I’m reading Bossypants by Tina Fey. It’s hilarious, but also includes some useful lessons and anecdotes about life as a writer.

On page 123, Fey writes about “Things I Learned from Lorne Michaels.” (In case you don’t know, Lorne Michaels is the creator and producer of Saturday Night Live. He is the guy who hired Tina Fey for SNL and later helped her start 30 Rock.)

Anyway, here’s the second lesson Fey learned from Michaels:

“The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30.”

This is something Lorne has said often about Saturday Night Live, but I think it’s a great lesson about not being too precious about your writing. You have to try your hardest to be at the top of your game and improve every joke you can until the last possible second, and then you have to let it go.

You can’t be that kid standing at the top of the water-slide, overthinking it. You have to go down the chute. (And I’m from a generation where a lot of people died on water-slides, so this was an important lesson for me to learn.) You have to let people see what you wrote. It will never be perfect, but perfect is overrated. Perfect is boring on live TV.

When it comes to writing for a living, there is no such thing as perfection: only deadlines and results.

If you are a comedy writer (like Tina Fey), the audience either laughs at your jokes or they don’t.

If you are a direct response copywriter (like me), the market either responds to your sales letter or they don’t.

So forget about perfection.

Just do the best work you can possibly do in the limited time you have.

Then sit back, relax, and see what happens when you let go of your writing and let it do its thing.

-Ryan M. HealySimilar Posts:

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If you enjoyed reading Cialdini’s Influence, Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, or Freakonomics by Levitt and Dubner, then chances are you’ll enjoy the new behavioral psychology book Situations Matter by Sam Sommers.

Situations Matter explores how our behavior is shaped by circumstance. For example: In one situation, we may be proactive; but in a similar situation with a slightly different context, we may be completely apathetic. What makes the difference? And why?

These are the types of scenarios Sommers investigates in his book. As the author explains on page 17:

So much of how we see and interact with the social universe around us is shaped by our immediate context. As the chapters in this book detail, seemingly trivial aspects of daily situations determine whether we keep to ourselves or get involved in the affairs of others, whether we follow a group or stake out an independent path, why we’re drawn to certain people and away from others.

I enjoyed Situations Matter more than I thought I would. After all, the title didn’t intrigue me at all, so I let the book languish on my desk for two months. (I think it would sell better with a title like The Hidden Power of Context: How Situations Shape Our Behavior, but it’s a little late for that.)

The title aside, after I started reading, I was hooked. Sommers explores fascinating topics like how we fall in love; why we tend to rate ourselves as “better than average” at nearly everything; how being part of an arbitrary group affects how we treat those outside the group; how context and expectation influences test scores; and much more.

And while you may already be familiar with some of the studies Sommers uses to support his arguments (like Stanley Milgram’s famous electric shock experiment), chances are there are many more you’ve never heard of.

Every chapter contains valuable insights into human behavior and practical lessons to apply long after you’ve finished reading. My favorite chapter was chapter six, the one simply titled “Love.” This chapter confirmed some of my hunches about attraction and romance, and revealed some new information, too.

Just be forewarned: die-hard romantics may be upset or even angry after reading this chapter. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for a relationship, this chapter may prove to be immensely helpful.

My least favorite chapter was chapter five, “Mars and Venus Here on Earth.” This chapter explores gender stereotypes. While I found some of this chapter interesting and enlightening, there were parts of it that rubbed me the wrong way — mainly the parts where he argues that gender differences are not as hard-wired as we believe. I get his point, but my thinking doesn’t go quite as far as his does toward erasing gender norms.

My only other criticism is Sommers’s efforts at humor. Quite a few of them fell flat for me. This is echoed by at least a couple reviewers on Amazon. William McPeck writes, “I could have done with less of the author’s attempts at humor. I feel it detracted from the book’s message.” Ditto.

Although many people could benefit from reading Situations Matter, it will probably appeal most to direct marketers, students of influence, and people who simply want a deeper understanding of human behavior.

Situations Matter was just published December 29, 2011, and is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other book sellers. So if you got a gift card for Christmas (or even if you didn’t), consider grabbing a copy for New Year’s reading. I think you’ll enjoy it.

-Ryan M. Healy

P.S. I received an uncorrected proof of Situations Matter in advance of publication for the purpose of writing this review.Similar Posts:

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Remember the “Kindle Marketing Experiment” post? Well, that post is now gone since the offer is over. But the results are in! And John Breese has generously shared what he’s learned in the following post.

If you’re interested in Kindle Publishing, this will help you make smart decisions as you get started. Enjoy!

-Ryan

Before starting into this post, I’d like to take this time to thank Ryan for being such a great help with my recent experiment in marketing a Kindle book.

