#121: How to Break into the Lucrative Market of Writing for Authors, Speakers and Coaches

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia.

Hey there. Thank you for joining me for episode 121 of the High Income Business Writing Podcast. My name is Ed Gandia and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to take their writing businesses to the six figure level or the part time equivalent. Just a quick reminder that you can find detailed show notes of this episode by going to b2b launcher.com episode121 and on that website you'll find all kinds of resources and show notes. I encourage you to check it out if you haven't been there before or if you haven't been there in a while. You know, when you do something well, you tend to take that skill for granted. And take copywriting for instance. I've been copywriting for about 17 years before I even knew there was such a thing as copywriting. I didn't even know what it was called. I was just writing sales and marketing materials for myself as an employee. But I've been doing it professionally for 14 years and I'm certainly not the best copywriter in the world by any means. But it comes easy to me. You know, I can do it well. I consider myself a good copywriter and that's not the case for many of my fellow authors, speakers and coaches, people who are very good at what they do. But copywriting is certainly not in their wheelhouse and they know it. Many of them deliver great results for their clients, for their readers, for their customers. But they can't do things such as write good landing page copy. They can't write an effective email campaign or even a basic sales page. Some might try, but you can tell immediately this is just not good. It's all over the place. Unfortunately. These are critical marketing assets you need to have in place if you want to have any hope of success as an author, speaker or coach. I mean, you just can't get away with, without these, without these assets. And believe it or not, most of these folks don't know where to turn for a good copywriter. And that's when my good friend and colleague Casey Demchak saw a real opportunity a few years ago. In fact, in this interview, Kasey is going to really get down into some, some detail about this particular target market. He's going to talk all about what this market is, all about what these folks need from copywriters, how you can find the better quality clients. Because there are A lot of people who aren't going to be a good fit for you. They might seem like they would be because they're having a lot of trouble, but they're not going to be a good fit. So he's going to show you how to identify the better ones, and he's also going to talk about what you can charge for your work, plus a lot more. In fact, we kind of get into some. Some significant detail. Casey was extremely generous with his advice, his information, his insights. I think you're going to get a ton out of it. But I do need to warn you about something, and that is that I had some serious technical difficulties when we scheduled our interview. And during our interview time, and this is the second time we'd actually try to schedule the interview, I decided to just run with it and have KC record it on his end. So I need to let you know right up front that the audio quality is not what you're typically used to in this podcast, but I think the quality of the material more than makes up for the less than optimal audio quality. So without further ado, here's my interview with the one and only Casey Denchak.

Well, Casey, welcome to the show, man, it's great to have you here. Been a long time coming. I'm glad we finally able to make this work.

My pleasure, Ed. It'll be fun.

All right, so before we get to what we're going to talk about today, why don't you give us a little bit of background. Tell us about yourself. Tell us about the kind of work you do, the kind of clients you work for, and, of course, your background, too, how you got into this.

Well, I got into this. I've been at it now for 23 years, 16 years as an independent copywriter and consultant. And basically, I always tell people I got into copywriting because I couldn't sell my screenplays. In the 80s, I went to film school at Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles. I won their top screenwriting award two years in a row. I was a story analyst for a while for Ron Howard, which was a lot of fun, and Anson Williams. They were Richie and Potsy on Happy Days. And so I did the Hollywood thing till I was around 30 and just got really burned out and couldn't get my career going the way I wanted to. And I came home one day and started reading my junk mail, and I thought, well, heck, they probably pay people to write this kind of stuff, too. And that was my first thought of let's check out copywriting. I didn't even know the term was copywriting at that point. Then, like a ton of people, I went down to Barnes and Noble and I bought two, went to the marketing section, and there was 10 books on copywriting, and like, eight of them were written by Bob Bly. So, you know, I picked up the Copywriter's handbook and the $85,000 a year freelance writer. And long story short, I was working for a company at the time as a computer operator at nights. And they allowed me to write some marketing materials for their company at nights and on the side and on the weekends. And I put together a little portfolio, was hired by a healthcare company in Newport Beach, California. It could have been a dog food company or whatever just happened to be healthcare. I worked for them for two years and then was hired as the senior copywriter at a medical device company called Mentor, which is in Santa Barbara, California, which is where I grew up and worked for them for five years all along, knowing I was going to eventually go independent. And in 2000, I broke free of that company and became an independent copywriter. But I made them my first client. And I still, till today, I've got two projects this week with people that I worked with at that company over 20 years ago.

