Book Launching and Building an Email List - and More! Open Q&A with Julie Broad of Book Launchers

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Hello. Happy Tuesday. Today is open Q A, so if you've got a question, drop it in because that's what we're going to cover today. We are really just. There's lots going on but really nothing prepped and ready to rock on topics. So I thought I would see what you guys most want to cover. So we've got Pamela here and she says hi one waiting. How are you today? That's cute. Henning is here and it looks like they're having a good old chat and Danielle is in the house and of course Angela's here behind the scenes as well. That's a weird place for my logo. That's strange. Let me just see if I can move the logo because it's floating in the sky over there and I don't know why. Let's see if we can. Oh, there we go. That's better. See and you can get in our community over at school where we are just really starting to ramp things up. We have lots of exciting stuff happening which actually leads me to I will get you to mark your calendars right now. May 17th. We have a deep dive training session coming up with Shane on our team and Shane is going to be taking you through everything you need to know for selling books direct to your audience. So that's going to be a fantastic deep dive. So a two hour training session. So Angela will be there and Shane. So mark your calendars May 17th at 10am Pacific Standard Time and also mark your calendars for June 19th, 20th and 21st. First, we are going to do our very first virtual summit and this is going to be an event to officially launch our brand new book marketing software which we are calling Author Launch Kit. The summit will run from 9am Pacific Standard Time until 1pm Pacific Standard Time on each of those days. So it's a Thursday, Friday and a Saturday. We have some fantastic content for you as well as some guest speakers and the whole theme is around the future of book marketing. So even if you don't have a book, you are welcome to come. But it is really going to be for those folks who are launching a book in the next year or so or already have a book out. And of course it will be nonfiction focused. So I know fiction folks, you feel left out sometimes. But nonfiction does not get half of the content that fiction does out there. So I Nonfiction is getting the love from us and you will be informed of all these things if you are on our newsletter, which you can get@bookclonchers.com newsletter or inside of the school community, which you can see the link here. And yes, Pamela asked, is that right here on May 17th. And it is going to be happening on YouTube and it will be at 10am Pacific Standard Time. And Tony is tuning in from Australia. Hello, Tony, great to have you here. And Jack, great to see you. So thank you for joining in as well. The summit will not be streamed on YouTube, just FYI. The summit will be recorded and members of our author business accelerator community will get access to the replays, but you will have to be live for that fun. Okay, so that's why my logo was floating. That's strange. We're going to just go with this for now. All right, so what questions do you have for me today? That is what we are here today to do is just answer questions. I did a live yesterday, if you missed it, with Craig Martel, who is he's written 200 books and he is the creator or founder of 20 books to 50k, which has now been taken over by Author Nation, but is the largest indie author conference in the world. And he was on the panel, Alexa Bigworth, who has who's the founder creator of the Women in Publishing Summit, and my friend Dale Roberts from Silk Publishing. With Dale, we were all on the panel with Teddy Smith and. And it was a lot of fun and we talked a lot about book marketing, but there were a few questions that we had planned to answer that we didn't get to. So maybe to kick it off today to, you know, help to help kick things, get things going while you guys come up with your own questions, I will try to find the list that we had that we didn't cover from yesterday. So let me just look here. And while I look for that list, Angela, do you want to go ahead and let's give prizes to the people who are here first? Because I like to do that sometimes Angela just pops in just like magic. So just open that Streamyard giveaway and go ahead and give folks a prize for being here early and saying hello while I go and get my list of questions, since everybody's happy to say hello but not asking questions yet.

Absolutely. So if you have not yet commented, how is a great time to comment? Because what this giveaway tool is going to do is it is going to count all the comments that have come in. So I will hang on for just a second because I've got it pulled up, but I can already see at least two people have added their comments in there. Thank you so much. So while I get this prepped and ready, let's see. Okay, there we go. Let me share screen now and we will get this, this going. Let me just, I have a lot of tabs open for me, which is actually pretty unusual.

I have, I have a lot going on here too. That's why I'm having trouble finding my, my questions from yesterday. Oh, really? Oh, that's funny.

Okay, so let's see, we've got 10 entries so far. Okay, let's see who is going to be our lucky winner for today. And it is Jack. Oh, that's so fantastic. How awesome. Well, Jack, please email me at Team T A M book launchers.com with your prize of choice. We have, we do have some more client books still. So if you're interested in one of our books that one of our authors has worked on, I can give you a list of some that we have left over. We've also got Julie's book Self Publish and Succeed and Self Promote and Succeed. We've got our hashtag no boring books mug as well as our journal. So there are plenty of options. I do have your mailing address, but I don't know what prize you would like. So again, please email me@teamoklaunchers.com and let's see, we've got a couple things coming in. Do you want to go through the questions you had from yesterday, Julie, or do you want me to start showing these?

