Alinka Rutkowska. AlinkaRutkowska.com

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1 Alinka Rutkowska AlinkaRutkowska.com Alinka Rutkowska is an internationally best-selling author, speaker, and book marketer. Her books include How I Sold 80,000 Books and a successful children s series about the adventures of two characters, Maya and Filippo. Previously, she worked in the corporate world but eventually decided she had had enough of it. Today, Alinka works from home, showing others how to write, promote, and selfpublish their books successfully. Caitlin: Well, hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Work-At-Home Summit. I m here with Alinka Rutkowska. She is a multi-award-winning and number-one international best-selling author. She is a coach who transforms struggling writers into profitable authorpreneurs. That s a cool word. She is the founder and CEO of LibraryBub, which connects librarians with awardwinning and best-selling books from independent publishers. She is the founder and host of the 5-Figure Author Challenge, which gives authors winning strategies to get five figures in five months. You ll learn more about that later on in this interview. She s also a sought-after speaker and has spoken at many online summits and podcasts, and to top it off, she s been voted topfive speaker and named most creative book marketer at the Bestseller Summit online. Welcome, Alinka. Alinka: Thank you so much, Caitlin, so exciting to be here. Caitlin: Yeah, I m super excited to have you here today so you can talk to everyone that s joining us live today on how to self-publish and market your book. But before we get into that, I want to know more about you and how you got to where you are. What did your life look like before you got into what you re doing now? Alinka: Right. So before I got into publishing, I was working in multinational corporations, and at a certain point, I got fed up with it and I found a way to get out with some pocket money. So the pocket money allowed me to live comfortably for about a year or a year and a half, so I decided to take a sabbatical, and I went to the other side of the world to take a cruise from Auckland to Sydney because I had never been there. When you go somewhere so far away, you need a lot of time, and you need extra financial resources, and I finally had everything right there and then. Obviously, all my friends were working because they were in the multinational company, so they wouldn t be able to go with me for a month in January, so I went by myself. I was not aware that the cruise industry is more targeted towards a more senior audience, so I went there by myself, and I think that made it very easy for my husband for my future husband to spot me. So it all started there. I know I really liked his lifestyle because he worked on the cruise ship, so he travels all over the world, and I wanted to be able to keep being active, mentally engaged rather than just travel around and not really do anything. It was more of a personal thing because all my life I d been ambitious. I had I have a really good curriculum and was scholastic academically, and I felt

2 like I wanted to contribute, so I got into publishing. My first book I actually launched it I actually published it when I was still working in Whirlpool. That was one of the companies I worked in, and it was since I had some book marketing background well, I had some marketing background. I managed to apply that to my book, and it really performed very well. I was actually surprised to see that the revenues I had from the book they were well, they actually surpassed the salary I had, so that was another reason why I thought, you know, I can actually go. Other than having this one-time sort of golden parachute thing, it is a really nice chunk of money that came in, but I was aware that it s a one-time thing. So the success of the book really got me excited about what s possible, and obviously now I know that it s very naïve to think that you would be able to maintain a good lifestyle with just with the royalties of one book, and we ll get into this, but at the time, I know that sort of illusion and those months were so good that I thought it s a really great thing to do. And Work-At-Home Summit, work-at-home the work-athome environment anybody can write books from not even from home, on the bus, on the train, on your commute. So I think this is very relevant, and there have been some surveys saying that 82 or so percent of people want to write a book, but actually it s a very low percentage of people who actually do, but there are so many reasons to do that. So since then, I ve since that first book, I now have more than 20 titles. I did a series for children, and I sold that series, the rights of the series to a traditional Chinese publisher, so that was a lucrative thing. And since I ve always been sharing how I how my marketing efforts perform, and that became a side thing that now became a major thing, so now I regularly share with my tribe what I m doing. And from that, at a certain point, I was