Creating a Body of Work

It’s strange to have made something.

All the energy, thinking, anxiety, sweat (sometimes at night), strategising, creating, flow, procrastination, growth, change, fear, courage.

And then, in some ways, it’s done. Out in the world.

Except it’s not done.

A body of work, created over many years, never stops being there unless you choose to stop it.

It becomes something out there, doing work for you, all the time.

It becomes a way for people to know you, before they meet you. So that all your conversations are different.

And it becomes something you can play with.

I’m doing that this week.

How to Start When You’re Stuck, my first book, is available for free on Kindle, from now until 4th April. (Get your copy here!!)

I found myself, as I let Love lead my work this year, continually being brought back to playing with some of the tools available to an entrepreneurial author. Namely, Kindle’s free book deals and book promotion newsletters. It turns out - and this makes total sense - that there are a set of entrepreneurial people (at Freebooksy, Fussy Librarian, Book Cave and other such places) who have created businesses to meet the desires of three groups of people.

The desire of readers to get access to free or discounted books in genres they love. (Sign up to their newsletter and you’ll get emailed loads of titles every day that are free or 99p in all the genres you want!)

And the desire of authors like me to find audiences for their work.

And in the middle are entrepreneurial people who make a little money for their ingenuity.

Honestly, creating the promotional period… it’s pulled me a little too far back into Will at times. But that’s a story from another day.

Creating a body of work means that there are almost infinite opportunities to reuse, repurpose and redirect people to things you have made. That’s what the 12-minute method books are, of course.

And that’s alongside the opportunities for people to find you through that body of work.

Or to know you through it, oiling the flywheel of your business.

And I have to say there are still moments I really doubt it.

All those hours poured into books. Mostly books that are out, sometimes books that aren’t.

All those hours writing hundreds of blog posts.

All those hours podcasting.

And yet when I slow down and think about money - as I did this morning when listening to my former client Molly Benjamin’s book, Girls Just Wanna Have Funds - I can’t help but wonder if I should have prioritised money that little bit more.

If I should’t have a bit more money in my business, and a lot more in my pension.

And I don’t feel like a smart entrepreneur in the way some people are. I’m sure there are ways I could optimise my social media to create far more followers, readers and likes. Probably even sales.

The fact that I’ve just discovered the LinkedIn newsletter function is incredibly powerful is a laughable example of that. In about five minutes a couple of weeks ago I created a newsletter which leverages my LinkedIn followers in an incredible way, to create more subscribers to that LinkedIn newsletter than I have on my mailing list, which has existed for about 6 years.

Anyone on LinkedIn can do that some might then have to worry about creating a newsletter. The laughable part was that I was already essentially running one. I just hadn’t clicked a button that meant it would get sent into the inbox of hundreds of people instead of being at the whims of the LinkedIn Newsfeed algorithm.

These are the troubles, of course, of a 21st century business person. You can’t know everything.

And you have the choice management problem.

I only have so much time: how do I use it?

Where do I invest for the future? Where do I play for the quick bucks now?

How do I even know which is which?

Will I ever know whether I was right to spend those hours on the books?

I won’t.

And I can’t change it anyway.

All I can do is look at what I have, and play with it.

Use it to my best advantage.

Try to make the greatest positive difference, as one of my clients once said.

And if I realise I’ve taken the wrong route, admit it, and change.

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My first book, How to Start When You’re Stuck, is FREE on Kindle from now until 4th April. Get your copy here.

This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online. 

The 12-Minute Method series books is out now - buy them here.

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Read more about my work as a coach at www.robbieswale.com.