Managing Beta Readers, ARC Copies, and Direct Sales with Story Origin

Just.

Hello, Hello. Welcome, everybody. Thank you for joining our book launchers YouTube live. We are very excited today. Obviously, I am not Julie Broad. Sorry, everybody. I am Sarah Bean, marketing manager for Book Launchers and happy to be here today and very thrilled to be here for this particular one because we are talking with Evan, who is the developer and founder of Story Origin.

We are.

Which is a service that I love and have been learning a lot about, about how it helps authors when they are marketing. So super excited to have him here today. Thank you for being here, Evan.

Thanks for having me on.

Absolutely. So, as we get started, we're going to let some people kind of filter in. Definitely throw into the chat where you're coming in from, where you're seeing us. Put some hellos in there. We do give prizes for those that are most active in the chat, so please do. Oh, great to see some familiar faces. Jason. Nice to see you, Jason. He's a Book Launchers author, along with Reba Parker, another one of our Book Launchers authors. We've got some of our YouTube besties here. KJ Gary, Kevin Hall, Good to see you all. So as you're coming in, please do comment where you're coming from. And then also, if you have any questions for Evan. Evan, as we dive in, please do throw those in chat. We'll stop throughout and answer those questions as they are coming up. So. All right, well, let's dive in. I really appreciate you being here today and educating our office on, or, excuse me, our audience on Story Origin and. And all that you do. So, Evan, I just want to kind of dive into a little bit to get started about some of the challenges that authors face when it comes to marketing, because that's going to get us to why Story Origins exist. So please, like, actually, before we even get started there, sorry. I do want to learn a little bit about you and just tell us some of the things that you've worked on and how you got Story Origin.

Yeah, so I used to write short stories back in high school, was interested in writing, got interested in tech and entrepreneurship in college, worked for a few years, and then wanted to quit my job and get back into writing and then build tools for authors. So I went and I talked to a bunch of authors and asked them their advice, and they're like, okay, so you need to get on this service to build your mailing list, this other service to build your review team. You'd be on this other service to create universal book links. You need to be using some combo of Facebook groups and Google forms to arrange newsletter swaps. And then you need you. And then you're going to have all this other stuff or building your website or distributing beta copies or doing.

Doing all the million things that authors have to do to start getting out there.

Right, exactly. So I was like, okay, so, so there's no real individual problem. It's. The problem is you have like five different logins, eight different spreadsheets. You're doing all this switching between different things at the same time. You. You're trying to maintain this entire world that you're building in your head as you're writing this story. I was like, okay, I'm going to build one thing that does it all. And so that quickly took over 100% of my time. So I did not have the chance to get back into writing the way that I had wanted to. But now I spend most of my time writing software, which I actually really enjoy. I love that. So I'm always working on improvements and developing Story Origin, adding new features. And so Story Origin does all the stuff that I just mentioned, plus, like a bunch of other stuff that we can get into as well.

Yeah, yeah, that's really helpful. I mean, so, I mean, it sounds like you really wanted to build Story Origin to just simplify the process for authors.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's a lot of different things that authors were doing before, which just took authors way more time. For example, if you look at, you know, before Story Origin, a lot of authors would arrange newsletter swaps, which is for those who are unfamiliar with that term. A newsletter swap is a direct one to one cross promotion where I'll agree to promote one of your books in my upcoming newsletters if you agree to promote one of my books in one of your upcoming newsletters. That term sometimes gets confused by people who haven't heard it before. They think like we're exchanging email addresses of our subscribers. No, you are not doing that. You keep your list private. You keep those emails of those people that are on your mailing list private. It's just you're agreeing to put a link to that other author's book into your newsletter when you send it out in a week or two weeks or whenever.

Leverage other people's audiences to market their book. I mean, it's. It's a really fantastic way to market your book, but I think it's actually really understated. And it's one of those things that people don't put a lot of, like, time and energy into thinking about, but it can reap these huge Benefits, Yeah.

It'S hugely valuable in a number of different ways because you are, you're providing content for your own newsletter. So if you were, if you were struggling with like, okay, what am I supposed to put into my newsletter? Like, I'm not really sure. Usually what I recommend to authors is there's basically two parts of newsletter. One is providing building rapport with your audience. So that is usually like a four sentence, you know, three or four sentences about something that you did in the past week or a couple of weeks. The other day I baked mochi donuts, mochi nuts with a matcha glaze. They were delicious. So, you know, I took a picture of that and then I put that in my newsletter that I sent out the other day and I got a few responses from people like, you can't share pictures of your donuts without sending me the recipe.

Right? Yeah, you're right.

I'm sorry. Here's the recipe I use. So. So yeah, it's like building rapport with your audience, right? Like developing relationships like that. And then the other part of your audience is providing them with value. And for me, that's usually updates about like, here's the improvements I've made to story origin or here I'm going to be going and doing this chat with this person. Like it's going to be helpful. So that's usually how I provide value for a lot of authors. The way, the way you provide value to readers is by giving them other books that they might be interested in browsing in your genre or. And that provides the real value to them opening your newsletter. If all I ever sent was pictures of me baking donuts, I would probably very quickly have 0 subscribers because people would unsubscribe. I mean, maybe, I don't know, maybe I could become a food influencer.

I don't know. You underestimate the power of donuts. I would definitely tune in to a newsletter about donuts.

Just three straight months of weekly pictures of donuts. That's all this mailing list has become. But you want to provide value to your audience. And so if you're only sending pictures of, you know, you, pictures of you walking your dog or making donuts or whatever it is, you know, people will eventually you'll unsubscribe and so you want to provide them value. And the way you provide that to readers by giving them other books that they might be interested in checking out. I have a very long to be read list. Do I still browse books all the time? Yes, absolutely. Because I love It.

