Who Is On Your Self-Publishing Team + Q&A

All right. Hello. Let me just make sure, just making sure I'm not muted, that happened to me the other day. So welcome. It's Tuesday. It's our live stream Tuesday coming at you from my bedroom office. Since it seems like I'm going to be working from this place for a little while, I'm gonna send up, set up a little bit more of a makeshift kind of studio space so that you guys don't have to stare at my bed and my close it when I forget to close the door. But anyways, hello and welcome. It is so good to be here with you again. I want to thank all of you, so many of you that came out for the Saturday deep dive into selling books from your home. It was spectacular, the turnout that we had, the questions we had. There were so many great questions, we couldn't get to them all. So I'm actually going to spend spend time today to answer three of the questions that we really wished we would have gotten to. And our regularly scheduled content was about who's on your publishing team. So we'll still talk about that, but I feel like the coronavirus and what's happening for authors and all of that stuff is more top of mind right now than figuring out who's on your publishing team. So I'm going to address those questions plus a couple other things. Amazon, for example, a lot of people are under the somewhat incorrect assumption or I don't know if assumptions the right word. They've read articles from Publishers Weekly and other places saying Amazon is deprioritizing books. And that is not exactly true. So I want to clear the air on a lot of these things. So we're going to talk about who's on your self publishing team really quickly and I'll shoot a formal video for you that I'll put out probably in the next four to six weeks. Weeks. So you've got that content and then we're going to address what's top of mind and probably more pressing for you right now than making sure you've got the right team. All right, so if you're in the house, make sure you say hello because of course there are prizes for those of you who join us live and participate. It makes my day. And thanks for those of you giving me thumbs up. That's great. So, Kai, Angela, Vince. Oo Nai or Oy Nai Latonia. Hey, Kai, Rachel. Hello. Kevin McGuire always loved when you can stay up and join us. Derek, Silksky and Guy. Welcome everyone. Welcome. Okay, so we're just going to dive right in if you have your own questions. Like I said, if you didn't get the email, let me just pull up my notes of the questions we're going to cover. Specifically, I'm going to talk about this Amazon situation because I've been on a lot of forums and groups lately where it's a hot mess of what you guys think and what is actually happening. So I'm going to talk about that. Is it a good time to launch your book right now or should you wait until the fall? Should you relaunch your book if you launched it in the middle of COVID 19 and my book is going to be seen as profit seeking while healthcare workers are suffering on the front lines. Should I not publish it at all or right now, et cetera? So I'm going to address those three questions because they were really good ones. There was lots of good ones that came in on our Saturday Live training, but we didn't get to those. So I want to hit those. Talk about Amazon and touch on your who's on your self publishing team. Plus, we have our usual swag. And I got to show you guys this. This is pretty funny. I'm literally bursting at the seams. There were so many people because I missed our last live stream. We were on a vacation just as the apocalypse hit. So I missed the last live stream and I'm making it up for it there. And we also have some other prizes. I'm going to give you guys some books because I think that a lot of us are at home with little extra time. We could use some inspiration. Motivation. So I've picked four books for you, so we'll be giving those away too. So make sure you're saying hello. And there's going to be lots of prizes, lots of fun today. So thank you for joining me. All right, so first and foremost, who is on your self publishing team? This is largely dependent on your goals and your resources. But you know, to me, if you were to work with book launchers, there are many people on your self publishing team because we're producing books that are as good or better than a traditionally published book. The only book I have here because all of the other ones are at my office, which I can't go to. This is the latest launch that we had from Jeff Ruby, Red Rock Leadership. So this is a fantastic book for everyone right now, but his subtitle is transform your company culture and unleash the potential for exponential growth. This is all about leadership, which we need more than ever right in this moment. In every organization. So we'll be giving away a copy of this book. But our books go through a rigorous process. So not every author is going to have the resources or the goals that align with having a full service team. But I'll tell you everybody that will work on one of our clients books and that will give you a sense. And then I'll highlight the ones that I think are a must have no matter what. And again, I always come at this as a perspective of perception because I never want somebody to pick up a book and go, you self published, right? Never ever, ever. So whatever you have to do. And this is for two reasons. One is because you know it's a, it's your book, it's your baby, you put your heart and soul to into it. So you want it respected and given the treatment that it deserves. But also as all of us indie authors self publishing there, there is less of a stigma than there ever was. But there still can be a stigma. And the more we all put into creating quality books, the less there will be a stigma because there will be no difference between a self published book and a traditionally published book and the stigma will vanish. So the more we try and create excellent quality, the better. So our teams depends on whether you work with one of our writers or one of our writing coaches. But everybody speaks to the story expert who helps craft your hook. Make sure we've got something that's going to make you stand out, that's going to make you unique. Then we have writing coaches that will coach you through. And I have a video coming out right