Business:Entrepreneurship
How to Become a Published Author as an Expert in Your Field with Morgan Gist MacDonald
2023-09-24
In this LMScast episode, Morgan Gist MacDonald covers a variety of topics related to content development. On the basis of long-term interests and market demand, she highlights how crucial it is to decide whether to write a book or create a course.
Morgan Gist MacDonald is an entrepreneur, investor, author, and the Founder & CEO of Paper Raven Books. The have a self publishing guide as well: https://paperravenbooks.com/ready
Morgan also highlights the need of systematic content preparation, which begins with a list of ideas from a brain dump that may be subsequently efficiently arranged. She advises using a linear strategy when it comes to content organization, especially for book chapters, to maintain a logical and sequential flow.
Morgan advises using narrative, quotations, true tales, ideas, and practical strategies to engage your readers and make your material more accessible and interesting. You may also find market gaps and make sure your work delivers a distinctive and worthwhile perspective by investigating comparable titles in your field.
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Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.
Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. Her name is Morgan Gist McDonald. She’s from Paper Raven Books. We’re going to nerd out today on creating books, how to figure out what to write about, the writing process, editing, publishing, launching. It’s going to be awesome.
If you’re creating courses, you’re perfect material to also create a book. If you haven’t already, like most people, you probably have a book inside of you and it’s, you just need a little help getting it out. Morgan, welcome to the show.
Morgan Gist MacDonald: Chris, super excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
Chris Badgett: I’m really excited to dig in with you today.
I’m going to, the first question is going to be a hard one because there is no correct answer. But what do you think is harder writing a book or creating a course?
Morgan Gist MacDonald: People ask me that question a lot too. Okay. I know I want a book and a course. Which one should I do first? And I will admit I’ve done it both ways with folks.
I’ve personally, I wrote the book and then I created a course. But we’ve definitely worked with folks who already had a course and they wanted to use the book to, to get the most of the content out to folks and then bring people. Into the course you can do it either way for folks who think in terms of PowerPoint slides for some reason, you open up PowerPoint or keynote and you start rearranging slides like that might be where you start, but then you can use that same.
Structure for a book and then instead of talking it out, you’re really writing it out. And gosh, we could, if people want to talk about how to use ChatsGPT or things like that to help just get a lot of words on the page. That’s certainly much more doable these days than when I started 15 years ago.
Chris Badgett: Awesome. Tell us about, before we get into the writing process and everything, tell us about Paper Raven Books. What is it?
Morgan Gist MacDonald: Yeah. So we are a self publishing services company, which means we help people to truly self publish such that they have You know, the rights to all of their intellectual property, the books are in their accounts, so they have the legal access to everything.
And then the royalties go straight to them. So there are a lot of publishing companies out there that just they say they’re self publishing, but they put the. Authors book files into their own accounts. And so for us, it’s really important that we’re helping folks to truly self publish so that you can set it up on Amazon sales on demand.
You can set up your own book funnels, print your own books, fulfill your own books or even get them into bookstores. So all of those options are possible for you with this kind of method.
Chris Badgett: Awesome. Go to paper raven books. com. I was there. I was looking at the books and I started scrolling and it just kept going.
There’s a lot. You guys have helped a lot of authors publish a lot of books, both fiction and nonfiction. I was really impressed. And then I went and I looked up some of the books on Amazon and they had a lot of reviews. Like I was like, that’s what, so I’m like, all right, this is cool. And like niche topics, like really niche specific topics, which I think that’s really the last part of the process is launching and getting reviews, but let’s start at the beginning. When somebody is an expert is trying to focus in on a topic and their body of knowledge and their life’s work, even how do they figure out? Whether they’re creating a course or creating a book, what’s marketable, what’s the market, where can they make profit?
How can they be intelligent? Cause once you commit, you’re committed, but how do you gauge that demand or help focus the topic?
Morgan Gist MacDonald: Yeah. So I would say a little bit more broadly is for you personally, as. The author, the course creator, like, where do you want to go in the future? Like when you think about what you’re building, what you’re creating now, and you fast forward three years, five years, is this still what you want to be talking about?
And the reason that I even bring that up is because I talked to a lot of folks who they have lived through something and feel some kind of like obligation. To write out their expertise are like, Oh I figured out how to do Six Sigma project management. So I should write a book on that so that I never have to talk about it again.
I’m like as the author of a book and the creator of a course, you’re probably going to be. talking about this topic for kind of years to come. Let’s face forward and where do you want to be going? And a lot of times just that conversation will help people decide between two pads.
So then, okay, we’re face forward. We know we want to be talking about this topic. Generally speaking I would say For anyone who’s doing the whole like blogging thing and course creation, y’all know about Google keywords, right? That’s nothing new how to go into the Google keyword planner and put in keywords and figure out what people are searching for on Google and there are similar.
Software is for Amazon because users actually use Amazon differently than they do Google. And so for instance, there’s publisher rocket is a software by Dave Cheston that we use that helps you to see what are people searching for in the Amazon bookstore specifically, not just amazon. com. But when they’re in the bookstore, maybe they’ve clicked on a book title and now they’re technically in sort of the Kindle store or the bookstore and they’re using that search bar.
What are they searching for? That can at least help you say, okay, these are folks who they’re looking for something about this topic. And then the other thing that we always want to look at is comparable titles which is just the publishing word for other books that are selling and authors are often really, or before.
