The Publishing Performance Show

The Publishing Performance Show: Our 2024 in Review & Future Plans

• Teddy Smith • Episode 53

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Hey everyone! What a wild ride 2024 has been. From welcoming a new baby (and realizing two kids is WAY more than double the work) to watching this show grow beyond my wildest dreams, I want to share the highs, lows, and everything in between of this incredible year.

In this episode, I'm diving into:

  • Life as a publishing dad 
  • The amazing guests who've joined us - from Susie Quinn to Kevin J Anderson
  • My Vegas adventure at Author Nation (what happens in Vegas... gets recorded!)
  • Growing my own book empire to 22 titles
  • How Publishing Performance's AI is changing the ad game
  • What's coming in 2025 (spoiler: it's gonna be big)


Resources mentioned:

  • Publishing Performance - Our AI advertising wizard
  • Author Nation Videos in Youtube


Connect with Teddy Smith:

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Teddy Smith (00:06.116)
Hello, hello everyone and welcome to this review of the last year of the publishing performance show. It's been a fantastic year and I'd really like to say thank you to everybody who has listened to the show, who's sent me emails, given me feedback, who's recommended guests. For those of you who have been guests, I'd like to say a big thank you as well. And I thought I would just do this show to give you a bit of a rundown of what I went through last year and what the plan is for the year coming up.

And at the end of the show, at the end of this episode, there is a little treat for you all. So hang on until the end of the episode and I will share that with you. But I thought I'd start with a bit of a review of 2024. So 2024 was quite a big year for me. I had a baby and so that was quite a big change in my life. I've got now a two and a half year old and a six month old. And you know what? That's been a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. Two is much more difficult than.

know, one times two, it's, it's been a bit of a big change, but I've really enjoyed it. And that's been the biggest thing that's happened to me this year. But also, obviously we started this podcast. Now I saw this podcast as a bit of fun just to try and speak to more authors, to speak to more people in the publishing industry. You know, I wanted to learn myself. I wanted to learn a bit more about how the publishing industry works. I wanted to speak to some cool guests and I wanted to just learn and meet new people. I never really thought it would go quite as big as it has.

And you know, each episode now is getting hundreds of downloads and we're getting thousands of people subscribed to the YouTube channel and to the Instagram and to the socials. And each episode's had some great feedback. And I've loved hearing that feedback from you all. So please keep that coming. So that's been a big start for me. And some of the highlights of that show have been speaking to some amazing people and much bigger guests than I ever thought I'd be able to speak to in my first year. You know, some of my favorite episodes with some huge authors like Susie Quinn and Kevin J Anderson spoke to Craig Martel, James Blatch.

You know, we all spoke to some massive software industry people such as ProWritingAid, Lulu.com and many others. So it's been amazing to get such great insights from all these good guests. And I've learned loads and I've actually implemented lots of the stuff that people have talked about in my own publishing business. So it's been fantastic to really to get to speak to these amazing industry people. Another highlight of the year was going to Ortha Nation, which was a trade show in Las Vegas. Now, if you haven't had a chance to...

Teddy Smith (02:27.064)
Here are my episodes from Alternation. You can go back and listen to some of the live episodes from Alternation. There's some really good ones there with some really interesting authors. And you can hear all about what Alternation is about. Now, if you are thinking about going to a conference, especially if you're in America, I would really recommend going to Alternation. There's some great talks. You can meet awesome people. You can go out to Las Vegas and have a few too many drinks and have a bit of fun. But it was a really good time to go to Las Vegas and to meet all those cool people.

I'm definitely going to try go back this year and hopefully to record some more live episodes from that show too. Now some of the other highlights of this year is in my own publishing business. So now I have 22 books published and they're all doing quite well and a lot of them have, I've worked a lot on the marketing for those books by improving my newsletter which was something I learned from one of the episodes I spoke to guests about. I've done a lot of the marketing with the social media as well, so promoting those books through different channels. I've also done a look at

updating some of the covers after speaking to Rebecca Haskell and some other people. I have changed some of the covers of my book to get them to convert a bit higher. And I've actually seen those conversion rates improve. just by implementing some of the stuff I've learned from these shows, I've actually been able to improve my books. So I'm really proud of being able to publish those 22 books on Amazon and in other places as well. And now the brand is growing overall. So was a really big year for working on my own book brands too.

And on top of that, Publishing Formants, the software that we've worked on, the advertising AI software is going from strength to strength. We've got lots of people using it and having really great success with that now. And the tool, if you haven't heard about it, basically uses AI to be your Amazon ad account manager. Now, if you're new to doing Amazon ads or you don't really know how to do it, then having an AI assistant to basically set up your account, to set up your ad campaigns, to run the campaigns, optimize them over time.

And so aim to reduce that ACOS and increase your sales over time is an absolutely fantastic way to run your ads. And we've had some really great feedback from the software and we've made some changes to how the algorithm works as well so that it can work more effectively for you guys that using it. In my own business, I've been using it for the ads and it's been working really well. So I'm really happy with how that's gone. So publishing formants has been a really good highlight of this year. Now, 2025 is a big year for me because I want to really

Teddy Smith (04:51.948)
really grow this podcast in something that is quite big. So my plan is to create more content for the show, for the podcast platform, but also especially for YouTube, which is where we're going to be showing most of the shows. Now, each of the episodes has been with either an author or an industry person, but we're going to start switching it up a little bit over the next year. So we're going to do each week, we're going to have one episode, which is with an author or a publisher and another episode, which is with someone who's an industry insider.