This experiment, however, was not only for my benefit. A short while ago, Ryan invited you and the other readers of his blog to take part in our little Kindle marketing experiment, and it resulted in some intriguing data.

So to thank you for your help, I offered to report all my findings from this experiment to give you a more informed perspective before jumping into the Kindle publishing arena.

Why Kindle Publishing Is Worth Considering

I can’t stress enough just how important it is to send as much information you have on your business as possible, no matter what your industry, to the Kindle store.

Even if you sell pistons, you should have a whitepaper in the Kindle store. In fact, when I typed the term “pistons” into the Kindle store I found four books devoted to the industry.

However, the focus of this experiment is moreover for those seeking to set-up additional streams of income.

So I’m going to pick up where we left off — in the event that you missed the initial Kindle marketing book experiment post (which Ryan has since deleted now that the special offer has expired), here’s the low-down:

For the past couple of months, I’ve had two ebooks covering the subject of publishing Kindle books taking up space on my desktop, and after hearing Kindle millionaire Amanda Hocking’s name enough times, I finally grew curious enough to find out what I could get from Kindle Publishing.

My goal was not to mimic Hocking and become the next Kindle millionaire (though I do have some lofty plans for that extra million once it arrives).

My mission was to gauge how easy it would be to create an additional revenue stream, no matter how big or how little that extra income would happen to be.

This goal was based on three criteria:

• Time investment: Though I’ve seen a few high-end Kindle books (up to $99), those examples are quite rare. The vast majority of Kindle books fall into the $1.99 to $3.99 range. This means that whatever you put out there cannot be allowed to chew up too much of your time — especially when aiming for scalability.

• Efficiency: Aside from creating the actual work (even for a low-ticket price, I prefer to keep the work I use as original as possible), you must also factor in cover design, comment solicitation, Amazon approval time, and Fiverr gig deadlines (some people will take a few days to complete a job).

• Cost: Once again, since your profit margins are likely to be low (just keeping a realistic perspective), you want to limit the initial cost as much as possible in the beginning.

Setting Things Into Motion

Let’s tackle the events of this venture by criteria…

Criteria #1 and #2: Time/Efficiency

For the time invested in the project, I took one of my existing in-house products and boiled it down to an adolescent’s comprehension and interest level (which was surprisingly more challenging than I thought it would be).

This took me a total of two days work.

While I plugged away on the revisions, I had someone on Fiverr designing a book cover, which was ready for me by the time the book was done.
Once the book was complete, I hired another worker on Fiverr to convert the book from MS Word to the standard Kindle format. It took him a day and a half to get that done (which is very good work rate for such a gig).

Once I received the files, I logged into the Kindle Publishing site and uploaded all the materials.

Amazon approved it quickly and the book was live for sale twelve hours after I had submitted it for review.

Total time investment and production efficiency: 4 days before going live for sale

Criteria #3: Cost

Now, for a look at the overall costs. My costs were quite minimal, but I could have done better. So let’s tackle them piece by piece:

     $10 – Converting a 70-page document into Kindle standard format. (This
     price will vary according to who you find on Fiverr.)
     $5 – Producing a book cover.
     $5 – Populating a Twitter page
     $5 – Populating a Facebook page
     $15 – Soliciting reviews of the Kindle book
     $10 – Domain name registry
     $7.50 – Giveaway to Twitter users

     Total costs incurred: $57.50

     Total profits to date: $12.75 (over two and a half weeks)

Things I Would Have Done Differently

Looking back on it I believe I had put too much stock in the customer value of Bieber’s fan base. The use of the Twitter and Facebook pages has proven largely arbitrary. So far as I’ve observed they’ve generated no more than two or three sales.

The website I set up for the book isn’t pulling in much organic traffic, so I see it as a waste of time.

Given that this Bieber book is a one-off project and not one I’d seek to continue promoting over the long-haul, creating Twitter and Facebook accounts proved a waste of time and money.

However, if you’re promoting a book that centers around your main business or your brand as an author, I strongly recommend you use these promotional vehicles to perpetuate your brand. But for one-off auto-pilot projects, they’re not worth the time.

By skipping the domain name, plus the creation of Facebook and Twitter accounts, you’d subtract $20 from costs.

A second look at production costs would show that if you skip the solicitation of initial reviews for your book, and you already have a website related to the book (or don’t want one), you could get started for as little as $15 to $20 per book.

Other Recommendations

My initial plan out of the gate was to sell the book at 99 cents to pick up some velocity. If you were to look in on the book now, you’d find it priced at $3.99.

