The Indie Author Mindset: How Changing Your Way of Thinking Can Transform Your Writing Career: Indie Author Mindset, #1
By Adam L Croft
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About this ebook
Do you want to sell more books and earn a good living from your fiction?
Discover how to change your way of thinking and revolutionise your writing career.
Are you struggling to take your author career on to the next stage? Do you wish you could sell huge numbers of books and make a good income for you and your family? Before he learned to change his mindset, Adam Croft's fiction books earned him around $30 a day. But, after developing the indie author mindset, he was earning $3,500 a day within a matter of weeks.
The Indie Author Mindset shows you how simply changing your way of thinking about your writing business can revolutionise your career. Using Adam's personal experiences and examples, you'll be able to think differently about the business side of your writing career and lay down the foundations for long-term success.
In The Indie Author Mindset, you'll discover:
- How to decide who to listen to — and who not to listen to
- How to unlock the power of residuals
- How to create more than half a dozen income streams from one book
- Lessons and advice from Bryan Cohen, David Gaughran, Brian Meeks and Mark Dawson
- Why almost every writer misunderstands profit and is doing advertising wrong
- And much, much more!
This life-changing book is the motivational kick-up-the-backside all authors need. If you like a non-fiction book with a personal touch, practical tips you can apply every day and all the motivation you need to kick your career on to the next stage, The Indie Author Mindset is for you.
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The Indie Author Mindset - Adam L Croft
The Indie Author Mindset
How changing your way of thinking can transform your writing career
Adam Croft
Contents
Foreword
Adam Croft
Introduction
What is self-publishing?
What self-publishing is NOT
What self-publishing IS
Managing your expectations
This is going to be hard
I. The professional mindset
Professionalism
What is professionalism?
You’re already a professional
Let’s get productive
If there’s a will, there’s a way
Encountering doubt
Believing in yourself
The power of others
When to listen and when not to listen
Working with (other) professionals
Overwhelm and burnout
Overwhelm
Burnout
II. The visionary mindset
How to be a visionary
Introduction
Short term v long term thinking
The power of residuals
Ownership and controlling your own destiny
Control in distribution and marketing
Wide v exclusive
Where to publish
The power of a mailing list
Get represented
III. The business mindset
Introduction
Why you need a business mindset
Let’s incorporate
Money
Money is not evil
Understanding profit and return on investment
Understanding expenses and investments
Do we need profit?
Pushing it on
Reinvesting what you earn
Multiple income streams
Advertising and marketing
Why marketing and advertising don't turn a profit
Why this does/doesn't matter
Data
The importance of data
Conclusion
Where now?
Want more?
Resources
Recommended reading
Foreword
I’ve had a lot of interesting conversations over the course of the last few years since I started to really concentrate on my self publishing career. I'm fortunate enough to be asked to speak at conferences around the world, and one of those opportunities comes to mind more easily than some of the others. It was the London Book Fair and I had just finished a Q&A session for Amazon. I was approached by a new writer who asked me how much of my day was spent writing. I told her that I tended to split my day into two parts: I wrote in the morning and took care of business in the afternoon. She nodded her head, as if I had just confirmed her worst suspicions, and then told me that I wasn't really a full-time writer.
True story.
I don't know the name of that writer, but I would lay long odds that she never had the success that she thought she was due. It is almost always the case these days that the successful independent authors are those who are prepared to combine their creativity with a willingness to roll up their sleeves and get stuck into the marketing, advertising and audience building that is necessary to move things to the next level.
We have to treat our writing as a business. That means that we need to be prepared to invest in ourselves, our books and the support network that will enable us to reach out around the world to find new readers and convert them into lifetime fans. Adam understands this. He was one of the first authors to enrol in my Ads for Authors course and has since become one of our biggest success stories. He has demonstrated that apart from writing page turning books that his readers enjoy, he’s also prepared to treat his calling as a business and act accordingly.
This book sets out how authors should think smart about their indie careers. If writers go into this brave new world of publishing with the right frame of mind and the right foundations for their businesses, more often than not the rest will fall into place.
