Authors Should You Go Exclusive with Audible Plus More | LIVE Replay

Hey, folks, welcome, welcome. Today is our live Tuesday and I'm super excited to have you tuning in live or for the replay. Whenever you get here, do say hello and let me know that you are here so that I can give you a shout out my appreciation. If you're watching the replay on YouTube, definitely comment and join in the fun as though we are alive. And I will comment back to you like we're live, so it'll be pretend. But you know, it's still a fun way for us to hang out. And then mark your calendar so you can be here next time I'm live so we can hang out for real. So the next one will be happening on April 16th, I believe. I didn't write it down this time. April 16th at 2pm Pacific Standard Time. Always Tuesday, every other Tuesday. So if you can make it, I would love it if you are here live because sometimes I'm kind of talking to myself or just, you know, my mom or just a few people. So I'm always very grateful for those of you who join live, but of course super grateful for all of you tuning in whenever you watch this. So do say hello. All right, we have lots to cover today. I kind of just decided to make today a show of randomness. Let's just talk about a bunch of things that come out all the time, come up all the time amongst my team who are working on people's books and of course, questions that come in from you YouTube viewers and other places. So I'm just going to dive in. But hey, if you first time watching, I'm Julie Broad of Book Launchers. And yeah. Oh, before I do that, I want to give you just a quick heads up. If you are in the Los angeles area on April 11, happening out in Burbank at Dark Delicacies are a fantastic author, Scott Bradley, the author of Screaming four plus Pleasure, he's having an event. He's going to be in la. Yay, Scott. And he's having an event at Dark Delicacies and it's going to be a live reading from his book as well as a live podcast interview with Heidi Honeycutt. So for horror fans or just author supporters, which are always very much appreciated, this is a great opportunity for you guys to all get together and support each other. His book here, just grab it off my shelf back here. So there we go. There's Scott's book, Screaming for Pleasure. Still one of my favorite covers ever. I just love this cover. Love this book, actually. And the author, he's a fantastic guy and it really, really is an incredible book. So, yeah, so that's happening at Dark Delicacies at. I didn't write down the time, but I think it's at 7pm on April 11. You can check out his Instagram hellbentforhorror. I think he also has a Facebook page, hellbentforhorror, so you can check that for details on that event and to rsvp. So that's very cool. And I'll just dive into number one exclusive. Should you go exclusive with Audible? And this is a question that we've had come up a lot with clients and even in some of the YouTube comments. So here's the thing. Audible is still the primary and actually you should have got some stats. I didn't make some stats on this, but Audible is still the primary place that people are listening in North America, that people are listening to audiobooks, but they are not the whole market. And there is a lot of reason why I wouldn't go exclusive with Audible. From us, from financial perspective alone, if you go exclusive with audible, you get 40%. If you are not exclusive with Audible, you will get paid 25%. The kicker of this is their exclusivity contract is for seven years. Long time now we've talked with them and acx, which is who you go through to get onto Audible. If you go that exclusive route, they will release you from that exclusivity after a year. And even we were talking to them about one of our clients and they said that they would even consider releasing her after six months. So that exclusivity, if you have produced your own audiobook, so you haven't done one of their royalty shares with a narrator, that is an option. They will release you. And the person that we talked to said they haven't seen a request to be released from that exclusivity be denied. That said, being exclusive with Audible means your book isn't available on a lot of platforms that you may want to be on. So what I typically recommend is you upload to ACX for Audible and you get your 25% and then you use a service like Authors Republic or Findaway Voices. My book, I went through Authors Republic, I think that was three years ago now because they were pretty much the only one that would work with a Canadian. Things have changed now. But at the time that was the only way I could actually get my audiobook out there was to go through Authors Republic. Today I do typically recommend our clients work with Findaway Voices, but I love Authors Republic. They are a solid option. They are great authors, but find a way Voices is really innovative and they're really working hard to provide a ton of platforms for you to get your book out there. A few to note are they have a better split with Apple. Off the top of my head, I don't actually think I wrote it down. They will give you, I think, 45% with Apple through ACX. I think you're getting 40 if you're exclusive and 25 if you're not. So it's a better deal to go through them for Apple Books. But