Author Nation 2024 Highlights Plus Publishing News to Know

Hello. Happy December. Can you believe we are in the 12th month of the year already? It's kind of wild. So let's dive in. I still owe you some highlights and recaps from Author Nation, which happened the second week of November here in Las Vegas. But I was, I was. I wrote a LinkedIn post today and I said, yay. I got inspired, I got information, and I got really sick. So I'm going to blame you, Efren. I know you had a cold there, so maybe I got your cold and. And took it to next level because it knocked me. It knocked me down. But I am back up and excited to be here chatting about Author Nation. And then next one, we're going to cover kind of publishing in 2025. Always a fun topic to kind of look at the year ahead. And interestingly, with Author Nation this year, I didn't have like a big, strong takeaway. Last year at the end of Author Nation, I kind of went, wow, direct sales is the big thing. You know, there was a lot of unrest around AI, a lot of discomfort, a lot of unrest, a lot of, you know, know, pretty big emotions around AI which I didn't see this year. There was, you know, there's still people who do not like AI at all in the publishing world, and there's still some people who are scared of it, nervous, haven't used it. But I would say the, the overall level was acceptance. It's here. You know, you can use it if you want to use it, you don't have to use it, but it's here. So it was, it was less, less heated as it has been in previous, at least in last year in particular, you know, there was a lot of, a lot of emotions and a lot of people, you know, were getting, you know, really a lot of heavy feedback if they spoke out in favor of AI in any way, which that wasn't present as much this, this year. But I've got a few key takeaways that I did get. I sat down and kind of pulled my thoughts to. Together to see, okay, what, what can I. What can I really, you know, offer? And I honestly, there's not anything that's going to shake your world. But there was some, there was a few things that I thought were interesting and are worth noting. So one of the big things was, and this is also because of the sessions that I attend, you know, I was very focused on nonfiction, business growth, brand growth, you know, selling books. Those were the kind of sessions that I attended. So my points and my feedback are going to be very different and than somebody who attended sessions on craft of writing or on, you know, different genre approaches or, you know, even beginner type material. You know, I, in general, I attended the advanced sessions and sessions that were really, you know, either going to help our clients or were going to be something that I could use in my own author journey. So that was really my focus. So my takeaways are going to be different than somebody else's because I can also tell you, some of my sessions there was. They were very empty. So the nonfiction crowd in this audience was. Was pretty small this year, which was a disappointment, honestly. One of my disappointments of this event was that, you know, last year when they changed from 20 books to 50k, they really stated they intended to grow the nonfiction angle and have its own track and really promote it. But I don't think that happened. I don't think there was, you know, really any emphasis whatsoever on nonfiction. There was, however, more nonfiction authors selling at the book sale event on the final day, which was great to see. Now, a bunch of them were book launchers clients, which is great, but that was. That definitely comprised a decent chunk of the nonfiction authors there. But one of the big things that I heard in multiple sessions, so that's really what I'm trying to share with you, is things that I saw or heard more than once and that, you know, because other sessions you might hear an idea and that was cool. But there was a lot of talk about kind of two things, which is, you know, the rapid pace of change and also, you know, just really the business focus. And I heard it in several different sessions to, as you look at your advertising in particular, whether it's Amazon or Meta or wherever you're doing your advertising. But it's really to think about it, especially when you're looking at Amazon ads, to have an advertiser's mindset. So not be an author, but look at it from an advertiser's perspective, which is, you know, you want an roi, but, you know, for me, anyways. And it's. And I know this isn't just me, you know, your first month of running ads is almost never going to generate a positive result. Sometimes it does, and that's great when it does, but that's not the common thing. So the first month you start running ads, your goal should not be. Your first goal should not be to have a positive roi. Your first goal should be to get data and to refine your ads and to really figure out what's going to work for you. And for your book. And I heard that over and over again that a lot of authors try things, but they don't give it enough time or they don't measure the right things so they don't get to the results that they want to get to. And really, when it comes to ads, it's about testing, it's about learning, optimizing. And your ad spend is an investment, and you have to look at it as not money down the toilet, which is generally how I feel about any ads I've ever run on meta. Facebook in particular. I feel like I just donate to them, like, here, have some more money, see where it goes. But Amazon ads, it doesn't function the way Facebook does. Amazon ads, in the beginning, it's actually hard to spend money. And you need to spend money so you can get information, so you can refine your ads and figure out what's working. And so if you go into Amazon ads as thinking of it as an investment, thinking of it as, you know, not just, not just putting money in there to sell books, but to get data and to grow your readership. And also even, you know, if you're selling books to