Hi friends,
So last year, I noticed that my indie book sales were flatlining. They’d been steadily growing until then, and I’m quite proud to say that I’ve had consistent indie book sales for 31 consecutive months, but the numbers had stopped rising.
This wasn’t entirely a surprise. I’d launched the books, given them some love, and then left them to do their own thing. The sales had continued to grow until, well, they hadn’t. And I wanted to do something, ideally something quick, that would help them get back on track again.
Over a week, I ran a super simple promotional campaign over email (no advertising, no social media, nothing fancy at all), and quadrupled my sales.
I had expected a rise in numbers but I have to admit, even I was surprised by how well the promotion had worked. I made extensive notes about what I had done and why I thought it did so well so that I could replicate it in the future and filed away my little report.
Last week, I chanced upon it again.
I’ve always wanted to do something with these reports I make, sometimes about book sales, other times about efforts to grow this newsletter, and occasionally on social media growth. I want to share this information with writers. It’s too short for a course, too long for a blog post, and not quite in the format of this newsletter. And it’s near impossible to sell a 45-minute standalone training. (Or even get people to watch for free.)
But not if it’s in The Bookish Academy. (New! New! Have you checked it out?)
I love creating. I love sharing. I love teaching. And lately, I’ve felt very limited in the ways that I could do so.
Instead of creating dozens of trainings, workshops, and courses for you each month, I have to limit myself by how much and when I can launch. It feels, to me as though I’m driving with the brakes on. And as my publishing career now begins to take off, I want to create things in the moment, record experiences before they become commonplace for me, talk about the lessons I’m learning and the mistakes I’m making at this level before I rise up to the next.
It’s why I’m so very much in love with The Bookish Academy and why I decided to create it.
It allows me to create as much as I want, in whatever format I want. It allows you to get all the information you need in one place at a price that works for you, and it gives us the freedom and flexibility to talk about subjects that would never have made it into a course or a workshop, but that is wonderfully specific enough to put into a training.
Such as a case study on how to quadruple your book sales in 10 days.
Which is, no surprise, exactly what I’ve been working on. In fact, it’s going to be one of our July trainings.
In addition to the training, I’m also including the actual email sequence that I used to promote the book and the specifics of what to keep in mind so that anyone watching can not only replicate the method, but get similar results. I’m super excited to see authors implement this method to give some renewed life and energy to stalled book sales.
The second July training is a mindset guide for authors who’re beginning to pitch agents. There is a clear and expected power imbalance when it comes to authors and agents and it’s something I’ve been talking/ranting about for a while now, in this newsletter and elsewhere. Because unless we educate ourselves, prepare ourselves, and fix the way we view ourselves as authors, we risk losing years of our lives to the whims of people we may have trusted with our work.
I wanted to record this second training while the process is still fresh in my mind and the experience of pitching and signing with agents is not quite a distant memory.
Can you believe you can get them both for only $9? And two others besides!
I’ve tried to make The Bookish Academy a complete no-brainer offer, and accessible to authors at every stage of their careers and every income range. And, importantly, in every country. It is important to me that people in the developing world have the means to access this information just as much as the writers in the West do.
In fact, I’m so committed to making this a success that I’ve tried to come up with as many enticing bonuses as I can to make it easier for you to take a chance on me and The Bookish Academy.
So, for today only, anyone who signs up at any level will get “The Agent Checklist: The 6 things you MUST know about an agent before you with them.” (If you’ve signed up already, you’ll get this, too.) Make sure to sign up before midnight, though.
Oh, and back to those book sales? Want to know how I did it?
I’ll leave you with one small tip from the training: “Offer a bonus but make sure the bonus is a different format. If people are reading the book, they don’t want more reading material.”
More details in the training. You know where to find it.
Should we chat about bias in publishing tomorrow? And how it can impact you?
I’ll see you then.
Cheers,
Natasha