sharing these articles and somebody said, Could you just write it in book form? And so I did, so actually it wasn t even my idea, this book here, How I Sold 80,000 Books, I wrote it because people wanted to have a book, so that s actually a great way to listen to the market, and so now this is my main thing. My main thing is to help people market books, but now I also moved into helping a specific target audience to do everything from positioning to writing to launching and keeping those sales. So it s all very exciting, and I think it s also exciting for people working from home. I have two children myself, so I know what it s like when you have a major sort of career change or when you re pregnant or when you have a little a baby to care for. The beauty of this business is that you re able to have your book business going on while you re fully present in your family life. Caitlin: Yeah, I love that, and so fun fact, you guys. She has two kids. She met her husband while cruising, and they live in Italy, and she s still making all of her money from home, and that is so exciting. And you said that your the revenue from your first book replaced your salary. Would you mind telling us what that amount was just so we can get excited about with you? Alinka: Well, I don t know if I can reveal these numbers, but it was I was called a management program sort of for high-performance or high-potential employees, so it was a very good, above starting salary that allowed me, as a single person then, to live very comfortably where I was living. So it wasn t money to go and buy yourself a mansion or something, but for a

3 single person, it was very comfortable, so it was actually difficult to say goodbye to it, and when I told my dad that I would be leaving the corporate world, he wasn t really very enthusiastic about it. He said, There s a line of people who would kill to have your job, and you re just going to, what, travel around the world? Caitlin: Yeah, I mean, life is short, and I think parents can take it hard sometimes. Family can take it hard sometimes, so I mean there s a lot of people who maybe it s not their parents, but it s their spouses who are like, Oh my gosh, why would you get out of something so safe and secure to build your own thing? But life is short, and really the question should be why not, especially when there are so many resources out there like what you offer and what we re going to be talking about today that allow you to build it, and it s not like it s a hit-or-miss thing. It s not a luck thing. There s a system behind it, so we re going to be talking about that. Would you mind telling us what your first book was, what it was about, and how you got the idea for it? Alinka: So my first book I don t even promote it anymore. It s called Read Me I Am Magical. It s a self-help book, which I was writing it was a personal sort of journey for me as I was going I guess I was going through a quarter-life crisis or something with all those changes that I had to make, so I wrote this book for myself. I did a lot of research. I figured if I can write if I could write an academic paper or a thesis, like a dissertation that I did at university, then I can research for a book, and I did that, and it was very well received. It was that was back in 2010, so things changed a little bit since then. But I think the main the key learning from that experience for me was that I m able to be able to support myself on my own. I don t need a corporation to employ me, so that was very exciting. And then, as I was traveling, I the maternal instinct kicked in, and I thought that eventually I would like to have children, and I thought how about I start writing some books for them, so that was even before the children came. I thought I m going to write some kids books about two children traveling on a cruise ship and discovering the world like that, and there s always a sort of positive message in those books. So the series is called Maya and Filippo, and this is one of the books from the series. I did 15 of these, so it was really exciting. I did I covered New Zealand and Australia where I first started, and then I did Alaska and a few American ports like San Francisco. I had at a certain point the ambition to do 100 of these, but I did 15. You just sometimes need to shut one door when you see that there is a bigger door that something bigger that you can walk into. Caitlin: So let s talk about you self-publish all of these books, and there s people watching right now that maybe they believed for a long time, because that s the only way there was to publish for a long time, was to the traditional publishing route where you got kind of discovered or you built a platform, and then you pitched your book to a traditional publisher. And there s a lot of people right now who think that s still the way that you go about publishing a book, but you are all self-published, so let s talk about the difference between self-publishing and traditional publishing and why self-publishing is such an attractive way to publish your book or books.

