Bob Fabien Zinga explains why self-published books work best as credibility tools for consulting and speaking, not direct sales. His strategy: send handwritten notes with advance copies to 300 relevant contacts, then follow up with calls to build relationships and explore how your book solves their problems.
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You know, it's interesting. I'm enjoying the fact that this is not your standard interview and podcast. Thank you. I love your enthusiasm. So you clearly love what you do. And I'm honored to be here. So thank you again.
Outstanding. And just to let you know, I am checking on the chat too. Somebody from Twitter— I told you we broadcast on Twitter as well. It goes by Légère Menstrual. It just says I. Usually I don't get any serious questions there, but there's someone from LinkedIn, Terence. He's actually a veteran. He says he used a niche publisher for his first book. Now he's decided to publish his second book himself. What advice would you give someone in my position to market the book as an independent author publisher? He hadn't thought about credibility being the purpose. Ah, for a driver.
So it's a great question, and it really requires a mindset change. Okay, the, the biggest thing, and, and, and this was potentially true 20, 30, 40 years ago, is that you might actually publish a book to make money on book sales. Okay. But at the time, and this was starting in 2005, and I have a number of authors that have made six figures in book sales. That said, the primary purpose of a book, if you're writing a book and you're in business and you're writing a non-fiction book so that you can actually, um, do more consulting, do more speaking, do more coaching, if that is the purpose of your book It almost doesn't matter how many books you sell.
Yes.
Okay, what matters is that you— are you ready? Hear my words— you put the books in the hands of the people who need to see them. So the best technique— and this was now 20 years ago, and, and I've repeated this over and over again— the best technique any author has ever done is before the publishing time, they've, they've actually written down the addresses of— in this case, she wrote down 300 addresses, um, professors, uh, referral partners, potential clients. And when the book came out, she had written the addresses. She created, uh, USPS and FedEx envelopes and she wrote handwritten notes to everybody. Wow. And stuffed the book in all those envelopes. And then her and somebody else on her team did follow-up calls. From what I can
