Self Publishing School With Chandler Bolt

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 everybody. Welcome back to the show. And today we have got a topic that I'm very familiar with and you, if you've been paying attention to the show, should be familiar with it too. It's a topic that comes up quite often. It's a topic that and a strategy that I've used with multiple clients of mine. And it's one of the single best ways to get your foot in any door to grow your business, to establish thought leadership and really make an impact, whether it's on a handful of people that you want to deliver a ton of value to or potentially change the world. We're talking about book publishing, self publishing more specifically. And I've invited Chandler Bolt, who I'll introduce you to in a second, to join me on the show and because he's got a really interesting story methodology and strategies to share with you. But before I do that, I want to give you just a little bit of context here. So we're going to talk about self publishing and the power of a book in your business. But that last part right there about the book in your business is what it's all about. We're not going to talk about how to publish that erotica novel you've always wanted to write and we're not going to talk about how to publish your little Game of Thrones knockoff fantasy series. There are other courses out there. There's other resources. However, publishing a book is a tremendous lead in to anybody's business. I have personally used it to.

Use it as a foot in the door to publish. I think I published by Now8Books and I've got another one on the way of other people become clients. It's been a tremendous foot in the door for me where I offer to do this work with them and it leads to very.

Lucrative consulting deals.

The other kind of cool part about publishing a book is that there's nothing quite like the, I guess the image to the general public that you're a published author, whether your books are bookstores or just on Amazon or Barnes and Noble or Ibooks, whatever that leads people to see you as a much more credible person than maybe you are. Anybody really can publish a book these days with the tools and tips and tricks out there. Amazon has just done amazing things to democratize the world of self publishing and there's never been a better time to capitalize on this. However, a lot of you are probably sitting around thinking, but I don't have time to write a book. I don't know what I would write about. I have no idea how to market it or what to do. Plus, I don't see making millions of dollars off of this book. I mean, I'm going to sell it for what, 99 cents to 10 bucks or so. How is it going to make a real difference in my life? Well, we're going to dive into that. I'm going to teach you some things that you probably never thought thought about. And Chandler, who I'll introduce in one more second, is also going to reveal some of the stuff he's done. And I'm actually very interested because he's got a best selling book as of right like today on Amazon and probably some other places. And I want to find out how he just hit that. So without any further ado, let me introduce you to Chandler Bolt. Chandler, are you there, buddy?

Yes sir, I'm here. Cool.

Well, thanks for joining me, man. This is a subject that's near and dear to my heart. And we met, we had lunch not too long ago. And I love what you're doing in self publishing school and.

You just told me that you're 21 years old, am I right?

Yes, sir.

That's awesome. My cousin Michael, I'm gonna make him listen to this big shout out to him because in about a week he turns 21 and I'm gonna force him to listen, to say, look, these are some stuff that you can do as well. Absolutely, anybody can do this. You're never too young, you're never too old. But I want to ask a little bit about your backstory. Is this the first book you've written? I know it's not, but give me a little bit of backstory on your involvement in the world of self publishing. Totally justify why you're on my show today.

Yeah, well.

I dropped out of school at 20 years old. At that point I'd done close to 320,000 in business. And that's when I kind of wrote my first book, got into this whole publishing world and the first book kind of took off. And the book, it's funny, right before the podcast today, I refreshed it like I've been doing probably 50 times over. The last hour because the book just launched and we just hit number one in all of entrepreneurship. So congratulations. Thanks, man. It's really exciting. You heard me let out a cry. That's right, a screech right before this show.

Cool.

That was awesome.

So let me back up just a second because you said a few things that I don't want to gloss over. A. You did about 300,000 and change in various businesses prior to this. So real briefly, the kind of businesses you've been involved with were what?

So started in high school, ran the canteen, made a couple grand off of that, then went up to like a landscape and lawn care business, made like 10 grand prepping for college and saving money for college, and then got involved in an internship called Student Painters and did my first six figure business with those guys and then came back the next year to do 192 brand. And that's when I was able to teach a few other guys to run their own businesses and kind of took that to the next level.

Cool. So yeah, these businesses had nothing to do with self publishing. But the first book that was self published was called what the first book.

Was called the Productive Person.

So a book on productivity, time management habits for busy people. Right? Yep.

And more specifically for entrepreneurs.

Right, Perfect. So that book, you got it out there.

It was your first one. Did you just sit down and write it? How did you write the book?

