Holiday Book Selling Tips and Ideas

Hello. Happy Tuesday. Today we're talking about holiday book selling. And I know, I know it feels too early. And that's what I thought when I walked into Costco a few weeks ago and they already had all things holidays out on display. And I thought, we haven't even had Halloween yet. But the reality is all of the holiday catalogs that you maybe wanted your book to, to appear in, they are already done. So if you want it to be in some sort of a holiday gift guide or a holiday catalog, you should have been doing that a couple months ago. So that does not mean you cannot sell books during the holidays, though. And I. And it's not too late. You can still plan for some cool things to do for your books. So today we have five Fresh. I'll call them fresh. They're probably not, you know, that fresh as far as ideas go. But they aren't ideas that we have talked about before. And so there'll be a magic link that will appear with the old video. And if you're watching the replay, of course we'll put it in the description for you afterwards. But sorry, I just. And I don't know what your, your favorite holiday is, Professor E.A. burlingame. Just that I hate that my favorite holiday is skipped over for the Christmas grift. I don't know what holiday that is. If it's Halloween. I mean it, it is definitely not skipped over in this neighborhood. I feel like we've already had Halloween with Trunk or Treat. We had a big festival. Yeah, it's. It feels, it feels already like we've had Halloween, but it was Halloween. So there you go. All right. And so Angela, can you magically make the YouTube link for the old holiday ideas, which are not old, you can still use them. But the past video, because today are ideas that we did not cover before. But before we get into that, let me share a few things to mark your calendar for. So number one on, let's see, I'm just checking my calendar here. So I give you the right days. So number one, November 7th, two weeks from now. So the next live stream, it will be with our pen to paper pro Chad, who is going to be sharing tips for writing your book and getting over procrastination. And you know how to be motivated when you're just not feeling it. And so that's going to be an extra special live. I won't be here because I will be attending 20 books to 50k here in Las Vegas. And speaking of that, another day to mark your calendar if you are in and around the Las Vegas area is to come on out on November 10th to the horseshoe Hotel and Casino into the convention center. And there will be over 300 authors selling books, doing signings. They're going to have giveaways, fun and games, you know, all kinds of fun and shenanigans. And of course, you know, you can say hello to me, Efren, who is one of our YouTube besties. He's also got a table so you can say hi to him in person. So it should be a fantastic event. At least one of the book launchers team members will be there. One of them lives in Las Vegas, so I might convince her to pop over for a few hours as well. So, yeah, so it should be fantastic. So that's at the Horseshoe Hotel and Casino on the Strip. And that's happening on November 10th. And the live stream is here, same time, same place, 2pm Pacific Standard Time. On November 7th. There's also November 11th, which is remembrance Day in Canada and Veterans Day. Here we are having our Deep dive. And this one will be an Author Spotlight deep dive with four book launchers, authors. That's happening at 10:00am Pacific Standard Time. I don't know if we have links set up yet, but I will make sure we get those. Actually, it's going to be here on YouTube. I'm going to stream it. That's what I'm doing. So you can already see the link. So mark your calendars, turn your notifications on, and hopefully you can join us because we've got four awesome authors. They're going to give you their best tips and they're also going to be there for your Q and A. So. Oh, and wait, one more thing. Wait, there's more. On Wednesday, November 15th at 2pm Pacific Standard Time, I have April Cox coming to chat with you. She is a. She helps people with a lot of different kinds of books, but her main focus is children's books. And she is going to come here and answer your questions, talk about best take tips, best practices for writing and publishing a children's book. I get asked questions about it all the time. And we are, you know, mad consumers of children's books. Actually, my son, just a side note, we have now, I don't want to say graduated, but he's kind of gotten over the picture book thing and he is into chapter books and we just read the first five books in the Hardy Boys series. And then we discovered this really cool book called the Wild Robot. And, and we've read the Wild Robot. We've now Read the Wild Robot Escapes. And we're just starting the Wild Robot Protects. What a cool, cool series. I just love it. So back to this April 15th, 2pm Pacific Standard Time. April Cox will be doing a one hour session and she has a new program that's coming out in January, so she'll talk about that. But she's like me. The bulk of what she gives is going to be massive, massive value. It's not going to be a pitch fest at all. Uh, but she will tell you about her program because she has awesome stuff and I'm really, really proud and excited to share her with anyone here that is interested or working on a children's book. So all that's coming up. You have to be on the newsletter to get all the links. So book launchers.com newsletter if you aren't already in our launch letter. Getting our launch letter emails. Whew. All right, all of you have already said hello. We're going to dive into our holiday tips here in a second. Looks like we've got somebody from South Africa