4 Alinka: Yeah, so traditionally, you would write a manuscript or the first few chapters. You need to have an outline, and you would create a book proposal and start pitching agents, so it s a very time-consuming process. So you need to find a catalogue of agents, so for example, you can Writer s Digest they released that catalogue. It s called, I think, Guide to Literary Agents in They have a list of 1,000 agents that you can pitch, and not all agents even want to hear from people that they ve never heard from before. But you would see who s where your book fits in, so which agents would be able to represent you, and you would pitch them. And now if they take you on, they then would pitch your book to the publishers, so it s a very long process. If the publishers say yes, then they would take you on. You would get an advance. So the advance is right now probably for a new author I guess it could be about $2,000, I guess. If you re a well-known author, then it s six figures and possibly even higher, so there are cases where people have been talking about really huge advances, so let s talk about a $50,000 advance, let s say. That sounds good, doesn t it? Throw it away, right? So you get excited about this advance. Then it s about a two-year process or so from the moment they take you on to the moment that your book is released, and they will ask you to change things, and they will change things for you, and you have very little control on what the actual end result is, things like the cover and so on. So you might get a $50,000 advance, but then let s say you have two years until that book is out. So now, divide that by 24 months. It doesn t look so exciting anymore. So that s one way, and you can still go that way, but it s really slow. And I didn t even consider traditional publishing when I discovered self-publishing because the thing is so now it s so obvious to me that I self-published, but there was a moment when somebody told me that you can actually do that, and I was like, What? That s amazing. I actually make all the decisions. I can do it so quickly. So I didn t even consider pitching anybody. Caitlin: You don t need anybody to tell you that your idea is good. So what s the first step that you take when you decide you want to self-publish? You obviously have to write the book, but what are some other steps that are involved in self-publishing? Alinka: So the first step that s involved is your book idea, so the first thing you do is you need to be able to position your book, and what authors often where they make their mistake is that they write. They have a heart book. They have an idea, something they ve always wanted to write about, their life story perhaps. But that doesn t guarantee that the book will be commercially successful. When I did my first book, by chance I created a book that was at the time popular, but many people would have don t think about that at all, so what you need to do is position your book. You need to look at the market. Go to Amazon and see look at the categories and first see where does my book fit in. So which category does my book fit in? So just to give you an example, this book, How I Sold 80,000 Books, the moment when I created it well, there were categories like marketing, writing, so there were definitely categories where the book fits in. But there were also other books, which is good, and those books were selling, which is good. So check if there are other books that are selling. That means that there s a market for that book. But you also don t want to have a me-too kind of thing. You need to have a unique angle, so why would I create there s this also like a mind

5 block many people have. There are so many books, millions. Why would I what would I add with my book? Well, you add your unique perspective. So, for example, this book is I created it around a marketing concept called the marketing mix, the Four Ps Marketing Mix, so I talk about product, place, price, and promotion, and nobody had done that before, and then there s also your writing style that comes in, that people resonate with certain experiences you had and maybe certain jokes you tell or certain ways you talk. So I wasn t sure if that book would be a success. Now, it s very popular, but I wasn t sure that it would be. So if you re not sure, something you could do is release your book as an ebook first to test the waters because you can always get rid of it. Nobody publishes a book with the intention of getting rid of it, but you ll see that as you move on and get better, sometimes you might feel ashamed of the first books that you published because later on you know so much more, and you can kill an ebook. You can just unpublish it, and it s gone, but if you have a paperback, somebody can buy it, and there will always be third-party resellers, and you will never be able to get rid of that from Amazon. So when somebody does a search on you, that crappy comparing to what you produce now, that book that wasn t so good, the first one, you can t really get rid of it. So when you re just first starting out, I suggest that, to do the ebooks, because then if you want to completely remake your platform, then you can do that. So I probably answered more questions than one here. Caitlin: Yeah, so actually that leads me up to the next one. So in terms of so you want to start out with an ebook and then that s a good way to test your idea because then you can just take it away, and then the people who have it, have it. But then it doesn t get spread around. It doesn t get resold through third-party sellers, anything like that. Once you maybe you can re-release that and then you can get the hard copy out after you ve gotten some feedback or something like that. And in terms of publishing, we talked about Amazon, but is it important to get your book on all the different outlets, or is it better to start with just one and then grow from