Building a Thriving Author Brand - Part Two

Hello, Happy October. Welcome to our October deep dive. I am just writing a quick note to myself. There we go. All right, so today we are kicking off part two of basically building your author brand to become a thought leader. So I've already seen some folks saying hello, we've got Darla from California. Who's here? Steve. Steve is here. And Steve, I posted the link so because you were asking for the replay to part one and I went ahead and posted it right there. But you can always find these replays under the Book Launchers TV channel where it says live. So if you go through the streams that you can see, you can find these replays and the replays to all of our lives where there's a lot over over the past and so you can find them there. But that is the link to the live. We also have, we have two Darla's in the house today, both Darla M2 fun fact for you, but one is Darla from California and the other is Darla from Phoenix. So welcome to all the Darlas. And hello Susan, welcome as always. And Susan says it's a gorgeous day in Ohio, I have to tell you. So I'm in Las Vegas for those that don't know. And we had a couple of beautiful fall days this week and it was and for us fall is, you know, lows of 70 and highs of, you know, high 80s and 90s in the day. And then the light switch went off and it became winter and we dropped down into the 50s and it's windy and it's blustery and it's in the 60s but it's now today it's in the 60s but it'S windy. So that's our, that's our winter. But yeah, we had a couple of days of fall. We went from blazing hot like over 100 to a couple nice days of fall. And now it's winter weather. So that's that. Anyways, it's fine for me. This is great because now I can get back out and hike every Sunday with my son which is what we like to do on Sundays. So tomorrow we'll be hiking and we have Mary from the surprisingly warm Toronto. So welcome Mary and BC English from Texas. And let's see. And Brian got his mug. Did you, you got this mug which by the way today, you guys, somebody can win one of these. It doesn't come with the stuff inside of it but our vintage hashtag, not vintage, our original hashtag no boringbooks mug. And then this is our seven year anniversary specialty mug. But I Think you got the regular hashtag noboringbooks mug. That's awesome. All right, let me share my screen and we're going to kick off. So. And Susan's mug arrives today and Amanda's here from Holland, Michigan. Welcome Amanda. And Eric from California. It's great to have all of you here and Angela who you can't see yet, but at some point during this live you will see she is here from Florida and, and she's always here helping me out for, well, not always, but most lives she's here helping me out and during these two hour live sessions she'll come on and take some questions, probably give a couple prizes, give me a chance to run to the bathroom and all those fun things. So you will at some point see Angela, but I assure you she's here and she'll be chatting with you. There she is right there. And she says hello from cloudy Miami. And then Kevin is from Rochester. I think there's a couple extra letters there, but I think it's Rochester. And Steve says there's two audios playing simultaneously that is probably on your computer, I suspect. Yeah, Angela's saying, shaking her head. So it's not, it's not me. It's not me Steven, it's you, Steve. So Steve, you probably have a YouTube or something else open at the same time as this live. So just check your browsers, check your screens. That is my suspicion is that there's two audios playing on your side so hopefully you can find the one that is not me live and turn that one off. Okay, so let me just dive right in because we got a lot to cover which is why we turned this into a part two from last time. And so what I'm going to do is I am just going to give you guys a real quick preview as to what we covered last time. And there it is. Yes, that's right. Just making sure I was sharing the right thing for you all. So this is from part one. We're going to blast through all of this. So we covered your, this is your author brand to thought leadership and, and this is a two hour training. So for those of you who come to the Tuesday lives, those are usually done in 45 minutes to an hour. This is a full two hour training. Hope you got your notepad, I hope you got your pen and a drink and you're ready to rock. So this is basically what we cut the agenda and we got to launch and we just started on early post launch last session. So today we're going to go into post launch and long term after launch with a few sections that I'll spend more time on. And I'm not going to talk about all this fun stuff that I talked about last time. I am pausing on this screen because I still love this, that my book that was rejected by traditional publishing went number one in print books on Amazon. I love that moment. And yes, at that time I became a thought leader and was on stages and all the fun things. So a lot of what we talk about today is in part this whole journey that I took, but also it's the journey that we map out and work our clients through. And we've been having some really great success stories lately come in of people who have followed our thought leader path as our clients. And now a year after their book has launched the they're telling us all these fantastic stories about their speaking engagements. And actually, I don't think Linda Magoon is here today, but she's going to be here in Las Vegas for Rave and Author Nation. And Sarah and I were just talking about her yesterday, looking at her website and she is just doing library after library after library event. And it's really awesome to see things like that happen because we started her off with a few libraries and now she's just, that's all she, she's just doing library event after library event, like four or five library events a month. And, and she's doing talks and she's selling books and she's telling her story and she's having a blast. And so the thought leader path looks a little different for everybody because we are all different. We have different audiences, we have different goals, we have different backgrounds, we have different experiences. But if you follow this path, it will lead you to the thought leadership version of whatever it is you do in your space, which is pretty cool. So we went through all of this and you can catch the replay on YouTube. I posted the link there. And, and what if you're watching the replay? What Angela does is she collects our links and she gives them to me at the end of this and then I'll post them in the description below so that after, if you're watching the replay and you're wondering what all these links are, you can catch them in the, in the live chat on the right if you're watching on a desktop or a computer. But you can also just go into the description and they'll all be there. So the replay for this part one, where we covered all this stuff is, is going to be posted there. It's already there on the side so you can bookmark it for later. So we went through all this. We didn't do deep into each of these things, which. Okay, by the way, what we do, and I'm going to mention this a little bit later, but we have a group called Author Business Accelerator. And what we do in Author Business Accelerator, it's a paid group, but it's very low cost. You know, $150 a month compared to our full service. But we're teaching you every month we're focusing on a piece and then there's going to be prizes where we might create your speaker sheets, your media kits, but we focus on brand. And then we're going to focus a month on building your website, and then we're going to focus a month on creating content and then a month on creating your email list. And so bit by bit, as you go through this process, you will absolutely build a strong author brand if you are doing the activities and participating in the training and contributing in the forum and winning the prizes. And it's going to be awesome. It already is awesome. But it's going to be even more awesome as we get going because we just started. Okay, so back to this. So we got through all of this audience building, media outreach. We started that piece. I didn't do a deep dive into pitching. We're going to talk more about pitching today. Content, activating the book army. We got to book launch. And then where we left off last time was on asking for reviews. And so that's where I'm going to pick up today. And so this is the path where we're going to go today. I'm going to talk about partnerships. I'm going to go. There's a lot of partnerships. And I'm going to specifically focus on influencer outreach today. That's where we'll go deep. I'm going to do a little bit on pitching for speaking engagements. I'm not going to cover this very deeply. We'll touch on foreign rights and then we're going to do some pitching right here in this section and carrying on through all the way down to the end. So that's where we're going today. As you can see, we have quite a bit of road left to cover on this journey. All right, so cruising through this is what you missed. So I'm not going to stop and talk about any of that stuff today because it's all in the replay. And what we are going to stop and pause. So we left off on reviews and. And so I talked about asking for reviews last, last session. But I added some material because I, I just can't help myself. I added some material to this section to go a little deeper into this piece because frankly, asking for reviews is a, you know, it is something. Not a full time job, but it is something that you will do for from the moment your book comes out, for as long as you want your book to remain relevant in the marketplace. And you know, I try. I'm. I don't ask a lot of people one on one. I tend to do it in group settings, but one on one is really one of the best ways. But there's also some services and things like that which I'm going to talk about today. But first I want to touch on rules about reviews specific to Amazon because there's a lot of misconceptions and one of the things that I get a lot of comments on, especially when I post videos about different services for reviews, is people. Inevitably there's multiple people that always say, why are you promoting this? People cannot pay for reviews. And that is not true. But it's true with the cab. It's not true with a caveat. And so I want to touch that here. 1. I also do not want my coffee to get cold, so I have to make sure I drink it because once it's cold, I will not drink it. Okay? So paying for reviews according to Amazon's rules, 100% you can pay for editorial reviews. So this is Kirkus. This is paying for, you know, through NetGalley or Publishers Weekly or any of those paid review services. They are pricey, just so you know, if you go to submit for them, you know, you're talking hundreds of dollars for each of these review services. And sometimes they're harsh reviews that you would rather not have. You're not going to post it anywhere. But for these paid reviews, you absolutely can pay for them. They do not show up under the consumer review section. They're going to show up in your editorial review section. But their editorial reviews are especially valuable if you're doing library outreach and bookstore outreach, because they're going to look for your editorial reviews and then you can put them in your editorial review section in Amazon. And then there are review services that you can pay. Now here's what, where I get the pushback is you can't pay these services for reviews. You can. What you cannot do is I cannot go, hey, Susan, I'll send you 50 bucks if you post a good review for Self, Promote and Succeed. You cannot do that. But what I can do is I can go, hey, booksprout, can you show my book to a bunch of people who will potentially post a review of my book? They can voluntarily post a review and they might post a bad one, but hopefully they post a good one. And then there's system set up within Booksprout or Book Sirens or these other companies to encourage people to follow through on the reviews for the books that they request. So people get free books to read in exchange for, you know, the, for their review. That is totally fine because you're not saying, you know, hey Darla, give me a great review for my book. And when you do, I'm going to give you a present or I'm going to give you, I'm going to give you a payment or a fee. And by the way, like that should be a five star review. That is totally not legit. But having a book posted somewhere where somebody can opt in, ask for a review copy and voluntarily leave a review, that is okay. Okay, now friends and family, I got more on this on the next slide because a lot of people just ask friends and family and technically there's rules around this with Amazon and there's also some things that I've seen happen. And so we'll talk about that more in a sec. I have an excerpt straight from the Amazon page. So you cannot dispute that side of what they are saying is okay and is not. I also wanted to put a recommendation on here just so you write this down. When you give somebody a book for, for review, you should recommend that they say this disclosure at the end of their review. I received a copy of this book via, you know, whether it's NetGalley or book sirens or, you know, the author. And I'm for review and I'm reviewing it voluntarily. That disclosure does help Amazon. It kind of just is one of those things where when people do that because it's not a verified review right on Amazon, you guys know what I'm talking about when I talk about verified reviews. Maybe I will pull up an Amazon page and just show you guys these Amazon pages. So you know what I'm talking about because I want to make sure there's no, no misunderstandings here. Hi, Aubry, great to see you here. Dorothea is here as well. Hello. Great to see you. I hope you've, I'm going to say that to you, Angela. I hope you've been doing well. And Angela just said that. And then we have Janine from Sunny Michigan, our book marketing manager, Sarah lives in Michigan as well. So. Okay, let me just Go ahead and share. Oh, and I. When I closed that out, I closed it out completely. That was my mistake. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen and I'm going to take you guys into Amazon just to show you what I'm talking about with a few of these pieces. Just so there are no misunderstandings as far as. Here we go. So, okay, got that open. And let me share my screen. Okay, Now.