away on what does a book coach do? So what is a writing coach when they're helping you with a book? So if you don't know that video is going to be absolutely awesome for you. So we have writing coaches and we have writers. Once that's done, we put every book through a content or developmental edit. So that's your view from 30,000ft. Also a video on the website, I'll put these links in the description afterwards because I don't think we can drop links into the side. But a video on what does each editor do? Like which editors do you need? When I have a video on that but a content developmental edit first, then we put it through two rounds of copy edit. A copy edit is your typical grammar, sentence structure, word choice, that kind of editing. These are two different people. In fact, very rarely on our team does a content editor also do copy edit. For our team, there's a few that we kind of call hybrid. They do A bit of both at the same time, which some people call a line edit. But we generally. It's very different because it's a different skill set. Copy follows rules. There's very strict rules that you're following with copy edit, whereas a content or developmental edit is a lot of choices and understanding genres, understanding what makes a great story, how to make compelling work, how to make a compelling story. And like an arc really of your book. Those kind of things come into the developmental edit and then we have a proofreader go through everybody's book. We have cover designers, professional cover designers. Once we have the COVID we design the interior. That's also a very, it's. That's quite an intensive process as I've talked about before. We have a great live stream where we went into that into detail. And then along the way you're talking to our book marketing manager who is really strategizing with you. So some of that stuff you can do on your own. To me, editing is an absolute must. At a minimum, you need a copy editor. At a minimum. Most books, though, realistically also need that developmental edit. There's a few books that can get away without it, but it's not very often. And this is the case where you meet people, where I meet people who say, I hired an editor, they made my book grammatically correct, but they didn't make my book better. And that's because the copy editor followed the rules, but they didn't actually dive in and really figure out what's wrong or where your book wasn't explaining things well enough, or where there was more examples or even where you repeated yourself. Sometimes that doesn't get caught in necessarily a copy edit. It's more of a content or developmental edit. So those pieces, I think are mandatory. I also think a professional cover designer is mandatory. And you know, I think line, line layout, typesetting, as we've talked about, or interior design of your book, it's an absolute pain in the patootie. So I highly recommend you hire that piece out too. You know, there's. You can get away with other things by having crowd, you know, crowdsourcing things, focus groups, you know, really utilizing your network. You can probably get away with hiring, not hiring some of these other pieces. When it comes to marketing, if you are a go getter, you are happy to reach out to people. You're good at networking. You can do a lot of that on your own. We have a project manager that oversees it for everybody. You, you can act as your own project manager. So you don't necessarily need that person on your team. The project manager also oversees the upload and distribution setup, and then our marketing team does pitching. And. And you can always hire those pieces out or do them for yourself as well. So that's in a nutshell. Of course. There's also graphics design work that goes into social media, there's copywriting, there's research that goes into your SEO and keywords. So those are all things you could hire out or you can do yourself. If you guys got questions about who's on your team, let me know. But otherwise, like I said, I think I'm really going to dive into some of these things that are more pressing for our times and not spend as much time talking about the team as I had originally scheduled for myself. All right. Hey, Dale. Hey. Hey. Polar's Petrol. I've never seen you here before, so welcome. Polar's Petrol. It took me a minute to figure out your name. It's great to see you. Hey, Sarah. And hello. Hello. Derek. Joan. Wonderful. Leonardo. Hey. It's so great to see so many new faces. And of course, all the regulars. Carol Lynn, she's from central Maine. Awesome. Wonderful. Hey, it's great to have you all here. And Rachel Robertson got her mug and book today. Yeah, I love it. Coffee, tea, and hot chocolate all tastes better in it, I have been told. And in fact, I did have my morning coffee in this mug that is bursting. This is my punishment for skipping a live this month because now this mug is so full. In fact, why don't we draw one of the names right now? All right. Doo, doo, doo, doo. So you guys can tell I'm not looking. Let's go over here. I'll look you guys in the eye, right? And I'll draw a name and we'll do two, actually. One is going to be for a book and one is going to be for the usual swag. Okay, here we go. I've pulled two out. Okay, so the first name is going to be for the book launcher swag, which, as you probably know, but some of you are new. So you will be choosing between the oh so soft book Launcher's journal or that fabulous noboringbooks mug that I just drew the name from. So. Oh, Robert Bell. Yay. Congratulations, Robert. We're going to shift that all the way out to you so you can let us know if you want the journal or the mug. Let us know. You can just email Angela or anyone on the team, you know how to find us and let us know what you would like. And then this is for a book. And the four books I have for you to choose from today are two from our past videos. So our most recent author spotlight videos. So we have Mean people suck with Michael Brenner, which was a author spotlight video on getting book reviews. And then the most recent one, which is from Gillian Gertzen, which is Elephant in the gym. She did a great spotlight on how to mobilize a small audience into massive results. Very, very cool story. So if you haven't seen those two videos, make sure you go check those out on the channel. And so