Michal Stawicki's Blog, page 31

8 Easy Ways to Help Your Indie Author on Amazon

Traditionally published authors usually have a huge audience. Because of the volume of supporters they also tend to don’t appreciate your individual support. Bah! Sometimes, overwhelmed by the adoration, they even hide from their readers!

Indie authors are hungry for contact with their readers—and I mean “hungry” like a werewolf on a full moon night.

In the case of books you – the reader – are the judge. As an author, I don’t want market analysis, I want the feedback from my readers, both negative – because it helps me improve – and positive, because it helps me persevere.

Your author needs you.

There is a multitude of relatively easy ways to support your favorite author.

1. Encourage him, praise him or give him thanks.

It’s better than an enthusiastic review. It’s better than buying his books.

Real, honest praise is worth more than gold to an indie author unsure of his potential, who write alone without feedback, not knowing if his writing is worth anything whatsoever.

You can’t imagine how lonely writing is. It’s just you and the emptiness of a sheet of paper (text processor doc). You struggle for weeks or months to publish your piece and then you are nervous, like a parent whose child is taking their first serious exam.

Nothing, NO SINGLE THING, is better at that time than an encouraging message from the satisfied reader.

If you enjoyed a book, communicate this fact to its author. The pro indie author will always leave his contact information in the book.

If he is a newbie who hasn’t, you can always leave a message on the Amazon forum on his author’s page.

If he doesn’t even have the Amazon profile, then you can always use the common reader’s power—a review.

2. Review.

A well written review can be as good as an encouraging message, plus a lot of other people will get to know your positive opinion about the author.

It may not make a difference to you, but it can make a great difference to him.

What does a good review look like? It’s not just praise and flowers, far from that. It needs to include at least one of three elements:

a) What you’ve learned from the book

b) How it affected your life in some detail (God forbid empty slogans like “It was a life changer for me. Thank you, bye.”)

c) What you would say to someone who is on the fence about reading the book

 

If you leave such a review you will score big in the author’s eyes.

Oh, and remember that your review has greater weight if you bought or downloaded the book from Amazon on the same account, it’s an “Amazon Verified Purchase” then.

3. Use your social power.

The next big thing is to share your admiration of the author’s work with your network. You can review his book on your blog, tell your family and mates about the book and, of course, share on the social media. The least you can do in that regard is to like his author page and book’s page on Amazon.

Each time you do one of those things you act as his ambassador. You do the job directly for him, even if he has no clue you are doing it. You act as his marketing agency.

Reportedly, a prospect needs to hear more or less 27 times about a product, service or brand to be interested enough to make a purchase. So if you share your opinion about the book with your friend, you are making it easier for the writer; he has to demonstrate his brand in front of this friend only 26 more times.

4. Throw the weight of your opinion into the equation.

You may present your opinion about the author and his works, but you can also argue with anyone who doesn’t respect his hard work.

You can comment on the reviews of other readers. Each time you feel that a negative opinion has no substance – like this one where a guy judged a book by its title – you can intervene.

Amazon also has a clever system of evaluating other reviews. Whenever you feel like a review is fair and useful you click the ‘Yes’ button next to the “Was this review helpful to you?” question.

Amazon’s system promotes the most helpful reviews at the top of the book’s page. If there are more than 5 reviews for the book, only the top 5 most helpful will be visible.

And you can vote all biased, unfair, bad reviews down. You can even report them as abusive.

Your evaluating power over other reviews is not restricted to negative reviews. Don’t hesitate to ‘vote down’ any review with no substance. You know the type: “Yeah, great book, fascinating reading”—you don’t even need to have read the book to write something like this.

Authors hate them as much as any other sane person. An ‘empty’ positive review at the top of my book page is terrible. I much prefer a solid 3 star review than any 5-star shallow fluff.

And one more thing… Amazon displays sometimes (when the number of reviews and votes on them allows) the most helpful negative review next to the best positive one. So if enough readers vote for a good 3 star review, then in the effect the book can hold an excellent 5 star review and solid 3 star simultaneously.

Your small ‘yes’ or ‘no’ can have great power and may be used to move up or down any positive or negative review.

Going back to #3, you can invite your friends (preferably also fans of your author) to create a “weapon of mass destruction”, voting up or down any review multiple times.

5. Competition.

You are not restricted to act only in the realm of your author’s books. There are a lot of competitors out there and you can work on their books too ^_^. You can give their books negative or moderately enthusiastic reviews.

You can vote up or down other people’s reviews when, in your opinion, they are worthy to be featured or forgotten. In one word, you can use all the range of options Amazon gives its users.

I am not talking about some kind of purposeful vendetta here. Just remember that you can represent your author’s interests wherever you share your opinion.

6. Spread the seeds on Amazon.

If you are really dedicated to help him, you can use another secret weapon—put links to his books in your comments or reviews.

For example, in my review of the children’s book I inserted the links to other books of the author.

You can do the same for your favorite author. Let’s say you write a review of a weak book about the same subject that your author wrote about. You criticize the shoddy piece and then you mention at the end, but I recommend a much better book upon this subject:—and you provide the link.

Or you can write his book’s review and say, “and I also loved this one and that one” and provide links to them.

You need dedication for it, because it’s not a one-click solution. You need the book’s ASIN. It’s a ten character long identifier. It can be found in the book’s page URL after “/dp/”:

Then, writing a comment or review you need to use the “Insert a product link” (1) button. Press it, paste the ASIN (2), run the search (3) and then choose the book from the search results (4).

7. Highlight.

If you read your author’s book on Kindle device or application, highlight some wise or fun quotations. Shared and most popular highlights are featured at the bottom of the book’s page. Normally no one goes that far, but there is always the chance…

8. Buy his book.

In my eyes, this way of helping out your author is secondary to all the support you can give in other ways.

It’s nice to have the food on the table, but most of the independent authors are able to support themselves, doing something else other than writing (for example, my royalties are around 33-50% of the salary I got from my IT job).

What we really want is to influence the lives of our readers, but we cannot know how we have done till someone tells us so.

 

Your turn

So, I encourage you to support your favorite indie author right now! Your feedback means a lot to him!

The post 8 Easy Ways to Help Your Indie Author on Amazon appeared first on ExpandBeyondYourself.

“Write. Publish. Repeat.” Review

Write. Publish. Repeat is a book written by a couple of indie authors with the goal to cover the whole field of independent publishing for all who want to write or want to take their writing business to the next level.

Yes, business. It’s not a book about how to write better or use beautiful metaphors in your works. It’s is about writing, publishing and making money out of it.

 

I had mixed feelings reading this book. Most of them were positive, but you know why they call it “mixed”? There were negatives too. And I will start with them.

 

1. The authors Sean and Johnny are a little shortsighted. They confessed they look just a decade ahead (while I am thinking in terms of the next eon )

I don’t know about you, but I want to be a writer for the rest of my life and I don’t intend to live just a decade more. Having said that, the timespan they focus on is  much longer than in any other book about indie publishing I’ve read (which usually was: “publish your 100 books yesterday and enjoy your life afterwards!“).

 

2. They use profane language; the ‘F’ word appears all too often for my taste. However, they were honest about it from the beginning, so I excuse them on this point.

