Ask Me Anything about Publishing with Julie Broad, Founder of Book Launchers

Hello and happy Tuesday. My mic's not turning green, so T Body, God's love power connection, I see you were here right on time. Hopefully you can confirm that you have audio. So thumbs up. Let's confirm that there is audio because, yeah, it's weird. It normally turns green and it's not green. So do you hear me? You got audio? Okay. And Angela's here. Good too. Okay, good, good, good, good. Awesome. Welcome. And I gotta show you guys, right off the hop, we've got new swag, so don't mind me as I lower the camera. And in case you can't read it, it says, I write books, drink coffee, and know things. That's what I do. So, new swag. We had our deep dive on Saturday and we unveiled the other piece of new swag that we have, which is the hat. And now that I've put the hat on, it would be very risky for me to take it off. It messes my hair up. So we gave some of these away in the deep dive on Saturday and I'll be giving some T shirts away today too, so. See what I mean? Okay, hold on. Don't mind me while I adjust. Okay, so today is an Ask me anything. We didn't have time for Q and A in the last live stream, so I promised that this session would be solely dedicated to your questions. And of course, for the month of July, we don't post any new content. There'll be some shorts that will be making their rounds, but there won't be any new content in the month of July. I know. I'll miss you guys too, but. But we'll be back in August with plenty of fresh content and I think you can keep yourself busy watching some of the 460 videos that are on the channel already. It probably is even more than that now. And. And catch up on any videos you may not have had time to watch. That's what you can do in the month of July. So we are still celebrating the six year anniversary of book launchers, though, which is why we have new swag, the hat and the shirt, and we'll be giving a couple of those away today. And. And as always, we do our YouTube draw, which will be a copy of Self Publish and Succeed the oh so Soft Journal, and of course our hashtag NoBoringBooks mug, which is now also featured on the T shirt. So. And I actually have a have the T shirt right here so I can hold it up too so you guys don't have to see it. Here we go. There's the front of it. And. And there's a women's and a men's version. So the women's has a little bit of a V neck and the men's does not. And then on the back, they all have theconchers.com. yay. So, yeah, if you've got questions, go ahead, post them in the chat. And Angela's back from vacation and she'll be supporting me as always. And let's see who's here. Efren's in the house. Hello, welcome. Tanya's here, too. Hello, and welcome. Dabby Gosin. And let's see. Tony. Tony's in the house. Awesome. I think we sent you an email yesterday, Tony. Don't know if we heard back yet. Angela is. I appreciate the oxford comma in the shirt too. I didn't even notice. Oh, yeah, there it is. That's funny. Oh, the oxford comma lovers. I always joke that when my books go to the proofreader, I feel like one of the things they do is add 300 commas to my manuscript. So that is. I think I'm not an Oxford comma user. Apparently, I'm not much of a comma user at all. So. All right. And I. And I'm gonna just see. Let's see. I saw a question from Tanya. Let's start there. Where's the best place to format my book? I have it typed already in my notes on my MacBook. I don't know where to go from there. Well, before you format your book, I would highly recommend that you get it and get it edited because once you go to formatting, you. Once you go to formatting, editing, especially bigger edits become very difficult because it will impact the entire flow of the book. Unless you're only doing ebook. If you are only doing ebook, it'll flow through a lot nicer. But with the. With print books, it. It impacts it because each page kind of gets hard coded and you want to make sure there's no widows and orphans and things like that. And so I. I would edit it. So step one, get it edited. Step two, there's a few different things you can do. You can hire a formatter. Places like the Urban Writers or Reedsy, they all have formatters, typesetters, layout, interior layout. There's lots of different ways to call them. You can also use Vellum, which is a Mac program, or you can use Atticus, which I have done a review of on the YouTube channel before. Both will work for fairly simple, straightforward books. Our formatters, they use Adobe InDesign so, you know, that is, you know, that's a more technical program. It's harder to. To learn. It's, you know, I don't know how to use it personally. And it's something that I would say you probably need a design background or design expertise in order to make that work for you. But Vellum and Atticus are both pretty easy to use from everybody I know that does it. And you still have to go through and make sure that it doesn't introduce errors. But that is one thing that you could do. But definitely, definitely get it edited first. And lakeisha says, I need one of those shirts. And. Oh, and. Oh, that's Jack. Okay, thanks, Jack. I didn't who you were, so thank you for telling me that that's who you are with your name. And Debbie Doson says, if. Oh, my, my. It just jumped. If a sale is more than just a sale, it's a person, then how or where do I offer discounts in bulk? Oh, okay. I was like, if a sale is this. Really, this. This was starting to feel very philosophical and I wasn't sure what to do with it. So I think what you're asking is how do I handle bulk sales? Sales. And there are a few things that you can do. If you are only working with kdp, you can still offer discounts in bulk because you can order author copies yourself and ship them in a box in bulk. So you can sell, but you'll have to take the money. So you'll have to collect the money from them somehow. You know, whether you set up a stripe account or PayPal or, you know, some other way of collecting your money, then you would collect that money and then