Yeah, no, I think that's a common trait amongst bibliophiles. Right, like, exactly. Red List is probably yards long, but that doesn't stop us from going to the bookstores and picking up new ones.

Exactly. And so, so having those other books, it's like providing Easter eggs to your subscribers, where every week or whatever, every couple weeks or once a month, however often you send your newsletter, they're going to open it up and they're going to be able to be like, oh, what's, what's here this time? And so, yeah, doing newsletter swaps, it's hugely valuable because you're providing content for your newsletter. But then at the same time, let's say you've got a mailing list of a hundred people or five hundred people or a thousand people. If you're doing a newsletter swap with someone of, you know, the same size, maybe a little smaller, maybe a little bigger or whatever, you could be doubling or tripling the reach of your audience. Every time you send a newsletter, you're, you're, you know, and you've arranged newsletter swaps with two or three or four other authors. Yeah, you're. You're multiplying your audience. And so, yeah, hugely valuable. And so authors used to arrange those things mostly through Facebook groups, but that was extremely time consuming and there was zero transparency to it. Right. Like when I arranged newsletter swap with another author on Facebook, I didn't know if they ever actually sent my book. And if they didn't, they. There wasn't really any ramifications for that.

Yeah. What are you going to do about that?

Yeah, yeah, what are you going to do about that? And other authors that they might potentially arrange newsletter swaps with that. Don't know. Didn't know that. Right. So story origin brought a lot of transparency to that community. So you can arrange newsletter swaps with other authors, find other authors in your genre, you can look at how many clicks that they've sent to their past newsletter swap partners. And so you can say, oh, okay, this person actually sends a decent number of clicks. Like, I would be happy to arrange a newsletter swap with this other author or what have you. And so, yeah, so that was one thing that saved authors a ton of time by arranging that on storage. And because I heard from many who were like, yes, I did try this. Yes, it worked really well. But honestly, it just took up too much time out of my week to arrange those over Facebook. And so I stopped and then I got on story origin and I was like, oh, I can do this. In five minutes on story origin. This is fantastic.

Yeah. And I would love, actually this might be a good time. I would love to hear from who's watching, put in the comments, what your experiences have been with either newsletter swapping or trying to work with other authors to help promote your book or promote their books. I would love to hear some real world stories about how this has worked for you because we may be facing your, your biggest solution to your problems right here. So I would love, please do put in in the chat what you've experienced with newsletter swaps, trying to work with other people's lists or even just, you know, doing that cross promotion with other authors, which is something we recommend quite a bit for our authors. But it's, it's a lot harder in execution unless you have a tool like yours.

Absolutely. And I will say it also varies by genre as well. Certain genres just have a lot more cross promotions in them just because there are more authors in that audience. Right. It's like if you, if you look at sort of the net publishing profits by genre, like you will find basically a proportional amount of newsletter swaps or other authors looking to cross promote by genre by how much money they make. Like in those same ratios.

Yeah, yeah. Now do you have any stats on that, like types of authors that this works really well for or I mean, understanding that we work primarily with nonfiction authors, you know, do you, do you notice a lot of difference between some of the genres?

I will say, I will say that I don't have like any specific statistics. I will say though that non fiction authors have not adopted cross promotions quite as much as other genres.

Sure.

And it kind of depends on the nonfiction genre that you write in as well. So for example, if you're writing maybe like Christian nonfiction or something like that, or religious nonfiction, like there's a little bit, there tends to be a little bit more of that. If you're writing nonfiction geared at for example, like weight loss or something along those lines. Usually those books tend to be like an upsell into a training course or into some sort of coaching program or something along those lines. And so there's a little bit less, there's a little bit less tendency to cross promote because, um, it's usually like a path to where, you know, I want someone to come in through this book and then they're going to go on to my, my training program or something along those lines. Um, and so yeah, I think, I think certain nonfiction authors tend to be less likely or wanting to cross promote.

Yeah, well, you know, and you bring up an interesting point there. And that is, you know, it's not enough to live off newsletter swaps alone.

Right.

You have to have a lot of other things in place in order for this to work. So what are some of the tools that you've seen authors use that could make this kind of strategy really useful? Like what are some of the things that they should have on their own?

Yeah, I mean, there. If you sort of just look at like the author platform, right. If you kind of think about an author platform, the sort of key components of an author platform would be having your own website and having your own mailing list and then having social media. Right. Those are sort of the three, the three pillars.

I wish I was on social media right now because that's exactly the comment I would make. I mean, you're preaching to the choir in terms of the things that we always say are the most important things to have in terms of platform.

Yeah. And then of course, I mean, there is advertising as well. I don't necessarily look at that as being a part of an author platform so much as being just an advertising and distribution channel. Not really, because that's not something that you own. Right, right. Like when I talk about authors platforms, I talk about stuff that you can own. So when you own your own domain, right, and you're not sending people to some other, you know, sending people to Amazon or what have you, you, you own that domain, no one can really take that away from you. Even if, even if, for example, like you're, let's say, you know, you built a website and then whatever hosting provider you're using for that website, let's say they go out of business or something. Right. And all those links in your, at the backs of your books and everywhere else, they're not, they're not dead though, because you own them. So you can always move your website over to somewhere else or, or recreate your website somewhere else and you can make those links work again because you own them. But if you, if you're putting links at the back of your book that are going to, you know, you know, Google's link shortening service or whatever, right? And then Google shuts down their link shortening service, well then, yeah, yeah, then those links are dead and you can't really get those back. But when it's a domain that you own, you. You can always make sure that those things are supported. And so, yeah, so that's like a. Things that you own are really key part of your platform. And again, that applies to having A mailing list. Right. When you have subscribers, let's say you, you are building a mailing list and you use mailchimp or something, and mailchimp goes out of business, you can always just download the list of subscribers that you had on your mailing list from mailchimp, and you can move those over to a different email service provider like Mailerlite or Sendfox or what have you. ConvertKit. There's a. Tons of other. There are tons of other email service providers. And so, so, yeah, so that's, that's something that you own. And that's the other thing that I would say makes mailing list more valuable than social media, because when you are posting to places like Facebook or wherever else, you don't know exactly how many people are going to see any particular post. You know, it used to be that those timelines, when you looking at your feed, it was all timestamp driven is like, did they post in the past two minutes? Well, then it's gonna appear in your timeline. Now it's all algorithmically driven. Right. So it's like, is this post likely to get a lot of engagement? No. Well, then we're not gonna show it to anyone. And so when you post to social media, probably only 1 to 3% of your audience is even going to see that appear in their timelines at all.

