Key Takeaways
Writing, publishing, and marketing aren’t three separate jobs — they’re one machine.
Most authors treat these as a linear sequence: write the book, publish it, then scramble to figure out marketing. Shea’s building all three together from the start, and this series is about showing what that looks like in practice.The numbers are part of the story, not hidden from it.
Tool costs get shared in the week they come up. Monthly, viewers get the full picture — spending, earnings, and the other metrics Shea’s tracking to move the business forward. Right now, that number is honest: not much yet.There’s no shortcut — and the series won’t pretend there is.
This isn’t a bestseller-in-30-days promise or a get-rich-quick scheme. It’s a real relaunch, documented in real time, with the setbacks included alongside the wins.Marketing doesn’t have to feel like an afterthought.
Many authors treat marketing as a painful scramble that begins after the book is done. Shea’s hoping this series shows a different way — one where writing, publishing, and marketing inform each other and where the process can actually be interesting to watch and do.- This series is the product — not a funnel to something bigger.
No upsell waiting at the end, no $2,000 coaching program pitch buried in week six. What you see each week is what you get.
If you’re interested, sign up at The Honest Author
Welcome to the first episode of the Honest Author video series. To get us started today, I want to talk about five things. I’ll start off by talking a little bit about myself, then I’ll dive into what this video series is about and what this video series is not. Then I’d like to spend just a few minutes talking about why I’m creating this series, and finally we’ll wrap up with what I believe you can get out of it.
I’m Shea Oliver. I’ve published two science fiction novels, one in 2015 and one in 2019. Not coincidentally, in 2019 I launched Best Book Monkey, a book promotion company. Now, I always intended to continue creative writing, but with Best Book Monkey up and running and the reality that I had a second business that I had started in 2003, which was a newsletter I wrote in the mortgage industry, plus having kids at home, plus life, plus a number of years ago I decided to start traveling full-time, I just never got back to writing my books or really doing anything with creative writing.
That’s all going to change. I am now jumping back into the creative writing world. For those of you who are interested, I have an undergraduate in Communication Studies, have done graduate work in Communication Studies and Rhetoric. I taught Public Speaking at Colorado State University. I have 30 years of sales and marketing experience. Two adult sons, no longer at home, which certainly gives me a little bit more time in life. And right now, at the launch of this series, I’m actually living in northern Colorado, but I intend to be going back to full-time traveling sometime within the next year or so.
Well, that’s more than enough about me. Let’s talk a little bit about this series. In the author world, writing, publishing, and marketing are often thought of, and even taught, as three distinct and separate jobs that happen in a linear order. First you write the book, then you publish the book, then you try to figure out the marketing of the book. I truly believe that those three things should be thought of more holistically, and that those three things actually can inform and feed one another and should be done pretty much together.
That’s what this series really is about. It’s about building the machine to support an author business. That’s really the whole heart of what I’m going to be talking about in this video series. As I began thinking about this concept and this idea, along with the idea of jumping back into creative writing, three words kept popping back into my brain. And these are three words that most of us have either seen written on a paper that we’ve submitted and is written on by a teacher, or a teacher has said this to us. Can you guess what those three words are? Show. Don’t tell. And that’s exactly what I want to do.
I’m launching my author career, or relaunching my author career. This video series is going to be the details of that. Every week I’m going to be sharing what I’m doing. Let me dive in a little. I’m not going to do a whole lot with writing. There are so many good courses and books out there. But this series is going to be me, every week, talking about what I’m doing, what’s working, what’s not working, the strategies I’m pursuing, the tactics I’m executing.
And probably as important as anything, to many people, it’s also going to include the numbers. And what I mean by that, I’m going to be sharing very specifically what I’m spending and what I’m making. Let’s be honest here to start with. What I’m making isn’t anything right now. And it’s going to take a while to ramp this business back up. So just to be clear around the numbers, because I know that many people are very interested in those.
What I’m intending to do with this video series is, if I share a new tool that I’m working with, I will tell you how much I spent on the tool. And then, and that’ll be just in the particular week where I’m showing off the tool that I’m using. But then, on a monthly basis, I’m going to show details. And you’ll be able to see, on a month-to-month basis, what it is it’s costing me, what it is I’m making, and what other key metrics that I personally think I need to be tracking to push this business forward.
One last note on format. I’m going to be shooting for 15 to 30-minute videos. Some will be a little shorter, some will be a little bit longer. But the point is that they’re going to be videos that you can sit down with a cup of coffee or a cup of tea and get some insights and maybe some ideas, and then get back to what’s important, which is working on your stuff.
