How to Use Your Book to Grow Your Brand and Author Platform - Author Writing Conference

Hello. Hello and welcome to the AuthorTube Writing Conference. Today's session that we are going to do today is all about how to use your book to grow your brand and your business. So I am so excited. So I already see people saying hello. So welcome. Darla SD Vixen of Fiction. Hello and welcome. So I will definitely check back for comments and if you have questions, we will have time at the end for Q and A. So absolutely put them in. Cool. Gamer. Hello, welcome. Hi, Margaret. Great to see you all. I'm going to go ahead and I do have slides, so I'm going to go ahead and share those with you right now. And there you go. Make myself little. We will dive right in. All right, so let's just see. I think the best place is to just give you a little bit of background first. So for those of you who don't know me, I'm Julie Brod. I'm the founder of Book Launchers. I started book launchers in 2017, but, well, before I started Book Launchers, I was really, I mean, a book changed my life is basically the short way to tell you. I was working at Kimberly Clark in Canada. I live in Las Vegas now. And, you know, I was referred to a book that I read in a single weekend. And from that book I decided to start investing in real estate. And that book was Rich Dad, Poor Dad. And for me, that book, you know, didn't tell me how to do anything, but it just changed my thinking so that I started looking for opportunities to get my money working for me. And that was 2001. And you fast forward, you know, to 2010 and by then I was, you know, so hooked on real estate. I was a full time real estate investor. I'd started a training and education company and I had started a real estate investing newsletter. A little bit by bit I had started to build what in this world is called a platform. And a, an editor approached me from Wiley and was interested in giving me a book deal. You know, a long story made very, very short. Um, we ended up, they ended up rejecting my idea and then they ended up rejecting the proposal that we built together after three months, saying that I wouldn't be able to sell enough books for them to make a book deal worthwhile. So as devastated as I was at the time, it ended up being a tremendous gift because I went back to the original idea that they didn't want to publish and I self published it and I dove into everything, self publishing and book marketing and all the things, and I ended up taking that book to number one on Amazon in print books. So you can see that thing right here, More Than Cash Flow, sitting at number one bestsellers in books, and it was in the top 100 print books for almost 200 days. Still, to this day, 11 years later, it is still selling. You know, some days it actually outsells self publish and succeed, which is sometimes annoying, but also kind of cool because I don't market more than Cash Flow anymore. But, you know, the momentum from all the things I did at the time were great. Now, this book opened my eyes not only to the tremendous power of self publishing a book and doing it really well because, you know, it was just. It was. It was as successful or better than most of the books Wiley had published in this space at the time. And I self published despite the fact they didn't think I could sell books. I sold a lot of books. But for me, the power of this book and, you know, every book that I've published and all the books we've helped our authors publish, is the power of the right book to grow your brand and your business in such an amazing, fantastic way. So I have a few pictures around here just to kind of show you. After the book came out, I ended up speaking on big stages all over in front of as many people as 800 people in a single audience. I was on TV, I was on radio. You know, I did all those things because the book opened the door to those opportunities. So today I wanted to cover some of the things that I did at that time and then some of the things that we've helped our authors do, and some of the things that, you know, are just not necessarily ideas, but they're not as fully tested. Because the beautiful thing about marketing and book marketing and just the author world in general is. And it can be also a frustrating thing, but the thing that works for one author is not necessarily the thing that's going to work for you, because you're not that person. You don't have the same skills, you don't have the same message, you don't have the same platform. So you have to try different things. That means it can feel a little frustrating if you've tried five things and nothing's worked. But the good news is there's always something that is a leverage point if you can find it. Before I dive into some tips and tactics and things like that, I want to share one of my favorite stories right now. I read it in a book by Price Pritchett, and I can't even remember what Quantum Leap, I believe, is the book is what it's called. But he tells this story of sitting in a hotel and watching this fly. And the fly is, you know, just keeps spamming up against the window, right? Like mashing his head, trying, trying, trying. And it's almost as though the fly felt like it had to just try harder. It was like, I know the outside is over there. I just have to try harder, and I'm going to get there. And he said, the sad part of it, because the fly ultimately dies, but the sad part of it is, had the fly just turned around and looked over here, there was actually an open door to the outside. So the fly was trying really, really hard to smash through that window. And yet, if it had just paused for a moment and looked around, it could have flown right out the window. So I'm thinking, I think about this all the time now because my personal approach to a lot of things is I just have to try harder. I just have to work harder. And at a certain point, you run out of try and work, and you can burn out. And I see a lot of people hitting that. That space. Space these days. And it's certainly a topic of conversation and topic of a lot of books we've worked on, too. And I think that just taking a moment to pause and go, is there