The Biggest and Best Book Marketing Tips - Plus Upcoming Book Launch Details

Hello, Happy Tuesday. I am so excited for today and I'm also excited because I have arrived in the right streaming. I started off in the wrong one. So today is an exciting day. We are sharing the news of Self Promote and Succeed. My new book, the follow up to Self Publish and Succeed is coming out October 3rd. So I've got all the details on how you can join my book army or advanced reviewers, if you want to call it that. And I've got some tips that I'll share from inside of that. But while we're waiting for folks to join in, say hello if you are new to the live streams or you're watching the replay. Just so you know, there's prizes for participation. So it pays to say hello and be vocal in the chat. And also we also give away the prizes for everybody who comments on the day a video is released. So every Tuesday and Friday we don't count our shorts that get released, we just count the videos, the official long form videos that get released on Tuesdays and Fridays. So every video that is released, if you comment within that day, within 24 hours of that video being released, you get entered to win some of our fabulous hashtag no boring books swag. Like our hat is one of our kind of six year anniversary swag items. Of course you also get entered to win our books Self Publish and Succeed and soon Self Promote and Succeed. Our journal and our mug, which somebody stole out of my office, it is gone. I thought maybe I misplaced it, but no, somebody took it. But anyways, that just tells you how hot and demand it is that somebody would take it out of my office. All right, so hello. Tbody Efren's here. Stella Golf, welcome. David. Hola. Back to you, Sydney, Jennifer, Anthony, great to have all of you here. Okay, so while I've got you, let's make sure your calendars are ready for the fun. So first of all, our next deep dive is happening September and I just forgot the date so Angela will have to put it in there. It's Saturday, I want to say Saturday, September 16, but Angela will confirm it and, and it's going to be on book marketing. That is essentially the theme of this month because Self Promote and Succeed is in fact all about book marketing. Self Publish and Succeed. My first, well, not my first book, but the book before this one. It really laid the foundation for writing a book that is set up to sell and Self Promote and Succeed takes you through actually planning and selling that book. And you know, being that it is, I believe a very Layered process. We do touch on some of the elements that were in self publish and succeed because you want to have it in your book. But it really goes into a lot of pieces around book marketing and in fact, how a lot of people. First of all, there's a couple things that I really aim to help folks with, and that is that a launch is just one part of the process of book marketing. And in fact, you know, it's. It's a stop on your journey, but it is not the destination as an author. And so I think book marketing and selling books and achieving your goals with your books goes so much further than just that one day. And so I really try to take the emphasis off launch, Although we do talk about launching books. Of course, there's our four launch strategies in this book. But really I talk about how the fact, you know, I open the book and I share that many good books don't sell, and that's how I open the book. I start with the good news. The good news is you can write the best book in the whole wide world and it still won't sell. And that is because you have to have a plan. You have to understand who your reader is and how you're going to reach them with your book and with your message. And that is one of the big reasons that you can have the greatest story in the whole wide world and shop it around publisher to publisher, and they will not give you a deal. Every once in a while they might, but usually you won't get a deal with a traditional publisher just because you have a great story. Because they know this. They know that what's going to sell a book is somebody's platform, an audience, a clearly matched audience to book. And so this is what I talk about a lot in the book. I also really venture past book sales because especially for nonfiction authors, success is so much more than bestseller status. In fact, many authors that don't achieve bestseller status can still achieve massive success as a result of their book because they're having impact. They've now differentiated themselves from everybody else in their field. They have increased the personal brand value that they have. They're now known as a thought leader. They're generating massive amounts of leads. They can. They're opening new doors to opportunities, paid speaking engagements. Maybe now they're teaching workshops or course sales. They're on panels. You know, the. The opportunities as a nonfiction author are so much more tremendous than just book sales. And a lot of authors don't even go into it saying, I want to sell hundreds of Thousands of books, they go into it going, I want this book book to lead to thought leadership. I want to be known a known name in my industry or I want this to generate leads for my business or raise my value in this industry. And so one of the big things I talk about in this book is making sure that you're matching what you're doing with your book marketing to those goals. Because a lot of book marketing out there focuses you straight to selling books, which is nice, but it doesn't always get you exactly where you want to go. And so, and sometimes it gets you there, but it's a much longer path than just going direct to using your book to open the doors to where you want to go. So I'm really excited to share this book with you because I think there's a lot of fundamental messaging and tactics and matching the tactics to your goals that happens in this book that you even if you have been a loyal like person in studying everything book marketing, I think there's still some interesting approaches and concepts and tying things together that you have not seen in other books or content or courses out there. So I hope you're excited to be invited to be part of my book army and my early advanced reviewers, because that's what we're going to do today. So we have a link for you to go ahead