Writers who are going to be authors we’re often really nervous about reading other people’s books because they’re like, Oh what if somebody already wrote the book that I want to write? And so I’ll we’ll often do is we’ll gather five comparable titles and we’ll say, look, this is these are some books that are around the same topic that you want to be writing about.
They’re selling pretty well again, publisher rocket that software I mentioned, you can see sales data they’re selling, a thousand bucks a month in ebook sales or 2000 bucks a month in ebook sales, read them read them, see what they’re talking about. Look at the table of contents.
And 99. 999 percent of the time the author’s Oh, there’s a whole chunk of information that this book didn’t talk about that. I would definitely talk about, or my story is totally different than their story. And so it, it ends up being that you want to be in a market where people are already selling.
This kind of product. But you guys talk about that in relation to, of course, creation too, right? You don’t want to be the only weird person who is talking about this totally niche thing. You want to sit in a market where there’s already people who are making money with this with this type of market, this type of topic.
Chris Badgett: We’ve got our topic. How do we chunk the outline? It seems like it’s so critical. And for somebody who’s not experienced in instructional design or whatever the writing equivalent of that is, how do you chunk down an outline out of the writer’s
Morgan Gist MacDonald: blockhead? Yeah. So I personally have never loved mind maps.
I know a lot of folks really geek out on mind maps and for whatever reason I put together a mind map and I’m just more confused than when I started. And so how I developed methods, cause I was, I’ve been a writing coach for book coach for 15 years. I’m coming out of grad school. I was just working with folks in the trenches of writing books.
And back in those days, self publishing was not nearly as popular. So we would write books and then just send them on to the publisher to, to get published. And so that’s where my origins really started. So it was a lot of time with authors. Staring at a word doc saying what are we going to write about?
So the method that I ended up developing for myself, as well as for clients is let’s just sit down and just do like a brain dump list, like just no order, no organization. What are the things that you think might be included in this book? And just it can be bullet points or not bullet points.
Like it doesn’t matter. Like at this stage, really just seeing what are all the ideas that we have going into this book? Because sometimes we think like when it’s all trapped in our heads, we think it’s going to be like thousands and thousands of ideas, and then when we actually start listing it out, we’re like, Oh.
This is it’s a lot it’s 115 kind of ideas, but now that I see them all on a list, I can rearrange them, group them together. And so that, that whole process, I call it a linear brain dump because we’re just. It’s a linear experience, top to bottom. And we’re really just reorganizing things and eventually this, I would recommend you spend a couple of days.
You do the first sort of brain dump, take a break, come back, revisit. Is there anything else I want to add to this list? Okay. Take a break come back. Do I want to. Move the order around, put some of these in different sections or start to group them together, group like things with like things.
And eventually what you’re creating from the ground up is is the structure. But instead of starting with chapter titles, we’re just starting with the raw material. All the stuff that I know I’m going to want to include in the book. And the reason I like it to be linear in this way is because the book is linear, right?
A book is chapter one, chapter two, chapter three, chapter four. That’s just where it is. So we might as well start with that and just know that we’re going to be fashioning it into a linear experience.
Chris Badgett: What about at the, like the less or not the lesson on the course creator at the chapter level?
Is there like a structure or I’m sure there could be lots of different structures there’s certain elements that could go with a nonfiction book chapter like Maybe a quote, maybe a story, maybe some theory and then some tactics or whatever. How do we, I found for me, writing is a lot easier if I have a, not what I’m going to talk about, but how I’m going to talk about it framework to follow.
Is there any recommendations you have there? There
Morgan Gist MacDonald: are some folks who will say, here’s your template. Every chapter needs to have a quote, an introduction to a story, your main argument or point or topic, and then revisit that story and then offer data to support that story. There’ll be people who have here are the five or six things that need to be.
In every single chapter. I personally have not found that to actually I don’t know, Chris, you just said that before we hit record, you’re like, I just wrote a book. So I’d be curious to know how what worked best for you. And I think if someone were to come to me and say, okay, but I want to make sure that I’ve got principles or like frameworks, like the nonfiction gut material, plus stories from my.
Maybe they’re my case studies, maybe they’re my personal story plus data points. Like maybe that’s important for my book. I want to make sure I’ve got all these data points. Then the way that, again, I would approach it as then let’s just make lists of the things you want included.
And for some people it’s quotes like let’s make sure we’ve got a huge list of quotes that you want included in the book, because what we’re going to end up doing is matching them up. together, right? And so it can be a little bit difficult to say I know chapter one is going to be about we already use nutrition.
I know chapter one is going to be about macros. And so let me find a quote for macros and a story about macros and conceptual information about macros in that. I have most people who I’ve worked with that works fine for a few chapters, but you run out of steam and get frustrated in the process because you didn’t do the earlier work of, I got to dump all this out of my head and really just say, here’s all the.
Pieces I want included in the book and then work the framework going up that way, which I don’t know, it’s to some extent like writing a book, they’re going to have different philosophies. We’re talking about a philosophical divide here. There are definitely folks in my space who are like, you need 16 chapters and each chapter needs six elements.
And we’re going to do this over a three day event and now go write your book. I have just found that hasn’t necessarily worked for me or the folks who I tend to work with. And if y’all are here and you’ve tried the template formula and it didn’t work for you, I just want you to know you’re not weird.
You just might need a different
Chris Badgett: take at it. That’s awesome. I see it with course creators too. There’s it’s like different personality types, like somewhat like lots of structure. So I’m just like, just cut me loose on camera and I’ll do my thing or whatever. It’s a wide variety. I’m going to ask
Morgan Gist MacDonald: you, Chris, I’m going to put you on the spot if that’s okay.
