In this episode, we’re talking about how and when to spend money to help you level up your writing career. How do you decide how much you’re going to spend on promotion? When should you buy a tool and go the DIY route instead of paying someone to do a job for you? What questions do you need to ask yourself when you’re analyzing any new “opportunity”? When and how do you know which tasks in the publication and promotion process you should hire out?

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Resources we mentioned in this episode

• ReaderLinks 
• BookFunnel
• HiddenGems
• BookSirens (Review service similar to Hidden Gems)
• BargainBooksy
• BookBub

Visit our websites

• Crystal Hunt (Non-fiction)
• CJ Hunt (Romance)
• Michele Amitrani (Fiction)
• The Creative Academy for Writers (Community/Resources)

Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 025: When to Spend Money vs D.I.Y.

Crystal: Hi there strategic authorpreneur. I’m Crystal Hunt.

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

Crystal: Welcome to episode 25 of the strategic authorpreneur podcasts. On today’s show, we’re digging into decision-making and how, and when to spend your money versus working with free options and DIY approaches.

But first, what have we been doing this week?

What has happened since the last episode?

Michele: There’s always that particular spot when we suggests books. And I usually do suggest books Crystal, but it’s usually nonfiction. This time, I’m going to suggest a fiction book and it’s called Circe. You can’t see it if you’re not on YouTube, but I’m showing you anyway to the viewers and it’s from Madeline Miller.

Now the reason why I’m suggesting this book is, I didn’t really read any mythological fantasy ever, I would say, I read epic fantasy and like dark fantasy, grim dark, but this particular genre, never read like this author, is conveying it, and it was mind blowing. So I’m suggesting this book this week, because I do believe if you really like it, genuinely well-written books this book is for you. Is basically the story of a secondary character from the Odyssey. And she’s a goddess and a witch. And she has a very small part in Odysseus’ story. But in this book, she gets all the story and, Madeleine really came up with the world building kind of things. Even in this world, we know how the story turns out, we know what happens, but she made out a book that is like almost 400 pages longer and it’s gripping in every single page. And I learned a lot about this particular genre and I’m trying to, I really wrote something like similar in the past. It’s called Soul of Stone before even reading this book.

But I found out, gosh, this is so much similar to this book and I had so much fun writing that story, so I’m digging more on this kind of fantasy genre. So definitely I suggest this book. It’s a New York Times best selling book and it’s really, really, really well written Crystal this for my reading of the week. Authorly-wise what I’ve been up to? I’ve actually trying to study a bit more about mailing list and newsletter. And I’m working on a new welcoming sequence for potential readers and people interested in my work. And I’m working on Sendfox this time, which is a service we spoke in a previous episode.

So I’m trying to do the shift from MailChimp to SendFox, but it’s a new service to me, I need to learn the nuts and bolts of it, not to screw it up because welcoming sequence are super important and Crystal has been very kind with her time and generous. So she is trying to help me also to plan a strategy.

And you know, it’s not something easy welcoming people. So I’m really trying to nail this down and make it right the first time it’s never going to happen because I’m going to change stuff, but I really, I’m really trying to make sure inexperienced that is going to be good for the reader.

So I’ve been working on this Crystal in the past few days. And also I am working on the eighth story now of my 12 by 20 challenge and I’m having fun with it. I’m not sure if it’s going to be done soon, but I do know what’s the theme and I know what’s the stakes, which is way more than I would say for other story where it just started out and I had no idea where to go. So I guess that’s a something more. From, with respect from the point that I started out this year in 2020 so I’m learning, basically learning new things. And now, what have you been learning in this past week?

Crystal: Well, I have been working through the Let’s Get Digital book, which we talked about last episode, the fourth edition has come out it’s by David Gaughran and it’s available now.

So it’s how to self-publish and why you should. So I’m not exactly a newcomer to this industry, so it’s not so much that I need to figure out how all this works, but for me, rereading it, just to make sure that you know, everything I’m recommending to people is still accurate and what other people are recommending.

And also I find it’s a nice way to go through my own stuff and do a bit of an inventory. When I read a book like this by someone else, and they talk about their process and the steps and what they go through. It’s just a little glimpse into someone else’s way of doing things. And so I like to do that every so often and just review my own processes of how I’m writing, releasing publishing? Is there anything that I could be integrating that David talks about in his book that I’ve not been integrating in mine? And we will get it to talk to you about some of that stuff over the next few episodes, but, for now it’s just a really good kind of reminder for me of all the different pieces and a good way of checking up on myself and making sure that I am adhering to all the things that I know are the best practices and that I am also just being flexible enough to integrate whatever new things are coming up. Anytime people have gained a lot of experience in an industry they meet people at conferences and get connected through different opportunities. And so you never know what you don’t know until you discover it in something like one of these books. So I’m excited to see where that goes.