 

3. At least several readers rightfully made the observation that the introductory part was too long. Ruminations about book’s voice, fiction vs. nonfiction, who they are, who their intended audience is, who shouldn’t read the book, publishing- marketing dictionary … it all took about 11% of the book. And later on they have the impudence to say that they wrote so huge a book, because they love me.

OK, I would maybe have skipped a half of this 11% of the book, but it was all I would have been willing to skip. The rest of the book is  pure meat. And I do the same in my books—I try to discourage people who have unreasonable expectations from buying and reading my works. That way I get less bad reviews and refunds.

 

4. They are arrogant bastards. (You see what I meant about profanities? I used the ugly word, after reading this dam… emotional book). They brag and brag about themselves making me feel soooooo tiny in comparison. I’m light years behind them regarding my publishing business. Bragging wasn’t helping me at all.

But their confidence is justified. They write. They publish. They do it again and again (just visit their Amazon sites! They produce books like machines!). Their books are selling.

 

And that’s as far as negatives go.

What is more, almost every aspect of those ‘not so bright’ points has at least some positives with them too (not profanities, I don’t see any reason to use them).

Let’s talk about positives then.

I’m a published author and, quite recently, a bestselling author. I’ve been studying self-publishing since March 2013. I knew about 99.5% of the subjects covered in Write. Publish. Repeat.  Most of them I knew by heart.

(I think the only thing I didn’t know previously was the reading trend on small devices and apps which allow authors to send their works directly to readers’ mobiles)

Your mailing list, owning your platform, the importance of reviews, connecting with readers, writing tips, marketing tips, editing tips—there was nothing new to me.

But I just needed to be reminded about it once again. I found myself nodding ALL the time. This book spoke to me, because it was like seeing the prior year of my life on fast rewind.

I felt like it wasn’t just a book about their publishing business; it was about mine, too.

And they covered EVERYTHING! I can’t think of a single item even remotely connected to the self-publishing business they forsook.

1. Those guys know what they are talking about.

They not only published a few dozen different titles among the two of them, they also have a Self-Publishing Podcast and they interviewed dozens of indie authors (and a few traditionally published). Their knowledge is impressive.

The breadth and deep of their analysis is stunning.  I’ve heard about practically everything that the book is about, but I applied only about 10% of that knowledge. The authors, on the other hand, discuss confidently every aspect of self-publishing, because they know what they are talking about.

2. Nuggets.

Because of their knowledge, Write. Publish. Repeat is full of data nuggets. Things that are absolutely unnecessary for every indie author, but any of them can use: ISBN management; producing audio or paper books; writing software; which sites are most efficient in paid advertising and so on.

For most authors those are just tidbits. And they are just the byproduct of the book. Johnny and Sean are in the business, so they know about them and share them by the way.

Tidbits are not relevant to the book’s message, but they are still there; by the way.

3. They are little more in the business and marketing than me.

I don’t like marketing and I despise internet marketing as a whole. It is so abused that it makes me sick each time I think about it.

But the authors of Write. Publish. Repeat have deeper backgrounds in business and marketing than me, and a different perspective.

I loved the core marketing advice of the book. Be yourself—it really resonated with me.

4. The voice.

Those guys write fiction; I don’t, and I can still use their advice.

They are fiction writers and you can easily feel that. The book is engaging and funny. I was literally convulsing with laughter when I read Johnny’s remarks about ‘scientific research stats checking’. I was fresh from latest book launch and I could totally relate.

They talk about fiction writing, but not too much. Their businesslike approach to writing stories reveals the principles every writer should follow—be true to the characters, be true to yourself, avoid the fluff, don’t waste the time of your readers (I’m guilty). Besides, I want to write fiction one day. In fact I’m writing a novel (drawer-destined) and found their advice convincing.

The voice of book is not exactly straight-to-the point, but as skillful story craftsmen they make the book interesting. They don’t come around the subjects. They name the things by their name. Lousy work is  lousy work. There is very little luck involved in success; everything worthy takes some time.

5. Attitude.

I like what they teach, but I love how they do it. They don’t give you a ready formula for success, because there is no such  thing. I found a Goodreads review whining about the fact that there is no program, no ready-to-apply tips & tricks.

The reviewer clearly didn’t get what the book is about. It’s not about tips & tricks; it’s about building a business.

If you want to build a business based on the proven formula, you pay a lot of bucks and run a McDonald’s restaurant then. I don’t want to run McDonald’s analogue of writing, thank you.

Every man is solely responsible for his own success (or failure).

I’m sick of sales pages and copies which in general try to say “This is your salvation!” (click to buy); which try to convey the feeling that their way is the only way and if you don’t save yourself (click to buy) then you are a loser.

The authors of Write. Publish. Repeat say “See what we do, pick a few parts and do what works for you.” And they repeat it over and over again.

I do the same in my writing. I’m a firm believer that success can’t be imposed. You are the one who makes it happen. Foreign solutions won’t work for you until you distill them and make them your own.

6. Motivation.

My belief is that you don’t need knowledge. Well, not exactly “don’t need”, it’s just secondary to your motives, attitudes, grit and action. It’s more the effect of your activities than something you need to start them. You can absorb a lot of data, but you truly get their meaning when you use them.

I mean, look at our society. We are the first generation which has ALL the knowledge of the world at our fingertips. And what do we do with it? Is success more common now? Is it?

So, Johnny and Sean provide some knowledge, but it’s not their main goal. They have a lot of grit and, thanks to their book, I was able to steal some of it.

And you cannot name the price tag on this.

I have a lot of highlights which shows me that anybody, even I, can do it.

In terms of motivation this book was like nothing else I’ve ever read and I read a lot. Why?

Because they have been there, they have done that. They had the same shitty self-doubts I have. On every page of the book I can sense the struggles behind the content. They named my all fears (nobody will read your books and if somebody will, he won’t like it at all), my all false hopes (it will be easy), and my all faulty expectations (one book, one bestseller and I’ll be done) and all the solutions (write publish repeat).

“For the first time in history, life as a full-time writer has become about simple math.”

And, oh boy, I can do the math! My first 6 months of writing gave me about 1.5% of my day job’s salary. In this tempo I would be freed of my job in about 33 years.

Reaching that point, I don’t have to rely on social security, whims of my employer and so on.

But it was just the first 6 months. Writing is no exception to the rule, that the longer you do something the better you are at it. And my latest book sales proved that quite convincingly.

I absorbed this kind of iron confidence page by page and highlight after highlight.

As I said, I knew all that Johnny and Sean said; I knew all the facts. But thanks to this book I was able to feel them too.

7. Timeless values and principles.

A decade is not enough long term perspective for me.

But…

All too many “advisors” out there don’t give a shit about next year, not to mention the next decade. Their advice comes down to “find a trick and exploit it; the readers are morons, so treat them as morons; it will make you riiiiich!”

“You’re not going to fool a reader more than once, and you deserve to fail if you try.”

However, you can do many other things instead. Like love your readers, be integral, be persistent, think of your publishing venture as a business and a lot more.

Again, Johnny and Sean named it all. The whole book is the textbook of making writing your way of life plus making money out of it.

It’s so refreshing to have finally found people who believe the same values as I and who get this message across with such  clarity and wit.