there? Alinka: Yeah, so it s a strategic decision. For example, there s something called KDP Select, which basically means that your book is only available on Amazon. That s your ebook. When your ebook is only available on Amazon, there are certain benefits. For example, you have in a three-month time period, you have five days where you can make your book free or discounted, but then you re not wildly available. My advice is to start with KDP Select and see how that works for you, and after three months, you can go wide and be available on other platforms, so different opinions, different I think the situation will be different for every author. It depends on the genre, on the book, maybe on the time period, so set something to test. And then back to the question, ebook and paperback, you definitely want to have a paperback as well for many reasons, though I don t know if you want to get into that or if you have some other questions. Caitlin: Let s come back to that because I just want to make sure we get to the stuff about marketing, and so let s just come back to that if we have the time. Which comes first because I m going to spoil it, but you re giving away a free copy of your book, How I Sold 80,000 Books, which I know that that question is answered in that book, so I just want to make sure that, for

6 people watching the summit, maybe they don t want to download a free book. We want to get through the questions that I have for you. So I want to ask you about publishing versus marketing. Most people will think I ve got to get the book out, and I ve got to make it perfect before I start marketing, but that s a myth. Is that true? You have to actually market your book and get some buzz going for it, maybe pre-sell some copies, things like that, get some buzz going about your book before it s published, right? Alinka: Yeah, so that s a very good and timely question because I m actually launching a new book shortly, and I have the proof here, so this is very exciting. When you first write a book, you get something that comes and has proof written here. It s the first time that you hold it in your hands, so this is something new. This is a proof that I m reading, so I just got here, and it s not out yet right now but probably will be out when you re watching this. So this book is not perfect yet. It s not perfect. It hasn t been copyedited yet, which is a must. You need to have a proofreader who is going to go through the book, but I already have a launch team, a landing page for the book in place, so there s a landing page, and what I do is I have an assistant who scouts Amazon reviewers, so she goes to people who she connects with people who reviewed books similar to mine. This is a business book, Supreme Leadership. So she asks reviewers who leave their address in their profile she asks them she says, You liked this and this business book. I think you would find this one valuable. And there is a specific call to action. Go to this landing page and sign up to get a free pre-release copy so that when launch day comes, I already have a team of people who will write reviews and that will and download the book. I will do free days, so they will download the book that will show Amazon that the book is in demand. They will write reviews, and that will look really good for people then who will want to buy it. So I think it s really important to have that launch team, and I was just since I m launching it now, I was just discussing this in my inner circle of authors who I work with, and one author said, Well, you really expanded my idea of what a launch team is because, he said, I thought launch team was just a few people that I worked with for the book, but no. A launch team is people who you don t know yet, so outside of your circles, but first of all, your contacts. So you would want to if you have a mailing list already, even if it s unrelated, since they like you, it s possible that they will also like this book. I mail my children s reader readers of my children s book just once, telling them that I have this book going on, and if possibly they are interested in business and leadership, then to go and sign up to be part of the launch team because it doesn t mean somebody buys children s books for their children, but they themselves might be a business person. So I don t want to bother them, but you definitely want to let the world know, and the best way is for them to go and sign up through that landing page for a launch team. Caitlin: So is that your main marketing tool is working with a launch team? Alinka: Well, my main marketing tool in general would be marketing, and the launch team is part of that concept. Caitlin: Cool, so let s talk about how you can use to market a book. And why is using important? Because we read so many s and stuff like that, and we talked little bit in

7 the Work-At-Home Summit about marketing. But how does that improve your chances of your book being a success? Alinka: Well, immensely because imagine you are going okay, so there are two ways you can publish a book. You can publish it and hope for the best, or you can orchestrate a launch, and I will tell you, if you publish it and hope for the best, nobody is going to find out about it no matter how good it is because Amazon that s a search engine. There s an algorithm there, so what is the main objective of people working at Amazon? To make more money for themselves, right? Obviously. They re a business. So they when they see that a book is popular, they will let it they will bump it up in the it will bump up its visibility. You will see it in different places. Amazon itself will promote it because if that book is lucrative because that book is lucrative to them, so they re not doing you a favor. They re a business. So even I work with authors who are multi-award-winning authors. If they don t market that award, then that doesn t really the organizations that give