Publishing Lessons Learned in 2022

Hello and happy Tuesday, my friends. Where are you at? Who's here? Say hello if you're watching the replay. Definitely play along and say hello. Today we're going to chat about publishing lessons from this year. I was inspired. I get a newsletter from Nicholas Eric. He has great publishing insights and he talks a lot of book marketing strategy. I think he does a lot of ad stuff for folks. His newsletter is great. It often cues me into some news that I haven't seen and so I get the newsletter. But this week it's been 10 years since he published his first book and he did a kind of a publishing review of the last 10 years and I liked the bigger picture view that he was sharing of the publishing industry and kind of book marketing success and so on. And so it inspired me to kind of think about the big lessons. And I mean, really none of them are like specific to 2022. But there may be some nuances and slight insights that I've gained from what's happened and what we've done this year as we've launched a ton of books. I don't know, I don't know how many we've launched, but you know, it's definitely been our. I shouldn't say definitely, but I'm pretty sure it's been our busiest year for book launches. We had some days where we're launching two books in one day, which we not had that happen very often. So it's been, it's been busy, which is great. That's what I want. It's what we all want. But it's been an interesting year in a lot of ways too. And so, yeah, so I'm excited to dive in. So say hello if you're watching the replay or you're here live. And I'm curious. We'll give you your participation question right at the start here. What is a lesson that you've learned from publishing and if you haven't published a book yet, from writing a book or doing the research or something, you know, kind of what's your big. What's your big overarching lesson that you have to share with folks? Go ahead and type that in the comments. And if you're watching the replay, I will read it after the fact. And if you're here live, you can type it in and we'll share it. And that will be part of your entry into today's prize pool. I still have. I have at least one more mug, maybe two of our classic vintage hashtag no boring books. So that will be one of the Prizes available to you. And also, as always, we have a copy of Self publish and Succeed. So if you haven't read it yet, you can win today. And Angela should be here. Yeah, Angela's. Hello here. Yeah, I'm sleep deprived too, Efren. I don't know why you are, but yeah, we've been enjoying an extra early wake up every morning thanks to that fallback. Yeah. Anyways, so I'm sleep deprived as well. And Pat is in the house. Hello. And Rachel. Awesome. It's like it's client day today. Ryan's here. Yes, Rachel, that is on my list. Oh, my goodness. That we've. We have had a couple of books this year that we have not been able to get ads run for at all. And yours was one of them. So. Yeah. So welcome clients. It's like the Book Launchers client training day. It's fabulous to have you all here today. All right, so while you guys go ahead, you know, unfortunately, Rachel's lesson is kind of built into one of mine that Amazon does not all. Does not let you run ads for every single book and, and is picky with titles and things that worked last year don't always work this year. But what other lessons are there? Oh, and this is a good one from Ryan. It was amazingly tough to hear feedback on my manuscript for the first time. It gets easier, though. I love that lesson. Thank you. Welcome, Gordon. Okay, so the first one I want to share is that book marketing and getting an ROI on your book is. Is a long game. I mean, this is a great example. So self publish and succeed. I was actually kind of horrified to realize that it came out in February of 2021. I could not believe that. I thought, no, it had to have been February of 2022. It's been out for almost 20 months. I'm still calling it my new book. I mean, it is my new book. But what's interesting though is that it's been almost two years. I mean, it's not a year and three quarters. And the real results of that book, which to me are people contacting book launchers after reading the book and saying, yes, I want to hire you. How can I work with you? And you know, those kind of conversations, somebody wanting to have me speak at their event. It's not a firm deal yet, but I think it's going to happen. And it was as a result of the book hitting their desk. And that did not happen that much last year. Yes, there was some momentum, there was some interest. You know, there's definitely. There was definitely people who were reading the book reaching out, but I'm really seeing it in the last three to six months. And part of that also is that, you know, internally we've actually turned off all of our ads as of September. We'll turn them back on in January, but for a variety of reasons, we turned them off. And, and so we're only seeing new people reaching out as a result of referrals, YouTube and the book. And so it's been really interesting to have these conversations and to realize that the book was out for a long time and it often is the case. And I look at a lot of our clients, you know, and I think of Shel Phelps, who recently shared on LinkedIn that she, you know, she's now getting she just got her first and maybe her second international speaking engagement as a result of her book. Her book's been out a couple of years. Martha Tuttenborn, who's been on here, she has a YouTube author spotlight with us. She was on a live, I don't know when, and she shared that she got featured in a documentary, but that was after a year after her book had come out. Robert Bell's TED Global Ideas Talk was more than a year after his book had come out. So it's really a long game and even knowing that a lot of people quit too soon and your book will pay off for a long, long time if you keep feeding it, if you keep taking care of it, if you keep talking about it. Because a lot of us might feel tired about talking about our book, but the reality is there's always new people finding you and even people who have found you and have been around for a long time, there's probably still some of you YouTube friends that have been watching a lot of videos that still haven't bought and read or listen to because it's on audio as well, self published and succeed. And my new book's going to come out in 2023. So you want to read this one first because the next one picks up where this one leaves off. But there's always new folks. And