kind of shutting the world down to a point and everyone is at home and reading lots of things, but lots of people aren’t working. And so things like Amazons Kindle unlimited program are seeing a huge boost in the number of people signing up for the program because people have limited budgets. And if they can read as much as they can read for $10 a month, then that’s a much more appealing option for them then having to pay per book. And if they are going to pay for per book, then the lower price points are selling better at the moment because people are in these uncertain of financial positions and looking for distraction on mass. It’s that careful balance of what is going on in the real world, not just, what do we want to have going on in our Bookworld right? There’s an intersection there, and it’s really important to be aware of the global economics, really, you know, how have you priced your book in other countries?

How does that work? So there’s lots of questions you can ask yourself around that. I think also you’re also boughts on your book. It’s a good exercise. Not all books can see also boughts anymore. We don’t know exactly what the determining factor is, but Amazon is always testing things. And so some books have multiple rows of ads on them and some have also bought.

So my personal theory is, if we are not quite big enough sellers to justify people wanting to have so many ads on our books and their space, then they will put the also boughts on. And that if there’s so many people competing for ad space on our book, they’ll bump the also boughts off. I have no proof that that’s in fact, the case that is pure speculation on my part, but that’s the only thing that has made sense to me so far in poking around and looking at things.

But if you look at your also bots on your book and they are books that have nothing to do with your genre, right? If I look at my small town romance, and my also bots are like a book about how to play hockey and another one on, you know, how to write a book and another one on knitting. Then I know that something has gone awry with my also boughts.

And so that is a challenge to undo that. And sometimes it means actually relaunching your book to kind of get out of that whole. Or you need to sell a whole lot of other books that are in fact related to yours to kind of override that. So I think that is something important to look at is just, is the algorithm helping you or is it not because that will have a huge impact on sales.

Michele: I guess one of the things we’re trying to say here, and I’m very bad at that, I would say that 100%, is looking back in the past and realize if you made some mistake. If there only one person that can change the fate of your books. You. And it all starts from sitting down and recognizing, if that’s the case, that you made some mistake with that branding, or with description. And I will tell you another story. When I had to sit down, when I was looking at the data of my Amazon adds and I was seeing people clicking, so the cover was okay, but not buying. That’s a clear indicator, it’s a red flag that the description wasn’t working, I did not want to sit down and remade the description. One is because I don’t like make description for books. And Crystal knows that well because now I have to do it on a monthly basis and it takes so, so much of my time, but that’s another story.

And the second thing was, I did not want to admit that my book description wasn’t good. And that’s, I think one of the biggest success for me was admitting that my book description was bad. And even as I’m saying that to you, I’m not proud of course, but, I recognize that that’s one of the steps I asked to take, self-criticism, in order to level up.

We like to word level up a lot, right? But that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy for you. It’s not going to be easy. Especially if you have an ego, which is not always bad, but sometimes can be bad. And same thing, for example, for cover. I really liked the cover of my books, but I realized that those covers for the Omnilogos series, were covers asked my designer, okay, I said:  like this cover, make this cover. While I shouldn’t have done something different. I shouldn’t have done this. I should have taken the first 25 covers of the science fiction category that my books are in and say: please make a book cover that looks like these books.

And I didn’t do that. I’m lucky enough in the sense that the kind of market is not as crowded as the American market so my book are still okay, but I do recognize that they are not as good as they could be, but again, Crystal, and again this is painful because I love those book cover there is a part of me that don’t want to change them. But I realized also that, in the long run, if I see those clicks go down, I would have to sit down and realize that I have to change something. Because if I don’t those books will die. You can take it as a patient kind of metaphor. You have to give the medicine to the patient that she or he doesn’t like or they die.

Same things for the books.. But again, what I’m trying to say here is that it’s very difficult to do this exercise of self-criticism. That is, why it might be useful somebody like Crystal. So it’s you an external eye that says: hey, okay, I love you, but your description sucks. Or your book cover sucks.