you would ship it to them from there. And you're offering them a discount off retail. So just to give you numbers so you get what I'm saying. Let's say your physical book is $15, and you would order copies, say, for $4 a piece from KDP plus shipping, maybe you're selling it to them for $10. So you're gonna have to collect, you know, $10 times 50 or whatever your bulk sale is, and. And then turn around and buy it from KDP and ship it. So hopefully that's what you mean. If you're asking how you do bulk for ebook, I can't remember how we're doing that. I don't know. Angela, if you remember how Sarah and the team are doing bulk ebook, because I know we have found a solution for that because we've had a few clients that have sold bulk Ebooks and I know you can do it to a point in Amazon, but I think there was a limit and so we had to find one that did more. Book Funnel might be one solution for that, but I can't remember, so I don't know. Angela, if you know off the top of your heads, a few top of your heads because your brain's so big you have two, you must have two heads for it. All right, let's see. Debbie Doson, how can I train Amazon SEO algorithm to successfully identify my book to potential buyers? Does cross promotion confuse the algorithm? I'm not sure exactly what you're asking there, but doing your keyword research and putting the keywords into title, subtitle, bio, book description, and then even the keywords that your reviewers use really will impact your SEO because if you look at the Amazon page and you scroll down and you see the boxes, you can see that it is analyzing the keywords and kind of commonly used words in those reviews. So the reviewers also will impact that SEO to a point. So that can be one way, I guess, to influence it. But you're, you know, you're not supposed to have friends and family reviewing your book, so there's only so much you'd want to want to play played with there. Efren is asking should we, or could we update our copyrights after the book upload is finalized? You don't need to. Once you have copy, once you've submitted copyright for your book, I think you're good to go. And questions like that that are so technical, I always go, well, I don't know with 100% certainty, but I know you're copyright protected because you filed it. And I don't think it has to be perfect as far as what the final version is because they do require for certain, for certain criteria to submit the, the e book version. You have to have submitted it in advance. That's correct. Yeah, I'll have to go back. But to my knowledge, you do not need to resubmit if you make changes after you have published it. Cool. So let's do some prizes because we have plenty. And and so first up, I am going to give the first person oh t body. Are you in the U.S. i feel like you're not because Tbody was the first to comment on today's live stream. So if you are in the US we will send you a shirt. So our fabulous new shirt, for any of you who missed it at the beginning, we have new swag and it is a beautiful shirt that says I Write books, drink coffee and know things. That's what I do. And of course it's got our hashtag no boring books mug on there and our URL on the back. So Teabody. But we can't ship these outside of the U.S. i'm afraid. It is a gigantic problem. So you're in Canada. I thought so. What I can do, Teabody is if you are okay waiting I can send one over the border with my family the next time they visit and they can ship it to you. But Angela can confirm too. I don't know if we've had the duty problem with Canada that we have had with Europe. With Europe it is cost in duty like three times more than the shirts are. The shirts, mugs, et cetera are worth. Okay, so next up is the. Well, Jack, Jack, we can send you a shirt. So let Angela know what size you would like and and email her@teamoklaunchers.com the best mailing address you'd like us to use as well as what size size of shirt you'd like and we will get you a shirt. Okay, my friend. Thank you for being here. Okay, and then we have our commenters for every Tuesday and Friday you get entered to win and that is going to be our hashtag. Oh so soft journal. Hashtag oh so soft our oh so soft journal our hashtag no boring books mug or a copy of Self publish and Succeed. So self publish and Succeed the book. I don't actually have a copy in my hand at the moment but it. The new version. New version. The. The follow up to it is Self promote and Succeed and the COVID is almost final. So when I get back to you guys in August I'll be doing a cover reveal and we'll be talking about the launch which is happening in October. So that should be a lot of fun. So I am going to head on over to hold on and I am going to share my screen and at least I'm going to try to share my screen. Last time I did this it sort of. It worked and then I. But I couldn't see you guys when I did this so I. It says I should have two monitors. So this is something Angela probably should be doing because she has two monitors. But that's fine. We are going to go over. Hold on one moment, one moment please as I switch this over. Okay, you guys can post your questions while you're waiting for me to do this entire screen. Here we go. Allow and we're just going to pop over really quick. Hopefully you're seeing the random name picker now. So everybody's name that has comment on the day a video is released and has been entered here. We're seeing all the names flashing before us. And our first winner is Barbara Britton, 6111. So Barbara, congratulations and thank you for commenting the day a video was released. And you can send an email toteambook launchers.com and let Angela know which of the three prizes you would like. Same with you, Carol Ann Crossley. 