so you want to keep letting people know about it and also realize that, you know, a lot of people may buy your book today, they may not read it right away. And so six months later they read it and then they tell their friend and their friend is the person who contacts you and wants to invest, you know, invest their money with your business or buy a house with you or, you know, join your course or bring you in to speak, you know, and those things don't tend to happen immediately after your book comes out. So, you know, the first three to six months can be the most exciting because that's when you'll be talking about it. That's when you'll be doing more media, and that's when you'll feel like the most energized about your book, usually. But you'll find if you have written a really great book with a targeted reader that it's intended to help, you will find that ROI is really powerful more than a year later, maybe even two years later. And I mean, my first book, More Than Cash Flow, it. It's been out nine and a half years now, and I still get emails from people that are being impacted by it, that are contacting the people who run the company that I used to have, you know, as a result of read that book. And that's nine and a half years later. So whatever you're doing, you probably just need to keep doing it longer and just keep, keep. I don't want to say building momentum, but keep the momentum going with your book and, you know, look back after two or three years and judge the return. Not after two or three months and judge the return. Okay. So the next thing is kind of on the heels of that, and that is that monetization of a book comes from things other than the book. And to that point, that doesn't mean you won't make money from book sales. You certainly can. And if you write a perennial seller, you know, that book that sells for years to come, like more than Cashflow has in many ways, because I'm not in real estate and haven't been in real estate for a long, long time. And yet that still, that book still outsells this book, which I am talking about all the time. So to have a book that doesn't, that. I'm not talking about outselling this book, you know, that one. I won't go as far as say it's like a perennial seller, like a, you know, a major, major bestseller, but, you know, it's still performing and doing. If I was still in the real estate business, it would still be benefiting me today. But setting yourself up to use the book as a hub in your empire, you know, to make your soil, fertilize that soil and plant the seeds and grow from there, that is a really, really lucrative approach. And a book can be the very reason, you know, as I just mentioned, you know, it could be the very thing that they read it and now they trust you. They feel like they have a Deep connection to you. They understand why you do what you do and why it's beneficial to them. And now they're like, yep, I want to give you my money to invest or to buy this or to consult with you so that you can help me directly. They want to buy the products that you sell. They want to take your course or your workshop or have you speak. And those things are far more, far more valuable than a book sale. And that doesn't mean you don't care about book sales at all, because a lot of what you do will be measurable by book sales. But generally speaking, you know, I. A lot of. Actually, two of the calls that I had last week with people thinking of working with us, they. I think two of them, two of them got the book free at an event. So I don't necessarily promote the book free out in the world, but when I'm at an event of people where the people are generally a good fit for working with book launchers, I'll give the book to them. And two of them, I think it was two of them had read it or one of them had read it or gotten it free and read it. And the other one had a friend that met me at an event, got a copy of the book, and they had told them about it. I think that's how it went, regardless. What I love about books is their ability to build that trust when you're not in the room and you're not even aware it's happening. And it also gives people an easy way to refer others to you. And it can be the start of a beautiful thing if you're growing a business or building a brand or kind of evolving from where you are. Or it can be the fire that makes you grow kind of fuel on the fire, I should say. But I. I always like to kind of remind people that are focused on book sales that it's not necessarily the best thing to focus on. You know, maybe. And if you are trying to make all your money from book sales, then what you should be doing is writing more and more books and continuously marking marketing everything as you grow your platform. So it's still going to be the hub of your ecosystem. It's just that your monetization is going to be in the entire community and in all the books that you're writing and selling. So. All right, let's see what you guys are talking about over here. Let's see. For Ray Ferry. I don't know how to say your name. I'm sorry, but welcome. It's great to have you here and Sean is here. Happy election day for all of you that can vote anyways. That's, that's the challenge of being an alien in the country. I don't get to vote. I just get to watch you guys all vote. So please, please vote on my behalf. And Mike's here and Bill, welcome. So, you guys, we were taking lessons from publishing, so I would recommend. I'm sorry, I was reading comments as they were coming in. So please share your publishing lessons as you have joined in. Now that's what we're looking for and we're talking about publishing lessons and I'm saying it's from 2022. I have nuanced insights from 2022, but largely this is, you know, overall kind of publishing lessons overall. And oh, it looks like we're light on, on the likes. So let's, let's, you know, get that number a little happier. Maybe more people will join in as well and catch the replay too. Okay, so, and by the way, Gordon, I saw your question come in. Angela is here and she will collect all the questions and I will answer them at the end after we've gone through the. For Ray. Perfect. Thank you for giving me the phonetic pronunciation. I appreciate that. And back to the question. So we'll. Angela collects all the questions that you have that aren't related to exactly what I'm talking about and she puts them in a list for me at the end so I can make sure I cover all your questions then. So, so anytime you have a question, you can go ahead, put it in and I will get to it at the end. Okay. Okay. So