Amazon Category Issues, Book Marketing Strategies and Ingram Spark Wholesale Update

Good morning.

Well, and good evening to those of you tuning in from South Africa and Ireland. I see you all saying hello in the chat, so welcome. It is exciting to have so many of you here and saying hello already. So hello, Elaine, Alana, Amanda, Marina, Suzanne, Aisha, Rhonda, and Suzanne again. Oh, oh, I don't know, maybe there's two Suzanne's. No, it's the same one. Carol, Michael. I thought I saw Tony in this list, too. Bill Miller's in the house. Hello. Hello and welcome. All right, so this is the September Deep Dive training session and I doubled it up because we are going to celebrate 50,000 subscribers as well. So thank you to so many of you. I know Bill's in the house. He's one of my YouTube besties. Bonnie here as well, probably several others as well. So thank you so much for your support over the years helping us get to 50,000. My son is anxiously awaiting the play button. When we hit 100,000, that's when I will become like super cool mom is when I get the YouTube play play button. So we're halfway there. And, and, and so we're going to have lots of prizes in celebration. And additionally, today is also a big day because my next book, Self Promote and Succeed, is coming out on October 3rd. And while I'm not doing a huge launch or trying to, you know, do anything big with this, of course I want everyone to get a copy because I wrote it to help authors. And today I've got a few incentives if you want to buy more than one copy, they're officially. My team is going to panic because this is officially the launch week incentives. But, but I wanted you guys to know about it and be able to get multiple copies now or, you know, you'll have the first week of launch as well to get them. So, yeah, that's happening. And so I've got tips for you, marketing tips, but I also have news. So I'll recap some of the big news over the last week and then I want to talk about Amazon categories because research from kindleprinter came out this week and it's really important that all of you know about this as well. So we have a ton to do and as always, we will also be giving away a lot of prizes and I'll be answering all your questions because we've got two full hours together in this deep dive, so. And Professor Burlingame says the book is lovely so far, so thank you. And. Oh, sorry, I've left Angela in the backstage, so I'm going To add her to the stage here. I don't know where that's going to put her. There she is. So, all right, so let's see. We'll have to mute your mic first. And then let's see. It says, I can kick you from the studio or ban you from the studio.

I'll be on my best behavior.

That's so funny. All right, I think I know. I'm just trying to figure out. So lowly. Oh, now, now. Angela's. It's the Angela show. Here we go. There we go. I got it figured out. Angela does not want to be in the spotlight for this, but Angela is here to support collect your questions. And of course, those of you who've been here before, you know she's in charge of all things prizes, so it never hurts to be her friend. And speaking of prizes, let's kick it off. So, I'm sorry, this is kind of awkward, but here you go. We have copies. We have some of these T shirts. It says, I write books, drink coffee, and know things. That's what I do. I. And it's got the hashtag no boring books mug on it. So we have five of these to give away today in celebration of 50,000 subscribers. So I'm going to kick it off right away and say, elaine, if you are in the United States, one of these T shirts is yours because you were the first one this morning to say hello. So, Elaine, all you have to do is email Angela teamoklaunchers.com with your mailing address and your T shirt size. We have women's and we have men's, so. And right now we still have a lot of sizes, so chances are we have your size. If you're not in the States, we will happily send you a book. So you can choose from self publish and succeed. You can choose from an arc copy of self promote and succeed, or we can send you our oh so soft journal. But thank you for being ready and early and saying hello first. Everyone else, Angela's collecting your names and we're going to put them in the random name picker and we'll be randomly picking. And then, of course, there's always prizes for participation. So asking questions, commenting all those things, paying attention for the skill testing questions, all those things will help win prizes. So I'm sorry, I just saw something here rocking my no boring books hat today. Yeah, we've got those. We are almost out of these. These are now going to be collector's items because there's only, I believe, two left. And we Might give one today, but I'm kind of. I think we're going to hang on to those ones for now. Okay, content. Let's talk about the news really quick for everyone. The first piece of news, which I had talked about a couple weeks ago, but I just. Because it's important. I want to make sure everyone knows if your book is out and you've used IngramSpark, you need to make sure your wholesale discount is updated. Excuse me. To 40%. That's all. It's nothing complicated, but a lot of people set it at the minimum, the previous minimum, which was 35%. And they are going to delist your book at the end of October if it is not moved to 40%. So just go log in. It's not very difficult. I might even be able to just quickly show you. So give me one second here and let me see if I can get logged in while talking, because I can. I should be able to multitask. We'll see how well I do this. So they. So the previous wholesale discount was 35%. If you were pursuing or you are in physical bookstore locations, chances are you've already got your wholesale discount at 50 or 55%. And again, a lot of people were, you know, saying not so nice things about ingramspark for this because they were kind of assuming this was ingramspark collecting more money. It is not ingramspark collecting more money. It is. The retailers were not cooperating or not listing or carrying their books anymore. Sorry, I have a lot of. Just make sure. Here we go. One moment while I get the password in here, because that is something I cannot do at the same time. Here we go. Okay, so if anybody hasn't done this, I'm just going to show you really fast so that it is easy for you to go and do this. And I'm just going to use. I'm pretty sure this has already been updated because I went through and made sure it was updated. But. Okay, I've got it on the screen, so let me just switch over so you can see it and stream yard. Okay. And I'm going to switch to this view. Oh, that brings Angela back. Okay, we'll just go to cinema layout. I don't know. We'll see. We'll see what happens here, friends. It's an adventure. Okay, so share screen. It always tells me it's easier with two monitors, that that means you should be in charge of this, Angela.

All right, we'll just get you that other monitor. You'll never, ever turn back.

I'm afraid of two monitors. I feel like, oh, it's the best. I feel like I can barely handle one. All right, here it is. Okay, I did it. I did it now. So it's really simple. I just pulled up my book, the new, brand new. I always do all changes on this one because it doesn't really sell. It's safe if I mess something up. So all you have to do is scroll down and you see your pricing down below. And the change is only necessary for the United States. So all you would do, if this didn't already say discount of 40%, you would just go in here and edit and change it to 40%. So nothing, nothing to. And I'll just show you. See, edit. I understand. And then you just go in here, really easy edit. And then click save. So no, that's all you need to do. But you do need to do that by the end of October or else your book could be delisted. So that was the first piece of news. The next piece of news was, of course, the Amazon disclosure requiring AI disclosure. And I did a full livestream on this on Tuesday of this past week. So Angela can put the link in the comments if you missed it so you can save it and watch it later. I'm not going to repeat or open up the tab in KDP to show you what you need to do because I covered it all quite thoroughly on Tuesday. But I did just want to note that that also is now a requirement with if you're uploading to Amazon or editing any books that you currently have on KDP which uploads to Amazon, you are now required to disclose if you have used AI. And the big distinction again was between generated and assisted. You don't have to disclose if your material was assisted with AI, which is, you know, there's a lot of different ways, but the big, the most common one for writers is if you've used ProWritingAid or Grammarly to rephrase a sentence or edit. Those are AI tools, but it is assistance. It's not generation. The big difference is where the material is originated from. So if you've written it yourself and then used AI to edit or refine it, that's AI assistance. If you've used AI to generate the first draft and then you edit it, that's AI originated. And so you have to disclose if you generated it. So originated it from AI, but you don't have to disclose if AI assisted. And this is for images, translations, and for text. So big change there. For book launchers, we have New terms and conditions that we will be rolling out, they're done. We finished them with the lawyer. We actually had already done this prior to Amazon doing it because we could see this coming. And so they're now done. The lawyer is just finalizing a few pieces where people are going to initial and we'll be rolling those out to everyone and all new clients next week. Just because we need to now know if you're bringing us a draft of your book, we need to know where and what you used to to generate that draft of the book. So all of that has to be disclosed to us. So the terms and conditions are just laying that out for us. And also disclosing the fact that we do use AI, and we've talked about this before, is that we're using AI as a company. We use it to generate ideas, brainstorm titles. We use it for creating first draft of copy, for book descriptions, media kits, bios, all of that sort of thing. So there is, you know, so from our side, we're disclosing that, but our writing team is not using it to write the books. We are using it for idea generation. So lots of changes and excitement in the world. And then, as if that was not enough, the piece that I wanted to touch on today before we dive into book marketing tips and strategies and talk about some of the cool content that is inside of Self Promote and Succeed is the research that rolled out from Kindlepreneur this week on Amazon categories. And some of it was not a surprise to me and to my team at all because we've seen some funky things going on categories this year. And some of it was validating and some of it was kind of like, okay, now what? So I want to touch on that with all of you today so that you're aware you may have seen some of the news. For those of you who follow things pretty closely, you may have seen the news already in terms of like, Dave Chessen dropped it and then some other people have followed pretty quickly with it. But yes, Michael Hurst, every day is an adventure is an adventure. There's always, always lots of interesting things. Okay, so sorry, I'm just watching some of the comments. I know Angela's going to collect the questions for me, so I won't answer those questions right now. What I am going to do is I have some slides pulled up and I just want to pull up a slide to, in order to just walk through the category information and let's see. Here we go. I tried to close a lot of things before I started this and yet I still have, I still have so much here. Okay, so slideshow. Hopefully you guys are seeing the slide. It took me out of the out of the streamyard view which is why they recommend you have two screens for this. So there's the book. This is some of the content we'll talk about today. Self Promote and Succeed. This is coming out October 3rd. I know quite a few of you here already have your arc copies because you're part of my fabulous book army who is reading the book right now and will be posting a review when it launches. So thank you for that everyone else. It is available for pre sale now so you can grab your print copy or your ebook copy. I am currently in the middle, like literally in the middle of recording the audiobook. I recorded seven chapters yesterday. I did two this morning. I'm hoping hoping I'm going to get five or six done today before I leave the office and I'll finish up the rest of them tomorrow. What I'm doing with the audiobook, just as a side note is I'm actually going to be giving it to people for free for a while and I'll be uploading it to YouTube as and I'll be it'll probably be in private links. I don't think I'm just gonna like upload it on Mass because I want people to subscribe to my newsletter, the Book Launchers, the launch letter that comes out every two weeks. So if you're not already on it, you probably are because you got notified of today's today's stream. But if you aren't already on it book launchers.com newsletter and then you'll get notified of the audiobook and then I'm also going to set it up on Book Funnel and give it away and run ads to it and it will just be an opt in as well. So it's going to be a platform building play which is a lot of what I'm talking about in this book. And what we're going to touch on today is, is there's a lot of hype around launch. There's a lot of pressure around launch and having done a big and fairly successful launch myself in the past, I can tell you it's a ton of fun. But it is not for everyone and you have to understand the trade offs and everything has trade offs when you go for it. And so part of what we'll touch on today is kind of looking at your bigger picture goals for your book, what some of your strategies are going to be and what the tactics are to make sense to get you to those bigger picture goals. Because there's a lot of, there's a lot of emphasis put on Lodge and that may or may not be the right fit for you as an author or for this particular book on your author journey. So we got lots of cool stuff to cover today. But touching on this category piece because this is also, you know, there's, there's multiple sections in Self Promote and Succeed where I talk about metadata because this is what makes your book discoverable. And for no matter what your overall goal is, having your metadata right is really, really important because it impacts everything. And so what Publisher Rocket is the software and we are affiliates. So if you don't have your Publisher Rocket software and you want to get it, I'm going to open it up in a minute, but I'm pretty sure Angela, our link for folks is book launchers.com forward/rocket. You can double check that please and then drop it in there. We do make a small referral fee from it and it also just helps me reinforce with Dave Justin that we are sending them a lot of clients for their Rocket tool. So I always like to have those numbers and statistics on hand for those especially because I really think he should support Self promote and succeed. I'm a big advocate for Rocket in, in this book and, and so far he's, he's only ever really sent tweets and about my book, but I about my books. But I really think that there's an opportunity there for him to put a little more emphasis behind promoting this book. So fingers crossed if we sell more Rocket softwares for him, perhaps, perhaps he'll be more inclined to be a partner with us on, on this book and beyond. But anyways, there are three. So, so Rocket did a big update and the big thing here is that in this research they discovered that 54% of categories in the KDP picker. So inside of the KDP dashboard where you're picking your categories, they're duplicates of each other. So that's interesting. This means they don't go to different places. You show up in multiple places in the store, but it doesn't, you don't want to have two categories that are duplicates, right? That's your wasting one of your category choices if you choose two categories that are a duplicate. So that's a little bit of a kicker. So I would say if you haven't already, get your copy of Rocket Publisher Rocket and make sure that you aren't in two categories. That are duplicates of each other because you don't know they're duplicates. You just. Because they just both go to the same place. There's no difference between those two categories. So there's no benefit in being in both of those categories. The one that we weren't surprised about because we've run into this before. We just never knew what was going on, if it was a glitch or what. But we've encountered this. I don't think we necessarily knew about the duplicate, but the Ghost category we'd run into where you click it and nothing happens or you can't find it. And 27% of categories won't allow you to be a bestseller for them. And you can't even find the category pages on Amazon. And they labeled these as Ghost categories. So categories marked as Ghost should be used with caution. Personally, I wouldn't even use them because the books, you'll only rank in the subcategory above them. So hovering over this will show you the sister Ghost categories and the parent categories in Rocket, which I'm going to open up Rocket for you in a second. But this was, this was really.

