How Authors Can Cultivate A Powerful Abundance Mindset With Alana Terry

ALAB 110 | Abundance Mindset

Do you believe the myth that you can’t be artistically and commercially successful at the same time? Ella Barnard sits with Alana Terry, a 6-figure author of more than forty published novels, to talk about the abundance mindset. Alana shares her struggles with her limiting beliefs throughout the years. And how she overcame them as she earned more through Facebook ads. You can write beautiful novels and earn money by doing so when you learn marketing. Another fear is the myth that rich people are greedy. But Alana believes that money is a personality magnifier.  If you are a generous, loving giving person making $5,000 a month, you will be a loving, generous giving person when you make $10,000 a month. Now with a bigger impact! 

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How Authors Can Cultivate A Powerful Abundance Mindset With Alana Terry

Author bosses, we are here with Alana Terry. She is a six-figure author of more than 40 published novels. She hosts the Successful Writer Podcast and has created dozens of courses to help authors reach their dreams of achieving creative and commercial success.

I’m so glad to have you here, Alana. Thank you so much.

I’m glad to be here. This is so fun.

Alana is one of my favorite people in the industry. I love her and her courses. I recommend them all the time. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your author’s journey?

I always wanted to be a novelist. Even before I could read, I would tell my dad stories and he would take dictation for me. I have always wanted to be an author. I was in my mid-twenties when I wrote my first manuscript. Up until that point, I would start things, encounter crippling self-doubt, and be like, “This is never good enough. It is never going to get published,” and not complete it. I wrote my first manuscript and decided not to pursue publishing. It was a mental hack where I told myself, “I’m not going to submit and publish this book. I just want to get this book written.”

That was my first glass ceiling of learning to complete a manuscript and turn off the inner critic. That book did not ever get published and I’m glad it was not ready for that. I needed to learn the discipline of breaking the habit of telling myself, “This is not good enough. It is never going to get published. Don’t bother.” I wrote my next manuscripts. This is early to mid-2000s. KDP and self-publishing weren’t around. It was still like, “If you can’t get a real agent and a real publisher, this is your last resort.” It was often more like a vanity press. You pay somebody $10,000 to get boxes full of your books.

I wrote my first manuscript and sat on it for a couple of years. I was not very aggressive in shopping it out. The little feelers I put out have not done anything yet. My friend told me about KDP, how much royalties you get back from it, and how you could make such a better living. I published my first novel in 2013. That book met with a lot of success in the genre. It was a Christian fiction novel. I was like, “I can keep doing this.” My second book was even harder. There was even more crippling self-doubt because that first book had 5 or 6 awards to it.

By the book two, I was like, “Everybody is expecting something.” It is a hard-hitting book. It is one of those once-in-a-lifetime and it socks you in the gut kinds of books. I felt so much pressure. Getting the second book out was harder. I did the thing that a lot of authors do where for several years, I was writing and selling enough to pay for covers for the next one. That was all. I was getting fairly discouraged because I was writing more books. I went from 1 to 4 books a year but my income was the same. I’m working four times as hard and not making anything up for it.

That is when I learned the ads and marketing. I started with Amazon Ads, got some confidence from that, and learned about Facebook Ads. For me, learning how to market with paid ads is what gave me the confidence to treat what I was doing as a business and not just a passion, labor of love, or hobby. I fell into the marketing because it felt like a necessity, “If I want to keep paying for these covers and doing this, I need to be making something back.” It turned into where I enjoyed the marketing side of it.

It turned into a fun break from the writing. It turned into a game like, “I have got a $500 ads budget. Let’s see how much I can stretch that.” When that royalty came in, “I have got a $1,000 ads budget.” It felt fun from that sense and very empowering. The next step then was once I learned the ads, authors in my genre were coming to me saying, “I see you are doing great with Facebook Ads. Can I ask you a few questions?” At that point, I was still publishing about a novel a month and whipping them out.

I recorded my first course to save myself time so that if somebody asked me for help with Facebook Ads, I could be like, “Here is a little course.” It is not the course that you have taken because I know you liked my Facebook Ads. This is tiny. It may take you an hour from start to finish and it walks you through. That was another funny accident. I made that course to save myself time and energy so that I could focus on the writing. People liked it.

Nobody needs to know how much you’re making unless you tell them. 

I found that I liked making the course. Years ago, I added a new layer to the business, which was teaching authors how to market from that. Some of the courses turned more into teaching authors to improve their mindset because you and I chat about this all the time. If you are scared to be successful, it does not matter how much knowledge you have about Facebook Ads or Amazon Ads. You are going to be self-sabotaging that. Added onto that is the ability not just to teach authors how to do ads but how to get over some of those common hangups and things like that.