Oh, good, the questions are coming. Yeah, no, I'll start. I do have a question that I'll cover. I have a couple of questions from yesterday. I'll cover and then we'll dive into these questions. I'll give you a folks a minute to get a couple more questions in, but that's great. Glad you guys are giving me some questions to work with today. So, yeah, so in this conversation that we had yesterday, there was some questions that we started to touch on and some others that I thought would be great to bring up. And one of the first ones that we did talk about in this session, but in case you missed it, when you think about launching a book, what's the number one thing you believe authors must get right? And one of the things is, well, it's funny because there's so many things that an author would ideally get right when launching a book. But for the most critical, my answer was positioning. And this really goes back to what we talk about all the time, which is the hook in nonfiction. You know, I call it the outcome of the outcome. And it's the who, the what, and the why of your book. And if you get this right, there's a lot of things you can do post launch if your marketing isn't working. If you don't have this right, your, your, your post launch marketing will struggle and you'll wonder why, right? It can, it can be one of those things that whatever you try to do, it might be lukewarm, you may have a blip where something works, but then it just doesn't go consistently. And I've talked about this before, but one of the reasons I am so passionate about this is because my second book, so my first book topped Amazon, right? It was number one in print books ahead of Dan Brown, Game of Thrones. It sold, you know, it was in the print books for almost 200 days. It still sells decently well. It's a Canadian real estate investing book. But my second book, I tried to kind of straddle the real estate world and start entering a new world and I didn't position the book clearly for an audience. Had I written this book really clearly for real estate investors to raise capital for their investment, for their investments without, you know, doing, without feeling gross and salesy and having people come to you with money, the book would have done pretty darn well, just given the, the audience that I knew and already was connected to. But also it was positioned well. And there isn't a book and there wasn't a book at the time, there might be now on this particular topic. And I was also seen as an expert on this. I had a course, I spoke all across the country on this topic and, and so that book would have just slightly positioned differently, would have done a lot better. But as it was, this book did not sell particularly well. And the, I don't know, 800 or so copies I did sell of this book, I sold largely through speaking because there was a chapter in the book called you are who Google says you are that people wanted to have me come out and speak about it and you know, coach and trade. So positioning is hard. And now I will relaunch this book. Probably it was going to be 2026, but we focus all our energy, effort, resources on Author Launch Kit, our book marketing software that's coming out in June. And, and so I'm going to probably relaunch this book in 2027 or 2026. Sorry, so it won't be this year, but we are launching a second edition of Self publish and succeed. So that has been reworked. It's at the editors now. I'm supposed to get it back actually this week from the editor. So I Would expect you guys can see a second edition of that book probably by September at the latest, if not sooner. But again, we're more focused on author launch kit than we are on relaunching that. But positioning is the big thing. Positioning is the foundation for your book. And so getting that right is so important. All right, so the other question I thought I would answer, I'm just scrolling through my script here to see what or not script. My notes from yesterday that we had that we didn't talk about. And let's see, we talked about what we disagree with, that kind of thing. Okay, what's one thing you must do for a launch to succeed? And I think, you know, ideally you create launch or demand before you launch. So, you know, because if nobody's waiting for your book, your launch is just kind of a lonely announcement. But a lot of our authors that we work with at Book Launchers, they have written a book to create the audience, right? So they're launching with not a lot of audience to begin with. Although, as you may have heard, if you were on our deep dive a couple weeks ago, Cynthia Pan did not think she had a big audience. And then, lo and behold, she had an incredibly strong launch. So sometimes it's just a matter of following the right process and activating the people in your network that you do have access to, which she did a great job. But that aside, I would say that you really want to have a focused audience centric, you know, demand building campaign, which is, I guess, a good, you know, going back to Cynthia as the example, that is something that she did really, really well. And you know, of course she worked really closely with our marketing team so that, you know, she was doing the positioning and the promotion in a sequential manner, but also so that she could tap into the existing audience that was there. So I think that's really, really important. And then after your book comes out, really focusing in on building momentum and just finding new audiences where your book resonates makes a big difference. All right, I've got a couple other questions from that, but I'll turn tune in, turn it over to you guys because you had a chance to ask questions. So, Angela, what's our first question? You want to pop it up on the screen for me there? All right. Pamela asked advertising dollars how to decide what's worth what depending on your target audience. So many choices. Yeah. And I mean, this is really general, but it's a good topic to talk about. So advertising in general. My rule of thumb for advertising is I don't Want to spend money until I know my book is selling. So that's kind of number one. And we actually talked about this yesterday on the panel a little bit because we were talking about Amazon ads and the different strategies. So some of them run ads right off the hop. And I said for the most part we don't run ads until after the book has launched. So and that's one part because it performs better after you have reviews. It's also because then you can see if the book is working or not. And if it's not working, you want to go back to fundamentals and tackle things like, okay, is the COVID the right, is the COVID the right cover? Is the. Sorry, I'm just going to take this question off the screen there. Is the COVID the right cover or is it. Is, is the description hitting the notes? Do we have the right keywords? Is it sitting in the right category? Is the pricing good? And so you want to go back to the fundament and often it's just a matter of getting more reviews in order to get results. So that's with Amazon, if you're going to run ads through Facebook or you know, run ebook sales or anything like that, we will run 99 cent ebook sales, you know, off the off launch. So before, you know, if the book is really converting, that can help tell you. So if you run a 99 cent ebook sale and you still don't sell books, there is a positioning problem or something else is wrong with your book. But as far as Amazon or, sorry, as far as Facebook or Google Ads go, I'm generally not running them to a book page on Amazon. I would generally only run those to a direct sales funnel where I can track conversions. Now I say that yesterday Craig Martel was talking a lot about how many of the big successful authors are in fact running it to an Amazon sales page. However, this is largely fiction and I think it's a very different world for fiction