And.

Nope, that's not what we want. Where is it? Where is it? Amazon is not showing as a choice here. Okay, let me. Nope. Okay, one second. I am not getting Amazon as a choice to share, which is not what I wanted. We want to do that. What? Oh, Angela's saying something. You're gonna have to come on stage, angel. I can't. I can't. The sign language is not.

I was going to say. Let me try. I've got Amazon pulled up, so let me try to.

Great. Yeah, just pull up your book. You can pull up. Yeah, you can pull up my book or, you know. Yeah, that's fine. That'll work great. I don't know why it wouldn't share, but it was not letting me share, I think.

Okay, so.

Oops.

Oh, now you're sharing.

Yeah, I don't want to share that one, though. So I'm just going to put that in the background and maybe you can share Amazon. And Emily's here from Colorado. Welcome, Emily. And if this doesn't work, then we'll just go back to my presentation because I'll keep talking. Oh, here we go. It's loading up, so. Yeah, so scroll down just a little bit there. Okay, that's too far. I mean, these are customer reviews. So this is what we're talking about. So let's see if you can find one where they've disclosed it. So verified review. So if you pause here on Chris G's review. So what I was saying about verified review, so you see that little orange statement underneath the stars that says verified review. So that, that shows up when somebody buys the book. So 99 cents, all the way up to, you know, whatever they buy and then they post a review, they're going to show up as a verified review. Now if you scroll down and find one that isn't verified, and then we'll see if there's a disclosure at the bottom of it.

They're all verified.

I mean, that's great. That's fantastic. And you probably have to go closer to launch anyways to find. To find. Somebody said it was disappointing. How rude. Okay, it's okay. I think I know that's the one that said I. Here we go. All reviewers there. Did you have a verified view? You had a verified purchaser filter? No, no, no.

Like, I was wanting to see if you could see unverified, but it only.

Shows you shows verified.

Yeah.

All right. Well, this is great. We have a lot of verified reviews. It would probably be closer to launch anyways where you would see an unverified. And so at the bottom, I was just going to see if somebody had posted the disclosure. Right. I received this from the publisher where I received this from NetGalley. There we go.

Well, this one doesn't give a disclosure, but it's not verified.