8. Write. Publish. Repeat provides more than just self-publishing info.

I got more advantages from reading this book. My self-esteem skyrocketed because I discovered I already know all that successful indie authors do (am I repeating myself? )

The “Dave jokes” were fun. This guy must be a saint to put up with Johnny and Sean

I even had a spiritual experience reading the passage about courage. I was reading Saint Teresa of Avila’s book at the same time and the lecture of Write. Publish. Repeat put some light on this.

Conclusion

This book is cool. If you don’t believe me just read the 10% preview on Amazon and you find the sections who is it for and for who it isn’t. If you find yourself among the target audience just read it and you won’t regret it.

 

Write. Publish. Repeat is great. It is so good in fact, that made me wish I had a Kindle device on which I could highlight all the fragments that spoke to me or taught me something. I’ve read part of it on PC Kindle where I could highlight and a bigger chunk on my eReader device without such a feature.

 

No, it’s beyond cool and great; it is even better.  I decided that, one day, when I can afford it, I WILL buy a Kindle, read Write. Publish. Repeat once again and highlight all those fragments.

And I will pay for it using my books’ royalties.

The post “Write. Publish. Repeat.” Review appeared first on ExpandBeyondYourself.

Your Life Has a Meaning p. II

The most effective way I know to Begin with the End in Mind is to develop a personal mission statement or philosophy or creed.

-Stephen R. Covey

Why is it important to Begin with the End in Mind? Let’s face it—because there is an End. It is how this world functions. You have been inexorably approaching the moment of your death since you were born.

Mr. Covey gave a few thousand words to explain why you should keep the End in your mind. I would have to quote him extensively to explain it as well as he did, however, Google doesn’t like quoting.

In short, if you won’t live true to your values, at the end of your life you could discover that you lived in vain. It’s quite probable in fact. It’s like travelling a really long distance without a map or GPS. Unless you are a great traveler you are destined to get lost. And I’m talking about the very long distance now, the distance of decades, of your lifespan.

Counter-arguments

Well, there are some who claim that the existence of the human race is a cosmic joke and we all live in vain. I think we all accept this point of view to some degree. Think of it; how many people do you know who will answer clearly, quickly and without much doubt the question: what’s your purpose in life? How many, on the other hand, live just to get by, to do the minimum their employer demands from them and then enjoy food, sex, stimulants, video games or TV excessively?

If you don’t actively pursue your destiny, you naturally tend towards the opposite. You live life with no final destination.

Hey, wake up! You know very well yourself that there will be some final destination anyway! Why not change the direction today?

Comparison

I have discovered my purpose in life: to expand beyond myself and to show others they can do it too.

I tasted the aimless life. It’s tasteless. It gives you a lot of excuses, ready solutions and reasons to waste your life on trivia. Ultimately, if your life has no meaning then you are as good as dead. If your existence makes no difference, then why exist?

When I studied at university I met one guy who led such a purposeless life. He drank a lot. He spent most of his money on prostitutes. He did only what was necessary to get by. He always cheated with sick leave and he was taking his exams 6 months after the deadline. And he always got a scholarship, because he was very bright. But he was also miserable.

Now it’s your turn. Think about someone you know who believes that life has no purpose and is happy simultaneously. Quite a mental exercise, isn’t it?

And I taste the purposeful life now. The difference is indescribable.

Each of my actions has a meaning. Each of my experiences is a lesson I need. Each minute is invested, not spent. The quality of my life has increased by an order of magnitude.

I feel more and deeper. I do more and better. I learn more and faster. I fail more often and thrive.

Words are just too dull to express this difference. Talking to the no-purpose philosophy believers I feel like describing colors to the blind.

Check it out

Do you really want your life to be just producing two swimming pools of saliva or eating 60,000 pounds of food?

Don’t take the ‘there is no meaning, there is no sense’ propaganda without a pinch of salt. First try both sides of the equation; try to live with purpose for some time and decide what’s better for you. Don’t take the word of the skeptics; don’t take my word. Taste it yourself. Experience it yourself.

What have you got to lose?

I’ve been there; I’ve done that. I tell you—there is no comparison between those lifestyles. Purposeful life wins hands down.

All those philosophies which say that humans are just tiny, tiny pawns on the universe chessboard bring nothing of value to humankind. They have made you powerless; they equate your fate with the fate of animals. It’s true that you can’t influence the movements of the planets or the work of the sun.

But you have free will. You have a working mind and imagination—and the power over a single entity in the universe.

You.

Take that responsibility. Seek your purpose and then live it.

Did you like this post? Check out Your life has a meaning p. I

The post Your Life Has a Meaning p. II appeared first on ExpandBeyondYourself.

Transform Your Body; Transform Your Life.

I think that what hiders us most, you and me both, is hidden in our own minds. The external circumstances don’t determine your standings in life. You know this. You can pretend otherwise, but in the depths of your heart you know better. You use the excuses to abstain from action.

The way to see this truth clearly is really simple. Just think of your biggest obstacle, your biggest fear or doubt.

Then think of someone who had the same obstacle or fear and overcame it. Or better yet, think about someone whose obstacle was twice as big as yours.

There are people on this planet who faced the same struggle, on an even larger scale than you, and still succeeded. That is an indisputable fact.

Thus, it’s not the external obstacles that hinder us. The reason of our malaise lies in you and me.That’s why you need to feel, to touch and taste, that you have the power to change your life.

Your body

In my personal opinion (which is supported by the experiences and recommendations of many successful people), the best starting point is your body.

Your body is definitely something you have control of. What is more, you recognize this ability to control your body. You are perfectly sure that, if you decide to raise your hand, you will do it. The connection between the decision and the result is instantaneous. It is hard to come up with something more controllable than your own body.

Have you the gorgeous body of a model or a sports star?

Yes? Then my idea is not applicable to you, find another way.

No? Then there you have an occasion to improve.

Start small

It doesn’t have to be a magnificent transformation. I’m talking here about the first step, baby step, in gathering your confidence.

Just. Start. Doing. Something.

And observe that you have the control of one entity in the universe—of your person.

Are you morbidly obese? Don’t start by planning to run the marathon next month; walk around the block instead.

Have you got a high cholesterol level? Don’t radically change your diet; pick the one kind of food you want to get rid of and replace it with raw veggies or fruits. For example, every time you want to eat a slice of pizza, eat an apple or carrot instead.

Be consistent

Nothing more is necessary to start.

Your action doesn’t have to be smart, scientifically proven or even effective in the grand picture, but it must be consistent.

I used to do pushups to lose weight. This is a ridiculous idea. I know, because I went through it.

You can lose weight by doing pushups. And you can hammer a nail using your hand. But it is much more effective to focus on your diet in the first case and use the hammer instead of your hand in the other.

I was doing pushups almost every morning for four years without any visible effect. In fact, I gained some weight.

Additional advantages

But I also gained different advantages to those I expected. The consistency of this habit taught me that I had control over my behavior. It also built my muscles. When I finally lost the excessive pounds, I found I had a nice musculature.

When I read The Slight Edge and was looking for the small, consistent activities in my life that made the difference, it was my keystone experience.

Because I was doing pushups for four years, I immediately understood Jeff Olson’s teachings. It was the first stop to embracing his philosophy and the starting point of my transformation.

Do you see how many blessings came from this single tiny discipline? Without it I would have said, that the book is a heap of New Age garbage. That it fuels wishful thinkers with false hopes for good fortune, which will never come.