grow your business and your brand, to also do that. And then when you do that, you have to be looking at the bigger picture when you're analyzing whether your ads are working. Because, and I've talked about this here before, a lot of people turn their ads off and then they find their overall book stops performing. But based on solely the ad data, the ROI doesn't seem like it's there. Like, it can look like your ads are not performing, but you've still sold. You know, just take an example. You might have sold 50 books in the month, but according to your ads, you know, you only sold five from your ads. So you might think your ads aren't working, but you turn your ads off. And the next month, you know, you sell none through ads because you have no ads running. But now, the next month, all of a sudden you sell 10. And that starts to tell you that by your ads, having exposure, showing people your book, by the sales velocity that was created, you know, it's only five books, but that sales velocity of those five made a difference and it helped you sell some other books. But then also looking at the bigger, bigger picture of lifetime value of a reader, if you only have one book, this may not be as relevant, but maybe you have a course, maybe you have consulting, maybe you are going to roll out another book. That one reader can sometimes be the very person that becomes a lifelong client or a lifelong consulting. Or it could be the thing that leads to a speaking engagement. And now five books on ads doesn't seem so bad if one of them becomes a high value person in your business or for your brand. So this came up in multiple sessions. Even in some of the ones that were very fiction oriented, they were talking about this lifetime value of a reader and how you're really creating an ecosystem as an author. And it's not just about this single sale. Right. And so much emphasis in the author world is focused on sales and sales are a metric, and this is something I emphasize all the time, is of course we want to sell books, but that's just one metric in a bigger picture of what you're trying to accomplish. So. So that's one thing I heard over and over again. Kind of. There's a couple ways you can take that. You know, to me, I'm looking at it as your business, as an author is creating an ecosystem and managing the data to figure out what's going to grow your ecosystem so that you have a profitable business in the long run. All right, so I'm seeing some comments. I want to say hello to people I know. Efren's here and Stella is here. Angela's here behind the scenes, probably hoping I don't pull her on stage at the last minute, but sometimes that happens. And KJ said, I'm having trouble with school. Maybe you can do a video about how it functions. Yeah, that's a good idea. I haven't done that. For anybody who doesn't know, we do have. We have two communities on school. We have a free one and we have a paid one, our free one. Everybody is invited. Angela can probably drop the link to join that school group in the comments. And it's really geared towards people who are working on a book. So it's not, you know, you guys can talk to each other about marketing and all that kind of thing. But this is really, for starting in January, some of the people on my team are going to host writing sessions and writing sprints and things like that. And we have tools and we have courses that you'll unlock, you know, through participation and just through time in the community, you'll unlock different courses and different templates and things. And we're just trying to, you know, have a fun place for our community to talk to each other, support each other and hang out. And so that's free and I can absolutely shoot a video on it. And I don't know if you're having trouble getting in that's not necessarily my forte, but once you're in, I can explain what's there and what you should be seeing and maybe seeing as you spend more time in it. We also have another group in school. It's a paid group and it is intended for people who have a book that's either coming out or it's already out. And it is for book marketing. And we're really. There's kind of several layers to that paid group and it is, there's layer one which is essentially the community. So you can post, you can get, you know, we have people right now that have been posting their book covers and they're posting their Amazon page and they're getting feedback from each other and from, you know, people on my team. The next layer is that we're taking you through a basically a 12 month path through thought leadership. So each month there's a theme that is based on our path to becoming a thought leader through your book. So you might have. In month one we had, I'm trying to remember is branding about your author brand. This month Shane on my team is talking about author websites. Next month Sarah's doing a training session on ebooks. And then we also have office hours. So actually tomorrow I'm hosting office hours for the. And this is our author business accelerator, by the way. That's the name of that. It's $150 a month. Although we do run specials from time to time to give you trials. So if you're on our newsletter list, you may get invited to a trial at some point. But yeah, for $150 you get office hours where you can bring, you know, sometimes we've done brainstorms, we've done, we've had people show their Amazon page and we've given them feedback and we've talked about where to pitch and how to pitch and all those things. So Those are the two school groups. So thank you, K.J. i will make a note to shoot a video and I'll probably either I'll probably post it in the school platform for everybody to check out and see or I'll post it here. One of the two. All right, Emily is here as well. And, and Susan. Hello Scotland Scorpion. Lovely to see you. Kevin from snowy cold Rochester. All right. And Parviz is here as well. All right, so all the questions, Angela will save them up and we will answer