That's crazy.

They've all branched out to different medical companies, and so it's worked out real great. So 16 years later, I've been writing for medical device Companies and other B2B companies and other industries. And also now a few years ago, I got into the author, speaker, coach world.

All right, so let's get into that. And this is fascinating because I'm trying to figure out how you bridge that, considering that you've been deep into the medical device world for so many years, by the time you started working with author speakers and coaches. So how did that come about?

What happened was a good friend of mine named Nick Zellinger, who lives here in Denver as well. Whenever I would write a special report or something to give away to people, he would do the design work on my special reports, he would do the COVID he would do the inside stuff, and we would always kind of shoot the breeze together. And what Nick's specialty was was doing book covers and the internal book layouts. So he'd always say to me, you know, Casey, all these authors, they just turn in this horrific back cover copy. They can't write their own back cover marketing copy. And I said, well, that seems odd. If you can write a book, you think you'd be able to crank out a little marketing copy for Your book? He says, no, trust me, they can't. So he urged me to go to a conference here in town. There's this organization called Author University. It's a national organization that just happens to be based here in Denver and they have a national conference every year. So I spent $600 and set up as a vendor at their conference with a table, with a bowl of candy, the table. And I created this big banner. And the banner that I put next to my little table, it said, I write marketing materials that sell books. That's all it said. They had a little artwork on it. And what I found, I just got tons of traffic from a lot of authors, but more than that from consultants, marketing consultants who worked in the author speaker coach world. And within three months of that conference, I had done my about 12 to $15,000 writing for authors, speakers, coaches. But it was in assignments, but it was all through consultants, a couple authors, but mainly through consultants. So what I found was, and what all these consultants told me was, you know, we have all kinds of people who could design book covers and all that, but we don't have a go to copywriter who knows how to write good sales copy. And so what I found was I was getting work through consultants who work with the author speakers coaches, more so than the authors directly. So I lined up like three clients who were feeding me work.

Yeah, they work with. These are people who consult with several authors. So it's not a one time opportunity. If you do a great job with one of their clients, you could do more.

Exactly. So they kept feeding me work and I work with a couple of those consultants till today. In fact, I finished an assignment this morning for one of them.

When was this again? When you started?

Five years ago, I'd say.

Five years ago. Okay. And just to clarify, when you say consultants, what kind of work do these consultants do for author, speaker, coach?

Well, for example, the one I was working on today, it's a company called Hasmark Publishing. And they work with self publishing authors to publish their book. But they also do a big launch day. What you do in the author speaker coach world is you'll have a book launch day where you get the author to find partners who will send out E blasts promoting their launch day, their book on launch day. And then has Mark has partners. They send out an E blast, their partners send out E blasts promoting the book on launch day. So you may have 50, 60 people sending out an E blast to their list, encouraging people to buy the book on this particular day, on launch day. And through that, the author may sell a couple hundred books and they become an Amazon best seller. And they get, and now they get the best selling author badge from Amazon and forever they can call themselves a best selling author. So best selling campaigns typically all happen in one day. So what I do is write the E Blast, the sales E blast that gets sent out to everybody. And then I also write the book sales page. So when you send out an E Blast, it kind of sells the book. But then if you need to know more information before you buy the book, you can click a link in that E blast and it takes you to a landing page, a sales page for the book. And so I write those two items for this particular company.

Okay, makes sense, makes sense. So you just described kind of the marketing consultant element of the market and how great an opportunity that can be. Can you kind of give us a. We can kind of step back to the 30,000 foot view, maybe give us an overview of the market and who the players are, just dynamics of that market.

Yeah, it's a huge market. I mean, people are publishing books now like crazy. So there's just a whole bunch of books being published every day. And so you have publishing companies, independent publishing companies, who need copywriting support. You need the authors themselves. I mainly work with authors who are also speakers and coaches. So there's a ton of them out there. And then you come down to the lower level, which, as I call it, the guy who wrote a book, the bartender who wrote a book, or the gal who wrote a book. And they may come from any background, but they generally don't know a whole lot about marketing and that kind of thing. And so I kind of wrote for some of those people for a while and it was not as enjoyable. So I learned to either write for the marketing consultants, the publishing consultants, or if I'm going to work directly with an author, I work with speakers and coaches who come from a C level corporate background.

So C level for those people who may not know what that is.

