Self-Publishing Training Manuals And Focusing On Your True Fans With Guy Windsor

What needs to go into a training manual if you are teaching physical skills? How can you focus in on your super fans and create only for them, while still making a living from multiple streams of income? Guy Windsor explains more in this interview.

In the intro, Amazon celebrates a decade of Kindle Unlimited and indie authors do really well!; Written Word Media has announced a new partnership with RetireHub, an innovative online community for retirees; Levels of author success [Draft2Digital]; Indie Writers Club; Blood Vintage book trailer and Kickstarter campaign.

Plus, Oprah's AI special [Variety]; Women using AI less than men [The Economist];
Amazon is revamping Alexa to use Anthropic’s Claude [The Verge]

Today’s show is sponsored by Findaway Voices by Spotify, the platform for independent authors who want to unlock the world’s largest audiobook platforms. Take your audiobook everywhere to earn everywhere with Findaway Voices by Spotify. Go to findawayvoices.com/penn to publish your next audiobook project.

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Guy Windsor is a consulting swordsman, teacher, and author specializing in medieval and renaissance Italian swordsmanship. He runs SwordSchool and is the host of The Sword Guy Podcast.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

Creating freedom with multiple streams of income Automating and outsourcing non-creative work Key aspects to consider when creating a training manual The importance of photo quality in print books Why write a book instead of produce an online course? Marketing a very niche genre Tips for building your online author store

You can find Guy at Swordschool.shop or Swordschool.com.

Transcript of Interview with Guy Windsor

Joanna: Guy Windsor is a consulting swordsman, teacher, and author specializing in medieval and renaissance Italian swordsmanship. He runs SwordSchool and is the host of The Sword Guy Podcast. Today, we're talking about his book, From Your Head to Their Hands: How to write, publish, and market training manuals for Historical Martial Artists. So welcome back to the show, Guy.

Guy: Thanks, Jo. Lovely to be here.

Joanna: Yes, great to talk to you again. Now, you were last on the show back in 2021 when you talked about pivoting your business from in-person to online and scalable, which was much needed in the pandemic. So just give us an update as to how that change has gone for you, how your business looks today, and—

What are your multiple streams of income?

Guy: Well, I actually made that pivot in around 2015 because I needed to get location independence so I could move my family from Finland to the UK because of elderly parents.

That was just super lucky timing because then the pandemic occurred, and we were fine because we were living off books and courses, which did really well during the pandemic. Rather than me living off in-person teaching, which I'd been doing before.

So it's blissful, honestly. The difference between if I don't show up to work, I don't get paid, and well, if I feel like taking three months off to go do this creative project or do something with my kids or whatever, I can do that, and it won't make a really big difference in the short term. It's just so freeing, which means, among other things, I can work on pretty much anything I like.

Now, you asked about multiple streams of income, and you sent me the question beforehand, so I made a list. So there's books, which are training manuals, mostly. There's also some translations and other things, which are in print, ebook, and some of them are also in audio. Then online courses.

Those are the two really big earners. The two of those together is like 90% of my income. The rest of it comes from in-person seminars, which is actually my favorite thing. I travel around all over the place teaching seminars in America and Singapore and New Zealand and wherever. It’s fantastic, but it's really, really demanding.

Then I have my own social media site called SwordPeople, which brings in some income. I have a Patreon which brings in a tiny bit of income.

I also, back in 2007, the warehouse space next door to the warehouse space we were using as a training space came on the market, so I bought it. So my students there are renting that space off me. So that's another income stream.

I also have merch, like t-shirts and whatnot, which hardly sell anything at all. So if anyone wants a really cool t shirt, I can point them in the right direction.

So like by platform, my Teachable account is the single biggest chunk of money coming in monthly. Then my wide books as an aggregate, I don't really pay attention to the different platforms there. My Shopify store would be third.

Rent on the space would be fourth. Then seminars, teaching in person, SwordPeople, and all the other stuff is sort of the tail end.

Joanna: That's great, and let's just point out that you started out by saying it was blissful. When people hear that whole list, they might be thinking, oh my goodness. How big is your team? How many hours do you work?

Just talk about how the structure of this works and how automated it is.

Guy: I do all the actual creative stuff for myself, and I produce an average of, I suppose, a book a year and an online course a year, something like that.

I have an assistant who is fabulous, and she does the tedious admin stuff. She started out by doing the transcriptions for my podcast, and then she kind of took over all of the writing the show notes, naming the episodes, uploading them everywhere, getting them all in the right place at the right time.

