Chris A. Baird | September 17, 2022
3 Self-Publishing Practices You Should Do EVERY DAY At Home!

You might be doing some practices that aren’t so important. Let me tell you the 3 self-publishing practices you should do every day at home!

Betty had no time for self-publishing. She was very busy with her kids and all the other things in life. So, she discovered that there wasn't any time in her day to get it done. To get her book out and onto the market.

So, she was thinking maybe it was best for her to give it up. But maybe not and that's one of the reasons why in today's article, we are going to discuss the 3 Self-Publishing Practices You Should Do Every Day At Home! 

This particular client of mine is Betty. She's a mother of four kids and she lives in Wyoming. Her particular genre is historical fiction. She's been working on her very first book and she has finished writing it. 

She's been a very good and excellent writer over the years. Many people had commented throughout the years that her ability to write was outstanding. Her ability to put the stories together was also really great. 

But the problem was that she was having a lack of direction and motivation. So, her time that she might have used during the day would be filled up with other things. Not unimportant things but just other things that were pulling away her ability to get this book onto the market.

If she didn't get this self-discipline and such in place, this book was never going to get self-published. So, she noticed another year had passed and the book was still not yet on the market. 

She had always wanted to get this book and not just this book but a series of books that she had within the historical fiction category out and onto the market. But she was thinking that maybe life was too busy now. 

She needed to wait until maybe when she had retired. At that point, she would be in a better position to go about getting the books onto the market. When she no longer had a responsibility with kids and family and all sorts of things in life that keep things busy.

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So, the first thing she tried to do to achieve this was because she was not ready to give up, she decided, fine I will spend an entire weekend dedicated to self-publishing. Where I can get down the writing, I can work with the formatting, ordering covers, and all of the things that are necessary to get that done. 

She did use a week and it was very productive. But at the same time, she was burning herself out. So, after that particular weekend and throughout this trial, it simply didn't result in what she was hoping would happen. 

She was hoping it would give her the drive to get going on the whole self-publishing. As opposed to killing the motivation. The second thing she decided to do was maybe if it's too hard to be focused on the most important things, she could do things like chatting on Facebook with other people. 

Chatting with other authors who are also working on something similar. Or maybe possible readers that she had found groups for those people interested in historical fiction or books that were like the book she was working on. Where they gather and then just talk with them. 

She spent a lot of hours doing that even though the whole problem was that she didn't have any time. But then maybe she did have the time and this is one of the little challenges that we find often when we're getting started with these sorts of things. 

It is that we think we have no time for hobbies or extra time. But then we found ways to use that time but this was not making any progress for her. So, what happened next was she had been watching my YouTube videos and she had been watching other videos as well. 

She came in contact with some fake gurus and one, in particular, was trying to say that self-publishing didn't even need to require any effort. There's a difference between what this particular guru was suggesting and what I suggest. 

It is that you can break it down into simple steps. Working through these specific steps at a certain rate every single day and making progress. You can get your book onto the market and get it selling.

Creating Content Every Day

It doesn't have to be hard; it can be really easy. But I'm not saying it doesn't require effort and focus and dedication. There are aspects of it that we don't like to do this part of self-publishing but we like to do other parts of self-publishing. 

So, there were a couple of key things and these are the 3 big ones that we're focused on that you can do at home. The key to successful self-publishing versus not so successful and this was what I was trying to help Betty with. 

We sat down during our free Discovery Session. The first thing was we should be creating content every single day for non-fiction people. That can be the books, that can be your courses, that can be your coaching or you’re consulting. 

All of these sorts of things can play together into this particular side of things. If you're on the fiction side, we should be writing books and creating the content. These are the very things that were going to sell the products and services but specific products. 

In this case, it would be the books and we need to put some time in, every single day as we're writing. I know, the rate that I found that worked well was a thousand words a day. Now for you, it might be something different. 

It might just be a certain amount of time and that is I'd say at least a third of our time on this one. Then comes the next third of our time, you may be thinking you're just putting books on the market but you're building a brand. An identity that's sort of around these books. 

That's why I tell you not to push books into multiple niches. Build your brand with marketing but focus on whatever you're interested in. And we can keep going for three to five years. 

It's going to take time to get traction on your books. So, we're going to want to build a brand with that and the marketing comes by. We can have content marketing, for example, YouTube, podcasts, and blogs and you have your email list as well. 