There's never been a better time to be a writer, with the caveat that you need to be prepared to learn from the people who have gone before you. This is a great chance to do that. Good luck and happy reading.
Mark Dawson
Salisbury, July 2018
Adam Croft
With more than a million books sold to date, Adam Croft is one of the most successful independently published authors in the world, and one of the biggest selling authors of the past few years.
Following his 2015 worldwide bestseller Her Last Tomorrow, his psychological thrillers were bought by Thomas & Mercer, an imprint of Amazon Publishing. Prior to the Amazon deal, Her Last Tomorrow sold more than 150,000 copies across all platforms and became one of the bestselling books of the year, reaching the top 10 in the overall Amazon Kindle chart and peaking at number 12 in the combined paperback fiction and non-fiction chart.
His Knight & Culverhouse crime thriller series has sold more than 250,000 copies worldwide, with his Kempston Hardwick mystery books being adapted as audio plays starring some of the biggest names in British TV.
In 2016, the Knight & Culverhouse Box Set reached storewide number 1 in Canada, knocking J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Cursed Child off the top spot only weeks after Her Last Tomorrow was also number 1 in Canada. The new edition of Her Last Tomorrow also reached storewide number 1 in Australia over Christmas 2016.
During the summer of 2016, two of Adam’s books hit the USA Today bestseller list only weeks apart, making them two of the most-purchased books in the United States over the summer.
In February 2017, Only The Truth became a worldwide bestseller, reaching storewide number 1 at both Amazon US and Amazon UK, making it the bestselling book in the world at that moment in time. The same day, Amazon’s overall Author Rankings placed Adam as the most widely read author in the world, with J.K. Rowling in second place.
Adam has been featured on BBC television, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 5 Live, the BBC World Service, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, The Bookseller and a number of other news and media outlets.
In March 2018, Adam was conferred as an Honorary Doctor of Arts, the highest academic qualification in the UK, by the University of Bedfordshire in recognition of his achievements.
Adam presents the regular crime fiction podcast Partners in Crime with fellow bestselling author Robert Daws.
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Introduction
I got it wrong for years.
When I first started writing and publishing almost a decade ago, there wasn’t the wealth of information available that there is now.
Today’s experts and visionaries had, for the most part, not even started on their own journeys into independent publishing.
The Kindle had only just become available in the UK and the industry was still extremely young and far from finding its feet.
Now that I’ve been able to enjoy extraordinary success, I feel it’s only right to help those who are at the start of their own publishing journey.
I often lurk about in indie author Facebook groups and regularly invite authors to contact me if they have any questions or need any advice or help. Giving back is something that means a lot to me.
But, more often than not, the problems that other authors encounter are the same. The more I think about it, the more I realise that the vast majority of authors’ issues and stumbling blocks are due to an incorrect way of thinking.
Being an indie author is hard. You have to be both creative and business-minded. It requires a totally different way of thinking to the conventional, and you will often need to apply a seemingly illogical or frightening thought process in order to succeed.
But, if you can nail the indie author mindset, succeed you will.
It’ll still be difficult. It’ll still take time. But you will get there.
Mindset might seem like a vague term, or the sort of thing a self-help guru might bang on about. But it’s much more than that.
This book aims to put you in the right frame of mind to succeed in your indie author career. It’ll teach you fundamental principles on which you can base all of your decisions as you move forward. Mindset will be the foundation for your future success.
This isn’t a book about marketing. It isn’t a book about advertising. But it is a guide to perhaps the most important but often-overlooked aspect of your career as an author, and one which will shape everything you do from here on in.
In this book, I’ll show you the three primary mindsets you need to adopt, along with practical tips and real-life examples from my own career.
The book will build on itself as you work your way through. Established authors will see the early chapters as fairly basic, and new writers might begin to get overwhelmed towards the end. That’s absolutely fine. I’ve tried to pitch this book in such a way that everyone will get something out of it.
If at any time you feel the book is going over stuff you already know or — conversely — is a little daunting, please hang in there.
You’ll come away