Many authors wanted to start seeing sales out from their self-published books but the lack of energy towards doing a book is their biggest problem. If you are one of those authors then check out this article to find out the lazy author's way to self-publish.
Today's article has three points and you're going to want to stick around for the third point. Because it is a secret as to how laziness is the key to winning at self-publishing.
The topic we're discussing today is The Lazy Author's Way To Self-Publish. When you're first getting started self-publishing, you want to get your book onto the market. And you want to start seeing sales.
But the complexity of the entire process and the repetitive nature of it is causing you to become demotivated. As you slowly start to burn out, therefore you're going to want to stick around. Because I'm going to tell you exactly how laziness can help fix this problem for you.
But before we get into the answers, grab a copy of my free Self-Publishing Checklist. To make sure that you are not skipping any of the secrets necessary to winning at self-publishing. Let's get into it from my own story.
When I first got started, I quickly figured it out that self-publishing can be quite difficult and demanding. There are so many phases to self-publishing. Many tools can be used.
If you're taking and listening to lots of advice, you're going to quickly discover that there are a lot of things to learn. Self-publishing is not something like, I've written a book and I just throw it on the market and it sells. There is a whole series of things that need to be done.
But this creates a bit of a problem for me. Initially, it took me time to figure out the necessary tools. Even the steps to getting these self-publishing tasks in order.
So that my books would get onto the market and then figuring out how do I get them to sell? By using content marketing and paid ads as a basis to do it. As I was building up a readership base, the thing is I noticed that a lot of the tasks I was doing were repetitive.
Initially, this might be great news because that means that those tasks that you're working through, you don't have to learn how to do it again. Because after all, they're repetitive, you've done them before. But this is a huge mistake if you think this is an advantage.
Because in reality, these repetitive tasks are going to start to wear on you after a while. So I started burning out over trying to figure out to find the balance between doing the important tasks and then these old repetitive tasks.
What happens is, you start getting squeeze is closing it's been too long in Norway. Between the new tasks and these old tasks and the repetition of it all. You start to feel that burnout of all these tasks at the same time and your time is limited.
You're going to have to figure out a solution that's going to work for you here. That was the problem that I was facing. Well, let me tell you a little bit about the key three points that help me get out of this mess.
So, the lazy author's way to self-publish. The first is to make checklists for all of the repetitive tasks you do and I mean even if it could be a repetitive task. You're going to do it again in the future.
This by the way applies to anything outside of self-publishing. If I'm going to do a series of tasks. I'm going to write down the steps one by one, you can use Excel or you can just use a text file.
The important thing is to capture these steps so we don't have to figure out how to do them the next time. If we fix something that's broken or whatever it is, we can write it down.
Focus On What Matters
That's the first thing and it ties closely to our secret number three issue of the day. I'm going to hold off on that for a bit but this one here is incredibly important checklists. The system itself is around the whole thing.
Number two is to figure out what will move the needle the most and do those tasks first. So what we're doing is we're seeing that we have this checklist we're moving through the checklist. But we need to make sure that the checklist does not involve unimportant things.
That is going to cause us to get our books onto the market or newer books onto the market like in terms of writing. Many words a day or maybe it's doing something else like you're doing some sort of marketing or setting up ads.
These sorts of things are going to cause your books to sell or get more books onto the market. These are the things the power high focus tasks we're going to want to do. This is where the laziness comes in.
A truly lazy author is somebody who's not going to want to do a lot of these extra tasks. We're going to be lazy and we're just going to focus on the ones that matter the most. We're only going to do one at a time, we're not going to overwhelm ourselves.
We're trying to go about doing this the lazy way. Now I know in using the word lazy, it may suggest you do absolutely nothing. I'm not saying that, I'm just saying we're trying to move away from the tasks that are not changing either.
Putting new products, our new books on the market or are shifting in terms of driving traffic to those. Increasing the number of people who buy those books that we're putting on the market. These first two points are key foundational points.
The first we have our checklist created, the second is we're doing the things that matter the most. But the third point and the secret point of the day is how we're going to pull this all together. Let's hit it we need to hire people to take over all the steps of your self-publishing processes.
That sucks away your energy so what we're going to do is we're going to take these checklists. We're going to hand them over to other people, virtual assistants. Like for example, you can find virtual assistants in the Philippines.
You can go on Upwork and find people as well who can work as virtual assistants. You can train them to do these tasks, after all, you know how to do them. I don't suggest outsourcing these tasks until you have figured out how to do them.
Then you hand them over to these virtual assistants who at a very reasonable price can take care of these tasks for you. These prevent you from becoming just terms of being bogged down. And overwhelmed with repetitive tasks that you're doing from day today.
It allows you to focus on the task that you're especially good at. A statement I'd heard from a podcast love marketing and they had commented on something amazing. They called it You're Like A Cow Out In The Field.
Content Marketing
I know you have to stick with me this can be a little bit of an insult. But the fact is your number one thing is you produce milk as an author. Maybe it's writing the books is your number one thing and on content marketing, it's getting your face out there as an author.
Showing people what exactly you can do if you need help with content marketing. You can check out my Content Marketing Course made easy. So for self-publishers, that's going to help you figure out how to get that going for you.
But the thing is that these are the high most important tasks that you're going to be doing. We want to be able to know and understand these other tasks but as we move through the process, it becomes repetitive those things become a threat to our business.
They threaten to us getting more books onto the market than we could. So we want to hand these tasks out over to these virtual assistants. You can find them very easily on Upwork or Fiverr if you need to. But Upwork would be the better place I would recommend.
And from there, you're going to be able to look through those tasks and figure out which ones you can hand over. One of the challenges a lot of people have is you feel you would do such a better job of those tasks. Even if you can, these tasks are going to burn you out.
You're not going to keep producing books in the long run and that is the number one way to succeed with self-publishing. To keep producing books, get better at the marketing production of books. Building your brand name out so that when people think of your name as an author, you're connected to this type of book that you're doing.
Let your virtual assistants do the rest. You follow up regularly, I use Todoist which you can find my affiliate link below in the description of my Youtube video. That's the tool that I use to keep track of all of the tasks.
So that multiple books can be worked on at the same time. I know where we are in the process and this is something that you're going to want to check out as you get further along. But even if you're just getting started with self-publishing, do yourself a favor and at least create a checklist.
And then hold yourself to that checklist. Slice and dice everything off of the checklist if it isn't directly leading to you. Getting more sales and more sales is done by putting more books on the market.
Driving more traffic with advertisements and content marketing. Then, in addition, as we have our face out there, we're just continually repeating this process to get in contact with our readers. Building up an email list and going from there to get the reviews that we're going to need.
As you can see, it goes around. It's an iterative process, just don't burn out in the process. Hire people to take over these tasks and you will thank me for that.
I can tell you I waited way too long before I started that process. I wish I had started much earlier. But I have a question for you today, are you overwhelmed by self-publishing work and could use to doing a little bit of the lazy method?
If the lazy method could work for you but you haven't tried it yet, then write "Yes" below in the comments. If you already have, then write "No" below in the comments because I need to know where you're coming from. Make sure you check out my other articles and videos for more answers to your self-publishing questions.