those are two great books for this time, too. And then, like I said, Red Rock Leadership, which just came out last week from Jeff Ruby. Really great book for anybody leading teams right now. And then another one, which I don't have because I'm not in my office is, ah, food. Why do you trouble me so much by Todd Nyholm. Also a recent release and a really great one, as we've been talking about around the office about how to manage your relationship with food while we're also close to our fridge and stressed out. So the winner of that is Benny Bullock. So, oops. Sor. Bump my mic, Benny Bullock. Let us know which of those books you want and. And where to send it. And so email us at Team T E a m book launchers.com and we'll get those over to you. So thank you so much. And since you guys are all saying hello, let's make sure we give all of you a prize, too. So let's go. What's today? Today's number today is March 31st. So let's go 31st from the top, all the way down. So, Angela, can you count number 31 from the top and let me know who that is and we will give them a prize. All right. Hey, whoa. We've got some bad language in here. I don't know how to get rid of that bad language, but not cool. Not cool. This is. This is not a family show necessarily, but I still don't want F bombs, please. Okay. How much of the marketing can book launchers do? Okay, so I always call it marketing with you because the reality is there, we're only doing 10 to 15 pitches. 20, 25 if you're on our higher level. And sometimes that's great. I mean, we had one group of pitches go out last week, 10 pitches for a client, and so far, we've already had four positive responses. But that's rare. I would say a lot of the months we get, we put 10 to 15 pitches out and we'll hit one or two things. So if you think about that, that's one or two media pieces or one or two podcast interviews. Sometimes it's a speaking engagement or a webinar. That's not enough to sell a ton of books. So it's really a joint effort. So what we always recommend is there's certain things that you should be doing in pre launch and then at launch and then post launch. And a lot of what I recommend is mobilizing your own network. If you have a platform or an audience of your own, then you're mobilizing them. Which is really why Jillian Gerson's video, her Author Spotlight is a great example because she had less than a people in her network like in her Facebook and on our newsletter list. And she mobilized it to massive results, getting cap like display space in 36 chapter stores in Canada, selling a lot of books. So. So she really mobilized a small audience. But that was her like, we gave her some direction, we gave her some tips, we told her kind of, we gave her a step by step plan of what to do, but she did that. And then we were able to do other things for her, getting her coverage. I don't remember if Sarah was on here. She'd be able to tell magazines and things like that, podcasts that we got her on. So our marketing is really geared towards places that you don't have access to right now and where your readers are hanging out. So some of the cool things we've, we've set up recently, we had one client, actually two different clients do a feature for Mentor Box. So they got interviewed for Mentor Box that goes out to 300,000 people. So it was an unpaid spot with massive, massive exposure to people that are in their ideal reader audience. So that's some of the things that we'll do. We also pitch what we were pitching. Bookstores. Now we're pursuing online book clubs. So if anybody has any online book club connections, we would love to hear about them if they're in the nonfiction space. Because that's one avenue we're really developing quickly. Libraries, live appearances. We've done some webinars with a major HR organization where our author teaches the webinar and the HR organization purchased books. And then it actually led to consulting gigs and two speaking engagements, two different authors, those results. So, but it varies, it varies on the author. One of our clients wrote a book on horror, so we've spent a lot of time lining up conventions for him. He does panels, you know, opportunities to promote his book in booths, those kind of things. So that's the kind of marketing we do. And, and we do pitch media and we get media. We just had somebody, Thrive Global, we get a lot of articles in Thrive Global, which goes out across, it's syndicated off quite a few things. Entrepreneur, Forbes, you know, all those kind of places. So we do a lot of that media stuff, but we really get excited about the things that get you in front of your ideal audience and sell books. But it's a joint effort and I never ever pretend that what we do is the only thing that you need to do to sell books. We also manage Amazon ads campaigns for the higher level. We do some paid marketing like Goodreads, giveaways, Book Bob, lots of things. But it really is a team effort. And if you as an author are not prepared to do something almost every single day to sell your book, your book is not going to have big results unless you already have a massive audience that you've worked hard to build. Excuse me. Okay, let's see. M. Dobbs. I'm writing a book. Woo hoo. From Coma to Walking. Wow. Wow, that sounds like a powerful story. Margaret's drinking from her mug at this very moment. Woohoo. I love it. The advantage of lockdown is we have far more diamond our hands to watch your live streams. Yes, Vince, it is wonderful to have so many of you here today. And on Saturday we had so many people stay for the full two and a half hours, which was pretty epic. So I was really grateful for everyone. Hey Scott. Woohoo. Hey. It was so great to have you in our hot seat on Saturday, so thank you. Okay, carrying on. Rude dude. All right, I hope you're polite. You said good evening, so that's off to a good start. All right, Derek Silksky. Woohoo. You were Comment number 31. So I don't know if you've won all the swag there is to win, so I'm just going to give you a complete choice, my friend. You can choose between the mug, the journal, or one of those four books, the Elephant in the Gym, Mean People Suck, Red Rock, Leadership and Food. Why do you trouble me so? Email us@teamoklaunchers.com with your mailing address and your choice of prize. Thank you as always for all of