Oh, yeah, that's not verified. Yeah, I was looking more for a disclosure. Wow. Totally unoriginal. I haven't read you guys. I don't read my reviews because obviously you see a one star and you're like, wow, that hurts. Okay. I'm especially impressed. Okay. That's not it. Yeah, it's okay. We don't need to see a disclosure. So the one other thing I wanted to show was just scroll back up and. And I just want to make sure everybody knows where editorial reviews go. So those are consumer reviews. They show up as customer reviews. So go click back on the page. The book page. Yeah. And now just scroll down a little bit. A little bit more. And underneath the books, there's the A content. So for those who maybe aren't familiar, that's a plus there. Right there. So editorial reviews. So those are where you maybe have paid for. So we have Midwest Book reviews, readers favorite, the Lovely Librarian, and NetGalley. So when you've paid for review services to review your book, the editorial reviews will show up there. And. And if you have, this is also where you might put a celebrity endorsement or those kind of things. So thank you, Angela. I just want to show people every, you know, those things. So everybody understood what we were talking about. And. Oh yeah, Aubry, we could have done a search for a disclosure, but they don't always say disclosure. They like the wording is sometimes I received a copy of this for free in exchange for a voluntary review. So it would have been. But yeah, thank you. Disclosure does not show up. It doesn't show up as disclosure. Usually. It's usually just like a little sentence at the bottom and it's fine. Okay, awesome. So cruising back to the reviews that we were talking about, and let's talk about a couple of the services that you can use for. For. Oh, it started back at the beginning. Sorry, I forgot to click it. Quick review of everything we've covered. Okay, so here is. Oh yeah, before the services. So this is specifically the wording that Amazon has about review, posting. And so they say we don't allow content if it's got this, you know, company website promotion, blah, blah, blah. But we also don't allow people to create, edit or post content about their own product or services. The same goes for products and services offered by friends, relatives, employers, business associates and competitors. So friends is a very loose term. But at the same time, this is where a lot of people, including us, recommend that you don't attach your Goodreads to your social media profile if it's the same regardless, because Goodreads is owned by Amazon. And so as soon as you attach your social media profile, they get access to your friends and then they can potentially. They don't say they do this, but, you know, a lot of people suspect this is one of the ways they identify who your friends are when they do review of reviews and remove them and so connecting it that way. And I mean, a lot of us are not necessarily friends on social media. And, but that's one connection. IP addresses. If you've sent people gifts on your Amazon, those are all ways that Amazon, Amazon has a lot of data on us. So it's really, there's a lot of ways they can determine how somebody might be a friend or a relative or in some sort of employment relationship. We had a client, despite our, our recommendation, she not do this. She still did. She asked all of her employees to post a review for her book. And, and at first some of them were able to post reviews, but then she had a whole bunch of reviews get removed. So, and, and some of the legit reviews got removed with the ones that were in fact not legitimate according to their things. Business associates. This is why a lot of our clients say, hey, can you guys post a review for my book to us Book launchers. And we say no, we are business associates of yours in relation to this book in particular. Plus we've worked on this book, so we cannot post a review. Just like, I mean, competitors, they say that just so that you don't post bad reviews about anybody who is kind of competitor. Now, this is their review terminal terms for all products and services, not just books. But it's important to know these terms because you really want people who don't know you personally to be posting reviews because that will make the reviews more legitimate and more likely to stick. And so this is, you know, this is where they go into even further. First personal or financial connection to the brand seller, author or artist is questions. That's about questions or any of those kind of things. So this is really important to understand their content guidelines and what they allow reviews for. And, and it says we review, we, we remove reviews. That's a hard sentence. We remove reviews posted by someone. Financial interest in the product or any other conflict of interest. And then you can go here and see examples of reviews they don't allow. So they are very particular and I've talked about it very openly before, but self promote and succeed. At one point I had 12 or 13 reviews removed in one, you know, one swoop. And none of them were ill gotten reviews. But what I suspect is that they seem like it because they're from people that are, you know, YouTube besties or they posted a review on my other book or maybe I've posted reviews for their books and they see it as review exchanges which are also completely allowed or not allowed, I should say. So I cannot post a review for somebody's book in exchange for them posting a review on my book. That is 100% not allowed. And, and I suspect in some cases that could be what's happened with some of the other reviews that got removed. I don't know the exact 12 that got removed. I just know 12 got removed on my account. All right, so services that you can use to help bolster your reviews. So these are just four. There's a lot of services out there. Book Sirens and we actually have a, actually we don't have an affiliate account with them, but we do with booksprout and with Booksprout if you use them. And Angela, I think it's just book launchers.com forward/booksprout. I believe you get a free month of their service if you use our link, which you won't get on their website. So good advantage to using the booksprout, our affiliate link for that. But Book Sirens and Booksprout are two programs that we use for pretty much all of our books. And I also have a YouTube video where I compared the two and talked about the two differences or the difference between the two. And I have more content coming out about these two specific sites. Probably it'll end up being in December or even early January, but they get consumer reviews and it's mixed for every book. Again, because it's voluntary. They post your book. People choose to review it or not. And, and also you can get not accepted into their programs, which has happened to me and happened to Some of our client books as well, because they know what's a fit for their audience and what's not. So these are great services. You're not going to get thousands of reviews using their services. We found that if it's working for your book, you might get five. But every review helps your journey as an author. NetGalley is editorial, just as an example. You can submit there. I always tell people that NetGalley. Most of our clients get three to five reviews through our NetGalley submission. However, they're not always good reviews. NetGalley are more professional reviewers and so the reviews tend to be harsher than the consumer reviews. We see a lot of four out of five reviews and sometimes they post them to Amazon and sometimes they don't as well. That's something to know about them. But they are a harsher reviewer. They're bookstore buyers, they're library buyers. But conversely, we've had clients get their book listed in libraries and bookstores and get written full blog posts about their books from a NetGalley reviewer who discovered it there, wrote a review, loved it and wanted to share it with their audiences, whatever their audience might be. So there's trade offs to that. But it is, it is harder to get a five out of five on NetGalley because they are more critical. And a four out of five is actually a really good review from a NetGalley reviewer. And they just save their five out of fives for their absolute stars. Right. The ones that are spectacular. There's also review services like Pubby and there's Author, Authentic Author Review Exchange or sorry, I don't remember the exact what it is. There's a couple services like this where you can sign up and if you're willing to read and review other books, then you get points and that will go towards people reviewing your book. It's not a review exchange. It's again, it's all voluntary. You'll volunteer to read certain books and give reviews and other people will volunteer to read yours and give reviews. So it's more of an exchange. It's. It's definitely work on your part, but you know, it can work to get reviews for books as well. And obviously the more you participate, the more reviews you'll get for your book as well. Whew. Okay. And so paid ads for your book and to build your email list is the next stop. I am not going to go deep into this. This is going to be an entire month and probably actually two or three training sessions when we're doing Author, the author Business accelerator group that I mentioned. And, and the reason I'm not going to go too deep into it is, is there's just so many elements of paid ads. So there's Amazon ads, which we have done some videos here and again there'll be an entire training session. And then Shane, who runs our, he's our online marketing specialist inside of the Author business accelerator. He'll also be doing one on one calls, or not one on one, but office hours where you can get one on one help. You can share your Amazon ad screen and all that fun stuff. Again, I'll talk a little bit more about it later, but here's the link if anybody wants to check it out. There's not a lot you can see inside of it because it's all behind a paywall. But that's our group where we do these deeper dive stuff and give prizes and all of that fun stuff. But also for ads you can, you can create a lead magnet or you can run ads to your book. So there's a couple different paths here. So one path that I use very heavily is I run ads through Google and YouTube to my free audiobook. So downloading, self publish and succeed or self promote and succeed, we run ads to those downloads so you can download the audio version for free and we pay for ads for that. And then after that they, you know, they might buy the print version or they might just join our community, maybe they become clients in the future, those kind of things. And then other authors will run Facebook or Google Ads to their book to try to sell it. It's not for nonfiction. It's very difficult to run a Facebook ad or a Google Ad to your book and sell it and make money at the end of that. Because by the time you've paid for your ad costs and your print costs and the shipping costs, you are almost always going to find yourself, you know, certainly not getting the money back on that particular ad because you're, you know, you might pay, you might get your cost down to a couple dollars per click. But not every click is going to convert into a book sale. So if you're selling your book for $20, which is probably a high price, you're still probably lucky if you are breaking even on those. But if you are offering a course on the back end or you have services on the back end, then that starts to make sense for different authors to run paid ads. So there's a lot of strategy, a lot of funnel building that goes into running paid ads. And then Amazon ads are separate. You don't have to run a funnel. Your Amazon ads can become profitable in time, and that's where Shane is really, really good and kind of can walk you through it. Not every book is going to be profitable on Amazon. We have a chunk of books that just don't work on Amazon no matter what we do. And then we have a chunk of books that they work, and we don't know why they're working because they're working really well. And then the ones in the middle where kind of all the same things work for them, and it works. Amazon ads definitely contributes to the overall performance of that book. So. So lots there, and there's lots of questions here. So I'm going to get Angela to save them. And we'll pause after I cover the next section. We'll pause and we'll catch up on questions. Okay, cool. And I see Christopher Mattish is in the house. Do I have. Hold on. I got your book here. I want to show everybody. One moment, please. Don't mind me while I have to take a big stack so. Of books back here. And I just dropped Michael. Michael Beatonbaugh's book. All right, here we go. Christopher. Let's show everybody because this is one of the most interesting. I mean, one of the cool things in this job is that there's always new topics and new books, but here we go. So this is Christopher's book, the Flag Revelation. Sorry, there's a little bit of a glare on that glossy cover now. I didn't even know that there was such a thing as a vex ologist, and I hope I'm saying that right. Christopher, before I met him, I had no idea that there's people in this world that study flags and do all that. So this is just kind of a look at his book. How cool is that? If you have any interest in understanding about flags and learning stories about all the different flags, this is so cool. I'm just trying to find one