There are a lot of techniques and skills that a self-publisher must possess to succeed at self-publishing. But have you gotten the most important one to succeed? Warning! Ignore this and you will never succeed!
Today's topic has three points and you're going to want to stick around for the third point. Because it is a secret as to the best way to not make this major mistake when it comes to self-publishing.
The topic we're discussing today is Warning! Ignore this and you will never succeed! with self-publishing So you're getting started with self-publishing and you're moving along the process. You're looking to get sales and get your book onto the market and selling.
But you maybe have made a major mistake that's going to cost you everything. Therefore, you're going to want to stick around so that you can learn how to avoid this specific mistake. So let's get into it.
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Focus on the road. Since I first learned how to drive, it was exciting initially. But after a while, I began to understand that driving can be a bit monotonous.
Just going along down the road driving and trying to get to a particular destination where the speed limit is pretty much the same. And the roads are flat or straight, it can be a bit monotonous and boring after a while.
Some people enjoy this aspect of it but for me, I'm not a true driver at heart. I prefer just to read or talk with somebody in the car, maybe listen to a podcast, or watch a video of some sort. But the fact is that that's not an option when I'm driving.
And most of the time, I do most of the driving which puts me in a difficult situation. The thing is that staying focused on the road is extremely important. If we're not going to go crashing into other cars or making mistakes.
Like that when we're sitting there and we have our hands on the wheel and we're moving down the road. We can begin to get a little tired. Maybe the vibrations of the road, the music we're listening to is very soft.
And so we start realizing this could be a dangerous situation, we're not paying attention to. I even discovered on my Volkswagen that I drive, that when it's on the cruise control, it automatically adjusts the distances and the speeds, going uphill, downhill, all of these sorts of things.
And so that you have even fewer things that you need to control. I mean it's nice on the one side but on the other side, it can make it easy to start falling asleep. Or paying less attention when you're on the road and these are things I want to pay attention to.
So we even have a rule where the person sitting in the passenger seat has to stay awake and talking. To help keep me focused on the driving that I'm doing as I go down the road. So I've used several tricks to do this one, it is drinking coffee to keep myself awake.
Or putting on music that isn't very soft. I've rolled the windows down, that's another key one. My top one is just holding a conversation going with the other person. And the other thing is just thinking about where exactly I'm headed what am I going to do when I get there.
These are some of the few ones and then a final one is I continually try to improve my driving. So I'm asking what can I do to hold myself in the center of the road or staying on track when it comes to driving down the road.
Don't Lose Your Focus
And these are a number of the things that help me deal with the specific problem that I have which is holding the focus. And so these are tricks that I found that can be very effective in this particular thing when it comes to driving.
But what about self-publishing? So warning! ignore this and you will never succeed well at self-publishing! So the first thing is it is all about focus, staying completely focused on the course that you're taking.
So that means that when we are just like driving down the road, we need to stay focused. This is the number one thing, it is the focus. I've seen so many people, writers who have come out with books or people who are looking to pay ghostwriters to write books for them if you're in profitable niches.
In other words, seeing an internet business that starts this journey and loses focus very easily and that's for some reason. One is they just get bored with a subject, they're no longer enthusiastic with the subject.
They find it too confusing so they lose focus or other people are talking about other things. You can do this instead of getting your books onto the market and selling and marketing them. And so we lose focus and as a result, we completely lose the entire self-publishing business that we're attempting to build here.
And you may not be trying to build a business, let's just say you're trying to get a book onto the market and selling. And this is another key factor that we need to pay attention to. So the second tip is winning at self-publishing requires three major things.
Check out this related article: Are You Failing To Sell Your Books?
One is we need to stay motivated so we have that energy inside to keep going. The second thing is we need to be innovative. That is to say, when we try something and fail at it we make adjustments to what we're trying.