another way? Is there a different way I can try? And so today I'm going to offer you a lot of different ways, and I hope that you don't feel. Don't feel overwhelmed. Like, you have to try all the things and do all the things. And with this whole conference, there's probably a ton of ideas, and you don't have to do all the things or try all the things, but you can make a list of things that you may want to try in the future. So next time you feel like the fly and you're bashing your head against that window, you go, wait, maybe there's a different way. And you can go back to your notes from all these amazing sessions, and you can go back to your notes from this session today and find one thing that maybe you haven't tried yet that you want to try. Ultimately, to me, everything in book marketing and book writing comes back to that reader. And. And I think it's always important to think. And I put this quote from Seth Godin on the slide for you. I think it's really important to remember that marketing is not about the stuff you make. It is about the stories you tell. And nowhere is that more important than in your author journey Cause it's not just the stories that are in the book. It's the stories that you tell around the book to help grow your brand and your business and ultimately sell books too. All right, so I'm going to give you five ways to use a book to build a business and a brand. By no means is this a comprehensive complete list because your book is a beautiful tool for, you know, and I focus on nonfiction. So anything, anything nonfiction, your book is a beautiful tool to grow your brand and build a business off of. So I'll give you the five ways and I'm going to break them down a little bit for you. The first way is to generate qualified leads. And so this, when I say qualified lead, this is somebody who enters your business world and is interested in engaging in business with you. That looks different for every author. It looks slightly different. It might be a course, it might be a product, it might be a service you offer, but it's somebody that's basically raising their hand saying, I'm interested in working with you. Oh, let me back up. So this, for me, there's lots of ways to do this. Lead magnet or reader magnet is a very common way to do this. But giving away a high value book for free can attract and convert highly qualified leads for your business. So when you, perhaps I wouldn't necessarily do this out of the gate, but one of the common funnels that I'm sure you've seen out there is the free plus shipping. And I put free around in quotes because it's not actually a free book. But you know, that's, that's a common one. But you can also just give a book away for free if you have a series. It can be a great approach to give the first book away in a series regardless, because it can enter, you know, help feed the whole funnel. But if you want to give away a book in exchange for contact information, that, and it's the right person, person that has the contact information that can be a really, really valuable tool. We'll talk more about this particular thing as we go through building strategic partnerships. Books can open the doors to partnerships. I've used books to partner with book award companies. I've used books to get magazine features. We've had authors use books to kind of get their foot in the door with big events. So there's lots of different ways that a book can be used for or a strategic partnership. I've also used books to get exposure at conferences where maybe I don't want to pay for a sponsorship fee. I'll give them books as a value add for their attendees, which gives me exposure and also gets me some features and kind of partnership angles within those organizations. It does absolutely increase visible in PR if you use it to do so. It doesn't magically do that for most authors. So usually you're going to have to actively pitch yourself or engage with an organization that will actively pitch you. But a book gives a company, like a podcast or a radio station or a TV station, you know, a live stream, an influencer. A book gives people a reason to talk to you and talk about you. It does need to be leveraged in order for that to happen. But that, you know, sometimes it can be very difficult to get the attention of some of these media outlets. But when you have a book on a specific subject with a really strong hook, that can create curiosity and credibility and make them want to put you in front of their audience. A book for Mark for from a business perspective, I think a good book is one of the best pieces of marketing material you can ever create because people don't throw a book out. It's also one of the only pieces of marketing that. And I might sneeze. Okay, so it's also one of the only pieces of marketing people will pay you for. I mean, could you imagine somebody saying, $5 for my brochure. Oh, here's $20 for my brochure. And not that your book should be anything like a brochure. It should add massive value to somebody's life. However, it is something that people will pay you so you can make a profit on this, this piece of marketing that will help somebody get to know like and trust you. And ultimately a book can shorten your sales cycle, especially, especially if you're producing something like a high end mastermind or something high ticket. Somebody reading your book builds such a level of trust that they're a lot more likely to spend thousands and thousands of dollars with you and not have known you before they read your book. It's one of the few pieces of marketing that can really, really accomplish that. And ultimately a book helps you stand out in your industry because I always talk to, you know, we've worked with a lot of doctors and like chiropractors and dentists and people like that. They all, in their industry, they basically compete on years of service because even in the financial planning space, they compete on years of service. They all have the same credentials as their colleagues. So how do you stand out? Well, you can write the book on the subject and now you have this positioning as an expert, which does make you the different than the