I love it. 

The whole reason I do what I do is to help authors get their books into the hands of more readers. Any time I can help an author reach more people, it makes me happy.

However, many of the emails authors send me are written in a way that makes it hard for me to help them.

Reaching out—the right way

A big part of my success has been the ability to surround myself with people who are way smarter than I am. Input from other authors and business people—clients, colleagues, and mentors—has dramatically aided me in getting where I am today.

We all need each other. 

We need people who have walked similar roads to help show the way, to help us avoid the common pits and potholes.

I believe in that process.

But I see many people making fundamental mistakes when reaching out to their chosen mentors and advisors. Those mistakes keep them from making great connections with people who are in a position to help them.

Today, I’m going to walk you through how to reach out and connect with amazing people who will help you reach your goals.

I offer this advice based on three important perspectives:

• For most of my career, I lived in a small town in Virginia. I was at least three hours from anything that could be called a major city. I’ve had to do the vast majority of my relationship-building remotely.
• I know what it’s like to feel like a “nobody” reaching out to a bunch of somebodies.
• As I’ve become a quasi-, low-level “somebody,” I’ve begun to see what it’s like to have people who are just getting started reach out to you for help and advice.

Put these in your toolbox 

These tools will help you get connected in the right way, so you can start building those relationships that will help lead you to success:

1. Get the right mindset

You cannot, in any way, have unhealthy expectations regarding the person you are reaching out to.

If you’ve got a copy of my book Your First 1000 Copies, re-read the first six sections of the Outreach chapter (pages 80–87 in the print edition).

If you feel you are owed something—and that you’ll be angry if you don’t get the response you want—stop now and re-route your thinking, or don’t contact this person.

2. Take a risk

Now is an excellent time to exercise your experimental side. Of course, not everybody you reach out to will respond and be helpful, but some will.

Take a risk and put yourself out there. It’s no fun to be ignored or to get a “no,” but it’s much worse never even to try.

3. Start with the B-listers

There are only ever a handful of A-listers, and most people are trying to get help from them.

So many people forget that the B-listers are also having a lot of success, and are much more available to help unknown authors than the A-listers are.

Everyone is clamoring for help from Stephen King, John Grisham, and Malcolm Gladwell. Shoot for authors who are selling tens of thousands of copies of their books, not millions.

They still see a lot of success, and probably have more time on their hands—and a greater inclination to help you than the more prominent names would.

4. Keep it short

I honestly wish I could sit down and have a long afternoon coffee session with every single one of you. I love hearing author’s stories and giving advice that’s specific to their situation. However, as you can imagine, that doesn’t scale very well, given how crowded my work week is.

The same goes for email. When you send out a message, keep it short!

Don’t share your entire life story. Don’t share a lot of unnecessary details. Get right to the point.

If you show respect for this person and their time, they will be much more likely to respond in a timely and respectful way.

5. Do your research

Recently I received an email from someone who claimed to have read my book and all of the articles on this site. They then launched into a bunch of questions around the intricacies of building a following on social media. If you’ve read or listened to anything I’ve said about social media, then you’ll know this isn’t the right place to start with me.

I never responded.

Every answer this person needed is easily findable in my book or on this website.

Do your research first!

Read this person’s blog posts. Listen to their podcast interviews. Read their books.

If you’re not willing to invest time into your learning, why should they?

6. Ask a specific question

Please do not send a massive backstory of what’s gone wrong (see #1) and then ask a question like “What should I do now?”.

A big, ambiguous question like that would take a lot of back-and-forths emailing to sift through it all.

When you send an email to someone who is an established authority or success story in their field, ask just one or two specific questions that can be answered quickly and concisely. Here's a great article on how to ask useful questions.

7. Take their advice, then report back

Most people ask for advice, get advice, then promptly do the opposite, or never act on the advice at all.

Please, don’t be this person.

People love to help other people. Every author I’ve worked with loves to add positively to other people’s lives.

But after they’ve gotten burned, trying to help a lot of people who never act on their advice, it’s hard to keep trying.

However, if you’re respectful of them and their time, do your research, ask a specific question, then promptly implement the advice—you become someone they love to help and will keep on helping.

Case Study: Do it this way

A good friend of mine used this method to get a very prominent and successful author to become his mentor:

First, he read everything the author had published—in this case, two books.

Second, he listened to every podcast interview with that author that he could find.

Third, he took a specific problem he was having and sent the author an email asking for advice.

That quick, concise, thoughtfully worded email showed he had done his research.

And, most importantly, it was something the author could answer very quickly.

Fourth, the author almost immediately responded with a short email, answering his specific question, and giving a bit of advice.

Fifth, my friend immediately dropped everything and implemented that advice. 

He then fired back an email the following day, describing the results and asking a short follow-up question.

Sixth, the author sent my friend his phone number and told him to give him a call.

Now, tell me: 

What do you think would have happened if my friend had instead sent a 500-word email describing his entire background, then asked a vague, open-ended question that the author had already answered in one of his books?

Exactly.

Get in their corner, and they’ll get in yours

It’s no fun to feel alone on your journey.  It’s also incredibly frustrating to repeatedly make the same mistakes that so many others have made.

By connecting in the right way with people who have walked the same road and found success, you will reach your goals much faster.

You’ll also be inspired and encouraged by the company you meet along the way.

Instead of just passively reading what comes across my computer screen, I recently decided to dive in and look at the research and the numbers and figure out what is really going on under the surface.

I took at look at the common beliefs many of us have about social media marketing and lined those up with what the numbers tell us.

What I found staggered me.

In this article I’m going to walk through 3 of the most common beliefs we have about social media marketing and show how each one is a myth. Then I’m going to share with you 3 ways to use social media marketing that have a real impact on growing your authors platform and successfully launching a book.

Let’s get started.

Myth #1: A Big Social Media Audience = Big Book Sales

Awhile back, in an interview specifically for authors, Gary Vaynerchuk, author of Jab Jab Jab, Right Hook and Crushing It made the claim that if a fiction writer started up Twitter and/or Instagram accounts for their book’s characters it would be the difference between selling 200 copies of their book and selling 25,000 copies of their book.

The problem is, there is no evidence to back up a claim like this.

In my work over the last year with dozens of top bestselling authors, many of which of large social media followings, I’ve never heard or seen anything close to this happening. I’d be extremely surprised if there is a single author who could show you even 1000 extra sales by creating Twitter accounts for their book’s characters.

So many social media marketing experts love to talk about the effectiveness of social media marketing for authors yet never back it up with real numbers, experiments, and case studies.

I have personally tested the effectiveness of social media marketing with my clients. These aren’t tests on the scale of my Twitter following of sub–6000. These are tests with people who are connected to hundreds of thousands and even millions of people.

Here are few examples:

• I worked with a client that had over 160,000 Twitter followers. We tracked the sales in promoting his book on the platform and it resulted in less than 400 sales.
• An author friend had someone with well over 1 million Twitter followers promote his book and it resulted in no noticeable bump in book sales.
• In multiple tests across many social media accounts, it’s a normal thing to get well under 1% – more like 0.25% – of your followers or fans to take action on a given update. This is just clicking on a link, much less converting to a sale. (Try it yourself with the service bit.ly to see how many people click on your links.)

Also, not to continue picking on Gary Vaynerchuk, but when his book Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook came out, I did a bit of simple arithmetic.

At the time, here were his social media numbers:

• Twitter – 1,016,311
• Facebook – 147,604
• Instagram – 34,563
• LinkedIn – 152,735
• Pinterest – 15,778

Through those five platforms, that was 1,366,991 connections.

(Stop and think about the daunting task of building that kind of following on social media.)

Now consider this: in the first week of sales for Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, Gary sold about 25,000 copies (according to Nielson BookScan). If you take out all the other promotion he did – the dozens of interviews, the appearances on NPR, CNN, Huffington Post, etc – and assume all of the book sales came through social media, that’s still only a 1.82% conversion rate.

That means for every one book sale, he needed 55 connections on social media (again, assuming every single sale came through social media).

Now consider your own social media. Think through how much time you’re spending on it in hopes that it turns into book sales and do the math to see how many book sales are going to result.

It gets worse.

I did some digging around to find out what kind of engagement rate you can expect on the various platforms.

Here’s what I found.

Twitter

• An engagement rate between 0.02% and 0.09% is considered good. That’s 0.2 to 0.9 reactions (I’ll define that shortly) for every 1000 followers. Anything from 0.09% to 0.33% is considered “high”. Anything over 0.33% is considered “very high” and is rare. That would be 3.3 reactions per 1000 followers. [1]
• The engagement rate is calculated by finding the average number of likes, comments, and retweets on a Twitter post and dividing it by the numbers of followers.

Facebook

• An engagement rate between 1% and 2% is considered good for a marketing campaign. That’s when you’re paying to promote your updates. [2]
• The engagement includes clicks, shares, likes, comments, and follows.

Instagram

Instagram is currently the most engaged social media platform.

• Engagement between 1% and 3.5% is considered average/good. Between 3.5% and 6% is high and anything above 6% is a very high engagement rate. [3]
• Engagement includes likes and comments (remember that you can’t directly link to anything in an Instagram post).

What do these numbers mean?

Think about that for a minute. Let it sink in.

The amount of people that may like, comment, follow, retweet, share, etc is much lower than the number of people that will actually click through and buy a book. So if “good” numbers of engagement are around 1% to 3%, what do you think the numbers are for an update on any of your platforms to translate to even a single book sale?

A bit more bad news…

The bigger your following gets, the more your engagement goes down.

If you have less than 1000 followers on Twitter, you may get an interaction rate of 0.18%. But by the time you build that up to 100,000 followers, it will drop to 0.04% and once you break 1,000,000 followers, it will fall to 0.01%. [4]

A similar drop in engagement numbers extends over every social media platform as your audience grows. [4]

A Big Social Media Audience ≠ Book Sales

Consider your own social media. Think through how much time you’re spending on it in hopes that it turns into book sales and do the math to see how many book sales are going to result.

