5 Things Happening in Self-Publishing to Know About

Hello and Happy Tuesday to you. Today we're going to talk about five things happening in the self publishing world that are essentially news. Although some of them aren't hot off the press news, some are things from last month that we haven't yet talked about. So we're going to cover that in just a sec. And while we give folks a moment to join in, I am going to just let you know about some cool stuff that's happening. So first of all, Self Publish and Succeed Live, which is a 12 week workshop hosted primarily by yours truly, but some other fabulous people from my team will also be teaching and you also get one on one calls with a book coach as well as our book marketing manager. So we pack a ton into the 12 weeks and at the end of it all you are eligible if you have your manuscript ready to submit for a $500 content edit, which is a tremendous value because you get the content edit and then a content edit delivery meeting. And and it's been very effective. The 100% of the people who showed up to 80% or more of the live classes submitted their manuscript for content edit. So this gets your book written and well positioned, set up for marketing and teaches you the whole self publishing process. So we go over things like hook, reader research, book outlining, using AI or just using your brain, book titles, self editing, beta readers, chapter titles, chapter templates, working with editors, the importance of the first 20 pages of your book, launch strategies, what is a content edit and what does it look like? What are you going to do after you get a content edit? So if you're interested it starts Monday night next week and you can get all the details@self publishand succeed.com live class and it's small, it's not a big, it's an intimate group so you get lots of one on one attention. There's four Q&A sessions where you can bring your work and we can workshop it. You can get some feedback, lots of accountability and support. So hope to see you there. Also on Saturday we have our next Deep Dive also hosted by me. This will be all things audiobook. So we're going to have a full on session about audiobooks and you can register if you get our newsletter so you can get the newsletter@book launchers.com newsletter and I'll see you at 10:00am Pacific Standard Time on Saturday for a two hour session and of course it's always free to join live and if you can't make it but you really want all the good content that we're going to cover, then Angela has a link where you can buy the replay. And of course, if your client the replays, as long as technology cooperates, are always available inside of your foundation library. Last thing before I dive into the first piece of news and say hello to all of you that are now joined. Is that also starting next week we have the book sales summit and it's five days of content to help you sell books and and you can join for free@book launchers.com summit after you sign up, you will also be given the opportunity to buy a discounted ticket. If you can't make all the sessions or you want access to the replays, that discounted ticket or the ticket later on if you don't want to get the discount, if you don't want to save the 30 bucks, you can pay full price later and get access to all of the replays. And there's some great speakers, great content. I we covered a lot in my session and a lot of things that I don't actually normally talk about. We actually went deep into YouTube and YouTube strategies in my session. So there should be some really great content in that summit next week. All right, so let's say hello to all of you folks that have now joined in. Clash is here. Kevin Hall, Bill Miller, Angela's here, of course. Darla, hello. Rich Sherman from Panama. Welcome. Danielle from Corpus Christi, Texas. And Efren needed this update. All right, so welcome everybody. So the first piece of news, I'm just gonna pull up my notes because I have some notes on this one and I'm on a bit of a tight schedule, so we'll be out of here in 30 minutes because I have a live meeting here in my office at the top of the hour that I have to get ready for. So, first piece of news, and it's not hot off the press news, but I finally read the lawsuit that was filed and it was fascinating. So I wanted to mention it here. David Goggins, who I love to back up a little bit, I love when I'm talking to librarians or even other people considering becoming an author who won't self publish because they think that self published authors won't get in libraries or they won't get bookstore distribution or they won't get the kind of recognition or sales that they want, and I love going, well, do you know how many books David Goggins has sold? And sometimes they go, no. And often they go, yeah, millions. I'm like, yeah, like more than 7 million. And he self published both of his Books Can't Hurt Me and never finished. And so he recently filed a lawsuit against Amazon because Amazon could have, but didn't shut down the bootlegged copies that were selling. And they guesstimate but of course they don't know, you know, that this is damages in the millions to him because he should have sold not only damages in the millions because of sales that he didn't get to benefit from, but also in damaged reputation and in, I think it was in the lawsuit. I read, I read a few articles around this too but I think it's in the lawsuit where he talks about the fact that he, he got paid for a speaking engagement and he spoke and they had 125 copies that they ordered that he had