March ‘20 Newsletter

Women’s History Month*, which is observed in the US, UK and Australia in March, and in October in Canada, began with a single day, International Women’s Day, observed on March 8 since 1911. In 1981, Congress passed a law which authorized and requested the President to proclaim the week beginning March 7, 1982 as “Women’s History Week.” In 1987, after being petitioned by the National Women’s History Project, Congress passed a law which designated the month of March 1987 as “Women’s History Month.” Between 1988 and 1994, Congress passed additional resolutions requesting and authorizing the President to proclaim March of each year as Women’s History Month. Since 1995, Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama have issued a series of annual proclamations designating the month of March as “Women’s History Month.”

March is an appropriate month for Women’s History month, given the importance of marching in the women’s suffrage movement and other campaigns.  In addition, Title IX and the Equal Rights Amendment were both passed in the month of March.

*Information from https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/01/us/womens-history-month-why-march-trnd/index.html and https://womenshistorymonth.gov/about/

1. New Author

SkillBites has just published the book of first-time author Don Stohler and his colleague Gary Brunson, a prior SkillBites author.  The title of their book is Warm Up a Cold Call: Become a Great Connector, a short book that contains a very simple process for making the connections that will exponentially improve your achieving whatever you set out to acquire or accomplish.  The book follows the paths of two young accountants, Fran and Rob, and a ‘connector’ named Carl.

Short pithy chapters make this an outstanding quick read with profound insight.  The whole book will take less than an hour, and the nature of the story permits reading in short bursts of only 10 minutes here and there.

In the end, you have the story of two approaches to developing a professional practice:  one appearing easy and quick yet proving to be difficult, complex, costly and frustrating; the other appearing to be more difficult and taking longer yet proving to be easy to understand, straightforward, cost effective and rewarding.  The story has broad application outside the area of accounting that is limited only by the imagination of the reader.

Finally, to bring home the most relevant and essential components of this proven process, the authors provide a set of action-oriented statements from which, if you choose to implement them, can profoundly increase your probability of achieving whatever you set out to achieve.  The book is only $7.99 and can be purchased on Amazon by clicking here.

2. The SkillBites Show

Each month, we bring you an expert to help you get your book done, leverage your book, grow your business or improve your life.  The shows are recorded, so if you can’t listen to one live, you can listen to the recording by clicking here.

Our next SkillBites Show will be held on March 18, at 1 pm ET / 12 pm CT / 11 am MT / 10 am PT.  Our guest will be Chuck Monroe, founder of Gold Dust Publicity LLC, which has been instrumental in the successful launch of more than a thousand books. These include politics, current events, history, fiction, health and fitness, science, biography, memoir, self-help, spiritual, religious, cooking, text books… if there’s a genre, he has promoted it.  Prior to founding Gold Dust Publicity, Chuck served as Vice-President of a Boston literary publicity firm, ran two fine Boston restaurants, spent 12 years on-air at Boston radio stations and spent 10 years working on commercial fishing boats in the North Atlantic.

If you don’t publicize your work, no one will know it exists. Chuck will explain how to self-promote your book.

To listen to the live presentation, you can go to https://zoom.us/j/3021564627 or call in, using a line local to you:

+1 929 205 6099 US (New York)

+1 669 900 6833 US (San Jose)

Find your local number: https://zoom.us/u/abAXTgmoXv

Meeting ID: 302 156 4627

Save The Date:

Next month, the SkillBites Show will be on April 15, 2020 at 1 pm ET.  Our guest will be Ann Covery.  Ann has helped authors and business owners pitch their book or their business for over 21 years.  She blends neuroscience and storytelling for book pitches that bring immediate attention from producers, publishers, agents, podcasters, and audiences for fiction and non-fiction books.  She has spoken over 150 times in the U.S., Europe and Mexico.   Ann will talk about how to pitch your book, including such details as:

• how to find your best story angles;
• how to tailor your pitch for either local and national outlets;
• your 3-5 best takeaways for podcasters;
• how to craft a one-sentence book description for podcasters; and
• how to pitch your book within a TV segment for producers.

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Last month, we heard from Ally Machate, a bestselling author and expert publishing consultant.  Ally talked about why you might (or might not) need an agent, what agents expect to see from authors, how to find the right agent for you, and more.

If you missed this presentation, you can listen to it by clicking here, or you can read a summary of the show on the SkillBites blog by clicking here.

Do you have expertise that you believe would benefit the SkillBites community of entrepreneurs and authors?  If you would like to be the guest on the monthly SkillBites Show, contact me at judy@skillbites.net or 610-783-4519.

3. Speaker Training

My colleague Steve Sapato is doing a 2 day SpeakerTalks training in Tampa, Florida on March 20 – 21, 2020.  In addition to getting trained to be a speaker, you’ll also have the opportunity to have a speaker real created to submit to event planners to get more and better speaking opportunities.  If interested, click here for more information.

