The Last 20 Books to $50K Highlights and Takeaways

Foreign Tuesday. Happy Thanksgiving week for all of you in the United States. It's also hard to believe, but it's our last live stream of November. And then we have two live streams in December and our holiday extravaganza. And then it's 2024. Scary, isn't it? All right, so today we are going to I'm going to share highlights From from the 20 Books to 50K Conference, which happened not last week, but the week before. Chad was here sharing with you some fantastic tips for writing your book and getting motivated while I was attending that conference. And so there was lots of great takeaways. And so some of them it's not. I kind of put them into three different buckets to share my kind of biggest takeaways tips, you know, if you missed it. And I'll tell you a little bit about what that conference was, in case you don't know. So Debbie Doson's already in the house. Angela is here, of course. Thank you for being here, Angela, Suzanne and Stella. So hello. And if you're here, definitely say hello. Because if you're new to the live streams, there are prizes for participation. So sitting there just passively watching does not get you a prize. Of course, if you're watching the replay, commenting below on the day the replay is out or on any day a video is released. So Tuesdays and Fridays gets you entered to win some of our fabulous prizes. And we have self promote and succeed. Of course we have this as a prize. We have self publish and succeed. We have our hashtag no boringbooks mug. We have our which I've got one in my office. Regular watchers will know that my other one vanished. So we'll see how long this one stays here. Somebody took my other one. We've got our oh so soft journal and I think that's it for prizes today. But if you have not posted a review of Self Promote and succeed, do that today and then email Team t a m book launchers.com so you can get invited to our reviewer party, which is happening next week and it's happening on Tuesday of next week. And I have some really cool prizes. I have some exclusive swag that Angela doesn't even know what it is yet. I also have some other swag that I had at 20 books that I have some leftovers. So I'll be giving that away. I got all kinds of fun stuff just for you fabulous folks who have posted reviews. You can come out, we'll have fun, we'll do Q and A, we'll talk about the book, some lessons learned and have some quizzes and and prizes. So it's gonna be fun. So if you haven't posted your review, definitely go post it so you can come and join the party now. Deep Dive Speaking of deep dives and celebrations and parties and giving away a ton of stuff, we have our annual holiday extravaganza which is our December Deep Dive. It is happening December 16th at 10:00am Pacific Standard Time. Make sure you're on the newsletter list so you get the link to join. It's book launchers.com newsletter gets you the updates. So can you you get that link if you have not joined our annual holiday extravaganzas. They are a blast. We are going to have different members from my team there, some that you probably have not met before. And we give a lot away, lots of prizes, we share some great tips, we give away books and have a lot of fun. So it's definitely worth tuning in if you can make it. Bonnie posted her review the day when the book was launched by Bonnie, you are the best. Thank you so much. And James is here from Michigan. Rural girl Renee, thank you. Always great to have you here. Okay, so. So 20 books to 50k. If you aren't familiar with 20 books to 50k, it doesn't matter because it's done. This was the last year, so you missed is the largest indie author conference in the world, I believe. And, and it's, you know, I would say largely for fiction authors there. In this year in particular, there wasn't really any content specifically for nonfiction, but it's still, I find it an incredibly, you know, valuable event. It's also convenient, well, relatively convenient for me because it's here in Las Vegas and so I just have to drive there and I can stay at home at night. So it's convenient for me. Although I say relatively because the new wrinkle in the fun is that F1 just happened this past weekend here and they turned the Strip into the track, which was pretty epic. Like I thought that was really cool. But driving to the Strip every day the week before F1, that was less than cool. But that aside, you know, it is a great event for meeting vendors, for getting tips and just meeting other authors and having some really cool conversations. So I went. But I also took a ton of notes and I've distilled it kind of into two big buckets and some random tips and thoughts that I thought were kind of cool that I figured I would share. And Bill Miller's here as well. Hello Bill. Thank you so much. And Stella also posted on book launch, my YouTube besties are the best. So thank you. And so I don't know if any of you have heard of 20 books. If you have, definitely let me know in the comments. Next year it is going to be Author Nation. And at first it seemed as though it was just going to be like a slight evolution because it's a different person running it starting next year. But now my understanding is that it's going to be a different event. It's still going to have, I think, a heart and soul for authors, indie authors, but it is definitely going to be a different event. They are running it in the same place. They essentially took over the contracts from 20 books and they'll be running it as Author Nation going forward. And my hope is that