It’s not just me

Darren Hardy, in his book, The Compound Effect, gave an example of an obese woman who wished to run a half-marathon. He trained her. She started with the 1 mile walk around the block. During the first 2 weeks she had to walk this distance 3 times. Then she was gradually increasing the intensity of her trainings.

After a total of seven weeks, she was jogging one mile.

Then she was gradually increasing the distance of her runs.

In nine months, she was running 13.5 miles regularly.

Start doing something. And never give up. Tune your methods, but never give up.

I went from doing a single consecutive series of common pushups in the early morning to doing a few series of legs-elevated, different types—narrow or wide grip or diamond—pushups. But I still do them.

Try

There is always something you can start with. And you know perfectly what this is. You just … procrastinate.

Or you think your past equals your future. You tried to quit smoking several times and failed. Once you persevered 6 months before you went back to your addiction. What’s the use of trying? You will fail anyway…

But what’s the use of not trying? You already are a loser, you smoke; you cannot make the situation any worse by another attempt to quit smoking.

Maybe you are the Thomas Edison of quitting smoking? You just have to try 999 times and fail to find this one method which will work for you.

Start doing something

Passiveness, indifference, is not the solution. There is a definition of insanity—doing the same thing and expecting a different output. As the late Jim Rohn said, you cannot change the destination of your life within the single day. But you can change the direction of your life within the single moment. The moment of decision.

I saw once Nick Vujicic, on YouTube, genially illustrating this point. There was a phone on the stage and he was supposed to reach it. Instead, he wandered around the stage for a couple of minutes.

At last, he set himself straight toward the phone and he came to it slowly, one pseudo-step at a time.

When you put yourself in the right direction there is nothing left to do, but to move closer and closer to your goal. The speed is irrelevant as long as you go steadily in the right direction.

Transform Your Body Transform Your Life

We are spiritual creatures put into a physical body. The bond between your spirit, your mind and your body exists and affects you all the time. Use it to your advantage. Take care of your body and you will change your life.

Do you know any “mind & body” transformation story? Please share it in comments.

The post Transform Your Body; Transform Your Life. appeared first on ExpandBeyondYourself.

How to Keep Daily Journal Online

In January 2013, I took part in The Transformational Contest organized by Early To Rise.

Participants were obliged to keep the online daily journal of their progress in three, very widely understood, categories: Healthy, Wealthy and Wise.

One entry per day is all that was required.

I don’t know the details behind their decision, but ETR backed away from the TC idea and focused solely on the health & fitness side of things.

So this year we (the original TC participants) decided to make our own TC. We decided to keep the TC rules for 90 days. We organized the secret group on FB and started to post our daily updates.

But I’m the only one who really does them daily. I’m one of the busiest in our group, with my family, job and Kindle business, yet only I manage to keep the daily commitment.

Part of the ‘how and why’ is that I have kept the habit of publishing my daily progress report on The Progress Journal. But that’s not all.

I’ll explain to you how I managed to post daily for the past 13+ months, missing only the days when I was offline. I hope it will inspire you to start your daily journal; it’s worth the effort.

1. You are doing it for yourself, not for show.

I’ve been keeping the internet journal for almost a year. I have more than 315 entries. Only 13 people are following that blog. There are only a handful of comments and 90% of them are from my close friends.

If I was doing it for show, I would have given up long ago.

Tracking and writing down the daily activities which compound into my achievements is beneficial to me. I can see that I work every day. I can see my results. I can connect the dots and see which actions led to effects and which didn’t.

Sharing my struggles is just an additional service I provide to the world. If the world doesn’t care, neither do I.

2. Know what you want to accomplish.

In our FB group we have announced our goals for the current TC. Mine are a substract from my 2014 goals.

3. Establish daily disciplines.

Consistency is magic in itself. Besides, you are going to post every day, so you should establish some daily metrics. If you monitor your health, it would be clumsy to post every day: I’m healthy, I’m healthy, I’m healthy…

If your goal is to lose weight, count the calories; if you want to get fit, exercise every day. If you want to save some money, track your expanses and monitor your savings account. If you want to develop your internet business, track your metrics—unique visitors, bounce rate, subscribers number and sales.

Narrow your goal to the actionable steps you can take every day and you can easily track.

So, for example, for my goal no 1, which is quite vague, I keep a gratitude journal for my wife.

To sell more books I write more books, keep this blog, am active on the social media and I organize free book promos and, recently, the book launch. There are a lot of things involved, but I want to keep track of them all. All in all, I work full time and can rarely put more than 4 hours into them, so tracking them all is essential and relatively easy to manage.

The same goes for the last goal—expanding my mailing list.

4. Tracking.

It’s crucial. You can forget about everything else if you don’t keep track.

I have my daily habits and I track them by various methods. Most of them I just tick off as done in the Lift application (if I’ve done them of course). Some of them deserve greater attention. For example, I track my writing. I had a special Excel sheet where I noted how long I wrote for, how many words I completed and what the subject was. I do this with every chunk of writing longer than my daily entry in The Progress Journal.

I track the number of hours I sleep every day. It’s a very important health factor to me.

I track my sales on Amazon, daily. Their reporting system sucks, so it has to be done that way or it would be useless.

And I track EVERY business-related activity I can think of in my Journal: editing, marketing, networking, publishing, outsourcing… You name it and you’ll find it in the Journal.

How do I manage all of it? Simply, whenever I do something I immediately note it down in my txt version of the Journal. 99% of business-related tasks need the computer and/or online connection anyway, so it just takes me seconds to note down that I formatted a blog post or submitted the info about my promo to the freebie site.

That’s why my entries are often so dry. I just jot down what I’ve done during the day without any additional ruminations.

 

I’m quite good at tracking, because I track a lot of activities in my life. Practice makes you a master. At the beginning of 2013, I tracked my calorie intake for 84 days. I quit doing this after I achieved my dream weight, but up to date I’m able to tell you all I eat since dawn to dusk (1 apple, 4 oranges, 1 carrot, 1 cottage cheese, 1 homo cheese, 1 can of fish). In addition to that, I tracked calories in my drinks too, so I’m aware of any calorific drinks I’ve had (2 cups of coffee with milk and 1 cup of chicory coffee with milk).

4. Develop a daily journaling habit.

Tracking all the info in the world won’t materialize your journal. All those data have to be put together and published.

As with every habit, it’s a good idea to make it as easy as possible. I used to publish my posts late in the evening; all in all a single entry is the summary of my day, so it should be done at the end of the day, right?

Wrong.

At the end of the day I had no energy. A few times I forgot about my daily entry. Also, my wife was very unfriendly to the idea of me opening the laptop during the time she considers belongs to the family.

So I changed the time.

I now post my entries first thing in the morning, summarizing the previous day.

It doesn’t take much effort. My posts are almost ready. I have them written down during the day. Sometimes I add a sentence or two at the end, but 95% of the time I just:

- check the spelling

- copy the text from my txt file into the clipboard

- open my blog in the browser and log into the administrative panel

- start a new post

- copy the text from the clipboard

- choose appropriate categories and publish

It takes no longer than a couple of minutes. It’s easy. I already decided to track all those things, so I would write them down anyway. I turn on my computer every morning to track my sales anyway.

 

Build your journaling routine around existing activities and it will be easy for you, too.