Like.

I said, validating in a lot of ways because sometimes we thought we were doing something wrong, sometimes we thought there was just weird glitches, but now we know it's official, it's a thing. So. And the cool part is though, that publisher Rocket discovered this and now they've given us a tool so that we can all, as authors, monitor this. Because you only get to choose three categories. You can use the keyword boxes in KDP to use category phrasing in those keyword boxes, which can influence which categories you go in. And also, by the way, just because you've selected a category does not mean that Amazon will show your book in that category, uses it as part of their overall decision algorithm. Decision. But keywords, you know, the content of your book, your book description and the categories you select all determine the category. So a lot of people will find that they end up in a wonky category. And that is not because you've selected the wonky category. It's just because of all the factors have played into Amazon putting you in. And of course, Amazon has different categories for all the things, right? Each. Each type. So ACX has a different store than your Kindle books, than your print books. And then of course, these categories are different in Canada versus in the States. But what you are picking it based on is your main market. So you choose a. I can't remember the Exact phrase they call it. But there's. You choose your home market, you, if you will, which is the market you're most focused on, which for most of us will probably be Amazon US and you choose your categories for those markets. But if you do, for example, if you are writing your main market is the U.S. but you also, you're in Canada and you want to target a lot of Canadian markets. You may, you may use keywords that are more specific to the Canadian market as well in order to influence some. Some of the category placements and. Or just be more discoverable in the Canadian Amazon as well. And then Tony said with publisher Rocket, I was able to confirm that my book was not in a duplicate or ghost category. Such a powerful tool. Yeah, absolutely. And Tony says we got to get Dave on board. Yes, please. Yeah, he. I'm really trying to work towards him being an enthusiastic supporter because, you know, he and I have a. Not a. Not a close relationship by any means, but we know each other. And he. For self publish and succeed, he just sent a tweet to support the book launch. But self promote and succeed. I talk about Rocket constantly. I. My team said he should have sponsored it. So I really think that he. It would be awesome if he did a little bit more to promote it. But in the meantime, I will do what I can to support and sponsor what he's doing because he's doing a major service for authors. So let's pop over into Rocket real quick so that I can show you what, what we have going on in Rocket, just so everybody has seen it. Okay, going again to share the screen and open up. Where's Rocket? Here it is. Okay, so what I did earlier today was I popped in to Rocket and I just opened up Books Reference and went to some of the categories that my book is in and was just checking them out. But I want to show you. So for anybody not familiar with Rocket, let me just back out here quickly. So this is not the homepage. So this is what you arrive at. So you can do your keyword searches, your competition analyzer, your category search, your AMS keyword search. We are so, so on the AMS keyword search. I haven't checked with my team since they've done some revisions in the last month or so, but we haven't found this to be highly effective for Amazon ads. But it's nice to get a big, massive starting list, which is what it gives you. Okay, so what we're focused on today is category search. So you can go in here, you can you can search in books, Kindle and Audible here. I'm just going to go for all at the moment, just to keep this quick and quick and easy. And so then I went down to reference, which is where one of the categories lives for my book. And so those were the big higher level categories, by the way. And then I went into reference and then go down to books. It says books reference. And then this is how the subcategories break out. Right? So the big category, of course, is books. My first, whenever I say More than Cash Flow, it was number one in print books, right? So the store was print books and my book was number one in print books. So the highest possible category. And then reference is the next big subcategory. And then underneath it are sub, sub and sub, sub subcategories. So if I scroll down to. Sorry, if it makes you spin, you can close your eyes and I'll tell you when I stop. There's like an authorship category down here that I'm just trying to get to do. Script writing, fiction, fiction, fiction. Okay, well, we'll go with writing skills, because I know it's in there, too. So in here, so you can see this book's reference. So that's one sub, and then sub, sub is writing research publishing guides. And a sub sub is writing and then writing skills. Okay, and so really cool. Now they've added this selectable. So that means Amazon allows you to place your book directly into this category as placement in kdp. Duplicate. Here we go. This category shows up more than once in kdp and each instance points to the same category page in the store. This category is also called. And then you click on this to view duplicate categories. So again, it's not bad to be in a category that has duplicates. What you do not want is to be in the same category. So you wouldn't want to be in the science fiction or the science fiction. Like, you can see the sub, sub, sub subcategories here. You don't want to have that and this. Okay, so you want to avoid that. And then a ghost category are difficult for shoppers to find. And books cannot rank or be a bestseller within them. We've seen this happening also with some of the books that have questionable content. And I'm not going to dive down that rabbit hole now. But we already knew they were ghosting. You know, some books just don't show up no matter what you do when you try to search for them, let alone their categories. So it was interesting about this. So books would rank only for the parent category. And the stats for the parent category should be what you're focused on. I would just avoid the ghost category then based on that, I wouldn't use it. And then it says view sister ghost categories. So this is what is new, which I thought was really cool. I'm just going to open up the insights for this. So everybody's probably going to grab Rocket. So again, book launchers.com Rocket or whatever link Angela dropped in there. Okay, so this is a neat summary. It shows you how many sales do you need to be number one per day to rank number one for this category? So 171. And if you want to be in the top 10 bestsellers for this category, it's. You have to sell 11 books. So not that many. And then publisher percentage. This is how many are from a big publisher. So only 29% of the books in this category are from a big publisher. The average indie price versus the average publisher price. I don't know why that's undefined. But average days old. So the average amount of days since publication for books with significant sales. So this tells you that there's some old. I don't know what the word is. Classic, maybe. Books that are dominating this category, most of them get 4.7 and their average size is 161. My book is rolling in at 303 pages. So it's substantially. It's more substantial than a lot of these books. Now this is what we like to look at because if you're going in this category, you want to pay attention to. Is this category a trending category? When your book has been out for a while and you want to check on how your book is doing and the categories it's in. If it's in three categories that are all shrinking, I would probably change it up and find a category that has a little bit lower competition but also has some momentum and growth behind it. So, you know, this one has relatively flat growth on a monthly rate, so forth. I won't read all of this for you, but I. This is a really, really cool addition. And then you can also click on keywords and get keywords for that category and understand that. And then you can take those keywords and research them to see how competitive they are in the other tab. Some really awesome stuff. But the whole point I wanted to share with you today was to understand ghost categories, duplicate categories, and just be mindful of your category performance because it does impact you on Amazon. Of course, for bookstores and retailers, it relies on bisect codes, which is Also something that I cover in detail in Self, Promote and Succeed. So if all of this sounds completely foreign and new to you, absolutely. Grab Self, Promote and Succeed because it's going to help you. And speaking of which, maybe we'll give a couple copies away of it right now. Um, Angela, I actually. I didn't open Slack. It's probably where you sent me the names. I don't know if you started collecting the names so we can start to do random draws.

Yeah, yeah, I have a whole list of names. I haven't sent them to you yet. I can send them now, though.

Okay, yeah, if you want to drop them to me and then we can. If you haven't already commented and you're going, wait, I'm not on the list. You still have time. Angela can add your name in after this, but I am going to grab the names right now and go ahead and post them. And while I'm doing that, Angela, if there's any questions that you know, you can answer while I'm doing that, just so there's not dead air while I'm. While I'm taking the names and putting them in the random name picker, that would be fantastic.

Yeah, sure thing. I just sent them over to you. They're space weird, but you got them. You got them. Okay, thank you. Yeah, let me. Let me pull up the list real quick. Hold on just a second. So Cynthia asked, if I work with Book Launchers, will you help me select my keywords? The answer is yes. Yeah, we definitely are going to be using Publisher Rocket and some of these other systems. Julie had mentioned that we are revising some of these pieces. But yes, we do want to make sure that your book is placed in the right category and have really strong keywords in the copy as well as with the title, the subtitle. So. Yes, absolutely. And even if you aren't working with Book Launchers, highly recommend looking up these keywords for your book because it's so key to making sure that your book is discoverable and just making sure that it's placeable to where you can get ranked. So no matter what, whether you're working with us or on your own or with a different company. Absolutely. Look up the keywords, look up the categories that are going to best fit your book and then work those into the copy for your book because it's going to make a huge difference on how discoverable your book is.

Working with another company. What?

Hey, I want to be kind to all people. I didn't want to oversell us here I'm just kidding.

