In this testimonial video, author Alex Vohr (author of "Speed Kills: Leveraging John Boyd's OODA Loop to Build Organizations That Win") reviews his experience with the self‑publishing service Book Launchers. He highlights the company's deep knowledge of the nonfiction self‑publishing community, including Julie's instructional YouTube videos, and their expertise in design, author bios, and platform navigation. Vohr credits Book Launchers' comprehensive editorial process—copy editing, fact‑checking, multiple rounds of proofreading—for delivering a professional‑quality book that far exceeded what he could have achieved on his own. The service also provided robust marketing support through the Author Launch Kit, which gave actionable ideas that helped him promote the book. As a result, the book has opened doors for podcast appearances and speaking engagements, aligning with his primary career goal. Vohr contrasts self‑publishing with traditional publishing, emphasizing that self‑publishing lets authors retain full rights to their work, and despite the higher upfront cost, he considers the investment well‑spent and would repeat the process without hesitation. He recommends Book Launchers to first‑time authors who lack the knowledge to navigate self‑publishing successfully.
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They understand the self-publication community for nonfiction. There's just a trove of videos out there that they have on YouTube that Julie puts out all the time that are very, very helpful for those who are publishing. And they also understand how to work with all of the, the self-publishing platforms, and they understand the importance of COVID design and of things like author bios. If I had to fumble my way through that, just the product I would've developed would've been a much lower quality than I got through Book Launchers. Hi, my name's Alex Voor, and the book that I just wrote is called "Speed Kills: Leveraging John Boyd's OODA Loop to Build Organizations That Win." What inspired me to write my book was when I was a young guy starting out in the Marine Corps, I was introduced to this modern-day war theorist named John Boyd.. And one of the things that John Boyd was most famous for was a model, a theoretical model that he put together for the way organisms and organizations work within their environment and when competing. It's called the OODA loop, which stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. And I've been thinking about that quite literally for about 35 years. And when I left the Marine Corps, there were people who were interested in learning about that, probably have been working on it from the beginning of the outline until now for about 12 years. The real benefit of Book Launchers for me is they made my book much, much better than it otherwise would have been. I have seen people who self-published who went directly from content editing. You're going to end up with problems, whether it's sentence structure, word usage, misspellings. And so I was totally impressed with, with Book Launchers and the editing that I got from them. I got copy editing. I had fact-checking and I had proofreading and then, you know, multiple iterations of proofreading at the end. And I feel like I truly got a professional product out of them. In terms of what this book has done to move my career, I have done a few podcasts and I've already had some people express interest in having me come and speak to their organizations. And that's more of my goal with this book than anything else. But I will say that in terms of marketing, Book Launchers has some, some really super tools out there. The Author Launch Kit, which they've just put out, is fantastic. Gives great ideas that help with marketing and help you. It's as difficult to market your book as it is to write your book. I'd recommend Book Launchers to people because they're so immersed in this space. For a first-time author who's looking to self-publish, you just wouldn't know what you're even missing because you, you know, you don't even know the right questions to ask. Book Launchers has people who do this full-time who are very experienced in it. So the way I kind of look at this thing is, I mean, you have two routes that you can go as an author. You could be— you go traditional publication or you could go self-publishing. I mean, the biggest advantage at the end of the day with self-publishing is that you own your book and the rights to it. You know, completely. And so it's, it's one of these things where you're going to spend some money on it and I'm going to, you know, Book Launchers is not an inexpensive proposition, but in my mind, that was some of the best money that I spent over the last year. It really was fantastic. So I would do it again in a heartbeat.