in that space. Partly because on nonfiction you are competing with more expensive audiences and keywords with your, with your book typically than a fiction book. Additionally, I think a lot of what they were seeing is the start of a series, hook the reader in and then they buy the rest of the series. So a little bit of a different model for nonfiction in general. I'm not going to run Facebook or Google Ads to an Amazon page. I would only run them to a direct series sales funnel where I can track conversions and offer upsells, which is where you'll actually get your ads to hopefully start generating a profit. It's very rare that you're going to generate a profit off of Google or Facebook ads direct to a book. You know, where you're going to make, you know, somewhere between 6 to, you know, 10 bucks off that book. So hopefully that, I mean, that's a general question. So I just kind of gave you general random information, but hopefully it gave you some food for thought. All right, what's our next one? Okay. Considering to relaunch my book, all that Reddit says it's great, but no sales, is that a marketing problem? So without knowing more Henny, I don't know if they've read your book. Were they the right readers? Are they the same the people that read your book? Are they the same people that you would consider your ideal readers? And is that how your book is positioned for them or are they friends and family or they, you know. So first I'd want to understand that information. Sec. Second, I would want to go, what did you do? So if there's no sales, what have you done for the book to date? You know, when somebody does go to the page, does traffic convert? And so it really comes down to understanding more about this particular book and how you positioned it and what you've done already to see if it's a marketing problem or a book problem. With as an example, talk going back to the new brand you, which I talked about as my second book that didn't do particularly well. I didn't know it had, it had a positioning problem. It also had a title problem. I've also talked about that before. So I knew the title problem about five podcast interviews in on my launch because people would be holding the book in their hand and they would say the wrong title. They would call it the Brand new you instead of the new brand you. And unfortunately, when you typed the brand new you into Amazon at the time, Dori Clark, who is a much more well known person in the branding space than me, her book would come up. So I probably lost some sales to Dori in this whole journey. So that was part one of my problem was for whatever reason, people's brains don't process the title as the new brand you. They just want to call it the brand new you even when they were reading it. But the second piece, I didn't realize the positioning problem until a little bit more into my marketing. But why I say I don't know for you is because I didn't realize it until I was reaching out to people who were big supporters of my book in the past or to people who I thought this book would be a good fit for their audience. And there was hesitation. And as I explored the hesitation, that's where I discovered, oh, I tried to straddle two worlds with the book instead of going clearly into one or the other and solving a very specific problem. Problem for that audience. I didn't know that until I was deeper into marketing. I can see it now, you know, now that we've worked with like 800 authors and you know, I've been talking about this for years, but at the time, you know, I wasn't in this space officially, so I, I didn't see that positioning problem. But it's something that you really only see once you're out there talking about your book and, you know, assuming with the book being out. So I know I didn't really help. But you can always write a second edition and relaunch it properly with a good marketing strategy and kind of tackle it from there. All right, Tony. I published my journal three weeks ago and started ads two weeks ago. How long does it take for the auto ads to work? In terms of sales, I have 30,000 impressions and 18 sales. This is a better question for Shane. And I know he's not going to necessarily dive deep into ads when he does his deep dive training on May 17. It is something that he talks about with our author business accelerator folks. So if somebody's interested in getting kind of one on one and group support and training and things like that, you know, I do recommend you join our author business accelerator. Just go to authorbusinessaccelerator.com and that's something somebody Shane would talk about. More ads are funny. I would say 30,000 impressions and 18 sales isn't bad for the first couple of weeks. Weeks. So, you know, I think you probably keep going with that. Refine which ads are performing and take out the ones that aren't. And by ads I probably mean keywords or depending on your targeting pieces. But, you know, that's not a bad start. Honestly, from what I can tell, again, that's not my expertise. Shane on my team is the one that handles all the Amazon ads. So he's in the dashboards every day. What kind of funnel do you recommend for a book launch and then for the longevity of sales? Yeah, Michelle, this is a great question and it does depend on you and your goals. So, you know, as, as, as we usually do with our authors, we have different paths for launches and if you have an existing audience, you may wish to go after, you know, the Amazon bestseller launch, which is Essentially during launch week you put your price of your ebook down to 99 cents. You might run some ebook sales. You know, do promo stacking. We use written word media. I think we have an affiliate link with them. Angela, it might be book launchers.com written word. I'm not 100% sure, but that's who we use. That's who we run a lot of our promos through and stack them in your launch week. And this is good for getting momentum if you don't have a large audience, but you've got a little bit of an audience to say, hey, my book's available, you know, buy it for 99 cents, post your review, so forth like that. But if you are going after say a USA Today bestseller list, your strategy is going to be different. You have to have book sales at a variety of places. And we, we saw this so clear not long ago when we had an author make the USA Today bestseller list and another author sell more books than the author that made the list. And the bo, the other author that sold more books, he didn't make the list but the other one did. And it's ultimately because the like the vast majority of this one author's sales, actually this happened twice now was on Amazon and the other one had diverse sales. Right. So, so the strategy of your funnel is going to be different for that as well versus the funnel which could be, you know, buy my book and now you're part of my, you know, buy my book direct from my website. And now, you know, here's the upsell offer to join my course or my membership or my community or you know, get my consulting or get a strategy call. That's a different funnel too. So I guess the point that I want to make is there's no one funnel, there's no one way to do a book launch to do, to do this business. It really is understanding what's most important to you, what kind of resources. And by resources I do mean money, but I also mean energy and time and mental space can you put towards achieving that particular goal. And that will tell you how many other things you can do to kind of facilitate that particular funnel. So it really is about figuring out that goal. What's the most important thing that you want to have happen and what are the steps you need to take to, to achieve that particular goal. Because there's so many things you can do for book launches and post launch marketing. So you do have to drill down to what matters for you. What does success look like.