here. Amazing. Hello and welcome. Marlise. Am I saying your name right? Hopefully. And we also have, of course, Stella's here. Darla's here. Richard. Hello, Richard. Kevin and Efren. Hey, I was just talking about you, Efren. And Renee is here, too. Hello, hello, hello, Ms. Lou. It is great to have so many people here today and saying hello. Woohop. Yes, woohop indeed. Efren, Horace is here. And Betty Bullock. Oh, amazing. And Ron. Ron is in the house. The Green wizard, my friends. And Kevin. Okay. And Kevin just said April is great on children's books. I've attended some of her podcasts. Awesome. And Luke said studio albums are book. Okay. All right. And then self publishing with Andy is here, too. The whole family's here together. So that is fantastic. All right, friends, while we have so many fabulous people here today, what is the date? Let me look. I don't know if we have 24 comments yet, but let's give it to the 24th commenter, Angela. So if we don't have 24 yet, you better get it in there. Say hello while you can. And we're going to give away our first prize. All right, so let's talk holiday book selling. Where are we? So, number one, because I am all about audio right now, I am so excited. And I've talked about this already, but you know, Spotify has just enabled premium. You know, the premium subscribers in the UK and Australia, they're getting 15 hours of audiobook content that they can stream and they've said us will be next, and I presume other countries will follow behind that. So I am super pumped because I think this is going to be really great. I don't think you're going to make a ton of money. I will be happy to be wrong on this as an author, though. I mean, you already don't make a ton of money through Audible. You know, Audible really restricts how you, how much money you can make. What, you know, they don't let you choose your price of what you can sell your book for as it is. So. But I do think as far as discoverability goes, especially for those of us doing a lot of podcasts or those of you who host podcasts, being able to be on a podcast and then have somebody not have to leave the platform and find your audiobook, this is huge. And I remain incredibly excited. And Spotify continues to make big investments in this space. They are going to give Audible a run for their money. And I am so, so happy about this. And so my number one tip, because I'm all about audio now, because all of our authors are selling, or I should say all, a lot of our authors are selling a significant chunk of their books in audio. I would say let's make a holiday playlist on Spotify. A quick search on Google will give you the instructions on how to create a playlist on Spotify and share it with your friends. But I mean, why not create an audiobook playlist and then if you want to kind of go a little not crazy, but you can give that playlist to people, you can share it on social media. I think you can enable it so you can share it to anyone. I'm not certain, but I think you can make public playlists that you can share and you can give it in your newsletter. So share it on social media. And you could also make it so that people could give this as a gift. So let's say you pick your top 10 favorite books for anyone who wants to dive into true crime or your top 10 favorite books on, you know, writing and promoting nonfiction books, and you put on some of these books in the playlist. Why not then, you know, promote that and say, hey, give your favorite true crime buff or your favorite author a, you know, here's the list of playlists and why not give them a Spotify gift certificate to go with it, right? So that's a really cool, I think, thoughtful book idea to give to give people. And if you've already created this playlist, that's awesome. Let's take this playlist idea a little further. What if you then shoot or write out the content or shoot some content for social media like on TikTok or shorts and tag the author, right? Say you know your favorite book marketing playlist and then you tag the author on this blog post or this video or these shorts. Well, not everyone is going to reshare your content, but I promise you are going to get some, some reshares, reposts, whatever it is, wherever platform you're on from those people. And so now you're going to get exposure to their list as well. And hopefully because you've got your book in this playlist, you're also going to get exposure for your book to their list. So that's my idea. Give it a whirl, let me know how it goes. But I think I'm all about these playlists, audio playlists right now and audiobooks in general, I think. You know, I'm so excited for Spotify. I am enthusiastically, whenever I'm giving somebody my book Self Publish and Succeed, I give them a code to Spotify Self Promote and Succeed though I got you covered on that one. So in a couple of points I'm going to give you, I'm going to tell Angela, like our magical link wizard over there to drop the link for so that you can get Self Promote and Succeed audiobook for free. Because that's what I'm doing with the audiobook for that. So let's see what you guys are talking about and see if we've got a prize winner. Where are we over here? Okay. Oh, it looks like self publishing with Andy won. Yay. Yay, Yay, yay, yay. That's amazing. So haven't seen you in a while. You pop in and you win. So our choices today, Angela probably already told you this. Maybe I don't see her comments. So you can choose from a mug, a journal, or a copy of Self Publish and Succeed or you can also get a physical copy of Self Promote and Succeed. Of course, if you want the audio copy of I'm about to tell you how to get it for free as well. So I've also filmed, I filmed myself recording the entire series of Self Promote and