9, 7, 0. I don't know why my YouTube is now always, always showing me like the number. So if you have a number in your, your YouTube handle, it's showing me that now. It's very weird. So congratulations you two and thank you so much for commenting the day a video was released. And I will be back in August. Actually I have a video for you all on Friday and then we'll be back again in August with our Tuesday Friday content. And of course then you can have a new chance to win the mug, the Journal or the copy of Self publish and succeed. Okay, so just looking to see what other questions we have here. So, yeah, as Angela was saying, as we were saying, the only reason we do we, we now say our swag. We can send the journals and we can send copies of the books to, to people outside of the states. But when we've sent anything else, it often requires the person who's receiving it to pay duty. And it can be a lot, which is why we've stopped doing it. It's not that we don't want to ship it, it's just that it, you know, we don't want you to have to pay 20, 30, 40, $50 to accept our swag. That's why we've had to do that. So, okay, let's see. Debbie Doson has another question. I saw a YouTube video that said Google Ads and Facebook ads work, but are expensive and harder to be profitable than Amazon ads. Amazon ads are all you need to succeed. Do you agree? I mean, there's so many things about that statement. The answer, I could break it down into a bunch of pieces. So let's do that. Amazon ads are not all you need to succeed. Amazon ads are a tiny part of what you should be doing as an author in order to succeed. Amazon ads will help your discoverability. Amazon ads for most of our clients, not all. Some we aren't able to actually get Amazon ads to work for. But what we do find with a lot of clients is that it may not seem like the ads are doing that. Much, but you turn the ads off and suddenly sales, the sales change a lot, as in go down. So that tells me that even though the ad itself wasn't necessarily causing the purchase, the it is part of exposure and it's leading to a purchase. Because I mean the old number that people used to say is that people needed to be exposed to your product, your service or you seven times before they buy. There's lots of new data saying that that number is more like 20 something. So 20 something times. So your ads running Amazon ads is going to be part of that exposure, even if the ad isn't always the thing that gets clicked on that ends up leading to the sale. So I believe Amazon ads are something that most authors, I won't say every author because there are some books that just won't, won't perform on Amazon ads for different reasons. And Amazon will reject advertising for certain books, like if you have a swear word in the title, those kind of things, or certain, certain other products. So I believe that it should be a part of your promotion, but it is not all you need to succeed. There's a tiny, tiny percentage of authors that are selling so many books through Amazon ads that they don't need to do anything else. And you know, it is, it is something to do. But I wouldn't actually spend a lot of money on Amazon ads until you have at least 25 reviews because anything less than 25 reviews and you're paying money for people to click on your book to probably not buy it. So you want to put your money and energy and effort into things that will generate book reviews so that when somebody does get your Amazon ad, they see a book that is well reviewed. So that's one thing. Facebook and Google Ads, it's a strategy that can work for fiction authors who have a free or a low cost book as an entry point and it hooks them into the series and then they're going to sell the series. I have heard from a lot of authors that this strategy works really, really well. Nonfiction, I can tell you, you know, our ad costs. The cheapest opt in that we get on Google is $3.76. So you can do the math. If that opt in is a and that's free, by the way, that's a free opt in. So they're signing up for our seven steps. You know, the book launchers.com forward/the number seven steps. They're signing up for that. And so they're getting a free. It's costing me $3.70 at the cheapest in order to get that opt in. Now this varies, that number varies widely based on the targeting and how competitive certain words are, certain categories, certain audiences are. So you can do opt ins for a little cheaper than that for some categories. Some topics on Facebook, I'm not getting $3.70 as my opt in. And when I'm selling books, so selling a copy of Self Publish and Succeed. So we drive people to self publish and succeed.com, we're lucky if we're spending if we break even. So the book is selling for $18. Most of my ad costs exceed $18. So to get a sale of the book. So and there are people who are successful in running book funnels that will generate, generate money from the back end. But most of the people spending money in the nonfiction space on these ads, they're not generating the money from the front end. Just like we aren't. Right. I'm, I am breaking even or even slightly losing money. I'm spending money for opt ins because I'm creating a community. I am attracting people into book launchers. You know, we have Self Publish and Succeed Live, which we're going to be rolling out again. Our course, we have a marketing course we're going to be rolling out. I have, you know, the books are not, the books are not the place that we are making our money. The books are something that we use to help people to generate interest, to generate awareness, to generate brand recognition. So I know that's a long answer, but there's never one thing that you need to do to succeed. So the bigger part of this comment about Amazon ads is all you need to succeed is that there's never one thing. Even the authors that are doing really well with Amazon ads, I suspect if you peel back what they're doing, they're probably doing a lot of other things that, that are feeding into the Amazon ad performance, whether that is running ebook sales, whether that is generating a lot of reviews. They have great endorsements and testimonials. Maybe they're doing, they have a series and so that's feeding into the series. There's, there's always so much more. Nothing is ever as simple as one thing. I wish it were, but it is not ever as simple as that. So I hope that helps. Let's