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Everyone on the podcast had some awesome news to report this week… and the reason you should care is because it was our interaction with each other, in part, that made the good news possible.
We’re a mastermind group of three writers — a mastermind group that broadcasts its meetings publicly — and the information-sharing and accountability we all share is a lot of the reason behind how seriously we take our craft and our writing businesses, and hence the results we get.
Sean and Dave sign with Amazon’s publishing arm
… but don’t worry, because they’re not selling out self-publishing. Far from it, actually. Because they’re Sean and Dave, they’re not deciding between self-publishing at all. They’re simply adding a project. Amazon called them up and said, “Hey, you want to write a serial for our serials program that we’ll own and get behind and push for you and make you popular?” and they were like, “Sure! We’ll just add that to the fifty books each week we’re already writing!”
Oh, but that’s not all. They’re actually doing TWO serials with Amazon… Z2134, which was previously self-published, and a new serial called Monstrous. You can get Z2134 for pre-sale right now.
You can read Sean’s official announcement here… and of course we go into all of the legally-disclosable details on the show.
Johnny took an idea from conception to a finished book in 29 days
On Tuesday, I (Johnny) released my second book, a horror/humor novella called Fat Vampire. And that’s awesome, and I hope you go check it out, but the bigger story is that thanks to my “masterminding” with Sean and Dave and my seeing how they work, I was able to get the idea (which came out of a hilarious discussion on Better Off Undead episode #6, write the book, have the cover made, and release the thing all in less than a month.
I actually wrote up my entire process in a blog post: From Idea to Publication on Kindle in 29 Days.
The Better Off Undead horror (um… really? It’s about horror?) podcast is now threatening to kick SPP’s ass
Oddly, the podcast we mentioned that we were starting way back in SPP episode #15 in order to better connect with people who might like of our type of writing is now as popular as this podcast. We talk about that a bit… the oddly useful experiment that is the Better Off Undead podcast.
So yeah. We’re glad we did that.
We took voicemail questions
We were way behind on answering questions that people have submitted via that nice big phone number on our homepage, so we caught up on them a bit. We got through three of them, with three left for next week.
Hey, some progress!
To view the video version of this episode, go to: Self Publishing Podcast #24 – The Importance of a Writers’ Mastermind
That is amazing news guys! I look forward to seeing how this all turns out. You should be very proud of yourselves. Amazon must know they are onto a good thing with you both.
Also – finished Fat Vampire – so funny, was telling people about it today at work. You might have some more fans in Australia on the back of it Johnny.
Thanks man! I just saw your Amazon review too, so thanks heaps (that’s me using my knowledge of Aussie lexicon) for the five stars!
No worries bro! (There is a mix of Australian and New Zealand for you)
Keep up the good work.
I started a “mastermind” group of writers based around a fiction magazine called eFiction. We’re nearly two hundred members strong now, and have a great method of promoting our work through the magazine. The synergy there is great. We recently launched genre-specific magazines too, to better reach readers of specific genres. We are currently experiencing many growing pains, but the power of the group is compounded by the new magazines. I can’t wait to see what the next two years brings for us.
Congrats guys – no one deserves it more – because you work superhuman-ly hard and you are inspirational with the amount of content you produce
Great show as usual, guys! Congrats on all of the success!
Congrats guys, and thanks for throwing out the bone about schedule: weekly, monthly or quarterly, just commit. Otherwise I was beginning to wonder is you all are, well, aliens, okay, there I wrote it. See I need sleep on a regular basis, or, its just bad. Makes the undead resemble desirable house guests.
Yes do talk more about process. Mostly thanks for taking the time to create the podcasts: laughter, insight and encouragement.
Thanks so much everyone. The well wishing really means so much. We’ve never been happier, or more tired. At least I’ve not been. Dave is probably still miserable, and will be for years!
Wowzee, congratz to Sean & David for that Amazin’…Amazon deal. Well deserved. And yeah, Johnny, writing a novella in one month while maintaining a full-time job is pretty swell, too
Question : I don’t yet FULLY get the “write more books” is the best marketing strategy. If you start out with a novel, and you got NO reviews, how do people even find you ? And even if you publish a few ebooks, they still start at 0 reviews, and how is writing more gonna help you get discovered without doing some “external” marketing ?
Hi Mars –
Joanna
on the ‘write more books instead of marketing’ school of thought – I am going to blog about this soon because the people who advocate only that approach often have 20+ books, some of them 50+ , so of course they don’t need to market. I think the need to ‘hustle’ readers diminishes over time as you build an email list and gain a following and the Amazon algorithms can market to others who bought you – but at the beginning, when you only have 1 or 2 books you need to market to find those first readers.
IMHO of course
Joanna said this well. I would only add that going into marketing mode with just one book is hard. And that marketing time might be better spent writing a followup. Two books is more than two times one.
I think one of the best decisions we ever made was to NOT market Available Darkness once it was finished, and to get started on Yesterday’s Gone instead.
It’s also worth noting that if Sean and Dave only had one book then their key strategy of “give readers an episode or book for free to attract attention to the paid products” would be impossible.
can’t wait for that blog post, Joanna, I’m still pretty clueless how the Amazon microcosmos works.
Thanks for the congrats, everyone… well, I mean, those of you who were congratulating me. I don’t give a shit about congratulating Sean and Dave. Everyone knows they’re just a couple of maggots who crawled out of a trash can and/or assholes with annoying laughs. That’s what the reviews say, anyway.
Thanks for answering my question. (I had started to think it would never happen – you guys are full of surprises, ha!) It made sense to me what Sean said about commenting on blogs being an echo of old advice which worked when the blogosphere was a lot smaller. And I like the idea of Twitter conversations too.
And once again congrats on the Amazon deal to Sean and Dave, and to Johnny for his 3o day project. Fat Vampire is a pretty golden title.
Yeah, sorry about that… it got away from us, but I don’t lose them!
I think that commenting on other blogs can be useful, but only insofar as you are making an honest effort to join and participate in a community — to be a part of the conversation, not simply to spam them with links to your stuff. The same principle seems to work on Twitter as well. You market your work without directly marketing your work by being a valuable member of the community, being yourself, etc., not by trying too hard to sell sell sell.