people that have the same credentials as you. And now you're competing on something that's far stronger and more compelling than just years of service or years in the industry. And that is a very, very powerful tool and line in your marketing, your branding, and all of those things. Okay, so I'm going to pop, pop over and just see if you guys have questions or comments as we're going through this. But, you know, one of the big things before you start using your book to grow your brand and your business is to get clear on what success looks like to you. Because for every author, there's, I think a lot of authors come, you know, to book launchers, and they say, I want to be a bestseller. And as you dig into it, bestseller is really just the only thing they can think of to measure whether they've been successful or not. And so I usually help break it down and go, okay, well, what, what is bestsel? What's, what's going to happen after you're a bestseller? Like, why is a bestseller important to you? And often, you know, it's because their goal is actually thought leadership, but they're not really sure how to measure that. And so a book, you know, can be the thing that gives you social proof. You can leverage your book to get media, which further helps you become a thought leader. And, you know, in order to do that, you might give away your book strategically. I will say that every time I talk about giving away a book, and I'll tell you a story about why in a second. But give away a book strategically can also help you become a thought leader. If it's getting into the hands of the right people and they're reading it and then telling other people. But maybe you want to be a speaker or grow your speaking business. Well, that's great. And a book can absolutely help you do that. Again, you have to kind of know that's your end goal and then think about how you're going to use your book to do it. Because a book can get you onto stages. In fact, if you've ever filled out a speaker form, a lot of times there's a question on there that doesn't say, have you written a book? It says, what books have you written? And you have to have written books in order to be considered for a lot of the big stages. A book is also a way you can get paid as a speaker. So if you think about, you know, a lot of times I even, I bring in speakers for entrepreneur organization in Las Vegas here. And you know, we do pay speakers, but we don't have a huge fee. But, but if I can, if there's a way that sometimes I had a speaker come in and I was able to negotiate with my board, hey, why don't we just give everybody a book? Then it's a value add for the attendees and it's a gift. You know, the author's getting their book in everybody's hands. And it was cheaper than paying a speaking fee, but it was a win win for both. As an author, that is a really great thing to do, especially if you're not already commanding 5, 10, 15, $20,000 speaker fees. And if you can get in front of the right audience and have a book in everybody's hand, you're going to make some money off of those books. But now you've also got your book strategically in the hands of a lot of people. But you can also give away your book strategically. And then back over here, I went backwards for whatever reason, the goal of a lot of people, and this is one of the things that I use self publish and succeed for, and self promote and succeed for, is to grow my business. And so one of the best ways to do that is to just get more leads into the business, more email addresses. It can also be social media, but for me, I don't own the social media platforms and so I would much rather have an email address than a follow or a subscriber. Although I love subscribers on YouTube too. But you know, I want to be able to build a long term relationship with you and that can be difficult with just a, an anonymous, like on a follower, friend or a subscriber, those kind of things where you're not building that relationship as well as you can on email. Your clear call to action in your book. So it's not just about giving a book away free in exchange for an email address. Having clear call to action inside of your book to invite people to connect with you and ideally come to your website and download your free reader magnet, your free tool, your free video series, whatever it is to build that connection further. That call to action has to be compelling enough for somebody to stop what they're doing and go and subscribe to your newsletter or get your free thing. But having that clear call to action in your book is important. A lot of people think just mentioning their website is going to do it. And sometimes people will be curious enough to go to your website, but most of the time you have to give them a good reason to do so. Ultimately A book, I think, is a powerful platform builder. It is the catalyst to a lot of things. But again, it comes back to that strategic approach. And we're going to break that down for you in a second. I'm going to tell you this story, and then I'm going to pop over and see what you guys are saying. So my one thing, when I'm saying, give books away for free, I don't want you to be what I call the book bomber. And I've had this happen more than once. But there's one situation that just. I remember so vividly because I was standing at a booth at a conference. So Book Launchers has done quite a few booths over the years. And I'm standing at this booth, and of course, this person spots all the books because we showcase a lot of our author's books. And he spots the books. And I see him pull out a book out of his backpack, and he practically runs over, and he hands me this book, and he says, you must love books. Here's my book. I was like, okay. And I'm just standing there, and he goes. And I looked at the COVID which I had no idea. Looking at the COVID and the title, I had no idea. Is this fiction, nonfiction? What is this book? I had no clue. And I just looked at him and I said. I said. I said, did you do your cover yourself? He goes, oh. He goes, my daughter designed it. Isn't it fabulous? And then he basically, he said something else, and he goes, okay, I gotta go. And he