So many books out there dive deep into how to earn millions in the easiest and fastest ways possible. But for Lee Savino, she achieved her millionaire author mindset not just because of financial strategies but also by investing time in what she genuinely loves. She joins Ella Barnard to share how she built her wealth by reinvigorating her passion for writing, setting aside her self-doubts, and being bigger than every roadblock ahead. Lee now shares her secrets to the world through the Facebook group she started, Millionaire Author Mastermind. She also looks back on how she met co-author Renee Rose, the person who helped declutter her mind and transform her money blocks.
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Lee Savino: How Doing What You Love Leads To A Millionaire Author Mindset
We are here with Lee Savino. She is a USA Today bestselling author of romance with over-the-top possessive heroes and the women they are obsessed with. That was short, simple, and does not say nearly enough about who you are. Thank you so much for being here, Lee.
Thank you so much for having me. I know that I need to workshop that bio. My co-writer Renee Rose had had her publicist reach out to her to say, “Lee Savino needs to put that she is a USA Today bestselling author on her website or something like that.” I was like, “That should probably be on there.”
You are okay because your name is already recognizable. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, your author journey, and how you became the Lee Savino?
I always was a storyteller turned into a writer because I was always reading. I even went to school for creative writing, which I do not recommend doing because you do not need to have a degree to write. You just need to be writing. I graduated and I have in my head all this clutter because they teach you a traditional publishing path. They do not even teach you that much about anything, honestly.
I decided I would finish the book then I worked on it to graduate, which was the one thing I did not get. I was able to work on one project in my senior year. I finished it up and then I was like, “Now I need to find an agent.” I did not know how to find an agent and the world was shifting because it was 2008. If I hung on, I would have found self-publishing right in the inception. Instead, I completely shut down and said, “There is no way I can do this. I need to go, get a job, make money, and be sensible,” because that was what my parents were telling me to do.
I went for 7 to 8 years until I finally snapped out of this mindset of, “I can’t do it,” and was like, “What if I tried and went for it?” I already had books sitting on my desktop that I could publish. I went ahead and published them and then I was in it. I made no money for two years but I was so happy to be publishing and self-published and I was finding a readership.
I worked briefly with an erotic publisher so I learned a lot about mailing lists, more about the marketing and the business side, and I was getting better as a writer. I was learning to write full books and finish them. I did not think a lot about it. I was in this go mode and doing it. I was happy and then I was like, “Where is my money?” My husband was like, “It has been a few years. You either get a job where you make money.”
I was done and determined that I can make money. I do not know what it was. I would see plenty of people making money and I was able to shift my mindset and go, “It is possible to make money doing this.” In my third year, I made over six figures. I made more money than in the past few years combined. That was the beginning. In my head, I decided it was possible. It is just as quickly as I had flipped the switch and decided it was not possible in 2008.
The biggest life lesson I have ever learned is don’t give up on yourself. You do not have to say no to your dream ever. No one came up to me and said, “You must quit writing or I am going to kill you right now.” I did that and I did not have to. I could have gotten a job and kept writing. If I told myself at that point, “I am going to get a job. I am going to pay my bills, but there is a way for me to be a writer and I am going to keep looking. I am going to keep finding it. I am going to keep going.”
If I had said that to myself, in 2008, I would have found Smashwords. It turned out it is okay because what happened was I got a dreary day job and I would sit in my office. I have worked my way up the corporate ladder, I would shut the door, and I would go and read erotic fiction online. All the free stories on Literotica. That was me filling my well, juicing up, and whatever I read a lot of I end up writing. What came pouring out was lots and lots of sexy books.
You are the first person to mention Literotica on my show. I am like, “I am sorry. Maybe you do not want to know this about me but whatever.”
Now you know. I am very proud of it. I was raised as an evangelical Christian. My parents were awesome. I went to a parochial school and we went to church all the time. It was a repressed environment. Writing sexy stories is my therapy. I do not know what unlocked but my mindset unlocked and I have been able to embrace it. I have been studying more and more about it.
We can talk about it. I was raised Mormon. At that point, in the raised part, I am reading romance. When I was growing up, these underground romance novels thing with all teenagers my age and their moms would go buy them.
We did that. We are passing the paperbacks around. I read romance novels in Math class under the desk.
Don’t give up on yourself. You don’t have to say no to your dream.
You can talk about whatever it is that comes up about working through some things with my romance novels. I am still because I took a little bit longer to make the decision than you did. I was like, “I can.”
The floodgates opened. I was like, “I am going to be a writer and follow my dreams. After attempting before and giving up, I am going to go for it. I will put my books up as self-published and I will figure this out.” Later, I was like, “I can make money doing this.” When I saw people making six figures, I was like, “I can make six figures a year but why not $1 million a year?” Once I made six figures, it was like, “This is already so much money. $30,000 a year would have been great. Now I am making way more than that. I am making so much in a month that I can’t even wrap my head around it so why not?”
