How To Land Speaking Engagements From Your Book

Getting speaking engagements is one of the best ways to sell your books, make money and expand your reach. Many times the folks bringing you in to speak will buy a copy of your book for every person in the audience. Or you can sell books at the back of the room. But how do you make that happen if you aren't speaking right now? If you're wondering that, stick around because this video is for you. Hey there and welcome. I'm Julie the Book Broad Award winning author and founder of Book Launchers, your professional self publishing team that will help you write, publish and promote a money making impact. Creating nonfiction book One of the things we do that's part of our promotional services is pitch you for speaking engagements. But if you haven't hired us, what you're missing out. Or you might be like Pesina who commented on one of my videos and said I'm a new author. How would I go about trying to get speaking engagements? Well Pesina, I'm so glad you asked. Let me walk you through it first for the beginner speaker. Okay. First though, I have to give a few folks a huge shout out for commenting on my YouTube videos. You really have become my YouTube besties and I appreciate you so much. Huge, huge hugs to the Crayon Kids Book Adventures Ryan K. Morris David Wong Wynonna R. Veronica Pryor Fasian thank you, thank you, thank you for all your shares, likes and comments. You absolutely make my day. Let's talk about speaking. Once you have a book, if you've done a great job of creating a hook and a compelling read, it's quite likely speaking opportunities will find you. But it's never a good idea to leave anything to chance. So here's my five step approach to get speaking engagements when you haven't done this before. Oh, and make sure you have already subscribed to the channel because next week I'm going to share how to leverage those speaking engagements so you can make the most of them, even if they are unpaid engagements. Which quite frankly, if you've never spoken before, that's probably where you're going to start. Okay, so number one, create some super cool and compelling speaking topics. I'll use our fabulous client Robert Workman as an example here. First, check out this gorgeous media kit my team put together for him. I'll do another video on how to create your own media kit soon, but for now let's use Robert as an example. His book Hired Gun 2 is for top salespeople. This book deals with the irony that the better salesperson you are the more likely you are to get fired or retired, especially if you're at the very top of your profession. So imagine he's going to speak at a top sales conference or at a corporate event where he's going to amp up that sales force to crush their next quarterly objectives. He could do a talk on how to cultivate sales superpowers. Three steps to identify and grow your best asset for success. Or maybe a talk on think you know how to sell and how to deal with the five biggest challenges every salesperson will face. Or maybe a talk on sales is no longer king the surprising connection between company growth and your role and what to do about it. They're not real speaking topics. I just made this up looking at his interview topics in his media kit. But I want you to see they are benefit driven and they create curiosity. They will appeal to the audience, salespeople and the people who will book him to speak, the companies or sales group organizers. And that is so important. So make a list of five to seven talks that you can give and give them really cool names. If you've done a good job of naming your book chapters, then you can use those as your talk titles. My book the new brand. You'd had a few chapters that actually became talks. One was how to make your words meaningless and another was you are who Google says you are. Step 2 Get your materials together for your pitches with some compelling talk titles. There are some materials you need to have in place. You need a great profile picture. You need a bio that is short but packs a punch. It needs to clearly highlight why you are are the person to speak on this topic and what makes you the person. If you did a good job of creating an author bio, you can probably pull from that. But highlight the years of success, the years of study, quantifiable success or name drop the big companies you've already spoken in front of or that will be references for you. This is not when you will be shy. Okay? You're trying to get other people to put you in front of their audience. Also references or testimonials from any other speaking engagements you've already done. Those will help too. Even better if it's on video and you can show how you will perform on stage. 3. Start planning your pitches. Start small and with who you already know that's going to have some interest or gain some value from what you have to share. Are you a member of your local chamber of commerce, a women's business association or a women's business owners group? Any other kind of association or meetup group that's relevant. A lot of my early speaking gigs and actually many of them even later on were in meetup groups because they had huge followings and sometimes it was the perfect audience for me. Your goal with your first few talks is to just get an audience for you and for your material. Start small. I highly recommend not doing what I did when I started speaking. My first event, there was 12 people in the room. It was a local real estate investing club. That was great. But a few months later, I gave a talk to 400 people at the Toronto Investor Forum. The talk apparently went fairly well because I got asked back to every forum after that, but I was so nervous I don't remember almost any of that talk. So it was a pretty big jump from 12 to 400 people. So I, I suggest you work your way up to that. Unless you're already experienced speaker just in another subject matter. These smaller gigs allow you to test your material and refine it. So when you do get into the big leagues, you're more confident and comfortable. When you reach out to these folks, make sure the pitch is about them and what you can do for them and deliver to their audience. That's super important. Step 4 Find your ideal audience. Now you've got a little bit of experience. Research who else has your ideal reader in their audience? Now here's where you can find them. Meetup.com, linkedIn groups, Facebook groups, good old Google. Just search away. Let's say you're looking for entrepreneurs. Look for local entrepreneurial meetup groups, local business groups, et cetera. If your audience is moms, do the same thing. What you're really looking for is a group that meets regularly and typically has a speaker. Even at my local mom's group, we don't have regular meetings, but a potty training expert contacted the people who run our group and we brought her in. We paid $20 each to have her speak. That's not a lot of money when you only have 20 people in the room. But she offers potty training, consultation, and I guarantee you there was multiple people in that room that hired her for her more expensive consultation. As you do these smaller events, if you're good and your content is resonating with their audiences, you're going to find bigger ones come up. You're also gaining practice, confidence and a track record that's going to help you when you start submitting speaking applications to the bigger and bigger events. Finally, step five, Videotape your talks over time. You're going to need to create a demo reel if you're going to ever want to be paid or get on stage in front of hundreds and hundreds of people, event bookers are either going to need to see you speak in person, get a referral from someone they trust 100%, or watch a demo reel. Your demo reel can consist of clips or an entire talk. Either way, this needs to be at least five minutes. It needs to show you engaging and interacting with the audience. Ideally having the audience laughing and clapping and really into what you're saying. Showing that you can hold the attention of the audience and get them to participate. Once you have a good video, you can start expanding your reach to a much bigger events. And now you're looking for conferences and events that you've already attended, ones that have your ideal audience, and ones that will be held by corporations that will be looking for a solution that you have to offer for their organization. This takes time. I landed on a big stage fast. But after that big gig, I did dozens and dozens of little gigs to groups of 20 to 80 people. It was hard work, but it was also work that generated a lot of book sales, hundreds of thousands of dollars for my training and education company. And I made friends that I'm still in contact with many, many years and a different country later. A few of them are even writing books with book launchers. Now. That was a big video. Congratulations for getting through it, Pesina. I hope that this helped you. It was kind of a mini course on booking speaking when you're just getting started. And if you want to write a book that will get you paid speaking engagements, let's talk. Not every book lends itself well to getting paid, so I will let you know if yours is likely to be a good fit. Now, if you like this video, smash that thumbs up button. Try it. It feels good. You'll see. And if you comment the day a video is released, you'll be entered to win some fabulous noboringbooks Book launcher swag. But comment anytime because you'll become my bestie. And if you have a question like Pesina did, I just might shoot a video to answer that question. Now there are so many fabulous videos on this channel for you to watch. I think you'll quite likely really enjoy this one. But if you've already watched it, well then check this one out. Go ahead, click one of these videos. I'm waiting for you over there.