ran. Oh, no, wait, sorry, I forgot one part. He handed me his business card, and he goes, you know how important reviews are for authors, right? He goes, here. Here's my business card. Here's my book. Please write a review. And then he ran away, and I never saw him again. And I'm up there standing with this book that I still don't know what it is or what it's about, what category it is. And I just. I thought, wow, does that author think that this was a successful situation? Like, was that. Is that going to do something for him at the end of the day? And. And I. And I've seen that happen before. I actually had somebody else come up to me at a different conference, hand me a book and say, my publicist told me I need to give out more free books. It seems like you would be a good person to give a free book to. And, you know, it's. Those kind of things happen all the way, all the time. So I don't want you to do that. I want you to think about who's the exact audience and how can you get in front of them. And maybe a free book is the perfect thing to give to that audience. And I'll give you some examples shortly. Giving books away for in exchange for reviews is great because if you are getting review, you have to have as many reviews as you possibly can. And if you give books away and all you do is ask for a review, I think that's a very fair exchange. And then partnering with organizations or companies, which I will dive in to some examples in a moment. All right, so there are some questions coming in and I will save some of them, but I just wanted to see who else is here. So Kevin's here. So glad you made it. Kevin, great to see you. And then Melanie from Ontario. Always a pleasure to see other Canadians. All right, so Kevin, I'm going to star your question so that I can find it later. So and I will come back if anybody else has questions, please go ahead and post them in because we will absolutely have time for questions very, very soon. All right, so heading back on over, we are going to. Oops, sorry, I hit the wrong button. So one of the things I want to talk about is one of, I think is one of my favorites. I think it was also probably my best kind of free book situation that I have done. And that was for my first book with More Than Cash Flow. And what I did was I'm just bringing this back up on the screen for you all. What I did was I partnered with Canadian Real Estate wealth magazine and I gave them, oh, you guys get a preview of where we've been. I gave them 250 copies of my book in exchange for exposure in their magazine. And ultimately they ended up putting me on their major stages all across Canada too. They had a forum called the Investor Forum Forum. You can see some. This is from 2011. They had an investor forum that was they would did in four different cities across the country. I think this was in Moncton. They had Toronto, they had Vancouver. I think they did. I don't know if they ever did any in Alberta. Regardless, I gave them only 250 copies of my book. It was print versions, so a little bit more expensive. But in exchange for that, I got magazine ads and I got featured in every magazine for quite a while because they were going to use the books as an incentive for people to subscribe to their magazine for two years or longer. So anybody who subscribed to the magazine for two years or longer got a copy of more Than cashflow. What a fantastic exchange that cost me. I don't remember exactly, but the cost of 250 print books plus the shipping to their office. And in exchange for that I got massive exposure. And in the magazine which I used the magazine ads to actually promote my business. So at the time I had a company called Revenue with Real Estate and it still exists by the way. So if you find it, it's not me anymore. I sold it, but it's Gary. So you can say hi to Gary. But this was an ad that I had in one of the magazines and on their website that you know how to become a full time real estate investor. You got that free report and then you were invited to take one of our courses and so forth. So I used the magazine ads for the business and then inside of the magazine they were promoting the book anyways because they had those little magazine cards, those subscriber cards, those would. Every one of them featured my book. And then they also, because I became popular and well known through all of these things with the book and the features, I ended up speaking at pretty much every conference they had. So there's my little baby face and there I am there. And I was featured in so many other magazines and articles. So this ended up being a massive, massive partnership for me for a very low cost because I couldn't have paid for that kind of exposure. I certainly didn't have the marketing budget to pay for that kind of exposure. But 250 books in the hands of the ideal person with the partnership with an organization that gave me massive reach in that space. It was a really, really good win win. And so just kind of going back to that for a second, you don't have to give physical books away, but they do have more value. Which is one of the reasons I having a physical book. Because for a magazine, giving an ebook doesn't have the same value as shipping a physical book to each and every one of their subscribers. And they're already shipping magazines so they can just add in that piece. But there's other ways to do this. So we've had, we've had clients that have like a lawn, a lawn type book and they would partner with you know, like a tool or. Well, that's not quite exactly how it happened, but we'll just say we'll just roll with this so they could partner with somebody who sells a product and maybe it's by product and you can get this book for free and you know, other kind of find those people that have the exact people in your audience, but they don't perhaps provide the information that you're providing. So a great fit would be somebody who is solving, solving a problem but creating a new problem and your book helps with that next problem or your book will help facilitate the use of their product, service or approach. Approach. And it could be a great win win partnership there. Now