E001 – Why You Should Write a Book Using Kindle Direct Publishing

In this post, we’ll discuss why I wrote a book through kindle direct publishing, and you should too. As you may already know, from first-hand experience, building a business is hard work. Mostly because you don’t know what you don’t know, and you continually fall, get back up, and start again to succeed. I hope this helps you build a better business and a blessed life.

“Once you start writing, it’s like a bug. You just want to keep going.” – Ark Pizarro

By helping others go above and beyond what we’ve been able to achieve, we better their lives and our own in the process. This podcast and my new book, Advancing Possibilities, are my way of answering many of the most common questions entrepreneurs have. With the hope that they can avoid some of the pitfalls we all encounter on this journey.

Topics Discussed:

• How to overcome your doubts and do what you need to
• Making the mistake of judging your value in comparison to other experts
• Disconnecting from outcomes and embracing the process
• Steps to self-publishing with Kindle Direct Publishing
• Overcoming obstacles and achieving your goals
• You are good enough to teach others life lessons
• Writing for long term relevancy
• And much, much more!

Transcript:

So I decided to write a book. I decided to write a book because I had basically had the manuscript sitting on my hard drive for the better part of a decade. And so I’m going to share some insights about writing this book with you.

The first thing is. Why the heck didn’t I put this book out sooner, right? I mean, that’s the obvious question. And, I would have to say that the most logical answer is just doubt, self-doubt, that it would be of value of it being received. Well, Selling. Well, you know, I’ve been coaching and training people on how to do digital marketing.

I’ve been consulting and working in digital marketing myself for about a decade now. And so I clearly have the knowledge and experience to write a number of books, which I now plan to do. because once you start writing, it’s like a bug. You just want to keep going. but I guess at the time, you know, I look around and you, and this is a mistake that many of us make is that we look at the landscape of what all is out there, all the content creators, all the famous authors, all the famous, you know, course creators and things like that.

And you just feel like, Hey, I’m not one of those guys. What they’re saying and what I’m saying, there’s a lot of overlap. Maybe I don’t need to put my book out. That’s self-doubt and that was a mistake. Because ultimately everyone has their own voice, right. There are people who. We’ll hear what I have to say, and we’ll immediately connect with it and love it and think it’s great.

And on the same way, there’s the other side of that coin. And it’s people who will hear what I’m saying and say, Oh, that guy’s, you know, he’s a hack. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s terrible. I can’t stand this voice. Whatever the case may be. In my opinion, you know, you have to be able to first overcome self-doubt in order to share what you have with the world.

And I think that the best way to overcome that self-doubt is to simply launch, you know, Put it out there and say, it doesn’t matter what the outcome is. I’m doing this because I feel the desire to do this. That’s the important part, right? Is that you have the desire you go and you build upon the desire and then you release it out into the world.

And then you do that again. And again, consistently. There is no way that over time you taking those actions consistently will not result in something positive for yourself and for your audience. And so what kind of got me to the point where I was like, you know what, I’m not going to attach myself to the outcome.

I’m going to attach myself to the process was competition. So my wife is also an author. She was almost done with her book and she had a couple of people reading her manuscript and she was getting a lot of positive feedback. And while I’m watching this, you know, I’m happy for her. And at the same time I’m sitting there going, you know, she didn’t do what I did.

She didn’t write this book and sit on it for years. She wrote it and then she started showing it to people while it was. Still in the process of being written, she was sharing it with friends and family who were all vibing on what she was writing. And so I thought that was pretty amazing. And, it got me to a point where I was like, you know what, I’m going to start working on my book.

I know that my book because it’s digital marketing and there are technical aspects to it. A lot of the tools change, you know, some of the ways that you do things now change, but overall. The concepts remain the same because marketing is basically math and persuasion, right? You need to know your numbers and you need to know how to persuade people, to let you help them.

You need to know what their problem is, and then provide your solution. So you have to be able to persuade people in order to get them, to allow you to help them. So, in that regard, I went back and I, I went over the manuscript and, I updated it. Took a lot of stuff out, put a lot of new stuff in. And, I came up with what I think is a pretty good book and I think it’s a great foundation for a series of, you know, smaller books that focus more on the many areas that I have expertise in.

You know, and the many areas that are important for building a successful business and for building successful online presence. and so that’s what I plan to do aside from the fact that, you know, in all this time, ever since I was like a teenager, I’ve had lots and lots of ideas. About books that I’d like to write.

And one of the amazing things is, is that when you take on a task like this, where you start to, you know, record your thoughts down and formulate them into a book that you want to help someone, it just brings so many other ideas, so much creativity starts to take place. And so then, you know, you have to be.

Jotting down ideas that don’t necessarily fit this book, but are definitely good for another book. And so out of this book that I was writing, I would say that probably four to five other books came to be because they’re in my mind and now they’re on my list of things to do so they will get written.