Me and my mentor at the time is now my business partner. We wrote it in Google Docs over Google Hangout mostly. That's awesome. We'd get onto just writing sessions and we wrote it in Google Docs and we didn't even intend to sell it to begin with, but we put it together. Then I went to study abroad in Austria. I was still in school. And we kind of just did a little MVP launch of the book and put it out while I was in Austria and then kind of took off. We dethroned David Allen's getting things done, like the productivity Bible, you know, it's number one in time management. And he lowered his price from 10 bucks to 329, which was, you know, cheaper than our book. And so that's when he regained his spot. But that was kind of. The book sold a bunch of it made close to seven grand in the first month while I was just snowboarding really in Austria. So that was kind of when I got the taste of passive income from a book. And then we went on to build a business off that book and just kind of all sorts of things. And when I Dropped out of school. That book was bringing in two, four grand a month. So that actually kept my head afloat when I had no money coming in.

That's beautiful. That's passive income. And it's fine, right?

Oh, for sure.

Cool. So here are the topics I've got in mind that I want to talk about today. And this is mainly for the listeners to know. Brad, where are you going to take this and what's in it for me? So I want to talk briefly about how you promoted the very first book. Especially if you were coming out. I mean, you didn't have a big business full of a bunch of book buyers, right? I don't imagine so. I want to know how you initially promoted that.

I want to.

The next step I want to talk about because I guarantee there's a lot of people out there who think, man, I got a book in me or I bet I could use it, but I have no idea how to sit down and write it. Doesn't it take years to write a book? And you and I both know it does not. So I want to go over some tips and tricks to write a book and write it quick and get it out there. I want to talk about, I want to revisit that promotion strategy. So in the beginning I want to talk about how you promote your book, but now I'm going to talk about some of the other cool ways that people can promote their book that you may not have known back then. And then I want to kind of finish this up with some of the other unique strategies and tactics that folks can use their book for to grow their business. And once more, folks, this is not about a book as a business. The book should be part of your business. It should be a lead in. So let's get started with a little bit of a backstory. You wrote your book the productive person or you co wrote it with another mentor now business partner. What did you do to promote the book? Hey, you got the book. It's already done. Self publish it. It's on Amazon and other places. Walk me through that.

Yeah, so I love what you said about the whole book is not a business. And also that it doesn't take a long time to write because we went from book idea to bestseller in two and a half months. And this is while traveling, while doing all that. So it can be very. That's like literally from having the thought about maybe we would write a book to like we're number one on Amazon two and a half months. So like it can happen really quick. But what we did to promote is we really didn't have a list, we didn't have an audience, we didn't have much of anything. But we did have some friends on Facebook and we did have kind of a little bit of a marketing brain. So what we did right off the bat is we got people involved. So we started getting people to vote on our covers, vote on our titles.

Facebook friends, social media.

Oh, yeah. And so people started voting. So they felt involved, they felt like it was. They helped with the book. You know, we were actually listening to their feedback. And so we created this launch story, you know, as Jeff Walker talks about. We were doing it without even have ever heard of him or his process. But looking back, we were kind of doing what he teaches of creating this launch story where instead of hammering people over the head with buy my book, buy my book, it's coming out, mark your calendar, all that, that no one cares about. We were building a story and then we built a little pre Release list of 124 people. So not that big at all. And we released the book to them. We took a very specific angle. So a lot of people were talking about productivity and you know, like kind of the pillars of things that will always sell. Right? Or are things about relationships, about how to lose weight, how to make money and how to be more productive.

Health, wealth and relationships.

So a lot of people writing about productivity, which for most people would maybe be like, okay, well, I shouldn't write a book on that, it's too competitive. But for us, we just carved out our little niche inside there. Like, no one was talking about productivity for entrepreneurs, really.

Although what's funny is those are probably the only people buying them, you know, like. But nobody was necessarily addressing that. But those are the ones who are always working on themselves, buying it, etc. That's great. Okay, so 124 people on the pre release list. I love how you said you make it a story, bring them along with you, don't hammer them over the head, but enlist them in the process. And, you know, I mean, crowdfunding has got that same spirit where people enlist, you know, they enlist others help us, you know, fund us to help us create this, and then when it comes out, you've almost got that tribe of people who've got a vested interest in seeing it happen. So what happened next? You pre released 124 people, did not a success make. So what, what happened?

Yeah, so we kind of followed a little formula. So we went for free to begin with and we got 5200 something downloads in the first three and a half days. And then we switched over to paid at like we manually cut it off. So that's one thing that people who do the free to paid promo, a lot of times they neglect that. And so Amazon cuts it off at midnight Pacific, which is like three in the morning on the east coast, which no one's buying books then. So we kind of capitalize on that. You have a three hour time window when you know, I'm sure you know this, like the free and the paid charts are mutually exclusive. Right. They don't affect each other's rankings.

Yeah, they used to way back in.

The day, but not anymore, before my time.

So we took advantage of that three hour time window, we switched over to paid. We targeted keywords, we targeted categories that we could own and kind of went after reviews and made that a big part of our strategy since that's like the long term success plan for Amazon.