We're here to support all authors. But for those of you watching wondering how you could work with us so we can do all your keyword category pricing research and set you up for marketing success, of course, it would be our honor to support you in that while I do the Random Name Picker. Maybe Angela, if you want to grab the link from our website that shows all of our services, that self publishing services tab and drop our link for if anybody wants to apply to work with us, you can put that in there as well. All right, I've got the names in and they actually didn't. Those weird characters didn't transfer over, so it worked great. So for those of you here, we have 10 prizes we're giving for celebration of the 50,000 subscriber. We already gave one T shirt away, so we have nine of those. So I'm going to give away five books today. And you can choose if you want a copy of Self Promote and Succeed or Self Publish and Succeed and Self Promote and Succeed. You'll have to be a little bit more patient waiting for it because I think Angela has gotten. She's already distributed all of her arc copies that she has. So we might be waiting for a new box before she can do those. But all right. And here we go. Hopefully you see my Random Name Picker. I might have to change the view here. Hold on. Random Name Picker, allow. Okay, so. Oh, there it is. Good. Awesome. So everybody who has commented so far today, you are now entered into this. As you can see, it's a free tool as we have all of the funny little ads appearing, but you'll see all the names spinning. And this is for a book. So, Aisha, congratulations. You can email angelaeamaoklaunchers.com and let her know if you would like a copy of Self Promote and Succeed, the new one coming out October 3rd, or self publish and Succeed, which is the no boring books way to write a book that is set up to sell. Really, they go hand in hand. If you haven't read Self Publish and Succeed, I would read that one first because a lot of the things I talk about in self publishing Promote and Succeed reference back to the layers that are marketing related that you need to have in your book. All right, so that's one. Thank you, Aisha. Thanks for being here. Let's get another book. Oh, I know Professor Burlingame already has both books, so if you would like to choose somebody else or if you want a copy to give to somebody, I will leave that up to you to decide. But you are one of my YouTube besties, so I know you've already got the books. I'm going to draw one more just because I know. But in the meantime, it is yours to gift. So you can gift. We can mail it to you and you can gift it to somebody, or you can gift it to somebody on the live stream today. And Efren. Efren is in the same category. And actually, you two, now that I think about it, if you guys don't have T shirts and you want T shirts, we can switch the prize over to be T shirts. So, Efren and Professor Burlingame, if you don't already have your fabulous T shirt. I write books, drink coffee, and no things. That's what I do. I already asked people when I first came out with this T shirt, and nobody seemed to know. But this is a play on Tyrion Lannister's words from Game of Thrones, where he always would. He wouldn't always say. But in a couple points, he's like, I drink wine, read books, and know things. So this is my version of that.

So.

And if they have. If you already have the T shirt, which I don't know if that's what Professor Burlingame is saying, I do want the T shirt or I do have it, I don't know. I'll let Angela message you and sort that out. Okay, so I'm just thinking now, I think next we will start talking about some of the points that I want to share from the book and for marketing, and then I'll. I'll. Then we'll have lots of time at the end for questions and to specifically talk about, you know, kind of any piece that you guys want to talk about. Okay, so let me just open my slides again. There it is. Okay, so, Efren, I put your picture up here because I thought you might be on the deep dive. So this is Efren signing copies of his book. The opposite is true. And his book is a nice, meaty book, as you can see there. It's a nice. It's got lots of. Lots of phenomenal content in it. Okay, so book marketing doesn't sell books. This is one of the things I talk about in Self promote and succeed and. And it. And then as soon as I write that, you know, I quickly counter it by saying, so why bother? You know, why do you do it? But book marketing can lead to book sales. But marketing and sales aren't the same thing, right? Marketing is about strategy. It's about Getting people to see you and have an awareness of your existence versus sales is about transactions or even, I would argue, about email addressing and contact information. And so a lot of people kind of immediately think marketing, which might be a podcast interview, should be selling books. And if it doesn't, it's not a success. And that just isn't true. And that's one of the big things that I really want people to take away from this book, and even from today, is that a lot of people write nonfiction books with the goal of thought leadership or business growth, platform growth, and yet they're measuring book sales to figure out if they're a success or not. And the. The reality is that there isn't. That isn't a great measurement, because the things that might sell your books may or may not be the things that are getting you that thought leadership, the. The speaking engagements, the clients, all of those things. So it's important to align your marketing for your goals first, and then sales. The cool thing about sales is that it gives you some data. It does give you data where other things aren't as tangible as sales. So, but that's also why people tend to hang their hat on sales and be like, oh, my gosh, I sold, you know, 100 copies. That was a massive success. Well, maybe it was a hundred. It was a massive success. But one of the stories that's in my book is a conversation I had with an author who didn't end up working with us, but he'd been introduced to me by a friend of his, by a mutual friend that we have, and he had sold his book, had been out four years, and he had sold 12,000 copies of his book, and yet he was. He felt very dejected. And the reason is because even though he'd sold 12,000 copies of his book, he had not gained one single speaking engagement from his book, which was his sole objective. When he launched the book. He had sold a lot of those by packaging them up with his existing speaking engagements, and that's why he'd sold so many. But he didn't. Not a single speaking engagement originated from somebody who got a copy of the book. So that, to me, was a positioning problem. His book was not positioned in the same way to get speaking engagements. Had he thought about it from the beginning and aligned it and then aligned his promotion, which is kind of why I wrote Self Publish and Succeed, which thinks about that alignment right from the beginning. But my point of sharing that story is Simply to say 12,000 books is a pretty successful book. After four years selling 12,000 copies of your book is solid, especially for a self published book that he's done almost no marketing for. That's a good number. And yet he felt like it was not a success. And then another story I share, which was a podcast I was on, John J. Bowen, and we were talking, I think he'd written 20 books and he said one of his books only sold a couple hundred copies, but it was a result of somebody reading that book. He sold his business for $6 million. And so he was like, all my books have been success. All my books have been successful. They just haven't all sold well. And I think that's a really big thing to keep in mind, is that sometimes book sales are not actually a measure of whether your book has achieved its goals for you or not. In order for a book to succeed, I believe there's five layers and I've, I've now baked them into this colorful cake for visual reference. And some of this is in self publish and succeed. And then I carry on in self promote and succeed. Because I think that a lot of authors really need to be very mindful of this. And this is one of the reasons we get a lot of people whose book is done or almost done, and then they just discover us. I'm working really hard for you folks to help you discover us before you get to this point, because I know it's heartbreaking. I have a lot of calls with people who are devastated. They've put a lot of time and money into the book, and if only they had found book launchers sooner or worked with us sooner, we could have helped them avoid some of the mistakes that they made. Because even if you hire a great editor, they are probably not thinking about your bigger picture goal and how to position you. And that's why I started the company six years ago, was because there was a lot of great editors or book designers or even book marketers. But bringing it all under one roof so we can all align towards your bigger picture goals is so, so important. And so layer one is a clear connection and knowledge of who your audience is. You have to have clarity on this and not just from who you're writing for, but who are you selling the book to at the end of this? And this is where a lot of people will tell me, my book is for everyone. I'm going to give them hope, I'm going to inspire them. And I'm like, I don't know how to market to everyone. Because if you think your book is for everyone, it's going to be important to no one. And you are much better off to go niche and not tell me. And when I say niche, I don't mean now focus on women between the ages of 40 and 60. I mean focus on that person who is struggling with their career at, in their, in their 40s, maybe if you want to have a demographic in there. They're struggling with their career in their 40s. They know they want to change. They don't know what that change is and they don't know how to do it. And your little special brand is going, your special sauce, your special story is going to help them with that particular problem. And so it's really that connection of who are they? Why are they going to care? Why do they need you? What are they laying awake, awake at night worrying about or thinking about? Sorry, when I said that, I just realized when I, I was laying awake in the middle of the night, well, I wasn't laying awake but I, when I woke up, I realized that I had, I was, I was recording, I was recording the pod, these audiobooks today. And I realized that there was one thing that we hadn't done as a company in preparation for it. So that's what I'm thinking about in the middle of the night right now. It's like, oh, what, my book launch is coming up. Have we done everything we're supposed to do? Did I forget to do something? But clear connection and knowledge of who your audience is that needs to be baked in throughout your book and then all of your marketing really needs to speak to that person and how you're going to help them. Layer two is clarity around your author brand so you know why your reader cares about your message. This goes back to who you are and your unique message, your unique story. And one of the stories that's in self promote and succeed. And don't worry, it's 303 pages. Even though I'm telling you some of these stories, they're still plenty, plenty to read and plenty to learn inside of the pages of the book. But one of the stories I tell is of this guy I met and, and I will never forget the conversation because he was telling me about how he had been in and out of foster care, he as a child and then he was in gangs to survive. He ended up in prison and then he launched a company that became I think a multimillion dollar company and then lost it. And now he was in sales and he was starting to build quite a good career in sales. And I was like awesome. And he had all these insights as to, you know, connecting with people. And just the way he had connected with me in this conversation, I knew he could help people because he didn't look at anybody and judge. Right. I think because of his background, he actually looked at the heart of the person and was able to connect right to the heart, not the surface level things. And that is a phenomenal talent for sales or connection networking, all of those things. So he would have had a really cool book. But he said something that I will never forget at the end of it and he was like, I don't have my perfect ending yet. I can't write my book. And I tried to convince him that he had a cool brand and this was going to be a phenomenal book for people. But he was convinced he needed a perfect ending. So please, you know, you can help a lot of people with your story. You don't. You have to have insights from what you've gone through, but you don't need a perfect ending. I mean, who has a perfect ending? We're humans. Nothing's perfect. We're messy. But knowing your brand, like what, what, what have you been through? What's your origin story? Why do you believe what you believe? And what are those kind of couple of core elements that you're going to hang your hat on. That is layer two that needs to be in your book and in everything you do for marketing. And layer three is a reason your audience needs your book. We call this the hook, the outcome of the outcome. We talk about this all the time at Book Launchers and Book Launchers tv. Layer four is building that relationship, growing the platform in your book and having invitations to connect. So you're going to see when you read Self Promote and Succeed. I'm sending you to a couple of pages to download resources to get on my email list. And the first page of the book when it comes out is probably. Well, it's not probably. It has an invitation to download resources. It says thank you for reading this book. And it has a connection point because again, my goal with this book is platform building and business growth for book launchers. Of course I would love to see books sell, but I'm going to give away enthusiastically books to the right people for years to come. Just like we have. We've given thousands of copies away of self publishing, Promote and Self Publish and Succeed. I'm going to do the same thing with Self Promote and succeed because the goal is not about a list. The goal is about helping authors and growing our recognition and our, our business At Book Launchers. Oops. And layer five, metadata research to position your title, cover, and book copy for marketing success. So this is your keywords, your category, all of the pieces that matter. Your title is really important to get right because you can't change it afterwards without having to change everything. But you can change your cover, you can change your copy. There's a lot of things you can play with post launch in order to get this layer right, but using tools like Rocket can really help you get it right from the start. All right, I still have more to cover, but I wanted to see what you guys are talking about over here. Anything I should know, Angela?