and join in our book army and Angela's going to drop it in the chat because I don't have the link here. I think it's juliebrod.com forward/, maybe self promote and succeed. I'm not sure. So she's going to drop it in there. And so what you'll do is you'll go there and just sign up. It's just name and email address and that will get you tagged into our book army and you'll get an email and the email will explain the four steps. It's very simple. Step one is going to be you'll get notified as soon as my book is available on Amazon for 99 cents. So we're setting. We're actually Amazon's been acting really funky lately. And so my book is stuck in this quality control processing phase. We had thought it would be live and we would have it on for 99 cents today. But it's just, it's just in this funky thing that a lot of our clients have faced this lately where Amazon is like going through this really weird staged process that it didn't used to go through. Possibly it's because of the books that have been produced by AI, I don't know, I could speculate all day long. But regardless, as soon as as it's available and we're able to put it at 99 cents, I will send an email to everyone that joins the book army and step one will be buy it for 99 cents. I'm not promoting it anywhere at 99 cents. This is just so that when you post your review, it is a verified review on Amazon. So step one, buy it for 99 cents. Step two, email Angela that you bought it. And step three, she'll get you a copy, an ebook copy. But if you prefer a print copy, which I totally get, you can let her know a mailing address. It'll just be a little bit slower for us to get you with a copy because we're just getting our print proofs. I should have them next week for an event that I'm at and I know Efren's at and a few other clients I think are going to be at, which is tied in with Lewis Howe's event and Nick Hutchinson of Book Thinkers, he's hosting an event before it. So I'm hoping I have print proofs in my hand for that event and, and then we can send out some print proofs which are proofs. These are all ARC copies. There's still some changes that are underway with these copies, but then you can read it. And then on launch week you will get another email and it will be time for you to share it to your social media, if you are willing to do that. And most importantly, post a review on Amazon, Goodreads and wherever you buy books. So that's the simple process. Once your review is posted, you can take an extra step and email a screenshot to Angela and we will have a reviewer party, which is what we did with self publish and succeed. So everybody who supports the book, you know, and if you're not able to post a review, which some people weren't able to post reviews last year, Amazon's very sticky about this stuff. Just let us know or post, post something on social media promoting the book, send it to us and we'll get you invited to our. It's really a supporter party that we will have. It's a virtual party and we have lots of prizes and fun and Q and A, probably some trivia. So we'll have lots of fun in our party. That will happen about a month after launch and launch is October 3rd. So that's all of that. So the link, Julie, Angela posted it. Juliebroad.com self promote and succeed. That's how you get on the advanced reviewer copy, or our book army, as we like to call it. Efren's already signed up. High five, my friend. Thank you very much. And Stella is having a clunky thing with Amazon too. So I know it's not just us and our books and our clients books. A lot of people are complaining about the clunkiness of Amazon these days. So Peter's here. Hello from Australia from down under. Thank you for being here. And of course Bill's from Bristol. Alana's here too. Hello, Holly from Chicago. It's great to have all of you here today. And so if you missed it, there was two links that we were sharing. One was our deep dive, which is going to be me teaching a bunch of content for from the book, talking book marketing, answering any of your book marketing strategy tactic questions that's happening on September 16th. You can get registered for that@book launchers.com deep dive. And then of course there is the Book army invitation so you can get your early copy of Self Promote and Succeed. And that was juliebrod.com self promote and succeed. So. So if you have questions today, go ahead and post them. Really that is my goal, is to invite you, my loyal YouTube family, to be the book army. We will also be inviting our clients, but beyond that, I'm not planning on opening it up to everyone else. I am just making it fairly exclusive in that it is the folks that have supported me at YouTube or on YouTube and our clients, they'll be part of the advanced reviewer community. And then the rest I will do. I will promote it once it launches and kind of focus on that. We also have a couple other surprises, but I'm not going to reveal those today. But we made a decision today regarding the audiobook which I am feeling really good about now. So I will share that surprise for you a little. Not today, in the next two weeks probably. All right, so just seeing other comments here. Angela shared the Deep dive link as well. And Sloth Dreams Books and publishing signed up and clashes in. So high five. High five. Thank you. Thank you for your support. Hopefully we'll be emailing you later today with the go ahead that it's cleared on Amazon. Otherwise you'll get an email that will tell you the steps and we'll email you whenever the Amazon clears us. But. All right. And Stella is feeling special. That was my goal. Okay, so let me just share a few little tips that are in the book to give you a teaser to help give you guys some Great content for showing up today. And so one of the things that I talk about in this book is the fact that book marketing doesn't sell books, so why does it matter? And I like kind of giving that thought and putting that thought in your head because a lot of people think that book marketing is what sells books. But technically marketing is eyeballs. And one of the things I'm just looking for, my note on this, one of the things to kind of think about is that marketing gives you attention and eyeballs, but sales are the actual, like add to cart, credit card, or sometimes in my mind, a sale is actually just a conversion, which is