you can also give out free books and I do this a lot with Self Publish and Succeed and Self Promote and Succeed as far as ebook versions. And no matter what you're doing, you want to be collecting people's email addresses. So some of the tools that I use that I love, here's just a list for anybody who wants to go and explore. I'm going to show you a little bit more on Book Funnel because I use it and if you are getting any of the freebies, the free books, I offered a free audiobook as part of this conference. Self Promote and Succeed. And you know, I'm happy to also consider giving or not consider but I don't have the link handy. But if anybody reaches out after I can also give you a free ebook version of Self Publish and Succeed or you can just grab it wherever books are sold. But Book Funnel is who I use to give away audiobooks. I can collect email addresses through them. I can create a landing page for them. So it's really simple. ConvertKit is what we set up all of our authors on because you can create a really beautiful landing page so that people can opt in to your free. Your freebie, whether it's your free book or your free ebook and get an email address. LeadPages is what I use for a lot of the business for, for creating giveaway pages as well. And it has great tracking. So if you're running ads through Google or Facebook or any of those places, LeadPages has really, really great tracking for that book. Sprout is another giveaway tool primarily for getting reviews. Same with Story Origin. Story Origin also has a great ARC feature. Advanced Reader. Advanced, yeah, Advanced Reader copies for when you want to get your book army going before your book is out. They have and they have great beta reader features and things like that too. So these are all really, really great tools. I just wanted you guys to have some things if you are new to this and you don't know where to go or what to do. Okay. So Book Funnel I mentioned and this video, I I don't know if we can copy and paste it and put it oops in the comments or if somebody can put it in maybe SD, but this is a video on my YouTube channel that actually walks you through uploading a book onto Book Funnels. So rather than me teaching you how to do it today, I just wanted to give you like, just to show you how like what's possible and how easy it is with a tool like Book Funnel to give away ebooks for free. So that if you're ever speaking at a conference or an event or you're connecting with people and you want to give them a copy of your book in exchange for their email address, or if you do some sort of a bulk deal with an organization and you want to deliver your E version or your audiobook version of your book in a seamless but secure way, Book Funnel has all the tools and options for doing just that. And so it has it just like. So you can see bulk delivery is one of their options here. So some of our clients are speakers and they sell ebooks with their speaking engagement. So not physical books. And especially this. This really ramped up in 2020, 2020, and 2021 when people weren't doing live events and they needed a way to deliver ebooks securely to a mass number of different people. And so the bulk delivery options gave them a tool to do that so they could charge a fee for it and then deliver them this way. So Book Funnel allows you so many ways to use your book to grow your brand and your business and do it very easily. And so you can get self published or uploaded, self publish and succeed in ebook version. And you can see the, you know, the file types here and they're going to read it in their Book Funnel app or on a browser. So it, it can be downloaded also in these formats if you choose to enable it. I usually disable that because I prefer not to have my book running around in a PDF copy, but it is there if you want to have that. So what I just want to show you was if you are not feeling tech savvy at all, I just want you to know that it's very simple to create, create a simple page to get email addresses here. And it will connect to most of the email companies, what, you know, convertkit but mailchimp, you know, those kind of companies. It does not connect to keep, which is what we use infusionsoft keep. And so we have to zap it over zapier but most people don't have to worry about that. So you probably can connect your email provider right up to it or if you don't, you can always get it next in a spreadsheet. And upload it from there. But this is a very simple sheet. I didn't have to do almost anything. I just inputted a few spaces and voila, you get a lovely download page which allows you to collect email addresses from, from their service. Okay, so another really amazing thing about being an author is you can use your content that you've worked so hard to polish and, and publish. You now can repurpose that content because you've done the hard work of thinking it now makes sense. You've got these cool ideas and strategies and approaches and you can take that content and put it out into the world in smaller pieces and use that to grow your brand, build your position in the world as far as an expert in your space. And you can also use it to lead into your business or even be part of your business business. Because that content can be courses, it can be a talk you're going to give, it can be, you know, part of your consulting or your service. It, you know, one of the things I teach, I have a class that I run twice a year with book launchers. It's Self Publish and Succeed Live. And it is essentially a 12 week course where we help you write your book, we help you get your first draft of your book done. But every week we're teaching part of the content that is essentially straight from self publishing. So succeed it is, it has more value in a live course because now you're interacting with myself or somebody from my team and you're getting feedback on your hook and your reader and your outline and you're, you know, going through it and having writing time, you know, and accountability. But essentially to create the foundation for that course, we just took the book and broke it up into 12 weeks. And so you've got that with a book, the