End of the Year Checklist for Author Success

Foreign. Happy December. Today we're going to talk about how to wrap up 2025 and set yourself up for success in 2026. And this is really going to kick off the theme, not kickoff, wrap up the theme that I've been talking about all year, but which is that this is a business. Whether you started writing your book thinking you had a hobby or it was a passion project, the reality is becoming an author means you are starting a business. And a lot of authors, because they're not thinking of it that way, they're wrapping up the year the same way somebody with a hobby does. You know, they look back and they shrug and they think, I'll do better next year. Or they go, wow, like some things went super well this year, but next year I really got to do better. And I think that that's okay. Take a reflection. But a book, especially a book that you want to have impact and maybe make an income from, you want to think about it as a way, how are you going to build your business even more, grow that impact, earn money. And you know, that requires a slightly different mindset. So what do you need to do as you wrap up the year? What are you. I'm going to give you five just because it's a nice easy number, but five things that you can do to end the year to set yourself up for a profitable, powerful, and potentially, potentially less chaotic 2026. So the first thing we want to do is audit your author business. Just like I audit book launchers, just like any good CEO will audit their business as they approach a year end and they're starting to plan for the next year. So what that means you look at the numbers, not your feelings. I mean, you can look at your feelings too. I always like to look at what have I really enjoyed, what was energy draining. You know, that's a, that is a feeling thing that I do evaluate. I think it's. There's a lot of value in evaluating the things that give you energy and take energy. But what I really want to look at is numbers. I want to analyze what worked, what moved the needle, what didn't. And I think in that you can also think about what moved your energetic needle because some things, they don't sell books, but they're fun. Right? And that's worth continuing and noting that. But you know, book sales, where did you spend your money? Where did you make your money? Marketing. Where what did you put money? What marketing did you put into money? What. What marketing did you put into money? Did I just say that? What Money did you put into marketing and what results did that get you? And then, you know, I always like to note surprises. You know, what was a good surprise, what was maybe not the best surprise? So do an assessment of the year. And you know, I like to look at it kind of, you know, just jotting down the answers to these questions. But, but then again, going back and kind of going, if next year I have to stop doing a bunch of things and I can only continue doing one or two things, what are they? And when you see this list, that starts to become a lot more obvious, a lot easier to analyze. And I see people saying, hello. So welcome Ron and Jennifer and St. John Butler and Nice Deluxe and Bruce Wayne and Beeline Bill. So thank you, everybody. Great to see you here. Okay, so, so that's the first thing. Let's audit the business. And we've got Beeline Bill at the house. He's, he is a business writer. He's a business mastermind. So feel free to add anything that you'd be auditing Bill. But that's really the first thing. So complete that audit. And when you do this, I mean, I'm going high level and, and, you know, big picture. But I would love to see you sit down like you're, like you're your own bookkeeper or if you have a bookkeeper, even better, and go, Okay, I spent $200 on Amazon ads. I spent $900 on editorial reviews. I spent $50 on this. You know, I bought posters this. Look at those things and then go back and see if you can attribute certain results to them, certain energetic results. Again, there's nothing wrong with saying that was super fun and wanting to do it again, even if you didn't sell a ton of books. And because again, why do it? You know, if you, if you're doing things that are selling a ton of books but you hate them, I don't think that's worth continuing either. So auditing is one. The next thing we want to do is, you know, we've talked a lot about this this year, the ecosystem or even the empire. And of course, we've created a whole live in person workshop called the Authors Empire Workshop, which is happening here in Las Vegas March 5th and 6th, I believe. Authorsempireworkshop.com if you're interested in coming, we only have 50 seats and I think we're getting close to being a quarter full already. So if you are interested, definitely mark your calendar and plan to get your ticket soon. But the ecosystem is a really, really important thing for Your author business. And that's, you know, I'm calling it ecosystem. But I also have been thinking about it as the empire and why we think of it like that is the book is just one piece and this is more true now than it ever has been. But I think it's been true for successful authors for a long