Phase II DONE! (Mostly)

Well I just kept plugging away at my editing and I finally finished Phase II of writing my Kindle Ebook with KDP. I also finished all my formatting; although I'm pretty sure there will be things I find when I convert the book with KDP that will need fixed. You'll notice though that I said "mostly" done with Phase II.

That's because I did not finish my initial emails for my email blogging campaign that will go with my Kindle books. Surprisingly, at least to myself, I've been struggling a little with one. I've only written 4 emails in around 3 hours. I did map out my initial 10 emails that I want to write, and which would have any form of monetization, and that helped me a lot. I wrote 3 emails in one night when I finished up my outline.

Lesson: a good outline can help save you a lot of heartache and floundering around, and they are NOT just for books.

I'm not completely worried about this though as I already realized that this would bleed into Phase III once I started to get into it. There is a lot that goes into an email campaign.

• How often will you send an email
• What service will you use, how will drive visitors to your list to sign up, will you have a blog, etc. etc.
• Will you monetize your email campaign, and how will you do it?
• How often will you send emails that are montized?

Those are just a few of the questions I found myself trying to answer and figure out when I started to plan my email blogging. I did read a great book by Steve Scott on my Kindle called : Email Marketing Blueprint - The Ultimate Guide to Building An Email List Asset. It was a great read and helped me map out the how, and when of my email campaign. It's a great read for anyone who would like to build an email list. So, while it's not done, I am gaining steam with this and I don't think it'll take me much longer to finish up the initial 10 to 15 emails I would like to have pre-written.

As I was editing I found a few more things that I need to add to my book as far as content goes. I have not added them yet, I just made a note to myself and moved forward with my editing. Mostly because I wanted to focus only on editing and I knew that I would be going through the book again for a final edit. In the end it took me around an hour to format the book. I've spent around 3 hours on writing my emails, and I've spent 11 hours editing. So what's next?

Phase III

1. Finish prewriting my initial emails
2. Create a squeezepage so that people can sign up for my email list
3. Add in the content that I feel is needed
4. Final edit
5. Convert book to KDP
6. Double check that all links in book are working correctly and that it looks good.
7. Create a cover
8. Launch

That's a very simplified list of what I have left to do, and I'm sure I'll find a million little things that need to be done in between those steps. Sadly I don't have much of a marketing strategy for launching my book, and I know that will hurt me. This is all so new to me, and I'm really testing the waters here, so hopefully by the time I get to book two and three I'll be able to focus more on that aspect. As I work through converting the book and creating the cover I'll put together some tutorials on how I did it for the blog with screenshots to help everyone help. I'll also do some more posts on creating my squeezepage and launching my email campaign. 

My goal is to finish all this and launch my book within the next two weeks. This should allow me to start collecting money for this project by the end of January. I was really hoping to finish in time that I would start collecting by the end of the year, but unfortunately it just didn't happen. Still, I've pushed hard, and I've made good progress. The next book should go faster now that I have a better idea of how much time this actually takes, and I can push myself even harder to get it done. My goal with my next book is to have it done by January.