I mean, we do have some questions and some of them are about Rocket, so we could. Are you okay jumping into those now?

Yeah, for sure. We'll come back to the other stuff in a bit.

Okay. Yeah, there are, I think, like, two. So Efren had asked, does Book Launchers customize the categories for clients in other countries?

Not really. And so we. Because your home market will end up being the US and so there could be keywords if there's a market you want to focus on. So occasionally we have a client who's like, okay, my main home market is going to be the United States, but, you know, I also think I'm going to focus on India because I have a large platform there. My business operates out of India. And then we would maybe look at some of the keywords we would put into the seven keyword boxes. But the one thing I always tell people is we're North American specialists. We are not international specialists specialists. So we'll help check your international pricing. We'll do a few things like that. But, you know, when it comes to international markets, we're, you know, we've really tried to be experts in the North American market, and there's little things we can do, but it's not our specialty.

Okay, thanks. And then the other one was from Michael Hurst, and it said, will Rocket help us determine which category is the best fit for our books?

Yeah, absolutely. So it's turning into a Rocket promo. Was that the right URL, by the way?

Yes. Yeah. Book launchers.com Rocket.

Okay, cool. I thought it was, but I wasn't certain. So this is definitely turning into a Rocket promo session. But that's okay because it is an important tool for everything that we're talking about around self, promote and succeed. And so let me just quickly show you. I don't want to do a full tutorial, but yes, the answer is yes. So if you Go into. Say this. Oh, sorry, it just opened it up. Amazon. And now you probably can't see it. Hold on. Okay, now I have everything open, but pardon me. Okay, let me get back to Rocket. Is that what you guys are seeing? Is Rocket? Angela?

Yes. Yeah, we see Rocket.

Cool. So I left Rocket and was sent off into another. Into another screen. That's why you lost me for a minute. So you can do this? Kind of. I won't go through how to do category search, but what you can do is if you choose a category over here. Sorry, it's slow to load. It might not like doing this live. Let me just see. Come on.

Maybe a small category.

Yeah, here we go. Okay, so you can see in here. So there's a couple things you can do. You can use the competition analyzer to see what categories some of the other books are in and then come and research them. And then over here, actually, things have moved around. I'm not as familiar. There was a green red. There was a green red thing. Sorry. Everything moved. They literally just updated it this week. So let me just see what it says here. Advanced analytics about this category, as well as keywords is relevant. So I'm thinking that it is now underneath here. And so what you want to look for is the. As they're talking about here, this category has relatively flat growth as monthly rate high competition. So what you want to find is a category and it used to show up as green, but you want to find a category that has, you know, is. Is busy. So there's sales, but there's not a ton of competition. And it also can be beneficial to have a category where there isn't books that have been there forever. And so there's an art and a little bit of a science to researching it. But having this will help you. There's also great tutorials in here, so you can go into their tutorial section. Oh, and it just took me out because it takes you to their website, but there's tutorials there that will walk you through how to. How to do this research and how to use their tool to understand the categories and find the best ones for your book. And then just check. The thing is, you, Amazon doesn't tell you what categories you're in. So if you're going later, what you will need to do is, is you will need to type, go to a service called I'm just dropping it in here. This website. You can use this website to figure out which categories your book is appearing in and then go into Rocket and research those Categories. Because you won't get a list from Amazon as to what categories you're showing up. Okay. Any other questions?

I mean, yes, but those are the ones about Rocket, so we can save them for the end.

I've got a few others for later. Okay, awesome. Well, since we're out of my slides already, let's do another prize. And so the first, I'm going to do a skill testing question this time. What is the launch date? And Efren, you can't answer. What is the launch date for Self, Promote and Succeed? And Professor Burlingame, you won already too, so you can't. You can't answer this either. But let let me know the launch date of Self, Promote and Succeed, the first two folks to get it right. I just said you couldn't answer. She does. She answers anyways. All right, Richard. And I just thought. Where'd it go? My screen. Marie, Claude, you two are winners. So you can. You can win a copy of Self Publish and Succeed or Self Publish, Promote and Succeed or so let Angela know. Teamoklaunchers.com People were paying attention. I like it. I like it, you guys. Fantastic. All right, let's go back into my short little slide presentation.

And someone had requested to see that. That cake with the descriptions again, if possible.

Oh, okay. Okay. We might be able to do that. We might be able to. No promises. No promises, my friends. Let's see what I can do. There you go. So there is our little layer cake. And of course, this is content. The beautiful picture is not inside of Self, Promote and Succeed, but these layers and their details is straight from the pages of Self, Promote and Succeed. Okay, so one of the things that I wanted to make sure you all take away from the book and from today is this idea that you want to align your goals with your tactics and how you're measuring your success. And so the idea is, if your goal is book sales, here are some of the tactics you'll use and how you'll measure your success. If your goal is platformed growth, there are some tactics that you'll use and you'll measure your success in a different way. And same with business growth. So these are just suggestions and ideas, but it's just to reframe your thinking so that book sales isn't always your measure of success. Because again, you know, I can't tell you how many examples I have of Self, Publish and succeed. We gave it to somebody at a conference or we mailed it out to clients, and it ends up resulting in, you know, me getting invited to, sorry, just reaching across here. It ended up in bringing on somebody as a client or somebody gives a copy of the book to a friend. Because sometimes it's easier to give a book as a resource than to say, hey, go talk to this company. They give the book to somebody. And it's happened in quite a few cases. One of them, we mailed a copy of the book to a client and the client gave it to somebody on their team. That person on the team said, this person needs to come and speak, speak at our event. I went and spoke at the event. And then we actually, we had several people become clients as a result of me being at that event. And then they invited me to, to teach a course as part of an academy that they have. And so that comes from one free book that is a massive success from a book I did not sell. And so I hope you understand why I feel like Self Publish and Succeed has been a great success, even though it never topped any of the bestseller lists. And you know, of course my ego would have loved that. But it's not, it wasn't the purpose of the book. Same with Self Promote and Succeed. The purpose is not that it's going to knock over anybody else's book on the charts. The purpose is that we as a company have another tool to grow our audience, grow our industry recognition, and further expand as a company. Okay, so book sales, because that is okay, if your goal, if you wrote this book and your goal is to sell it, that is totally fine. Let's make sure you're doing the right tactics that lead to book sales because again, and I'll pick on podcasts. For now. Podcasts are great for a lot of reasons. Podcasts rarely sell a lot of books. I have sold books from being on podcasts. I know some of our clients have sold books from being on podcasts, but podcasts tend to be the indirect route to a sale. They aren't. It's not be on the podcast sell books, it's usually be on the podcast, get invited to speak, get invited to do something else or be on podcast. Podcast person loves you, says, hey, I am interested in your service and oh, hey, actually I want you to speak and can you send me 100 copies to, you know, as part of the speaking contract. It's not usually beyond podcast sell a lot of books. So book sales promotions are things that lead to book sales. Doing 99 cent ebook sales, getting those coveted BookBub features, doing 2 for 1 offers incentives for purchase, running ads, Amazon ads, banner ads, social media ads, Goodreads ads, bookbub ads, these are all things that directly lead to book sales. And your measure of success is simply number of books per dollar spent. So it's pretty straightforward. It's not necessarily an easy thing to do. It's not an easy game to play. Play authors that have a bigger backlist so they've got more books to sell. Fiction authors, they can play in this field a lot easier, I can tell you that. You know, we, we have days where self, self publish and succeed. We're running ads to sell that book direct and we have days like yesterday we had I think three copies sell. That's a pretty busy day as far as our ads selling books. But I'm not making any money on that. Especially when you factor in Angela's time because she's mailing the books out. Those, those are not profitable. It is, it is leading to people who will get a copy of our book. Now we've got their email address. So it's just really covering the costs of promotion. So you have to be really good at this if you're going to run Facebook ads, Google Ads, these kind of things. And most authors who are successful at this, they promote one entry point, they, and then they have a whole bunch that they hope you buy afterwards. But the 99 cent ebook sales can work for getting lifts, getting exposure. And by the way, the other thing with book sales is your metadata is as perfect as it possibly can be. All right, if your goal is platform, goal growth, which is a phenomenal thing to focus on as an author because the bigger your platform, the more books you'll sell, but also the more things you can offer these folks as far as courses or speaking, you know, one of the things we do for our clients at Book Launchers is we help them turn their book into an online course, which can be another way to help people in a deeper way. And you have a lot better margin on a course than you do on a, on a book that you're selling where you might make $4 per book sold on a course, you know, hopefully your net is a few hundred dollars at least. So platform growth, once you have a platform, you could do a lot more things. So I think if you don't already have a platform, using your book to grow a platform is really, really great. Platform growth comes from advertising. You can promote your book as a lead magnet. I already said this is one of the things I'm going to do with the audiobook, you know, and I have a lot of reasons for choosing that path. One was in celebration of 50,000 subscribers. I wanted to do something for my YouTube community and I think giving away the book. So I'm filming, I'm filming while I'm recording this. So this might be the most boring videos you guys have ever seen in your entire lives. So I'm thinking people on YouTube won't necessarily watch me reading the book. They're hopefully just going to listen to it. But I'm trying it. We'll see what happens. Regardless the, you know, I'm going to get them edited so you're not listening to me repeating a sentence because I missed a word or repeating a sentence because I, I fumbled a word. We'll get them edited like all my YouTube videos. But I was smiling and laughing this morning thinking as I rolled in, I rolled into the office here at 7am to start recording and I was laughing at thinking about people, people just watching me read the book. But anyways, that, that aside, I did want to do something really cool to celebrate 50,000 and I thought why not give everybody who's part of my YouTube community a copy of the, the audio version of this book for free. And then like I said, I'm going to promote it. I'm going to promote it as an opt in for on book funnel. So people that put their email address in, they'll become part of our, our platform and they'll get a copy of Self Promote and Succeeds audiobook and then of course I'll still sell it because I think something for something to be valuable free, it also has to be sold. So giving it away for free is not a strategy that I think works if you do it in its entirety. So you know, and there's a whole section on in Self Promote and Succeed where I talk about the strategy of free and how to not be a book bomber and just give everybody your book. How to give it away for free in a way that is still highly valued by the person who gets it. So platform growth, you know, using it to get an email address is a phenomenal tool. You know, we've garnered, you know, hundreds if not thousands of people onto our list. Oh boy, my voice is starting to waver and I still got a lot of chapters to read today, my friends. Okay, so promote your book as a lead magnet or sell it for the cost of shipping only. You see a lot of people do this and I won't get into my thoughts on saying it's free plus shipping because they charge enough that it covers the print cost of the book book. So it's not really free shipping, but, you know, there's lots of ways to do it. What you're measuring is the size of your audience. So I would recommend focusing on your email list growth. But, you know, you can measure social media, you can measure phone numbers, physical addresses, whatever it is. But your. If your platform growth is your. Is your goal, your measure is not book sales. Your measure is your platform and how it's growing. Business growth publicity is phenomenal for platform growth and business growth. You can use the book as a tool to land these PR opportunities. And that is where podcasts are great. Podcasts are great for platform growth. They're great for business growth. We've had, as I've said before, but I've been on a lot of podcasts where the podcast host ends up becoming a client of book launchers. So while I don't know if anybody bought a book as a result of hearing me on that show, I have managed to connect with a lot of podcast hosts who have helped us grow our business by becoming a client or referring people to us that become clients and. Or, you know, getting invitations to speak. Some of our clients have landed documentaries, documentary features as a result of being on a podcast and speaking. I think there's been a few speaking engagements come out of podcasts as well. So business growth and platform growth publicity is a great tactic to use for that. If business growth is your measurement, I would measure the leads and the sales that come as a result of these activities. So it's not that easy to do. This is something Angela and I have been working on a lot lately is measuring kind of how something originates in your business and understanding kind of how it got there. So a referral from a client, but then you can dig back in and go, okay, how did I get that client in the first place? And you could kind of dig back down and see the ripple effects of all of these efforts. It's pretty phenomenal. But you won't know it if you're not tracking it. The other thing that's not on this chart, but I absolutely want to share it, is your opportunities and your network. And I wish this is something I had tracked. But, you know, when your book comes out, you start having a lot of confidence conversations. And you get these conversations, and now all of a sudden somebody is like, oh, hey, you know, I know you're you. They think of you, they think of your book. And now they say, oh, so and so. You should really talk to so and so, because they're affiliated with this or they're interested in this. And all of a sudden, your network, which maybe was this big, is now this big. And, you know, I know Efren's here, and you saw that picture that I shared at the beginning of him signing his books. That was at this Book Thinkers event, which was before Lewis Howe's the Summit of Greatness. And it's really cool to see, you know, here he's an author now. His book is out, and he's, you know, he was out there networking, meeting people. And it's maybe not a direct result of the book, but I think, you know, if I could put him on here, if it's zoom, I could, you know, put the. Put the light on him and put him on the spot. But, you know, I think he would safely say that because his book was there, he was connecting. He was in the author area with the other authors, and it was a much easier connect because he's now an author like they are. And so he was connecting with people who have big networks and tremendous potential, partnerships and opportunities and even just friendships. So lots of really, really cool stuff in that regard. All right, I'm going to take. Efren said, happy to be on the spot. Later. Yeah, we'll definitely have you on for a detail dive. You know, one of our author Spotlight deep dives will definitely have you on then, because there's lots of things that you've been doing, and it's been fun to watch you on your author journey. So. Okay, Angela, what have we got? I'll take a. I'm going to take a big gulp of water while you take over for a sec.