Turns out that I’m not alone — a few authors do this. But from all the seasoned Kindle publishers I’ve spoken with, sticking with the 99 cent price tag is not a great idea, as it fosters a low-perceived value.

On the durability front, it’s still a little early to determine just how things will play out in the long run for the Justin Bieber book. However, if the New Kids On The Block and The Backstreet Boys serve as any sort of a measuring stick, it isn’t the most evergreen product out there.

From what I’ve studied, the books that really make for great automated income streams include anything belonging to the evergreen topics such as health, wealth, education, relationships as well as popular hobbies (gardening, sewing).

So if you’re looking for long-term automated profits, stick to the popular subjects and try to keep away from PLR — though if you want to use one or three PLR articles as additional chapters, there’s nothing wrong with that, either.

Results So Far

So now let’s take a look at the profits of the Bieber book to date for a quick (but not necessarily accurate) view of what could be possible.

Looking at Kindle Publishing from a long-term perspective, if you can assemble a product within to two to four days each month, and keep the costs at or around $25 a month, your total investment would come out to about $300 a year.

If we take a look at the low-end of the revenue stream (like my $12.75 to date for the Bieber book over a two and a half week period) per book, your overall closing revenue for 12 books per month, would amount to somewhere in the vicinity of $1836.

I’ve seen all kinds of different revenues for Kindle publishers, so how about we go with a figure of $53 per month, per book (which quite a few authors achieve), your closing figures for a 12-month cycle would result in profits of $7632 on auto-pilot.

Of course, these are low-ball conservative numbers, but I think they help give you a realistic idea of where you’ll start and what you can set as a goal.

Wishing you luck,

John BreeseSimilar Posts:

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Do you have a bunch of paid and free PDFs languishing on your hard drive?

Here’s how to blast through them in a fortnight — without sitting in front of your computer screen for hours at a time.

• Step 1: Get a Kindle. (I got mine as a Christmas gift last year.)

• Step 2: Email each PDF to your private Kindle email address (issued to you when you register your Kindle). Put “Convert” in the subject line.

• Step 3: Make sure you’ve got a WiFi connection, then synch your Kindle. All the PDFs should download to your Kindle within a few minutes.

• Step 4: Read the PDFs on your Kindle!

This has got to be the single biggest unexpected benefit to having a Kindle — the ability to read PDFs away from my computer.

Note: Amazon does charge a small fee to convert a PDF to Kindle format, but it’s more than worth it… because… you’ll finally get some value from all those ebooks you’ve purchased!

Update: Antone Roundy shared the following tip for getting your PDFs converted for free…

You can get the PDFs converted for free if you add “free.” into the email address you send them to (i.e. “…@free.kindle.com”). You just have to have WiFi to get them automatically loaded on your Kindle (“free” doesn’t deliver them over 3G).

-Ryan M. HealySimilar Posts:

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One of my favorite business books is Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. I’m reading it a second time because I liked it so much the first time.

While I was reading this morning, I came across the chapter called “Start making something” on page 38. It corroborates everything I wrote in The Myth of the Killer Idea.

We all have that one friend who says, “I had the idea for eBay. If only I had acted on it, I’d be a billionaire!” That logic is pathetic and delusional. Having the idea for eBay has nothing to do with actually creating eBay. What you do is what matters, not what you think or say or plan.

Think your idea’s that valuable? Then go try to sell it and see what you get for it. Not much is probably the answer. Until you actually start making something, your brilliant idea is just that, an idea. And everyone’s got one of those.

Stanley Kubrick gave this advice to aspiring filmmakers: “Get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.” Kubrick knew that when you’re new at something, you need to start creating. The most important thing is to begin. So get a camera, hit Record, and start shooting.

Ideas are cheap and plentiful. The original pitch idea is such a small part of a business that it’s almost negligible. The real question is how well you execute.

Amen.

-Ryan M. Healy

P.S. I highly recommend you buy a copy of Rework. Read it. Then reread it… because how can you not reread a book called Rework?Similar Posts:

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Always be looking ahead to see where your market or industry is headed.

What are the trends? What are the ramifications of those trends?

This summer marked a tipping point in the book industry. From Bloomberg as reported by the July 30, 2010, issue of The Week:

The e-book revolution has reached a tipping point. Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos said this week that his company now sells more electronic books than hardcovers. It’s “astonishing,” Bezos says, “when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months.”

Ebooks are dead? Hardly.

The ebook market is growing while the print book market is shrinking.

• This is why Barnes & Noble and Borders are struggling to stay afloat.
• This is why B&N released their own e-reader called The Nook.
• This is why my local B&N has reduced floor space for book shelves and now has a dedicated selling area for The Nook right when you walk in their front doors.