other page here so you could find your state flags. Here we go. There's my state. Nevada. Wrong side. There we go. Anyways, there you go. Christopher's book. Okay, now I got myself distracted. Here we go. Let's go back to my presentation. And so, Angela, if you want to hold the questions after we get through the next section, I'll do some questions and we'll do some prizes then, too. So now where are we? Let me see if I can get it to start back at where I left off. That's always. Where did it go? Okay. Nope. It started at the Beginning again. All right. I don't have my little button that I usually have that says resume. So forgive me for the recap. Okay, now, next thing. So you saw paid ads. That's what we just talked about. And now seek partnerships to promote your book. This is the next one I'm going to go a little bit deeper on. So there's different kind of partnerships. There's four that we focus on for our clients at Book Launchers. There's bulk sales, there's partnerships with other authors, there's influencers, and then there's just creative things. And of course, not every book lends itself to all four. And this is part of what we do when we do roadmap planning for our clients and their bulk sales, which are outlined there. So businesses that you may be frequent or your reader frequencies frequencies frequents. There might be sponsorships, you know, like this. The example that is on this slide is a gardening book used by real estate agents to congratulate new home buyers. So one of the things, one of the bulk sales that I did with my first book was there was mortgage brokers that, that bought my book and they, I'd have to sign them. They want to sign copies, but they were my local area and they loved giving my first book more than cash flow to their clients. So they would give more than cash flow to their clients. So they would buy my. Bought my book in bulk. And then, you know, you can kind of think of other examples. But there's a lot of bulk sale opportunities. Can even be quite corporations for gifts. That can be one. One of our clients, I think it was a couple years ago now, but she sold 800 copies to a company who gave the every one of their employees her book for Christmas gift. So bulk sales are, you know, all of these require some creativity and kind of understanding your market and where they're hanging out. But, you know, there can be really great opportunities in there if you're creative and you're good at networking other authors. You know, I've done this too where I've had another author give me books and we've sold them in bundles. Usually for me, the partnerships tend to be some sort of an exchange. Like I feature you, you feature me. But you can do newsletter swaps, you can do takeovers. Dale Roberts and I were talking about how I might do a takeover of his channel come when we do our holiday extravaganza in December. If you're new around here, you maybe haven't been to one of our holiday extravaganzas. But it's like a deep dive session, but we just give prizes and answer questions and there's usually multiple people from my team, so you get to hear other people's perspectives. And he has offered for us to take over his social media. So if you're here today, live, or if you're watching the replay, let me know what you think of that idea. I think that could be fun. And then influencers, which is what I'm going to talk about a little bit more today, you can do all kinds of things with influencers and sometimes just having them endorse your book can be really powerful and then creative. You know, nonprofits, you can do a lot of things with nonprofit organizations or other kinds of associations and groups. So I just did eo, which is entrepreneur organization and I'm a member. They had a Western regional event last month and I gave them, well, we gave them too many books, but that's a different story. We gave them 500 copies, 250 copies of each of my books, Self Promote and Successful, Succeed and Self Publish and Succeed. And what they did was, you know, they featured book launchers in a few places and, and then they put one book in every attendees bag. Now they didn't get as many people attending as they expected, which is why we, you know, Angela now has a whole bunch of extra books. So if anybody gets a book that has a sticker on the front page, that's because it covers up the personalized letter for the EO members. But we didn't want to throw them out, so we kept them and we're using them for other purposes now. All right, so let's talk about influencers. Now usually when we ask our clients which influencer, you know, which would, who would you like us to reach out to for you? Or they say, hey, these are the people I want to be on. We usually get Reese's Book Club or Oprah's Book Club or people want to be on Joe Rogan's podcast or Jordan Peterson's podcast. And yes, these folks absolutely are influencers. However, it's not that easy to get in front of them to get on the book club, to get on the podcast doesn't mean you can't shoot for that goal, but it usually means that's not where you're starting. So where should you think about starting? Well, make your list so you can make a dream list. So who do you know your readers know and will be influenced by? So that might be the Reese Witherspoons or you, you know, whoever it is for you and your industry so you can make your dream list. Now also look at YouTube influencers. So who, who has a good audience, like who has a hundred thousand subscribers and, or even 50,000 and, and is in your space who are social media influencers. And for me, it's not just about the number of followers. I want to see engagement on the post because I see an awful lot of people who have a hundred thousand followers and nobody's commenting. So they got a whole lot of bots. I'm looking for real influencers. They haven't bought their, their likes and their posts. They have people who are commenting and the comments are legit because you can read the comments. You can tell when somebody has paid a service to just post comments on a, on a post or a reel or a picture. And, and so what I'm looking for are people who probably have a hundred thousand followers on their social media platform, but it's an engaged audience. So it's not just 100,000 bots. It's people who are, you know, they're getting 50 to 80 comments on every post or most posts. And you can see that they've, they have influence over a group of people. Podcasts, live streams. You know, I would go for the ones that are top 10 in their, in their category, but it's not one everybody knows. And I say this not because I'm trying to take your dreams down, I'm saying this because everybody has to start somewhere. And you can aim for Joe Rogan, but you need to start at the smaller groups that are going to give you influence and open up your door a little further. So if you kind of look at it almost like pouring water on the cement to get to the other side, right? So you're going to start right here. You're going to pour in a little circle and then as you pour, it expands a little bit, expands a little bit, expands a little bit. Sometimes it goes out to the side. You're not always going straight to where you want to go. And little bit by bit you're going to get. Well, you might not get on Joe Rogan eventually you might, but you know, you're going to get closer and closer and you're going to get to more equivalent level media outlets. But that's not where you begin, but where you begin. And actually in a lot of cases, these are phenomenal places to begin. They have major influence over a smaller list, even micro influencers. So content creators with 10, 10,000 followers, that can be really, really lucrative because sometimes, sometimes that, that thousand Ten thousand can be a really, really engaged group. Popular authors conferences, look at who's speaking. They, you know, a lot of times there's a really big list of speakers and you don't have a clue who any of them are except for the three keynote people, but yet they're on stage. So they have influence, they have expertise. So why not try to connect with those people? And so those are all ways to make your list of, for influencer outreach. I'm just giving you three examples from my own, you know, people that have been phenomenal referral sources and you may or may not know who any of them are. Ali Fallon, who's find you'd voice. She's actually not going to be teaching her course anymore, but she has been just an extraordinary partner for us. We've worked with her, I've taught classes for her, she has sent us a lot of clients and, and it all started with me being on her podcast and, and it's just been an extraordinary partnership and it's been, you know, very good for my books and for my business and I've had a lot of fun with her as well. Chris Kremotesis, he runs podfest and Vidfest and you know, he's doing a billion things now. He, he's got a bitcoin conference too. But I met him through podfest, you know, eight years ago, seven years ago. And he, you might know him now but when he started it was, you know, PodFest was started off really small and has grown and he has been an extraordinary person for me, not necessarily referring business, but opening doors for me to do more and more speaking and ultimately actually led to me being in an entrepreneur organization. And then Danielle Kobo, she was a client of ours and she, I don't know, she probably referred 50, maybe 50 people to us as a company for services. And she's, you know, she's an author, she's a speaker, she's a phenomenal networker and it's not necessarily somebody that you would have known who it was, but she has been a incredible source of referrals. So a lot of people really focus on these big, big names and, and yet these kind of mid sized folks that you don't know their name, they can be extraordinary partners for you, your company, your book and all of those kind of things. So this is where I recommend you start. And a lot of times you won't even know, which is why we have some people who come to us and they say, I don't want to be on that podcast. I don't want to be on a bunch of small, small level podcasts. And I always smile and nod because I understand. I mean, I'm crazy busy. I don't actively pursue any podcast interviews anymore just because my schedule is so full. But if you are really actively trying to grow and you're turning your nose up at smaller podcasts, you will miss out on the Ali Fallons of the world. And you could miss out on building a relationship with somebody like Chris, who their organization is really small today, but five years from now, it's going to be massive. And, and Danielle, you would never know it. Like, she, I think she has a podcast of her own and now she has a book and she's on stages, but you wouldn't know what a phenomenal networker she is. But if she has a podcast and it's small and you meet her and she loves you and she starts referring a whole bunch of people to you, well, you've just missed out if you've turned your nose up because you think she's not big enough for your time. So it's an interesting thing. I always tell people it's a privilege to have an audience. And, you know, even if you have one person in that audience, sometimes one person is all it takes. And so, you know, start small. And it's actually not only okay to start small, I think it's great to start small. And if you do it well, you'll find that you are growing your sphere of influence, your platform, your book sales, your reviews, all those things. Okay. And one of the best places to start is social media for meeting them and, and social media to dos. Look for where they interact with their audience, look for what they're posting, add value when you can share, comment, you know, basically just follow them and engage with them on social media and support them when you see the opportunity. This will also allow you to spot when they might be speaking or attending certain events so that you can meet them in real life. That is the ultimate. If you can make it an in person connection with somebody and, and kind of create that organic connection, not the constructed social media connection, but be ready because when a door opens, you want to step right inside. And going back to Ali, one of the things I was on her podcast, I said, yes, I went on our podcast and then, and then there was the opportunity to, you know, reciprocate because she was doing something. And I say, hey, why don't you come on my YouTube channel? And. And then she said, hey, I've got this class. Do you want to come teach this section of this class. So the more you step inside to those doors, the more you'll find other doors open, open. And it's okay if you've had relationship with somebody for a while and you know the door doesn't open, it's okay. You can still ask, you know, they might say no, but you know, at least after you've built a relationship it's comfortable and you can, you can make the ask and see what happens. A couple of our client examples of this, Carol Sanford, she did this on Twitter with and this was when it was Twitter she started engaging with Tom Peters. And now Tom Peters, I believe wrote the foreword for her most recent book. He's endorsed her books, he's promoted her books. And it all started with just some really authentic but engaging dialogue on social media. And then Martha, she also had, you know, one of the things that she's, she did, it wasn't necessarily directly on social media, but you know, she