your comments. I think you comment on every single video, so thank you for that and thank you for being here. Happy April Fool's Day is tomorrow. Unless I guess you're if you're in Australia, perhaps it is in fact April Fools. Derek. Oh, There you go. So you can pick a book. So I thought you had all the swag. See, my brain still works, you guys. Okay, hover over the comment. Three dots will appear on the right. Click them and you see options to delete the tweet. Oh, sweet. Okay, I can go get rid of that. I'm just gonna back up for a second because I saw. I didn't like seeing the bad words in there, so I want to get that out. Thank you, Kevin. I did not know that. Okay, so bad word removed. Thank you. Okay, carrying on. So now I'm gonna hit some of these questions. If you guys. Marlena Davis, welcome. Big Drew, welcome. Rude dude is actually a gentleman. I suspected so. It's great to have you here. Okay, so what? Oh, Angela said she already blocked it, but I can still see. Can see it. Okay, if you don't know what we're talking about, that's good. It was just an inappropriate remark. Okay, so the questions. If you guys have other specific questions, I'm going to, I'm going to answer those. And actually Joan, I think one of those was your question from Saturday. So it's great to have you here so I can answer it. But first I want to talk about the thing that, that people have been that I've seen on quite a few posts about Amazon saying that they've deprioritized shipping books. And I want to clear something up because we have done a couple of launches in the past couple weeks for clients. So we've seen this and we understand what's happening. And I want you to know what it means. Now of course that's subject to the fact that I've also seen things about Amazon workers striking. And you know, things are a hot mess. Right. So I put that caveat on that what we've seen three days ago may not actually be true anymore. Okay. So forgive me in advance for that. But the situation is what we do, we upload our clients books to IngramSpark prior to launch so that we can have a print pre sale period. And then we turn on KDP print once we have launch day. And so what we're seeing is that Amazon has in fact deprioritized books from third party places so somewhere like Ingram would be shipping it into their warehouse and then out from the Amazon warehouse to do the fulfillment when that was the case. So in the pre launch period before we turned on KDP print, the shipping windows were insane. We were seeing. I'm trying to remember, it was like April 28 to May 15 or something like that was the shipping window. It was like so far in the future. It was wild. But that was. So while it was in pre launch, that was the shipping date, which isn't ideal for anybody to see that by the way. But so you would have to communicate to your audience that that's happening. But as soon as launch day happened and we turned on KDP Print, so the fulfillment of the books would be switching for Amazon.com would be switching from Ingram to Amazon. The shipment window went down to five days, which is kind of normal for Amazon right now. Amazon prime is not doing immediate to your door shipping or even two day shipping. So five day shipping was, was, was pretty normal. So that's what we're seeing. And in fact Jeff's book, that was right on target. I got it three, actually three days after his launch. Three, four, I can't remember. I think I got it three days after his launch. So. So that wasn't. I tested it because I was curious. So I purchased it on launch day and got it three days after his launch. So just so you guys understand, of course things are a little bit more of a mess. And this ties into one of the questions I wanted to answer which was I have a launch right now, should I post like I have a launch coming in the next month, should I postpone it? What should I do? So I want to answer that question, but I wanted you to understand that there are some challenges and you, you know, you need to communicate to your audience, to your buyers, to those that book army that you've been building, hopefully what's going on and if they're seeing this shipment window that they know that that might not actually be the case once you turn on KDP Print. And of course if you are doing KDP solely, then you won't be doing print pre sales so you wouldn't have this issue anyways. Okay. Just checking out here. Let's see. Vince said he loved the Saturday session. Thank you. It was awesome to have you there. Okay. Oh, it's in New Zealand. April fools in New Zealand. Indeed. So Australia wasn't far. Okay, Jewel, welcome. First time on this live but have subscribed and love your YouTube post. Thank you. It's great to have you here for the first time. Can you say hi to my friend Nick Gurr? He's in the live here somewhere and I'm a big fan. Okay. I did, but you've said that over and over again so I don't know what that's all about. Okay. So I'm Looking to republish my first book, Runaway John. I wrote two more books to add to the Runaway John series. Would I be able to publish it as a whole series? Okay, I'll come back to that question and I'm going to answer the question about launching right now first. Okay? So please remind me to come back now. Launching right now. So here's the good news about launching right now. While things are a hot mess in the world, there's way less launches happening. There's way less launches. So you can choose to stand out amongst a field of few or you can wait until the fall when all the big publishers, some of the indie publishers, they're all planning to launch in the fall. So you're, you know, that is one thing, right? Like you, a lot of people have pulled back their launches. One of our writers, you know, one of our top writers, he was booked up and we couldn't get any projects into him because he had, I think he had one or two of our projects, but he also had, I think, two or three from other places. Those projects are all gone. They stopped. So he's looking at us going, hey, I'm free and clear. What else have you got for me? And so knowing that you want to make strategic choices here and think carefully about your launch, because you are now, you have two things going for you. One, you're going to be launching in to captive audience. I mean, look at you guys. Many of you have said, hey, I