at the end. And of course we have prizes too, but I'm going to hit a couple other key points. So the first thing I mentioned from author Nation was kind of building that ecosystem and having, you know, an advertiser or even, I would say, a business mindset. As you look at your ad budget and ad spend and the results you're getting, the next thing that, like I said, I think I mentioned change is. Has picked up. I mean, I feel like every year people say things are changing at a more rapid pace, but really with AI and all the tools and all of the opportunities and challenges that are created from that, I do think things change fast, and they are going to continue to change fast for a little while. And as a result, I think it was Joe Solare or somebody else on one of the big main stages. He was talking about how you can't have a rigid plan. And I think this is true in business, too, and I think it's always been true. But as the speed of change picks up, I think it's more and more important to know where you're going, but be flexible about how you get there. And that is because the path you're going to take will inevitably change with doors that open with opportunities as well as new challenges. Because as things change, you know, I get excited when things change because I always think, wow, when things are changing, that means there's opportunity. Change is what creates the new businesses and the new, you know, the new, like, you know, there was iPhone was a change at one point, right? And, you know, there's an opportunity in the market. When the Internet came, suddenly things. Everything changed. You know, even if you go back into. Into time, when the automobile came along, things changed rapidly. And when those things happen, it's scary and it's unsettling, but it's also exciting because that's when there's room for new ideas. That's when there's room for new voices, and there's plenty of opportunity for you to step up and create something great. In that era of change, when everything's the same, it's a lot harder to kind of get out there and really have people pay attention to you because they're comfortable, they're happy, everything's going kind of the way they want. But when things are unsettled and unrest and there's unrest, people are looking for new guidance and new paths. So I think it's kind of exciting. But you have to have a plan. You have to know where you're going. But I think you have to be flexible in how you get there. And that came through in quite a few sessions as people were talking about how, you know, adapting new ideas and trying things and not everything works. You know, this is one thing I always try to tell authors that talk to us about working with book launchers, because they come in and they're like, okay, this is what I want to do. This is my goal. This is, you know, this is what has to be. And then they ask me for guarantees and I like, look, there's, there's really, there's not a way to guarantee this. What we do is we try something, we see if it works. If it does, we lean into it. If it doesn't, we're going to try something new. And, you know, and if something works and it's working, you keep doing it. But then you try other things along the way too, to see if you can find other things that'll work so that you can layer them on top of each other to create maximum momentum over time. But that doesn't happen if you kind of come in with a rigid plan of, this is what I have to do. This is, you know, this is what has to happen. You know, you may miss out on a lot of opportunities and sometimes your path works, but a lot of times you have missed out on something. One of the other things that was talked about, you know, I actually had a session on it, but it was talked about in several other sessions was free books and how the strategy of giving free books has evolved over time. Now my, my personal session was on free books for business and brand growth. And I did talk about something I heard in several other sessions as well, which is I'm not a fan of any sort of free book giveaway for nonfiction authors. As far as, you know, making it free on Amazon or going through some of those free book promo sites. You know, to me it's like throwing a cannon in a lake. You know, you're going to hit some things, but I don't know how effective it's going to be for your overall big picture goals. But free books can be incredibly valuable if you give them away strategically. And that was kind of my whole session which was about that. But in other sessions, they talked a lot about how Amazon doesn't value free books at all. It used to have value. The algorithm changed and now you can barely find the free books on Amazon. They don't show up in the also bots. So while you may want to do a free book giveaway on Amazon, it doesn't count towards sales. It doesn't really. It can help you with reviews, but it rarely does. You know, platforms like Apple Books, they actually treat a free book download like a sale so you can use it to rank in different charts so it has more value in a platform like that. Apple Books also has a more easily found free list of books, like a book of. Sorry, a list of free books that you can find a lot easier. Trying to find free books on Amazon if you don't know where you're looking, it's, it's, it's a challenge. It's like a maze that you gotta know the way, you gotta know your way in to get to that list now. So it's changed a lot now. Free books is more of a strategy for fiction authors who use it as an entry point into their series. And so you hear a lot about it for fiction authors, for nonfiction, there's times when free books can. Free book giveaways can be useful, but generally speaking, I would, you know, I'm only going to do a free book giveaway through a platform like Goodreads or somewhere else where the goal and the outcome that you're going after is reviews. By the way, speaking of reviews, get authentic book reviews. I don't have an affiliate link or any sort