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TBT: Bestselling Author Publishes Novels, Online Courses, and More
Welcome to Throwback Thursday / “Where are they now?” where we take an in-depth look at someone who’s story has evolved considerably since we first featured them.
Today, in our latest feature, we’ll hear from Jessica Brody, Ep. 303: Published Author Adds Income Source; Makes Extra $21,000 Her First Year.
What’s happened since? Let’s hear directly from her. She has a lot of updates, it was a struggle for me to condense them because she gave us so many good things to work with.
But suffice it to say that she has massively increased her following and income and influence since Ep. 303. And not only that but she’s making some really smart moves to reduce her dependence on an outside platform.
I’ll be back at the end to say more about that—there are several lessons to take from this one, especially if you are at all interested in writing or making an online course or anything related to education.
Hi, I'm Jessica Brody, and I'm a full time novelist living near Portland, Oregon. I was featured on episode 303 of the podcast and as a full time novelist, my side hustle is a company called Writing Mastery, which is dedicated to teaching other writers how to elevate their writing and their writing careers through online courses, webinars, YouTube videos and blog posts.
So I got started because I was doing a lot of speaking engagements. I was hired to speak to writers at writing conferences and different writing events, and I found myself traveling a lot. And so I actually discovered an online learning platform called Udemy. And I decided as a test to put one of, or transform, one of my one of my speaking, one of my workshops that I would do live and transform it into an online course. Just as a test. And I put it up on Udemy, and it ended up being very successful on Udemy, I think we made a thousand dollars in the first day or something. And we were, we meaning me and my husband, who is my producer for the courses. We're so excited. We were like, what else can you talk about? And from there I started to brainstorm a bunch of different topics of things that I felt like I was good at or that writers often asked me about. So, meaning they thought I was good at it. So I came up with a bunch of topics and I just started to go through them and create courses based on them. So the second one we launched a few months later also did really well. That was, of course, all about productivity hacks for writers and we've just been producing courses ever since.
About a year after I was on the podcast, I released my very first nonfiction book, which is a book all about how to plot a novel and how to write a novel. And it's called Save the Cat Writes a Novel. And it's based on a very popular screenwriting method called Save the Cat. And I have adapted it for writing novels. I looked back and when I was on the podcast before, we had thirty seven hundred students on Udemy and today we have thirty thousand students on Udemy where I first launched my courses. So that's just crazy to me. But then I think the most exciting thing that's happened is, is was in January. Which is my husband and I launched our very first online learning platform that is all ours. And it it is called the Writing Mastery Academy. It is a subscription site where you pay $12 a month and you get access to all of my courses and unlimited access. So you don't have to decide which one you want to take or what order you can dabble in them. You can take them in any order, you can take them as many times as you want.
I think when people, when people want to create online courses, they struggle with either two different kinds of things. They struggle with either what is called expert syndrome or imposter syndrome. And expert syndrome is when you are so knowledgeable about something that you don't, you can't break it down or you can't figure out you can't wrap your head around the fact that other people don't just naturally know how to do this. So you're just so good at it that you don't understand that it actually is a skill that many people don't have or that many people need to learn. And then on the other hand, is this imposter syndrome, which is where I think people say, well, I can't create that course because I'm not the best in the field. Like, I'm not the best at whatever I do. So why would people turn to me to learn that? So they feel sort of like an imposter by making a course and saying, I can teach this. They feel like a little bit of an, the imposter syndrome.
And I think I have I have some advice on both of those. I think for one, for the imposter syndrome, I think the key thing to note is that you do not have to be the best at something in order to teach it. You just have to have some sort of skill that other people don't have. And even if that means you're not the best in your field, it means that you have something to offer people who want to learn about that field. In terms of expert syndrome that one's a little bit harder to overcome. But I think the whole idea behind creating courses is being able to break down skills and knowledge into these bite-size learning nuggets or these bite size markers on a journey. So I structure all of my courses as 'here's a pain point that you need to overcome', like conquering writer's block. And then I look at it and how can I break that down into bite sized skills or bite sized steps? So I think a lot of people, the big mistake they make when they create a new course is they sort of try to tackle it all at once or they or they sort of tackle a little bit of this skill and then a little bit of this skill. And it doesn't really have a clear learning path. So I guess that's my, my best piece of advice for anyone who's trying to break into the world of online learning.