For a lot of people, there is a part where you are like, “I have been doing this and something has to change because I can’t stay at this level. I have to do something.”

I was inviting kids over to my house and teaching homeschool clubs. It was like, “Tuesday is Math club. Wednesday is Science club.” That is how I was funding my covers and things. It was not going to be sustainable.

I have done your Amazon Ads and have been doing them the way you have suggested, so I started. At this point, I have a pretty extensive backlist and I’m like, “How can I make these?” I have plateaued. I’m not making more money. Part of that is because of the categories we are in and the books I’m writing. I’m also like, “I still have all these books.” I jumped into Facebook Ads because I’m making more for the book covers.

If anybody is at a plateau, that is a time to question what is going on. Sometimes the answer is the market. It is not always something. Sometimes it is your mindset like, “I’m comfortable earning this much but not that much.” Sometimes you are not making the most of your backlist. Income plateaus can be frustrating but they can also be useful to dig into like, “What is going on here?”

I have a number of things that we will talk about based on what you have mentioned. I’m hoping the Facebook Ads helped my backlist but I’m also going to try some other things to increase the money while still be doing things that I love. I have a couple of things that are related. You had mentioned something about mental hacks. It was a mental hack to get you to love to finish the book, which is another thing that a lot of people struggle with finishing.

I wonder about any mental hacks, especially around marketing. We are talking about that marketing mindset. Even though I have been doing your Amazon Ads, I still have a resistance to looking at my ads dashboard. I still have that. I’m like, “I don’t want to look and see how much I spent.” I did not have it for a while but I have it again now. I’m not sure but it is definitely a mindset.

Is it that the numbers are intimidating? Is it that you are nervous about spending money or is it something else?

It is not the numbers. It is about how much money I’m spending. Have you had any experience working around that? It does not have to be a habit. It could be, “Try this.”

What I love about all the ads that we are able to use is there is no minimum commitment. You could say, “I’m going to spend $5 a day for three days on Facebook and see what happens.” You only need to increase that if you see it coming. That is one of them. I like to simplify it. Some people will be like, “I spent $20 on Facebook selling this book. Now I’m going to go into KDP and see how many sales came from that but I need to subtract how many of those sales came from my Amazon Ads. I got this many pages.” I don’t do any of that. I say, “Over a given amount of time, have I spent less in ads for this series than that series has brought in?”

ALAB 110 | Abundance Mindset
Abundance Mindset: Learning how to market with paid ads is what gave me the confidence to treat what I was doing as a business and not just a passion, labor of love, or hobby.

I look at it across the whole series in all formats, page reads, wide sales, paperbacks, and audiobooks. I compare two numbers. How much should I spend advertising this series? How much did it bring in? I don’t try very hard to be like, “This sale came from this Amazon Ad but that sale came from a Facebook Ad.” You can do some of that. Sometimes at the beginning, it is good to get a baseline but once you get past that point, you know what your baseline is. You can drive yourself crazy trying to go too deep. I love looking at it as a game, “Here is my budget. How much can I make from it?” That is fun to see. If you are losing money, that is not the fun part.

That is my worry. I’m like, “How much am I spending? Am I making money? I do have money coming in but I don’t know how much profit. I can look at that other side and not look at the side that I’m spending on.”

Sometimes what I have done is I have set a percentage as I was fast scaling up. I had several years where my book income doubled from year-to-year. I would take straight up 50% of anything that came in from book sales and put that into my ads budget. In a way, that was nice because I knew what I had to work with and I was not at risk of going over budget because once I hit that budget, I would pause my ads for the rest of the month if I did not make that budget.

I felt like I was being aggressive with my ads and my business but, to be honest, I’m fairly conservative when it comes to taking big risks. That helped me feel like, “If I made $10,000 over last quarter, that means I have $5,000 that is going to go to ads. Presumably, that is going to turn into more than $10,000 next quarter.” It takes a tiny bit of the decision-making process out of your conscious control. You don’t have to be like, “Should I spend more or less on my ads?” If you make it a percentage, then you are never going to overspend.

I was like, “I can make that decision about my percentage without looking at any numbers.” I can make that in my head and say, “This much goes to ads for next time without looking at any numbers.” That does help. I do want to talk a little bit because it is a money thing. It is worry, fear, or unfamiliarity. I have never made in my life more than $5,000 a month at some job or something and surprise, that is how much I’m making now with my books.

Are you familiar with the idea of your money thermostat?

No, let’s talk about it.

This is exactly what it is, just maybe not with that term. You have already brought it up. Everybody has an amount of money that feels safe for them. It is going to cover things. We can all say, “I would love to be bringing in $50,000 a month.” For most of us, if I said, “You are now earning $50,000 a month, there is going to be a squeezing in your gut about that.” Sometimes I love to come up with what to me sounds like an absurd amount of money, like if I said, “Let’s make it to $50,000 a month.” To me, this is a mental hack. I say, “From now on, I’m guaranteed $50,000 a month.”