Myth #2: Social Media Will Make You Famous

Take a look at the top 100 people on Twitter by follower count. Now, how many of them are not independently famous outside of Twitter?

Social media marketing is not a way to grow your “fame”, it’s a reflection of your fame. There are, of course, outliers of people that became famous as a result of social media, but these are outliers.

If you think through how you find new followers on social media, it’s rarely because you just happened upon them on social media. You find about them out in the world, and then find them on social media to follow them.

This is the norm, not the exception.

If you’re focusing on growing your social media following, you’re focusing on the wrong thing. It will always grow slowly when you’re running around trying to build your follower and like count.

You should be focusing on your obscurity problem – the fact that not enough people know you exist – and the way to solve that is not social media.

MYTH #3: Social Media Marketing Actually Works, You Just Haven’t Figured Out the Formula Yet

Honestly, this is how I often feel.

I look around at all the advice and “success stories” and think maybe I’m missing something or just doing it wrong. This may be how you’re feeling too.

It’s not true though.

I’ve gotten the chance to pull the curtain back several times, and the truth is always much more mundane than you think. Here’s the common things I’ve seen in “successful” social media campaigns:

• It wasn’t actually successful. This is the most common. We see something bouncing around the social mediaverse and assume it must be selling like hotcakes. Once you get a look behind the scenes though, it’s not usually the case.
• There was something else going on. For the successful campaigns, there was usually something else going on that wasn’t as public. In the book launch examples I give in this article, I was questioned after the fact by several people who assumed our social media campaign was a big hit. The truth is, most of the book sales came from everything but social media. Social media was just the most public thing so people made assumptions about it’s effectiveness. It’s the tip of the iceberg that you can see, but what really drives sales is hidden behind-the-scenes.
• The scale was enormous. I addressed this in Myth #1, but the successes I’ve seen selling things via social media is because the scale was enormous. Your 5k, 10k or 50k followers/fans aren’t going to generate many sales for you.

At this point, I’ve spent a good bit of time pointing out the myths of social media when it comes to marketing. My hope is that it will save you a lot of time and frustration and help you see through a lot of the misinformation that is swirling around out there.

But I don’t want to just leave you with the myths. I want to share with you how you can effectively use social media.

Social media is just another tool in your toolbox. When people try to use it like the above, it’s the equivalent of grabbing a hammer to get a screw into a board. It’ll work a bit, but will mostly waste time and frustrate you.

What I want to show you now is the right way to use social media to build your platform.

Here are 3 truths about social media marketing for authors.

Truth #1: It Is A Great 1-on-1 Connection Tool

When I talk about Outreach and connecting with influencers, it’s often hard to make that first connection. Either the person doesn’t respond to your email, or you’re not even sure what to email them.

This is where social media marketing can be very effective. Even influencers who have teams of people who maintain their email inbox are often maintaining their Twitter or Instagram account themselves. It can be a great way to get past the gatekeepers and introduce yourself for the first time.

This has worked for me several times. I’ve wanted to connect with someone. I emailed them and never heard back, so I reached out with social media and got a response. Then I was able to follow-up with email and got a response.

Social media is not a mass strategy. It’s a 1-to–1 strategy.

Experiment with thinking of social media more as a 1-to–1 tool instead of a way to communicate with a mass of people. You’ll start to see the effectiveness go up, your time wasted go down and your frustration be set free.

As you build your platform, the number of people you are connected to will continue to grow. When you first get started, it’ll seem pretty easy to keep track of everyone. But as the numbers grow and you meet more people, it’s going to be harder to stay connected to everyone.

This is where social media can be extremely helpful.

I’ve been able to stay connected to people who I’ve met at conferences, have emailed me about my book or met in some other way. This is fun on a personal level, but also extremely helpful for building my platform.

Truth #2: It's Easier to Leverage Other People's Followings Than to Build Your Own

Since my book came out, I’ve had a lot of people share the book on Instagram. I went back through everyone who shared the book and added up their followers.

It was over 600,000 people.

By inviting people to share your content on social media, you’ll be able to reach many, many more people than you could with much less time and effort than building your own following.

Here’s the other thing to consider…

Most people don’t have email lists. Most people don’t have a blog. Most people don’t guest contribute to other blogs. The typical person that waits tables or does data input only has one way to share content online… social media. By inviting people to share your content on social media, it allows them to be involved with what you’re doing and help spread the word in the only way they can.

While Myth #3 above still holds true, making your content easy to share and inviting people to do so is a great way to spread your message.

Truth #3: Email Marketing Is Still Far Better Than Social Media Marketing For Authors

According to a recent study, people value email 26x more than they do social media.

Let’s compare engagement rates.

In the case of email marketing, we’ll look at open rates.

MailChimp recently put out a report that shows industry wide open rates for email marketing, and the lowest average number is 15.66%. [5]

Compare that to the engagement rates of social media from above.

You shouldn’t be trying to build your social media following, you should be building an email list.

That is where you will get the most long term engagement in a way that actually drives book sales.

(If you don’t have an email list yet, I wrote a step-by-step guide for you.)

Why are you on social media?

When you’re engaging with social media, it’s important to remember your goals. Are you using it for fun and to stay connected with friends, family and colleagues? Then it’s great. If you are hoping to build a huge following that will turn into big book sales down the road, you are going to find yourself frustrated with a lot of wasted time behind you.

Also, more importantly, be suspect of advice you read online – even this article. Judge it against what you’ve experienced and make sure people are backing their advice up with real world experience instead of anecdotal conjecture.

With all the ideas, tools and tips I share, my goal is to help you get the most impact out of everything you do. You can dig a hole with a spoon, but it’s a lot easier with a shovel. The same goes for social media. Yes, it can have impact on your platform. Yes, it can help you sell books. But if you try to use it for something it’s not built for, you’ll find yourself digging a hole with a spoon.

Footnotes:

1. Mee, Georgia. “What Is a Good Engagement Rate on Twitter?” Blog. Accessed August 24, 2018. .

2.”What’s a Good Facebook Engagement Rate?” Aamplify | Marketing Expertise Outsource Capability. Accessed August 24, 2018.

3. Mee, Georgia. “What Is a Good Engagement Rate on Instagram?” Blog. Accessed August 24, 2018.

4. “Which Social Media Sites Get The Most Engagement?” How Much Should You Budget For Marketing In 2018? Accessed August 24, 2018.

5. “Average Open Rate for Email & Other Email Benchmarks.” MailChimp. June 13, 2018. Accessed August 24, 2018.

It includes step-by-step how-to along with templates and example author website designs so you have everything you need.

Download the Author Website Checklist

You've written an amazing book, but now you need a website.

It goes without saying that every writer needs an author website. A web search is the first place people go when looking you up and you want to make sure they find a website that you own and have control over. It allows you to put your stake in the ground and own your own little corner of the internet.

However, as someone who has worked with over 100 authors and gone through at least 1000 author websites, I constantly get a first hand look at how much authors need help getting their website put together.

My goal with this article is to walk you through exactly how you can get your website up and running for very little money and, if you have all the content ready, just about an hour of your time. I’m going to walk you through the best practices I’ve learned over the past ten years of working with authors to build their online platform as well as share a few of my favorite tools for getting it done quickly and affordably.

Table of Contents

• Author Website Goals
• 5 Best Author Website Examples of 2018
• Step-by-Step How to Create an Author Website
• 2 Author Website Templates
• Your Author Website

Your Author Website Goals

It's really easy to get distracted by lots of bells and whistles as you build your author website, so I like to establish at the beginning what we are trying to do.

Here are the author website goals (in order):

1. Sell Books. Don't forget that the whole reason you have a website is so that people will eventually buy yours books. This is more important that social media, the perfect headshot, or even a gorgeous design.
2. Build an Email List. Like I've said before, building an author email list is the most important way to build a long term connection with your audience.

Back to Top

5 Best Author Website Examples of 2018

Before we dive in and start building your author website, I think it's helpful to take a look at some examples of how authors have done it right.

1. E.L. James

Whatever you may think of her writing, E.L. James gets a lot right with her website.

Some things I love:

• Simple navigation. One of the worst things you can do with your website is get fancy, especially with the navigation. I like that “Home, About, Books, Blog, Shop, Contact” is clear and concise.
• Welcoming feel. In the giant “Welcome” section, it's a nice touch to have a note to visitors and a nice author photo front and center.
• Clean, organized design. There is no clutter on the website. Her books are lined up and easy to find. Connecting with her on social media is easy to find.

Could be better:

• Email list signup could be better. First, I would put it higher on the page. Second, have an invitation that is something other than “Sign up for updates by email:”. It's important to give a great WIIFM (What's In It For Me?).

2. Anthony Horowitz

Things I love:

• Visually appealing design without being distracting or cluttered.
• Newest book front and center. It's hard to miss what his latest book project is.
• Great introduction to himself. I like the byline on the website right under his author photo so you know you're in the right place.
• Next event. It's easy to not only see where he is going to be next, but it invites you to see if he's coming near you soon.

Could be better:

• Too many navigation options. I would cut the forum (it's sparsely populated) and combine some of the others or move them to the footer.
• No email signup.

3. Heather Sunseri

Things I love:

• Email signup front and center. The giant block offering the free series starter is going to email list signups. Also the box directly below that offers good reasons to sign up.
• Easy to find her latest books.

Could be better:

• The social media links at the very top are too cluttered and too many.
• The copyright notice and legal disclaimer should be small links in the footer to their own pages. They take up far too much room where they are.

4. Julie James

Things I love:

• Simple, clear, concise. From the navigation to the content, everything is uncluttered and straightforward.
• Monthly giveaway. This is a great way to build the email list.