have more time to watch your live streams. We had people, we had over 50 people sit with us for two and a half hours on Saturday for our live stream. And so you have a captive audience of people who want content to consume. So if your book has any sort of a message that's of value right now, like I said, Jeff Ruby, Leadership. We need leadership more than ever. Todd Nyhem's book, Ah, Food. Why do youo Trouble Me so Much? I mean, like, I'm a fit, healthy person and I'm eating more than I should be because the fridge is right there. I'm a little more stressed than usual. There's more pressure. Just everything that's happening is more pressure in the world. And so, yeah, this topic is really useful. So if you've got a spin on what you're talking about, we had somebody on the live stream on Saturday whose book is all about online meetings, how to run an online meeting. I mean, can you talk about a book that is meant for right now? So if you have that book, if you can find an angle of what people need to know what they, that they, you know, should be learning right now in this time period. And you can do it to an audience that is more hungry for content than, than ever because they're sitting there and there's no sports to watch, there's no major movies launching, there's no movies to go to, there's no restaurants. We can't do anything. So to me, unless your book is really not something that you can find an angle for right now, then I would launch right now. There's some books that I could see maybe not being appropriate to be marketing and promoting right now. But there are a ton of reasons in my mind that I would go forward with the launch knowing though that you're going to have some distribution struggles, people are going to have shipment issues. So I would probably emphasize the ebook right now, now, and then push the print later. So that's, that's my take on it. I'm curious to see. I've seen some comments popping up. Oh, gee. Okay, we need to get rid of some people here. Remove. Sorry. Please, please excuse me while I am. Reporting people. Okay, Okay, okay, hold on. Cancel. Just removing remaining. Okay, so hopefully that removes that. Okay. Yeah. So Rachel's block Joe. If you guys want to block Joe, please do. I thought. Oh, and you're saying hi channel. So I'm sorry, I don't. Let me see if I can do that now. I think I've hidden them. Oh no, they're still there. So hide from channel. Hide user on this channel. Okay, perfect. Thank you. So hopefully this user's message will be hidden. So hopefully I've done that so you won't see them anymore. Thank you, Dale. I appreciate it. Okay, cool. Now, beta reader videos. Queen of the Nile, I need to look at your beta reader videos. Yes, we have one out about that and I'm just looking to see. I have to in between all of these messages. Okay, cool. All right. So that's the answer to that question. If anybody has any follow up comments or thoughts, please do chime in. I know we were distracted by the trolls that also have a lot more free time. They're coming out in droves today, my friends. Okay? Everyone is at home, so that's what they're gonna do. We choose to be productive and constructive and others choose other things. So. So that's my take on launching a book right now. Now the other question that came up was I launched in the middle of COVID 19. Should I relaunch? And one of our clients actually has a book out with Hachette she launched in the middle of this, and it hasn't gone super well because. Because she has strategies that really rely on live events and things like that. So she would sell a lot of books in bulk. So she's pivoting to more webinars and things like that. But her launch kind of fizzled because all these things were planned and then got canceled. And so she hasn't sold super well. So they're looking at doing a relaunch in the summer, hopefully reinvigorating all of these corporate things that were there for the bulk sales. And, you know, for some people, I think that might make sense, relaunching. So, you know, you could take your book down and start over. There's lots of ways to tackle a relaunch, but for some people, again, like if you're looking at your book and, you know, like that guy that was on our live stream on Saturday whose book is all about online virtual meetings, he launched in February, I'm just, you know, just go right now you've got a strong message that fits with what's happening in the market. It I would be all over pitching podcasts and pitching even companies to help them with this and not necessarily going at it from a pay me a lot of money, because that's also not the environment we're in. Which I'll. Which kind of leads into the other question that I'm going to answer. But really, I would be going, hey, like meetings, online meetings are different, and there's some things we need to be doing so we're not wasting our time on zoom all day long. And here's my best three tips. And, you know, media is going to pick this up. Podcasts are going to pick this up. There's going to be a lot of people that are trying to add value to their audience and be of service in this time that that book is a fit with. So if your book fits right now, then absolutely not. I would not relaunch. I would just go harder. Just get your message out there. And again, I've seen this before. This is not like 2008. It's way bigger. But in 2008, I watched people reinvent themselves and come out massively strong. They didn't freeze when things were going wrong. They looked strategically at how they could position themselves and how they can position themselves to serve people in the 6:12, 24 months later. And those are our industry leaders today. If you look around you, people that pivoted in 2008, they came out so much stronger. People who Froze, which a lot of people are doing right now. They froze. They didn't take action, and they just waited, and they took years to recover. So I encourage all of you, unless you have a really good reason for not taking action right now, pivot and support people. Be of service. Now is the time for visibility and service and supporting others. And that will come back to you tenfold in the future. So if you have a book that is of value to people right now, don't freeze. Don't think about relaunching. Don't give up. Just go harder. Go. Okay, These people really need my