power you can create a live course or a seminar or an online course that is on your website. And I'd be remiss if I did not mention AI as a tremendous content repurposing tool. I'm not going to get in to AI as far as writing books and all of those things. But for me, I love and Claude, I use ChatGPT, I use Perplexity, I use, I use a lot of different AI tools. I'm actually very, very excited and enthusiastic about a lot of things AI. But where I think it really helps with brand and business building is in repurposing your book material and even rewriting things that maybe aren't performing the way you would like them to. And for me, my personal belief at this Stage is Claude is the better writer for repurposing content. I love chatty for ideation and brainstorming and things like that and I use perplexity all the time for research, but I find Claude is my writing buddy. And so what do I use Claude for? Well, if I need content for social media posts, I find Claude can be really useful. I can upload a chapter in my book and say, hey, I need to create an article that's going to have this keyword focused. Or I can even just say, can you make this SEO optimized? And Claude can do that. I also use Claude for video ideas or even sometimes to script and outline some of my videos for book launchers. Tv. You can ask Claude to construct a social media calendar to help you lead up to X event and create content from your book for those posts leading up to X event. It might be an awareness day or it might be an event, something like that. You can even brainstorm and get content for book launches. Claude writes decent press releases. So Claude can be a really, really powerful partner for you to repurpose some of the content from your book and get a lot of material. You're still going to have to edit or have somebody else edit and then design things from here. But it's such a time saver because I find that just looking at my book going, okay, I need to get an article, I'll just stare blankly at it. But AI can really help you extract the cool, cool piece or important piece and restructure it into these kind of things that you can then use for branding and business building. Also, another piece on AI that we are doing now and we're, you know, we've done it on our website and we're starting to do it in, in other, in other ways that aren't quite out there yet. So I don't want to speak too much is you can upload your book and, and then create a chatbot so your, your audience can chat with you as the author. And, and I just actually was talking to a friend of mine that's really deep in the AI space now and the long form capabilities of some of the not, not the ones that everybody knows but of a couple of other companies to make it incredibly accurate is so, so phenomenal. And he had a, he had an example of an event. I don't, I don't know if I can share the exact details of this thing so I'm going to blur it, but it was a historical event in time that was recorded from start to finish and they uploaded the transcript from that to this, this long form AI processor and they asked it what were some of the funny things that happened during this historical event. And it came back boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, instantaneously with these historical things. And it doesn't hallucinate. So there's nothing made up, which can be a real issue with ChatGPT and some of those other platforms. They will, they. It always comes up with an answer. So you have to be careful because sometimes it makes up an answer and that's when they call it a hallucination. Anyways, I'm showing you our website because we have a chatbot that is. Is trained with our. With both of my books, Self Publish, Self Publish and Succeed and Self Promote and Succeed. It's also trained with all of the content on our website and you can go and chat with it. And now you have this ability on your own author website to create a chat with the author. So ask me any question about this book and this chatbot will give it an answer. And you can see this one we created with Chatbase Co. There's lots of different companies that do it. We really liked this one, but that's just another idea. The ideas are limitless. But I just wanted to give you a few really cool ideas because everybody's going to come at this from different, you know, different angles and different goals. So this is another way you might be able to use your content. Okay, so we're starting to wrap up, so if you've got questions, definitely post them in because we have time for questions. And I love Q and A, so I want to share this story. I'm sure all of you know Tim Ferriss and the Four Hour Workweek. When he launched this book, he essentially launched himself, right? Because when he launched the book, he was relatively unknown. I believe he had a nutrition business or a supplement business, I should say, but he was relatively unknown. He'd done a lot of work leading up to the book. What he did leading up to the book launch was very smart because he networked for two years and built relationships with bloggers and people with audiences. So that was one thing he did that was extremely smart and strategic leading up to it. But when his book launched, what he did was strategic giveaways. He gave away hundreds of free copies of the Four Hour Workweek again to those influential bloggers, podcasters, journalists. The thing that he did that I think a lot of authors don't do is he built a relationship and then gave it to them for what we do at Book Launchers we, we give it away for events, things like this, because this is our audience. If you're, if you're an author and you're looking grow a brand and a business from a book, you are somebody that we could potentially help with our services. When we go to a conference like the National Speakers Association Conference, I hand out physical books in exchange for email addresses because every speaker will benefit massively from having a book. So it makes perfect sense for us to exchange a. Something, you know, a book in exchange for an email address in those, in those situations. But we don't just hand out books at those events. We have a