Succeed. And I'll be giving you all that playlist link next in next time you see me. So in a couple of, in four weeks. But for now, I do have the audio version completely edited and ready for you and we'll be uploading that to be available on Spotify. I'm in the process of Uploading it actually right now. So it should be available on Spotify within a week or so as well. Okay. And you can keep the questions coming. I saw Kevin post a question. We'll do Q and A at the end. So you can go ahead and post them and Angela collects them all up. And then I will answer them with whatever time we have left, which should be lots because I only have five short ideas for selling books over the holidays for you today. Okay, so my holiday idea number two. Number two is to publish a holiday themed ebook that leads people into your ecosystem. You can sell these kind of things for 99 cents. You can give it away for free. Fiction authors do this all the time. You'll see a holiday, they'll take the characters from their book and they'll write a short novella or some other sort of little mini book and they'll give that or sell it for 99 cents. And then at the end, it's really selling you on reading the rest of their series. So you can see these characters in action in the real full story. And I can tell you right now, you know, something like that leading into your fiction or your nonfiction could work as well too. You can share it. You know, again, there's lots of free ebook sites, which is why something like this works if you create something short but valuable. So take a look at a problem you can solve in a short, like 20, 25 page ebook and you know, quickly create that ebook and theme it for the holidays. That would be great. Like for me, if I wanted to, I could create a, you know, a short ebook on how to sell more books over the holiday season. And that's my holiday themed book. Or it could be how to how to write your book despite the busy holiday season, you know, something like that. Or 10 tips to write, you know, a thousand words a day through the holidays, something like that. Something holiday themed. Then that can go out for free and voila, you're entering people into your ecosystem. Have a clear call to action at the back of the book to buy your book or do whatever else you want them to do as far as joining your community. Oh, and because I'm on audio kick today, why not also create some sort of short audio version? Because you can upload short form audio content to Spotify or to Sorry to find a way Voices to upload onto Spotify. And I think some of their other platforms that accept audio content will also accept that. Audible doesn't accept short audio audio content like that, but others will and you can give it away for Free again or, or distribute it. I think you can sell it. I'm not certain I haven't done short form audio, but I know other people who have and I'm pretty sure you can actually set a price like $0.99 for that audio as well and sell it and you could also do that and create it and distribute it through Book Funnel which is the platform that I'm using to distribute my audiobook self promote and succeeds audiobook for free as well. So. So lots of options. Idea number three, plan your holiday. Holiday promotions. Now I've already started to see, I think this is crazy because it's still October, but I've already started to see Black Friday sales. I mean that's planning ahead. That's a little crazy. But start planning your holiday promotion and holiday themed each emails for your community, for your social media, for your email list. You know, here at Book Launchers every year we do our holiday extravaganza which kind of cheats because number four I'll get to in a second. But we do a holiday extravaganza which is a big, our deep dive for December is you know, myself and usually two, three, sometimes four members of my team, we all get together on a live and we have a ton of prizes. We do Q and A. We have some fun, fun facts, all that kind of stuff. We feature some of our authors, books, you know, we do, we try to make it festive and fun and we give away a lot of prizes. We also at Book Launchers generally do a holiday pricing and this is partly because we close. I close, I close the company from the 24th to the 1st, you know, however the dates land every year because there isn't really much that we can do that's valuable as far as book marketing. It's hard to move things forward, forward in the production side. And it just allows my team one week where they can fully disconnect. They can, they're not allowed to check email. And so we've, we've always done that. And, and so to make up for the fact that if somebody were to start with us at the end of November or early December, they're going to start with our service and then boom, we shut. So we always do some sort of a holiday deal because the first year when we didn't do that, we found there was a lot of people who wanted to wait and they waited until the first week of January, which guess what is the busiest week? Actually we have two busiest weeks, the week before Christmas and the week after New Year's are our two busiest weeks because we're doing a whole bunch of extra work to move projects forward. And when a bunch of people also sign up that first week of January, it's pure chaos for us. So having some sort of a big holiday incentive to get people to sign up prior to the new year makes our life so much easier. So we plan our holiday pricing. It's not a holiday. We don't. We don't do discounts on our price, but we add incentives to encourage people to join our services early. As far as books go, you can start thinking about this, too. Do you want to do a book bundle? Do you want to offer your book with a special incentive