Any questions about daily journaling on the Net? I’ll answer them gladly. Use my experience

The post How to Keep Daily Journal Online appeared first on ExpandBeyondYourself.

Instantly Boost Your Reading Speed

Do you want to read faster? This case study will show you how you can do it this very minute.

When I was on a retreat with my church community at the beginning of November 2013, I took part in a speed reading experiment.

I read the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas during that time.

I took the book and read as fast as I could (and still comprehend the text). Before then, I had been measuring my reading speed only with small chunks of text, reading for one minute with the timer.

I was curious as to whether my reading speed is reduced when I read for longer periods.

Firstly, I was reading for 35 minutes straight, using the pointer.

Then I read 16.5 minutes without the pointer.

The pointer won. I read about 293 words per minute (wpm) using it. That was 17% improvement over my reading speed one year prior.

I read only 259 wpm without the pointer. It meant only 3.6% improvement over my basic metric.

I was reaching about 400 wpm during my 1-minute exams at that time.

Conclusions:


1. You can focus better in a short time span and uprate your result.

(By the way, yesterday I beat my speed reading record – 575 words per minute; it was a 1 minute test, of course).

In that case, the results may not reflect your average reading skills.

To reliably gauge your reading, you should measure your results over longer periods of time.

2. Practice makes perfect.

As you can see on the photo above, the font in that book was really fine. The subject was complex. The kind of language used by Saint Thomas was sophisticated.

But even so I was able to read faster than a year ago.

3. The pointer is THE speed reading technique.

It’s easy—you can use even your index finger for this technique (however, I recommend a pen).

You can use it in your normal lectures; you don’t need special circumstances or reading material to practice this technique.

It works. Immediately.

I read twice as long with the pointer than without it, but my result was still 13% better.

The next time you take a book in your hand, use the pointer. It should boost your reading speed at least by 10%.

Interested in speed reading? Check out 7 Ways to Gauge Your Reading Speed.

The post Instantly Boost Your Reading Speed appeared first on ExpandBeyondYourself.

To be like James Arthur

One day my wife showed me a YouTube video that inspired the heck out of me.

James Arthur, a young unemployed guy from Middlesbrough,

took part in the X-Factor competition and he sang his soul out. This performance blew me away. I really recommend you watch it. The actual performance is between 3:34 and 5:55.



I could rant for hours about how shallow and empty the music industry is nowadays, but I won’t. James Arthur reminded me what the art really stands for.

There are a lot of lessons in James Arthur’s story: about cultivating talent, perseverance, success and personal progress, among others. I know this just from watching that video (which includes hints about him) and skimming the news on the Internet.

Those are important lessons, but I wasn’t inspired by them.

My soul was touched by his authenticity and transparency.

He wasn’t afraid to sing about his life, which allowed him to sing with unrelenting passion. I bet it made everybody in the audience think about their lives as it made me to think about mine. They connected to him on a personal level, on the innermost level, where we very rarely meet with each other.

Those moments of intimacy are always precious. Recall your own such memories – with your spouse, your children, other family members or with friends. They happen when two people abandon their internal fortresses and come out to meet another person without lies, masks or pretense. Such moments give births and fuel for love. They create the bonds for life.

That’s what the art is for. That caused the audience to give him the standing ovation.

I want to be like James Arthur

After watching this video, the very same evening I wrote a poem about how I would like to be so transparent in my writing, about showing my true pain and the story of my life, and use them to inspire others.

The next morning I composed a prayer which I say every time I write any piece of content (that is, if I remember to ).

In a nutshell I ask God to give me the strength and ability to show my real self to my readers, and I hope they connect with me on a personal level and feel what I felt when I watched James for the first time.

Authenticity and transparency establish the first important layer of what I want to communicate through my writing.

Integrity

The second layer is what it takes to be transparent: The courage to be myself, to be vulnerable, and to share my story. I’m not perfect, and neither is James’ story. His song is not about an artificial and easy life; it’s about his life. It’s real. It’s humane.

I need this touch of humanity in every book I read. For example, I hate “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” because it is a fiction story presented as the truth. I have nothing against teaching and moralizing via fiction, but I have everything against pretending that it’s true. That’s the worst type of falsehood. It is hypocrisy, and I don’t want to commit it.

It takes courage and discipline to maintain one’s integrity. Sometimes I have to confess my vices and failures, especially when I want to warn you against committing the same mistakes I made.

Be somebody

The third layer is to have something worthy to say. It’s cool to be authentic and have courage; however there is nothing to be proud of if you are an asshole.

James Arthur didn’t just come up on a stage one shiny day and become a rock star. He practiced his craft, he trained long hours. He had been working hard for many years, through an endless succession of bands and gigs.

And most importantly, he matured. He has grown enough to weave the threads of his life into his art, to recognize the patterns in others’ songs that are relevant to his story. It’s what he has done with Tulisa’s “Young,” and later on with every single song in the X-Factor, including his famous “Impossible.”

Responsibility

I need to be someone worth listening to. If I just sat on my hands for the last 16 months I wouldn’t have stories to tell you, because that’s what my books are really about – my personal stories. They tell about an ordinary guy’s mission to find purpose, to lose weight, to hone his reading or time management skills, to support his kid in learning, and so on.

Those stories make you believe that you can do it too. They steal the mystical envelope from the subject of personal transformation.

That’s why I strive to be the best version of myself. It takes a ton of discipline and mundane hard work. Sometimes it is simply boring. The whole process of expanding beyond myself would suck if I was just doing this for myself.

But I want to be like James Arthur. I want to touch your heart.

A word to you

I don’t want to get a standing ovation for the sake of a standing ovation. Surely it’s nice to observe how my latest book has sold several hundred copies a month, but I want to see people moved by my work. I want them to take action and get results.

So my reader, if I ever string a chord in your soul, don’t hesitate to share it with me. That’s my real reward. You know, I’m not a saint. I don’t write like crazy just to touch your heart. I wish my heart to be moved by yours too. Give me feedback: Email me, Tweet me, comment on my blog or give me a review.

Using James’ words: “Thank you. It means the world to me”.

The post To be like James Arthur appeared first on ExpandBeyondYourself.

Book Launch Autopsy

I am incredibly lucky. My editor, Chris, not only offered me his superb editing services for free; he was just starting his indie author support business and he wanted to hone his marketing approach on my book. He offered to make a full-out marketing campaign for me, free of charge.

I jumped at that chance.

Planning

The 4th of January, we had our first Skype call when we basically got to know each other better. Chris asked me several questions about my up to date marketing strategy (almost non-existent).

He came back to me 2 days later, with the marketing plan for the book launch. It was detailed, 4-page document with many tactics, including the creation of a pre-launch mailing list, social media, networking with other bloggers, the usage of my blog and more.

On the 8th of January, Chris established a Trello board for our campaign, a crucial project management tool for our launch. The whole launch was broken down to specific tasks. The tasks were divided into time sequence and assigned between two of us.

Preparations

On the 10th of January I contacted my mentor S.J. Scott and 3 bloggers with whom I had some previous relationships and for whose audiences I thought my book would be helpful. My mentor and Timo Kiander, the owner of Productive Superdad, were aware of my book and had read it in advance, but I didn’t discuss any help from him before.

Anyway, S.J. and Timo agreed to help me, both of them wanted to arrange my guest post on their blogs. The one for S.J. had even been already written.