to sign and they weren't, they weren't legitimate copies, they were all bootlegged copies. So but he couldn't upset his client that had paid him to be there. So he had to endure signing 125 bootlegged copies. And the quality was not there. That's how he knew for sure they were bootlegged. You know, often the spines are off or the printing doesn't look right. Sometimes the pages are too thin. There's a lot of signs often that it's crappy, crappy quality. And so he had to sign these 125 copies and then he ordered 13. I don't know how many actually, didn't say how many but he's, he ordered a bunch from Amazon and of those I think it said 13 were bootlegged copies as well. And by bootlegged I just mean they weren't, they're not his print on demand copies. They're not the copies that they have generated and have sold. And I think, I think he's actually done print runs now because he's in the Amazon Advantage program. So he's done print runs and you know, they are selling his books that way. But yeah, it was, it was fascinating and straight from the lawsuit. I'll just read this one part because this is what I found frustrating slash fascinating. After informing Amazon that we can only beg for help so long, Goggins representative informed Amazon that he would make the issue public. On October 5th of 2023, Goggins, who has over 11 million Instagram followers, posted the posted a message on his Instagram feed informing his followers of a systemic issue at Amazon whereby it allows bootlegged copies, allow bootleg copies of his book to be sold on Amazon. The Post generated over 6.2 million views, 300,000 likes and 5,000 comments, many of which expressed shock and disbelief that Amazon would allow bootleg sales of Goggins books on his platform. Now the frustrating slash fascinating part of this is this is the second time Amazon, or sorry, this is the second time Goggins has either threatened to or gone public with his issues. And of course, both times Amazon then acts in its own self interest and also by doing so showed that it had the ability to control and prevent the sale of of these copies all along. Because within days of Goggins Instagram post, Amazon called Goggins representatives and foreign rights literary agent, reflecting Amazon knew how to reach Goggins all along. And then it shut down bootleg sales of its books on its websites by limiting the sales of books to authorized sellers, namely only Amazon.com so Amazon could have prevented the listing, sale and distribution of these bootleg copies at any point in time. And if you read the whole lawsuit, they actually detail a time, I think three years prior to this where a similar thing happened and a major journalist was doing an article on it and then Amazon rectified it before the article came out. So I find this fascinating because he has self published and has more control and more data than a lot of authors who are traditionally published who are made aware of bootlegged copies, but they don't have much control or data to really understand it. But it's also frustrating for all of the times that we are fighting Amazon for resolutions to things we know they can fix, but they choose not to. And I tell people this all the time that we spend, and by we, I mean people on my team spend a huge chunk of their day fighting bots. And, and then they fight the bots to get to a human and oftentimes the human sounds like a bot. And it is so frustrating. And so that's where it's frustrating and fascinating because knowing we're not Goggins and we're not representing authors with, you know, 11 million Instagram followers, so we don't have that clout, it's fascinating to see that he runs into the same bot battles that we do. But of course it's frustrating at the same time because you think if, if Goggins has to file lawsuits and go public in a massive way with these things before Amazon does something, it kind of makes you feel like, wow, you really don't have much power and control as an author regardless. And so it just reminded me and I wanted to share it both because I think it's just fascinating. And like I said, if you, Angela, may have Already dropped the link in the chat for the lawsuit. But the other thing of this is to be ordering your copies on Amazon on a regular basis just to check, especially if you've had a good sales run, because this happens to authors after they've sold out on Amazon. So after you launch and you've sold out of the copies, and it's like they're in this weird no man's land where there's no copies available or if you are traditionally published, this happens, too, if you have a big sales run. But if you have a big sales run, you want to be monitoring what's happening with your Amazon account. And. And I did do a video on this, I think, last year, and I gave Angela the link to this already, so she'll drop that in there. And if you're watching the replay, I'll put it in the description below as well. On how to monitor, how to watch for these kind of scams and what you can do, because the sooner you get on top of it, the better, because there are ways to prevent this and to stop it and minimize it. And of course, eventually, you know, push Amazon to do the right thing and shut it down. But you got to monitor it because the longer it goes on, the higher the cost to you and the damage, too, because you'll start getting bad reviews from. For these bootleg copies which have sub, subpar quality. And that can be, you know, again, you can't get those reviews taken down, even when it's clearly not about the book itself. It's about