Book Marketing ROI - Strategy Vs. Tactics

Hello. Happy Tuesday. Welcome. Welcome. It is a fabulous day, wouldn't you say? Today we are talking about book marketing roi. So pretty fabulous topic for book authors everywhere. But we're not going to break it down in the financial sense of like, you're going to sell and make $6 per book and generate this kind of a return. I'm actually going to take a look at it from the perspective that a lot of authors aren't aligning their marketing strategy with their marketing tactics with what they're measuring and they're unhappy with their results. So that's what we're going to dive into today. So welcome. Please do say hello when you join in and if you're watching the replay, say hello as well so we can become friends. Like I said, today's session is taking a look at how you measure the ROI on your book marketing and make sure you've got alignment between your book marketing strategy and the tactics you use. And this is coming up because I see a lot of authors doing book marketing tactics that actually don't align with their bigger picture goals and they're measuring the wrong things and then they're feeling unhappy or disappointed with the results and they're giving up and they're giving up on really good books. And I made this equation. I was on a podcast yesterday and I said, look, I said a lot of people call it their book baby. But the thing is, anybody who's had a baby knows that the real work begins when the baby is now in the world and you have to raise it. And our books are very similar in that regard. It feels like a lot of work carrying that baby around in your stomach and, and the event of the birth is certainly something to celebrate. And the work has just begun and I think a lot of people need to go into it with that mindset of you now have to raise this book baby of yours and give it a lot of attention and nurturing to get results. And if you've got a bigger picture goal for why you have produced that book, then you really need to be measuring the things that matter so that you can get the results that you want from that book. So it's going to be good. I can't wait. And do say hello because I love making new friends. And the more you communicate, the more you comment, the more likely you are to become one of my YouTube besties like Alan west and Sean Hayes and Linda K. Lee, Rachel Robertson, Poetry from the Heart, Mike Herd, and of course, all the new folks. I'm so glad to see you Here. All right, so I am just going to kick it off with the first prize of the day, and Sean is even in the house. Hello, Sean, Welcome. Surprised you're not tired of my voice. And so I had already decided that the first prize of the day was going to go to the second comment. And Angela doesn't count. I mean, she counts, but she doesn't get prizes because she's the one that sends you the prizes. So Sean said hello first and Angela said hello second. So, Bill, you are the second commenter. So I don't know, it's been a while. I think since you've won, maybe I can't remember. So let us know what you want. I believe Angela has told me we have our no boring books mugs, we have our, oh, soft journals, and of course, there are always copies of Self publish and succeed. Bill, I know you've already read that, so please go ahead and let us know what you'd like and let Angela know where to send it. So thank you. And Ron, hey. It's so great to have the Green wizard back in the house. Welcome. And Jeremy, welcome. Dan. Snowy Canada. Are you kidding me? You've got snow. Oh. Oh, dear. Oh, and Efren says we can start now. Okay, great. I can stop the small chat. We'll get into the meat of the conversation today. Thank you. All right, so. And Dab Dabadosin. Hopefully I said that right. Welcome. I think this is the first time I've seen you on a live. So welcome. Great to have you here. Okay, so book marketing is a massive success subject, and many authors are doing book marketing that doesn't get results. So I want to help you to make sure you're getting the results you want from your book marketing. And of course, I'm not going to dive into it today, but one of the fundamental things that we do at Book Launchers is position your book from the beginning and make sure that we're testing and checking the positioning of that book all the way through so that we've got the big picture of your book in mind the whole time. And so that's really fundamental, no matter what we do as far as tactics, once your book is out, if your book isn't positioned right or well to begin with, then everything is a challenge. But I'm going to, for the purposes of just focusing the conversation today, I'm going to assume that your book is positioned for your end goal. And now it's just a matter of making sure that you're measuring the right things and tying that Measurement back to the tactics so that you're achieving the overall strategic goal. Cool. Cool. Since you can't talk, I'm going to assume that you're saying cool right back to me. Well, you can talk, I just can't hear you. So many, many got, so many authors are doing the all important work of brand and platform building. So platform really quickly is just your audience, anybody who's listening or paying attention or watching what you do. And so in doing that, a lot of authors are getting on podcasts, you're doing outreach to get speaking gigs and, and you're even connecting with reviewers. And these are all important tactics and things that I would recommend pretty much all authors do. And they're vitally important in the long run for your book and your brand success. And