I went after it. In one year, it went over $1 million in gross revenue. People are like, “What about net revenue and ads?” I am like, “For tax purposes, I have as little profit as possible but you want to parcel it all out. I am doing okay. I can still afford all the things I want.” Getting over $1 million was compounding everything I had done before and then starting to focus on translations. I had already been doing ads and then building on that. Now I am doing no ads but my co-writers do so I am doing it but it does not quite count.
Can I ask you some questions about the journey so that we can get a little bit better understanding? These are the moments that I am most curious about people because we all have our limiting beliefs. We have thoughts that we have about ourselves that stop us from taking action. For each of us, whatever it is, something happens to change us. The first one that snapped you out of it was when you were not writing and then you were like, “No, I am going to write.” You snapped out of it. Is there more detail or was it, “I woke up one day?”
I was in financial sales then I went to a business meetup. I met a hypnotherapist and went for a free session. He is awesome but also weird and I loved it because I am weird. I was like, “I want to make six figures in my company.” He was like, “Let’s do this.” He completely removed whatever barrier I had put up in my brain. It was so effective. I am a big fan now of meditation. You can call it hypnotherapy or meditation. I was raised to believe that hypnosis is evil and you are allowing demons into your brain. Once I got over that, I was like, “Come on, demons. Let’s play.”
You can go totally woo-woo here. In the last couple of years, I did some hypnotherapy with one lady and it was useful. It was not exactly the same because I was doing other work but it was surprising. I can feel the difference that it made for me.
Whatever style is, I think of it as meditation. You get into a meditative state, your brain is open to impressions on a subconscious level and you are able to take in information. Whatever he suggested, it completely removed the brakes. Remember, I went in there and said, “I want to make six figures in financial sales.” I left and was like, “I am going to be a writer.” It was on a subconscious level and I suddenly had all that drive back. He released the brakes.
He removed this huge block and I am 100% thinking about, “How are you stopping yourself?” I call those blocks and that is a pretty common term. People talk about money blocks that stop you from earning money. There are all sorts of blocks. Society can put them in. You see your mom and dad fighting about money or being creative or something and you decide never to do that thing. No matter how much you want it, you stop yourself.
I met Renee Rose, who you interviewed, and she is all about removing blocks too. She is like, “How do you remove your money blocks?” That is what I had to focus on next because once the block to write and be creative was gone, I was going for it. I was, “I want to make money and I have never been able to figure that out.” I worked in an industry where people can make a lot of money and I did well but I did not hit that goal, subconsciously probably because I did not want to hit that goal in a job I hated. I wanted to do what I loved no matter what I was earning.
Once I was doing what I loved, it was like, “What’s next? The sky is the limit.” I worked with Renee on removing money blocks. I coached authors and now a lot of my coaching is not about ads, backlist, writing series, and doing translations, although it is fun to talk about all of that. Instead of it being prescriptive, the only thing that I am like, “You must do this,” is work on your mindset. Work on believing what you want as possible that you deserve it. There are many ways to get the life that you want and you deserve an amazing life. The end.
However you are holding yourself back from that, then you will float effortlessly into what you want. I was broke. I was making no money as a new author and it did not matter because I was so happy. I would spend my last dollars to get to an author conference. I would go negative in my account to pay for a basic author website.
I was ecstatic. It did not matter. I was going for it. Now that I have worked on my mindset, I have removed the money blocks. My husband has retired from the job he hated. I support my family. I have two kids now. I did all of this while having kids, by the way. We can talk about any how-to author. So much of it is in your brain.
That is something that I 100% agree with and working on day-to-day very consciously more than I have ever done before. I want to bring everybody who is not at the same vibration as you are right now and help them to get there. We have all been there where somebody is like, “You can totally do it.” If you are not even close to feeling like you can totally do it, it does not resonate the same. It almost can be a little annoying sometimes for that space. We are going to bring people in with your journey to getting to that. You can totally do it through the course of this episode.
I am going to pop back because you were not just learning that you can do it. You were also learning some practical things like writing full books, which I am curious about. Some people were like, “I learned how to write full books.” There are a lot of people who write, start, write, start, start, start, and then do not finish. All of this is part of your journey to believing in yourself.
Finishing books regularly is getting you to that level of, “I can do it.” If you can’t finish the book, you can’t do it. I am going to frame this in the way that we are talking about. What are some of the more practical things that grew that feeling of, “I am doing this. I can do this. I can keep doing this,” that maybe were significant?
I jumped in and started writing books that I thought up in college. One of them happened to be a mafia trilogy. Looking back, those books had a great, swampy middle as Jim Butcher will call it. I needed more of a driving force of the conflict woven through. If you are clear on the conflict, then you can move the readers through any scene. Cowriting was a huge boon because between Renee and I, we figured out that some of our best books followed the beat sheet, not the Save the Cat! beat sheet, but the one by Gwen Hayes.
Now we use that as a roadmap. In fact, I could probably sit down and write an erotic book shorter or longer, even a trilogy just by thinking through the scenes I have in my head and the excitement. To get the narrative structure nailed in a way that makes sense to the reader, I am going to map it out against Gwen Hayes’ Romancing The Beat. I might think of it as a little bit more generalized.