Then she took on my newsletter as well. So I write it, but she does all the formatting, and making sure all the links are right, and all that sort of thing.

So I've outsourced as much as possible of the stuff that involves, shall we say, spreadsheets. I have an allergy to spreadsheets, so if it involves a spreadsheet, I hire a professional. Katie is excellent at spreadsheets.

I also have an accountant who does anything related to bookkeeping, and accounting, and all that sort of stuff, because that's just not what I'm good at. I sort of break out in a rash when I see a spreadsheet.

So it sounds like a lot of stuff because I've been accumulating it for 20 years. Okay, I didn't produce all this stuff in the last week. My first book came out in 2004. My first online course came out in 2016.

I started my podcast in 2020 while everyone was miserable at home and they needed a friendly sword person to come into their ear hole every Friday, just basically to make everyone feel better. So it's sort of grown bit by bit, but I don't actually work that much.

I mean, normally I've got maybe three or four hours of creative juice in me in a given day, and then I'm pretty much done. Then I sort of wander off and do some woodwork, or I go for a walk with one of my kids, or whatever. So it's little and often.

Joanna: Yes, and I think this is one of the principles of lifestyle design, business design. I think about this sometimes, I mean, maybe you do too, which is, sure, I could build a really big company and make seven figures or whatever, but…

Guy: You could, Jo. I don't think I could.

Joanna: But as in, I feel like you and I are quite similar in this way, in that we're happy in our work, but—

We don't need to scale and work harder or employ more people. Because that's not the lifestyle we're looking for.

Guy: I mean, at one point, I had four people working for me in various capacities, and it didn't make my life any better. So with goodwill on both sides, that got now whittled down to just Katie. I would be lost without Katie, so we're quite clear.

So, I mean, fortunately, my assistant before Katie spent like four months as—basically what happened with her, it was great. Her name's Kate Tilton. She's an author assistant. We were working together for ages, and she basically outgrew me.

She had this utterly charming way of firing me as a client because I just wasn't going to bring in the kind of work she wanted to do. That was fine. She spent several months working with Katie to teach her the specifics of how to publish the books on all the platforms, that kind of thing.

So hopefully when Katie eventually outgrows me, as she inevitably will, she'll also train up her successor. Again, without the assistant, I think the first thing to go would be the podcast. I couldn't keep it regular.

Joanna: That's really good because something like a podcast, I mean, I have help with this show. That is outsourceable because it's kind of the same every week, the production side of it.

Let's get into the training manuals, which we're focusing on today. A lot of people do want to do training manuals. So whether, let's say they might be teaching yoga or knitting or all kinds of physical skills, and of course, you can do videos and all that kind of thing. So talk about training manuals.

What are training manuals, and what are the key aspects to consider?

Guy: Well, as I see it, a training manual is a book that is intended to communicate a particular skill. It doesn't really matter what that skill is, most skills can be communicated, at least in part, through a book of some kind.

You need the regular stuff, kind of the front and back matter. If you're doing anything like martial arts, you have to have safety stuff baked in so that no one can accuse you of promoting dangerous practices.

Basically, in terms of the actual content, I'm assuming that anyone trying to write a training manual actually knows their subject already, which isn't necessarily true.

I mean, I wrote my second training manual because I wanted to learn the subject that the training manual was about. So it took me a lot longer than it would now to write the same thing because I was learning the system of early 17th century Italian rapier as I went.

So you can use the writing process as a way of learning the thing you're trying to teach. You need a set of basic principles, so your whatever general principles of your art may be.

I mean, in knitting, I have knitted maybe two things in my life, last one was probably 40 years ago. So perhaps something like “controlling your yarn and not getting it tangled” might be a principle. So whatever things that the student needs to know that will apply to everything they do from there on.

With swords, it's quite straightforward, “don't get hit.” If you get hit, it's always wrong. So that's like one simple principle.

Then you have your practical instruction, and the thing that people tend to get wrong when I've seen less well-executed training manuals, is you have to understand what is the very first thing that the person needs to know. If you're an expert in your field, that can be quite a difficult thing to figure out.

So for example, if I'm teaching you how to parry with a sword, well, a parry is a defense done against an attack. So whoever you're training with needs to know the attack. So you have to teach the attack before you teach the parry because the parry doesn't exist until the attack occurs.