the quality, which you couldn't control when it wasn't you selling it. So anyways, I'll leave that there. I don't want to go down a sad, dark rabbit hole, but I think it's just a good reminder for all of us to stay on top of our business. Don't just post your book and forget about it, even if you're out there marketing it. Check on it, Check what's going on, check what's happening with the reviews. And, you know, sign up for the book scout little app that I talk about in that video and order copies from time to time just to see what's going on with your book. All right, let's see. Professor E.A. burlingame is in the house. And Efren says human bots on customer service detail is frustrating. It sure is. And Rich Sherman says, how is it possible for others to get bootleg copies? I don't know if you mean how is it possible for them to make it or how is it possible for people to buy it. They were just buying it off of Amazon because there's different sellers that can be made. And then there's also in that scam video, I talk about. I talk about how some people can sell with just one letter change in the name or a title. They can sell copies and it can be a complete replica. There's lots of ways they're doing it. And anybody can scan a book. Um, they can just take it to a printer and get a digital copy. Um, that's why the quality is usually less, because they use that OCR and they'll just completely replicate the book. They'll make a new version of it by that. Sometimes it's just like photocopied pages put into a new book. There's lots of ways they're doing it. Um, also, you know, you can take a copy off Kindle and pull it down and make replicas. There's plenty of ways that people are going to be able to scan the book, but then they're just buying it off of Amazon. Okay, just seeing if there's any other comments that you guys had and said. Didn't Jane Friedman also have her. Her book spoofed on Amazon? Yeah, that was an AI generated content and with her name. So it wasn't her book per se. It was, I believe they were playing off of her name and then putting content on there that was AI generated. I can't remember the exact details of it, but it was a slightly different scenario. But again, not the issues are the same in that Amazon could have prevented it or stopped it a lot faster than they did. And then the secondary part of this is really just the reminder to be mindful. And on top of this, because it was one of her readers, I believe, of one of her newsletters that flagged the issue for her. And so the more as authors that we are on top of this, the faster you can solve and resolve these issues. Efren's like, slow down. I'm taking notes on how to bootleg. Sure you are. Sure you are. Okay, number two. So this is. I'm not going to reiterate all of the content on this subject. It's more because I keep getting asked. So am I still using and recommending Find a Way Voices for audiobooks? So the really short recap version is that Findaway Voices by Spotify put some shenanigans out there with their Terms of Service question. Quickly reversed it mostly. And what I'll do instead is I gave Angela the Authors Guild link, which is a great summary of the new terms and service and like what their stance is on it. So you can read through that because they did an excellent job. And, and that will help you kind of understand the issues around Findaway Voices and, you know, what their terms of service say. But I wanted to kind of make a point around this question because that's come up many times since this all happened. Am I still using Findaway Voices? Yes. Am I still recommending them? For the most part, however. And I'd already shifted. Right. So if you want to take a step back, before this even happened, I had already shifted my own focus and strategy towards giving my audiobook away for free to grow my platform. And I did this strategically because Audible is, you know, I don't love how Audible treats authors. You load your book onto ACX and you sell it on Audible and they don't pay you very much money and they don't choose, they don't let you choose the price point. So they set the price point and then proceed to pay you pittance, frankly. And they, even if you go exclusive with them, I still don't think they pay you very much, considering it's, there's no print costs involved in this. Yes, there's digital hosting, but really it is, to me unnecessary how little they pay authors and, and then they don't give you any tools to really promote the book. And, and so I, I don't love Audible, but at the same time, it's where the vast majority of mine and most of our clients audiobook sales come from. So I don't feel like I can say, don't publish your audiobook on, on acx, because it's a great place to be discovered. It's. It also gives you more formats, which gives you more credibility. So there's tremendous reasons why I still recommend, you know, Audible and audiobooks in general. But that said, I had already been feeling like going direct with my audiobook was the right play. And there's ways to sell your audiobook, but I chose to use it to build my platform. That was really my intent and my focus with it. So I was already leaning towards, you know, a different direction than pushing audiobook sales on Audible myself. For our clients, you know, it's always been 5050 because of the money that you make if you go exclusive with Audible. You know, we, we have had a lot of clients that we are saying, hey, it's probably best if you just go on Audible. Most of your markets in the US that's where most of the