Authority Through Authorship With Julie Broad

How do you make business problems disappear? Wrap em in bacon for business owners, marketing execs, and anyone trying to grow your business, pump your profits and make more while doing less. Welcome to Bacon Wrapped Business with Brad Costanzo. Sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits. Every week, our chefs will serve you proven recipes for ramping up your revenue. Now here's your host, Brad Costanzo.

Hey there. Welcome to Bacon Wrapped Business. This is Brad Costanzo and I'm really excited to have you guys.

I have got a topic that I'm going to invite a guest on to talk about something that we have covered before in some aspects in the past. And today I'm going to explore a slightly different facet of that. Before I get into telling you exactly what that's all about, I want to first thank all of my longtime loyal listeners. And for anybody who's brand new who maybe stumbled across the show and just thought that this sounded pretty cool, smash that subscribe button. If you're listening on itunes and come on over to baconrattbusiness.com Sign up for the newsletter and you're gonna get a lot of extra bonuses that just traditional subscribers on itunes don't get. And I'll let that be a surprise if you come over and sign up for the newsletter. That being, we are going to talk about how to build authority through authorship and take a book as an entrepreneur and launch that in a way that not only generates authority and credibility, but also.

Creates new business opportunities, ones that you probably never even thought that you might have in the past. Now today's guest is authorship book launcher Julie Broad. Now, Julie is a well known expert in the subject of book authority through authorship. And she's graciously agreed to join us here on Bacon wrap business to share her knowledge and expertise so that every entrepreneur, every professional business owner listening to this can really get the answers to these questions. Because I know, I know you've got a book in you. We've all got a book in us and it'd be a shame to kind of not let that out. So, Julie, welcome to Bacon Wrapped Business.

Thanks, Brad.

Yeah, so book launchers. I like the name of that. It's got a cool ring to it. Tell me about how you got involved in the book publishing and in space where you've been helping other people get their books to market.

Well, it's not a short story, but I'll make it as short as possible. I'm a real estate investor, so my background is actually real estate. Spent many years since 2001 investing in real estate. In 2013, I self published a real estate investing book. I went down the path of working with a traditional publisher and looked like I was getting a book deal. But it turned out they decided I didn't have a strong enough marketing platform. In other words, they didn't think my audience was big enough to sell books. So I kind of. And it was funny because it was actually a book on real estate investing for couples, which I thought was kind of lame. The whole time I was like, who's going to buy books? It wasn't even the book I wanted to write. So I ended up self publishing the book I wanted to write, which was telling the real stories, you know, the problems that we had, the tenant that pulled a knife on another tenant and the property manager that got charged with manslaughter and all these problems that we'd encountered. And that book went to number one overall on Amazon as a printed book. So hanging out with Dan Brown and the Game of Thrones and, you know, all these, it was just incredible to be the top book. And I was there for a day and a half, so it was pretty phenomenal. And that kind of kick started people asking me questions about their books. And I even started helping some traditionally published authors with their books. And I was doing that for free, kind of behind the scenes for years because that was 2013, that, that happened. And as we started to pursue moving down to the US because all that happened in Canada, I kept thinking I didn't want to be a coach anymore. I had a real estate training and education company and I kept thinking I wanted to have a service. I kept looking at what everybody was asking me for help with and what I was doing for free and what I enjoyed. And it all came back to book publishing. So I joined them together and thought, hey, I'm going to help people. I'm going to have the team so that we do as much of the work for you as possible. And it'll be a service company, not a coaching company.

I love that. Now, the book writing and marketing aspect, it really is two very important sides of it. And a lot of folks out there who have got the idea for a book or the concept or they know they could, you know, create it. I know they get very intimidated on how can I actually get this out without, you know, just bleeding for years to write this? Do you have a. Do you have a process for authors to get this out in a relatively painless manner?

I'm glad you said relatively painless because at the end of the day, it's still work. Like, it's still you, because you have to organize your thoughts, which is something that a lot of us don't spend a lot of time doing.

