6 Years of Self-Publishing Books at Book Launchers

Book launchers is turning six. So not only are we celebrating working with 450 authors and six years of service, but we're also getting so close to celebrating 50,000 YouTube subscribers. Woohoo. And so while I'm in a celebration mood, I thought we could have some fun. I've got some special six year anniversary swag and six things you probably don't know about Book Launchers. So if you want to have some fun, this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the Book Broad, Founder of Book Launchers. Seven years ago, when I started dreaming up the company I wanted to create, which was essentially the company I would have hired for self publishing my books, I made several important decisions. Marketing would be layered into everything we do. We would be set up to serve people on a monthly payment basis and we will pursue long term relationships with clients, helping them through the part that's the hardest marketing your book. One of the driving reasons behind me starting Book Launchers was that at the time, and even largely to this day, nobody really integrates marketing into the process. It's either sold separately or not at all. And the reality is that you have to be thinking about your goals, your readers and your marketing strategy from very early on to give you in your book the best chance of success. And that has to continue throughout. Like, your cover needs to be designed for marketing and not just for visual appeal. And it's for this reason that you can't hire us for a la carte services because we can't and we won't peel out editorial from your marketing needs. Now the monthly was because of my own bias. I really didn't like the companies that charged 30, 50, $80,000 up front. As a business owner, I wanted to manage my cash flow, but I also wanted to make sure that if I didn't like them or something changed in my business, I wanted to have the flexibility to exit from that situation. So with our service, it's not a contract and you can cancel at any time and there's monthly payment options. Further, with our monthly there's no set end date, which means we're working on your book for as long as you're a member. Now some people take this to mean that we're going to drag it out, but that's not fun for us or for you as a client or what it really means for us is that we want to help you so much in reaching your reader and uncovering opportunities from your book that you stay with us for years and years or write many books with us, and we'll talk about that in a minute because we've got a good list of multi book authors. We also never raise our prices on an existing member. So even though we have price increases every year, we have people who have been with us since 2017 and 2018 who enjoy our consistent improvements in service and no extra charge. That means it's always a benefit with you to start with us sooner than later and stay with us once you join. Okay? That's what we do. Or at least part of what we do that I'm super proud of. Now here are six fun facts you maybe don't know Fact number one I hired my first two team members in June of 2017 and told them we had 10 clients we needed to start working with in July. These 10 clients were beta clients and they were all people who were on my email list or knew me from my previous business in Canada, which was revenue with real estate. I Of those first 10 clients, only two ended up finishing their book, and I don't really think that's on Book Launchers. I think the reality is they got really excited about the idea of getting a book done really cheap because we were losing money on every one of those beta clients just to test the process and figure out what was going to work and what wasn't. But the reality was, I think once they got in and realized how much energy and effort it was going to take to do a book, a lot of them just didn't follow through. But two did, and one of those authors was Jill Phillips, author of Lamblash Street. She's still a client of ours and we have been proudly marketing her book for years and now she's working on a new book. Fact number two Speaking of Jill and the fact that she's working on another book, we have a nice contingent of multi book authors. Some are finished their books and some are still working on them, but they include Jill Phillips, Scott Bradley, Carol Sanford, imani Roberts, Lynae St. John, Todd Nyhome, who's working on his third with us, Guy Blaise, Kathy Balustrari, Beth Kavanaugh, Richard Lewis, Todd Tresiter, Dwayne Jenkins, Nathaniel Arnall, and Justin Goodbread. Many of these have their second books in progress, but several, as I mentioned, have done two and have their third in progress, like Carol Sanford and Todd Nyholm. Guy Blaze finished two books with us, as did Dwayne Jenkins. And if I missed you on this list, I'm so sorry. Feel free to tell me in the comments below and I'll make it up to you. Fact 3 More than 50% of our authors found us on YouTube. Referrals have been source of authors for our business, followed by conferences where I've had a booth or spoke on their stage. So thank you for your comments, likes and shares on the channel. Which by the way, our next celebration is 50,000 subscribers. So if you haven't already subscribed, go ahead and do that now and turn the notifications on so that you find out when our 50,000 subscriber party is happening because it's going to be a big one and I cannot wait to celebrate with you. Fact number four we are a fully remote team and always have been. When I started the company in Los Angeles, we're now in Las Vegas. I tried to hire people who would come into the office in la, but the traffic was so bad nobody wanted to commute into the office. So after trying with my first couple of hires, I decided to focus on having the best people and set it up to be remote. The first four people were all in California, but eventually I started hiring all over the us and while we have a few contractors in other countries, the vast majority of our team, employees and contractors are all US based, but they're located in states all over the country. I can tell you it's a bit of a pain in the butt from an employer perspective because we have to set up state specific business stuff every time we have somebody in a new state, but it allows us to have a