Americans are going to buy their their audiobooks through their Audible subscription. So just go there. Um, but if anybody wants library access, that's why Findaway Voices is such a powerful platform. They also have widespread distribution elsewhere too. I used to be a really big fan of Findaway, but then Spotify bought them and you know, I, you know, I was still excited about Spotify. I started making revenue from Spotify before, you know, I literally got paid from Spotify. I don't know, about four days before all these shenanigans and I was like, woohoo, this is working out great. And then all this happened. So I guess all I'm saying is get yourself informed and make choices that are right for you and for your bigger picture strategy. Because this is always my message is there's no one path for everyone. Everything has trade offs. There's never a perfect choice in, well, I think in life, but in books there's never a perfect choice. Everything has trade offs, right? You go publishing, you get a traditional publishing deal, you're going to make almost nothing per book. You give up a lot of control, you're giving up your rights, but you know, you've got that traditional publishing deal that you know, in a lot of people's minds has credibility. You get the, the feeling of being chosen and you know, you should get some good bookstore distribution as a result and potentially some higher level media through that deal. But you've given up an awful lot to get that. So you better have gotten in my mind, you know, at least a six figure deal up front for me to, to want to do that and give up all of the rights and all of the, the control and all of the say in that. So there's no, there's no perfect path. That doesn't mean traditional is a bad path. It just means that unless I get the right deal, it doesn't necessarily make sense for me personally. So I also have a new video coming out on Authors Republic. Authors Republic was actually the original audiobook distributor that I used because when I launched my first audiobook in 20, 2017, 16, 2016, I could not publish through Findaway or ACX. They did not allow, I was in Canada at the time and they didn't allow Canadians to publish for a variety of regulation reasons. And Office Republic had a path. So that's where I published my first audiobook. And you know, I was quite happy with them. There was limitations with, to their reach, but they've made a lot of updates. So I've got a new video coming out on them as well. So there's Lots of choices. You're not stuck. Okay, so let's do some prizes, shall we? Let's see. And everybody asking questions. The Angela will take them. And as long as I have time, because I am on a little bit of a tighter schedule today, we will do all the questions today. If not, we can save them for Saturday for the deep dive, especially because if you're talking audiobooks, Saturday's deep dive is all things audiobook. We're going to talk about everything but the technical aspect of editing and producing an audiobook because I do nothing with that. I have zero expertise. I always hire that piece out. But we can talk about the narration, we'll talk about distribution, we'll talk about AI. We're going to cover a ton on Saturday, so make sure you're coming to that. And we can cover any questions that we don't cover today for that. Okay. Surprises, if you haven't already said hello. And I see Evelyn from Seaside Cabinet, California, I think saying hello as well. And hello, cupcake, it's me. I love that name. Has also said hello. So hello back. Okay, so I'm going to head over to my random name picker. Every Tuesday and Friday we have new videos that go live. And when you comment the day a video goes live, you get entered to win. And so I'm going to share my screen and bring on up. Where are you? I think this is it. This should be it. It's bringing up the streamyard tool, but it should be right beside it is also my random name picker. So. So every Tuesday and Friday when you comment on the day a video is released, you get entered to win a prize. I believe our prizes today are a copy of self promotion, promote and succeed, a copy of self publish and succeed. And I think we even have some of my original books, my more than cash Flow, my real estate investing book, as well as the new brand you good. You can see my name picker. Okay. And we may have mugs and journals back, I'm not sure. So if you are one of our lucky winners today, then you will email Angela at Team T A M book launchers.com with your mailing address and your prize choice. And so grid e ho. Thank you for your comment and hopefully your like and your share and your subscribe. You have been selected to win a prize so you got to email Angela@teamoklaunchers.com and let her know what you want and where she should send it. And while I'm in here, I'm going to do my other prize let's just hit submit for a second time. All right, Volkstone 8398, congratulations. Same thing for you. Okay. And then over here, what we'll use shortly is we're going to select somebody who's here live and you have to have commented to win a prize. So that's your incentive to comment if you have not already commented. Okay. All right, I see questions coming in. I'm going to ignore those for now. Third point. The third little piece of news that we're going to talk about today is Draft 2 Digital, which I feel like I've been talking about them a lot lately. I put out a video last week which was all about things you may not have known about Draft 2 Digital. And as all of these platforms seem to do at the