there is a stream for us nonfiction authors and that I will be able to help and contribute. And maybe if, if that is the case, we will try and get a bunch of you fabulous book Launchers, TV viewers to come to Vegas and we'll have a really cool book Launchers meetup, which was something I wanted to do a couple of years ago, but we weren't able to kind of make it work at the time. But we'll see if we can do that, see how things go. But, you know, for now, I'm excited for that. So my first thing was the big conversation of 20 books was direct sales. And the opening panel of the entire event was five. You know, it was their successful author panel. Funny enough, it was five female authors. I think two of them wrote, you know, steamy, steamy kind of stuff. And, you know, all of them were fiction. One, one was kind of a hybrid. She writes fiction and nonfiction. Regardless, they're all very, very authors making, I think, more than six figures per year from their author business. And it was interesting because five out of five of them said their focus for 2024 is on direct sales. One of them defined it as subscription, but that's still direct. So, and this is something I've been talking about a lot is that value of building that platform and even selling your books direct. And. And so I put some pieces together. I solved a few things that I've been stumped on that I thought were too expensive or were too challenging or too logistically complex for the average author. So now we're testing some new pieces. We're going to have some new ways to help our clients at Book Launchers. I'll have some new video content to help you here on Book Launchers. TV on that, but definitely it was the topic of the conference. So you can summarize the conference by saying Direct Sales was the big piece that I think most authors walked away from that on. Now, specific to Direct Sales, there's kind of when you're thinking direct, you're thinking selling straight to a reader. And there's lots of ways to do it, but it is. There are some logistical challenges and some security concerns and, you know, some other pieces. But a lot of authors, their direct sale plan is things like Kickstarter. And this is a big, big thing now. And Kickstarter doesn't work well if you don't have some sort of an existing audience to sell to. We had a Kickstarter person do a talk for client only training, you know, this year. And so all of our clients, if you're a client and you're watching this, you can access that in the foundation library. We have that Kickstarter training session, and we have, you know, access to that Kickstarter person. Should you, you know, be interested in doing any sort of Kickstarter campaign around a book? But a lot of authors are launching books with a Kickstarter. And, and that's a big, big topic is, you know, how do you create these exclusive versions of your book so that, you know, maybe you're going and signing copies, or you're giving them a special hardcover with like gold embossed pages or, you know, those kind of things. And then what else are you giving your best supporters of your Kickstarter campaign? So that was really the big, big thing is launching your book with a Kickstarter. Patreon is another one. A lot of podcasters use Patreon or Patreon depends on what your accent is on pronouncing that. And that's another way. And so what they would do. And some of these things, again, I believe, more applicable to fiction authors than nonfiction. But Patreon allows you to, you know, basically support your favorite creator with, you know, $5, $10, $20 a month. And what a lot of these authors are doing is creating separate special content for their Patreon subscribers. And in theory, this is something that I could do here on YouTube. So not Patreon, but they have like a YouTube membership. So I could at some point, just for fun, roll that out. And then, you know, I would have special live streams. So special gifts, special content, maybe special PDFs, you know, even little video courses or video series that I could, in theory, be offering that membership. And that's like Patreon. So people just kind of support you at different levels. And they get things in in exchange for being a Patreon supporter. So other tools that will help you sell direct Shopify. Shopify. A lot of authors have stores set up on Shopify or they use Shopify to connect to some of the other providers. You know, they sell through their website and then they're fulfilling through things like Book Funnel or, you know, Book Vault for print books. And Story Origin can also be a way to fulfill some things. So there's other services that will fulfill, but you need a way to take payment, and that's where, you know, a Shopify store could be the way that you take payment for those things. There's other ways to do it too. But those were a lot of the tools that came up over and over and over in the discussion. But really, I think especially when people hear about these Kickstarter campaigns and how some of these authors are easily making $40,000 on a Kickstarter campaign and some are making hundreds of thousands, it's easy to get really excited and be like, oh my gosh, I'm going to fund this and pay for my year. Kind of like getting in advance if I was to get a traditional publishing deal. And wouldn't that be great? Wouldn't that be great if that's where we all got to start. But the reality is a Kickstarter, if you don't have an existing audience to offer that Kickstarter to, you're going to struggle a little. So. So I would say, you know, your number one goal is and