they've also expanded and they are the partner for Chirp. Now. If you don't know what Chirp is, this is going to be probably a bunch of things that you may not know about bookbubble. And if you're not familiar with bookbub, it's a big mess. So this is why you work with a company like Book Launchers, because we just tell you what to do and we've got all this stuff figured out. But bookbub is a promotional platform for books and it's a great way to get your book out there. I did a BookBub promotion for my first book. I was actually able to get one. They're really hard to get. And it. And just the response was incredible. How many books can be sold in a short period of time. So they have a database of readers that is millions and millions and millions of people deep. And they have now come up with an audiobook platform called Chirp and Find a Way Voices is their partner in this. And what that means is now you can access and promote to those millions and millions of readers on bookbub, which was not a way promoting your audiobook in this way was not available previously. So there's a lot of reasons why I am very pro going wide. And the reality is you're never going to know where you would make the most amount of money. So I'm more about let's have the widest amount of reach. And the more support we as authors give all these other platforms that are trying so hard to give us options, the less we have to rely on a single entity, AKA Amazon, in this case Audible and acx. So the more you give them, the more you're feeding that monster and that monster just gets bigger and bigger. Oh, hey, Nicole. Thank you. So it's really, really important, I think, to go wide, not just look at the numbers, to look at the other reasons to to go wide. But there's, you know, financially it's 40% if you go exclusive with ACX and 25% if you don't. And Audible will probably be your biggest market. So something to consider. Findaway Voices lists all of the places where your book is available. Just so you know, overdrive is the library system. And there's several ways that you get paid through these different platforms and the different service providers for the library system. Typically it's upon checkout. If it's a. If they have an unlimited, what they call it an unlimited subscription model, like with storytelling, I think that's an unlimited subscription model. Usually the person has to listen to at least 15% of your audiobook and then you'll get paid for that as though it was a single license purchase. Also worth noting that with ACX and Audible, you cannot set the price of your book. They set it. You have zero control over that. So to me, that's another reason to spread out your distribution, because on Apple, if you go through Findaway Voices, you can then set your price. So this is a big subject. Hopefully I've answered the question in a little bit of detail for those of you who've been asking. All right. And if you're here, do say hello like Nicole did. All right, so number two, Amazon. In the last couple weeks, there's been a lot of stuff in the news about Amazon now having to charge sales tax in multiple states. And I had a call with someone on Monday. Today's Tuesday. Yeah, it's one of those weeks. And he was saying he didn't want to deal with selling his book on Amazon because he didn't want to have to fill out forms for every state. You won't have to do that. So if you've seen the news where Amazon's going to have to collect sales tax in all of these different states and you're freaking out that you have to fill out a bunch of paperwork. You don't. If you're going through, if you are an Amazon seller. So you have a product. So say you were, you know, say I decided to, you know, produce and distribute these fabulous book launchers, you know, hashtag NoBoringBooks, which is one of the prizes we've got for you guys today. You say, I wanted to sell these on Amazon and, you know, produce them and then distribute them via Amazon. I have to now fill out the sales tax forms. But we're going through print on demand companies like IngramSpark and even through KDP Print, and all that sales tax stuff happens through those systems. Okay. This is not something you have to deal with. You just get paid, you'll just get your royalty checks every 60 days and that's that. Okay. So you don't have to worry about that news announcement if that was freaking you out. Hey, Brian. Awesome. I'm hoping today is your lucky day. You're in this draw three times. This could be your day. So, yes, thank you. Thank you for tuning in and saying hello. Okay, number three, leveraging speaking engagements. This has been coming up quite a bit. We've had a few clients landing speaking engagements around their books and their promotion, which is great. And so I've been talking with different people about how to leverage those speaking engagements. So what can you do if you get a speaking engagement and maybe they're not paying you, because this is common. If you haven't already been a paid speaker speaker and you release a book, it doesn't mean your book automatically translates into paid speaking engagements. You need to have a demo reel. You need to show that you are worthy of being paid. So sometimes you have to work your way up to being paid. Or if you haven't been paid