like if you go to self publishand succeed.com you can buy self publishing, publish and succeed, but you also get some other things with it. And I'll be doing the same thing for self promote and succeed. For people who want to buy the physical copy of the book, we'll have incentives that will go along with that, and we'll roll that out probably, maybe December, likely January, where you'll get to buy the book and then you'll get incentives with it. And so if I wanted to do a holiday promo, and maybe I will. I don't know. We've got a lot going on. But if I wanted to do a holiday promo, I could say, okay, buy both books for $25 and get XYZ included as a special holiday festive promotion kind of thing. So lots and lots of options. The big thing is to start planning it now, because before you know it, it's going to be the holiday season and there's a whole lot of noise. So you want to be ready to cut through that to know what you're offering and to have it ready to go. Maybe be like this other company that's already doing their Black Friday sales before Halloween's even hit. All right, so let's go do our YouTube. Let's go to our YouTube giveaway. So every Tuesday and Friday, when a video comes out and the replay for this counts, the day the video comes out for basically 24 hours after it is released, you, if you comment, you will be entered to win. So that's why I always tell people to make sure you subscribe to the channel and turn the notifications on so that you know when a new video comes out, because then you get entered to win. And we have fabulous swag, like the hats, we have T shirts we have sometimes we've had backpacks, we've had blankets, we have really cool swag of course, we always have our journals, our oh, so soft journals, and copies of Self Publish and Succeed and now Self Promote and Succeed too. So today, let me go over to. Let me share my screen. One moment. Let me get this set up for you. And I've got all of our names from the last couple weeks. Now, I didn't release a Friday video last week because my editors were busy working. Oh, whoops. I didn't mean to share that screen. You guys want to see what's going on on my side? There you go. Not really. It doesn't look that crazy. Okay, let's try that again. Share screen over to the. Where is it not Streamyard. I have to stop sharing Streamyard. I need the random name picker. There it is. Okay, here we go. All right. So this is our winner or not our winners. Our names entered. So there was no Friday video last week. Get out of my way, Larry. Larry's in my way. There we go. There was no Friday video last week because we have been busy, busy editing all of the Self Promote and Succeed seed videos. So there was one. This is a little shorter list of people entered into this one, but normally there's a video every Tuesday and Friday. So congratulations, Lori. Lori, you can choose from Self, Promote, Succeed, Self Publish and Succeed, a journal or a mug. I also think, Angela, you still have enough T shirts that we could probably give one away today, but I think we're going to save other than that. So, Lori, because I feel like you've won almost everything if you also have not won a T shirt, let Angela know your size and where to mail it. But otherwise we're going to save those T shirts for the book reviewer giveaway. Which, by the way, if you have not yet posted your review of Self, Promote and Succeed, please do so and email Angela@teamoklaunchers.com with the screenshot of the review just to verify the review is posted. And she'll get you invited to our reviewer party, which I think is happening November 28th or 29th. I'm not sure. We'll make sure you get the invite. And we're going to give away. We're going to clear out Angela's closet for the new year. So we'll get rid of all of her T shirts between the holiday extravaganza and the reviewer party. And we'll. We'll clear her out of any other swag, miscellaneous swag that she has so that she can start the new year fresh and I can fill her closet with new swag in 2024. All right, so thank you, Lori. Email Angela@teamoklaunchers.com and then our other win is. Whoever that is. KJ ZR2KO. Congratulations. I don't know why we're getting this funky view of things. We don't see the, the name anymore. We see this, this ID, the, the Google ID, I think, or the YouTube ID. So whoever you are, thank you for your comment on the day a video was released. And congratulations, you have won a journal, a mug, or a copy of Self Promote and succeed or Self Publish and Succeed. But you need to email Angela@teamoklaunchers.com with your mailing address so that she knows where to find you and what you want to receive. All right. Okay. I see questions, but I won't get distracted by the questions. Hey, Tony, good to see you here. Hello. Hello. Okay, so now number four, the fourth idea for holiday book selling. I already kind of mentioned this one, so it's kind of a cheater. But specifically, host a holiday themed party. I would say that hosting a holiday virtual theme party works just as well, especially if you have an audience that is all over the place like we do. We have people chiming in from South Africa, Europe, sometimes South America. So. So having a holiday themed party means you. And doing it virtually means you can have your friends and supporters and fans, whatever you want to call them, from all over the world join you. Now, if you're thinking, I don't have very many people who are going to join in, why not pair up with some other authors so that you can borrow each other's audiences and invite each other's audiences. Plus, one of the reasons I do this with members from my team is that it's more fun. It's a little easier of a lift because everything is not all on you. Somebody