With all your expertise, experience, & education, you have a LOT to say!

Your goals are to impact & help many many many people with your insights, thought leadership, and body of knowledge.

SO…that means, it's HIGHLY likely that at some point you've pondered this question:

"Should I take everything I've got and turn it into a book?"

GREAT Q! 

Today's episode of Content Creation Made Easy will help you navigate the reality of bringing a non-fiction book to life.

In a delightfully honest convo with author Annie Schiffmann, author of Simple Social Media, she reveals the truth about her bringing her book to life.

(SPOILER ALERT: there were definitely days where she wondered, "Who the HELL thought this was a good idea?!")

Annie says: "I don't know what happened. But I was like, okay. If this guy can get away with this, I can write a book? But the reason, besides just overall delusions of grandeur, why I wanted to write a book, was so my ideas would be able to get in front of more people without ME having to get in front of more people."

Listen & learn about the misconceptions, challenges, & lessons of turning your intellectual property into a published work…

And make it all a LOT easier when it's your turn!

BONUS - Since Annie's book is called Simple Social Media, we dive into her framework & unpack how to ease-ify social media & make it take WAY less time.

Grab your copy of the book here: https://www.simplesocialmediabook.com/

Is getting a book out of YOUR head on your 2024 "list"? 

Listen for honest nuggets to ease-ify your path to authorship AND social media!

**Thank you for taking a moment & telling us how this podcast helps make your content life easier!

We so appreciate listener comments and reviews because this stuff does NOT have to be complicated. Your valuable review helps us share this information with many more people's ears. 

 

SUBSCRIBE TO THE CONTENT MADE EASY PODCAST ON YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST PLATFORM

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Full Transcript

Jen Liddy 

Hey, welcome to Content Creation Made Easy. I'm your host, Jen Liddy. This is the first podcast I'm recording for 2024. And I wanted to do a little introduction to explain what I'm doing over the next two episodes. 

So over the past three or four months, I've been doing a ton of research about writing a book. I wasn't sure if I wanted to write a book, but I had a couple of clients come to me, wanting help.

They have written books and they wanted to market their books. So I got into this world of book writing and I did all of this research and I met a lot of amazing people. 

I interviewed two people because I wondered if you, as a person who's been in your industry for a long time, who has a lot of nuanced understanding, a lot of knowledge, a lot of training probably, if you might wanna bring a book to life.

This year or maybe the year after, but maybe you've been thinking, like “I really should turn what I know into a book.” 

So I interviewed two different people for the next two episodes and wanted to give this introduction because who you're gonna meet today, Annie Schiffman, is a marketing and media specialist, but she wrote a book all about how to use social media very simply. 

It's called Simple Social Media. And in my interview with her, I talk about what is it like to be an expert in something with years and years and years of experience that you wanna translate into a book so that you can impact more people, have a broader reach, and just basically get your intellectual property into something that can have a humongous impact. 

So in today's episode, you're going to meet Annie Schiffman. We are gonna talk all about why would somebody do this? What is the process of taking your ideas, putting them into a book? What are some things you need to know or think about?

And then we actually do talk about her PAGER method to using social media in an extremely simple way. Annie is a person who has a family and a spouse and a business and a life and so for her, being on social media for hours a day was a non-negotiable. 

In today's episode, which I hope you enjoy, we are gonna talk about what it really takes to create a book from your intellectual property. 

Tune in for the next episode where we're gonna talk with a different type of book service provider because the other thing I found in my research was there's tons of people out there to help you with your book and how do you know who they are and how to choose which one is right for you. 

So that's the next episode! Tune back in for that one and I hope you love this episode with Annie Schiffman. She is an absolute delight. See you on the other side. Bye!

 

Jen Liddy 

Hi, this is Jen Liddy. You know me as your podcast host, but today I'm kind of a mess because the guest that I'm having on, I was excited to speak with her, she just wrote a book, it's coming out soon. I can't wait to talk to her about her book. 

A friend of mine introduced us to each other, so I wanted to make a good impression. Yet the internet went out. I lost everything. I couldn't get into the recording studio. 

So I'm a little bit of a mess. So thanks for being here on today's podcast. I promise it's going to be good because I'm talking to Annie Schiffman.