Yeah. So you said that you took a sabbatical and wrote a book. Would you like to share with us a little bit of what your experience was?
Chris Badgett: In terms of the structure and
Morgan Gist MacDonald: stuff? Like at what point did you go into the sabbatical knowing you wanted to write
Chris Badgett: a book? I did. And I didn’t spend, it wasn’t like a full time job.
I traveled and spent, did a lot of other things too. But I think a lot of people have had the idea to write a book for a while, and they just never get around to it. I think like 2 percent of the books you see out there, there’s 98 other people who really want to write a book and for whatever reason it got in their way.
But in my mind, I’m like, all right if I’m going to do it, like I’ve been thinking about it for almost a decade, I’m going to do it now. Yeah. So for me, just a little bit on the process I wanted, it’s about online learning and creating courses. That’s my niche and my subject matter expertise. I I like structure.
I’m more on the structure end of the spectrum. So I’ve spent a lot of time on the outline like you I am a mind mapper, but what I try to do is once I get the mind maps out there and I’m like, that looks terrible, that’s disorganized, like what goes, so then I, and then I move it over, I move it from the right brain to the left brain.
And now we’re like. Same for creating a course, same process for the outline or curriculum level. And for me, I was not, I wasn’t trying to write a super long book as minimalist in nature. It’s. I think it’s about 20, 000 words. I don’t know if that’s where that stands in my mind. I’m like, is that long enough?
Oh, that’s
Morgan Gist MacDonald: almost exactly what my book is. Oh, awesome. I think mine’s 22, something like that, but it’s a five by eight. If that helps you imagine it. Oh,
Chris Badgett: nice. Yeah, that definitely helps. You just made me feel a lot better about myself. I’m like, Oh no, it’s too short. But for me, I wanted a little bit of a structure for the lesson so that I could just, I only had a limited amount of time and I, it helps me stay focused to have that.
So I had I did have some quotes to go with each one. Personal story, customer story, principles, strategies, action steps, and I even a little drawing for each chapter that, you know, like a visual aid thing. Yeah, so that was it. And right now I’m in the editing process, but it was yeah, and it wasn’t a full time job for me.
I found that thing where. I’ve heard writers say you can’t do it or some say you can’t do it like eight hours a day. You only have three certain amount of good hours for me that was around. I couldn’t really do more than four and three was even pushing it sometimes to really get in a zone and do that deep work.
But how’s that for you? What do you think is
Morgan Gist MacDonald: There have been folks who I’ve worked with that did it in very crunch time. Like Stephanie, stephanie Reinold was approaching having a baby and she owns a business and she was getting onto like early maternity leave.
And it was like, I want this draft done before the baby comes. Like that’s a pretty extreme kind of circumstance. And she just chugged through and she got her first draft done and two weeks, but yeah, she was doing six, eight hours a day and it was the first draft.
Then it moves through the editing phases that you’re experiencing. But I would say most of the people that I work with, like we’re all writing on the margins of life whether we are working or taking care of family or growing a business or maybe even full time authors. They’re marketing their first books they’re marketing the books that are already out and still trying to come out with the next book.
So we’re all writing on the margins of life. I would say something like eight to 10 hours a week can get you a draft done in a couple months. That’s awesome. Yeah, that’s, if you’ve done the structure ahead of time, which you pointed to, I do agree spending a couple of weeks, really thinking about the structure, whether you’re going to go, if you already have a course, you’ve already got a lot of this thought out, you know the, what those, the lessons are more or less going to become chapters you’ve done that hard thinking already.
If you don’t have a course on this yet, then maybe you want to start from the ground up and just mind map or list out all those ideas and let that structure emerge. But that’s going to take, I don’t know, a couple of weeks to really get solid and good on that. Now you begin writing. Yeah.
I think something like two, three months is is very reasonable.
Chris Badgett: And just to answer my question earlier, now that I’ve done the book thing a little bit, I think you make a better course if you do the book first, it really sharpens your thinking in a way that getting on camera, you can do that, but it’s just the book really forces you to get it perfect or at least closer to perfect.
You
Morgan Gist MacDonald: spend more time thinking about it because you have to write every word, right?
Chris Badgett: There’s no shortcuts or
Morgan Gist MacDonald: yeah, or even if you’re feeding it through chat GPT to get some of that initial raw material, you’re still going to be rereading it, refining it. I want to say it this way, not that way. So there’s that mental clarification process and you will nuance your own frameworks because you’re thinking.
And about it in a much deeper way.
Chris Badgett: How should people use AI? I found myself at first, I was like I’m not going to just be like, Hey, AI, write the book for me. It was, but I found myself like, Hey, I need a quote that like is related to these three things. And boom, it gives me five. I’m like, wow, that’s awesome.
Or. Hey, I’m having trouble saying this. I’m trying to say this and this, and I would write it in terrible English and then it would give me something and be like, I can work with that and I’ll let me make it half as long. And in my voice and all that, but how, what do you recommend? Yeah,
Morgan Gist MacDonald: I like chat GPT for kind of a sounding board partner.
In a lot of ways. So at the very beginning of the process, if you’re still working on your structure, you’re still getting your list together, which is going to become your outline you could even go to chat GPT and say, Hey provide a table of contents for a book about this topic.
And just see if chat GPT comes up with something that you forgot. It’s Oh, I totally forgot to explain the difference between. Passive income and active income if you’re talking about real estate or something like that and so chat GPT might prompt you to maybe remember something that you didn’t think about.
