Julie Broad walks through the rough launch of Self Promote and Succeed: a frozen Amazon listing, an audiobook editor who quit, a family death. Her advice: take daily action, aim for incremental improvement, stop comparing yourself to others, and use your book as your promotion roadmap.
My book Self Promote and Succeed launched in October. It's collected a lot of orange flags from Amazon and is already getting good reviews. But I was feeling pretty down around the launch. There were a lot of reasons why, but if you are feeling disappointed for some reason or you're thinking about quitting at any stage in your author journey, well, this pep talk video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the Book Broad, founder of Book Launchers and multi award winning bestselling author. Now let's just get right in to the real talk here. My book launch was fine, but it wasn't a knock it out of the park kind of launch. And that was mostly okay with me because I didn't have the energy or time to put into a big launch with everything I'm dealing with personally and professionally. And frankly, my goal for this book was always with an eye towards lead generation and brand recognition for book launchers. My bigger strategy was always to tie it to some initiatives we have underway for 2024 launches. But the launch didn't have the same feeling that other launches have had for me. And I had a little bit of emotion around putting a book out on book marketing and not doing a big crush it kind of launch. That felt a little weird. So now that you know my personal experience, let me ask you, are you feeling a little bummed because you're comparing yourself to others who are crushing it? Do you think about quitting on your book or quitting on your book marketing? Or maybe you're just thinking how hard or unfair or how slow things go for you? Well, you're not alone. That's why I wanted to shoot this video for you. One of our clients made a comment about her bumpy pre launch and said everything seemed to go fine for Julie's launch and that was a great comment for me to realize. She was probably comparing herself to me and she had no idea all the stuff that was going on behind the scenes. Like my audiobook editor quitting just as he was supposed to edit my audiobook. So my audiobook didn't launch at the same time as my book. On launch day, my book got frozen because of a copyright verification request from Amazon and I think it caused some buyers to have delayed shipments. We had other issues that made everything last minute, which meant there was a lot of extra stress for people on my team and we had a death in my family a few days before launch. So I really didn't have any desire or energy to be promoting a book in the midst of all that. I'm Sharing because there are so many ups and downs in the author business. You have to enjoy the good times when they hit because there will be some rough times around the corner and that is normal. And launch day is a single day in the long journey that is your author life. A month where you get a bad review and no book sales will be followed by that speaking engagement invite and 200 book sales followed by a bunch of great reviews you didn't expect. Well, that happens if you're working it. And my book self Promote and Succeed will absolutely help you to know what to do and when to do it so you can enjoy those ups. So what do I do when I hit a down spot? Well, first I recognize that it's a down spot and I refocus on taking action because I always believe the missing piece is action. So get out there and do something every single day to create value for other people to start to build new momentum. Write some high value social media posts, comment on some influencers posts. Take pictures of others succeeding and congratulate them. Create some great videos or articles to help your ideal reader pitch yourself to speak or be on media. Focus on helping others and creating value. I got this amazing card in the mail with two pictures from Renee Reddy. She was thanking me for the deep dives and the videos and for Angela's amazing support on my team. The card made my day. I'm helping people and sometimes they become clients and sometimes they do it on their own. In both cases I'm having a positive impact and that feels so good. It feels good and helps pick me up in those down days. Which is what happened when Renee's card hit my inbox. My mailbox actually. The next thing to realize is that you aren't the person you're comparing yourself to. I've had so many people say I want to have an Alex Hermosi book launch. And if you don't know what that means, he livestream to hundreds of thousands of people and did this huge webinar pitch to sell his book. And his bonus was a hat. And it was the talk of the marketing, all the marketing people I know for a few weeks. He sold tons and tons of books direct to readers. He wasn't going for a list even though he could have taken down every book on every list. He sold direct. So he got contact information and he got a lot of book sales and his book still sold on all the other platforms. It was a huge launch, like the launch of launches. So of course other people want it. But he spent years paying for ads, to build the audience. And leading up to it, he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more, to get registrations. And he spent years creating content, especially on YouTube. You can't have an Alex Formosi launch because you're not him. You don't have the game plan he has. You have your business, your audience, and your resources. He spent a lot of time and money and energy getting to where he is today. And you can do that too, but not in the same way he did it, because you're you and he's him. And if you're just getting started, don't compare yourself to the people who've been at it for decades. You can't win. Their value output is just too far ahead of where you're at today. My trick for this is to not compare myself to other people, but to compare myself to where I was, what I was doing, what I knew a year ago, five years ago, 10 years ago. And when I do that, I feel so proud and I feel stronger and smarter and more successful. And suddenly I feel empowered to do amazing things going forward in the future. But to do that, I focus on creating incremental improvements. And by doing that, life and business get better, little bit by bit. So go back to what I said at the start. Focus on taking action and give yourself one task to do every day to improve. Start an Amazon ad, run a Goodreads giveaway, post a review on someone else's book, write an article, create a great video book, a ticket to a conference to learn something that you need to know. The list of things you can do is endless. But if you do one thing every day at the end of a year or three years, you probably won't even recognize the person you've become. Because you've been incrementally improving yourself, your book business, and you've moved yourself massively towards your goals. Now you should go and get a copy of Self Promote and Succeed right now from your favorite book buying website or@selfpromoteandsucceed.com so you know what to do. And then you should watch this video on how to do influencer outreach or this one that YouTube really thinks you'll enjoy. See you there.
Should You Skip Amazon When You Publish Your Book? #digitalmarketing #amazonauthor