Yeah.

And so with mailing lists like email, is this the most archaic technology that we use every day? Right.

Which is funny when you put it that way, because it's a technology that's only been really, really accessible to the masses for, like 25 years, you know, maybe, maybe 30. But I mean.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd say like the, like the 80s, like late 9, like early 90s is.

When I remember getting an email address, you know.

Yeah, yeah, so. So, so it's. Yeah, but it's like the most archaic social network that exists. But it's one thing that is not. It's not owned by any particular company. So.

Yeah, no, I mean, we've had authors who, you know, I hear authors tell me this all the time, that they don't want to start their own newsletter because, well, I just do LinkedIn newsletter or, oh, well, I've got my substack or, you know, whatever it might be. And there is always that argument where we've had authors who, for whatever arbitrary reason that they were unsure of, had their accounts shut down, had Instagram boot them off, had LinkedIn, like, suspend their account, and you never really know when you're sometimes crossing some Arbitrary line. And so if you don't have those email addresses, you've just lost your audience. You've lost your gateway to your audience.

Yeah.

And so, yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense to own that newsletter, you know, and use maybe social media to funnel people into that newsletter. Yeah. What are some of the ways the authors, you think could really make that newsletter more enticing than someone just seeing them on social media?

Yeah, so that's a great question, because you can be like, yeah, you should have a newsletter, but then why do people want to sign up? Because for the most part, people don't want to sign up to get emails from another person. Right. And so you want to do something to entice readers to sign up, and the best way to do that is to give them a free book. Right. So. Or, you know, if you're writing nonfiction, that might not necessarily be a book. It might be a set of worksheets or, or a sort of a companion guide to your book that helps them go through it and all that stuff. So it doesn't exactly need to be like a certain thing. You can come up with lots of different ideas, but generally I would recommend it being some sort of downloadable as an ebook, even if, even if it's, you know, worksheets or something like that make it available as an ebook. And so, so when they sign up to your mailing list, you would then deliver them that file. And so Store Origin has a feature that works with that that's a. Called a reader magnet. So on Store Origin, you can build a reader magnet landing page where someone could read the description for what your Reader magnet is. Then they would enter their name and email address, and then Story Origin can automatically send their contact info to your email service provider. Whether you're using Mailchimp or Mail Light or ConvertKit or ActiveCampaign or what have you. Store Origin integrates with nine different email service providers. So Storerogen can zap that contact info straight to them to whatever mailing list you want. And if you're using an email service provider, like I said, there are tons of them. If you're using an email service provider that storage and doesn't currently integrate with, you can always download your list of signups as a CSV and then just manually upload that file to your email service provider as well.

Oh, that's great. So break that down a little bit so, you know, so that people kind of understand what it looks like from the, the, the reader side. You know, reader magnets, like, you know, we call it the customer journey. Yeah, whatever it might be. Like, what is it? If the author's gone and they've built a landing page for their reader magnet, what are they using? And kind of explain that journey a little bit.

Yeah, sure. So, so from the reader side, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, so the way that. So it might look like this, right? So you post something on LinkedIn about, you know, maybe, maybe you're, you're posting something on LinkedIn. In the comments you say, hey, by the way, if you want my companion guide to, or, you know, my, my free PDF or whatever on how to get started doing take making this advice actionable, check the link in the comments or something. And then there you could link to Story Origin. Story Origin. You can also host those pages on your own custom domain if you want them to. So going back to what I was saying earlier, like, owning your domain is so valuable on storage and you can have those pages under your own domain as well. So you can. Yeah, so you can have it on storage and app dot com. If you don't have your own domain, that's totally fine. Or it can be, you know, evangel.com freebie or whatever. You can, you would post that link in the comments and a reader would be like, oh, this is very helpful post. Yeah, I want to learn how to make this advice actionable. Click on that. They'd get that landing page that gives them the description of it. They'd hit, yeah, I want to get this. They'd enter their name and email address, hit send download link, and then store Origin, would email them the download link. They'd be able to download it, the EPUB or the PDF or whatever, whatever the appropriate file is for their preferred reading devices and storage and provides them with instructions on what, what type they should get for whatever their preferred reading device or app is. And then from there they would just, they would, they would, they would start reading. Now I would also recommend, sort of the other question that goes along with that is like, okay, so someone signed up to my email to my email list, like, now what?

Now what do I do with them? What do I do with them now that they're here?

Yeah, exactly. So I recommend to authors set up a email welcome sequence. So when someone signs up to your mailing list, they'll get an email that says, hey, thanks for signing up to my mailing list. If you, if you want, you can also provide them a link to that download again from your own as a part of your own email welcome sequence. Just to be like Reinforce hey, this is who I am. And this is, this is the download link for me and all that stuff. I generally recommend a four step welcome sequence. So the first email that would be like a, hey, thanks for joining my mailing list. Hope you enjoy the book or whatever it is that you're, you're giving away. And just to be clear, when I'm talking about all this stuff, it's, we're talking about ebooks, right? Because if you were to deliver physical books, this would quickly.