Yeah, sure. Do you. Do you want me to go back over some of these other questions?

Yeah.

Okay, so I'm going to go back because we haven't had any questions specifically about the slide that you just talked about. So this was actually one, I think, the first question that came in from Efren regarding the updates that you provided, specifically about the wholesale discount. Can authors still profit with that 40% wholesale discount?

Depends on what you're pricing your book at. That's a. I can't answer that in a blanket answer. It depends on the paper weight, the color, the type of printing, and then your overall price. But, yes, you can still profit. It's not. I mean, I've been pricing on my books. My other books I price. I have the wholesale discount set at 55% because I have physical distort bookstore distribution, so I have to have it at 55%. And you can't choose. A lot of people are like, well, can I have 55 for the bookstores and then, you know, 40 for the other ones? And no, it's 55 or, you know, or bust, basically. And I'm still making a profit on those books, but. But it varies depending on a lot of factors. So it's not possible to really answer that. But you can, you can run the calculations before you change the wholesale discount.

Awesome. Okay, another one from previously, because you've mentioned your audiobooks a few times, Rhonda had asked, do you use a program to record your audiobooks? And if so, which program do you use?

Yeah, so I'm using GarageBand and Rodecaster, mic and a Rode switchboard, all that stuff. I don't recommend recording your audiobook solo. It's painful. I did my first one in by myself using GarageBand on my Mac and recording it in a home studio that I set up with blankets and soundproofed it. And I'm definitely better now than I did than I was when I did that book. But I did self publish and succeed in a studio with an engineer. And it was magical. I loved it. I showed up, I didn't have to think about was everything working and I just performed and there was somebody there to go, hey, you missed a word. Whereas I have to pay attention to what I'm saying and make sure I'm not missing a word so that I don't have a bazillion pickups. Although I'm going to use, I'm going to have my editor use 11 labs for my pickups anyways. Because 11 labs can handle, you know, my voice with one word. Which if you don't know what I'm talking about, I think we did an AI or there's a, there's a YouTube video on five ways. I'm using AI. So Angela, if you can grab that YouTube video, 5, 5 ways. I'm using AI. As an author that talks about 11 labs. And anyway, so, so yes, I'm using GarageBand, but having it in a studio if you're not if technology. So you guys heard me say I don't want to have two screens because I can barely handle one. So you can imagine how I feel in a room where I have the mic and I have a switchboard. I have, I have the Rodecaster, I have to use GarageBand. And I'm also filming this so that I can put it on YouTube. Yeah, I was, I was having a little bit of a freak out session on Thursday because nothing was working and I was wasting time and I was really like, why didn't we get a studio? But. But I do have a soundproof room that I'm using and, and some good equipment to. To make it happen. But again, I'm also not focused on selling this book on Audible. I'm going to make sure it can be edited to the quality that can go on Audible. You know, I already checked it with my editor, but my focus is going to be on giving this one away for free. So the standards are a little different for this one than maybe a book that you're hoping to sell thousands of copies on Audible.

Awesome. Okay, we have a couple others. Do you want to pause for a break or do you want to keep going with content and save these for later?

You know, I have drank a lot of water, so I would love a short break. And so can you do. Can you do a couple questions and. Or give away a few prizes while I'm gone? You can do a skill testing question. You can do, you know, whatever you want to do. You know, you could put, you know, shine. We've. We've been picking on Efren all morning. You could just tell Efren he has to pick somebody who's been participating the most. Do whatever you want. I will be back in three minutes. Thank you.

Yes. Yes. Yeah, you're welcome. Okay, so first I'm going to hit up another question. This one is from Mary Whitfield, and it says which is better? Title or subtitle search for your book? This is a really good question. And I might actually mention this one again just because Julie might have some additional items to add in here, but it is going. Both of them are important. However, your title is going to be more important. Like overarching. All of that, though, is being able to have really good, rich keywords in your title and in your subtitle. And so, you know, Julie really recommends having just a few words in your title. So three to four words in your title makes it easy to remember. And if you can get a keyword that is performing well, yet has low competition and be able to put that in your title, that is. That is amazing. Trying to get. So pull your research. We use rocket. We'll use all of these different keyword and SEO things to find what people are searching for. We also do that based off of the content of the book, of course. And we as a team will actually brainstorm around the content of the book and around those keywords. And then, you know, sometimes some of our authors will actually request, hey, can I have a specific word in my Title or in my subtitle. Sure. You know, we try to accommodate that as much as possible, but really the key here is to get really dense, rich keywords in your title and then add as many as you can in your subtitle because your title is the one that's going to be really key. And as Julie mentioned earlier, it can be changed, but there are a lot of steps. It is not an easy process at all to change your title. So really take your time, do that research to get it right because it really, really will make a difference. Really good question though. Okay, I've been seeing the chat over here come up. So let me see. And True has been a great search monthly. So yeah, Efrain, you actually had a question about search. So your question was someone on social media tried to search for my book on Google and said they could not find it. Is there a method to make your book searchable? So this is another one. We could ask for some additional insight from Julie on. But with some titles there is going to be some keywords that automatically lead to certain areas of the Internet. With your title, the opposite is true. That is there aren't as many key things that would lead someone directly to you. So what I would recommend is if they're actually searching on Google to search plus book or plus Efren Delgado. Because when I saw your question in the text, I actually did that same thing. I went to a guest Google page that it wouldn't know like all my cookies or anything and it would truly be guessing. And I typed it. And your friend was exactly right. You can't see it if you just type the opposite is true. However, if you add a plus Efren Delgado or plus book then you're one of the first ones to pop up. So that would definitely be something I would recommend to anyone who you are telling to just google your book. So you were really fast, Julie. I only answered two questions. I didn't give away any prizes because you were quite speedy. So one of the questions I answered and I didn't know if you wanted to add any additional context to was about title and subtitle and saying which is better. So I gave a brief description and about making both of them as keyword rich as possible. The title is more important, but I didn't know if there were any other additional things you might want to add to my response.

So the subtitle is where we would focus on keywords. The title we want to focus on making sure there's not other books with that title that it can show up in the search engines that it's memorable. Easy to say, and ideally that you can own the URL for the subtitle is where we really want to identify the reader and sell the book to that reader in that subtitle and do that with keywords that will make it more discoverable in the search engine. So longer tail keywords, single word keywords can be okay, but I like those buying intent keywords because, you know, those can really help sell the book and get, get attention.

Awesome. That was, that was a great addition because those aren't things that I had covered in my response. So thank you. Okay, we just have one other question, but we can save that one for later unless. Oh, and I think some questions are coming in, but we're ready to dive back in if you are.

Oh, yeah, I'll answer, I'll answer the one more question and then, and then we should give away a couple more prizes.

Okay. So Ken had asked what books that you have produced have had the most sales?

I mean, more than cash flow. My first book definitely had the most sales. As far as our clients books, I can't disclose that. You know, our clients books aren't our books, they're their books. So it's up to them to disclose their sales. I won't run around, you know, shouting their sales because it's kind of like shouting somebody else's income. And I'm not going to shout what somebody else makes from the rooftops, but from, I mean, more than cash flow. I've already disclosed this in the past, that in the first year alone, and it's been out for 10 years, I had generated, I think it was $86,000 in proceeds. And that was the trackable receipts. I always say don't tell the cra, which is Canadian Revenue, Revenue Associate or agency, you know, but I sold a lot of books at the back of the room for cash. So, you know, it's been 10 years. I think, I think I'm safe. But, but there was a lot of books that I sold at events at the back of the room and those, those were maybe not tracked the way they should be tracked. At the time. I didn't know, I didn't know what I was doing at the time. I was just like, oh, you want to buy my books? 20 bucks. Okay, cool. It was great. But yeah, so that that book did well. And still to this day, it often outsells, even self publish and succeed some months, not always, but there are months where it is still outselling self publish. And succeed, which we've promoted a lot. But again, our focus was not necessarily on selling the book per se. Our focus was on using the book as a tool for book launchers.

Okay, thanks. Tony had asked, is there a limit to the length of the subtitle that you should shoot for?

