From Book to Thought Leader: Building Your Author Brand

Hello. Happy Saturday, everyone. Welcome to our September deep dive. Today's topic is building your author brand on the road to thought leadership. And while folks are jumping in and saying hello, hi Sybil, hi Tracy. Hi Kevin, Brian, Stella, great to see you all. I'm gonna bring up and Angela's here too. I see her backstage. You guys can't see her yet, but from time to time we will put her on here to help out with things like prizes and you know, if I need a restroom break, all of that kind of fun stuff. So I'm just going to share my screen to show you where we're heading today. And this is the path that we are going to take. And now let me just make sure that you guys are seeing it. You sure are. Okay, so this is our roadmap to becoming a thought leader. So this is the book Launchers pathway and we're going to take a trip today on this road. So we have lots to cover. We will not be able to go in depth into all of the stops on this road. But the good news is we have a lot of video content on a lot of these topics. There's Self Promote and Succeed, my book, which covers a lot of this as well. So we won't leave you hanging. And of course we have services where we can help you with these pieces too, if you're interested in that. So this is where we're going today. We are going on a trip and we have a two hour deep dive. If you are brand new to our deep dives, we don't normally host them on YouTube. This is something we're testing. Normally it's a private zoom room and we, and we would offer recordings for sale afterwards and all of our clients get our recordings. But we wanted to just try this and see, you know, if we get more attendance, if the, the responses are greater from this, all of those sort of things. Because then it also allows people to jump in on replays and you know, just get more access to it. But we're just testing it. So if you're loving it on YouTube, let us know. The one thing that I don't like about this setup is I don't see you on the zoom rooms. I can see you guys. So I get to interact and get to know you a little bit more. So definitely participate in the comments and Angela and I will be keeping track of the comments as much as we possibly can. All right, so let's just say hello to the folks that are here and then I'm going to put my presentation slides up there and dive right in. So KLM's here. Efren is here, Kevin Hall. I think I said hello to Kevin already, Kiki. So Kiki's asking hello, whether View replay. This is YouTube. It will be here on YouTube afterwards. And Alan west is here as well. Thank you for joining in. Kj, Darla, Tracy, I think I've said hi to everyone now that said hello to us. So thank you for being here. Okay, I'm going to dive in. And actually, before I do that, I want to set the stage a little bit before I bring up my slides, because I was thinking about this, the whole thing about author branding, thought leadership, even becoming a bestseller. I was thinking about it this morning, and one thing that comes up a lot is this notion of looking at other authors and going, okay, this author is a New York Times bestseller. They're on all these big stages. I want to do that. And that's great. I think it's wonderful to have a vision of where you want to go. What I want to keep in mind is the idea of progress, because what happens is we have a lot of clients that come to book launchers, and they're. They're starting something new, right? They're pivoting. They've exited a business, or they've been, you know, they've been a doctor for so many years, and now they want to take that expertise and start to share it with the world. And while they have a deep well of expertise, nobody knows who they are. And there is this thing that happens to all of us where we make massive progress, but instead of looking at the progress that we've made, we turn and look at that person that we want to become like or be doing the things that they're doing, and we just feel dissatisfied and unhappy. And my challenge to all of you is to keep those dreams, keep those wants, be like, I want to do that and be excited about it. And look at the progress that you've made. Because if you're building an author brand, it takes time. There is almost no instantaneous path to building a brand. And it is something that takes consistent action and consistent messaging and constant work. And it takes a while. And you have to be prepared for that piece. And in order to make it fun, I think it's great to look back and go, wow, I have come so far and I heard a story. There's this really great book. If you're somebody who is constantly struggling with comparison and feeling dissatisfied with where you are today, it's called Gap in the Gain and It's Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan. And I've recommended some of Dan Sullivan's books before. Who, not how and 10x is greater than 2x. These are all great books. But this Gap in the Gain, I've been actually listening to it with my son. My son's 7 years old, and I put it on when I pick him up from school sometimes. And last night we were watching a movie, and this is kind of why it's all become, why it's front and center and why I started here is because we were watching this movie last night. I can't even remember what the movie. Oh, yeah, Tintin. Tintin. And the kind of hero of the story is really discouraged and he's basically giving up, and he's going through all the things that have gone wrong and. And Jackson looks at me and he goes, mom, he's in the gap. And I just. I gave him a big hug and I'm like, you're right. And I'm like, how could he go to the gain? And he could. And he's like, well, he could. Look at how far they've come already, how much closer they are to finding the treasure and to solving this puzzle and. And on and on and on. And so I wanted to start it off by bringing you to that, because a lot of times just going, let's say newsletter subscribers or social media followers, we might have 100 and go, oh, gosh, you know, I only have 100. Look at that person. They have 10,000 or they have 50,000 instead of going, wow, I've already gained 100 followers. Now I have 100 people who are listening to me, and I'm just going to keep going. I'm excited, I'm grateful. And that's a lot of what this book talks about, is that gratitude. So with that in mind, let's start going into the path of building that author brand. And as much as you can, celebrate those little wins along the way so that you're excited and happy to keep going, knowing that this is not an instantaneous journey, and neither is being an author and having success as an author. By the way, I always tell people, those folks that show up on the New York Times bestseller that was many, many, many years in the making, that was not an overnight success. The greatest books in the world don't top the charts without having somebody behind them, working for years and years to build an audience, do strategic planning, and then, of course, probably having a pretty large team behind the scenes helping promote that book and get it out there. So all right, I see more people have arrived. Hello. Eric's here for the prizes. Dora is here. Alan is is awake at 2am in Japan. So as always, I appreciate you for your crazy hours and for being here. And that is one of the things with this I can't see. Sometimes it looks like Alan is hiding underneath some stairs or in a cave when he calls in from all hours because he's in Japan and probably trying to be quiet when he's on these. When he's on these sessions. Okay, so I'm bringing up my slides for you all and I will check back to comments in a few minutes. But we're gonna dive right in here. Hope you got your notebooks because we have a lot of to cover today. Okay, so your author brand equals thought leadership. Of course we're talking nonfiction. If I've got some fiction friends here, I'm sure there's takeaways. But this pathway was built for the nonfiction author who is seeking thought leadership with their book. So this is very simple what we're going to talk about. I'm going to take you through the path and it's going to cover some pre launch activities to do. It's going to talk about early post launch and then it's going to talk about long term after launch. So. So lots to cover. I took you through the roadmap already, so you know where we're going. If you've heard me speak before, you've probably heard this before as well. But I want to tell this quick story to set the stage for today. Books change lives. That is a big reason why I am so excited to do what I do, why I happily get up on a Saturday and have spent hours and hours prepping for this session for you today. And why I believe books change lives goes back to 2001 when I was working at Kimberly Clark in Canada and a coworker said to me, hey, my daughter just read this book and you know, she's so excited about it and I think it would be great. And so I bought the book, I drove to the bookstore, because that's what you did in 2001. I drove to the bookstore, I bought the book, I read it in a weekend and I did immediately, it did immediately change my life just because it gave me this idea that, that I didn't need to keep working for somebody else forever to create success. And in fact, you know, while I was working, I should get my money working for me. And yes, that book was Rich dad, Poor dad, and it doesn't matter. You Know what you think of Robert Kiyosaki? Because I talk about him sometimes and I get comments like, oh, well, he went bankrupt. Maybe you shouldn't set him on this. Like this book, it doesn't matter the fact that, you know, it's a fictitious story that he made up, that he has never admitted that he made up, but it's been proven multiple times that, you know this story, there is no rich dad in this story. He's a fictitious, his character largely based on the work of Keith Cunningham, who was his business partner in the beginning. So it's fictitious. And so whatever you think of all of that stuff, it doesn't change the fact that reading this book completely changed my mindset. And I immediately started investing in real estate. Well, not immediately. I spent five months reading every book I could find on real estate investing. And then I started investing in real estate. I bought two investment properties in 2001 and I kept going. And it's because of that book, and it's because of that book that I also wrote. Oops, sorry, that was a spoiler alert. I also wrote a book that changed my life a second time. So this set me up on a path of investing in real estate and starting to grow an investment portfolio, eventually quitting my job and starting a training and education company and going full time as an investor. And through that I had a lot of crazy stories and I wrote my first book, More Than Cash Flow. And through that book, I watched what happened in my life after the book came out. And for those of you who don't know the story, the really short version is I was in talks with Wiley for a book deal back in 2011, I believe, and they ended up rejecting first my book idea, which is the book I ended up publishing. Then they were, but they said, oh, we've got an idea here, go make a proposal. And I spent three months building this proposal. And they ended up rejecting the proposal proposal, saying, we don't think you have enough of a marketing platform or enough of a platform for us to sell, sell enough books for this to be worth a book deal. And so they rejected me. They rejected my idea. And it forced me to really look inside and go, you know what, I still want to write that original book. And thank you, Wiley, but I'm going to do it better than if you had given me a book deal. And I believe I did do it better than if they had given me a book deal because I took that book, self published book on real estate investing. I took it to number one in print Books on Amazon, ahead of Dan Brown, ahead of Game of Thrones, and it was in the top, top 100 print books for 200 days. The proceeds from that book in that first year were $93,000, roughly. I can't calculate it precisely because I didn't keep receipts on every sale, but because I sold a lot of books at the back of the room in events and things like that. But had I, had I traditionally published that, I would have made less than $10,000 in royalties because, because of the book deals, the way it worked, I would have made about 80 cents a copy per book sold. And, you know, of course, self publishing, I made way more money, but ultimately readers did not care if it was self published. And it became a very, very powerful tool for me to use in building my brand and ultimately positioning myself as a thought leader in the Canadian real estate investing space. I was everywhere for a while on big stages. You can see this one. There was like 600 people in that audience. I spoke at almost every investor forum for, I don't know, four or five years, which was the Canadian real estate wealth magazine's big event. You can see I was one of the featured speakers here. I was on TV stations, front page of the business section of major newspapers. So I became a thought leader after this book. And so it's one of the reasons why it changed my life. But. But it also led me to starting book launchers to help other people write books and follow the path to thought leadership. Now, the one thing to note is that a lot of these things didn't instantly happen after the book came out. In fact, a lot of the major media was six to 12 months after the book came out. These things take time for your name to get out there and for people to start creating demand for you because they read your book and then they go, oh my gosh, this was so good. And then they pass it along and so that's where we are today. So it started with Rich Dad, Poor dad, because without that book, I wouldn't have gotten into real estate. And without me writing more than cash flow, I wouldn't have uncovered how amazing all these authors, you know, how amazing it is to self publish and have control and be able to create this path to thought leadership and building a business and having bigger impact on other people's lives through your books. And Angela here, she's in this picture. She's also here today to help us out. And this is Sarah Bean, our book marketing manager. And I don't know where we were. This is at some event. I can't remember. I think, yeah, I don't know. I know it's in Texas because Angel is there, but that's the only thing I remember. Okay, so diving into your roadmap to becoming a thought leader pre launch. So before your book has come out, you start building your brand. And one of the core elements of your brand is an author website and creating content to attract and appeal to that audience. I mean, that's what today is. Today is content to support you, to, you know, teach you, but also so that the people who are interested in working with book launchers in some capacity, you know, know us like us, trust us more and step forward and go, hey, I would love you to help us with this because I know you. And then building and nurturing your email list, this is such a big piece, is making sure that you are creating a list or a relationship with people. That is not something another company controls. Right. So when you sell your book through Amazon, who owns, who owns the content, the contact information, not you. You don't know who bought your book. Amazon does. When you are posting videos on YouTube, do you have contact with these folks? Well, you do. As long as your channel is up and running, you can post videos, but I can't. What if YouTube shuts me down one day or is down when we're supposed to have a live stream? How will you know that? The only way I can tell you is via newsletter or other channels where I've built relationships with you. So controlling your newsletter and having that contact information is really, really powerful. Social media giveaways, media outreach, these are all things that we'll touch on today. Some of these things we're going to go into more deeply than others. We're not going to spend much time on social media today. And there's two reasons for that. One is that this would. That would be an entire session unto itself. But also because if you don't already have social media, it is a great way to, you know, slowly build an audience, but it is especially low burn. It is very difficult to put up a channel and suddenly have put up a channel, put up a page, put up a profile, and suddenly have a big network. It rarely happens. And when you do see it happening, it's because they have an audience somewhere else and they're able to draw them from that place over to whatever. Whatever place it is. Rarely is it because suddenly you're using the right hashtags or you've posted something that's gone viral. You know, somebody on my team Posted something that went viral a few years ago and she had a boost in followers, but it didn' her engagement because it didn't build a relationship, it just kind of people were interested to see if something else would be viral ish audience building activities like giveaways, media outreach, content. Your Book army is a big piece that we talk about and I'm not going to get into it today, but it is in Self Promote and Succeed, which I'll give you the link to get the audiobook for free if you want. Otherwise you can purchase it wherever you like to buy books in whatever format you like to buy them. But your book army is a group of people who are going to support your pre launch and your launch and post reviews and tell other people about your book and. And then your job from from book launch day forward is to ask for reviews. So by the way, if you have read Self publish and succeed or self promote and succeed and you haven't posted a review, now is a great time to do that. So please, you can even go ahead and pop on over while you're listening and post a review. Sorry, I heard a weird noise so I'm just going to pop over here and just check to make sure everything's okay. You guys can still hear me, right? Alana's here from Canada. Hello. The decisions you make dictate the life you lead. I love that that Kevin said that. And I want the link to the audiobook. Yes, we'll make sure you get the link to the audiobook shortly. Okay, sorry, just checking to see what the noise was, but it looks like everything's okay. Thumbs up. Angela, is everything okay? Oh, I can't hear you. Hold on. I'm going to bring Angela onto the stage. One sec. Hello?