So you need those eyes, sometimes. That’s why you need other people can be a designer, another buddy, somebody you can ask: Okay, this is my book cover, what do you think is not working, if you are a reader of science fiction, for example? I did it the hard way because the feedback are coming on the thousands from the Amazon ads and I’m seeing what’s working and not, but there are other ways, probably less painful for you, to realize if your book is on the market you’re trying to sell it to.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is that is going to be painful, especially if you have to really change deeply your series. And so not only like something cosmetic, but something’s genetic. So that means I’m talking about the book cover, the back matter, I’m talking about going inside the books sometimes time. You were mentioning Strangers to Superfans, and there was, actually the author that was mentioning there was one of the author he interviewed or he was friend with and, he said that he had to go back and in the book make over completely change the story of the first book, you know, before the second, the third and the fourth.

And he described it as super, extremely painful, because like, imagine like, it’s like going into a festered wound, like you have to see it … sorry if I bring so many bad examples, but you have to see it, and you have to cure it.

And it was painful for this author, but he did it. It took a few months because he had to rewrite the part of the story.

But the read through went up like magic, because people were buying the first and the second was already good and the third was good, he already learned stuff l in the way. And so that changed everything. But again, that doesn’t make it less painful. So, yeah, because I mean the point and I’m doing it, I just wanted you guys to be aware of that it’s going to be difficult and probably Crustal can add a bit more about that.

The painful part of it. She’s been doing this for longer than me. What would you say? It is something painful that you, as an author had to go through when you had to tweak or change something?

Some challenges when tweaking and changing things

Crystal: Oh, yeah. All of it. I’ve, I’ve changed all of the things in various ways. And you know, it is really hard to look at the early things you did, even just going back and reading the early books can be really stressful.

I know lots of people who can’t read themselves after they’ve published their book, because they’re just like: No, I just, I’ve learned so much since then physically painful to read the early books. And I think that is an interesting case study when,your early books are standalones, you can kind of decide, maybe I’ll kind of walk away from those.

But if they’re at the beginning of your series and that’s your entry point for your readers, you need to go back if, what you, if you’ve learned so much and you understand that that first book really isn’t doing what it needs to do in terms of turning those readers of your first book into series long readers and fans, you’ve got to make a change because otherwise it doesn’t matter how much money you pour in you are costing yourself opportunities with every reader who comes into that reader funnel. And I think that’s something that’s really important to talk about is that when you’re doing the analysis, you need to do it from the point of view of a reader who’s coming in fresh, they’re reading your first book when they get to the end of the first book, what is the call to action at the end?

Do you even have back matter? Because when you did your first book, you probably didn’t have anything else to send them to. And so if you haven’t gone back on the regular with each new book and added to your back matter or changed your call to action to be, please leave a review or, you know, come join my mailing list or read the second book in the series. You’re going to have to, you know, revamp those, but you really want to follow the reader journey from start through, to finish when you’re doing your analysis part. But when you’re fixing things like Michele mentioned earlier, you want to fix them backwards and it might not have been clear what that meant at the early part of this episode.

But now that you can see how the pieces come together a little bit better, think about how that works. So let’s say that we have a reader who’s coming in your, your cover might you might’ve fixed your cover. So it’s great. And maybe your book description is now great and your, pricing is all good, but you haven’t actually edited the story.

Then people are going to hit a wall and you’re not going to get any further. So all these extra people who are buying your book are going to be disappointed potentially in this story and not going to go on to buy your other books. So when you’re implementing your changes, the first thing you do is, you know, actually fix up the story or the back matter, look at what are going to be the stumbling blocks and work your way from the end to the beginning.

Then you want to make sure that as you’re upping your traffic to your book and the number of people who are clicking in buying there is nothing to stop them from going all the way through the process. So even though it feels kind of counterintuitive because you think, Oh, but if I had more people buying it, then that would get me to the result I want.

But that’s not going to be sustainable because you are not creating fans, you’re creating one off people who buy a thing, but then don’t make it all the way to the end of the journey where they become your super fans. And that’s really where you want them too be right? You want your, your arc team and your passionate fans and your review crews, then you’re your readers groups on Facebook to be filled with the people who made it all the way through that process and really, really love what you’re doing.