Not necessarily there. I think we do have some parameters internally. I don't know if it's 20 words or what the team uses, but generally speaking we're like it depends on how long the title is. Because if you've got a long title and a long subtitle, your cover is just going to be text and or you won't be able to read the subtitle. So we're really focused on like overall pieces of the puzzle. So if you've got a short title, you have a little bit more room with your, with your subtitle. But also if you have giant words in your subtitle, it'll make that subtitle look longer than if you have shorter, concise, to the point words. So it's it. We do consider having a subtitle too long and how it will look on the COVID for the COVID design. Okay, let's give away a couple prizes and then I will go back and there's a couple other points points I want to touch on from the book and then this is all for the rest of the time will be for you guys. So let me know what questions you have primarily about book marketing. But honestly we can talk about anything. Do you have ideas for prizes? Sorry.

Oh yes, sorry. Yeah, let me, I'll let you think of another skill testing question. I'm going to do a count. What is today the 16th? So I will go back up from Professor Burlingame's comment about Does Darla Mondragon know that I gifted her my prize? So Darla, if you're listening, if you have not seen the comments, Professor Burlingame kindly gave you her prize from several, several minutes ago. So please do email me@teamoklaunchers.com if you have not yet seen the comments on here because you have won a prize. So I'm going to go 16 back from Professor Burlingame's comet. So give me just a second while Julie comes up with a question and then we will go through those answers.

All right, I want somebody to name one of the layers from the marketing cake. So let's see who took notes, who took notes on our marketing cake and somebody layer name one of those layers and, and we'll see what who was taking notes from today's session. Oh, Cynthia, that's pretty close hook of the book. So I will go know your audience. That was layer one. Layer one was a clear and connected idea of who your audience is. So, Cynthia, congratulations. You have won. You can choose between. Actually, where are we at with shirts relative to books? What are we giving? What have we already given away most of. I know we were going to give away five of each.

Yeah. So, I mean, we still have plenty of both. We have given away three. Two to three books. Three books and potentially three shirts. So.

Okay, so, Cynthia, you can choose. Just let Angela know now so she knows what. What tally we're working from. You can choose whether you want a book or a shirt. And the book choices are self publish and succeed and self promote and succeed. I think you already have self publish and succeed. So self promote and succeed or a T shirt. What? And she would love a shirt. Cool. So I think we have your address, but if there's an update to it, let Angela know.

All right.

Love coffee and writing. I know, right? I love the shirt for so many reasons. And it's soft, too. It's like super soft and comfy. I just. I, I, I, I, I'm. I'm in love with our swag.

It's my favorite of all of our shirts. Like, we. It's like my third or fourth one now. It's my favorite. I love the, the smart comment on there. It's just great. I love it.

Yeah.

And.

And it still has our hashtag no boring book mug, which is. Which is quite famous. And the V neck for the women's. Yes, I agree. I think, I think it's. I think it's a. I think it's a great. Sure.

It's a winner. It's a whole.

Okay, so the, the last piece that I was going to touch on, and I was just actually looking. So I've got my.

We have one other prize.

Sorry, sorry. Yeah, yeah, thank you. Go ahead.

Yeah, sorry. It was actually the 16th comment back was Efren, but Efren has such a kind heart, so I know he wouldn't mind me going to the next person after that, which is Carol Harris. So technically, your comment 17, but, Carol, you are the next person prize winner. So please email me@teambooklaunchers.com with your mailing address because we don't want you putting that in the chat. But let me know if you would like the book or the T shirt because. Yeah, we've got one more T shirt or two more books. Books are self Publishing and succeed or self promote and succeed. So let me know in the email. And now I'm done.

Okay, great. So the last thing I wanted to touch on, I wanted to kind of share some of the the chapters here as well and see if there's something that sparks you guys as to what you want me to talk about today. But the last thing I wanted to talk about was reader magnets and incentives around your book. So that's what I will talk about. I don't have a slide for it, but I've got my. So whenever you read an audiobook. Sorry, there you are. Whenever you read an audiobook, you want to have it on an iPad so that when you're turning pages, the page turning is not sounding through on the microphone. So I have it on my iPad for reading today and I want to share some of the chapter titles that may spark something you guys want to talk about today. So your author brand. We talked a little bit about branding. Social media doesn't sell books much, but relationships do. Networking for introverts, your launch strategy menu. We've talked about that before, so we have videos on that with probably won't get into that. The lowdown on libraries. Does money solve all book selling problems? DIY pr. That's a. Okay, so pr, the power of podcast promotions. Speak and sell audiobooks and cutting out the middleman, selling direct to your reader. Those are some of the chapter titles. So if any of that sparks something you want to talk about about today, that's not even all the chapter titles. There's 20 chapters which ask me how much I'm regretting 20 chapters. As I'm reading the audiobook, I'm on chapter nine. But on the bright side, I am at page 150 and there's 303 pages. So I know even though I'm only at chapter nine, I'm halfway through. So that's the good news for my voice and hopefully it makes it through. Okay, so the last thing I wanted to touch on was reader magnets and reader incentives. And so one of the things that a lot of authors do, and I've already indicated one of our focuses, is on building a platform from your book. And so having a reader magnet is really powerful because as you do things that will promote your book, for example, podcast interviews, media, writing an article for a magazine or a newsletter, a lot of people's if you're not clear on your goal and you're kind of like, I'm going to sell books, but I also want to grow my platform and I want to grow my business and all of these things. When somebody says you have one link, like @ the end of a newsletter, at the end of an article, you'll have one link you can send people to, you may panic and not know what to do. If your goal is to grow your platform which as I said self promote and succeeds job is to grow our platform. Ultimately that platform growth hopefully leads to business growth, industry recognition, all of that kind of fun stuff. But number one is platform growth. So when I am doing an interview, I am going to send people to download a reader magnet. I have a few that I use. Next year we're launching a brand new reader magnet which is going to be really exciting. It's in development and it's going to take a little bit of effort. It's taking a lot of investment of time and energy to create this one. But it's going to be exciting next year. I know you guys are going to be pumped when you find out what we're building. But you have this reader magnet and so send them to that one URL. Don't say, okay, you can buy my books on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, chapters, Indigo, like Hobo, Kindle, all the places and I'm on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok at this URL at this Instagram and then my website is this and this. People are going to remember nothing. And then in a lot of cases you only are given one link that you can use. So keep it clean and send them to a single download. Now please, please your download. Even if you use a free chapter, so you can use a chapter from your book, please don't tell them it's a free chapter. Nobody wants a free chapter. It sounds like it's easy to do. If you give away a chapter as your reader magnet, don't say this is a free chapter. Go download my free chapter. Sell the chapter like a tool. So for example, if I look at my list here, let's see, Networking for introverts. Okay, that's one of my chapters. So I'm not going to say go get, here's my free chapter from Self promote and Succeed. I'm going to say, you know, at the end of this, I'm going to say, you know what? And I've got this really awesome download which is a guide for getting book sales and building your brand as an introvert. Really simple little workbook or little download. It'll explain how to network, how to grow your network, sell your books, build your brand as an introvert. Go get it at, you know, book launchers.com forward/introvert. That's not a real URL, so don't go there. That's how you need to build value. It has to be something so valuable people would pay money for. They're not going to pay money for a free chapter. They might buy your book, but they're not going to pay money for free chapter. So think about what it is that you offer that gives value. So one of my reader magnets is our game plan. We have a game plan that is how to sell a thousand books without spending a hundred dollars. And you can get that@book launchers.com gameplan one of our most our best performing reader magnets is@book launchers.com seven steps. The number seven steps and that is the seven steps to write a book that is set up to sell. It's a workbook. So those are examples. And that URL is, I mean you can get fancy and you can change the URL for, for every event you're on so you can track which ones are performing or you can give them different links to that URL. But at the end of the day you have to have something of value and your best. If your platform growth is what you're trying to achieve and or inside of your book, you're hoping people connect with you, give them something of high value to connect with you. Okay, that was the last piece that I wanted to share today and now I want to choose. Let's see here. Just Angela. Actually I'll let you choose. I want to know who has been the most active, the most talkative, the most supportive in the chat. So that will be our next prize. So sorry to give you a project. You can give me a question.

Before all of our active people have already won prizes like two times.

Over. Well, pick somebody who hasn't won a prize and they've been.

Active. Will.

Do. Will.

Do. Give me a second. Okay, so I will throw a question your way though. This is from. Okay, let's see. I'll do one because we have some that are not marketing related. So I'll save those for later. So Rajesh asked, do you guys have KPIs about cost per sale on social media platforms like.

Facebook? I mean honestly, when somebody really wants to go deep in that, we turn them over to an agency or a Facebook ad professional. We are not, you know, we're not an agency. I have multiple ad people that I actually, actually work with for book launchers. As far as a KPI as you know, for opt ins, I Can I can offer what I pay as, as a marker, but everybody's every. So the, the piece I'm struggling with in answering this question is your back end, your cost that what you're paying on the front end is only really relevant for what you're getting on the back end from that product person. And so if you're trying to sell a book and you're trying to sell that book through Facebook, you have to have a lot of margin or a bigger plan as to what you're doing. Which is why series works better, right? Because if you're able to sell somebody for, let's say you're actually able to convert, you know, your clicks are under a dollar, which is in very few nonfiction niches. You'll find that. And so you're actually able to convert like 25% of those, which you probably won't able to be get that number either. Now you're like, okay, $4 for every book sold on Facebook, you have to be making at least $4 per book sold, which can be really tricky, right, depending on what you're selling that book for. So I guess my answer to this is is KPIs aren't going to matter in general. It's going to matter what your bigger, like your whole funnel looks like and your whole back end. I can tell you that having put a ton of money into advertising, you know, we're getting opt ins for $3, you know, around $3. Like it bounces from $2.70 to $4 in our opt ins but it averages out about $3.12 these days. So an opt in is somebody who joins our email newsletter list and from there we're then, you know, offering books and courses and our services. And so, you know, that is a good opt in for us for the books. As I already mentioned, I'm not selling them on Facebook. Me and Facebook really aren't friends. I'm still trying. Like I have somebody running Facebook ads. I still, I still don't think they're working. For whatever reason, me and Blue just, it's just never, it's just never worked for me. But some authors have had a lot of success on Facebook. But I can tell you that our books that we're selling the self Promote, Self Publish and Succeed. Sorry, it's tricky having two books so closely titled Self Publish and Succeed. We do send people to self publish and succeed.com to buy the book. We charge $18. There's incentives. You get a copy of the new brand you which even though that book didn't sell. I do actually believe it was my best book that I've written, just not. Not well.

Positioned.

And. And that's why it didn't sell. But. But we give some incentives away and that, like, we're lucky if that is. Our ad costs are $18 by the time somebody buys the book because you've got clicks. Every click costs you money. And then it. You know what your percentage of conversion is. So we're. We're not usually breaking even on the sale of that after cost of print and shipping. And then again, that doesn't factor in Angela's.

