Next week, Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing will bring together five self-published business writers for the company’s first KDP Business Author Roundtable. The event is invitation-only, primarily aimed at members of the press, and follows another such roundtable last year that featured children’s authors.
In this case, the writers involved are Guy Kawasaki, Pat Flynn, Honorée Corder, James Altucher, and Hal Elrod, with Amazon Independent Publishing manager Natalia Montuori moderating this chance for a special group of self-publishing nonfiction writers to talk about their experiences.
The occasion gives us a chance to talk with Elrod, who produces the Miracle Morning series, focused on his concept of self-potential rituals practiced before 8:00 a.m. The newest book in his Miracle Morning series—The Miracle Morning for Writers—releases Friday [June 3, 2016] and launches Tuesday.
Convinced by a friend that he needed to provide some sort of community for his readers, Elrod says he opted to create it on Facebook “because people have enough things to log into.” It’s now up to 45,000 members and grows organically by 200 people a day. People find the Facebook group from reading about it in Elrod’s books. Elrod’s team members facilitate and monitor exchanges in the group, but he finds he doesn’t have to be constantly on-hand or available because the community basically runs itself. He calls it a “self-sustaining” community.
Elrod says, “You set up a simple framework where you give [followers] something to do. The simplest way to do that, depending on your book, is to say, ‘Post the biggest takeaway you got from the book.’ Or ‘Post the one action you’re going to take’ or ‘Post the commitment you’re going to make as a result of reading this book.’ That’s the first part of the instructions you give them in a post that’s pinned to the top on Facebook.” As a second step, Elrod asks new group members to post an encouraging or supportive comment on someone else’s post. “So people come in and immediately they’re engaging. It’s like this reciprocal value-add in engagement.”
Bottom line: From Hal Elrod’s approach, we see a format for reader engagement and platforming that requires potentially less time-consuming interaction with readers than might be expected. That’s because it tasks the readers with creating their own mutually affirming interaction. “Miracle Morning has basically taken off without me,” Elrod tells us. And did he know to do this before he started this community? He laughs. “Probably 30 or 40 percent was intentional and 60 to 70 percent was, ‘Oh, thank goodness I did that.’ There was so much I didn’t realize ahead of time.”
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