time. The famous example is of course Harry Potter. Thinking about how, you know, the book was just one little piece of something that has become a mega empire. And so that's what I think it's important to really, really look at. And then what can you tighten up? What can you make better? And so this is know simple things like website. It's also your email list. It can be your reader magnets or your lead magnets. It can be your funnels, it can be the positioning of your author brand. It can also be the things that you offer around your book. So this could be apps, workshops like we're doing. We have our live, it's virtual so it's not in person, but we have our live course that is a direct, you know, it pulls content directly from self publish and succeed. And now the second edition. So it's our self publish and succeed course. That's part of our ecosystem. Of course our services are part of this ecosystem as well. For some people it's speaking, paid speaking, it's consulting that is all part of this empire or ecosystem that you're building. And so again, kind of like you've audited, you know, what worked and what didn't, what was fun and what wasn't. I think it's all also important to now look at, okay, where, where am I? Where am I leaking? And we just did this. Well, I've been doing it more than, than I say we as my team, but, but I've been doing this as well. I'm even specifically going, okay, YouTube as an example is a cornerstone, is a foundational part of our empire, our ecosystem here. And, and some things are not getting the traction that they used to get and other things have tremendous potential. And so next year, can you hear that? They are fixing up the office next door to me. And he just finished sanding the walls and I think he just was vacuuming after sanding the walls. They just painted and sanded. So apologies if even if you weren't distracted, I was so, so YouTube, we are seeing areas where we're going to change and shift. We'll be making that announcement beginning of January, how that's going to change. But that's an important part of this Ecosystem and evaluation because YouTube is a cornerstone. But also one of the big things that we have as part of our ecosystem or empire is our Author launch kit in 2026, we've just finished rebuilding Author Launch Kit. If you already have a license, make sure you're checking your email because we have sent out an email moving you from our previous platform over to the new robust and and newly built platform which has multi book functionality, some really great social media content creation tools and so much more. So check your email. But you know, all of these things are pieces that we're focusing on as a company now as an author business. It may be a lot simpler. It might be okay. Book is the cornerstone and I want speaking, I want some media and then you know, I'm going to run a couple live events or I'm going to do a virtual workshop and that's kind of your ecosystem. But tighten it up, look at what, what you're doing for next year and start to plan it. You know, I have a old school written calendar, I write things down and I'm like, okay, I'm promoting this, this is happening. Then this is when I'm going to be talking about it, you know, plan it out. And speaking of planning, that's number three. So as you wrap up 2025, look back at the content that you created and if you didn't create content, think about what you want to create in 2026. But same thing, look at 2025, what worked, what content resonated. That's part of what I did when I was evaluating the YouTube, our YouTube videos and our, our live streams and all of that and, and look at what worked really well. And then you know, think about what you're doing if you have a new book coming out in 2026 or are you doing some of these other empire building pieces and, and then you know, just get a pen and paper and sketch out your calendar and kind of put those big things down those book launch or an anniversary, like celebrating the one year anniversary of your book being out and plan that content and think about even if you don't have something going on monthly, can you plan some sort of core thing every two months? So an ebook sale, an anniversary celebration, your workshop your know, those kind of things. Think about themes. If there's a specific day of the year that ties really nicely to your book, you know, like a cancer day or a, you know, I think we have, we have many that tie. I mean there's even donut days and things like that. So I can Promise there's a day that ties to it. But if you're going to do something around it, create that. And if you do have Author Launch Kit, Author Launch Kit will help with some of these things, this content planning and strategic planning. So you know, just log into Author Launch Kit and start playing around. But I think that that's really important and a lot of people don't look back at their whole year and go, wow, okay. So in the last 12 months, if I'm filtering through for content, this post, like I have one post on Instagram, I didn't do a lot on Instagram, just kind of in the last few months I started posting some of my YouTube reels and one of my