they're really great. You know, podcasts and speaking and live appearances and articles and media, these are all really great for creating that feeling of being everywhere and that creates that know like and trust factor which are very, very important things. But do you know what these do not do in the short run? Rarely. It's not to say they don't do any of it. But you know, podcast interviews, live appearances, media, writing articles, they're great brand building, great platform building, but they don't sell a lot of books. And again, there's always exceptions, but generally speaking you're going to sell a book here and a book there and a book here, but they're not going to sell tons and tons of books in the long run, at least in the short run. In the long run they open doors to opportunities where hopefully you're selling bulk books, you're selling books at the back of a room, books to people as they hear about you. But it's not typically instant results. And I'll give you an example from my own history. So I had a long standing relationship with Canadian Real Estate wealth magazine. I wrote a lot of articles for them where I never got paid a second. I got a link at the bottom of every article. Sometimes I got a cover, a little cover feature which was always really exciting. But they didn't pay me for those articles and I put a lot of time into them. Like typically an article would be, you know, 10 to 15 hours of work on my part, plus I would hire a proofreader before I submitted it. So there was a lot of work that went into this relationship. When my book came out, they were a tremendous supporter for me and I ended up striking a partnership with them where I actually gave them 250 copies of my Book. And in exchange, they gave me a lot of promotional space in their magazine and they also gave me tables at many of their events. And I actually keynoted some of their major real estate investor forums in Canada. So it was a really strong partnership. But what I want you to hear from that is not the fact that I sold a lot of books and it actually grew my training and education company immensely. I want you to hear that I spent two or three years prior to my book coming out writing a ton of articles for them for free. So if you haven't done that, you haven't already created relationships with people and your book comes out, what you can expect is to be spending time leveraging your book to then accelerate the building of those relationships and then you can capitalize on them. What a lot of authors think is book comes out and immediately you're getting results. And that is just not how it works for most people. Again, there's always exceptions, but you're. You have to focus on what's going to get you the results that are most important to you. And for some of you, that is. In fact, you like, book sales is the number one thing you care about, which is fine. There's tactics to execute to get book sales. But I just wanted to touch on that because the brand building, the platform building is really important marketing and it has tremendous value and it doesn't tend to return immediately. A ton of book sales. Again, there's exceptions. We've seen clients get on certain programs that are really aligned with their audience. It leads to a bulk sale or it leads to just a ton of sales because the audience is well aligned. But that's an exception. That's not the rule. All right, I'll take a pause here. Let's see what you guys are chatting about over here. All right, let's see. Bill. We're good there. Okay, cool. Dan Fraser is getting an invitation to South Florida so he can get out of the snow in Canada. That makes a lot of sense. Type 20 Bish. Hello. Brian Krieger is in the house, everybody. Brian, it's been a while. I hope you are doing fabulously. Deborah, hello. So great to have you here. It's okay that you didn't make it on Saturday. It was a great session and we missed you. But it's okay that you didn't make it. We'll make sure that you get all the material you need that you missed. Let's see, Bill. Angela, I won two weeks ago. I wonder. That was kind of nagging in my head that I Felt like you had just won you or I. So he was telling me that we can pick. So Bill, please go ahead. You know, you can be Santa today. Choose someone that you'd like to give a prize to. You can randomly pick or do whatever you want, but please go ahead. Mike, great to have you in the house. And John, hello. First time live. Great to have you here. Okay, I will go back to the notes I had here. Where was I? Okay. All right. So book sales, that's kind of where I was. I left off. So if you're like most nonfiction book authors, you're writing a book, hoping for sales. Of course, we all want book sales, but you're probably, that's probably not your first goal, right? For many of us, it's impact, it's growing. You're your audience. It's, you know, becoming known for the work that you've done or the things that you've experienced. You know, it's building your business, it's, it's getting those speaking gigs, getting the media opportunities. So. And if your singular goal is to make a living off a single book, it's rare. Again, I will never say that you can't do something because there's always an example of someone that has done it, or if there isn't one yet, there will be, but it's rare. It's really rare that you will ever meet an author that's making a living off a single book. There's almost always some other income source, whether it's consulting, courses, speaking, all of the above, products, services, future books, selling rights. Like, there's