else can answer questions and then you can also each come to the table with a gift or some prizes to give away so you can make it more of what we have, which is an extravaganza. Because having some prizes, not just books to give away, you know, having a mug or a mouse pad or a tote bag, you know, or anything else that you may have. Even sometimes giving away coaching calls, we've done that too. Having anything like that and having things from other people, there's many benefits to it. And you also get the cross pollination of audiences. And so if you have some sort of a special freebie that you can give to everyone, that can be a tremendous thing to do as well if your audiences have alignment. So like, for example, I'm just trying to think I could potentially, if I wanted to, to connect with other authors, you know, people like David Goggren, Joanna Penn, Dale Roberts, you know, we all are serving very similar audiences, although we each have different, different kind of angles and different people that will be in one audience and not in the other. But we could all pair up and team up and do a holiday extravaganza. Or Dave Chesson, you know, there's lots of people that potentially, you know, could come together and create like a big holiday extravaganza summit that I know that would all connect to, to you guys. And so you can do that. And then they would each invite their audience and I would invite mine. And then that would be a great opportunity to then offer something of massive value. So here's my massive offer to you today, which is to get a copy of Self Promote and Succeed. So Angela, if you want to drop the link in there for Book Funnel so you can download your copy, so it's through Book Funnel. And part of why I'm doing this right now is I am curious how this goes. How many of you take advantage of it, how many of you listen to it through Book Funnel, Because I believe you have to listen to it through their app in order to hear the whole audiobook. But I'm going to be running ads to the audio version of the book in the future. And so if, if Book Funnel works, that's great because it's a nice secure way to listen or to give the book away and then also for audiences to listen versus just giving people the MP3s. But there's other ways to do it too. So I'm just testing it. But in, in testing it, I wanted to give it to as many people as I can so that you can experience it. And I can see on the back, on the back end how it's performing and how it's working. So, so the links here, and if you're watching the replay, the link will be in the description below in order for you to download and listen to Self promote and succeed. So in a holiday extravaganza or a big virtual event, you can have that, you can have an ebook. You could have, you know, physical things that you're going to mail. Of course, if you're mailing them and you don't have a fabulous Angela on your team, keep in mind that you're going to have to do some trips to the post office and nail, make some labels and all that fun stuff that Angela does for me, all Right. My final holiday book selling idea for you today is to give your book a holiday photo shoot or because there's so many tools now where your book does not have to put its hair, do its hair or put its makeup on. You can just use AI or use Book Brush, which is a tool that we don't really use a lot, but it's really cool because you can upload your book cover and then have it appear in a whole bunch of images and some of them are really, really good. So you could have holiday themed, you could go on Book Brush and pay for their subscription and do it that way. Or you can just use Canva and put your cover in there. Or if you are a photographer, you can post your book. You know, you can stage your book with some holiday, a hot cocoa and a wreath or, you know, a menorah or whatever, whatever the holidays mean to you. You can give your holiday, you can give your book a holiday photo shoot and then you can use that on your social media posts, your website if you want to have a holiday update on your website, all of those kind of things. But it would, it looks better than just posting the same old kind of pictures on your social media and on your website because it looks fresh and new because it's holiday themed. So those are my five. What have you guys got? Let's see what questions you have for me today. Where are you? There you are. Okay, let's see. I'm just waiting for Angela to collect the questions and I'm seeing, I'm seeing all your chats and Horace says Love Book Brush had them for years. Yeah, it's a really, really cool service and they have an enterprise version now. So we've been revisiting them at Book Launchers, but in the past they weren't really set up to work with companies that have a volume of authors. So we hadn't really used them. I used it for, I got a whole bunch of images for self publish and Succeed. And we were just revisiting it recently as we were looking at some, some things to connect into again going forward to help our authors. Okay, sorry, just hanging out here. Oh, here's question one. Okay. Professor E.A. burling game. So going back to my first idea with the audio playlist and the clarifying question was, is this a playlist with our audiobook too? Absolutely. The whole point of creating a playlist or a list of top 10 books or best holiday books for your true crime lover or for your author in your family is to have your book be one of them. So obviously, you have to choose other books that you would recommend or that you like or that come highly reviewed in that space in order to create a playlist. But, you know, the whole point of the playlist is, in fact, to put your book in it. And so I would probably put my book in third. So if