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Then at the same time, you're going to have paid ads that we can send using Amazon ads against it. Or possibly, if you're depending upon your value ladder, if you're in the non-fiction area, it could be using Google ads and Facebook to drive traffic there. 

It will also cycle through the books and all of your other offerings. But we're using time every single day on building the marketing portion of our business. That's a third, we're going to use a third of our time focusing on creating content every day. 

The final third should be learning something new. We're going to try to learn and expand our skill sets so that we're able to be the best self-publishing business owners possible. That's one of the things that I do. 

I sell a couple of courses to specifically help people who don't know how to format their books. Or to do the content marketing side, how exactly to go about doing it? There are two tools that I like to use. I think one of them I have not mentioned before is the Toggle Track.

It will give you the ability to track your time. So, as you're working through your self-publishing, you’re able to see that you are using a third of your time on these three different areas. If you're not learning anything new, we have a problem. 

We're talking about listening to podcasts, reading books, and watching YouTube videos for example. But not doing it all the time, only a third of them. A third of the time you're creating new books that you're putting on the market. 

That was one of the problems Betty was having. It was the fact that working through these different three categories, she was a little bit of that. Some days, we did absolutely nothing. We weren't making progress. 

The second tool to make sure that we have a schedule of things that we're doing is Todoist. That's the tool that I like to use. I run every single one of my projects through this specific tool.

Using Your Time Effectively

Todoist is a wonderful task management system. I know it's difficult to get used to a task management system. But it is probably the most transformational thing that you can do for your book business. Where you can set up individual tasks and we can mark them off as we get through them. 

We can make little checklist daily, they recur. These are incredibly powerful at holding that focus. So, these three main areas within our self-publishing business that we're able to get those things going regularly.

So, Betty was excited because after we'd spoken, she was feeling new motivation and energy to keep things going. Back to the free discovery session, for so many of my clients, and even if you don't become a paying client in the long distant future or ever, the fact is you should take advantage of this offer. 

Most of the other people, many of the fake gurus, charge for everything. I'm just giving stuff away for free about these coaching sessions. If you talk to anyone who's gone through one of these sessions, everybody has a positive experience.

Because we're able to look and see where you're at and where you need to get going. So just check it out and book a slot. You can find a time that works for you. We do it on Zoom, you can do it with video or without video, no problem. 

So that was one of the things with Betty. We used no video because she didn't feel comfortable on video which is just fine. So, there's no need to do that. It's very casual, you don't have to prepare for it. 

We're just going to talk through where your business is at. And what you can do with your self-publishing, with your books, with your ideas, and we're going to move forward. Some people haven't even started writing and they'd like to sit down for a session perfectly. 

Or they've already got books out and they're not selling just fine. There are lots of different options when it comes to doing a free discovery session. So back to Betty, what then happened was that she still didn't find that she had any time. 

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But she decided she was going to invest and use time on using these tools. Todoist was one of the big ones, setting that up. Here are the things I need to do, and here is the priority of them. Trying to get into those three different buckets, these three different areas we're going to spend our time. 

She started working around that and keeping track of the time. In addition, she joined my 1-On-1 Program where we were able to go back and forth daily. Seeing what she had done since the last day. 

We were able to hold that accountability a much closer way than you would if you were trying to go through it alone which is a huge mistake. Through a period, by focusing on the three buckets, using the time that she did have even if some days it was only 10 minutes. 

Okay fine, 3 minutes in this area, 3 minutes on that, and 3 minutes in this as we're moving around and trying to hold the focus. So that we can make progress on this. In the end, she was not only able to get her first book in historical fiction out but also her second book in the series. 

And what was crazy was that it wasn't taking social time away from her family. Because she had just been using this time on other stuff like the media and things like that. Just to decrease the use of time on those things to prioritize the most important things. 

When the day started, it didn't just go randomly in the direction of wasting time. But trying to say, look, is this something you want to do? Is this something you're willing to invest in yourself?

Well then, this is something you're going to need to consider when you're first getting started. But I have a question for you: what practice have you found works best for you when you're trying to get your book self-published? 

Something you can do at home or maybe it's something that you're doing every single day or every other day. Whatever it might be, that's helping you make progress on your self-publishing. Let me know below in the comments, I reply to every comment and check out my other videos.

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