conversation, we build a little bit of connection, and then we hand out the book in exchange for that email address. So he was very strategic. He built relationships. People knew who he was, so when they sent the book, it wasn't a total stranger sending a book. But that was very strategic for him because he got interviewed and connected and featured in a lot of places. With the free books being given away, he built partnerships. And so he. Jack Canfield's partnership was one that opened obviously, new doors to a lot of different opportunities, business opportunities, mentorships, all of those kind of things. And again, he used the book for those kind of partnerships, obviously media. It's, again, a really good reason to put, put yourself in front of, or for rather for the organizations, whether it's tv, podcasts, radio. For them to put you in front of their audience is to talk about your book. He also monetized his stuff through courses and workshops and of course generated substantial revenue through just engaging that audience and giving them more of what he already was giving them. And then he did what a lot of smart authors do, is he didn't just stop with the book. Of course, he wrote other books, but he also really leveraged that momentum and built the Tim Ferriss show, which, you know, they get massive revenue from advertisers. He gets to meet anybody he wants to have on the show, and then he has. Has built a further market or further audience for than any bestsellers or programs or anything else that he wants to do, because now he has massive reach and influence. So it's a powerful approach. And again, kind of going back to that fly, you're not going to do all of this at once and you'll. And if you do, you're going to just find yourself having to try harder and work harder and just feel like you're bashing your head against that poor window when there's a door open here. But that's also why I started off saying, let's think about the stories that we can tell and connect with our readers. And sometimes you just need to pause and look around and say, oh, wait a minute, I haven't gone over there yet. And this particular story will really connect with that particular audience or doing that particular approach. So kind of ties back to this is if one thing isn't working, pause and look around for a door. And if something's working, go all in. Go. If you're getting momentum from something, keep doing it. Because it can be really hard to get momentum. And so if something's working, just keep doing that for a while until you get bored or you feel it stagnate. Then start looking around. But please don't be the fly and just bash your head against that window until you give up or die. Okay, so I'm going to come over for come and check in with all of you for questions. So if you have questions, please let me know the As I mentioned, you can get Self Promote and Succeed Forward slash or self promote and succeed.com forward/audio. That is the free audiobook version of Self Promote and Succeed. And if you were preferring to get self published and succeed, you can just reach out and I can send you the E version of it. Or like I said, you can always buy these things too if you want the physical version. But at Book Launchers TV we have a ton of great content as well. So now that you're here, hopefully you check out a lot more of the videos too. Okay, I'm losing my voice. It looks like Kevin's the only question we've got, so that's where I will go right now. If anybody else has questions, you are welcome to put them in. So Kevin's question, in your opinion, what is better to give away paperback book, ebook or audiobook? It's going to depend on the situation, the circumstances, and your goals. So for me, when I'm at a conference, I generally will give somebody a physical book. The reason not is because I want them to have to pay to ship to have their luggage checked in when they're leaving the conference. It's because especially at a conference, you are going to get a ton of emails after an event and if I'm sending them an ebook or an audiobook, it's probably just going to get lost in the shuffle. But a physical book, when they unpack, they're going to be reminded of it and they may not read it right away. I've had conferences for me tend to be one of those things that's a slow burn. So I'll get a call from somebody. Actually this happened last year and it was about not quite a year after the national speakers event, I got a call from somebody who wanted me to come and speak at their local chapter. Excuse me. And she showed me the book and it was like all tagged and written and highlighted and all of those things. But she said, she said she hadn't even read the book. Like it was like six months after NSA and she just turned her shelf because she was starting to work on her own book. And she's like, what? What's on my shelf that can help me? And so she pulled out the book and then she said she couldn't put it down and then she contacted me. But I think in a physical book has a longer shelf life for those kind of things for events like this. I'm not going to ask everybody to send me their address so I can send you a physical book. So then it makes more sense to give you a free ebook or a free audiobook for running ads. This is really interesting. I actually just, I chatted yesterday actually with the COO of ClickFunnels and ClickFunnels, for those of you who don't know, Russell Brunson is kind of the one that made free plus shipping for books a major thing because he sold, I don't know, millions of books that way and made a ton of money for ClickFunnels. But the CEO said they don't do that anymore because. And he kind of went into a lot of reasons. But ultimately the cost of that is quite high and the conversion wasn't there for those people, which was very interesting. So I think for running ads, because ad costs have just gone up and up and up on Facebook and Google and those kind of places. I think for running ads I've been testing giving away free ebooks and free audiobooks. It doesn't actually outperform our other, our other freebie which is just a seven steps, you know, seven steps to write and publish a