I haven’t finished it all yet, rereading it. So we’ll see what else I find. But for me this week has really been focused on closing circles, which is, is a concept that my mom actually taught me when I was little and whenever we would get overwhelmed or feel too frustrated about something, it was usually because we were a little overloaded and so mom would say, okay, you just have too many open circles: How, how are you going to close those up? And open circles or really just undone tasks that are using up your memory and your energy to keep track of them. Now, David Allen wrote a book called Getting Things Done and he uses open circles as a concept and that book is super famous so most people think that that’s I got it from, but I’m going to give my mom a shout out credit here. Cause she was teaching us about that before that book came out. So good job mom! And for anyone who wants to learn about the power of closing circles, that book by David Allen has been redone and rereleased recently as well.

So we’ll link to that in the show notes, along with the other books we talked about, but it is a great resource in terms of learning how to organize information and learning how to develop your own systems around calendaring and dealing with stuff that’s incoming at you all the time. How do you organize that and how do you organize appointments and how do you kind of keep your stuff together, basically?

And I have had great success following a lot of the recommendations in that book and the new one has been updated to kind of include digital stuff. When I first read that book, it was over 15 years ago and it was all about file folders and physical papers and everything else. And so now it’s been dusted off and shined up for the modern age, which is great.

Now we’re going to dig into how do we spend our money and also talk about how do you know when you should, and when you should try to do stuff yourself and talk about some differences in those answers, depending on what stage of your author career you’re at, because your answer for your first book or your third book is not going to be the same as your 11th book or your 13th book.

So for you maybe first let’s talk about just quickly: what is your sort of approach in general to finances in your strategic authorpreneur life?

Personal approaches to finances

Michele: So I use an approach that I’ve basically been using for my adult life I would say for financing. I have a budget and I don’t go over that. And this is something that has worked for me, but it’s difficult to understand how much you need for things.

So for example, let’s take, let’s break down this thing with, an example that interests, me. How do I go about budgeting things. One year ago, I published my first, self published of course, dark fantasy book, Lord of Time, the very first one that I have written in English and published in the U.S. and North American market.

Now I had no idea how much I needed, for example, for the promotion side of things. And I really didn’t know, for editing how much it was going to be. In that case, that was my benchmark. What I was trying to do in that first instance was don’t fret too much. This is your first work. You don’t have to go busted. How much he said you can afford.

You are … in that case I was 32, hopefully you’re not going to die soon. So you’re going to have a lot more instances to learn from this launch. What I did was this: I chose a number that was comfortable with, with promotion. So I’m telling you this number now, which is ridiculous, it’s super low.

I said, I’m going to spend $200 on the promotion kind of thing. So if I needed to book a promo sites, for example, $200 was the maximum cap. I couldn’t go over that. Not possible. Can’t do that. Of course, you have to self-impose that to yourself because that’s a beautiful thing and the not so beautiful thing, of self publishing. You, nobody that is taking your hand off the wallet.

So you have to be extremely, how would you say, you have to be extremely draconian, you have to be extremely careful with what you’re doing, but in my case, if I put that number over there, 200, I’m not going to go over there. So that’s how much I spent to promote Lord of Time. Did it become a best-selling book?

Absolutely not. I would say I am happy. I am going to do the checking for the years since it was published at the end of August in a few days now, but if everything went well, I broke even with this book, going on the editing, how much it costs in the promotional kind of things. The hard copies that I bought, purchased and sold in physical places.

I would say I barely broke even, maybe I made some money. So, I wouldn’t call that a success per se but why these important, this story? Why am I telling that to you? Because it’s just one damn book, only one, and I’m planning to release way more of them in the next months and years, again, hopefully.

What this is all about is something we already said more than once in the previous episodes. It’s, don’t bleed out, especially at the beginning. The budget is my way to protect myself against the weird jumps of my mind. So if I would have been reckless, I would have said, this is my first book, it needs to be a success because if it’s not, it means I’m a failure as an author.

Right? I mean, working on that book for two years, so I need to push it. I need to do everything. I can go bankrupt, but not that much, but I know it’s the thought that goes over in so many author’s mind. So my way of dealing with that Crystal is budgeting. And I’m going to do that for the next release of the next book.

But this is basically the way I go about spending money, at the moment I am now, after having published only one book, a full-length novel, almost 50,000 words, because I also published other shorter stories. Now I know that the way you Crystal go about this, is different because you are an author at a different moment in your writing career.

And other, authors that are spending tens of thousands of dollars every month have a different kind of approach. So I give you my 5 cents of that. I really want to know what do you think of this budgeting thing? So if you have a benchmark, if you have suggestions for people that are at different moment, what do you say?

Crystal: Yeah. I think we actually don’t come at it that differently. I think because of my past experiences of, you know, doing all the things everybody said you needed to do and just, okay, well, if we invest more in marketing or we put more money into the product preparation side or whatever that it will eventually come back.

And that isn’t actually true. And so there is no guarantee that because you spend more, you will make more, that isn’t how publishing works. And so I think that is a dangerous kind of a trap in that we can absolutely justify any costs that someone tells us is going to help us sell more books. But what it comes down to, is it going to help you sell more books to pay for the decision to do that thing?