see. Oh, Angela had given some more information about ebook sales. She said it depends on the buyer. Amazon does bulk ebook sales through Amazon Business, but there aren't a lot of reliable bulk sales for ebook places. That's what we did was Amazon Business. Thank you for checking with Sarah Angela. Thank you. All right, we've got Battalion 13 Entertainment in the house. Thank you. I am so glad to have you here and to have you subscribe describing. And you want to add the abandoned cart option in Squarespace. That's a good point. Thank you. All right, let's see. And also, don't forget to add the tax options. That's also true. Okay, I missed a question from quizmaster China. Guess my ask me anything question is how to get book reviews. So kind of like we just touched on there isn't one way only to get book reviews. There are many ways, but the best way is to just keep asking people consistently and ask them personally. Sending mass mails doesn't work. Just gently reminding people, hey, the best thing you can do is give me a review. And I don't think I have maybe, maybe I have a sticker. So I put in the front of books that I give away, whether it's our author books or other books. No, this one, none of these have it. So I put a sticker kind of like this sticker. This is a promotion sticker for book launchers. But I, I have a sticker like this that just says, you know, if you enjoy this book, the best gift you can give is a review or something, a positive review or something like that on Amazon or your favorite book buying website. So I also have those stickers and I put them in the front of books that I give away at different events or if I give them to people at different, you know, when I'm meeting them somewhere, I usually have that sticker or some sort of a sticker inside to promote book launchers and our service. So consistently asking if you have a bunch of people that have promised reviews and you've given them free copies, make a list and follow up with them. And I would say, you know, keep following up. Not, don't be a pest. But I would say every two to four weeks, just kind of gently say, hey, have you had a chance to post that review yet? Looking forward to seeing your review. Those kind of things because they are so important and it is really the best way is getting is asking for them. There's also some review sites out there and so you can use sites and I. There is a video on YouTube that talks about the different sites. One that one of our authors at the deep dive this weekend mentioned was Pubby. I believe it's P U B B Y. And you can sign up to review other people's books and people will review your books. It's not a review exchange, which is in violation of the Amazon rules, but it is kind of a reviewer community. And we also have a reviewer community at Launchers. Angela can drop the comment in the chat as well if you're interested in reading some of our books, getting advanced copies and posting reviews. We do have a reviewer community here as well, so you are invited to join that and post reviews too. All right, so let's do another prize. We have. We gave away a shirt. Now we can give away a hat. I'm not going to put on my hair again because it messes my hair up. And let's see, what are we going to do for the hat? Let's see. I was going to do a skill I did on the weekend. I did the testing, skill testing question to see if anybody remembered what my book was called. My new book, but which is called Self Promote and Succeed, which is a follow up to Self Publish and Succeed. But you know, for fun, I'm gonna see who knows what the title of my first book was. Kind of the book that started it all, if you will. So first person to say what my first book was called will win a hat. As long as you're in the States. If you're not in the States, Angela will, you know, offer you a copy of Self Publish and Succeed. Okay. And Jack, you need to email team at Tony, anybody can answer is the first one to answer is the winner. TeamBookClunchers.com is where you need to email if you win. So, Jack, email teams.com your mailing address and in your case, it was the T shirt size that you would like. I'm just reading. I'm reading. Questions. There's more questions. So I'll, I'll come back for the prize winner in a second. And let's see. Efren's question. When recording our audiobook, sometimes a word in parenthesis and a footnote may or may not be read for flow. Flow issue. For those who use that service, Whisper Sync. No, not, not little things. And I, I do have a video on YouTube somewhere that talks about what to read and what not to read. And, and so no, I, I would recommend skipping certain things. And you know, if it's a word that you don't need to read for some reason, it's okay. I don't remember the exact percentage. If anybody knows the exact percentage that it needs to be identical to the text version, that would be awesome if you could share. But it's like 90, maybe, let's say 90, 95%. So there's room to not have it be identical, for it to still qualify for Whisper Sync. And so there's certain things like charts and graphs that you may just want to reference. So instead of reading it, you may say, see the download that comes with this book, you know, or see chart A or exhibit A that you can find in the download. And sometimes it makes sense to describe what it is. So if there's an image and what is in the book won't make sense if they don't know what the image is, you'll say, and C, exhibit A for the image of and describe what it is. And doing that won't deviate too much from the actual text, and it will still work and still qualify. Let's see. Tony wins. It was more than cash flow. Efren, the new brand you was a book number two. So Tony wins more than cash flow. So we can send Tony a hat. Here we go. It's a hashtag. No boring books hat. And Angela, you'll need to email Angela teamokunchers.com where you want her to send it, and congratulations. And Efren, you know you already won a hat on the weekend, so I don't feel too bad that you didn't get it, but it was a good. It