What I do is notice what feelings come up. Do I feel excited? That means my money mindset is ready to take on that much. Somebody was like, “I can’t ever become a millionaire because then I would have to get my hair done every week.” We have these silly things in our head, “If I started making this much money, then everybody is going to be asking me for loans.” For one, nobody needs to know how much you are making unless you are telling them. We have this thermostat. You think about the thermostat in your house and set it at a certain amount.

When the temperature is over or lower than that, your thermostat kicks in to get it back to comfort level. Our money mindset has this set thermostat of, “This is the amount that is safe, expected, and comfortable.” Let’s take your $5,000. If you know that $5,000 is what you make and you look and you are on day twenty of the month and you have only made $500, you are going to kick it into gear because you know that you need more than that to keep on living at the level where you are at.

If you fear having to replace your car, then start putting money away into a car fund.

Whereas if you wake up, you are halfway into the month, and you are already at $4,000, it is like, “I can sit back and take it easy.” Some of it is on the subconscious or below the conscious level. Some of it, too, is at the energetic level. If you are repelling increasing that baseline, I’m going to use you as my Guinea pig. Your new monthly income is $10,000 a month. That is how much KDP brings in. It is natural and normal. It might fluctuate some but your average is always going to be right around $10,000. What is your first reaction to that? What is happening in your body? Let’s explore that. What do you think makes you nervous about that number?

It is interesting because I have done some of this mental work before and it used to be that I have to work this hard to make $5,000. Imagine how hard I would have to work to make $10,000. I’m like, “There is so much work.” I don’t think it is the same thing anymore. I’m not sure. It used to be that but now it feels like, “How?” Rationally, I know some things that I could do to help me. Mentally in my brain, I’m like, “I will do this,” but my gut is like, “Wow.”

There are so many ways that we can impose our glass ceilings. Here are some of the real common ones. There are a lot of authors who feel like they need to make a choice between artistic success and creative success. There still is this mythos of the starving artist. You look at another author and they are making $500,000 a year from selling their novels. If your initial reaction is, “How good are those novels?” It is likely that it might be one of your struggles. It is feeling like you can’t be artistically successful and commercially successful.

Sometimes it is, “Rich people are blank, greedy, or terrible on the environment.” What I love to think of is money as a personality magnifier. If you are a generous, loving, and giving person making $5,000 a month, you are going to be a loving, generous, and giving person who makes $10,000 a month and now can have an even bigger impact. I love going into this because so much of especially these income plateaus, can be the marketer, but sometimes it is our imposed thermostat, “I don’t feel safe to earn more than this or more than my partner or my parents earned.”

This was huge for me for years when I was learning the ads and things like that. My husband was a pastor. We were living off of a small stipend that came in from donations to the church. People in this little itty-bitty rural farming community are making donations, so our family does not starve. It is not safe for me to be like, “I’m going to make $10,000 this month from my books.” The immediate question is, “Why are we paying your husband?” You need to look where you feel unsafe to earn more. For some people, it is, “I feel like I would lose some of my privacy. People would want to sue me.”

Sometimes they are very silly, “If I earn a lot of money, then I need to get my hair done every week. That sounds like a pain.” There is no rule that says you got to get your hair done. We have these imposed ideas of what it would mean we would be giving up if we were to earn more. Because we are so good at protecting ourselves and the ones we love, we will tell ourselves, “This much is safe but not that much.” For a lot of women, “I’m okay earning up to 90% of what my spouse makes but 110% of what my spouse makes is where we are starting to feel like we are in the danger zone.” Those are the things to pay attention to when you feel nervous to explore where that comes from.

As you have been talking, I realize that I started writing as a way to prove that my course works. It is fun like, “I’m going to show you.” It was not where I was primarily expecting to make money and then it has turned into that and been a lifesaver. I do take it seriously but my mindset when I started was always like, “I’m just going to see how it goes.”

We flip-flop because that is how I treated courses. I’m like, “I will work on a course on Facebook Ads.”

I’m like, “This has the ability to make more but I have to take it seriously.” There is a thing around, “This is not just for fun anymore.”

The important question is, “What would I give up if I reached the next level of success?” It sounds like in your mind, you are worried that you would give up being fun, playful, low-stress, and no pressure. You are going to be protecting that part of you. The question is, “Who says that $5,000 can be fun and playful but $10,000 has to be high stakes?” For some of us, that means having a bigger savings buffer to fall back on. At one point, my husband and I were having a conversation.

ALAB 110 | Abundance Mindset
Abundance Mindset: Money is a personality magnifier.

