On Sunday, Joanna Penn wrapped up the conference with a keynote address. Sorry the photo is a bit blurry.
She talked about how deeply unhappy she was in her day job–she’d actually written her first book as a response to how unhappy she was. Then, she went to a vanity press, got a bunch of copies…and well, you know how that turned out. Though a vendor is trying to make money off that old book. I saw it online for $200!
When she jumped in on the early days of epublishing, she also came up with a lot of different ways to make money that were related to the books. She expected that she wouldn’t make money with the books for a while. That was a very realistic way of viewing what she was doing. Most writers seem to think their writing is so fantastic that everyone will flock to it and turn it into a best seller.
She also noted that marketing should be able to happen all the time even when you aren’t tending to it. That goes to making smarter choices about marketing, rather than doing as I saw a writer say, “Writing books is 90% marketing and 10% writing).
Like going to Amazon and starting to type “How to” and seeing what those results are…and doing a book using those results. She updated her first book and released it again under the title Career Change–because that was an Amazon search term. It helped sales because it showed up first when people typed it in.
She also brought up consistency, which was a theme during the conference. She was doing podcasts and got frustrated with the lack of success with them. But then buckled down and started doing them consistently each week and then they gained popularity. I think this is the hardest thing is just sticking to the schedule.
The conference was all very positive, and I’m glad I was able to hear Joanna speak. It has been hard sometimes to connect books and blog posts to actual actions.
One of the first things I did after I got back from the conference was to set up an email newsletter, which you can find here. It’ll start up on December 3.
Linda Maye Adams 