Annie has written Simple Social Media and I'm going to dive in with her today about why writing a book, why would somebody do this to themselves, and what is the pathway forward, and why would we want to do this? 

What are some of the things that we need to think about when we're creating a book and publishing a book, and then what happens after we hit publish? So Annie, I'm going to let you talk for a little while.

The introduction is that Annie is an author, but she's also got a marketing firm called Downstage Media, and she's really focused on helping clients create and automate content. And I think this idea of automating content is interesting. 

I don't know if we're gonna get to talk about it today, but she is great at helping people have a presence without pressure, which is I think some of the struggle that we have when we think about marketing anything because social media is so relentless and email marketing can be overwhelming. 

So Annie is the author of the book Simple Social Media. And I'm curious about this and I want to ask her about, she has two daughters with Beatles themed names and she has brainwashed them to like musical theater. So of course I wondered if they were named Ringo and Yoko.

 

Annie Schiffmann

Right, so they are named neither Ringo nor Yoko. My daughter's names are Abby and Penny, so Abby Road and Penny Lane. And yes, technically it's Abigail and Penelope, but for sure we call them Abby and Penny.

 

Jen Liddy 

There you go. Beautiful. Well, at least you can find a license plate with your name on it if your name is Abby or Penny, but not Yoko or Ringo.

 

Annie Schiffmann

Right, which honestly, they can fight those battles. We're gonna leave that to them. If the world is demanding it, they both have the means to make that happen. So, yeah, I'm so glad to be here. 

I'm so glad that you are, that we're talking today. And yeah, I have this book, Simple Social Media coming out. And it's so funny that you said, ‘Why a book?’

Because it dawned on me a couple of weeks ago, this was optional, because I've been a little bit overwhelmed the past couple of weeks. And so I just thought to myself, this is optional. 

This past weekend, as we're recording this, was the New York City Marathon. And I think there are a lot of similarities to being a marathon runner and being an author. 

And I say this as someone who's qualified considering that I've run zero marathons and I have authored a book. So I'm clearly these already.

 

Jen Liddy 

You've got the cloud, yeah.

 

Annie Schiffmann

Yeah, it's just that kind of a thing where it's a very long road. It's a very long trip that you have to go on. I hate to use the word journey. 

So I thought that writing a book was not actually going to be that hard because the idea was that I would just take blog posts that I had written and I would pretty much just turn them into a book. 

I'd read a book that was very clearly copied and pasted from someone's blog, to the point where it was a hard copy book and there were hyperlinks. And I was like, “I can't click on these. I'm reading a book.”

 

Jen Liddy 

Like the editor couldn't pull those out.

 

Annie Schiffmann

I don't know what happened, but I was like, “Okay, if this guy can get away with this, I can write a book.” So that was the idea. 

But the reason why, besides just overall delusions of grandeur, the reason why I wanted to write the book was so that way, my ideas would be able to get in front of more people without me having to get in front of more people. 

That my ideas could get in front of more people at a reasonable cost to them because initially when I first got started in social media, I was in social media for the performing arts. 

And I realized that if I served that niche, I wouldn't really be able to earn the living that I wanted to earn. There's just not that kind of money in there. But I will always have a love for the arts. 

I used to be a comedian, I used to do five shows a week in New York City. It's where I met my husband. That is such a huge part of my life and who I am but I hated that I would have to say to people prices that were just not going to be possible for them. 

So I felt like I could say, “Here, get this because this you can do and you can implement it.” And then the other thing was I also wanted to do more speaking because I'm so comfortable on stage. 

I had created the keynote in the first place with this idea and I knew that I could serve nonprofit marketers, those kinds of events, or just, you know, I'd gone to the National Arts Marketing Conference, I'd spoken there in the past, and it was all a bunch of marketers from a whole bunch of arts organizations, right? 

So I felt like I could get that idea out there, and if I had a book, I would have more clout. And I also knew that for other kinds of stuff that I wanted to do, other engagements I wanted to have, it would just overall help my thought leadership. 

So that was the idea behind why I wanted to write Simple Social Media.

 

Jen Liddy 

That's what I hear from a lot of authors and then they get into it and they're like “Who thought this was a good idea?” So how long were you in the process of writing a book before you really questioned ‘Is this worth it?’