of promotional link with them right now, but I've been testing their service and just in the last week I got three new reviews for Self Promote and Succeed Through Their service. So I'm pretty excited about what I'm seeing. So if you're, if you've used them, I'd love to hear your feedback. Um, and I, I'm in conversations with the, the creator, the founder of it, and I'll probably work on getting some sort of a deal for, for you guys and see if, you know, I don't think they're that expensive anyways, but, but yeah, I'm testing them. I've not done the test, but I'm pretty excited because it's only been on for a little bit over a week and I've already got three reviews. One's a four star but still positive review and two were five star, you know, quite glowing reviews, which I thought was pretty, pretty awesome. So, sorry, a little tangent, but I'm, I'm always looking for new book review sites for authors and for non fiction, it can be tricky to find good ones. So. Oh, Efren is giving a free book to Zac Efron tomorrow, friends with his current bodyguard and he's expressed interest in my content. So why not? If you can get a picture of giving him your book, I mean, that's, that's gonna be epic. I love that. Okay, just seeing who else is here. Dr. Natasha's in the house. Welcome, welcome. And Jason has joined late, but is here. That's really all that matters. So thank you for joining in, Jason. Okay. All right. I see a couple questions. You can go ahead and post questions and we'll have time at the end. But right now I'm going to pop in and do a couple of the prizes. So I missed last two weeks ago because I was sick. Thank you, Author Nation, for giving me information and germs. But although I'm blaming Efren. Efren was sick, and I was around Efren a lot. So I'm blaming you, Efren, for the cold, but because I kept my distance from. No, I didn't. I hugged everybody. I did not keep my distance from anybody. Okay, so I'm gonna go in and share. I'm gonna share the price screen. So there's two different prizes if you're new here. We give prizes for participating. So if you haven't already said hello, it's always a good time to say hello when you've joined in on the live or. Or if you're watching the replay, you can also say hello. Because we give two different kinds of prizes. We give prizes for the day a video comes out for commenting on that video on the day it comes out, and then we also give prizes for those of you who are here live. So both. Both ways to get some of our fabulous prizes. And Speaking of prizes, December 14, 10:00am Pacific Standard Time, 1:00pm Eastern Standard Time. Come back here. We are doing our annual holiday extravaganza. So if you haven't seen our holiday extravaganzas in the past, you've missed out. We have multiple people from our team, maybe a surprise guest or two. We're going to spend two hours answering your questions and giving you prizes. Yep. We have mugs. We have journals. Basically, this is Angela's, like, clear out my storage closet session of the year. So she looks forward to the holiday extravaganza so she can have room in her closet for just a few brief weeks until I fill it again. But. And I can see she's laughing. You guys. You guys can't see her, but I can see she's. She's laughing because it's true. We've been doing this for years, but we give away tons of prizes and we answer questions, and you get to hear from some of the fabulous people on the Book Launchers team, not just me. So be sure to join us December 14th at 10:00am Pacific Standard Time. And I'll be happening right here. Yeah, angel just posted. It's not a lie. Help me clear out the swag. So. But speaking of that, right now I'm going to pop in. Hopefully it'll work for me. Sometimes it does not like me. And I am going to share my screen streams and recordings studio. Where is it? I think this is the wrong one. No, that's not it. And that's not it. Let's try this. Let's see what happens. Nope, that's not it. Oh, okay. Now you know what, Angela? I think I just made it. So it's not going to let me share. Let's see. Oh no, it's okay. I'm still can share, but it's not letting me share the right one. All right, let me. Oh, I see what happened. Okay, this was user error, not a technical glitch. I'm rusty. One month without doing a live stream and I am not on my game. Okay, here we go. You guys should be seeing this. Great. Maybe seeing it. Nope, you're still not seeing it. Okay. I don't know, Angela. It's not liking me. See, try one more thing. You guys, thank you for sticking with me while I'm just randomly talking to myself trying to fix this sharing thing. Okay, let's see. It wouldn't let me work for that. We'll try one more time. Get your comments in. That's right. This is just buying you time to say hello so you can get a prize while I am. Oh, there it is. Okay, got it. I did it. I did it. Hooray. Okay. Angela was getting ready. She's like, okay, I'm gonna get pulled onto here any second now. Okay, so heading on over. So this is everybody who has commented on Tuesday and Friday when a new video has come out. That's gonna be my first prize and I owe you guys an extra one because we missed a week. So here we go. Let's see who our first prize is. KJ. KJ's in the house. So your choices are journal mug, self promote and succeed or self publish and succeed. And we also have some of Dale Roberts books as well, which I was saving for the holiday extravaganza. But kj, I think you've won a lot of our prizes and you may be interested in something different. So Angela, which if you want to post in the comments, which of Dale Roberts books we have to give away and they are real pretty version of his books. So she's going. She's just checking. I see. She's just left to go check. So congratulations, KJ. And you'll need to email teamoklaunchers.com with your mailing address and your prize choice. All right, so the other thing we're going to do is everybody who's here today and has said hello, we're going to choose one and