Yeah, you know, like someone who was the, you know, if you work in a company, you've got the vice president of marketing or the CEO or vice president of corporate control, or all the kind of executive level people who work at bigger companies. A lot of them either through their own choice or they're forced out of the corporate world because they're getting older. They become independent consultants. So they may do speaking and also have a book and information products as well, related to their book. And so if they've got an information product based on A book and they also do some speaking. They're going to need copywritten for their business as a whole. They're going to need copy written to sell their information product. They're going to need copy written to sell their book. So there's a potential copy there. The advantage of working with people from a C level corporate background is they are used to living in the world of larger numbers. So when you send them estimates, they respect bigger numbers. They tend to be quality and value first clients as opposed to price first clients. So that's kind of the area I try to work in is the more high end speaker coach who happens to be an author and then also working with some of the more high end consultants. If you just work with a guy who wrote a book, a bartender who wrote a book, who doesn't have a real professional background or marketing background, they're not used to seeing proposals and estimates and your normal pricing could kind of blow their mind. They're looking in there and they're looking for lower, lower, lower prices. So I stay away from that crowd and I go more for the high end corporate crowd and more high end consultants because again, they come from the world of bigger numbers. They're used to seeing proposals that have larger numbers. They realize that good marketing copy costs some money and it's much more enjoyable space to work in within that niche.

Okay, so, and that makes perfect sense. And I also, and maybe I shouldn't assume this, but it sounds like a lot of these people already have a pretty good idea of what they want. They may not know all the specifics, but they're a little bit more educated in terms of what they're looking for.

They're more educated, they're confident, they want to work with the best. So if your estimates are too low, they don't think you know what you're doing. But the big advantage you have as the writer, as confident and as accomplished as these people may be, they have a heck of a hard time writing about themselves. You know, they tend to be too humble. And what I do through the interview process with them is I really bring out their talents and what they've done and their accomplishments. And I write about them in a way that they would never write about themselves. And so they tend to be very, very pleased with what I write for them because I make them sound really great within. I mean, I don't lie or anything like that or bs, but I really pull out their accomplishments and make them sound very accomplished and authentic. And so they tend to be very appreciative of that.

Oh, that's fantastic.

And yeah, you're immediately their hero.

Yeah, exactly. And they refer. Because when I write for a marketing communications manager at a medical device company, they may refer me to product managers and whatnot within their company, but they're not so much referring me to marketing communications managers at other medical device companies, but people who are in the author speaker coach world, the speaker coaches and the executives. And they speak, they're keynote speakers at conferences. They do tell their colleagues about me. So I get quite a few referrals.

Oh, that's fantastic.

You're right.

It's not as common or as easy to get in other aspects of commercial writing. I'm curious. You mentioned a few of the projects. You mentioned book campaigns, promotional campaigns. Can you touch on a couple other projects that you. I'm sure there's all kinds, but maybe some of the more profitable ones. You did touch on info products as well.

Yeah. So a lot of speaker coaches, if they have a book, they come up with kind of a curriculum for their book through an on demand online program or something. They'll turn their book also into programs and seminars. So what I tend to write and I really push message platforms, my core message platforms. I kind of designed core message platforms for this particular crowd. So I'll offer them a bundle of marketing materials within one package. So that might consist of website copy for their book, let's say. So that would be a home page, a sales page for the book, an about page, maybe a Q and A if they have an information product. Or it could include a sales page for their information product. Eblast, they got to put a lot of email out, so I write a lot of E blast for them. So if they have a book, an information product, or even just a book or just an information product, I'll tell them that we don't want to just write all these pages as a one off. We want to have common threads that run through everything, common thematic elements. We want to create an entire messaging package for you that includes a lot of those projects. That's what I sell. And that's, you know, I really don't do just a one off. Like, okay, I'll do your home page or I'll do your about page. I want to do the whole package, and that's what I go for.

So I'm assuming you bundle price, Right? You.

You have packages I sell, you know, like, I'll sell. Maybe I did one recently. A package, an assortment of the materials I just mentioned. And I sold it for $5,500 to, to the speaker. So then. And I've done them for as much as 65. And the author speaker coach crowd like $6,500 between 5 and $7,000, basically.

And give us an idea of what that might include in a package like that.

You know, again, they'll say, okay, I need some website copies. So speaker coach websites tend to be a little smaller. You want to keep them pretty basic. So you have a homepage, you have an about page, you have a sales page for the book and or information product. Maybe you have a Q and a page. Then you have a.