an email address. Because it depends on your bigger picture goal. And that's why I think it's really important. And if you ever contact us to work with us and you know, have book launchers help write, publish and promote your book, one of the very first questions, you know, we want to understand your reader in as much detail as possible. And then I also think we want to understand your reader, we want to understand the hook of your book. And then we also want to really understand your bigger picture goals. What is success for you from this book? What does it look like? And most of the people that we work with at Book Launchers, you know, getting the bestseller might be something they want to tick off, but really success looks like consulting engagements, speaking engagements, course sales, thought leadership, or legacy. We do have a decent number of clients that really put this book out there because they want it to be in the world for their family, for their employees, for their, you know, their children and their children's children, you know, those kind of, those kind of things. They want the story to be told and to be remembered. And so you got to look at what is that bigger picture goal. Because when you go out there and you're trying to accomplish it, you, if you are using tactics that go, that get you somewhere else, it may not get you to that bigger picture goal. And so that is a lot of what I talk about in the early parts of the book is just lining up that strategy and that tactic. And so I'm just going to pull up the chart that I had. So one of the things is, and I'm just going to go through goal, tactic and how to measure your success. Because this is the other thing to think about is a lot of authors, their only measurement of success is book sales. And yet if you look back after you've had your book out for a while, then, and you realize, oh my gosh, it goes so much. It goes beyond so much more than that. And one of our clients, you know, Scott Bradley, he wrote Screaming for Pleasure, a book. You know, he's a, he's a genre horror expert. So all things horror movies, authors, directors, you know, anything in that genre. And you know, we've been working with him for years and years, which has been an absolute pleasure and honor. And it's fun because when he started out he wanted to be known in the industry. He wanted to really be a peer with the people that he was talking about and that he looked up to. And in the last couple of years he's gotten there, he's on the panels, he's a known expert, he's hanging out with the people that he used to kind of look up to and want to aspire to be like or to be around. And so that's a huge thing doesn't the book sales aren't, you know, they played a role in probably getting him there in many ways, but ultimately that was the goal and that's where he got to. And so if he only measured book sales, he might not feel like he achieved his, his success. So, so book sales, if book sales is your number one only goal, which is not our typical client at book at book at Book Launchers, but it is a typical client as far as, or not a typical client is, it is a typical author, right? They, they, their number one goal is book sales. So their tactics might be things like ebook sales, you know, 99 cent ebook sales, BookBub features, running Amazon ads, running social media ads, doing Goodreads ads, bookbub ads. You know, those kind of things would be tactics that I would consider things that will drive book sales. And their measure of success is simple. It's going to be number of books sold per dollar spent. And then they might have, you know, return on spend and those kind of other measurements. But it's a fairly straightforward kind of tactic to measurement. And then you look at, okay, platform growth, which is a great goal. You know, books are phenomenal, phenomenal platform builders. And you know, that's some of the things I'm not revealing yet, but some of the things we're doing with this book is solely to continue to grow our community and to say thank you to our community and things like that. And so, you know, platform growth is a tremendous goal of an author because when you're out there, so one of the things just to give you to break this one down a little bit, let's say you're on a podcast or you're speaking on a Stage. If your number one goal is to sell books, your one and only call to action is go buy my book. Right? Go buy my book. I'm selling books at the back of the room. Go buy my book at this link. That's your number one and only call to action. If your goal is platform growth, your call to action when you're speaking or you're on a podcast or any media and they allow you to share a link, it's hey, go to my lead magnet and you can get my lead magnet at, you know, book launchers.com forward/game plan, which is our game plan to sell a thousand books without spending more than a hundred dollars. That's a legit link. So you can go there if you want. Bookclinchers.com forward/game plan. And that's your call to action because your goal as an author is to use the book to open the door so that you can grow your platform. How you're going to measure success with this goal is the size of your audience. And your audience might be email lists, social media could be, you know, phone numbers, mailing addresses. You know, it could be anything like that. You know, we measure every day, we measure the growth of our email list, our community on AT Book launchers, the people reading our launch letter. And so that is a measure of success. So if your goal is platform growth, then your measure of success should be something related to that most important piece. And your call to action when you're out promoting your book isn't buy my book, it's join my community. And then of course, once they're in your audience, in your community, then you say, hey, I got this book. Do you want to buy it? And I mean, some people actually write a book, a really good, high quality book, and they generate leads solely by saying, hey, you can, I'm giving my ebook away for free. Go give me your email address and I will send you this book for free. And it's totally legit. But they do it because their number one goal isn't book sales, it's platform growth. And then another example. And then I think you guys get it, the picture about matching your measuring