message, and here's why. And get that message out to them now. If you have a book that is completely inappropriate for this time, Nothing's coming to my mind right now, but I'm sure that if I looked on Amazon, I could find a few that just aren't going to resonate right now. Then, yes, I would pull it down and relaunch when the time is better for it. Because obviously what has happened has completely changed the entire world in a very, very short period of time. So you may even want to revamp some of the content in your book in preparation for that relaunch. Okay, so I think there's some questions here. Okay, so I'm going to go back to the one question that I said I would come back to. I wrote two books more to add to the Runaway John series, which I'd be able to publish the as a whole series. I'm not as familiar with series or box sets or those kind of things. Dale might be able to answer that question better than me, but I. I mean, it sounds like it could be a series. I'm not seeing why it couldn't be a series. So I'm not sure it sounds good. Okay, so then carrying back on, yes, it was killing me not to be able to drop the hammer on him. So thank you. I should make. Kevin, you're on almost all my live streams. And Dale, I should. I should add you guys as moderators because that would be super useful. Okay. I'm delaying the release until everybody's back to work. So your book, I kind of remember. I kind of remember what it was about, but I'm not sure. I mean, again, it depends what it was about. So I don't know if my question answered or if my answer answered your question or if you want to be more specific about it uploaded the file and how much time between upload of the file and official launch. Any thoughts on the Amazon algorithm? So. So here's the thing our approach might not be what your approach is or how you want to do it. So for our clients, we typically want the book uploaded at least six weeks prior to the launch. There's a bunch of reasons for that, not necessarily Amazon algorithm related. The number one reason is we're trying to get book reviews and the major book reviewers are most interested in the book before it comes out. So they want to see that book early. So we want to get that book out to them as soon as possible. We also want to rally people to buy the book early, especially in print version. This was before, so that Amazon can know that it's going to be a seller so that you don't have that out of stock problem when it launches. So that can happen if you haven't been properly feeding the beast in pre launch. So it really depends on your strategy, what's going to happen on launch, you know, if you're promoting a print book in pre launch. Now the other thing about, and I have a whole video, I think I've done a couple videos on pre launch kind of explaining our strategy and why we do it this way. We're going for momentum because pre launch gives you that opportunity to reach people who are most interested in your book before it actually comes out. Reviewers, those top reviewers, they want to be the first to review your book, so they want to be that first seen review. So if you want a big reviewer to be reviewing your book, you want to get it out early. We like to also do netgalley reviews, which are librarians, bookstores, a lot of book kind of professionals, they write columns about books, books. We like to do that early too because again, it gets the book out in front of the people who are going to be buying it for distribution purposes early. So if those things don't matter to you and you've got a solid kind of e launch strategy, then you may have a different approach. But we're really trying to upload six weeks before we're actually doing a launch date. Of course there's ways to, you know, mess with that and not have it finalized. And there's, there's, it could be an entire session on this. And I'm actually not the person who does all this. So the nuanced pieces you would need are our client care manager on here answering those questions. And sometimes she's on here, but I haven't seen her today, so. But hopefully that kind of addresses it like it's a strategic thing, not necessarily a time thing. If you're just going for I'm uploading it and I want it to be for sale. I think it happens within 24 hours, even less sometimes. Okay. I'm not a writer person, but I have a book in my head. Well, there's people that can help you get the book out of your head and onto paper. That's kind of what we do at Book Launchers. A lot of our clients have ideas and they actually aren't. They don't want to be the ones to write it, or they are stuck. And that's why we have writers and writing coaches that help you with that. Yeah. Non fiction Work at home. So why wouldn't you launch it now? Kevin? Nonfiction work at home. What are people doing right now? So, I don't know. We can talk about it offline if you want. I. I remember us talking about it. Tips and stuff like that. But let's do one more. One more draw from my YouTube pile. Sorry, I keep bumping my mic. It's in an awkward spot over here. Okay, so book sales. So that's interesting to me that you say book sales are down. Are you sure? You know, are you really sure they're down? Because we're only seeing them down a little bit in some of our clients, and some of them are up. Some of our clients actually surprised us by the sales that they've had in the past couple of weeks. So I'm not convinced the book sales are down. And I think as the weeks go on, as we're staying at home more and more, I think you'll actually see some lifts if you're doing the right things to get in front of people with the right message. But, you know, you're also assuming book sales will be back up in September because, you know, here's what I can see happening in the fall is everything's going to be happening, and it's going to be really hard to get people's attention. Right. A lot of these events, whether we'll all be traveling fully normally in the fall, I'm not certain because it's not like we're going to wake up and this virus is going to be totally gone. So I'm curious to see how this actually plays out. But a lot of these events are going to be taking place. A lot of these launches now, all the movies that held off on digital release because they wanted to have a theater release, they're going to be like, it's going