social media is valuable, but community is better. And you know, social media, for any of you trying to build social media followings, it's slow, it takes a long time. You know, I, I've seen some people have success building audiences quickly on TikTok. I've seen, I've seen myself some decent results from LinkedIn. I'll be doing a video on, on LinkedIn very soon because I've been posting regularly on LinkedIn. Bill, Bill here, who is here, he does a great job of posting regular content on, on LinkedIn and commenting on other people's materials as well. But generally speaking, it's slow going creating a following on social media. So I don't put a lot of emphasis in it. If you have, if you have it, great. It will be valuable. If you don't have it, I wouldn't worry about it necessarily. Where it is valuable is when you're pursuing speaking media or other kind of exposure opportunities. Sometimes some of those people, some of the event bookers, some of the, the people kind of screening for those, those opportunities. They look for people with audiences because they want you to leverage your audience for them to get new listeners, viewers or attendees to their event. So that's where it can be valuable because people will see, oh, she's got 50,000 followers. That's great. We'd love to have her speak because maybe some of her followers will come and pay tickets to see your speak. I look at social media as an amplifier. You can use it to amplify what you're doing, but it's not really going to be the thing that gets a lot of results. And I've talked about this before because of the numbers on, you know, somebody sees if they even see your post, if they click and then if they click, does that convert into anything? The numbers are pretty abysmal. You can run ads and if you run social media ads, I would recommend running them to your, your reader magnet for an opt in, not for book sales. Because the challenge is that it's really hard to get in to get a good return on your ads. With books, you know, you're probably going to make four, maybe six dollars per book sold. And you'll be lucky to run ads that only cost you four to six dollars per book sold. So. So generally speaking, you're better off to get the email address, sell them your book, and sell them other things from that. But again, the social media has value. But my recommendation and what I have seen this year more than ever, and we've even seen a lot of articles in 2022 and I wish I had grabbed one before. I'll try to grab it and put it in the description afterwards. I believe it was in Publishers Weekly this year where they talked about how traditional publishers used to give book deals to social media influencers because they saw them with their million followers and were like, okay, they're going to sell books. And there was a couple of cases this year where those million plus followers did not translate into book sales. And so traditional publishers are even taking a second look at social media and going, maybe it doesn't matter as much as we once thought. And so, you know, that's, I think, a really important thing. But the difference is, is if they're followers or if you have a community, like if you think of. And I just saw Taylor Swift has announced her tour dates for next year. If I think of somebody who has created a community, I think of her. She has not Just a following, but a robust, like, fan base of people who support her, and she supports them. And so that's really, really powerful. And so if you think of people as building communities, not building followers, the community is. Is different. I mean, I think of the folks even here who are here today. I mean, Mike's here, Bill's here, Efren's here, Sean's here. You guys are my community. You're my people, and. And I'm there supporting you, and you are here supporting me, and that means everything. I mean, it's. I've got people like Scott Clancy who emails me. He's like, hey, I don't think this link is going where you want it to. You know, people who take the time to let you know. You know, Efren always sends me these articles. He's like, hey, I think you'll find this interesting. And. And Sean always gives me motivational messages, you know, when I share something. I was particularly emotional at the start of a deep dive, a couple. Whenever I did that, the October deep dive, because I just got some challenging, challenging news, which, you know, I won't go into it now, but it may in the end, it's still going to be rocky for a bit. But just so you know, Sean, it's probably been for the best. So I'm looking forward to 2023 and kind of how the. The tough times I've hit this year are actually going to turn out, I think, to be in my favor in 2023. But all that said, you know, Sean heard the emotion in my voice and sent me a note. And so that's community to me. And so it's not about tacking, like, rallying up. Okay, awesome. I've got 500,000 supporters. To me, it's. I've got YouTube besties, and I'm here for you and you're here for me. And that means I have people who are going to write reviews, they're going to buy my book, they're going to tell other people, and vice versa. And I think it's a bit of a mindset shift for a lot of people to focus on building a community versus creating followers. But I think if you do that, you'll find that you're in a much stronger position when your book launches, when you have services to offer, products to offer. Because again, the big thing that. I've been saying this for a while, but traditional publishing has even found this in 2022, that social media does not sell books like they've expected to. And, like, they've done the math to calculate that it has maybe even maybe as it did in the past and it's not doing it now. So that was, that was something different this year. Not really different for me, but different in kind of the whole industry, how they're looking at these things. All right, let's do a prize. So let's see here. Oh, oh, Deborah's under the weather. Hope you feel better soon. And I see some questions which Angela will collect for me. I, I first, Mike, I thought you were talking about Rolexes. And I'm like, what has happened in the comments that they're talking about Rolexes, but it's Rolodex. Okay, so prizes. So if you comment the day a video is released, that's Tuesday and Friday. Every Tuesday and Friday. And by the way, so I know there was no videos last week, apologies. My editor had Covid and then had a family situation and I'm not sure if he's going to be editing videos for me anymore. But again, community is