was a good close second. That was book two. All right, so let's see. And I love your analogy. Book reviews truly seem like the melted butter garlic bread of book going by of a book going viral. That's fun. Okay, I'm scrolling back up to catch up on your questions, and I think, Angela, were you able to find those YouTube links or are you not able to post? You know, you're an admin, so you should be able to post links. But I haven't seen the YouTube video links pop up here. I'll put them in the description. So hopefully, if you're able to find them and just not post them, Angela, I'll put them in the YouTube description after if you send them to me. So, okay, let's see, who's next? Who's next? Let's see. Dabby Doson, does there exist an email list or social group or a combined group that's able to match you to your readers in a specific genre? Goodreads. Goodreads has groups. Goodreads will kind of match you to your reader. Probably not exactly what you're looking for. You can find book clubs. There's book clubs out there. There isn't a perfect answer to this because it's really going to depend widely on your group. And your topic. But I would start by looking on Goodreads and looking around some of the other social media places to see there are, like I said, there are some reviewer sites. And that was one of the videos that I was asking for Angela to share and post, which was the book review sites that I list. I had one video on it. I also listed what worked to get book reviews for Self publish and succeed. I did a full analysis of all the reviews that I had and where they came from. Sometimes it's the best guess as to where they came from, but. But that will help you kind of break that down too. So some review sites are more useful to certain books than others. We've also used NetGalley, that can work to get reviews. Booksprout. There's a few other sites that can be very valuable. But again, it's going to depend on your genre, your book, all of those kind of things. And what does it feel like to accomplish six wonderful years on YouTube? Well, it's six years on YouTube, yes, mostly. But it's six years at book Launchers, which I think is. I'm very excited and very proud. And it's really cool, too, because, you know, just this past weekend, my team, Sarah and Nicole from my team, were in Chicago at the American Library association, and four of our authors came to town and did book signings. And it was just. That's really cool to me because our authors especially, it was really fun to hear the lineups and how some of our authors were kind of like, what? Like, these librarians are excited to meet me. And, you know, it was just. It's just really. I don't know, it touches my heart for those kind of things because I am very much about having an impact and helping others. And so it's really great because my team is getting to do that too, and our authors are getting to do that and have an impact. And so that is, to me, is really, really special and meaningful. And I just love it. And then we did our deep dive on Saturday and, you know, we had four of our authors who joined in and shared their experience. And they were just all so honest and transparent and giving in their advice to others, to anybody who's writing a book or promoting a book. I thought that was, you know, I live for those things. And that's what is so great about being around for six years, because we have helped so many authors and we've helped so many books come out. And I'll never, ever know the impact that all of that work has done. But I Get a little taste of it in these moments. And that's really, really special to me. Me. All right, so here we go. Let's see, what else do we have here? So this, anybody who's joined in, this is an Ask me Anything and we're giving away a few prizes to continue our six year celebration this month. So if you have questions, you can go ahead and post them and I will do my best to give them the best answer I can. D. Clark, is writing in the health and wellness genre profitable anymore? Especially in how to information. So I mean, this is always a funny question. I get people who come up, who I have calls with or I talk to them and they're like, you know, is this going to make any money? And the honest answer is, I don't know. And nobody knows for sure. Even publishers don't know for sure if a book is going to make money. They have ways of kind of checking the market and they know they have their pulse on certain things so they'll understand what the potential market is. But ultimately the answer is it can be, but it might not be. How's that for definitive? So when you say writing in the health and wellness genre, well, what are we talking about? Who are we writing for? What problem are we solving? And really dive deeper into that. Because when you do that, you will find there's, if you have something of value that's helping a certain type of person get over something, avoid something, or, you know, reach, reach something they've always wanted to reach, then yes, there's going to be, there's going to be money there, there's going to be value, there's going to be impact. And, but a lot of, a lot of the issues, especially health and wellness. But I see this in business, you know, in leadership and all of these kind of books is they're like, well, that person has a pulse, so they're a potential reader. And I talked about this recently as well. I, I heard a great example that I love is this one publisher was talking about how she had an author that had a book on heart health and, and the heart health. And the author was like, well, everybody has a heart. So my book is for everyone. And the reality was that, you know, not everybody is going to care about their heart until there's a problem. Right. So it really wasn't for anyone. It was for the people who, you know, have heart issues or they've just been diagnosed. And we talked about this on the weekend too, with Monique's book prescription for admission, which is she's a hospitalist. And she's talking about, you know, all the things you really