This might sound hard to believe, but most of us are born with gifts.
Some are damned amazing writers.
Some are damned good marketers.
Some, like me, are blessed with a superhuman work ethic.
What’s your gift?
I happened upon a podcast where the guest was talking about exactly what I’ve been talking about for the past 2 years: if you want to be more efficient, optimize/streamline, automate, then outsource.
Most people try to outsource processes that are already inefficient, therefore costing them money.
That’s my gift—I’m moderately good at efficiency, and I can achieve levels of productivity that don’t seem real. But it’s because I inherently understand the intersection of technology, data, and writing.
Those are my gifts.
Whatever YOUR gift is, understand it and harness it. Lead with it. You’ll always have weaknesses: the choice is yours whether you do something about them.
Some weaknesses aren’t worth working on. But some are. You get a better sense of this the longer you are around.
I use to think I had to be a super networker in order to be a successful writer. And maybe you do. (Getting blurbs, doing box sets, etc.) But that burns me out something awful, so I just focus on a small group of folks to connect with. It’s extremely rare for me to reach out to people. Most of the time, they come to me. Sure, it’s a weakness, but I have other more important things to focus on.
It reminds me of the first Kingdom Hearts game. You can pick 2 out of 3 skills to become a master in: strength, defense, or magic. Whichever one you DON’T pick, you’ll always be weak in it. So you can be strong in strength and defense, but terrible with magic, or strong with magic and defense, but bad with strength.
Writing feels the same to me. Writing, marketing, and business. Pick 2. You already know mine. LOL
Instead of chasing your weaknesses, how can you leverage your strengths?
LESSON LEARNED
Final day of the month, so it was time to see how everything did for the entire month.
Overall, I made a big profit. The new ads helped contribute to that, but my spend was definitely higher. But I’ve got to keep creating ads and watching them closely.
From a big picture perspective (which is the best way to manage your ads), I knocked it out of the park. 7 out of 12 of my ad portfolios (of about 500 ads total) were profitable. That’s about 60%. Not bad for just two weeks of ads that are still in their infancy and haven’t been optimized yet.
My short story collection dropped off in clicks by about 50%. So I may increase the bid by $0.01 tomorrow if the trend continues. But overall, I definitely stopped the bleeding for my short story collection which will make a big difference in my December ad spend. It may very well cut my total spend by about 20%.
BRIGHT SPOTS:
- My poetry and short story collections. I’m pleasantly surprised by how well the ads are serving. I’ve chronicled the short story issues, but the poetry is pretty clear skies. I just need to improve my conversion rate. I’ll share more on that in December.
- My fiction ads are starting to turn on, and while my conversion rates are pretty bad, I haven’t made any changes to the sales pages. The good thing about fiction is that Amazon is way more conservative with your spend. So even if I’m not profitable, I won’t bleed too much money. I think I can turn this around by end of Q1 2021 and get at least 50% of my fiction portfolios turning a profit.
- The books where I have a very clear market definition tend to do the best (My Last Dragon Lord series is about dragons, my poetry collections have clear comparable, etc.) That’s helpful to know as it tells me who the best candidates for scaling my ads are.
LESSON EXECUTED
Bryan Cohen recommended adding a subtitle to fiction Book1s to help them with discoverability. I did this with my novels Android Paradox and Dream Born. I did it now so I can start the month with some fresh data to see what happens.
A small change, but it could possibly make a difference.
Hope everyone enjoys the rest of their Sunday.
