Triage One—My Jeff Walker “Ugly Workshop” Bonus

Free UGLY BABY WORKGROUP is now live. Info in the following post…
https://hollylisle.com/ugly-baby-free-plf-based-workgroup-is-now-live/

Thank you. I’ve built bonuses to make the course work even better for you as a writer.

My plan is to have the whole pack of us making real money from our fiction by the end of the bonus. And to have the ones of you who aren’t making ANY money from your writing seeing your first income by the end of month one. So be prepared to work. 😀

We’re going to have a pretty good-sized group. Enough people to add genre variety and give us all a lot of practice with our own launches and launches with our JV network, but few enough that we’ll all know each other pretty well by the time Jeff wraps up the last material (in time to open the new class).

Hi, Mike,

Though I don’t know the price, I’m guessing you’ll be in the ballpark.

I’ll note that, having taken previous versions of Jeff’s course, I have never found ANY of his core strategies available publicly. Like me, he invented what he teaches while he was using the processes himself. He covers basic marketing and product creation for newcomers, but where he shines—hell, where he’s incandescent—is in showing you how he built his own business.

He is to teaching promotion what I am to teaching fiction writing—he will show you how, rather than tell you how, and will walk you through the doing so that when you’re done, you KNOW how to do it, because you have already done it successfully.

Finally, while I could go WAY past two indispensable things, I’ll give give two examples of the ones I’ve used that will make this easier for you to see the value.

I’d done some clinics, but I needed to create a course that would give me a steadier income, that would allow me to build a business that could support me securely while I wrote fiction. I was sure I had a couple winners. I through in some off-the-wall right-brain stuff to pad out the list.

I came up with a bunch of ideas for them. And I used his Seed Launch to put my ideas in front of the people who were willing to help me figure out what course to do next.

The weirdest, stupidest, most off-the-wall idea I had, the one I almost didn’t even put on the list because it was, I thought, such a loser, won by a landslide.

That idea became How To Think Sideways.

I did a Seed Launch to get to WARPAINT, which I love wildly, which is selling well, and which I didn’t even do a LAUNCH for…just the seed launch to figure out that was the next project.

So the Seed Launch is the tool for creating work your readers WANT.

Then there is the process of bringing in YOUR readers, who are unique and not everyone else’s readers. I use this process, which is spread across a number of Jeff’s lessons, for reaching my people—the ones who love what I love and who are most likely to love my books as a result.

I’ve been really blunt about this. I’m not trying to get everyone to read my novels, and I have worked carefully to make sure that the ones most likely to hate them won’t buy them in the first place.

I save them money. I save myself the headaches of dealing with people whose company and opinions I don’t enjoy. Pissing people off is something I’ve always been pretty good at.

For the folks I want to spend time with, though, I’ve learned from Jeff how to make sure I communicate well using all sorts of media, and create things they’ll love. And that is NOT something that has always been easy for me.

Hi, Selene,

Here’s the deal on promoting your work. You can take me and the results I got by NOT promoting it as world’s most effective negative example.

I told myself at the beginning of my career that it was my publisher’s job to promote my work. I wrote good books, and I built a good website, but I never used my website to actively promote my work. At the moment, I still don’t.

After I took Walker’s course, I realized that I could use what he was teaching to help my books sell better.

So I started putting together a real Jeff Walker-type promotion for my second Moon & Sun book, The Silver Door. Had a thousand dollars set aside to spend on promotion (which you can do amazing things with independently on the Internet—Internet dollars go farther than advertising dollars) , had planned out my whole campaign, let my publisher know what I was doing…

…And my publisher KILLED the campaign, right then with no quarter given. I was told that, since I was willing to promote, Scholastic would have a publicist get in touch with me to go on a blog tour. I waited, the publicist never got back to me, and The Silver Door, which is a wonderful story, never got off the ground.

I know that I could have saved that book. Could have got it in front of people who wanted it, could have helped it do better than the first book did. Could have given the whole planned seven-book series wings.

But no. I looked at a future filled with people who said they loved my books but did nothing to promote them—same as the past–and I ended up saying “hell with ’em” to commercial publishing after 30+ novels. That and the Hawkspar debacle were the reasons I went indie.

Now I’m FINALLY at the point where I’m doing expansions and additions to existing classes (rather than building brand-new, massive classes), and looking at offering some live workshops for writers, and I’m planning the core of my life around writing fiction again.

This time, I’m going to know how to promote my fiction, and THIS time, the person who gives a shit about how my books do is going to also be the person who is in charge of seeing that they get promoted. That would be me.

If you want to publish commercially, you NEED to know what Jeff is teaching, because the only person who gives a shit about your book is you. Commercial authors are disposable. Publishers have no clue about how to promote a new product to an unknown readership. Their philosophy is “Throw enough writers against a wall and some of them will stick.”

Most don’t. I stuck through more than thirty books, until I decided I was tired of being thrown against walls and walked away before I started hating the thing I love—writing fiction.

If you want to give yourself a chance of sticking when they throw you, be the person who makes sure you can promote your work in ways that will actually work.