YouTube reels just went bananas on Instagram and generated, I don't Even know, like 400,000 views or something and 25,000 not comments. But there's, there's thousands of comments on it too. So it was one of those crazy ones. And I look at that and I go, well actually, I don't know. So I'm going to create more content like that. But that's kind of cool that that one went viral. Ish, not quite viral, but it was very popular. But looking at that going, okay, which ones did really well, why do I think that is? Is there more content around that that I want to create going forward? Because that's going to help you. And then even think about your podcasts that you did, your media did, any partnerships that you had. I've actually had lots of meetings. Just today I had a call with 11 labs and I had another call with Spotify for authors. So I'm starting to plan and build out more partnerships and do more work with some of these key companies that we want to work with that we're already talking about. They're looking for support, you know, amongst self published authors, which is great. So that's some of the stuff that we're doing. So I got two more for you, but I want to see what you guys are talking about. Jason said he's finally doing his author photo. Yay. That's great. Hey Jack, great to see you. And Beeline Bill is just echoing what I said, which is track it all, every dime spent and I would argue every dime that comes in and try as much as you can to correlate the two. So this dime went out and it brought in this quarter as much as you can. It's not always that easy. And even on something like Amazon ads, it's not necessarily a one to one. Right. So an Amazon ad. You know, it does show a click and a conversion, but the reality is by running Amazon ads you may see more organic sales as well. And a lot of times you don't realize this until you turn your Amazon ads off. And that's just because of the, you know, just showing your book to that audience multiple times. The ad may not actually be the thing that finally makes the sale, but the ad was part of them seeing it and finally going, oh, I've been hearing so much about this book when in reality it was just your ad. Which, you know, that's not a bad thing. But that's part of the benefit of ads is they will keep that visibility, those touch points up. And so sometimes you can't track dime out quarter in, but it does help and it's feeding it. Okay, and let's see. Ms. Awesome Anna, I love your work and mentorship. Thank you so much. With my next book, I'm thinking of working with your team. Well, we would love to chat with you to see if it's a fit, of course. But regardless, come over to our school community. Angela will put the link in the comments. We are supporting authors over there for free in a lot of ways and then we have a paid community where you can join us and get support through office hours, calls and other training. But come on over, we got lots of amazing things planned for for that community for 2026. So whether we're working with you one on one in our services or over there, we would love to support you in your journey. Okay, so see, let's go back to my notes and see. So number four, strengthen your assets. I don't know, I probably should come up with a slightly better way. But you know, I would even say strengthen around your intellectual property. I'm not sure I need to play with this one. I should have run it through chat GPT first but thinking of your book as an asset was kind of where I was going with this. And so as you look at at your book as an asset, think about how you're going to make this asset appreciate. Because again, if you think of it as an asset, you're not just thinking of it as the book I launched past tense and now it's collecting dust. Right? We're thinking of it as that, as the beautiful intellectual property that it is. And now let's see what else we can do with this intellectual property in 2026. And I think sometimes that means updating. So that's what we just did with self publish and succeed. We looked at it and we went at the start of 2025, we looked at it and we went, you know what? This book isn't talking about AI. We've worked with, you know, another 500 authors since this book was written. We've refined our processes and it's time, it's time to give this book an updated look. And so that's what we did. We rewrote a lot of the sections, added some material on how to think about AI and, and really brought it back into the times. So, but that's thinking of it as an asset, as the cornerstone of what we do at Book Launchers. You know, when you sign on with our full services, Angela, she ships you a box, a welcome box that has some goodies in it, of course, but it's also giving you a copy of Self Publish and Succeed and Self Promote and Succeed. Because these aren't just books, they are foundational. When somebody starts working with us on, in our team, we also have them read these books because they need to know everybody who's on the team needs to have read these books and needs to know this content inside and out. And we used it to train Julie the Book Bot. So you know anybody who's used Julie the Book Bot, say hi. Because