As the clock struck midnight one year ago, watching the fireworks light up the sky over Las Vegas, I was full of optimism for 2020.
I had been working on a deal to take over operations of Publishizer, the premiere crowdfunding platform for authors and was ramping up to publish dozens of books this year.
We closed the deal and went live with Publishizer on February 3, then a month later I was heading to LA for Marisa Murgatroyd’s live event first week of March.
She invited me to share my story to her amazing audience, and there were set to be 600+ people in the room.
But then in the days leading up to her event, the bad news started to really hit. Fortunately her event still went off, but hundreds of people had canceled or were prevented from coming last minute.
That’s when I started to see the writing on the wall that we were in for a wild ride in 2020.
But interestingly, in the tense uncertainty of the early days of the looming pandemic, the energy in that room was electric!
Just a few days later we had what became our final SPICE Dinner for a while.
SPICE stands for Supporting Prosperity, Impact, Contribution & Entrepreneurship and these dinners had been a reliable fixture in our lives that I really love.
After hosting 22 consecutive monthly SPICE Dinners at my place in Las Vegas, the streak was broken. I had often wondered what it would actually take to break the momentum we were building having SPICE Dinners monthly in (at that time) 4 different cities each month.
Well, I can report that it took a global pandemic to stop that momentum and derail our monthly dinners and gatherings.
In it’s place, I entered what felt like a Groundhog’s Day experience of life – the classic movie where Bill Murray lives the same day over and over again
I’d wake up with the sun, stretch and spend some time in my garden, then sit down at my desk in Lifestyle Entrepreneurs Press HQ and dive into 7-9 hours of publishing work each day.
Fortunately we have always been structured as a virtual company, with team and authors spread out around the globe, so there was no real disruption to our workflow and thankfully Ingram, our distribution partner, stepped up big time to make sure there were minimal disruptions bringing books to market.
This allowed us to provide some much-needed stability and reliability to our authors. To be a lighthouse on solid rock, when the winds of change are whipping up a storm.
I reflect that for the 5 years I’ve lived in Las Vegas, I’ve rarely been in town for more than 2 weeks at a time.
This year I was here just about every day of 2020!
In place of traveling, I started exploring the surrounding area and fell in love with Mt. Charleston and the Spring Mountains, which offer 9,000+ feet of elevation in an alpine environment, less than an hour from the Vegas valley floor.
My most salient memories this year involve morning hikes in the mountains, looking out over 100 miles of Southern Nevada and eating a peach and yogurt for breakfast in the forest, before barreling back down to the valley floor and right into a full day of author calls.
Finding the enjoyment and creating contrast in what would otherwise have been a depressing monotony of progressively worse news in the broader world.
Indeed, spending time hiking off trails in the mountains helped me turn further inward for answers and guidance. Listening to my own inner prompting, instead of living in reactive defense to the latest statistics and restrictions piling up.
Never have I been more clear, decisive and aligned with the vision and mission I’ve set out for Lifestyle Entrepreneurs Press as 2020:
To Elevate Global Consciousness by Empowering Authors & Entrepreneurs. We are the Publisher for the Passionate and Help You Change the World With Your Words
So many times I’ve leaned in this year to help and support; from countless strategic guidance sessions with out authors to help them navigate the year, to giving away free books to our audience to stay inspired and consulting with entrepreneurial friends whose businesses were being rocked.
We also ran a number of contests on the Publishizer platform, which allowed our team to serve and support hundreds of authors…many more than I could work with directly in publishing partnership.
Our authors that stayed the course and leaned in to support their audiences saw considerable book sales and business growth, which of course is a reflection of the positive impact they are making in the world.
On March 31, Dane Maxwell’s book Start From Zero came out, just in time to provide thousands of people with practical advice on how to build a business with zero ideas, zero cash, zero experience and zero confidence (as the cover boldly claims)
The net effect of these stories, and the countless others I could tell here, is that 2020 is Lifestyle Entrepreneurs Press best year in business ever, and to be honest it’s not even close.
This was a banner year for book sales, and I have signed over 55 publishing deals in 2020, ensuring that we’ll have a consistent stream of inspiring books gracing shelves throughout 2021.
So, on this final day of 2020, I bid farewell to what was undoubtedly the most wild and crazy year I’ve experienced.
The world changed in 2020.
And that isn’t just going to stop once the clock strikes midnight tonight.
We are all in for a wild ride next year, so my advice is plan accordingly.
Take this opportunity to get real with yourself about what you want to accomplish next year.
Get real with yourself about who you want to be, and how you want to show up for those important to you next year.
Get real with yourself about what you’re really here on Earth to do.
Is it to play it safe and be on the defensive, wary of dangers and threats coming in from seemingly all directions?
Or is it to play a bigger game, to make a real difference by inspiring others with your bold action?