So I think, you know, make your list and then look at what can I change quickly and efficiently and what will have the most impact and what do I need to do in what order to make sure that you’re not upping your traffic before the flow is there perfectly for the readers to go all the way from beginning to end.

Michele: Yeah, I also think it’s worth to stress is that the really, you have to put yourself in the reader’s shoes and it’s difficult. That’s why it was so refreshing to read Strangers to Superfans, because I don’t think there is something similar or at least I didn’t read something like that.

Usually the point of views is from the author perspective, but never from the readers. It is good to do this exercise so that you are aware of what are the steps, especially for me, like the takeaway, the biggest takeaway that I got from Strangers to Superfans is that you have to shift your mentality, which is something very difficult because you are basically the author and you think, and you perceive your story in a specific way. And when somebody else says differently, you’re stumping your feet, right? You say, I don’t think you’re right. That’s wrong. That’s death.

It’s exactly like when you’re starting saying my stories are wonderful. I don’t need to change anything. And that’s something that the great author says: the moment you say that sentence, you are dead as an author. And I think it’s completely the same when it comes to book maker over. You have to realize that you are the author and that you count nothing when it comes the purchasing of the book from another point of view, from the perspective of the costumers.

If the customer is not buying your book, and it’s the customer that you’re looking for, in my case, it’s the science fiction reader in Crystal case will be a romance set in a small, contained area, if they don’t your book, if they don’t buy your book, there’s something wrong that you need to fix, period.

And that’s part of the difficulty of it. And that’s why Strangers to Superfans was so refreshing. Because basically was saying shut up. And do the work. In a very, a charming way, but it was saying this and that’s difficult. Again, go back. Maybe have a glass of beer if you drink beer, relax a bit, and really assess your assets.

Think of your book as assets. And if they’re not providing you with  whatever you want to price, income, whatever it is that you are seeking you have to sit and understand why. That’s the old point of this episode. You have built something beautiful for you, but you have to prove that with the other people.

And the only way to prove it is if you are an authorpreneur, is that person buying your book and then buying the next one? That’s I think it’s the biggest takeaway of the book Strangers to Superfans. It’s the most important thing.

Crystal: And I think something that’s really interesting is that we sometimes, we apply stories in our mind to explain certain things.

So let’s say I’m not getting a lot of reviews on my book. Even though, I feel like I’m asking people to leave reviews and they’re not. So that must mean they don’t like it, but sometimes it’s actually, the problem is in the process or in the way you’re asking for reviews or where you’re asking for reviews.

Because what if your request for reviews is after the end of the book as part of the back matter. And since Kindle starts doing a little popup thing on your Kindle app, after you hit the end of the book, nobodyrealizes necessarily that there’s more stuff after that. And so unless they know when they close that little end screen from Kindle and they keep scrolling, they’re never going to see your call to action.

So yeah, I think we have these assumptions about why things are happening or why things are the way they are. And we could tweak that we could improve that maybe what we need when we send out a request to our readers, to get them to post a review, is we need a direct link to where they could leave that review because finding the book and figuring out how to review it is actually the part they’re struggling with.

It’s nothing to do with whether or not they liked it. And so it’s interesting we can make these small tweaks to make it easier for people. And then you start to get a different set of data, which brings me to a very important piece of all of this, which is the only way to know if something is working is to have actual hard numbers to look and proof for yourself and for others that what you’re doing is working and you need to track what you changed and you need to track your various numbers, whether that’s mailing list signups, or number of reviews that you have on the different books or number of sales or number of page reads. But I think maybe you want to talk a little bit about the process we just set up for you this week in terms of tracking some of those steps.

Michele: So there are two ways you can do this, the painful way, very slow, which I don’t recommend, which was mine. And then the smart way, which is basically learning how data impact your auhtor business. And I’m going to give you again, a very concrete example. Up to 72 hours ago the way for me to track data was taking a spreadsheet and without really knowing what I was doing, just putting numbers. Putting numbers and putting a, for example, the name of the first book, the title of the second book, but I didn’t have really any strategy. And then I’ve asked Crystal: there must be a better way because I’m going crazy here.