And then, yeah if you get stuck on something, I think it’s very helpful to at least have chat GPT to go to and say, how would you explain this or come up with. Yeah, a quote or provide an article that references this idea and then ChatGPT can go and find some sources for you.
Or if you’re like wording and rewording a paragraph and it just does not sound good, you can feed it through ChatGPT and just see if it gives you something else interesting. I have not really been seeing anything super compelling like. Come out of chat, GPT, the first go round, if you said, write a, I’ve seen people who are like, write a chapter about this and yeah, it writes 5, 000 words or whatever, but maybe not even that much, maybe it’s 1500 words, but it’s like not exciting writing.
Relatively clear, grammatically correct, boring. So it’s a good sounding word, good research partner good if you get stuck. I just, I don’t, and obviously you can use it for proofreading later find any grammar errors, although I would use grammarly. For that but yeah it’s a good sounding board partner.
Chris Badgett: Part of writing is like beginning with the end in mind with Oh, what do I want this book? What job does this book have to do for my business? And for course creators they probably want people coming to the website or Yeah. Going from the 7 book to the more expensive course or whatever.
What’s, what have nonfiction authors do these days to really bridge that gap without being overly salesy, but at the same time using the book as a solid tool for their business? Yeah,
Morgan Gist MacDonald: you definitely want to include at least one freebie in the book. And certainly you could do more if it would, if it felt helpful to the reader.
I always recommend putting a freebie in at the very beginning of the book. The first 10% because that’s where the Amazon look inside is. So if someone finds your book on Amazon, they click look inside. Amazon’s going to show them the first 10 percent of the book. And specifically this is going to get a little bit in the weeds.
But I would have a preface in the preface. I would put the freebie. In fact, in the table of contents, I would list Preface, Chris
Chris Badgett: is
Morgan Gist MacDonald: right, in the table of contents, Preface is the first thing in the table of contents, you provide the rest of the table of contents. And then the first section is Preface, where you’re giving them a free bonus.
And the reason is, this is relatively recent. Amazon has changed its Look inside behavior such that as soon as you click, look inside, it takes you to the first section. As identified by the table of contents, so it skips all that front matter and gets you to preface definitely works. I think we’ve experimented with introduction would work.
Author’s note would work. But I like preface because that gives you a little bit of space just to say, Hey. Reader. Here’s the amazing benefits you’re gonna get from the book. In fact, I have a free gift for you, snappy name for a free gift, and then a QR code. QR code that goes to the landing page with the free gift.
And the reason for the QR code is because another recent Amazon change, they disabled the clickable link from look inside. However, I don’t think they can disable a QR code or at least not easily. So we’ve switched everyone over to QR codes in the preface, make sure the preface is in the table of contents.
So you’re just using that Amazon traffic to try to build your list. Even if people don’t buy the book, you still want to get as many people as possible onto that email list. And then now you can follow up with all of your typical email marketing strategies. You can also You know include resources throughout the book.
So like Chris, you mentioned there were like different drawings and diagrams. If you wanted to include a little QR code and say, Hey, would you like the full package of all the drawings and explanations, scan this QR code, take them to a page, you get an email address and say, we’re going to send you the full PDF guide of the visual guide of this whole process.
And you could link that. Every chapter, if you wanted to, or where there’s a visual in each of the chapters. So fast fast action fast track companion course could be a good one. Any if your course is going to include any guided meditations or things like that you could include just the links to those guided meditations.
Any PDF workbook, I would just include it as a free workbook, a free guide companion companion guide, something like that throughout. Then you can reference that throughout the book. If you want
Chris Badgett: pro tips right there, that’s awesome. Another hangup I just, I’ve seen in others and I see it myself.
Was I guess, concerns about plagiarism though, not directly. It’s more just I want to write this so that I don’t necessarily need to have footnotes. And I might mention I’m combining ideas and I might mention people and stuff, but at what point do you really need to like cite a source in a nonfiction book and have footnotes?
Morgan Gist MacDonald: Yeah. If you’re using a direct quote from someone, you would want to be able to cite that. It does not have to be a footnote on the same page. If you want it to be clear like a nice reading experience, the there could be a reason for you to drop a footnote and then you actually put it at the end of the book.
Their end notes at that point that’s an option. Another a lot of people, they just want their name referenced. So if you’ve got an idea from someone and you say, Hey, I worked with so and so for years and this was a great idea. I should probably do that. I worked with Chandler bolt way back in the day.
And we had a bunch of ideas for like freebies for books. Like you could reference it conversationally like that in a lot of. Like folks aren’t going to sue you if if you’re at least giving them credit in the book itself. But a specific quote, like if you are quoting their book or quoting their website or something like that just drop a footnote, but then put the reference at the end for end notes.
Chris Badgett: Awesome. Let’s say we made it over the hurdle of outlining and writing and we get to editing. There’s different types of editing. Like how would you describe I feel like when I write a blog post as an example, like I do like content edit and then I do A grammar edit, then I do an edit for SEO and I’ll have all these like layers that I have to go through for a nonfiction book.
What are the layers of editing
Morgan Gist MacDonald: that needs to happen? Yeah. So we would look at a developmental edit, which is the big structure are the chapters in the right order within each chapter are the sections in the right order. Does anything need to be rearranged, added to, or clarified or trimmed out?