Fortunes are made and the future is written by those who take decisive action in the face of uncertainty.
Spoiler alert: There will always be uncertainty.
So plan accordingly and chart your own course.
Stand firm in your choices
Let your inner voice guide you towards your own definition of Greatness
If you don’t, someone else will guide you to theirs
You can take that to the bank.
Much love and see you next year,
Jesse
PS: Have something inspiring to share going into 2021? Hit reply and let me know 🙂
Special Gift from Santa all the way from the North Pole!
Christmas Greetings from Santa and to help make his deliveries easier this year, I’m giving you a copy of Lifestyle Entrepreneur right here, right now 🙂
Make Money Doing What You Love, Even in Tough Times
Lifestyle Entrepreneur is the result of having lived a non-traditional life. In my twenties, I launched five businesses and sold the last two. I have been in a rock band touring America, and I’ve been flown around the world as a professional dating coach. I have traveled to and lived in over twenty-five countries, learning the local languages while there. I feel very blessed to have friends all over the world, a family that loves me at home, and generally able to live the life that I’ve always dreamed of.
But this book isn’t about me. It’s about you!
If you take only 10 percent of the information and ideas in this book and put them into practice, it will change your life. I promise.
Lifestyle Entrepreneur contains the essence of everything I’ve learned over the last ten years of starting businesses, traveling the world, and exploring the things I’m passionate about. Now I would like to share a blueprint for how you can do all of these things and more.
Q4 2020 Strategic Planning Call for LE Press Authors
So much has happened this year, and it is important to honor all of your experiences. We will guide you to arrive at a place of inner peace on this call. Because only from a place of inner peace can you plan your best and brightest course of action into 2021.
On this call I have some exciting updates to share with you, including an opportunity to get booked on a number of podcasts quickly and for free!
I’ve been developing a relationship with Kevin Harrington & Seth Greene who run the Sharkpreneur podcast, as well as manage a network of dozens of podcasts. On our upcoming call I’ll share the specifics of how we can get you in front of larger and larger audiences.
I’ll also share an overview of Lifestyle Entrepreneurs Press operations in 2020. This has been our best year in business by far, and we are building momentum into next year that I want to benefit you and your book/s.
Then the majority of this call will be spent with master teacher Dale Halaway and I leading you through a process of “closing the book” on 2020 and dreaming, planning and deciding what your 2021 will look like.
By the end of this 90-minute call you will have closed the door on all that you wish to leave behind in 2020, and identified & elevated your priorities and top opportunities for 2021.
This call is exclusively for you and every quarterly call we’ve had this year has been absolute GOLD, this one will not disappoint.
Every savvy entrepreneur who sets their sights on writing a book does so not only to share their message with the world and people on a large scale, but also to stake a claim to their thought leadership and build their business strategically in the process.
Bringing your message to a greater audience is only one part of what a book can do for your business. When done well, your book can become the vessel through which you take people you’ve never met on a transformational journey. By committing to writing The Book – as opposed to some also-ran pamphlet type book – you elevate your business prestige and have the key open doors in the media
Here are 5 ways your book can serve as an asset for your business, when done well and intentionally:
Create an Emotional Connection With Your Audience.
Well written books rely on well-told stories. Stories that allow your audience to see themselves in a world they’re longing for. The key to those stories is to connect emotionally, reaching through the pages of your book to your reader and pulling at their heart strings. When done effectively, you can close the gap in the relationships between reader and author, no matter the physical distance. That emotional arousal also gives us a piece of valuable real estate in the memory of the reader, keeping you and your book around in their mind long after they’ve put it down.
Create Multiple Touchpoints In One Sitting.
Your book should be designed with a transformational arc, that takes readers from where they are today, to where they want to go. Your book providesmultiple touchpoints in one source, bringing readers deeper into your sphere of influence with each chapter. One important touchpoint is to make the reader feel understood in their current struggles, like they have an ally in their journey, cheering them on with each page and chapter. Someone to guide them, an emotional connection to the author (you), tactical advice and strategies they can put into practice, and advise as to how to implement those things. Where else can we do all of that for our audience in one place over and over again, without having to repeat the process or increase our time commitment? Only with a book!
Meet Your Audience (and Potential Clients) Where They Are
The opening chapters of your book should be designed to meet your audience where they are, and let them know they are reading the right book, at the right time, to make meaningful change in their life. Although it may feel extensive, the point is to speak right to the journey you know your audience is in before they find you. Think of this as speaking to their “before state” trusting that the right readers will self identify with the language, stories and guidance in a way that makes them want to take their next step with you and within your business.