Costs. All right, awesome. Okay, so as far as prize winners go, we've had a lot of activity in the chat today, which is super awesome. Makes my doing of this a little difficult, but Michael Hurst, you are our winner. So I actually need to jot down your name to make sure I don't forget it. But, yes, you are the winner. So please email me at team to claim your.

Prize. And I think we're down to one T shirt and two books. Is that.

Right?

Yes. Okay. Yeah, so you can choose. Let us know in the chat, though, what you've chosen. So then we know what our final prizes of the day are. And I did see some demand for a mug, so we will give one mug away today. That's usually what we reserve for our YouTube lives on Tuesdays and Fridays is our mugs and our oh so soft journals. But I did see some demand for a mug, and I know there's been demand for a hat, but I'm still not sure if we should give a hat away today. I know we're down to two hats, and they're pretty special. They're very popular. I know. I wear mine every Sunday when I go hiking. I am always wearing my.

Hat. Okay, now I will say. Sorry, a little caveat. If you're outside the US we will need to limit you to a book just because the duties on the packages are pretty outrageous right now. And sometimes for some of the countries, it does even charge you the. The recipient, which is not the best.

Surprise. No, exactly. And Michael wants the book, so that means we still have a T shirt and we have a book. So Fantastic. And we'll give a mug away too. So what I would like, though, is if anybody else. If you want to add anybody else to that list for the random name picker, because I will go back into the random name picker for the last two.

Prizes. Okay. Yeah, give me a few minutes. I need to alpha those, but yes, I will do that. We do have some other questions, though. We're. Some are going to audiobooks, some are going, yeah, we got a couple for audiobooks. Do you want to tackle those now? I don't think. Yeah. Okay. So Christopher Mattish asked, does book launchers help with setting up a print on demand stores related to the.

Book? So I don't know what you mean by that. I mean, we do set up your IngramSpark, your KDP account. If you mean like a direct store, the answer like, so when you say print on demand so somebody can order direct from you, like they order from me for self, self publish and succeed and what we'll end up doing for self promote and succeed, we are actually setting up stores for clients. But there has to be, be. You have to have a way of fulfilling it. We don't have a great service. We used to use Lulu. We don't have a great service where they fulfill what we used to do with Lulu. And sorry, for those of you, I'm going into the weeds a little bit for a second. Lulu was our print on demand provider. When we sold books direct to clients or to, you know, readers and Lou, the order was connected through Shopify and it would order, order the book on Shopify and then it would send the order to Lulu. Lulu would print and ship the book. Lulu kept raising their print prices and their shipping prices to the point where it was costing us more than $18 per book to actually do this, especially when you added in the merchant fees for Shopify. So we had to get rid of Lulu for this. We don't have another company yet. I think there's a couple companies that should in the next year start doing this. So in between, we are setting up some of our clients with this store on our no Boring Books site. So they have their own store and then that same setup could be used on your own website. And. But you have to have a way of fulfilling the back end right now. So my fulfillment is Angela and her house. She graciously, she graciously does all our shipping, all our swag, shipping, all those things. So you know, when you, when you look at the stamp and you're like, how is this coming from Florida? When, when, when Book Launchers is in Vegas? It is because Angela is in Florida and our all swag and shipping comes out of Florida. However, as we continue to expand our direct sales, which is where I'll be putting more and more emphasis in the coming years, obviously this will not, we will not want this to be Angela. Angela will not want this to be her. So we will be. We're constantly looking for a solution for our clients as well as, as well as for us on that. So I hope I answered your question. I'm not totally sure what the question was, but I gave you a lot of.

Information. Awesome. Okay, I'm just going through and adding a couple other names to there, so I will send that to you again momentarily. I have it all nice and alphabetized though, so that's lovely. Okay, so Alvin had asked. So this is going back to our brief conversation about title subtitles. Is it a firm and solid no if there are other books with the same.

Title? No, it's not a firm no. And I know, Angela, you're already doing a bunch of things, but after you're done those things, there's a YouTube video which is our book title checklist video. If you can grab that link and drop it in the chat, that would be. That answers a lot of the title questions. However, the short answer is no. Unless it's already a title that is in your category that's performing well because you really don't want it to show up. And if somebody searches for your book, you don't want them to lose interest in your book and go to the other one or get confused as to which book they went there to buy. If it's completely irrelevant or it's a book that has no reviews and the sales rank is in the millions, it's not selling. I wouldn't worry about it. You can dominate it. So it's really a question of making sure that you're not losing sales when somebody searches for your book title because you can have the same title as another book. You can't copyright a title. You can trademark sometimes, but you know, of course the trademark process takes forever and you may or may not actually get it approved in the end. So yes, that's, that's the, the answer to that. But the video will also give you more information on.

That.

Woohoo. Look at you. You are a rock.

Star. It's because the dual monitors, Julie, that's, that's why. Okay. I am sending you the, the lists. It's long, so prepare yourself.

Cool. Okay, I will, I will open.

It. Okay. And I did just post Alvin for your, your question. I did just post that YouTube link there. So that one is. Yes. Tony Jacobson, dual monitors for the win. Absolutely.

Right. You know what, when you come here, when we, when you come here in May or whenever we do that, the next in person gathering, you can set me up how about that. Oh.

Dear. I might not be your IT person, but I can recommend it all day.

Long. Maybe Shane will do it for me. That's my problem right now is that I have a fear of setting it up at the.

Moment. So I. I had help when I got mine, I'll tell you.

That. Yeah, so that's. That's why I haven't gone there. But the more I use Streamyard, the more I wish that I had had this happening. All right, we got more prizes, my friends. And then keep your questions coming. I am available here until noon. And then I'm going to go back into my audiobook cave and use what remains of my voice for the rest of the day to record this beautiful book for all of you. Okay, so let me share my screen so you can see the random name picker in action. And let's see here. Presenting. I am on a Mac and I can use an iPad. But, Michael, that also sounds scary to me. I have an iPad right beside me, and my extent of using it is to hold it up so you can see it. Okay, here we go. To stream here. Oh, no, wait. Wrong. Wrong thing. Stop. Stop sharing. That just gives you guys a really creepy view of all the screens on my computer that are open. Okay, there we go. Now we got the name picker. So here we.

Go. Can't see the name picker.

Though. Oh, you can't? Oh, thank you. Thank you for telling me. One moment. Let me try that one more time. Somebody's name. When we go back onto that screen, somebody has just won because I pressed the button, and so somebody's name is there as the winner. So here's your anticipation of who is that name? Random name picker. Where did you go? There you are. Okay, so who won? Carol Harris. Has she won.

Already? Yes. All of our prize winners have doubled up today. It's so funny, all of you.

Folks, because there's a whole bunch of people, I think, watching this that have not. Not commented. There's a lot of lurkers today. There's a lot. A lot of lurkers. So you guys are missing out on the prizes. Well, Carol, you can be Santa Claus today. You can choose someone here that has not won. If you can find.

Someone at this point. I don't.

Know. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see if she can find someone. If not, you know, it could be your lucky day. But I think. I think there's got to be somebody here who has not won. I'm confident. I'm confident. Carol says I already Won. Suzanne has not won. See, Suzanne's like sitting over there going, I haven't won. And Josanny Joshani. I'm not sure how to pronounce your name. And Allison. See, there you go. See, there's all these people that are going, I want to win. So there's people to choose from. All right, let's do one more draw on the random name picker. And this one, if they are in the United States, this will be a mug. Okay, this next one, as long as you're in the United States, it will be a mug. If it's not, if you're not in the United States, we'll draw another one for the mug and you can choose one of the book choices. Okay, we just need a drum roll. Oh, my gosh. And I think, I think this is a she. I'm sorry if I'm not right, but you were just asking for a prize. So there you go. You have just won a mug. If you are in the United States. Just see.

Here. Oh, Carol, I don't know if Julie has a way of finding the third person who joined the.

Call. Yeah, I have no idea. That would. That would require be deep diving deep into the depths of Streamyard, which I'm unable to do. I can just maybe if she.

Had the second monitor, but not.

Today. I'll just. I'll just draw somebody else. And then while I'm doing that, Angela, if you want to pick one more question. And by the way, actually, hold on, I have one more thing I want to share with you. All the incentives for getting multiple copies of Self, Promote and Succeed. Christy. Christy has not won yet.

Right? Sure.

Hasn'T. Beautiful, Christy. Congratulations. You can choose. That was not for the mug. Joshani, if I'm saying that right, that was for the mug. But this is a T shirt or a. A book. Here we go. A book. Okay, so really quick, I just want to share a couple of the incentives that are available if you order multiple copies of Self, Promote and Succeed. So if you order and this, this is going to be heavily promoted the launch week. So you. Do you have time to do this? However, you know, getting these will be easier in right now because we won't be promoting them as heavily. So it'll be easier for Angela to get you your prizes in the coming weeks before we launch. So here we go. Back it up. So if you buy three copies of the book and you can buy them from anywhere, it just does has to be print copies, you will receive an email template bundle. So my team has A bunch of emails that templates that we give our clients for book army, for outreach, for those kind of marketing activities. So you will get a copy of this email template bundle, you will get a sample media kit, a sample one sheet which we use for speaking and for podcasts. And you will also get our self publishing roadmap and our launch strategy guide. So a lot of really, really cool, high value material for grabbing three copies and then if you buy 10 copies, you're going to get that plus access to our foundation library. And some of our clients are here. I don't know how many of them have explored all of the information in our foundation library, but if you can imagine an entire database, not just of the YouTube videos that I've created, but videos from our writing coaches talking about how to outline your book, how to write a great chapter, how to write something interesting, videos from our production team on how to check your, how to check your sales inside of your KDP and your IngramSpark dashboard, how to make changes to certain things, how to handle track changes in a Word document, how to draft a sample PR pitch for pitching media, how to prepare yourself for media media for media interviews, like media training and all of those kind of things. This, I mean, Angela, you actually know the foundation library better than I do. I don't know if you have a sense of how much content and how it's all broken out that you could share with everyone, but our foundation library is.

Massive. So I can pull it up because there's a view, I can get it in just a second where.

It. Oh, that would be.

Awesome. How many, how many videos are in each course? Because it's broken down into, into courses within here. So I can find out how many. It does need a 2fa. So it'll give me a second to log in, but I can, I can announce what they are in a.

Second. Yeah, Suzanne says hours and hours and hours. Yeah, we've never, this has only ever been for our clients. And so for this limited period of time, we're going to give folks that buy 10 copies of Self Promote and Succeed, we're going to give them three months access to the foundation library. You know, it is, I think better than any course that you could take as far as like the robust nature of the content because we've created it to support our clients as they go through our process. So it is, it is massive amount of information in there. Okay, so Angela will give you guys a preview of that. So all you have to do is order 10 copies and then just Email Angela for now at Team at Book Launchers with your receipt, and we'll get you that access for those three copies or those 10 copies, and we'll be promoting that heavily in launch week. But, you know, if you want access now, you can, you can get your access. While Angela's bringing that up, I will scroll through and see if there's any other comments that. Or questions that we have not covered.