much and you're still missing a few of the elements, you may have to work your way up. So in the meantime, what can you be doing to leverage these speaking engagements? And a lot of it depends on the arrangement you have with the host and what's going on. But I recommend you consider and talk with whoever's running this event, see what your options are. So if you're not getting paid, the number one thing I'm looking at is how can I either sell books or generate leads? So in a lot of cases, unpaid gigs, they still will buy a copy of your book for every person in the audience. So that is still a tremendous opportunity for you. And again, if you're just joining in, say hello. I love to chat with you guys. And also if you're watching the replay, do say hello and chime in if you've got questions. If I covered something and you still have questions, post those questions. I on YouTube after, when I post the replay, I respond to every single question. And of course, while we're live, I'm definitely responding to every single question. So just so you know, okay, so talk with your host and see what options you have. But, you know, focus in on how can I generate leads for your newsletter. Right. Hopefully you. If you've been watching me long enough, you know that's your number one priority is to build your email newsletter list. So how can I build my email newsletter list and. Or sell books? That's your two things. So one of the Things. And I'm going to borrow this from Carol Cox, who's a brilliant speakers coach. She can help you craft a great talk if you need help with this. So you can look her up. Carol Cox, C O X is her last name. And she gave me this tip after she saw me speak at PodFest a couple of years ago. And she said, you know, she said one of the things that you could have done is pass around this evaluation form. So a lot of the companies or places where you might speak won't want you to collect email addresses. But if you just hear hand out an evaluation form saying, hey, here's a worksheet, you know, to go through my talk. And at the back there's an evaluation form, you know, have it be a tear off. They turn in the evaluation form, give you, you know, what was your favorite part of the talk, what could have been better. And at the bottom, if you'd like to get my freebie and get on my newsletter list, here's my email. Brilliant. You know, in most cases you're going to find 30 to 60% of the room fills out that evaluation form and a big chunk of them will say yes to your email newsletter. And you've done this without really offending anyone in you probably should ask for permission. In other cases, use your discretion and just do it again. Have a value add worksheet on the front and evaluation page on the back. And the evaluation page just has a simple invitation to join your email newsletter list. That's the cleanest way to do this. Also, you can ask if you can set up a table at the back of the room. So if you're speaking at an association, hey Larry, welcome. Good to see you. If you're speaking at an association meeting or some sort of club, in a lot of cases, they would be happy to have you set up a table at the back of the room. If they're not buying books already and sell books now, it's not going to be huge. But it does two things. It makes people even more aware of your book. And you will sell books. There will be, if your talk was even remotely interesting, you will sell books. And you know, you could probably sell your book for 20 bucks even if it's on Amazon for 16 because you're signing it, people will grab it while they're there. And this is also a great profit margin opportunity for you because your book probably costs you roughly $5 at the end of the day after it's shipped to you. Printing costs all that. And you could sell it for 20 dol. You know, you sell 10 books, that's 150 bucks. And now your book is in the hand of 10 people. And you probably will do even better than that in many, many cases. So lots of options. But you have to ask. This is not something you can just show up with a case of books. And I've actually had a lot of the talks that I did. They would buy a case of books and they would sell it and they would have me sign it while I was there. So that's totally fine with me too. Either way, I'm getting my books into hands of readers and I'm getting a little bit of a pay. So I highly recommend that as an option. If they're not paying you and they're not already buying books, ask. There's certainly going to be some events. You know, some of the bigger events won't let you do this, but even I did this at in Canada. My first book called More Than Cash Flow was a real estate book. And I did a lot of speaking at the Canadian real estate wealth magazines. They had this thing called the Investor Forum. And in the early years, they, I mean, they, they pretty much didn't pay anybody except for their one single famous keynote speaker. But I did a lot of keynotes with them and for them. And in exchange they would cover my expenses, my travel expenses, and they would usually give me a booth or a table. And so at that booth or table I would sell books. And some, some events I actually sold, like I would make 5, 6, $700 selling books, plus, you know, building my business and building my email database. So