Can you hear me? Yeah, yeah, it might have been me because I had to sign in in order to like have admin access to all the fun things. So if the sound was me. Sorry.

That's okay. I just want to make sure something wasn't broken because when I'm in the slides, Angela has a fancy two screen setup. I do not. I'm not fancy like that with two screens. So when something. When I hear a noise, I have to go find out what's caused the noise. Whereas Angela, Angela has multiple screens open, so. Okay, thank you. And. And there's Angela, everybody. I told you she was here. I wasn't. I wasn't making it up. Angela's real. She does. She does exist for everybody on live streams. She's not just a name. That's replying to you and sending you prizes. She's. She's a real live human being. All right, I'll. I'll hide you for now.

Did I miss anything, though? Do I need to send a link?

Oh, the link to the audiobook. Yeah. So self promote and succeed.com forward/audio or audiobook. So double check which one it is and then drop it in there for people. That's how. That's to download Self promote and succeed in audio form. Yeah. Thank you. Okay, we'll head back to my slides now that I know everything is okay. Alan says if you've already posted a review to check to see if it's still there and if not, replace it. Thank you. Yes, I did have 12 reviews, at least 12 reviews removed in one swap. So, yes, please, please do post a review and repost it if it's not there. Thank you, Alan. Okay, heading on back here. Back to my slides. Okay, so next up, let me put it back in slideshow view for you. Oh, we get to start at the beginning. So those of you who've just tuned in, this is what you've missed. Okay? All right. So did I talk about this yet? Media outreach. Okay. Social media campaign, pre sale, book launch. Okay. No, I did cover this one. Oh, paid ads. So one of the things, and this depends every author, you don't have to do everything on this list. And some things will make more sense for some people than others. One of those things is paid ads to build your email list. I do a lot of paid ads, and that is not because I'm trying to sell books. It is because I am paying for the ads, you know, sometimes to sell books. But the goal is not the book soil. The goal is that somebody enters our community, becomes a part of the community, and then will potentially work with us in some capacity in some way. Really. It's part of a bigger goal for growing book launchers as a company. And so for some people, serial authors, as an example. So somebody who has, you know, my friend Dale Roberts, many of you know, self publishing with Dale, he is in the process of publishing a 12 book series series. And he will or could be running ads for some of those books because it makes sense. Because you buy one book, maybe you're going to want the other 11 in that series. So the ads for the one aren't really just to sell that one book. It's to sell the entire series. If you are a single book author, other than running Amazon ads to sell your book, I would say things like social media ads you know, Facebook or Meta, so your Instagram, even LinkedIn, it's not financially feasible for most authors to just run those kind of ads to sell books. It will cost you more money than you're going to make on those books most of the time. So generally speaking, Amazon ads is a much better place to invest your money if your only goal is book sales. But if you have bigger picture, you know, bigger picture, like you have a service or a product or even if you're a speaker to some degree, there's probably some value in running paid ads and it will build your brand partnerships. You know, one of the big things that I have done and continue to do is find people with my audience in their audience and do partnerships with them. It is a fast track to building your brand, growing your business and selling books because they already have the know like and trust with that person. And now you get in front of them and immediately that know like trust gets transferred to you. One of, one of our great, I mean, we have quite a few great partnerships, but one of our great partnerships, Allie Fallon, she teaches people how to write memoirs. And actually she's stepping back from teaching people how to write memoirs now for a while just to be with her family more. But she has been a great partner. I've had her here to speak. She's been on the YouTube channel and, and I have taught one of her class. There's a section of her classes that I teach just to teach people the difference between self publishing, hybrid and traditional. And also walk them through the mindset of thinking about if you want your book to be marketable. At the end, here's some things to consider as you're going through that journey. And so we've had this wonderful partnership because while there's overlap, you know, we have writers and coaches that could, in theory, coach people through the memoir writing process, which is what she does. She does it in a way that is different than what we do, that is a better fit for the people that she works with. But then we take over on the other side and do all the things that she doesn't do once the book is ready to go to editors and beyond. So those kind of partnerships can be phenomenal. And honestly, it makes life more fun when you find people like this who you can support and they support you and, and you can do things together. You know, Dale Roberts and I, another example, we do a lot of things together and some of our audience is definitely the same people. And then there's some people because he's a little bit more diy. So he will appeal to the DIY crowd a little bit more than I will. And I think he also touches on more than just nonfiction, whereas I am just nonfiction. And I will tell you how to do some of the stuff diy, but I don't diy. So I am more like, here's how to hire the great people that can do this but for you and help you create massive success that way. So it's a different thing. Speaking engagements. Speaking is a phenomenal way to build your brand, sell books, grow a business. And then ultimately, for those of you who are here, when I started at the beginning, tracking platform growth is really, really important. And the story I was talking about in the beginning, talking about how looking at 100 subscribers, you can look at it two ways. You can go, wow, I have 100 subscribers. I'm so grateful for each and every one of them. I am going to deliver the best content I can to those 100. That is one mindset. The other mindset is I only have 100 subscribers. Like, what? This is taking forever. This is, you know, I thought I would have a million by now. And. But tracking your platform growth is not so that you can be that person that's sitting there going, I only have 100 subscribers. It is so you can go, wow, a month ago I only had zero and now I have 100. What worked to get me those 100? Because I'm going to do a whole lot more of that. So that's where tracking your platform growth is really important. Foreign rights, I'm going to touch on that today. Reviews, right? It's going to keep coming up, keep asking for reviews, media articles, things like that can be great. Repurposing your book content. And I have several videos on the YouTube channel which when we get there, I'll have Angela pull them up for you. If you don't know where they are. Lead magnets or resources through your website, Events in person is really powerful for building a brand. Promote your content year round. Oh, and by the way, just going back to the events because I'm not going to be talking about that too much in detail today. Author Nation here in Las Vegas in November. I think it's November 11th to 15th. Angela, if you can grab the Author Nation link, I am not an affiliate for it. I am speaking there. And Book Launchers has. We're doing an. We're having a bunch of our authors. Efren is going to be there. Yay, Efren. And a handful of our other authors. We have a section where we're going to be selling books on Friday during their rave event. On the Monday we're part of the vendor day. And then Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday we'll be attending. And I think I'm speaking on Tuesday. I'm mentioning it because it is a really cool event for you to learn and network and meet other people. Like, you know, like I met Dale. I met Dale online, but then we've met in person several times as well. But Efren, sorry, I'm putting Efren totally on the spot without telling him here, but there he landed a podcast interview with Joanna Penn, New Creative Penn podcast. And I think, I mean, he sold books and he would probably have to type in any other wins from there. And he may have booked himself on a couple other podcasts and made some other relationships. I know he's coming back this year, so it obviously went well enough last year that he's coming back. So attending events with your Target readers and selling books at those events and networking, that's really, really powerful. And if you are coming to Author Nation, let us know and you can come and hang out with us on Monday and Friday when we have those booths. And I would love to, to meet you in person. All right. Track of growth. A lot of these things are repeat and at this point you're getting close to a year post launch, you may want to do something to refresh it. You may want to announce that you're working on a new book or maybe you have a special event, something to celebrate. Celebrating the one year anniversary of your book release is really powerful for you and for anyone else. And then just enjoy and be grateful because after a year you have certainly increased your audience, your network and you have more opportunities as a result of this work than you did a year ago. Now, again, going back to my original story, you may after a year beyond big stages and have made a huge leap from where you were to where you want to go. But it's not always that instantaneous. One of our clients, Brent Pullman, he's over a year past his launch, but he's now booking keynote talks. You know, when he set out on this, that was his goal. And I know actually this month and next month he has a handful of pretty significant speaking engagements which he booked probably not quite a year after his book came out, but he did other smaller speaking engagements along the way. Another one of our clients, SA Bradley, he launched his book with us in 2018 and we're still working with him today. I would say it was probably two years after his book came out that he started to be on panels and started to be the person on the stages that he used to be at the events where he used to be in the audience. So it wasn't instantaneous, but consistent action allowed it to get, you know, get where he really wanted it to be so that his network was the people he was looking up to when he started this journey. And. Yes. So anybody who saw this graphic going, I would like to have this graphic. I will make sure. Let's just see. Angela, do you have the Dropbox link for that or should we do. Do you want to do the Dropbox link or how could we give people the graphic? I'll bring you on stage here.