When I start out, I put a mark on a piece of paper. I am thinking about where the character is emotionally in the beginning and where she is in the end. I am doing this with my characters right now. If I can figure out how to get them through all the stuff they are going to go through, clear that in the beginning. Lana is craving family and she has been rejected by her family.
At the false high, she feels like she is part of the family. False high is the middle where the characters think that they have gotten everything they wanted and they don’t. They do not have it quite yet because they need to resolve their inner wound but by the end, she knows that she belongs and she is part of the family. She is good enough and that is typically what it goes down to. She is worthy of love.
On the flip side, the guy made a huge mistake when he was eighteen and was betrayed by who he thought was his true love. He feels like Lana is going to drag him through all of that again. He accepts her briefly at the false high. He seduces her and feels like they should be together but then he gets scared. Seventy-five percent of the way through the book, there is the black moment. If you hit that high and then the black moment is super low, then a happily ever after feels like a wonderful resolution and it is very satisfying.
That was one of the things that made it a pivotal difference. When did you learn that? Was that after you had been writing for a little while when you were not making money and then you were like, “I did this thing.” For anybody who wants to know Romancing the Beat, if you are interested, it is fun to read. As you are talking, I am thinking about Bridgerton. I am like, “You could watch Bridgerton, have your beat sheet and be like, ‘There is the false high.’” Everybody is probably watching it but the false high in the first season would be they are married and perfectly happy together but she does not know. That is the false high.
There are a few books on emotional wounds. There is a talk by Michael Hauge and Chris Vogler on the Hero’s Inner Journey. A lot of us know that there needs to be conflict on the outside. In the story, there are explosions, there are helicopters, chases, and some badass fights. There is lots of sex, jokes, and fun, but I can’t move the reader from a funny scene to an action scene to a sexy scene without them caring about the characters.
They are going to care about the character if they see how wonderful they are. They like them and then see how these characters have this blind spot about themselves, which is accurate because humans have blind spots about themselves. You are like, “You are Lee Savino.” I am like, “I do not see myself as that.” I am sitting here struggling through this book.
Right before we were talking, I am sitting here like, “I have got to fix that scene. I have got to get over there. I am too mustard to even move on and write the scenes. I wanted to write now, which was all the blowing up of the car scenes. There is an assassin after her. I am trying to fix those scenes I have written before and I have this timeline. Is it going to get to the editor in time?”
She is showing me a whole sheet of scribbles and notes.
There is a beta reader and a sensitivity reader. I am going to Edinboro for a conference and I am like, “Darn me. Why did I do this to myself?” That is why we are all in this struggle and we are all working on mindset. I am sitting eating my lunch right before this talk and doing affirmations. I am like, “I write so much and I write it easily. If everything flows, it is going to be fine.”
You are aligning with what you are saying right now. I can feel the sarcasm. Can you feel the sarcasm? Taking us back, you learned better writing. I have worked with a lot of people and I am like, “I believe that anybody can do this but you have to do it as a writer. You can learn the writing.” Anybody can learn the writing. There are beat sheets and things to do.
Sometimes, the more polished works have no soul. Still, every book has something that you can love about it.
You can get editors, you can get people, you can co-write various things but at the core, you have to have a good story. Once you have that, all of the things are easily possible. It does not have to be a perfect story. That is the thing that a lot of people, women especially, set their bar so high that they are like, “It is not perfect so therefore, none of the other good things can happen.”
One of my friends, Nic Erik, is very wise. I would recommend his ad course but I do not think he is selling it right now. He is very good. I have hired him to do launches with me. My ad knowledge comes from him even though I bought all the other ad courses. He said imperfection is art. I wrote that out because I was struggling with putting pressure on myself that I did not need to put on myself.
How do I level up? How can I be better? How do I make a quantum leap? How do I go further? I want to be a better writer. I want to deliver an amazing and great book experience. In every project, there is going to be a certain amount of floundering because sometimes, you are in the flow, and then you are not thinking about writing, you are just writing.
Other times, you are in the shower and you are thinking about a plot. That counts as writing too. Other times you are judging your own writing and that is the issue. That is not even useful editing. That is you going, “I am not good at this. This is awful. Why do I do this?” Editing can be useful when you are in it and you are like, “Let me move these words around. Let me play with this. That looks good. That sentence makes much more sense now.” When you are in it, it is wonderful. When you are criticizing yourself, you will not like that.
I know exactly what you are saying. It is like, “The actions that you are taking are exactly the same but the energy that you are doing them with is different.” For me, the best example that is quite relatable to a lot of women is when you are exercising. If you can go into exercising, you are going from a place of, “I am ugly. I am too heavy. I need to do better,” which is not kind. It does not feel good.
It comes from a place of like, “You are not good enough. Therefore, you have to exercise,” versus, “I like feeling healthy. I enjoy going on walks in nature.” You come from a place of you feel good enough and you are like, “I want to do this because I like it. It is enjoyable and it feels good to move my body a little bit.”
