Most authors focus on strategies such as email marketing and social media when connecting with readers and promoting their books. On today’s episode, you’ll hear from an expert who gives you the keys to unlock the power of traditional media—perhaps something you hadn’t considered before.

Mary O’Donohue is a Media Coach for Authors, #1 bestselling parenting author, and former post producer for “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” She has worked in high-profile television for decades including years on “The Today Show,” “NBC Nightly News,” and “Meet the Press.”

As founder of Authors In Media, Mary teaches women nonfiction authors how to get publicity and do media interviews that sell books, expand their impact, and change the world.

Her unique coaching framework, The Media I.M.P.A.C.T. Method, is a proven path to publicity with purpose, and has consistently led to author success in national media, with her clients reaching audiences of more than a billion people—so far.

In this conversation, you’ll learn how traditional media is different than other types of media, a few obstacles authors face when navigating traditional media, and the 6 pillars that create media success for authors.

And, as Mary mentions in the interview, she’s getting ready to offer her Publish to Prime Time program for women nonfiction authors. To find out more, you can book a time on her schedule.

In addition, I encourage you to download her free podcast one-sheet templates by visiting her website, https://maryodonohue.com. I’ve already downloaded these myself and will be using them immediately!

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When we talk about writing on the podcast, we usually do it in the context of writing books. But writing can take many forms, and today I’m excited to welcome a guest whose writing and creative work has taken shape in many different ways over the years.

Andrew Greer is an eight-time Dove Award-nominated singer/songwriter, producer, author and television/podcast host who is known for his old soul sound and thoughtful conversations.

Andrew’s fifth and newest collaboration with Parable Christian Stores, Tune My Heart 2…Songs of Goodness & Love, follows last year’s Tune My Heart…Songs of Rest & Reflection—which debuted at #1 and spent 23 weeks atop Parable Christian Stores National Retail chart.

In addition to writing and recording his own music, Andrew is a producer as well. Just last month, we saw the release of Bellsburg: The Songs of Rich Mullins, co-produced by Andrew. The album featured recordings of classic Rich Mullins songs by Christian artists, including Amy Grant, Derek Webb, Cindy Morgan, Andrew Peterson, and many others.

Andrew is also known for facilitating conversations that dig deep. He co-created and co-hosts the popular television and streaming series Dinner Conversations with Mark Lowry and Andrew Greer. Additionally, he co-hosts Bridges with Patsy Clairmont and Andrew Greer, which is a podcast inviting listeners of all ages to find common ground by embracing a fierce faith in a tough season.

Carrying on his affinity for meaningful conversations in a spiritual context, Andrew has authored two books—Transcending Mysteries: Who is God, and What Does He Want From Us? co-authored with Ginny Owens, and Winds of Heaven, Stuff of Earth: Spiritual Conversations Inspired by the Life and Lyrics of Rich Mullins.

As you can see, Andrew is an artist and writer who operates in multiple genres and formats. In this wide-ranging conversation, we talk about his journey as an artist and musician, his burgeoning interest in filmmaking, producing the new Rich Mullins album, and much more.

The post Musician & Producer Andrew Greer on the Artist’s Journey appeared first on Daily Writer | Essential Habits for Impact & Influence.

Kent talks to author Todd Henry about the importance of daily practices, how Todd used his daily writing time to write a draft of the book in just three months, the specific morning routine he has followed for many years, and more.

Todd Henry describes himself as an “arms dealer for the creative revolution.” He teaches leaders and organizations how to establish practices that lead to everyday brilliance. He is the author of six books, which include The Accidental Creative, Die Empty, Louder Than Words, Herding Tigers, and The Motivation Code, and his new book Daily Creative, which is a year’s worth of short daily entries about doing your best creative work. In addition, Todd is the host of the Accidental Creative Podcast as well as the Daily Creative Podcast.

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Kent talks to author and entrepreneur Sadie Kolves about getting to 100 Amazon reviews with her first book, using social media to promote your book, and how to handle marketing if you’re an introvert.

Sadie Kolves is the author of Anything is Possible: 10 Keys to Unlock the Life of Your Dreams and the Anything is Possible Companion Journal. She is also host of the “Anything is Possible” podcast. She grew up in a small Midwestern town where she learned to overcome setbacks by working hard and believing in herself. Sadie discovered a passion for network marketing and grew it into a multiple six-figure business in just a few years.

The post Hitting 100 Amazon Reviews and Social Media Book Marketing with Sadie Kolves appeared first on Daily Writer | Essential Habits for Impact & Influence.

Establish a specific goal for your writing.