There's a couple ways we could. Because we have it in two formats. We have. Let me just see what the difference is. The combined infographic, which I believe makes it look like just one page, and I think the other one kind of.

Splits it up to where it looks.

Like it's two pages, but it's the same thing. Yeah, yeah, that's the exact thing. So I can send the Dropbox link or people can write in and they can, like, to our team. Email. Not in the chat, that'd be way too chaotic. But they could write in and I could email that to them directly.

Okay, let's see. Can you make a separate Dropbox link for it that we just make available today for the people who are live and then we'll delete it so that it's gone.

I think if we delete it, then the Dropbox. Well, unless people don't like.

Actually, they have to download it. Yeah, I want them to download it. Okay, so, yeah, do that. Because I don't want people emailing because, you know this is going to be live on YouTube, so two years from now, they could be emailing, asking for it. So we'll just make sure, if you're watching live, we're going to give you this graphic. Angela's going to drop it in there and download it because a week from now we're going to delete it so that it's not available anymore. More so if you're watching live or if you're watching the replay wondering why the link doesn't work. That's why. Because we're deleting it. You have to download it today. So, yes, there's lots of people saying.

Yes, I'll create it.

Great. Yeah, no rush because we want people to stay to learn all the stuff today so they can wait for the link to come take Your time. All right, friends, I'm just looking to see. I'm just looking to see what everybody's chatting about. And Alan will be there. Right, Alan? I'm so sorry. I forgot about that. Yes, Alan is making the great journey over. I'm very excited to meet you in person, Alan. So, yes, Alan will be there as well, which is really great. And Heather is here from Ali's group. Yay. So great to see you here, Heather. All right, let me bring my slides back up and. And Kevin says, fabulous to have the download. I took a screenshot, but it's small. Yeah, I did the same thing when I was prepping this. I took screenshots and it was really small for the slides. Slides. So that's why I figured I would just give you guys the download. All right, back to my slides and we'll do a prize next time I come back from my slides. We'll do a prize now. Oops, Pardon me. Here we go. Okay, where we're going to start. Well, not start because we've already started, but dive deeper is more accurate. Is your brand. So what is your brand? Well, I had to come up with an acronym to make this fun. And by the way, I am mentally. I haven't physically started yet, but I am mentally starting to rework the new brand you, which I have talked about, if you're new here. I have. My second book was not a success. It's been a great example of things that didn't work, even though the book I think is fantastic, fantastic content. So mentally, I have been working on the book and deciding how I'm going to slightly adjust it for authors. And I'll be relaunching it probably in 2025 as a book on branding yourself as an author, probably for, you know, the purpose of thought leadership. So what is your brand? And so with that in mind, I'm thinking of cool things I can put inside of the book. And one of the things I had in the original book was the brand magic formula. But I really want it to be book focused. So I've been playing with this. And this is what I have right now is the author. This is your author brand. And so a is appearance. And this is online and in person and thinking about little signature items. And Imani Roberts is one example that I have. Angela, you might be able to find his website and post it if people want to check him out. But he, he is a DJ who teaches business and teaches DJing. And, and one of our, one of our popular videos actually on this Channel was him explaining how he did his launch. He did a very cool virtual book launch in, you know, 2020, which was not. His original plan was to do a virtual book launch, but, you know, people had to pivot in 2020 and. And he just did some fantastically cool things. But he has a signature bow tie and he has signature colors that he uses. We also have. I'm trying to think of some other cool examples. I might have a couple screenshots coming up with websites, so I'll use those. But online and in person, what are some kind of signature things people can count on from you? And this goes to your digital footprint as well as your physical in person footprint. And this can be logos, this can be colors, this can be something that you are often seen wearing. Those kind of things all bundle up for being something that's recognizable as part of your brand. U is for unique perspective, which is your story. Ultimately, I think this is the foundation of everybody's brand. Why you do what you do, why you think the way you think. And this piece, I've been saying this for a while, but this piece has become even more vital with AI because the reality is whatever book you're writing about AI can write that book. What makes it the book that only you and a human can write is this unique perspective and lens and story that you bring to it. And it's the piece that makes the book not boring. Right? So understanding what your unique perspective is, why you think what you think, why you believe and you know, have this lens on life. This is really, really important to your brand. T is for topics you talk about because you're not just going to be singular in what you talk about. If you think about. Well, for myself as an example, I don't talk about everything that's going on in my life, but some stories that you may know are the fact that I am Canadian, I live in the States, and immigration has been challenging. I talk about that sometimes. I love poker. Sometimes I use poker analogies. You know, I'll bring in the poker, the poker pieces to some things that I write about or talk about, you know, and of course I love all things books and authors and, and business building around those things. So those are just. And then of course, I'm a mom and I'm a very proud, proud mom of my son. So definitely I talk about him. And then we do a lot of hiking. So if you follow me on social media, that's something that I often do, you know, post about, is our hikes and things like that. So you kind of get spokes, right? Like, what are those five or six things that you talk about? It's not everything that is in your life, but you have kind of cornerstone things or key things that you might share with your audience and that becomes part of your brand. Your brand also needs a hook. So your book needs a hook, which is your outcome of your outcome, but your brand needs a hook too. What's, what's the promise you're making your audience when they connect with you and they, you know, follow you, they get to know you, you still need to have some sort of a hook. And often I actually heard this. I was at the Summit of Greatness Lewis Howes event last week. I don't remember what it was, but there was a speaker there, Rory Vader, who is the founder of Brand Builders Organization. And he talked about how a lot of people have one word which is kind of their hook. Right. So sorry, just blanked on her name. Hold on. Brene Brown. There we go. Brene Brown. Her one word is shame, right? So she has become like, if you follow her, she's going to talk about shame in some capacity. Just as an example. And David Goggins was a speaker at this event. I'm trying to think of what his one word would be. Unstoppable, probably, you know, so you kind of think about those, your hook. What are you going to be hooking people in and supporting them through? And then of course, online presence. Online presence has, has been important for a long time. When I wrote the new brand you, the most popular chapter in that book was a chapter called you are who Google says you are. That is, you know, just as true today as it was, I guess, not quite 10 years ago. That book came out in 20, 20, 16, so eight years ago. But your online presence is really important. And we learned this the hard way at Book Launchers early on. I can't remember what year it was. 2018, maybe. We had landed a major, major magazine article interview for one of our clients, but he did not have an author website. And this magazine asked for all of his information. And when he did not have an author website, they said, oh, we are not comfortable that he is credible enough for this interview. And they backed out of the interview. So we learned early on that having an online presence is really, really important as an author, especially if you're seeking any sort of media or speaking engagements for your book or anything else. So being able to be found and having what is found match your brand. And what you're talking about is really, really important. And then ultimately R is reputation. And the way I see reputation is what do people say about you when you're not in the room? What are people saying when they hear, oh, you know, Julie Broad or Book launchers, Whatever they're saying about you, that becomes a really, really core part of your brand. All right, next up, we're going to dive into websites. But first, let's do some prizes to liven things up because two hours is a long time. And what I'm going to do is we have our Streamyard giveaway. That is the cool thing. That is a cool thing about being here today on YouTube with the Streamyard background. So let me just share our giveaway tool. So if you haven't said hello, now is your chance because this is going to be for everybody that's here so far. And where are we? Here we are. Okay. Ta da. And we'll go full screen for this maybe. There we go. So you guys can all get a good look at who is going to win. So, yep, here we go. We got some more people saying hello. So I'm going slow just for you folks. And Angela, what do we have for prizes today?

Yeah, so we have our classics. Oh. So Soft journal. That is probably one of our most popular prizes. Our hashtag, no boring books mug. A copy of one of Julie's books. Either Self Publish and Succeed or Self Promote and Succeed. So three of those are going to be books. Esque. The journal is, you know, kind of like a book. So if you are outside of North America, your choices are either the journal, a copy of Self Publish and Succeed, or a copy of Self Promote and Succeed. If you are within North America, then you can choose from the mug as well. So those are our classic prizes. I think of those, I think either one of Julie's books or the. Oh, so soft journals probably are most popular one. I should have brought one over here with me. Do you have yours?

I do, I do. Okay, I'm gonna do the draw and then I'll show everybody. So that gave. That gave people extra time to say hello. So we will do our draw. There's 29 people who have talked so far. There's a lot more online. So everybody who said hello, you have a good shot at winning. And let's see who our first prize. Kj. KJ Wins all the time. Kj, Congratulations. And you know the drill by now. But email Angel Team t a m book launchers.com and let her know what prize you would like.

I literally just dropped something off at the post office this morning for kj.

So here is the oh so soft journal. It's really quite lovely. This one I have not used yet. So this one is. Is nice and fresh still. I still use it for demo purposes. And our. I have our old mug here. So this is our old book launcher or is this the new one? No, this is the new one.

Yeah. That's not the vintage. That's our new logo.

Yeah, this is the new one. Yeah. I just realized as I was looking in there. So that's your mug. And of course, Self publish and succeed and Self promote and succeed. I only have Self promote and Succeed. Easily reachable. Self publish and succeed is hidden. So those are your prize choices. And then there's Self publish and Succeed, which I would have to. Hold on. Where is it? There? Oh, no, it's over here. The mirror version throws. There we go. It's behind my plant underneath that sign. So I'd have a potential disaster on my hands trying to get it. Okay. And Irma's mowing the lawn as she listens. So now she said hello so that she's in for the next prize.

I thought I was multitasking.