so many ways to make money from a book, but it's not just the book sales. And so a lot of the tactics, if you are focused on book sales, you want to be looking like. So if your measurement. Let's go back to this idea of measurement. If your measurement is book sales and you're doing podcast interviews, you're going to think that nothing is working. But if you're doing podcast interviews and you're measuring your website traffic, you're measuring your opt ins and you're measuring even like follow up opportunities how one podcast leads to other things. Those are great things to measure. If you're writing this book to build your platform, measuring book sales is nice. And again, book sales feeds the ego. Book sales does give you some return. But you want to make sure that if book sales are your number one, then you're focusing on the things that sell books immediately, not necessarily those podcasts. Now, I'm going to also argue on Top of this, that you should be doing all of it. Because in the long run, those things that you're doing today that are building your brand and building your platform, those are the things that will sell books and do other things for you in the future. But I want to focus on the fact that a lot of people are doing those things, expecting results today and give up really quickly because they don't see those results today. And that's where I want to emphasize the fact that most of the time, platform building, brand building, it takes years of consistency, multiple years. And if you quit six months in because you're looking at book sales and that's your measure of your success, and you quit because you're not seeing massive book sales as a result of doing these brand building activities, you're probably quitting well, 18 months before the real results and the real fun is going to come in. And I can speak to this from my past two businesses as well as book launchers, as well as from watching our clients. And one of my favorite examples, I don't know, I don't think Martha's here today, but Martha came on a live stream and shared Martha Tattenborn, who wrote Hacking Chemo, I think was her book title. It just went out of my, I can see her beautiful cover. But. And so she came on and she started to talk about this documentary that came up as a result of the podcast interviews and kind of the acceleration that she's experienced, experiencing, you know, more than a year after her book launch. And Robert Bell, who has also been on our author spotlight, he's done an author spotlight, but he also did an author deep dive where we introduced you to four or five different authors. And he shared that, you know, it was through all the podcast interviews that he did that he got the opportunity, but also the experience he needed to land a TED Global Ideas Talk. And he has had more than 2 million views on that. And I've seen pictures of him now he's in South Africa and there's pictures of him, you know, in the top 40 under 40. And I'm going to mess up the exacts because I've just seen the pictures of him on social media getting all this recognition. All these cool things happened. But those things happened more than a year after their books came out. And it happened because of consistency. They kept going, they kept doing all of these things. And their goal was impact. Their goal was, you know, long term opportunities and things like that. So really, really beautiful stories. And I want to emphasize the fact that it didn't go book launch, boom. These things happened. There was a period of time where they probably felt some discouragement, maybe disappointment, maybe they felt like things weren't happening fast enough. But now, two years post launch, they're both looking back going, wow, so that's pretty cool. So get clear on that strategic goal, the first and most important thing that you, that you really want to accomplish. Because I think it goes without saying, we all want to see book sales. And there are value. You know, book sales means more and more people are getting your book. But in many cases, you know, there's another client that we had that he gave away 750 copies of a book he, he did previously before working with us. And then he sent out a fundraising letter three months later. And that fundraising letter raised more than six figures, more than they had done in previous fundraising efforts for his nonprofit organization. And so he didn't sell books, but he got a massive result from his book. And so that is again, where you want to be looking at what's the most important goal and how are you achieving it and are you doing the things to achieve that goal? So it's getting that alignment. It's really, really important. Ron says, one book leaves you with an empty fridge. You need to be working it. That's right. A long term mindset. Oh, Martha is here. Oh, my goodness. I wish we share it over to you because I loved what you said about how the podcast interviews led you one by one to that opportunity with the documentary and those relationships. And I think, I think that was on a deep dive, but I can't remember. Anyways, I'm glad you're here, Martha. So that's delightful because that was a great example of how consistency over time opens the doors to opportunities. So that's great. And Ron says, laugh, just laugh out loud. Just walked in. That's so great. And Mike says, like, kind of social proof, you build credibility. And Deborah says, I will measure success by how many lives, say I have changed or saved their lives. And I mean, a lot of that you will never know. Right? So I always, I always think about