Julie Broad (founder of Book Launchers) explains why vague questions about selling books lead to poor or unusable advice and shows how to ask context-rich, specific questions that let experts give actionable help. She contrasts examples of unhelpful queries with meaty, situational questions (e.g., about Amazon sales, ad performance, finding reviewers before launch, and leveraging speaking engagements) and ends with a CTA to join her newsletter and livestreams.
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If you want to sell more books and you're asking people for advice to help you do that, well, this single tip is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the Book Broad. I'm founder of self publishing services company Book Launchers. Every day I get emails, comments and questions from folks looking for help with their book selling process. And that's fantastic. And that's why I'm here. That's why I wrote two books, Self Publish and Succeed and Self Promote and Succeed. That's why I post all of these videos. But I think there are a lot of people running around getting bad or useless advice because they aren't really asking good questions. They haven't thought about what they really need to know. Here's a sample of the questions I get. I have no money, but a great story. Help me or will you help me? My book is on Amazon. How do I sell more books? I want to make more money as an author. What do I do? I can't answer any of these questions without anything that will be of value to someone. Someone once said there are no bad questions, and I respectfully disagree. Those are not good questions. So therefore the opposite of good is. You get the picture? All right. The issue with every single one of these questions is that I can't give you any valuable, actionable advice to truly move the needle because I don't know what will help you. There's no context. Without context, I have to work really hard to give you advice or support. And. And if I have to work really hard for you, well, first of all, you should probably be a client of ours at Book Launchers. But I also am probably not able to give you good advice in a short amount of time. So if you come on one of our lives or our deep dive training, I'm doing those because I want to help you. And to help you, I need you to ask better questions. And if you meet with any sort of expert at a conference or get live to ask anybody a question, I want to make sure you can ask a question that will get you an answer that will actually help. So here's how to ask a quick question with context to get better answers. I want to sell more books on Amazon because my book has stopped selling. I tried Amazon ads, but they didn't work. What do I do next? My book launch is coming up in six weeks and I need to get book reviewers. I don't have an audience to ask. How can I find people who will review my book? I have a speaking engagement coming up and I want to be able to leverage my book to get more speaking engagements and grow my email newsletter. What can I do without promoting my book at this event because I can't promote it when I'm being paid to speak? Each of those are meaty questions I can dive right into. Sure, there's more things that would help me get more specific, especially with Amazon ads, like are you getting clicks? How many impressions are you getting when they click? Are they who buys? There's lots more questions I could ask, but if you ask questions like that with context, you'll find that you're going to get much better answers that will help you. Now you want to test this out? Make sure you know about our next livestream event. Go get on our newsletter@book launchers.com newsletter and after you do that, this is the latest and greatest video on the channel. And this is all about how to reignite book sales after launch, which might be the answer to one of your questions. All right, enjoy.