always has been, if you have been around book launchers TV for a while, is to build your audience. Because as soon as you have an audience of people who are interested in what you have to say, you have people to offer Kickstarter promotions, too. And yes, Kickstarter has people who might find your campaign, but your campaign isn't going to show up unless somebody's searching specifically for it or it's doing really well. It becomes like one of the hot campaigns. So you really do need an audience to Kickstart that and get it going. So that's one big thing that I would say. So let's see what you guys are talking about. Kevin's here. Stella has not heard of 20 books to 50k, which is what we're talking about. For those of you who've just tuned in and are going, what's on the topic of the day over here? We're talking about tips from 20 books to 50k, the author conference that was here in Vegas A week and a half ago. And then I see a question. I'm just trying to see what it is. Debbie Doson considering. Okay, so I'll just answer this question right now, Angela, so you don't have to save it. What is an underused tip you'd suggest for direct sales for authors considering 20 books to 50k next year? So there is no 20 books to 50k next year. It is going to be Author Nation and it's going to be a totally different conference. I think it's still going to appeal to the same people. I do hope there's more of a nonfiction appeal. So what underused tip would you suggest for direct sales? I mean, ultimately, I think build your audience is number one. I don't know if it's an underused tip. The second tip is also getting mastering ads, because that's the second piece I was going to talk about is if you are able to run ads, you can, and you can sell direct, then you can do this without an audience, or at least you can use this to build your audience. But it's tricky to run ads and have it financially pay off if you don't have a back end. And so what I mean by a back end is I run ads to self publish and succeed dot com. So if you go to self publish and succeed dot com that's a landing page that I run ads to. And or we have equivalents like that. And I'm going to be building, I'm going to be building a couple of other pages. I'm going to build a combo, so self promote and succeed and self publish and succeed combo. I'm also going to build a digital download ad for people who want to get the audiobook or the ebooks of these. I'm going to run ads to those as well. And so you pay for it. But in addition to getting the book, you're going to get some extras because you're paying $18 here. You're not going to Amazon or why would you do it? Well, you're going to do it because you're going to get a copy of the new brand. You, you're going to get other tools and resources. So I'm going to build some bundles like that and we'll test them. But with those bundles, now we're fulfilling that ourselves, which is a bit of a pain. But we're testing Book, Vault and Shopify because we used to fulfill with Lulu and it was just too pricey. But the benefit of doing this is that now I get customer data. So now I can run an ad. Not only do I know what ad is converting, so what? By that terminology, I mean when I run the ad, somebody clicks on it. That's great. But a click doesn't mean I got any information from them. A click just means they clicked on it. But if you then buy that book, now I've got your information and you've joined my email newsletter list, and I'm going to be shipping you this book. And now I know this person that went from this ad that was shown on this website. They. They became a book buyer. And then a year from now, I can look. Oh, the book buyers from this website, they became clients of Book Launchers, which is the back end. So the back end is, you know, you join my self publish and succeed live, or our book marketing magic course, which is going to run next year, and. Or you join our services so that we're now helping you write, publish, and promote your book to grow your brand and your business. So ads can be a really, really effective tool. But running Google Ads, running Facebook ads, running Instagram ads, all of the, you know, LinkedIn, all those ads, it can be tough to have those ads be profitable if you don't have a back end on the other side. Most ad campaigns take a while to get traction, and so you have to be ready to invest in those. And then most likely, you know, the one or two or $3 you're going to make per book sold, it's not going to be worthwhile unless you've got that backend that you're going to be offering people after they have bought your book. So hopefully that makes sense. Hello, Joyce. Welcome. Good to see you here. Okay, so you know what? Let's do a prize. What is the date today? 