to be. So much is going to be happening. I don't know what that's going to be like to Try to get attention in that market. So I don't know. Nobody knows. And I'm just not a big fan of waiting and seeing. I like to take advantage of what's in front of me in the moment. So that's my personality. Some people are a little more risk averse, which would mean you're not a Canadian living in the us billion miles from your family in the middle of an apocalyptic situation. But you're in the Ukraine, Kevin. So. Okay, so here's another YouTube Prize winner. I'm looking you guys in the eye so you can tell I'm not looking. And here we go. Okay. Okay. All right. Brian K. Morris. I think you've got all the swag too. So if you want to choose one of our books, you can email us@teamoklaunchers.com the four books you had to choose from were Mean People, Soccer, Elephant in the Gym, Red Rock, Leadership, and oh, Food. Why do you trouble me so much? Okay, and then one more. James Branson. All right, so James, you know where to find us and you can choose if you want to have a mug, a journal. I don't think you have either. So you can let us know@teamoklaunchers.com Congratulations you guys. I'm going to do one more, two more draws, but they'll be from the folks that are here live today, six weeks before launch. So upload and launching are not linked? No, nope, not directly. Any more information since it contract contradicts. So I'm not sure what algorithm you're referring to with that. So you might have to be more specific with what you're actually asking guy, because I'm not certain what, like maybe I totally missed the mark on what you were trying to ask for. Rachel says I hope Barnes and Noble doesn't close for good. There was a fear that Powell's was going to, but their online sales drastically increased. Yes, thank you for mentioning that. So that's where I was wondering why Kevin was saying book sales are down. Because we've actually seen a couple of articles where the some of these independent stores and Powell's was one of them, had laid off their workers and then all of a sudden the online sales were booming and they were. They had to rehire some of their employees back to handle the online sales. So there is opportunity. And also with Amazon having these funky windows, if they are getting distribution, distribution from other places and not storing in their warehouse, people are going to turn to other places like their independent stores. So Barnes and Noble, because Barnes and Noble doesn't have the same funky window that Amazon has. I think we're going to see some benefits to other places. And then the people who are being savvy about it, they're having online book clubs or online author events to sell books through their, their stores. Again, this is all about opportunity. And it's what I'm saying about people who freeze up right now, they're frozen and it's going to take them a lot longer to recover than the, than the companies who pivoted and saw an opening. And it's all about focus. So, and I'm kind of harping on this, but I think it's important. If you focus on all the things you can't do, that's what your mind is going to see. If you focus on all the things you can do, you're going to see that there's massive, massive opportunity in this market. Every, every situation of adversity also creates a corresponding advantage. And the people who see the advantage and focus on the opportunities and the openings, they are the leaders, the thought leaders of tomorrow. They're the ones that are going to be financially and emotionally stronger as a result of this situation. And unfortunately a big, big chunk of the population doesn't think like that. And, and again, that's also an advantage for those of you who do. That's my. I'll stop there. Okay, so Queen of the Nile, can you buy advertisement space for your book through a national magazine? You sure can, but it's really expensive and not always worth it. I generally recommend if you're going to pay for advertising, you pay to get some sort of, you pay to have an opt in and also so you can track where that comes from. We do some promotion. We do pay for catalog space for books, but it makes more sense when we're buying for. We usually do six books at a time for our clients because it's a cost, you know, cost benefit for us. It provides exposure for the company as well as for those six books or whatever we choose to do. At that time we did have, we did have amazing results from the library blast we did through ibpa. You know, we, we reached a lot of libraries. We think, we don't know for sure because it was right before this whole thing happened. But we think it actually led to quite a few listings for our client in the libraries print and ebooks. So there's lots of, there's lots of opportunity there. But the budget constraints may make it limiting for some people. Again, we have a little bit more flexibility because we can do More than one book at a time, which lowers the cost per book promoted. So we get a little better deal for it. Okay, yeah, so just. I'll touch on it quickly. Guy. And then it's like. Is a whole nother topic. And Dale actually probably has some really good videos on these kind of algorithms. He goes deep into kdp, in particular on his website. You talk like he's got some brilliant videos on that. So you could even check self publishing with Dale's channel. But, yes, you want to get reviews really soon, But Amazon doesn't reward single spikes. Amazon rewards consistency. So with Amazon, what you really want to be doing is showing a consistent stream of sales. Sales, they don't like the blip. Right. So this is the launch model that you saw with a lot of people. They get that sticker, and then, boom, they get no sales. Well, Amazon doesn't really like that. They want to see consistent sales for your book over time. And, yes, reviews matter, ideally, although it's not proven verified reviews are better. But yeah, I mean, if you're trying to play the Amazon algorithm, nobody actually knows what the Amazon algorithm is. I would focus on fundamentals. Create a great book, get your metadata down so your keywords, your SEO, and then really focus on creating momentum and getting consistent sales, which means doing something every single day to get people buying your book. All right, so pre launch. Yeah, thanks, Angela. That's