The Long and Winding Road to Making Good Things Happen for Your Business
I wrote last week about the social part of social media, and this week, I have an example of the strange and wonderful ways that human connections and business connections can work in the digital world we are all a part of. It has to do with the course I am teaching for Mark Dawson’s Self Publishing Formula, which launched this week. It’s a course called How to Revise Your Book, and it’s a meaty course that took more than a year to produce, but why SPF invited me to do it and how it all happened is what I want to talk about. It’s a story about how, when it comes to marketing your business, you never know what will really work, but you know that doing things, and saying yes to things, and being helpful and generous will lead somewhere you will be happy to go.
In 2018, I began working with podcast PR specialist Brigitte Lyon. She now runs Podcast Ally, but back then, she was doing mostly 1:1 podcast PR work. I hired her to help me get the word out about book coaching — this new gig in the gig economy. Author Accelerator has the only book coach training and certification program that I know of. Other people certify in their specific writing system and we have one of those, too — but we also teach people how to work with clients, how to price their services, and how to run a sustainable book coaching business. I wanted to be out in the world talking about book coaching in order to raise awareness for it, and to drive traffic to our program.
What Kind of Impact Are You Making?
I did a campaign with Brigitte, who is very data-driven and great at what she does. She booked me on about 8 shows and helped me hone my storytelling and my messaging. It was a good campaign, but I didn’t think it was great. As part of her work, she did a post-mortem on how it all went. “The shows went well,” I said, “but we can’t really point to a lot of traffic coming to our program from the podcasts you booked me on. It didn’t feel like I had much of an impact.”
“Are you forgetting about what happened at Self Publishing Formula?” she asked.
For a second, I thought, What about it?
I’d done a podcast with SPF’s James Blatch. He is writing a novel inspired by his father’s experience in WWII and was struggling with a revision. We talked about how a coach might help, some tools he could use as he worked on his revision, and a mindset shift he might want to make (from being a writer to being an editor). He ended up working with an Author Accelerator book coach and having a great experience.
A short while later, James invited me to be the guest editor on SPF’s BookLab — an occasional show where an editor, a copyeditor, and a cover designer dissect a book based on the images and words we can see on Amazon. It sounded like fun, so I agreed to do it.
So the connection Brigitte helped me make did not lead directly to new students signing up for the book coaching course, but it led to me doing this interesting thing with James. I had failed to see that impact because it didn’t look like the impact I thought I was after. It wasn’t big and splashy. It wasn’t about money. It was about the chance to do a cool thing with a person doing good work in the world.
Impact Ripples Outward
I became a regular contributor to BookLab and treated each episode as a mini-coaching session. I always offered downloads and cheat sheets to listeners. I talked about the book coaches’ ability to see patterns and to find evidence. And before and after our recordings, I would talk with James about his own revision process. The book cover expert ended up being the one to design the cover of my book, Read Books All Day and Get Paid For It: The Business of Book Coaching.
One thing led to another, and James invited me to present a full-featured revision course at SPF. This was a big undertaking involving building a curriculum and a script that taught my tools and processes but that we could break down into specific elements according to the SPF design standards. We also worked on compiling examples to teach from; learning new software; getting a new camera to film the episodes; building and polishing the course; dealing with delays caused by COVID; recording advertising snippets; and preparing the launch.
As part of the course, SPF decided to offer a bonus lesson on copy-editing from ProWritingAid, a powerful AI software program that analyzes your writing in a variety of powerful ways. (I used it for this post and it pointed out 16 grammar errors, 12 style errors, and 6 misspellings.) Pairing ProWritingAid with my revision course was a perfect fit, since the course is all about the big picture elements of revision — finding the holes in your manuscript, following the threads, making a project plan. Once you do that heavy lifting, you want to turn to line by line edits.
Because of the connection to SPF and her exposure to my course, Lisa at ProWritingAid asked me to write a guest post and host a webinar for their audience, which allowed me to spread my message to a whole new corner of the publishing universe.
The SPF course launched this week, and I have been in the class Facebook group with students who are all using my revision tools, learning my revision mindset, and getting a direct experience of what a book coach is and does. Some of those students have told me they’ve taken other courses of mine, read my books, heard about my training and certification program. It’s proof that the ripples that flow out from your actions often flow right back to you.
Now when I think about the impact that one podcast appearance had, I have to laugh. It still hasn’t necessarily done what I wanted it to do — at least not in a direct way we can measure — but it has done a lot. The impact of our actions isn’t always obvious, or straightforward. Marketing doesn’t always look the way we think it should. But it feels good to be doing what I set out to do: get the word out about book coaching and how a pro can help a writer do their best work.