That was actually it so Far as questions, we've already sped through them.

Cool. We can do. I do have the prizes for people who have commented on the day a video has come out. So every Tuesday, Friday a video comes out and you get entered to win a prize. And so we have our hashtag noboringbooks mug. We have our oh so soft journal. We've got copies of Self Publish and Succeed and Self Promote and Succeed and there's some other books too. So if you're somebody who's won all the things, Angela has some of our author books as well. So when your name is picked, you can email teamoklaunchers.com and find out what choice you what choices are available. But also if you know right away, hey listen, I want a copy of your book Self publish and succeed or Self promote and succeed. You can get that. So everybody who has commented on a Tuesday or a Friday, you have been entered to win here. And also thank you for your comments. It makes it a two way conversation instead of me just shooting videos and staring at the camera and having my editors and my husband participate in the whole journey. So thank you for your comments. So Debbie Martin, congratulations. You have wonderful prize. So email Angela@teamepiconstress.com and let her know what she would like and I'll just go ahead and do the other one while we're here. And oh, verifying I'm human. How about that? Yes, I'm human. Let's go. Okay. HK very 3852. Thank you for your comment and congratulations. And again email angelaeamooklaunchers.com to collect your prize. All right, so are there any other questions? We are taking Q and A for those of you who have joined. This is open Q and A today. We don't have a particular topic, although we are kind of veering towards the topic of launching your book or post launch marketing. With that in mind, I will address one other question that came up yesterday that we didn't actually get to dive into on the panel more deeply. And that was around editorial reviews. So we started talking about editorial reviews and then we kind of went off on other topics and I wanted to come back to it a little bit because there are a few kind of quote unquote industry recognized reviewers and it depends on your goals. Again, because what we were talking about yesterday was is it worth it to pay Kirkus because Kirkus is pricey. Is it worth it to pay Kirkus for a book, an editorial review, or should you submit to one of the other ones? And the answer again goes back to your goals for your book and what you're trying to achieve. And where editorial reviews do have value and they carry weight is if bookstores and libraries are a core piece of your strategy and plans for your marketing, if bookstores and libraries are having a really positive publisher. Weekly Book Life review or a Kirkus review or a Forward from Clarion, Those are three reviews that carry weight. And I always warn people with Kirkus, they are pricey and they're brutally honest. So if you get a good Kirkus review, like, celebrate it. If you get a mediocre one, just be. Just know that you are in very good company. Really great books get brutal reviews from Kirkus. They are harsh. They're hard reviewers. But Publishers Weekly Book Life reviews, they're. They're respected. I think they're more accessible for most indie authors. And Forward for nonfiction authors is a great one as well, that Forward reviews really help with library listings in particular. So those. Those are kind of three editorial reviews that, you know, I think are potentially worth it. But if you're not pursuing libraries or bookstores, I don't know if you really need to spend money or go after those. You can submit to some of the free ones. And we've done a video. It's been a little while, so I don't know how easy it will be for Angela to find, but she's pretty good at finding them. We've done a video on reviews and paid reviews and free review sites. So that YouTube video does cover editorial reviews that are free that you can submit for, as well as some of the paid ones, too. All right, so let's see. It looks like I've got. Angela's probably frantically looking for the video, so I'll take the next question here. I don't understand how to grow social media platforms. I have one TikTok follower. I also have NetGalley with no response and no. And one review on Booksprout, though, up for months. Okay, so there's a couple things here. I mean, this is. There's a lot here to unpack. I don't understand how to grow social media platforms. I'm not an expert at social media platforms. That's, you know, YouTube. We could talk YouTube. I've done a pretty good job of building a YouTube following and community here, but on Instagram and Facebook, I mean, I'm not even the one that manages our Instagram or Facebook accounts. So I'm not. I'm not there. And I don't use TikTok, like full stop. What I can Say is that consistency and clarity of who you're talking to and what value you're bringing to the table makes all the difference. And you know, have fun with it. Right? Educate and have fun. So entertain along the way. That will help a lot. But you know, I would tune in in the future. We'll have social