same time, or just the day before or day after the video came out, they also made more announcements which I couldn't include in the video. But the big thing that they announced was that they are going to be doing, or they now are doing, more affordable print proofs. And so a print proof is something that you order before you publish your book to make sure everything looks okay. And we always recommend that you order a print proof because things sometimes just don't look right or look off or you can see something. You can notice an issue with the book when it's in print that you may not have caught in the digital file. And so through Draft 2 Digital, you can do your print books through Draft 2 Digital as well, I'm pretty sure. But I don't know this for a fact, that Ingram is actually there underneath. And so I think this is why we don't use Draft Digital Digital. We just go straight to Ingram. However, they have author sharing. So if you have a co author and you want a more simple way to track and pay and get paid out, draft 2 digital has that which Ingram and KDP do not. So that might be a really good reason to do your print book with Draft 2 digital. Regardless, it used to be like 30 some dollars to order your print proof from them, and they changed that. So if you haven't yet created a physical version version of your book and you're going to go through them, you can now order it more affordably. And so when you order a proof copy or an Author copy from Draft 2 Digital Print, the process works kind of like it does with everyone. You pay for the cost of the print, the manufacturing cost, plus the price of the shipping. And you get to choose which shipping option you want for proofs. You can only order one proof copy at a time. But once your book is published and you want to order author copies, it's the same thing. You're just paying for the manufacturing costs plus the shipping. And you can order an unlimited amount. And their water, their proofs don't have a watermark, which I think is the same for Ingram. I get them all mixed up sometimes. So that's an exciting little update from Draft 2 Digital that I just wanted to add because I just did that video last week and it didn't have that. Now next up on my list of news is the London Book Fair is on this week and I'm already seeing some content from it and I think it will be really, it's really exciting and interesting because they have sessions and then of course, you know, partner lots of international rights deals get done and international rights agencies are there pitching to bookstores and publishers and all the like. So I have never attended, but I always love reading recaps and information from it. But one post that I saw that caught my attention was from in a newsletter called Publishing Perspectives that I read and it talked about audiobooks and it covered big trends and themes in the European market. And it's a kind of a prequel to a presentation that's going to happen this week at the London Book Fair. Angela can post the link in the comments. And I bring it up mostly because Audible wasn't mentioned once in this entire post. And again, I bring this up because I think that it's really easy for especially and I'm not picking on American authors. But I mean, I do this too. We get our blinders on it, right? And we just focus on what we know and what we see every day, which for a lot of us is Audible. And for a lot of us that is only Barnes and Noble. And we forget about this huge world that we live in and all the places people buy books, consume books, uncover their next favorite author that are not places like Audible and Amazon. And and I always had some attention to this coming from Canada because in Canada, and this may have shifted since I've left because I've been in in the US for seven years now. But you know, Kobo was the go to reader. Like people didn't read on Kindles that much. We mostly in Canada read. If we were going to read an ebook, we read on a Kobo device. So coming down here, everybody was talking Kindle, Kindle, Kindle. And I was like, hey, what about Kobo? Like they're a really cool company and you're missing A big chunk of the Canadian market if you're not selling your book on Kobo. And so I was already aware of different buying habits just on the country that's just north of the American border. So imagine when you open up your scope and your purview to the rest of the world. They also talked a lot in this article about the hybrid purchasing. And so you already see this with Spotify and Audible where there's the subscription base but then you can also just go in and one off buy a book on on in the audio format. And how that's a really, you know, it was interesting kind of seeing the splits and understanding how different buying habits by different country are going to lean towards subscription versus, you know, one off buying and all of those things. So again, I don't think there's anything really to take away from this except to note that there's more than Amazon. All right, the final little piece of news is just a little celebration. Self Promote and Succeed is a quarter finalist in the Publisher's Weekly Book Life prize in the business and personal finance category. This is one of the best book awards for a self publishing authority. So we are really excited that Self Promote and Succeed is advancing to the next and hopefully we make it all the way through to the finals. But it's still an honor to get into the quarterfinals and or to be a quarterfinalist and, and to see where that can take us because