21st. I think we're the 21st. All right, Angela, you know what to do. Let's count 21 from the start. We might not even have 21 comments yet. So now's a good time to say hello and get yourself into the comments. And I'm going to just cover a couple more tips and then I'll do our draw for our Tuesday and Friday commenters so you guys can find out who won that. All right, so I've got a video coming out really soon. I don't know exactly when it'll be on deck. Maybe next week on why go direct. But data, the ability to run ads. You know, the ability to get more information, which is data, but to test things like promotions and things like these bundles and just learn more about your audience and what what they're looking for. Being familiar and able to sell direct also allows you to pivot. We have talked quite a bit this year on the channel. You can search for the, the videos on, you know, what to do if your Amazon account gets terminated. You know, some of the scams that have been running these things are impacting authors at a greater rate, I believe, than before. And there's some tools out there and so definitely watch some of these videos on, you know, account termination and scams and what to watch for and how to help try to protect yourself from these things. But being able to have your audience and sell books to them, even if for some reason you're unable to sell on Amazon, I think is really, really vitally important. It's also why I'm a huge advocate for selling your books wide. Because we're seeing a constant array of issues. Cropping up and popping up, mixed together would be propping up as we upload and things get kicked back for all kinds of reasons. I even shared in my pep talk, my author pep talk that I posted last week, I even shared that, you know, my book on launch day got kicked back from Amazon with a copyright notice. It was easy to resolve. I just had to submit the copyright papers and it was fine, but it caused a window of delay and if I hadn't have been on top of it of my email that day, it could have been even worse. So there's just constant issues and some authors are just finding, you know, it's, it's way more of a hassle or it's causing them issues to be dependent on any one platform. So being able to take control back, we're also seeing our margins constantly squeezed as authors. So we're constantly seeing this wholesale discount has to go up and you know, how much you can charge for this is going, going down and, and how much you're going to make per copy because print costs have gone up is, it's, it's a squeeze. And so if you can have more control, you have more ability to pivot and do more things in the future should you need to. And direct sales gives that to you. You then have the opportunity to cross sell and upsell and partner with other authors and just be more creative in this journey now, it is more work. And so I would say if you are brand new, you're not starting with direct for most people. If you're brand new, you don't really have much of an email or social media audience and all of this is just scaring the pants off you. Start by going wide so you're selling your book more than just on Amazon and grow your audience. And then you can add direct in later because it is extra. It's extra work. You're setting up more accounts. You now have more tax responsibilities. You now have more logistics to deal with. You know, it's a lot of pieces. You have more fees because every account you add has more fees or service fees or membership fees or subscription fees or whatever it is. So it's not a beginner move, but I think it's a great place for all authors to kind of set their sights on and think about it. So that was the big talk was direct sales. And like I said, I've got more content coming out specifically on how to do these distribution, you know why to all those kind of things. So you know you're already here. But if you haven't subscribed, make sure you subscribe so you're getting notified when those videos come out. All right, so our winner is. Let's see. Do. Did we go? Where are we? Are we at 21? I don't know where Angela is. Mine, mine, mine. Suzanne's really going for the victory here. All right, I'm sure we're at 21 now. All right, lucky Fortune 8, your comment was 21st. So email at team@book Launchers with your mailing address and your choice of prize, self, promote and succeed, self publish and succeed. Our hashtag no boring books mug or our oh so soft journal are your choices for today. Okay, so, and now while we're paused from the content, next up, by the way, I'm going to talk about AI because that was a big topic, very polarizing, hot topic of discussion at 20 books to 50k, which is what we're talking about. I know some new people have joined. So 20 books to 50k is the author conference I was at a week and a half ago. I'm sharing takeaways, tips, and I've got some kind of random things to share from the conference here in a moment. All right, so give me one second here. I'm going to share my screen and take you over to our random name picker, which is where I have uploaded. Let's see. Share screen. I don't know if I want to share screen. Is that what I want to do? I think I want to. Yes, I want to share my screen and I want to choose the select window, which will be the random name picker. Okay, we're in business. Here we go. Okay, so there's our random name picker that's kind of hard for you guys to see. So let me make me small. And there we go. So I have entered in everybody who commented Tuesday and Friday of the last couple weeks. Your names are all in here and you are gonna spin around and around until we have our first winner. So, Mike Cook, you are winner number one of the folks who have commented every Tuesday and Friday or on the Tuesday and Friday when the video came out. So you'll need to email Angela and let her know what prize you would like. You know, self promote and succeed and self publish and succeed. If you've already got copies. They do make fabulous gifts for the holiday season that is upon us now. All right, I'm going to do the other one while I am here. So, so. And Renee. Ah, congratulations. Congratulations. And I know I saw her on here already, so I know she's here today, so congratulations. You gotta email angelaeamooklaunchers.com to get your prize. I'm just going to remove that from the stream here. Okay. So heading back in to my tips. If you have