you awards, some of them do some type of marketing, but I haven t seen anything very effective yet. But you, if you have an award and you have an list and you can tell people on your list that, Look, this book is an award-winning book. Go get it now. And that s the social proof. So if you have an award and you re able to market that fact, then you want to let people know. So imagine releasing a book I did that when I first starting with my children s books. I released a book, and I was really excited about it. Wow, some people think they will become an instant New York Times best-selling author or an overnight millionaire because they released a book. And then they re very disappointed when they see that nothing happened. They haven t sold a single copy, or they sold one copy, and it was their mom who bought it. And so that s usually when I meet them, and compare that with having 10,000 people on your list and blasting them saying, Here s my new book; go get it. And you can even tie it up with some incentives saying, If you get it today and send me a receipt, you ll get this bonus. So there are all these things that you can do with the people that are following you that you can t do with anybody else. So that s why I m such a huge proponent of building and nurturing your list. Caitlin: Yeah, I think that s really, really smart, but there are some people who I mean, you hear of authors getting famous overnight, and it might seem like one moment someone is completely unknown, and then they publish a book, and they re raking in millions and going on speaking tours and all this crazy stuff. But what we ve gone into in the last half hour or so has been this background process of actually getting the book published and out on the market and actually the whole process behind getting the word out on the book, and it s not an overnight thing. And so I know a question that some people are thinking right now I m certainly thinking it is staying motivated. Your whole business is in publishing books, and you have more than 20 titles now, and you re working on new ones. How do you stay motivated to keep working on all those details? There are so many moving parts, and then there are multiple books and then just managing all that. How do you stay motivated to keep going, especially when it gets tough or maybe it gets monotonous or it s just like, Okay, here we go again? Do you have down days, and if so, how do you stay motivated to keep powering through? Alinka: You know, this excites me. It excites me incredibly, so I don t need to find ways to motivate myself, just naturally motivated. When this book was on its way, I was tracking it. Every

8 day I was checking where is it today because I can t wait to see it, or if the cover is coming. I just can t wait for the cover artist to send it to me, so I m just so excited about it. And the same when I m working with clients. I m like, Okay, so let s see how many people we have on the launch team and how many reviews are coming in and how the sales are performing. I check the Amazon rankings, and I get really excited about their results. Their success is my success. So I don t need that. And when it s successful, when the business is successful, then just success brings more success, but I know that people don t start from there, and there is the moment when you it seems like nothing is happening. So what I find motivating is talking to people who have been through that, so for example, a very popular movie right now is The Founder, Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald s. So he said something like he was an overnight success but 30 years in the making, so he was over 50 when he got started with McDonald s, and I found that movie to be incredibly inspirational because it just shows you how he was listening to these the self-help types, and I like I have read tons of self-help books, and I m very much into The Law of Attraction and positive thinking, and what you visualize then happens. And I really believe that, and that has been working really well for me. I did a ton of research for Supreme Leadership on what allows business people CEOs, these are I interviewed 34 CEOs for this book, and I ve 34 CEOs who launched their companies 25 years ago, so they re all celebrating 25 years, and I found commonalities between them. So I found six factors that basically allowed them to get where they are, and one of the factors is passion. So you really need to find something that you re passionate about, and you re going to work from home. There are so many things you can do. Pick something that you re excited about because the just to make money, that won t be able to carry you through the down times, so that s not powerful enough. It s not substantial enough so Caitlin: It s not the money. It s why you want the money. Why do you want the money, right? Alinka: Yeah. I really like a quote from, I think, Steve Jobs who said that if you find this is not the exact oh, actually, I could get the exact quote for you from here. Caitlin: I butcher quotes all the time. It s fine, all the time. I never remember. Alinka: This quote is from Richard Branson. There you go. I restarted. Okay, so Richard Branson says, There is no greater thing you can do with your life and your work than follow your passions in a way that serves the world and you. So ask yourself: are you passionate about this? And if you re not, find something else, and ask yourself: are you passionate about this? And does it serve the world? And it doesn t have to serve the world meaning you re going to fight famine or something, but for example, when I help people sell books or write books, that definitely serves them and changes their world. So I will answer yes, and does it serve you? So it serves me because I m doing something that I love, and it s turned out to be a great business. So I think that s really important, and there are other factors.