it from the fact that, you know, if I get an email from somebody and they say this made a massive difference, I can feel pretty good that other people have been helped that didn't, didn't take the time to reach out or didn't feel like they would know anybody would be listening on the other side. You know, there's lots, there's lots of books I've read that have made an impact on me and on something in my life, and I don't reach out to the author. Sometimes I'll make an effort to post a review and say it, but I don't necessarily personally reach out to that author and let them know. So know that if one person is telling you that, there's almost certainly others out there that you have helped and had an impact on. Oh, this is exciting. So. And Martha said, and it gets better. Two weeks until I go to California for a scientific conference where I will meet a ton of the people who have been important on my journey. Networking mecca. So it's so exciting. I'm so, so excited for you, Martha. And I think I actually gave away. Hold on, let me just look here. I think I gave away my last copy of your book. I think I did. Because I did. So sorry. But I do have Ron's book right here, so I can show Ron's book since he's in the house. I've got Ron's the Green Wizard Guide. There's a little bit of a reflection. So that's awesome. But, yeah, sorry, I got to order another one of your books, Martha, because I keep. Sadly, there's, you know, it's good for your book, and it's good that you're helping people, but sadly, there's a lot of people that I know that have either relatives or they are going through chemo and cancer. So I've been handing out a lot of copies of your book these days. All right, so let's go back to this conversation a little bit and just make sure that I've hit some of the. Making sure that I'm hitting all the points that I want to hit. Okay, so let's use the common goal. So I've made a note to talk about speaking engagements because this is a really, really common goal. A lot of authors come in, and they either already are doing some speaking and they want to expand their speaking business with their book, or they want to use the book to break into speaking. And of course, your. Again, the inclination is to measure book sales. And again, I love selling books. It's fun and it's important. But if your goal is speaking gigs, I would say let's focus on the things that are going to get you speaking gigs. So you always want to get book reviews. So no matter what your goal is with your book, book reviews are going to help you. So be measuring book reviews, Always be asking for book reviews. They are vitally important. That's why I even have, um, this little magnet right here, which is the greatest gift you can Give an author is a review on Amazon. It really is the greatest gift you can ever give an author is that review. And so you always want to be asking for reviews because as you go out to try to pursue speaking opportunities, people will check out your book on Amazon and if you have four reviews, that doesn't speak to the social proof aspect, that doesn't speak to your credibility and how your, your message is having an impact. But if you have 100 reviews and they're largely saying how your message was, you know, life changing, important, you know, all these things, then that's going to help you with your speaking engagements and anything else that you do, media outreach and so forth. So for me, I like to measure things that I personally can control that can lead to the outcome that I want. So even I don't even measure book sales. I would measure the things that are going to lead to the book sales. So for speaking engagements, I wouldn't again, I like book sales, but I'm going to focus on how many, how many out, like how many outreach pitches have I done? So how much outreach have I done? I would be aiming to be doing like mailing a copy of my book to anybody in the space that I know of. And you can hire researchers on upwork and fiverr. I like upwork. There's some great researchers on upwork that can actually get you name, address and email of people in certain industries, certain job descriptions, certain job positions, mail them a letter of that says dear future friend, you know, here's this book. It's great. You know, you can even get a little clip on what the person does or what's important to them and personalize each letter if you want to do that. Excuse me. And so you could be controlling. Okay, I'm going to send 30 books out a month and that's not going to cost you that much media mail in the US anyways. You can send it for $3 and it used to be $2.50, but I think it's closer to 320 now per book. And each book costs you $4. So $7 is 210 bucks a month. You're sending out 30 books. You can also be submitting speaking proposals for conferences. And I think if you're not already well versed in speaking, one of the most important things you can be doing is, is trying to get local gigs. So reaching out to your local meetup groups, reaching out to your chamber of commerce, any groups and associations, local schools just start getting audiences, full stop, unpaid. Bring in a videographer or friend to film you so you can start building your speakers reel. Those are things that are going to lead to speaking gigs. And having the book is an opportunity to get paid along the way because you can sell books at the back of the room, Especially with those smaller groups, they're almost always going to let you sell books. Sometimes they'll buy books as part of their little association meetup. And also you now have that thing