He brought it up maybe on a Tuesday about how he would retire from his office job and come and be home with the kids. We could find a place to plug him into my side of the business. Within 24 hours, I was freaking out because I was like, “What if sales dip? What if we have a bad month?” My husband, being so wonderfully pragmatic, says, “I would then go back to work.” Knowing that we are putting more pressure on us and we need to be putting on can help.

If $10,000 a month feels like too much pressure, then you could dial it down a little bit and go back to $5,000. That is the other thing. Much of what we think of is the worst-case scenario. It means we are no worse off than we are. The worst-case scenario is you push a few buttons, hustle a tiny bit more to bump your income up to $10,000, and decide, “This is more work than I thought it was going to be. It is more pressure. I’m going to dial it back down.” You are right back to where you started. You are no worse off than you are at this exact minute.

I have what I call Bag Lady syndrome, where you feel like you are one step away from being homeless on the streets. Sometimes, what I like to do is to gently prove how absurd I’m being. I will ask myself, “What is the most ridiculous, worst-case scenario?” Let’s say you start making $10,000 a month starting tomorrow. What is the most ridiculous, worst-case scenario? What are all the horrible things that might happen?

All of a sudden, my car will die.

That is another big one. You tell yourself, “My car could die tomorrow. I would rather have been earning $10,000 a month to fix my car than earning $5,000 a month to fix my car.”

That was what came up in my mind. It was like, “My car is going to die. I will have to buy a new car because I made $10,000.” It does not make any logical sense.

It is like the woman who thinks she has got to get her hair done every week.

The car dying is going to have nothing to do with how much I make.

It does not feel that way. What you can do then is you can gently explore that fear. If you have a fear about having to replace your car, maybe that means that you start putting some money away into a car fund so that should something happen to your car, you are ready for it. When we allow ourselves to see what we are afraid of, either we can laugh it off and be like, “That is silly. That would never happen,” or we could say, “Here is one practical thing I could do to feel a tiny bit safer about it.”

Talking about plateaus, I’m at mine and I have not gotten to the other side yet. I’m curious. Can you share a plateau and what you went through to get to the other side of it?

Up-level your social group and make sure you’re not spending all of your time with people who complain. 

The most dramatic one was when my husband was a pastor. We were a family of five making this much. A family of five, to not starve, needed to be making this much. My plateau was about $500 to $800 of profit a month and everything else went right back into the business. I felt fine with that. It was not as much as my husband made. It was not so much that people at the church would be like, “Who do they think they are living this high-style life?” It was enough to make sure that we could afford our groceries, car payments, and things like that.

My husband left that job and we had a lot of things happen at once. He was without a job for a little bit. We moved to another town where expenses were significantly higher. The biggest thing is he was not a pastor and we weren’t living in a fishbowl off of people’s donations. That is when I realized, “The sky is the limit. If I was contributing maybe $800 into the family budget last month and this month, why not make it $8,000?” It was as soon as we weren’t living off of people’s donations. Some of it was not a necessity. Some of it was like that thermostat.

For us, it was a family thermostat. Our family needed to be bringing in this amount of income. Until my husband got his new job, which thankfully did not take super long, I was like, “Here I go. I have got to kick us in and get us back to this baseline level.” That is what showed me. That was the most dramatic because it went from maybe $500 a month to $3,000 a month. It was a fast jump and it was like, “I could do that.” The minute you set that number, you are going to find a way to make that number work.

I was making a good $8,000 to $12,000 a month gross. I’m embarrassed to even admit this. At the time, I was contributing $500 to the family. I was making $7,000 a month. I don’t remember the exact numbers. I was making a lot of money compared to how much of that was profit. I switched a few things around and it is amazing. As authors, we get this because our income does fluctuate a lot from month to month. On a month where you earn $1,000 or $3,000, you make it work.

It felt like once I took money for the family and took that off the top, nothing in the business changed other than I was even more motivated to make sure my ads were working well and things like that. It was not an either/or. It was not like, “I make $2,000 a month and that is either going to groceries or to book covers.” It was, “Here is how much we need for the family and everything else goes to the business. I need to make sure that my gross is going to cover the business needs and the family needs.”

There is a good book called Profit First that I recommend to a lot of people. It talks about how when you own a business. You take the first fruits or the top 10% or whatever percentage you are going to keep for you because otherwise, it gets eaten up. If you take it right off the top, you don’t even miss it. It is like how if you work a W-2 job, they take your federal tax money out of it and you don’t think about it. Maybe you do when you look at it. You make it work.

You aren’t counting on that as part of your income because you know it is not going to be there.