And if I think I have to do this month by month, so we’re talking about an ongoing process, It’s not just on a monthly basis, I was like, there is no way that I can keep track of all of these things and remain sane in the process. So when Crystal says tracking data, there are definitely some things that you can do to keep yourself on the sane side.

One of these things is something that I learned” do that on a regular basis. Don’t let the work accumulate. That’s something that I’m also doing on, for example, if I have it expenses. I know that if I spend something and I’m not putting on thecnow, the moment I’m spending, it’s never going to happen.

I’ve been doing this since October, 2018 and now I’m very focus. So if I spent anything and use an app and I’m tracking to my finance. My shift was you have to realize you have to do the same for your author business. So I’m doing the AMS ads, but I have no idea how much I’m spending. Now, the moment I’m talking to you.

But then I went through this process with Crystal again, and, she was like, you just can’t do this and not go to a psychologist. You need to have a system to keep up track of what you’re doing,, the same way that you’re doing it for your finances. Once I did that shift and once that I realized that basically the way I keep data and I that I keep track of data for my book sales and in this case, because my books are on Amazon Kindle unlimited, I also have to track sales for page reads.

If I don’t do that on a weekly, monthly basis, I know that the work is when I become so big that uh, a factor like resistance will kick into place. So what I’m trying to say is make your life easy. Develop a system if possible, even before you get into the makeover phase, try to understand what’s working and what’s not working, in my case, I do not know how to get fancy with Excel, or Google sheets

I don’t know exactly how that works, but I do now know, especially after yesterday when Crystal showed me for like 30 minutes there are some things that I can do to make the process faster. And now I learn how to do that. Once I know that I can apply that to May June, to July until the end of the world is hopefully it’s going happen very far in the future.

But again, have a system in place decide what’s important to you. That’s the second thing that I’ve learned. When I do my, a calculation and I checked that my data, I have some things that I looked for, like the copy that I sold, the page read, how much I’m spending for Amazon ads. So there are these things that you have to be aware of.

What are the things that from today, until at the end of this experiment, you’re going to keep truck on. You can change that on a monthly basis, because if you do that, that’s going to be, he’s going to hurt you because you’re not going to have a benchmark and you cannot compare months by months what’s happening.

And that’s bad for you.. Not only because will not know how far you’re gone, but also because you will lose sight of the process. So again, take some times to understand what are the things that are important for you to track and then stick to it. Those are, I will say the most important takeaways of what I’ve been learning and I’m learning when it comes to bookmakers and also keeping track of the data regarding the bookmaker over or advertisement.

Crystal: And because we love you guys and we don’t want you to do everything the hard way we are in a position to be helpful. So I have recreated a spreadsheet similar to what Michele and I set up for him that will calculate some of these things for you and make your life much easier. There are some tools that will help with a variety of things like ReaderLinks or BookReports, do various kinds of analysis for you.

And the BooksSprouts folks have a data sprout. They all kind of do different things, but they also charge you fees. Once you start to get a little bit of income so we’ll put links to those tools and we’ll maybe do a whole episode on data and tracking in the future. But, for now you can go to strategicauthorpreneur.com and find episode 15 and look for the link to the resource.

And so there will be a checklist for you to walk you through doing your own book makeover, and there will also be a spreadsheet. I may even get very ambitious and make you a little tutorial on how to use that spreadsheet on a video so that you can see exactly how to update things. And if you need to do a little bit of customization for yourself, you’ll be able to tweak it a little bit.

I am no Excel expert, but my husband has been teaching me all kinds of things about spreadsheets. And so I have come a long way and I’m happy to share that knowledge with you. So that will be your homework is to go and get that resource and then poke around and see how you can make it yours and work for you and your process.

And now it is time for the curious jar.

What is the part of the writing or publishing process that you find the most unpleasant and what are your strategies to conquer it?

Michele: It’s time.

Crystal: Okay. So I’m going to stick my hand in the jar. You’re going to tell me when to stop. Oh, that was really fast.