shared this and she said that she was off to Low Carb USA conference and she's sharing her book and she's going now as somebody who is known in that field. And this was all because of slowly but surely kind of following the path of thought leadership and building those relationships and making outreach. So a couple things to talk about on don'ts, you know, if you, if you connect with an influencer that don't ask them to share your post or retweet, you know, that's just not going to build a relationship or really give you any value either. And please, this is a personal pet peeve, but I know it's not just me. Please don't ask to pick their brain. Nobody wants their brain picked. Now you can, and this will often hook somebody in. You know, if you're meeting them live and in person and you have a specific thing you want to ask, you could say, hey, listen, I have a question I think you're the perfect person to answer. And then just ask the question. Don't give a five minute background, just say, you know, I've really struggled to get Amazon reviews. What's worked for you? If it's appropriate to ask that person that question. Right. Just have a really pointed, quick question. Because most people love to help. They just don't have time for the five minute background story on why you're asking them this question and why you love their work. And they certainly don't want to have their brain picked, but they will answer a question and try to help. Most of the time this is One that we get emails on all the time and it's annoying. Can we have a call to discuss synergies? No, I don't want to have another call. I have a full day of calls every single day. And so, you know, if you're reaching out to somebody again, this is not going to fly. And being a pain or nuisance is also something, you know, commenting is not being a nuisance, but you know, constantly writing people and saying, hey, just want to see if you got my message. Hey, can you promote my book? Hey, can you retweet? Hey, can you share? You know, you're just, you're just asking and asking and asking. And conversely, don't be afraid to say nothing at all. You know, do connect, do comment, do post. Because engagement is a great currency that you can give an influencer. You know, everybody needs audiences and the more engaged their audience, the more, the more they have. And if you're the person, you know, if you see a SIA post and everybody's saying, oh, this is great, thank you, amazing, and then you put a thoughtful statement, a sentence or a story about how this really connected with you that day, that kind of thing will stand out. Especially if you do that a few times when you're meeting them. Don't go in unprepared unless you, it just happens to be an accidental meeting. Again, kind of think about that specific question or that specific statement and try to be fast and efficient with whatever you're saying or construction, constructive kind, you know, those kind of things. But you know, it is, it is hard when you, somebody's a speaker as an example, and they get off the stage, they might have 30 people around them and they're going to want to try and give time to everybody. But if you take up five minutes and there's still 25 people waiting, they're going to have a hard time staying focused on you. So that's where being prepared and kind of knowing what you're going to ask, what you're going to say is really, really important. Okay? And so just really quick. Book Launchers does do full service marketing. And a lot of people ask me what we do for full service marketing. It is better to come and work with us throughout the editing design, you know, even early writing, but editing design process, because we start working on your marketing, your roadmap, your research, your keyword research or category research, you know, who are you going to do influencer outreach to, who's going to do endorsements, what's the review plan, all of that, we work on while you're doing editing and design with us. But if your book's already out, we will review it and consider it. We don't take on a lot of books that are already out unless somebody is willing to go back and make some improvements and adjustments. But we will consider it. And we do pitch for live appearances. So if you really loathe the thought of pitching yourself for speaking or for podcasts or for media or for bookstores and libraries, that is something that we do. We will manage your Amazon ads, we submit to bookstores and library catalogs, book awards, and of course we do strategic calls to support you in your strategy and summarize all that every month. So that is something we do as a full service offering. And then I already mentioned earlier, I just have a little slide for it. We also now have our new author Business accelerator. We've put it on school recently because it's got a really cool platform with a calendar. We can do a forum so people are posting and asking for support. And we have monthly training calls as well as office hours so you can go and check it out@school.com author business and we've put Julie the Book bottom inside of there. So this bot was trained on every piece of content. You can brainstorm with Julie the Book Bot. Ask her questions about, hey, I think I want to turn my book into a course. What should I do next? What what do you think of this idea? Or what is something I can do to, you know, my book has stopped selling on Amazon. What's five things I can do? She's going to answer all those questions and she does a great job. She also will filter through all of our content. So if you say, hey, is there a video on this? She'll pull the video up for you. Our team uses it to find the videos because we have 700 plus videos now. So that's a quick way to find video content on things. So I just wanted you all to know because a lot of times I forget to tell you and people are asking afterwards. So there you go. All right, let's do questions and next we're going to go into pitching for speaking engagements and I have a little bit of a speaker path and some ideas and some speaker one sheet examples as well for you coming up when we get to that part. So all right, Angela, what do we have for questions? So first, can you should you use AI for a review? If it researches its vast database to critique your book content, I mean it's not going to post it on Amazon. So I'M not totally sure I get that what I do use and you may have been on one of the lives when I did it, what I do use is I will take all of the Amazon reviews like for my, my book for example. I will take all the Amazon reviews, I'll copy paste them, put them into chat GPT and I will get a summary of the highlights, the lowlights, areas for improvement. You know, things people like from the book just to kind of get a sense of that. But, but I'm not sure exactly how I would use AI to post a review or you know, because the piece is more like who is posting the review. That's more the concern when it comes to Amazon. NetGalley being a little harsh. So this is Aubrey, she says Julie was talking about NetGalley being a little harsh. I wonder if it was more about a professional layout problem with self publishers or what? Okay, so no. So netgalley, the reviewers, how do I put this? So they're professional reviewers. So they're not necessarily going to give five stars to every book whereas a lot of consumer reviews will generally give you. They're more generous with the five stars. They can be harsh. So if you're a self published author and you have not gone through rigorous editing for your book, I would not submit to NetGalley because they're going to tear you apart. Our books generally come back with four or five star reviews but our team puts every book through content edit, two rounds of copy edit, sometimes a fact check and a proofread. So our books are as good or better quality than a traditionally published book. So all of our authors, we're not worried about them coming back saying this book was riddled with typos or what generally comes back is more of a critical like the structure or not the structure. This storyline didn't work for me or you know, I can't think of a good example but usually it's a four star review and they love the book. Right? So that's what I mean by harsh. So they're going to say fantastic book, great read. I think everybody who's new to, you know, writing books will love this book. Four stars. So that's what I mean by they're a little harsher because they are professional reviewers and like I said, they're bookstore buyers, they're library buyers, they're bloggers, you know, they're, they're avid book reviewers. So they don't give five stars to every book because you know, if they read 100 books in a year, they're going to save those five stars for the 10 or 20 that they think are extraordinary reads. So a good or great book in their mind is a four star read. That's more like what I meant. But you absolutely don't want to post a, or you don't want to send them a book that you haven't gone through rigorous, rigorous editing with because they will tear it apart. I don't think we've ever had anybody say the layout was bad. I mean our layouts are stunning. Our team, we have extraordinary designers on our team. So our layouts like, I mean even this book which, which just came out, Reviving Our Republic and it was a pretty fast project for the team. Even that, like, look at that layout, it's gorgeous. So yeah, and then here's Danielle Cogo's book because I grabbed a bunch, I talked about Danielle. Let's see what her, her layout. Every layout's a little different. But I mean these are, these are good looking books. Okay, next question. Alan, speaking of great authors with books that are out, I don't have my copy of your book yet. I missed it. I think it came in on Friday. But I was not in the office to pick up my mail. Alan, otherwise I'd be showing off your book right now too. So this may be off topic, but my site technician wondered if there was possible to apply for affiliate linking to my Amazon page. So yes, you, you can get an Amazon business account and affiliate link generally. And I did a video. There's a lot of little rules around the Amazon affiliate links and I think, Angela, there is a video on, and I'm trying to remember what topic I covered that under. There's a lot of places you can and cannot use your Amazon affiliate link. And so you want to be very careful to read those reviews. Alan. And, but you can and you can get that. And I don't personally use my, use an affiliate link for my book and it's just because again, I'm trying to keep everything clean. But if I was, if I was selling say, paint, if you wanted to sell painting products that are similar to what you might talk about in your book or like, you know, your favorite paintbrush, get your affiliate link for that and promote those things and use it. And if there's other books you recommend, you could do that. And then in certain places you could use your Amazon link for, for your book. But sorry, I can't remember the exact nuances and rules for that one. And there is a video somewhere. Did she just find it anyways? Oh, Angela saying, your book, your cover is stunning. Yeah. That's why I wish I could be holding it up here in my hands right now for Ellen. Angela, you're welcome to put a link to Alan's book in the comments since I can't hold up his book right now. Okay. She may have found the link as well for you, Alan. There you go. All right, next question. And Alan, Alan is also saying our layout team and design team is fantastic. It is not just me raving about my fantastic team. All right. And Radom, I am sorry, I don't know how to say your name. I'll just. I'll just say. I'll just read your question. What is your opinion on Kirkus Reviews? So Kirkus reviews are. They're expensive. So that's the first thing I'll say about them. I can't remember the exact price because. Because my team is the one that submits our clients for cookers reviews. We don't use them for very many books, but, you know, books that are going to have a big library strategy or a big bookstore strategy as part of it, we will submit for cookers reviews. They do have. Their reputation isn't as good in the publishing industry as it used to be. And so the only real reason to me to submit for a Cookers review is if bookstores and libraries are a big part of. Of your strategy and you need them. You need a Kirkus review and other reviews to. Because they look at that, that's important to them. Yes, that's the right one. Angela was just clarifying that the link to the video that she sent was authors. Are you making an affiliate income selling books yet? Yes. Yay. Thank you, Angela. She's. She's amazing at finding the videos that I'm talking about about. And also she dropped in the link to Alan's video, so fantastic. Thank you very much. All right, let's do. Let's do two more questions, and then I am going to turn it over to you to do a couple prizes so you can open up the. The. What are we thinking here? The. The live stream giveaway tool and you can do a couple prizes while I run to the bathroom and then even answer questions as well. That's all the questions. Sweet. So I'm going to go do that right now. I'm going to pop out, take a quick break. Angela is going to do prizes. So if you haven't said hello, this is your chance to make sure you're in on that prize giveaway. And I'm going to pull you Onto stage. Are you ready? Oh, you're there. You pulled yourself onto stage. Awesome. Thank you.