You know how much you have to work with. In your case, maybe your next step is you commit to $1,000 a month for the car fund. Let’s say $1,000 out of every paycheck every month is going to get put in savings for the car. You are going to find a way to make up that difference because your income can fluctuate by $1,000 a month, I would assume. It is up and down. On a month where you only bring in $4,000, you make it work. We could call it a mental hack. You take money off the top and then you don’t miss it. You don’t feel as if it is this or that.

You get motivated to make up the difference because we do have a thermostat. We can use that to our advantage by saying, “If I know that I’m used to bringing in $5,000 a month for bills but I know that I’m going to take $1,000 of that and put it away into a separate account that I’m not going to touch, I’m going to find a way to make up that $1,000 a month difference either by cutting expenses or earning more money.” That is the other cool thing about being an author. Earning more money is always a choice. If you are working an hourly wage, you only have so many hours. You can’t say, “This month, I need an extra $1,000.”

ALAB 110 | Abundance Mindset
Profit First: Transform Your Business from a Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine

That is what I want to take advantage of. A lot of authors don’t think that earning more money is an option. I know so many authors who are like, “I made $100 this month. That is a big deal.” I would like to hear you talk about how being an author, you can always make more money. That is a thing that not everybody thinks. You are like, “We can make more money.” Your energy is so light around that. A lot of people are like, “What?” Even a little bit, I’m like, “Tell me more because I’m very interested in that.”

The one thing that we have is the 60 to 90 days from the time someone buys our book to when we get that. Here is one way around it. I sometimes will do a direct sale promo. If you are in Kindle Unlimited, it won’t work. Don’t go against their terms. If you need an extra $200 for the Christmas party or something like that, you could take some of your eBooks, bundle them up, and maybe put in a short story that you can only get if you buy that bundle. You can sell it directly to your readers and get that money that day.

You can do it with PayPal. There are lots of ways that you could set it up. That is one option. If you need money immediately and you are not in Kindle Unlimited, go ahead and give it a whirl. Put some of your eBooks into a special bundle and if you have the means, give them something that they can only get if they buy the bundle. There is money right there. For people who are not going to be selling directly, even if you sell more books now, it takes 2 to 3 months before that money ends up in your bank account.

For me, the easiest way to boost up the bottom line has been through ads. Here is another way, especially if you don’t know ads yet or something. Making the most of your backlist is huge because for someone like you, Ella, where you have got dozens of books out but your income is staying the same, I don’t mean to be rude about it but that should be frustrating because you are like, “I have got twice as many books out as I did at this time in 2021 and I’m still making the same amount of money. What is up with that?”

Making the most of your backlist can be important. You had talked about running Facebook Ads to your backlist. I like to bring an evergreen launch strategy into everything. I don’t like to be like, “I’m going to launch my book. Whatever comes in the first week or the first month is how much that book brings in.” I want my launch to be a fraction of a percent of what that book is going to bring in over its lifetime. One way, if you are not sure where you fall on that, is I would look at your breakdown of how much money each month comes from your newest book versus your backlist.

A healthy option is to make sure that at least 50% is coming from the backlist side of things and significantly more the bigger your backlist gets. A way to optimize your backlist is to make sure that all of your covers and blurbs are good. Many of us published a book years ago and we have never even looked at the blurb since then. Maybe it has funny formatting or it is not as good because we have learned more about copywriting. Get things optimized. Your backlist should keep selling.

There are very few cases. Ella, you are the author where if you are doing KU with lots of books out and that rapid release model, it is easy to get caught up in the launch. That gets exhausting. Ideally, because you are an author, you do the work and write the book once. That book should still be selling in five years. Specifically, in your case, step one is to not be content with where things are and have it. It sounds like you have already had that wake-up, “I have doubled how many books I have got. That means I should be making not exactly what I was making.”

Some of it is practical like that and getting things well set up. I love having a backlist automation sequence so that people on my email list are not learning about my newest books. They are automatically getting emails about every other book I have written. That is another way to make the most of your backlist. Some of it is the practical stuff and mindset side. It is mentally raising that thermostat by doing some of the things that we already talked about.

Those are all excellent suggestions. A lot of people have the same questions, especially for people who are just starting and are not making a lot of money. There is usually a combo of the practical and mental things because we were talking about that, “Is what I’m creating good enough?” For a lot of women, that shows up financially. You are like, “I only made $100 and I have five books out.” It is proof you are reinforcing your beliefs about whether you are good enough.

One question I love to ask is, “What do you get by staying stuck?” You are getting something out of it. Sometimes what you get out of it is the opportunity to sit around with the other ladies and complain about life. It is not a good place to be. I always like to ask, “What am I getting? How am I benefiting from being right where I am? Is that because I’m not rocking the boat and making any waves?”