it can be a pretty lucrative way for you to go, let the audience know. So another way to leverage. This is number three. I think another way to leverage your speaking engagements is just really quick. At the end, you can just say, hey, listen, I'd love to speak to more fantastic people like you. So if you guys are part of any other group that should have a speaker like me come in, you know, please connect me after the, after this talk or something like that. You probably can find a more eloquent way to say it, but ask people. Let people know you're looking for more speaking engagements, especially if they're within driving distance of where you're at. Because again, if you've got a book to sell, you want to get out there. Also, if you want to become a paid speaker, you need to just get out there and have people see you talk. Even if you're not getting paid in the beginning, you need to get Demo reel material, which leads into my next point, which is film these things. In very rare cases, the organizers will say no, but generally speaking, there's no issue with you setting up a camera and filming you doing these talks. And that is great because now you've got more demo reel material. You might be able to take clips for your YouTube channel. You might be able to put clips on social media for your, you know, to further promote your book and to let people know you're a speaker, you're doing talks. So another great way to do it. And like I said, very rarely is anybody going to say no. They may just ask you, not if it's a paid event that you're speaking at. They may just ask you not to make your presentation publicly available for at least a year. Finally, ask for testimonials. So, and this is largely for you to ask for testimonials of the hosts, because if you're trying to get more speaking engagements, more opportunities to get your book out there and ask the hosts, do you know of anybody else that would like a speaker, would like me to come in and give a talk? Can you connect me to other organizations that are like you, that kind of thing. But ask them for testimonials and collect those and you can use those on your website, you can use those on your Speaker One sheet, all those kind of things. Which actually, now that I'm thinking about, we should talk about Speaker One sheets. One day. We create media kits and speaker one sheets for everybody that works with book launchers. And now that I'm thinking about it, I should showcase some of those because they're pretty awesome. I love our one sheets and our media kits that we put together for clients. I think they're spectacular. So we should probably talk about those in the future because that will help you too. Number four topic today. And again, if you've got questions about what I've just talked about, please post questions. I know sometimes I just rifle through because I have so much stuff I want to share. But do ask questions, I'm happy to answer them. So number four topic is table of contents. This isn't really a question, it's more like something that just comes up over and over again. We see so many books on a regular basis that have really weak table of contents. And so I thought I would take a minute now to just touch on what makes a great table of contents and why does it matter? So I've talked about this on the YouTube channel. There's several videos about Amazon and the Look Inside feature. And also just how when somebody picks up your book. Here's what I have on my desk. Think and Grow Rich. Right? Classic. It's on my desk. So. But if somebody sees this in the bookstore, for example, they pick it up, they look Think and Grow Rich. Okay, cool. Like the title? Yeah. Looks kind of interesting. What do they do? Sometimes they open to the middle, but usually they open to the table of contents. Now, Think and Grow Rich has a very bizarre table of contents, Right. I don't know if you guys remember this book, but their table of contents is really bizarre. So your book can be extremely successful even with a weird table of contents. But you want to set yourself up for the most success possible. So on Amazon, they're going to click, look inside, and they're probably going to go look at the table of contents in a bookstore or wherever they see your book physically, they're going to flip to the table of contents. And basically the thing that's going through their head is, have I read this stuff before? Is there anything interesting? Should I read this book? Should I bother spending money? Should I bother spending time? So your table of contents, if you've done a good job of creating a title and cover that makes people at least remotely interested, then your table of contents needs to seal the deal. I think, and I don't have, again, I don't have data on this, but I think people are more likely to buy a book based on the table of contents than the book description. I could be wrong. I'd love to do some sort of study on this and see if I can figure it out. But my bet is that the table of contents will weigh more heavily, heavily than a book description, even though most people are probably buying it online now. So your table of contents has to make them think they haven't read this before. So what you have to be very careful of is to not have a bunch of chapter