I’ve got a full-time job. Like a lot of people at the moment, I’m finding that I’ve been on pay freeze for quite a long time. And basically I’m finding it hard to make ends meet. And there’s no point in complaining about it. You’ve got to just get on with the job of trying to solve the problem. I’ve got an attitude in life of you obey the law, you pay your tax, and after that you create your own chances. One of the things that attracted me to Blue Sky was the fact that it just made so much sense. And I like the ethos and attitude of the company. And it’s just really, really nice to see a company that actually takes the trouble to explain how to do things and then updates the training records so that whenever things change, you can go back into the training records and you can see that actually things have been updated. So I just find that’s really, really positive.
And I began on the products and I had a coach and I was identifying test products to download and to order from Asia and so on and then COVID hit. And then I had major problems because the whole logistics of COVID hit shipping, it hit prices and so on. And then Sophie did a webinar on publishing and I listened to what she had to say. And as per usual, she talks a lot of sense. She’s coming at it from an attitude of basically, this is what I’ve tried, this has worked, this hasn’t worked. So I’d signed onto the publishing course.
Now, one of the books I did was on my time in working what was the Soviet Union. And I wrote a book about a journal that I kept when I was over there and published it. And it’s out on Kindle, it’s on paperback and it’s also gone to audio. I checked today to see what the figures are on it and I’ve sold 65 books so far within about three months of actually releasing it. Made some mistakes in the process of doing that. And I knew that it was going to be a learning process. I also discovered that I’ve actually sold the first books today in German as of yesterday, which really surprised me. So the Germans are very interested in the book in English.
So I’ve got two more books in the hopper at the moment. One’s on electric bikes, which are big in the United States. And that’s now going through the process at the moment with Urban Writers, but I’ve also taken the book that I wrote about my journal in the Soviet Union and I’ve developed it into a spy thriller. I’m using it as my jump point to take what was factual and what I encountered when I was there and then turn it into a fiction book. So I figure that if I go for a spy thriller the keywords should be really easy. I mean, you can’t get much wrong than that. So I’m hoping that by doing that and then by learning my lessons from the marketing funnel up front, then I’m hoping that I’m going to get more buy into that and I’m hoping that I’ll learn lessons from the first book.
My takeaway so far are that you’ve got to have continuity. You need to make sure that you follow a format and you’ve got to make sure that you have a discipline to work on the business. Even if it’s 10 minutes a day, you’ve got to do something so that at least the day hasn’t actually been wasted. I don’t know what normal is at the moment if I’m honest about it with COVID and pandemic and so on. Life is not what it was two years ago. No doubt about that. We don’t know what we’re doing. So the best thing to do is keep your head down and keep on pushing the business, because this is the future.
E-commerce online is the way things are going in the future. And I’ve now got to go forward and learn lessons from what I did wrong. And I think basically the two lessons I have to learn from are making sure that I get the message out there before the book is published and Dr. Trina has been very helpful on that. And some of the other ladies, CJ and so on have been fabulous and Virginia and so on, have been wonderful in providing support in how to do that. But it’s getting those keywords right. It’s the key point of the whole thing is to sell the keyword and the keyword will lead people to the product.
The ethos of Blue Sky is excellent. The underlying message through the whole thing is don’t forget your health, because if you don’t look after yourself you’re just going to burn yourself out and you’re never going to achieve anything. So it’s a combination of all of those things, discipline, health, and then go for it. We’re heading in the right direction and thank you to your support.