That's a whole lot too expensive, right?

Like if you're, if you're trying to get a thousand people on your mailing list and you're spending, you know, six to seven bucks on each spot person signing up, it just becomes way too expensive. So yeah, so we're talking about, we're talking about digital downloads here when I say books. So, so yeah, so that first email will be like, here's the download link again just in case you, in case you missed it again. Storage and provides them the download link. So you don't need to do that as a part of your welcome sequence. It's just like another nice gesture kind of a thing. Yeah. And then email number two in your welcome sequence, I generally recommend doing a little bit about yourself, right? This is where you would start to build rapport with them. Say oh, hi, my name is such and such. You know, I'm from here. These are some, like some of my hobbies. Here are maybe some of my favorite authors or the only thing that you really know about them at that stage is that they've gotten your book so you know what they are interested in. So if you are, if you are writing a nonfiction book about how to publish your book or something along those lines, right? You might, you might say, oh, when I was getting started publishing, here's how I sort of tackled these things, right? And then you might ask them a question like where are you at in your publishing journey? And that gets them to respond to you and then you can actually start to build a real relationship with them. And I don't say this stuff as like a, like a be phony and like just ask questions to ask questions. Like I, I ask questions in lots of my newsletters and I always respond to everybody and like I genuinely want to hear responses from sometimes, sometimes in my newsletter I'm just like, I grilled this weekend. We did it over at my in laws because we don't actually have a grill and the in laws are like three minutes down the road. But should we get a Grill and people, people respond my newsletter, they're like yes, you should get a grill. And also specifically this one. Yeah, they're very opinion, some people are very opinionated about grills.

But I mean they could be sending you donut recipes.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean I, I love it because I'm like, yes, actually I would very much like to know this information because I have no idea what I'm doing.

And it goes back to that, building that relationship with your reader which is what's going to keep them engaged with you. And your content is, is building that relationship and getting into, to like what they are looking for. And little, little tip here too. The more you get to know your readers and the more that they engage with you, the more you're going to start to understand what they're looking for, what they want and the problems they're trying to solve, which you can then address in that newsletter. So yeah, you cannot discount that relationship building enough.

Absolutely, absolutely. So that, so that second, that second newsletter that you send to them, that's the one where you really want to be trying to start that relationship with that, with that reader. For the third email and you're welcome sequence, I would actually go back and have start to and encourage them or entice them to get started reading that reader magnet. Because like we were talking about earlier, people's to be read lists are very long. Yeah. And so even if they've picked up your book, even if they've downloaded it, they've got it on their Kindle or their phone or their tablet or what have you, that does not mean that they've read it or are even going to read it within the next three months. Right. And so as a part of your welcome sequence, I encourage you to entice that reader to get started reading today. Right?

Yeah.

So that's part where you can be like, oh well like here's how you can make, start making this stuff actionable today. Here's day one or whatever like and get them or maybe you tell a story about how you came to write that reader magnet. Like what was your what, what's the story behind the story kind of a thing. Yeah. Or maybe you can be asked them something like hey, what did you, you know, I'd love to hear, you know, if you, if you gave them something like an action plan in chapter three or something like that. Be like hey, I'd love to hear what did, what was the action plan that you came up with at the end of chapter three. I'd love to see, see what you came up with something that gets them, gets them to engage with you again and then also entices them to be like, if they haven't come up with that action plan, they were like, oh, there's a, like I got, I gotta start reading because I, I'm gonna figure out how to do this the right way or whatever.

Yeah.

And then, and then chat and so, so that'd be the third email in the welcome, the fourth email in the welcome sequence. I recommend doing something like a, like a find your champions email. Right? So people that might join your review team or people that might be willing to share on social media when you have a new release, or people that would be willing to become beta readers for you. So those people that would be willing to read an early manuscript of your next book before you publish it and give you feedback on, you know, the pacing or development or anything along those lines, etc. So, so that fourth email in your welcome sequence would be the find your champions email. And that's just like a, hey, would you want to join my review team or whatever, get. And get early access to all my books? Or sometimes it depends on how many books you plan on publishing and what your, what your own strategy is like. But yeah, one thing that I sometimes recommend to authors that plan to write a lot of books is as a, as a call to action for readers is, hey, would you like to get all of my books free forever? Because that is a very enticing.

Yeah, that's a great offer.

Yeah, that is a very enticing offer. Right. And in, in, that's the hook you say, if you join my review team, you'll get early access to all my books for free. And it's just the idea is I give it to you for free, you know, a month or maybe two months ahead of publication or maybe just a week ahead of the publication. And then whenever you get through it, just, can you leave me a review of that book on Amazon or Goodreads or Bookbub or what have you?

Yeah.

And so yeah, that's a, that's a four step email sequence. Now you can do a much longer email sequence than that if you want.

Oh yeah, of course.

You know my email sequence, I just, I just took it from several email welcome sequence to now I think I have like 20 something emails in my welcome sequence. But again, like I, I had a, A, like one email welcome sequence for years. Right. And most authors, other authors that you talk to, if you talk to them later, like later stage authors that you're aspiring to, to follow. They'll be like, oh, yeah, I have, you know, I have 20 emails in my welcome sequence. I'm running all these Facebook ads, I'm running all these Amazon ads. I have my own website and my own web store and all this stuff going on.

Yeah.

And, and then you can quickly become overwhelmed, right?

Yeah.

And so I would say my one piece of advice that I, I give to authors is like, do not let recommendations be roadblocks. Right? Yes. So if that seems overwhelming or intimidating to you to have, you know, a fully fleshed out, you know, welcome sequence with four emails, like, that's fine. You don't need, you don't need that.