Some people have this fear of, “The more money I make, the more financially literate I need to be. I don’t trust myself with money. I am going to be the parent and impose an allowance on myself so that I can only earn this much because I’m not responsible with more.” There are all kinds of ways that we are keeping our income lower than it needs to be.

Feel grateful and at peace wherever you’re at, at this exact minute.

Do you have any resources? I have read some money books. I’m wondering if you have.

I have got a course called Smash Your Money Blocks for authors that dives into that pretty deep. I put a couple of the lectures from that. If you want a teaser on the Success Writer Podcast, look at the success rate or podcast feed from the early fall of 2021. That is where you will find some of those. I feel like this is so huge and not something that gets talked about. We talk about how to do ads, set up your lead magnet, and write a blurb. We don’t talk about the money mindset.

If you have a broken mindset, that is going to impact everything and how you write your blurb. If you are afraid that people who make money with their books have poor artistic quality, that is going to come out in your blurb and how you write your email newsletters. If you are scared that anybody who earns money is greedy and selfish, you are going to come across as apologetic when you are trying to sell your book. That is going to be pushing your readers away.

You subconsciously sabotage yourself too. For example, you can promote your backlist in an automated sequence, “I do have that but I have not updated that in a very long time.” I have so many books going through an update in the blurbs and the back matter. Formatting the books for new back matter on 50 books is paying project but the automated newsletter sequence would take me 2 or 3 hours for all the sequences that I have. I have a lot of sequences but it is doable. I could do one at a time and it would have a big impact. I just have not done it. That is like, “I have something more important that I have to do resistance to doing the things that will work because I’m comfortable at this financial spot.”

What you were talking about made me think of my sister, who had a preschool. She was getting more students. She was not watching the finances because she had that mindset, “I can’t look at it,” which is also denial. Magically, no matter how many students she had or did not have in that particular month, she always broke even with how much she spent on the business versus how much she made on the business. It would always even, even if one month was $1,000 more or one month was $1,000 less. She was not even looking at the numbers.

Much of this can happen subconsciously. In the book Profit First, he uses a toothpaste analogy. When you got a whole tube of toothpaste, you are not paying attention to how much you use. When you are down to that little itty-bitty bit, you can make that last for a long time.

It is so interesting. I do think you are right because a lot of people don’t talk about the mindset around making money, and it does affect everything. I’m glad you made a course for it because it is not something easy. It is uncomfortable to look at your money issues.

Going back to that question about what benefit do you get from being stuck where you are, some people are stuck by blaming Amazon, Facebook Ads, or their competition. You and I do not even embrace that word. The benefit they are getting by blaming someone else for their lack of success does not mean that they are spared the uncomfortable work of looking at how they are sabotaging themselves. Another huge one is your social sphere, whether that is other authors or your-real life social interactions, because we do not want to be outliers.

We want to feel like we belong. If you were to 10X, your income and your friends or author colleagues would not be excited for you, then you are going to be holding back because you are a kind and loving person who values friendship more than money. If you are worried about that, then that is another way. The answer to that is to uplevel your social group and make sure you are not spending all of your time with authors who only complain about how hard it is to make a living on Amazon and things like that.

I do want to acknowledge it is a risky thing. There are some mornings that you are like, “I’m not going to be that person anymore. I’m not going to have those friends anymore.” I have accidentally upleveled a few times and I don’t have those friends anymore. I was not even trying purposefully. I was like, “Why are you doing this?” It just happens. It is very courageous, especially for authors, to say, “I care about my writing and this thing that is important to me. I’m going to make a go of it.”

ALAB 110 | Abundance Mindset
Abundance Mindset: If you are scared that anybody who earns money is greedy and selfish, you are going to come across as apologetic when you are trying to sell your book. That is going to be pushing your readers away.

Do you know what I loved from your show years ago? I still remember that I was in the Target parking lot listening to it. Was it your bus analogy about saving a seat on the bus? It was straight from your mouth and I loved it. It was this idea of when you do realize that you are parting ways even if it is not deliberate. You are going this way. Somebody who meant something to you years ago has gone that way. Your analogy was you are on a bus and you realize, “This is their stop to get off.” You are going this way. They are going that way. It is not that one of you is going the wrong way. You are both going the right way for you.

What you said is, “I’m saving a seat for them.” It is like, “I know that I’m going this way. I would love for you to be on this bus with me. If you are not on this bus with me, that is fine. You have got a cool bus that you can ride over here. Should our paths converge again and you get back on this bus, I would love to sit next to you.” It is this empowered like, “I know where I’m going. If you are not going that way, that is fine. God bless you. Have a great trip on your bus.” You are not begging and pleading, “Please come ride my bus.” It is, “Here is a spot for you if it turns out that our journeys converge again in the future.”