then we'll choose another one in a little bit. So there's 14 people that have said hello, of course, book launchers does not count. All right, Scotland Scorpion, I believe you've won before, which is fine. You're welcome to win more than once. But let us know which prize you would like and where she should mail it. So Angela will go ahead and post that in the comments. And congratulations and thank you for being here. Okay, so back to my Author Nation takeaways. Physical books. Oh yeah, this was a good one. I just noticed on my note. So physical books, a lot of people are actually I've had calls with people who are just planning to release an ebook, and and I always strongly encourage them to create a physical version of the book. And this is for multiple reasons. But one of the big things is that and I heard this even in the fiction rooms, which I was a little surprised at because I thought it was mostly a nonfiction thing. But physical books are still outselling the other formats. And even if you take all the other formats in aggregate in the nonfiction space, most of the data shows that physical books are still outselling. So one of the stats I saw, and I'm going from memory, but I believe, oh, it didn't have audiobook in it, but more than 54. Or did it? I don't think it did, but more than 54% of the sales. Oh, yeah, because it had hardback. That's what it was. Soft. It was soft. Cover was 54%. Ebook was like 20 some. And the rest was the hardcover. So when you look at that, it was three quarters of the sales were actually in a physical book. And you know, many of the stats I've seen have said this. Even if you combine ebooks and audiobooks, the physical book is still outselling the ebook and audiobook. And I get excited about physical books anyways because people will not throw them out. They pass them along. They'll give them away. They'll donate them to the library. But rarely are they going to throw a book out versus your eBook. You know, it's on your digital device and that's it. And one of the stats I heard was that a physical book is typically touched by seven different people, whereas a digital book is handled by an average of 1.8. So another reason to get your physical book out there in the world as much as you possibly can. But also, if you were considering publishing a book without a physical book, I strongly recommend that you reconsider and make sure you have a good quality physical book to compare to, you know, to be part of your portfolio of books. Final thing was, of course, selling direct was still a topic of discussion last year. It was kind of a theme that emerged this year. It's kind of like AI. It's a given. It was a conversation piece in a lot of rooms, and it was more, you know, tweaking how to do it than, you know, speaking about. It's the way to go. But more and more people were talking about funnels, which is great because I've been talking about funnels for years and years, and. And I think it's a vital piece for just about every author. You know, there's always exceptions, so I'm not going to say every author, but just about every author should have some sort of a funnel. Whether you're selling direct through a store that you've set up on Shopify or not, or you're, you know, you're using the Ingram Share and Sell link, which works as well, or you're just collecting email addresses and then getting them to go buy it from somewhere else. You should be building a platform and having some sort of a funnel. Now, if one of the interesting points that I heard, and I think it was Pierre Gente said this in his session was, he's talking about, okay, look at how Amazon funnels people through their system and they create awareness and then they create interest, and then they're going to try and convert you. So it's showing you the things you might like to buy over and over again. You probably don't even realize it. And then all of a sudden it's going to pop up in front of you. You're going to be like, oh, yes, I need that, or I want that, and you'll start to buy it. So starting to look at how you're selling books and mimic these funnels that clearly work, they've put a lot of time, energy and effort, money into creating funnels that convert. So starting to look at some of those funnels and just recreate that kind of ecosystem and feeling in your own platform. Now, how people are selling direct varies widely. Some people are selling enough that it makes sense to get their book warehoused and they'll sell through Shopify and have the warehouse fulfill the Shopify order. That's the most cost effective way to do it, but only if you're selling hundreds, if not, you know, more than a thousand books a month. If you are getting that kind of a volume through your direct sales funnel, that warehouse option is a great option for you because you can print your books for the cheapest possible amount, and then the warehouse will ship them through media mail. And then the warehouse usually has a small fee per item touched and a warehousing fee. But it really only makes financial sense if you're. If you're selling a decent volume through direct sales. So the bigger authors with many books, you know, that's an option that works really well for them. Some clients of Pierre's, actually, he has his own little warehouse system that he runs for his clients and other people that want to pay him, but, you know, they're running. They're spending a lot of money on ads on Facebook ads, Google Ads, and they're selling that way. And so that can be a really, really effective methodology for them. Book Vault is also, you know, selling an option for fulfillment for physical books. Lulu is an option for physical books. And then, of course, we have book funnel and StoryOrigin for digital. StoryOrigin is great if you're just selling ebooks, and Book Funnel is great if you're selling or giving away ebooks and audiobooks for the back end. So that was. Those are kind of the main places that everybody was talking