a wonderful thing. When I shared that, I then had a bunch of video editors and other people refer editors to me. And so now I have three editors testing. So I have new videos for you. Starting Friday, I will have a new video and I have two more for next week. So even if my editor doesn't come back, which would be sad because I love what he did with my channel and he's been with me for four plus years now. But I've got other editors that are working hard to create to turn my green screen raw content into viewable goodness for you guys. So we're back at it. So every Tuesday and Friday, normally we post and if you comment the day a video is released, you get entered to win some of our fabulous swag. Oh, little detour here. But I just ordered and Angela doesn't even know what it is, but I just ordered our swag because we're going to be celebrating our 400th author here pretty soon. And in addition to that, it's holiday. The holiday extravaganza is coming up in December. If you're new to book launchers, you may not know, but we just do a deep dive, a two hour live stream where we just do Q and A and giveaway prizes. And so I ordered some extra, extra special swag. It is not though, Sean, it is not a long sleeved black shirt yet. That'll come next year, my friend. But I'm really excited about this swag and I think my team is going to love it because they're all Going to get one when we celebrate our 400th author. So. So it's a secret for everyone but me. Okay, so. But that's not today's prize. Mugs, journals, I think Angela has to confirm and self publish and succeed are the prizes today. And I've entered everybody's name into my random Name picker. And our first winner of the day is. Could that be for real? I wish you guys could see this. For Ray, I think it's you because I'm going to double check the last name matches, but I think it is. So you are the winner. Let me just check. Is that the same last name? It is. So foray. Good thing I got the pronunciation of your name because you are the first winner of the day. So thank you for commenting on one of the videos. So that's awesome. Thank you. Congratulations. Okay, next one, because I'm going to do both right now is. Did you do it? Spinning. And Alan west, who is in Japan. So I don't know if Alan's here, but we probably will pick something else because we've sent Alan almost everything and. And he's far away in Japan. So Alan. I don't think Alan was here. You just double check before. I just draw again. And hopefully Alan will be okay with that. But if Alan was here, I would say he could pick. I don't think. Nope. Oh, and we do still have a few T shirts left, so thank you, Angela. So for a. If you're not seeing Angela's note there, you need to email her@tamooklauctures.com and let her know your mailing address and your choice. Okay, so I'm going to draw again. So thank you, Alan, for generously allowing us to choose someone else. And today it's easy graphics. I don't know if he's here, but I'm sure he'll tune into the replay. And I think it's been a while since he's won. So let us know what you would like. Easy graphics. Email angelaeambookcontros.com and let her know. All right. Awesome. Okay. And Mike's leaving, but he'll be back in 10, so we'll still be here. Mike and Quizmaster China. You gotta be in it to win it. So if you have not, speaking of that, posted your publishing lesson, please go ahead and post it because Angela's gonna collect all of them up and she'll draw from those publishing lessons. And she just found that out now. So now she's frantically going back and going, okay, who's Written who's posted a publishing lesson, and she's gonna collect the names and figure and pull one of them as our one winner for the day. One of our participation winners for the day. Okay, so this is kind of what Rachel, who was here when at the beginning, was talking about her lesson, which is Amazon does not like every title. And this is my other lesson is what worked yesterday might not work tomorrow. Which is kind of like saying what works for one book doesn't always work for another. This has been the year of Amazon glitches. In 2021. It was paper short, and timing of things was much slower. There was fewer people. There was the paper shortages. You know, a lot of people were off sick and just lots of kind of interruptions in the whole supply chain of books. This year has been less that and more glitchy. And we. I covered a lot of the glitches that we were seeing recently. We still have one book that. It's like every glitch that could have happened has happened to it. And it's been frustrating for the author and very frustrating for us. And, you know, we're able to escalate things to a certain point. We have connections to a point, but certain glitches, you know, we're just not. We. We hit the old wall. We know it's a known glitch and we're trying to fix it. And I guess if they haven't fixed it, there's nothing we can do. And then, as Rachel alluded to, we've hit a couple of situations where there's books that we just can't run ads for. So the title, for whatever reason, is against their guidelines. And it's not even a title with swears in it because, I mean, like, you know, the f. You know, subtle art of not giving a F. You know, that's a swear word that's hidden. And we know that we've. We've run into that before. And so we are able to warn a client that that is likely to be something you won't be able to promote in a lot of normal channels, such as Amazon ads. And that's a choice that some authors make especially. They're like, fine, I don't care about that. I still want this title. But sometimes we run into brand new things. And I talked about this. I think it was last year, might have been 2020, but we had books getting kicked back from Apple because they had the word Amazon in it. And in that case, it was actually talking about, like, the Amazon Forest or the Amazon river or Something. It was something Amazon Geographic, not Amazon, the company, but it was a mention of Amazon was kicking it back. And so this is the fun of this world, is that what worked and what was kind of standard is always changing. It doesn't do a 180. But we run into these things where we're like, what? Like, that worked fine before. And we've seen this too, where we upload a book, it gets approved, we make one little change to the book and then we upload it, and then it gets kicked back for some reason. So it's a little bit of an adventure. But we also have a couple of books that we can't get. Ads. We can run the ads, but we can't get them to generate