media experts and people who, you know, we, we've kind of gone down that road where we bring other people in to talk about that. I'm more of the, the vein that I'm not going to worry too much about social media for launching a book. If you don't have it, let's put your book in front of other people's audiences and focus on getting traction that way because it takes time to build a good, strong following on social media. And a lot of people who have a million plus followers, they're not engaged followers, right? They've got bots or people who aren't, aren't, aren't following them at all, or they're not engaged, they followed for some other reason and they're not engaged. And really what matters is engagement. As for the reviews, so a couple things. One is not every review platform is the right fit. So sometimes with booksprout or Book Sirens, whichever one you've gone with or that you're working with, sometimes you won't get any traction and we have really mixed results on that. And, and sometimes we'll get four or five reviews and other times we'll get none. As for NetGalley, part of what you do when you sign up for NetGalley is you have to also promote that your book is available on NetGalley. So you'd be sending it out through your audience. And, and that is part of it. It's not just NetGalley's reviewers, but the other piece is usually you still will. Especially it's been on for a couple months. You should have gotten a review. So, so my question now starts to go back to what's this book? What, like, what are they seeing? What's the blurb about your book? Because if nobody's reviewing it, then I'm wondering, you know, if there's, if it's, if there's enough clarity to even have somebody want to review the free book. So I would start digging into the underlying, you know, blurbs and content and cover and those details on the book because you should have had somebody on NetGalley review it by now. That's. It's unusual to have it on for two months and not even get a single review. It's not unusual to have it on booksprout and not get a review through there. That's, you know, that happens. Not all the time, but it happens with different books. I think in one of the videos that I talked about, I talked about my results from reviews, and I think you should be able to find that one. Angela, actually, where I go through the, you know, what worked to get book reviews might be what it's called. And I talked about how I was not. I don't know if it was Book Sirens or Book Sprout, but one of them rejected my book, was like, no, this isn't going to get reviews on our site. And then the other one, I got four or five reviews through it, but then other clients have gotten none. And so it really is a mixed bag. One of my favorite sites that is great for getting verified reviews, but you have to review other people's books. But it is a legit. Everything's above board is get authentic book reviews. And I did do a video on them, but you could just go straight to their site. We're not affiliates with them. But, you know, I really like what she's built and it's been a great tool for me to get reviews and. And some of our. Our author business accelerator people are in it and getting reviews as well. So it's Get Authentic Book Reviews, I believe is the exact website, but Angela will bring it up and make sure you've got it there too. I just got my books published. I have no friends or social media to get my info out. Where do I go to get info to find people to get my book to. Goes back to what I said at the beginning, which was the bigger picture goal. So, you know, if we're just getting books out there, if you're fine to give away free books because there's an end game after somebody gets the books in hand. That's a different strategy than who am I selling the books to? You know, my first approach is to always find other people's audiences. And one of the best ways to do that is to start doing podcast interviews, right? You can, you know, Pod Match. We have an affiliate link with PodMatch because that's the site that we use all the time. I think it's just book launchers.com forward/podmatch, and you can set yourself on there and get started getting some podcast interviews to help get yourself in front of other people as well as, you know, starting to build relationships. So if you have no friends or social media, then it's time to get out and meet some people. So Meetup Groups is a great one. Find some topics that are relevant to your book and you can go out and meet people. Author Nation in November is also a great event and I do have an affiliate link for Author Nation as well. If anybody is going and they go through our affiliate link, I've been telling them to tell us so because we're going to host a little Book Launchers community celebration at Author Nation because it's happening here in Las Vegas. But getting out there in real life is important. I do have a video that Angela will pull for you on how to sell books without social media. That's a more recent one, Angela, so you should be able to see it probably in the last two or three months and that will help you as well. And there we go.