Lidiya from Let’s Reach Success also agreed to help me out. Another blogger was willing to help, but our schedules didn’t fit very well. All of them gave me helpful advice about my upcoming launch.

There was a confusing period of a few days when I waited for the info from Chris on Trello, which already had been posted. It was then that we decided to further break down our to-do lists into “Chris to-do” and “Michal to-do.”

The 15th of January, I managed to set up a new email list, sign up form and a landing page. I sent a broadcast to my list (48 names, 13% open rate).

On the 16th, I tackled Trello and the communication process between me and Chris. I started to reach out to the bloggers he found.

I also published the first teaser post on my blog.

In the meantime, I formatted the book, got four versions of the cover and posted them on a few FB groups for crowd voting. Judging by the results of my promo and the sales afterwards it’s a very effective tactic.

Troubles

Then the shit hit the fan at my work. On Friday, January 17th, I worked from 12:30 p.m. till 12:30 a.m. and worked throughout the weekend as well.

I was discouraged as hell. Chris was very supportive. From that moment on, he took the initiative and I just awaited his instructions.

On the 19th, I uploaded “Master Your Time in 10 Minutes a Day” to Amazon and got the ASIN number. Chris started posting the info to the freebie sites.

I managed to send a couple of emails to bloggers on Monday 20th of January. I also finished my guest post which was scheduled for Wednesday. Chris did some emergency editing of it.

I was also busy making several versions of the landing page for the bloggers who agreed to help me.

January 21st I was visiting blogs and preparing my pitch in advance till 2a.m. On the 22nd, I took a day off from work, sat down and sent 14 personalized emails within 2.5 hours.

The pre-launch period

All our efforts were starting to bear fruit. On the 22nd of January, my guest posts on ProductiveSuperdad and on EarningFreeMoney went live (the second one was composed by Chris and edited by me). Several people subscribed to the launch list.

On the 23rd, Emily from FreelanceLady.com published an enthusiastic review on her blog. The email list grew further.

On the 24th, I published a blog post sharing my sand-grain method from the book’s and I sent an email to my list announcing the post. Both items were prepared by Chris, I need formatted them and made some small, final edits.

The broadcast was sent to 67 subscribers and had a 15% open rate.

On January 25th, Lidiya published a post on her blog, sharing with her audience the news about my book. Very generous of her!

On the 27th of January, I sent an email to David Allen, who invented and perfected the Getting Things Done productivity system. I was super stoked to get his reply the very same day. Here are some excerpts:

Thanks for your lovely e-mail. I’m always delighted to hear when someone takes GTD to heart and actually implements it–it always works! (…)

And thanks for the link to your book. I’m rather stretched in my own time resources to do anything but work on my own next book project (updating GTD); so no promises that I will get to it anytime soon.

Well, not much in terms of help, but a gigantic amount of encouragement. Just in time, as I was approaching the point of total exhaustion.

I published the last post on my blog in the pre-launch sequence.

THE LAUNCH

Compared to the crazy amount of work we put into preparations, the launch itself was a piece of cake.

On the day of the launch, my guest post on my mentor’s blog went live and it was the first guest post ever on Develop Good Habits. I swelled with pride

What’s more, S.J. sent a broadcast to his list, which is considerably larger than mine. At the end of the day he informed me that over 220 people had clicked over to my book.

I also sent the broadcast to my list (72 people). It had a 27% ctr.

I posted daily on freebie FB groups using my list. I tried to keep my announcements always present in the current feed. Almost 48 hours after the launch I sent a follow up to those from launch email list who didn’t open the first message. This one had an even better 39% ctr.

Chris did everything in his power to sustain the momentum. He sent an email to his list. He also secured a guest post on FreeBookDude in my name. It went live on the 30th and I think it drove great results in the last day of the promo.

Chris is a very resourceful guy, this post had been rejected by another blogger and he managed to utilize it!

To boost the downloads in the last day Chris came up with the idea of the review contest, but my list’s response was very weak, only 3% ctr. I think they were tired of this email bombardment

I posted one last time on FB groups urging readers to download before the promo expired and I went to bed anticipating the results.

On the 1st of February, I woke up early. It was still a few hours before midnight in the USA. I checked the stats and I was blown away! My book was #84 on the free Kindle list!!

My greedy side said to extend the promo for another day, but I decided that my word is worth more than a few thousand additional downloads. Practicing integrity was painful at that particular time, but I believe it is rewarding in the end.

I checked the numbers once again, after the midnight in the USA. The last day was great, well over 1.5k downloads.

THE PROMO RESULTS

The downloads grew on Amazon.com as follows:

Day 1: about 580

Day 2: up to 1250

Day 3: up to 1940

Day 4: up to 3531

Totals from other markets were:

Amazon.co.uk: 411

Amazon.de: 98

Amazon.in: 28

Amazon.ca: 42

and about 40 on other markets.

The book got 13 reviews, most of them 5 stars.

My list grew from 47 before the launch idea (at the beginning of January) to over 125 at the time of writing this post (13th of February). Well over 100%. I’ll take that!

DETAILED ANALYSIS AND THE LIST OF RESOURCES
Free sites

Chris submitted the promo to 24 freebie sites. I submitted it only to EbookBlitz.com. Only 6 sites actually published my promo (Chris checked all the sites on 31st of January).

Those were:

http://freediscountedbooks.com – I cooperated with them with my past promos. I highly recommend their service, especially because the listing stays on their site and can be a source traffic to your book in the future.

http://www.freebookdude.com – Chris also submitted this guest post in my name. The listing is permanent.

http://www.ereaderperks.com – It wasn’t a very big source of traffic. I know because it was one of the couple of sites out of those which published, that allowed shortlinks. I got a few dozen downloads through them, but their efficiency (they published!) and the ability to track their results with Goo.gl shortlinks is valuable in itself.

http://indiebookpromo.com

http://awesomegang.com – Their listing is also permanent and they allow shortlinks too.

http://bookangel.co.uk – Permanent listing and they send readers directly to the UK store. About 10% of my overall downloads were in the UK.

There is a big lesson here for indie authors. We should definitely track the quality of service of these freebie sites. Only 25% of them actually published the info for my book! Every indie author knows how much time it could take to submit your entry.

On the other hand, the impact of free sites can be significant. I was able to track back only about 14% of my downloads via shortlinks and info provided by S.J. A whopping 86% were the results of word of mouth, Amazon marketing at work and untraceable freebie sites.

Facebook freebie groups

These are all featured in my blog post:

http://expandbeyondyourself.com/express-way-to-promote-onfacebook/

Other social media

Chris posted reviews to two groups on Reddit using one of our Goo.gl shortlinks. This turned out to be a great source of traffic, we’ll see the numbers for that in a bit. The info about my book was tweeted a couple of times by various authors and people ‘in the business’ (Greetings Jay!).

Networking

It’s awkward to include it in the resource section, but where else? These people helped me with my launch. Here is who and how:

S.J. Scott from DevelopGoodHabits.com published my guest post with the link to my book on Amazon at the end. He also sent a broadcast to his list, which is about 1,800 members strong.

Timo Kiander from ProductiveSuperDad.com published my guest post with an invitation to join my pre-launch list. He also sent a teaser mail to his list about this guest post.