questions, you can go ahead and post them and Angela will hang on to them for the end. So like I said, AI was also a hot topic, but very polarizing. It was very interesting actually to see how heated it got in some cases when people would talk about using AI. There were some sessions on AI and they were really good. We one of them was actually really advanced. And I, I consider myself to be decent with AI, but I was sitting in that session going, whew. She just dropped a whole bunch of stuff on me that I did not understand. And, and so that was interesting. But the interesting part, so where it really got heated was, you know, talking about writing your book with AI Definitely people have some very strong opinions about that. But audiobook narration, there was a lot of people who were very anti AI for narration. What I found was interesting was that there was, you know, a lot of people are in the middle, which is, which is kind of where I am. Like, I think I'm an advocate of AI for as an assistant. Right. I don't see it and I don't plan to use it to drive the drive the bus, but I do think it can be a great co pilot or co driver. And so for AI narration for audiobooks, I personally narrated my most recent book, but I used AI for the pickups. So I didn't have to go back into the studio and do the monotonous job of re saying the random words that I missed or that I mispronounced. Which I thought was heavenly. What a gift to not have to go back in and spend a few hours repeating what is almost always one or two words that you just haven't pronounced clearly enough. And to have AI be able to, you know, I've cloned my voice and to have AI do it, I thought that was great. And had I been able to clone my voice and have AI narrate the entire audiobook so I could have saved myself three days, I would have done it. However I it, I have found that it doesn't emote at the right places or sound enough like me to go for long periods of time. That's going to change. And. And when it does, Julie Bot will absolutely narrate my next book because it's a ton of work. But there's a lot of narrators that, you know, feel like this is taking their jobs and they're very concerned. And the reality is it's not take, you know, in my case, it's not taking somebody's job except for mine, which I didn't. You know, if I don't have to do it, I'm all for that. But there is so. But the interesting thing that I think to look at this is that if you're a narrator, you want to build your name, because if you are a known narrator, you're going to have a following and that's going to give you value, that not only are you still going to be in demand, but also that you are going to be able to command a higher rate, despite the fact that the price of narration is going to go down because of the ability to narrate it with a robot. And so the more you create value for yourself, the more you, you excel at doing something and you make yourself not replaceable by a robot, the more value you're going to have. And I think a lot of people kind of land in the middle where they're just doing a ho hum job. And that ho hum job can be replaced by a robot. But narrators, especially in fiction, have massive value. But even in nonfiction, and I'll give you an example, Britney Spears latest memoir, I have not read it. I have too many other books to read. But I do follow a lot of chat about different books because I always like to kind of read what people are talking about. And a lot of people said this was a mediocre written book which was written by a ghostwriter. So it's funny because I imagine that ghostwriter was probably very well paid and universally people thought the writing was mediocre but if somebody listened to the audiobook, they raved about the book. And many people acknowledged that the narrator is who made this book exceptional. And so in that case, you can see where there's massive value in having a narrator. And now what I also saw was people would be like, what other books has this narrator narrated? And now they're going off and they're buying the other books, not because of the book, but because of the narration and the narrator. So that's what I mean by, you know, this. I. I look at it a little differently than. Than every. Not everybody. But then a lot of the people at the conference were looking at it because I looked at it as, wow, if I was a narrator, I would be crushing. I would find a way to stand out, build a brand, and be the voice that everybody wants to hear. Because now I'm going to be able to command a better, stronger, bigger rate for my services. And if you can be that Britney Spears narrator that everybody goes, wow. The book was so. So. But the narration made it exceptional, like, you're winning. So. But it was interesting because everybody has opinions and strong kind of thoughts around this. The writing was interesting. I think from a fiction perspective, there's some really cool tools out there. There's Dibly Create, of course, which we've talked about here. There was another one which has just slipped my mind. I want to say. It's like a rabbit. Anyways, it was a tool that, that one of the authors has created, and man, was it a cool tool to build out and think about characters and even plot your book using AI. I could see how it would assist greatly. And I met. I met a couple of authors who won't necessarily disclose what their pen names are, but they've built bots that have imitated their voice and they're able to crank out a book every week with this AI. And, you know, their books are performing, they're selling, but