And my driving philosophy has been: there will be no debt to do this part because; this is my second or third publishing career, depending on how you break up the pieces. But I was very determined that my only restriction is that I can’t spend what is not in my publishing account. Now, to be clear, that doesn’t mean I can only spend what I’ve made from other books, because obviously that wouldn’t work for the first little while because you don’t have any product to sell starting out.

So I seeded myself from my day job and from taking on teaching commitments and doing other things where I have, well, it was actually a jar on the counter back in the day when I was waitressing, I would bring home, I had a set amount I had for my tips that had to go into the bank for basic bills and things everyday.

But anything above that amount that was on the counter was spending money and that spending money could go to whatever I wanted. And so I was applying that to my book publishing account. And so that’s how we did a lot of our publishing for our kids’ books, but also now with my romance novels, every penny I make in royalties goes back into my publishing account.

And when I take on other projects or other jobs that will pay me, whether it’s a speaking gig as an author or maybe I take on coaching clients, to help with their project or something like that, that money can go back into my publishing fund. Now I am very privileged and my husband currently is taking care of the household bills, which means that my business can be a separate thing.

It doesn’t have to support our family at this point. So I definitely acknowledge his support in that way. And also acknowledge my own privilege that I can be in a position to do that. Now, to be clear, we’ve not been in that position for a good portion of my life. This is a very recent development. So I am extremely excited about being able to do this transition.

But I think the important piece is there is no magic amount of money that has to be in an account. When I first started out, I did all my editing myself or I traded with other people. I used the tools that were available, whether it was, you know, spellchecking in Microsoft Word or whatever to do the best I could.

I had my mom’s spellcheck things for me, family members, friends, whatever, and really did start out using everything free. I designed all my own covers and did all my own layouts, like everything. I would just find a free tool that could do what I needed to do. I would take the time and energy to learn how to use that.

And then I would put out the best product I could with the budget I had, which was pretty much non-existent. And then the first few stories, once they’re out and you can start generating a little bit of revenue, then you can start putting that money back into that publishing account. The biggest thing I think for me was that I wasn’t willing to risk running ads or spending a lot of money on stuff that I couldn’t guarantee I was going to make back.

And so I decided if you listened to our last episode on the fire hose approach to content or advertising as two options for building your career, I chose the content route for the first couple of years of my writing romance career, because I was not willing to risk the financial investment required to go all in on the advertising.

And I was trying to put out a lot of content in a short period of time, which is really expensive if you’re paying for every part of things. And so I think what you really want to analyze is where do you get the most bang for your buck? So, I knew, okay, well, I have a thousand dollars on my account that I have saved, that I can spend on making books.

So what are my options here? Well, if I get a pro writing aid subscription on Black Friday, then I could get a whole year’s or I could get a lifetime subscription for, I don’t know if it was $150 or whatever it was, but that saved me a fortune when it got to paying an editor. Right? So when I was looking at well, if I spend this $150 now on this thing that I will have a lifetime of use out of, then that’s going to make every book that comes after it better.

And it’s going to make any services I do pay for a lot cheaper. Same with Vellum was a choice of, okay, I used to use InDesign, I used all of the things to do the layouts for my books over the years, but Vellum is super fast and it’s easy to learn to use. And it would, it costs, I think about $200 for the base one when I bought it now it’s about $300 because they have the print edition worked into it as well. But when I look at what it was going to cost me to hire somebody to publish my books for me, or to do the layouts for me, it saved me thousands of dollars in those first two years. So when I was choosing, out of my thousand dollars, what’s going to get me the most mileage, the layout being done and an initial polishing being done was really high on the list because I think even though it’s best if you can get your books professionally edited or proof-read, if you can get it very clean yourself as a starting place, you can always go back later if you want to have those first books polished up, if they’re part of a series or whatever, but you’ll get a pretty good idea if people are interested in your characters and the world you’ve created and the rest of what you’re building. By that time so that, you know, it’s a smart investment.

Does that make sense? And then, I mean, covers are really, those are really somewhere where you should not try to make your own, unless you are actually a designer, or are willing to invest in courses and software and really go all in like the amount of hours I’ve spent working on covers over the years is hundreds and hundreds, and it’s something that I love.

And so I enjoy playing with the design software and figuring out how all that works. Was that efficient? Hell no! Not a smart way to go but it was part of my process. And so for me, it does make sense, but for most people, I would say, if you’re choosing where to spend your money, then your cover is your absolute priority and then your editing and your layout options as well. But I think one thing people forget is there are, there’s a whole range of price points for all of these services as well. So when we talk about covers, there’s lots of options that it doesn’t have to be full custom cover job with a photo shoot and all of those things, you know? There are options of pre-made professional looking covers that start at like $30 to $50 and go up to $200 to $300 is fairly standard for that type of a cover. So I think that’s definitely something to think about when you’re budgeting is you can treat it like dials: the items on your budget can be like, or like sliders is probably a better way to describe that.

You can slide your, if you know what your range for your cover is $50 to $300. You can maybe slide the cover costs down a little bit if you need to slide your editing costs up a little bit, in order to help you get the maximum kind of quality product you can for the budget you have available.