You can get away with one.

You can have one email that just says, hey, thanks for joining my mailing list. Yeah, and that can be it. Like, you don't need to do it. You don't even need to have a welcome sequence. Many authors don't have a welcome sequence. Now, they're extremely valuable.

I would recommend them at least one.

I would highly recommend at least having a one email. And it should be easy enough to, it's, it's fairly easy to set up with most email service providers to just be like, hey, when someone joins mailing list, they're going to get an email and this email is going to say, hey, thanks for joining my mailing list or whatever you want to have in that email. It's, it's pretty easy to set up. So I would recommend at a minimum having having one. But again, like, if you want to do that in two weeks after you've, you know, set up your landing page or whatever, or three weeks later, like, that's fine. You don't need to have it like at the, at the beginning, beginning, because sometimes setting up all these different things can take time. And so, yeah, so I, I would say like, don't be, don't be intimidated by other authors who are later in this, later in the, who have like much more fleshed out, you know, processes and analytics and all these.

They've been spending time building that up over time. You can't compare a brand new author to someone who's exactly 20 books deep.

Like, it's just exactly.

I guarantee different.

Yeah, yeah, I guarantee you they did not have that stuff on day one.

No, no, absolutely not. Now you touched on something and I want to get into this in a minute, but before we do, this is a good time to give away a prize. I put into the chat that I would love to hear. What are people using as their Reader magnet and David already was. Oh no, Kevin. Kevin already mentioned that he's using a section from his last book as his reader magnet. I would love to see what other people are using as their reader magnet. If we can get a couple, we'll do a drawing and for some prizes. Let's see what do I have here? I have got some great options. So Angela, I am going to pull from my own inventory here. So I keep my book launchers inventory back here. I've got a few fantastic ones. Let me just grab.

Sarah, I was.

Gonna add that I asked in the chat where people are and it doesn't look like anyone is post launch yet. Everyone is either still writing the manuscript or in the pre launch editing phases. So that might be why some people don't have as many reader magnets or stuff in yet. Kevin has worked on multiple books. I think that what he's talking about is from his latest book or we have quite a few people though that have reader magnets here as part of their brand. So it doesn't have to be specifically for your book. If you have a website and a brand you can use a reader magnet, you know, so it doesn't have to necessarily be around your book, just whatever you would use. And if you don't have one yet, then this is how we'll get around this. If you don't have one yet, what is an idea that you would like to use? Vibrations like this is perfect. Like you're joining at the the perfect time with a perfect guest. I'm still learning. So this is insightful. I mean like what serendipity to be watching the YouTube live right now. So. Exactly. So we've got three options here for books. The first one is a Working man's guide. This is by Dr. Mark T. This is a great book meant for the working man in America or woman. And it is on how to. It is strong values, strong, strong life, strong legacy. And this is all about how to build your legacy by living through this amazing problem solving framework. So here's one off one book. The next one is we have the Quiet Storm by Imani Roberts. This just came out a couple weeks ago and this is a deep dive into the history of R and B. Takes us all the way through the 1950s up into the 2000s. The historical, cultural analysis of the power, passion and pain of R B groups. This is, this is an incredible prize by the way. It is chock full of images, discographies, history, all these incredible for groups that you have loved and heard about. For years. But it also gets into why these R and B groups have disappeared, why they are now accepted, extinct. So this is a really fantastic one for those music lovers, history lovers, and the last one right here we have the Freedom Frameworks by Jack Cohen. This is a fantastic infinite possibilities to achieve career independence on your own terms. So what this is is a framework and a mindset for approaching your life, your career and decisions that you make by a icon, iconoclast executive. Jack Cohen has been a titan in the commercial real estate space for over 40 years now. You do not have to be in real estate to appreciate this book. I actually read through this one quite a bit myself and it is just chock full of really fascinating and really amazing ways to just approach all your decisions and problems in your life. So all three of these up for grabs. So we've got the Quiet Storm Freedom Frameworks and we have got a working man's guide. So let's give it about two more seconds. Just last, last little time here to drop it in the chat. Either what your reader magnet currently is or what you think you would like to implement as a reader magnet. And while Angela is grabbing those, I want to get into next, because we talked about this just very briefly, but I know that one of the big hurdles that a lot of authors deal with is how to distribute copies of their books, how to get more readers for their early books, how they can get people to, you know, be beta readers. So I want to dive into that next. Let's see. Angela, do we have some. Let me just get into. Yeah, they're all starred, so if you just want to click on that Star tab, you can just read them all. Okay, so we've got Kevin, who said he's using a section from his last book as his reader magnet, which is great. I mean, I always say that one way to sell your first book is to write another book. That tends to be the way that it goes. So I think I can definitely see how that can be helpful as a reader magnet. Let's see, Gary says I use the books as a reader magnet, looking to pull them into a bigger parts of the business. And so, yeah, I mean, honestly, that's one thing that we spend quite a bit of time working on with a lot of our clients is how the book fits into your bigger picture, where that book fits into your overall brand and business and how you're going to use that book within your business.

So, right, you may not be trying to make money off of the book itself. It just may be that the book is, is a lead in to something else.