about. There's other things like payhip and some of these other options, but these other systems have really honed in on the author community and have developed so that they are, you know, really supporting, but also answering kind of the needs of authors in a lot of different ways. So, yeah, those were my highlights from Author Nation, and I'm just looking to see. Okay, it looks like we've got questions. Stephen just joined. Hello, Stephen. Welcome. And of course, if you guys aren't familiar with the Outstanding Creator Awards, you should absolutely check them out. Our. One of our clients, Jonathan Stanley, I don't know if I have. Have his book he. He cleaned up on at the Outstanding Creator Awards. I have my medal over there anyway, so welcome, and let's go back and do a few more prizes, and then I'll get questions from you, Angela. So let's finish up the prizes for the last. The last session and this session that I owe you guys for prizes. All right. Okay, so let's see. Where are we here? Random name picker. All right, so KJ is a winner. KJ might be picked again, but it can't win twice in the Same day. So. So we will try to pick somebody new for a prize, which would be our journal. Beautiful. Oh, so soft. Journal, Maryland. Jones. Thank you for your comments, shares and likes, of course. So you have a journal, you have our hashtag, no boring books. Mug a copy of self publish and succeed or self promote and succeed. And I just dropped part of me, my blue blocker glasses on the floor. All right, so I'm going to do one more. This is from people who commented on the day a video came out. So if you're watching the replay, you can always comment. And of course I do my best to reply, but also you get entered to win. So, Jason Ward, I think you just arrived too, for the live stream. So congratulations, my friend. You've arrived just in time to let Angela know what your prize is. So email Angela at team t e a m@book launchers.com, let her know your mailing address as well as which of the prizes that you would like. Okay, now let's do some questions, please. All right, so based on your professional experience, what would be the most effective way to mark? I assume that's market a new five star book online as a new author, a new five star book. I'm assuming that means you've had five star Amazon reviews. I mean, this is way too general. So I mean, a general answer to a question like this for me would be first of all, focus on getting reviews. And then second is depending on what the book is, find other people's audiences to put your book in front of. So this can be going through podcast interviews, this can be writing articles for magazines or platforms, newsletters that can be, you know, potentially submitting to speak, partnering with other people. There's lots of different ways, but I think the first thing is to make sure your metadata is on point and you have a decent number of reviews. And then you can start to do a lot of other things. You know, everything will start to perform better once your book page is up to speed and looking good, which we've done many. We've, we've talked about the Amazon page and what to look for many times. Um, so there should be, I don't know, I don't know if there's a specific video to, to get Angela to send you to, but it's certainly something we've talked about a lot and making sure that's in place so that it's performing well and then you can start doing a bunch of other things. And of course, self promote and succeed is your guide. Right. So that's why I wrote it. Self Promote and Succeed will guide you through what to do to sell your book, especially if it's a nonfiction book. So. All right, next one is from Shannon. Anyone know how Amazon accepts the ISBN number dashes or no dashes? I don't know. I don't do any of that. We have people on our team that. That upload all of those things, but I don't think there's dashes in it. That's. Sorry, it's. I don't mean to sound like it's a strange question. I'm sure it's a very needed question, but I would think that there's no dashes in it, but I don't know. Again, I haven't uploaded a book in forever. I joke, but not. It's not completely a joke that I created book launchers so that I would never have to upload any of my books ever again. So I don't do those. Those steps. Somebody on my team does, but I don't think there's dash. Anybody else. Is that it? There's no other questions. All right, sweet. So I've got one other prize for you folks that are here today and I will once again share my screen and that is not the right one. Let me switch it to the Streamyard giveaway and. Oops. Streamyard giveaway. And then it should automatically change and I will go ahead and draw again. Antoine Lincoln, congratulations. I think you're a new winner. I don't know if I've ever seen you win before, so thank you for being here and joining in our livestream. Fun. And what you need to do is email angelaeamteamook launchers.com and let her know which of our prizes you would like. And they again, it's self promote and succeed, self publish and succeed and the mug or the journal. And if you're outside of the United States, we only will send the books. The mug is the duty, and shipping it doesn't make it. It's just not worth it for you or for us. So you could choose one of those other ones. But email her your mailing address as well as which prize you would like. And thank you for being here. Okay, so let's see. I think I saw another one. Oh, Efren was asking what is the review company you referenced earlier? It's Get Authentic book reviews, but if you hold tight, I think I'm going to have some sort of a deal from them because we are working with the founder. So you can go check them out. But email me efren and I'll see if we're getting some sort of a deal, and then we'll get a affiliate link from them. So you might be able to get a discount on their service. Now, heads up on that one. The way they work is a point system. So in order to get reviews, to get