Lidiya from Let’sReachSuccess.com extensively quoted excerpts from my book in her post about productivity and invited her readers to join my pre-launch list.

Louida from EarningFreeMoney.com published my guest post with an invitation to join my pre-launch list.

Emily from FreelanceLady.com wrote an enthusiastic review of my book and told her readers how to join my pre-launch list.

Six other bloggers answered my appeal for help, but our schedules didn’t fit very well or they were just those polite enough to send me an email refusing their involvement.

At the beginning of the launch, my pre-launch list included 22 email addresses.

Tracking

I used bit.ly for the links posted on FB groups. They were clicked about 230 times (I don’t know when exactly, because reporting is in my timezone) during the promo. About 30% came on the 1st day, 30% on the 2nd, 22.5% on the 3rd and the remaining 17.5% on the last day.







Only 8.7% were clicks to non-US markets, but the downloads in foreign markets were about 17% of the overall number of downloads. This tells me that foreign customers hang out more on freebie sites than on FB.

It could be very profitable to precisely target such freebie sites. I suppose http://bookangel.co.uk/ has a lot to do with my good results in the UK and, in one of my previous promos, one of the pages had good exposure in Japan (I got 17% of overall downloads in Japan). Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to track down which one.

Chris used goo.gl shortlinks to track his efforts. He got 114 clicks.



It looks like Reddit turned out to be a much bigger traffic source than we expected, it accounted for 40.5% of “his” traffic. Facebook was the next biggest.

Out of the freebie sites, it looks like freediscountedbooks.com was the best traffic generator. Remember, those are only conclusions from a partial data set (14%).

THE SALES

I couldn’t resist the temptation of checking my book’s rank and sales. I did it at 3 p.m. I sold 7 copies of “Master Your Time…” and a few copies of my other books. Cool, the launch strategy seemed to be working! It was the first time I priced my book above $1. The sales have been already higher than my average daily sales from past month and the revenue was a few dozen times higher. AND my 3 p.m. was still an early morning in the USA.

I was excited, but it was nothing compared to what I found the next day checking the sales stats.

In the first 24 hours after the promo ended, I sold 68 copies on the US market and about a dozen on different foreign markets (6 in UK)!

One day, and the profits were bigger than my last 2 months of royalties put together.

After the launch, the book climbed to #2 in following categories:

Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Investing > Business Life > Time Management



Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Self-Help > Creativity



It peaked at #2579 on Kindle.



Within 3 days I sold 96 copies in USA, 25 copies in UK and about a dozen on other markets.

Within 11 days I sold about 350 copies and my book was borrowed more than 40 times.

My other books’ sales jumped from 4.48 copies a day to 7.27 copies a day.

The free promo is not dead yet, but its advantages rise exponentially after you break a certain level of downloads.

Where exactly is this ‘certain level’? I don’t know. I know it is above 1k threshold, because my promos in the past had reached this point and the sales afterwards weren’t so impressive. It is probably well above 1k downloads.

Failures

Although the results were amazing, not everything we planned worked out smoothly.

But most of the shortcomings were due to fact that both Chris and I were doing a coordinated book launch campaign for the first time. Our communication was imperfect.

The Trello board was an excellent idea and helped us a lot, but I had to get familiar with it. Sometimes I waited for Chris’ input, only to find it had already been added. Sometimes, our communication or efforts were redundant; for example, at one point, Chris and I were searching independently for the contact information on the blogs we were going to contact.

We planned to run quite a campaign on Facebook, but we got a list of FB pages rather than FB groups. These need to be approached as blogs, via their owners. We realized it too late and had no time to look for other places to connect to the audience.

Chris planned to send a series of tweets to Twitter users who specialize in tweeting about free books, but he realized that it would have spammed my Twitter followers. You need a dedicated account for such an action.

Lessons for other authors
Your assets

If you are an indie author you HAVE TO have your platform and mailing list. Those are the prerequisites. Most of self-publishing authors do realize that, but this launch has taught me that you never should assume something in advance.

So, step zero is: setup your website and a mailing list infrastructure. I use Aweber (affiliate link) for managing my mailing list and this blog as my platform.

Joint-venture

If you don’t have the time and/or ideas for your book promotion, connect with someone who has a marketing background to join your team.

In hindsight, the steps we undertook are quite obvious, but I alone lacked the imagination (and confidence) to come up with them.

Chris saw the potential in my book, and approached the launch from a whole new direction (for me). And his input was enormous: his research, writing and editing my guest posts, emails and teaser posts on my blog – it was just too much to do for me alone.

Prepare in advance

It’s very important. But it’s not urgent and we tend to focus on urgent things and ignore the important ones. Not a wise time management tactic (with which I deal in “Master Your Time in 10 Minutes a Day” ).

It’s not a bad idea to learn before you do. I learned on the fly: how to set up a landing page on my blog and how to manage sending emails to a few mailing lists at once.

I also searched for the keywords and appropriate categories on Amazon in January. This job could be done much earlier.

All these tasks meant I had less time for strictly launch-related tasks.

I regret that I didn’t start the preparations earlier. We had just 25 days for the launch and half of this time we spent on planning. It meant we needed to compress a lot of tasks into the week before launch. It helped to gain some momentum, but it also meant we did everything in a hurry and the amount of work almost overwhelmed me (I have no idea how Chris coped with his, more extensive part).

Note from Chris:

I just kept watching the “Done” list in Trello grow and that was so energizing and inspiring. Also, (not a plug for the book, though it may seem so) the concepts in Master Your Time in 10 Minutes a Day were a huge help. Two specifically made a huge difference: Tackling the biggest task first, and using the Sand-Grains Method.

Due to the short time between the moment of contact and the launch, some bloggers couldn’t give me a hand and some freebie sites were not able to publish my listing on time. I got an email with apologies from EbookBlitz.com because of that. BTW, I’m impressed by their level of customer service, no other site that failed to post my promo has apologized. We even have worked out some compensation!

Relationships

Part of being prepared in advance is having relationships already developed. Timo and S.J. Scott helped me without a moment of hesitation, because they knew me. They also knew about my upcoming book, because I shared this info with them.

I exchanged a few emails with Lidiya before reaching out for help.

A lot of bloggers are willing to help. I reached out to 24 people who have never heard of me before. About half of them replied and a few of them agreed to help.

I had a 100% success rate among the people with whom I already had existing relationships. It’s an ample subject (and I plan a whole post about it), but I’ll give you one piece of advice which helped me most in connecting: visit and comment on others’ blogs.

Everything else

Get a few drafts of your cover and put them in FB groups for crowd-voting. It works.

Facebook doesn’t seem to be a big source of traffic. As far I could track, only about 5% of downloads were coming directly from the freebie groups. But I got most of the reviews from there. AND it’s so easy to post your ads on FB, that’s it’s a sin not to post. AND I got over 20 clicks after the promo, which means additional sales.

Facebook is a place for American audiences, freebie sites are the source of international traffic.

Most Facebook clicks happened during the first 2 days of the promo.

Track your traffic sources using shortlinks. We were able to track only about 14% of the traffic, but even partial knowledge is better than none.

The more you do for your book, the more Amazon will leverage your efforts. When I did a weak 1-day promo in December I was able to track back 41% of my traffic.