good. Okay, I got one more question to answer, and then we're done. We've gone on long today, but there's so much to talk about in this day and age. And, hey, you guys are hanging out with me a little bit longer than usual, so. Okay, so last thing was Joan's question about. I think it was Joan from Saturday. Sorry if it wasn't Joan. About really being seen as opportunistic in this market. And I think that. And I think, like, her. Her question was specific to healthcare because her book kind of falls into that category, and she wanted to be seen opportunistic. While, you know, healthcare workers and frankly, delivery people, grocery clerks, like, they're all frontline people. I know they're not necessarily dealing direct with the sick, but they're almost in. In. I think, as one person, one of our clients said he's. He's in. In emt, I believe. And he said, you know what? I signed up for this. I signed up to be on the front line. He said, it's the grocery clerks, the delivery people, you know, those. Those folks who are still keeping us fed who didn't sign up. To be on the front lines and they're exposing themselves every single day they go to work. So there's so many people we have to be grateful for and appreciative of around us. And. Yeah. So, I mean, you don't want to come into this market and be like, I have the way to get rich off everybody's pain and suffering right now. Like, that is not the message you want to go into this market with. You want to go in thinking about, what do people need? What do they need to hear? How can I help them, how can I serve them? And with a book in the healthcare space, you don't go in going, get to be a doctor, be rich. Right. You know, and I mean, that's not the case. I know way too many doctors to know that that is not necessarily the case either. So it's really about positioning yourself with your message in this market in a way that you can serve and offer value. So if you're Kevin McGuire with a book all about working from home, maybe people have realized the risks of going to the office every day and they want to find a way to work from home and make money from home home. So now your book is offering them. Or, hey, maybe they're off work, they've been laid off, they've been furloughed and they're working. They're at home and they want to be working. So maybe you've got tips and tools that can help that person who doesn't have income right now get income. There's always a way to position and to find a way to serve your audience with your message. So I don't think it's about going into it. And I mean, I don't ever come into things going, hey, I'm going to make you rich. So. So that's my natural tendency anyways, is that tendency out from a place of service. But now more than ever, if you come into things with that intention and that, you know this book is going to help you with this, and it's a problem you're having right now, especially because of whatever. Whatever coronavirus or the economic downturn has caused. To me, that's a powerful place, and I wouldn't worry about being seen as opportunistic if you genuinely aren't being opportunistic about this. So you're genuinely coming into this from a place of service, which I know you are. Okay, so one more live prize and then we'll call it a day. Actually, two more. I promised you guys two more. So we're going to do a skill testing question. So what was one of the book titles that I'm giving away today? Put that in there in the first one to get it right can win a prize. And then let's go from. Let's see, it's 2020. Let's go 20 back from Angela's comment where she was telling Guy to go to the YouTube channel and search for pre launch. So Angela, count 20 back from your comment and then whoever. Derek, you already won. So Derek's already a winner today. So I'll take the next. Oh, no, wait, Rachel was above that. Rachel, congratulations. So you can choose one of the four books if you want. Mean people side. I feel like, I feel like you won a book already recently, but I don't mind you can have another one. So you can choose one of those four books. Food. Why do you trouble me? Mean people Suck. Elephant in the Gym or Red Rock Leadership. Email us@teamoklaunchers.com with your choice and your address. And number 20 behind. I'm just waiting for Angela to tell me who our fantastic winner is for the day. And while I'm waiting for that, I'll just say thank you so much for joining me. If you guys have an idea for a future live video topic or you have a question that I should answer in video form in the future, let me know. I am going to shoot some videos next week, so let me know what you want me to cover and I will. I've got some good ideas coming from the questions you guys had for me today, but I will come up with some new stuff. Okay, so Margaret, thank you, but Rachel already won. I'm just waiting for Angela to give me the final winner before I wrap up. So hope you guys are doing okay. Double checked from the retracted comments. Oh, so she's double. So she's double checking the winner. We don't want to. We don't want to misannounce somebody. All right, Queen of the Nile, thank you so much for being here. It was fantastic to have you. And if you're watching the replay, make sure you've said hello and you've commented, of course. And, and let me know what you want a future video to be about. Angela, everybody's holding, holding on. They're waiting for your announcement of your win. Though I'm running out of things to talk about. Let's see, I'll put my cool glasses back on. These are helping. These are the beta blocker glasses. I have found myself staring at the screen a lot. It looks like Rachel again. Okay, can we pick another one? Let's pick another one. I don't want to have double winners on the same day. So pick the next one behind. Behind her, please. Rachel, thank you for being here and congratulations. We need music or something. Okay, Scott, thank you. Woohoo. Hey, DJ Jazzy Jules. I gotta work on my country music Julie Bean or something. Okay, guy, congratulations. Let us know if you want the mug or the journal@teenoklaunchers.com and let us know where to send it. And thank you everybody for being here. It was such a pleasure to spend some time with you. Take care, stay safe. And I can't wait to see you you on the next live stream. All right, bye.