If you hang around other writers long enough, you’ll hear a lot of talk about habits. After all, you’re listening to this podcast about habits right now! However, the point of developing a writing habit is not the habit itself. The habit is just a mechanism to help you get the writing done.

But the question is: what are you writing? What is the end product this writing habit should be producing?

I encourage you to set some type of goal, since this is the point of doing all the writing work to begin with. Steven Pressfield, author of The War of Art: Break Through the Creative Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles, said this:

This is the other secret that real artists know and wannabe writers don’t. When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us. The Muse takes note of our dedication. She approves. We have earned favor in her sight. When we sit down and work, we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. Insights accrete.

There is real power in simply doing the work. My question is: what are you working toward? Is it a book? A weekly blog post? Podcast episodes you’re writing, like I’ve done with this one? Freelance or ghostwriting work?

No matter what it is, I think it’s vital to have something you’re working toward, some type of tangible goal that is important to you.

Question: What is a writing goal you are working toward right now?

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1. The Daily Writer Starter Kit. This is our brand-new premium resource for writers. And the good news is that it’s totally free!

The Daily Writer Starter Kit is actually a collection of guides on the most important topics for writers who want to take their craft more seriously and even build a writing business. How do you get these guides? You can visit https://DailyWriterLife.com/free and it will take you right to the page where you can sign up. These guides will be delivered over seven days.

2. The Daily Writer email. When you sign up for the Daily Writer Starter Kit, you will automatically start getting our daily emails, Monday-Friday with a Saturday recap. These emails are basically a written version of each day’s podcast. Some people like to listen to podcasts, and others prefer to read. I like delivering things in both formats, so you’ll get our short daily email delivered right to your inbox every day.

3. Our Daily Writer Fall Retreat. Now in some sense I hesitate to mention this because it’s close to being at capacity and those spots will be filled pretty soon. But I wanted to mention it here because this Fall retreat is our first live event. This will be held in St. Charles, Missouri, close to where I live. We have a really cool location for this small retreat—it will be about 15 people total. The focus of this specific retreat over two days will be putting together a short book.

4. My next book, The Daily Writer: 366 Meditations on Habits, Creativity, and Finding Your Authentic Voice. It releases in January. I’m extremely excited about this book and have been working on it for nearly two years. When I first had the idea for the Daily Writer concept, I was frustrated that I couldn’t find a book of daily inspiration and tips for writers—at least nothing that I liked. So I decided to write it!

I’m excited about these updates and am looking forward to continuing to serve you with the Daily Writer resources!

The post The Daily Writer is Back! (And a Few Exciting Updates) appeared first on Daily Writer | Essential Habits for Impact & Influence.

Just a quick note to let you know we’re taking a short break from our daily episodes. Over the next month, I’ll be finishing the second draft of the Daily Writer book that releases on November 1st, and I’ll also be making several major improvements to our Daily Writer Club as well as my main website, KentSanders.net.

When the podcast returns on August 15th, we will be featuring not one, but TWO weekly interviews with amazing writers and creatives. In addition, we’ll be continuing our several-month-long series on The Writer’s Path, which is a framework for building a writing-based business.

In the meantime, I encourage you to go back over the last year’s episodes and listen to the ones you haven’t caught yet… or better yet, re-listen to them because you often catch things the second or third time that you didn’t catch the first.

As always, I appreciate you listening and I look forward to returning on August 15th.

The post The Daily Writer Podcast Will Return on August 15th appeared first on Daily Writer | Essential Habits for Impact & Influence.

I’m thrilled to feature this conversation with my good friend Ken Hannaman. Ken is a Possibility Mindset Coach who has a never-ending thirst for knowledge and personal self-discovery. Ken is an executive in the corporate space and has just written and published his first book, which is titled Ungraduated: Finding Your Why and Dropping Out of Outdated Belief Systems.

Ken is also the host of the excellent podcast, Ungraduated Living & Learning, which I highly recommend!

Ken is one of the most driven, thoughtful, yet kind and curious people I know. Through his leadership experience as well as his personal learning, he has gained the perspective that while formal education is necessary for some basic life skills, what we all really need is personal & self-driven learning. He believes we often need to “ungraduate” from the old school of thought that has been socially programmed into our mindsets. (I love his thinking!)

Ken is part of our Daily Writer Community, and it has been a blast seeing his book come together over the last year or so. In this conversation, Ken shares why he wrote his book, the biggest challenges he faced, how he formed his launch team, and some advice for authors. As a bonus, we also get into some topics from his book, including labels, personal abundance, and growth.