How did you do that? Did you do that with Your friends, family, 124 person interest list and just really request it? Did you do anything else different?

Yeah, so we sent out.

We gave people pre released copies of the book and then we scrapped for everyone. We did a ton of personal thank you videos, like 30 second videos, so thanking people for their support and then a little call to action at the end like, hey, the single biggest thing you can do is leave us a review.

So you said you did these thank you videos like individually for people or you did them for. Where did you explain that?

Yeah, so we did those individually and that really moved the needle because it's a level of personal touch that nobody does.

But how did you like, I'm not putting those two together. So if somebody left you a review, you'd send them a thank you video?

No. So if people would express interest in our book and we would track it like maybe if they shared it on Facebook, if they shared it on LinkedIn or you know, whatever, any sort of support that they'd given us, we would record a thank you video thanking them for that action and then asking them to leave a review at the end.

Yeah, and it was like we made it funny. We would like do a little dance, just like had fun with it and then sent it out and just like high level of personal touch.

Okay, perfect. So then what else? What else kind of helped get you over the hump? Because I know, you know, for folks who aren't familiar with the whole free strategy, Amazon allows you to give your book away, the Kindle version for Free for a limited time, like five days, for instance, before, you know, you switch it over to paid. And a lot of times what happens, I mean, that 5,200 downloads, that did not. All of a sudden you weren't getting 5,200 buyers. It doesn't translate like that. What helped kind of push you over the edge to get extra.

Publicity? Because still, I mean, did it just really grow organically like that or did you do anything to put that in front of a lot of people?

We maximize our organic reach. So we went after specific keywords that we knew were being searched a lot and that weren't too competitive. So we started out going for time management. And then we realized that there's a bunch of books called Time Management, so that those keywords were really competitive. And so we switched our strategy to productivity. And then we kind of keyword loaded our book description. We used our keywords in the back end of Amazon to go after productivity. So then we ranked highly for that. And Statistically, usually about 60% of book purchases go to the top three in any category or in any keyword. So whatever categories we went after and whatever keywords we went after, we made sure that we could rank in the top three.

Okay.

And then for categories we cross categorized. So we didn't just put it in two different business categories, we put it in a business one and a self help and then a subcategory that we could get to the top of and that had some decent traffic.

Okay, did you do any paid media advertising, buying ads and emails? Did you do anything like that?

We did very, very little bit of Facebook ads, but I'm talking like maybe 50 bucks, 50, 100 bucks. And this was after the fact. So a lot of the beginning stuff was organic. And the only time we started doing any paid stuff was after the fact, when we were like, when we were already sure that the book was a success. And we're like, okay, let's try to make this even bigger.

Nice. I love it. Okay. So that alone should give every listener great.

Cyber. Like, okay, these guys didn't spend a lot of money to promote this.

It was a little bit, you know.

A little bit of elbow grease getting out there. I love the 32nd little thank you videos and just really encouraging with the word of mouth. That's the way books really spread these days as it is.

Okay. So things took off and I guess it caught hold, started being really well received like you said, and it started doing really well. Now you started. And I'm skipping forward a little bit because folks can, I want them to get the most out of this time we've got together. So the next topic I want to talk about because soon after you started teaching people how to do this and you opened up your own educational system and home study course where people learn how to self publish on their own. From talking to my clients, from dealing with this, myself, etc. I know one of the biggest hurdles is the thought of sitting down to write a book is probably akin to standing at the base camp of Mount Everest and going, oh God, find that thing now. So where do you start?

What do you tell people? Let's just say.

You know, they've got a general concept for a book or they, they want one, they know they want it to help with the lead generation, etc. How do they start? What's the best ways to get the book out as quick as possible and still be a quality book?

Yeah, so that's a great question and that's something that so many people struggle with, is I don't have enough time or I'm not an expert or all that stuff. So we kind of broke it down to a three step writing process. This is something that one of my mentors taught me. This is how I wrote my first book. It was 225 pages. Wrote it in a week. And it's funny like the productive person was actually the second book I wrote. But the first one I put out.

It'S like the other one took way longer.

So that's great. 225 pages in one week.

Most people think that would take them.

One year if not longer. So what are the three steps?

Yep. So the first step, and this is going to sound so elementary, but it works. But the first step is mind map. So maybe take that fuzzy idea, that fuzzy just baby egg idea and you write that down on a piece of paper and then you start branching out from that and you start thinking of every story, every example, every teaching point, everything you know about this one topic.

You'Re brain dumping, right?

Oh yeah, just everything.

Now let me interject real quick because it's if somebody doesn't know what a mind map is, a shame on you. B, it'll change your life. And three, Yes, I did it like that. A being three. It's very easy to. You know, there's a lot of free software. My personal favorite is xmind.net you can also use mindmeister, mindmeistdr.com there's a lot of them out there. I use these constantly in my business to map everything out, it'll change your life. It is very, very similar to an outline. So if mind maps are just a little too foreign for you, you can do the exact same thing with just a general outline. But continuing on the mind map process, because that's how I wrote one of the books that I wrote.

