One IMPORTANT Lesson My Nieces Taught Me on Vacation

Welcome to the Author Audience show, the podcast that helps you reach more people with your message. Create a book, connect with your audience, change lives. Here's your host, Shelly Hitz.

My nieces painted these for me while I was on vacation, and I want to share with you the one important lesson they taught me and how it can help you to sell. Sell more books. Hi, my name is Shelly Hitz. I'm the creator of authoraudienceacademy.com I'm an author coach, and I'm on a mission to help you reach more people with your message. Much of that has to do with marketing, but I work with writers, and so many writers really, really cringe when I talk about writing. They're like, sholli, I just want to write my books. I don't want to market. And so I wanted to share with you today a story about what I learned from my nieces while I was on vacation. I just returned this week from vacation. I had a great time away, and I wanted to share with you something because I noticed the difference it made for me. I was on vacation, and my nieces are 9 and 10, almost 11 years old. And while I was there, my sister has some of their paintings displayed in her house. And I thought, how fun would it be to have my nieces paint pictures for me that I could post in my condo and just be reminded of them. My husband and I have not been able to have children, and so my nieces are really, really close to me and they're like, extension of my, you know, just being my own kids in a way. And I just really love them so much. And so I asked them to paint some pictures for me. My sister and I, we went to Walmart, we bought a couple canvases, and. And we bought some paint. And I didn't realize how inexpensively you could buy some supplies. I mean, we got these canvases for like $2 each, a two pack for like $4, and the paint was like $0.50 a bottle. And I was like, oh, wow. I didn't know it was this inexpensive. And then we went to paint, and my sister said, well, maybe it'd be a good idea to look onto Pinterest and get some ideas of what they could paint for you. So I found a picture of a lighthouse, and then I found a picture of star. That's part of my branding. Let your light shine. It's your time to shine. And so I thought it'd be fun to have some things that also incorporated my branding. So they painted these two pictures for me. Aren't they awesome? Our 9 year old niece did this one and my 10 year old niece did this one. I love how the gold paint kind of glitters in the light. Isn't that fun? But the lesson my nieces taught me is that what I thought it would take to create a painting was not really true. Like I thought you had to be Picasso. Like I thought you had to go to art school to do a painting. And isn't this fun? Like this is just my nine year old niece, like doing some abstract stuff. She's nine. And yet this is so cool. I love it. And you don't have to be Picasso. Plus I thought it was so expensive, like you had to spend tons and tons of money on supplies and all of that. And I realized it's a lot cheaper to get started. I mean, yeah, it's probably you can spend more if you want to expand later, but just to get started and do some fun things, you can get started really inexpensively. So my niece has taught me, like I can try painting. I could actually be an artist. I could actually do some painting. And so today I went to the store, I went to Hobby Lobby and to Walmart and I got some supplies. And here's my basket of supplies. I just got. I got some paints. You can see the different paints. These are only 50 cents at Walmart. And I got some fun ones. This one's a gold glitter one. But I just got some basic supplies, all for about $30.