Could be better:

• The blog is rarely updated. It would be better to raise the profile of the email list and get rid of the blog.

5. Antony Beaver

Things I love:

• Design. It fits very well with Antony's writing and immediately grounds you in the kind of author he is.
• Simple and clear. This continues to be a theme of what makes an author website good. The design isn't cluttered. The navigations is straight forward and the site flows well.
• Books (with reviews) are front and center.

Could be better:

• No email signup.
• “Titles” should be renamed “Books”.

Download the Author Website Checklist

Back to Top

Step-by-Step How to Create an Author Website

There are five steps to build your author website:

1. Choose a Domain Name
2. Signup for a Web Host
3. Choose the Right Platform
4. Choose an Author Website Theme
5. Add Your Content
6. Customize with Plugins

1. Choose a Domain Name

The first thing you need before setting up your website is a domain name. That’s the .com, .net, .org, etc that people will type into their browser to go to your website. In order to have a website, you need a domain name.

A lot of authors default to setting up their website under their book title or a book series or a book’s main character. I highly recommend you don’t.

Setup your website under your own name.

You have a long writing career ahead of you. Odds are, your writing is going to change. What you write about today will very likely shift and change over time. While today you can’t imagine writing anything other than this trilogy you’re currently working on, given enough time, you’re going to shift to something new.

The one thing in  life that you can count on staying the same is your name. Build your author platform around your name.

What if your name is taken? What if your name is Mike Smith and mikesmith.com is long gone. Get as close to your name as possible. If you can’t get mikesmith.com, I’d look at buying mikesmithauthor.com, mikesmithbooks.com, michaelsmith.com, mikeericsmith.com (middle name), etc. Something close to your name that will be easily found when searching.

What if you’ve already setup your site under a book title or series? Unless you are planning on riding this book or series for the next decade, I recommend changing now. The sooner the better. One of my clients is Daniel Pink. His first book was Free Agent Nation. He’s since gone on to write books about motivation, sales, right brain thinking, etc. It would be really odd if he had set up everything under a site about freelancing.

What about .net, .org. me, etc domains? Be very careful with these. You’ll always lose some traffic to the main .com domain because that’s the default. However, if your .com is taken and many of the .com’s around your name are taken, it is a viable option. Just choose carefully.

How do you find and buy that perfect domain name?

The tool I recommend is www.domize.com. It is the fastest, easiest way to find domain names. On most websites you have to type in a domain, run a search and then see if it’s available. If it’s not, you have to reload the page and try again. This little tool searches on the fly and lets you know immediately what is available and what is not.

For purchasing domain names, I recommend www.iwantmyname.com. They make it simple and uncomplicated to buy your domain names. I highly recommend you do not use GoDaddy. Besides their abhorrent marketing practices, they will do their best to trick you into buying products and services you don’t need. If you already have domain names with them, you can easily switch them to www.iwantmyname.com.

2. Signup for a Web Host

Now that you have a great domain name, it’s time to get hosting for your website.

If you’re unsure of what web hosting is and how it’s different from your domain name, let me explain briefly. Your domain name is like your address. It let’s people know where you live. However, it’s not your home. Just because you have an address doesn’t mean you have a roof over your head. Your web host is your website's home. It’s where your actual website lives. All of the HTML, CSS, PDF, JPG, etc files have to be on a computer somewhere that people can access. This is where the web host comes in. For a pretty small fee, they will take care of storing all of your website files and making them available to people online. In a little bit I’ll show you how to get your website setup on the host, but for now, just know you have to get a web host.

For your hosting, I recommend BlueHost. It’s a very affordable option that lots of high-profile sites use. They have great support and make it dead simple to install your website and get it up and running.

To get it setup, visit BlueHost.com and click that giant green “Sign Up Now” button. They’ll walk you through the process of getting everything purchased and setup.

3. Choose the Right Platform for your Author Website

Unless you’re planning on hand-coding HTML, PHP, CSS and JavaScript, you’re going to want to use an existing web platform to set up your website. Luckily, there are a lot to choose from.

The one that we strongly recommend is WordPress. Here’s a few of the reasons:

• It is the most popular platform used across the internet.
• There is a powerful community around it. If you ever have major trouble with your website, you can easily find someone to help.
• Thousands of plugins have been developed that you can access for free to add customized functionality to your website. I list a few of my favorite below.
• Thousands of themes have been developed that allow you to customize the design of your website.
• It's what I use for this website.

Another great feature of BlueHost is it allows you to install WordPress with just a few clicks! Once you have signed up for BlueHost, check out this video that will walk you through getting WordPress installed in less than five minutes.

4. Choose an Author Website Theme

WordPress makes it really easy to change the design of your website. There are hundreds of themes available that you can install and customize.

For a walk-through on how to install themes on your website watch this short video:

When it comes to choosing a theme, there are two options.

Free. There are literally thousands of free themes to choose from. I would recommend starting with TwentyThirteen from the creators of WordPress. It's not their newest theme, but it is the easiest to setup based on my advice here. In has a lot of great functionality and offers a lot of customization. If you want to get your website setup and start adding content right away, stick with this default theme.

The downside to free layouts are they are often hard to customize and come with no support.

Premium. Usually for less than $100 you can pickup a premium theme that has a lot more functionality and comes with support, customer forums, and most importantly, documentation on how to get the site setup. Here are my picks.

• Thrive Themes. If I had to pick just one option to recommend, it would be from the company Thrive. Check out their Ignition Theme. Combined with their amazing drag-and-drop Thrive Architect you're able to create a great looking website that is highly customizable. Warning: If you aren't tech savvy, there's a learning curve so be prepared to spend a few hours going through their documentation and learning how to set it up.
• Published: A WordPress Author Theme or Cadmus: A WordPress Theme for Authors – These two themes are much easier to setup. They are also a little cheaper. The only downsides are you don't have as many layout options and having an email signup on the homepage is harder to do. That said, you get a great site that you can setup in less than an hour.

5. Add Your Content

Up until now, most of the advice applies to anyone setting up a new website. This is the part of the article where we dive deep into how you add content to your new WordPress site and what content every author should have on their website.

Before we start adding content to the site, I have two quick videos for you to watch that will teach you how to add pages and content to your website:

• How to create a static page
• How to create a page for your blog posts

What pages should your website have?

What I’m about to share with you is the content and pages that every author website should have. It may be the case that you will have additional content to add, but this is meant to be a jumping off point. It’s also meant to be a checklist to make sure you don’t miss something important. So many author websites I see have many fundamental pieces missing. I’ve seen sites that don’t have buttons to purchase the book, have no way to contact the author or have no descriptions of books. I once had to rebuild a site for an author because you couldn’t even tell there was a book for sale!

These guidelines will help make sure you don’t miss an important aspect of your author website.

Here are the basic pages every author should have on their site as a bare minimum:

• Homepage
• About
• Books
• Contact

Here are three additional pages most authors are going to want as well:

• Events
• Blog
• Resources

I’m going to go through each of these pages and share exactly what content should be on each one. But before I move on, let me touch on one thing.

Email Lists

Your #1 goal in building out your website, and in everything you do to market your books online, is to grow your email list.

If you followed me long – whether through my book Your First 1000 Copies – my focus on email lists won’t be a surprise to you. However, if you’re a little confused around why I say your email list is more important than Twitter, Facebook, blogging, podcasting or anything else you do, then I highly recommend you pick up a copy of my book.

As I step through each of these pages and highlight the content that should be on each one, you’ll see that your email subscription box shows up a lot. Once you understand how powerful having the direct connection to your audience through email is, you won’t be surprised.

Click here if you need help getting your email list setup.

What should I put on each page?

In this section I’m going to step through each page and share exactly what content you should make available on each one. Once again, this is a guideline to make sure you don’t miss anything important, but feel free to make it your own.

Homepage
Your homepage is a portal. Don’t try to cram everything in, but don’t leave off the important things either. Give highlights of your most important things and allow people to click to find out more.

• Latest book – Make your latest book front and center on the site. Show the cover, give a brief description including blurbs and make the links to purchase very prominent. This serves two purposes. First, it makes it easy for your fans to buy your new book. Second, it’s good for branding. If people have read your latest book and land on your website, they’ll immediately know they’re in the right place.
• Email subscription box – As either #1 or #2 call-to-action on the page, invite people to join your email list.
• Headshot and short bio – Have your headshot and a short bio that ends with “read more” and links to your About page. Again, this is good for branding. You want visitors to know they’re in the right place. Pro tip: Use the same headshot everywhere – Facebook, LinkedIn, Amazon Author Page, website, etc.
• Excerpts of other content – Show your latest three blog posts or links to your resources page or short stories you have available online. Make it easy for visitors to find additional content online.
• Connect – Highlight where visitors can connect with you online. Social media links, contact page, etc.

About
This page serves two purposes. It allows readers to learn a little bit more about who you are and what you do. It also allows media, bloggers, etc to easily get information and images when needed.

• Headshot – Use the same picture as the homepage. Potentially make it available in hi-res to download if you are planning to do media and interviews.
• Short bio and Long bio – Give two versions of your bio. A two paragraph version that is very straight forward and then a longer version that goes into your background, where you grew up, what led you to being a writer, etc. Again, this is a place for readers to get to know you so don’t be afraid to share your personal story.
• Email subscription box

Books – Overview
Make sure it is easy to find all of the books you’ve written in one place. Especially for fiction writers, your backlist is extremely important. On the books overview page you should have all of your past books showing in reverse chronological order. For each book on this page you should have:

• Book Covers – The most instantly recognizable part of your book. Make it front and center, though if you have a larger backlist, I recommend showing them as thumbnails so people aren’t overwhelmed.
• Title
• Short description
• Links to buy the book
• “Read More” link – Link to the Single page for the book (covered in the next section)
• Email subscription box

If you’d like to see one of these Books – Overview pages in action, the one we did for Hugh Howey is one of my favorites.

