Category Archives: Support

The Top Tip To Getting Your Book Published – and 13 other things you didn’t know about what it takes

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The Top Tip To Getting Your Book Published - and 13 other things you didn't know about what it takes

Writing a book is a common bucket list objective.

If you have dreams of seeing your name on the spine of a physical book, you’re not alone.

This past weekend I travelled from Victoria, BC Canada to Orlando, Florida USA to join 300 other attendees at a writers conference.

My objective was to find out: exactly what does it take to get a book published by a major publishing house?

What I learned out is that having a really great idea, or even a magnificent finished book has very little to do with whether or not you get published.

What I learned is not news to me.

I certainly did not need to take three planes across North America to learn that it’s not so much the quality of the end product, but the quality of the business plan and ultimately sale potential that matter most.

It is after all, what I preach loud and long to my small business owner and entrepreneur clients; if you’re in business, you’re in the business of selling.

CEO/Publisher Reid Tracy of Hay House said it at least 15 times over the course of the two day conference.

The most important deciding factor in whether or not your book gets published is the size of your platform.

Your platform means your direct relationship with your community of fans and customers.

Yes, you heard me right.

Getting your physical book published and out in the world is very much dependent on the size of your Facebook and Instagram followers and your email list.

Because of all that reading means to me personally,  and the long tradition of storytelling dating back since people drew on cave walls, I guess I was a bit surprised to hear this news.

I really love books.  I’ve loved them since I was a kid. I can be found deeply inhaling the pages of fresh new and musty old books alike.

Even though my clients call me things like social media guru (which makes me cringe, honestly), and I am more tech savvy than your average bear, I still prefer physical books to e readers or audio books.

Surrounded by people of all ages, including a few senior citizens, many including me were a bit dismayed to learn: the publishing business is simply another business, and the players exist to make a profit.

I GUESS I THOUGHT THERE WOULD BE MORE EMPHASIS ON WHETHER THE BOOK WAS LIKE, GOOD.

And of course, it does, to an extent.

But given the choice between two similar quality books, the author with the bigger platform wins.

I sat through the online marketing portion of the conference with a wry smile on my face.

The golden rules of online marketing apply to author platforms:

  • Have a mobile friendly, search optimized website with clear calls to action.
  • Use multimedia like images and videos
  • Have a very clear “elevator pitch” ; It should be very clear what problem you solve.
  • Gather email addresses by offering something valuable for free
  • Build your audience on Facebook and Instagram

Beyond developing your online platform, here are 10 other things I did not know about getting your book published.

  1. Unsolicited manuscripts sent to publishing houses end up in what’s called the Slush Pile and no one reads them
  2. The odds of getting published are not good: 80,000 books are published a year and less than 300 will sell more than 50,000 copies of their book
  3. It’s easier to get non-fiction published and sold than fiction. Unless you have a series, in which case that is more saleable.
  4. You need to submit a book proposal to get considered. A document that takes most people two months to create.
  5. You are well advised to get an actual professional editor to help you with your proposal. You can get a really good one for around $4000 USD.
  6. You may need an agent to help you submit the proposal to publishers (and get it read), but you probably don’t need a publicist. You’re advised to promote yourself.
  7. The book you write and the one you publish are likely two very different books.
  8. It takes at least a year, more often two, to go from proposal acceptance to holding the book in your hand.
  9. Traditional publishing exists because getting your book in stores used to be the only way to sell your book, and publishers were the only ones who could get your book in stores.
  10. The reasons getting published is an attractive idea is because your publisher takes on some of the risk, and helps you with getting the book out in the world. Then it’s your job to sell it.
  11. Your publisher will provide you with an advance against future royalties ( about $3-$5 a book ) and provide you with an editor who will help you personally as well as the book.
  12. Being a published author will not make you any money.
    I was told this repeatedly by some of the authors at the conference. They do coaching, speaking, retreats and all kinds of other things to make money.
  13. There are two other ways to get published beyond going the traditional publisher route.  Depending on your skills, budget and the amount of time you have, you may want more or less support.

Self publishing:
Upload your word doc and graphic through amazon and boom – you’re a published author! Whether it will sell is another story.

Assisted self publishing:
There are a few places, that for a fee, can provide fee for service editors, cover designers and book marketing people. They can also help you with printing and distribution.

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Do you have any questions about publishing your book, or building your author platform?
Email me – la@laurelannestark.com and I’m happy to answer your questions and share what I learned.

Struggling to build your platform?
Learn how to succeed at social media marketing in  just 17 minutes a day.
Download a free copy of the book here

Just wanna see pics?
Check out photos and videos of the trip on my Instagram

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RIP LinkedIN

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ByePlease, a moment of silence for the business-to-business social media networking site LinkedIN.

You may be thinking, “Laurel, what are you talking about ?  LinkedIn’s not dead.”

