💅 Planning to boss 2021 🙏

This email is shiny and new. View in browser Hello! It's 2021, which still sounds like the future to me. January is that time of year when everyone looks back at the year just gone, apologizes to their body, and promises to do better this year (and really means it this time). It's also the time of year when we have to work twice as hard to dodge all sorts of questionable offers on Facebook pushing Amazon Ads courses and the like, because internet marketers know that people are an easy mark in January, all pepped up on regret and indigestion. Be careful out there, and remember that if someone is pushing a course, they are probably getting paid. Which is okay, I guess, but if they aren't disclosing that they are getting paid, it's all starting to get a bit fishy. IMO, YMMV, etc. I used to waste a lot of emotional energy on shady characters, but I've since found the best way to combat snake oil merchants is to give stuff away for free, which is why I have a free guide to self-publishing, a free guide to building your author platform, and a free course teaching you how to launch a book and build a backlist promotion. I'll be adding a lot more free resources in 2021 as well. One of the projects I've been working on for several months now is an overhaul of my website. It's mostly unsexy, back-end stuff I won't bore you with, but the fun part is you will see a lot of content appearing there over the next few months. First up is this post about self-editing. It's a huge 5,000 word guide to self-editing – which isn't a replacement for professional editing, but the thing you need to do before handing it over to an editor. You can read Self Editing Explained here. While this newsletter is strictly about marketing, and that will not be changing, I realized that the original focus of my website had been lost in the last couple of years, and I had started almost exclusively focusing on marketing topics there as well as here. That will be changing in 2021. The above post on self-editing also links to this post on the Five Stages of Editing, to show where self-editing fits in the process overhaul. And I'll have many more posts on every aspect of successfully self-publishing a book and building a career as an author. Also – look at those blog post images!  I'm doing all this in Canva myself, and if you had told me that a few years ago, I would have thought you had been on the breakfast sherry again. I'll have more tutorials on using Canva as the year progresses – although those will probably go out via my YouTube channel for obvious reasons. And some less obvious ones too: I just got my first check from YouTube, and I'd very much like more, thank you very much! While this here newsletter will still get all the best stuff first, and exclusively in many cases, I will continue to cover marketing topics periodically on my blog also, and doing that allows me to combine a number of previous emails and posts into one big meaty resource. For example, regular readers will have seen this post on Amazon Recommendations and Also Boughts in some form previously. I recommend that you still check it out though, because it actually combines 5 or 6 historical posts and emails on Amazon's recommendation engine (and how Also Boughts fit into that system) to give one clear, comprehensive explainer on the topic. And hopefully we'll stop hearing that Also Boughts disappearing somehow kills organic discovery on Amazon – that's just not how the system works, no matter how many times people selling "solutions" to that "problem" repeat that canard. The overall aim here is to rejuvenate my site and refresh every single bit of content on it – which is quite a lot of work when you have 600+ posts and over a million words to wrangle. But I've been quietly working on it for a while and have made a lot of progress already. And some of the content is already in great shape, it was just… buried over time. For example, that self-editing post above was actually first written in 2011 or 2012, but it's evergreen advice and only needed a moderate clean-up (and a lovely new image). And the advice is 100% relevant today. So that's my big non-fiction project at the moment, along with exploring recording some audio myself and (probably) selling it direct on my site. On the fiction side, I have one historical novel to finish and another to research. And all of that will certainly keep me busy enough in Q1 this year, and probably a little longer. On top of all that, I have lots more fun stuff coming for my non-fiction subscribers – i.e. you! – in 2021 as well, but I can't say more just yet. Happy New Year! Dave P.S. Resolution making music this week is Such Trying Times by Marlene Dietrich. DavidGaughran.com Broomfield Business Park, Malahide, Co. Dublin, Ireland You received this email because you signed up at DavidGaughran.com. Unsubscribe