That is. I love it. That's fantastic. And we have Purity from South Africa in the house as well. Fantastic. I love it. So thank you everybody for saying hello as we're going through this. That is great. So the next thing we're going to do, I'm going to go through websites. And while we're going through websites, I would love. And this is for the next prize, this is going to put Angela to work as well. What I would love is to hear one tip or a quote or a takeaway, something from this first 45 minutes that you have taken away. And we're going to choose. Well, Angela's going to choose her favorite. It'll be completely biased because it's all her. It's completely her selection. But so, you know, just, just saying that, you know, we're not promising unbiased prizes in this, in this regard, but she's going to choose her favorite when I. On our next kind of interlude from my slides. So let us know what your favorite takeaway or quote has been from the first part. And I'm going to dive into author websites right now. And yes, I see Angela letting you know. So all questions, we will hopefully have time at the end for questions. We'll see. I have a lot to cover today and I will try to speed through those questions. If not, we will save them. And I will make sure they get answered on an upcoming YouTube Live, which on Tuesday I won't be here for our regular live stream. It will be Shane, our online marketing specialist, and he's going to be taking you through building an online course from your book, which is going to be a really, really great session because he oversees that for our business because we do build courses from nonfiction books. And you don't have to be a client anymore, we don't have to have created your book in order to turn it into an online course. We are able to, and we will accept you as a client for that sole service if you are interested in working with us to create your online course from your book. All right, back to the website piece here. Here we go. Okay, so an author website has a few purposes and some of it is going to depend on what you are doing, big picture. And so for some people who have a business, the book piece of your website may just be a singular page. You may not have an entire book or, sorry, an entire page dedicated to the purposes of your author or to the purposes of your book and your website and your author life. For most authors though, they will create some sort of an author website because this is going to feature your book. And if you're doing speaking and if you want to do a lot of media, this will be the place that people come to learn more about you and potentially book you for those kind of things. So understanding the objective of the website, and I will argue, for a lot of authors, the number one objective of your website is, is going to be credibility. So for whatever, whenever somebody comes to check you out, your website speaks to credibility for your topic that you're talking about, or for just your expertise overall, or if you're a speaker, you know, it showcases that you're credible. But the number two objective for the vast majority of websites should be to collect email addresses. Now, some people's number one goal, no matter what, is I want to sell my book. So that might be what they focus on. There's no right answer and there's no wrong answer. There's trade offs, right? So whatever you choose to focus on, you're giving up a focus on the other things. So that's why it's really important to figure out what's your number one goal, what's the number one objective of this website. But universally it should be to come across as credible for your topic, then think about your brand elements. So a lot of people, when they think of branding, they're thinking logos or websites and that kind of thing. And hopefully you got from that author that it's a lot more about your story, your reputation, what you're offering your audience. That's more. But the things that make you recognizable and known over time are things like colors or, you know, what you're wearing or how you look and other kind of pieces of the puzzle, so to speak, which, like I said, Imani has his bow tie. But there's always kind of elements of that that are going to make up your brand and that should be showcased in your website. So those would be some of the brand elements, whether it's the colors or other details. Absolutely. On your author website, you need book details. You need to showcase your book reviews where they can buy it and anything else that kind of feeds into that book credibility elements. So this can be as seen on, you know, your logos or media features. It can be those reviews. It can be articles or videos or other things where people can get to know you. If you are a speaker, it should be a speaker reel.

While you take a water break. Julie, just so you know, we can't see you. I don't know if you wanted it to just be a presentation or. Or side by side of your face.

And I mean, I'm okay not being seen, but thank you for telling me. I will change the format back. That was from our giveaway. Oops. Well, now I'm really big. All right, let's see. Let's go back to. Let's try this view and bring back it in. Thank you for telling me. Oh, and you know what? I'll take you off for now so that you're not there and then you can do your thing. Okay, now back to the screen. There we go. Okay, now you can see me, right? I can't hear you. So it's okay. Even if you can't, we'll carry out. Okay. Call to action. So call to action is. Could be by my book. So here with Linda Magoons. And now that I've shared screen, you might not see this. So I got to make sure that you can see it. Okay, let's see. Streamyard. No, you can't see her website. Hold on, let me switch it over here. I want you guys to be able to see her website share screen. Is it going to let me.

I think you have to select the one where it's not your little picture in the bottom corner. It's side by side.

No, that's not the issue. It's. Sorry, I'll just fix it. I know what the issue is. The issue is I put it In. It's in the same window as the stream yard. That's where it went. And with it being in the same window, I can't do it without still doing it. I need a new window. It wasn't letting me create a new window. There we go. Okay. That's why it wasn't showing is because it was just going to share the streamyard instead of sharing her website. But this should fix it now. All right. Anyways, I was going to show you a couple of websites to kind of talk you guys through some examples. And little Julie in the corner. I just saw you guys comments. John's here. Favorite idea. Idea. The one word author hook. Unfortunately, mine is longer. Three words. Never too old. I like that though. That's a good one. Okay, let's see if we can get Linda Magoon on here. Hold on. I think I gotta stop. This is.

Sorry. I did pick my favorite thing from earlier if you want me to say that while you figure it out.

Yeah, I've got it. I. I definitely could use a moment because it's. I have to refresh.

Yeah, sure. So what the second prize was was being like sharing your. Your favorite tip or quote that you have heard so far. And this was from Wonder Bing Travel. And their comment was, while there's so much to do, I love the idea of a one word hook and I'm even more stoked that I have such a word wonder. So I don't know that I can. Maybe I can go back and find that and see if I can share that. But you are the prize winner. There we go. So Wonder Bing Travel, please email me@teamoklaunchers.com to claim your prize. If you are within the US it is either a copy of Self Publish and Succeed or a copy of Self Promote and Succeed or the oh so Soft Journal or a hashtag no boring books mug. If you are outside the US Then please choose one of the book options because it's much cheaper for us and for you because there's typically duties where the recipient has to pay for the. The package being delivered to them. So that does happen in a few countries. So Wonder being Travel, thank you so much for your comment and I love that you already have such a word. So please email me@teamoklaunchers.com and Julie, now I see what it looks like for you. I see you in the background. Are you ready to come back online? You are? Okay.

All right. Thank you. I managed to have to. I managed to block my own screen from being shared so I had to reboot.

But we're back in dual monitors. Julie, come on.