results. And we've tried everything and they should be working, but we haven't been able to crack the code on why these particular. There's two right now that we just can't get sales from the ads for. And it's frustrating, but it's also kind of fun to find these challenges and to work hard and to try and figure them out. And next week is a great week for figuring out a lot of things. It's 20 books to 50k, an event here in Las Vegas. I think we're going to see Efren there, so that'll be fun. But this is a really cool event because there's. It's a whole bunch of authors all in one place, and all the speakers are authors. And so you can hear some of the challenges that people are encountering, but also how they're overcoming them, how they're thinking them through. So I'm really excited to just go there and kind of just sit in the back and write down notes and soak it up and bring it back to the team. And Sarah, from our book marketing team will be there too, soaking it all in. So there isn't a magic bullet. And sometimes there's easy fixes and common solutions, but other times, you know, the things that worked yesterday just don't work. And so for you, what this means is if you're fighting with something in particular with Amazon, because that's where we've been fighting most of the battles lately. You're not alone. And it's not just book launchers. You know, this has been something that a lot of people are talking about in the industry for the last four to six weeks in particular, with the glitches. But it's also, I think, one of those things where sometimes you kind of have to just go, okay, like, pursue the solution for as far as you can. But then at a certain point you go, okay, well, that's not an option anymore, so what can I do instead? And as I was alluding to, you know, even with my own personal situation, you know, I hit a really big, big roadblock and some big challenges, and yet it's going to turn out to be a really, really great gift. And so I think, you know, in Rachel's case, where she can't run ads on Amazon, the gift might be that she and we find somewhere else to focus her, her advertising or her efforts to get the book out there. And maybe because of that, we uncover something really cool or some angle that we didn't see before because we were focused on Amazon ads. So that's how I like to kind of look at these things is okay, it's a bit of a pain, it's not particularly fun. And yet there's almost always something that's like, hey, because of that, I'm now looking over here and I'm seeing something I didn't see before. And so that can be the fun of the whole thing, of what work didn't work yesterday or what worked yesterday doesn't work today. And now we have to try something new. And now we might be discovering something totally awesome that we didn't see before. So my final thing, my final publishing lesson for 2022 is something I've stood by for a long time, but I've seen this a lot more in 2022, and this is starting local and building from there. A lot of people, a lot of authors, when they launch the book, they're looking so big and so far they kind of miss the whole opportunity in building kind of grassroots momentum. And a lot of times that grassroots momentum is in your local market and bookstores in particular. And I talked about this, you know, a couple years ago when Barnes and Noble's ownership changed over and they hired the same guy who oversaw the, the transition in the UK to, with Water Stones, Waterstones, I think is how they say it. And he went local and I said, they're going to go more local. That's what they're going to do. They're going to reduce titles and they'll, they'll probably follow the same strategy because it worked really well over there. Sure enough, most of the Barnes and Noble stores have culled a lot of their titles, so they're carrying a lot less books and they have local sections and they have local events and they're really local author focused. They're not only local Author focused, but they're local buying trends. So they look at what their community is buying and they support, support that and they bring in more books and more local books on those, those topics. And so you have the opportunity not just with Barnes and Noble, but your indie bookstores, which, by the way, you know, in many cases your indie bookstore, if you become a regular customer at your indie bookstore or your indie library and you become a familiar face and then you go in and say, hey, I've got a book launching, you'd be surprised at what they'll be willing to do to support you. So build that relationship now while you can, before your book launches. Because when you do launch your book, if you're just going in there for the first time, it doesn't have the same impact as if you've been buying books or, you know, attending events or whatever it is for six months or a year or even longer before you go in and say, hey, remember me? I have a book coming out. But the real, the really cool opportunity is, is in your local market for a lot of things, not just your bookstores and libraries. But, but I'm sticking with that for now because a lot of the shift, it's not, it's not been an overnight shift, but it's a shift that we've been seeing more and more. You know, a lot of the buying used to be done from a regional office and pushed down and even head office and pushed down. You know, still a lot of the space is sold to publishers. So you know those tables when you walk in and you see those bestseller tables, those aren't bestsellers. They were bought. That was display space that somebody paid for in most cases. Sometimes they have legit, but in many cases it's actually bought and paid for space by the publishers to guarantee, you know, exposure and coverage for those books. But they also have a lot more space dedicated to local and local events and things and even topics. So monthly genre topics, they might have an upcoming theme that they're focused on. And those can be really great opportunities for you. A couple of notes with bookstores, because I always like to remind people of this. Yes, Amazon has global distribution and no, your local bookstore does not want to buy from Amazon. They don't care that you were an Amazon bestseller either. They don't care about Amazon. So when you go into your local bookstore, library is different. But when you go into your local bookstore, don't mention Amazon. Let's talk about the book awards, the media, what you're going to do to help them sell your book and just avoid Amazon altogether. And make sure you're listed with