When to hire someone else

Michele: Yeah. I think it’s very important to, you were mentioning before the cover. Absolutely. That’s something that is very, very important. If you don’t know how to do it, or you’re not the designer. Please don’t do it. Should be one of the things that is most important for you, to realize, and I want to drop a couple of mention resources-wise. There is one website that is called GoOnWrite.com that actually makes a good, a premade covers for 30 to 50 bucks. So GoOnWrite.com. if I’m not mistaken, there is another website that is called 100Covers, if I’m not mistaken Bonnie Goldberg, which we interviewed, she used that service to make her own a book cover. And it was great. It was amazing.

There is another service that I only use it’s called 99Designs. Now these colors are going to be a bit more on the expensive side, but it works more of like a competition. You basically make a brief and then designers compete to get, of course the price, your money. And I think the last time I used, it was $299 for the basic price.

And then there is the gold and then the platinum one. And then with the platinum you might get 80 to 100 submission from really, really good artists. So it depends again, as Crystal said, it depends on how much you can spend, but there are a lot of resources out there and tools that can help you definitely craft a good cover on a budget.

Crystal: Just to add to the resource list, if you are thinking of designing your own cover, there’s a course that is through the Mark Dawson series of courses with is with Stuart Bache, who does professional cover design. But there is a course in there that’s quite affordable and will teach you how to make covers and as really specific examples in all different genres. So if you are going to tackle it yourself, I would highly recommend investing, I want to say it’s about $150, but you’d have to double check the website, but I found that one was very good, very well put together and really, really helpful in terms of teaching you practical skills on how to build the cover.

Michele: And on the other thing that I wanted to mention you, Crystal said the editing and the cover. Absolutely. There is another thing that I did in 2019, which was investing on my formatting of the inside of the book. I did purchase Vellum. That was a big, huge expense for me, but. Boy, am I happy I did that.

You have no idea how many hours have I saved. Now at this point I have published six stories and I’m on the way to publish the seventh and the eight. I have no idea how many dozens of hours I would have had to spend on the formatting every single time without counting the update, because Crystal, I did update the stories, of course, while they were being reviewed and I was getting feedback.

No idea, no idea. I’m just so grateful that I spent that money. Again, I was in the position I could do that though. Although I had to really save up, to get that resource. But again, one other thing that you want, if you can, if you value time in that regards a bit more than money than something like Vellum really, really, saves you a lot of time.

And another resource that I found it cost, but again, it’s saving me a lot of time and it’s not something you can delegate this thing. It’s something just a service can do for you. And I’m talking about BookFunnel, it’s an easy way to provide your book in any format you want to the hands of your readers.

Imagine you have to deliver your book in Mobi format or Epub or a PDF to a person that doesn’t have any idea of how to run that file in their device. It’s going to get you crazy. BookFunnel has a customer service that is going to help people that have problems dealing with that issue, if the issue arises and it’s a platform that you can use for so many more things that are not just delivering your content, it’s important because it’s basically a platform you can use to give a way to get your books out there that is not in a store like Amazon. So it’s a bit more on the independent side and you can even use it for book promotion for giving books to your newsletter. I cannot recommend this service enough and really it saved me a lot of time. And I do believe Crystal, we have a like, a code or something that actually are going to help people saving some money.

I’ve used this and I have saved if I’m not mistaken 50 bucks on the mid-list author option, which was great. So probably we can put the link on that, if people are interested in purchasing that, on BookFunnel. So definitely Vellum for the book formatting of your interior for the design; and definitely I’m using again for delivering your content in a professional way is Bookfunnel. So editing, we talked about the importance of it. Making covers and make sure that they are professional. There are several ways and several venues you can get covers professionally done, The internal, the way it’s presented the book to the reader, is important and you will have to do it every single time. If you don’t have something, Vellum of course you can do it with Scrivener, I did that for years it does take time, it’s a bit faster than Word, but again, that comes down you. How much time you have and how you can use it instead of money.

And then, easy, effective way to deliver your content that is not stored on Amazon or Kobo or Barnes & Noble, I think started the things for me, Crystal, people should really think about not to save up money, maybe, but just to invest this thinking of their author business, 10 years from now, 15 years from now, what do you think?

Crystal: Yeah, I think that’s really important to have a sense of what your intentions are as an author and how you intend to grow your career and how much you intend to grow your career. For some people, they really, they want to publish a couple of books and that’s all, and it’s a passion project, it’s not that they’re trying to build an ongoing publishing empire that’s going to last for years. And so if you’re in a position where you only intend to do a handful of projects in the next few years, maybe you don’t buy all these tools, right? Maybe you do hire someone for $50 or a hundred dollars to use their copy of Vellum to lay out your book because, you know, you don’t need to buy all the things and learn to use all the things unless you’re going to use them enough times.

So for me, the question to ask yourself is, how many books do you think you’re going to publish in the next three to five years? And how much would it cost to pay somebody to do that for you for the next three to five years? If you have a day job or some other way of earning money, how many hours would you have to work to pay for somebody else to do that?