Books – Single
For each of your books, you should have an entire page of your website dedicated to it. You can link to it directly when promoting the book, but it is also linked to via the “Read More” links on the Books – Overview page.

• Book Cover
• Title and Subtitle
• Full Description
• Blurbs and Testimonials
• Links to buy the book
• Email subscription box

Books – “What if I don't have a book yet?”
If you're working on your first book, I still recommend you add a Book page to your site.

Add as much to this page as you currently have, and continue updating it until you have all of the pieces listed above.

If all you know is a tentative title and short description, add that. Once you have a cover, add that too.

This is the preview page for your upcoming debut title!

Contact
Make it extremely easy and clear how people can contact and connect with you.

• Email address – I still see people from time-to-time not want to post their email address online for fear of spam. As long as you are using a reputable service such as GMail, you shouldn’t have to worry about this. I’ve been posting my email address all over the internet for years and have basically no trouble with spam.
• Mailing address – If you’re uncomfortable sharing your home address, use your office address or a PO Box. It’s important to make it easy for people to mail you things. I recently received my first handwritten thank you note from a reader and it meant a lot to me.
• Social media links – Share your Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, etc links for everywhere you are active so people can connect with you on these platforms.
• Contact form – While this will merely sends an email to your inbox, it saves an extra step for the visitor so is nice to have.
• Email subscription box

Events (or Speaking)
This is one of the pages that not every author is going to need. However, if you regularly speak (or would like to) or have a book tour coming up, it’s important to have this information on the website.

• Speaking
  • Speaker reel or video – Let event organizers see you in action.
  • Contact – Make it clear who and how to contact to hire you.
  • Topics – List 3–5 topics that you are comfortable speaking on.
  • Social proof – List out logos and venues where you have spoken before.
• Events (or book tour)
  • List of upcoming events including cities and locations.
  • Contact – Make it clear who and how to contact you to set up an event.

Blog
Whether you should blog or not is outside the scope of this article, however there’s a few things you want to have in place if you decide to start blogging.

• Blog posts
  • Author – List your name as the post author, even if it’s your website. You want to make it very clear to new visitors that you are the one writing.
  • Share links – Make it easy for people to share your blog posts through social media.
  • Comments – I recommend starting out by opening comments. You may have problems with people being trolls, but I find for most authors this isn’t an issue. You can always block people or close comments later if it becomes a problem.
• Sidebar – Most blogs have a sidebar and it’s a great place to pull new visitors deeper into the site. Don’t overload it though with word clouds and other miscellanea.
  • Email subscription box
  • Headshot and short bio
  • Latest book
  • Popular posts

Resources
Having a resources page is a great way to share your “evergreen” content – the content that doesn’t get old over time. Use this to share your tips on writing, short stories, white papers, videos, interviews, etc. It’s going to be extremely specific to you and your platform so I don’t have any specific things that have to be on the page except, of course, for an email subscription box.

These are the pages and content that you should consider having on your author website. Overall, you want to make it easy for people to know they’re in the right place, buy your books, sign up for your email list and connect with you through your content.

6. Customize with Plugins

One of the great things about WordPress is the vast array of plugins that are available to help add functionality and customization to your website. However, as of this writing, there are almost 30,000 plugins available in the WordPress Plugin Directory. That’s a lot to wade through! Here’s the ones that we use and recommend:

• Jetpack by WordPress.com – This is a plugin built by the same people who created WordPress. It offers a lot of great functionality including easily embeddable media (YouTube, Vimeo, etc), social media integration and much more.
• Optin Monster – The best popup and slide over tool for email subscriptions. Offers themes, split testing and lots of other options.
• Google Analytics for WordPress – Makes it easy to integration Google Analytics into your website.
• All in One SEO Pack – A great tool to automatically make your site more friendly to search engines such as Google and Bing.
• BackUpWordPress – Keep your website backed up for when disaster strikes.
• Limit Login Attempts – A great little tool that keeps your WordPress site safe from hackers.
• Sumo – Makes it easy to add email signups and social share to your website.

Download the Author Website Checklist

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2 Author Website Templates

Sometimes it's hard to look at an existing website and figure out what should go where. I created these two templates to help you see how best to arrange your website.

Author Website Template #1

This template allows you to highlight your latest book at the top of the page while keeping your bio box and email signup “above the fold.”

Author Website Template #2

This option allows you to have a welcome box at the top of the site while keeping your latest book and email signup front and center.

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Your Author Website

Having the home for your writing career established online is an important step in building your platform and selling a lot of books. It’s the first place people are going to go to find out more information about who you are and what you do.

However, having an incomplete or bad website can hurt you more than help. It doesn’t have to be the most beautifully designed website, but it does need to have the right information and content readily available to visitors.

Make sure your website reaches these four main goals:

1. Let’s people know they’re in the right place (headshot, book covers, etc).
2. It’s easy for people to find and purchase your books.
3. It’s clear that people should sign up for your email list.
4. It’s easy to connect with and/or contact you.

I hope this post has been helpful in getting your website setup and getting the right information up.

Download the Author Website Checklist

How do I get my writing done, build my author platform, and continue to fulfill all the other responsibilities I have as a husband, dad, business owner (and person)?

In this article, I’m going to explain in exact terms how I get a ton of work done each week in a very small amount of time.

Because despite a high level of output, I usually only work about 30 hours a week.

I’m going to give you specific advice on how you can accomplish a huge amount, even if you have limited time each week to work on your writing.

The 3 Part Writer Productivity Plan

For a while now, I've had a full-time business to run that keeps me very busy.

When I first started writing, I knew that even though I didn't have the constraints of a full-time job, I still had to figure out how to get my writing done while meeting the demands of the rest of my life.

Here’s the framework I created. You can use it to build your own productivity plan.

It’s a three-part system that's simple and easy to use:

• The Mindset – You must get your thinking straight first.
• The Schedule – You have to figure out the when before the what.
• The Plan – You must decide what you’re going to get done, before you start working.

Each part is built upon the one before it, so read all of this information straight through to the end.

1. The Mindset

As with everything, we have to establish the right mindset before we can start talking about strategy and tactics.

Don’t skip this part. If you think you don’t need to read this section, then you should skip this entire article.

I have some basic productivity beliefs and habits that help me make decisions quickly — and stay sane in the face of a never-ending deluge of To-Do tasks:

1. Ruthlessly cut out all distractions and unproductive actions.

I can get more done in one 30-hour work week than most people get done in a month, because of how I work:

During my writing time, I’m hyper-focused and avoid distractions like the plague.

No social media. No emails. All chat programs turned off. I put on earphones, and put my phone in my bag.

I am ruthless on this point. You need to be too.

2. It’s more about what you don’t do.

There are lots of ways to be active and busy, but very few ways to be active and effective.

It’s extremely important that you learn the difference between busy and effective, and are honest with yourself about it.

Learn what actions are actually moving you toward your goals, and then only work on those items.

3. Figure out your values and goals ahead of time.

A good productivity system organizes only those actions that are built upon your values and goals.

If you don’t know why you’re doing something — finishing your manuscript, building your email list, landing guest posting opportunities, etc. — then you’ll constantly feel frustrated about your life as an author.

I’m going to ask you to do some hard work in this article, and unless you have a solid Why motivating you, you won’t be able to follow through.

If you need help in that area, I go much deeper into that topic in this article.

4. Your productivity system should be simple.

While I can appreciate productivity systems such as Getting Things Done (GTD), most of them are too complicated to apply to real life.

All the successful people I know and work with have very simple systems for tracking their actions and getting things done.

5. I don’t try to be perfect, track everything, or keep everybody happy.

I receive anywhere from 100 to 150 emails a day.

Though I try respond to all of them, it's inevitable that I’m going to miss an important email every now and again.

I’m also going to forget to do some things, not finish my To Do list for the day, and a commit a few other errors and losses.

I deal with my lack of perfection by accepting it ahead of time, giving myself grace and forgiveness, and moving on.

6. Don't make excuses.

Some of the things I do, you might not be able to do, but don’t use that as an excuse.

Use your imagination, embrace the principles you can use, and apply them to your situation.

If you find yourself thinking:

“Yeah that’s great for him, but I can’t do that because __________________.”

STOP, capture that thought and turn it into:

“I can’t do that, but I could try _________________ instead.”

7. Ambiguity is the enemy of productivity.

My most unproductive times are when I sit down to work and don’t know what I should be working on.

This is when my time gets filled with checking email or reading blogs.

I do everything I can to ensure that every time I sit down to work, I know what I should be working on next, so I don’t waste time, frittering away my precious few hours of work time.

–

Once you have your mindset properly in place, you can move on to Part 2:

2. The Schedule

Your work schedule is the second most important thing to establish.

You must know exactly when you are going to work and what type of work you’ll be able to get done during those hours.

If you start each week “hoping” you’ll get some time to write, you’ll end each week having written far less than you could have.

Here’s a look at my weekly schedule:

Monday, Wednesday, Thursday

• 4:15 am: Awake and making coffee.

• 4:15 – 5:00 am: Reading/Prayer/Meditation

• 5:15 am: Get to my office (3.1 miles from my house).

• 5:15 – 8:45 am: Do creative work for the day such as writing, planning and online course content (more on that below). Other people don’t usually arrive at my office until 8:30 am, which leaves me with more than three hours of quiet, uninterrupted creative time.

• 8:45 am: Go back home.

• 9:00 – 11:30 am: Do homeschool with my two sons, Conner (9) and Max (6).

• 11:30 – 11:45 am: Pack up, get my workout clothes, kiss the family goodbye, and head back to the office.

• 12:00 – 4:15 pm: Back at my office. Focus on non-creative work: answering emails, making phone calls, and other “running a business” chores. If it’s not too busy and I can concentrate, I’ll try to get more creative work done, but it’s usually a stretch to manage that.