That's not very much money. I spend more than that just sometimes going to the grocery store and getting snacks, you know what I mean? And this is something that is just opening up my heart. It's opening up the creativity in me. My theme for this year is thrive and just being able to express myself. Like my nieces. They painted these now, these are in right now. I'm holding them, but they're in my hallway. I see them every time I leave my office and it just fills my heart. It just fills my heart with joy. How does this relate to you as an author? I talk to a lot of authors that are very resistant in marketing their books. They love writing, they just want to write and they want other people to do the marketing for them. But to be honest, some of the marketing is best done by you, like writing the emails or writing the thing. I mean, you can outsource some things, you can outsource the scheduling. I outsource it. You can outsource the formatting of your blogs, the text stuff, you can outsource that. But the voice, your content creation, certain things that you're putting into place needs to come from you. And yet sometimes it's like you have that mind block, kind of like I had with painting. I thought you had to be Picasso. I thought you had to go to art school. I thought you had to spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars to get started painting. And that's so not true. And you may have a mind block with marketing that it's going to take tons and tons of time, it's going to cost you tons of money, you have to buy all these tools and it's going to just overrun your life and you're not going to have a life anymore. However, there are systems and there are strategies. And just like my nieces showed me, painting is so much easier. And you can do something very inexpensively with marketing. You can get started with free strategies, free tools, and you can set up a system that runs in the background 247 that you don't have to be sitting behind your computer all day every day. You can set it, forget it. Yes, you have to do some work up front, but then it works for you. And that's what I'm teaching you in authoraudienceacademy.com I'm teaching teaching you my author automation system to work smarter, not harder and how to sell books without being pushy and self promotional. And a lot of this will run without you having to sit behind your computer. Because marketing, yes, it can be very expensive. You can put a ton of money into something like Facebook ads and not see the return on your investment. There are certain ways I recommend you do Facebook ads, but that's a whole other training. But you know, it could cost you a lot of money if you invest in a ton of tools up front. I didn't do that. I built as I went. So my husband and I were missionaries in the country of Belize for two years and we saw a lot of really amazing things that God did through us. I did physical therapy, I was a volunteer physical therapist and my husband did youth ministry. Well, anyways, we saw people that built their houses. They were able to get mortgages like we are here. And so they built their house brick by brick, stone by stone, wire by wire, just with the money they had. What I have done is I have built my business and built a full time income. Now last year we earned six figures by doing a similar thing. We only used the money that we had. And so if we didn't have the money, we didn't invest it. As my business grows, I invest more. But I started with primarily free tools and there are ways like even with your email list, there's free tools you can use that I recommend something like Benchmark Email that allows you to have autoresponder emails. But I share the entire system, all the tools and the things. And it doesn't have to cost you an arm and a leg, doesn't have to take all your time. And it's something I don't see really anyone else teaching in depth in the way that in the system, in the way that I'm teaching. And so I'm excited to share it with you. I'm going to be doing a live training this Tuesday, let's see, June 28th at 1pm Eastern for my Author audience Academy members. And so if you would love to join us and be part of the Author Automation System as I teach it, be able to come on live, be able to get in on the action. The trainings will be up ongoing, so whenever you join it will be there for you. But I'd love to have you can join us@authoraudienceacademy.com you know, we're just listening to my story of the paintings and how it was so much cheaper and so much simpler than I ever thought. And I encourage you, I encourage you to think outside the box. I encourage you to really not let certain thoughts and certain obstacles that may have stopped you in the past keep you from moving forward. There is a system. There is a way for you to market your books without being pushy, without being self promotional and without spending all your time in front of a computer without having to invest tons and tons of time. Like you can set up a system that will work for you and everyone's different. But I'm excited to share with you the Author automation system in authoraudienceacademy.com you know, we have had over.

$150,000 of consumer debt, not including mortgages and that sort of thing. And we have a little bit of debt left to pay off on an issue we had with our taxes. When our business started growing, we had no idea we were going to have to pay that much in taxes. And so we're almost completely debt free again. But we have made a lot of really bad choices. We've ran up credit cards before and I actually for a while I had to freeze my credit cards in a bag of water. So then it was in ice so that I didn't have access to them so that I couldn't buy them because I'd gotten into a routine of spending on credit and spending money we didn't have so much. So we've learned to be able to just to use the money we have and to grow with the profits. So if you have just a small amount of profits, I encourage you to consider reinvesting those back into your business, back into your marketing. And as you grow, you'll be able then to keep more for your family, to pay bills, all of that, but to just keep reinvesting back into it. Just like the Belizeans would just build their house brick by brick as they had the money. We can build our business that way too. Awesome. Well, I'm gonna head off for now, but I will see you guys later. Bye. Bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Author Audience Show. Connect with us online@authoraudience.com where you'll find all the resources mentioned in today's episode. While you're there, grab Shelly's free video training on how to write and publish your book using her Six Step Ascent method. Join us again next week to learn how to reach your audience with your message.