 

Annie Schiffmann

Oh, that was up until like two weeks ago. First of all, I'm pretty much a one woman show. Until recently, I didn't really have that many people who were subcontractors of mine or things like that. 

And even when I had studied theater at NYU, it was always like, ‘You can't wait for the phone to ring. You have to create your own experiences.’ So, writing the book took me about a year. 

I would wake up every morning from six to seven and I would write for an hour. And then that was about a full year. 

And then in the summertime, I was pretty much done with the meat of it and I could hand it off to the editor and we could kind of shape it and proofread it and things like that. 

But then from this past summer, and we're recording this right now, it's the fall. This past summer, I then started the whole actually marketing the book itself and figuring out all of those machinations because I was completely self-publishing. 

And not only that, but I knew that I didn't want to put it solely up on Amazon because I had known about a publisher, Lulu Press, where you could then sell your books directly on your own site. 

And if you did that, then in lieu of getting from Amazon or from wherever, a check or whatever that would say you sold X amount of units, I would see you sold this amount of units to this person, and this is that person's email address, and this is that person's shipping address. 

And I felt like that was really valuable information.

 

Jen Liddy 

Yeah, I want to talk about that for a second because I think a lot of authors don't stop to think about what happens when you sell books versus what happens when you know the person you're selling the book to and have their information. 

So can we unpack why that's so important for people, because they're authors but they might not be thinking like marketers.

 

Annie Schiffmann

Right, so that is a huge reason behind why I wanted to. So the book, Simple Social Media, is only available on SimpleSocialMediaBook.com for a certain amount of time. 

And then after a few weeks, I will open it up to Amazon and bookshop.org and barnesandnoble.com and things like that. But I wanted to get all of that data. 

I felt like for the same reason why it's important for me to get email subscribers as well as social media followers, right? Because one, I have a little bit more control over than the other. 

So that's why I wanted to make sure that I knew that if somebody bought 25 copies of a book, I wanna know what that person is using it for. 

I want to know, I can come and speak to your group. Let's do a workshop, let's partner together, what do you need? Who is this for? Tell me more. 

So that way I know how I can serve you better. And then once I find that out, then it's like, ‘Oh man, you're gonna need this worksheet and let's turn this into a workbook.’

Let's really serve you what you need. And I'm gonna know that way better if I actually know who the person is.

 

Jen Liddy 

I love that you keep using the word serve because I feel like people who are writing books for the reasons that you wrote your book –  to have a bigger impact, to reach a bigger audience, to be able to serve people who maybe aren't at the financial level that they might need to be to have a higher level services with you. 

They're very mission oriented authors. And so this isn't about being nosy and it's not being about taking data for the sake of taking data. 

You keep saying it’s because I can serve them better. I think that's just an important thing, mindset shift for people.

 

Annie Schiffmann

Completely, because then you just think to yourself, “Okay, well, what else can we do together? Let's do something cool together. What else can we do?”

So here's an example. The book, Simple Social Media, is made out of that keynote that I gave, right? So I turned that keynote into a webinar. And so I then do this webinar now four or five times a year, Simple Social Media. 

I now have a giveaway during my webinar, somebody can get the book, right? That's kind of a fun thing that I can do. And I'm having a launch party for the book. 

I'm doing a virtual online launch party and we're going to have games because like in the book, I talk about a dice game that I created to help you make posts faster. 

And I'm going to use some of my improv comedy background. My husband's an improv comic and we're gonna do some bits together that are based on things in the book. 

It's just gonna be a fun night that we can incorporate that together. But I now can give people copies of the book as a prize. 

Sure, I can also give them the webinar as another giveaway or as a prize or something else that I can talk to you about. And then from there, I could say, we could do a private webinar for your group. 

So it just sort of became this thing then that I can really play with to figure out what people need. How can we get in front of their audience at the budget that's gonna work for them? 

And because I just feel like social media has gotten so, so hard and what is expected of small business owners is, I mean, frankly, it's completely nonsensical. 

I was talking to a woman owned business in my town, she has a brick and mortar store. She is doing so well. She's got 20,000 followers on Instagram, right? 

And so I'm talking to her and I could see that she's a little unimpressed with my social media follower count, which by the way, feel free to look me up everyone. 