I know, I know, right? I don't know. I can barely handle one, so. All right, thanks, Angela. Okay, so taking a look at Linda's website, just as an example. So she, her focus here is to sell her book. And one of the things Linda does a lot of is library talks. So she has it here, book talks. So she goes from library or bookstore to bookstore doing these events where she has 30, 40, 50 people in the audience and sells books and signs them. But that's kind of what she does for selling her book. So on the top of the page, she's got her order now. And when you click on the order now, it shows you all the places that you can buy her book. So that is one. And then she scrolls down. Subscribe now. Sign up for a dose of inspiration. Outdoor, blah, blah, blah. So if I was doing this website, I would probably have something different than subscribe now. I would probably have some sort of a call to action that would tie to her ideal reader whether she's giving them something. I don't think she has a lead magnet. But you know, Trail Mix is her newsletter, which is a cool, clever name. It might be some sort of a call to action that sounds. That has more of a reason to subscribe versus subscribe now. So I like this though. Sign up for a dose of inspiration. So it might be get inspired now or uncover new adventures today. You know, something like that. Just as something that is more than subscribe now. But anyways, carrying on. So she's got a forward down here, she's got her subscribe and over here it's about Linda. So Linda's goals are not as grandiose as some authors as far as what she's trying to do. She wrote her book really to have an impact and to have a little fun and share her story. So if we go to, if I take you to a different website, actually, I'm going to take you. Well, I'll show you Roger's really quick and then I'm going to take you to one other one as another example. So Roger here, his number one goal is to speaking engagements and his book is down below here. So outthink, outperform. His whole feature up here is to build credibility because he wants to speak at on your stage. And so he's got speaking up here. He's got his book featured here now for him, I think I didn't double check this. Yes, okay. I was, I was going to say for him, we Set it up so that his book could be purchased directly. So you buy his book here. And we set this up to be a direct sales link. So it's set up with Shopify and Book Vault for the delivery of the book and so you can buy in bulk. So again, his goal is speaking. And as a result, one of the things that a lot of our speaker clients do is they sell their books in bulk. And so they can sell it slightly discounted with the more books you sell. And he doesn't have to go through Amazon and pay Amazon their fees. He's able to deliver these books through Book Vault and the setup here. So this is another method or another technique that a lot of authors will use if they are speaking. And just checking one thing here. So let's make sure. Were you guys able to see that when I did? Yes, you could see. Okay, cool. That is where the second screen would help me to make sure that I showed you guys what I thought I was showing you. Okay. So the last one I'm going to show you as an example is Rini Cavallari, who we worked with on her book Head Trash. And so she also is a speaker. And you immediately see that when you arrive at her website, because here she is on stage giving a talk. You know, people are clapping, cheering. She's got her speaker reel right there featured. And right here, the number one goal is book Rini to speak. So it becomes very apparent what the goal is here. Shows you who she's worked with. So very credible. And then she's got her book down here and George Clooney, which some of you may have heard me talk about this. But it was. It was funny. Not funny, because when we did her A content for her book, when you put any sort of testimonial inside of your A content, it has to be by a celebrity or recognizable name. And the initial rejection was that George Clooney was not a recognizable name or something like that. I can't remember the exact rejection of what it was. But anyways, so the book is here and she's got other books that she's created here for feature. You can listen and learn. So you see her on these podcasts, appearances, and then down here again, her number one objective is to book more speaking engagements through her book and her and her profile. So just as some examples for you for author websites and what they can contain. Now let me head back to my slides here. Here we go. Okay. And one thing that I don't think a lot of people know is that we build author websites. It's something that you can hire us to do for you. And we did not create renies, so I don't want you to think that that is what you would get. Although, although it's very feasible that, that we can build something similar to that. She obviously had that phenomenal video to put at the top of it. But Roger's website we created and I don't know if we did Linda's actually, but I know for sure we did Rogers, and we can build your website for you. So this is on our website. I think it's book launchers.com website or websites, if you can drop the link there, Angela, for me. And by the way, until October 1st, we will also include three months access to our Author Business Accelerator program. So our Author Business Accelerator program is a group that we have where you get access to basically all of our online training content that we've ever created. So I don't even know the volume of that. We have also created Julie the Book Bot for you. And she has been trained on everything and she's really, really great at brainstorming and supporting you and answering questions and telling you where there's content that you might want to access. Hey, do you have a video on how to file for copyright? Hey, do you have a video on this? Julie the Book Bot will help you get all that information. And I think the best feature of our Author Business Accelerator is every week there's an office hour call with somebody on my team. So last week it was Sarah and she did. And it was, it's a small group. So in this case there was only one person that showed up to the call. And so that person essentially had a one hour private branding strategy session with Sarah, our book marketing manager. But you know, you can't always expect that nobody's going to show up, especially as the group expands. But for three months you will have access to the Author Business Accelerator if you grab one of our website packages by October 1st. So there's three different packages. I only have two up here. Most people will work with us for the deluxe website package, getting the lead magnet as well as three email sequences and your website built. And then I think there's another package or there's an add on where we can build out your direct sale piece as well like we did with Roger's website that I showed you. Okay. And Angela, if you have questions about that, Angela can answer that in the, in the chat here or you can just email us@teamoklaunchers.com all right. So the next thing is content creation. And there's a lot of ways to create content for your brand. But this is one of the reasons why I'm super excited about AI these days, because it's become so much easier once you have your book content, to now generate a lot of other content and to do it with so much less work and less brain power than you used to have to use. So a couple of examples, for example. A couple of examples, for example is lead magnets. So having something that you offer people when they sign up for your newsletter so that you're giving them something of high value. And there's a tool, and I did a video on five AI tools for authors that you can find on the, on the YouTube channel. And I talked about this one designer. And if you want to create a lead magnet with a much less lift, there's still work that will be involved in this. But if you want to create a lead magnet with a lot less work, then this is the tool to use. And you can use our affiliate link. You don't have to, but if you want to use our affiliate link, it is book launchers.com forward slash designer with one. So D, E, S, I, G, N, R. Angela can drop it in the comments for you as well for an easy click over. But. And of course, we get paid a little bit from this. But what I always tell people is if you have issues, then I'm able to go straight to the people that we work with at these companies and, you know, get resolutions if you need them. Hopefully you don't need them. I haven't had any issues with this company, but I have found them very responsive and have started and have an account manager there that I can connect with if we need to. But what you do is they have this project tool and I'll probably just open it in a second to do a quick demo for you. But this is as simple as it was. So you just fill in the blanks here and it's a dropdown. I want to create an ebook to be published as a flipbook or a PDF or a mobi file, whatever it is. And I'm going to use a PDF or a blog post or something else as my baseline. And then you choose a template and kind of select your genre and voila, something appears over here. And oops, I thought I had linked this, hyperlinked it, but I hadn't. So let me just go ahead and open up Designer and show you guys what this looks like, because it's kind of cool. So, okay, All right, I am just going to log in over here. Okay, so let's see, you can see all these choices here. So what we want to do is we're going to create something from a blog post. So I want an ebook to be produced as let's do Flipbook just for fun. And I'm going to just quickly grab a blog post from over on our blog. Okay. I've already got my theme selected author business, writing nonfiction. And let's start. Okay, so now it produced this here. Now it's going to let me choose a template for the Flipbook. So they've got all these templates here. I'm just going to grab. Let's see, Let me see. There's a writing one that looks cool. Let's do this one. So while it's loading, you can see it's got all these ways that you can customize it on the left. But. And of course I had a blog post to start with. This is, you know, we'd have to change and edit this so you'd have to make this good reads, whatever you can see. Okay. All right. But now it's dropped right in here. Not a bad looking first draft. Right straight from a blog post. So you could do the same with, you know, a chapter from your book and then you can go back in over here and add elements like a video. So you could embed a video from YouTube or somewhere else. You could put a QR code in here. You can add images. So pretty quick way to produce some pretty awesome content. So there's no reason to have a boring lead magnet. If you've got content in your book, which you will, you can create a lot of high value pieces for your brand and for your marketing. Another technique that I like to use is to can it auto generate. So Eric just asked, I just saw it pop up. Can it auto generate image suggestions? No. So it is more. There's. And there's no one tool that solves all the things. So honestly I still, we're still sending our stuff to a graphics team designer to do for the ones that we do for our clients. We're not using designer to do it because it's not a perfect solution, but it can save you hundreds of dollars in hiring somebody to do this whole thing to format something. And, and it produces, it does also write ebooks. It'll write a 50 page ebook which I, you know, it's AI generated. I'm not a fan of it. But, but as far as having somewhere to start, it will it's a great place to start. And you will have to pull images from somewhere else and they'll probably have image selections. They do drop in some images randomly based on your text sometimes, like some of the ones that I've done before. It puts images in based on the template and some of the text, but they're, they're not good. Like you're, you're going to want to swap them out and play with the formatting. And if you saw the very last page had warm ips, some content, so you're going to want to add content there. So that's why I say it's not an immediate like, voila, you're done, but in an hour with a little like, with a, with something to start with, in an hour you're going to have a really high quality PDF or flipbook or out, you know, output that you want, which is pretty cool. All right, coming on back here. So back into here. So the other thing is talking to Claude or ChatGPT or whatever your favorite AI tool is, is just taking some of your content and having it produce LinkedIn posts, social media posts, or article selections or YouTube video selections. It can be really, really great. So as an example, I uploaded chapter four from the new brand you'd into Claude and I asked it for five social media posts and then I asked it to write a LinkedIn post again. I would not personally use any of these things word for word, but it helps me so that all of a sudden I'm like, oh, I'm not starting from scratch and you know, I would edit, I would edit this post and then potentially have something there. So instead of taking an hour, I'm now taking 10 minutes, 20 minutes to create the content that, you know, previously would have taken so much more time. So you want to be producing content on some platform and you know, besides your website. So besides that, I'm not a, I'm not saying everybody has to be on social media and has to be everywhere, but I do recommend you find one platform so that you have a place to connect with your audience. And so if that's LinkedIn, you should be promoting or you should be producing regular content for LinkedIn. And if that's YouTube, you should be producing regular content for that platform, social media, if it's Instagram or whatever. So finding that platform that you're going to focus on and producing content for it, you can even ask it for a social media calendar. You can ask it to tie that social media calendar into holidays, upcoming awareness days, all of those sort of things. Let your imagination be your guide here. But there really is no excuse for not creating regular content today because there are so many great tools that are going to speed it up for you. And a reminder on this. Your book might be about you, but it's not for you. How many times have you guys heard me say this? What are you offering your reader? Well, it's the same thing when it comes to social media posts. It might be for you or it might be about you, but it's not for you. Think about. And this is going to go into your reader demographics and reader psychographics as well. Yeah, okay. I was going to say, I think I have slides for this. I do. So this is going to go back into understanding who your reader is. And the more you know them, the more you can. Even again, if you're using AI, you can prompt it to say, okay, this is who I'm writing this post for. Here's some of the challenges they're going through right now. Here's the problem they're trying to solve. You can give it a little bit more information and say, what can you pull from my content to speak directly to what this reader is going through today? And if you're not using AI, well, that's the same process you need to take yourself through to produce this content. And so again, I said, I'm not going to take you through too much detail about social media, but what I do want to touch on today is that piece that is fundamental to your brand, which is building this brand for attracting and connecting with your ideal reader. And so in order to do that, you always have to put your reader at the center of everything that you do. And this is what I teach and what we as a company do at Book Launchers, when we're helping you through the whole writing, editing, designing, and marketing your book, we're always putting the reader at the center. So the stories you tell, the outcome that you're writing about, the perspective that you're sharing, this all comes back to the reader and how you're going to get them to that outcome of the outcome for your book, for your social media posts, for the content that you're putting out there. And the most important thing for you is to not just think about your reader as a demographic. This is one of the things that when I talk to authors or people working on books, I hear way too much is, oh, my book is for women between the ages of 40 and 60. And I'm like, no, it's not, because those women are all Very different. What we want to dig into is there's probably an element of demographics in your reader, but what we really want to figure out is what have they tried that hasn't worked? What are. What is that outcome that they're trying to find? If it's inspiration, why do they need inspiration? What are they trying to do? How do they describe their situation? And I had a call with somebody who kept using a word. Oh, crumb. I can't remember what the word was, but they kept using this word. And I. The word just kind of kept popping up in my head. Is really that word. And so I said to them, I said, is that a word your reader uses or is that a word you use? And this person said, oh, well, it's. It's what they need. And I'm like, yeah, but is it the word they're using? And he's. And he said, no, it probably is not the word the reader's using. I'm like, okay, so you don't use that in the beginning. You introduce the word as part of the solution as you're going through the book. But you want to make sure that you are using the words that your reader uses to describe their situation on all of your outward material. Because if you're using a word that they don't use, you're not going to relate. It's going to go right. So we want to be using the words they use. Some demographics are important because you want to know where you're going to find them, where they're hanging out, you know, who they have commonalities with, who they follow is important. Again, this is, you know, when you're seeking partnerships and collaborations, knowing who they follow will help you know who to reach out to for those collaborations. Really, this comes down to what keeps them awake at night. What are they seeking? What are they dreaming about? What are they worrying about in the middle of the night? And, you know, figuring out where you can find them. This is more about how you know who your reader is. And I have a video, Angela, if you can find it, it's get how to get into the mind of your reader. It talks about different research tools and techniques. And so Angela will drop that video so you can bookmark it and watch it later. And this is an exercise that you can do. This is an exercise we take our. When you. When you take our class, self publish and succeed. This is how. This is one of the things our coaches walk you through when you're writing your book. So what. What is your reader worried about? Why do they need you? What have they tried that doesn't work? How do they talk about this problem or situation and are they using specific words? So if you can write all this down, you can use this to figure out what content to put out into the world, to build your brand and to attract your readers to you. To sell your books, to get yourself on stages, to sell products, services, coaching your course that you may build from your book. All of those people pieces. Here's a couple examples. And then I'm personally going to take a short break and so Angela will be answering any questions that she can answer herself, any other pieces like that. Because I am going to have to take a short restroom break here in a moment. But a couple of examples. So Yukimi, I'm going to click on this and bring. Bring up her LinkedIn in a minute. But just to show you how her posts are for her audience on LinkedIn. She does a really, really great job and her book has done really, really well too. So this is one of our clients as it as. As Nick, or he was a client working with us on his book Rise of the Reader. And I put this up because Nick has. This is Nick's personal page. So he built this page when he was going to be launching his book. He has a very, very successful book book, Bookstagram page called Book Thinkers and a business where he helps authors build videos for their social media content and beyond in their branding. And he pitches people for podcasts and things like that. And so we also collaborate on a lot of things because we have a lot of the same people in our audience and he sends a lot of people to us and we've worked with him in a variety of ways as well. But he built this page solely for his book launch. And so you can see how he mixes things personal in with his book. If you go to his page and I'll bring both of them up right now so you guys can see them and. Okay. All right, where are we? Okay, we'll do this. There we go. Okay, so we'll go to Instagram. Nick loves books. So you guys can see this just as an example. So he's got his post pinned about his book. He's got lots of personal aspects that tie in here. But then you can see he's featuring his book, he's sharing content. How Books Changed My Life. So this is all content that is about him, but for his audience. Right? So even when he's posting about his, his triathlon success, it's talking about a book I picked Up a book built to finish, you know, and so it feeds into all of these pieces that attract and appeal to his ideal reader. Now let me bring up you Kimmy's LinkedIn. See if it's going to show up that it's not as easy. We might have to search for her over here. Okay. Okay. So her posts, she's got her featured here. So book her to speak, download her free roadmap. So her lead magnet, order her book. Now this is really, really great, right? This tells you she's a speaker. This tells you you can get something of value from her. You can order her book, carries on from here. Here's a post to get to know her. So all of her content, when you look at her posts, let's just go see if it'll bring this up. So, so she's. And so this is about her. I'm only halfway through Monday, but I already feel behind. But ultimately she brings it back to a lesson for her audience. Right. So her content is about her, but it is for her ideal audience. And she does a really, really great job of promoting her book but also hanging back to that author profile of, you know, what's her appearance, what is the stories she's telling, what are the topics she's talking about. It all gets tied together really, really well. Okay, I am going to take a short break and I will be right back. Angela, I'm going to bring you on stage. Do you have the Streamyard link? Because you could do a giveaway while I am gone. It should work for you because you're logged in. But here I'll give you the Streamyard giveaway link in Slack so that you got it. And I think it'll work for you because you are logged in through Streamyard as well. So it should work for you. And I will be back momentarily.