Cause it’s It’s maybe a bit of a rabbit trail. So those are our big three questions in a developmental edit. Same thing needs to be rearranged, added to, or trimmed out. So we’re just trying to get the content all we have all the content and it’s all in the right order. The next level of edit would be a copy edit or a line edit, depending on…
Your vocabulary. They’re more or less the same thing. That’s when you’re starting to get into the wordsmithing. You’re going to go in paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence. Does this sound good? Sentence variety. Do I use the same sentence structures over and over again? Is there more clarity that needs to happen because the way I explain this is a little bit fuzzy.
So that’s copy edit or line edit. And then the third level kind of zooming in here is more word by word capitalization, hyphenation, italics, bold just consistency, internal consistency, punctuation, spelling, that kind of stuff. So a lot of times what we’ll do with authors is before we even jump into any level of edit we will do a manuscript review.
Just to assess, just to do a read through all the way top to bottom, and then we can come back and say, okay, actually Chris, your structure’s really great. Here’s two things that we saw that you should you should adjust on the structure level. But after that, it’s ready to go into copy editing or whatever.
And the reason why we’ve found it’s important and why we recommend, even if you’re not working with our team, like whoever you work with, get a manuscript review. We’ve seen a lot of folks who they hire an editor And they don’t even know to ask the editor, like what type of edit are we doing? So you’ll bring an editor in and they’re going to charge you whatever thousands of dollars.
And they are starting with a copy of it and you get it back. You’re like, wait, don’t we still have this other big Developmental question mark and they weren’t looking for it because they weren’t doing a developmental edit. So just using the word like editor is not really sufficient to know what level of editing they’re doing.
So ask for a manuscript review and and then discuss with your editor, what makes sense developmental copy proof.
Chris Badgett: The next part with the interior design.
Morgan Gist MacDonald: Oh yeah. You’re like way in the weeds. Chris, this is fun.
Chris Badgett: Oh, I have your website up. You should, you out there listening, go to paper, Raven books.
com. Your publishing success program, like infographic is very is good. It’s wow, there’s a lot of value you guys add. And but it goes over the process of how it works, which is awesome. But what’s the, I guess book cover design. I think everybody gets, but the interior design, I think there’s probably a lot of gaps in knowledge out there.
What happens with that? Yeah.
Morgan Gist MacDonald: Cover design, we like to use 99designs. com. There’s a lot of platforms out there where you can just get someone to do a cover design for you, and then you want to use some of those elements from the cover in the interior. If your cover has typography, that is a lot of sans serif, let’s say where it’s like straight letters.
There’s no little curvy decorations on the letters. It’s very modern usually. Then you want your interior fonts to also be more modern, right? You don’t want to use the big flourishes inside. For most people, you’re going to tend that way anyway, but just something to be aware of. A couple of softwares, if you’re DIY doing it yourself we really like Atticus, A T I C U S.
Atticus is another Dave Chesson software that’s really good for formatting or the interior design. The other one is Vellum, V E L U M. And that’s Apple only, unfortunately, but it’s a really good kind of DIY interior design and it will help you find all of the elements and what decisions you should make on each element.
Your chapter font is going to be an element. Maybe there’s a chapter main title and a chapter subtitle, need to be a font and they need to be positioned. Top of the page or bottom of the page, middle of the page or to the, in the corner you get to decide your spacing are you going to have tighter margins or wider margins?
How close to the edge of the page are you going to get? And then also the spacing between lines, how close together are the lines going to be or spread apart? And then character spacing. I don’t know if this is helpful for people or not. But I was going to, I can just show a quick picture.
Like
Chris Badgett: if you’re listening on the podcast, jump over to the LFTRLMS YouTube channel and you’ll see what we’re look for Morgan Gist McDonald. And you’ll find the video if we’re going to do a show and tell here.
Morgan Gist MacDonald: Yes. We were doing a show and tell. So y’all go ahead and pop over. Okay. So here’s, this is my book.
So you can see there’s like a chapter title and then a little design element. And then there’s it really is just the chapter number written out. And then this is the, you can’t do this backwards. That’s the title itself. And then you got to think about like your, bullet points, like I put some extra spacing between bullet points.
This is all about the writing the book process. So if you want to know more about that, you can grab your book’s name. Start writing your book today. Awesome. It is very straightforward. What are some other. Some of these things like for sections sometimes you can just start with a bolded sentence and that’s like the beginning of a section.
That’s a technique that helps with nonfiction sort of skimmability. Oh, the running heads. So the top of one page is usually the title or the chapter title. And then the top there’s a chapter title. So book title. chapter title. So we’ve got a lot of this actually. You, let me drop a link in the show notes.
Cause we have, we just put together like a free overview of the like DIY publishing process. So if you guys are thinking about what’s even involved we just, we have a community in circle. That’s our kind of like. Learning platform. And so we just put together a free preview. So let me get you a link, Chris, for everybody so they can get that preview.
And it has like the timeline and some of these tools that I’ve mentioned as well.
Chris Badgett: Awesome. And I just want to. Agree with that strategy of when you give somebody like a full process and I’m particularly talking to you, agency people out there who are watching this, who build sites for clients, when you detail out your whole process, once somebody gets into it, they think they’re DIY and then they’re, then some of them will be like, wait a second, I think I just want to hire you to do it for me.
It’s a really good strategy. So if you’re hung up on what to write about. Don’t be shy and just share your process. Cause it’s actually some of the best marketing you can do. Yeah.
Morgan Gist MacDonald: It’d be good just for like meta. If people want to see what we’re doing for the free preview. Cause exactly what you’re talking about, Chris.