Clarify and Claim Your Thought Leadership
The birthing process of writing a book – identifying your framework, gaining clarity on the entire customer journey, understanding how you do what you do – will undoubtedly bring you higher levels of clarity and understanding about your business. Writing your book is, accordingly, an opportunity to really stake a claim with your ideas, your thought leadership, and what you want to be known for in the market.
Open The Door For You to Share Your Message on Major Media
There’s a reason that the root word in “authority” is “author”. As soon as you’ve gone through the process of defining and refining how you help your customers and can replicate that for someone else without you needing to guide every step in person. As an author you achieve a level of authority that is recognized by the rest of the world. To be an author means you have learned valuable lessons and are now sharing them for the benefit of others. Once your name is stamped on the front of that book, doors will open and you will stand toe-to-toe with peers you once admired, reaching and serving larger audiences of people than you ever before.
Although your book is written for your audience in order to be the best asset for your business, there’s a cathartic transformation that happens when you become an author. The process will push you to the edges of your emotional limits and perhaps just a little beyond. However, once your book is complete, it has the ability to take on a life of it’s own and you get to close that chapter in your own life.
When your book is intentionally thought out to be an asset and positioned as a starting point for someone else to begin to see, feel, and understand the transformation you provide, it sells forever and lives forever.
When designed within the longer customer journey in mind, your book is just the hook, serving you to bring attention, interest, and leads into your world for the life of your business and beyond.
The question isn’t if you can write a book, or whether that book will be valuable for your readers and therefore your business; with the right guidance and intention both are true.
The question is will you write it?
If you’re ready, my team and I stand ready to support you through the entire publishing process with no out-of-pocket costs to you, the author.
The first step is to Submit Your Book Idea so my team and I can review and reach out to connect with you!
Don’t Make These Mistakes when Launching Your Book
George Bryant: If you tell somebody they’re going to launch their business, right. It’s very hard to take a book and then distill that book down to an action plan of what steps to follow. Cause the book is kind of the blueprint, right. Say you have a process with 9 steps in it. So it’s a perfect example to be like, “Oh yeah, now that you have all this, you understand the paradigm, you understand the framework.”
You don’t have to go through the whole book, just come to this part of my website and I’m going to walk you step-by-step through the process with 9 videos and 9 emails, so you can launch it. But now you’re taking that book and you’re really using it as a calling card in the best of ways. So the one mistake, and I say, I’m going to harp on this one is that people launch a book and they leave too many holes in the bucket.
If that book doesn’t serve the purpose of, if somebody finds it and they need more accountability, more access, or an escalation into your world – and they don’t have a path to get there – then it was the biggest mistake that you can make.
Because now that book just becomes a liability, right? It’s kind of like noise, it’s disjointed.
It doesn’t fit into the business model and you’ve spent years of your life developing these tools, developing the mindset, developing the knowledge and the wisdom to be able to do this. Then another couple of years writing and editing.
And I remember that editing process. Right. And I was like, “If I’m ever going to go through that again, I’m going to make sure that I’m doing it for a purpose and a reason. Right?” And so the biggest mistake here is that thinking that the book itself is the calling card or is the way out.
If I had to give it an analogy, the book itself is the Light out in the water that serves as a waypoint to get them closer to you where your lighthouse is the final destination. So I think I nailed that. Did I miss anything there, Jesse?
Jesse Krieger: No, that’s 100% right, George. And the one thing I’d add to that is the biggest mistake that I see, or one of them is people saying, “I’m just going to put it out there and see what happens.”
And I can predict with almost one hundred percent accuracy that almost nothing’s going to happen. That sort of wraps into this conversation that we’re having around the book. Understandably, because it takes so much to write it, to edit it. It can be a grueling process. So by the time when it’s launched, you’re like, “Oh my God, thank God it’s done.”
Meanwhile on the other side of the looking glass, that’s the first time that that product, your book is now available to the public to consume, engage with and all of the benefits that it has to bring. And so we have to have that mindset as authors, as entrepreneurs that writing the book, editing even the whole publishing and launch process gets us like to bat, to start taking a swing.
So many times I’ve written my own ticket. Like, people have read word-for-word things that I’ve written on the air, on live broadcasts.
…and I love it. I just sit there and smile 🙂
“This is great” I think, I’m getting media coverage and it’s literally my words coming out of someone else’s mouth. Now, I’m not throwing anyone in particular under the bus with that, but pay attention to that because…
Now imagine you’re sitting inside of a Media role. You have a demand of crank out X amount of content. You’re trying to find this content 24/7, and here’s somebody who gives you something ready to go, and it makes their life easier. And in that process, you get all of the benefit of what you want to share and the exposure that you’re looking for.
I truly look at this as, you’ve got to get the media’s attention, but once you have the opportunity, make it so easy that all they have to do is say “Yes.”