and your strategy and your goal to your tactics. So business growth, right? So say this could be thought leadership too. I think this plays beautifully into thought leadership. I did post a video on Friday of last week. Angela can put the link in this, in the comments here, and I'll put it in the description below for those of you watching the replay. But it was on Five Steps to Thought Leadership. From a book. But let's say your goal is business growth. Your strategy, your tactic that you might be using is. Sorry, not your strategy, your tactic that you might be using because your goal is business growth or thought leadership is publicity. So you're looking for podcasts and media. You want to be in front of the right audiences so that you are attracting that those sales. You're getting that credibility, you're getting that attention. People get that know, like and trust feeling that you're everywhere. So you must know what you're talking about and what you're measuring is ultimately the leads and the sales. Right, the leads and the sales. And if you're. If your goal is thought leadership, to be a known thought leader, I would be measuring. I would probably still be measuring leads and sales, but if thought leadership's a little bit harder to measure, but I would measure the invitations and the opportunities and the new connections that you're getting. That's. And I would have a spreadsheet and I would just track that because that would be a great goal or, sorry, a great form of measure measurement towards your goal. Because really, how do you know when you're a thought leader? But when you start to get invitations to speak at summits, you start to get asked to do live streams, you ask, get asked on podcasts without you pitching the podcast. Those kind of things are really indicative of your moving into or are already considered a thought leader by many people. All right, cool. Scully's House of Thrillers is here. You may have missed, but we are inviting people here to our book army for Self, Promote and Succeed, which is coming out October 3rd. So Scully and everyone else that has joined in, it's at juliebroad.com forward slash, self, promote and succeed. Just sign up and then you will get an email with instructions on what to do as part of my book army. But the. The ask is really simple. You know, download. Basically download a copy of my book and ideally read it, but post a review on October 3rd or sometime after the book has launched and. And support the book in whatever other ways that you can. So posting on social media, telling your friends and family all those things are greatly appreciated to help get the book off to a healthy start. All right, so if anybody has questions, let me know. I'm just going to see what you guys are chatting about. I don't think I've seen any questions flash on by. I'm going to pop over and do some prizes here in a second. And Tbody says, super excited to read your new book. Thank You. I am excited to share it with all of you. And Michael says, that's my goal, to be a paid speaker and thought leader. Fantastic. A book is a really, really great way to do it. And we've seen it. It was actually one of our authors also. She shared a picture of her book Launcher's backpack at the airport. And she said, you know, she was off to this conference in her space. This was Martha Tettenborn, and she was off to a conference in her space. And she was just like, before Book Launchers, you know, I was attending these conferences, and, you know, I was looking kind of like I told the story of Scott Bradley, too. But she said, now, thanks to my book, I'm attending this conference as a peer of the experts that are on stage. You know, I'm their peer now. And she was just so excited. And it was such a great picture. So a book is a great path for that. One of the things I always like to share, though, is that it is not an overnight thing, and it's kind of a funny thing. And I think it's part of this whole launch mentality that the publishing industry has really, and publishers in particular have really driven people to be launch focused. And the reality is that a lot of books can do tremendous things without having a massive, massive launch. And this is why I always. And it also. The thing is, if you're with a publisher and your launch is so. So you're kind of dead to them. They're like, oh, that book didn't do well, and then they move on and they put their resources behind other books. And so as an author, you're kind of left feeling like launch is everything. And yet, if your goal is to be a thought leader and to be a speaker, the launch is barely a blip in what you have to do in order to get there. It is one little milestone along the way of, like, years of work ahead of you. And that's not to discourage you, because it is a path that is fairly well traveled and fairly well proven as far as using a book to get to where you want to go, assuming the book is well positioned to get you in front of the audiences that you want to speak to and that you want to be known as the thought leader for. The challenge is that mental barrier of it's not all about launch. It's about everything else that you do after launch. It's about showing up every Tuesday and Friday in somebody's YouTube channel or somebody's YouTube feed with consistent content. It is about getting on this and the little stages to begin with, because if you're unknown, a lot of people think, I've published a book and you want me to speak for free. Well, I got news for you. We actually ask a lot of people when I say we. I am the learning chair for the Entrepreneur Organization in Las Vegas. And so I book speakers for various events, and I'm part of a lot of meetings of other learning chairs booking speakers. And we have budgets to pay speakers, but some of the chapters have much smaller budgets than others. And so you get really creative and you can ask some really big names to do talks for very little. And many of them will say yes if there's a bigger picture vision of what speaking to this audience can do for them. And so I always kind of encourage authors to be like, if it's a really great audience for you, you never know who's sitting in that audience. And that could lead to some incredible opportunities for you for more speaking engagements, for more thought leadership, kind of positioning