Hello, guys. Happy Saturday. Sorry, my virtual background. I thought it would look good and it's like, making me look very alien, but hope everyone, Saturday is going well. Let me get the giveaway tool going because we haven't given away a prize yet today, which we're an hour in, so that's a little unusual for us. Thanks for sticking around. Let me. Let me see.

Let me.

I've got this pulled up on one of my other screens, so I'm just going to pull the right people and let me see if I can share this while we're actually doing it. So I'm going to go to print present, and let's see if you guys can watch live for the giveaway. Yes. Okay. I think this will work. All right. There's been a lot more than 15 or 15 different people, I should say. So let's see who the first prize winner is. It can't be me or. Oh, it's Steve. Yay, Steve, I hope you're still here. That's awesome. Yay. So, Steve, please email me at teamoklaunchers.com to claim your prize. We have our oh so soft journal, our hashtag no boring books mug. Or you can receive a copy of either self publish and succeed or Self promote and succeed. So those are our prize options. If you are outside the US Then please choose from one of the books options. Either self promote and succeed or self publish and Succeed. There are customs fees that both the recipient has to pay and the sender has to pay whenever it's a bulky package being shipped outside the US So let me know what prize you'd like. Again, the email address is teamoklaunchers.com so. Okay, I've seen a couple more comments come in. Let's do another prize, guys. I mean, why not? Julie's not here, so I can. I can give away as many prizes as I want. This clears out my closet a little bit where I have a. A few closets here. One of them is dedicated to this. Yay, Aubry. Yay. Fantastic. Well, Aubry, you know the drill. So please email me at Team, there might not be a prize yet that you haven't won, but that is okay because we love winners here. And something I would love to see. I'm going to stop sharing. There we go. Something I would love to see in the comments because we have 38 people watching right now and I would love to see who is here live who was actually on our first rendition of this training back in September. And if you have, if you weren't and you got the replay link that Julie shared at the beginning, I am just curious who, who was in the September deep dive training that we did on YouTube and who is here today? Who is continuing on? So go ahead and put that in the chat. Let's see. I don't see anyone posting anything yet. Okay. Susan. Yes. And I think you actually won a prize. Alan. Of course, yes. We love having some of our YouTube besties here. Kevin, Christopher. Oh, you were here. Or Kristen. I'm sorry, Kristen. Mary Kay, if you missed the September one, that's totally fine. We did post the link earlier. But I will go ahead and put it in the chat again. That way everyone has it handy. So Julie will put this in the description afterward. But here is the link to the first half of this training. So do feel free to share it to. Darlo is here the hearts way. Oh, I remember. Janine, I think that's what you said because your YouTube handle is different than your name. So that's awesome guys. So many people are here. Okay, so on another note then, for whether you were here the last time, let's just focus on today. What is something that you have learned today so far? I mean, we were only halfway through. What's something that you've learned that you didn't know or haven't yet implemented with your book? Whether it's paid reviews or how to handle those. What is something that you've learned today so far from Julie's presentation that you have not yet implemented for your book or you plan to implement it in the future? Aubrey, I'm so glad that you love these. We love having you and everybody, everyone else on here. That's awesome. So yeah, go ahead and put that in the chat and that might be one of the prizes later. Just FYI is letting me know what, what one of your favorite things is that you have learned today so far? Okay. I like Susan's. I like the do's and don'ts for influencers. I'm looking forward to the speaking segment. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Julie, in the last deep dive, we had shared a Dropbox link for the Roadmap. Is that exclusive to that specific September one or are we also sharing that one today?

No, that was for the September one. I don't think we'll share it today. Yeah, I hadn't planned on sharing it today. Maybe we'll see. But yeah, I actually don't know if the same Dropbox link would be Valid because we might have moved it since then. So anyways, I can double check if.

We do plan to do it for this one. I haven't seen any new questions come in since you've been out, but I'll scroll back through and double check. We got a couple prize winners and a few more entries from people who said hello.

So great.

All right, I'll dive to the next prize in the future.

Wonderful. Well, thank you so much. Oh, yeah, partnerships. People are liking the Wow, a win. How do I get to appreciate it, Steve? Oh, that's great. Okay, I'm going to just dive right back into the presentation and we'll pick up where we left off on speaking. So if you do have any questions as I'm going through it, you can just go ahead and let. Let Angela know. And I figured it out. You guys play from current slide. I found my button. All right, so pitching for speaking engagements, that's our next stop on this author, this thought leader roadmap that we are on. So the speaker path, if you are new to speaking. And one thing I want to address is that a lot of authors, they come to us and they'll say, I want to write a book to become a speaker. And that is fantastic. They think the first speaking gig they get after their book comes out is going to be a paid speaking gig. And that is extraordinarily rare. In fact, I still do a lot of speaking for free, and I'm happy to do it because I have a business in the back end that a lot of times, if I'm saying yes to a speaking gig and I'm not getting paid for it, it's because I'm hoping to be in front of an audience of people that are going to join my community, and they're ultimately going to either become a client or tell somebody else they know who becomes a client. So it feeds the business. That said, if it's not a perfect fit for the audience, then I would like to be compensated for that engagement in some capacity. But I don't expect every gig is going to compensate me. And if your book, if you have never done any speaking before, and you may, your book may immediately lend itself to speaking engagements, which we talked about. Linda Magoon at the beginning or earlier today, how she is now doing a whole bunch of library speaking engagements. And Alan, you'll meet Linda at Rave, because she's going to be there along with Efren and some of our other fabulous clients. But, you know, she didn't. She. I don't even know if they're paying her for these engagements, some of them, I think she's getting an honorarium, but she's selling books at them. And so that's where we want to start, is what's your goal? Is your goal when you want to become a speaker, that you want to be like, you know, Danielle Cobo and she gets paid for her speaking engagements? Or are you going to be speaking to get leads for your business? Or do you want to speak in exchange for the opportunity to sell books to everybody in that audience? Or are you going to sell books in exchange for that speaking? Which our author, Carol Sanford, she has done a lot of virtual as well as in person events and she will take a fee for it. She does a lot of high paid consulting as well. But she will, you know, if you buy 600 copies of her book for your organization, she'll come in and speak. And so those are some of the exchanges. But what are your goals? You have to understand what you know, where you want to be in the future and what you are really focused on, why you're speaking and what you know. So you know, these little interim steps that you might want to take or the things you might want to say yes to. In the meantime, the next thing is to develop a signature talk. And for me, like as an example, I'm going to be speaking at Rave, or sorry, not Rave, Author Nation in November. And my talk is one that I've never done before, but I pull elements from what I would call my signature talk. You know, there's elements of my story, there's some kind of standard pieces that I use. And so your signature talk may not be the talk you give every time. If you want to be a keynote speaker, you'll probably end up with one or two kind of signature talks that you give. So when I book people, so I'm learning chair for Entrepreneur Organization, the Las Vegas chapter. And my job is to book people to speak. And we have a budget. I don't pay people their, their full keynote rates, but a lot of the speakers I'm booking, you know, their normal rate is 20, $25,000. And what's interesting you'll find is they tell you these are the two talks I have to choose from. And I may or may not want that precise talk. So they'll tailor it a little bit. Like next week I have a speaker coming in who is a three time world Guinness Book record holder for ice swimming, long distance ice swimming, Ryan Stramrood. And so he's coming into town to Speak. And when I was booking him, he said, okay, here's my two main talks that I give and here's an optional add on for those talks. And that's typically what I'm seeing from the keynote speakers is they have specific things, but they'll tailor it. But you need to have that specific thing to start with. So develop your signature talk. And then it will get tailored to each and every audience. But you need to know what your story, usually it's your origin story and what the core message is that you're talking about, which usually comes from the hook of your book. Now sometimes this can also be a chapter in your book that's kind of your signature talk, but usually it's the hook of your book and your story and that starts to form the basis of your signature talk. Then you're going to want to create a speaker media kit. And you may not be able to do it off the hop, but you want to eventually have the goal of having a speaker reel and then your speaker one page, kind of like a media kit so that people get your bio, your credentials, testimonials, and your talk topics all from one page. And then this is really important. Start small, build experience. Create that killer speaker reel, especially if you want paid speaking engagements. Because the only real path to paid speaking engagements is either referrals or. Sorry, I'm checking my. My babysitter, My babysitter just sent me a note, so I just had to make sure everything was okay. And so you, you want to be creating that, that speaker reel to get paid engagements because the path is referrals or, or through killer proof that you're going to rock the stage because when somebody books you. So even going just using my own experience on this. So when I book people, this is my second year doing this for the Las Vegas chapter and I'm volunteer so I don't get paid for this role. And let me tell you, if a speaker is subpar, like I booked a speaker last year who. And I won't name the name, but, you know, it's pretty. This person, this person came very well recommended. I've never seen them speak before. I had two calls, I had an interview call and then a prep call with this person. And yet still 25% of the reviews slammed different aspects of this speaker and what they did on stage. And uh, and it's hard. So it's really hard. And I'm a volunteer. So imagine if this is my paid job and I have to excel at it or I'm not going to have a job. So you have to vet those speakers that you're paying so well. And so the best way to do it is to. And so the speaker that I'm booking, not now, I'm booking another one, a fairly high end one for May of next year. I'm booking him solely because another chapter said he was a 10 out of 10. And I mean, it fits with what I'm trying to accomplish too. But another chapter of the exact same audience is saying he was amazing. And then they've given me outcomes. And like three months after the fact, why people are still saying, because it's hard. It's hard as an event booker to find great speakers that's going to please your audience. So the more you can prove to an event booker that you are going to be worth the risk even if you're free, by the way, because I book people, don't pay them and I still get panned afterwards. Most, most of the time people are nice about that. But even free right there, it's their time, their energy they've taken, they've put that into being there. So there's risk when they book a speaker. So you have to do everything you can to mitigate that risk through proof that you're going to be awesome. Now you also leverage your book for credibility. So you can, if you haven't done a lot of speaking, but even, or if you have, you can still leverage your book. You can leverage the awards you can leverage if somebody famous like Tom Peters has said your book was amazing, that's an endorsement of your thinking, which is often what they're looking for when they put you on stage. You also want to network with event organizers and speakers because guess what? A speaker is often, if they're great, they're going to be asked, hey, do you know somebody? And they will refer you if you are friends. Again, that's where Danielle Cobo's networking has been extraordinary for her because, because she is a speaker and she networks with a lot of other speakers, which is why she has so many people to refer to us. But she knows that's the path to getting more speaking engagements. Online presence. Just like you're selling for your book, building your author platform, guess what, that also helps with your speaker path. I get speaking invitations because of my YouTube presence. So I'm not. I sometimes actively submit for speaking opportunities for. But a lot of speaking opportunities come to me because of my online presence. So again, another reason to build a strong author platform and be somewhere not just on a website. So YouTube channels, you know, Instagram, Facebook, especially if you're a speaker, putting yourself on video is really powerful. And then you'll actively pitch yourself to speaking opportunities. And I'll talk about that in a minute. Then you want to collect and leverage testimonials. This is something I have not done well this time around. When I was a real estate speaker, I collected letters of after every talk I did, I got a letter from the event organizer basically saying I was easy to work with, the crowd loved me. You know, we would definitely book her again. And it was a very simple letter but I got it from every place I did. And then whenever somebody was considering me, I included copies of these letters from these major events that I had spoken at. And then my speaking submissions were almost always a yes because again, going back to that the risk mitigation, if you have other event organizers saying you crushed it, then somebody's going to feel a lot better about booking you. So collecting and leveraging those testimonials, then you can put them on your speaker one sheet, your website and all of those places because it really helps with that risk mitigation. And then woohoo, hit five and repeat or hit hit nine and then hit go back to five and repeat. Keep learning, keep going, keep growing. Update that speaker reel as you get more speaking engagements and continue to network and grow and build that platform. Platform. Those things are all going to feed into being able to do more speaking now. Well, I'm not there yet. So this is a Speaker 1 sheet. These are examples of Speaker 1 sheets we've created for our clients when we talk about speakers speaking inside of the Author Business accelerator. One of the prizes that month will be we will create your speaker one sheet for you because again we have extraordinary design team and they do a great job of this. But we also write the copy, create a lot of the copy for this page. But this is an example of what it should include. It's got your social media links on there, it's got your bio, it's got speaking topics and where you've already appeared. So Devonte blows. He's been on XP Con 2023 XP big agent meeting Western Washington University ENI, Central Valley Ranch, Rise above, so forth. So being able to showcase where you've already spoken is really important. Kenneth Monahan his he's been on the Neurology Support Center, University of Ulster. Ulster. I don't know if I'm saying that right. Kenneth is overseas. I believe he's in Ireland is where he lives. And then having the ability to download your image, your picture that's on this speaker one sheet. And, you know, also your book. Right. The book is available from these places. So this is a simple speaker one sheet. This is very similar to what I get supposed to submitted from these big, big keynoters that I am considering for EO Las Vegas as well. So creating something like that for your own book and your speaking engagements is really important. If you have a killer testimonial from some organization that you've spoken at, you could also include that on this page. And then what I used to do is my next page would be just photocopies of those, or not photocopies, but images, copies of the testimonials and the letters that I had. So this would be page one, and then page two, three, four, five was just extra proof of the fact that I was a good speaker. Okay, so here's some things to consider when you are pursuing opportunities. And there's actually, I've been talking about her today, and I almost forgot that I had a picture of Linda. This is an example of one of Linda Magoon's talks. So she wrote Live Free and Hike. And. And I mentioned that we were just on her website and she just has a whole bunch. She's just been doing library talk after library talk after library talk. And this is her book, one of her bookstore talks. So you can see what the room looks like. You know, it's not these big fancy stages where, you know, she's on the stage and there's 600 people in the audience. There's 20 to 50 people in her typical event, and she gives a little talk about her book and her experiences, and then she sells books. And it's working incredibly well. And I share this because I think a lot of people get hung up on what success in this space looks like. And this is massive success. To be booked almost every single week, sometimes twice a week, to go to different places to talk about your book and to have these bookings coming in organically, that is massive success.