book that's set up to sell that particular er, freebie actually so far out converts our books. But I think it's always worth testing and trying. So that's kind of my, my long answer to that, Kevin. Ultimately, if your goal is say to be a speaker giving away books strategically to people who can help you get speaking engagements, I would probably give physical books for those kind of things. So hopefully that helps. All right, I've got. I see somebody else commented. Hello, Eric, is goal is the goal to brand the business or the person example, Julie Broad or Book Launchers. That is a great question. And again, it goes back to. It depends. I think unfortunately or fortunately, I think you as a founder of a company, you tend to end up being the face and having a brand whether you want it or not. You know, that was one of the challenges with my past, my previous business that I talked about in the beginning, revenue with real estate, I was the face of that company. And so I also was the main person delivering all the services along with my husband. And so it made it hard to sell it and we ended up basically selling it off for pieces and licensing off the courses and doing that kind of a thing. So if your end goal is to have something to sell, you're going to want to brand your business. But a lot of businesses that were, well, branded, those former owners are now writing books so they can brand themselves. So there isn't one answer to this. It really is going to come back to your bigger picture goals and where you're at in your business life cycle. Because in the beginning, I think that you're going to be probably branding yourself no matter what, especially as an author. But it, again, it depends on the bigger picture. I think no matter what, people want to do business with other people. So even if I'm branding book launchers, you'll notice that when somebody, you know, somebody writes a testimonial or they, you know, they say, oh, it's amazing working with Julie and her team at Book Launchers. It's very rare that I am not mentioned personally in somebody talking about book launchers. So it's kind of hard to separate the two. Even though when you work with us, you don't work with me almost at all. You see me on the odd video, but. But I'm not working directly with you or on your book. So hopefully, hopefully that helps. It is not a straightforward, easy answer. As an author, you're. When you're out doing book promotions like podcasts and things like that, it's your brand, it's your story that's going to matter more than. But it could be your company's origin story and how you started it. So there you go. Anybody else have questions? I don't see any other questions here. We can go into a lot of other pieces, but yeah, I just, I wanted to make sure you guys had lots of time. I saw Margaret's comment. The fly story is too relatable. I know, and that's why it stuck with me. I love Price's book because, you know, he starts that's the very first page of the book is that fly Story. And it's been great because now I, like I said, whenever I find myself mentally going, okay, I just got to try harder or I got to work harder, I pause now and I look around and I go, okay, is there a better way? Is there a different way? Is there something I haven't tried yet that I should try instead of just sticking my nose to the grindstone and going harder? All right, so. Oh great. Another, another Canadian. Yay. Bruce. Bruce says Halifax, Nova Scotia author here. Is there a less expensive way to mail physical books to North American reviewers, podcasts, media people? So less expensive. I mean, I use media mail here in the States and it's not that expensive expensive, but if I'm shipping internationally, it is more expensive. So here's the, the challenge with your situation. Yes, there is a less expensive way. What I do is I will. And it has a trade off. Everything always has trade offs, right? So what I do is I will log into my Amazon author account and I will ship it from my author account direct to somebody because then it will ship from that country. So then you don't have to pay for the shipping from country to country, however it now arrives from Amazon. So the challenge of course is if this person doesn't know the book is coming or even if it does, that Amazon packaging could be confusing or problematic. So if you want to personally package it for yourself, it's challenging. And so that is, you know, where you might want to. What I've done in the past and of course I have an advantage because I live in the States, but I have family in Canada is I. When I was doing a lot of physical book stuff that needed to be mailed, I actually had a stack of prepaid envelopes and books at my parents house and I would just send them the address to print it off and stick it on the prepackaged envelopes and they would just ship it in Canada for me. And then I did all the shipping down here. So it depends on what you're using it for. If you're selling physical books direct, that's a whole other challenge. Of course we use Book Vault for shipping, but it doesn't work in all the countries either. So yeah, not, not a perfect answer for you. Hopefully, hopefully there's something there you can use. Anybody else have questions before or we can just wrap up for the day and you guys can go off to the next fabulous session at the AuthorTube Writing Conference. I hope you guys are getting some great tips and and and strategies and tools from this conference. Giving you guys a second here to see if there's any further questions before we wrap for the day. And you guys can go find another great session to hang out at and take notes. Don't see anything yet. All right. We got lots of Canadians in the house today. I love it. That is great to see. I was just back in Nanaimo on Vancouver island visiting my family. All right, I think that's it. So thank you, Melanie. It was lovely to hang out with all of you. I wish you a fantastic event and conference. And of course, if you're watching the replay, you can always post questions. And I will get back to you on those as well. All right. Thanks so much, Adam. Thank you, everybody. Have a great day. Bye.