Amazon works for you

I’ll show you it in the bare numbers:

I generated 75 downloads myself during that 1-day promo, through posts on FB freebie groups and a broadcast to my small list. I couldn’t pinpoint 105 downloads, which were generated from other sources – 1 freebie site and Amazon organic traffic.

During the recent launch, I pinpointed about 664 downloads generated by our efforts – S.J.’s and my broadcasts to mailing lists, FB, Reddit and a couple of freebie sites which allowed a shortlink.

I wasn’t able to track down over 3400 downloads – they came from 4 other freebie sites, Twitter and Amazon organic traffic.

Thank you

Chris, for your amazing support. I owe you man.

Hynek, for the cover. Superb job!

S.J., Timo, Lidiya, Louida and Emily for your help.

My TC friends, for their relentless encouragement.

My subscribers, for their patience

My readers. I write for you.

Now it’s your turn

Please share in the comments how you drive readers to your books, and let other indie authors learn from your experience!

The post Book Launch Autopsy appeared first on ExpandBeyondYourself.

Master Your Time in 10 Minutes a Day launches tomorrow!

I am so excited to announce that my latest book officially launches on Amazon Kindle tomorrow, Tuesday, January 28th! It will be on free promotion until Friday, January 31st! A lot of work has gone into writing the book and getting the word out, but it has all been worth it because I am so passionate about sharing this message. I just wanted to give you another brief look into the book and a reminder about the launch.

Why kill yourself in your daily life?

Chapter 6 of my book discusses Time Killers. Here is an excerpt:

Analyze how you spend your time. Pin down the time killers you use to feel better, activities which don’t bring you closer to your purpose, but take up much of your time. Cut them ruthlessly from your life. As long as your yardstick is your purpose, it’s relatively easy to root out these worthless activities. Just replace them with something worth doing, something truly fulfilling. Killing time is suicide in installments.

Facebook, TV, celebrity gossip magazines, Candy Crush… We all have thosanaesthetize ourselves from the pressures of daily life.

Are you really going to look back on your life from your deathbed and see any value in these activities? What if you took even half the time spent on those activities each day, and applied them to your life’s purpose, your mission? Would you not likely find yourself more fulfilled, more alive?

How to live each moment

I know that as people we do need periods of mental rest in the midst of all the demands of daily life; we cannot expect to sustainably be “on” all the time. But, when you are working towards your personal mission, the allure of just “checking out” for 10 minutes or a few hours begins to diminish.

“Master Your Time in 10 Minutes a Day” discusses a number of strategies for creating downtime in your day that still moves you closer to your goals while reinvigorating your spirit and mind.

The choice is yours

I am in no way advocating that you eliminate fun from your life. By all means, continue to spend enjoyable leisure time with family, friends and peers. However, too many of us have built routines incorporating leisure activities that contribute nothing to our lives, to our purpose.

It is easy to get caught in the rut of using these activities as distractions and nothing more; leisure does not always equal fun or fulfilling.

What I do advocate is that you take a close look at these activities and ask yourself whether they exist to further your growth as a human being with much to give to the world, or do they exist simply as painkillers? When you have discovered your true purpose and decided to follow it, the painkillers become unnecessary.

Your purpose

Because following your life’s true purpose is such an integral part of managing your time and pursuing your dreams, I want to get you started on the right track with my book “A Personal Mission Statement: Your Roadmap to Happiness.” On Smashword you can set your own price on it and preview 30% of the content.

The post Master Your Time in 10 Minutes a Day launches tomorrow! appeared first on ExpandBeyondYourself.

Time management – The Sand-grains Method

The following post is a sneak peek into my latest book, MASTER YOUR TIME IN 10 MINUTES A DAY, which officially launches on Amazon Kindle Free Promotion on January 28th.





This post discusses content found in Chapter 11 – THE SAND GRAINS METHOD. This article is not an excerpt from the book, but rather, a brief discussion of the concept as Amazon is pretty stringent about content from books being published elsewhere online, even if it is your own content.

Please enjoy the following article. If you would like to sign up to receive updates on the launch and a reminder when it is available for FREE DOWNLOAD, sign up at the bottom of the article.

Increasing your “Productivity Density”

Take a moment to do a little visualization exercise with me. Imagine a glass jar, something, perhaps, like what Grandma used to store her fresh strawberry jam in.

Imagine you have a lot of small stones, maybe grape-sized, that you think are nice to look at and you want to put them in the jar. So you wash out the jar, sit down and start dropping stones into the jar.

Before too long, the jar begins filling up. You know at some point, you will need to stop adding stones so you can still fit the lid back onto the jar.

Once done, you lift the jar to hold it up to the light and look at it. The jar, full of stones, is now pretty heavy. With the lid on tightly and without room for even one more stone, the jar is full isn’t it?

Your jar, your life

Every day, you wake up and for the rest of the day, you add stones to the jar. Make breakfast for the kids? Plunk. Drive to work? Plunk. Drive home? Plunk. Make dinner? Plunk. Pay some bills? Plunk.

By the end of the day, you are ready to go to bed, ready to put the lid on that day’s jar. You reflect on the day and think “Well, another day, another full jar.”

But look again.

How full is it really?

Pick up that jar one more time. Look closely, look inside the jar. Look past the stones and you will see tons of gaps, small spaces between the stones that hold nothing but air.

This is the foundation for the Sand-grains Method. Imagine if, instead of only adding stones throughout the day, you added one or two stones and then a sprinkle of sand. If you then repeated this all day, what you would find that night would be a jar much more full than the one with only stones.

Stone vs. sand

Often times, the stones represent the demands of daily life. Working, doing chores, preparing meals for the family – these things are often not optional. There is nothing wrong with the stones necessarily, they are often quite important and may even be things you find tolerable, if not enjoyable. The thing about the stones, however, is that for most people they don’t represent passion or fulfillment and they often seem to crowd out things that do represent true purpose.

But, by using the Sand-grains Method, you can instantly begin reclaiming space in that jar for the things that do excite you, the dreams that propel you forward. Even the loftiest goals are full of sub-tasks that take less than 5 or 10 minutes to complete. Examples:

● Perhaps you have been meaning to put together a website for a business you want to start. Ok, in between cleaning up from dinner and sitting down to pay bills, hop online and buy your domain name. In less than 5 minutes, you’ve taken an essential step toward your goal.

● Maybe your goal is to become more connected to your spiritual side and improve your health. Why not spend 10 minutes doing Tai Chi between showering and eating breakfast?

● Want to write a book? Hop onto Amazon or Google and spend 10 minutes typing partial search terms into the search bar to get an idea of what people are searching for in the niche you want to write about.

Make every day a walk on the beach

If you stop to truly look around you, ‘sand moments’ really are always around. Every day is full of them, popping up just begging to be utilized.

The key is breaking your tasks down and finding those little nuggets of the goal that take just a few minutes to complete. By filling your to-do list with these Sand-grain tasks, you will always be ready to snatch up these moments and make them productive. Instead of logging on to Facebook to kill a few minutes and reading about what your friend had for lunch, you will cross another item off your to-do list.

Another benefit? Sprinkling these little victories throughout the day boosts your mood and gives you energy to tackle the next stone.

The “Sand-grains Method” and many other powerful tools for reclaiming your time are explained in detail in my book Master Your Time In 10 Minutes a Day, which launched officially on Amazon on January 28th.

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