Hiring a Virtual Assistant for Self Publishing w/ Ava Fails

About this video

Interview with Ava Fails, Dale’s virtual assistant and a self-publisher herself, on scaling a publishing business with a VA. Ava’s background is graphic design and online writing from around 2006 via Digital Point forums and Demand Studios. She has 13 or 14 books; she wrote her first at a quiet third-shift job in 2011, formatting it in HTML for Kindle, published a second in 2015, had a low-carb cookbook taken down after a recipe-source dispute, and now her best sellers are her Conspiracy Fact Declassified books, sold as ebooks via Amazon/CreateSpace, Google Play Books, and ACX audio, largely set-and-forget. She says she markets others’ work easily but struggles with confidence marketing her own. On VA work, she does newsletter, website, SEO, landing pages, and SoundCloud tasks for Dale and suggested repurposing his videos as a podcast, which reached hundreds of listens via iTunes/Stitcher/Google Play. Advice: find VAs through author networking/Facebook groups rather than relying only on Upwork (which takes 20%), build experience there if starting out, use video chat to build rapport and play to strengths, and beware that cheap overseas help can fail on native-level language/culture despite fluency.

Key takeaways

• A virtual assistant in self-publishing can handle almost anything doable by computer/internet — newsletter, website/SEO, landing pages, social feeds, and even parts of writing, editing, and publishing.
• Find a VA through author networking and Facebook groups and referrals; platforms like Upwork offer escrow protection but take 20% off the top.
• Video-chat rapport matters: Dale says Ava worked about four times faster on her strengths (SEO, email list, landing pages) once he stopped assigning off-strength tasks.
• Cheap overseas VAs at $3/hour can create a native-vs-fluent gap — missed clichés, pop culture, and phrasing — plus constant retraining costs.
• Ava’s own books illustrate set-and-forget income and risk: 13-14 books, a cookbook removed over recipes, and steady sellers in her declassified-conspiracy nonfiction series across ebook, print, Google Play, and ACX.

Episode details: published September 1, 2017 · 37:12 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Dale L. Roberts’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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