But you know what? I’m predicting it’s going to die in relevance, and here’s why:

The Gloves Are Off! Facebook vs. LinkedIn

Facebook announced recently it’s jumping into the job seeker’s marketplace, which was the reason that LinkedIn came to be in the first place – so job seekers could connect with employers and vice versa.

Now, Facebook is going to start letting employers actually post and advertise jobs on the newsfeed of Facebook.

Because pretty much everyone’s on Facebook I think they could have a real impact on LinkedIn’s market share.

 

LinkedIn’s going to h – e – double hockey sticks

Hockey analogies aside, sInce LinkedIn was purchased by Microsoft I’ve been pessimistic about LinkedIn.

I don’t know about you, but my experience with Microsoft has been absolutely terrible.

It seems like their business model is going to take the LinkedIn contacts that you have and try to integrate them with the contacts that you have if you’re using Outlook, and to encourage you to continue to use Microsoft’s software.

I don’t know about your experience, but Outlook actually just, yeah, killed my computer, so I switched to Mac.

“ Microsoft buying LinkedIn makes me think they’re just going to ruin it. “

Historically, I love LinkedIn in terms of a lead generation source and to get me in front of the people that I am trying to market to, because of course, I’m in the business of helping to other businesses.

Since the acquisition, If you’ve been posting to Pulse, which is the LinkedIn blogging feature, you may have noticed that only a fraction of the people can actually see your blog posts than before.

Reach has declined, which means you’re not going to get as much exposure to your target audience as you would have before Microsoft took over.

Alignable, the rookie, might take it away!

Alignable is a relatively new social media networking site for businesses to connect with other local businesses and network within those local groups.

I’ve been on there playing around for a couple weeks now, and you know, I have to say, I really like it.

There’s an ease of use that’s there. You can promote your business for free. And so far, I’ve had a lot of success with it. Their customer service representatives have reached out to me via email and other platforms – amazing!

For these

These three points are just a few reasons LinkedIn is going to end up dying.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Do you use LinkedIn right now for business-to-business marketing?

Are you thinking about it?

Have you been doing it in the past and not so much now?

Are you going to use Alignable?

Please weigh in with your comments below. I’d love to hear what you have to say about my prediction.

Thanks so much for checking this post out, and you can visit me on my website or YouTube for more online marketing tips at www.laurelannestark.com.

May Cause Sads: When The Price Of Success Is Too High

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may-cause-sads-when-the-price-of-success-is-too-high

It’s a familiar scene: the ambitious, young business person works determinedly at their laptop.

The desk that surrounds them is littered with empty Red Bull cans and coffee cups.

There they are, grinding it out, hustling, pushing. Meeting that deadline and hitting those numbers.

It’s such a commonplace occurrence that it hardly bears mention.

when-the-price-of-success-is-too-high

“Sacrifice for success” is such an accepted and glorified narrative. A close cousin to the beloved rags to riches story.

The sacrifices of many start up or even established business owners is well understood, and even expected — long working hours, not a lot of sleep, nonexistent social life, sporadic nutrition.

All to attain a future vision of success. A goal. A target.
More sales. Get the business funded. Triple the bottom line revenues.

And yet, often when the lofty goal is achieved, the feeling our hero experiences can be anticlimactic.

Instead of the much anticipated, soaring feeling of success, happiness and accomplishment, our hard working entrepreneur feels an empty disappointment; another hollow victory.

It’s confusing and even embarrassing to admit this — that the tremendous sacrifices have not produced the expected feeling of success or fulfillment.

The assumed happiness and feeling of satisfaction that would result from the achievement did not in fact appear.

This can be so embarrassing that many of us push it away. I must have done it wrong, somehow.

The next ambition will produce the feeling of satisfaction, it’s decided. It must. So we immediately set our sights on the next horizon and trudge ever forward.

And our hero continues on. The years go by and she does succeed. From the outside it looks like she has everything she needs to feel happy and fulfilled.

But because she doesn’t, she pushes harder, on to the next glittering success.

The continuous, habitual sacrifice of the present moment’s happiness and wellbeing for some future achievement can be a dangerous habit.

If happiness and fulfilment is only available in the future, conditionally, than it may never arrive.

This is how midlife crises occur.

Suddenly you wake up one day and realize you’ve sacrificed too much for your outer success.

Playing by the rules has you winning someone else’s game.

Maybe the wake up call occurs due to a health concern — burnout or cancer.

Or maybe there is no wake up call. And instead, your regrets join those documented deathbed laments.

“I worked too much, I did what was expected of me instead of what I was true to my heart.”

The drive to continually achieve, whether it’s making ever increasing sums of money or hitting ever increasing growth targets, isn’t a bad thing.

What’s dangerous is that many of us can get caught in the cycle of striving without really examining whether or not the path we are walking is contributing to our fulfillment, joy, happiness and wellbeing.

Small decisions made each day make a life. Habits, including the habit of mindlessly striving, shape our days.

Honestly looking at how you’re living your life — the life you created for yourself — can be frightening.