I'm sure you have more followers than I do. I'm sure you do. I don't care. My pipeline is full. I have tripled the revenue that I've had from last year.

I do not care about follower count, but this woman clearly did. And so I asked her, I said, “Tell me about how you know this is working for you.” And we started a conversation and then she shared with me that she spends four hours a day creating social media content. 

And I am glad for her, she loves it, and she feels it works for her. But that's just not the people that I am interacting with. That's not who I'm working with. 

And I was just listening to a podcast the other day with this other creator, influencer guy. 80% of his time is spent on content creation.

 

Jen Liddy 

How do you actually get your work done then? That's what I don't understand.

 

Annie Schiffmann

Exactly. If that's your work then that's your work but you need to own that is your job, but if that's not your job then it is okay for you to not have those big huge inflated numbers. 

That's okay and I really think that we need to shift that paradigm and adjust those levels because they're just too high. 

And the problem is that people are like, ‘I'm just not gonna do anything’, but it is a worthwhile tool. And it's a great way to play and experiment and be creative and get to know your audience and have them get to know you.

Like the same way, Jen, that you started this podcast by saying that things did not go the way that you thought they were going to go, right? So now your audience knows a little bit more about Jen's life today.

 

Jen Liddy 

It was windy outside and the internet didn't like that it was windy outside. So that was my day today. I did not spend four hours making any kind of social media content. I can't even imagine that.

So when you're thinking this is an important thing. I think you're making really clear for you, for listeners is your audience, the person who's going through, your readers are not the people who are spending 80% of their time making social media. 

These are the people who are saying, forget it. It is too hard, I'm opting out. I'm not using the powerful tools that are at my disposal. They're just opting out, or they're feeling completely flattened and overwhelmed by it. 

They're not getting filled up and feeling excited about spending four hours making a 30 second reel, which is how I feel that sometimes it feels like.

 

Annie Schiffmann

Right, it's for people who have a lean marketing team, and I'm using the word team very generously, right? Or I also was thinking about those organizations that don't have that many people who are necessarily qualified.

I think about if you have children, then you know all of these different little organizations that the kids get involved with, whether it's their sporting event or for my kids, it's always theater stuff. 

And so there's some parent who is sidled with this job of like, ‘Oh, just do the Instagram account.’ And they're like, ‘I don't even, I don't know.’ And so they do, and they do as well as they can. 

But then that parent moves on because that child graduates and now someone new is in there and there's a completely new strategy.

So the idea here is like, “Here, this is what we do. We just do this PAGER method. Every letter stands for a different kind of content and we're just gonna make sure that we have one of each of those kinds of content for each, you know, the five days of the week.” 

Boom, or, “You know, we only gonna post once a week, that's all we can do, so once a week, each one of these letters for the month,” right? So that kind of a thing. 

So it's for people who aren't passionate about social media, who don't care about content creation, who just want to get their work out into the world a little bit more.

 

Jen Liddy 

Right. I feel like you hold your reader very clearly in your mind when you're thinking about marketing to this point. 

Beyond the writing of the book, then you had to think about, 'OK, shit, I need to market the book.’ And so you keep holding that reader very clear in your mind. 

And I'm just curious about when it came time to market it… Now you do own a marketing agency. So I'm wondering what your edge was having that.

But tell me, let's talk about what the marketing of the book has been like for you? Have you been having fun with it or was it something like ‘Oh fuck? I have to do this now’ or where were you when you were like ‘Now it's time to go sell it.’

 

Annie Schiffmann

Well, it's very intimidating because it's a book about marketing and you have to market it and you have a marketing company. So all of those things mean that you gotta have your A game. 

And so one of the things that I realized was what I could and what I couldn't do and then what I could and what I couldn't afford to outsource. So a website, right? I can build a website, that's fine. 

But I just knew that I wasn't gonna be able to build a website and an email series and social media posts. I wasn't gonna be able to do all of that from six to seven from the summer until the fall when it came out. 

And I knew that I wanted it to come out by the end of the year. And so once I saw that very clear day in my mind of when I knew I wanted to come out, I just started looking at all the different pieces.

I started with the two different pieces that my firm does, which are email and social. So I kind of started there, but I knew that I had to have a website, obviously, because I was gonna be selling it through the website. 