they've spent the time training the AI. So there's lots of people using it in all kinds of ways. But I think, you know, ultimately, I still stand by the fact that, you know, certainly at Book Launchers, we're not generating the books using AI. We are using AI to assist us to go more. To go. To be more efficient, more effective, more productive. You know, it's great for ideation, it's great for brainstorming. But yeah, that's kind of the gist of what was being discussed at the conference. And, and sometimes the after comments in the Facebook group, they had to turn them off because it was, you know, it was almost like the pitchforks and the, the fire were getting out there and people were going after each other. But, you know, I can see it from all sides. And I understand, I understand the fear, I understand, you know, the concerns for sure. But I also see the opportunities and the places where, you know, it can, it can apply and make our lives better. And the reality is it's here. You don't have to adopt it, but you do have to accept the fact that it is here and it is not going away. So there is that part of it too. Okay, let's see, let's see. Okay, I'm just checking my notes to see what else we're gonna talk about. And I'll come back to your comments in a second because I just have a couple other random pieces. So there was. I attended several sessions on just the business of being an author and just some mindset pieces to kind of have in your back pocket is it is a business. It, no matter what you've written your book for, it's a business. You have tax write offs. Now you need to, you have some, you know, risks and liabilities. And of course your goal is to have revenue as well. So treat it like a business. You know, set up a credit card that is just for your expenses pertaining to your book. You know, even set up a separate bank account if you want. You know, there's lots of other business kind of steps. But think about when you run ads, those are an investment in education. In the beginning, you don't necessarily run ads and expect them to return a profit immediately. You're going to learn from them, but it's an investment in that education. Knowing your reader is as important as knowing your customer in business. You have to understand why they're buying your book, where they're buying your book, what they're looking for, what else they want from you. All of those things are really important. And if you think of it like a business, you'll think of that reader in a slightly different way. Universally, this came up a lot. Don't try to do all the things. There's a lot of ways. You know, I talk about this a lot. You can. There's so many ways even. I mean, look how gigantic self promote and succeed is. And I don't get into the tactical execution of a lot of the pieces. I'm just discussing the strategy and the tactic you use. But then there's a whole other step to go and actually learn, for example, how to run Amazon ads or how to Do a bookbub or how to use ebook sale sites. There's like all the how to after that. So don't try and do everything all at once. Pick one or two things, figure out what of those things is working, keep doing them. If they're not working, stop and start adding another one or two things in and just keep doing that. Because a lot of people do a whole bunch of things and then they don't actually know which part generated the results and which one didn't. And I'll give you an example, a simple example, which is Amazon ads. Some people, their books are selling, but their Amazon ads look like they're not performing. They turn off the ads and suddenly their book stops selling. And what this is is just that exposure effect. So maybe people aren't clicking on the ad and buying the book from the ad, but they're seeing the book on the ad. And then when they hear that person on a podcast, now they're buying the book, but they don't click from the ad to the book. You take out the ads and now suddenly it's not working or your book sales start to go down. But if you've done 10 things all at once, you're not able to identify what the cause and effect is of each of those items. So you want to do one or two things and just slowly add in and take out one or two things because otherwise you won't know what caused the change. Finally, and I kind of actually touched on this inadvertently, which is, you know, the narrator. If you do end up using a narrator for your book, it can be worth it to hire that name, that celebrity or that well known narrator that has an audience that has a following. Because you know, if you're investing in narration and you're not narrating it yourself, why not help your audiobook by getting a boost? That's what the publishers are doing. That was one of the panels I attended on audiobook marketing and they said that they are hiring narrators that have a following. Again, this goes back to my piece about if you're a narrator and you're worried about your job, build your brand, build your following, be amazing at your craft because you're going to have more value in the marketplace. And that cross pollination of author narrator is really powerful. Some of on this panel they even talked about adding extra content for Patreon or Kickstarter campaigns or even just to make the audiobook something they buy. People buy in addition to is things like if anybody listened to David Goggins, I can't think of the title of his first book, but he and the ghostwriter. Was it the ghostwriter? I think it was the ghostwriter. They actually, they narrate the book somewhat together. So it's a joint