Because if you have the kind of job where you could work for two hours and pay for all five of those books to be laid out, then it doesn’t make sense to learn to do it yourself unless it’s just because you love it. So you really have to do a cost benefit analysis and think about how does that work.

And I think one more piece to think about in that same vein is if you are going to hire something out, you want to make sure it’s something that is a one off project. So if you are hiring somebody to do your book covers, for example, you hire them to do a cover, they do it. It’s over. If you hire somebody to do an interior layout for you and then you want to change ,you want to update your, your front and back matter into months because you’ve learned a bunch about how things work and you know, now you have to pay the money again to make those changes because you can’t make the changes yourself. So when we talk about sustainability from a tools perspective, and from a systems perspective inside of your author world, that’s one of the things that comes up is: if you hire somebody to do it, can you still access your source files? Can you make those changes? What’s it going to cost you to update things and keep them current as you go? And so that is a really important thing to ask yourself. There’s actually a series of questions that I use to help analyze every opportunity that comes my way.

And I think they might be helpful for you also. So the first question is how much will this opportunity cost me? Whether it’s a chance to be part of a certain type of promotion or whether it’s a new tool that comes across my desk? What will it cost? That’s question one. Question two … Oh, and I should say: How much will it cost in money and how much will it cost in time? Because it might be the coolest tool ever but if it’s going to take you a hundred hours to learn it, then that’s actually expensive.

Time, money and energy

Michele: There is a third currency that I use also: energy. Like the mind energy and stuff like: time, money, energy.

Crystal: Yes, absolutely. And the second question is, will it actively generate revenue?

So if you’re looking at okay, if I put out this product using this thing, will that help generate more revenue? Yes, probably it will. If it’s, Oh, it will make my website look fancier. Will that translate directly to revenue? Nope, probably not. So you need to look at it as what is the function of the thing that you’re spending that money on, and what will it add for that investment?

I also will do the math of how many books would I have to sell to pay for this. So let’s say I put a book on a 99 cent promo on BargainBooksy, I’m going to get 70 cents roughly for each book that sells because I’ve been smart and I’ve used my match pricing from KDP so that I’m still getting the 70%. Okay?

So I’m getting 70 cents per book sold. It’s going to cost me how much, like, $50, I don’t remember how much that one costs, but let’s say it’s going to cost me $50 to do that. Yes. So I would have to sell at least 71 books just to make back what it costs me for running that promo. Okay? So, it’s useful to do that math because sometimes we get it and an opportunity that would actually, maybe we’d have to sell a thousand books to make that worthwhile. Right? If, and so then you need to think about it. Okay. What are my odds of selling that many? And so often promotional websites or anyone who’s trying to sell you something that they’re telling you will help your sales should have statistics to back that up. So if you go on BookBub and you want to do a promo, it will be okay. It’s going to cost $1,200 to be part of a promo in this particular romance category but 3 million people will see it and the average download for those types of emails is 20,000 or whatever it is, then you can do the math. You can multiply the, you know, 20 cents you’re going to make off each book by that 20,000 and decide if it’s worth doing.

Keeping in mind, always that it’s going to be an average, probably a high average they’re using as those stats and you may not be that high average if you are starting out and you don’t have as many reviews and you’re not as established and, you know, depending on how well your product is put together, you may not get the average results.

So just being a little bit conservative in your analysis about how many books you have to sell to pay for something. You can also ask what other good effects will doing this have because sometimes being in a promo might result in X number of downloads. Maybe you’re giving your book away for free.

And so maybe you’re paying $50 to get on a free promo site where maybe 10,000 new people are going to download a book. So you’re not going to make anything directly off that opportunity, but if you get read through, if that’s the first book in a series, then you might sell way more copies of your other books following that promotion.

So it may have really good impact and be totally worth the money, even though it doesn’t immediately generate revenue by that specific action. So taking some time to analyze that is always a good strategy before deciding if something is in fact, a good opportunity. And I think one more thing to look at is alignment.

So, will this get me the right kind of readers? Because it’s one thing if it gets you a whole bunch of views and a bunch of people download your free book, but if none of them are readers in your genre, or if most of them don’t read in your specific sub-niche of that genre, that may not actually help you in the long-term, right?

It might skew your also boughts and it might get the wrong kind of people on your mailing list because they’re not really interested in what else you have to offer. So I do think looking at how closely is this opportunity aligned with your vision, your values and your brand is really, really important.

Michele: Yeah, absolutely. The effect that we’ll have, you were mentioning like those 10,000 people, maybe they’re not going to give you any money, but what if 30 or 50 of them, or even more leave a review, like leave reviews who have to consider that you save that money to a service, like for example, BookSirens or Hidden Gems where you actually have to use, allocate some resources to get some, eyes on that book and so getting some reviews. So there are a lot of cascade effects that you might consider: visibility for your websites, for your previous published work. If you already have a backlist, you can’t possibly predict everything, but I guess what Crystal is saying, you can prepare yourself as best you can with the data you have, the resources that you have, and you can get your platform ready for this, in this case, promo.