Okay, awesome. So before I do a giveaway, there were a couple questions I wanted to answer. I know some of you guys have been waiting so patiently. So first question was from Heather Casper. And actually, I don't know, this was.

A while back, so I don't know.

If I can find it over here. But Heather had asked about the website. Yeah, I don't think I can multitask to that degree of answering the question and finding the comment. So her question was, I'm curious, do you suggest making your. Your domain, your name or the title of your book? Doesn't matter. Buy as many as you can. So we personally as a company have so many different URLs and it's a Great idea. Absolutely. I would recommend for anyone who can buy your domain as your name right now. You never know what the future holds. Julie would say the same thing and I'm pretty sure she bought the domain for her name years ago. So. Absolutely. It's great, great to have one for your name for your book. If you have a brand or a company that you're just starting out, absolutely buy it for that. And then if you have other ideas of things that you might want to say with your brand that you might want to explore in the future, see if a domain is available for that or a variation of that and buy that. So one of the great things with let's say if you just have one with your name and then you bought a second one with your book, if you write multiple books in the future, you could create a new domain for that book, but then you could have them all listed on your main website or if you start to establish a brand or a business, you could also have it linked back to your website. So I would absolutely recommend buying multiple. Buy as many as you can because it will more than likely be able to be used in the future. So that was one question. Let's see, there was another question by Kevin Hall. So let me just. And I don't think I'll be able to find this question in the comments either to actually show it on the screen. But his question was what might be a best tool to use to build a website? My latest was built using HTML code and I want to redo it. So typically our websites are built through WordPress but there are are many different tools out there nowadays to do that. So you could absolutely do WordPress. There are a lot of different features and functionality with WordPress. Wix is another common one. GoDaddy Weebly is is one that's usually for. Well Weebly is one that you could say for sure I already said GoDaddy. There's another one that I'm blanking on, maybe Canva even. But yeah, typically we will do hours through WordPress. Squarespace is also another one and you could even Google some other ones. But yeah, there are many, many tools out there that you can use to build a website and I know that WordPress does do HTML as well, so hopefully that will help you out.

Okay, let's see.

Let me attempt to do a giveaway. I have not yet. I'm always on the behind the curtain roll for this. So let's see if this works. Okay, so we're gonna see who has said hello again and we're gonna try to give away that.

I don't. I'm not. I don't think it's.

Sharing screen. Let's see.

No, no, we're not seeing. We're not seeing it.

We're not seeing it. So I answered a couple questions, but the winner was Purity. And purity, I think you had mentioned that you were in South Africa, which is awesome. So that means one of our prizes would be one of the books. So either our oh, so Soft Journal, a copy of Self Promote and Succeed, or a copy of Self Publishing and Succeed. So please email me at teambook launchers.com to claim your prize. I will also need your name and your mailing address because I have many talents, but mind reading is not one of them, so.

Or stalking. You could say it.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Definitely not that one. So, yeah, that was. That was fun. Thanks for sending me that little URL, Julie. Yeah, yeah, I just answered questions, a couple questions, and then. And then did the giveaway.

Great. Awesome. Okay, cool. So we will. And I'm looking at the time and I'm looking at everything else that I want to cover today, and I'm thinking that we should do part two of this in October. I don't think we have a topic yet for October, do we, Angela?

I can look. I don't think so.

Because I have. I'm going to go through one more section, but the next piece that I was going to dive deep into was kind of the speaking piece and going from there. And I feel like, you know, there's probably been quite a few questions already that we probably want to cover today. So let me know in the comments if you think we should just do part two or if I should try to fly through the rest, because I'm inclined to go deeper in a part two in October than I am to just fly through, because I'd rather spend some time working on some of your questions and answering that today than going too much further. But I will bring the slides up. You guys can discuss. And I will check back in after I have talked about this next section. Yeah, see, Brian's saying part two. Amalia is saying, I'd love a part two October, and we don't have anything.

On the books yet, Julie, for.

That's what I thought. Okay, great. Because I know November we have Rena from Speaker Slam coming to talk to us about, you know, speaking and, like, that kind of piece. But yeah, okay. Part two. I don't even have to. Deep is most helpful. There we go. All right. I don't Even have to wait. So we will. I will wrap up this next little piece and then I'll stop there and we will call. We will call it and I'll just answer questions for the rest of the time. And we'll have one more prize. So don't go away. Okay, here we go. Which also saves me some work for next month because I spent hours and hours prepping this for you guys this, this month. So then it'll be a little bit lighter lift for me, but I can go a little deeper on a few things that I didn't add in for next month. Okay, so let me go back to my slides and you guys will probably get a sneak preview of where we've been. For anybody who wasn't here, this is what you've missed and why you will definitely want to go back and watch the replay. Excuse me. All right. And I just pause here. And it's funny because this was 10 years ago now. So seeing all my pictures from 10 years ago, but carrying on. We have been going through the roadmap and we have covered deeply today the brand, the author profile. So here you go. Your author acronym. We covered author websites and some of the things that you want to make sure that your author website has, by the way, the pages, the type of pages you want your author website to have. You want an about, you want something about your book, you want contact information, and then anything else would be specific to you. So speaking or a blog or media appearances, those are kind of the main pages. If you have something else to offer, you know, courses or workshops, you know, you put that there too. But your website doesn't need to be huge or fancy. And like we showed you with Rogers, to sell your book and to sell bundles and things like that, you can actually have it linked to a Shopify store page. And that's a really, really effective way to do it. Okay. Oh, and again, just a reminder, you can get a website from us. We'll build your website. We'll create a lead magnet and a three email sequence for you. And you get three months access to our author business experience accelerator if you grab your website package by October 1st. Okay. And then we talked about content and I gave you guys some AI tips and tools for that. And then we've just spent a little bit of time talking about kind of a perspective, not a how to on social media, but a perspective on what content to share, to grow your brand and to connect with your audience. So going back to our roadmap, we are, I asked for reviews of Course. So sorry, where's our social media campaign? That's where we left off. So then audience building give activities like giveaways. We've done a little bit about this on the YouTube channel so you can search for Goodreads giveaways. That's, you know, lead magnets can also fall into that. There's some programs out there that work well for, you know, audience building. Some of the things that we do are more like ebook sales than free ebooks. But there are ebook sites where you can do free giveaways or paid giveaways. Those can be great media outreach. I skipped over that completely today. Don't plan on going deep on it. We did a session with Jason Jones YouTube live, which Angela can find the link for you and post it here. And I'll. She gives me a collection of the links after and I post. I'll post them in the description for those of you watching the replay, these links should be in the description below for you as well. But we did a media outreach session with Jason Jones, I don't know, two weeks ago, three weeks ago on YouTube. So we have that as well. Plus I have also done some YouTube videos on how to pitch the media for your book. Releasing content around the book. That was, that was a lot of what we were just talking about with using AI to release content. You can use the book to then extract pieces to repurpose that content. Efren, by the way, I don't know if he's still here, but Efren's social media. He has been doing a great job of, you know, taking podcast interviews, content and stories from his book and repurposing it and sharing it on Instagram. So check him out, follow him on Instagram. Angela, if you can, grab his Instagram link and drop it in there. Because I think he's doing a great job of releasing content around the book. And he has, he has. I mean, it's a big book. He has a lot of really great stories and really great content. So it's fun to see him pulling those stories and content out. And then we touched on Book Army. But I'm not going to go into that too much today. You can get a lot of this in detail from Self promote and succeed. So all of that stuff are things that we do pre launch to the book. Now, if you haven't done it and your book is already out, today's a great day to start, right? Yesterday is almost always the best time to begin, which makes today the absolute best day to begin because these things are always done, always better to be done before. So doing them today is the best day to do it. I wouldn't put off any of those things that we've talked about. If your book is already out, start now and then, as we talked about, asking for reviews becomes your job from now and forever. And posting reviews is really, truly a great gift that you can give an author, but also a great gift that you give their potential readers. And why I say that is because they, you know, if the book has helped you or had an impact on you, which, as I say that I really have to go write a review for the Gap in the Gain, because, you know, as I kicked off today's talk by sharing that I've been sharing the Gap in the Gain by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy with my son. And I didn't. You never know if these things sink in until a random comment comes. But it has sunk in with him and he gets it. And I want to share that review with them because it's made a difference. And I would be sharing it not just as a thank you to the Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan for writing the book, but to help other readers who might be thinking, I might read this book, right? Maybe I'll read this book, maybe I won't, or maybe I'm not sure the book is for me. So it's a gift you're giving other readers as well as the author when you post reviews. And asking for reviews isn't just about helping you, right? It's about helping your book find the people that you can help with that book. So it's a really important thing and it impacts everything. If you don't have a lot of reviews on Amazon in particular for your book, it will impact your ability to get speaking engagements, to get media, and of course, when you run Amazon ads for the performance of those ads, the more reviews you have, the more social proof, the more all of those things are more likely to happen in a positive way, which means you can have more impact. So if you're the kind of person who's like, I don't want to ask for reviews for me, don't ask for reviews for you. Ask for the people that you can impact with your book. Because the more reviews you have, the more impact you'll be able to have on your, on your audience and on the people that you wrote the book to help in the first place. Okay, so seeking partnerships to promote your book. I'm going to touch on that and then we're going to end. And part two is Going to pick up on pitching for speaking engagements because I built a whole speaker path for you guys. See, there's a sneak peek. Okay. That's where we're going next time. So going in reverse. So where I'm going to leave off is partnerships to promote your book. So I don't have a slide for this. It's just something I wanted to talk about really quickly to wrap things up. And if you do have questions, I'm going to shift to questions here in a few minutes. So now is a great time to post your question. Partnerships are powerful. And earlier on, I touched on, you know, my partnership with Ali Fallon. I've talked about my collaborations with Dale Roberts from self publishing with Dale. Looking for places and people and organizations that have your audiences in their audience and then finding ways that you guys can win together is a powerful way to build your brand and sell books. And if you go back to my story about more than cash flow and how Wiley turned me down for a publishing deal because they didn't think I would have a strong enough platform to sell books. But then I went on to, you know, sell a lot of books. And, you know, I topped the Amazon print charts with a book which I believe they have not done with a real estate book in Canada. They've had some best sellers that have sold a lot of books in Canada, but they, you know, I, I took it there, which they have not done with their, with any of their books. And they don't publish in Canada anymore. They only publish out of their New York publishing house. But how my book went to number one was not because I had a massive platform. I had, I think, 10,000 people on a newsletter list and a small YouTube channel presence when this happened. And why my book went to number one was because of a handful of key partnerships and collaborations. Real estate, Canadian Real Estate wealth magazine became one of the big collaborations that helped the book do well over the year. What I did was I gave them, I think it was 250 copies of my book, and they promoted the book in every magazine because they had a deal where if you subscribe to the magazine for three years or two years, you got a copy of the book. And as a result, my book got a lot of exposure and I was given ad space and features at their events and things like that. So it was a really, really powerful collaboration. With the launch, there was a couple of groups that were really, really behind the book and promoting it. One of them was Nick and Tom Carradza, who run Rockstar Real Estate, which is A group out of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. And they, their audience was exactly my audience. And they said, you know what? We'll promote your book. And when it got into the top 100 print books, they said, let's make it number one. It wasn't even my idea. They're like, let's make it number one. And they emailed their list more times for my book than they've ever emailed it for any of the things that they've promoted at that time anyways. And I think between them and a handful of other groups and organizations that had strong lists that promoted the book at the same time, that's what took it to number one. But it was ultimately them that when they saw that it was getting close, they were like, hey, let's push hard. Let's make it number one. And between them and these other folks, it did get to number one. Okay, so that's all I'm going to say about promotions. So look around. And by the way, you don't have to find big gigantic organizations. Some of your greatest partnerships could be in people that have, you know, small to mid sized audiences as well. But those small to mid size audiences sometimes are the most absolutely engaged people. And some of the large audiences that they have, they're not that engaged. And so having a perfect fit in a small audience I think is better than getting featured to a large audience in a lot of cases. So I would not discount some of those smaller people. You know, maybe they only have 5, 10,000 people on social media or a 5 to 10,000 person newsletter list. If you guys can, if you guys have great synergy, a great relationship, you guys can grow together. So it's okay to collaborate with small, with other small fish in this big pond world because together you can build big audiences and have a bigger impact and it can make a big difference to your brand in time. All right, Angela, give me Q1, please. We'll dive into questions.