I love that. So brain dump. Mind map it, connect it all together.

Yep. So when you're mind mapping, that's the point where people, a lot of our students go from like I maybe could, like I could write 15 pages on this to I have three books, I just got to figure out which one I'm going to write. Now really going through that, people will find if you just trust me and spend 15 to 30 minutes on this, you'll find that you know way more about it than you think. And then what you're able to do, transitioning into the second step is that you take those groups and groups of ideas and you organize those into kind of sections. This is starting to form your outline. So you start to group those common themes and then you have like all these sections and you break those down further into chapters. So then you go that. And then the third step is rise. So that's simple enough. But the way we suggest you do that is you repeat this process over and over, chapter by chapter. So when we wrote that 225 page book in a week, we did this whole mind map, then outlined big picture outline chapter by chapter. Then we would sit down for every chapter and we would mind map everything we knew about that chapter. We'd spend 12 minutes doing that.

You just keep on chunking it down.

Spend 10 minutes on the outline, then we spend an hour and a half writing the chapter and then you just repeat that over and over and over again.

That's awesome. So let me expand on that because here's how I wrote my book. And it was exactly like this.

And by the way, when I say I wrote my book, I never tell people what this book was. But I created this book and I licensed another well known author, his name, because it was a topic he had not written about. And as opposed to ghost writing for that person for a fee instead, I paid him a royalty for the book because I wanted his social capital. I put it on there. But it's a book that I wrote, I own copyrights for and everything else. So by the way, this can be done in a lot of ways. There's a lot of cool things you can do with self publishing. That being said, what I did is I had a general idea of what I wanted it to be about. I mind mapped it and let's just say I don't remember how many chapters, maybe 10 chapters. And then.

As exactly what you just said, I had a kind of unwell formed kind of idea. And then I would just turn that idea into a sentence and then I would put another sentence and another sentence and another sentence and they weren't necessarily strung together correctly. But then once I turned that kind of into an outline, all I had to do was go in and connect those sentences. And before I knew it, I had a really good book and it's following. I didn't even know your steps, but it is exactly how I wrote mine. And it probably took me about two to three weeks to finish it out.

That's awesome man. That's great.

So I love what you're saying so far. So three steps to writing the book. But now what if you don't feel as though you're a great writer? Do you, do you recommend folks find an editor?

Yeah. Well, so we, you know, that's the thing. Some people are better at speaking stuff out. So if you actually go through this three step process, you can speak out chapter by chapter, all your thoughts and then you can have that transcribed. And then that takes away the intimidation of staring at a blank word doc and then you have something to at least work with. When we did the Productive Person, we self edited so we read through it twice and that's what we considered editing. And I mean the book took off and then it made enough money to hire an editor later and do the update and revise version. Right. So you don't have to pay a professional editor. You can self edit yourself or you can find an editor on elance and get them to do a copy edit or something like that.

Yeah. And those editors are actually pretty cheap. I've got it going on right now and I've got about for one of my clients, he's got about 25 pages in each chapter and I think they're charging me 50 to 75 bucks per chapter to edit. I'm not talking about just proofreading, I'm talking about full blown editing. And they're doing a great job. So it's out there. You can do it really cheap. Okay. So writing the book, we've just proven that it's not that challenging. And there's a lot of steps in between. Right. Between writing it and getting it all done, the of COVID and all this other detailed stuff. And that's why people are going to rush out and Purchase your book and your home study course and all that.

Other stuff you've got.

I'll give you guys the links at the end. But like, it's a big surprise, Chandler does have a system that you can invest in if you want to learn how to do this. However, as is always the case on bacon wrap business, one of the things that I like that you.

Episodes to do is to feel as though they are already paid. So I want, I'm going to ask you for some other strategies that maybe you normally charge for some of the juiciest stuff because I want people to come away from here actually just really excited to jump into this. So let's talk about things that you recommend, not things that you necessarily did and already talked about before. But let's say I wrote a book today and I didn't know a lot about this and the book is, oh, I don't know how to grow your business using direct response marketing. Right. It's a topic I love. What would you tell me to do besides what you've already said before and list people in the help. What do I do to help launch this book? Get it off the ground. Give me something that you normally charge for some best practices that are just like, man, you gotta hear this. This is awesome.

Yep. So what would your purpose be for the book? Are you focused on book sales? Are you focused on building the business on the back end? What's your main purpose?

Okay, let's say my interest was to, let's say my interest was to establish thought leadership, to get readers to read the book and go, I need to find out more about this guy, enter my sales funnel and become a client.