We have all walked that line at some point, generally, as women where you are like, “I should.” It is hard sometimes to walk that line. Sometimes, you do not know until you are doing it or you can go from one side of the line to the other while you are doing it. You start the walk and you are like, “I am doing this,” but as the walk progresses, you are like, “It is a nice day.” Where I am at, there are baby geese everywhere. The energy that you approach your book, work on it, and make it happen determines something.
I said it to Renee this way and she repeats it all the time so now I remember I said it. I said, “The most important thing is for us to love our books and to love the ones we are writing currently.” I do talk about there being a honeymoon period sometimes where you are in love with it and then you fall out of love with it. Sometimes, when you are publishing it, it is the best book you have ever written or by the time you are publishing it, you hate it and you do not want to talk about it.
Sometimes, ten years later, you are like, “That was my favorite book. It is good,” or you are like, “I was not a good writer ten years ago. That was not my best work but I still have fond memories of it. I am proud of this.” It is a brick in the wall. It is loving your book, yourself, and your work. If you do that, a lot of stuff will sort itself out. Think about it. If you love your book, you are going to spend more time with it. You are going to play with those words.
You are going to make them smoother, easier to read, or rearrange some plot things so that it flows better. You are going to read books by Gwen Hayes and Save the Cat! guy. You are going to read this and you are going to invest time in it because you love it and you get better at it. If you allow yourself to keep going and you absorb more and more, you get better.
Loving your book even works with marketing. You want to talk about the book. You want to run ads to it. You are not ashamed of it and you are willing to put yourself more out there because you are in love with it. It is okay because there is a honeymoon period. Sometimes, you are like, “I am done. I am going to schedule these posts on my Facebook group and then move on. It is okay.”
When you invest time in what you love and you let your love for your book be bigger than your fear, your block, or whatever it is. If you can pivot to, “Do I love this book? Do I love this?” If you love it, the answer is yes. One time, I asked my sister. She was good at doing things even when she was nervous. I have gotten there but I am a lot better now but at that time, I was like, “How do you do that?”
She was like, “The fear does not go away.” It is in her peripheral vision. She can see that it is over there. She keeps going even while it is over there. I was like, “Oh.” She does not focus on it and lets it get in the way. If you can let whatever your block is or something, sometimes there are other strategies, but when you are talking about that, if you let the fear be over there, but you focus on the love, you put your attention on the love for your book, and then let that feed all the things that you need to do.
Sometimes I talked about in the middle of the book there is some floundering and you were asking about finishing things. At some point, you snap into it, and you go, “I am going to finish this. I am going to move this across the finish line.” I finished my first book, which I had worked on for a year with an advisor in my senior year of college. I graduated but it was not done. I had won an award. It was a big bulky piece of fiction set in Viking, Norway, and it was about werewolves. I knew early on what my loves would be for werewolf books. My longest-running series are all werewolves.
I had this book and I needed to finish it. I did not know what to do. I did not have any plot structure. Sometimes, the plot structure can help people and other times, you are going to write into the dark, as Dean Wesley Smith would say. He has a book about pantsing books. I was writing into the dark. I was moving it forward. I had never done this before. I had a vague idea of what the ending was. I tried to workshop it with some friends. They came up with different ideas for me, and I was like, “That is not going to work.”
I would write in my journal, “Today, I am finishing my book.” I would go and throw myself into figuring out the book and I would not finish it that day. I would write, “Today, I am finishing my book,” the next day. I did that for weeks and then I finished it. Was it good? No. Every book has something though. Maybe it is not as organized or as polished.
Sometimes the more polished works have no soul but if you put what you can into every book, it has something that you can love and respect about it. I respected that. It was my first work. I have had readers who have read it and who have been like, “That was good.” In my brain, I am like, “That was 93,000 words and it could have been 50,000.”
You know a lot more now. I do want to ask you because we talked a lot about mindset. As you are talking what is coming up for me is, because you made a change, you made a different decision and then you went a different direction because you had a pivot. You met Renee Rose somehow and started that. I am very woo-woo. You and I, me and Renee, talked about the same things in slightly different languages. I am hoping we are meeting someplace.
When you pivot to something that is more in alignment with your gifts, your heart, your love, or whatever, I find that the universe helps because you feel good. Can you give us an example of some time where maybe when you met Renee and you guys started writing together something, where you pivoted to something that was less blocks?
I decided to become a writer again. It was a very intuitive time. I was just going to do it. I talked to my husband. I was like, “I want to quit my job and be a writer.” He is like, “What?” He was not excited about it. He said no and I was like, “Fine.” I was bummed for three days and he is like, “Do it but please make some money. I need you to make money in the household too.”
I went out after it. I was on Facebook and I was like, “Here is a writer group. Let me join it.” Someone posted and she had a British flag as her avatar. I had lived in London and I messaged her. I clicked on her because of that. I said, “I see you live in Richmond. Is that Richmond, England, or Richmond, Virginia, because I am in Richmond, Virginia. I am across the pond but I lived in London.” It was something like that. This author, Bella Bryce said, “I am in Richmond, Virginia. We should meet up.” She lived on my street.
