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    The Indie Author Strategy Guide: Author Level Up, #12
    The Indie Author Strategy Guide: Author Level Up, #12
    The Indie Author Strategy Guide: Author Level Up, #12
    Ebook86 pages1 hour

    The Indie Author Strategy Guide: Author Level Up, #12

    By M.L. Ronn

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    About this ebook

    What's your author strategy?

     

    Strategy is more than selling books. It's about the survival of your author career tomorrow, next year, 10 years from now, and beyond.

     

    In this guide, prolific author M.L. Ronn will teach you how to cultivate the practice of long-term thinking and strategic planning. He draws on his experience of over a decade of self-publishing and extensive experience in the corporate world where strategic planning is his job.

     

    In this guide, you'll learn:

    * How to craft a winning author strategy that will make you look like an evil genius in retrospect

    * How to think long-term

    * What strategy is and what it isn't

    * How to connect a bigger strategy to what you're doing every day to write and sell books

     

    Few things are more important than a sound author strategy. Buy now to learn how to develop yours!

     

    V1.0

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAuthor Level Up LLC
    Release dateSep 20, 2021
    ISBN9798201994334
    The Indie Author Strategy Guide: Author Level Up, #12
    Author

    M.L. Ronn

    Science fiction and fantasy on the wild side! M.L. Ronn (Michael La Ronn) is the author of many science fiction and fantasy novels including the Modern Necromancy, The Last Dragon Lord, and Sword Bear Chronicle series. In 2012, a life-threatening illness made him realize that storytelling was his #1 passion. He’s devoted his life to writing ever since, making up whatever story makes him fall out of his chair laughing the hardest. Every day.

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      Book preview

      The Indie Author Strategy Guide - M.L. Ronn

      The Indie Author Strategy Guide

      THE INDIE AUTHOR STRATEGY GUIDE

      CRAFT A WINNING LONG-TERM STRATEGY FOR YOUR AUTHOR BUSINESS

      M.L. RONN

      Copyright 2021 © M.L. Ronn. All rights reserved.

      Published by Author Level Up LLC.

      Version 3.0

      Cover Design by Pixelstudio.

      Covert Art © awesomedwarf / Depositphotos.

      Editing by BZ Hercules.

      Special thank you to the following people on Patreon who supported this book: Zhade Barnet, Stephen Frans, Michael Guishard, Jon Howard, Beth Jackson, Megan Mong, Lynda Washington, and Etta Welk.

      Some links in this book contain affiliate links. If you purchase books and services through these links, I receive a small commission at no cost to you. You are under no obligation to use these links, but thank you if you do!

      For more helpful writing tips and advice, subscribe to the Author Level Up YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/authorlevelup.

      CONTENTS

      Introduction

      The Foundation of Your Strategy

      Your Why

      Who Do You Serve?

      Your Mission and Vision Statements

      Crafting Your Strategic and Tactical Priorities

      Determining Your Key Performance Indicators

      How to Be Efficient and Effective

      How to Cultivate Long-Term Thinking

      Contingency Planning

      Branding and Messaging

      Parting Words

      Read Next: The Pocket Guide to Pantsing

      Meet M.L. Ronn

      More Books by M.L. Ronn

      INTRODUCTION

      This book is a guide on how to think about your author strategy. It won’t tell you what your strategy should be. Instead, it will help you craft your strategy on your terms.

      If you're looking for the silver bullet or the lazy person's guide to author success, do me a favor and put this book down. I wrote this to help people think long term, not get rich quickly. If you think that writing will make you insanely rich overnight or that you can find a paint-by-numbers answer to all your problems in the pages of a book, then you're going to be sorely disappointed.

      If you're still reading, let's talk about a topic that I find endlessly fun and fascinating.

      YOUR STRATEGY: AN ANALOGY

      There is no such thing as a done-for-you author strategy. There is plenty of content online about how to build a business, but I've found that most of it doesn't quite fit the author business model.

      Go to any entrepreneur blog, website, podcast, or YouTube channel. You'll undoubtedly hear things like You've got to find a market need or You've got to understand your target audience or You've got to do a minimum viable product and grow from there.

      Okay…but how does that apply to fiction writing? Nonfiction writing? The advice sounds great, but when you apply it, it doesn't make practical sense. The result is that authors find themselves surfing all over the web trying to get help on creating a winning strategy, often with varying results. I was one of those authors.

      The author business model is unique. Entrepreneurs build products that fill a market need. Authors turn their imagination into profit. There's a huge difference. The author's imagination is the best part of the business model, but traditional business models don't know how to treat it. How does one account for fun and imagination in the world of business? It's next to impossible, which is why so much traditional business strategy is lousy for authors.

      The best way I've learned to think about strategy is to think about it like cooking.

      Here's what you need to cook a good meal:

      Ingredients

      Proper cooking technique

      Intuition

      Without the proper ingredients, you can't cook at all. Sometimes, you don't have all the ingredients you need, so you have to improvise.

      Without the proper cooking technique, you'll undercook, overcook, under season, or over season your food, and that won't do. The tools and equipment aren't that important—a skillet is a skillet is a skillet regardless of how much it costs. A chef can make a better meal with old cookware than a nonskilled cook with ultramodern, expensive cookware. Skill is everything.

      Without intuition, you won't know what your dish needs. Sure, you might have a recipe, but a recipe isn't heart and soul. A recipe might call for a certain amount of turmeric, but upon tasting it, you'll sense that it needs more. Or you may add another spice that the recipe didn't call for because your tastebuds tell you to do it.

      You’ll create an amazing dish, mix amazing ingredients, cook them just right, and use your intuition to tell you what the food needs. And, of course, it'll taste good.

      Strategy is no different.

      You need the right strategic ingredients.

      You need proper execution of those ingredients.

      You need strong intuition to tell you where to go, what to look for, and how to adjust your strategy accordingly.

      It's that simple, and that hard.

      If you know how to cook, then you already know everything you need to craft a clear and compelling author strategy. Follow the exercises in this book, season to taste, and you'll be surprised at what you can do.

      WHY I'M QUALIFIED TO WRITE THIS BOOK

      In my real world career in insurance, I am currently an executive at a global insurance company. My job is to set a strategy for my department and execute it. My job performance is based on how well I do. It's high pressure, high risk, and high reward. The possibility of failure is ever-present. The truth is that every plan

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