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Continuing on from International Women’s Month, American women are now being encouraged to share their inspiring stories and become accomplished authors. One company empowering women to do this right across the country is the Ultimate 48 Hour Author.
Everyone has stories in their head – daydreams, life experiences, longings… even erotic fantasies. Many people want to write them. Some do. Most are put off by the processes, and there are many. They begin with sitting down and writing a book, then there’s getting it published and finally selling it. Australian Author, Natasa Denman, has written a book that guides people through the writing process. It’s called Shut Up and Write your First Book and it’s a hot seller.
“Writing a book is a leap of faith that we are never actually ready to take. However, there comes a point in our lives when the reasons why we should do it seriously outweigh the reasons why we shouldn’t,” the book urges in its opening. What’s behind it is even more compelling. Denman has worked out how to make anyone an author in 48 hours. Her company is called, aptly, Ultimate 48 Hour Author.
It began because Denman faced and conquered the process of writing and publishing herself. “I wrote my first book, The 7 Ultimate Steps to Weight Loss, because I wanted to get a life coaching business off the ground,” she explains. “I had no clients and no ability to generate leads or prospects. But I had a marketing idea. I’d come out with a book, which I did. I wrote the first book in a matter of 80 days and had it published within six months.”
The book became the catalyst for a six-figure income that enabled Denman to quit her day job. It also lit a fire within her to write. In the process of writing two more books, one co-authored, she worked out how to produce a book in 48 hours. “If I could write half a book in just three hours, then others could do a whole book during a 48-hour retreat which guided people through the entire writing and publishing process,” she reasoned. Denman ran her first retreat in October 2013.
Since then, the business has been evolving as Denman wrote and published eleven more books herself (fourteen in total). “When I find the most successful way of doing something and get a result from it, then I’ll reverse engineer the steps, and I’ll share the things that have worked. And I have always invested in mentors and courses and my own coaches during that journey,” she says. She has grown the business with neither outside funding nor business loans but by being proactive and nimble. “I’m very big on taking action very quickly to implement something and test it out, even if it’s not perfect.” In the last three and a half years, for example, 48 Hour Author has added an in-house publishing house to its services.
Denman is not unnerved by challenges either. “The greatest challenge was to be able to continually discover budding authors who wanted to write a book and go through our program. So, our biggest winner has been our half-day seminar that we run quite regularly, up to 40 times a year.” Before COVID, she also had a heady schedule of national and international tours. These are now held virtually. “It has been a roller coaster at times, but certainly we’ve always stayed solution focused to make sure that we are always planning ahead of what’s going to happen.” Outsourcing the publishing part of 48 Hour Author’s services became a challenge as the business grew. “By bringing publishing in-house, “We brought profit back into the business and hired more people within the business, which meant we could also support more authors. And now we also have recurring royalties from book sales as well as loyalty from our clients. They keep coming back to us. The lifetime value of our client base has quadrupled,” she explains.
Denman also faced the challenge that confronts many women in business. She also had the business of being a mum with three young children. “So I’m not the nurturer in the family. My husband, Stuart is, and we’ve got a little bit of role reversal in our business. Finding comfort in all of that wasn’t easy,” she says. Denman turned that challenge into another book, again aptly named – Guilt Free Parents: Love your children, build your empire, satisfy your desires.
Were there any angel-gifts? “To be honest, COVID,” Denman confesses. “Everyone all of a sudden found the time to write the books they’ve always wanted to. So we thrived. We had our best year in 2020; we did $1.8 million in turnover and then in 2021, we also had an amazing year of $1.5 million. This year were heading past the $2 million mark, hopefully. We were proactive though. We pivoted online very quickly within days of everything happening. We didn’t wait for it to ‘blow over’,” she notes.
“The other gift, she says, “has been my mum, who has been involved in the business since day one. Not many people know how much she does behind the scenes to really help the business. She always took the kids during every retreat we ran as well as all our national tours and international tours. And she has supported us with so many odd jobs.”
The 48 Hour Author climbed to a seven-figure turnover within a couple of launches and is very close to passing the $2 million milestone. “Last year we had a seven-figure profit,” Denman notes. “My accountant is astounded by how profitable we run the business and how lean it is.”
Denman has no intention of resting on her laurels. She has recently invested further in the company’s growth. “We have just employed a salesperson who is going to be trained up to do what Stuart and I do all of the time, so that we can grow further and do more follow-ups with people. I’d like to see that grown into a sales team,” she says. “We have helped 600 people become published first-time authors. My goal in the next two years is to get past 1000 authors so the next stage is to grow the sales side because the publishing, admin, design and editorial sides are really well established.”
Long-term, Denman would like her “well-oiled machine” not to need Stuart or her to always be present. “We don’t necessarily need to grow too much bigger from where we are right now because we have an amazing balance in lifestyle and travel and fun, and a team that really is close-knit. It’s not one of those things that you feel is a job.”