it was like a top 10 list, I would probably put somebody else's book in first, maybe, maybe my book in second, but I wouldn't usually lead with my book. And that's typically how I see playlists and things out there. Is your service or your book or whatever it is, or not just playlists, but top 10 list is in the middle somewhere. And then you're getting exposure when other people share the list, which is kind of the point of, of the whole thing. If, if you do a top 10 list and you tag these other authors in it and they. Your book isn't on the list when they reshare it, you're not really going to get benefit. So that was, that was, that was my goal and intent is that this is to help you sell books, not just to help sell books into the world, although that's a nice thing to do, too. All right, question two. Kevin hall, for audiobooks, do you recommend having yourself do the audio narration over having someone else do the narration for nonfiction all day long? And there's a lot of reasons for that, but the two big ones are that most nonfiction authors are creating the book for thought leadership, for brand building, for business building. And there's this weird thing. If you're the one out there doing podcasts, shooting videos, and suddenly one of the people that's a fan or they've seen or heard you a lot, they go to listen to your audiobook, and it's not your voice. There's like this weird disconnect. And that happened for me. The example I always give, because it was so jolting for me, was Mark Manson when I tried to listen to the subtle art of not giving up on audio. But I had listened to multiple podcast interviews, and, gosh, it bugged me that it wasn't him on there. Because they're personal stories. And to have it be personal stories and not have it be narrated by him, it bugged me. The other piece of that is that I do actually prefer, as a listener, and this is my opinion, but I've heard it from many others, is even if they're not as good or polished as a professional narrator, the author of a nonfiction book is able to just put something behind their book that A professional narrator doesn't. And I think it's like that emotion, that energy, the passion for the subject, that just doesn't exist when you're a professional narrator. So the professional narrator will do a great job of enunciating and pausing and all of those things, and yet it may not have the same feeling. And there's just powerful psychology of being the voice that's in someone's head. It's. It's really, really. There's. There's a lot of power to it. So there's. There's authors that we've worked with that have not narrated their book for a variety of reasons. You know, heavy accents, dyslexia, you know, just. Just impossibility of scheduling. Those are all valid reasons for not narrating. But if you can, I highly, highly recommend it. And if you happen to watch my video on. I think it's on how to narrate your audiobook at home. There was somebody who posted I shouldn't. I shouldn't laugh. There was somebody who was very angry and said I was blatantly lying that you could record your audiobook and have it be of professional quality if you record from home. And, you know, his. His words were very strong, and I replied politely that I'm sorry that they were having such a bad day. They felt the need to attack me. But if you happen to see that, I want to let you know that it is better to record in a studio. It's easier. It's less energy on your part because all you have to do is show up and read, and somebody's there, and they can say, hey, your energy's fallen flat, or you missed a word, or, hang on a second. This isn't right. It's great having somebody there, but I've recorded two on my own now, and it works. And a great editor can take it up to that high professional quality. I would recommend getting some voice coaching before you narrate your audiobook on your own. Just because. Knowing where to pause, there's some cadence things you should be aware of. Knowing when to breathe. I mean, even today, I was just. I think I was just excited and I was anxious to get into this. And at the beginning, I was out of breath because I was talking too fast and not taking enough breath. So when you're narrating your audiobook, it's really important to know when to breathe and how to prep for that narration. But, yeah, I threw a whole bunch of extra information at you on that. All right, question three. Efren is A Is trademarking a symbol like the one on the COVID of my book a simple process? No, trademarks are not a simple process. You can use the TM without a trademark. I believe the criteria is intention to trademark the. Because the difference is registered trademark versus trademark. And wow, are you putting me in an area that I do not profess to be an expert in at all. But there is a difference. Now actually getting a trademark does require getting a trademark attorney. They have to search for whether the trademark is available and then file. And then there's a period of time where people can dispute or I don't know what the actual terminology is, but basically dispute that trademark and then eventually you get your trademark. It's a long process. So you can put the TM on and that's the intention to trademark. But until it's actually a registered trademark, which I don't know what I think there's an R, I think that gets put on there is the actual registration of that trademark. So yeah, it's a whole thing. But I don't. I would highly recommend getting a trademark attorney and not trusting anything I say. Okay, question four, and this is the last question so far are which is great, but if you have more questions, you can keep them coming. Renee said, since things are so crazy in December, I want to launch my book in