Thank you.

And Jay is asking. I have just uploaded my first ever journal. It's medium content, but it appears that Amazon seems to treat journals as low content. I am so deeply unfamiliar with low content and medium content books and we've done some workbooks and I know we've had to be careful with where those land. But I have done nothing with journals. So I am not, I'm not an expert or somebody that can really help with this. I do believe that Kelly publish Dale Roberts wife, Kelly Roberts, she has a YouTube channel and I know that she has done a lot of low content books and I believe a lot of her videos also address some of the challenges and, and issues with low and no content books. So if, if Angela can find that video too. She's working really hard. I can see her. You guys can't see her, but she's in a little screen down below for me and I can see her. She's got double screens. So she is like over here and over here. So she's working really hard to get you guys answers to the questions and to the things that you're asking for. But yes. So if you can get Kelly. Kelly Roberts YouTube channel, if you're able to find it, it's Kelly. I think it might be Kelly Publish. K E L L I publish. I don't remember exactly, but she does talk about low content, no content books. Dale Roberts also has a bit of content on that. And then somebody is asking for the link on the editorial reviews video. So I don't know if you found that one or not. All right. Wa Blinko. I'm struggling to build a mailing list. Can you please advise on how I can build one? You? Yes. We spend a lot of time in Our author business accelerator talking about email lists because it is not a one and done. There's not one thing that's going to be the magic button. But I will give you three tips to help you with this and hopefully one of them you implement and it starts to make a difference. Number one is let's make sure you're not offering a free chapter. Free chapter is not going to. And sorry, I'm just going to hide your comment. And a free chapter is not going to generate people signing up for your email list. There's no value in a free chapter. However, what you can do is. And I'll just take. I've got a book here from. This is Stone Loden Sager's book Garage Shop income. So let's just say I'm Stone and I want to, I want to have part of one of my chapters be my lead magnet. So he's got one here that is learn your craft endlessly. So I would probably look at that and go learn your craft endlessly. That means, you know, master your craft to, you know, maximize your income, right? So now I'm going to say, okay, download the free ebook on how to master your craft to maximize your income. And you can get even better than that with this. You know, here's your 16 page guide to maximize your income by mastering your craft, right? So that's giving away the chapter, but I'm creating massive value in it. I'm not saying free chapter, I'm saying here's your guide on how to do this and that's number one. Because if you are trying to give away a free chapter, people don't want your free stuff. So you're not going to get email addresses. The second thing is to make sure you have a very simple page that you are sending people to on the regular. And I have a page that's not pretty and yet it converts 40 to 60% when I share it. It's book launchers.com, seven steps. And I think Angela may be busy so I will quickly type it in for you. There you go. It is there. I don't know if the link works, but we'll try it. And if it didn't, she can fix it. And that is just a very simple landing page that converts incredibly well. But you need to have a landing page on your website. If there's other things going on and you're directing people to your website, you're probably not going to get as many email subscribers as you want. So that leads me to point three, which is when you Do a podcast or you write a guest article, or you're doing a live stream and you get the opportunity to share a link, you can send them to your website. However, I would say, hey, sell your little free magnet, which, you know, in this case, it's the seven steps to write a book that's set up to sell. You go and download that workbook because it's a. It's a workbook on how to write that. Write your book. And by the way, you're not actually writing the book until, like, step four or five in those seven steps. You know, there's a lot of things to do before you actually start writing your book. Go get it. And then, you know, if I'm on a podcast, I'll say it. When you do that, you also get my contact information. So you can just reply to that email and get in touch with me. So that's the way to do it. So those. That's three, three tips for you. Hopefully you can implement at least one of them and that'll make a difference for you. I. All I saw is pickleball. I just saw the word pickleball in my comments, and now I'm all distracted and excited. I don't know if you guys know, some of you might know this, but I play a lot of pickleball. True. People I know may not be pickleball. Interested? Well, I am. I love pickleball. So. Okay, that aside, there was more relevant topics to talk about here. I created book trailers for my books and puzzle books in Canva and uploaded them to YouTube.