Okay, so I actually, because now you're back, I could not do this while you were away. I can multitask to this degree. But we'll scroll back so that we can show the questions this way.

Look at us, all sophisticated. Rashmir. Oh, I love this question. How big a platform do you need before launch? Need. Need is the word that I zero in on this. This is how big you need. Zero to launch. Okay? You don't need a platform to launch a book, full stop. And the difference here is what are your goals? What are your expectations? What do you think you're going to do? And what are you willing to do pre launch and post launch to sell your book? So you don't have a platform, that's fine. You're going to use your book to build your platform. Because building a platform takes a long time, which is how I started this whole conversation basically going, it's a privilege to have any audience, so show up and shine and deliver massive value to whatever audience you have, whether it's one person, 100 people, 1,000 people, a million people. When you are marketing a book, if you think you are going to sell 10,000 copies on launch because you've written the greatest book in the world, but you do not have a platform that is a very, very big chasm that you're going to try to fill. And so not to say it's not possible, but it's to say that you have to have a really good plan of how you're going to sell 10,000 books. Because if you have nobody that's waiting for your book when you launch, then you're going to be relying very heavily on other people's audiences, paid ads and other services. So you're going to need to have a lot of time, money and energy invested into selling those books. And it's hard to do without an existing platform. When we have authors at book launchers that don't have a platform when they launch a book, we put them in what's called a phased momentum launch. Again, this is in my book, self promote and succeed. And if you are working with us as a client, some of our clients are here. This is one of the launch strategy choices that we offer. The phased momentum is we're going to run ebook sales and put your book in front of audiences with giveaways and things like that. But you're not expecting a 10,000 book launch. You're not even expecting 1,000 book launch launch. For the most part. You're expecting to launch the book and every month look back and go, wow, I have 10, 50, 100 more book sales than I did the month before. And I've grown my newsletter list by 100 more people or a thousand more people, or now I'm on this stage, in this podcast, in this media outlet where I was on none before my book. That's the phased momentum approach. And it's really important to go into a launch with the mindset of this is a year or two or three long journey of building my platform and building my audience to sell books, to grow my brand, to grow my business. Because again, the greatest books in the world do not Sell themselves. They have to have marketing plans behind them to sell. And it's not one thing that's going to work to sell a book either. Woo. All right, Irma, what about nonfiction children's preschool books? Is it possible to create a question course from a book that significantly less content compared to nonfiction books for adults? We only do nonfiction books for adults and nonfiction courses, or, sorry, courses from those nonfiction books for adult audiences. Is it possible? Yes, it is absolutely possible. Your audience, though, is probably your. The parent more than the child. So, and this is something that I actually have a video. So just sending Angela off into YouTube for another video. It's buyer versus reader is the video. And whenever you're selling a book or a course, whatever it is, think about who your buyer is, because it's not always the reader or the student. And an example of this might be somebody who is selling their course or their book to a corporate audience, the reader or the student. The participant is the employee in that organization. The buyer is probably an executive in that company. And those are two different audiences with two different objectives from the same material. And what you need to think about is the marketing to speak to the person who's going to buy it and then having the content deliver to that audience so they're engaged. And so if you're speaking about, if your content is for the children but you're selling it to the parents, what do the parents want and how are the children going to want to consume that content? Brian says my Internet info includes board game creator, fine art photographer. How do I get that reduced to just writer? Why does it need to be reduced to just writer? Because your brand isn't just writer. My brand, I've got four books, but I wouldn't even put myself like my brand isn't even writer. You know, I would probably say I'm a, I'm a found. I'm a book. I'm Book Launchers founder. And then I'm, you know, I've written four books and I've, you know, other things. Again, it goes back to those topics you talk about and the spokes on that wheel going back to Nick Hutchison that we showed his Instagram profile. You know, he's got his triathlons, he's got his wife and the baby and their dog Pickles. And, you know, I mean, I know Nick personally, but if I didn't, I would feel like I know him because of those posts. But I. He never just posts about those things. He always has an objective as to what he's helping the reader with. So I would say you don't necessarily want to delete that information. Now if you're like me and say you had a different business before this. So my previous business was a real estate information and training company. And still when you Google my name, you're still going to see a whole lot of real estate content. Content behind Julia Broad. But the answer to how do you get your Internet, your Google search to be more about your book work than these other pieces? Well, what you do is you start producing a whole lot of content for a whole lot of places on your topic that you're writing about. Because in addition to seeing, you know, Julie Broad, real estate investor in the Google search results, you're going to see a whole lot of book related content. Because I've been on 100 plus podcasts, I've been on, I don't know, 50 plus stages talking about book stuff. So my Internet profile over time, again, this doesn't happen instantly, but over time my Internet profile shifts to be more book focused than real estate focused.

Okay, sorry, I was getting another question.