effort. And some parts are narrated by David Goggins and some are narrated by the writer, I believe. And so it's a cross pollination. It does not sync up with whisper sync, but it does create some added value for the audiobook that people who love the book might buy the audiobook to get that experience. So. All right, what are you guys talking about over here? Okay, I just saw your question, Kevin. Are there any stats regarding having a name narrator do your audiobook and the resultant sales effect? No, not that I know of. Because here's the challenge with that. Unless you produce your audiobook first by yourself or with a no name narrator and then hire a narrator you really don't have. How are you going to, how are you going to test that? It would be very difficult to test. So I don't know how you would test it, but the publishing houses were talking about it and saying that the books that they had and it's not apples to apples comparison because every book is different, but the books they had that didn't have a named narrator were underperforming relative to the ones that had a popular narrator. So it became, it has become part of their strategy. If the author is not narrating it, they hire that named narrator with a following. All right, Angela, I am ready for questions. I'll scroll up and see some comments. I see Suzanne's comment. I took a class on AI and it appears if you use AI on just the dedication, you don't need to disclose for Amazon. Okay, I'm not familiar with like the nuances of would make sense that if you use it on just the dedication, because the dedication is usually so short. So I don't know if there's a percentage or what that class taught you. But as far as the book content, you can use it for your book description, your author bio. You can generate that using AI and you don't have to disclose that. But the meat of your book, like chapter one, if you, if you generate it with AI, you have to disclose that it was generated with AI even if you substantially edit it. Okay, question one from Suzanne. When I set up my business page on Facebook ads, do I have to, do I have two friends? All my friends. Oh, do I have to friend all my friends again? Or can I get all my friends automatically to business page? You can invite all your contacts to like the page. I find it very annoying when people do that, but you can have, you can just send out a mass like notification to your contacts through that business page and, you know, hopefully some of them like it. Just waiting for the next question. All right, so today's question is what is the conference going to be called next year? That's our skill testing question for the day. So if you were paying attention and you know what 20 bucks to 50k is going to be called next year, then you are our next prize winner for the day. And Suzanne said, why would you want a website with AI? Oh, dot AI? I don't know. It depends. You never know what the hot, hot item could be. I can see value in AI if you are creating some sort of a website that will be using AI that you're going to promote that way. I don't know. I buy, I like to buy a lot of URLs. I kind of collect them. So I always like to buy, you know, the websites that have certain extensions that are already related to the other ones that I have. But yeah, I don't know, it really depends on your market. It's like I bought book launchers TV because it's a great fit for my YouTube channel. So if you have a reason to make it fit, then I would grab it. Question 3. Oh, Dabi docent is our winner. Davidosa got it right. It is going to be called Author Nation next year. So congratulations, Davidosan. Whatever prize you have not won lately, let Angela know, a team at Book Launchers, what you'd like and where to send it. Question 3. What is an overlooked tip? Oh, I tried to answer that. I'll. Oh, wait. Capitalize on when setting up their direct sales website. Okay, so what is an overlooked tip authors are failing to capitalize when setting up their direct sales website? I don't know because I don't know exactly. I haven't worked with a lot of authors on setting up their direct sales websites, so I don't know what tip they would be failing to capitalize on. The tips that I would recommend are to think of it like an e commerce site. So think about things like abandoned carts. Do you have messaging set up to address an abandoned cart or a failed payment? Are you capturing email and name before you're asking for the sale so that you know who's been there? Are you. Do you have email funnel for after they've bought your book to remind them that they bought your book to remind them of the bonuses that went out there to then introduce yourself and start to get to know them. So thinking of it like an E commerce site, I think is really important, even even though it's not a complex E commerce site. Those are some key things that I would be thinking about. Arnav. I'm not sure if I'm saying that right. Please, can you assist fiction writers also? Sorry. Nonfiction is a big, big category as it is, and fiction would just add so many nuances to what we do that, you know, we're, we're going to focus on being the absolute best in nonfiction. And maybe someday, maybe someday we'll do fiction, but for now, we will be the best in nonfiction. And that's our, that's what we'll be constantly striving is, is to be the absolute best alternative to traditional, to a traditional publisher so that you can keep your rights and keep all your proceeds in control and sell direct to your reader. Go wide. All those fun things. All right, I think