Okay. Our question from the curious jar. Okay. What is the part of the writing or publishing process that you find the most unpleasant and what are your strategies to conquer it? So like, how do you get over that difficult part?

Michele: You can start.

Crystal: Okay. That’s so generous. That’s a tough one. So. What do I find the most unpleasant? I mean, honestly, a lot of what we’re talking about is the most unpleasant. I’m not, I’m not great at looking backwards. I’m big on looking forwards, which means I just always want to move on to the next project. So for me, going back and like overhauling things and tweaking things and spending the time on making those tiny little incremental changes on stuff that already exists is really hard for me.

That’s not where my sort of natural inclinations go. My natural increments inclinations are like, story idea, squirrel fun characters, new things, worlds. And I just want to like make all the things in all the new places and the shiny new stuff is where my attention wants to be. So there’s definitely some challenge in doing these kind of ongoing business tasks and the maintenance things. I’m really crap at doing stuff on a very regular basis. So, I have been fully committed to this podcast and we have been rocking a weekly, like progress here for you, which for me is a big thing. I am great at binge creativity. I do my accounting four times a year.

Like I, I will spend an entire day entering all the things from the previous three months. And I have good systems to make sure I don’t miss things, but doing it like Michele on an ongoing basis, would wood just wither my soul into dust. I I’m so bad at the, the constant stuff like that. It’s like the same way I’m just not good at having exactly the same writing routine every day and doing that. I have time set aside for advancing writing projects, but I really do, I call it binge cycling in terms of what I’m working on, I will do all social media for like two weeks and then I will write a whole book in three weeks and, you know, that’s just how I operate the most efficiently for me.

So I would say, yeah, the most painful parts are anything that requires steady, incremental progress. And the looking backwards and overhauling what already exists for me there. Did I buy you enough minutes?

Michele: Thank you so much. A great job. Okay. Yeah, I would say, for me it’s the reverse, so I don’t find it is difficult the writing process per se. It’s actually exciting. I see it as a challenge. But when you start talking with me in legalese, and especially because we’re Authorpreneurs, so we have to also know like the number side of things, the tax side of things, I would say, okay. Numbers are not really my strong suit.

The way I deal with that is that I pay other people to do it for me. That’s one way of seeing

Crystal: Legitimate strategy.

Michele: Yeah, it’s a legitimate strategy. It’s like, I delegate that part because like, for example, I want to make sure that for example, my taxes are done. Right. And we already discussed about this in one of the previous episode.

But I also know I can’t do everything by myself. You mentioned a great book, The War of Art. And something that Steve Pressfield said, a professional, hires other pros to do other kinds of things. So a pro author has a lawyer was a lawyer. Some other person who takes care of the tax.

You can do it by yourself, but I recognize I’m not good enough, probably. I can bang my head on the wall writing-wise all day and I will be loving it. But there are some things that are just don’t recognize me, at least at this point and age, not to be good enough. And because I don’t want to screw it,  I would say I delegate other people to do it for me, but at the same respect, I do recognize that it’s not something I can keep avoiding forever because for example, one of the other things that we discuss about it’s about growing.

What if in the future, I need to, for example, hire a lawyer because I realized I want to be a more the structured publishing company. For example, can you call it? You want to incorporate, incorporate the yeah. When, if everything is going to be okay. And fine, when things go bigger and bigger, right?

That’s something I’m very weak at. And this is my confession for you here today. I am afraid of becoming maybe bigger because I know there are going to be more of this stuff that I don’t like to deal with, that I will have to deal with that are a planet away from writing, which is the thing I’m very much concerned about.

You can close me in a cave and I will be writing and writing. But pay me good money to do that of stuff I’m not going to get very much excited, but again, we need to grow as people as authorpreneur. And so I recognize that that’s a one of my lacking points.

I also need to be more curious on that side of the business. And in one sense, I’m not sure how you’re going to take it, but I should be a bit less artistic and be more a businessman. Which is one of the parts of what we’re talking about, but putting them together, the artist part and the business part, it is difficult.