activities. So, but that doesn't happen by turning your nose up at every opportunity. That isn't a $10,000 or $15,000 speaking engagement. It happens by thinking strategically and knowing what your end goal is. And, you know, one, a great example from my experience this past year. And so Self Publish and Succeed has been out for three years. I think it came out 2021. It came out in hold on February 23, 2021. So it hasn't been out quite three years. But I can tell you that the speaking engagements and other opportunities that have arisen from that or have really just started this year. And so that means the book was out for a full year and a half before I really started to see momentum that wasn't generated by our outreach. And so there's two kinds of things that happen, right? You use the book as a tool to open the doors yourself, and then over time, the book itself will open doors. But what I've found is that it takes time for that book to get out there for people to read it and go, wow, this is awesome. I need this person to come to my event and speak. And so that's what I have found this year, is the book landed on some people's desks, or they read them last year or late last year, and then they said, hey, come to my event and speak. Come do this summit. Come do this thing. And then the doors have opened fairly quickly, actually, in quick, quick, quick sequence after that. But I would say all of the stuff that happened in the year after the book launched was Largely driven by our outreach. And now we're not doing outreach at all around the book and things are kind of manifesting. But it's because there was momentum, there was outreach, there was work that went into it. You know, we still do a little bit like we're running Amazon ads and you know, we do our own outreach for our clients. And so sometimes opportunities come up for, for, for me or for the company as a result. But. All right, that was a big tangent. Let's do a prize and then I will come back and see what you guys are talking about. So first of all, a prize for being here today. So our. The Launch is on October 3rd. And let me just see here. What can we do? What's today? The date today is the 20. Is it the 29th? August is almost over. Okay, Angela, get your counting hat on. Let's go 29 from the start. And that will be our first participation prize for the day. And then while you're doing that, I will share my screen and I think I can do this. And I will share my screen and one moment, I will bring up our little random name picker over here, right here, and allow. Okay, so you guys should be able to see that, I believe. And I will go ahead and draw our first name. So again, this is from every Tuesday and Friday, the folks that comment within the first 24 hours of the video coming out. So if you're watching the replay and you're not subscribed to the channel, make sure you've done that so you can be notified when a video comes out and you can get in on the commenting. So, Sheila Flores, 5608, congratulations. You have won your choice of a oh so soft journal. A copy of Self Publish and Succeed. That one's going to stump me up a little bit here and there. Or our hashtag noboringbooks mug. So thank you so much for commenting on the day a video was released. What you need to do is email Angelaean T e a m booklanders.com with your mailing address and your prize choice. And if you are not in the US Your prize choice is limited to a copy of our book Self Publish and Succeed. Or if you want to wait and have us send you a copy of Self Promote and Succeed after it launches, you could do that as well. Or you can just get on the advanced reviewer list, which is@juliebrod.com self promote and Succeed and we will mail you, email you, get you a copy that you can read. All right, while I'm here, I'M just going to go ahead and do. Oops, I'm going to do this second prize. Get that done for the day. Oh, I'm going to pick someone else. Alyssa's on our team. She was testing commenting. We had a video which also is kind of an interesting side note. One of the videos I posted did not do well at all and it had some chatgpt. I used chatgpt in writing the description and I had used chatgpt not to write the script, but to layer in some ideas and examples into this video. And kind of funny enough, it was my worst performing video in years. And to the point where at 3 o' clock that afternoon there was no comments, which never happens because you guys are always on top of the videos. So I feel like it got suppressed. Suppressed in the algorithm somehow because it was just. Nobody commented. It still has terrible views. Um, anyway, so I got a list on my team to comment because I thought maybe there was something broken. But no, it was just, I think CHAT GPT, even though I edited it and it wasn't all originated, I think there's something to do with that tangent. Darla, congratulations and thank you for commenting on the day a video was released. And congratulations and same thing to you. Mug, journal or copy of Self Publish and succeed. Email angelaeambookconstros.com and let her know what your choice is. All right, so let's see. I will stop sharing that. Okay, just checking what you guys are talking about. Scrolling down. Okay, there we go. Sorry. I'm going to be publishing my first book on KDP during the first week of October. With the delays, should I submit it a few days earlier than I planned, I would submit it quite a few days earlier. If you have a launch date that is like say October 3rd, when my book is launching, I would be submitting it the week before. It has been. It has been a journey and some books have been stuck for a lot longer than a couple days. And I don't know the exact on this, on my book, on its status, but I know that Alyssa on my team thought it would be live yesterday and it's still stuck in processing. So I would give yourself lots of room for that because it has been funky and it's been difficult to. To get resolution as well. It's. I mean, anytime you try to get help from Amazon, it's a. It's a journey. So I would give yourself lots more room than you think you need. Stella's off to a book event. Thanks for being here. And tbody Congratulations. You are our winner for the day. For participants. I have another one coming up, your participation prize. So same choices to you. And Angela's already told you what