January. Is the first part of January still too crazy of a holiday season to launch your book? Yeah. So avoiding December for a book launch is very smart. It's not that books don't sell in December. A lot of books sell in this in August and in December. And yet those are both really hard munches. Those are both very hard months. Months. Those are hard months to launch. My brain wanted to combine month and launch into a new word. So we're going to now call it matches. And it's not a good match. No, December is not a great month to launch a book. And the reason that I believe and I've heard many other people in the industry say this is it's really hard to get people to follow through on the book support that helps make a book a good at book launch big which is getting the reviews, getting, you know, your influencers to provide their support, getting media to post or share or interview you. It's very difficult. A lot of places are half staff cut down on what they're doing. They go to skeleton crews. They aren't even filming or recording in that month. So January is better. We end up. We end up with a lot of launches in January and most of Them do quite well because there's a renewed energy. People are back at it. Most of them had a break and they're ready to follow through on their commitments. You can get renewed attention as far as media goes. And you know, podcasts are usually back recording and so forth. So yes, I would say the. I wouldn't go for launching January 2nd, but I would say January 7th and beyond. You should be in good shape. Okay then, I see lakeisha said, what if you do a booklet with a lot of suggestions and have people select some of them or one of them. I mean, I think you could do that. I'm not sure what you mean by suggestions and have people select those like a checklist or. I'm not totally clear on that. And then do you know if you can have one auto book about a lot of writers who have been around since they were popular? Sorry, Lakisha, I'm not totally understanding the questions, so I might need a little clarification. And then Emily said, in a co authoring situation, do you recommend that one author narrates to keep the voice consistent or do you recommend that the authors alternate chapters so everyone's voice is represented? Co authors are tricky and we've had, we've had some do it in a variety of ways. Shelley Buck is one book that comes to mind where she had, where we had multiple voices narrating. Leave the Light On, I think is the title. Angela might be able to grab it because she's the wizard of all links. But so you could listen to that. I would say listen to how it goes. Having voices alternate can be jarring. So what I would do is, is go to your genre, see how other authors have handled it. Read the comments and the reviews on Audible because what, what I worry about is the difference in quality between the two voices and what experience that creates for the listener and how that can pan your reviews, which you don't want where. And alternating chapters I would not think would create a good experience. I think where and why it worked with Shelley's book and where it can work for other books is if you have two distinct voices. So like we have one book that, that is in my class, in the Self Publish and Succeed Live class where there's mother and daughter and there's, you know, the mother's perspective, the daughter's perspective and other content. So to me you could even have, you would have somebody be the narrator, but then one person be reading the daughters or the mother's voice. You could have somebody else's voice for that because Theirs is very personal. So they probably would want to be the reader of that portion and then have a narrator or one of them be the narrator and the other one be the voice of that. But this is where it's really important to consult with a production, like an audiobook production expert and have them listen to the voices and give you options because you know, it is. The answer to this is truly going to depend on the author's, the quality of their narration, the structure of the book, and so forth. Just checking here. Okay, one. Okay, I think. I think I tried to answer those questions. Lakisha. I want to have a book for everyone to read after it's on the shelves. Is there a way to get it on the shelves quickly? So bookstore shop, like physical shelves or virtual shelves? Because physical shelves take time, effort, energy to get them on the bookstore shelves. And we have plenty of videos on book launchers TV about how to get your book into bookstores. But virtual shelves, I mean, once your book is ready and formatted for upload, you can go to Draft 2 Digital. That's my favorite ebook aggregator. You can upload there and they'll distribute it. And depending on the platform, it can take seven. It can take a couple days up to seven to 14 days. I was trying to think. I think it was about 10 business days after we uploaded Self Promote and Succeed. It was widely available on most of the platforms that Draft two Digital distributes too. All right, Mark says to pick off the book launch question, which months are the best for that event to promote your book? Depends on your book. If you can tie into some other theme that can help. Depends on what your promotional plans are for the book. You know it. If you're planning to launch it and looking for media, tying your book into something that's happening globally or locally or in awareness month or, you know, like a cancer month, some of those kind of themes, if your book ties into that launching in that theme month can really help because you've got the topic that they want to talk about. They want to do some coverage on that during that month. And your book is new. I mean, that's