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351 percent
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That's how many more books I've sold in the last 7 days compared to the past 7 months The Monkey State has been out in the wild. Maths isn't my strong point. There's a reason I write. What I can see clearly though is it's 2,350 more people with a copy of the monkeys in their hands (or on their devices). Shame you can only run them once every 3 months? Maybe. I'm still processing exactly what I think about this promo, but I can certainly say the experiment—to focus on that one thing for my marketing—was a success. I'm also left speculating why this promo went exponentially better than my first back in April. New variables were having a 2nd book available. More social proof on my product page. Yet, my hunch is it came more down to another element... With a little help from some friends. 5 in fact. The first three are individuals with aligned writing work who popped me on their newsletters for which I'm super grateful. Rather than blabbing on about me, which I seem a little prone to do on this newsie (probably because I see it as a form of diary and I did promise you the experiment results 🙊), I wanted to give these writers the floor briefly. 1. Serena Choo - Has a simply beautiful book released this year. It has 28 calming short stories from the simple philosophy of Zen. It also happens to feature a monkey as its protagonist and with over 180 reviews at an average of 4.9 she must be doing something right. You can get your tail around The Monkey and The Way of Zen here. 2. Emma Ellis - Has become a mini virtual mentor to me in recent months offering advice from 10+ books into author life. Incredibly prolific whilst living a nomadic life for most of the year. I'm torn which of her series to recommend given I'm currently immersed in two of them... so here's her Amazon author page. 3. Tom Grundy - Took the biscuit by not only featuring me in one of his emails... but in 3! He even had me doing copy edits from a Starbucks in Brasov. Aha, I'm kidding (kind of). Tom has had me hooked on his daily emails since I first saw him featured on Paul Millerd's blog as part of a piece on Quitting & Returning To Work. We're plotting a collaboration down the line, so won't say much more now, but he has a book coming out pretty soon, Don't Quit Your Job, which I cannot wait to read (again). Grab his free workplace happiness report from a link within that link if you want to revolutionise your 9-5 mindset. I was told that other people's audiences (OPAs) could be a 'hack' for marketing your product. What has been nice though is that these three features came about completely organically. Trusting my toucan, you could say. |
J. R. Roberts
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Evening,I hope you're having a good week so far. I'm fresh back from the Romanian mountains and, as promised, I wanted to let you know that The Monkey State and In Search of Maya ebooks are currently available for free and 99p respectively until around midnight on Saturday.You can pick them up by clicking on the banana below.>>> Now, as a special offer for subscribing to these rambles—If you send me a screenshot of both books next to each other on the Kindle app, along with your address, I'll...
I was recently chatting with a colleague at work about HBO's plan to adapt Harry Potter into a TV series. It's a bold vision to create a series for each of the 7 books, spread over a decade. My friend went on to claim, 'Original stories are dead!' I had to admit, he had a point... Between endless sequels, reboots, and “reimaginings,” it can feel like the spark of fresh, original storytelling has truly dimmed. But there are exceptions. New explorations of existing story worlds are not without...
I was told from the start that books don't sell themselves. That whatever effort you put into crafting the story, you'd need to double that with your marketing. Like most first time authors I probably paid lip service to this. Nodding along. Reading up on the topic, without acting. Thinking I'll work that out when the time comes... That time does come. The monkeys have done pretty well—from a standing start—with 649 units processed and 9,000+ page reads since 20 Jan this year. Yet, it's still...