headings that sound like everything else, sound like stuff they've read before. And that's what I see all the time. Because a lot of us are writing books that have been, that are in subject matter areas that have been covered before. That doesn't mean your book is the same as them. And that's why you need a table of contents that showcases that your book is different. So as an example, one that we worked on, and I don't have permission to share anything about this book, so I'm going to keep everything very vague. But this subject, or sorry, the chapter heading was Finding youg. Why Now? I don't know how many books have a chapter called Finding youg why? But I would venture there are dozens and dozens that have chapters called Finding youg why? I think I've even, I think I even have a chapter heading in one of my books is something like that. So it has to be different than that. It can't be Finding your why, because if somebody's looking at that, they're going to go, I've read that before. I already know that. So we dove into the content of this book and we found some things that were more interesting in that chapter. And so some of the things that we came up with were dreams and escape plans, dancing around your dream, your dream in a trust. So those were some of the things. So those are way more interesting and stuff you haven't read already. So you want to take it that little bit further. I'm just checking to see if I have any other ideas. Multiple streams of income. This one you hear all the time, right? Multiple streams of income. So what can you do to make that a little interesting? Maybe you're the cast, the cash catcher. Maybe you're trying to think, you guys can give me some ideas here of what you would do instead. Multiple streams of income. So the core benefits. So what we do is we go, okay, what's the core benefit of multiple streams of income? Well, the core benefit is that you're getting paid from various sources, right? So maybe it's how to pay your kids college tuition while you're on a beach. Or even better, how to have other people pay your college to it. Your kids college tuition while you're on the beach, right. So it's really diving in. And I'm just flying off the cuff on that one to kind of show you. But what you're doing is you want to have a killer benefit. Creates curiosity and really is what's in it for the reader. And that's either entertainment, something they don't already know, something that's going to make them curious. So it's got to be a hook of a good story, all those kind of things. And speaking of hook, this, everything on your table of contents needs to fit with the hook of your book. It's very, very important. So go through. If you're working on a book right now, go through your table of contents and ask yourself, does this chapter heading really sell my book on its own? Is that going to make somebody go, what's in this chapter? In my first book, More Than Cash Flow, I had a chapter called Where Are the Ladies? And just about every media interview I did was they would ask me that because they were curious. You know, I'm talking about. It's a real estate book written by a woman. I'm going, where are all the women? Like, there's no women in real estate. And this is real estate investing, not Realtors. Because sometimes people go, there's tons of realtors that are women. Like, yeah, but I'm talking investing. How does a. I bought houses. I used to say I'm a house collector. So that's. You really got to think about that. My second book, the New Brand, you had a chapter called you'd Are who Google says yous Are. And I actually had people ask me to create a talk out of that one. So if your chapter heading is so interesting, it could be a talk title. Cha Ching. Okay, that's a good thing. All right. Last thing I thought I would mention. Oh, thanks for the thumbs up. Whoever just gave me the thumbs up. I love thumbs up when you're on the Facebook Live because it flutters across the screen and the hearts flutter across the screen. So it's really, really fun. On YouTube, you don't get that. So that's one of the advantages of Facebook Live. Alright, so final, final topic I thought I would cover today before we do our draw to see who's the winner. Hey, that looked like Scott. Hey, Scott. Long time no see. Happy belated birthday. All right. Yeah. Callie treats me very well. The sunshine does not get old, Erwin. You gotta come down and visit. Okay, number five, final point of today, Facebook or sorry, not Facebook. I'm all, all excited because you guys gave me so many thumbs up there and it flew across the screen. It made me happy. Readers don't care who publishes your book. So I've had some conversations with people who are debating between traditional publishing and self publishing still. And I have a video on YouTube I highly recommend you watch. If you're still debating this yourself, there are very few situations where I believe you're better off to go with a traditional publisher. Today in 2019, I am very, very firm and not alone in saying that you are always better off self publishing in this day and age for a variety of reasons. And one of the big things people say to me is, well, you know, people are, you know, people are going to judge me. You know, if I self publish, they're going to