Whatever the skill is, you need to figure out what the prerequisites are and make sure they go in order.

I mean, the classic mistake in this area comes from Windows back in the 90s. Where there was this instruction thing, which was, “Press ctrl, alt, delete, enter, enter, to wipe your hard drive.” So someone who's just doing as they're told and haven't read the whole thing before they get stuck in.

I know this because it happened to a friend of mine, they merrily pressed control, alt, delete, enter, enter, and then was astonished when everything just disappeared.

Joanna: It wiped their hard drive!

Guy: Yes, it wiped their hard drive. Now, if they had just taken the end of that sentence and stuck it at the beginning, it would have saved an awful lot of trouble.

It's that empathy for the student and understanding what it is they need to see first that is one of the really key things about writing a good training manual, I think.

Joanna: I guess another thing is thinking about progression. So that maybe you won't do one mega mega training manual, but you might do some for beginners, some for intermediate, some for advanced, and then assuming the knowledge in the earlier one. So, I mean—

This can turn into a lot of books, right?

Guy: Yes, and it's best to start with the most basic one first, for two reasons. Firstly, there are vastly more beginners than there are relatively experienced people, I mean by definition.

So the first book will have the biggest market, and those that like it and like your approach, will then want to get the next one, and the next one, and the next one. So I did this with my rapier training workbooks, which we talked about in the last interview, and now it's available.

I just got fed up with handling multiple SKUs, so I just got rid of those. Now it’s just the combined version, like the complete workbook that people get now, but it's actually made up of what was four separately published books.

Joanna: So that could be a bundle.

Guy: Absolutely.

Joanna: Okay, that's really interesting. Then you mentioned respecting the person who's going to get it, but actually testing the manual, as you said. I mean that Microsoft one, if you'd have handed it to an actual human.

I still remember the first time my mum tried to use a mouse, like a mouse with a computer. She took it to the end of the table and then said, “Where do I go now? It's about to fall off the table.” It was like, oh, you pick it up and you move it again. She didn't even know that you could do that. So we have to assume people don't have a clue, basically.

Guy: Yes, and I have access to a lot of beginners because my job is teaching people how to fight with swords. So I can get my training manuals tested by the actual target audience.

I think, honestly, for any kind of pedagogical work, it's a really good idea to be able to test how it works in the real world.

I mean, I remember back in 2005, a couple of guys in Singapore had come across my first book, The Swordman's Companion, in a bookshop, back in the old days when people went to bookshops. They emailed me with a question, and we got into an email back and forth, and they eventually came to Finland to train with me for a month.

So I got to see them doing the drills from the book, having only learned them from the book. I just remember, this was before YouTube was even invented, so there wasn't really much in the way of video sharing. So they'd never seen the motion. They'd only seen the pictures.

As a result, they were moving in this sort of stop-start-stop-start way, because that's what they'd seen.

Joanna: It's hard not to do that in a book because they're still pictures.

Guy: It is very hard. Which is why, I mean these days, now that the technology has caught up —

I create videos for any motion that I'm trying to teach, and I link to that in the book.

So you produce the video, you throw it up on Vimeo, for example, create a redirectable link to that video—in case you ever want to change the video, you don't have to then change the book—and then you put that redirectable link, something easy to type, into the book itself, and maybe even create a QR code.

Joanna: With the photos in the book, talk a bit about that.

Of course, they need to be consistent, they need to be professional level. There's all kinds of things that go into that.

What are the challenges for preparing photos and also for putting them into the book, around costing?

Guy: I mean, I cheat, generally. I have students who are serious amateur photographers who honestly enjoy spending a whole weekend doing sword pictures for a book.

So, if possible, get a professional is like the best advice, or an enthusiastic amateur. The thing is, a picture that looks great on your phone may print appallingly badly when it's converted to black and white and thrown into a book.

So for any of my books that have lots of photographs, which is quite a few of them, I mean, the main tips that my photographer gave me are, you want the camera as far away as you can reasonably get, so you have this kind of flat focus. If the camera is too close, you get this slight fish eye effect.

So you want the camera as far away as it can reasonably get if you're shooting action shots. It's different if you're shooting like close ups for a craft thing, that has a whole separate like macro lenses and whatnot.

Basically you need to get the right focus so that the image is as flat as you can get it so that you don't get any distortion. You want to be shooting in as high a resolution as you can get. It's going to end up being a 300 DPI TIFF file, that's what the printers usually want.