We do not quit the entire process but we simply make small adjustments to what we're doing. And the final thing is we need to be dedicated. This isn't going to be fun for some days, yesterday for me was a bad day I didn't get as much work done on my business as I wanted to get done.
It got an hour in whereas, I was hoping to get two hours in. But at the same time, I don't want to hit burnout. So there's this fine balance but dedication means you're making progress every day, we don't take off days.
So we have vacations and stuff where you're taking a zero-day making no progress at all. We should try to do something even if it's five minutes. I've mentioned this before, I hit a very down period at one point where I just couldn't even do anything.
So I hired a coach specifically just to make sure that I was spending at least five minutes a day. The funny part of it was the person had no background in self-publishing. They had one job which was to check in with me daily.
To find out how I have done five minutes of work which is amazing. You could also hire somebody to help you with your fitness goals. Going for a walk or hitting the gym or their job isn't necessarily even tell you what to do there.
But just to check in on you that you are doing these things that you say are important to you. So these are the big three that I would focus on. But the secret answer for today and I've hit a little bit on it already.
It's that the absolute best way to hold focus is through a coach and community. So I work with students and writers and self-publishers specifically to help hold that focus. There are two issues, one is the knowledge you bring to the table.
The 200 plus books that I've published on Amazon help you through the process. But the second thing is accountability and motivation to keep on going through the process. The same goes for the community.
Surround Yourself With Motivated People
Now there's something very important here and you'll notice it's that even when you're watching my videos which you've perhaps watched a number of them or many of them. I can see you all watching a lot of my videos, I appreciate you supporting me in this way.
The fact is, can you feel you have that motivation that starts building up to get back to your books to keep on keeping on with your writing and your self-publishing, and your marketing? And the reason is it's because you need to surround yourself with motivated people and avoid vampires.
Now motivated people like me I'm very interested and excited. There's nothing I love more than playing around with self-publishing and working books. And helping other people get their books published is something I enjoy.
And if you enjoy it, well then we're clicking with each other right now. I go back and forth with people in the comments section who comment on. The fact that as we interact with each other, keeps each other accountable.
It gives us energy and motivation but maybe you found vampires in your life. People who take that energy from you and tell you "you shouldn't keep in the game" maybe "you should just quit altogether" or maybe "you'll never succeed".
Check out this related article: 3 Ways To Find More Readers
These people it's not that we would cut them out but we just aren't going to give them a space for that voice. That negative voice of theirs and we don't know the reason. Maybe they're envious of what you're doing and they just feel that if you have succeeded in this then they aren't going to succeed.
Or maybe they're looking out for your best interest. They just don't want you to get hurt, what if you try to put your book on the market and try to get it to sell? But it doesn't sell and so they're trying to help you out that way.
In reality, they're just shutting down the process. So you need to focus on building that community and surrounding yourself with people that are giving you energy. For example, if I were taking energy from you, if you felt that you were less motivated to do self-publishing, then you should quit listening reading these blogs or watching these videos.
Because it's going to demotivate you and pull you out of the game. Whereas I surround myself I'm continually sharing things on this blog and on my Youtube channel that I'm learning from other people and other communities that I'm a part of.
So it's a larger community of people who are very excited about self-publishing and we're working together, moving in the correct direction. To build, creating valuable books into the world and helping us find those readers that would want to read our books and getting in this positive cycle. Warning! Ignore this and you will never succeed!
It's more than just knowing how to do it, it's also having the emotional energy, enthusiasm necessary to succeed. And that is the key to holding the focus. Without focus, you will never succeed at self-publishing. I can just tell you that right now.
I've seen the graveyard of people who have attempted to start this process and then just given up right before they were about to succeed. So this is something that you're going to want to keep in mind. But my question for you today is do you have a problem staying focused?
If you do, write "yes" below in the comments and if you don't, you're very enthusiastic, you have no problem whatsoever staying on target using time every day, then write "no" below in the comments. Because I need to know where you're coming from and check out my other articles and videos for more answers to your self-publishing questions.