What has been the biggest impact for you on some of the concrete outcomes of changing that mental mindset, not the financial? It is making more than enough money. What does that look like? Can you share some of that energy with us so we know what it feels like?

Many people feel like, “I will feel rich when I’m making this much.” My thought is if you don’t feel rich making $60,000, you won’t feel rich making $80,000. If you don’t feel rich making $80,000, you won’t feel rich making $100,000. How does it feel to 10X your income? Let’s make that the number. How can you feel that now? At 10X, my income and daily life would change to zero because, for me, here is what being wealthy feels like to me. It means that I don’t worry about if there is going to be money in the bank to make the next grocery bill and utility bill.

It means knowing that I have got a tiny bit of a plot twist account so that if something unforeseen comes up, we are not driven into financial ruin. That is it. You don’t need a super outrageous income with a lot of zeros after it to feel those things. For me, being wealthy is knowing that whatever comes up, between my husband, we can find a way to make it work. It is like, “I will get another job.” For me, it is not even about how much is in the bank. Here is what I tell the authors.

We are getting out to the point in the author industry where some people are saying things like, “I used to make $10,000 a month and now I’m down to $4,000 a month.” It used to be we were all on this uphill all together. It was fun and exciting. What I like to tell those authors is, “You have not lost the knowledge of how to make $1,000 a month and the books that used to make $10,000 a month.” For me, a huge part of it is even knowing that should inflation go crazy and all of our bills get doubled, we know that we can figure it out.

It is not even necessarily I know that money is in the bank because there is never going to be enough money in the bank to make everybody feel completely secure. Some of it has to do with trust. We will figure it out and that our needs are going to be met and provided for. This is a pithy little story but it drives a point home. There is a monk who eats beans and rice all day and a guy who works for the king who gets to feast every day. The guy who works for the king looks at the monk and says, “If you learn to work hard for this king, you could eat rich meat every single day.”

The monk says, “If you learn how to eat rice and beans, you wouldn’t have to work for a king.” Some of it is being extremely thankful and content with everything you have. For me, a huge part of being wealthy is being so grateful for what we have, which was happening even when we were on an itty-bitty pastor stipend. There is no magic number. How you feel if you double your income is not going to change how you feel about your place. Let’s go ahead and say there is a threshold.

It is hard to be in the energy of gratitude.

It is this idea of the difference between absolute poverty and relative poverty. Our family lived under the poverty line for a big part of our family’s life when our kids were younger but we weren’t in absolute poverty. We never went hungry. There is a threshold. Once your basic needs are met, adding to that is not going to change dramatically.

The more money you have, the more you can make a difference for other people.  

That is the other thing if you are expecting this massive change like, “Once I hit six figures, then I’m going to be a legitimate author.” If you don’t feel legitimate now, you are not going to feel legitimate making a little bit more. If you are not feeling legitimate making a little bit more, that is not going to change making a lot more. It is all the mindset stuff. It is feeling grateful, at peace, and well-provided for wherever you are at. Everything else can magnify or amplify that.

I liked that because I was under the threshold. It is sometimes hard to get into that new mindset when you are under that threshold. It is very difficult. I was driving for Thanksgiving. It was a three-hour drive. It was just me, so I had plenty of time to think. There are a lot of things that come into this family relationship and all kinds of dynamics. For the first time, I remember money felt energetically like love. I’m very grateful for it. I’m like, “‘this $5,000 a month has been here for me and has given me access to what I needed these last couple of years like a home, heat, and Krispy Kremes.” This money felt like God’s love or whatever spiritual you are. It was a completely new way of me feeling about money.

It is because so often, we battle it. We are like, “There is never enough.” I have a similar thought about time. Many people think, “Time is the enemy. I’m racing the clock and fighting against time.” I treat it the exact opposite. Time is my friend. When I need the time, the time is there for me. Ninety-nine percent of it is mindset work and then the rest follows. I feel comfortable in 10X-ing my income. That way, I’m confident when I go to do my marketing or look at the news and we see scary headlines. I don’t make decisions out of fear or scarcity.

A healthy money mindset is also why you and I don’t think of things like competition. We both write books and make courses for authors but it is not as if like, “She signed up for Ella. That is $400 out of my pocket.” There is always enough. Much of it is embracing gratitude and contentment and knowing there is always enough. To me, that is what being wealthy is. It is not the number in the bank at all. Here is one thing that I have trained myself to do. I’m wide, so money comes in month round. Draft2Digital comes in the middle of the month. Sometimes it is high and sometimes it is low.

I train myself every time I open up and see a royalty report or an automatic payment that comes in. IngramSpark sometimes sends me $2. Whatever the amount is, I had trained myself to feel so much gratitude because this is my dream come true from back when I was a little three-year-old girl wanting to be an author. It is not like, “There is $50 from Kobo. That is ridiculous.” It is like, “Wow, it is another $50.” If basic needs are met, you can feel rich no matter what is in the bank.