there's one more question and I'm just waiting for it to pop on up here. And Debbie Dos. And I already told you that you're the winner. So after this last question, I think we'll be done for today. And hopefully you've all marked your calendars for December 16th for our holiday extravaganza. And then I'm not here with you in two weeks. Somebody from my team is doing it. I don't know if Angela knows who is doing it, but somebody will be here, same time, same place, in two weeks with some amazing content for you. But it won't be me because I'll be at a training in Maryland, so I'll be freezing my buns off. I always think people should not host events in cold climates in December, but I am Canadian, so I'll do my best to survive my cold trip. All right, the question is used, used AI to make the background for my book cover. Do I need to disclose it for to Amazon? Yes. If you generated anything with AI, you need to disclose it as AI generated. And there's different categories, which I showed you and talked about in a past live event. So I kind of took you right in there and said what you need to disclose in there. But if it's generated and then heavily edited, you'll mark that off. If it's generated and not heavily edited, you'll mark it off. It's not. I don't think you have to freak out about it. They're not shutting down the accounts down that are disclosing that they've generated with AI, I think for the most part it is a data collection play. And of course they are trying to minimize the scammers. And so if you just, if you do it and don't disclose it, it's going to be a way that they can shut your account down. So disclose it. Be honest. And you know, I don't know of too many people who are disclosing it and getting their account shut down, at least not yet. So, you know, they're, they're not anti AI. They own an AI company. They're constantly investing in it. They' come out with AI narration stuff that's I think going to be available soon. It's beta, so there's lots of things they're doing with AI. But yes, okay, it's going to be Sarah. Thank you, Angela. So in two weeks you'll have Sarah Bean, our book marketing manager, here to talk all things book marketing. She is a wealth of knowledge, so definitely show up and ask your questions because, you know, she knows all. She used to be a speaker's booking agent. She's been running our book marketing. Well, she, she's been running the book marketing the whole time Book Launchers has been around and she's been a part of more than 200 book launchers here at Book Launchers as well as she's worked with New York Times bestseller on his launch and so much more. So you're going to have a blast with her. Back here in two weeks and until then, by the way, I saw somebody else's comment here. Where'd it go? Oh, St. John Butler. Just wanted to say your content is super valuable. Thank you. And thank you. And Suzanne just clarified. They said if you do use some art using AI, you don't have to disclose because you're directing AI. So it's just like you are painting. Yeah. I'm not sure. I don't know what course you took, but yeah, I think it depends. I think it depends a lot on what that is and how that's defined. I'd have to see what you were told and what the nuances are there. Suzanne always makes me nervous. If there's a gray area I would rather stay. Especially when your account is because it's really hard if your account gets shut down to ever get it re. Re. Upped. Re. Engaged. So. But yeah, I mean, if you took a course and there's somebody who's familiar with it because she's saying if you do some art using AI, you don't have to disclose it because you're directing AI. So it's just like you painting. But really, I could argue I'm telling AI with my typing what to put on the screen. So to me that's kind of like painting too, or photography, but yet because of where the origin of that image comes from. So I'm not sure of the specifics and the nuances of it. But yeah, if you've got any documentation, I'd love to check it out so I can get more informed on those specifics. That would be cool. Yes. And Debbie Dos and added. So does this mean that cover artists, illustrators and editors need to disclose to you the author if they use AI? Yes, your ghost. If you have a writer, a ghostwriter, a co author, they have to. You have to get disclosure. We updated our terms and conditions at Book Launchers just for this reason. Because if somebody comes to us with a manuscript or some design work, we need to know so that we can properly disclose it. Let's see, ARNAV said audiobook on playbooks will be better option only as asx. Oh, ACX probably. Can you also give more options where else we can publish the audiobooks? Yes, I just released a video, I think, or it's coming out on Friday about how to let me just look quickly where that is because I do actually have some content that I just filmed on audiobook distribution. So I think it came out already. So let's see. Sell your book on Findaway Voices came out on November 4th 14th. And then I have another video that is selling your audiobook. There's another one, Audiobook Publishing how to Avoid Audible. That one came out on November 3rd. So check those two videos out because that will help you immensely with that as well. All right, my friends, have a wonderful Thanksgiving if you are in the United States. Everybody else have a fantastic rest of the week. And I look forward to seeing you on our holiday extravaganza on December 16th. And have fun with Sarah in two weeks back here on the next live stream. All right, take care. Bye.