So it does take a little bit of work. And I have everybody work with a writing coach that comes to us with nothing, and they're kind of like, I've got an idea, and they want to work through it. Or even somebody with blog content or podcast material, we'll sit down with them. The writing coach will. And they'll go through it and try to figure out, okay, what's the interesting part of this? What's the hook? Because we're thinking marketing. When we're starting to write the book, we're thinking, okay, how are we going to sell it? And who are we trying to reach with this book? Because a lot of the people that come to us with finished books and they want help with marketing, we actually can't help them, or it's not good value, in my opinion, for them to hire us because there's an inherent problem with their book that's making it very difficult to market, and that's why it's not selling, which is why they're looking for help. So we really want to think right from the beginning, what's going to make this book interesting? What's your hook as an author? What's the hook for this book? And then we craft the outline from there. The tough process, once that's done, the writing or speaking, if you want to speak out the sections of your book, which a lot of our clients do, it's much easier. But that. That outline truthfully takes most of our clients, you know, six to eight weeks to get done. Because it's the hard part, finding what's interesting and organizing it.

Yeah, it's not. It's not the easiest part. But that being said, let's assume that that part's done, the book is complete, and we're going to fast forward into some of the stuff that I think that I find the most interesting, which is the marketing of it. Now, some people, not everybody has a podcast, right? Or a big list or a big social following or something in order to launch a book. And I know one of the concerns that a lot of people have is I just don't want to launch this book out. And, you know, it's like crickets. So what are some of the things that people can do throughout that are the best ways that you've seen in order to get some real momentum behind the book sales?

Yeah, I Mean, the big thing is the number one place to sell a book is to your audience. So if you don't have an audience, start building it now, which is something I'm sure you spend a lot of time talking to people about, is start connecting with people. And it can be a newsletter list is ideal because I'm kind of of the mindset that social media can always turn, you know, they can change things, right. Facebook's changing algorithms already. So it's one of things where I recommend you have a newsletter list. But you know, even speaking at different places and making connections that way, having partnerships or friendships with people that have an audience that's similar to the one that you want to reach, those are some things you want to start doing. As soon as you think I'm going to write a book, you really want to do that because that is the single most powerful piece. I was just talking to somebody who helped a New York Times somebody become a New York Times bestseller. And she said, you know, she said 80% of the sales came from me contacting his colleagues from the last 15 years and saying, hey, he's got a book coming out. You know, do you Want to buy 100 copies for your company? And that's what did it. So it's your relationships. So that's really the most important thing to start today.

Okay, so they start doing that. What about book is ready? What are some of the strategies to that.

You know, besides just the traditional.

The traditional ones? What are some of the ones that are the, the sizzling hot. I mean this is bacon wrapped a business. What are, what are some that you've, you know, some of the most highly, I guess I should say highly leveraged activities you can do in order to promote the book.

It depends on what your goals are. Because one of the things, one of the big strategies that a lot of people talk about is becoming a best seller in your category. So you know, you find that, you know, not so trafficked, trafficked Amazon category and you focus on it and you really try to become the number one in that sub, sub subcategory. Now depending on how you do it, that has benefits. You know, one of the benefits is when you become a number one in a sub, sub subcategory, Amazon will move you up into the next Cate category underneath or above that, I should say. So you kind of, you slowly move up. So Amazon will start showing you to more people. So that's a good thing. The drawback is a lot of the companies that are selling this sizzle factor because it is, you know, people are always like, can you make me an Amazon best seller? The drawback is how they're guaranteeing it is they're putting you in a room or they're connecting you with a group of people and you're giving your book to everybody in the room free or for 99 cents. And the problem with that is everybody in the room isn't necessarily your ideal reader. In fact, you're now buying their book and it's messing up the algorithm on Amazon's page for the also bought. So, you know, this has happened when you go to somebody's book and you look at the also bought and you've got a cookbook beside a financial planning book. Besides, yeah, totally random things, things that not one person would really very commonly buy at once. So that's the drawback with looking for those sizzle high factor things is it's not, not going to, it might not get you the results that you want, but it'll get you to that number one in the category.