That was the whole plan. That was the whole business model. So I didn't wanna just sell it through my own firm, because I do think that there's some things that I do as Annie Schiffman, like if you hire me as a speaker or something like that.

And so then there's Annie Schiffman, there's Downstage Media. So I felt like if I do it through Shopify, then I can integrate it with all of these. 

And I could really serve them at SimpleSocialMediaBook.com and really have just the very clear stuff that you need to get the book and to get the free resources that are gonna go with the book. 

And all the bonuses that you would get if you get it from me versus Amazon, right? I could just make that really simple without all of the other bells and whistles of the other sites.

So I love working on that stuff. Like you asked me, if it felt like a burden, no, I love doing it. I love creating things. 

I love writing stuff. I love sitting in my little office doing this. I love collaborating with Jennifer Barden who made the website for me. 

And we also did this fun thing. This was optional, but I'm so glad that I did it and it was really fun. Trying to think if I have one here, I don't. But so the pager method, obviously pager is a 90s communication device.

 

Jen Liddy 

Oh yeah, I saw that on your website.

 

Annie Schiffmann

Yeah, so the whole idea is we're going back to simpler times, simpler communication times. And also I had heard the song where Taylor Swift says, “I come back stronger than a 90s trend.”

And I was like, “If Taylor Swift says it's a trend, I'm doing it.” And this is before all the Eras tour stuff happened. So, I decided that I would create a zine, which is like a magazine, but in the 90s, it's what riot girl feminists would make about their favorite riot girl feminist bands. 

And so I was like, “I'm gonna make a zine because those purposely looked DIY, because they were and mine will be DIY, because it will be.” 

But I knew the value in also having some kind of a print thing to promote the book. And so I felt like this would be a fun cheat sheet that I could do. And when I went to a couple of events, then I could give that out and that was a really fun add in. 

So I worked with Ashley Folletta. She's one of the content creators at Downstage Media and she's so smart and she's so talented. And so we made this really, really fun. 

I created a playlist. So all the songs that are referenced in the book, and there are a number of them, I made a playlist for that too, so you could get the pager method mixtape. 

So I was like, “What else? What else could we do to make this experience more fun and more theatrical and more interactive?”

And I just started playing with different ways of doing that. And then that experience became so fun. So marketing the book became very fun. 

Some of those things are extra and above and beyond, but they just made some of the drudgery of writing, like writing an email sequence again, a little bit more fun because I knew that I could talk about things like the Pager Method mixtape. 

And again, that then became more bonuses that I can add into things, right? So now everyone who attends the launch party, I am mailing them all a zine. So they're going to physically have something in their hands.

 

Jen Liddy 

Oh my God. How fun. The thing that I love, this is something I talk about when it comes to content creation and marketing in general, but if you don't lean into your personality, then everything feels drudgery.

And it feels like you're either wearing somebody else's suit or imposter syndrome or whatever you want to say. But you started by saying you used to do standup comedy, you love theatrics, you love musical theater, you love performing. All of this makes so much sense.

But for somebody to adopt Annie's marketing plan as their own for their book would be, if they're say, highly introverted or the idea of doing something with music would be so anathema to who they are…

It's so important to tap into your own personality and strengths and I think it's so beautiful that you've just given us how you did that. And I also wanna just say, the question isn't how can I do it like Annie, the question is how can I do it so I'm more like ME when I'm marketing my own book. It's so great. 

So I love your landing page. It's basically like a website, but it's just a landing page. Everything is there that you would need. You can get your bonuses there for the book, and just in case, listener, you are wondering what it is. 

Oh my God, you know what happened? Can you tell us what it is, Annie? Because it disappeared when my internet went down before.

 

Annie Schiffmann

Sure. So the book is titled Simple Social Media and the website is SimpleSocialMediaBook.com. So since we're talking, if we're talking to authors, I just wanna kind of give you a little behind the scenes. 

I know that when you are going to buy something that is not from Amazon, there will automatically be friction, right? 

You're gonna have to put in your name and address where normally you wouldn't have to do that if you're doing it on Amazon. 

So my goal was throughout this process, how can I sweeten the deal? How can I make it worthwhile for people who are going to take these extra steps?