to email her and choose your prize, so you are golden. And Scully's is out of here too. Thanks for being here, my friend. Okay. Yes. And T body's saying the same thing. You had to submit your print copy early too. Yeah, I would submit everything early because you still have your launch date. So it's not like it's going to go live early on you. But I mean, print copies for us have been really interesting because we submit, we do pre orders, print pre orders, and we use Ingram to do the print pre orders. And so then we've had extra funkiness in that Ingram is trying to figure out why Amazon is getting stuck up in processing or we've even had some weird things where they've been rejected for. I don't remember exactly what the rejection notice was, but when we talked to Ingram, they were like, oh, this was a mistake. Like, clearly this was a glitch. So, yeah, there's been some really, really strange things going. It's been a little frustrating for everyone. Okay, so I do have a question. Thank you. Efren says, what is one of your favorite takeaways from your new book that you're excited about? That's a good question. I mean, one of the things I am is kind of what I just shared is I'm really excited for people to think about their bigger picture goal, think about the strategy and then execute with tactics and measurements that are going to get them to their goal. One of the things that I see, there's two things I see in this industry that I really tried to do differently in this book. One is that launch focus, like driving for that bestseller launch. And yes, it's fun. You know, as some of you know, my first book, More Than Cash Flow went to number one overall on Amazon. It was a rush. It was, you know, it was amazing to have that happen. And I am not going to do all the things I did to make that happen again because it was just a massive. It was a full time job for many months to have that happen. And I had a full time VA and I had other people helping and supporting that launch to make that happen. And it was great. I loved that that happened. And it's also just something that I think was a little easier in 2013 when that book came out. But I also don't know if it's really worth it. I always joke that Oprah didn't call. I didn't get to dance with Ellen. Like, it was great. And, you know, was it everything? Was it worth all of the effort? I don't know. And so one of the things is this emphasis on launch and kind of like, if you don't have this amazing launch, you know, you're not a success. And that's garbage. It's just not true. And I think, again, kind of re emphasizing what's your bigger picture goal for this book? And keep your eye on the prize. Because if your goal is to be a speaker, of course you want to sell books along the way, but most importantly, you want that book to get in the hands of people who are going to pay you to speak. You get out there, you speak, you crush it. And you're going to get so many more speaking engagements from just crushing it on stage. And that's really, really important to remember because you can spend a whole lot of time trying to sell a lot of books and not have it get you a single speaking engagement versus being very strategic about filling out those speaking speaker submission form, sending your books to the people who can book you to speak, and really finding your audience who is going to be in the room and who might say, hey, bring me to speak, or sorry, hey, bring this person in to speak. Which is interesting because I mentioned already that I book speakers for eo and our speaker coming in September is Amanda Holmes, and she is the daughter of Chet Holmes, who wrote the Ultimate Sales Machine. And it's a book that I've had on my shelf forever. And somebody in my chapter said, hey, listen, I tried to find Chet, and it turns out he's passed away. But his daughter is something special. She is cool. She's helped me immensely. I think she could be good for the chapter. And so I got on the call with her and I was blown away. I was just absolutely blown away by her. But you kind of think about it, and it started off with a book that somebody read, loved it, they tried to find the author, found out he passed away, ended up connecting with his daughter, and now she's going to come and speak to our chapter. I have a feeling she's going to be an extraordinary speaker. And when she crushes it for us, I'll be telling all my other EO folks about her. And I bet you she'll be booked at a bunch of other chapters in the next year. And that's how it can happen for a speaker. But, you know, if all you're thinking about is book sales. Yeah, I mean, it originated from that first sale or whatever it was. Maybe somebody gave it to him. But book sales may have gotten it there. But putting it strategically in the hands of the right person who can make that recommendation that somebody else will pay attention to, that will book you, that's so much more important. So hopefully that's what I'm most excited about, Efren, is kind of that tying in that tactic to the goal and getting you to that bigger picture goal, so that five years from now, you're like Martha or Scott and you're going, oh, my gosh, I am now going to these conferences as a peer. People are going to be asking me to lunch where I used to be, like, longing to go sit with those experts, those people that are the thought leaders. And you're kind of staring at them, going, I wish I could hang out with them. And now you're the one that's being invited to those sessions, to those meetings, to be on stage and all those things. So. And that's the other side of this, too, is to emphasize that none of this is overnight. And even though people inherently know that all those overnight sensations were decades or many years in the making, it still is something that we, especially authors. It's like my book is out and nobody knows who I am yet. It's a process and it's a journey. And have fun with it and enjoy it, but make sure you're aligning those tactics to the strategy and your big picture goals. Um. All right, Cool. David says, good. Talk about the big picture. I'm probably going to sign up with. Your process should be in Las Vegas by mid October, so I'll schedule Old school. Awesome. I love it. Might not be able to meet in person, but if we can, I would love to. I travel a lot. I've got Ohio coming