Right. And to add on to that.

So you mentioned something important which was one of the reasons that you do want to go for one of the subcategory bestsellers is because if you're a best seller there, then Amazon will, a lot of times it'll bleed over. It'll allow you to leapfrog up a category, right? So if you're seen well there, it can generate some sales and then that can, you know, start to step up. However, I, I think people who go after being able to claim that they're an Amazon bestseller, just like, just for the, what do you want to call it? The, the vanity of it to say that they are, it's so misguided. You see a lot of people out there promoting, I'll make you an Amazon bestseller. And that's their entire, that's their entire pitch or. Well, I want to tell my listeners right now it is a complete and utter bs like you literally could claim to be an Amazon bestseller without ever being an Amazon bestseller. Because it's not like the New York Times, right? It's completely fabrication. But it's not like any Amazon's not tracking like, oh, hey, you're a bestseller and here is the third party validation that you were. There's a lot of people who are like, I touched it for a moment and then they put that, they plaster it everywhere. And I'm also not saying that it's a bad thing to plaster it everywhere that you're an Amazon best seller. What I'm Saying for my listeners, and my advice is, don't just get suckered into thinking that you need to.

Chase that one thing like Amazon best seller, that badge. Would you agree that it's.

Absolutely. I think that too many. I think people are starting to wise up to that claim, too. I agree. But, yeah, there's some funny stories out there of people. There's one guy who took a picture of his foot and put it on Amazon, made it a bestseller, and there was literally no content.

Well, exactly. Well, and quite literally, you can say I was an Amazon bestseller and nobody, except for the people at Amazon could prove me wrong. Because I was like, well, I was. But then, you know, I forgot to screenshot it. You know. But ultimately, it's what you do with the book. It's how it's like, does the book actually get read by the intended audiences and.

Exactly. Yeah.

And then how do you leverage that for even.

You know, jumping over bigger, you know, jumping to bigger opportunities is that, you know, that publicity and having the book, et cetera.

Yeah. And I think that's the piece that I, you know, I definitely want to emphasize is what's your goal in writing the book? And really focus on achieving that goal. And even if you're saying, well, I want to be a bestseller, to say I'm a bestseller, well, why, you know, what, what is that going to get you? You know, if you think you're going to get engagements from it, then, you know, it doesn't necessarily. You don't necessarily have to be a best seller. You just need to have a really great book with great reviews and get it in the hands of the people who are going to put you on their stage. So it's more. I think it's more strategic than that. Bestseller is fun and it does have some benefits, but it's not as great as you might think it is. Now, what you do want to do, though, when it comes to Amazon is do some research on the categories and put yourself in the categories where you're most likely to leap up and be shown to more people, because that's where it really matters. If you're number 4 million and 274,000 in the rankings, Amazon's not showing your book to people, and you have to do all the marketing yourself in order to get the word out. So one tip I'll tell people is checking the Amazon rankings for the book and checking the categories and try to find categories that are suitable for your book. So you're not choosing some random category just because it's. You Know, gonna be easy to rank in. And you're looking at the books to make sure that you're not competing with a bunch of top 100 books, but you also want to make sure that there's sales. So to make sure there's sales, you want to have books in the top 20 that are at least 30,000 or above in the overall rankings. And then now you've got a category where there's people buying books, but you're not competing with a whole bunch of top selling books, which is hard to compete against.

Yeah, 100%. Now you're familiar with the 8020 rule, of course. Cool. What would you say is the 20% of book marketing activities that really, you may have already covered some of this, that really generates about 80% of the results.