• 4:15 pm: Pack up, change into workout clothes, and leave for the gym (.5 miles from my office).

• 4:30 – 5:30 pm: Do CrossFit at my gym.

• 5:30 – 9:30 pm: Go home, shower, have dinner, have family time, go to bed.

Tuesday

This year my family joined a homeschool group, which threw a monkey wrench into my Tuesdays.

However, I re-worked my schedule to ensure it accommodated the homeschooling first (#3 in my Mindset principles: My kids are more important than my work) and still covered all the work bases.

• 4:15 am: Awake and making coffee.

• 4:15 – 5:00 am: Reading/Prayer/Meditation

• 5:00 – 7:00 am: Creative work at home.

• 7:00 – 8:30 am: Get the kids up and ready for homeschool group. Get myself ready.

• 8:30 am: Go to the office.

• 8:45 am – 12:30 pm: Focus on non-creative work: emails, phone calls, run-my-business tasks, creative work if possible.

• 12:30 pm: Pack up and drive to homeschool group for afternoon session with Conner.

• 1:00 – 3:00 pm: Homeschool group.

• 3:15pm: Leave for the gym. (Conner’s swim practice starts at 4:00 pm and, conveniently, is at the same gym as my CrossFit workout.)

• 3:30 – 4:15 pm: Get a bit of work done (usually email) while waiting for my 4:30 CrossFit class to start.

• 4:30 – 5:30 pm: Do CrossFit at my gym.

• 5:30 – 9:30 pm: Home, shower, dinner, family time, bed.

Friday – Sunday

No official work schedule.

I usually sleep in on Fridays to recover from lack of sleep Monday through Thursday. I hang out with the family and get house projects done.

I usually also get some work done (I’m writing the draft of this post on a Saturday afternoon while the boys play Wii), but Friday through Sunday is very fluid.

I never officially plan on getting anything done, so I won’t be disappointed if that happens.

The point of sharing all this? To demonstrate that as a writer, I live a very regimented life.

For the most part, every week looks exactly the same as the last.

This does a couple things for me:

1. It makes it easier to plan. I know exactly how much creative time I have each week, which helps me know how much work I can get done in a week. If you don’t have your writing/creative time set in stone, it’s impossible to be consistent with it.
2. It deletes on-the-spot decision-making. Decision fatigue is real. Having a set schedule, and a basic idea of what you’re working on for each hour of that schedule, keeps you from having to make a lot of decisions every day.

“What if I can’t follow a set schedule?”

I realize that not everyone can have such a regimented schedule. You might be a new parent, or at the whim of a very busy day job.

Not too long ago, that was me too.

So what can you do?

1. Get up early.

It’s amazing how few distractions there are at 4:30 am. No co-workers. No phone calls. No new emails.

Just you, a cup of coffee and the blank page.

For those of you moaning about getting up early in the morning: See #3 under Mindset.

If you have a vision for what you are trying to accomplish, you can get up to accomplish it.

I do not naturally wake up at 4:00 am. Every single morning, it’s a struggle.

But when that alarm goes off, I focus on my Why and force my feet to the floor.

2. Put a Writing Meeting on the calendar.

When I was trying to write Your First 1000 Copies, I struggled to find time to write.

I had a very busy client business and was averaging five hours a day on the phone. There seemed to be no time to write—until I started scheduling it into my calendar.

I would create a meeting on my calendar called “Writing.” This would block off that time so that nothing else could get in the way.

If someone asked to meet with me during that time, I would say I was busy, and would offer an alternate time.

That kept me from putting the writing off indefinitely.

3. Cut down your consumption. Think about how much time you spend consuming other people's creativity (television, reading, music, movies), versus how much time you spend doing your own creating.

Scott Berkun talked about this at a conference I attended last year.

This topic is strongly related to productivity, and the talk is well worth watching:

Stop watching so much TV and go to bed (see Point #1).

Install the News Feed Eradicator so you'll stop checking Facebook. Even better, delete the social media apps from your phone.

Stop consuming other people’s creativity (or social media drivel) and order your life around your creativity.

4. Create a “Do Not Do” list.

People are often surprised by the number of things I don’t do.

Here’s a short list of what I don't spend time on:

• Facebook (except for a couple of groups I’m a member of)
• Twitter (except for responding to people who reach out to me)
• Pinterest
• Instagram (except for posting pictures of my kids)
• Printing business cards. I don’t have any.
• Printing any other materials other than my book. No stationery, no bookmarks, etc. I’ve just never seen the ROI on these for what I do.
• Blogging more than once or twice a month
• Commenting on other people's blogs
• Reading that many blogs in the first place
• Reading/watching any news outside of the particular industry news that's relevant to my business goals

Your writing and creativity time is priceless. Don’t waste it on non-impactful work.

This part of the system is vital, whether or not you’re a full-time writer:

Plan out your work schedule ahead of time.

If you already have a full-time job that requires you to get up at 6:00 am, start turning off the television at 9:00 pm, so you can get up at 4:45 am and write the next morning.

And take your laptop to work so you can put your ear buds in and get another 750 words written at lunchtime.

If I called you on a Sunday night, you should be able to list out the days and hours each week when, barring a catastrophe, you butt will be on your writing chair.

3. The Plan

The Plan is the third component in this system.

Now that you know when you are going to get work done, you have to figure out what work you will be filling that time with.

As I've stated above, it's best to never sit down to work without first knowing what you are going to work on.

However, you have to start with the long view first.

Planning the next 3 to 6 months

This is my calendar: three calendar months, laid out right in front of me where I can see it every day.

I pre-plan every single blog post, email list send, and webinar, three months ahead of time.

What do you want to have written three to six months from now? How many words?

How many people do you want to add to your email list by then?

What are you going to do to make that happen?

Setting out my expectations for the next few months keeps me consistently moving on to the next step.

Planning the next week

Before I plan a week's activities, I ask: What needs to get done this week so that I  stay on my three-to-six-month schedule?

This is where I plan when to do my “big rocks” — so I can fulfill my greatest priorities.

Watch this video:

For example, this week I need to:

• Write two blog posts
• Outline a new course I’m building
• Put together a slide presentation I’m giving at a conference on Friday

Planning the next day

Now that I know the big things that have to be done this week — and I know when I’ll have creative time available to work on them — I can schedule each day.

Tomorrow, I’ll write the blog post and get started on my slideshow for my conference presentation on Friday.

I chose those two things because they have to be done so that I can keep to my three-to-six-month schedule.

I’ll save the product planning until later in the week, because if something happens and I can’t get to it, it won't mean failure for my long-term plan.

I do this every single day.

Before I go to bed at night, I know what I’m going to work on first thing the next day (see #7 of Mindset).

–

By following this three-part system, you’ll make sure you're using your precious creative time to get the most important work done.

When your writer productivity goes down in flames

“No plan survives contact with the enemy.”
– Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

Even though I've laid out a solid, rigid plan above, of course it doesn’t always survive real life.

Your plan will not stay 100 percent intact.

Your kid is going to get sick. You’ll oversleep.

Your boss will make you stay late. Your editor will run two weeks late.

Or you will just plain feel unmotivated or discouraged and procrastinate your day away.

Here’s what I do when my plan starts unraveling:

1. Give myself grace. It really is OK. It doesn’t make me a disgrace or failure. It doesn’t mean I’ll never succeed. It just means that, for today, my plan didn’t work out.
2. Realize I’m still getting more done. While today may be a wreck, on a week-by-week, month-by-month basis, I’m still getting way more done with this system then I did in the past.
3. Stop, readjust and start again. If I just lose an hour by oversleeping, I can usually catch up. But if I get the flu and am out for two days, I need to take a few minutes to pause, rework my plan, and then get back on my schedule.

Now is the time

You can do this.

If you’ve struggled in the past to get your writing done and move toward your goals, give this system a try.

The Writer Productivity Framework

We need to start by categorizing the things we spend time on. I split all the things I do into four groups:

• Unessential – These are the things that fill up our lives but don’t have to be there. Watching television, checking social media, playing ultimate frisbee, etc. We do these for fun or pleasure.
• Essential – The things we have to do with our lives but aren’t the creative endeavors that are meaningful. Things like driving our kids to school, going to work, paying bills, going to the restroom, and exercising. We have to do these things to keep our lives running.
• Meaningful – These are things like having dinner with your family, taking your spouse on a date, or volunteering at the homeless shelter. These are things we do to add meaning and fulfillment to our lives.
• Creative – These are your writing projects and other endeavors that are fulfilling to your soul. These are want we want to spend more time doing.

The goal of this article is to free up as much time and space as possible for the Meaningful and Creative parts of our lives.

Looking at these four groups, it’s pretty easy to see that we want to have more time for the Meaningful and Creative. This means to increase our writer productivity we have to:

• Remove the Unessential – Identify and reduce the amount of time and activities in the “Unessential” category.

• Systematize Repeated Tasks – Figure out ways to make the Essential items in your life take less time and mental energy.

If we’re able to do this, our lives will immediately and automatically become richer because we will have more time for the Meaningful and Creative activities in our lives. Let’s start here:

First, Remove the Unessential

We all have things in our life that are filling up time but not getting us any closer to our goals in life.

I want to be clear here… these things aren’t bad. Nothing in this article is meant to be a moral judgement on you or what you spend your time doing.

However, if you want to increase your writer productivity, that time has to come from somewhere. Let’s take a look at two different ways to start making changes.

Exercise 1: Choose to Choose

Somehow in our culture the phrase “I’m too busy” has become both ubiquitous and a badge of honor. We do all have a lot going on. It takes a lot of time to actually live a life.

However, what I hate about the phrase “I’m too busy” is that it inherently shifts the responsibility for our schedule off of us.