That is an example of the universe. It was serendipity. That was cool. I walked into the coffee shop that I knew about because it was in the neighborhood. She was sitting there in this beautiful headband and she looked like a writer. She looked like a blogger goddess with her little Mac computer and typing away with this headband of flowers. She looked pristine and beautiful. It is like she is ready for her writer photoshoot. She wrote for an erotic publisher called Blushing Book and they were having a conference.
She said, “You need to come. Here is a free ticket.” I overdrafted my bank account paying for the hotel room and down the hall was Renee Rose. Renee and I immediately clicked. She uses a different language than I do. I tend to try to relate everything to the brain and the subconscious mind. She flat out was like, “We know each other in a past life. We had to. That is why we worked well together.”
What was interesting is the month before I had sat down and made a list of my friends in Richmond. There were not many people. I realized I was chasing after a lot of people, trying to make friends after graduating college, moving back home, and going in and out of jobs. I was trying too hard and I decided to let everyone go emotionally. I said, “I am going to cut ties. If they reach out to me, I will be friendly, and we can still be friends but I am not chasing anyone anymore.”
Emotionally, there was a bit of a vacuum. I have cleared the depths and decluttering can be a huge part of letting go of stuff you do not no longer need in your life and creating a vacuum to suck everything that you want in your life. What happened was that I immediately made close writing friendships and Renee Rose was one of them. I had been a fan of her writing.
We connected. We talked about the industry. I helped her to talk to her about her mailing list. When she set it up, she immediately started getting subscribers. We saw how successful that was going to be with the biggest marketing tool that we have in our tool belts. The biggest marketing tool we have on our belts is still a mailing list. Ours is very powerful because we have been building it forever. Renee and I were always together and we would be invited to collaborate.
Even if someone says no to your book or podcast, keep putting yourself out as someone deserving. If you work on your self-worth, rejection can never crush you.
Before you co-write with anyone, you want to collaborate and play in the sandbox with all the other authors and play nice. Get to know everybody and be a force for good in the author community but then you can start doing projects together like do a newsletter swap. We were in a multi-author box set a few times. I would watch Renee outwork everybody and then she will go and apply it to her own career. Now she is more successful than anyone I know.
I love being around someone like this. She is totally positive. We talk a lot about money blocks. She taught me a statement that I use to clear some money blocks and you basically say, “I destroy and uncreate my beliefs about money.” Saying that helped me clear way more clutter internally. I am talking a lot about decluttering, mindset, and block work but it is all good.
I decided to make six figures and I almost demanded it. I was two years in and I would have a successful werewolf series based on the book that I started in college and I went, “Where is my money?” One January, I made $2,000 and I was angry. Even though I had made $2,000 the first year I started writing. That month, I was like, “No. I have written almost six books in a good series, and people are liking them. Where is the money?” The next month, February, I made over $6,000 which was more money than I made in a month ever. I decided right then and there that I was going to be a six-figure author.
I was like, “I did not decide who I was going to be. I had already decided who I was going to be.” In February 2017, I told myself that I was a six-figure author. I was like, “This is a short month. If it had been a long month, I would have made $8,300. $8,300 times 12 is over six figures and therefore I am a six-figure author. It was delusional but I was like, “I am in it. Let’s do it. Let’s go.”
That summer, I had a friend formatting my books, Tara Crescent. I wrote her a scene. She formatted my books for free. She was nice about it and I said, “I know you hate writing sex scenes. Let me write your sex scene.” When I sent it to her and she was like, “This is good. Is it okay if I use this?” I am like, “I wrote it for you. You could change every word in it. I do not care. It is done. It is yours. I will sign over my IP or whatever to you.” She said, “We should write a series together.” She was so generous so I was so generous. That is how the co-writing came about.
We wrote a book together, we put it up, and she figured out this great cover. It was a menage dragon. It was our Draekon series. She wanted to start a new pen name. I had a platform and she did not but she did all this world-building, wrote the book, and found the cover. We put it up and we went to 134 in the store without any ads. We were like, “We should co-write more.”
I told Renee about the success and Renee said, “I have these three books sitting around that I sent to an agent. The agent did nothing with them, can you fix them and put them up and we will co-write together.” That was the start of our series. The first book we wrote together that I took, fixed it, I added more, she finished it, I added more, and I changed the entire thing to first-person present tense.
Everybody co-writes differently so you co-wrote it.
We tend to swap back and forth. The book I am working on now is the one with Renee Rose. I am going to write most of it and then she is going to come over. I am going to leave her scenes and she is going to fix it.
I am co-writing with an author. I do the outlining and she does these brackets for me where she is like, “I do not want to do this.” I come through, fill in and revise/edit/whatever. That is our co-writing process.
Part of me is making all these charts, list them, and going, “Renee will fix it. I am going to make it as great as possible and then I know that it is going to get there because Renee will help.” A fun way to get your book done is you think to yourself, “I am going to get as much done as possible and I am going to pass the baton.” If she will do as much as she can, then she can pass it right back.
