That was pretty cool, I must admit.
It was actually quite addictive… so I wrote 4 more books in the same series and they all became best sellers too. (By this point I was thinking, “This is soooo easy…”)
Then…
I decided that my next book would be on a topic that was truly important to me: helping women business owners.
I decided to write a series of books called See Jane Grow and focus on a different aspect of business growth strategies in each book.
The first one was called “See Jane Grow: How To Establish Yourself as an Expert In Your Industry.”
I launched it on Amazon and guess what happened?
Absolutely NOTHING!
No sales. No reviews. No nothing.
It was a total BOMB. The only thing coming from Amazon was the sound of crickets.
I was so disappointed. I began to wonder if I even knew what I was doing…
I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I did wrong…
I was spinning my wheels and wasting my time obsessing over it.
Has this ever happened to you? When you thought for sure something was going to work out? And then it totally failed?
It was so upsetting!
As I was wallowing in my self-pity… one day, out of the blue, the phone rang.
To cut another long story short, it was a non-profit foundation that had funding for a project to help women entrepreneurs succeed.
I nearly jumped out of my chair!!!
I said, “I wrote a book about that! I want to help women entrepreneurs too!”
Lo and behold, I got a contract to coach women entrepreneurs for the next 5 months.
Are you ready to hear the whole point of my story?
Here it is: I made more money from that one contract than I did with all my book royalties from the entire year!!
Do you get what I mean by that?
Are you picking up what I’m putting down?
I quickly realized something. You can spend all day trying to sell books one at a time so you can make a dollar each time… OR you can forget about the book sales and use your book to attract high paying clients and contracts.
And then do you know what happened next?
I became an Authority on writing books and publishing. I didn't start out to be one. It just sort of happened.
People started asking me how to do it.
At first I said, “It’s easy. You just write a book.”
But that was not helpful because it made people feel like, “Oh sure, it’s easy for YOU but not for ME.”
So I sat down and analyzed what I had done. Remember, I am not a writer.
I do happen to have a Bachelor’s degree in Linguistics but that just means I’m a bit of a geek and I’m good at grammar ;)
I realized that I actually had a system! If I wrote 7 books in 2012, while working full time and raising three kids, I obviously had figured out a way of writing quickly.
I decided to put on a workshop in my little town to see if I could teach others my system.
YUP! It worked! My students actually wrote books and got them up on Amazon!