Like we know that if we share here’s the 12 major. You’re going to go through and writing and publishing and marketing your book. Then we have a 15 page master checklist, every single little step. So again, this is in that free preview that we’re going to drop a link to in the show notes, but like you can just see how we’re doing it.
And one, it’s helpful. Like we get a ton of questions about this stuff. And so now we can just point people to the free preview. And then, yes, to your point, like the folks who are out there shopping and looking around and who am I going to hire? Like they are probably going to hire the people who give them the best information and help them make the best decision.
Right on. On the same track as you.
Chris Badgett: Can you gimme a quick tip on how to work with like pictures, little diagrams and stuff like that’s, it’s on an iPad now, but how does it end up in the book?
Morgan Gist MacDonald: Yeah, so you do wanna create those as separate JPEGs or p and gs? Yeah. And then they get put into the formatting later.
Yeah. So what we typically do is in the Word document or the Google document where the text is all the words are, we’ll just put like a little placeholder note. That’s this is going to be image 1. 1 or 1. 2 or 1. 3 make a naming convention there.
And then we actually create each of the images separately. And I think for printing purposes, it needs to be something like 300 DPI, which I’m not. I’m not a formatter or a designer, so I don’t entirely know what that means. But certainly the software, as I mentioned, Atticus and Vellum will help you to make sure that those are of the highest quality.
A lot of our folks will either design them inside of InDesign itself, or. Keynote or power note and PowerPoint can do them as well. Canva is a great software, but you just want to export those as individual images, put a naming convention on them. And then once you actually get to the formatting phase, you’re putting everything into Atticus or vellum or InDesign, that’s when you’re starting to slot them into the interior itself and you want to mostly wait anyway, because I mentioned when we first started, Chris, are these two different sizes? This is, nope, that’s another size. They’re different sizes. Sorry, stepped away. So here’s three different books, technically three different sizes, right? And so each page is going to be a little bit different width, a little bit different height.
So I would not get super worried about it until you actually have something that’s like exactly five by eight with your bleed set and then start playing with the sizing and the layout.
Chris Badgett: Awesome. And from the what’s the path from the interior design tool, like vellum or Atticus, is that what gives you the export that then goes into Kindle direct publishing?
Yeah, exactly.
Morgan Gist MacDonald: Exactly. Yep. So those softwares in particular will export for the ebook. And the paperback and the hardback although really most, most people choose to have the paperback and the hardback the same size it’s five inches by eight inches or six inches by nine inches are a standard size and so therefore you’re using the same PDF file.
For paperback and hardback but yeah, you need a KPF file for Amazon and a PDF file for also Amazon or IngramSpark, but that’s getting into kind of a whole different tangent. Most folks were recommending Amazon, KDP for eBooks, KDP print for print books. They can do paperback, they can do hardback.
And then if you later want to add on bookstores Ingram spark would be who you’re looking at for a printer.
Chris Badgett: How do you do audio books?
Morgan Gist MacDonald: Yeah. Audio books. So typically we’ve just hired narrators to do audio books. You can also do it yourself, especially if you already have like your mic set up and all that.
You would want to still hire someone to do the editing of the MP3 files and you have to, each chapter is its own MP3 file. And then you upload everything into ACX for Amazon it is separate. It is a separate thing. It’s a separate, like ACX is its own login interface, but it indexes to Amazon such that you upload it to ACX, but then it populates on your.
Amazon sales page.
Chris Badgett: Awesome. We could go for three hours, but I gotta,
Morgan Gist MacDonald: and you need a square, you need a square version of your cover for a c x for the player or whatever. Why it has to be square .
Chris Badgett: What can you tell us about your five day online book launch process? What is that piece of the pie?
Yeah,
Morgan Gist MacDonald: so we have. Found that there’s a couple of things that you have to solve for very quickly when a book is launched. And the reason there is a bit of a time urgency on it is because when you upload an ebook specifically to the Amazon platform, you have about a 30 day honeymoon period where the algorithms crawling through the product page and trying to match who are the best types of folks to, to buy this book.
And so what we’re doing is we want to. Set the keywords. This is very similar to any other Amazon product, right? You want keywords that people are searching for attached to your book. You want categories that your book can compete in. And it would be very nice if something like. 20 to a hundred sales.
You can be number one in the category. That’s very helpful and visibility in the bookstore. And then the third thing is reviews. So getting reviews on the book as quickly as possible does help with overall visibility in the bookstore. So what we do is we get everything all set up and get the ebook files uploaded, we have the keywords, we have the categories.
We have a launch team of people who are ready to leave a review on the book and we tell everybody, hold on, wait until X date. And for us, it’s five days. We say Tuesday through a Saturday Tuesday, August 8th through Saturday, August. Whatever. I don’t have a calendar up . Saturday, August 12th, right?
And during those five days, we are sending a bunch of promotional traffic. We’ve set the ebook for free. We’re driving as many people through that sales page as possible in a short amount of time while our launch team is also leaving reviews. So we’ve told the launch team Tuesday, August 8th. Download that ebook.
It’s free and leave a review. So we’re trying to get eyeballs onto that page as many conversions as possible. Even if they buy a free ebook, it’s still a conversion. And so you’re still going to pop to the top of those categories. You still if you hit a hundred or a few hundred free ebook downloads, you’re going to hit.
Number ones and categories and your book launch team is downloading your ebook and leaving leaving reviews all at the same time. So we’re just like giving it a big push, a big lift in a 5 day window so that by the time that 5 days rolls off. We’ve driven thousands of people to that page.