Yet. Yeah, I've got a couple I could, I can add in. Hold.

On. Oh, sure. I had you doing so many things I didn't want.

To. Well, it's funny because in Foundation Library, the videos are set to autoplay, and so I heard you on one side playing in a video, and I heard you over here. Okay, so we have a couple questions about audiobooks. So Efren had asked. He admits that this is a little in the weeds, but we love Efren. Audiobook recording on GarageBand is something he's planning to do. Is there a link or a list or a video that you, Julie, have used to ensure your settings are ACX.

Friendly? I'm probably messing this all up. I am not the person to ask, so, so no, there are a lot of settings. I think the big thing I sent, basically what I did, Efren, the extent of my setting testing was I opened it up and I set it to natural voice, and then I played with it until it sounded normal in my ear, because there's lots of reverb, lots of, like, little things, and it sounds really funky when, when you, when it's wrong, you know it's wrong. And then I sent files off to our audiobook editor and said, are these going to work? And he confirmed they would work. And so I took a screenshot of my settings, and I make sure they match that every time. And so that's what I did. I, I, there's, there's certain things, like making sure you leave space at the start and the finish of every chapter. You record every chapter individually. There's those kind of things. And we'll send you a checklist when you start your audiobook. So you've got all of that information. But, yeah, I mean, I, I constantly am worried I have made a mistake, which is why I like recording with an engineer, because, you know, this is. It's taking me roughly an hour per chapter. Not quite. It's close. But when you factor in taking a break, saving the track, exporting the track, and also exporting my video from my phone for, for that piece as well, which is not a piece that most of you would be doing. You know, it's taking about an hour per chapter, which. And I'm fast. I know I am much more efficient at this than most people will be. So. Yeah, just to give you a sense on that, my chapters are fairly long, though I don't know the actual word count, but I would say most of my chapters are probably 6, 6 or 7,000.

Words. On that note, what you had mentioned it earlier, what mics are you using.

Or. Mike, It's a rodecaster mic. I don't know the number, the technical number on what it is, but it's a rode rode has really high quality products and it's got like a cover on it that's multi. Like it just kind of makes it unidirectional. So it's just coming from my voice. But when you do stuff like that, you also have to make sure you're positioned in the right spot on the mic for this mic type. Which is why, you know, our editors do voice tests and voice coaching with you. Typically, you know, we're, we, we transitioned editors, so I kind of was a little bit more on my own with this one than I think most of our clients would normally be. But thankfully I've done this several times.

Before. Yeah. And Michael actually posted a link in the chat that says that it's a YouTube video to show you how to acknowledge how to I guess set the ACX settings are what they should.

Be. Beautiful. Awesome. Thanks.

Michael. Thank you. Okay, and then this is actually. Oh, second to last question. Also on audiobooks. This is the last audiobook question I have so far. Rob Leinberger asked. My book is about a visual model to understand it project management. It has dozens of images that form the heart of the conceptual model. Should I still be considered considering an.

Audiobook? Maybe. And, and I don't know the perfect answer to this. In the past, with technical books that have a lot of visual representations, it depends on how valuable the text is without the visual representations. And there are. There is the option with ACX and with. With creating your own book to reference the tables and have people download it. But it depends on how well the text stands alone without the tables. And then also it's awkward when you're reading the book to have a bunch of tables because you're like. And referencing table 19.2, you're seeing the line goes up to, you know, Q2 and at Q2 it like, it's just you kind of describe the chart and reference it. But if you have a lot of it, it'll be awkward because, I mean, personally, that's my own personal feeling, but I think it's awkward. And then as a listener, how frustrating is it for the listener if they aren't seeing? Because most people listen to audiobooks on the go, right? That's part of the appeal of audiobooks. They're cleaning the house, they're driving, they're running, they're working out at the gym. So. So that's why I don't have a perfect answer for you. Because only you know how much not seeing the charts and graphs will impact the experience for the.

Listener. Awesome. Thank you. And Cynthia had a question. Cynthia, can you expound a little bit? Because I don't remember what context we were talking about. Your question only says, what about COVID design and marketing? So can you please expound on that for me? That's the last question that I have noted for right now. I did add up the lessons that we have in foundation library and they were over 130 lessons in there, so quite a.

Lot. Oh, awesome. Yes. See, I knew we've been busy. It's not just there's some of the YouTube videos for sure. So people who have watched the YouTube videos, those are there. All right, well, let's give away two. I think we have two prizes left to give away today. Am I right? Am I wrong? Did we, Are we done? I think we had two.

Prizes. Well, yes, we should. Well, with crazy Christy and Alvin, we're pretty neck and neck. Since we don't, or at least I don't know what prize they chose. I'm fine giving away more.

Swag. So get it out of my house. She says, okay, we will give away two more. So one more shirt, one more book. How about that? So works for me. The first person to win can choose and then the person next, unless they're outside of the United States, they will go. So here we go. We're spinning for our last two prizes to wrap it up today and then we'll figure out what's in. Speaking of Cynthia, speaking of Cynthia's question. Cynthia, congratulations. So you. I know you've already got self publish and succeed. I don't think you have a shirt yet. You might want a.

Shirt. She got a shirt earlier.

From. Oh, she won a shirt. Okay. Oh, from Efren. All right, we're gonna draw again. Let's spin.

Again. You know, there are some of these that will, like remove the name once it's been picked. Oh, Tom.

Jordan. Congratulations, Tom. I don't know if Tom's still here. I haven't seen Tom commenting in a bit, but. Tom, you've won. Congratulations. You've won a shirt. And my final winner of the day, Alvin.

Congratulations.

Yay. And you win. Well, you already get a.

Copy. He also won as.

Well. Okay, who's left? Who's left? Who's left? Alvin has won. What? What did Alvin win? Did he take a T shirt or did he take a book? I think he's already got the.

Book. It was one of those from the last draw after Christie. So teacher or book? So one of those.

Two. All right, Tony hasn't won yet. Let's send Tony a T.

Shirt. Tony Jacobson. All right. Okay. And then. Oh, yeah, go ahead. Well, Cynthia provided the additional context for her question. She said it was just a general question on how cover design affects marketing. Really good question.

Actually. Oh, my gosh. Cover design affects marketing so much. How do I even wrap my head around this? So what? I just put the link in for people looking for the random name picker. So cover design, it works hand in hand with your title, which is what I was trying to give you guys, some really valuable information around your cover. Your cover needs to be for your reader, so it has to appeal to your reader. So you want to look at the category you most want to compete in. And you can look at this by Bisec and go to Barnes and Noble, or you can look at. Or go to the shelves of Barnes and Noble, or you can go online. And what we usually do is look at the Amazon category you most want to compete with. Not the sub. Sub. Subcategory, but like a sub sub, if that makes sense. If you were here earlier, you know what I'm talking about. And we'll look at that category and look for the elements that. That are trusted. So, like, everybody has certain elements, like everybody has a certain kind of imagery, or everybody has a certain kind of coloring, or the title appears in a certain way. We look at those trusted elements, but then we also look at other things that will. That will make you stand out. And we try to tie it back to your title and have it appeal to your reader. And it's art and science to do this really, really well. If you do it properly, poorly, you will impact your sales because. And you can see this on Amazon ads. This is where you can get data. And running ads can be really powerful because what you'll see is you will be getting a lot of impressions, but not a lot of clicks. And that is a sign that either there's a mismatch between what's getting people to your page and what your book actually is. And. Or if you look at your list and you're like, oh my gosh, all these impressions are for the keywords that and absolutely should have sold this book. But nobody's clicking. There's probably an issue with your cover. And changing your cover could make all the difference in the world. And so it is. It is vital to your marketing success to have a great title that sells your book, that makes it good for your reader. And that that cover goes hand in hand with it. And I've. And I don't think it's one or the other. Like, if you've got a bad title but a great cover, you're both probably will still struggle. If you've got a bad cover but a great title, I think it's going to struggle. You need a great title and a great cover and they have to work.

Together. And Cynthia had asked, speaking of the color of the time being magenta, I think that was a deep dive from a while back with our cover designer, our cover design, because I think that was specifically geared toward just 2023 and that was like the projected color.

Of the year, I believe. Yeah, they did a, they did a cover design prediction deep dive earlier in the year. I think that's when I was off. I think some. I think. Yeah, you guys, you guys.

Ran. It was a while.

Back. Yeah, regardless, I wasn't on that one, but yeah, we did a trends, a cover design trends. We talked. They talked about fonts, they talked about, you know, know, imagery. And that was also where you get to see that my team is actually the cool geniuses behind all the stuff that we do. And I am just the talking voice that's voices fading. But truly, because there's, there's so much especially in the intricate details of fonts and design that I don't know anything about. But they live it every single day. I mean, Cassie, our designer, if you want to make per year, just give her a new font package and she's like the happiest person in the whole wide world. All right, friends, so October 3rd, self, promote and succeed comes out. Please support in grabbing your copy, grabbing three copies or grabbing 10 copies and most importantly, posting a review after the book has come out. That is the greatest gift you can give me and give book launchers is a review for that book for self, for self publish and succeed as well. If you're getting a copy free or you buy a copy, posting a review is absolutely the greatest gift that you can give us in helping us grow our not not even the book sales necessarily, but just expanding people's awareness of what we're doing and helping it find other authors that we can help and support in their journey. And and thank you as well to everyone for supporting us in getting to 50, 000 subscribers. My goal is a hundred thousand subscribers just because that will make me the coolest mom in the eyes of my son. When I get a YouTube play button, that is genuinely the only reason I'm like I want to get to a hundred thousand so I can get a play button. So my son thinks I am the best. But of course, as always, we'll be back on Book Launchers TV Live in a week and a half. It's every other Tuesday. We're always live. There's new content there every Tuesday and Friday. And so if you didn't win today, which I think everybody who commented today did win, but if you didn't win today, commenting the day a video is released gets you entered to win. And of course, if you want to work with us and our my fabulous team at Book Launchers, head to book launchers.com forward/apply, fill out the form and schedule a call to chat with myself or with Lynn on my team and we'll explore your book and see if we're a fit to help you on your marketing journey. So. And your writing journey as well. I'm just marketing focused at the mind. Oh goodness. This is going to be fun when I finish recording today. Can you.

Tell? I can.

Tell. All right. Thanks, Angela, for being here and for all your support today. And thank you everyone for all your comments, questions and participation. I it was a blast to spend a couple of hours with you on Saturday. All right, take care.

Everybody. Bye.