This is a short America Trends interview (host Deb Cole) with Julie Broad, a best-selling author and founder of BookLaunchers.com, about scams and misleading promises in the self-publishing industry. Broad warns against guaranteed results, pay-for-award schemes, and manufactured “best seller” claims (e.g., gaming Amazon categories or buying a small batch of sales). She emphasizes clarifying an author’s goals, validating a market, and not relying on friends/family to buy books.
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Welcome back to America Trends. I'm Deb Cole, your host and I'm here with Julie Broad, the best selling author of two books and the founder of book launchers.com and you're now going to share about scams and the things that people need to be warned about in the self publishing industry.
Yeah, I mean self publishing has become easier than ever and more popular also because the traditional publishing world, there's been so much consolidation that it's more difficult to get a book deal than in the past. So a lot of people are turning to self publishing. Plus it's just easier and you make more money in a lot of cases as a self publisher. So a lot of reasons why it's blowing up. But of course with everything when it starts blowing up, lots of people come in and figure out how can I make more money in this industry from people who want to become authors? So a few things to kind of pay attention to because you know, there's people that will take advantage of your desire to write and publish a book. One thing is to really think about what's most important to you. What is your goal? What do you really need to achieve? Because people are gonna sell you on this concept of bestseller and even award winning. And there's a lot of gimmicks around it. They'll guarantee you. If they guarantee you anything, it's a gimmick because they can't guarantee results. Right. It's like getting on media, you can't be guaranteed.
Yeah. So that's the first thing to look out for if anyone comes in with this guarantee of anything.
Exactly.
Have your radar go on.
Unless it's a guaranteed top quality book. That's a good guarantee. That's a good guarantee. But yeah, I mean the award winning one is kind of comical because some of the companies that promise you you'll be an award winning author, they hold an award ceremony for all of their clients and then they just whip you up on stage, take a picture of you with an award. It doesn't matter if your book was crap or not. Oh wow. Right. So then, but you got an award. So you're an award winning author. So yeah, that's one of them best sellers. Another one, they say you'll be a best seller. Well, a lot of times you can actually game the system on Amazon and become a best seller by selling 20 books all at the same time. And so what does that do for your ultimate goal?
Really?
Like you gotta look at what's most important. Getting it out to a thousand people who are gonna want to read your message and potentially become clients or being able to say that you were a bestseller in some sub, sub, subcategory on.
Amazon and you sold it to 20 people that were all your friends and family.
Exactly. That didn't want it in the first place. They're just doing you a favor.
When you first had your first book in real estate, you said your family kept asking you for books.
Yeah, they don't buy, that's the thing. Friends and family don't buy your book. They want it free. Don't rely on your family to buy your book.
Make sure you have a market for it.
So please come back and you can.
Follow Julie heJuliebroad on Twitter and go to her website book launchers.com and check out the services that her company offers. Why not have a team to help you?