We’ve probably had hundreds, if not thousands of people download that ebook. It gives the algorithm what it needs to know who to show the book to. And we’ve got reviews stacked on. So we want to aim for at least 20 reviews in five days. Sometimes they don’t all come through at the same time. Like Amazon will hold them.
But still we’ve got enough to get that initial lift on the book. So that five days rolls off and now it’s being shown in the bookstore. Is the idea
Chris Badgett: and is that during that first 30 day window or right after that? Yes. We, so it’s during that initial calling period.
Morgan Gist MacDonald: We hold the ebook until we know we’re ready to commit to those launch dates.
Awesome. So you can upload the paperback, upload the hardback, no problem. Those can be up and live and available for as long as you want. But hold that ebook, download or hold the ebook files and hit upload like about a week, seven to 10 days before your launch dates. And that way you’re getting to take advantage of that 30 day period
Chris Badgett: and you recommend.
Making the ebook version at free at first to just maximize exposure and reach, which makes sense.
Morgan Gist MacDonald: Yeah. There’s definitely different camps on that. Some people will say you should do a 99 cent ebook so that you’re hitting the number ones in like the paid store. But I haven’t found that Amazon particularly cares whether it was number one in the.
Quote unquote free store or number one in the quote unquote paid store. Where the reason I came down on free is because we can get so many more conversions with free. Like for instance, scribe is a, I guess was a big competitor of ours and they always ran the 99 cent eBooks. And they would get.
Maybe 150 to 200 downloads of the 99 cent ebook, which was enough to pop it up in the paid store. Whereas we will hit a thousand, 1500, 2000 ebook downloads, pop it up in the free store. And even after the promotion rolls off, it’s probably still selling. So it’s it might still sell in the paid store, but what we’ve just done is given it like.
10 X the number of conversions. Wow. You think about seasoning a pixel, that’s how we want to season a pixel with 1500, 2000 downloads would be ideal. So that’s how we think about it.
Chris Badgett: We’re running up on time, but I want to ask you as we land the plane here, like what’s your advice just at a high level for evergreen marketing beyond the launch?
Do we do a podcast tour? Do we like how do we just. Not just launch it, have a bunch of excitement, but continually to drive traffic to it and give it some extra love after the initial launch.
Morgan Gist MacDonald: Yeah. I want to share a perspective first and then some tactics that I really like. So a perspective, anytime you launch anything.
It’s a spike and then it comes back down. That is pretty much the definition of a launch is you spike it and then it comes back down and it settles on a baseline. So what I recommend to our authors is every quarter, think about another promotional event or several promotions that you’re going to stack together to create that spike again.
And then it will come back down and we’ll settle on a baseline and that baseline should be higher than the previous one. So we talk about the 90 day relaunch kind of rhythm. So every 90 days we’re thinking about relaunching for folks. I’m a little bit lazy about some of these things for me.
It’s like at this point, I just set my ebook for free every 90 days. Algorithm brings some traffic through it. I get some free downloads and it pops the book back up and visibility. I did not mention earlier, but it would definitely be important for this long term sort of marketing strategy. Remember when we talked about getting people’s email addresses in the book, scan the QR code, provide your email address, and then you can give them the free thing.
You could also follow up and ask for reviews. So give them the free thing. Seven days later, say, Hey, hope you loved the book. If you wouldn’t mind, please leave a review on Amazon. Here’s the link. To leave a review 21 days after that. Hey, hope you had time to finish the book. If you haven’t left a review yet, really love you really appreciate leaving a review.
Here’s the link to leave a review. And what that means is every time that someone downloads a free resource from your book. So that’s a huge part of how myself and our authors continue to get reviews long after they launched their book is because every single time they do a promotion, they’re also getting more email subscribers, And more people seeing those emails asking them to leave a review.
So I like to set my ebook for free every 90 days. I get a new influx of people and then more folks being asked to leave reviews and that sort of adds to the visibility. Just remember it’s always like a launch promotion event and it comes back down to a baseline. So we just want to keep launching and resettling on a slightly higher baseline.
And that’s how we think about incremental growth over time. There’s a whole like. Backstory from the publishing industry about like, why people don’t talk about books this way. And it’s all because of the publishing industry machinery. Like they don’t promote backlists. They never have.
It’s all about the new releases, but that’s totally the choice of the publishing company. The author keeps promoting their backlist, but publishing companies almost entirely focus on new releases and nothing else. But most of the authors that I work with, we sell more books. Now than we did the year before.
So every year my book sells more like in 2023 than it did the years before. So it’s definitely possible to do the incremental increase. Some tactics that I like podcasts. I love podcasts. They’re so great for being able to, just like we’re doing now, Chris, right? Add value to your people and some folks will come and check out my book and that’s a great way to really.
Build relationships with folks and serve and add value and get in front of potentially your good readers. I love podcasts, do as many of those as you can. And then I also really like book awards, which are a little overlooked, often forgotten. But the benefit of a book award is not just that you get the shiny sticker on your book, digital sticker, right?
Because everything’s digital now. But. When you submit for a book award, even if your book doesn’t win, let’s say it’s a finalist, they’re still going to email their list and say, Hey, here’s all the finalists for this book award and the winners for this book award. And you’ll get an honorable mention, even if you’re just a finalist and.
Even if you’re not a finalist, you will often get a professional review. So someone who was one of the judges for the book award might say, Hey, here’s some nice things about your book. Sorry. You didn’t win. Take the nice things, put them on the Amazon sales page, put them on the website put them in the front of the book.