Cool.

But I haven't gotten any sales. Do these count as a plus content? And can I upload these to Amazon? Your book trailers don't count as a plus content. Can you upload them? And there's no spot in Amazon to upload videos anymore. I don't think we used to be able to put videos on our author central page, but I believe we can't do that now. I think somebody posting a review can put a video. They certainly can put pictures, and that's encouraged, but I don't think we can. Yeah, so A plus content is static. It's image content. And so you'd want to have like three. I think they have templates, but I think most of ours are three blocks of content. It can't repeat. You shouldn't repeat your book cover. You shouldn't repeat anything in the book description. It can be awards that you've won. It can be up to three. Three or two endorsements. But make sure they're from notable people. I've, I've talked about this before, but we had a client, Renee Cavalier Cavallari, who had a quote from George Clooney and, and they kicked back saying it wasn't from a notable enough person. We're like, what's your criteria if George Clooney is not notable enough? So we did get it approved eventually, but. So there's criteria and rules to follow with A plus content, but you can't put video in there. Yeah, thanks, Tony. I was pretty sure sometimes on the spot my brain does not have. I'm like, am I right about this? Because things change all the time. But I'm like, I feel like this is the right answer. So thank you for verifying on get authentic book reviews. They say you have to read and review books. Yes. So that's what I was saying. I was saying you have to do work to get reviews through them. It's basically, it's not review exchange. I don't want to call it a review exchange site because that's against any Amazon's terms and conditions and reviews. You cannot exchange reviews with other authors. What they do that allows you to do it and have it be still above board is basically, it's like a library of books. You go and you buy the book. So when you are on the site, they encourage you to discount your book. My book is not discounted because I want to run promos and I've kept my book on there for months. So you're paying, you know, whatever. My book's normally available for sale for as an ebook, but they do that so that it's a verified review when they post reviews. But then you get points. So if you read longer boy longer books, you get more points for that. If you read shorter books, you get less points and those points then are exchanged for the ability to then feature your book in the library. So other people will now read your book and write reviews on it. So it's done and then somebody's monitoring it to make sure you're not writing a book review for another author because then that becomes an exchange and that would be a violation. So it is, it is work, but it, it, it's work, but it works. I've had a lot of success getting book reviews from them and it's kind of fun. I've. I've actually checked out some books and read. I read a fiction book from there over the holidays, which I almost never read fiction. And I've checked out a few other topics on books that I wouldn't have normally read, so I've enjoyed it. But it is work. It is not a pay it and get results kind of system. It is. It is a work system. Do you believe in AI to help edit? Yeah. I'm a big fan of AI assistance to a point. I think when it comes to editing, I think you ultimately do need a human, if not a couple of humans to touch your book. But what I do love is, and I use this all the time, I'll upload something to AI and I'll give it some parameters of what I'm trying to achieve, who I've written this material for, and I'll ask it to be a skeptic or I'll say wear the hat of my ideal reader. What, when you read this, what questions are going through your mind? What have I addressed? Well, what should I what. What is the gap that you think I'm missing here? So I like it for those kind of conversations. I do like Grammarly for light editing, but I don't love it for replace like 100%. I would never replace a human editor with Grammarly or prowriting just full stop. I would not. A human copy editor just is night and day difference different than Grammarly? Because they will actually address a lot of issues with your writing and nuanced context. But for a thought partner and critique, I think it's great. I actually have a video that will be coming out. I don't know when it'll be coming out, probably in the next two or three weeks. So if you're not subscribed to the channel, please do that now. I'm also my son is avidly counting. He's like, mom, when are you going to get your play button? I'm going to get my play button before you. I'm like, you haven't even started your channel yet, Jackson. And he's like, I know, that's why I'm going to. But I'm still going to beat you at the rate you're going. So for the sake of my reputation in the eyes of my 8 year old, please do subscribe. But in all seriousness, I have a video coming out in two or three weeks where I've actually walked you through how to use ChatGPT as your book writing coach. Because I think it's if you're using it right, I think there's a lot of opportunities to get some good developmental coaching and some good context, contextual coaching and positioning. I don't believe it replaces a human, but I think what it will do for you is when you do bring in the humans, you're able to get, you know, amazing advice from the human because they the manuscript is so much cleaner and well thought out than what you would have done before. So now they can really, you know, work on polishing it into a diamond from whatever it was to begin with, which was so much definitely not a diamond. All right, what else have we got? How many review sites do you recommend? This is Jennifer's question. I have been successful on authentic book reviews, but it is the only one I am on on. Yeah, there's a few others that. It's the one. It's the main one that I'm using. So it's the one that I can endorse right now because I have really enjoyed it and gotten good results from it. Angela did post a video that I did on what's worked to get reviews. Goodreads Giveaways. We've been finding okay results with doing print giveaways. The ebook giveaways have not generated much at all. We are finding the print giveaways do perform better. We are seeing some reviews. So running a Goodreads giveaway, if you haven't already, is worth it. I do like Booksprout and Book Sirens if they will take you and you can get some reviews through those sites. And just trying to think Book Award Pro, which we also do have an affiliate relationship with. So if you do like to support our affiliate, you know, because the every dollar helps when it comes to video production and content creation. It's book launchers.com book.com bookaward. They also have a tier that helps you get book reviews. And I've seen it get some. As for your question, how many do you recommend? I mean, you need as many reviews as you possibly can. I joke all the time that James Clear really should share with the rest of us because he's got like 135,000 reviews. And by the way, like what goes through reviewers mind when they go to post a review and they're like, awesome. I'm going to be number 100, 135,289th review for James. Like, why would you post a review at that point? Just give us give the rest of the authors some reviews, would you? But anyways, I'm just. That's just jealousy. I'm like, it's amazing how many reviews he has. So you really can't have too many reviews. So if you have the bandwidth and you know, the resources to put towards it, try all the sites. Okay, what do you do with a Book review, once you get it, I let mine sit there on booksprout and did one post. So, I mean, it depends on, like, a lot of these. They're supposed to then post it on Amazon. I don't really typically do much else with it. I do. I do encourage our authors that, as they're getting good reviews, especially in the beginning, to post those good reviews on your social media sites and thank the person and make a big deal out of it, because that reminds people to post reviews. It also is, you know, social proof of your book and the fact that people have enjoyed it. But through Book Sirens and Booksprout, they should be then posting those reviews on Amazon after they've posted it in those sites. But as for what you do with it, you know, that's generally what I would say is, you know, share it. So you encourage other people to do reviews of your book.