All right. B. Do we do bestseller campaigns? Yes and no. One of our launch strategies is the Amazon bestseller. And the reality is pretty much all of our clients get an Amazon new release bestseller flag without going into that launch strategy. And the reason is that the bestseller campaign that you pay companies for, when they guarantee it, to guarantee it, they're going to play some sort of a game to guarantee it. And so we don't guarantee it. And the reality is even without the guarantee, the vast majority of our clients are getting a flag if not many flags on their launch. I don't like the guarantee because I don't want to play a game to fulfill that guarantee. Because when you mess with the algorithms to put play a game and what I mean by that is when you have people buying your book at 99 cents who would not normally be buying your book, you're teaching the algorithm the wrong person to show your book to. And over time that's going to negatively impact your conversions. What I would much rather you do is show your book to people and have the right people buy your book so that over time Amazon becomes your ally in marketing your book so your Amazon ads perform better. You show up in the also bots to the right people and your metadata is just right where it needs to be in order to perform over the long haul. But a well orchestrated launch with good strategy, good keywords, good research, you can almost always get some sort of a best seller flag. Now if you're talking big media bestsellers. Well, the Wall Street Journal bestseller list is gone now. The USA Today bestseller list doesn't have a whole lot of credibility. And New York Times is not on the table for self published authors because it's a curated list where they choose which books go on it. And even if you sell way more than any of the other books, if you've self published, they almost never put you on their list. So it's a long answer to kind of say yes, we do, but it's not what we like to focus on again. We're really focused on big picture. What are you trying to achieve? What are what's most important to your book for the long haul? Not just for that orange flag that, by the way, doesn't really do a whole lot for you. Because do you, do you meet any author today that doesn't call themselves a best selling author? I don't meet any author that says, hey, I'm an author. They're all like, hey, I'm a best selling author. So there's no authors anymore that aren't bestsellers. So it's lost its meaning. Hi Efren. So my favorite AI software for illustrations. Illustrations? I don't know, I don't really have one for illustrations per se, if you just mean graphics. Canva has really great simple tools. I use them. Mid Journey is more complex. I also use Mid Journey through Discord. Cassie, our book designer, our lead designer in house, she uses Mid Journey all the time. She actually did a little demo for us. I think it was this week, even Tuesday, where she did her little Mid Journey demo, showed us what she does for certain ideas. But honestly, the simplest thing these days for me is just in chat GPT. I just type in what image I need and it will produce an image for us there. I don't play around with those kind of things too much because we do have phenomenal designers on our team. So I. If it's going to take me more than two minutes to do it, I usually outsource. All right. Jason, is it a good idea to give away chapter one for free on your website? Okay, as long as you don't call it chapter one. And why I say that is because what sounds better? Let's see. Okay, let me. Hold on, I gotta look at my book. Let's see what chapter one in Self, Promote and Succeed is. So let's say I said I should know what chapter one is, but I don't. Where's my table of contents? Here. Okay. My chapter one. Okay. So is it better to say get chapter one free. Or is it better to say get the guide on why book marketing doesn't sell books. And here's what to do instead. Which do you want? They're both the same thing. Chapter one. Or do you want the guide on why book marketing doesn't work? And here's what you do to sell books instead. Two different things. Or sorry, same thing, but positioned two different ways. And if you position it as the second thing, yes, you can put that on your website and that should work. And at the end of the lead magnet, that is that chapter one put. By the way, this was an excerpt from chapter one of my book. And here's the link to buy the rest of the book. Angela's reading comments and she's like, oh, wait, Julie stopped. Julie stopped talking. We need. Oh, you know what? There's a pause. What we'll do. Sorry. While you're looking for the next one. So we're gonna do the last giveaway, and it's going to be your final, your second takeaway from the second half of this morning. So. And then Angela can choose her second prize winner. So everybody who's still here, let us know what your favorite takeaway from the second half of this morning's training was. And if you're watching the replay, you can play along, too. We will. I will respond to everybody who comments on this replay as well, so go ahead and post your favorite takeaway below as well. All right, I'm ready for the next one. Irma, when should I consider a ghostwriter? I'm strapped for time, but I know adding an adult nonfiction to Myself series of children's books seems necessary. Okay, so this is a little trickier to answer without knowing a whole lot more. When a ghostwriter is really useful to come in is when you know who your audience is. So going back to what we talked about as far as not just a demographic, but who it is, the problem that they're struggling with, and how you're going to help them with that problem. When you know that and you've got the content ideas so you know the stories, you know, some of. Maybe you have research that you're going to bring in or you have the tips or the acronym. You know, like I said, that author acronym is something I'm playing with right now in consideration for revamping one of my books to launch it next year. If you've got some of that content and you know the reader that you want to help and what you're going to help them with, that is a great time to bring in a writer because together with the writer, you can develop the hook for the book, which is the outcome of the outcome. You can build the outline based on that hook and you know the content that you want to put in it. So you and the writer can work together to figure out what the journey is for that reader and start to build it from there. And we do have writers. So if you're interested, you're welcome to reach out to us and talk to us about it. You can book a call book launchers.com apply a P, P, L, Y. And and so that will be, that will be the best time. But where I would say is not a good time is you don't know what the book's going to be. You have no idea what the book's going to be. You're not even clear on the reader. Yes, a writer can help you figure all of that out, but it's going to take you a lot more time and money to work with a writer to figure it out than to figure and for you to determine that to begin with. But really, you know, I don't think there's a bad time. Even if you've half written a book, bringing in a writer can work really well. I've told this story a lot, but this book, the last quarter of this book was written by a writer. I did not. I was struggling to finish it. I think I sat on it for six months. And then I don't know if it was Angela or somebody on the team was like, hey, you know, we have writers. And I was like, oh yeah, okay. And we brought in a writer and the book was done in a month. And it was just, I was just stuck. You know, it wasn't that just my mind. I did not have the mental capacity to finish the book at that stage. And it was weighing on me to not have it done. So there isn't a bad time to bring in a writer, but hopefully that helps. All right, Dorothea, what if you're a first time writer and don't have a lot of money to start it does money does cost money. Yeah. So I feel like this is a question. I mean, this is part of why we started Author Business Accelerator was to help you guide where you invest your money in the project. But if you're really, really cash strapped, you may want to barter and exchange to make sure that you get some really good editing and you get a great cover design. The rest of it, you know, through these videos, my books, you know, a lot of the other content online. You can, you know, DIY it as much as you need to to get the book done in the first place. But I would really, really recommend you get professional editing and. And you get a professional cover design. I don't know if that helps you with where to start. I mean, as far as where to start, get self published and succeed. That's where you would start. From a nonfiction book perspective. That's what that book is for, is to help you, you know, figure out how do I write this book? What do I. What do I need to do in order to produce a book that's set up to sell? B is asking, do I work with Amplify? I think I'm from. I'm just trying to remember Amplify. Is it a company or a software?

I couldn't remember either. So.

Yeah, I don't know because I know there's. I mean, the one. The one that comes to mind is the curriculum or something for students, which I don't use. But I had talked to another author about it recently, but I don't know what Amplify is, so I would say probably not. All right, Heather. I'm writing a book about how to stop drinking, but I'm not sure I want my entire brand to be about sobriety. There's so much more I want to talk about and write about. Any advice?

A quick caveat did add afterward that she has no brand or website I. At the moment.

Okay, yeah. Thank you. So a brand is never one thing. So even though I'm just trying to think of the best way to answer this, because I could go a lot of ways. So even though I'm all about, you know, hashtag, no boring books, and we are all about writing a book that is set up for. Set up to sell, I wouldn't say we're only about no boring books. Right. This whole day was talked about your brand, building your author brand and giving you examples of that. And as part of helping you through, you know, to become an author and to sell your books, there's a lot of pieces that I also talk about, and I bring in people who will help you with speaking, who will help you with social media, who will help you, you know, with. With some of the emotional things that you might go through. So sobriety might be kind of the core. The core outcome of the outcome that you're offering, but in order to achieve that outcome of the outcome, there's probably a lot of pieces that you would touch on, and there's also elements in your own journey. Sorry, my voice is starting to go after two hours here. There's a lot of other elements in your journey that you will draw from that you can talk about. And then you know you don't have to be only one thing, right? That's the, your, your first book might focus on that, but then you can talk about other things. I mean, my first book was a real estate book. My second book was a branding book and then my next two books were book marketing books or not book marketing, but book publishing related and book marketing. So you don't have to be one thing, but in the time when you're promoting that book, that's kind of what you want your core messages to be. But hopefully that helps. I know there's a lot of ways I could answer that. That's kind of where my mind went first. V E O E O V O Ito I don't know how to say your name. What's the final word about copyright for AI generated content in a book? There is no final word yet and there won't be. I don't think this will ever be fully settled, but it certainly is not settled right now. You do have to disclose it. Sorry, can you just take that one off for a sec? So with regards to AI, you do have to disclose it. So when you upload the content to wherever you're uploading it to, to sell it, you will have to disclose what level of, of usage you have had with AI content. If you're trying to copyright protect it, there's limitations as to what can be copyright protected so far, but that is all still being sorted out in the courts. For, for me, my perspective is kind of twofold. I am not a fan of writing a book with AI. Doesn't mean you can't do it again. It's not right or wrong. Some people are doing it, they're happy with the result. My personal perspective though is that's why brand is so important. Because your story, your perspective, your lens is the very thing that's going to help you stand out in this marketplace. And so can you write a book with AI? Sure. Is it going to be the book that's going to help you achieve your long term goals and objectives, build your brand, make you a thought leader? Well, how could you be a thought leader if AI generated all the content? Right. That's not your, it's not your thoughts. So you know, that's my one perspective on it for that regard is in order for it to actually do the things you want it to do in the long run, you're going to want to generate that content yourself, but can you be assisted by AI all day long? And I'm a fan of that. Okay, so we've got three minutes left. We want to do our prize. I'll do this question and then we want to do the prize and we'll probably wrap.

There was one other question that I think would be good, if we have time for that one, and that would be the last question after this little AI one.

Okay, we'll try. So, yeah, what's our. Who's our prize winner?

It is from Brian. I don't need to change my Internet present. And it's B R R Y A N. I think that's a really great prize winner just because of the fact that you said that multiple things can go into someone's brand, which a lot of people here have that. So, Brian, please email me@teamoklaunchers.com with your mailing address and your prize of choice.

Great, thank you. All right, Steve, can AI disperse your content if you give it to them for creating a course via chapter? So I think you're asking about. So it can be used in certain cases and read the terms and conditions of any AI company you sign up for. It can be used to train it, and so, yes, it can be put into the big, wide database. My perspective on uploading some of my content is my stuff is all on the Internet already, so it's already been used to train the AI stuff, because I'm on YouTube. I've got my blog posts. Like, all of my content. Not all, but a lot of it's public anyways. So if I give it a chapter to withdraw content from it, I'm really not that worried about it being used to train AI because I think my stuff's already trained AI. But if you have something that's really proprietary, really secret, then I wouldn't use it. I wouldn't upload it to AI. Unless you've gone through the terms and conditions and you've made sure there's no way they're using it in any way, because a lot of the sites are using it to train. And anywhere you're uploading content nowadays, you should be paying close attention if that's a concern of yours. Because there's a lot of things like Zoom as an example, in their terms and conditions, their stuff is being used to train their systems. And, you know, it kind of all goes in their own flywheel. But yeah, read terms and conditions. All right. If you already have a brand Is it advisable to have your author website redirect to your current site as well from a different name? Hard to say. That's a very difficult question to answer without knowing what your brand is, how it ties to your author website, you know, how do these things work together or not? So I have a juliebroad.com website that's technically my author website. I never refer people to it because ultimately everything I'm doing is intended to grow book launchers. So I always Send people to book launchers.com but, you know, if, if that wasn't the case and I had a different brand that was still my real estate brand, I probably would not redirect my real estate brand to my new brand because it would be confusing. So that's why I say that's a very hard question to answer without going deeper. Again, that's where we built Author Business Accelerator, the new program, because then we can spend time in the one on one calls to have you share your websites and have us go through it and go, okay, what are you trying to do? And should you do this or should you do that?

And I had shared while you were away earlier that if they have a book brand, their name, they should try to buy all the URLs for all the things.

Yes, be a URL collector. It comes in handy.

And that was the last question that I, that I have.

All right, great. Well, thank you everybody. We'll see you back here in October for part two, because you have spoken and I am happy to listen in that regard. And we'll dive into speaking and the second half of the roadmap from author brand to thought leader. And I can't wait to see you then. And please come back on Tuesday to join Shane for the live stream, which is happening at 2pm Pacific Standard Time on building a online course from your book. All right, thanks everybody. Thanks, Angela. Bye.