So book awards are great because they have big email lists and they. Email out the winners and the finalists. You got to think about that one ahead of time, because you can only submit for the year or maybe year after the book publication date. But those can be really fantastic. And then also I don’t mind just paying for some traffic every now and then.
So a good source for paid traffic is cravebooks. com, C R A V E books. com. You can, they have lists of readers. You can select nonfiction readers, self help readers, professional development readers, sorry. And just let them know, do a book promotion.
Chris Badgett: One just lightning round question before we go here. Why does some books just hang on the New York Times bestseller? And not that like everybody should aspire to do that or whatever, but something like Atomic Habits by James Clear is an example. What nerve did he strike with that book?
He’s a great marketer and a great writer, and I love the book and I’m a big habits guy. It makes sense to me. But why does some really just. Get exponential results.
Morgan Gist MacDonald: I do think like in the instance of James clear specifically he had blogged for 10 years. Yeah. Like sometimes we forget that Tuesday and Thursday, James clear blogged and released the blog to his newsletter.
Yeah. For 10 years. Yeah. Like I definitely did not do that. I didn’t have that kind of platform coming into the book. And then I think the other thing that he did well, he, so he had an existing platform. Number one. Number two, he had. Just an amazing Rolodex of contacts, right? When James Clear wanted to get on a podcast, he didn’t want to do just one podcast, right?
He was going to do like hundreds of podcasts. And so I think a lot of it was just that brute force of gathering all of that promotion together. If someone wanted to do straight up pr. There’s no, there’s nothing wrong with getting a PR rep. I don’t think he got all of that coordinated for free.
I think he and a lot of the folks who end up popping to the New York Times bestseller list, they they’re selling out big cash to even just coordinate logistically getting onto as many media outlets as possible in a short period of time. The other thing is most this, I won’t go too deep into this, but the publishing industry in its relationships with bookstores, Barnes and Noble, your local indie bookstores, they have, because of their distribution relationships, those bookstores will actually take pre orders.
For months before the book actually is quote unquote released and they will hold all of those pre order sales until a specific launch date. So for instance, I have a friend who is launching her book next week and she’s signed up with Simon Schuster and she’s making a run for the New York times. She has spent four months selling that book week after week, event after event, pre selling the book, offering bonuses, and every single sale is pending.
They’ve taken the credit card, but all the sales are pending until next week. They’re all going to release on the same day. It’s going to pop to the New York times bestseller list, and then it gets to be a New York times book. Now, how many weeks does it hang on? That’s a different question, but that is how traditional publishers do it.
And that is. Not available to Amazon. Amazon does not play that game. Amazon’s you bought that book on May 29th. That sale went through on May 29th. We’re not holding it until August so that’s just something to be aware of that. There are certain mechanisms that are available to traditionally published authors.
Right or wrong. Does it really matter what I would say for any of us who aspire to something like New York times, get those, that first book or two or three out, really build your audience, build your platform. Go ahead and do the podcast interviews, build your network. And that, that is something that you could achieve with a traditional publisher.
And it may not be your first book. For most folks, it’s not their first book that hits the New York times. So even for my friend, I’m speaking, that’s not her first book. So for a lot of these James clear, that was his first book.
Chris Badgett: I’m not sure. As far as I know, but I’m actually not sure,
Morgan Gist MacDonald: but he wrote a heck of a lot.
Yeah.
Chris Badgett: Yeah. He did his time, Morgan. This is awesome. I feel like you’ve dropped like so much valuable information here. I really appreciate it. What. Is the name of your book again, and tell us what people can get from your services at paper, raven, books. com.
Morgan Gist MacDonald: Yeah. So my book is. Start writing your book today.
Very straightforwardly titled. It’s on Amazon. Also there’s an audible version if you’d like to listen to it read. And you can find out more about me and my team at paperravenbooks. com. We can plug in and help you where you are. If you are just thinking about a book and you want maybe to be a part of a group of writers that are going through this process together, we have coaching and mentorship.
We walk you all the way through writing, publishing, launching your book. If you just want straight up some services, you’re like, I got a manuscript. I want you guys to review it and advise me on what publishing could look like. We also do that. So you can find out more about all that at paper, even books.
com. And I will make sure Chris, that you, your folks get the link to that overview. Of all the phases and the big checklist of what it would take to DIY self publish your book. There’s some great tools out there that we recommend that you guys check out. So definitely doable and best decision I ever made in my business.
Chris Badgett: Morgan, thanks so much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it.
Morgan Gist MacDonald: Thank you, Chris.
Chris Badgett: Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. Her name is Morgan Gist McDonald. She’s from Paper Raven books. We’re going to nerd out today on creating books, how to figure out what to write about the writing process, editing, publishing, launching, it’s going to be awesome if you’re creating courses.
Your perfect material to also create a book if you haven’t already, like most people, you probably have a book inside of you and it’s, you just need a little help getting it out. Morgan, welcome to the show.
Morgan Gist MacDonald: Chris, super excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
Chris Badgett: I’m really excited to dig in with you today.
I’m going to, the first question is going to be a hard one because there is no correct answer. But what do you think is harder, writing a book or creating a course?
Morgan Gist MacDonald: People ask me that question a lot too. Okay. I know I want a book and a course. Which one should I do first? And I will admit I’ve done it both ways with folks.
I’ve personally, I wrote the book and then I created a course. But we’ve definitely worked with folks who already had a course and they wanted to use the book to
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