Ingram and that you've set your discount at 55% or that you're going to strike a consignment arrangement with that store. And then you want to look like you're a great supporter of local bookstores, include your local bookshop links and your local bookstore links on your website or your social media profiles, or post about your local bookshop and include links to their store to help support them. So really, that's my final tip on that. But I'll also kind of emphasize that Amazon's not the only player in town. And the more authors create relationships and pursue other opportunities outside of Amazon, the stronger the publishing community can be. Because the more power we give Amazon, the more we're at their mercy with these glitches, and the harder it is to gain momentum when Amazon isn't running your ads or isn't letting you do certain things or is raising the price of your book at random or whatever's been happening. So I really, I go wide, even though I make less money going wide and I don't sell a ton of books outside of Amazon, you know, I still go wide and I will always go wide. But it was fun when Spotify launched audiobooks because I'm not wide. You know, my book was on there day one. My book was listed on, on Spotify for audiobooks because I am listed wide and was uploaded through Findaway Voices. So those are my lessons. Let's see what you guys have to share and we'll do our participation prizes and answer all the questions today. See what we've got over here. Okay. I love Your comment, Efren. 2023 is going to rock. Adversity is a catalyst to purpose, action, and success. Yeah, I feel, I feel like that's a great summary of my 2022 share. Your editors, Julie? Not yet. Yeah, my video editors. Once I have good ones, I can share them consistently. Okay. And I, I hope the editors keep the bloopers in too, Mike. That's something I'm working on with them. I can tell you the first video, it might not have had a lot of bloopers, or at least good ones, but the first one that I have does not have bloopers in it. But that's something I am encouraging them all to do as well. Checking out the comments. Okay. Will the updated swag include. Include new T shirts? Yes. And Efren says he loves the comfort of the current ones. I know to me, it's really important that you get. You know, for anybody getting swag, I pay extra to make sure that we get the soft. The softest. Because, you know, what's the point of having swag if nobody wears it? I get a ton of T shirts when I go to these conferences and a lot of them are that like, harsh kind of feeling fabric. And I'm like, they just wasted whatever that was, five bucks or seven bucks on getting this T shirt printed because I'm never going to wear it versus the ones that are soft. I wear them all the time. So I'd rather spend a few more dollars on a T shirt to make sure it's soft because then you're gonna wear it and you're gonna love it. So, yeah, always, Always. We always make sure that they're soft and good quality. Okay. Angela says the current T shirts are the last of the stock. We don't currently have new T shirts, but that is going to be something I will get again next year. But Sean has put in a special request for long sleeve T shirts first, so that's probably what I'll do. Still debating, haven't. I haven't finalized that choice yet. Keywords and search terms are critical success factors for Book Description and Amazon ads. Yes, they are. And my favorite tool for that is Publisher Rocket. But. But I don't know always if publisher Rockets words for Amazon ads are the best. We often are finding that we are not using their keywords for ads and getting better results when we don't use their Amazon ad keywords. But for beginners, I think it's a great place to start. And as always, I will put. Put it in here. Or maybe Angela has it. Our affiliate link for Publisher Rocket. So if you're getting it, you not only will it give me or us book launchers a little kickback, but then if there's any issues ever, you can contact me and we'll go straight to Rocket and get it sorted for you. Okay, I'm ready for questions, Angela. I was just checking everybody's comments. Oh, Dale's here. Hey, great to have you here, Dale. I've seen you've been working on a new. A new book. That's what I saw. I was like, there's something that Dale was working on that I haven't talked to him about. We're gonna see you next week too, right, Dale? I think you're gonna be at 20 bucks, so that will be fantastic. Okay, Angela. Waiting for. Waiting for the questions. And Dale, Dale has a hoodie. I think Dale has our backpack too. Okay, first question is from Gordon. How much do I need to spend on a blog or your LinkedIn account? I'm not sure. I don't know what that's referring to. So, I mean, if you are creating a LinkedIn account, you can create it for free. You don't need to spend Money on your LinkedIn account. If you're writing a blog, well, you need a website. So you may or may not spend money building a website. But yeah, I'm not totally sure I'm getting your question, so we might need more clarification on that piece. Let's see, question two. Beret. Which one is better, the author's website or a publishing company website? Well, in my case, it's about. I mean, the author is the publishing company. And so generally speaking, if you're kind of asking. So, like for example, my books. Oh, that one doesn't have a logo on the side. It's fine. My books are published by Stick Horse Publishing and. But there is no Stick Horse Publishing website. It's all my website, which is my personal website, as well as on book launchers. I don't think we actually have all three of my books on book launchers dot com. So I would say you want to have. It depends on your goals and what you're doing. But if it's just your books, I would have your own branded website and build your own brand and have reader magnets that will feed into your brand and your funnel and kind of what your bigger picture goal is for your book. You've got five new nonfiction books. Wow. Yeah, I saw the beta for the self publishing book, so that's exciting. Wow. 5. So NaNoWriMo is not fiction for you this month. So you wrote the fiction book and then you were like straight into, I'm going to write five nonfiction books. Dale, you're a beast. That's awesome. Okay, Efren, question three. Efren, my reader Magnet PDF, Will book launchers provide their experience, experience suggestions and creative design to make it look nice? I have ideas aside from my boring text with photos PDF, as in now. So in our service in the platinum