That means, however it's cropped down and modified, it will need to end up as 300 DPI. Anything less than that, you're going to get a grainy picture.

So, I mean, the last really photo heavy book I did was the second edition of The Duellist's Companion. I ended up spending nearly two grand on, not even layout, just getting the photos we had made print ready. It's hard.

If you're doing this on a shoestring, you might want to think about not doing a print book if there's lots and lots of pictures. You know, get loads of people to like the ebook and the PDF, and then use that money to get the pictures sorted out for a print book.

Joanna: Well, even on that, many people don't realize this, but publishing on Amazon, they take a delivery charge. Most of the time it's very, very small because most of us just have text-based books, but if people don't get their images right in their EPUB, it can be massive. So you could end up losing all your royalty.

So if you are going to do an ebook that people can read on a big tablet or whatever with all the images, then again, I think Vellum does it, I'm sure Atticus does it, but formatting those pictures appropriately so they're high res. Don't just do it yourself and then assume it's fine.

So this is the thing, I feel like people just think that they can stick photos in everywhere and it won't impact cost, but it is a huge cost.

How did you decide how many pictures in the book versus text, and balancing that with the cost of the final product?

Guy: Okay, I don't consider the cost at all because I don't require any specific project to break even. If enough projects are making enough money, I can use that money to make, for example, this book. I mean, the second edition Duellist's Companion has made its cost back, but I don't think it's made me any money.

I don't actually care because it's a book that needs to be there in my body of work. It needed updating because it came out in 2006, so it was really bit long in the tooth. I didn't have an ebook version of it, I didn't have a hardback version of it. So now there's a full-color hardback, which is pricey.

Joanna: How much?

Guy: I charge, I think it's 55 quid for it.

Joanna: Okay, so it really is only for the super fans.

Guy: Right, yes. Some people buy it, and some people don't. If they can't afford that, or they don't want it, they can get the paperback, which is about 30 quid. Then my eBooks are, I think, 10. Again, I'm only talking about on my Shopify store. I don't even look at what the wide thing does.

Joanna: So you do put them wide? Like, for example, Ingram does that, right?

Guy: Yes, so I have hardbacks through Ingram, paperbacks through Amazon and Ingram, ebooks through Amazon and all the platforms. Mostly through Draft2Digital, but I do have my own KDP account and my own Kobo account, but it's super wide.

The color hardback was too expensive to do through Ingram, but on Bookvault, it was fine. So the color hardback is only available on my store.

So people who find the regular hardback on wherever they find it, in the blurb, in the sales copy, it should say—I think Katie did this just a couple of weeks ago—”You can get the full color version of this at Swordschool.shop.”

So people who want the hardback and want the full color, they can get it for pretty much the same price on Swordschool.shop as they can get the black and white hardback anywhere else. Like, Bookvault is really good for color printing.

Joanna: Yes, they're excellent. Just on the why, I mean, you said you don't really mind so much if it doesn't break even, but most people are looking at this as more of making more money. I was thinking about this, like just a fundamental question—

Why do a book? Why not just do a course when it's a physical skill?

Guy: Oh, I mean, the main reason is that some people prefer books. I mean, you may say, like theoretically, a video course is better for teaching skills involving movement. You're probably right, but there are some people who simply don't like them. They prefer books.

So the books are for the people who don't like the online courses. Also —

If you're establishing yourself as an authority, then authors have authority, and online course producers don't.

Joanna: I totally agree. Isn't it weird? It's a weird thing, but it's true.

Guy: Also, books are spreadable and shareable in a way that online courses aren't. So I mean, those guys in Singapore came across my book in a bookshop, and that changed many things. I mean, I was in Singapore just this year teaching a seminar because those guys found that book in a bookshop.

You might go to somebody's house and see one of my books on the shelf, and go, “Oh, that's interesting.” Then they go, “Oh, I'm not really into swords and stuff anymore. I'm letting you borrow it.”

So they'll take it away, and they'll read it, and they'll go, “Oh, this is quite nice.” Then they'll come to my website and go, “Oh, I actually quite fancy some of that,” and off they go.

So books are sticky, and they're durable. Particularly physical books, they have a certain resonance and heft. The thing is, personally, my house is full of books, but I hardly use online courses at all because I don't really like them.

Joanna: Yes, I buy a lot of courses and end up not doing them all. I know people listening do the same.

Just on the hardback high-quality print books, I heard some stat, I can't remember where it was, but that hardback books can go through seven pairs of hands over time, either gifted, or second hand, or whatever.