I almost think that that is how the universe works or whatever woo-woo that we are talking about is. You do have to do as much as possible. I am going to get to the best whether it is energetically. I am going to know what I need to know, love what I am doing, and get to a good energetic space. I then pass the baton so that the universe can guide me through my intuition or gut or whatever to go into this Facebook group clicking on that lady because you can’t control that.
What did I do? I told myself that I could do it. I joined the group. I was clicking around in the group. I was involved and present. I also had no expectations. I was like, “Let’s do this. This is going to be fun.” If you come at it, you decide what you want, you think about all the things you want, and then you go, “I have no expectations. I am going to go have fun and play with this.” That is the hard part.
We forget about that. We then try to manage our way to success, but its creation and creation is scary. It is like writing the end of this book. Where exactly is it going? I do not know. Let me write it. Let me use my tools to figure it out. In the end, a lot of the time, I take a walk, I stand in the shower, and I come up with this brilliant way to tie everything together. Some of it is taking step-by-step trusting that that will come because if I am afraid, I shut down and then my brain can’t make those connections.
This is a regular phrase, but at times, it is stronger than others. I am more focused on others. It is faith or fear. It is not faith in a religious way. It is the faith that things will turn out okay versus the fear that they won’t turn out okay or the faith that I am okay or I am enough versus the fear that I am not enough.
At this moment, do I want to choose faith or fear? I can feel it especially if it is two choices. It was like, “Should I do this one thing or this one thing?” I am like, “Which one is faith? Which one is fear? Which do I want to choose? Do I want to choose faith or fear?” I do my best to choose faith, whether in myself that I am good enough that the universe will meet me where I am at that.
Deep down if you have this belief that you are deserving. If you already are enough, you are already good enough. You reached out to me to do this episode, I easily could have not seen the invite then you thought I was ignoring you or rejecting you, or seen it and said, “No. I can’t do it right now,” but you put yourself out there and I was able to meet you.
Now, we are here talking and it happened but we had never met before. You can describe that as magic or as, “You went networking. This is how business works.” You can describe it either way but you have to believe that you are good enough. Even if someone says no to your book, your podcasts, or whatever you are putting out there, you are deserving. If you have this self-worth that you have worked on, rejection does not crush you.
In January 2017, I made $2,000 something and I did not go, “I am going to quit.” I had already quit in 2008 and 2009. That was the worst pain of anything I have ever done, giving up on myself. I was going to keep going. Even if I made $2,000 in a year or nothing. I will eventually get back to, “I am so grateful to be publishing and doing this. This is amazing.” There are months when I complain, “I only made $50,000 this month.” I am like, “Are you kidding me? Go smash it up.”
It is possible for you to write a book and be so proud of it. You then write another one and you complain. It is fine but it is that belief and inner deservingness. One of the best things was I did give up on myself and then I decided not to give up on myself anymore. I reversed the decision. I did it on my 30th birthday and on my 90th birthday, I will do it. I decided I did not want to wait until I was in this grandma mode. I wanted to do it immediately.
I do want to speak a little bit about that. We will talk about the Millionaire Author Mastermind after I talked about this. We have been talking all around the topics but specifically, there is a Facebook group. I do want to mention something that maybe is not obvious up until this point. I am listening to you and I understand but I was much more damaged from my childhood and stuff. I am much more damaged than I seem sitting here right now in front of the microphone.
I am feeling a little vulnerable. In the first iteration of this show, I could reach out to people because I was so used to not being enough. It did not hurt if anybody said no because it was almost expected. I only realized that I felt so little that it was not a big deal for me to reach out to people. I do not have any expectation that anybody will find value, but they said yes.
My bar was so low that it was like, “I can’t lose anything.” It was not, “I feel worthy and they might.” It was not because of the circumstances in my life. I have been sharing with people but if anybody is new, and you, my mother was narcissistic. I never talked about it. She stopped talking to me a few years ago. I got really good at being, “I do not care because I am not lovable anyway so whatever.” I do not know where this came from but I always had the drive to be like, “No, it can be better than this.”
Even when I was at my worst, I was like, “No, it can be better than this.” I do not know how I am going to figure out that it is better than this. I am going to keep doing things until I figure it out or get to a place where it is better. After years of not talking to my mom, I realized that thinking so little about myself was what I had to do in order to be in relation to her because she would compare us.
If I wanted to have a relationship with my mom, I could not be powerful, awesome, make money, be successful, or write books. I could not do any of those things and still have a relationship with my mom. We do not have one right now. Beyond in the ether of me loving her abstractly so now, I am finally consciously saying I deserve more. It is the first time in my life that I am able to believe it because I have been doing Law of Attraction and this money block stuff for decades and it never took because of that blind spot that I had, which was unconsciously minimizing myself.
I have met Marisa and they talk a lot about you can do all the vision boards you want but if you do not deserve it, you do not get down into, “I do deserve this,” and realized that you set out to make money and the vision of your mother shows up to chase you away. If you do not deal with that deep down, then the vision boards and the affirmations are not going to work.
Read a bad book that can motivate you to write even better.
