The Tiniest Tweaks Make the Biggest Difference

A story about a little girl who loves books and the iterative nature of selling your services.

Photo from Canva

I am a student in a business mastermind that is schooling me hard on so many aspects of marketing, sales, and mindset. One of the things I like best about the work is the focus on testing and iterating, which mimics the creative process of writing a book and mirrors what I teach the book coaches I train about launching their own businesses.

We don’t just pick a price and forget it.

We don’t just decide on a package and leave it.

We don’t just try one thing and convince ourselves that we tried.

We all need to be reminded of the iterative nature of the work. Sometimes I am the reminder and other times I am the remind-ee. (Is that a word? I don’t think so. But there’s proof that I am a human writing this and not a machine.)

One of the skills I have been learning is how to run ads to a live webinar and how to use that webinar to effectively convey what we’re doing in our book coach certification program so that the right people will be inspired to sign up.

One of the first ads we tried featured a little girl in glasses sitting on the floor surrounded by books. (You may have seen it because I hadn’t learned the lesson yet of how to exclude people who are already following me or engaging with the content I create; there’s a lot to learn…) The copy that went with this image started like this:

Were you that kid who hid under the covers with a flashlight reading past bedtime? The one who wanted to be Jo from Little Women?

Maybe books saved you from loneliness, boredom, anxiety, or chaos and your passion for them has never dimmed.

Becoming a certified book coach allows you to work in that powerful space of possibility. That’s because your job as a book coach is to help harness other people’s creative genius.

I loved this ad. I felt like it got at the deep connection so many book coaches have to books and stories and reading, and also got at the way so many of us and the writers we serve leave behind the things we love as a child.

I felt like it called people back to doing the work they love and captured the spirit of what we do at Author Accelerator. I was proud of it.

The ad performed like crazy — so much so, that people thought it was a regular post and not an advertisement. It elicited so many fun comments of people remembering what they read under the covers (Charlotte’s Web was one, Harriet the Spy, Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret) and times they were caught. People talked about how books have been an anchor in their lives through all the ups and downs. People referenced their TBR piles and how much it delighted them to acquire more books.

The ad also performed in terms of getting people to sign up for the webinar — we got about 500 sign-ups. People connected with the idea of doing the meaningful work of helping writers bring their books to life.

I taught the webinar and only 4 people came. Claire, my business coach made me run the whole process again and 6 people came.

No one did the thing we wanted them to do, which was to sign up to talk to me about book coaching to see if our program was a good fit for them. And because no one signed up, no one purchased the program.

Last year, I wrote a piece about what it feels like when no one shows up to the thing you create and put out there. You can read that piece here. TL;DR: it’s no fun.

We Axed The Ad

Claire’s solution for the next iteration of the webinar was to get rid of the ad — the beautiful, soulful, charming, powerful ad. “Delete it,” she said, “These are not your people.”

Not my people?? People who have always loved books are not my people? They are totally my people! We’ve certified 300-something book coaches and I would venture to guess that the vast majority of them love books, were saved by books, and identify with this little girl

But because I am in this mastermind to learn and the only way to learn is to take action, I thought, Okay, I will try it.

We axed that ad and created new ones that focused on becoming an entrepreneur. We changed the graphics and we changed about 50% of the copy.

Instead of speaking to people who love to read, we spoke to people who are likely already working in some capacity with writers and writing (they are writers, editors, teachers, professors, librarians, and journalists.) We figured they are bone tired of depending on an institution or organization that could cut their job, lower their salary, or take back their grant. We talked about having agency and control in your work life.

While we were doing that, we also trimmed the emails we were sending to people who signed up for the webinar— not the number of emails, but the actual number of words in each email. We cut to the chase faster in addressing what the webinar was going to teach and we addressed the most common objections people have to the idea of enrolling in a book coach certification program.

I also tightened the screws on the webinar itself, cutting the number of slides.

This time around, another 500 people signed up, but 80 people came and 19 signed up for the 1:1 calls. So far I’ve made 5 sales, which is thrilling. The funnel works!

As I continue to host the 1:1 calls, I am answering a lot of difficult questions about the realities of book coaching and the state of the world.

Will Ai make book coaching obsolete? (Answer: It will certainly change it.)

Is it a misguided time to launch a business? (Answer: Maybe, but it could also be the most opportune time. We can never know, which is a risk of starting a new venture.)

Do books matter when the world is on fire? (Answer: Yes, absolutely, more than ever.)

Every one of these conversations circled back to the pull of doing work that we love, that we have always loved, and that we believe matters.

These people want to help writers who are writing about the natural world; they want to guide experts who are working to improve our physical, mental, and spiritual health; they want to assist folks writing sci-fi that might help us make sense of our relationship to technology; they want to coach novelists working on narratives of the enslaved.

Every person who is contemplating becoming a book coach knows in their bones that books are vital — especially in a world on fire.

They speak about the role of books in their own lives and how books have saved them, and still save them, every day.

It was ironic because that little girl was missing from the ad and the ad copy, but she was there in spirit. It turns out that was precisely the right place for her to be and the only way I figured that out was to be willing to tweak, to iterate, and to try again and again.

Is there anything you need to test or to try to reach your ideal client?

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