to leave behind so that you can generate more. Like, you've got that. That thing that they're going to pass around. They would read, get to know you more, and maybe they'll reach out and book it. Your book, your book, you in the future, or pass it on to somebody who will. So those are things that are measurable. You have more control over those because you can control your outreach. You can also be getting yourself on podcasts in front of the bright audience. Like, you know, like I was saying, Martha did and Robert did. It's just consistently going on podcasts. You refine your message, you get in front of more people. Somebody hears you on that podcast and goes, hey, I have this event. I'd love for you to be a part of it. Hey, I've got this documentary. I'd love for you to be a part of it. And it expands from there. That's a very different metric than book sales, and it will direct your energy in a different way. But you're using that book to accelerate it, to go faster, to open the doors. That might have been a little bit more difficult because there's a very different thing when you say, hey, I'm the author of this book versus, Hey, I do this like, hey, I'm the author of Hacking Chemo versus. Oh, hey, I'm a dietitian specializing in this. There's just a stronger ring and credibility factor to that author of peace. What you measure matters, though. And that's why I want to emphasize this, because, again, I've seen a lot of authors give up because they're measuring book sales, and yet what they were doing was actually working. And if you've ever read I think it was Seth Godin's the Dip, it's like just before you're about to have that breakout moment, a lot of people give up because it feels like nothing's working. And so this is me telling you to measure what really is going to matter and use the book and leverage it and to get there. Let me just see if there's anything else I wanted to say about that. I think that was it. So if you are focused on book sales, and that is most important. Then I would be mastering Amazon ads, bookbub ads. I would make sure my metadata is dialed in. And again, these are things we do anyways because it's all part of the bigger picture. But as far as measuring, if what you're looking at day in, day out is your book sales, then you would be focused on your metadata, testing your cover, you know, split testing a lot of things, mastering these ads, making sure they're doing really well, paying for promotional opportunities, paying for reviews. Because if you're running Amazon ads in particular, you want to have those reviews. And I've been running bookbub ads for my audiobook. We're just trying to test different ways to sell audiobooks specifically, because that can be a challenge. And I'm finding I don't have a lot of Audible specific reviews. So anybody who's watching this, if you have listened to my audiobook, please, please, please go over to Audible and post a review specifically on Audible. Because I think I only have 8 or 9 reviews for self publish and succeed on Audible. And I keep getting turned down for a lot of these Chirp promotions and other audiobook promotions. And I suspect it has to do with the fact that I don't have very many audio specific reviews. So if you'd help me with that so I can test this so I can tell you guys how it all works, that would be great. But I can tell you that I am struggling to get momentum on that. And I suspect it's because of the reviews. That's how important they are. We see that tipping point with, with our Amazon ads is kind of 25 to 30 reviews. The the ads start performing better and the more reviews, the more the ads perform. Again, a combination approach is really the best. But I want you to focus on measuring the things that will eventually get you or more likely to drive you to the most important result of this whole thing. So if you are trying to generate leads for your business, you really want to be measuring, you want to be tracking who's coming to you from the links inside of your book as much as possible. Any referrals or any mentions of your book, you want to be tracking that so you can ultimately see what your book is doing for your leads, for your referrals, all of those kind of things for your business. All right, let's see. I think there's a few questions here. Lakeisha's in the house. Hello, Mindful Eats. Hello, welcome, welcome. Okay, so I think, okay, so I think I'll let Angela collect the questions and we'll do all those at the end. But we do need to do the YouTube Prize and then I've got a couple kind of wrap up comments that I will make on the whole subject. But if you've got questions, go ahead and put them in the chat now and we'll make sure we get to that. And I will head over to my random name picker where I've put everybody in who has comment commented on the YouTube videos for the last Tuesday one was Saturday. Oops. I had a little technical thing. I took Friday off and I thought I had posted the video but I didn't. So Saturday I corrected it. So normally it's Tuesday, Friday. Every Tuesday and Friday a new video comes out and when you comment the day a video is released, you get entered to win our fabulous prizes. But I had a little technical issue, mostly user error. So this week it was Tuesday, Saturday, Tuesday, Tuesday, Saturday and Tuesday Friday. But I did get you a video. So I've taken all those names that commented on the day a video was released and I put them into my random name picker which I'm just trying to find here. Where did it go? Oh, there it is. Okay, so first up we have. It's just spinning