I’ve heard whispered confessions from many clients…

  • “I haven’t taken a vacation in over five years”
  • “I don’t have time to eat breakfast”
  • “I can’t actually work any harder than I am without getting sick”

These truths may be indicators of future regret…

The choice seems to be happy now or successful later- and that’s simply not true. You can have both. But you have to choose it.

After all, didn’t you start your business to be the author of your own destiny? To make your own rules?

Tell me…

Are you sacrificing too much?
What are you working so hard for ?
Do you find yourself constantly chasing the next accomplishment?

What to do when what’s on Google about you is costing you clients

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What to do when what’s on Google about you is costing you clients.Generally people become aware that what’s on google about them is damaging after they’ve lost business.

It’s more common  than you think that bad things come up on Google, as errors, bad reviews or even mistakes.

It happened again this week.

I got a panicked phone call because a client googled their name and what is shows up on page one is unfavourable or damaging to their reputation, their business and their bank balance.  

There is a lot of time and expense involved with manipulating google search results to display favourable articles about you

Here are some things you can do to damage control:


Create a press release


PR newswire is one of many PR companies that will send your press release out to tens of thousands of news websites for a nominal fee.

If your press release gets picked up by these news websites you can often have page 1 of the Google search results dominated by the press release – instead of the unfavorable article that’s damaging your reputation.

The trouble with this approach is typically clients need to scramble to be able to determine a newsworthy angle for their press release.

Also, there are no guarantees that even if you have a newsworthy story and you pay for your news release to go out to all these websites that it will actually get picked up and republished on the news websites.

So worst-case scenario if you can spend a lot of time and money and not get any results.

Claim and brand online assets

Another approach is to begin feverishly creating online assets, branded under your name.

If you don’t already have them set up you could create the following:

  1. A simple website under your full name, so www.yourname.com
  2. Social media accounts such as LinkedIn, YouTube,  Google plus, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook. These assets should all be registered under your name as well.
  3. Start writing blog posts and publishing them to your social media accounts.

Create backlinks or mentions on other websites


Examples of this would be a membership with the BBB, your name listed as a member of that association you’re part of, your name listed at any places you’ve been interviewed at.

While these three tactics can certainly help to push the unfavourable Google listings down on page 2 of the best practice is to proactively manage your own reputation online.

Don’t wait until it’s too late to protect and control what Google posts about you.

It will certainly not cause any harm to establish your personal brand online by using the tactics above in a proactive manner.

And don’t forget to do a quick check on a reasonable cadence to ensure your reputation stays squeaky clean!

The difference between domain registration & hosting

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Domain registration and website hosting services are a necessary component of your website design process.

Once your new website has been launched, the bulk of the costs associated with a new website design are over.Social-Media-Marketing-Set-Up-Cheat-Sheet

However, there are two fees that you must continue to pay in order to keep your new website live and accessible on the internet.

They are domain registration/renewal and website/email hosting.

Before we get into the difference between the two, let’s start off with some definitions.

What is a Domain?

This is also called your url and is the name you registered that usually starts with www. and ends with .com or .ca .

Some companies have more than one domain name registered so as to have ownership over specific niches as well as their company name.

What is Domain registration?

The purchase of your domain name is also called domain registration and can be done through providers, or domain registrars like godaddy.com or webnames.ca and are generally for the period of one year.

This means each year you must renew your domain name each year in order for you to maintain ownership. This is typically a nominal fee of under $40 per year.

What is Website and email hosting? 

Simply put, website and email hosting is essentially renting server space online for your website files to live.

In addition to the actual space, a host will provide band with, or data transfer services.

For example:

Your website files are stored on a server and whenever someone types in your website address, these files are sent to that user’s computer over the internet, using bandwidth.

The same goes for email associated with your domain name.

When someone emails you at yourname@yourcompany.com files are sent over the internet to that user’s computer.

The service that sends those files is your website and email hosting service.

It requires a lot of hardware and expertise to provide reliable web hosting services.

A good web host will actively update their servers to guard against spam, viruses and hacks. These are just some of the things happening behind the scenes at your website hosting provider, but they are very important ones.

You must continue your website and email hosting services for your website and emails to remain functional.

We are an authorized reseller for rackspace email and website hosting, and as such can guarantee 99% uptime.

ProTip: We recommend that your website and email hosting provider be the same as your web design provider. 

3 reasons why to source your web hosting and web development services from the same company:

1. If your website goes down or breaks, it’s just one call to one company. This saves you time and headaches when you just need it fixed.

2. Your website design may require very specific server configuration in order for it to function. Not all web hosting companies offer support of all technologies which will cause delays in your web design project, and may result in additional fees.

3. You don’t know what you don’t know about website hosting.

Your website developer will have the technical expertise and experience to recommend a hosting company with a solid reputation combined with great support and an infrastructure big enough to not disappear into the night.

Most of the time you’ll rely on your web developer to communicate with the web host on your behalf, so it’s important to consider your web developer’s recommendations for a web host, as they have a vested interest in keeping your web design online, functional and virus free.