Again, I really think it's your audience and your relationship. So the people's, you know, other people's audiences. So my book, you know, the example that I gave my audience got it to top 100 overall on Amazon. So I was able to sell several thousand copies to my audience. I had about 10,000 newsletter subscribers and they were active. You know, a lot of people say 10,000 newsletter subscribers, but only 10% are opening. I had about a 45% open rate. So they were pretty, pretty avid audience. And then I had realtors and mortgage brokers because the book was geared towards real estate investors. So you're looking for people who have the same ideal reader as you or the same, you know, that is their ideal customer, but they're not necessarily a direct competitor with you. So when you find those people, they're a perfect promotional partner for you. And so it was really a couple of realtors that had huge audiences that sent it out to their readers or, yeah, their newsletter subscribers. And that's really what bumped it up. So that's 20%. The other piece was speaking engagements. You can move mass quantities of books if you get booked by a company. So a company might book you to speak and they might buy, you know, 100 for that speaking engagement, but then they might buy, you buy 500 for their employees or 1,000 for their employees. You can sell a lot of books going after those bulk orders.

Yeah, absolutely. So this can be a very.

You know, writing and publishing a book, especially if you're an entrepreneur and not just an author. Right. There's not many people out there who are just authors unless they've had a tremendous amount of success and they're living off prior royalties. However, I know that one of the biggest issues here is that for Most people, a book, especially for most entrepreneurs and business owners, most people listening to this, the book is in essence going to be a marketing collateral for the rest of their business. Right. In a lot of cases. And thus there's a big opportunity cost because there's a lot of time, energy and money that goes into creating the book and then publicizing the book for potentially a very low roi because they don't know how it's gonna, you know, how it's gonna be seen. Obviously they're not selling it. You know, it's not a high ticket product, it's very low ticket. And ideally it'll get spread amongst the masses. So I know that it can be very daunting to and do kind of a opportunity cost analysis. I've done this in the past where it's like, do I spend the time getting the book out there and doing all this or do I just go after bigger, you know, bigger fish without it, et cetera. And I also know that you offer services, not just. You're not just teaching people how to do this. Is that correct? You're actually helping people with services as well.

Yeah. We will kind of teach you how to write the book. So we've got a writing coach, but after that we do the work for you. You know, I've got the editors, the layout, the designer and pr, like, yeah, it's really a done for you service, with the exception of I'm helping you become an author, so we're actually helping you write the book. But yeah, this is really a service company which was important for the both the return on your time invested, but also because it takes hundreds of hours to research how to do the little things in here. And why waste your time on that? Because somebody else can do it for you for way less time and do it right when you can make a lot of mistakes.

I agree completely. So what.

If somebody does work with book launchers and let's say they've got the idea, the concept for a book, but they don't have it mapped out, they don't have anything like that. If, if they are serious about it and they just say, julie, help me out. Soup to nuts. What can they expect? How long? How long? For instance, if they do what they're supposed to do, what does it typically take to get it from that position to out the door and rocking and rolling?

It's hard to estimate because it depends on the size of the book. It depends on how much content somebody already has that they can pull from. But typically, I'll tell you nine to 15 months is what we're ballparking generally. And that allows for three months of lead up to the launch. So you've got a finished manuscript for three months where we're kind of planning and executing the launch.

Love it. Okay. And that's to be expected. But this is also exactly one of those reasons why I was saying this. These things don't happen overnight, or at least a good book doesn't happen overnight. I mean, you can throw lipstick on a pig and get it out there, but. And some people do, as we all know.

Yeah, yeah, some people do. That's one. One of somebody came to me one day and said, well, so and so, promised me a book in nine weeks. I said, did they promise you a good book?

Yeah, exactly. Well, there's, what is that? There's a, there's this like triangle. I forget what it is. You can have, you can have speed, you can have, you know, fast. You can have it cheap or you can have it good. You can't have it all three, right? So you can have it good and fast, but it's not going to be cheap. You can have it fast and cheap, but it's not going to be good. Or you can have it good and cheap, but it's not going to be fast. So I've always liked that. It's like, hey, pick one. Pick the one you don't want good, fast or good, fast or cheap.

And you're representing your business. So, you know, kind of thinking about that investment, you know, in time and effort. This is something. Books last way longer than any brochure. So you really don't want to have something out there representing you, your brand and your business that you're not proud of. You really want it to be your best work. Because, you know, I throw a business card, I take pictures and then toss the business card immediately. You know, business cards don't live around town.