Enter George Bryant: So, when you think about your book, your book is an asset, right? But it’s only an asset for the people that are going to promote it. If they don’t have to do any work, if somebody finds out, you have this book, but they know nothing about it, they don’t know what’s in it.
They don’t know the hooks. Well, now it’s a liability because if you’re sitting in the role of a producer or a content creator or a show booker, and you have 10 people in front of you and 9 of them are like, “yeah, here’s my book. Let me know if you want to interview me.”
But then one (ie, YOU) are like:
“Here’s my book, here’s the hooks. Here’s the three angles I talk about and the four biggest takeaways. Done for you.”
=> Which one are they going to choose? Because now they get to punch the clock at six hours instead of eight hours go home and get paid for it. Cause you made their job easier.
That my friends and fellow authors is how to get epic media coverage, do the media’s job for them and smile for the camera ?
Q3 2020 Strategic Planning Support for LE Press Authors
On this call you will be supported with just-in-time insights on how to reach new readers, sell more books and thrive amidst the uncertainty in the world today.
You will also be supported to create a 90-Day Plan for what you’ll create and do next as an author and entrepreneur. For those of you who haven’t met Dale Halaway yet, he is a transformational leader with 40 years experience leading over 3,000 seminars! He is also the best-selling author of Being Called to Change: Let Go of All That No Longer Serves You and Grow Into Your Full Potential Dale and I look forward to leading you through a visioning and planning process, as well as holding you accountable each quarter when we have these Strategic Planning Support calls. This is part of my 2020 Vision for Lifestyle Entrepreneurs Press – Deepening our partnership and support with our amazing authors (aka YOU :)
Want Weekly Support with Dale Halaway? Join the ELEVATE program at an introductory price of only $5.00 for the first month (especially for LE Press authors!) See you there and let’s lean into the second half of 2020 with intention and passion.
Want a firehouse of qualified leads delivered straight to your LinkedIn inbox?
That’s what Jimmy Coleman and his team at LeadBaller do every day!
Listen to learn the exact process we use to identify super-targeted potential clients, create “touchpoints” that warm up the connection, and result in…your ideal clients reaching out to YOU thank you for endorsing, recommending them etc.
Jimmy broke this strategy down to me last year and I thought it was brilliant…so I asked “can you do it for me?” – A great question to identify business ideas, by the way.
Well, fast forward a year later and he has built done-for-you LinkedIn Lead Generation into a business that’s growing like wildfire, but at the heart of it is his passion for getting results for his clients. If you want an intro to Jimmy, drop a comment or shoot me a message, enjoy!
Want to know the secret to getting booked on Top Podcasts? Jeremy Ryan Slate shares it in this video, as well as how his show The Create Your Own Life Show became a Top 100 podcast!
Podcast listenership is absolutely exploding! From March-May 2020 overall listenership is up 40%+
Getting on podcasts is also one of the BEST ways to get your message out, as people can hear the whole story (as opposed to a 2-min guest segment on TV, for example).
Jeremy is also the founder of Command Your Brand, which is who I use to get me booked on Top 200 shows (see ya in your Airpods soon 🙂
Enjoy and if you want an introduction to Jeremy, drop a comment or shoot me a message!
Here is the Media One Sheet we created to pitch me to podcasts:
This is our second Strategic Planning Support call in 2020 where we support you in deciding which aspect of your book, business & brand you will focus on building over the next 90-days.
On this call we have some important announcements for you:
Social Media Takeovers –Join us to learn how you can “takeover” the LE Press Facebook Page and Instagram account, reaching 40,000+ with your message and driving interest and sales for your book.
The Author’s Lighthouse– I’m launching a podcast and I want to interview YOU and feature you to our combined audience of 75,000+
Rich Author Pages on LE Press Website– We are in the process of a major upgrade to how your book/s are featured on our website. Soon we’ll include videos, book excerpts, custom content and syndicating any podcast or blog of yours.
…there are more, but that is a teaser 🙂
Then Dale Halaway is going to go 7 levels deep on what’s happening in the world now and how you can stay centered and grounded.
For those of you who haven’t met Dale Halaway yet, he is a transformational leader with 40 years experience leading over 3,000 seminars! He is also the best-selling author of Being Called to Change: Let Go of All That No Longer Serves You and Grow Into Your Full Potential Dale and I look forward to leading you through a visioning and planning process, as well as holding you accountable each quarter when we have these Strategic Planning Support calls.
In addition to his invaluable contributions to LE Press and our authors, Dale Halaway also hosts a monthly themed 4-hour live training online.
The next one is called Be The Victor: Navigating the Great Winds of Change begins Saturday, April 25 @ 9:30am PST
We hope this Q2 Strategic Planning Call serves and supports you for this next season of growth as an author, entrepreneur and leader in this important time.
Reach out to me with any questions and we’ll see you soon!