points, to get reviews, you have to give reviews to other books. So it's a little bit more work than, say, a book sprout, which you just submit your book and people are, you know, reading books and reviewing them. This one is more. It's not an exchange. Right. Because that's against Amazon's terms and conditions. But our terms of service, it's basically a point system. So you would review somebody else's book, and then that gets you points, that you can now submit your book. You can request that your book then be reviewed. So I assume at some point, once she has the community built up enough that she'll probably have a pay to play, so you won't always have to review other people's books. There'll be enough of a community there. But it's not an exchange, right, because it's. You're. You're volunteering to review somebody's book, and then you review it, and then you get points, and then somebody else volunteers to read your book and they review it and gets points for. For posting the review. Okay. All right. I see a couple more questions. Yeah, I was gonna say, I think I saw somebody else's question. So, Antoine, one of our winners of the day. What if I have a controversial celebrity in my book due to some recent incidents, what should I do? Should I remove the person? I don't know the answer to this. Yeah, there's just so many. There's so many things. I mean, I don't know what the recent incidents are. I don't know what your book is about. I don't know how that may or may not be a detriment or an advantage to your book. I don't know how this celebrity would think about it. So, yeah, Diddy. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know who it would be or what it would. You know, what the. Yeah, I'm sorry, Antoine. I don't think I can even come up with a good answer without knowing a lot more information. Because it's ultimately, you know, there can be legal ramifications in this situation. There can be reputational ramifications. The one thing I'll tell you is if your book is already out, if you then go ahead and try to remove it after the fact. You know, there's still copies that'll be out there that you'll never get back. So, you know, probably talk to a lawyer, unless it's more of a reputational thing that you're wondering about. Oh, and then I saw Angela did look up the ISBN thing and it was without the hyphens. Correct. So no dashes. I think I saw you post that, Angela. Yeah, she's nodding. Okay, Dennis. How to deal with bad reviews. I got my first bad one star review recently on Smashwords. It hurt my feelings, but not the sales. I'm just ashamed to sell it at this point and talk about my books. So I actually, I filmed the video with Efren because he got a one star review too. And I loved what he said, which was that he was celebrating his one star review and he actually used it in his marketing. Now, it depends what this one star reviewer says, but I agree generally with the approach to celebrate the one star review because people are paying attention. They're not going to post one star reviews if you haven't done something to get their attention. But also, you know, a lot of times a one star review can be a really good piece for advertising. So marketing the book to show people, hey, like, look at what this one star reviewer said. And hey, they're right about this part. But that's because I didn't write it for that kind of a person. I wrote it for this kind kind of a person. And so there can be opportunities to kind of leverage it. And then that helps kind of neutralize it emotionally for you as well. Because if you're not, if you're using it and you're kind of celebrating it, then it loses some of its power. But the reality is like, they hurt. And I was reading some of the reviews on my book, Self Publish and Succeed. I hadn't looked at reviews in a long time and I was reading some of them and I was like, there was one. I think it was a three star review. They put a lot of effort into that review. It hurt a lot because they kind of highlighted some things that I was like, that's kind of mean. But at the end of the day I started to think about it and I'm like, you know what? We need to re. We need to redo self publish and succeed anyways. Not redo it, but have a second edition. It's time. It's been out for a while. Book Launchers has learned a lot. We've worked with hundreds of clients since we put that book into the world. And we've gotten really clear on our brand and our process and, you know, we've really refined how we do things to the point. Not that I think anything in that book is wrong, but I can write and improve things from it. And that review kind of highlighted a few things that I was like, yeah, you know what, that's a, that's a fair point. So for me, I kind of look at. I actually don't read the reviews very often, but I was looking at them for something. I can't remember why. And you know, that's one approach. So ultimately, I'm, I'm sorry, but one star reviews are, you know, the good news is that means people are paying attention and sometimes that's the hardest thing. But I don't know if that helps. But Efren had. Efren did do the video, and we'll be putting it together in the near future to help all of us celebrate our one star reviews. Kevin says the worst is not getting a one star review. But personally, I do not like it when I get a review that is a two. Yeah, two. Two. No. Comments really stink. Right? I agree with that. Like, if you get a one or a two, but they don't even take the time to tell you why, they just post it. I tend to think those are knee jerk reactions. Like, I hate the color orange and your cover has orange on it. Boom, one star. I don't know if that's what they do, but that's how it feels. That's how it feels as an author, right? Completely. Okay. Dale Roberts got a tough review from us about two years ago. He came back with a much better book. Yeah. Awesome, Stephen. Yeah, and that's true. Like, I think that if you can take, if you can look at