away right now. I'm just waiting, just waiting. And the first one, our first winner is. Let's see. Brian Atnosin, thank you so much for your comments, likes and shares and I don't know if you're here. I don't think I saw your name. So when you are watching the replay, email Angelaeen T e a m booklaunchers.com let her know if you would like the mug, the oh so soft journal or a copy of Self published and succeed. And if you're not in North America, self publish and succeed is your choice. All right, so thank you. I'm going to do the other prize right now and it's just spinning around again. And Andrew hall is our next winner. I don't know if Andrew's here today. I don't think I saw his name either. So Andrew, same thing. Team@book launchers.com let us know what we can send you and make sure you include your mailing address because Angela is awesome but she doesn't have your mailing address so she needs that in order to be able to send you a prize. Okay, so heading back in to my closing notes and then we'll do one more participation prize. So if you've been lurking and haven't said hello, now is A spectacular moment to do so. So kind of concluding and then I'll go into questions. Ultimately, my recommendation is to measure the things that matter the most or measure the things that will lead to the results that matter the most to you and then focus on the tactics that are going to move the needle on those things. And for most nonfiction authors, sales are a bonus. What matters the most are, first of all, reviews, second of all, influencer connections, third, opportunities, and fourth, book sales. Sometimes leads would be opportunities in there as well. And so you really, for a lot of authors, I would highly recommend measuring number of reviews. And then your tactic to get more reviews is to ask somebody every single day to post a review for your book. Anytime somebody says that they enjoyed your book, be bold and say, hey, I'd love to help. I'd love to get your help finding more great people that we can help. I can have an impact with this book if you would kindly post a review so that my book can be found by more people like you. You know, I'd be really grateful. Or you can take the old, you know, if you want to give me a gift, give me a review. Both work and both are great strategies and approaches, but you do have to be asking for them. But also measuring your opt ins. How many people are opting in measuring just random connection points? A lot of people reaching out to you? I think a lot of people forget that you're getting emails now from people that you wouldn't have that didn't know about you before. So be measuring those things. Website traffic can also be a great one. And then tracking the links of where they're coming from. That will also help you identify podcasts that have had a good lift on your performance. Even if you're not necessarily seeing directly they bought books, but you're, if you're getting people clicking through on the show notes from the podcast over to your website, that's great. So start measuring those things if, if you want to be building your brand, growing your business, you know, growing that platform, and of course check your sales because that is a metric that will tell you if something is working and what is going on. But I wouldn't focus on sales if those are your first goals. And then layer in other things that will generate sales over time. Ebook sales, Amazon ads, bookbub ads, you know, all of those things. But mostly I just wanna say don't be discouraged if you have a month where you have five sales or you have a month where you have 20 sales, if you're measuring these other things and you do see momentum, you do see movement, you are seeing new reviews, you are seeing lift in your website traffic, you are getting new opt ins, you are starting to have new conversations with people that you weren't having conversations with before. Keep doing what you're doing and whenever you can, just layer in something else and try something new. And you will get results over time. But the people who have big book launches, the people who are launching to a thousand sales or 10,000 sales again, even my book launch, my very first book, where I went to number one, that was as a result of five to eight years of networking and building relationships and delivering massive value to a lot of people and asking for nothing in return. So when my book came out, I had tremendous support behind me. But it was not something that was overnight, right? This is something I had built up over many, many years. Like I said, I wrote for Canadian Real Estate wealth magazine. I wrote articles for them for years before I ever had the opportunity, before I published the book and before I had the opportunity to partner with them and really leverage all of those years of doing things for free. And so that's what I think a lot of people get that imbalanced expectation of. I'm going to have massive results when my book comes out. Even though I'm brand new to this industry and I haven't done any audience building, I haven't done any networking and I don't have anybody following me yet. But I've got a book occasionally that works like we have. We do have one author whose book is doing incredibly well and he has not really done a lot to market it. And, and it's just one of those things where the metadata, his book topic, it's, it's a up and you know, it's a hot topic and it just does well on its own. And I can only imagine how phenomenally well it would do if he was putting more gas on the fire. But, you know, that's