Julie the Book Bot is, is brilliant and she has been trained on the books and on the YouTube content and she can answer your publishing, book marketing, book publishing questions in quite a detailed way. She can evaluate your book description, she can evaluate your author bio and give you suggestions and she can do it in a way that ChatGPT or some of these LLMs doesn't because she has been trained on everything you need to know to succeed and build your author business and succeed as a nonfiction self publishing author. And so it's really, really niche and really, really specific. But that's using the book as an asset, right? It is not just about the book. We have a client, we have actually quite a few clients now, but we just got news yesterday, I think that one of our clients has a lot of international rights interest. And so our partner agency, Drop Cap has signed, is sent over a contract to sign him and represent him. And we've had this happen, you know, a handful of times before and they've gotten deals and the books are published in other languages in other countries. And again, that's an asset. So you retain the rights to this asset in this country and then in other countries publishers license it from you sell it and you get paid a royalty and a fee for that. So that's really great. So when you think of it as an asset, how do you keep it appreciating and not having it lose value? One is keeping it up to date with the content. Another is keeping the metadata. So your keywords, your categories, the COVID the book description. Is everything still current? Does it need a new format? Should you record an audiobook? Could you add a workbook? Could you add a companion product to it? Maybe it needs its own clone. And for book authors right now, if you're working on it, of course, Self Publish and Succeed Live and Authors Empire Workshop, those are two things that you should seriously consider, because it will help you write a much, much better book. Because you're going to work on your reader, your hook, your business plan behind the book. Those things are fundamental. And thinking of your book as an asset now sets you up for a greater chance of success. But then also, as we wrap up 2025 and start to look at 2026, how does this book play into your goals? How can you. How can you utilize the book to get you where you want to go? So maybe it's bigger stages or it's media or it's okay, I want to monetize my content. I want to leverage what I'm doing. So it's not all one to one. That's a common goal with our clients. So thinking about that and then thinking about this book as an asset, and what do you need to do to make this asset worth even more in 2026? All right, number five. And then we can open it up to questions. We can do prizes for everybody who's here and who has said hello. But number five, is. Is speaking of scaling and kind of thinking about using it as an asset is to really kind of look at 2025 and go, what am I going to stop doing? And at Author Nation, there was this really, really great presentation that kicked it all open. Drew, can't think of his last name, but he had this presentation with all these cubes, and he brought them on stage. And one thing he said is when you set a new goal, you need to immediately stop doing two things to make room for that goal. He said, you have to stop doing the easy thing, and you have to stop doing the hard thing. And the hard thing being the hard thing to stop doing. And for some people, that might be okay, I can't watch, you know, no more weeknight TV watching or no more, you know, something. Because in order to make room for this goal, you have to stop doing things. And for some people, it may be looking at that energetic Lift that one thing you've been doing, it might be social media as an example. I know for a lot of people social media is a big energy suck and it often doesn't have the return that you want. And so maybe it's I'm going to stop doing social media, but in its place, I'm going to put my energy, effort, attention onto this thing. So as you look at 2026 and you're wrapping up 2025, let's look at something that you want to stop doing and then find that thing that was working, that you enjoyed and let's double down on it for 2026. And I think if you can wrap up 2025 thinking about those two things, like the one thing I'm not going to do and that one thing I'm going to double down on, that will make 2026 your best year yet. Because now you can be strategic about where you're going to invest your time, your money. If you have a team where you're going to invest their time and their energy and ultimately, you know, this is committing to this being a business. And as soon as you commit, as soon as you say, okay, I am running my author business and you get in that mindset of oh my gosh, this is a business, I think you will change how you behave and that shift alone is going to change the trajectory that you are on. Especially if you've been thinking of this as a hobby or a passion project, that one mindset shift will dramatically change. Ultimately, if you do exactly what you did in 2025, don't expect any different outcome at the end of 2026. I think