Now, I want to be really specific on what this series is not. It is not a course promising a bestseller or some type of guaranteed income. It is not tutorials about writing or how to use specific tools. Now, I’m going to show you what tools I’m using, and I’ll even show you how I’m using them. But I’m not going to do step-by-step tutorials. There are plenty of those for any of the tools that I’m going to be using out on the internet. And if you need to figure out how to use them and can’t find it, ask me. I’ll be more than happy to direct you to a resource that’ll help you learn a tool.
And I want to be really clear on one thing. This is not a get-rich-quick writing scheme, okay? Ever since I started my first business, and then when I launched my first book, I get hammered every day with promises of a do-something incredibly fast. And I think we both know that most of that is marketing hype and that it really doesn’t work. So this series is not about getting rich quick writing. And again, on the writing, I’m going to be pretty light on the writing because there’s so many good resources out there.
One last thing that I do want to say that this series is not. If you’ve gone out and bought things on the internet before that look like they’re really a reasonable price, you’ve bought it, and then all of a sudden you get hammered with offers for a very expensive thing. That’s not this. This video series is the product. It is not something that I’m using to get you to try to buy some $1,000 course or $2,000 coaching program. This series is the product.
I’ve only got so many hours in the day, and I’ve got to get back to creative writing. Honestly, I’m excited and kind of scared to get back to my stories and to do the things that I was loving doing years ago before, well, life got in the way.
Now, I’d like to share a little bit about why I’m creating this series. And there are three reasons. The first one is personal. I want to get back to creative writing and storytelling. And this series creates a bit of public accountability for me, and I’m hoping will help keep me motivated to press forward with my author career.
The second reason is professional. With Best Book Monkey, I continue to see the same thing over and over. I see authors who have written a book, then they’ve gone and they’ve published a book, and then they’re trying to figure out the marketing, often desperately. And I’ve seen so many authors give up at that point. I’ve also seen a number of authors that do the same thing repetitively: write a book, publish a book, try to figure out the marketing, scratch their head, hear that phrase, “Your best marketing is your next book.” They go write the next book, and they go through that same linear sequence.
I really want to teach about how writing, publishing, and marketing really can be seen and done as a holistic—I’m lacking a better term right now—but a holistic machine. So that’s a big driver in this. When I started Best Book Monkey, I never meant for it to be the end-all, be-all of the marketing for authors. It was one tiny little slice. But I didn’t realize how frustrating it would be for me personally at times to watch authors struggle with what to do next, how to get their book out there, how to actually do a lot of the marketing side of it, and not think in such a linear fashion. And so that is a big driver of why I’m going to do the series the way that I’m doing the series.
Third reason really is around frustration. There are so many fast-solution products, courses, coaching that are sold to us as authors, sold to us as business people, that I want to offer a counter version. I want to say, “Hey, yeah, I get it. Every once in a while there is someone who is, in the business world we call it, a unicorn. But it’s somebody who has exploded to the top, made a fortune quickly.” For the rest of us, that’s unlikely to happen. And I want to offer the counter version to that. I want to say, “There is a path to a successful author career, but you have to be patient and persistent to get there.”
I want to show you how I’m building the machine. Now, there’s a number of other ways you can go about doing it. And I’ll probably talk about some of those too. But I want to show, not tell, how I am building my author career.
Finally, I’d like to point out some things that I believe that you can get out of this video series. If nothing else, first and foremost, I hope you get permission and ideas to stop treating marketing as an after-the-fact scramble, as some add-on to being an author, as something painful, as an albatross around your neck. I really hope that as you watch this series and watch what I’m doing, that you see there can be some fun and enjoyment on the marketing side of being an author.
Second, it’s numbers and it’s progress that you can compare against your own. I’m almost certain there’s going to be some authors that are going to sign up for this series, look at it, and go, “Wow, I’m just beating the crap out of Shea. I’m really doing better than he is.” There’s other people that are going to be going, “Hmm, I’m going to try it now and see how doing A, B, or C that Shea is doing, how well I do it, and how it compares against the results that he’s getting.” I do hope that in all of this too, when you see something I fail at, that you go, “Hmm, maybe I shouldn’t be trying that because it doesn’t look like it’s working that well.”
So ultimately, what I want to give you is kind of a playbook, or at least a general model of how you can go about working, writing, publishing, and marketing together to build an author career. And I’m going to be doing it in front of you, honestly, and showing you what works, what doesn’t work, and what the numbers look like.
Thank you so much for joining me today. Next week, I’m going to dive into my kind of overarching strategy of what I’m trying to accomplish and some of the big tasks that I need to be doing over the next couple of months to get this machine off of the ground and actually get myself back into the marketplace as I’m spending some time with my storytelling. All right. Well, let’s have some fun together here as we trek on The Path of Words.