And.

And it looks different for every book and every author. So ways you can go there and get to this point? Well, one of the things I've done a lot of is using my book as creating currency. So I either get paid through people buying my book, or I give my book in exchange for exposure in different ways. Because sometimes people have budgets for materials and educational material, but they don't have budget for a speaker. So perhaps you can say, hey, listen, I know you only have, you know, $500 for education budget. What if you buy $500 worth of my books and I will come and give a talk to your local group. I did a lot of that in the real estate space. I would sign the book so it was extra value for them. They would give a copy to everybody who attended the event. And then I was putting books in the hands of people who were a perfect fit for my services or for investing in my properties at the time. And they got to give everybody a copy of the book. And then I got some sort of a fee for speaking where I never would have been paid before. So that's a win, win again, it's not what people think of. They're like, I want to get the 10,000, the $20,000 speaker fee. Well, sure, you know, that's a great goal, but that's not A, where you typically start or B, what you probably are going to see with each and every gig. So selling from the back of the room can also be a powerful opportunity for some of these bigger events. So you may speak at an event that has thousands and thousands of people and you might be in a breakout room. They are not going to pay. They don't pay the breakout room speakers most of the time. They might cover your expenses. You know, at some events I get hotel and food and, you know, those kind of things covered. But I'm not necessarily getting getting paid to speak on that stage. So what will happen is you might be given a table and at that table you can get email addresses and you can sell copies of your book and so you have different opportunities. Or if you're at the stage, you might put a QR code up there and they can sign up for your email list. And that can be really valuable too. If you are getting paid to speak, you will almost always submit two different proposals. You'll submit the straight up, this is my speaking fee proposal. And then straight, then the other one will be, this is my speaking fee proposal. Plus if you buy a copy of my book for every person in your organization or for every person attending that talk. And I don't know the stats recently, but I know I had a call with somebody who was tracking the stats on this. I think it was about 18 months ago. And they said 40% of the organizations were taking the speaker fee plus books. So maybe you give them discount on your books, but you're still probably going to make three, four dollars per book. So that might be an extra 400, $800 on your speaker fee because you had books to include. So that's another thing to Consider virtual events for books. That can be a great avenue. I actually already mentioned this. Carol Sanford does it. She does virtual webinars and talks about for organizations in exchange for book purchases. And if I can't sell books or I'm not being paid to speak, my number one focus is always getting email addresses. And one tip you can take away is when you do give a talk, you can hand out a feedback form, because some organizations won't allow you to collect email addresses or to get email addresses from everybody, but they'll be fine with you collecting a feedback form. So you can hand out a feedback form and. And on it you can say, hey, do you want to get my free. My free worksheet or my free audiobook or whatever it is? Just fill out this name and email address and return. When you return the feedback form, I will put you on the list to get that. So that can be a way to collect email addresses, even if you're not necessarily supposed to. Paper and pen list is always the best way. So when you come to a booth that I have or that Book Launchers has, we will probably have a QR code, but we will also have a pen and paper list, because I've found that a lot of people don't end up signing up through that QR code. They open it up, they talk, they get distracted, they leave, and they never actually sign up. But if you have pen and paper, they'll write their name and address down. So I want to see what you guys are talking about, see if anybody has any questions, because speaking is a big, big subject, and we will spend a lot of time on it in Author Business Accelerator. And we spend quite a bit of time working with our clients on this piece as well. All right, any questions? Here we go. Does Julie do the for you? I don't. I don't. I could test it at Author Nation. That would be fun. I think a lot of groups would look at me really weird if they've never seen a YouTube video. So if you're here for the session on learning how to strategically use free books to grow your brand and your business, this talk is for you. I should try it. I don't know if I've got the guts, but. But maybe I'll take that into consideration. Okay, for the reel, do you want those to be actual events? Okay, Susan's question. So for the speaker reel, do you want those to be actual events, or could you do one privately and record it? For the real, you ideally want it to be live events where you get Audience reaction and multiple events ideally as well. In lieu of that recording something is better than nothing. And in lieu of a reel where you have multiple events to string together, you can take one event and take a five minute clip from it. And because sometimes they'll just say submit a reel of you talk or submit a video of you talking or giving a talk. And so this is where, you know, we've, we've had some clients do talks with Blue Organization. I was just promoting their, their expert boot camp this past week and they'll film you in front of a small audience. I was on honestly disappointed that they just basically film you at the front of the room. So you might be at, you know, I did it with them and I was at mit. They don't get audience reaction, they're just filming you at the front of the room, which isn't as good. You see the best speaker reels, they're going to see you and the audience and they're going to see you interacting with the audience. Because what they want to see is engagement. They want to see clapping, they want to hear laughing, they want to see the audience high fiving, you know, so that's the best. But you know, if you have nothing, start with what you have and you could film in a room in a professional looking setting and film that and, and then go from there. But you really do want that live audience and in an ideal world you want multiple settings where you're in different outfits, different talks, different reactions. Aubry says do most people use the same one page for both speaking and podcast bookings? Best practice? No. So speaking is really geared towards that. Keynote a podcast. We do media kits and generally we use those for radio, TV and podcasts. Although if we're really focused on podcasts for one client, we might create just a podcast one sheet. And the podcast one sheet will have questions that somebody might ask you versus the speaker. One sheet is going to be where you've been seen for talking, for giving talks, as well as it's going to just be your one or two, maybe three keynote topics or main topics that you give talks on. So they are different and you do want to have both. If you're pursuing both, can you recommend a concise book on public speaking, TED Talk style? I have read a few, Trying to think of my favorite one. There's one. There isn't one that stands out in my mind as I was like, that was the greatest one that I loved that I read. I don't have one here right now, but you know, I'LL I'll take that into consideration, Brian, and I'll try to think of one. There isn't one that I loved that comes to mind. We've had a couple of books that we've worked on that were good for presenting. Like, oh, what's the PowerPoint one that we did? It had the great subtitle. Angela might remember it. She'll. She'll be able to find it. So that was good. And then there was another one we did on. On Speaking that was pretty good as well, but not TED Talk style. But I'll have to go look, Brian, because I can't think of it off the top of my head. It's been a couple years since I've. Since I've read any of those books. Okay. Is there another question? If you don't have a reel, have you found a Blue Talk like you did to be helpful for establishing a reel? I mean, it's better than nothing. So, like, the Blue Talk, again, what I was disappointed with was they didn't get audience reaction, and it wasn't a big audience, to be fair. You know, I think there was 20, 20 people in the room. But. But I think the audience reaction is really, really important. And I think that just having a video of you speaking at the front of the room is better than nothing, but it's not. It's not great. And so what would be better is if you had the Blue Talk mixed in with speaking somewhere. Or like, if you're Linda Magoon and you're not ever in front of a big audience, you could just have a videographer come out to a couple of them and you're seeing a couple different settings. Just get them, like, giving you an ovation as you stand and you welcome. And you can even tell people in the audience, hey, I'm filming this. I need you to go crazy. You know, people will participate in those kind of things. And so that's probably what. What I would do if I was trying to create a speaker reel and, you know, pursue that side of it. I would try and get as many talks as I could and just film them all and get them strung together. And, you know, Blue Talk could be one. But I think without the audience reaction piece, you're missing. You're missing something there. Mary says, do you think landing TEDx talk is beneficial? And where, in the maturity of a speaker's work, is it a worthy goal? I mean, yeah, I think. I think there's value in it. We've had. We've had. We've had quite A few clients actually do TEDx. We even had Robert Bell who did a TED Global Ideas. I mean that changed Robert's life, like his trajectory from his book to doing podcast interviews to doing the TED Global Ideas talk, you know, and literally he's moved in, he's in a different country now. It completely changed his life what, what he did with that. So. But that's ted global ideas versus TEDx do. It depends what your goal is. So do I see a TEDx leading to a lot more book sales? Not really. It's really comes down to the author and what they do with that TEDx credential. Does it give you more credibility? It can. So if you are a consultant, if you're a speaker and you've had a TedX, I think there can be value in that. Absolutely. Certainly if you've done a TEDx and you can put that into your, into your speaker reel, that is going to be high value there. So it just depends on what your goal is. It's never been something I've pursued. I've never felt like I needed a TedX to get where I want to go. And so I've just never, it always just felt like a lot of, a lot of work to do at TEDx that wasn't necessarily going to add to what I'm doing, but depends on your goal. It can be really good, I think. Oh, thank you. Dan Fraser. Kick Ass Presentations. That was the book I was thinking of. I love his book. He did a great job of this book. Not necessarily what you're looking for as far as TEDx style. It's more like, you know, giving talks when you're not used to giving talks. But, and I just remembered the other person that was working on a book, she has not launched it yet. So she has a framework for creating talks and giving presentations as well. And let's see, has there ever been anyone that ever launched more than one book at a time? Just asking. I mean I'm sure there has been at book launchers we have not launched, I don't think two books at a time. So here's the good and the bad of doing that. And actually so here's an actual example from that Dale gave. So Dale Roberts and I just did a live stream on Tuesday. He just launched for in a 12 book series. And so what he said in that live is something that I think applies to this situation is he said because he's launching 12 books over a year, he is not going to be able to put emphasis on any one book. So if, if he was writing one book this year and putting emphasis on it, he would be calling in favors from all the influencers he knows. He would be doing speaking engagements, media, and everything around that one book. But because it's a book every month, he can't do that kind of a push because he'll kill his network, he'll kill his audience. People are going to be so tired of hearing about him and him asking for favors. So if you are launching two books at once, there's some benefit in that when people find you, they will now have two books that they may buy at the same time. But it can also dilute the efforts that you have because people might buy one book and not buy the other. They might review one book and not review the other, versus if you launch one book now and another one six months later, you can take the platform building that you did with this book, feed it into that book and have it be like that circle that's growing around it. But without knowing bigger picture strategy and what you're trying to accomplish that you know, my preference would be not be to launch two books at once. I also think energetically it's impossible to handle both. I mean, ask a mom of twins how they manage that, right? So there you go. Okay, it's 11:31. We still got lots to cover, so I better get back into it and. But before we do that, Angela, did you pick somebody for a prize for your favorite tip from the early part? Might as well do a prize. All right. The Heart's Way and imagery and insights. Coming up with a wish list of who I would like to get to know, meet and collaborate with. You have won a prize. Are we doing the usual. Do you want to come on and tell. You can do the instructions.