Get yourself ready, set yourself up for success. And there was actually something that I wanted to ask you: in your author career, when did you decide, for example, okay, I can’t do this. I need to hire somebody else to does that for me. Like, what are the metrics that you use usually?

Crystal: So I have an interesting set of metrics, which is often when I really don’t want to do something, to be perfectly honest.

If there’s something that has a really high resistance threshold for me, that sometimes knowing that I’m going to have to do the editing myself to a really extensive degree is actually enough to make me not want to finish the book. And so if it’s something like that, where it’s going to have a really nice negative impact, then I know I need to invest the money into hiring somebody to give me feedback on that book so that I can just keep going and stay in story mode. Another example is if I’m going to need to schedule social media stuff … Well, the podcast is a perfect example. I absolutely love doing this podcast and I, I enjoy the editing part and I enjoy all the pieces, but the transcriptions for me are … cause it’s hard. It’s so hard. And also the scheduling of all of it, the technical stuff after it’s all set, I know how to do all of those things, but I was finding that the extra time that that was taking away from my other creative projects was creating challenges in keeping me motivated to do it. And so that for me, the cost benefit analysis is okay, well, if that’s taking, you know? Eight hours out of my week for those two things, and I could pay for those by working for a couple of hours at another project, it just makes sense to me to keep the energy flowing in a positive way by doing that. So for me, that’s one of the biggest metrics, is do I like it?

Is it interesting? And does it make me say hell yeah, or, oh goodness, I have to do that thing and I really don’t want to, so really you can do a really quick inventory with yourself of whether or not it’s something you want to do just by seeing how you feel like, what does your body language do?

Do you kind of slumped over or do you perk all up and look all bright and shiny and you know, just talking to somebody about the steps in the process for something you can see it on their face when they’re like, oh, and then I have to do this and you can, I just feel it’s like popping a balloon and there’s just poof! Flat! Right? And so I think that is really important to recognize in ourselves, which are the pieces we’re super resistant to and which are the pieces that really drain the energy out of us, because those are going to be harder to get the momentum going. So for me, that’s often the case and I think also, I look at what can I hire out that doesn’t impact the brand, the feeling of the brand. If that makes sense? Like, for me, I’ve built a brand for my author stuff that’s very much me. And so if I hire somebody to do those pieces, of connecting with my readers and, you know, some people have admin assistants who answer their emails and handle all that kind of stuff and do their newsletter scheduling and all of those things.

But for me, I find any distance that I create between me and the readers has huge ill effects in terms of me connecting with people in a real way. And a lot of my writing energy comes from sharing directly with the readers, the outcome of that. And I, for me, that’s where I get the energy to keep going on things.

And so I need to not hire out those parts because hiring somebody to do those has an impact on the finished content, whereas hiring somebody to do the technical parts of the podcast or to do the layout on a book, it has no impact because they’re using the same stuff where I would use. I’ve already written the words I’ve already decided what’s going to go where: it’s a mechanical assistance, it’s not a creative assistant. And I think that’s the important piece to look at is: will adding someone else into that process, enhance the product you’re getting? So if I was just starting out and I was hiring somebody to help me with the layouts who knew a lot more about book layouts and marketing than I did, then that would absolutely make sense because it’s going to move you forward in that as well.

So what will hiring that person add into the mixture is also really important to be aware of.

Michele: Building up on that, that’s important but when do you really understand that’s the maximum I will do with the resources that I have now? When do you know like how you have to stop?

Crystal: Well, I think that’s having a budget, whether it’s an envelope or a spreadsheet or, an actual bank account, or however, you’re going to track that.

I think you need to know what you are comfortable investing and you have to track your expenses. You have to track your receipts. And of course, you’ve listened to our earlier episodes about treating your writing like a business. And so I’m sure you have a spreadsheet because we gave you a template for one and you are naturally entering your expenses and keeping all of that for your accountant at the end of the year. So you already are rocking this. We have every faith that you’re doing this, so you do need to know, okay, what is my threshold? And sometimes that may mean you make a decision, you know? Not to order, take out one night and you put that money into your publishing funds to, you know, increase your budget a little bit.

There are ways to make that happen. Maybe it’s your birthday and you, you tell anybody who would normally give you a birthday gift that really all you want is a contribution to your book dream fund. Right? And so there, there are ways to make this work, even if you don’t necessarily have enough disposable income to be adding from that.

But it’s really about indicating priorities and then setting a level past which you are not willing to go. And like you said, sticking with it. And I think if you’re choosing, how am I going to spend that? Outside of specific tools, I think the first focus always needs to be on a quality product. And then secondary focus is on promotion and advertising, because if you put money into promotion and advertising with a product that is not up to par, you are wasting your money, because you’re not going to get as much uptake. People aren’t going to click as much as they could if the reviews aren’t high enough quality because people aren’t loving what you put together or there’s issues about your product that are making them give you less than five stars reviews. You’re wasting your money in the promotion side.

You can always scale up promotion later. But if you don’t have a product that will sell on its own, then you are going to have trouble with that scaling up and it’s never going to be as financially efficient as it could.