We all have a huge amount of autonomy when it comes to our lives. There are very, very few things that we have to do. Yet, we complain that we are “too busy” as if these choices were made for us.

The first step in your writer productivity is by mentally taking back control of your schedule.

You do this with one simple mental switch.

Any time you think:

“I’m too busy to ________”

You must replace it with:

“I have chosen not to prioritize _______”.

You aren’t too busy to exercise. You’ve chosen not to prioritize that over the things you currently do in your life.

But you must remember, this is not a moral judgement. Because I could also say, “You aren’t too busy to spend the entire day writing because you have chosen to prioritize paying your mortgage.”

Some of what you spend your time on is binge watching the new season of your favorite show. But then you also spend your time visiting your mother in the nursing home.

Your job at this first stage is NOT too:

• Moralize. You are not to justify your choices or shame yourself for your choices. You just watch as an impartial observer.
• Make changes. The first part is to merely notice how many times you complain in your head (or out loud) about being too busy, and then take back ownership by replacing it with “I have chosen not to prioritize.”

The first step in writer productivity is NOT to make any outwards changes, but to merely decide that you are in control and recognize that what you are currently spending your time on, you have chosen to spend your time on. Once you have done this, we can start taking action.

Exercise 2: Stop Doing Everything

Several years ago I installed a tracker on my computer. It was this little piece of software that ran in the background and logged everything I did. It kept track of how long I was in my email, getting work done for clients, writing, or browsing the internet. It also kept track of all the websites I visited and how long I spent on them.

At the end of the week it gave me a report. I was able to see just how much time I was spending on various activities during the day and I was appalled. A huge chunk of my day was being eaten up by activities that didn’t actually help me reach my goals.

Suddenly it became extremely easy to block those distracting websites and uninstall those useless programs on my computer once I saw clearly how much time I was wasting on them.

Now that you’ve taken the step of owning your decision on what’s in your life (Exercise 1), it’s time to actually evaluate what you have chosen to spend your time on.

This is an exercise that you will need a writing utensil and a piece of paper for.

I recommend you do this exercise right now. It will take about five minutes.

1. List out everything that you do in a day. All of it. Get as granular as you can. Here’s an example of a partial list I might create:
   
2. Circle everything that is Essential. Here is my criteria for what is Essential: First, you would die or get extremely sick if you didn’t do it. i.e. going to the restroom or taking your medication. Second, it is an extremely important obligation. i.e. going to work or taking your kids to school. Watching TV is not  Essential. Reading the news is not Essential. Having coffee with my friends is not Essential.
   
3. Cross out everything else left on the list.
   
4. Live like this for five days. For one work week, Monday through Friday, only do the circled items.
5. Each day of the exercise, journal about what it feels like to live like this.
6. After five days, evaluate. Decide what crossed out things you will add back in, and what should stay out permanently. Some of the things you lived without for five days you’ll want to keep out permanently. Did you enjoy not being on social media or reading the news? And other crossed out things you will add back in, but you will do it decisively. You will decide you want to do these things instead of passively letting them creep back into your life.
7. Do this exercise once a year. Resistance is insidious. It is slow but deliberate. Like the ivy that is beautifully and slowly growing around a tree and choking the life out of it. You must regularly reevaluate what you are spending your time on and where it is going.

It’s important to remember that I am not saying that you have to live like this forever. I watched a movie with my wife last night and I’m still getting my writing done this morning.

This is meant to shock you out of the belief that you are too busy.

This is a practice to use when your life is filling up with things and your writing productivity is getting pushed out the back door.

Also, it’s extremely important you don’t merely mentally do this exercise. You need to actually do it.

You need to feel what it’s like to be sitting on the coach at 8:00pm staring at the floor because you have nothing to do because you have not filled your life with the Unessential.

It is in those moments that you will realize that you are not too busy to be creative.

Taking one week to stop doing everything that is Unessential is the exercise that will ruthlessly open your eyes to where your time is going and it will be much easier to keep your life free of these distractions.

These two simple exercises — Choose to Choose and Stop Doing Everything — will help you start Removing the Unessential from your life.

But what about all those Essential things like taking the dog to the vet and eating lunch that we have to do but aren’t the Meaningful and Creative aspects of our life?

That leads to the second part…

Second, Systematize and Automate the Essential

Let’s pretend that your ability to focus, make good decisions, and do great work is like a bottle. Each morning you wake up with a bottle full of the ability to focus, make good decisions, and do great work. However, every single time you make a decision or have to focus or work on something, you pour a little bit out of the bottle.

Throughout the day, levels in the bottle get lower and lower and this means it’s harder to focus, make good decisions, and do great work.

Once your bottle is empty for the day, you’re done until the next morning.

This is how your brain works.

Every time you have to apply mental energy to something, you give up a little bit of your ability to apply mental energy to something else later in the day.

There are ways to increase the amount that your bottle can hold — get good sleep being the main one — but in general it’s hard to increase your capacity.

The best way to make sure that you can focus, make good decisions, and do great work is to reduce the amount of things that you have to expend mental energy on.

You do this by taking all of the Essential things in your life — the things you have to do but aren’t Meaningful or Creative — and reducing how much you have to actually think about them.

There are two exercises for this:

Exercise #3: Make Future Decisions

I like to start with this question: “What one decision can I make today that will reduce the amount of future decisions I have to make?”

Here are three examples:

1. I wear the same basic outfit every single day. I have eight different colored t-shirts, two pairs of pants, and three pairs of shoes. All of them match each other. So each morning when I’m getting ready to leave, I don’t have to think about what I’m wearing. I just grab a tshirt, pair of pants, and pair of shoes and I’m ready to go. I made a decision years ago about what I wear to work every day and then I don’t have to make a decision each morning.
2. I have to cook breakfast for my kids every morning. We decide on Sunday, when we go to the grocery, what they want for breakfast that week. I buy enough for the entire week and I cook the same thing for them every day. I decide once a week what my kids will have for breakfast and then I don’t have to decide (or help them to decide) every day.
3. Lunch has always been an issue for me. I hate thinking ahead and packing a lunch. But then I either end of not eating lunch or picking up something unhealthy from a fast food place. Eventually, I found a meal preparation service that delivers to my gym. So each Monday I get lunches delivered to my gym for the entire week. I take them to my office, put them in the fridge, and now I don’t have to think about lunches any more. They automatically show up every single week. I decided once how to handle my lunches and now I never have to decide anymore.

The more I identify ways to make one decision today that saves future decisions, the less I have to expend mental energy thinking about, focusing, and deciding on the Essential (but not Meaningful and Creative) items in my life.

Exercise #4: Systematize Repeated Tasks

Here’s the trigger question:

“What Essential actions am I doing repeatedly?”

Then:

“How do I remove thinking from the process?” or, even better, “How do I remove myself from the process?

Anytime you find yourself doing an essential task repeatedly, think about ways to reduce the mental load of the process or completely automate the process.

First, Remove Thinking

The first step here is to focus on creating checklists.

Anything that you have to do repeatedly that has more than a few steps should be turned into a checklist.

Each week I have to edit and publish the Story Grid Podcast. It had become a huge pain for me. It would take a lot of time and I would always forget one of the fifty steps it took to get everything ready. Finally, I created a checklist. I sat down and typed out every single step in detail that has to be done to edit and publish a podcast episode. Now, I don’t have to think about it or try to remember all the steps. I just sit down and run through the checklist. It now takes less than fifteen minutes and I don’t have to think about it and, most importantly, I never miss a step.

I do something similar when I’m packing my gym bag before leaving for work. Every day I need the same seven things in my bag:

• Shorts
• Spandex
• T-shirt
• Socks
• Shoes
• Towel
• Washcloth

Inevitably, I would forget one of these things. Twice I arrived at the gym and realized I didn’t have my workout shoes and couldn’t workout that day.

So I keep the number “seven” in my head.

Everyday I pack my bag, and then I count how many things I have in the bag.

At least one morning a week I have less than seven things and it forces me to stop and figure out what I haven’t packed yet.

This allows me to mindlessly pack my bag knowing I have a system in place to catch myself if I forget something.

Anytime that you are doing a complex task (more than 3 steps), you should create a checklist.

Second, Remove Yourself

Are there any of these tasks that you can completely move off of your todo list by making it someone else’s responsibility?

The best way to do this is to hire someone.

Spending money to save yourself time is one of the few ways you can use money to make yourself measurably happier ¹.

If you have created a checklist for a task, there is a good chance that you could hire someone to do that task for you.

Could you pay someone to clean your house or pickup groceries or move your blog draft from Word to WordPress? What kind of Essential tasks are you doing repeatedly? Could you move them completely out of your life by hiring someone else to do them for you?

Where does this leave your writer productivity?

I want my life to be filled as much as possible with Meaningful experiences and Creative work. The only way to do that is to remove the Unessential and reduce the time and mental overhead of the Essential.

Please hear me when I say that the Unessential/Essential items are not evil and the goal is to not completely rid your life of them.

Over the last weekend I binge watched an entire season of a television show in two days. I also checked in on social media from time to time. The focus of these exercises is to make sure that these things don’t creep so far into our life that they choke out the Meaningful and Creative moments.

Our goal is to create as much time as possible for our writing productivity. Follow the steps above and you will be surprised by how much creative time you start experiencing in your life.

It’s not only hard to know what you should be doing. It’s also hard to keep up with all the options that are available.

After years of helping authors build their platforms, and then use those platforms to launch top bestsellers, I’ve put together this checklist of proven book marketing methods to help you create your book marketing plan.

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Somehow, talking about how busy someone is has become a twisted sort of compliment, and a point of pride.

When I get on the phone with people, they usually thank me for my time, saying they know how busy I must be.

When I ask people how they’re doing, they tell me how busy they are.

When I tell authors they should make time to send emails to their fans, they tell me they’re too busy.

From the CEO to the high school student, everyone is talking about their packed schedule. There’s just no room for anything else.