9 But I think the passion is what s going to make you just happy. If you re doing what you love and it turns out to be a great business, then you obviously will be very happy about it. And when you have these times when you re thinking, Will it work? Will it not work? Then there s another thing. It s called perseverance where you re able to push through, and if you really believe in it, then it will work. And something else that I think is really important is to keep learning and educating yourself. If there s a books change lives. I m the first to say that. You might find a book that will completely change the way you view your life, your business, so go out there and read. Then there might be an online course that will be super helpful for you to get to the next level, and I know you don t start out that way. When you have put aside a little bit of resources, I would invest them really into getting a mentor, and I used to be the type of person when I first started out that I would say, no, I m never going to pay for somebody telling me what to do, but now that I have funds to invest in my education and I found a mentor that has been unbelievable, I will go ahead and invest large sums for that because I know that it s an investment. If I invest 10, whatever, bananas, into that and the result when I implement what I learned and I get 100 bananas, so even if the 10 bananas that you invest is way more than you would ever invest in anything similar, then when you see a result like that, you ll keep doing it. And there are just some things that we are not able to jump over. Somebody just needs to enlighten us, and I see that in my relationship with my mentor, and I see that in my relationship with my mentees, when they say, Now I get it. Now I get it. But I read about it before, but I wasn t able to apply it to my particular situation. So I think Caitlin: Something happens that just turns the light bulb on, and I think that s really key. I ve been in that boat as well where I m like, Oh, I already know what to do or blah, blah, blah. Then the question becomes, then why aren t I doing it? Because it s not quite making sense, because somebody hasn t helped me turn that light on, but then when I actually invest in myself, and I flip the switch from thinking, Oh, I m spending money for somebody to help me. No, I m investing in myself, and I like to call it the magic rabbit. So if you give somebody if you give a magic rabbit $5 and every time you give that magic rabbit $5, he gives you back $500, how many times would you give the magic rabbit $5? I would give the magic rabbit $5 every month, every week, every day, and that s really what an investment in yourself does, and that s what we re really trying to create with Work-At-Home School, with the Work-At-Home Summit, and all of the resources that our instructors offer as well. And that s what we re actually going to get into right now. We ve run out of time, but I m super excited about the stuff that you re offering our viewers for free, so I first want to say thank you. I know that writing and publishing a book isn t for the faint of heart, but it s so worth it, and it can be overwhelming knowing even where to start after you have this great idea for a book and you want to get it out into the world. But you ve broken it down really well for us today. And you ve also got your freebie. We mentioned it already, so I spoiled it. If you ve got a book ideas, guys, you re listening to this right now and you ve either thought about writing it or you ve already written it, you ve got to check out what Alinka is offering to everyone tuning in to the free Work-At-Home Summit right now. It s a free book called How I Sold 80,000 Books, and that s a

10 lot of books. So if you want to learn steps and step-by-step motions, she did write a book on exactly how to do that. Click the link below this video, and I know you hear my dog. He s going crazy right, but we home and work we home at our work, just like we work at our home, so click the link below the video to get that free book. It contains more than 100 pages of essential book marketing how-tos, and it s yours free just for tuning into the Work-At-Home Summit. Alinka is also an esteemed instructor here at Work-At-Home School. Her VIP pass to the 5- Figure Author Challenge is inside the curriculum, the Committed Curriculum Package, and that challenge will give you lifetime access to more than 30 experts who share information on how to write, market, and sell to your target audience as well as a toolbox valued at $2,000 packed with courses, books, and sessions that will jumpstart your 5-figure author journey. And I m laughing because, holy smokes, that s worth the cost of the entire enrollment and to the Committed Curriculum Package at Work-At-Home School by itself, just the free bonus that s inside her 5- Figure Author Challenge. So you get the 5-Figure Author Challenge plus a $2,000 package of courses, books, and sessions, and then you get everything else inside the Committed Curriculum Package. It s totally a no-brainer. Again, that is all included inside the Committed Level Curriculum Package. If you don t have it yet, links for everything are below this video including your free How I Sold 80,000 Books from Alinka. Thanks for being here, Alinka. You ve been amazing. Alinka: Thank you, Caitlin, and this summit is phenomenal, and you are amazing, so thank you so much for having me. I m honored to be part of it.