Michele: Yeah. And I think all these things that we said lead to the moment in which you have to sit down, see the data, and trying to realize, okay: this is what I’ve learned, this are the books that I have out there, this is how much I spent, this is how much I learned so far. When do I level up? When do I decide that this is the moment in which I’m going to get a bit bigger and when I’m going to be a bit more daring, I will say, I have a couple of approaches to this idea, but because I’m really starting out this year, I would like your feedback.

I’m just going to tell you what I would do when I get to that point is, I want to make sure first that I have enough, backlist, a backlist of products that I can use to advertise and to cross promote. But even before that, Crystal in the previous episode, we spoke about, the fire hose approach, right?

That moment when you have enough books that you can just release them one once every two months, every three months, or even after every month, I want to make sure that I am on a point that I can do that for a sustainable period of time, especially as I’m starting out, and I don’t have anything in my bag, if I don’t have anything in my bag, it’s double more important. Right? So I will say I’m going to level up when I have something in my back that I know people might enjoy after I’ve finished something, for example, that I drive the traffic on with, for example, a book promotion, but if I don’t anything else, people are not going to buy anything else. That means there’s going to be less revenue for me.

And that’s going to make all the plans that I have for future project less likely because I will have less resources. So that’s what I would do: Making sure that I have enough products in my bag so that I can release them, ready product. I’m talking about products that have the cover that has been edited, they just need to be released in a strategic way, because we are strategic authorpreneurs, and once that has been done I have to stick to that publishing schedule. I can’t just say I have six products that I’m going to release this year, and then at the end, I’m going to reach two or three. I need to stick to that, especially if I set up expectation, right Crystal? So these are the two things that I would in the leveling up phase. So when to leap, to take that approach, would you take it in a different way? Would you give some other suggestions on that regard?

Crystal: No, I think that’s a good, that’s a good kind of benchmark is making sure that you have more in reserve than you have put out, whether that’s talking about products and word count and stories, or whether it’s talking about your advertising.

One of the things about leveling up is that often that comes with investing in ads and building an ad platform now that we can, as much as we would wish we could escape it and just completely be content focused, and you can, but if your goal is really to hit six figure kind of numbers that you see author’s talking about, and that’s where you want to head, you will need to do that with advertising.

That isn’t something that happens just on its own. And so, the thing to remember is that we’re always, front-loading our payments and we’re not collecting revenue for a very long time when it comes to the author world. So whether it’s me investing in editing, short stories, and then converting them to audio books and all of those things, I’m investing now, and I’m going to make that money back over time.

But for some things that may take quite a while, you know? My audio books that I invested in, it’s going to take at the current rate, it’s going to take about two years. Before that first batch has paid itself off. And that was okay because I invested that money from profits of the eBooks so I’m not missing it, I didn’t have to pull that out of my household budget in that way it was in my publishing revenue stream and I could reinvest it in the business and feel comfortable waiting for a couple of years for that to pay off. Same thing when you pay for editing and cover design and everything upfront, it’s going to be a while before you make back all of that money, especially when you’re first starting out.

Once you have a list built and you have a really strong base on your mailing list, you can actually do quite a bit. So now I know when I put out a new book in the first week, to first month, depending on, the title and what it is I can make back all the money it costs me to produce that book within the first month.

And then after that, any money it makes is going into the revenue pot for supporting other things. Bu it takes a bunch of books to get there. That’s not how you start off in the beginning. And that’s why we are constantly focused on getting you to build your mailing list because if you have that crowd of true fans, those thousand true fans who will buy whatever you put out, you can pay your production costs on any book with a thousand purchases.

Right? So that’s just something to think about when you’re thinking about building, when to scale up and when to start paying for some more of these things, if it’s going to mean you can spend a lot more time writing and if you have the money to invest, and if you are kind of ready to make that next leap, then that’s how you’ll know you’ll have money left in your account at the end of the month, you will start receiving royalties, but you always need to plan for a bit of a buffer period because when you do start those ad spends and you start increasing those things, you pay for ads in real time and the money doesn’t actually arrive in your bank account for about two months.

So you have to really make sure that when it’s time to do that scaling up, that you have a buffer, you have a cushion, you have a way to make those payments to keep that momentum going while you’re waiting for that money to come in. Ideally without mortgaging your house, because that is not a thing that we recommend.

Michele: Yeah, not, not the good thing. And it’s something that I’m noticing also on my author business, I started doing ads with Amazon, this is a true story, around three months ago, and I’m definitely seeing what Crystal has been saying, you need time to build the momentum. You need to understand what you’re doing and you need data in order to understand that’s the problem or the good thing, It depends. But if you need to have time and you have to have latitude, that’s what basically we’re saying you have to have room to maneuver. You have to be able to understand you’re going to do mistakes and very transparently speaking, the first and the second month, I really didn’t make any money out of the Amazon ads that I put out there.