Cool. Great. So I love that angle.

I think that's a pretty common theme with a lot of folks listening to this, a lot of consultants, a lot of experts, a lot of business owners are like, man, I want to get.

I want to get people to buy.

More of my stuff. What do I do? Because otherwise you float it out there and your mom and your grandma buy it.

Right? Right. Okay. So what I would do there is once you have the book, obviously you do some of the positioning stuff we talked about earlier. But what we do, and this is one of our best tricks is we get the audiobook recorded and then we give away the audiobook in the first page of the book. So that drives a ton of leads. We capture 50 to 70% of book buyers leads using an audiobook. And a lot of people are using like PDFs, checklists, all this really lame stuff that Nobody cares about like at the beginning of their. For their call to action or for their lead capture. So I would have you do an audio book. Actually. You can just find someone on Elance that is a professional voice talent that will do it for 400 bucks or something like that.

You can also go to. Is it acx?

Yeah, I'm not huge on that. They'll try to either take 50% of your book royalties or I've heard of them just charging kind of astronomical amounts. Okay.

I haven't used ACX in the past for this, but I was familiar with it.

We sell through them. So even though we give the audiobook away for free, the audiobook will pay for itself really quickly through. Through ACX sales. And through all that, ACX will pay you what they call a bounty, which is like, basically you're acquiring a customer for them. So if someone's searching through the Amazon store or your email list and they sign up for Audible because of your book, like they want to get your book, then they actually pay you 50 bucks bounty for acquiring that customer. It's just another way to make money off the audiobooks. But the way I would use it to drive your business is we put it the first page of the book and people can actually click the look inside feature so they can opt in without even buying your book, which is awesome. Plus, if you're trying to build a relationship with them, a lot of people, if they're busy and they want to learn direct response marketing, they don't even have time to read a book, nor maybe do they want to read the book. So now you just gave them an audio book they can listen to on their drive. They're happy about that. They're in your funnel. You can follow up with an autoresponder that leads to more business, maybe pitches them on an upsell, all that stuff. It's a way to pump these billions of people inside Amazon, kind of just carve out and funnel out leads out of Amazon and out of that ecosystem.

You're right. You're absolutely right.

Cool.

So audiobook. And here's a. Here's one of the other little tips that you kind of touched on this, but.

I think it's really poignant right here. So you said if you want to speak the book, you can. So you can come up with these ideas. So chapter one, you've got all your notes there, and maybe you're not a good writer, but you can talk and you can have it transcribed and then turn it into a book. So you could take let's just say chapter one and you're recording this for your transcript and then for your editor. However, those recordings can be the audiobook version. It doesn't have to be perfect. The audiobook can be kind of the raw. As long as it's good quality, it can be raw. You don't have to do it again. And I've done this with some clients of mine where they had, you know, one of them had like a really high value webinar and it was, it wasn't a sales webinar, it was just all content about real estate investing. So what I did is I, I edited the transcript, I got it transcribed for the webinar. I edited it so that it made sense and took out some of the ums and ahs, et cetera. And then the bribe, the opt in bribe on the page one was get the, get the video. It was actually a video webinar. Get the video and audio of this, you know, of this training the book was out of. So we didn't even reinvent the wheel. We just took the raw stuff like, yeah, speak it, then go back to it. Make that the bride. It doesn't have to read the book word for word and sometimes even better.

Yeah, Brad, I love that because a lot of your listeners, maybe they have a blog, maybe they have a podcast, maybe they've done webinars, maybe they even have a course. All of that's a book, right? The book that just hit number one for me today on Amazon is a 10,000 foot view of my course. So we just took all of our best stuff and put it in the book like it was already. The book was already created. It created itself.

Yep. Yeah, it's beautiful. And then you can.

You know, the fact that it's raw.

You can actually use that as a.

What do you call it? I mean, you can use it as kind of that value added, like listen.

To the raw.

People, like that, the behind the curtain, how I create it.

Anti sell kind of.

Plus what I also just said about how we did this before. You don't have to do it from the beginning. If you are already an expert out there, you're creating a lot of content. You've got a podcast, you got blogs, you got all this other stuff. Just take what you've got and then take that and turn it into the books. So let me give you, one of the things that I will be doing. I just haven't actually sat down to do this yet, is writing a book based upon the podcast and the shows that I'VE got, I've got a lot of topics I cover and I solve a lot of problems for people. However, a lot of my shows are about an hour long and there's a lot of just cross talking fluff that. I don't want to just transcribe those and put them into a book. But I could very easily take make it like the best of bacon wrap business. And like, like today we're talking about self publishing. The last episode I did was on YouTube advertising so I could create a short chapter. It could be five pages long. I have the transcript to it, by the way, of the top Advice on running YouTube ads and the top advice for running for self publishing a book or doing xyz. And then after every single chapter, this says click here if you'd like the full audio to this chapter. Of course they can always just go listen to it on itunes or whatever. But I could still just use that as the audio bribe. Yeah, that's really powerful. I just want people to understand that you're not hindered by it doesn't have to be as much work as they think it is. Yeah.