rare. Again, that's not the common situation. The common situation is that it needs to build. And so you need to have patience, you need to be persistent and you need to be consistent. All right, let's see what questions you've got for me. Okay, I'll just wait for Angela to go ahead and post. I can't, I don't want to say Mindful Eats says, what's the hot topic? I don't want to say because I'm telling you that he's not doing anything for his marketing. So I don't want to call him out I'm very, I'm very, I keep things very confidential and very private. That's why most of my examples, unless somebody has come on Live like Martha had and shared publicly, I really won't talk about a lot of our clients or our books without their permission. So I definitely won't be telling you that because I've just said he's not doing anything. Okay, Efren's question. What do you mean by measuring book reviews? I mean count them. And so every month when your book comes out, we do a monthly marketing report at Book Launchers. And, and one of the things we're monitoring is book reviews. So I would say just keep track. And so you can keep track of Amazon, you can keep track of Goodreads, you can keep track of anywhere else that you're kind of focused on selling books. So if you're selling them on Apple or Kobo or anywhere else, you can, you can be monitoring reviews kind of anywhere you're focused. We generally track Amazon and Goodreads. And so I would have a spreadsheet and I would say January, February, March, April, May, and just track how many reviews have I got. And then I would even be, you know, we have one of our clients who he's actually tracked everybody he's asked for a review and who has followed through on those reviews. And then he hunts them down if they haven't. But you know, I don't, I don't go that meticulous on those things. But, but he has. And, and so he, if somebody says, yes, I'll, I'll write you a review. He, he follows up to make sure they, they come through for him on those reviews. And then he monitors how many reviews he's getting that way. Just reading, waiting for Angela's next question. Okay, question two. Dabi Doson, for self published novels, is it okay to publish ebooks first before attempting a Library of Congress ISBN approval in print form? Woo. We're going granular hair. It doesn't. So will the ebook first disqualify from appearing in libraries? If your book is published prior to trying to get in the Library of Congress, it will not be allowed. And I think, I don't think it format matters, but I'm not certain on that. And so that would be something to look up specifically if it's really important to you. You can get in libraries though, no matter what. So I would say, you know, there's lots of ways, if you have an ebook only, you can get in libraries through publishing, through Draft 2 Digital. There's still more steps, not just going through Draft 2 Digital, but that gets you listed in overdrive and then you get somebody who's got library memberships. And there's lots of there's a process, and we have a video on getting into libraries that you can follow the process on that the Library of Congress is a different beast. And getting accepted into the Library of Congress, I would guesstimate that 20, 25% of books that submit even get accepted into the Library of Congress. So if you're bending any of their requirements, you're not going to get in because it's not, it's not a, you know, apply and get in kind of thing. Just because you meet certain criteria, they vet it and only accept a certain percentage. Mindful Eats what's your skin care regime? Julie Water. Honestly, like, whenever I don't drink water, that's when my skin starts looking terrible. And that's not just because I'm in Vegas, although I'm sure that's part of it. But that just reminded me I'm going to drink some water. But I think a lot of people are dehydrated. We could go into that as a whole different subject. But water keeps me awake. Well, coffee keeps me awake. Water keeps me feeling a lot better. Whenever I feel, it's usually because I haven't had enough water and my skin looks like it, too. So there you go. Question 3 Can I call myself an author if I've published a coloring book with some accompanying text? Sure. You're a coloring book author. I would probably call myself a creator and even an illustrator if you've created that coloring book. But you're, I mean, if you've got a book out, you are an author of a coloring book to me. But I don't know. That's, that's kind of a subjective question. I think how you would define an author is totally up to you. Let's see. Jennifer Olson, is Pinterest the best place to be marketing books? I also put my book on Pinterest and on my Facebook page. It depends on your book topic. A lot of our books are business books. I don't really see Pinterest as being a great place to sell. And again, this is I don't actually use Pinterest. I don't have a I don't have a lot of time for those kind of things, unfortunately. But to me, if you've got a crafting book or a creative angled book, Pinterest probably is a great place. Place. If you are a book like Carol San well, this is, this is her book before her latest one. But if you're a book like Carol Sanford, you know, she's getting quotes from Tom Peters, you know, saying this is a great book. I don't see Pinterest as a great place for that kind of a book. So it really comes down to who's your audience and where they're hanging out. And if your audience is, are the kind of people who are hanging out on Pinterest and they're looking for the kind of solutions