But I learned things so that in the second, and in the third month, I could target the keywords that I was seeing were having effect on my books on the sales and on the third month of the things went a bit better. So I’m learning and that’s evidence that we have been saying to you up to this moment, it’s a learning curve. It’s going to be taking time. What we’re saying here is that if you have a system and if you stick with that, the budgeting is one of that things, do whatever works for you, but realize that as always, this is a marathon, it’s not a sprint. There are some things and some tools that you can focus on, but ultimately, Crystal, this is something I really believe, you have to have a set of skills that you can only build by publishing one book after the other. You can’t do that after two books, and then you have to see what other people are doing. You have to keep, getting yourself out there, adapt to whatever is happening in the market.

And again, at the same time, you have to have the data to take the next decision, because if you don’t do that, it’s like shooting aimlessly. You don’t know what you’re doing. So if there is something, a lesson that you take out of all of these is to try to learn from your mistakes if you made some, and gathered the data, stare at that and make it be your teacher.

Crystal: And luckily for you guys, we are big on sharing our mistakes. So our next few episodes, we’re actually going to take a deep dive into each of the areas of the publishing process. And we’re going to tell you all the mistakes we made, all the expensive choices that you don’t have to make, because we’re going to share with you exactly what we did and what happened and how we are going to do it better now.

So definitely make sure you join us and hit the subscribe button so that you can get those future episodes. We’re going to do a whole series on that for you, but before we go, we have to do our curious jar.

Do you sometimes wake up with whole story reels in your head? How do you capture that before it fades away?

Michele: It is that time of the day.

Crystal: It is that time of the day. I’m sticking my hand in. Tell me when to stop.

Michele: Okay. Go now.

Crystal: Okay. Orange one. Aren’t you glad you get to play with the curious jar? Okay. So, excellent question here: Do you sometimes wake up with whole story reels in your head? How do you capture that before it fades away?

Michele: I have the answer to that question right away. Yeah. Full disclosure. So it would happen sometimes that I wake up in the night and I have an idea and I just have to wake up, take my notebook, opening up, cracking it open and just write the idea and imagine my, like at three in the morning I would be like, and then I will have this pen and I will just write something. And then I will be like, okay, I’m good.

The idea is there. I don’t have to do anything else, so I go back and sleep. And the morning after I will have no idea what I’ve written because I was sleeping basically. So either I will not be able to read my own writing, which is quite flattering and at the same time funny, I think you should cut this.

No, don’t cut it. Or the other thing is the story that had somehow an amazing impact on me in that moment, because I was living the dream doesn’t really make any sense. So, I can’t honestly say that I haven’t used an idea that I had in a dream and that ended up being one of my published books so far.

That’s something that I do remember. I don’t know, what’s your experience on that regard dreams and usually they’re nice, but most of the time I don’t even remember my dates. Is that good? Is that bad? Tell me something.

Crystal: It just means you sleep deeply. Yeah. So that’s probably not a bad thing.

Michele: What about you?

Crystal: I don’t, I don’t wake up generally with ideas in the night. That’s another thing. I pride myself on 98% of the time being a rock star sleeper actually. And so I burned myself out in the daytime, I crash hard and then wake up the next morning, but I do get flashes is maybe the best way to put it, but it always happens when I’m awake and when I’m out and about doing things.

So it could be that I hear a snippet of a song lyrics and all of a sudden I can see characters in my head, I can see a scene happening, I can here dialogue. It’s like somebody flicks a switch and the story starts. So it is a bit like, like a reel, like if you think of it, like pushing play on a movie scene, that’s a bit how stories come to me. And sometimes it’s an image that will start that. That’s why I love doing the cover designs and why I love it finding pictures for all my characters I have on my website, a meet the neighbors section, which is actually images of all the characters from my books. And I use those in the writing process as well.

But part of my process is I will find a song that feels like the story to me, and collect images and all of that. And sometimes, sometimes I start from the outside in like, I start with a song or I start with an image and other times I just see or feel like I can feel what the characters are feeling.

And then I go find the things that fit that. So there isn’t one way, but definitely I get these sort of waves of story that come at me. And the way I capture that is I always have, well, I have like five notebooks within reach, but I always, my current one is right here. I always have a notebook with me everywhere and I that’s my, the first space where I will jot down any ideas that come to me and I’ll just free write sensations and I’ll make sketches and whatever it is that is coming to me, and then also after that, when things get a little more coherent and I can see where that fits into the larger world of Rivers End, then I put it into, I have some ideas documents that things go into, and if it’s super clear that it’s its own book, or if I already can see like the cover image that it goes with, or I know the character that story belongs with, then I will actually start a Scrivener document and start outlining, once I know where it fits, but.

Yeah, that’s how I captured the thoughts and I don’t let them go away. All right! What do you do? I’m curious, do you wake up with story reels running in your head and how do you capture them before they go away? So you can tell us in the comments below wherever you are listening to, or looking at this episode.

And if you have a curious jar question, because we are getting quite low in our jar, then you can email it to ideas as strategicauthorpreneur.com and we’ll add it to the mix.

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

Crystal: Now, you know how important book reviews are and podcasts reviews are equally important. So if you can leave us a review or rating, wherever you’re listening to this, we will be forever grateful. Take care, happy writing, and we’ll see you next week.

Michele: See you next week.