think my book's lesser. And the reality is if you invest in your book and create a book that is the same quality or better than a traditionally published book, which is exactly what we do at Book Launchers. Nobody's going to know and nobody's going to care if your book is awesome and it helps them. That's all I care about. Nobody's going, oh, Wiley came out with a new book today. I have to go read Wiley's latest book. As in Wiley, the big major publishing company, nobody thinks that way. With the exception of maybe Harlequin Romance. Right. Harlequin Romance branded themselves as a company that publishes a certain type of book. But with that exception, I can't think of a publisher that maybe there's a couple, but, but there's very few publishers out there where people go, oh, this is by Joe Publishing. I gotta read Joe Publishing's next book. It's not how people think. They think about the author, they think about what's in it for them. So you just have to get them to hear about your book and then when they do pick it up, it has to be awesome. Because if it is lacking in editing, if it doesn't have the design that a traditionally published book would have, if you haven't got the professionals that have done it, they're going to see that it's self published and you're going to feel that and that will definitely detract from it. But if you create a great book that is as good or better than a traditionally published book, readers don't know and they don't care. All they care about is what they're getting from that book and then you just have to get it heard. And a traditional publisher doesn't do the marketing for you. The only real big advantage of traditional publishing in 2019 is that they have access to the distribution channels and a little bit more access to the bigger media, but they really only open the door for the bigger media for their bigger name clients. So you're kind of in a catch 22 there. So bookstore distribution is much, much better for traditionally published books. You can still get bookstore distribution as a self published book and in many cases it's worth it. But in many cases it's a lot of effort for very few sales. So something we could debate about another day. All right, that's it. Those are the five things I thought we could talk about today. Thanks, Larry. Brian said most people I know don't know the difference between traditional and self publishing. No, really, they know a good book and a crappy book. Right? Like that's, they're like, this book is not very good quality and this book is. That's what readers pay attention to and that's what they know. They don't know the difference. And again, like, little things like, here's my book. I'll use my book for a change. I usually show all our clients books, but I'll show mine, like, little things like, sorry, this, right. Getting a little, you know, getting your own little publishing company and putting a logo on it. That just makes it look professionally published. Right. You can't tell. And I've actually had people ask me, hey, can you connect me to Stick Horse Publishing? Sure. So little things like that will make it so readers really can't tell. So, you know, at the end of the day, that's really what matters, is quality. So it's time for draw. Now, if you don't know how to get into these draws, for these fabulous. We have lots of swag here. We've got. Well, not lots. We have a few different kinds of swag. We've got this fantastic, very coveted no boring books, noboringbooks Book launchers mug. That is one. And today, if you're a winner, you get a choice because I actually had a lot of names in there. You guys are awesome. My cuff literally runneth full with all you fabulous folks at YouTube. And then also our book launcher's journal. This is mine. So it's, you know, got a pen in it and written, but there we go. It's really soft. It's nice. So you can choose which one you would like today. Now, if you were wondering how do you get your name into this draw? What you need to do is on Tuesdays and Fridays when my videos come out, you just need to post a comment the day the video is released and you will be entered to win and you become one of my besties as well. You are very, very, very appreciated. I love and appreciate every single person who hangs out on my YouTube channel. You make my day. And I do remember you. And you might get a shout out, which Brian found out. Okay, so let' the draw so you know who wins the swag for this week. And let's see. I put this out here so you guys can see. I'm not looking at it, I'm looking at you. Okay, here we go. Let's see. William Robardo. All right. William Robardo. So all you need to do to claim your prize is email me at Team T E A M book launchers.com and let me know whether you would like the mug or the journal and you can collect. Oh, and you'll have to tell me your mailing address too, because I don't. Psychedelically, I don't know your mailing address. So, William, congratulations. Thank you so much for being a part of my YouTube community. And thank you to everyone who tuned in today and said hello. I really, really appreciate you, and I'll see you guys here again on April 16th, right? I think that's right. Two weeks from today. See ya. Thank you. Thanks, guys. Bye. Erwin, Larry, Brian, Nicole.