Try to spot the trends in your industry. Figure out how you can profit from them so you don’t get left behind.

-Ryan M. HealySimilar Posts:

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If you’ve been a student of copywriting for any length of time, chances are you’ve encountered most of the classic books on the subject…

• Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins
• The Robert Collier Letter Book by Robert Collier
• Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples
• The Ultimate Sales Letter by Dan Kennedy
• Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz

With so many perennial favorites, does the world really need another copywriting book?

Having just reviewed Ray Edwards’ new book Writing Riches, I can confidently answer that question in the positive.

The biggest drawback to so many of the classics is that they were written during a time before the advent of the Internet.

As you know, the Internet has changed everything.

It hasn’t changed the principles of salesmanship, of course, but it has certainly changed the mechanisms, devices, and techniques we use to sell.

What I like about Writing Riches is that it breaks down the process of writing copy for the web into an easy-to-follow sequence of steps. And each chapter is like a succinct “mini-course.”

Inside, you’ll find “mini-courses” on writing sales letters, headline writing, bullet writing, email marketing, writing PPC ads, and even writing copy for product launches.

The best part: Writing Riches is only $14. And if you visit the link below, you’ll find out how you can get a $197 gift from Ray as a thank-you for purchasing the book.

• Click Here to Get Writing Riches for $14 And Get Your Free Gift

-Ryan M. Healy

P.S. Although I did get a review copy of the book back in November, I don’t get anything for making this recommendation. If you are a copywriter… or if you simply want to make more money from your copy… then Writing Riches will be worth far more than the $14 you’ll invest in it.Similar Posts:

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Here’s a simple way to instantly build more value into your information products: change the form(at) of your content.

Let’s say you have 2,000 words of content on a certain topic. You now have a choice of how to publish that content.

There are basically three different ways to deliver content as a product: print, audio, or video.

And each of these options can be delivered digitally or physically.

• A blog post will have the lowest perceived value.
• A PDF report will be more valuable, but still relatively low value.
• A physical book, workbook, or manual will have the most value in a printed format.

• An MP3 download may have more value than any of the printed formats.
• A physical CD + MP3 = even better.

• A streaming video with images to support your content will generally be more valuable than print or audio alone.
• A physical DVD will be more valuable than streaming video.

Remember: Your choice of format determines the value of your information product and how much you can charge for it. The same content in three different formats will command three different prices.

Therefore, if you’d like to quickly raise your prices, consider changing the format of your content — or even combining multiple formats together (for instance, a print book + an audio CD).

-Ryan M. HealySimilar Posts:

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On page 110 of How to Make Your Advertising Make Money, John Caples writes:

Techniques change, but basic sales appeals go on forever. Therefore, when you are searching for an idea to sell your product or service, don’t forget to review the ideas that have been successful in the past.

I’ve gotten some great ideas from reading proven ads and sales letters. Sometimes it’s just a small copy idea. Other times it’s a headline or subhead. Still others, a sidebar or scarcity play.

Just remember: It does you very little good to review (and recycle) the same three or four or five ads over and over again. You need to be continually inspired by fresh material.

Click here to learn more about Swipe Files.

-Ryan M. HealySimilar Posts:

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I’ve recently been on a book binge, buying up some volumes I’ve been intending to buy, but postponing.

Part of my reasoning is I’d rather pay $20 to get a used classic book now, than pay hundreds of dollars later when it’s considered a rare book.

Perfect example:

For the last year, I’ve been searching for a copy of This One Mad Act by Izola Forrester, the granddaughter of the infamous John Wilkes Booth, alleged assassin of President Abraham Lincoln.

There are currently only 3 copies of this book available for purchase. It is a rare book indeed. The cheapest copy is $294; the most expensive is $357.

I’ve got a thing for books, so price usually isn’t an objection. But I do think twice before dropping $300 on a used book.

The most expensive book I’ve purchased to date is How to Make More Money with Your Direct Mail by Ed Mayer. I paid $199.99 for that.

The second most expensive book I’ve bought is Reality in Advertising by Rosser Reeves. That only set me back $108.99.

So when I got a first edition 1983 copy of How to Make Your Advertising Make Money by John Caples for just $28.89 this week, I thought that was a pretty good deal. (Some copies are selling for twice that.)

Anyway, the whole point of this post is this…

When it comes to used books that are no longer in print, better to buy them sooner than later.

As copies disappear from circulation, what were once considered classics become rare books. And rare books command top dollar in the used market.

-Ryan M. Healy

P.S. Speaking of rare, I may soon be removing Copywriting Code from the market to add some additional content and training.

When I open up membership again, it may not be as affordable as it is now. If you’re interested, I suggest joining now.Similar Posts:

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