100%. Yeah. So Christy says my bonus is a one page guide on how to leave a toxic partner, which is what my non fiction book is about. And that's, that's spot on. Honestly, there are so many reasons why that can work. Number one, I mean getting into a toxic. Getting in or out of the toxic relationship aside, getting into just the logistical side of things from an SEO perspective, I can see see how, how to get out of a toxic relationship can rate very high, which drives organic traffic to your website. And you've got a reader magnet there that is directly related to the book. So you're using it like a teaser into that book content, which is great. Let's see. Reba, I'm using a free PDF download offering the five steps to changing your peaceability mindset. Absolutely. Reba's book. I can't Wait for Reba Reba, I can't Wait for your to be out Peaceability mindset. It's about using peace as an actionable skill, which I think is very. We don't think about peace that way. And Rebus set out to really change the way that we think about peace. So this is an exciting one. Let's see. K.J. a.J. I want to give out posters of my children's book. Interesting. Okay, so this is where we get into that. Does it make sense to distribute like physical products or digital products? So I am hoping here that you are using digital downloads for your posters. The times in which I say it's good to do physical products is if you're already set up for that kind of distribution. So if you, you know, also do T shirts and hats and you know, other kinds of things that people are already ordering for you, then it makes more sense to do a physical reader magnet.

Or you could do it as a raffle potentially. So.

Oh yeah.

If you get a bunch of signups for a raffle and then you only actually have to send one out, then it's not too bad. Yeah, right.

Absolutely.

Or you know, maybe, maybe you're taking, you know, three winners or 10 winners, but it's something that you can put a limit on and say, here's my budget for this and I'm gonna, you know, however many people submit. And then I'm going to be, I'll be distributing this many copies of my poster physically. And then also the other thing with physical products that just makes them a little bit harder as a, as an enticement to sign up for your mailing list is if you're, if you're going to dis, if you're going to give a physical, if you're going to send a physical poster to everyone that signs up to your mailing list, you also then need to be collecting their mailing address, which a lot of people don't want to give you. Right. And so you may be actively hurting your sign up and conversion rate because you're asking people for their mailing list when they sign up to your email list. But if you do a raffle, you could say, hey, just sign up with your email. I'm going to pick, you know, five winners or 10 winners or whatever and then I will email just the winners. Hey, what's your mailing address?

Yeah.

And if they don't, if they don't opt in at that point, like, that's totally fine. They're still on your mailing list. And if they don't respond with their mailing address, it's like, it's okay if they didn't actually end up wanting the poster or whatever and they just wanted to get on my mailing list. Yeah. And so that, that is another potential way of doing that and making that work.

Yeah. Let's see. David says, mine is a devotional covering the four subjects of my six books, but plus a bonus option of a personal consultation. And I love this because what you always want out of that reader magnet is some kind of call to action. Whether it's to buy the book, you know, signing up for the mailing list is, is the first action step. But after that it might be, you know, sign up for a call or reach out to set up an appointment, something along those lines. So I love that you have that option in there. Let's see. And Matthew says, does anyone use a short section of their upcoming book as a book magnet? Now what do you think about that, Evan, of people using chapters or excerpts from their book as a reader magnet?

That is a great reader magnet. When you're just starting out and you don't have anything else, if you, you know, you're like, I just spent, you know, six months or a year or however long writing this whole book and now you're telling me I need to write another book that I'm going to give away for free. When someone signs up to my mailing list, entice them to buy this other book. This seems like too much work. So you, I mean, you don't like, again, this goes back to my. Don't let recommendations be roadblocks. Right. If what you have today is you've written a book and maybe you've already published it, you can still take the first one to three chapters out of that book, make that a little standalone ebook there and make in, and then have that be your reader magnet. Now I will say sample chapters or previews of books tend to be less effective in getting signups just because if someone knows that they're only getting a partial book, they're less likely to be enticed by that. Because when someone, when someone's getting something they want, like the full version, right. And so, and so doing something like a companion guide, maybe it's not a full length book, right. Maybe it's only, you know, 10,000 words or something like that, or 5,000 words that can be, you know, relatively quick to write or create and use that as your reader magnet. And that would be, that would be a full, you know, complete thing, even though it's much shorter maybe than your full length novel or book or what have you, and use that as your reader magnet will be more effective than just pulling out the first one, two or three chapters out of an out of something else. But again, if, if the difference is you start your mailing list today with that three chapter preview versus you start your mailing list in three months after you've, you know, created that other reader magnet. It's like get started today with that three chapter preview and then down the road you can have multiple reader magnets. You don't need to only have one, right? You can have multiple ways that you entice readers to get onto your mailing list, that maybe, maybe one reader is going to be enticed by a companion guide. Maybe someone else is going to be enticed by a preview of your next book. Maybe someone else is going to be enticed by like worksheets or something along those lines. So you never know exactly what's going to entice readers. So have multiple things and ways of making those readers interested in joining your mailing list.

Absolutely. And I will say this is probably going to be very dependent on genre as well. Because you know, I would say that fiction authors probably releasing, whether it's a sample chapter or if it's, you know, even an extension of the book, a novella or something along those lines, bonus epilogue or bonus epilogue, bonus scenes. That's going to work a lot better than if you're writing say a business book or a, you know, a how to book or some kind of self improvement book that's going to work better with a companion guide or something where they can interactively use it with your product. So, and speaking of which, we have Jason who he's thinking about giving away a digital mobile guide to his book. Jason's got a great self improvement book that is coming. Finding your gold thread about how to, you know, follow your passions and the things in life that line up and how to pay attention to those signs. And I can see how a mobile app that you can be able to take from that's creating an interactive experience for your reader. It's not just the pages that they're reading, they're then able to take those pieces with them and take it into the world. So really love all of that. I do want to get into. We're going to move on and talk about how to distribute arcs. But first I'm going to choose a winner here and I think I'm going to go with Christy Piper. Her bonus is the one page guide to Leave a Toxic Partner, which is what her nonfiction book is about. So Christy, I think that's a fantastic one. I love it. You get your choice of our three books, A Working Man's Guide, Freedom Frameworks, or the Quiet Storm by Imani Roberts. So what you'll just do is send an email to teamoklaunchers.com with your book choice and your address and we'll get that out to you. Okay, so we, so you've, you've done a great job of really explaining how story origin helps with, you know, building up those, those newsletter lists and we've talked about newsletter swaps, but I want to talk a little bit about more of just that act of trying to get your book out to people and initially get those early reviews. You know, what are some of the challenges that authors really face there and, and how can you help with that?