That was the last question.

All right, let's do our last participant prize, and then I will get out of here. And you can go, too, and you can stop your frantic multitasking. I was working hard today. I was working hard, hard today.

Do you want me to do the giveaway? Do you want me.

Yeah, sure, go ahead. You can do it. I'm going to read some of the comments here because I catch up on some of them.

Yeah, sure.

What the what on gc? I don't know what that means. Colleen Brown. What the what on gc? Okay, I didn't know either. Good. I didn't know what it is. And then Jason says, I'm hopping in to say hello, but I'll have to watch the replay because I'm working in Texas today. Well, thanks for saying hello, Jason. Always great to see you here.

Well, all right, we're gonna do another.

And wouldn't it be funny if Jason pops in and then he pulls out the prize? Oh, it can't be me. It can't be you. Oh, it was what? The one on George Clooney not being valid. That's why George D.C. was George Clooney. Yeah, I know. We were stunned, too. We were like, what? How much more famous do you have to get than George Clooney for this to pass through your bots? Amazon. All right, Michelle. Yay. So email Angela@teambookcontures.com and let her know if you want our journal, our hashtag, no boringbooks, mug a copy of Self Publish and Succeed, Self Promote and Succeed. Or if you've got all those or you want something different, she's got a library of our author books. In her closet as well. And she is happy to clear out any of those things. Yes, I am. Awesome. And Pamela is saying get the journal. Get the journal. So there you go. All right. Well, thanks Angela for being here and thank you to everyone. As we talked about at the beginning, so if you weren't here May 17, we have our deep dive happening which is going to be all about direct sales. And June 19th, 20th, 21st, from 9:00am to 1:00pm Pacific Standard Time, we are having our first virtual summit on the future of book marketing and that is going to be to launch our author launch kit. But it is going to be three days of jam packed fun, content, prizes and I'm telling you now so you can mark your calendars and be there because it is going to be a ton of fun. And recordings will be available to everybody who is in our author business accelerator group. But everybody else will have to be there live to learn and have fun. So. All right, well, thank you so much and I look forward to seeing you back here in two weeks. It might not be me hosting. I think Angela or Sarah or both of them will be hosting as I believe we have a guest expert on. It might be on branding or social media. Something like that is coming up with Melissa Henry joining us. So tune back in in two weeks, same time, same place. All right, thanks everybody. By.

Sa.