Ken is a master thinker, and I highly encourage you to get his book if you want to be challenged in your thinking.

You can connect with Ken, listen to his podcast, and pick up his books through the links below:

Ungraduated.com

Ungraduated Living & Learning Podcast

Ungraduated: Finding Your Why and Dropping Out of Outdated Belief Systems

Connect with Ken on LinkedIn

Connect with Ken on Facebook

The post Lessons from Publishing My First Book (with Ken Hannaman) appeared first on Daily Writer | Essential Habits for Impact & Influence.

In yesterday’s episode, we talked about the power of being a guest on other people’s podcasts. Today, we will turn the tables and talk about the importance of starting your own podcast.

Podcasting is a powerful and inexpensive way to build an audience and share your ideas. One of the big advantages of podcasting over video is that people can listen to podcasts, while they are doing other things such as walking, driving, or chores.

People also listen to podcasts for much longer than they view videos. It is not unusual for a listener to tune into a podcast for an hour or two per week. When you are “in someone’s head” for that much time, they develop an intimate relationship with you as a listener.

You don’t have to do a podcast about writing. It can be about any topic you’re interested in. Podcasting is a phenomenal way to build relationships, and establish your credibility and expertise on a topic.

Daily Question: If you started a podcast, what would you talk about, and whom would the target audience be?

The post Create Your Own Podcast appeared first on Daily Writer | Essential Habits for Impact & Influence.

I want to take a moment to let you know about an important milestone we just passed here on the podcast in the last couple of weeks. We hit 100,000 downloads!

There are many podcasts with far fewer downloads, and many podcasts with much, much larger numbers. So, what does 100,000 downloads actually mean? It means that 100,000 times, people have been touched by the message of writing. I consider that a pretty cool success, no matter how you slice it.

Although I’m the one who writes and records the podcast, I don’t really take credit for this. Who deserves the credit? You do. My listeners are the ones who tune in and listen, who download and share this podcast, and who make it worth all the time and effort.

So, thank you. I mean that sincerely. I am genuinely grateful for your time and appreciate each download and listen. There are so many other ways you could be spending your time, and it means the world to me that you have chosen to spend it with me.

We are right at 700 total episodes of the podcast. I don’t consider myself to be a person of unusual talent or skill, but I have consistently shown up to create this show day after day. And I want you to know that’s a big key for your success, too. If you decide you’re going to do something important to you, and you stick with it and keep showing up, you can achieve big goals as well. I think we make success way more complicated than it needs to be sometimes.

There’s one more person I want to thank, and that is our podcast producer, Raejan Noh. After I write and record the podcast episodes, she handles the audio editing and uploading, writes show notes, coordinates with podcast guests, and also handles social media for the Daily Writer. Raejan is an absolutely indispensable part of the Daily Writer, which is not only this podcast, but also a membership community that you hear about regularly on this show.

So Raejan, thank you for all your hard work and creativity. It truly makes a difference in people’s lives. And thank YOU, our listeners, for letting me come into your life and share interviews and inspiration related to writing.

So, what’s ahead for the Daily Writer? Let me share a few things we have on the horizon.

Of course, I’m going to continue with the current podcast schedule, which means this will keep on being a daily show. But in May, we are going to do something we’ve never done before, which is doing a monthly theme. The theme for May is mental health, so May will essentially be Mental Health for Writers month. Each of the weekly guests will have some things to share related to staying mentally healthy. We will also be doing a challenge during the month of May related to mental health.

You will also see a growing focus on the Daily Writer Community this year. Our members are having some fantastic successes, and I encourage you to strongly consider giving it a look. I guarantee that your writing life and your success will be stronger when you lock arms with other writers and spend time around successful people, like those we have in the DW Community.

I’m also planning two writing-related book releases this year. The first is How to Build a Writing Habit, which will be a free download. This is the first of a series of short guides for writers. I’m calling this series “60-Minute Guides for Writers.” That book will come out next month or early May.

Then, in October, I’m releasing the big book I’ve been working on for a couple of years, appropriately called The Daily Writer: 366 Meditations on Creativity, Habits, and Discovering Your Authentic Voice. This is a daily devotional-type book for writers, and you will have the chance to not only be a beta reader, but also join the launch team for the book. More info will be coming in early summer about that.

I also really encourage you to follow the Daily Writer on Instagram, @dailywriterlife. We have some very cool things happening there and will be ramping up our presence on social media very soon. Who knows, maybe I’ll also get active on TikTok…

That’s it for this update. Thank you again for being a faithful listener. I truly appreciate you and look forward to catching up with you in the next episode.

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