And it's funny you mentioned that, Brad. That's what Gary Vee's doing right now. Like he's doing the Ask Gary Vee show and it's, you know, he's coming off a jab, jab, jab, right hook. And the AskGaryVee show is basically a bunch of jabs. And he's openly admitted this. Like, the right hook is going to be the AskGaryVee book.

Yes. Buy my book. Absolutely. To all you listeners out there, I will be asking you to buy my book when it comes out. I will be asking you to help me design the COVID the title, and all of this other stuff. And I will be asking for your help because that's how we do this in the sharing economy. So that's awesome.

Okay, cool.

So we've talked about the three steps to getting it written. We've talked about.

How to build leads from that using the audio, the bribe, especially early on and maybe after every single chapter. Let's talk about other ways to promote the book. Let's say you don't have a list, you don't have an email list, you're an expert in, in whatever.

But you're.

Sitting there going, I don't know what.

To do besides the stuff that you've already talked about. Is there any other book promotion strategies that you necessarily recommend or that are like, man, this is great. This is a good way to get a ton of people buying the book that most people don't talk about. And if there's not, that's cool. But if there is still the new.

Business gender, yeah, let's do it. So I think the biggest mistake that people make is they try to focus on doing everything and not distilling down to what really matters. So for us I think if you're a first time author, that's the free to paid route. Doing that, rocking out reviews, targeting your keywords, targeting your categories. We use Buckbooks. That's a great way when Your book is 99 cents.

Oh yeah.

So I interviewed Matt Stone, one of the partners in Buckbooks on episode. I'll put a link there but you gotta go check out Matt Stone. Killing it on Amazon, killing your blog and then killing it on Amazon. And Buckbooks is a tremendous resource. I've actually put several of my clients into the Buckbooks promotion and they've been tremendous.

Those guys rock it. That's the thing. A lot of those sites just really suck and they try to get you to pay for them and then they don't deliver any results. I love Matt's business model and those guys are making great money but they deliver. And I'm sure you've seen with the books you put on there, you put them on there and you get some sales like a lot.

Absolutely. You can go to, I think it's buckbooks.com but also listen to that episode with Matt on here. So let me ask you a question about the free to pay promotion right now. So there are a lot of sites out there. There's a lot of Facebook pages and other people have lists who their entire thing is like free ebook. We're building a list of people who want free ebooks. Do you submit to these various pages directories, communities that the book is free or do you just make it free, tell your friends and let the chips fall?

Yeah, we do. So we submit to these sites and trainingauthors.com has a great resource where they have like they distilled the best free sites and the best free Facebook groups and the forums and stuff like that. And so some of those better ones will move the needle. And so like with this most recent book that we were doing, we did a soft free launch because we're using this as leads to lead into self publishing school.

Kind of like Jeff Walker used launch to launch plf. So we did the free launch since last Thursday and we did four days of free and we promoted to all these free sites, all that stuff so we used that to kind of take advantage of that. And we got super high on the free charts and got thousands of downloads that way in a few days. And then we switched over to 99 cents, and now we're doing buckbooks and we're doing other stuff to promote. So that's kind of how like you can leverage those to do well and then you can leverage the other stuff when you switch to paid. And it's just kind of part of the whole strategy.

Cool, I love that.

Let's talk about a couple other ways that you can use your book besides selling it on Amazon. I've got multiple episodes and strategies and stuff that you can find out about. Okay. Once it's on Amazon, what to do. Let's talk about what to do with your book now. Some creative strategies about getting business, about using that to get your foot in the door, about using that to build that credibility. What do you do once that book's out there? Do you have any other strategies for folks?

Yes. I mean, there's a ton of ways to. This is where I really get excited is the back end. Right. Beyond just Kindle sales. So one thing a lot of people aren't doing is the list building, which is kind of what we talked about. But we did a perma free book. So Amazon, they won't let you do a book for free on Amazon, but they work. Yeah, you can price match. So we price matched and we use that to pump tons of leads and to sell our other books. And so then that leads into all kinds of other stuff. So that's one way. I mean, then we have the course, we have all that on the back end for some of those books. But then we've had people use it to do more speaking, more coaching. You know, you book your speaking gig and then include a hundred copies of the book and you can charge a grand or two more. You know, like use that as a selling piece to sell your book.

Right.

I mean. I mean to sell your speaking. So we've had people easily pay for the course doing that.