this is like I said, one of the best awards that you can be in as a self published author. So hooray for that. And of course if you want Self Promote and Succeed you can get it for free in audiobook version which you can go to self promote and succeedforward.com forward slash audio. And again Angela will put it on the side and I'll put it in the description down below. All right, let's do prizes really quick and then I will spend the last 10 minutes that I have answering any questions that you have and sorry, trying to get back into my stream yard to go and give you guys another prize. Okay, here we are. And I didn't ask you to say any specific text. So we'll just draw from the people who have commented today. I feel like there should be music but you just play your favorite song in your head. All right, Professor E.A. burlingame. If there's anything you haven't won my friend, let us know. Otherwise you are welcome to gift this. You can play Santa or whatever you would like today. So let us know if you want the prize and what it Is. Or if you want to gift it to someone else and let me draw again. Clash. Congratulations. So I believe your prize choices today are self promote and succeed, self publish and succeed. The new brand you more than cash flow or I think we have journals and mugs again in stock, but Angela will have to confirm that for you. All right, what do we have for questions? I know there was some. Okay, we got journals in. So you can, you can. You're basically turning. Churning. You're basically choosing something in a book format. The old, the old vintage journal. The oh so soft journal is right here. Mine is very well worn and well used as you can see. I actually might be due for a new one. Angela. Now that I think about it, that one is full. Full, full. Okay, question one from John Comic Avalon. Quick question. Do you still not work with fiction books and are there any plans for that to change in the future? We only work with nonfiction and no plans at the moment to change that. We will stick with nonfiction for the foreseeable future. We have lots of cool things that we're working on in the nonfiction space. We're launching a client portal so they can see our process and it's going to be cool. I'll show you all the portal once it's live. And we also have another piece of software we're launching this year. Our focus is pretty intense on the nonfiction space. I still think we have room to grow in really mastering all things nonfiction until. Until that day, I don't think we'll do fiction. But we love having our fiction, our fiction friends around here. So do hope you keep coming back and commenting and saying hello and, and, and we'll try to add value where we can for you. Question 2. Is Audible's compensation roughly 40% of whatever they decide to price our audiobooks? Yes, assuming you're exclusive. If you're not exclusive, I believe the percentage is 25%. I'm just going to see if I can quickly double check it. ACX compensation because I think that's right. All the percentages start to mix up in my head between all the different platforms. But I feel like you only get 25% if you aren't exclusive with them. So one moment. Yeah. It says ACX authors can between can earn between 20 and 40% through ACX. The royalty rate you earn, it says for non exclusive distribution the rights holder earns a 25% royalty. And that's a little bit older article that I pulled up, but I was right. My brain was right. So 40% is only if you are exclusively selling your audiobook with them. Oh, Clash. That's so nice. Clash won before and has kindly deferred to another person. But that is so nice. Okay, so I will. I guess I'll draw another person. Unless you want to choose the. The gift person. The person to gift to Clash. No pressure. If you don't want to, I will hit the button again because I still have it open and I will bring it up. But thank you for your support. Says you have all my books already, so thank you. That's very sweet, Suzanne. You're always welcome, even if you're late. And you can always catch the rest of it on replay because we did cover five news points and now we're just on questions. So the question three. Hello, cupcake. I'm in the process of trying to get my manuscript published, but I've been thinking about doing crowdfunding because I really don't have the capital to do it on my own. Suggestions? I haven't done crowdfunding myself, but I know quite a few authors who've had a lot of success. Joanna Penn did a really good post and a podcast episode or a couple podcast episodes on the crowdfunding she did. Her book was pretty much done, and she crowdfunded, I think, through Kickstarter, her book. A lot of authors are doing that. You do have to have an audience to help promote that crowdfunding, too. It can kind of take on a little bit of a life of its own if it starts to get momentum. But if you don't have any audience at all, then I would definitely pay close attention to the tips and follow what other authors are doing, because, you know, it only works if you are matching the incentives to the people who would be paying for those incentives. So creating things that are of value for them to support the book, but then also just making sure that you've got some promotional strategies to get the word out about your crowdfunding. Okay, so I'm going to quickly draw so we get that done. I let me just quickly share this again. Add to stick stage and pop back over. Okay, draw again. Angela can't win. By the way, Evelyn Mitchell, congratulations. I don't know if you're still