It’s July already, and the first half of 2022 has completely zipped by. Each quarter, I try to do a little quarterly review, so here’s what’s been happening over the last few months. Clearly this isn’t everything, a lot more (good and bad) happened than I’m sharing here. But I hope you enjoy reading the highlights.

Client work

Last quarter, I decided to stop working with ongoing publishing clients, and started working exclusively with authors, or on one-off projects for publishers.

Given that ongoing contracts made up around 80% of my income, there was a big drop in my earnings following that. I had kind of expected that to happen, but it still felt quite terrifying to experience. Will anyone ever book me again!? My brain was shouting, even as I started booking in new work.

Fortunately, creating the space to take on more author clients eventually did pay off, and this was my busiest season ever, in terms of one-to-one client work. I worked with some really dream authors AND ended up working on a couple of brilliant, one-off publishing jobs, which were perfect, in terms of their size and how much energy they needed.

I’m about to head into a quiet (on purpose) season, in terms of client work, but hoping that when I am ready to ramp this back up in the autumn, I’ve been laying the foundations to work with some wonderful new clients then, too.

The Empowered Author

I have to admit that I didn’t move as far forward as hoped. We’ve created a digital product, but have yet to launch it (more this month, I hope!). We had a live planned, but it had to be cancelled, and so far we haven’t been able to reschedule it (although again, hopefully that will be happening this month).

BUT, the Facebook community continues to thrive, and the authors in there are a wonderful, supportive bunch. Someone asked me recently about how much time I need to put in to monitoring the group and, although I do check in most days to check what’s being posted and delete anything that looks like it might be spam, it doesn’t take much time at all. People are, for the most part, sharing genuine questions, celebrating good news, and sharing interesting things they’ve come across. A wondrous space on the internet.

Digital products

Last quarter I had hoped to release a new email-based course, but in the end that was cast aside for the Book Launch Club (more below). I’m really happy with that decision.

I did create a new, free, workshop, which was available exclusively for my newsletter subscribers. This was to help promote the Book Launch Club, and I really enjoyed putting it together. I will almost definitely rerelease the same video before the next round in September, so make sure you are on my list if you’d like to watch it!

One thing I’d like to prioritise next quarter is to put my older workshops up for sale. When I relaunched my website earlier this year, I totally forgot to copy and paste the product descriptions, on the sales pages. Writing sales pages is my nemesis, so I’ve been meaning to get these up for sale and putting it off, because it means writing new sales pages.

I’ve come to the decision that I’m going to go for bare bones sales pages, and just get them up and running. It’s such a waste to just have them sitting there, in my google drive, when they could be helping people & earning me money!

Investing in myself

This quarter I decided to spend some money and invest in some mentoring. I try to do some kind of coaching or mentoring once or twice a year, because I find it incredibly useful to have an outsider’s perspective on what I do, and to have someone to talk through ideas with.

I booked in an intensive day session with Ray Dodd, who I have worked with before, and booked on to a 6 week group programme with Jo Hooper, who I have not worked with before. Both were so useful in making me think a little bit longer term than the here and now.

One thing I talked to Ray about was my idea for a group programme. What I had in mind, how it might work, and how I was thinking of pricing it. I’ve talked about this for a *long* time with my co-mentor, but haven’t ever managed to work out in my head how it would work. So having this dedicated time to talk about it, amongst other things, was so useful. And I felt so confident with the end result, which was…

The Book Launch Club

As soon as the ideas crystalised for how this would work and what it might look like, I felt really good about it. I think the offer (3 monthly workshops, 6 co-working sessions, more-or-less weekly office hours, plus a supportive community of other authors) is really strong, and so far the feedback from the authors in the group has been wonderful.

The price felt to me like a ‘no-brainer’ if that is the kind of support you are looking for, and talking about this was the easiest thing I’ve ever launched.

I’m so happy with how it’s going that I’ve already opened it up for the autumn 2022, with a couple of authors already signed up, which is extremely exciting! If you think it sounds like something you’d like to be involved in, you can read more here.

Intentions for the next quarter

• Slow down a bit. I’ve purposely been building up savings to allow me to pay myself for some holiday across July and August. In August, I’m planning to take 10 days totally off, and another week where I do only existing client / Book Launch Club work. That means I am currently closed for new clients in July and August. If you’d like to work with me later on in the year, I have one quarterly marketing support package and one one-off call available from September.
• Focus on delivering great value inside the Book Launch Club. I want everyone who actively takes part over the summer to come away feeling like they’ve really made progress with their marketing, so my focus is on helping the authors taking part to do that.
• Get the digital product shop back up and running. As I mentioned, I have a number of existing workshops that I’d like to rerelease for sale. By the start of the next quarter, I’d like to have these up and running.
• Launch a product with The Empowered Author. This is up and ready to go, the only thing left to do is launch it, so watch this space…

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