So that's why I created bonuses. So if you buy it from me, there's only certain things you're gonna be able to get from me. 

And if you pre-order the book, there's certain things you're gonna get for pre-ordering. So that's why there was always something along the lines that I was trying to think of and not expensive things, but I'll give you a 20 minute session where I will talk to you about what your strategy could be for this. 

Just little things like that were ways that I could sweeten the deal. But then if you're looking at SimpleSocialMediaBook.com, sorry guys, I had to say it again. 

But if you're looking at it, you'll also see, and this was something that I did because I had taken a book marketing course because I didn't know anything about it. 

And there was the idea of what the bundles are for bulk orders, which you would be surprised that people order bulk, but they do, right? And I hadn't thought about it before, but sure. 

So if you're gonna buy one for each of your clients, that might be a group of 10, or if you wanna buy one for each of your prospects, that might be a group of 25. 

And so then what would that look like? What are the extras that I can give you if you're going to do that? How can I make this easier for you to unload those books?

And so that's why then I could also tap into other things. Like if you're buying 25 books, I'm gonna give you, or whatever it is, I can't exactly remember, so these might be wrong, but I'm gonna give you a whole bunch of copies of the zines, because you might wanna give out some cheat sheets to people if they're gonna have this whole book. 

You know, just little things like that. So that way, it's not so much one-to-one, but then one-to-many, which has already helped me sell more books.

 

Jen Liddy 

There's one more thing I want to talk about, which is beyond the book publishing. So you've gotten these names and email addresses, and then there will be the book launch. 

There's the pre-launch, then there will be the launch. And what are you going to be doing to continue the relationship with the people who bought your original book from your page where they could enter their information?

 

Annie Schiffmann

Right, so they will know when there are other webinars coming up or other events where they might wanna go deeper to understand how they can implement it because we've all read books before, but it's a little bit different just reading a book versus actually doing it. 

So this way you can hear, you can ask questions, it's a little bit more interactive. So they will know about those kinds of events. And then if they wanna have their own, how they can reach out to me. 

But then what I'm gonna do now is also that the pager method is meant to be evergreen. So it doesn't make a difference if you are on TikTok or you are on Instagram or you are on whatever the next one's going to be, right? 

So I did that on purpose in the 10 years that I've been in the social media marketing space. What were the things that I could make evergreen? 

And what's cool then is to look ahead and be like, “Okay, cool.” So right now, if there's this whole thing about zero click content, right? So how can you get social media posts out that don't say, ‘Well, click on the link so you can read the blog post,’ right? 

So I can say, “Hey, zero click content is a trend that's happening right now. Here's how you can use that with the pager method.”

So I'm looking forward to also putting out more content that way, which is - ‘this is what's happening now, here's how you can blend what's happening now with this evergreen strategy that you've learned.’

So it's exciting to think about that because that just clicked a couple of weeks ago. I was like, “Great, that's gonna get me through. And I'm gonna keep doing the zine as a quarterly thing too for that same reason.”

 

Jen Liddy 

Oh, fun. It also keeps, you know, sometimes when you buy a book on social media, it's fun to go on Amazon and search ‘social media books’ that came out in 2009 or 2012 and they're just obsolete. 

But because your PAGER method is evergreen and if somebody's on your list, they can learn how to implement with an updated issue or an updated platform. That's freaking brilliant. Which is why you're in marketing.

 

Annie Schiffmann

Well, but honestly, it came out of the fact that when you do this long enough, you see things that you could rely on four years ago, you can't always rely on now, but there are a few things if you can extract what those are. 

And so that's what I did. I was like, “I gotta figure this out. I got to figure out a way that every time I have a new client, I don't have to put, create a brand new strategy from scratch.” I don't have that kind of time.

 

Jen Liddy 

Yeah, and they don't have that kind of time either. They don't want that. Yeah, I love this.

 

Annie Schiffmann

Especially because they don't have that kind of time. Yeah, I mean, I created this during the pandemic. I had a 7-year-old and a 10-year-old at home. 

My seven-year-old didn't even know how to type. And now all of a sudden, everything she had to do for school was on the computer. So I had to be hyper efficient with my time. And so did everybody else.

 

Jen Liddy 

Right. Oh my God, this is amazing, Annie.