Yeah, so on story origin there is a feature called the review copies feature. It can be for pre publication or post publication books. So it doesn't matter whether or not your book has, is, is not been released yet or if it's been out there for a year or two years or whatever. Um, so the review copies feature, the way that works is you could, you would send the link to readers and then they would be able to say, yeah, I want a copy of this book and I'm willing to leave a review on it on Amazon or Goodreads or Bookbub. So they'd say where they would plan to leave a review. And then you as the author can vet their reviewer profile on story origin and say, okay, this person looks like they've completed 19 out of the 20 review copies that they've, they've received through Story Origin before. So I can be relatively confident that if I give them a review copy of my book that they're actually going to review it. And so you would approve their application and then that would send them the download link and then they get, they just get a review copy process page on storage and that says, you know, here's your download link. And then step two would be for them to write their review and then step three would be to, for them to post. It gives them the links to where they said they were going to post a review. So if they said they're going to leave a review on Amazon, it would take them to the Amazon page where they could leave that review, etc. And so that sort of helps manage that process for managing a review team, which can be very tricky if you're doing all this stuff using like an Excel spreadsheet and then you're like manually emailing people to follow, like, hey, did you read the book yet? Or hey, you had it for a couple of weeks. Story Origin automates that process. So, you know, after you approve someone, if they haven't left a review in a couple of weeks, storage and will send them a reminder email saying, hey, just a reminder, you, you got this book, it's on your reviewer dashboard here. And yeah, so, so sort of, man, it sort of automates a lot of that process. Now how can you use that page to build a review team? So there are a few different ways. So one is you can publicly list that. One is you can publicly list that book on storage. And so Story Origin has a directory of review copies available that readers can request and you can optionally choose to have your review copy listed in that public directory. You don't have to totally optional. Even if you do list it in that directory, you, the author are still in the driver's seat about who gets approved for, for the review copy storeroigin never takes that control away from you. So even if it's in that directory when people request it, you still choose who you want to approve for your review team for that book. And the other thing I should mention there is you can also see like their, you can check out their reviewer profiles on their, on the reviewer platforms where they said that they were going to leave reviews. So you can see, okay, has this person ever reviewed a book in this genre before? Because if they've only ever reviewed this, this, this, this analogy is a little bit easier with some fiction Titles. But like, if this person has only ever reviewed steamy romance novels and I've written a cozy romance novel, like, they might be requesting the book, thinking that they're going to get something that they're not. Right. They might be thinking the book is a steamy romance novel for whatever reason, but it's a cozy romance. So I maybe don't want them to be a part of the review team, even if they have like really high completion rates or something.

Yeah, yeah. So it gives you that opportunity to vet them and make sure.

Exactly.

Because there's nothing worse than like having someone review your book. But if your book is not for them, they're not your audience, that review may not help you that much.

Exactly. And so, so, yeah, so, so you can choose to optionally list that. You can optionally choose to list that review copy in the public directory on story origin. The other thing that you can do is like we were talking about with newsletter swaps, where you can arrange cross promotions with other authors. Those newsletter swaps can be for review copies. So it would be, you know, so, so a newsletter swap is sort of a generic term, but you can, you can agree to a newsletter swap for promoting your book, just being on sale at Amazon or something. Or it could be for reader magnet, or it could be for review copy. So when I arrange newsletter swap with another author for a review copy, they would send the link out to my review copy to their mailing list to their subscribers, and then anyone on their mailing list that wants to get a copy of my book, they could request that review copy from me and then I can approve or decline them. And so, yeah, you can arrange newsletter swaps, no matter what your goal is, whether it's to build your mailing list or to increase your sales or to find new reviewers, etc. The other thing you can do is to join, is to join group promotion. So a group promotion is another type of cross promotion where you, me, and let's say 20 other authors, we all list our books on a single landing page and then we all drive traffic to that landing page together. Um, and so, yeah, so the other option that I would recommend too is going back to building your mailing list. When you build your mailing list, you can put building your review team on autopilot as well. So as someone, as, as you participate in cross promotions or whatever, if you're building your, if you're using those cross promotions to build your mailing list, as people go through your welcome sequence, they hit that email in your welcome sequence, which is the find your champions email, where you say, hey, would you like to join my review team? Now that email in your welcome sequence could point to your review copy on story origin, where you say, hey, you can get a free copy of this book. Just let me know where you're going to leave a review. And then you put that whole system sort of on autopilot. So as you build your mail, as you build your mailing list, you are also sort of automatically building your review team as well. And with each, you know, with each launch, hopefully, you know, you've been building your mailing list over time. And so, you know, you might have a pretty small review team when you're just getting started, but you know, over, over a year or two years or something, as you release more books and you've been building your mailing list over that whole time, you might have 50 or 70 people that are on your review team that when you've got a new book to release in a month or two, you can say, hey, do you want an early copy of this before I publish it? And would you be willing to leave a review?

That's, I mean, that's fantastic. I mean, it's just, it, it seems like people could in theory like kind of set that up and then go on vacation and come back and they could have a mailing list and they could have a review team and everything all ready for them.