Whereas, and in fact, many second hand bookshops won't take the crappy paperbacks because they don't—not crappy, but just in general, paperbacks don't last so long so that they would rather have nice hardbacks. I did want to ask— How did your book end up in a book shop in Singapore?

Guy: It was my first book. It was published by an American publisher that is now defunct. Basically, this is actually an interesting story about formatting, if there can be an interesting story about formatting.

A colleague of mine called Christian Tobler, he is to German medieval martial arts what I am to Italian medieval martial arts. He had a similar book to mine, The Swordman's Companion, coming out in the same year. His was on the German medieval stuff, mine was on the Italian medieval stuff.

He insisted on A4 US Letter size, quite a big workbook, because it would be better for the pictures. He was completely right. It's a better product.

My publisher had a bit more leverage with me because it was my first book. He said, well, we should go with six by nine. So I said, okay, and we did.

Barnes and Noble picked up 50 copies of my friend's book, and they picked up 600 of mine, just because of the format.

It has nothing to do with our reputations because he actually had previous books out, and I didn't.

Barnes and Noble wanted 600 copies of my paperback, and they sold them through relatively quickly, which was nice. So it was a Barnes and Noble in Singapore, which just happened to have one or two copies, because Barnes and Noble put in a chunky order.

Joanna: That is another argument for standard formatting. It would have been cheaper for the publisher to produce those copies, so Barnes and Noble would have seen a cheaper price as well. Then they don't fit so well on certain shelves, and all of that kind of thing.

Okay, so I just want to mention audio, because you did say you had some audio, but of course—

Training manuals don't really work for audio, right?

Guy: Generally not. I mean, From Your Head to Their Hands doesn't rely on pictures, and I'm not like illustrating how to type. So that body of knowledge, that skill set, doesn't rely on visuals. So there is an audiobook of that.

My audiobooks are basically anything that is not like physical practice stuff. So I have a book called The Theory and Practices of Historical Martial Arts, that's available as an audiobook.

My current favorite is a colleague of mine in Italy who is a trained musical theater performer. We had lunch in Florence in January, and I had this genius idea, which I thought was a genius idea, which was I would get her to read this medieval manuscript on martial arts written in 1480s by a guy called Philippo Vadi.

It's quite short. I got her to read the Italian as an audiobook, and I read my translation of it. So there's an audiobook which is this beautiful Italian voice reading beautiful Italian. Then there's my kind of clunky workaday English voice reading clunky workaday English.

For, I guess, 99.9% of listeners, that's of no interest whatsoever, but I mean, I told one of my students about it, and she literally got goosebumps. So for my niche, something like that is just catnip. So it's totally worth doing.

Joanna: Exactly. I think you definitely prove the point about nicheing down.

You have a good business based on something very, very niche.

Guy: Well, the thing is, if it's very specific, it's easy to market.

Joanna: Yes.

Guy: If I say, Jo, I'm writing a book about this specific medieval manuscript which covers this specific style of fighting, are you interested? Yes, no. For you, that's an easy no. You don't have to think about it. Am I right?

Joanna: Well, exactly. I must say, I've never bought any of your books, Guy!

Guy: That's fine. I don't mind because I didn't write them for you.

I know who I wrote them for, and the people I wrote them for really like them.

It's easy for me to find those people because I can describe what the book is super specifically.

The same is true for online courses. I don't spend any time fussing about the sales copy on my sales page because the people I'm marketing to, if I say, “I've got this online course about medieval dagger combat.” It's an easy hell yes for some people, and it's an easy no thanks for everyone else.

So the sales copy isn't even really relevant. It's just there to fill out the page a bit, to give people an idea to make sure that they understand what is going to be on the course, what is not going to be on the course, what they can expect.

So it's just to give a clear picture of what a course contains and some sample videos in case they're not sure. Then they know, and I don't have to plug the value.

Joanna: Yes, on that, let's talk about marketing then. Obviously you have this direct store. Obviously you have an email list.

Is it mainly SEO because people who are interested in this go searching?

Guy: I don't pay any attention to SEO whatsoever,

Joanna: You naturally do SEO, basically.

Guy: Yes, I have natural SEO. I mean, the WordPress version that I'm using has this sort of SEO score. The professional who built my website cares about things like SEO, and so you have this like SEO score when you write a blog post, and mine is usually under 15% because I just don't care.