Speaking of that, do you have any of the. What's the biggest student success story that you can think of? Because you came out with self publishing school not too long ago, right? Yeah. And then you've got like a tremendous student success percentage. Right. So what is it you were telling me that 50% or something crazy.

Yeah, we're close to 60% now, which is insane.

60%? What. What is the.

That's like actually writing and publishing a book. Yeah. That's huge. That's huge.

Yeah. So 60% of people who purchase and invest in your self publishing school actually get their stuff done and they get it out there. That's half the battle. That's awesome. I mean, very few people who sell training programs can even come close to that success.

Yeah, barely anybody gets 10% of people to even open their course. Right?

Yeah. Bingo.

Just to give kind of perspective for the audience who's like, well, 60%, that's not a done deal.

That's not 100.

But that's a lot of horses drinking that water.

Okay, so that's great. But let's talk about, is there any student that you're really proud of their success because they just really did some awesome stuff with what they learned with you?

Oh yeah. One of our students, Lise Cartwright, she's crushing it. She's making a couple grand passive income a month with books, but more importantly, she's getting to do less client work. And she's on a seven week book writing challenge where she's writing a book a week for seven weeks. What's her topics on outsourcing and on freelancing, how to do that well and how to make side money doing that.

So she's really crushing it. And she's already gotten like seven books out since joining our program. I think she's coming up on number eight.

That's crazy.

Steve Windsor, he's put out, he's written three fiction books, so we're talking like novels. So this guy's building like an empire, which fiction's a way more long term game, but he's building an empire. And he's got a nonfiction book that he just put out. He's crushing it. There's one of our students, Azul Tyrones.

He'S crushing it. He's been helping out Pat Flynn with his new book based off of kind of the success of his first book, Azul's book. He got in touch with Pat and helping him out. And then Kelsey Humphries, she wrote a book called Go Solo and she said she's already paid for the course and speaking and coaching stuff, but she got endorsed by Barbara Corcoran of Shark Tank.

Wow. Do you know how she did that?

What's that?

Do you know how she did that?

Oh yeah, she hustled. Hustled and did a lot of emailing and like, you know, she's a woman entrepreneur, so she played that card and was able to get that review. And John Acuff reviewed her. She's been on entrepreneur.com like she's just hustling it. But that's a classic example of what I love, which is she's using the book as a calling card for a lot of other doors being open.

That's beautiful. And that's the way, you know, that's the way you do this. There's so many doors that can be opened with, you know, with your own book. For any of my listeners out there who want another strategy, there's a. I did an episode and I'll link to this with Mike Koenigs and Mike had a, you know, Mike had just a tremendous strategy talking about how to, once your book is on Amazon, the physical version, buy that book as a gift. If there's an individual that you're trying to a CEO of a company or somebody else that you're trying to get a hold of, buy that book as a gift wrapped gift and mail it to their office and mail it to them and say, listen, I'd love for you to have a copy of this. There's an idea inside page 63 I think you could use.

There's a lot of strategies you can.

Use with.

Your own book, with things you can publish. And if you get good at this, you can do something like I have done. So I have reached out to potential clients who are consultants and experts.

Actually, if they're already authors, I don't do this. But other business owners, and we're talking about ways I can potentially help them. And if they don't have a book, but maybe they've got other content that I can repurpose, it is the easiest thing in the world to go in there and publish that you can start your own publishing company because most people have not done what you're about to do, which is doing, learning about self publishing, maybe investing in Chandler's course and saying, okay, I know how to do this. You don't have to do it for yourself, you can do it for other people. And when you help somebody publish a book, which oftentimes can be like a lot lifelong dream of theirs, they love it. And they're like, yeah, this is so great. If you get them the best seller status in their category, don't think that you've got a halo around your head now. You can think, how else can I help you grow your business? You're like, well, what else have you got? I mean, that's been the way that I've gotten most of my clients. I don't advertise for clients cold. I don't need to. I go really deep with my clients. And it's just there's so many opportunities that you can that are open to you when you do something like this. And dude, I love the fact you're 21 years old, you've got how many books out from yourself? Is it four?

Yeah, four like legit books. And then we have a couple more that are short books or easy to put out or whatever. But like four really good ones.

Right. And especially with Kindle, but also with CreateSpace, the physical version of what Amazon's got, it doesn't have to be 225 pages. You can have a 50 page book, it can be less than that. Yeah, yeah, it doesn't really matter as long as it's out there. And you know, I told my 21 soon to be 21 year old cousin Michael, Michael, you better be listening this far and not be off playing Xbox or something by now. But like I told him, if you're going to be out looking for a job, especially in a quite corporate, let's just say you're looking to be a salesperson and you want to get a leg up. You want to look good when you send your resume to somebody. Well, if you send your resume to somebody. I've told several of my friends who are in corporate who are looking for.

Jobs to do this.