that is one of the most important things to take away. In fact, if you do the same things you did this year, even if this year was a good year, if you do the same things, you probably will get less success in 2026. That's why I think it's really important to evaluate what you're going to stop doing and what you're going to do more of and really do that strategically and also look at where we're going, right? Where's the world going, what's trending? And we'll be doing another video on that coming up this month. What to watch out for. I just had a call with 11 Labs, somebody from the 11 Labs team today. They just announced today that they have 11 reader chat and so you can set it up. And I'm in the middle of doing it with self publish and succeed. I used my voice clone and produced the audiobook version for it. And I'm just in the middle of publishing it to 11 reader. But on 11 reader it has the functionality now where a reader can chat with the book content. So I'll be curious to see how it stacks up against Julie Bot. It won't be quite as good as Julie the Bookbot, but. But I believe that this is where we are and I've said this before, that I think you have to set your book up to be experienced, not just to be read. And this is just further evidence of kind of where we're going and where the world is going to be at at the end of 2026. So it's looking don't do the same things in 2025 because it is not going to get you even the same results as you got this year unless you were very future forward with what you were doing. You know, looking at LLMs and discoverability and audiobooks and engagement and exper activities for your book. But a lot of people just think it's a new year, I can work harder, I'm going to get better results. And that is not going to work. You have to work smarter and strategically and remember that you're running a business and a business grows because an owner makes intentional strategic choices. So there we go. That was what I wanted to share. I'm curious what you're going to do. What's one thing you're going to do as you wrap up 2025 and head into 2026? Let me know in the comments and we will do prizes in a second. All right, so let's see. Bring all the cool new stuff. You got it, Gary. I am on it. And this awesome. Anna, I want to go to Author Nation next year. Yeah, it was a great event. And you know, it's really. It's more fiction than nonfiction by far. There's definitely a lot more content for the fiction authors, but there's lots of great networking, great events, great learnings, you know. And of course you're in Las Vegas, which is always a fun place to be. Okay. And St. John Butler is going to have the book done in 2026. And looking forward to holding that first copy in your hands. That's great. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and pop on over hopefully to share screen and if there's been any questions that come in or if you have a question, you can go ahead and post it right now. And if not, that's cool too. I'm happy to call it a day at any point. I will tell you Next week, Angela will be hosting, but I'm going to pre record a video for you for livestream on some of the content changes that Draft 2 Digital has rolled out recently. They've made some dramatic shifts that are pertinent to nonfiction authors to pay attention to. So I will record some content for you and then Angela will be here to hang out with you and chat about it in the comments. All right, we have 10 entries. Somebody just snuck in because it went nine to 10. So let's see who our winner is today. And Dana Baker, congratulations. I don't know if you've won before, so here's how it works. What you're going to do is you're going to email angelaeamooklaunchers.com she'll probably put it in the comments for you, and you are going to let her know your mailing address and then what prize you would like. And we typically have four different prizes that we're giving away. And the prizes are a hashtag, no boringbooks mug or an Author Launch Kit mug. I don't know which one. Nope, not Author Launch Kit hashtag, no Boring Books mug. Yeah, okay, perfect. It's the hashtag NoBoringBooksMug. And also our OSO soft journal. And then we also have copies of the old Self Publish and Succeed. Angela's like, yes, take them. Take them out of my closet so I can make room for the second edition. And we have copies of Self Promote and Succeed. So let her know which prize you would like. And while we're talking prizes, I also want to let you know that we have our annual holiday extravaganza happening December 16th. It's going to be right here, same time on December 16th. So 2:00pm Pacific Standard Time. Our holiday extravaganza is a great big party we where we clean out Angela's closet. So basically, for an hour straight, we're going to answer questions. Different people from the Book Launchers team will be here and we're going to have prizes. We're going to have fun and, and it will be not a guaranteed win of a prize, but we give away a lot of prizes. So the, the a great chunk of the people that are there partying and celebrating the holiday season with us will take home a prize. All right, Angela, any questions?

