Book Marketing Breakthrough 01 - Scratching Your Own Itch
Scratching Your Own Itch - when a burning question won't let you go...
Lesson 1 – Scratching Your Own Itch
Quenching a Burning Question
I started out this project a couple of years before. It ended up with three massive books and several auxiliary books – all involved with the burning questions of: How to I get my books to sell better? And: How do I control my income?
My job in life, beyond all the job titles I'd been given, was in finding out how things worked. Specifically, I had been narrowing down a study of human existence itself – since I started at age 8 – to how people found their happiness and achieved any goal they set for themselves. It turned out to be a little-known, natural phenomenon.
After that, I then saw I needed to become an evangelist for this. I needed to share this.
So I got inspired to get married. And after that, my income demands really increased.
While figuring out how I could leverage my book sales better – read that as: book marketing – I started to review all the books I'd ever written, re-published, or merely collected in my studies.
What follows immediately below is the first lesson in this text, which is the mechanical solutions I'd found about the self-publishing business. Most of these were suspected, but none were collected into a set of books and then distilled down into a longish essay and course.
So, there's that.
But as I kept writing past the ending, I would realize it – and start a new book. The one you are reading is the end of this long line.
Of course, I'm not going to spoil the ending for you.
I will tell you that a failed Kickstarter project forced me to come to grips with the core problem of earning writing-income in an entirely new way. And ended up discovering another natural principle that “everyone knows”. What I founnd, again, is that our obsession with depending on mechanical solutions to spiritual problems is what too-often hampers our discernment.
In short – there are none so blind as those who will not open their eyes and see.
Until then, to paraphrase another verse – we continue to lead each other from one ditch to the next, criss-crossing the road instead of simply walking down a well-beaten path that leads on right in front of us.
My work, as I'll tell you shortly, was to boil down my 18 years and 22 published books on self-publishing in order to extract the evergreen principles they contained. I wanted to build a book that didn't need updating. Well, for a few years, at least.
I already knew that I was missing something. So this became a method to find the holes. For each I found, I'd then start researching that narrow point. Of course, those new solutions often led to other questions.
But ultimately, the journey finally ended – when I found a singular underlying truth.
*
How to Research Anything
One thing I learned well during my lifetime of studies was how to analyze, how to research, how to write up my findings.
First, you narrowly follow just your own bliss. You don't take up anything that doesn't fascinate you, that doesn't involve you emotionally.
While doing that, you amass anything and everything that might possibly have some solution to what you're trying to solve.
You realize one thing right off: Probably 97% of everything out there is useless crud. But the 3% you distill out of that is spun gold.
Another tool pops up: “When the Student is Ready, the Teacher Appears”. So be always open to that small still voice within. You'll get nudges to find some old book you read and dismissed years ago. You'll suddently want to buy a used hardback remaindered out of a library and then dig down to a small section where only that author had researched an answer to your question – where you go through a small pile of post-its so you can find the missing spun gold the author didn't even know was there.
Research is persistence. It's faith in yourself. It's keeping your goal bright.
And it's also learning from the long, twisting, blind alleys you ran down into with all that energy. On your way back up to the main trail, you salvage what you can out of your notes – for later use, maybe.
This two-year-plus journey was to discover how to “build audience”. Right off, whilc I was doing all this distilling of my other work, I'd swallowed the conventional wisdom that social media was the fastest way to do this. After six months, none of this panned out. So I left my content there (as I'd kept copies of everything) and went back to ignoring it. Tim Grahl had laid this out years ago - and he has an upcoming chapter – but I had to prove things for myself to know for sure.
That's the third concept of effective research: Test everything. Keep only what's true. (Not surprisingly, I uncovered that as a paraphrase of a Bible verse.)
You're looking for commonalities – things that keep coming up.
Mostly models. People call these systems, patterns, hacks. You want to find outlier successes and then discover the model they were using. That is the exact basis of the bestseller “Think and Grow Rich”. It's the concept that Anthony Robbins and Jay Abraham used – they simply collected models from everyone they met.
Models will start repeating. They'll be stated in different forms, using different nomenclature or slang. But when you test a version for yourself, in your own words – and it works – then you add that to your portfolio of models and keep researching until your main question gets ansswered.
Of course, the next test is whether you can write it up in a format that others can readily understand. There's an old twisted phrase that goes: Those who can't do, teach. Those you can't teach, write textbooks. This is patently false (although Academia has a habit of hiring incompetence and setting them up as authorities.) Once someone masters a subject as a professional – and gotten all they can understand from practical experience – the next level of training is to start teaching others, through apprenticeships and courses. The top level of training is to write up what you know and make your text clear enough anyone can understand.
Once you've written up all your discoveries, then you can publish everything as a final note. Others can now wear the hat you've engaged in for so long.
Then you can take the next question off your stack of personally unsolved mysteries and start a new reesarch process on that.
That's too much common sense, perhaps. I've spent nearly two decades chasing down this exact problem and this series is designed to remedy that problem. And by the end of this book, it does.
Of course, I'll always tell you next that you'll have to test it for yourself to be any use for you.
That light in the darkness up ahead isn't a train coming your way – it's your salvation.
Still, you have to walk into that light.
So lets begin.
Principles of Researching Solutions
Disocver and Follow Your Bliss
97/3 Conventional Wisdom Winnowing
When the Student is Ready, the Teacher Appears
Finding Recurring Common Models
Can You Write up What You Found to Teach Others?
Test everything
How This Can Help You
This course evolved while I was wrapping up the first three books in this series - and became part of the fourth book (see below.)
In that fourth book are three mini-courses — this is just the first lesson of the first one. The reason for this last book is to give you actionable material to get you started simply. After the first three were ready to go to press, I found I still had these too-short-for-paperback works were sitting around unpublished — so…
I intend to run a group chat on this course, lesson by lesson, where you can ask me anything about what I cover here.
And you can always buy me a coffee…
Always pay attention to that small, still voice...
And keep copious notes, of course.
Research is invaluable.
It's nice to see that my research binges had a purpose. Depending on the topic I found the urge annoying at times.