need to know when you're about to be admitted to the hospital to get better care, to have it cost less, all those things. Tbody, in Canada you don't have to worry about this, but in the US it is quite the labyrinth of things that you sign and you shouldn't have signed and all these things that can wreak havoc with your financial life and your experience in the hospital. And so she was talking. And so in the beginning when we were pitching her book, we actually had a little bit of trouble getting the attention for it. And then it was in a conversation with Nicole. This is what Monique shared on the, in the, in the session she said they realized that they need to go with the people that have an urgent, like immediate, pressing need, which is the people who just got admitted to the hospital or they were just diagnosed with something and they're going to be going in and having surgery or doing this or they're going to be admitted for some reason. So hospital gift shops, talking to the people who are like on the front lines diagnosing these things, the people who are caring for somebody who's about to be admitted, you know, the urgent need. And now suddenly the angle is hitting and we're getting a lot of exposure and attention for her book. And so it's, it's diving deeper and deeper until you find that angle and that pain that people will pay to solve. So yes, there's money in every genre, every book, so long as you do that. And a lot of authors are, maybe it's not brave enough or they don't believe enough or whatever it is, but they don't go deep enough to actually find those rich, rich markets where they will make money as an author in a variety of ways. So, yeah, hopefully that helps because the answer is very difficult to give. But I think that if there's one thing I can always offer people, it's that you really do need to find the pain that people are experiencing and a particular type of person is experiencing and offer them some sort of solution. Hope, avoidance, you know, money, financial. There's lots of money and financial, same thing, but there's lots of ways to kind of keep going deeper so you find that outcome of the outcome that you're offering for that very specific person and you'll find the opportunities to sell those books. Can I copy and paste using chat GPT for writing an ebook? I don't know what we're talking about here. You can Copy and paste and you can write an ebook with Chat GPT. You didn't put a standard of how good we want this ebook to be or what we want to do with it. And ultimately, you know, there is the issue of copyright and rejection. If you just copy and paste straight from ChatGPT, you will have a lot of bots stopping you from being able to post that. There's more and more detection, AI detection software being used and more and more platforms are not necessarily banning the use, but, you know, putting limits on what can and can't be done. So I'd be very careful with that. We are users of ChatGPT at book launchers. We have a person on our team whose job is to, is an AI specialist for the marketing team. And what he does is, you know, he's basically a prompt engineer. He's playing with prompts to help write, you know, help brainstorm book titles, help with chapter titles, help with bio and book description drafting media kit preparation speaker, one sheet. So there's a whole bunch of pieces where we're finding massive value in, in using chat GPT&AI and the writing team is using it for ideation, table of contents and you know, if we need, if we just need some fresh ideas, it is better than staring at a blank page. But we are not. We're actually also rewriting a few books that ChatGPT has written because it, it doesn't write a book that is good enough for book launchers. All right, Angela found those YouTube videos, so thank you for posting those and, and if you save those links, I'll put them in the description after the fact as well. Soul Magic. Welcome. Hello. What can you tell about ISBN number and publishing and printing? I'm not sure. I need a little more information. All I can say about ISBNs is I highly recommend that you get one unless you're only publishing on Amazon and that's all you care about. But if at any point you think you might want to publish elsewhere, as in have your book in bookstores, then I would get an ISBN and use that ISBN when you upload the book. And so I would start with an ISBN for print and for any other format that you're going to use it if you want to have distribution outside of just Amazon. And then Angela also posted what's worked to get more book reviews and the paid book review site 1. So thank you very much. Self love ignites me. Thank you sent me. I think that's a kiss right back. And Cat, can authors attend that event? Sorry, Tony, I I talked so much. I don't know which event you're talking about, if you meant the Deep Dive on Saturday. It is available on YouTube. I posted it to YouTube after it was live. So another link for Angela to hunt down. So you can post that and. Oh, I see. I know what you mean. I saw your comment below. I'd love to meet librarians. So I don't think anybody can just go to the American Library Association's annual event. We had to pay a lot of money to have a booth there. And then as part of that booth, we were able to bring some of our authors in as guests. I don't think authors can attend unless they buy a booth. And there were a few authors that had their own booths, but mostly it's publishers. We. I think we're the only self publishing company that is there. At least I didn't confirm that with. With Sarah and Nicole. But I know last year when. When I went with Sarah, we were the only self publishing company there. Everybody else is a publisher, and it is. It is a kind of an interesting place for a self publishing service to be. But, you know, our. One of our values is that we win when clients win. So we are really pursuing those wins for our clients. And that's why we are, you know, pursuing relationships with libraries, because we know they're a big part of grassroots support. And