 

Annie Schiffmann

Except for, there was a small subset of people who were like, ‘I have so much time on my hands.’ And that was not the people that I was talking to. 

Those people I did have to mute. I'm sorry I muted you, but it was a dark place. I couldn't follow your content.

 

Jen Liddy 

Annie, is there anything that, one last nugget that I didn't ask or didn't know to ask that you think is important for authors to think about?

 

Annie Schiffmann

Well, I think here's just a little thing for me as far as where some of my money went in terms of actually getting the book just for you to all know and you could take a bit what you will. 

So I did purchase a course to figure out how to do book marketing specifically because I wanted to just like business book marketing because I knew that I wanted to use it to help extend my reach. So that was an expenditure. 

I spent money on the website and the domain name and stuff like that. And that's pretty much it. I did price the book that way, so obviously if I sell it through my own site, I make more money than I do at Amazon, but I priced it low enough so I'm only making a couple of dollars for Amazon.

And again, I don't really think that, I'm not really in it so much for the book royalties because I think that's going to bring way more opportunities for me thought leadership wise, but those were some of the main expenditures.

Oh and then hiring people to create the zine for me and then hiring somebody to make the website for me that's where the money.

 

Jen Liddy 

And then you'll have postage too that you'll have to pay for to send the zine out, right? 

Then not even including the time where you're going to do these 20 minute calls or you'll do a webinar, but it sounds like the last thing I wanted to say, which I forgot to say before, is some of the things that you're doing are really relationship building. 

Which I think in 2024 is a vital marketing strategy that people need to lean back into even if they're using social media and digital marketing.

So you're really marrying two worlds here of relationship marketing with digital and social marketing. So I think it's fairly brilliant all the way around.

 

Annie Schiffmann

Well, Jen, I'm just glad it's brought me to you and to your audience. And I'm certainly no expert on this, as I said at the beginning, in terms of I've written a book. 

And I have never run a marathon. And frankly, I'm almost positive I could say I never will. Because I just don't think that's it. 

That's just not something I'm interested in doing with my time, especially now that I've written a book. Oh, wait, but can I tell you one last thing?

 

Jen Liddy 

Yeah.

 

Annie Schiffmann

One last thing between so many people will say to you when you are writing your book, “Oh, it's like having a child” and it's not. 

I have had two children and the main difference is that when you are pregnant that baby pretty much decides to come out when that baby is going to come out, right? It does not make a difference if you have the car seat hooked up. It's happening.

And, or at least it's growing, it's progressing along. I understand some people schedule their C-sections fine. But that is something that when you take on the job of writing a book, that is something that requires a choice every single day or every single time that you sit down to work on that book. 

I am working on this book. Whereas when you are pregnant, the wheel is just kind of in motion, you know? But that is a very big difference.

 

Jen Liddy 

Nature takes over. Yeah.

 

Annie Schiffmann

Yeah, nature takes over, but this is not. You really need to remember why you're doing it. And work yourself through every step of it. 

So that's something I'm just, because you're gonna hear that a lot, like, “Oh, it's like having a child,” and I really don't think it is.

 

Jen Liddy 

You're way more in charge of it than you would be if you were just having a baby. You're just having a baby, it's not a big deal. Annie, can you say the book's homepage one more time?

 

Annie Schiffmann

Sure, it is SimpleSocialMediaBook.com. And I look forward to hearing your thoughts when you read it. Please let me know. You can find me at SimpleSocialMediaBook.com. There's a way that you can reach out.

 

Jen Liddy 

Yes. I'm actually on my way to go over and preorder it. By the time this podcast comes out, the book will already be out in the world. People will still be able to go to that website and buy it. 

And I'm excited to learn from it because I can't wait to learn your pager method both for myself and to share with others as I can use it with my clients because I feel like nobody needs to start over from scratch again. 

So if we have a methodology that works, let's use it. And Annie, I just want to say not only has it been a delight talking to you. I just want to say thank you for your time and expertise, especially with how rough of an entry it was to get into our conversation. 

But you're just such a delight. Thank you so much.

 

Annie Schiffmann

Thank you and thank you all for listening.

 

Jen Liddy 

Yes, thank you all for listening. I'll see you next week. Bye.