level, we generally provide guidance. There is the option to add on the website and PDF reader magnet and email sequence. I don't know if you did that, Efren. If you did that, then yes, we will build your website or design that lead magnet, edit it and give you a lot of guidance on it. And if you didn't do that, then in your group marketing calls that Nicole is hosting, they'll give you guidance and ideas on that. And, and then you can always ask her in one of the kind of one on one calls that you have to tailor your strategy. So. But yeah, that is something that we talk about a lot. So we'll give you as much guidance and support on those pieces as possible. Question four from Gordon. Do Amazon marketing tools work? It seems though, they just want you to throw money at the feature. So if you're talking about Amazon ads, like AMS ads, yes, they work. Not always. I mean, as Rachel was saying in the beginning, and one of my notes was, they don't work for every book. Some books, we have not been able to get them to work. We have two books, like I said, right now we can't get ads to sell books. And then we have a one book right now that was rejected and another one earlier this year that was rejected based on the title. And the title was not expected to be something that would stop the Amazon from allowing us to run ads in this one case. So. So in those cases, no, they don't work. But for a lot of authors. And running Amazon ads is a really, really great tool. And it's not like running ads on Facebook or Google where as soon as you set your budget, it's like your budget just gets sucked up into the ether. And it may or may not have done anything. With Amazon, I find it in the beginning, it's really hard to actually spend money and get them actually to use the budget that you set. It's a, I find it's a really, really strong tool. It doesn't sell thousands of books for most authors, but it, it is a tool that will help you sell books. And if you are already converting when you send traffic to Amazon, it's kind of, it just adds fuel to the fire and your book will show up more places and see more, be seen by more people. And a lot of book marketing isn't just getting somebody to see your book once, right? Book marketing is getting people to see your book over and over and over again. Because it's not the first time that they see it. That is usually the time they buy it. Right? It takes somebody hearing you on a podcast and you know, seeing your book, an ad on your book ad, and then maybe having somebody even recommend it and then they finally buy it. You know, it's a lot of touch points for people to pull out their credit card and take action. And so, you know, having ads running is just another touch point. And it may be the thing that converts them or it might just be that they keep Seeing your book to the point where they're like, I gotta buy this. I keep seeing it. Right? It's those kind of things. So, yes, they work. But yeah, not always and not for everyone. Which is kind of what we were talking about earlier today. Oh, interesting. I'm excited to see how that works. Dale said that he is finally pulling the trigger on these books and he might self fulfill. No Amazon this time. So that'll be really exciting and interesting. I can't wait to see how that works. So if you do videos on that, tag me. I can't wait to see that. Question 5 As a follow up. So Gordon said. Oh, I just meant in terms of book marketing. Do you need to lure readers in through a blog coupled with an email list? Okay, awesome. There's not one magical approach to this, and it depends on your audience, where they're hanging out, who they're listening to, you know, what it is that you're offering them. I kind of, like I just said, I find that one thing isn't going to work. You have to do multiple things. That doesn't mean you have to do everything, but it does mean that you want to have multiple things on the go in order to get results with your book. But it does come back to making sure that you've got a really strong product. So that title needs to speak clearly to your reader. Sell a benefit. Your cover has to package it up in a way that makes people curious, makes them want to click on it. And. And then you can run ads and then you can write blogs, you can post on LinkedIn, you can talk about it. But ultimately, you know, one of the most powerful ways to sell books is to get somebody else to recommend your book. And so that can be in the form of influencer outreach. That can be in the form of, you know, if you can get a speaking engagement, they might talk about your book. Podcast interviews. Getting in front of other people's audiences can be a shortcut or it can be something that is in addition to the other things. And it can all work to build momentum. Okay. Oh, question six. I am writing a supernatural horror short story. Do they sell well on Amazon as a first book? Dale, you want to take that one. So we only do nonfiction, and I don't even read supernatural or horror, so I am not of any value. But Dale, who is, who seems to be hanging out in the comments, he may have some comments for you on that, and I welcome you to comment. And if you're not already visiting Dale's channel, please do. Especially his Videos he did. He went for Halloween. He went to a haunted house and was writing a book in a haunted house, which I thought was really, really cool. So, yeah, go check out his channel if you haven't already. Okay, question seven, Deborah says, where do we get copies printed if we want to sell them at seminars or speeches? I don't want to get them printed in China. So, I mean, generally speaking, there's, there's a few ways you can do this. So I generally go to Ingram and I mean, or even kdp. KDP actually is slightly cheaper, but Ingram has a slightly better quality. So I would go straight there and just order 200 books from them. If you are ordering thousands and thousands, you may want to go overseas or start contacting local print shops. There is a bulk service that we work with and I'm just blanking on the name right now. But Sarah, you can always reach out to Sarah or when you're talking to Nicole, ask them, Deborah. But for me personally, like when I go to PodFest or Podcast Movement, I'm going to an ALA, an American Library association event in January. I am, I'm speaking on how to work with your local indie authors on library programming. So I'm really excited about that talk at the ALA event. But I'm just going to. I just order my books from Ingram and have them shipped to the event and it works out