But what if we got rid of the word “busy” altogether, and replaced that whole concept with something much more honest?

Instead of the word “busy,” let’s use “prioritizing my time.”

I didn't somehow squeeze people into my frantic schedule. I made a choice to consciously set time aside to speak with them.

On a larger scale, let's all stop complaining we’re too busy. Let's tell the truth instead, which is: “I haven’t prioritized my time well.”

“Busy” is something that happens to us. Prioritizing our time is something we make a choice about.

This is a simple choice to make. Stop looking at your schedule and thinking “I’m too busy.” Instead, look at your schedule and ask yourself, “How am I prioritizing my time?”

Just this one change will cause you to think differently about your schedule. You’ll quickly begin to look for ways you can control it, instead of letting it control you.

Here’s one example of how this can work for you:

You don’t feel as if you have time to write in the morning, because you have to be up at 6:30 am to get the kids ready for school before you go to work.

Ask yourself, “What would it take for me to get up at 5:00 am?”

Of course you need your eight hours or so each night. But what are you usually doing between the hours of 9:00 pm and 12:00 am? Is it time spent in a useful way? Or is it time spent on Facebook or watching The Tonight Show?

What if you started going to bed at 9:00 or 9:30 pm, instead of 11:00 pm or midnight?

What if you prioritized your time around your writing, instead of your current schedule—which leaves you with “I’m too busy to write”—?

Of course, this means you’ll have to say “no” to a lot of time-wasting stuff.

People are often surprised by the number of things I don’t do. I don’t:

• Spend time on Facebook (other than the Instant Bestseller group), Twitter, Pinterest or Instagram (except to post pictures of my kids)
• Print up business cards
• Have any printed materials other than my book–no stationery, bookmarks, etc. I’ve never seen a return on investment on these for what I do.
• Blog more than three or four times a month
• Comment on other people’s blogs
• Read that many blogs in the first place
• Read or watch any news outside of a few particular niche media channels that I feel are important for my business or personal goals

I recently had a few authors call me out on my article about the myths of social media.

They claimed that social media does work, saying they’ve seen sales occur because of it.

I’ve never claimed that social media is a complete waste of time. I've simply pointed out the social media is the 90% of effort that gets you the 10% of results.

The results are not great, considering the amount of work you have to put in for them.

Once you decide to start prioritizing your time, you’ll start looking for activities you can remove in your daily life that get less-than-optimal results.

That one action then leaves room for the three or four things that bring you huge, not meager, results.

You must ruthlessly cut unnecessary stuff out of your life.

When it comes to planning my time, I have learned to be ruthless.

If an activity is not significantly helping me towards my goals—whether that goal is selling books or having a good relationship with my wife—then it gets cut out of my life. End of story.

As one of my mentors regularly says, “You can say whatever you want about your goals in life, but the truth is in your calendar and checkbook.”

What exactly are you spending your time on? What activities are you doing that are significantly helping you reach your goals?

Activity—busyness—does not equal progress.

Activity also does not equal achievement.

How do you start prioritizing your life?

1. Decide now that you are in control of your schedule.

Yes, we all have things we have to do, such as work every day and take care of family. But every minute outside of those things is a choice.

Decide that moving forward, you are in charge of how you spend your time, and will act accordingly.

2. Set your priorities.

What do you want to accomplish in your life? Where do you want to be in a year? What do you need to do each day to get there?

When you’re planning your week, here’s how to fill your schedule:

• Start with what you have to do. If you work a 9 to 5, block out that time on your calendar. If you go to scouts every week with your son or daughter, put that on the calendar too. Start with the non-negotiables.
• Then add what you need to do. This is where your writing goes. This is where your platform-building activities go. This is where date nights with your significant other goes. This is where exercise goes, so you don’t drop dead at 44 with your next novel half written. This is where your steps to achieving your life goals go.
• Fill in any time left. Hobbies, Facebook, TV, etc.

3. Plan ahead.

This is the one that can easily catch me off guard.

When I don't plan, I'll show up at my desk at 5:30 am, grab a cup of coffee, sit down, and… nothing.

I’m not sure what to work on, what to write or how to spend my time. The way to solve this is to plan ahead.

When I do it right, I have my entire week scheduled before it starts, and I know what I’m going to work on the next day before I go to bed the night before. This allows me to sit down and immediately get to work.

4. Change the way you describe your time.

Instead of saying to yourself or other people that you’re just too busy, say “I’ve chosen not to prioritize that.”

Because that’s the truth.

Whenever you don’t do something in your life, it’s because you have chosen not to prioritize that activity.

Please don’t read that as a judgment. An author friend of mine recently had a major disaster occur in his family. He’s spending a lot of time at the hospital right now, hoping his loved ones don’t die.

He’s choosing to prioritize his family over his writing, and that is obviously a great choice.

But choosing to prioritize useless activity over taking active steps towards your life goals—that is a choice you’re going to regret.

–

So how’s your day looking?

Have you gotten so busy that you can’t see straight? Are the days ticking by without you reaching your goals?

Or are you consciously prioritizing your life so you can get the important things done—like be the writer you always dreamt of being?

I talk about how your writing can make people’s lives better. I discuss the fulfillment that comes from connecting with your fans.

Overall, I try to focus on the positive.

But let’s be honest. The publishing experience is not all positive.

Most writers feel plagued by self-doubt at one time or another. “Is this piece well-written? Will it reach the right audience? Is this point worth making?”

Unfortunately, it’s not only our own doubts that can plague us. Often, we also have to deal with other people's doubts about our writing.

A couple weeks ago I received these two emails, within five minutes of each other:

Talk about a high and a low! One person compared my writing to holy scripture and the other called it stupid nonsense.

Then there was W. Terry Whalin.

He published a 3-star review of my book, Your First 1000 Copies, on Goodreads and Amazon. It ended with the phrase, “That I gave it three stars was a bit generous in my view.”

Of course, it’s fine that someone left a negative review of my book. That’s what the whole customer review process is for.

And Terry wasn’t the only one to leave a negative or lukewarm review.

But instead of merely writing the review and leaving it at that, he decided to post a link to his review on Twitter with the comment, “Save your money.”

Again, completely his prerogative.

But did he really have to tag me in the tweet so it would ping my phone during my drive home from work that day?

It’s one thing to leave criticism online. It’s another to intentionally wave it in the criticized person’s face.

And while there’s no scientific study that’s been done on this, I think we can all agree that most writers need to receive about 50 good reviews to recover from a single bad one.

Sooner or later, we all face criticism

If you’re doing something interesting–something new, something novel–if you’re taking a stand of any kind, then at some point, someone somewhere is going to have a problem with your work.

Or just not understand it.

Take a small peak into history and you’ll see that anyone who did anything interesting in the world had a lot of critics.

Hell, Copernicus waited until he was dead to allow publication of his book that stated that the planets revolved around the sun, not the Earth. He knew it would be considered highly controversial, and he was right.

The biggest downside of the internet age is that so many now have the ability to publicly rip someone to shreds, without being there face-to-face and having to deal with the social consequences of their action.

But if it is all part of the job of being a writer in the internet age, then . . .

How do we deal with criticism?

Over the years I’ve come up against criticism in various forms, aimed at both my own and my clients' writing.

Here are a few ideas that help me deal with it in a positive way:

1. Know it’s coming.

Don’t delude yourself into thinking you’ll escape it.

Even if you are talking about the most benign of subjects, someone somewhere will have a problem with the fact that you are doing something with your life besides being an internet troll or a couch vegetable.

2. Whenever possible, avoid the negatives.

After a while, Hugh Howey came to the point where he stopped reading his negative reviews.

I know writers who have someone else check their email every day, and delete all the negative ones before they see them.

I don’t spend any time on Reddit. Actively avoid negativity and criticism, even about other people, whenever you can.

3. Kick negative people out.

Among Tim Ferriss’ rules for leaving comments on his blog: “Remember what Fonzie was like? Cool. That’s how we’re gonna be — cool. Critical is fine, but if you’re rude, we’ll delete your stuff.”

I’ve also heard him refer to his blog as his living room. When he invites people into his home, they’re allowed to disagree, but if they get rude, negative or offensive, he’ll kick them out.

You’re allowed to do the same. If someone enters your space not with simple criticism, but with a rude or offensive comment, block their email address, block them from your site, and do anything else required to keep them locked out.

Delete their comment. Delete their email. Hide them from your newsfeed. Unfollow them.

Do whatever it takes to get them out of your life for good.

4. Don’t engage. Just delete.

Don’t feed the trolls! Any response from you will only encourage them to keep going.

Don’t email them back or reply. Just delete the message and then see #3.

5. Only accept criticism from people you trust.

I sent the second draft of Your First 1000 Copies to five trusted friends.

Four of them said it was great, and offered suggestions for minor changes. The fifth one gave me six pages of notes on things that needed to be fixed. It was extremely hard to hear, but it led me to fix several major flaws in the manuscript.

I recently sent the first draft of a new book to a writer friend. His response was “OK, brutal honesty–it’s a mess.” Again, hard to hear, but when I took a second look at the draft, I realized the advice he gave me after that comment was right on the money.

Surround yourself with people you trust, then ask them for their honest opinion. If they care about you, they will give you honest criticism that you can trust and take to heart.

6. Keep your eye on the why.

Remember why you started writing.

Focus on the people you are relentlessly helping. As far as my own writing is concerned, I’m willing to make a few people angry in the pursuit of helping you reach your goals.

7. Don’t add to the negativity.

This one is maybe the most important.

I have a personal rule: I never post anything negative on social media. Whether it’s a complaint about the weather, a rant against the government, or criticism of someone’s work.

While there are times and places to criticize, I think long and hard before I do it, especially publicly.

There’s already plenty of negativity out there. I'd rather do the work to fix a problem, instead of adding to it.