Muted. We've only had a couple come in so far. There was a comment from Mike, though, that I wanted to share. He said, I'm also thinking asset include your brand name and all social media names and email address, website, etc.

Yes, thank you, Mike, and I know Mike's definitely thinking this too, having suffered all kinds of fraud and online challenges this past year. But yes, your brand absolutely is an asset. And I think that's a great point. So it's not just your book to think about and evaluate. I mean, that was, that was kind of point one was evaluate where you know all the elements to your empire and think about your funnel, your emails, your website, you know, your author pages and just give them all an assessment and make sure they're in line with where you want to go next year. You know, what is your brand going to increase in value next year? And if you look at this strategically, I think that you can set yourself up to treat it like a brand and have it. Or, sorry, treat it like an asset and have it grow in value. So that's great. Thanks, Mike.

Okay, next up was from St. John Butler. Any good author events in NYC that you know of?

There are a few. Nothing's really independent author focused that comes to mind because a lot of the stuff that happens in New York is traditionally published focused. And, and so off the top of my head, no. But I think you're already in our school community. Go ahead and post this question there and I will do a double check and see there's a few east coast things that are happening. Like I'm drawing a blank on the name. I can see their brownish kind of website. And it's not, I want to say it's in Chicago, so it's not New York City. But there's a few things that are east coast that might be worth checking out. But a lot of things are traditionally published focused.

Okay. Only other question we have is from Jennifer. She said, how do new authors navigate all the new tools with limited funds?

Yeah, I think that's part of your prioritization and looking at your 2025, what worked? What do you want to do in 2026? And then carefully going, okay, these things I'm going to stop doing or stop spending. One of the things that we do as a company is we, we basically. And I say we, you know, loosely, because Angela does it, but she goes through and she makes a spreadsheet of all of the subscriptions and all the things that we spend money on because they start to add up. They creep. They creep up on you. You know, you get 20 bucks for this service and $12 for this service, and the next thing you know, you have $4,000 worth of subscriptions in a month. Of course, we're an excessive example because we test Things for our clients. We test things for you guys. We use things ourselves. So, you know, we're an extreme, extreme case, but I think it's worth it. At the end of the year, just export all your credit card expenses and start to look through and go, okay, which, which of these services am I paying for that I actually need going forward? And can I free up a little bit of money to test some of these things and then to think about which ones I want to test? Well, what's my most important goal for next year? So, for example, if my most important goal is, okay, I really want to spend next year doing something every day to market my book. Well, something like Author Launch Kit is a perfect tool for you. If you're focused on writing your book next year and you want a simple, powerful tool to help you with all the things kind of writing and crafting the book. You might want to look at something like dibly create. And so those are some things that you want to think about. But you have to know where you're going and in order to assess, you know, where the limited funds that you have should be, should be put towards or what they should be put towards in order to get you closer to your goal.

Okay, that's as it is for. Actually, let me unstar that one. That was the only questions I had starred. Oh, it looks like one just came in from exceeding great reward are prizes taken from the folks who chat during the live. Or else we.

Yeah, so we have two different kinds of prizes. We do. The first prize is. Sorry, the first kind of prize is. Yes. The people who are here live, interacting, saying hello, participating. That's the draw that you saw me do. The other prize we do and we do this one every other week. So we just did it last week. Is everybody who comments the day of video comes out. So Tuesdays and Fridays. So if you're watching the replay, go ahead and post a comment, say hello, tell me what you're going to do different in 2026 or what you're assessing from 2025. And. And then we put all of those people into a random name picker and we draw prizes as well. And then on the holiday extravaganza, you have to be live. It's going to be people who are, who are there live having fun. We'll have quizzes, we'll have, we'll have just random prizes. We'll have, you know, enter this hashtag in and you'll win all of those kind of things. So we have lots of fun on that. But you do have to be live to win on that one, but we want to make sure everybody has a chance. So just commenting the day a video is released gets you entered as well.

And I think we should remind people, especially for some of our old timers who have been with us for years on end, that the holiday extravaganza this year is not on Saturday. It's always been on Saturday in previous years. It is on a normal YouTube live stream time for us. So it's on the 16th at 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern.

Exactly. Yes. Thank you for that reminder. We changed it. This year feels extra busy. I think. We've tried to do so many extra things and so we just couldn't settle on a Saturday that worked. So we went with a regular live stream, which I think is going to be fun. Hopefully everybody can still come out and celebrate the season with us.

All right, that's it. That's all I have, Julie, as far as questions go.

Fantastic. All right, so next week, same time, same place, we're going to be talking about the draft, two digital content changes because they came out with some pretty wild and crazy changes to their content guidelines, so books that they will and will not publish. So I'll have my thoughts on that for you next week. And Angela will be here to do all the prizes and chat with you. And then we'll be both back here on December 16th for our holiday extravaganza. We'll see you then. SA.