Today, I had to pick up the second half of a coaching project, the proofreading stage, and I also had another request come in, so it looks like the next few days are going to be filled with that task, but hey, it funds my learning and my business resources.
In the meantime, I have been continuously studying from podcasts, including the Six Figure Authors podcast, The Creative Penn, and the Self Publishing Show. I just started supporting the latter two on Patreon, as well. Most of the time, the podcasts cover marketing, so they’re not always relevant to where I am in my career (can’t market a book that hasn’t been written yet!), but they do give me something to think about as I prepare.
Although this is the Book 1 Project, one thing I have been thinking about is whether or not I should publish this book immediately after I’ve finished it (and done the necessary launch prep, of course), or whether I should wait until I have three in the series and launch them in a rapid release. That seems to be an effective way to make a splash and having three books in a series seems to be the minimum threshold for getting started with paid advertising, if you don’t want to lose money.
But on the other hand, as this is my first book, I want to get it out and to start getting feedback. If I write three books before I launch one and nobody likes them, then I’ve wasted a lot of time and money. Whereas with one, I can use that feedback to improve the next books. That’s where I’m leaning, for now.
On a recent Six Figure Authors episode interview of David Gaughran, he mentioned the encouraging fact that by his reckoning, Amazon does not hold a book’s past sales against it. So, even if I launch book one without advertising, and it sinks in the rankings, I can revive it later when I start hitting the advertising (provided that everything else about the book is good). More support for the release-when-I’m-done strategy!