What I learned at Author Advantage Live 2020

The Coronavirus Pandemic required a lot of in-person events to go virtual this year. Author Advantage Live was no exception. It was supposed to be held in Orlando, Florida, at the new JW Marrott at Bonnett Creek, but about three months ago, the company putting on the event made the announcement that the decision was made to go virtual with the event due to the health crisis (the good news about this is all of the people who initially bought tickets for the event will have a ticket of equal value at next year’s in-person event!).

Despite the health scare, the event went on as scheduled September 24-26 and I had a great time! I was able to see some of my friends I had met in the online group again. It was like a huge family reunion and I look forward to meeting them again in person at next year’s event.

The whole event is based around three pillars:

1. Getting Published;
2. Getting Noticed;
3. Getting Profitable.

My top five take-aways from this year’s event were:

1. How to make every book sale into three sales (how to build virality for a book). Being an author and not really a business-minded person (numbers are not my thing…), turning one sale into three was a very tough thing for me to grasp, but I feel like I’m making a step closer to actually accomplishing this feat this year after hearing this talk.
2. Half-built bridges get you nowhere. This boils down to having too many projects and not getting any of them fully completed.
3. Do it scared. Face your fears and create a life you love. This was probably one of the best seminars at the conference. Ruth Soukup is the author of Do It Scared, Founder and CEO of Living Well Spending Less and Elite Blog Academy. She spoke on the seven fear archetypes. While Ruth was talking about them, I noticed I had a few characteristics of a few of them, but after taking her assessment, I noticed that People Pleaser is my most dominant fear archetype. (If you would like to find out your Fear Archetype, you can take the Do It Scared Fear Assessment, too!)
4. The Mindset and Skills to Start Selling Confidently WITHOUT feeling “salesy.” If I’m being vulnerable, sales is something that terrifies me. I hated the anxiety before a sales call was to happen. (I would always be pumped until about 30-45 minutes before the call was supposed to happen, then the anxiety would set in.) The presenter, Chad Aleo, really brought the art of sales down back to Earth for me and helped me realize that it was something attainable, that anyone and everyone can do it. As he put it: “Salespeople are not born, they are made.”
5. Scaling Your Ads. For months I have thought that ads were the way to go. It felt like I had found the “missing piece” to the puzzle that is the question, How do I scale my income and scale my book? Well, I was given a few answers. I now have to figure out which one is the right way to go, and I’m excited to figure that out for myself (one is something I have thought about doing for the last year: a book funnel. More on that in a future blog post).

What I also found incredibly impactful was the last session of the event. We were asked to write a Letter to Yourself from your future self in September 2021 to your current self on September 26, 2020. We were asked to include the following things in our letters:

1. What does your life look like?
2. What goals have you accomplished?
3. What progress have you made?
4. Who have you become? What skills have you learned?
5. What does your day-to-day life look like?
6. What are you most proud of?

This was (and is) an incredibly powerful exercise. There were so many wonderful things that were talked about and gone over at this event that it was extremely hard to choose in which areas I was going to focus on for the next year.

I highly encourage you to write a Letter to Yourself and include the above points. I’ve no doubt you’ll be amazed at what you can accomplish. One thing that was given to us as a challenge that I would like to pass on to you: Once you write it, I highly encourage you to share it with someone. If you would like to share it with me, you can either write it in a comment below or, if you aren’t comfortable doing that, please send me an email at louis[at]louisvendetti[dot]com and share it with me that way. I look forward to reading your letters and supporting you!

If you attended Author Advantage Live 2020: What were your five main take-aways?