here, but if you are, you can thank Clash for deferring the prizes to you. And you are our new winner. So, Evelyn, you can email Angela at TeamokLaunchers and let her know which prize you would like. Okay, I know. Did I do that one? Question four. I'm looking for question four. There we are. Alyssa, what capital does it take to self publish. You can do it all yourself for the cost of your labor alone, or you can, I don't know if that part was a question. So, and I guess that is part of the answer is you can do, you can self publish for very little cost, um, but the quality probably won't be there even if you put in all the effort that you, you know, all the heavy lifting. But you can spend a lot less than say, hiring a company like Book Launchers, where we do everything at the quality level of a traditional publisher. You know, we put everything through three different kinds of editing and an optional fact check. Our designers create like the most beautifully designed book covers and interiors, you know, and everything we do is at an extremely high standard so that, you know, our books are not recognizable as a self published book. But not everybody has the budget or the goals that really require them or, you know, facilitate or necessitate investing in that. You know, our services are really geared towards people who are going to be stepping on stages, they're going to be consulting, they have a business model behind their book. So on the other side of it, you know, you can do things like get a whole bunch of beta readers and manage them, which is a lot of work. A lot of people don't realize how much at work it is to find, manage and then incorporate feedback from a beta reader. I still believe no matter what, you have to pay for at least one professional edit. If, you know, I talk, I have a video on beta readers and where to use them and how to use them to get the most of them. And then I also have another video on storyorigin, which has a really great tool and it's cheap, it's like $11, I think a month in order to manage beta readers, which if I was to ever do beta readers again, I would absolutely use their tool for that. But I think you really have to pay for at least one edit and that's going to, you know, and pay for professional, like a true professional editor, which will probably be several thousand dollars depending on the length of your book and a cover design. So I mean, like I said, there's, there's every spectrum of this that you could spend, but I would expect to spend at least $3,000 to get a book that you can be, you know, proud of and then it can just go up from there. You know, most of our clients are going to invest somewhere between 18 to, you know, if they have a writer on, on the project or if they want to go a lot faster, you know, they'll invest upwards of $40,000 in their book project. But it's a different experience and they're doing less of the management they don't have to worry about okay, I need a content editor. Who do I hire? How do I know if they're any good? How do I know if this feedback is worth following? How do I know if it's in alignment with my bigger picture goals? How do I know if my my book is going to be set up to reach the audience I want it to be set up to reach? How do I know what makes a good copy editor? How do I know what makes a fact checker? What are they supposed to do? Like all of those things require hours and hours and hours and hours of research. Which I know because that's why I started the company, because I did it all myself the first time. I spent about $7,000 back in 2012 to to self publish my book. But I had to, it was a full time job for me for almost a year to do it at the quality that I did it and to manage the process at the level that I did. So I joke, but not joke that I started the company so I never had to be the one that did all of that again. I have a team that does all of that for me. Okay, question five, Wiener Beaner. Can we publish the same book both on Kindle and Kobo? Yes. And you know, we publish it on all the platforms. You want to have an ISBN that you own so that you can publish it and then use the same ISBN for each format. So if you put your ebook on Draft 2 Digital and on KDP, then you would use the same ISBN for that ebook. And then you have a different ISBN for the audiobook and a different ISBN for the soft cover and a different ISBN for the hardcover. But you're using the same ISBN for all of the platforms. I know it can get a little confusing. Christopher Mattish is in the house. I'm sorry that we missed you. I'm just wrapping up. Christopher. I think that's everything and I'm just checking to make sure I think that's everything. So Christopher, you'll have to catch the replay. You can comment in the comment area after as you go along and I will be sure to respond. But I do have to run. I do hope I see all of you back here on Saturday. Well, not here but on the Deep Dive link on Saturday for our Deep Dive and that is happening at 10:00am Pacific Standard Time Monday. We are sorry all week this week. I think it is I'm getting my dates confused. But there's also the summit, so you can go to book launchers.com forward/the summit for the book sales summit. I'm speaking on Tuesday. I'm sorry, dates are getting jumbled in my head. And then Monday is the start of self publish and Succeed Live class. Angela already dropped all the links on the side and I'll drop them in the description afterwards. And I can't wait to see you guys at one or all of those events coming up. All right, have a great week. Bye.