It is about deserving that. You are right. Anyone can do it but we are both two White women sitting in America and there is a ton of privilege that we have. I recognize that I can say anyone can do it, but I do not even see all the blocks that society puts in to stop people who are trans, people of color, people who are trans and of color.
It is all of that or someone who grew up outside of the US who does not have internet is trying to figure it out from that place. I do want to recognize that we are able to say that, me, maybe flippantly knew with a lot more realization of the baggage. It sounds like you were able to declutter your mother and at this point, it is great.
There is definitely some morning of not having what we thought or wanted us to have but there was morning time and now it is gradually shifting to freedom, which is fun.
One of the hypnotherapists that I follow, Marisa Peer, talks about you, “Now you are old enough, you can mother yourself.” You imagine your perfect mother and your perfect father. They are perfect parents and you make them however you want to make them and then you have them say to you what you want to hear.
It is powerful. That is why I am into the hypnotherapy stuff and the meditation stuff. My parents are awesome but nobody is perfect. We are all missing what we want to hear, “I am good enough. You are a good writer. You are able to finish this book. You are going to figure it out.” To bring in a meditative state is more powerful than me sitting eating my lunch angrily repeating affirmations.
I do like my own little mini meditative hypnosis that I got daily but the one that did help me clear a lot of this stuff was six sessions. If anybody is interested, send me a note. It helped me clear the anger that I had that was so deep that there was no way I could consciously access it. I was like, “I am not angry.”
It was cleared in over six sessions. After that, I was like, “It is not there.” Sometimes, my sister is still angry because she has not done the hypnosis thing that I have done. In the whole dream was her being angry and me being, “It was not me. It was mom. I did not do it. It was mom. I was a kid too.” I am going way into it.
Not all my dreams are but that one for sure was a processing dream. This is what is happening. I am processing. She is still angry and that is okay. I am not so much anymore but I know that it was not my fault. I get to go into my bathroom, look into the mirror and be like, “Look at how beautiful I am.” They are like, “I feel so good.” The ones that I am doing right now are like, “I feel like a million bucks,” which is a fun phrase because it already exists. You utilize it and look in the mirror.
Speaking of feeling like a million bucks, I talk about six-figure authors because most of the people that I work with are earlier in the writing process. They are finishing books. How do I do ads? I like that you have the next step, the Millionaire Author Mastermind group. Can you tell us more about that? We have been talking a lot about mindset and stuff but I have a feeling that you have a purposeful something in here.
The Millionaire Author Mindset is a Facebook group. I started it because I started making money and I wanted to be able to share it with other friends in an environment where they said, “I want to hear about writing and making money.” There are many reasons to write a book and money does not have to be part of it at all. Sometimes, you trigger people’s money blocks in the conversation when you talk about, “I wrote this Sci-Fi romance with Lili Zander. I might make $20,000 this month. I can’t even believe it. I made $20,000 last year.”
In this group, it was like, “We are writing books and we can make money off of our books.” It has been amazing to share what I am going through. I pretty much share what is up with me. People post there and share what they are doing. I had a talk with a lady who is using Patreon so we talked about Patreon and how she is using it to make six figures. It is so great because there are so many different ways. I think about me in 2009, 2008 and then again in 2015 when I decided to snap into it and go for it.
I thought about what I wanted to hear. What did I need to hear? Someone told me about mailing lists so I set one up on my website. I told Renee and immediately she had a ton of people on her mailing list and then she started to realize how powerful it was to drive sales. I see newbies and I am like, “This is a great way to start.” You write books and you have a mailing list. The mailing list is set it and forget it. Maybe we are asking people to join your list. In your sleep, you have people joining your list and getting added to your list then you tell them when you have a book on sale.
To get to six figures, what I did was books. Also be networked, have a mailing list, do swaps, and then try to push into whatever I could. I did not want to figure out ads. Once I did, I hit $500,000. I have always written in series. If it is a long series, then each book is a different couple because I write romance. That is pretty simple. I can see that the money for me is in series and not necessarily writing standalone. I naturally write them. Writing series has worked.
To get to seven figures, I hired translators. Once you have some cash, reinvest into audio and figure out the best ways to promote your books. For me, I can write fast enough that I do not necessarily need ads, but ads can help like running ads to book one, using a lot of promotions in book one, and using promotions on sales. Renee and I spend big on our launches. We have hit the USA Today list with the last four releases.
Congratulations. You covered all that I wanted to cover with audio and translations because I am like, “When is the right time? Is it after you have some money?”
I am a fan of get started, get writing, figure out how you write, figure out what you want to write, and work your way if you can into a niche. Read Write to Market by Chris Fox and then take it with a grain of salt. You are not a robot. You are not a business-minded writing machine. You are a creative person. You are a writer, have a muse, and want to keep it happy. Thinking about how I do want to reach readers, I am in a smaller niche.
For example, if you write twenty military romances, it is going to be easier for people to find you than if you write a thriller or a Western romance, and you bounce around like that. You might have to do that to figure out that you do not like writing Western romance. You like writing dark romance or something like that.