Anyway, there’s a number of ways that you can go about, you know, publishing books. One of the very popular ways nowadays is self publishing and that’s the route that I chose to take. you know, I decided to do it through Kindle with, Amazon’s KDP and, as a paperback. And so the, the process of doing all of this.

Was so interesting because there are so many things that go into the creation of a book. For instance, you have to do a bunch of category research so that you can hopefully get your book found in the Amazon Kindle store and you know, the paperback store, there’s a bunch of keyword research. So that was right up my alley because as a digital marketer, you know, one of the things that I cut my teeth on was SEO search engine optimization.

And so keyword research kind of comes naturally to me because I’ve been doing it for so long. but doing it for your book and doing it for the Amazon platform, you know, it has its own idiosyncrasies, its own ways of working. And so you have to figure out what’s the best method. So there was a lot of research and learning that went along with that side of the process, right.

How to do that best. and it was, you know, it was one of those things where it’s like, frustrating and rewarding at the same time. Right. When, when you have work that, has ups and downs, I feel like that’s the work that is most interesting. And it’s also the work that’s most rewarding when you finally complete it, right?

You feel more fulfilled. Cause you, you came over the mountain, you, you challenged yourself and you overcame all these obstacles and you achieved your goal. Now, you know, the, the next step is to promote the book and to, get it to the point where hopefully it becomes a best seller in its categories. And then, you know, that lays down the foundation.

Okay. For me to continue writing other books and helping people for many, many years, because one of the things that I try to focus on when I write this material is will this be relevant? And will it be valuable to someone in 10 years? Like I have a bunch of books on my bookshelf that when I bought them, they were perfectly relevant to me at the time.

But now looking back at them, The only reason they stay on my bookshelf a lot of times is because of the money that they represent that I spent on them. Right. They’re not so much valuable to me now because they’re either too technical or they’re too tied in to the timeframe in which they were written.

Right. And so I wanted to try and avoid that as much as possible, you know, and stick with evergreen concepts and then dive in a little bit on the concepts to give the specifics of how to execute. Right. But I wanted to do it in a way so that someone. Who finds this book 10 years from now. And even though the names of the companies and the tools may evolve a bit, the concepts themselves, and the ability to pick up that book at any library or anywhere that someone may find it and say, Hey, with this book, I can actually build a business online hope.

You know, this really does help me go from not knowing anything about how to build a business online, to actually being able to do it and go back and say, Hey, that book is what got me started. That book is what launched, you know, my, my business career online. That’s that’s right. My real, Heartfelt goal for this book.

And so all of that was just to, express the fact that, you know, if you are having these thoughts that you want to share something with the world, whether it’s, you know, a book or it’s artwork or it’s, you know, music singing, whatever the case may be. Right. How to do Excel better? Anything. How do you know, play basketball and better?

It could be anything that you have within you. That is a skillset, you know, is on a high level. You don’t have to be the best in the world to teach a bunch of people. Very valuable lessons. You know, most of us don’t learn our lessons from a Michael Jordan. Right. Or from a Wayne Gretzky or, you know, from, Elon Musk.

Most of us don’t have those guys as our dad. Right? Most of those of us don’t have those guys as our moms, per se. We have parents, we have teachers, we have elders. We have people in our community, neighbors who invest in us time and share their wisdom. And those are life lessons that are hugely valuable.

Yet these people aren’t necessarily rich or famous, right. They don’t have any renounced, so to speak. But we still find value in what they have to teach us. Right. They still are able to impart wisdom to us. That is life-changing sometimes. And so, and that we carry with us right throughout our lives. And so in that same way, The lessons that you have, the expertise that you have, right?

The ideas and the creativity that you have, you can share that with the world in the same way as if you were sharing it with a neighbor or a nephew or a child, right. Someone that you care about. So if you can do that for someone in your own life, Then you can do that for the rest of the world. All you have to do is record it, right?

You have to record it into a medium where the rest of the worlds can access it. And nowadays that’s easier than ever. We have podcasts and we have videos and we have, you know, all sorts of formats for social media, but. In the end, we will always have books, right? They have gone from parchment paper to, you know, cover bound to now digital format is Kindle and eBooks and things like this and who knows what their next iteration will be.

But the bottom line is, is that man will always share knowledge through books. And so if you have. Ideas that you think could reach 50 pages, double spaced, right? Maybe a couple of images thrown in. If you have an idea that can reach 50 pages, then you owe it to the world to write that book. And this is something that I feel strongly about, and I decided that I wanted to share it with you today.

And so not only is this. Like the precursor to my book launch. And I’m sharing with you my thoughts, but this is also going to be something that I’m going to do daily, which is to share my thoughts with you. So that going forward, we can all help each other. Right. I share some thoughts with you. You share your thoughts with me in the comments I’ll respond and we’ll have conversations and maybe at some point, we’ll meet up.

Right. That’s my hope. That’s the reason why I’m recording this now. And so I hope that this was helpful for you. You have a blessed day.