up twice in the next month, Seattle. And that might be it. That might be it. So we might be able to meet up and I just called you Arthur, but author M. Royce, thank you for being here. Jim Campbell said, would you recommend having your marketing strategy in mind before you start writing the book? Absolutely. That's one of the things I talk about in Self Publish and succeed, which you can see over my shoulder here. And then I really emphasize and self promote and succeed, and I call it the Marketing layers. So it's like a big, delicious cake. And the cake will not turn out quite right if it's missing the eggs or it's missing the flour or the sugar, you know, one of those core ingredients, maybe the cake still turns out but it's not as good as it could have been. And so it's really layering those in. And I really love this is one of the big reasons I started Book Launchers, you know, six years ago was because I saw companies that would help you write a great book. I saw companies that did well. I hired a company that did good PR for me, you know, for. For my first book, and I hired another company that did podcast booking for my second book. And editors, you know, that were great at their job, but there wasn't a company that was looking at the overall big picture of this is what I want my book to do at the end, and here's the path to get me there and to make sure my book is positioned from the very beginning. One of the things we do at Book Launchers is one of your very first calls with us, no matter what stage you're coming in at, is with our book marketing manager. And it's an author branding and a book positioning call. And we love to do that early because if you do that while you're still writing the book, that information gets fed to your writer or to your writing coach. And we're using that through everything to make sure your book is positioned so that if your goal is to be on stages, your book is positioned so that you can be on stages and be paid to be there. Because that is a gap that a lot of people kind of miss. They write a good book, it's got an audience, but it's not necessarily an audience that's going to lead them to those paid speakers. Speaking engagement. So. So yes, a long answer to basically just confirm that, yes, that is what you should do. You should think about your big picture marketing strategy before you write, while you're writing, while you're designing, and absolutely when you're launching. All right, thanks for today, Bill. I'm looking forward to getting an arc. Thank you for being here and thanks for being part of my Book army and anybody that's joined in, because I know some people have left and we're holding steady. So@juliebrod.com forward, slash, self, promote and succeed. That's our Book army sign up. I'm only extending this invitation to this beautiful YouTube family and our clients at Book Launchers. I'm making it fairly exclusive and. And then I'll be promoting the book when it launches and, you know, much more wide then. But as far as Book army, early ARC access, it's just for you guys. So get on the list and we'll get you all the Instructions so that you know what to do and when to do it. But thank you so much for your support. I really, really appreciate it. Tbody says, do you have any advice for a book that was going up and now there's a dip in sales when it comes to marketing? Yeah. I mean again, it depends on what you've been doing and what you haven't done. Because a dip in sales is normal. And lots of things are cyclical and they come in waves always. Not just book sales, but kind of overall business. It tends to be that way. But I would look at a couple things which is, you know what's happening with your ads. If you're running Amazon ads, you can get a lot of really great data from your impressions versus your clicks versus your conversions. So that would be one thing I would look at. Because keywords do change. So looking at your keywords can be a good thing. If you used to have more impressions and you're not getting them now, be a good thing to do is to look at your keywords. If they've shifted, there might be a better keyword to emphasize now. The other thing you can do is run a promotion because sometimes doing a 99 cent ebook sale or running some sort of a promotion through BookBub or some other platform can just reinvigorate sales again and kind of give it that spark and get it going and then it can get momentum and keep going from there. Getting some new fresh reviews I think also helps. I think consistently getting reviews is really useful for the algorithms to kind of like still know the book is relevant. This is a guess on my side. This is not fact. But it makes sense to me that having renewed activity, whether it's more consistent sales again or new reviews, that's a sign that a book is still relevant and it will get shown more. Michael says, all I'm thinking about are speaking gigs. So it feels like this is the right move to write a book. But I'm concerned about book sales. Roi. What is the expectation of landing paid gigs after launch? Again, it's a long term game and I was talking about it kind of earlier as far as, you know, with self publish and succeed. I got speaking engagements right after the book came out, but those were largely as a result of relationships or outreach that we did and none of them were really paid. But I don't do speaking engagements for like. I mean sure if somebody wants to pay me, I'm. I'm happy to be paid for it. But really everything that I do kind of looks at the Bigger picture, is it going to grow the community? Is it going to grow book launchers as a company? And if the answer is yes, then I will often pay or, sorry, I won't pay. I will often say yes to an unpaid speaking engagement that is a really good fit. But what I do find is that there's lots of opportunity, local and small. And that's how I started speaking in the, in the first place was I was writing articles for, for a magazine who eventually happened to do national conferences, and they got me to speak. The first talk went well and I got invited to be a keynote speaker at all of their events for many years. But then the other thing that I was doing was I was speaking at small local meetup events and some of them were 20 people, some of them were 60, there was a few that were over a hundred. But I would say