Your email list!! I recommend a bunch of tools in this video but my favorite two are of course Author Launch Kit for helping create the content and getting your content out there to grow your list. Then for email delivery and collecting emails we use and recommend Kit. What are you doing this week to grow your email list?? :)

I need some help (or a kick in the seat). I have a second video ready to go live, and frankly its been a pain in the backside. Took me several takes, and when I used the tools recommended to me, I was able to add some quiet music background. HOWEVER, I could not enhance the video, and when I went to export it - now they want me to pay for the non-free part of the application. I am just starting down this whole video path and frankly I do not want to pay for a tool I may or may not use in the future. Call me frugal, cheap, whatever - but if you offer a free tool, then let me export from the tool the product that your free tool helped to build! Am I being silly here to think that?

Beatrix was a self publishing success from the early 20th century, admittedly children’s fiction. She offered her Peter Rabbit stories to publishers. They said no. She self published the books and they sold well. She then got a publisher to come on board. She had a level of success which was getting towards Harry Potter level. She then had the chance to do more books. Apparently she was good at book marketing. She had a patent/trademark on Peter Rabbit toys. She had a game. She was from a fairly wealthy background anyway, but she used her money to buy property in the Lake District. When she died, she left all of her property which was very extensive to the National Trust. As you may know the publisher’s nephew proposed to her. He died before they could marry. She later married her solicitor.

I have been busy offering to do a talk based on my Jane Austen book for any organisation that will have me - while I wait for US copyright. It’s now 14 weeks. An organisation with branches all over the country offered me a fee. I turned it down because i assumed it would be quite small. I have now Googled what the fee is and found that to me it’s quite generous. Some branches also pay travel. Going forward, I will accept the fee. The fee they offer is such that a £1 from Amazon per book no longer needs to interest me. I either sell books direct or not at all. These branches plan their programme of talks a year in advance. My task now is to ensure that I can get myself invited back to do something else the following year. The book has opened this door but is not even out yet. As I hoped, there is huge interest in anything to do with Jane Austen.

I am going to concentrate on doing talks and lectures over the next year. I am coming off Amazon. I am going to use D2D and Book Vault to have physical copies to sell. I am not going to bother much with other marketing efforts. I have got 2 talks already booked. I did one 6 weeks ago which I thought was a great success. I hope to about 8 talks over the next year or so.