Julie BroadYour Non-Fiction Sidekick for Writing, Publishing & Marketing a Book That Builds Your Brand and Grows Your Biz

Stop Writing for Everyone, Start Selling to Someone #BookMarketing #AuthorEmpire #NicheMarketing

26 Apr 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:29

In this monologue, Julie Broad explains the critical difference between buyers (those who hire speakers) and readers (those who purchase books) and why authors who also speak must appeal to both. She argues that writing a book should be a strategic tool to secure paid speaking engagements, targeting the buyer who will benefit from the author's expertise. Broad illustrates this with a case study of a tactical lockpicking book aimed at first responders; the niche focus attracted a crime‑writers conference that invited the author to speak, leading to a high conversion rate (about 75% of outreach resulted in interviews or paid gigs). She emphasizes that while niching can feel exclusionary, it actually creates strong, specific demand and can still generate broader opportunities, as niche success signals value to other audiences. The overall message encourages authors to stop trying to please everyone and instead focus on a well‑defined audience to drive both book sales and speaking revenue.

Chapters

There's buyers and there's readers, and they're not always the same. And especially when you're a speaker, you have a different buyer than you do a reader, and yet your job is to appeal to both of them, right? So we're writing a book when we want to get more paid speaking engagements. We're writing a book that the buyer, being the person who's gonna put us on that stage, they're excited about it. It's gonna make them look good for finding you and putting them in front of the reader. One of my favorite stories, we had a book on tactical lockpicking. Right? And so it's a book on how to get through locked obstacles to save lives and reduce property damage. So the market basically was first responders, but in the marketing for that book, an interesting thing happened. And I think it was Sarah got the call from a crime writers conference that said, hey, we would like to have this guy come speak and teach everybody how to pick locks so that they can write more accurately about it in their book. And I only share that because a lot of people are afraid of excluding people when they go niche. He was To this date, the best wins we ever had, because like everybody that Sarah and her team pitched for him were like, "Yeah, like that solves a problem that we have and it's exactly what we need." So he immediately had traction, right? If you can imagine 75% of the people that you reach out to want to interview you, pay you, whatever it is, that's what he had because he went niche and he solved a very specific problem that a very specific audience has. And he had opportunities outside of that niche because there's still people that will want what you have. It's like, I've been to events that are for women and there's men there. It's okay, right? But at least you'll appeal to somebody. Strongly, and other people are going to go, well, I want that too.