to, I don't know, about $5 a book. So you can definitely get it cheaper if you print them by the thousands. But I'm pretty happy paying that with shipping included to order, you know, 200 books to for these events. So. Okay, I think. Oh, Victoria had a question. I don't know if Angela sees that question and is it okay to. Oh, there it is. Sorry, Victoria. Will book launchers help to develop a companion workbook to a published book? Yeah, if we've worked with you, which, you know, I know, but if we have worked with you on your book, then. So there's kind of two ways we'll do workbooks when you're going through the whole process. We can add a workbook on while we go through it because it's easy to break it out when we're going through editing, etc. When your book is already done. We have a workbook add on that we can do for you. And I don't know how much it is, but it's, it's pretty reasonable because we've already gone through a lot of the work and will help break out the workbook from your existing material. If that's what you want. Or if you have the material ready to go edit, design it and set it all up for you, then yes, we can do that for non clients. We don't do workbook only but we, we do do it for clients that have worked with us on their book and we can do it as an add on. So you can just write some support book launchers.com if you want more information on that and they'll get you the details. Hey Tony. Hello. Speaking of people that are helping edit books, Tony is one of the folks that is or edit books, sorry, edit videos. We were talking about you earlier, Tony, so welcome. Angela, was there another one? I feel like I missed one. Is that it? I thought I saw one more on AI. Come in. Oh, there's Catherine. I see it. Is it okay? Is it okay to use AI generated art for book covers? Thanks for your talks. I love listening to them. Well, thank you for being here. So when you say it's oh, is it okay, I'm assuming you kind of mean from a copyright basis or from an aesthetic basis. I'm not quite sure. And so this is one of the areas that I'm watching right now and what I'm seeing, it depends on the source of the original kind of design that the AI has gone from. So depending on the source, there could be or may not be copyright potential issues with the imagery. But assuming there's no issue there, I think there's kind of where I see it at least how book launchers may use it in the future is we have a brilliant person who oversees our design work and she could be potentially someone who teaches and trains and uses the AI for some of the design design, but it's still human generated. It's just the AI supports it and there can be imagery that we maybe can't find in a stock photo or that we, you know, we can take her work and kind of train the AI to use it. From an aesthetic point of view, I still think it's, it's good. I've seen some really cool book covers designed by AI and at the end of the day I still think that human person, human person, redundant. I still think there needs to be a human at the helm. But I do think there's some really cool opportunities with, with AI for cover design and how it can be trained to do certain things and how a base image can be used to generate other images. It's really exciting and I could see a lot of potential for social media posts as well going forward. So hopefully that Answered your question. I wasn't quite sure which direction to take it. Okay. Okay. So finally, participation prize today is November 8th. So let's go up from. Let's see. Where are we? Where are we? Let's go 8. There's a lot of Angela's in here. I just. I was trying to find this place where Angela wasn't commenting so much. You're rocking it out in the comments, Angela, so thank you. I don't know. Let's go. So, Angela, first we have the publishing lessons. So hopefully you picked one, someone that shared a publishing lesson and we can give them a prize. And then also, let's go eight from. Let's go eight from the top. Why not? So eight from the top. So we'll go back to the people who are here at the very beginning and that those will be our two prizes. So I'll give Angela a moment to share our prize winners, and then it'll be just in time. And five came in. I have wrote a story of mine in my language, and I want to publish it English. So what is your advice for me? Hire folks that. So I assume it's translated. If it's not translated, you want to get it translated from your language into English and then hire an English team to edit, design, and get the book ready for whatever market you want to put in. We have one book that was in. I can't remember what language it was in, but she had it translated. She actually sold it in Europe and she had it translated. And then we've been editing it to the English language. It's been interesting, though, because there's some nuances in. In certain words and certain ways that she wants things expressed. And they don't always translate exactly the way you want them to, which is why it's important to get an English team editing and setting up the design for your book. Because what is acceptable in other countries for a cover or even what's desirable in other countries for your coverage may not be what is the COVID that you want for the country that you want to market it to? Okay, Angela picked the publishing lesson from Ryan Franklin. It was amazingly tough to hear feedback from my manuscript for the first time, but it gets easier. So congratulations, Ryan. You have won. So you can let Angela know what prize you would like. And Gordon is the eighth comment from the beginning, not. Not including Angela's comments. So, Gordon, congratulations. So, Ryan and Gordon, please email angelaeamooklaunchers.com we do have a couple of T shirts left in kind of select sizes, I think we had like an extra large and a small left last last time. And so let her know if you want that or if you want a mug or you want self publish and succeed or a journal. And make sure you share her mail at your mailing address because she won't know where to send it if you don't. All right, thanks you guys. You kept me busy today. It was wonderful to have so many familiar folks in the live today. So thank you so much for joining in. Deep dive on the 19th book launchers.com forward/deep dive. It is a NaNoWriMo style. So we're going to be doing writing sprints and writing. So if you are working on a project, come join us on the 19th for some prizes and some focused writing time. And we'll be back here in two weeks, same time, same place. All right. Thanks everybody. Here we go.