some books that we put out there, you know, it's a really great fit for libraries, school libraries, college libraries, universities and public libraries. So it's a big. It's a big part of what we do. But I don't think, unless you want to buy yourself a table even then, I don't see a lot of authors there. Most of them were there through publishers or through. Through people like us that had tables. And. Yeah, I think your book would be a great fit for libraries, Tony. I completely agree. Bradford, what do you think of books with curse words in the title? I mean, I feel like it's kind of a trend that's gone by now. I feel like it had its heyday for 1 for 2 is that it limits some of your promotional abilities. So. And everybody goes, yeah, but Mark Manson's book was, you know, it still is a bestseller. And I'm going, yes, but Mark Manson was already a famous. Well, not famous, but he had a very strong circle of influence when his book came out. For those of you who don't know, I'm talking about the subtle art of not giving up Leap. And. And there's other ones out there, too, that. That are that have done really well and kind of made it trendy. If you're not famous or you don't have a huge list or a huge audience, you can do podcasts. Most podcasts don't care that you have a swear word in your title. You will struggle with advertising. You will not be able to run Amazon ads. We've even had, I believe you know, the donkey word. We've even had that one, I think have problems with Amazon ads. I'm trying to remember. Exactly. And then there's media now if you want any sort of traditional media, tv, radio, again, they're probably not going to be interested in featuring your book in any way if there's any sort of swear words on there as well. So it depends on your strategy, depends on your audience. You know, it's a choice that you can make if you believe the trade offs are worthwhile. Like if it really is going to appeal to your audience to do it and you have an audience and you know your audience well and you have a sphere of influence that can help you sell books no matter what limits you've put on it by. By doing that, then go for it. All right, Angela, let's get a couple more prizes because we're getting close to the top of the hour. I want to give Mug journal or self publish and succeed. And I also want to give one more shirt away today. So let's do for the shirt, let is what's the date today? It is the 27th. So let's go to the 27th comment. See 27th comment from who's at the bottom here? Soul Magic's comment. So go 27 up and we'll see who that prize winner is. And Efren had to think about what the donkey word was. I probably could say it. I don't know. It rhymes with grass. Okay, let's see. I've gotta go find where I was at. And let's see. And Debbie Doson's face, palm smiling. I don't know if that's because of me saying the donkey word. Oh, good times, good times, my friend. Okay, and then the other prize, let's see. Angela, why don't you pick the person who has been participating the most out there. So you're kind of your MVP of the day or your most sportsmanlike participants. So You've got our 27th from the the Soul Magic comment at the bottom and then our MVP of the day, if you will. Okay, let me see. What is the Super Bowl MET Gala Oscar red carpet of book marketing and campaigning does such an experience exist? What's the most grandiose launch you've seen in recent years for self publishing? I mean David Goggins is absolutely the beast in, in the self publishing world as far as I'm concerned. I believe I saw that his first book made $25 million in sales. And I don't even remember where I saw that, but I remember seeing it and feeling like that was a very credible number. And then I, I believe his recent book has also done extraordinarily well, all self published. So that isn't necessarily the Super Bowl Met Gala answer that you're looking for, but. But yes. I mean he to me is. I don't know if I would say he's the goat, but he of recent years, I would say he has absolutely crushed the marketing of a book. And I also believe he didn't pay for advertising of his book. He did a lot of that just through brute force and his audience building that he has done over the years. Okay, D. Clark, in terms of market research, how reliable are programs like Publisher Rocket or are other market research avenues better? Depends what kind of market research you're looking for. There's value in looking at Publisher Rocket, but it is limited to Amazon. And if you have a business book, you know, I can speak to some of our authors who, they sell a lot of books outside of Amazon and so you may discount a category thinking it is not a great place. But yet there's probably a lot of authors that are speakers that are selling a boatload of books that are never registering on Amazon. Bookscan is a paid service, but you can get more data that's a little bit wider, not just Amazon from there. So again, it depends what kind of research, keyword research. We don't rely just on Rocket. We find sometimes their results are a little bit wonky. So we tend to draw from Katy Spy, we draw from Rocket, we also draw from Google and just our own kind of intuition. At one point ingramspark had some great reports that we were also buying and using. I believe those reports have now gone away or somebody had commented that they weren't for sale anymore. And I checked and I couldn't find them either. So I also think that there is a lot of value in doing your own research by going on Reddit, through threads, LinkedIn groups, commenting, posting and learning. So again, this depends what your market research is. But there's. I wouldn't rely on any one source because I don't. I think sometimes the information that we see doesn't match what the experience is or what we're seeing in. In the field, so to. So to speak. So. But I do love Rocket. Huge fan. We use it every day, and it does give us a lot of good information that you can't get elsewhere. And one of the things that is nice is that it's now showing the different formats. And