AuthorDock Support Plan

A Concierge Plan Tailored to the Needs of Authors & Publishers

A retainer is a fee lawyers and doctors (aka boutique medicine) in demand charge to help cover their fixed overhead. They can't spend their time with everyone who wants it, and this model allows them to deliver greater value to a fewer number of patients. Similarly, the concierge model provide me the time to maintain a focus on each of my client's needs without spreading myself too thin.

The majority of my clients fail to build momentum for their work. Doing something now and then rarely offers long-term benefits.

How do you build momentum? You have to commit to consistent and sustained effort. Momentum begins when we allocate sufficient time in our schedule.

Simply put: I see opportunities where others don't.

Pre-scheduled time on your calendar each month creates the opportunity to review and update your plan in AuthorDock. Every action item we discuss will be logged into AuthorDock and assigned a priority of Could, Should, or Must. These three priorities allow us to quickly discern what's most important.

Most importantly, you get dedicated mindspace time from yours truly each month. I'll zoom out and take a high-level view of your portfolio. Then I'll zoom in and assign action items mapped to a strategic direction based on new opportunities. When needed, I'll advise on course corrections and identify potential areas to pivot. We all possess certain skills and one of mine is an eye for opportunities.

I'll give you guidance to assess the health of your publishing business, metrics and best next actions. Typical topics include (but not limited to) contacting reviewers, updating existing marketing campaigns, optimization of your current titles, ad spend opportunities, and building your online presence.

While new and existing projects will still require a scope of work, a retainer allows me to allocate time to scope the most effective path to completion. Rather that carve out how to profit from the engagement, I will consider your best interests first.

The challenge with the transactional engagement I have used in the past is that I rarely had time to look at the bigger picture with a client. This model allows me to move away from transactional-based clients and towards more meaningful long-term partner engagements.

I will be your expert eyes on the publishing aspect of your business. Like a good accountant who keeps an eye on the financial health of your business, I will keep an eye on the health of your publishing division.

We lose sleep so you don't have to.

Any scopes of work I create will be part of the larger strategy we've already discussed. Similar to revisiting a blueprint if you were building a house. What's been missing is an architect and a project engineer who checks the work against the blueprint.

Participation in AuthorDock includes:

• AuthorDock Project Manager access - your central hub for all things related to your books we’ll revisit when we talk. It's a collaborative, secure space to keep everything we need centralized and readily available.
• Website Hosting. We use our own in-house web content engine that allows us to put up call to action pages quickly (and makes pages like this one editable via dropbox).
• Prioritized support. You can expect a response typically within 24-hours (M-F).
• Regularly scheduled strategic planning meetings where we'll review your bestseller blueprint. We'll establish and analyze metrics (sales, reader engagement, reviews, marketing, etc.), create and monitor milestones, and identify the best next actions to take.

All time will be logged in AuthorDock so you can see exactly where they time was spent. Status updates are always reported in AuthorDock.

What gets done is what we choose to focus on.

Projects are complex, dynamic, and involve a geographically dispersed team. Email quickly becomes a hindrance to insure our priorities rise above the noise of everything else going on.

Authordock is the tool we developed in-house to manage the work we do and provide our clients with updates and quick access to vital information. You'll find AuthorDock is uniquely tailored to the needs of authors and publishers. AuthorDock is what allows us to implement the Self-Published Success framework we have been refining since 2009.

I've found that AuthorDock is simply the fastest way to get up to speed and avoid spending time searching for the information we need.

AuthorDock is where we'll log time spent on your project and where you can get a birds eye view at anytime.

You can read more about the origin of AuthorDock here.

My best,
Brian Schwartz
805-225-1251 (PDT)