But you don't throw the book away.

No, I would never throw a book away. I might give it to somebody, but I won't throw a book away. Even if it's, even if it's a terrible book, I won't throw it away.

And that also brings up another point which is especially for business owners who are using this to build a little extra credibility and authority, but they're not looking to be the next Malcolm Gladwell.

Right.

Or, you know, whatnot. It has to be a good book, but it doesn't have to be an award winning perfect book. Because the truth is, I don't know the exact stats are probably out there. Like how many people who even buy the book of their own volition actually crack it open and get past the first few pages is probably relatively low. Which means, but I mean, for those who go through it and actually read the book, you want it to be good, but you don't want the pursuit of perfection to stop you from pursuing it. Because truth is, most people are not even going to read the whole thing. They'll scan through it and go, wow, I just need to hire this person.

Yeah, exactly. Which leads me actually to a kind of a cool little marketing tip that I'll give you guys. I don't, I don't give this tip to just anyone, but you know, we have, we have mutual friend in common. So inside, when you're planning your book within the first few pages, make sure you have some sort of a call to action to lead people to your website. And you do that for the people who buy your book, but only read the first few pages. But you also do that for the Amazon look inside because people who are browsing, they might do the Amazon look inside and they may never buy your book. But if you have a really cool call to action, you know, come to my website to download this, this cheat sheet or something that's compelling that they would otherwise pay for. It's got to be good. But you've got that in there and they see it and they go to your website. Now you've got a contact that you can build a relationship with and it's going to be a lot more valuable than anybody who just downloads your book and never looks at it. That's kind of a little marketing tip to take advantage of it. You may not sell a book, but you might get a client.

Exactly. It's super powerful. I know I did that when I, I actually consulted with a client. My very first client I ever got. I did that back in five years ago, almost exactly five or six years ago, we launched his book and primarily on kindle, but also CreateSpace and we put that in there. And I mean it had a, just a tremendous opt in percentage of the people who, whether they bought it or whether we're just doing the look inside. And we even put a picture like for the Kindle version, we put a photo of a video that when they went with the hyperlink and when they clicked on it, it went over and then they opted in for the multimedia aspect of it. So with Kindle, it's tremendous way to do it with, you know, with a physical book, you know, Obviously putting the link in there.

The.

I'll just, since I'm on this topic, I'll share with you one of the things that I did, one of the, or two of the more non, I guess, out of the box nonlinear ways of publishing a book that I've done. So one of them is they're both very similar because I didn't actually want to write the entire book, although one of them I did, but my name's not on it. So what most people will do who are looking for a ghost writer, right? They want, you know, they want to have a book, they don't want to write it. So they'll pay somebody a bunch of money to actually write the book and then go away, right? Maybe, maybe they'll get a percentage of the royalties. But I had the. I had a consulting client and then I had a concept for a book that I thought would do really well based upon the hook, the title and the hook and everything else. So I mapped it out, I outlined it, I ended up writing the entire thing that I found an editor to go over it and clean it up. But instead of charging the client for the book, I just said, hey, how would you like to have a best selling book and not have to do a thing? And he said, sure. Now he had at the time about a hundred thousand person email list and he was already thought leader in this market. So I retained ownership of the book and in s. In an essence, I'm licensing his name, putting it on my book. I wrote it in kind of his voice, I put it his name on my book and then I leveraged his list to promote the book and we split it 5050.

And we marketed to his list.

Right, Nice.

And then the other is like, like a reverse ghostwriting thing.

And then it is, yeah.