That’s why there is a podcast that we created about that because hopefully you’re going to get something useful put of it. So I would say that’s the difficult part for me. It’s numbers. It’s making sure that I’m on the right track when it comes to my a publishing business.

Crystal: Excellent. And I got to say that once the checks start coming in, that justify you needing that business structure, you’ll get a lot more interested in the business side quickly.

It definitely scales as things grow. And that was one thing, you know, as you start to see the momentum, the first little bit is so hard, so hard, but once you get that momentum and you kind of hit a little tipping point, you become much more personally invested and excited about the leveling up parts because you realize then, okay, well, if I did this shift, I would have more, I would keep more of my money, less would go to taxes.

I would have, I mean, you have the money to pay somebody to help you with those things. When you’re at the point of needing to level up. Then it just makes sense. And you’re in a position to also support someone else, which is nice to be kind of contributing to the economy in that way and to be giving back to someone else.

And you’re providing somebody an opportunity to do something that they love as hard as it is for us to imagine that people choose to be accountants and financial managers and things like that. They do, and they love it. And they feel about those things as we feel about writing. So, everybody gets to do the thing that they’re passionate about, which works out fantastically well for everybody else.

So if you have something that you do not love about the writing and publishing process, we would like to hear about that. So drop it in the comments under this episode, or come to strategicauthopreneur.com and leave it as a comment on episode 15 for us, we would love to hear the kinds of things you’re struggling with and how you find a way around it.

And if you have a curious jar question, you would like us to answer you can email that to ideas@strategicauthorpreneur.com and we’ll add it to the mix.

Michele: And as always for show notes, links to resources we mentioned and coupons or discounts on tools we love that please visit us at strategicauthorpreneur.com.

You can also subscribed to the newsletter and each week we’ll make sure to email you just one thing that we think we’ll help you on your authorpreneur journey, and also a link to out latest episode.

Crystal: If you want a gold star and a million bonus points in the game of life, please leave us a review wherever you listen to this podcast.

I don’t know if we still count as new. I don’t know when we get to stop being shiny and new, but for now, we definitely could use your help with a rating or two and a couple of comments. That’d be great. Thanks so much for taking time out of your busy life to get to know us and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out on our next episode where we’ll take a look at how to keep your writing habits on track with accountability, coach and special guests Claire O’Connor

Michele: See you next week.

Crystal: Bye everybody.

Oh, wait, I have this bright white thing one sec. Make that go away. Okay. Episode 15.

Michele: Can you believe that? Oh, that’s crazy. Own it.

Crystal: A lot of talking.

Michele: talking,

Crystal: but yeah, it’s good. It’s fun. I’m enjoying it.

Michele: Me too. 100%.

Crystal: Yeah. Excellent. All right. Well, shall we be podcasty?

Michele: Let’s do this.

Michele: I think that’s something very Italian. Like we have to say hello, and then goodbye. It’s something that I didn’t see in the anglosaxon culture, if you will.

[Like even now, when you. Yeah. Sometimes he don’t say bye. Okay. Okay. We always say goodbye.

Crystal: Yeah, I don’t do that.

Michele: Really?

Crystal: Yeah, no, I always do that. My grandfather, grandpa Bern, he used to just randomly show up and like my parents owned a hotel, so there was lots of grounds or whatever, and he would never come and say: Oh, Hey, I’m here. I’m visiting. He would just. It’s like go do something. He would find a project on the property or he’d be making something or trimming a tree or whatever.

And we just like, Oh, grandpa’s here. Okay. And he would never say that he was leaving. He would just finish at some point. And we would be like, Oh, I guess grandpa went home.

Michele: A mystery man. I love it.

Crystal: I know. So that’s just kind of a, I don’t know, something. I always felt pretty strongly, just let people know you’re there and then let them know you’re leaving.

And then everybody’s on the same page and there’s no confusion. So grandpa, if you’re watching.

Michele: We love you. I just want to make sure, I don’t know. They know that we love them and we want them to come back. So I don’t know, maybe it’s an Italian think. You know? Hello and goodbye.