Yes. So that is Janine. So, Janine, please email me@teamoklaunchers.com I had talked about what the prizes were while you were off earlier, Julie. They are for anyone who is just hopping on. They are either a copy of Self Promote and Succeed or Self Publish and Succeed. We have our oh so soft journal or our hashtag no boring books mug. So please email me with the prize you would like and your mailing address so that I know where to send it. If you're outside the US Though, please choose from one of the book options. So again, either Self Promote and Succeed or Self Publish and Succeed. I will put the email address in the chat so that you know exactly where to send it. But thank you. That was a great one. There were lots of really Good ones. That one just happened to be my favorite.

Great. Thanks, Angela. Okay, let me bring my screen back up. I unshared it by accident. Okay, so here we go. This is where we left off. Let me just make sure you guys are in fact seeing what you're supposed to be seeing. Yes, you are. Okay, so let me go back here. Okay, so next up we have another stop on our thought leader journey and play from current slide. There we go. Okay, so we went from speaking engagements, tracking growth of platform. We're not going to dive into that today, but that's tracking emails, website visitors, followers on social media, etc. Etc. Okay. And we have this on our roadmap as six months to a year later, sometimes this will happen faster. Some of these things, some, some of these things you're constantly doing, which is kind of something we shift focus on these other things the further out from launch that you get. Six months may not be accurate. It might be more like three months. It's basically just saying we don't do these things, launch a month because there's so many other things to focus on. But seeking foreign rights for your book, this can be a tremendous opportunity and it has been so fun to see some of our clients, you know, getting interest and some securing. We've had a few clients secure multiple foreign rights deals. So what does that mean? That means they still own the rights to their book because they've self published in, you know, English speaking countries. But as an example, I can't remember exactly which countries it was. I'll just make it up because I don't remember the exact countries. But Nick Hutchison, who wrote Rise of the Reader, he was a client of ours and what, when his book came out, he started getting interest from, let's say a Turkish publisher. It wasn't Turkey, but anyways, I'm making that part up and a couple other publishers. And he ended up signing two different publishing deals. So that publisher publishes it in their language in their country, owns the rights in that language in that country. He had to write another, a different intro for it for those countries. They translated it, they took care of everything. He gets an upfront fee plus ongoing royalties. I believe Carol Sanford also secured some foreign rights and there was a couple other clients that were in negotiation and I haven't heard if they actually landed firm contracts yet. But what I love about foreign rights is part of this whole idea of this book being intellectual property and you've done the work and now you're finding other ways to get paid for it. And frankly, your book probably never would end up in those countries in those languages otherwise because, because you're, you're probably not going to pursue the translation of it. So having somebody else buy the rights to that country while you retain the rights and ownership in all the English speaking countries can be a fantastic way to go. Now how does that happen? Well, first of all, it almost always happens if your book is selling well and it's of interest in a foreign market. So by the way, my books self publish and succeed, self promote and succeed, that topic just not interesting to the foreign market. But things that are mindset related, sometimes certain health topics, those can be really interesting in foreign markets. There's a demand for those kind of books and those foreign publishers are actively seeking content from other countries that's selling well, that has great reviews and they meet those criteria for those topics. And being self published, they immediately know they can get a better deal than if they try to negotiate with a big five publisher here. So it can be really, really appealing. So how do you find it? Well, we work with drop cap. So we have a, we pitch our clients to drop cap usually about month three post launch because at that time we have enough reviews and we have a monthly meeting with the agents and they become your agent. So they represent you at the Frankfurt Book Fair and all these book fairs all around the world. They pitch you to the publishers that are seeking that and they become your agent and they get paid when there's a deal. So you're not paying them a fee. And so that's what happens for our clients. And some of the books they take and some of them they don't because they know what the appetite is. And again it goes back to sales volume and reviews. And also a factor in the international market is your social media presence. So having social media followers or a visual proof of your kind of, of, of not your expertise but kind of of your, of the reception to your ideas and your content that does help this market. So all of that plays into whether they take you on as a client or not. Now if you're not a Book Launchers client, you're not going to be able to pitch to their agents. But what you can do is you can use this link book launchers.com forward/drop cap. And that link allows you to list your book on the international marketplace. When you do that there's a fee. I think it's, this is a reduced fee. Going through this, we get a discount. So the book, this is a Book Launchers link. We get a discount for you. But when you do that, if there's interest, so there's publishers actively shopping. And I know we've had a couple of authors that have used this link in the past that have had interest. Again, I don't know if they actually ended up signing a contract. But what typically happens is if you start getting interest, you can then let Drop Cap know. This publisher has contacted me. A, are they legit? And B, you know, are you interested in representing me to negotiate this deal? And so that's kind of how Drop Cap works. That's what we do with them. But their international marketplace does allow you to kind of shop the international market without going to the Frankfurt Book Fair on your own. And if you don't have access to an international rights agency directly, if you get enough interest on your book, then it'll be a lot easier to get them or some other international rights agent to represent you and start shopping your book for you internationally. Okay, so then the next piece we're going to talk about is pitching to media. So placing thought leader articles in media. I'm going to talk kind of generically about media in general, but I do love articles in particular. TV is fun to do tv. We've talked about that before. You know, being on a live television show can be great, but it doesn't sell a lot of books. It doesn't grow your platform. Typically it can be a good credibility booster, like as seen on, you know, whatever station it was. But, you know, more and more TV is not what it used to be. I mean, how many people even have tv? A lot of people just stream their content now. And so articles, though, are great because they, you know, people are still reading online magazines, they're still consuming content, even physical magazines, newspaper content, it can, it can still work. And so pursuing that can be great. Oh, I did. I had a couple examples here of kind of who you're aiming at. So live free and hike. Linda Magoon, I've talked about her a lot today, so I put her book up here. Her book, when we started pitching it, was aimed at individuals kind of in a couple of spaces, so travel interest, as well as females who are kind of getting out of. Getting out of a bad relationship of some kind. And in the end, what we discovered is kind of what we've talked about today was libraries love Linda. And we found that out first when we were at the. We had a booth at the American Library association and Linda was there doing a signing and she had a lineup. Like usually the lineups are, are for you know, named authors that people know and recognize. We did promotions leading up to this, but there was a lot of interest rate off the hop from librarians for her book. But travel sites, women's groups, these are all areas where you might pitch hers. Brent Pullman Leaders Look Within. His book is aimed at business owners and managers. And, you know, it's pitched. He's had a lot of success speaking through his alumni groups, his business associations and business groups. And so he is an example of somebody who has followed the speaker path. And he actually just gave us some sort of a testimonial recently sharing success about how he's now in front of a lot of speaking audiences. And, you know, it's been more than a year since his book came out. So not to think book comes out and automatically you're a speaker. You know, a year later, he's enjoying massive success and it's growing success with this audience for speaking. And then Monique Nugent, she, this book is just such so valuable for anybody that's going to be having a hospital stay because she's a hospitalist and she helps people have a better hospital experience. We pitched it initially, we were pitching it to patient advocacy groups. But what we have now found actually is a great market for her book are people in care facilities, seniors homes, because it's sad to say, but it's inevitable that they're going to have a hospital stay at that age. And so it can almost be, you know, when you're going into an assisted living facility, it's a gift for you to, you know, if you move in, they give it a. They can give it as a gift. If we have a guest speaker come in, you know, content around that. So some of the magazines or associations or article pieces, her book's a great fit for that stuff. Okay, so how do you find these places? Well, there's a few things you can look up who's talking about your keywords. So you can set Google alerts and follow hashtags on social media. You can also follow certain organizations to uncover who might be talking about the thing that you talk about or the groups that you're looking for. Associations and organizations. Google your keyword + association or organization or group or location or meeting if you're trying to find upcoming meeting dates. Those are all kind of little techniques that you can use. Magazines, blogs and podcasts, broadcast. We, we pay for these tools. You know, muck, rack, incision. They're very expensive. We pay for them because we're pitching our clients for media. So we kind of need them. So you're probably not going to pay, you know, thousands of dollars a year for those tools to access the media outlets and the contacts and their contact information. But you could use something like HARO or Quoted or a news tip. These are places that you can check for for media that are actively pursuing content for stories. You can also go to stationindex.com tv if you're interested in broadcast television. Contact information events and conferences. Directory associations can be a great one. 10times.com again keyword plus conference or audience chamber of commerce can be great. Meetup.com when I was first starting with speaking, I gave a meetup.com talk probably every, not every month, probably. I probably gave five or six a year to different meetup.com groups. Some had 12 people in the room, but some had 200. And they were a fantastic place to get video footage, testimonials, collect email addresses. They're very casual most of the time and, and it can be just a great place to get your feet wet. And speakertunity.com is also another place you can go to for things. I also use ChatGPT to do research as well. And some of the other tools we've talked about here, Perplexity AI and there's some other ones that Apollo. I think it's Apollo AI. I think that's what the link is. That's another one for doing research. You have to pay for it. But it can be a great contact research database too and it plugs into LinkedIn. So yes, research takes a lot of time. This is one of the reasons, you know, in our service the team is spending a ton of time doing research because not only are you researching who to pitch, you then have to research what to pitch. Okay, so here goes the elements of a great pitch and how are we doing for time here? Okay, so we could almost do a part three, but we're not going to. That's really what Author Business Accelerator is for. Now we're going to deep dive every month into these things and then help you with them. So again, kind of just plugging that group because it's still a very small group. But I love this group that we're creating and building because we are going to spend more time just teaching you versus if you want us to do it for you, then you hire our full service. But a lot of people don't want to hire, they want to do it themselves. They want to learn. And so, so that's what we've created Author of Business Accelerator for. So we can Deep dive into these things and not rush on a Saturday, but the elements of a great pitch. You really have to know what value you're providing, but not just that value relevant to that particular audience. And so you have to figure out. What I've done is I often go through. So say I'm pitching a magazine. I will read the last six issues of the magazine and I'll go, okay, cool. They've covered this, this, and this that are really related to what I talk about, but they've never covered this gap. So now I know they're covering this topic, but they haven't addressed this piece. And that's actually something that I am uniquely situated to talk about. So now I'm going to go, okay, that's the value I provide. This is the angle. So now I'm going to customize it to that particular outlet and then I'm going to give facts or really kind of draw them in, whether it's research or stats or, or a story of what I'm talking about and why what I'm talking about is going to be relevant to their audience. But this has to be short, brief, to the point you're not sending a copy of your book with your pitch. You're not even sending. Sometimes you don't even send your media kit. You might attach it as a link at the bottom, but they don't usually click on links or attachments when in the first pitch. So you're usually just sending a quick little thing to see if they're interested, and then they'll write you back if they are. But it's really important that you do this. And this is where, you know, some of those companies that will pay, they'll charge you for a press release service. The press release service is not going to get you pressed. It might get you a couple backlinks to your website, but it doesn't get pressed. Because a media company will get thousands of press releases in a day. They never read them. This means you have to work, though. You know, each and every pitch that you're doing is probably going to take you an hour or two, if not longer, to prepare and properly put together. Because you have to figure out not just the value you offer, but how does it relate to the content they've previously talked about? And what are you going to bring that's new and backed up by facts and research. But when you do this and you get it, you'll start getting. You'll start getting people going, hey, I'm interested. Can you send me a copy of your book. Can you send me your media kit? Or hey, can you just write me the article and send it to me and let me see if we can get it in? Okay, cool. So I kind of flew through that. But we are near the end. So post launch, a year, post launch, obviously do something to celebrate your one year anniversary. You might be then ready to announce your new book or special event and you're going to keep tracking growth and enjoy your increased audience, new connections and new opportunities. Like I said, Brent recently sent us a note because he's just a little bit over one year post launch and he's loving it because he's having so many cool opportunities come about. And again, he's somebody who said yes to a lot of things. I think he did some free speaking engagements in the beginning. I think he did. He said yes to every podcast and he's busy. He runs I don't even know how many multimillion dollar company, but he said yes to everything and has been very gracious in growing that author platform little bit by bit. And here we are just a little bit over a year after his books come come out and he's just really enjoying the fruits of his labor and potentially working on a new book, which often happens. So. All right, that is the presentation for today. If you haven't already got self, promote and Succeed, you are invited to download the audiobook for free book launchers.com forward/audio. And of course, even if you download it for free, I would still still be grateful for a review on Amazon. Of course, you know now to put the disclosure at the bottom that you received this free copy and you are leaving the review voluntarily, but I would still be grateful. I've given so many copies of this away for free that I don't have AS. And I've had 12 reviews get removed. I don't have very many reviews. So I'd be very grateful for your help getting more reviews to help it find more readers to help it open more doors. Because of course, course as the doors open for me, I help share that with you so we can all grow and learn together. All right, we got time for a couple questions and. And then that's the end.

I think we're solid. Actually, I don't have. I was just double checking.

I don't.

We. You answered all of them in the last session, actually.

Great. I love it. I do see a question from Karen that says will these links be somewhere after the chat? And yes, Angela collects the links and puts them in a message thread for Me. So I can put them in the description in the YouTube video afterwards. Yes.

Yeah, but that's literally it. There are no other questions. We can do another prize. I've got the giveaway tool.

Great. Let's do that. One more prize and. And then we will say goodbye until next. Well, okay, so Tuesday, while you're getting the giveaway tool up. So Tuesday we have live stream back here on bookconscious TV and we're talking about holiday book sales. So getting your book ready for holiday book sales. And then we are back here for the next deep dive in November. And I have a special guest. It is Rena from Speaker Slam. Which Speaker Slam is another organization you guys might want to consider. They have a path to put you on their stage and their stage does have a live audience and they have contests for speakers. Sarah Bean, our book marketing manager, is heading up to Toronto in November to be one of the judges for their Grand Slam events. So all the speaker events they've had all through the year, they have the winners of all those events to speak at this event. And Sarah's heading up to judge their event, but so she's going to be here talking on the deep dive and kind of teaching us some tips for growing that speaking business and stepping on stages and things like that. So that's going to be a fantastic deep dive as well. And that's happening November, something. I don't know what it is.

My head either.

All right, I'll find the date while you do the giveaway.

Sounds good. I was trying to give people a chance to get their stuff in there. All right, there we go. We got a couple other numbers ticking up. Get some last minute comments in there so that way you can be entered to win this prize. Let's see if it lands on me. I can't win. That doesn't do me any good to clear out my closet. Like I said, St. John Butler. Looky there. You won. We're very excited for you. I think you just won something recently too.

I think so, yeah.

I mean, you're winning all the time, apparently.

I believe so.

So you know the drill. Please email me@team epochlaunchers.com with your. I don't keep your mailing addresses, folks. So I do need your mailing address.

Even if you've won in the past. I just, I just saw Aubry's comment that I think was Aubrey, somebody commented that they recommend landing local media by Jason Jones. I just happen to have that book right here. There we go. Yes. So, Susan, I don't know if you saw him on our on our YouTube live, but yeah, he was a guest. We have a video on that as well where he broke down a lot of pieces. But yeah, it's a very short, quick, easy read. So definitely gives you some good tips as well. So, yeah, thank you for that. That's funny that I just happened to have it right here. All right, well, thank you, everybody. I did post the date the deep dive with Reena from Speaker Islam is on November 16, so of course it will be. We're doing all our deep dives now here on YouTube. So you can just pay attention here, make sure you're subscribed and you have the notifications turned on because that will help ensure that you're here live for the prizes and to get your questions answered. But yeah, thank you so much for everyone who is here. And if you're watching the replay, you can comment. And I always comment back as well. But thank you, Angela, as always for spending some time on your Saturday with us. I appreciate you and thank you everybody else. It was great being with you you today.

Bye, everyone. Hope to see you on the next one.