Unfortunately, criticism is part of the writer’s world.

But it doesn't have to hold you back or keep you from your most important work.

You can learn to not only cope with criticism, but to overcome it!

Don't let it shave the edges off of what you're doing.

Don’t let it stop you from changing the world!

“This advice seems geared toward extroverts/people persons, but many writers are introverts who find it hard to reach out to people and who, thus, suck at marketing. [It is] easy for extroverts, and painful or even next-to-impossible for introverts. Is there any hope for introverts like me who just want to write our books?”

And the other:

“Marketing seems to come easy for authors like you but I just don’t think an introvert like me can do it.”

If only people knew.

Put me in a room of more than two strangers and I’m the guy standing against the wall looking at my phone and feeling like everyone can sense the anxiety rolling off of me.

After I did an all-day workshop a few months ago, I literally found a corner in the office building where I could hide behind a couch and just sat there so I could be alone.

Newsflash: Authors, as a group, are introverted

Isn’t that why most of us pick this profession? It allows us to sit alone with our thoughts for hours on end. It’s the perfect situation for an introvert!

Here’s the truth though.

Don't let your introversion become your excuse

It's often a lot easier to blame something like being introverted instead of taking responsibility for our success. Yes, you may have to learn some new skills and yes, that will be uncomfortable. But it's part of the job. And I promise you, if you stick with it, it will become something you truly enjoy in the long run.

We all have hurts, habits and hangups that hold us back. One of yours, like it is for me, is being introverted. That doesn't mean we throw up our hands in defeat. It means we lean into it, and learn how to be successful through it.

How introverts can be good at marketing

The key to success as an author is to change your perspective of what it means to be good at marketing. It’s not a used car salesman mentality. It’s a 1-on–1 helpful mentality.

1. Understand the true definition of marketing. The following is an excerpt from my book, Your First 1000 Copies:

Let’s sum up what marketing is and should be.

Marketing isn’t sleazy car salesman tactics.

Marketing isn’t tricking people into buying.

Marketing isn’t unethical.

Marketing isn’t intrusive self-promotion.

Marketing is two things: (1) creating lasting connections with people through (2) a focus on being relentlessly helpful.

Does that seem so bad?

Once you change your perspective from “marketing is tricking people into buying something they don’t want” to “marketing is helping people connect with my meaningful work”, it takes on an entirely different tone.

2. Focus on one person. I used to go months without writing anything for my platform. No blog posts. No emails. Nothing. I was so caught up in my head about people judging my work, that it wasn’t good enough, and people smarter than me were already writing about this stuff. Even when my readership was extremely small, it still seemed overwhelming.

However, when I got on the phone with an author who was struggling, I would light up and truly enjoy helping.

One day it clicked. When I’m helping one author, it comes easy. When I’m trying to help hundreds or thousands, the sweaty palms happen and I clam up.

So I picked one of my clients who needed my help the most, printed off her picture and taped it to the wall next to my computer. Then, when I would sit down to write, I’d focus on writing something that helped her. I’d forget about the part where I’m going to share it with thousands of authors later. While I wrote, I only wrote for her.

3. Go slow. This is a long-term game. I want my book to continue to sell month-after-month and year-after-year. Don’t put pressure on yourself to make everything happen now. This week. This month. Give yourself grace to play a long-term game. Have an experimental mindset. Do two things a week.

To invoke a cliché, this is a marathon, not a sprint.

Remove the pressure and give yourself permission to find your pace.

4. Find what you enjoy. Here’s the truth: I can talk about books for hours. Both reading and marketing them. While I enjoy writing these blog posts, the writing part is pretty laborious on me so I try to dodge doing a lot of guest blogging on other websites. However, I love doing podcasts and webinars because I really enjoy talking about books. So any opportunities I get that involve me sitting comfortable in my office while talking on the phone with someone about books, I jump at.

I’ve tried many different ways to do outreach, and this is what works for me. I’ve found what I enjoy, so I pursue more opportunities in that vein. You can do the same.

5. Don’t wait for the fear to go away. I talk to a lot of aspiring writers. They all believe the same myth about writing. They believe that at some point the fear goes away. They assume the big best-selling authors confidently approach the blank page and scrawl out their words knowing the world will love them.

This, of course, is not true.

I’ve worked with those top, best-selling writers and I’ve worked with those just getting their first project off the ground. The fear is always there. It never goes away. In fact, they know if the fear is gone, they’re doing something wrong.

The good writers learn to lean into the fear instead of allowing it to keep them from writing.

The same is true for marketing.

It’s scary. Every time I write a new blog post I worry what people will think. Every time I do an interview I wonder if this will be the one where everyone realizes I’m a fraud.

But I do it anyway. Through practice and repetition I’ve learned to lean into the fear and accept it. It’s not something to beat. It’s not something that will ever completely leave. It’s part of the process.

And if it ever goes away, that means I’m doing something wrong.

Introverts can be great book marketers

Don’t believe the lie that your introversion means you’ll never be good at marketing. Just focus on connecting with and helping one person at a time. Experiment to find your pace and your sweet spot.

People need your writing. Don’t hide behind introversion.

However, when it comes time to actually make a decision, it’s really hard to figure out the right choice. How can you know that you’re picking the right title? How can you know one title is better than the others?

As I’ve worked with authors, I’m constantly surprised by the methods even top publishers use to make their decisions. It often starts with these two words: “I feel”.

“I feel like X will get people more interested than Y.”

“I feel like X embodies the ideas in the book better.”

“I feel like X will convert better.”

Here’s the problem: Your feelings are probably wrong.

You, your spouse, your friend, your editor and your readers are too close to the project and know too much about you. Anybody that has read your stuff before or is involved in getting your book out into the world is going to make biased decisions based on the fact that they are already familiar with your work.

This would be fine if you were only selling the book to existing fans, but you want this to be a title new people – people who have never heard of you before and don’t know your writing – will click on and buy.

Throw out feelings. Get some data.

The first thing we need to do is stop basing our decisions on everyone’s feelings. This will only steer as wrong. Instead, we need to get some data.

When it comes to book titles, this is the kind of data I’m looking for:

1. Unbiased. It has to be from people that don’t know who you are. We need strangers.
2. A/B split. People have to clearly choose one potential title over another.
3. Numbers. We need more than five or ten people. We need to test titles to hundreds of people.

If we can get a large number of people that have never heard of you to make a split second decision between two different potential titles, then we’ll be able to see exactly what strangers will think when the title of your new book shows up on Amazon, Twitter or anywhere else.

But how can you possibly find these people and run these tests?

How to test and find the perfect book title

When I was trying to choose the title for what would become Your First 1000 Copies, I knew I was too close to the project. My favorite title was Relentlessly Helpful. When I asked a friend of mine if he liked it, he said “Tim, that’s a horrible title.”

I felt (there’s that evil word) like that title summed up the principle in the book nicely, however, as you’ll see shortly, my friend was right. It was a horrible title. But if I had stuck with my gut on the title of my book, I would have made a huge mistake.

Instead, here’s the process I took to pick the perfect title for my book. You can use the exact same method to find your perfect title and skip those wasted nights lying awake wondering if you made a huge mistake.

1. Get lots of suggestions

The first thing you need is a list of potential titles. I recommend at least six, but the more you get the better. Where do you get the titles?

• Past Readers. People who already know your work. You can send them a short synopsis of the book and then get their input. This is a great time to use your own website, social media or email list.
• Early Readers. Who read early drafts of the work? Get them to provide potential titles as well.

Here’s a few that were on my list of eight titles for testing:

• Relentlessly Helpful
• The Connected Author
• Don’t Be An Asshole

Once I had the title set using this process, I also did it for sub-titles:

• Winning in the New World of Book Marketing
• The New How-to of Book Marketing
• The Breakthrough Guide to Book Marketing

Once you have your list of at least six titles, you move on to step #2.

2. Create a bracket system

If you’ve ever been involved in the March Madness basketball championships, then you know what I’m talking about. If not, here’s what it looks like:

(Click here to download an empty PDF version to print)

Print that out and write in your titles on the first lines. We’re going to pit the titles against each other to find out which one is the best.

3. A/B split test the titles against each other

If you’re unsure of what A/B split testing is, here’s a simple explanation for our purposes: It’s a method for validating which title out of two options a person is most likely to be interested in.

The reason we’re only testing two titles at a time is this makes the choice simpler for the responders and is more likely to get a split-second decision.

The tool that I use for A/B split testing titles is PickFu. It’s a simple, affordable tool that is exactly what we need to test our titles. In fact, after I used the tool to test my own title, I reached out to the guys that built it and they were kind enough to provide a discount for my readers.

Use this link to get 50% off your first poll.

Once you are signed up, here’s how to use the tool:

1. Set each poll question to “Which book would you buy?”. You want to keep it purposefully vague in order to get the most unbiased response.
2. Do a new poll for each of your brackets. So pit TITLE #1 against TITLE #2 and then write down the result. Same for TITLE #3 against TITLE #4 and so on.

I promise, you’ll be surprised at the results. Remember that title Relentlessly Helpful that I loved so much? Here’s what happened.

Not only was the title I liked not the best, it ranked as one of the lowest. Same goes for the the sub-title I liked, The Breakthrough Guide to Book Marketing.

4. Use the title that wins

Trust the data. If hundreds of people keep picking the same title over and over, you know you've got a title that will catch people's attention.

This is about selling books

Selling books is hard. You’ve put a lot of work into your latest manuscript, now it’s time to give it every chance to succeed. Picking a great title – one that will catch people interest and get them to click on your book – is an important part of your book marketing strategy.

Don’t pick a title based on your feelings. You’re too close to the project and will make an extremely biased decision. The only way to make a good decision is to get stranger’s split-second, un-biased feedback.

By using this approach, you’re leveraging the experimental mindset and ensuring you make the right choice for your book.