4. Tip of the Month:  Launch Strategy Part 7:  Free or Discounted Book Campaign

Last month’s newsletter discussed how to expand your reach by getting in front of new audiences, such as those of bloggers, podcasters and influencers.  Prior newsletters covered how to get everything in order so that your launch runs flawlessly, developing joint venture connections to increase the reach of your launch,  building your audience, getting reviews and testimonials from the media, influencers and members of your target market to build social proof of the value of your book, and building a book sales page, along with setting up your book delivery system, thank you page and follow up email sequence.  This month addresses running a free or heavily discounted book campaign to get more eyeballs on your book and increase sales.

To get the most sales of your book for your launch, not only do you need to reach out to as many people as possible, you also should give a significant discount off of your book, or even sell it for free.  For instance, if your book is normally priced at $14.99, you could offer it on the launch day (or during the duration of the launch, if it is longer than 1 day) for free or, say, for $2.99.  That will motivate more people to get your book during your launch.  Moreover, in your emails to your audience about your launch, you can mention the significant discount on the price of your book for the short period of your launch, creating the perception of scarcity, which will cause more people to buy so they don’t “miss out” on saving money.

If your eBook is in the Kindle Select program, you are entitled to sell your eBook for free or at a significant discount for 5 days out of 90.  As previously discussed in an earlier newsletter, the Kindle Select program is only available for eBooks that are sold exclusively on Amazon.  If your eBook is being sold anywhere else online, including your own website, then it cannot be in that program.  If your aim is to get your book in as many hands as possible, then running a free book campaign will help you to do that.

Another option is to run a free book campaign at GoodReads.  The GoodReads program is for print books, not eBooks.  GoodReads has longer free book campaigns than the Kindle Select campaign; in fact, your campaign must be run for at least 7 days, and not more than 30 days.  Also, you can run the campaign more frequently; you just need to have 1 week between the end of one campaign and the beginning of the next.  When you start a campaign, your book will be listed in the New Giveaways list, and just before it ends, your book will be listed in the “ending soon” campaign list; so you’ll get your book promoted more if you run multiple short campaigns a week apart.

In GoodReads campaigns, people sign up to be eligible to win a free copy of the books being given away.  GoodReads selects the winners.  You can determine how many copies of your book you are willing to give away.  I recommend keeping the number to 10 or fewer copies, so it is more manageable for you.  You must mail the books to the winners within a few weeks from the closing of the campaign.

On both Amazon and GoodReads, you can boost your campaign with an ad.  Ads are run on a pay-per-click system, which means you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.  To get started with an ad campaign on GoodReads, go to goodreads.com/advertisers.  For an Amazon campaign, go into your KDP account and click on Promote and Advertise in the menu to the right of the book you want to promote.

When you run a free book campaign, you not only get more people interested in your book, you will also likely get more reviews of your book.  Particularly on GoodReads, people who win free books tend to leave reviews.  Often, the momentum from running a free book campaign continues after the campaign has ended.

To make your free book campaign as successful as possible, here are some additional tactics you should implement:

• you’ll want to get the word out about your free book or discounted book campaign on various websites that list free book or discounted book campaigns (e.g., bargaineBookhunter – 7 days in advance), and post on Facebook groups, Twitter, etc. (let them know that they can download a free Kindle app and read the book even though they don’t have a Kindle).
• On Facebook you can pay $5 to boost the post to get it in front of more eyeballs.
• You can also promote your campaign on Kindle Forum, Amazon’s Meet our Authors Forum, KDP Forum (just for authors), etc.
• Remind people to share your post with friends so they can get your book free too.
• When you promote your free eBook in other countries, you should use a cool tool called GeniusLink (geni.us).  If you put a link to Amazon.com, people in other countries will receive the message that the book isn’t available; but on GeniusLink, you can put in the link to the US Amazon page where people can go to get your book and it will give you a nice short link to use in your postings that will work for anyone in any country that Amazon serves.  It’s free for up to 1000 clicks per month, and $10 for each 10,000 clicks above 1000.  GeniusLink has lots of other cool features as well.

5. Get Your Book Done On Your Schedule

For those who have wanted to write and publish a book but cannot find the time to get it done, or aren’t sure how to get started, SkillBites has developed a program just for you.  Each week, you will be emailed a small assignment that should take less than 30 minutes of your time.  You have the option of having your assignments reviewed and getting feedback on them or not.  At the end of three months, if you do the assignments, you will be well on your way to getting your book done.  Interested?  Contact me at Judy@skillbites.net or 610-783-4519 for more information.

6. Earn Commissions For Referrals

Do you know anyone who has been wanting to write a book but has been stalling?  Let them know that SkillBites offers a variety of services to make book writing and publishing easy, quick and convenient.  When you sign up to be a SkillBites affiliate, you can get a commission for each person who signs up to purchase SkillBites services through your unique referral link.  To obtain more information and to sign up for our referral program, click here.

Thanks for supporting SkillBites.  If there is anything you think we ought to be doing better or anything we should be doing that we’re not, please let us know.  We value your input.

Cordially,