Again, most people in the early days found me because I was running a school, and I was advertising and putting up flyers in martial arts shops, and doing demos at games conventions, things like that. So word spread, and people brought their friends, and so the school did fine from the very get go.

Then when the first book came out, that sort of established my international reputation, and people started hiring me to go abroad to teach in these places. As the more books come out, if you're interested in my topic, I am very hard to avoid.

Joanna: That's what I mean about natural SEO. I mean, even my site, The Creative Penn, I have also been pretty similar. I have put content up, but when it's around the same topic, you naturally rank over time for things, and if people start trusting you and linking to you.

Do you do any paid marketing at all now?

Guy: I have done, and it was always at best break even, and usually a giant waste of money. I mean, the first bit of paid advertising that seemed to be working was I did Amazon ads for a bit.

At one point I was spending 500 quid a month on Amazon ads. I thought, that's a lot of money, why don't I just turn it off and see what happens? So I turned it off, and three months later my sales were the same.

Joanna: It's a good experiment.

Guy: It was a great experiment. It saved me a fortune. The thing is, sometimes you type a search term into Google, for example, and let's say you're too lazy to click on ebay.com. So you just put eBay and hit go, and eBay pops up.

If you're looking for eBay, if eBay is paying for ads for their own name, then they're wasting their money. This is established by an economist who, I think, saved eBay hundreds of millions.

So when your stuff arrives at the top of the search when people type in normal search terms anyway, there's no sense paying for advertising.

Honestly, good advertising is a spreadsheet game. You have to have analytics and figure out which ads are performing, and turn some on and turn some off, and tweak the amount of money you're paying on this. It's horrible.

So I've hired people to do it, and again, they're all competent, but the only one I've ever had who I would consider hiring again, the thing that made him different is he would work for a relatively small fixed fee and then a percentage of sales.

Joanna: That's very rare.

Guy: Yes, it is very rare. The thing is, if the product is advertising, I think that should be the minimum. Really, it should be the standard.

Joanna: That's not the reality of the market. That's old information. So for the last year, I've been running only Amazon auto ads, and this will work for you as well because you're so specific.

So on my top selling books, which are How to Write a Novel—this is non-fiction only, by the way—How to Write Non-Fiction, and How to Make a Living With Your Writing. They're like my top selling books.

So I just put an auto ad, which is all you do is select the book and you give it a budget, and then the Amazon algorithm does everything else. I check it once a month, and that's it.

Guy: Okay, but you're still giving money to Jeff Bezos, who has enough.

Joanna: Yes, but I'm getting more back. So I have found that just doing a basic level. Also, let's face it, I'm in a much more competitive niche than you are because there's a lot of books on how to write a novel.

So for me to keep my books higher up, then I need to do something. I just decided that I want to have something on Amazon, because now I don't focus on Amazon, I focus on my direct store and all of that. So I just have that kind of running in the background. I wanted to make sure people listening knew that—

It doesn't have to be a spreadsheet game. I do not do that at all with Amazon ads.

Guy: Fair enough. Still, basically, I'm not willing to make Jeff even richer to maybe get a few more sales I don't care about because the only people I care about are my people.

So the people on my mailing list, the people who listen to my podcast, the people who are on my Swordschool platform, the people who show up to my seminars, the people are already buying my books. Those are my people, and I will do anything for them. I mean, I'll write them whatever book they want.

Someone who finds a book of mine on Amazon when they weren't specifically looking for me, they're probably not my person yet. Now, if they buy the book and they like it, they may come onto my platform and become one of my people, but until that happens, I don't care.

I am not interested, because there are far too many people out there who may or may not like my stuff, who may or may not find my stuff. I have all my books out there to be found, and I think of Amazon as an outreach project.

Joanna: Yes, and I think it's a good attitude to focus on your people, and I do that now a lot more with my Patreon, for sure.

We're almost out of time. So I do also just want to come back on that direct store. So you've got Swordschool.shop, and you have, as we mentioned, all these books and products. A lot of authors now want to start selling direct. You've been doing it for a while.

What are your top tips for authors who might want to build their own store?

Guy: Well, do it, obviously, because it doesn't cost very much, and it's kind of fun, and you'll learn a lot doing it. If you want to actually sell books, the easiest way—well, easy is the wrong word—he most reliable way, I think, is have a list. It's the classic, have a newsletter.