your reviews, some of them are just mean. Like they just react to something. They have a knee jerk reaction and it's not fair. Sometimes you get a one star review because Amazon sent them a book that got crumpled in the mail. Like, I mean, that's not your fault. That has nothing to do with the book. But they're mad at Amazon and so they go on Amazon and they post a one star review, which has nothing to do with you or the quality of your book. So that does happen. But what, like I said with this three star review that I was reading, the person took a lot of time and effort to write an elaborate review. And it just made me go, you know what? There's, there's some merit in this and I think it's time we rework we rework the book because it's been enough time that a second edition, you know, makes sense. So I think there's opportunity within reviews to learn and grow and, you know, like Stephen said, become a better author and make a better book. So let's see. I would love to hear your thoughts on how Chat GPT has impacted self publishing. That's a general. A general comment. So AI, so not just chatgpt, but AI has evolved the self publishing industry in a lot of ways, but it's also created some challenges. And the challenges are, in my view, the fact that there's a lot more books coming on the market at a lot faster pace. And, you know, that doesn't mean there's a lot of good books, but it still means you have that many more books that you have to wade through to stand out in the crowd. But I also think that AI has allowed us to be more efficient and streamlined and we can do faster research. We can. You know, I was showing the team today, we have AI tip Tuesday in our team meetings and I was showing them how, you know, with Chat GPT, I like, I use it for therapy and ideas. It's just like I'm tell. I'm asking Chat GPT like, okay, based on all of our conversations, what do you think my greatest opportunity as an author is? What do you think Book Launcher's greatest opportunity is? What, you know, show me a picture of what you think my day is. Which is freaky because it was. I'll maybe show. I'll maybe post the picture in the YouTube community afterwards because it was kind of funny. We were just at Star wars, the Galaxy's Edge in Disney World last week, and my son got a porg, a little baby. And I was asking ChatGPT what to name the porg. And so there's a whole bunch of porgs in my picture of what my day looks like. It's quite funny. But I think, I think there's opportunities and challenges and I think for me at least the challenges are more like, how do you stand out in a small of books? And also how do you get through all the issues that are cropping up on all the platforms that are also trying to protect themselves from crappy content and from, you know, frauds, from people who are committing fraud with, you know, taking other people's content and just turning it into some other format. But I also get excited because I think the more that you. The more that people use AI, the more being a human is going to be more and more valued and More and more important. And so, from a self publishing standpoint and a business standpoint, I love AI. I never have to start with a blank page. I never have to worry about. I have no idea of what to do here. I always have somebody who's there 24, 7 ready to answer my questions and even just give me a starting point, which is awesome. And then there's always new tools evolving to make our job easier, cheaper and more efficient, which is fantastic. But I also think it's an opportunity because the more you are human, the more people are going to connect with you. Because the people who write a book with AI, as good as AI is getting, that's still missing that human connection. It's missing that human lens. And then, of course, we want to know that people are human. The number of people that will say, are you a robot? Are you a human? There's even commercials now that are making jokes about that. I think that humanity piece and connecting with people, so doing videos so they can see you're not just a bot, doing things that showcase your humanity and connect with other humans is going to be the way forward. Which is great because that does give many of us an opportunity to create a platform, build an audience and build deeper connections, and then we can do it all more efficiently with AI. I just read Angela's thoughts on. Of course. And of course, Chat GPT created pork books. Yeah, it was. It was pretty funny. So I'll definitely post that in. In the community on. On. On. In the. In the YouTube channel, but also on our school platform. I'll post it there. So if you're on our school platform, you'll see it in. In the community as well as on the YouTube channel. All right, so I just see some other people commenting. Great. That's awesome. I think we're done. No other questions. All right, so December 14th, our holiday extravaganza. Q&A. It's two hours. I highly recommend you join in. It's going to be two hours of festive fun. You can ask my team all the questions. We've got Alyssa. I think Alyssa is going to be there. She's our production manager. She oversees writing, editing, distribution. She's the one that would know the answer to that ISBN question because she uploads all the books, does all the things. Sarah Bean, our book marketing manager, she's. She's going to be here. She does. She oversees all of our marketing. So if you've got book marketing questions, she is your gal. And then, Angela, you're going to be there too. So you can ask Angela any questions. Ask her what's in her closet, and I don't know. Is Shane going to be there? I think we have. Might have a couple other people. I'm not sure. And I'm working on a couple surprise guests as well, so it should be lots of fun. So please do join in on the holiday extravaganza. Otherwise, I'll see you back here in two weeks and we'll talk about what's in store for all of us in 2025. All right, thanks, everybody. Thanks, Angela.