a. That's a double whammy for a lot of media. For some local stores as well, they may have certain themes that they're trying to hit at certain months. So you might be able to do your book signings and tie into that as well. So knowing, you know, having an awareness of what you're trying to accomplish and what those outlets or places. Places are doing at those times and tying into that if your book is a fit, that can be really, really effective. And so that would depend completely on your book topic and your goals for the book. If you are, if you have a lot of folks who are going to support your book, so you're planning on doing something like we would call the maximum momentum launch. So you've got some really strong giveaways. You're reaching out to people who have email lists and social media following and they're going to promote your book heavily during this time to get their audience access to those freebies and those giveaways. Well, you want to give them time. I mean, that would be the number one thing. And then you want to look at what else is going on in that month. Like I would not want. If that was my launch strategy, I would stay away from November, December, because a lot of people are going to be running big promotions already for the holiday season. Conversely, I might look at like February or April or some of these other months where there maybe isn't as heavy of promotion going on, then you can, you know, reliably grab space on somebody's promotional calendar and tie into those things. So I know that doesn't give you a perfect answer. All I can really say is we generally discourage authors from a July, August and a December launch. Some authors still launch traditionally at book launchers over our six plus years of doing this. July, August and December launches are always the weakest, no matter how big our clients. Our clients audience is. I think I don't even know. I feel like we've had a July exception, a really strong launch in July. But generally speaking, those are months that we would recommend, at least in nonfiction, that you stay away from. Saint John said. How do you gauge how many books you give away to podcasters, influencers to get buzz heading into launch? As many as you can. And it depends on how many targeted, how targeted these folks are, if they're warm people on your list or if it's cold outreach. We don't find, you know, sending books in a cold outreach to influencers does much of anything. We find that you have to warm them up and build a relationship, get them to know your name and then you can send the book. Because I mean, I mean, even at my office I get sent at least a book every other week. And I mean, I don't promote other books on my site at all. I only promote book launchers. If I promote a book, I'm promoting somebody who's within the book launchers community almost always or somebody who has a book that's a direct value to you in our audience. Like, you know, one of Dale Roberts books, for example. So. And so I still get sent books. So if you're. If an influencer is actually promoting books, like Nick Hutchison at Book Thinkers, like, he's, he's, he's filmed videos showing the gigantic stack of books that get sent to him all the time, unsolicited. You know, it's massive, Massive, massive number of books. So I would not recommend just cold sending books. I would do some warm. Get that warmed about, do some outreach first. And there's a video on how I recommend you do influencer outreach first. We typically pitch, get some interest, and then send the book after we have some interest. That is how we usually do it. So, you know, we're probably not needing more than 20 books for most of our authors, depending on what we're doing. If you're doing a lot of book review site submissions, they'll require books, and you sometimes have to submit the book with your review submission request kind of thing up front. Who. All right, I think we got through it. And I see Angela put Leave youe Light on there. I haven't seen the link drop for the influencer outreach on YouTube yet, but we'll make sure if that doesn't drop here, that it goes in the description. But I owe you guys one more. One more prize, I believe. So let's do. Okay. What day are we having our author Deep dive session with the four book launchers? Author Authors. It's a Saturday. There's your big hint. So first person to tell me what day. So month and day of the month, the next deep dive is happening for the author deep dive and that. And there's the link on influencer outreach. Thank you, Angela. So you've got that one as well. So the first person to tell me that will get the final prize of the day. Nope. We had a guess. We had a guess from Tony. That is not correct. So if you see Tony's guest there. That is not the right answer, my friends. And Efren's staying out of it. So while we're waiting, I'll just remind you on November 10th, you can come. If you are in and around the Las Vegas area, come on by to the Horseshoe Casino and Hotel. Hotel and casino. There we go. And come to the convention center, because Efren will be there signing his books and I'll be there signing my books. And there'll be 300 other authors so sharing their books as well. So come on out and support them. There we go. Oh, Stella. I was gonna say Benny won, but Stella was ahead, so congratulations, Stella. Email Angela@teamoklaunchers.com and let her know what you would like for your prize. And Benny, you were close second, so good. Good on you. All right, friends, have a fantastic rest of the day. You'll see Chad back here in two weeks to talk about how to get over procrastinating and get your inspiration back when you're writing your book. And I will see you back here in four weeks. All right, take care.