or experiences that your book offers, then yes, be on Pinterest. I think that's great. But it's not a great fit for a lot of our authors because a lot of our authors are, you know, business self help and I don't think that's a great place for, for them on Pinterest. Let's see. Question five. Bob Tarmac. I have a marketing strategy question. Is it advisable to write two books, one fiction, one nonfiction? Published a fiction novel first, then months later launched the non fiction. It's, I mean one of the best ways to sell more books is to publish a new book. You know, using Carol as an example. Her latest book, which I think is here, it's called Indirect Work, I can't find it. It's funny, I have all these stacks of books and I don't know where it is. But her, her, she's done lots of books and every time she launches a new book, the previous books sell. And even with my book self published and succeed, my first book in particular, More Than Cash Flow, which is a real estate book, there was a lift. That said I am not certain that fiction and nonfiction are going to have that same correlation to a point like Joanna Penn, the Creative Penn Podcast. She's an example of a fiction and nonfiction authority author and I believe some people will find her through her fiction and read her nonfiction and her nonfiction. They may be curious about her fiction and read her fiction. So there will be like some overlap between those audiences. But as far as having a fiction book and then you know, as a strategy releasing a nonfiction or vice versa, I don't really see a tremendous amount of benefit because you're, they're going to have two different audiences and you're probably going to have two different places platforms like you're unlikely to benefit from having one website for the two of them, one social media because you, you're targeting different people with those books. So hard to say. A lot of authors who have fiction and nonfiction, they have slightly different names. Again going to Joanna Penn. Her nonfiction name is Joanna Penn, I believe, and then her fiction name is J.F. penn. So there's different names. So there's actually two different brands associated with those genres. But I haven't published fiction. So everything I say, take it with a grain of salt, because I don't. We don't do anything fiction as a company, and I personally haven't done anything fiction except read. Let's see, is there. Oh, that's all the questions. All right, so we do have one more prize to give away. So today's participation prize is going to go to Mindful Eats. Joanna has a fabulous podcast, and that definitely helps her. Her findability. Yes. Her podcast is a big, big part of her platform. Okay, so from that comment, Angela. So Mindful Eats comment, let's go in reverse. And there's not. It's the 19th today, right? I believe it is. Just check my phone. Yes, April 19th. So let's go. 19 comments above mindful Eats comment about Joanna Penn. And that will be our final prize of the day. I love the little cat. Cat. She's got a cat in a box. Little icon there. That's very, very cool. I love that. So I'm just waiting for the final prize. And while I do that, I'm just trying to think. Our next deep dive is going to be on May 21st at 10am it is going to be how to pitch yourself to the media. And I've got a special guest coming in, and he has been on, I don't know, probably 800 different news shows. And, and he and his business partner have a PR firm, but they also have a really great course that I've gone through on how to pitch yourself to the media. And he's just a really dynamic, exciting, interesting guy to talk to. And so he agreed to come and provide a training session for all of you on how to pitch yourself to the media. And I think it's going to be fantastic because he's going to cover all the things like, you know, being ready for it in zoom and prepping your sound bites and, and getting back, like, getting invited back again and again and again. It's going to be a really, really great session that's going to be on the 21st. I don't have a link for you to register yet, but that will be happening at 10am Pacific Standard Time on May 21st. And I will be there, but I'll probably be a little bit late. So Sarah Bean, our book marketing manager, will be kicking that off. And Angela, I believe, will be there because she always. She always graces us and helps keep us organized in our deep dive trainings. All right, so 19th comment was cat Lind. Ooh. Congratulations, Kat. So let us know what you haven't won or what you would like the journal, the mug or self publish and succeed. And. And she's been winning a lot. Late winning a lot lately. Yeah, I was gonna say, I'm pretty sure you won something else recently. So let us know what we can get for you. And did we end up getting another prize to replace our first prize? Winner of the day? I believe that Bill was going to. Did Bill pick somebody? Just reading here. Oh, live John. Oh, first time live, John Cuomo. Great. So congratulations, John. I don't know if you saw that. I didn't mention it, but thanks for picking John, Bill. That's great for welcoming our first time live. What a great idea. And, John, hopefully you've connected with Angela@teambooklaunchers.com and let her know what prize you would like. So awesome. All right, well, thank you, everyone. And, oh, and I see John chose my book, so that's great. Good choice. You're going to like it. All right, thank you, everybody, for being here today. I'll see you back here again in two weeks, same time, same place. Make it a great rest of your week. Bye.