Yeah, I've talked to authors that are, that have, you know, a mailing list of 3000 people or something like that. And, and they're like, I don't have a review team. And I'm just like, I'm like, what a missed opportunity. Had you just had a single email in your welcome sequence from the get go when you started building your mailing list that just said, hey, do you want to, you know, do you want to get all my books free forever? Yeah. Have you had that email in your welcome sequence and you've got 3,000 people on your mailing list? You know, not everyone's going to opt into joining your team, but let's say 1% did. You'd have 300 people on your review team. And so when you go to launch a book, you got 300 people that you can count on and say, hey, you know, yeah, I'd love to read your book two months before anyone else gets to.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I've definitely got some authors that I love being on their review team because, you know, I already know what I'm going to be kind of getting out of it. And it just, it just, it makes it real fun because you are then getting a chance to build that relationship directly with that author because the review team is the one that's really helping the author get out there into the world. I mean, so what are some ways that you have seen authors use Story Origin that has really worked well? Like what? Do you have any stories of great case studies to showcase?

Yeah, I mean, so if you go to, if you go to Story Origin, you can also. Let's see. Can I, can I present?

Yeah. Yes, you should be able to. There's a present option down there at the bottom.

Okay.

While you're finding that, I'm going to answer David's question real quick. So I can sell my book for a dollar, maybe via code on Amazon, ask the buyer to review, right? Legally, yes. You could always. You can set your book price for Amazon. You can set it anywhere. They, they have banned perma free. So you can't do perma free anymore. Meaning you do. It does have to be if someone has paid for it. There is no code on Amazon though. Whatever price you set it on Amazon is the price that it has to be. There's no promo codes or discounts that they offer to their vendors. There, there. But then after that, you can absolutely ask a buyer for a review. It's up to them whether or not they choose to do it. Okay, Evan, go ahead. You go ahead and take control there. Here we go. Add to stage.

Okay, sweet. So, so yeah, we were just talking about case studies and things from Story Origin. So if you just go to storyorigin app.com you can hit this tutorials tab on Story Origin and you'll find case studies there under that tutorials tab. So there are some case studies here. There's also just a bunch of video tutorials on how to use each of the individual features on Story Origin. And then if you go back to just the homepage as well, regarding whatever individual feature that you're trying to learn more about, you can click on. So I'm just, again, I'm on the Story Origin app homepage. This is just the section consolidate and simplify storage and does it all. Could click on one of these and you can see testimonials from authors about any one of those individual specific features. So, you know, Kaels gained 120 reviews. She, she, I know she has basically sort of put her, her, she's done what I, what I suggested from what I remember seeing seeing in her post was she basically has her review team serve on autopilot. Like I suggested having it a part of her welcome sequence and all that stuff. And other authors here that have used that as well. And you can click on any of these to go see like the full review of story origin. And you can also go here and just say what your, what your goal is. So like, let's say it's to build a mailing list so you can find all the reviews from authors on story origin that have used it to build your mailing, Build their mailing list and what that's all about. Oh, sorry, I think I was on it. I ended up going to a different page, but it'd be reviews, reviews of story origin. And so yeah, you could, you know, click there, build your mailing list and then you can, you can see basically case studies from other authors saying like, oh yes, I, I went on story origin and here's what I did and this is what worked for me. So those are a few, those are a few different ways that you can see case studies and things.

Oh, that's great. Well, you know, we're running out of time, but I do want to. Angela did drop the link for story origin in the chat, so please go check that out. And you know, and we didn't even touch on some of the other ways the story origin helps authors, like with direct sales, for example. So we're gonna have to have you back another day. Just talk about direct sales because that is a topic that is growing in popularity and honestly I think is one of the biggest tools that a self published author can do. I mean, we're finding so many more instances where self published authors are outselling and making more of a profit than traditionally published authors because of the direct sales options. So, you know, I definitely want to hear about that. But I recommend everybody go check out story origin and look through all those amazing features. I want to do one more prize before we wrap up. I mean, we have gone for an hour here. My goodness. So those of you that have stuck around, I was. Angela, how do you want to do this? Do you want to just throw the names in a randomizer? I can do that. But a fun way. Because what that's going to do is that's going to take all the comments. I think since we've been going for an hour, we should do story origin in the chat right now. I will put that into the box. I will type it out so you know exactly what it should look like. Capitalization doesn't matter though. I will say throw in hashtag story origin in the chat and we'll be entered for your last prize. In the meantime, Evan, what are some ways that people can get in touch with you or, or learn more about this aside from the link that we already dropped in in the chat?

Yeah. So my email address is evan storyorigin app.com. my inbox is always open. People are welcome to just shoot me an email. I'm always recipes ask me for my donut recipes. That's. That's right. Exactly. Yeah, I, I'm always super open. So even if you just go to story origin, let's say you forget my email address, that's totally fine. Just go to storyorigin app.com. if you scroll to the bottom of the homepage, you'll see my face, you'll see my name, you'll see my email address. If you hit the contact link on store version, you'll also see my name and email address. Like I'm very, very open with my email address. So. Yeah. So honestly, that's, that's the best way to get in touch with me. And if anyone has any questions, again, my inbox is always open.

Well, I really appreciate you being here today. Really would love to have you back another time. So we'll, we'll work that out. But Angela, in the meantime, time. Who is our winner? It is. Let us see the people who have typed in story origin. Today is. We need some music. Stella. Oh, congrats, Stella.

Yay.

So we have got. Yeah, we've got some special books. Yeah, I'll stop sharing so they can be bigger. Perfect. Just drop into There's a Working Man's Guide. We've got the Quiet Storm and we have got the Freedom Framework. So just send a note to Teamoklaunchers.com with your book choice and your mailing address and we will get that out to you. Congrats, Stella. Evan, thank you so much for the time this afternoon. Really appreciate the walkthrough, all your insights into newsletter swaps, building newsletter lists, reader magnets, email sequence. I mean, this stuff is gold, you guys. You just got like master level class education. So I hope it was helpful today. All right, well, I am going to wrap it there. Always send us any questions if you guys have them. But otherwise we will see you all soon. Thank you everybody. Have a good one.