team of people who have flexibility and mobility. When the pandemic hit and people were going remote, we were already there, so that was nice. Also on that note, the being remote doesn't mean we're not connected. We have a full roster client review meeting every Monday, then we meet as a company Tuesday through Friday. Then I have a weekly leadership meeting. Plus the smaller teams meet weekly too, so we are in very close contact. I was speaking at the EPI Summit in Phoenix and I ran into our client Bruce Hostler. I didn't know he was going to be there and I said, oh, your book is back from compliance. That was pretty fast. And he was surprised I knew where his project was. And while I wouldn't have necessarily known this for every project, we just happen to have talked about his project. I do stay in touch and I don't necessarily touch every project, nor would you want me to, but my team takes great care of it and I watch all of the projects to see how they're moving along. Fact 5 I don't have favorites. I get asked all the time if I have favorite books and what they are. And I truly don't actually have favorite books now, there's some projects we've worked on that hold a special place in my heart, and that's almost always because the author was incredibly kind or brave in sharing their story. Like Laurie Britt here, I feel honored that someone would trust us with a personal story or like Patrice d' Amato's book A View from the Clinic. But there's other authors who also make an effort to be amazing clients. They provide good, constructive feedback, they're responsive, they let me know when the team can improve. But they're also extremely generous in letting us know when when and not just letting me know, letting everyone know when someone has done great work. We've had so many and I won't name them all here because the list is thankfully sizable. But each of those books and people hold a special place in my heart because they made my team love their work and that means the world to me. We also have authors and projects that go on to do really cool things, like Gillian Gertson's book that got end cap displays in Chapters, Indigo Bookstores. Robert Bell, who went on to do a TED Global Ideas talk. Martha Tettenborn who got invited to be part of a documentary, which was something she really wanted to have happen. Our authors winning hundreds of book awards. Emily Citrian winning in the nonfiction book category for Reader's views. I don't have favorites, but I do have a bursting heart with all the impact our authors are having in the world. Fact number six, the best is yet to come at Book launchers. Last year, 2022 was a hard year, not just for me personally, which I've shared about my visa struggles and other things last year, but for the business we had to restructure because we weren't profitable. A drawback with the monthly model means there's some months where a client is paying us less than we have in expenses, especially when books are in editing or layout. And it was compounded by the fact that we kept going way over and above to make our clients happy. And little by little, this crept into our margin and put us to the point where we were losing money month over month, and I was worried we weren't going to make it. Thankfully, the whole experience taught us not only that we have to honor our process for profitability, but but because our process is full of wisdom. I mean, more than 400 book projects full of wisdom. And we realized that the projects that stuck to our process were the ones that were far more successful than the ones that tried to break everything by doing things out of order or going faster than we have things set up to go. So it was a big hard year of lessons, but it has set us up for a fantastic future. And we've got some amazing things that we're working on right now that we'll be able to talk about in the next six months to a year. And I'm so excited about it. But here's a couple little things. One of the things we're working on is a client portal to improve our client experience. It's going to make what we do a lot more transparent. So those times where a client thinks we're not doing anything, they can log into the portal and just see that there's a whole bunch of things in progress and nothing is complete yet. I'm really excited about that. The other thing that's coming, which you probably know about if you watch this channel, is Self Promote and Succeed, my new book and the follow up to Self Publish and Succeed and then the third Thing. Well, it's still under wraps, but I can tell you that it is something that every nonfiction author can use and we will make it available to anyone when it's launching. And I'm so excited about it too. But it's still a little bit too early. If you want to stay in touch on that, make sure you've subscribed to the channel and turn those notifications on because we'll be talking about it here first. It's never fun or easy to go through tough times, but I truly believe that we had a hard year because we needed to get stronger roots for the growth that we're going to experience in the next six years and beyond. And if you want to join in the fun as a member of our team or you're someone looking for a passionate, experienced and professional self publishing team to bring your book to life while you keep rights, royalties and control. Well, connect with us over@book launchers.com Our job postings are all at the very bottom of the page and our services are on our website and you can apply for a call with us right there. We would love to learn more and help you out. Thank you for a fabulous six years, YouTube besties and YouTube viewers. The company would not have grown the way it has and I would not have had as much fun without you sharing the journey with us. So thank you for every like comment and share you've ever given us. I am already excited to share a seven year anniversary update with you because I feel like this next year is going to be our absolute biggest and best with what we have on the go. Now, now, after this, you might be wondering what our services are. This video right here explains a bit about what we do. And this is the latest and greatest on the channel. Please click on over, watch it and say hello afterwards. I reply to darn near every comment, so go ahead and test me on it.