so I am able to see in certain categories, books that are like the audio version of a book, crushing the other versions, as an example. And I'm able to see that it's not just our authors whose print book outsells the other formats. Like in all of our authors, print book is the number one selling format, usually soft cover. And in a lot of cases, we're now seeing the audiobook being the next most popular version and the ebook being the least popular version, which runs counter to what a lot of people believe. I've even had calls as recently as this week where somebody said, do I even need to bother printing a print version? And I'm like, oh, yes, my friend, you do. All right, let's see. Is there a bookstore in there or near. I don't know. I don't know if you mean at the ala. I'm not sure what you're talking about. Oh, and this. The publishing and printing part is for a journal. I don't do anything with journals. I. We have workbooks that we sometimes do for clients to correspond to their books because we turn books into courses as well, online courses. So we do workbooks, but we don't do anything with journals. All right, let's see who our prize winners are. We don't do anything about poems either. Angela, where's my. Let's see. Jack Hollenbeck with the 27 comment. But since he won already, I went to the next one up, which is. And my thing scrolled, Battalion 13 Entertainment. If you are still here, congratulations. If you are in the US you have won a T shirt. Our new T shirts. And they're soft, too, by the way. We can almost, almost call these the oh, so soft T shirt, but here you go. Does anybody know what TV show was the inspiration for me to create this little logo theme on here? The. I write books, drink coffee, and know things. That's what I do. In fact, that'll be the last prize of the day if you can tell me who said something very similar to that and what TV show it's from. Let's see if you know who inspired my shirt. Shirt. Okay, so that was for Battalion 13 Entertainment. We need to know your T shirt size. Male, female. Because I do have women's version and men's version of the shirt and what size and. And then you'll need to email teamoklaunchers.com to let her know the winner and then the other one. Dabby Doson, you are the winner of a journal, a mug or a self publish and succeed a copy of the book. So let us know what you would like and and email angelaeamaoklaunchers.com okay, a couple more questions before we wrap for the day. Do you think Amazon is the best way to go if you want to print your own published journal? If you can't finance, invest yourself. I again, I don't do anything with journals. I would go to Kelly Publish she or yeah, I'm pretty sure Kelly publish has done a lot of journals, low content books. She would be a great resource. She has a great YouTube channel. So check her out. K E L L I publish on YouTube. We don't do anything with poems either. Lakisha. So I'm not. I'm not much assistance there. Oh, and Mike made it. Hello, hello, hello. Welcome, welcome. As Efren said, we can start now. So does anybody know? Mike, you might be just in time to tell me. Does anybody know what T shirt or what T shirt? What TV show inspired this? I write books, drink coffee and know things. That's what I do. Does anybody know? That's my final thing for the day. It's not the office. It is not the Office. And Darla says great T shirt. Thank you. We will be giving more of them away in August and September when we return. I got a whole box full of them, so not to worry. There will be more chances at winning this fabulous shirt in the future. But right now. But right now is the best time because we have all the sizes. As we get further and further down the line, there will be less and less sizes because we also give them to people on our team at various milestones in their journey working with us. So Mike is here. All right, I'll give you guys another minute. I don't think. I think I've answered all the questions. I'm just scrolling back. Oh, we have Yog. Hey. Hey. My name is Celtic. I published my debut novel two days ago and within 24 hours became the number one dark fantasy bestseller in Sweden. I feel overwhelmed right now and wonder what to do now. Ask for reviews. That's always the answer. Get reviews if you've got momentum. Ask people to review your book. When they post a review, post it on social media. Thank them and encourage others to post reviews. That is the best thing. And then because you already have momentum, I would start running some Amazon ads in your country and start promoting your book in other ways. You could even run an ebook sale and just keep going because you have some momentum now. All right, Nobody has. No. So Tyrion Lannister, he says, and I don't know the exact phrase, but it's like, I drink wine, read books and know things. That's what I do. It's something like that. And when I, when I saw that, I was like, I don't drink wine and I don't. I read books, but I write them, too. So I turned it into my own version. So you can thank Game of Thrones and Tyrion Lannister for this new shirt. All right, everybody, thank you so much for being here. There is a video on Friday. It is on getting book endorsements. It is the part two of the video that I posted a couple weeks ago on getting reviews. And then we're going to take a break for the month of July and so you can catch up on some of the videos that you have surely missed this year. And we'll be back in August with new content every Tuesday and Friday and new chances to win shirts, books, journals, and all the fun. And in August, I'll be revealing the COVID of Self Promote and Success Succeed and starting to get some of you to join my beta reader team to post early reviews and start to get early momentum for Self Promote and Succeed. So hope you all have a fantastic July and I look forward to seeing you all back here in August. And if you comment on the videos you're watching, I will still be here to respond. So you can still comment and say hello if you haven't already. All right, take care. Bye.