My friend Hugh Hancock told me this in 2015. He said, “Guy, the money is in the list.” He was absolutely right. You start with five friends on your email list, maybe, but you need to get the people who are interested in what you have to say to interact with you directly.

Then when you have the next book for them, you can simply tell them, and a chunk of them will just go and buy it. They'll buy it off the platform that you particularly send them to.

I mean, I've been fielding emails for 20 years now from people saying, “Guy, I want to buy your book. Where do you get the most money if I buy it?” The people who care, really care, and those are my people. Now I can just say, well, go to Swordschool.shop, please.

Now I actually have a really good answer for them, because until Bookvault integrated with Shopify, I had direct ebook sales and direct course sales. That integration is the game changer that means I can focus all of my attention on that one place. Most of my people prefer paper, so most of my sales are paperbacks.

Joanna: Okay, that's really interesting.

You mentioned merch briefly and said that wasn't doing very well.

Are you just cutting that out completely? Is that not something that's worked? I mean, I haven't even done it yet.

Guy: It's sitting on my store, and every now and then somebody buys a t-shirt, but it's extremely rare. I don't mind. It's again, it's one of those things. Like some of the books I've written, maybe 10 people bought them when they came out, and now, five years later, there's maybe 100 sales a year or whatever, and it's finding its audience.

It doesn't cost me anything to have the merch sitting there on Shopify because I use, I think it's called Printful. Shopify integrates with them, and so when someone orders a t-shirt, it's printed and shipped. So you don't have to hold any stock.

So it doesn't cost me anything to keep it there. So I'm just going to leave it there until either it picks up, or I don't know, maybe one day I'll just stop it, or start actually promoting it, or I don't know.

Joanna: I'm struggling with that side of things. I had an interview with Alex Kava earlier this year, and she said something which made a lot of difference, which was that you don't have to have the merchandise selling all the time.

So you can say, right, for the next two weeks, I'm selling this print run of… I've just ordered some creative badges from a site, and I just got it, and I'm like, I love these, but I can't do them at the quality I like with print on demand.

So I was thinking I would say, okay, these are available, everybody order. Then it's closing, then I can put my kind of print run in. So that freed me a little bit from thinking that everything has to be evergreen print on demand.

Guy: Sure, but is the fulfillment automated?

Joanna: No, but that's the thing. This would be for a specific event, like a Kickstarter or something else where you're doing a special event. This was a more eventful thing.

Guy: I can see the value of that. I am allergic to packing and shipping and printing out labels.

Joanna: Oh, me too.

Guy: That's not a bad idea. You can probably do that even with the print on demand stuff, you can just turn it off.

Joanna: Yes, turn it on and off.

Guy: Then make an event out of turning it on again and see if anyone goes and buys it. It basically gives you a reason to mention it in the newsletter again.

Joanna: Yes, exactly. Although, to be fair, I'm waiting for Bookvault to integrate a lot more products.

Guy: Stickers. We need stickers.

Joanna: Well, they do have Photobubble, another business that they have. I'm like, well, if you start doing this, that and the other. I did try Printful, and I got some of the stuff, and I was like, oh, this is not making me enough profit to be worth it. Obviously, you know, there's potential returns. I wanted to do mugs, and it was too painful.

Guy: Okay, I don't do returns, and I'm not shy about putting decent prices on things. So, like, my hardbacks are like 45 quid normally, and my paperbacks are 30. I'm selling a book that people want, it'll help solve a problem for them, and they'll be working out of it for a long time. Honestly, it's cheap at that price.

Joanna: Yes, and no one else is doing it.

Guy: Right, and competing on price is a great way to turn into Walmart or die.

Joanna: Or turn into like Amazon KU, I mean. Okay, so we are out of time.

Where can people find you, and your books, and your podcast online?

Guy: Well, they can go to SwordSchool.com and they can find everything there. So if listeners are interested in From Your Head to Their Hands, I've created a discount code on Swordschool.shop.

So if you put JOANNAPENN, with a double n, into the discount field, you'll get 30% off the ebook of From Your Head to Their Hands. So Swordschool.shop or Swordschool.com, and JOANNAPENN is the code.

Joanna: Is that all one word and lowercase?

Guy: All one word, and you can put it in all caps. It's probably the easiest.

Joanna: Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for that, and thanks so much for your time, Guy. That was great.

Guy: Thanks, Jo. Lovely talking to you.

The post Self-Publishing Training Manuals And Focusing On Your True Fans With Guy Windsor first appeared on The Creative Penn.