Once the books are bringing in money, then you can reinvest in ads. I am a big fan of do not go into debt to do it. I could not go into debt to do it. I had no money so I made the money and then I reinvested. I started with covers that I bought from people on Fiverr and then I upgraded. Some people make their own covers and that was not me but I got cheap covers.
Reinvest in audiobooks. Put your paperbacks up. Your paperbacks can be wide even if you are a Kindle Unlimited. That is a way to get more exposure. Once you have more cash coming in, the audiobooks have paid themselves back, which might take a while, then you are investing in German. That seems to be the top language and top market for my books anyway, French, and then Italian.
It took us the whole interview to get here but I like the combination of your mindset, feeling more worthy, and investing in what you love growing. All this is happening in the mental-emotional space and at the same time, you are doing these practical things like getting your first covers, then up-leveling the covers.
If I were to tell somebody, “Here is what you do.” I can tell people the practical part and then I am like, “Here is how you can maybe do the emotional part, but you have to do that. I will give you some tools and resources. They go together but I can’t predict how the universe is going to guide you to learning about translations.” That is something else but it is a part of it. Join the Millionaire Author Mastermind Facebook group and that helps.
Search translations but know that what I laid out is the way I did it. It was pretty linear. Once I got going, I had done some mindset work before that. Do the mindset work, join some groups, and then absolutely join the Millionaires because the last talk I did, she has no translations. She does have some audiobooks, but she is making her money on Patreon. She used to post on Wattpad for free. For someone who is like, “I have been posting on Literotica and Wattpad. What do I do now?” There are so many different ways to get into writing.
What is it that we want? We want to be happy. I prefer to have free time and work from home. Some people are like, “Who doesn’t?” You might be an author and you are like, “I am introverting too much. I need a day job.” That is cool, too. Ella, you like face-to-face so you are like, “Let’s do some conversation.” I like conversations with my co-writers. I missed them. I am like, “We need to write a book together so I can talk to you all the time without calling you randomly to talk your ear off for five hours about nothing.” That will be awesome too.
There is a role to play. Renee said, “Do not be so prescriptive to people. Do not tell them, ‘You have to write five books in a series. This is how you structure it.’ We found the beat sheet helpful. We have done fifteen books in the series and we see which one we prefer.” If you have ideas for fifteen books in the series and it is selling, go for it.
Some of it is going to be playing with things and the universe. I said I wanted to make $1 million a year but what does that mean to me? It means that I can go to the grocery store and swipe my card without fear. As someone who had a lot of overdrafts and felt a lot of shame about it in her adult life, clearing that and getting through that was powerful. You do not have to make $1 million a year to do that but it was more of why not.
Renee Rose and I feed off of each other. We started calling our series together, The Millionaire Series. This is when it was making $10,000, which is still a lot. At that point, it was like, “That is more money than I have ever dreamed of so this is our millionaire series.” We joked about it. The series, we have written a ton of books in it and it has made over $1 million and we will probably accelerate. Now we call it our $100 Million Series because we want to move the bar out a little bit. We are like, “We will include the Netflix deal and all the merchandising.” You have to think big enough. You have to give it room.
I appreciate you sharing whatever it is that I asked you to share. What is your best advice for the people who are reading?
My best advice is to love your books. If you are stuck on that or too woo-woo positive for you, read a bad book. That is in the eye of the beholder so it could be some dusty old classic that you had to read in high school or it could be something that everyone derives nowadays. It could be one of my books, that is fine. I am willing to sacrifice one of my books for the cause. Read a bad book and that can motivate you to say, “I can do better.”
That is what made me think I could be a writer. I have been thinking about writing and pondering writing for a long time and then I read Twilight. I was like, “I could write way better than this.”
“I want to write better than this. I want something better.” I could say read a good book because there are definitely books I have read where I am like, “This is what reading can be. This is what a book could be,” but those can be intimidating because I was looking at an author’s finished product and you have to go to a blank page. Read a bad book then your bad drafts do not look as bad.
Thank you. Where is the best place for people to find you?
Come join the Millionaire Author Mastermind on Facebook. If you hate Facebook, you can go to my website, LeeSavino.com. You could download a free book and then you are on my mailing list as a reader. If you want to be on my mailing list as an author, you have to have a login for that.
Energetically if people were like, “I want more Lee Savino and Millionaire Author Mastermind,” if your source is nudging you in this direction, do it. Thank you so much, Lee, for chatting with me over this time and sharing all of your wisdom.
Thank you so much for having me.
Thank you everybody for reading and hanging out with us. Hugs and happy authoring here at Author Like A Boss.
Important Links
- Lee Savino
- Renee Rose
- Smashwords
- Literotica
- Gwen Hayes
- Save the Cat!
- Romancing The Beat
- Nic Erik
- Dean Wesley Smith
- Marisa Peer
- Millionaire Author Mastermind – Facebook
- Patreon
- Write to Market
- Fiverr
- Wattpad
- Twilight
About Lee Savino
Lee Savino is a USA today bestselling author of romance with over top possessive heroes and the women they’re obsessed with.