You have trained yourself, but one thing that helped me is to remember that on the other side of that money is somebody who gave me $2 of their money and their time. If they are reading my book, that for me is even almost bigger because I know how busy people are. I know my audience is mostly women and how busy women are. I’m like, “Somebody gave me $1 and an hour.” I am very grateful for that because they are not that different from me.

That can be fun, especially if you are in KU refreshing. You can see to the minute what page reads you are getting. That is pretty cool. I remember the day I realized, “I’m selling a book a day. That was huge. A day does not go by that somebody does not buy my book.” You can be like, “A minute does not go by that somebody does not read at least one of my pages.” That is very exciting. Regardless, it is celebrating at 5,000, 50, and 50,000 a month. That all contribute to feeling rich.

Here is one thing I loved when you were talking about money as a sign of love. I don’t have any full-time employees. That terrifies me to know that somebody’s mortgage payment is on me. That is a step I have not taken yet. I have several people who work for me part-time. A couple of them have had these vet emergencies. Those can get expensive.

Somebody else can pay for their rent and groceries because that is too much pressure for me, knowing that it might be grandiose like, “I saved my friend’s dog’s life.” It is a way to look at it. Especially as women, the more money you earn, the more you can share with others and create this cycle of blessing, whether that is hiring an assistant, cover designer, or even somebody to come and clean your house or go to the local restaurant.

My husband and I treat eating out not as a splurge but as a way to support our community. The more you have, the more you can bless others. That resonates with us so much more than like, “The more you have, the more check marks you get to put as little trophies in your chest.” That does not matter. Knowing that because my book sells, I can hire an assistant, and now that assistant could pay for her dog’s emergency surgery is huge.

ALAB 110 | Abundance Mindset
Abundance Mindset: If you don’t feel legitimate now, you are not going to feel legitimate making a little bit more.

You can pay them a fare. You don’t have to be chintzy and be like, “I know you deserve more but I can’t.” It is very abundant.

For anybody who is still stuck being like, “All rich people are greedy. If I get rich, I’m going to be selfish,” that is not it. The more money you have, the more that you can make a difference for other people.

That is so much true, which is something that you often say in some of your courses. I have taken some. At this point, she has a lot more than I have taken. She keeps making them but I have not done all of them. She has done a lot of courses. I like her specifically for the combination of practical and detailed this-is-exactly-how-you-do-it, which is not exactly what we have talked about in this conversation but which you are very excellent at. I have done a few courses. You are my favorite because of the detail, especially around something I’m interested in.

I try to keep it simple. Simple and accessible is what I hope for.

It is also practical. You are not like, “Make a tagline.” You are like, “You will need to make a tagline. Here are some of the things that you should make sure to include in your tagline for your genre. It might be different but it is not just a tagline.” I’m like, “What kind of tagline?” I don’t know, especially when I’m insecure or something because I’m very new. I’m like, “Facebook is so overwhelming.” It does not have to be. With your courses, it is so much easier. You also have this mindset thing and all these things that you have created. I would love for you to share with people where they can find your stuff and some of your popular works, one that you recommend the most, or one that people like the most.

You can add the Successful Writer Podcast to your feed. In terms of courses, if the money stuff resonated with you or especially if it felt new to you like, “I have never even thought about it in this terms before,” I have got a course on money mindset for authors. That is what I recommend. Also, if you are looking more for practical help with ads, the Facebook Ads and Amazon Ads courses are my two most popular. All of those are at Courses.AlanaTerry.com if you are interested.

Do you have any last advice that you would like to offer people?

It is not advice but it is almost like my hopes for you, Ella, and your readers. In your case, I would hope that 2022 bursts through all the glass ceilings that you have imposed on yourself, the income and also in all the other areas. For your readers, I hope for great creativity, inspiration, and smashing through all of the mindset blocks that are holding you back.

My wish for everybody, Ella and your readers, is for a lovely community because that is so important. We even talked about that. If you are stuck in a community that does not celebrate your success, you are going to hold yourself back. My hope for all of you is to find an amazing, vibrant, and supportive community like what Ella is building on the show to make sure that as you grow, you have people cheering you on and that we are normalizing success.

Thank you so much for being here, Alana. I appreciate you sharing your time and knowledge.

Thank you. It was so much fun.

Thank you, everybody, for reading. Hugs and happy authoring.

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About Alana Terry

ALAB 110 | Abundance MindsetAlana Terry is the 6-figure author of more than forty published novels. She hosts the Successful Writer Podcast and has created dozens of courses to help authors reach their dreams of achieving creative and commercial success.

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