And then the other, the other thing I did after I got that idea was I had another. But his wife had written a recipe book like vegetarian recipes and it was going absolutely nowhere. So I asked him if I could, if I could license the contents of the book and do whatever I wanted with him. And he said, yeah, sure, go ahead. So I said, I'll pay you 20% of everything I make. So then I went to another friend who had a very health or health oriented blog with a couple hundred thousand readers and newsletters subscribers. I said the same thing. How would you like to write a book? How would you like to have a best selling book and not do a damn thing? He goes, done. So I put, I put their blog's name and I put him and his wife as the. As the authors. I put their blog name as their. As the. As the book. And I edited maybe 10% of the book. I just created a forward and changed a couple things around and made it a little bit unique. And then I paid him 20% of everything he made. Now, obviously, he gets the benefits of it doing really well on Amazon. And then there's a. There's a link in there for lead capture for himself, but. And I kept 60% of the profits, so I didn't even write the book in that case. I just kind of put them. Put the pieces together and said, here, go for it. So anyway, that's. That's kind of a couple of my more fun anecdotes. With book publishing.

I don't have anything that creative, so that's pretty impressive.

Yeah, it was fun. Well, and I think part of it is out of laziness. Like, I didn't want to write in the first one. I was like, I don't even have. I don't have the list. I don't feel like developing the list myself. I'm just gonna leverage somebody else who's got it. And the other one, I didn't want to write the book or build a list. So that was fun. It reminds me, like, why do I do those things, make a bunch of money and then not repeat it?

Well, I was just gonna say you could have a whole new arm.

I know. I can't tell you how many times I've done that, but that being said, no, I think what you're doing here is great. Book Launchers. Looks like you've got a lot of cool services. I'm on your website right now, book launchers.com for the. For the public. You can take a look at the self publishing services and take a look at everything that Julie offers here for, you know, the aspiring author and aspiring, you know, entrepreneurial.

Authority with authorship. I don't know. I'm tongue tied right now, but I think. Go ahead.

I was gonna say we work with mostly entrepreneurs and professionals, but we do have a few people working on memoirs and, you know, a few little fun kind of side projects, but it's all in the nonfiction category. But being in Los Angeles, of course, we've got a little bit of a Hollywood spin. Some people come to us looking to create a TV show or a movie from their book. So we've got some of those projects on the go, which is kind of a fun. A fun thing I didn't expect. But having my business in Los Angeles that's been a nice side benefit.

Yeah. Oh, I can imagine. Absolutely. Well, Julie says the best place for folks who are listening to this to get a hold of you just book launchers.com.

Yeah, you bet. There's the launch letter where you can download the. We have this great ebook. So talking about marketing tips, it's the eight ways to sell 1,000 books for under $100. And you can download that. And when you do, you'll be part of the launch letter. And if you have questions for me, you can just hit reply to that and it goes straight to me.

I love it. Perfect. Well, Julie, thank you very much for being a guest today on Bacon Wrapped Business. I appreciate, I appreciate all of your insights and I think you've got a tremendous service out there that a lot of people can take advantage of, especially if you value your time and don't want to learn this all yourself, because I know how brutal that can be for my listeners out there who this has kind of made you curious and struck a chord. Go check out book launchers.com, check it out and see if this is an avenue that you wish to pursue. Obviously, you can tell you're in good hands with with Julie. And if you like this episode and you think that there's somebody else who might need to see it or hear it, send a link to them. Share it with your friends and family on social media and when you do, tag me in it. And as always, if you ever want to get ahold of me personally, you can send an email to ask bradaconrapped business.com I want you to stay tuned for the next episode because next week we've got a really special guest coming up. I'm going to leave it as a surprise. I'm not going to tell you all about it right now, but if you're not a subscriber to the show, you definitely want to be. Julie, anything else to add? Any big nuts you're trying to crack in your business? Anything you're trying to.

Learn? Anybody trying to meet? Any way that we can add value to your life?

Well, no. I mean, we're just launching this company in 2017, so we're always looking for people who want to chat about books. So that's the big thing. A little side note is I'm a vegetarian, so I kind of want to wrap your business podcast in kale.

I love it.

Wrapped something it doesn't even for vegetarian. That doesn't have the same ring as Bacon Wrapped Business.

Not at all. But that's great. Well, Julie, thanks a lot for enlightening us today. And to all my listeners, thanks for spending time with me, Julie, today and look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Talk Soon.