I would do those for free and I would do it to build my platform, build my, build my audience, sell some books. And little bit by bit, those engagements turned into more speaking invitations and beyond. And we've seen that with some of our clients as well. What can be a struggle is if you have this mentality of launch book, get paid to speak. If you haven't already been getting paid to speak, then you will probably have this gap in between because you need to have a really great speakers reel or you need to have people who've seen you speak speak that are going to, going to say, yeah, he's amazing. You'll definitely want to have him on your stage. Because, you know, as somebody who books speakers, I do not want to have somebody be a bad speaker. Because I can tell you, there's one story of a speaker that was here a few years ago and he was terrible. And whenever they talk about, like, what you don't like, they bring it up every time. And I just think, oh my gosh, I never want to be the person who booked that person because this was so. It was one of those events nobody will ever forget because it was so bad. And so I never, ever want to be that person. And if you're organizing big events that people have paid to be at, you're going to be very rigorous in choosing your paid speakers. So, you know, that is something to be aware of, is that there is a path to be a paid speaker if you're already on it. Great. Steve Molter, who wrote, he's one of our authors, he wrote nothing gets sold until the story gets told. He was already a speaker when his book came out. And now, goodness gracious, he is, he is booked so solid, I'm bringing him to speak to our EO Las Vegas chapter. And, and it's been fun because he's like, okay, well, I'm already booked to speak in Vegas. This date, this date, this date, I'll be there. This date, I'll be there. This, these five days I'll be coming off of a speaking engagement in San Diego, flying to Vegas. So Steve is crushing it. But the thing is, it might look to somebody on the outside, it might look like launch book, get paid to speak all over the country. But he was already speaking when the book came out. So the book is just fire or fuel. Yeah, fuel on an already burning fire. And now he has some another way to monetize his speaking engagements, another way to grow those bookings and go from there. So hopefully that helps. As far as, like the ROI book sales, it varies widely, but specifically, speakers are typically the ones that will get the fastest roi. Because your speaking engagements, there's kind of three ways you're going to get paid. There's your straight up speaking contract. There is your speaking contract plus books. So that's like icing on your cake. And then some places can't, can't or won't pay you to speak, but they will buy a copy of your book for every person in the audience. So in those cases, that's how I have been paid a lot for speaking engagements in the past is that third option, they would be like, look, I'll buy 200 copies of your book. And you know, if you can sign a copy for everybody that's actually physically present that day, great. And what I would do is I would buy them from my, you know, print on demand provider. So I'd Pay, you know, $5 a copy and I would sell it to them for 20 or whatever the retail price is. Which is also something to be mindful of when you are pricing your book, because a lot of people are thinking, I want to price it low. But if you're a speaker, you want to make sure there's value in that book for these contract negotiations. So let's say it's retail value 16, because that's more likely these days. And so now you're going to sell it to them, say for 15, so they're getting a deal. You're netting out still some money on that engagement where you might not have been paid before, you might have just had your expenses paid. So hopefully that makes sense. But those are kind of three paths. And speakers will generally get a faster ROI on their book than many other types of authors. I don't. Efren just said cringe. I don't know what he's cringing at. Okay, I'm paid here and there and I'm looking to build a speaking business, but community is the bigger picture. Okay, fantastic. All right, let's do our final prize of the day and. And then we will wrap up and we'll see you guys back here in two weeks. It will be a shorter live stream that day. I don't know what the topic will be yet, so if you have a request, by all means, share it. I have a couple ideas, but I haven't booked it. But I do know it will only be a 30 minute livestream because I have a meeting I have to get to in person after. So prize for today. So skill testing question. What is the launch date of Self Promote and Succeed? Who is paying attention? I tried to say it many times. So let me know what the launch date is and you, my friend, will get to choose from the absolute best prize. Our hat. Or we have a T shirt. And we still have quite a few sizes of that T shirt as well. And it and M. Part wins, by the way. Congratulations, M. Part. Hopefully you're in the U.S. if you aren't in the U.S. then you get a book. But we also have a T shirt. And I just love this T shirt because it says I write books, drink coffee and no things, which is a spin off from Game of Thrones. If anybody knew Tarian Lannister, he was like, I drink, I drink wine, read books, and know things. So I kind of took a spin on that and made it into an author version. So you can win the hat, the mug, the journal, the T shirt, or a copy of Self Publish and Succeed and Empire. I'm just waiting to see because if M. Part is not in the US then I will. Richard O', Keefe, welcome. Go to juliebrod.com forward/self promote and Succeed and get yourself on the list. And if parts in Chicago. Okay, fantastic. So you'll have to email Angela what your choice is. If it's the T shirt, let her know the size. We have female and male T shirts as well, so let her know that. And. And thank you so much for being here. Thank you for your support. I look forward to seeing you on the deep dive in September on the 16th, as well as live here in two weeks and for the book launch on October 3rd. So thank you so much everyone. And if you're watching the replay, make sure you comment and join in on all the links and all the fun. All right, thanks, everybody. Bye. Oh, and thanks, Angela. Appreciate you.