Now each of those episodes are going to be slightly different in their formats, but still familiar. You know, there's still going to be interviews and we're still going be learning, but the episodes with the authors, I'm hoping they're going to be quite inspirational. I'm hoping to get some big guests so that we can speak to some really good authors who have had great success with their books and we can learn exactly the steps they did to write their books and to get them successful. And then with the industry people, we're going to be learning about the software or the tools that they use and some tips and tricks for

basically learning how to sell more of your books, which is why you're here in the first place. It's what we all want to do. We all want to sell more books. And so in those episodes, we're going to be learning a bit more about that. Then we're going to be adding a third episode each week, which is going to be me or me with one other person, possibly sometimes, but mostly just with me, where I talk about something I've learned about in the publishing world. So it could be something I've learned from a conference, or it could be a new tip or trick, or it could be just a very small learning about how to

do something on Amazon, for example. And in those episodes, they can be very much about learning. Now with all of this new content, we're revamping the website as well. So the blog is going to be massively updated so that there's going to be lots more links so that you can understand a bit more about the people I've interviewed and you can easily go and see a bit more about them. And also you can easily access joining my newsletter as well, where we're going to be speaking a lot about different things that are happening in the publishing world.

Now the last thing that I want to be planning for this year is speaking at some more conferences. Now there's a lot of conferences and I'm definitely going to be going to the one in London, but there's lots of conferences around the world that are all about self publishing and publishing books. Now my aim for this year is to try and speak at some talking about Amazon advertising or maybe growing your podcast as an author, maybe being a guest as a podcast, as an author, or possibly something else to do with Amazon, but really want to start putting myself out there a bit more.

Teddy Smith (07:17.536)
And of course, when I learn about getting invited to speak at conferences, I'll talk about it all on this channel so that you can get that learning as well. So the plan for this year is to do all these things and aim to try and grow the subscription base. So I've got a few goals that I wanted to do. And the first one is to make the episodes a bit funnier. Now in my normal life, I like to think at least that I'm a bit of a funny person. You know, I like having lighthearted conversations and I do try to bring that lighthearted elements to the conversations.

But sometimes when you're talking about quite dry business topics, it is hard to inject that level of humor when you're talking about keywords or you're talking about, you know, different KPIs for your ad campaigns. I understand that those aren't particularly funny things. So the plan is to try and add a bit of element of humor to it. And that was one of my goals this year. And I'll only be able to do that, I guess, when I get feedback from you guys. And by the end of the year, I want to get each episode to be averaging over a thousand downloads for each episode.

That's quite a stretch goal for me, I think at the moment we're in the few hundreds. So it would be quite a big change to get that to over a thousand, but I think it's doable, especially by doing more work by promoting the, by promoting the podcast on YouTube, Instagram, and especially on LinkedIn. As I mentioned, I'd like to speak at two conferences. That would be the plan by the end of the year. And I think that is, that is absolutely doable. The other goal is to build the YouTube subscribers to 10,000 people subscribed to the channel.

Now, the reason I'm telling you these things is because I want to make it a goal that you can listen to and then I can have some accountability so that by the end of the year, I can tell you whether I've achieved them or not. And then you'd be able to hear exactly the steps I was able to do to achieve them so that you can then do it yourself if you want to. And the last one, which is the little treat that I was telling you about at the beginning of the show, is we're going to be doing some live talks with some amazing guests just for people who are subscribed. Now, all of these talks are going to be on YouTube first. So...

If you haven't subscribed to the YouTube channel, now would be a great chance to search for Teddy A.G. Smith or search for Publishing Performance Show on YouTube and subscribe to there because we're going to be doing some YouTube Lives shows with some amazing guests. I've got some really good guests lined up starting from next month and I think you're going to find them really interesting and it'll be a chance for you to even ask some questions of some of the guests who I'm talking to. Now these are going to be people who are talking at big conferences, who own big software companies. Some of them are going to be huge authors.

Teddy Smith (09:41.87)
but they're going to be people that you want to be listening to if you want to learn how to sell more books this year. if you can do me a massive favor, go over to the YouTube channel and subscribe to my YouTube channel. You can just search Teddy A.G. Smith or search for the publishing performance show and you can find it on there. And if you search, subscribe to Instagram as well, you should also be able to find links to where you can join those shows later on. But those are my goals for the year. So get to a thousand listens.

Speak to a thousand listens per episode. Sorry. Speak at two conferences, build YouTube's 10,000 people, write more books. I forgot to say that I've got plans to write more books for my meditation brand as well. And that's in the off. Those are already, I've already sort of written the outlines of those and those are ready to be written and then start these live talks for my subscribers. Now I've got a question for you all. If you could let me know your goals for the year.

I'd love to hear what your plans are and we can talk about them in a show one day as well. But let me know your plans for the year. So have you got any goals for writing books? Have you got any goals for other things for your business to start building your exposure? Have you got any topics you'd really like to hear about? Have you got any people you think would be great guests for me? Do you know any famous authors more importantly that I can interview on the show? If you have any information like that, you want to share your goals with me or you want to share.

a great interview guest with me or there's a particular topic you want to hear about, me an email either on, message me on Instagram or you can email me teddy at publishingformance.com. I respond to all my emails. you can, my email's out there so you can now send me a message, but yeah, let me know and I'll be eternally grateful for any help you can give me. But thank you all so much for listening. think it's going to be a great year. 2025 is going to be a huge year.

I'm over the worst of the baby problems of this first six months are out of the way. So I'm really happy to start moving on with my professional life. And I'd like to wish you all a really happy new year. I'm really looking forward to this year, but please get in touch. Please subscribe to the YouTube channel so that you can hear first about the live events. And I will hopefully see you in one of these live events very, very soon. Happy new year everyone and see you soon.