And to this date not one has done it. I totally would if I was back in that world, which was okay, I want to be in sales. I could write a book or hire somebody to write a book about best practices in sales. How to keep a customer for life, how to prospect and how to sell without being sleazy.

It doesn't matter.

Come up with a sales topic and you can hire somebody to write this. If you don't do it yourself really cheaply. Sales books are a dime a dozen and so is sales wisdom. Publish it, put your name on it, get it out there. Because when you send your resume to a hiring manager, every single one of those hiring managers is going to Google you before they interview you. Guarantee it. Guarantee it. Now do you want to be just okay? They don't find anything except your Facebook page with you doing cake stands at the fraternity party. Or do you want to say, oh, we're thinking about hiring this guy for sales position. Oh, he wrote a book on sales. It doesn't matter if the only reviews are your mom, your uncle and your cousin Jed. You've got a book on the topic that you want to be seen as the expert in. I guarantee you you're on the short list to be interviewed what you do after that is up to you. But pick a topic you want to be seen as an expert in and either learn enough about it to write a book or hire somebody or interview an expert who is. Put your name on it, co write it. Boom, there you go. Game over. That's why I love this topic so much, because there's so many things you can do with it.

Yeah. And like you said, once you do it, once you realize that it's a duplicatable process and it's so easy, and then you're like a magic maker. Like, I have an instant inroad to any entrepreneur on the planet because chances are they either have a book or they want one. And I'm like the magic man that can make that happen. Right.

I may write a book that night.

Why not?

But you literally could. With the tools out there, I could easily write like 15 pages about some kind of dribble that I wanted to write. It doesn't really matter. And I could have it published on Kindle. It would be okay. What is today? Today is Tuesday. Today's Tuesday, about 5pm My time. And I could probably be a published author on Thursday. Realistically. Yeah, a lot like published if I didn't really care about quality. And I just wanted to get it out there. Guys, the sky's the limit. You just got to kind of know the steps. And that's what you've provided with self publishing, school and your book.

Before we get into plugging that and.

Talking to all these people about reaching their back pocket and pulling out the credit card and buying whatever you had to sell, because they should.

Is there anything else that we're leaving out? Is there anything else that's really cool and juicy that you'd like to leave folks with about why they should, you know, why they should either invest in their education by themselves or with you. We leaving anything else out or have we covered it all?

I mean, I really like what you were just touching on with. Like, what we were talking about with sending someone your book. You know, it's a glorified business card. It's a foot in any door. But really, the magic man stuff we were talking about, like, if you're trying to get it, like, I got in with John Lee Dumas because of. I was like, hey, man, your lead capture on your book can be a lot better. Let me fix it for you.

You know?

And like, now I'm being interviewed on this podcast next week. I just kind of want to touch on, like, there's a lot more that, like, you can leverage a book in so many ways. And doing that, doing your first book is the first step to all that.

Absolutely. Okay, let me ask you two more questions that I ask everybody.

A.

What do you think is the biggest unexploited opportunity out there that you see right now? Whether it's to do with books or anything else, Is there anything you're kind of excited about? You only tell your closest friends over beers at a mastermind you would never reveal to the masses that you're going to reveal right now?

I would say I've had my eye peeled on doing a.

Udemy book combo. I think there's a lot of synergy there.

So buy the book and then enroll in a Udemy course.

Yeah, just create the Udemy course off of the book, then leading straight into that in the sales funnel, using the Udemy course to sell the book, all that. Because cross platform, like Udemy, Amazon, itunes, with podcasts, like, once you know the rules to the game, you can do anything. Like, the same way I would rank a book is the way you would rank your podcast is the way you would rank a Udemy course. Right. So there's a lot of synergy there, and I think that someone's gonna do that and really knock it out of the park and be able to make a lot of money and then add an even bigger back end.

Yeah, I love that. Okay, last question. What's a nut that you're trying to crack in your business right now? And I don't mean we want to get more customers. Like something that you're. I'm not talking about, you know, what's something that you want more of that you're already doing. What's a nut that you're trying to crack? And you're either looking for resources, looking for skills, looking for people who know how to do that. This is where you're basically asking myself, my listeners, to turn on their earballs and ask to know if they can help you.

Yeah. So I'm systematizing and scaling. That's where we're at. So for me, I'm really recognizing that as an entrepreneur, growing this thing to the next level, I need to get my systems locked down. We're also. We've already got some help, but like hiring more like VAs and people to put in the system and stuff like that. So I've been reading books like Work the System and the E Myth and stuff like that. Oh, they're great, man. I'm still in this. Like, that is a nut. I'M trying to crack. Like, systems don't come naturally to me. So, like, really working hard to reverse that and to get good at it because I spend so much time doing that. Like, the system aspect is something I really need to focus on to be able to take this thing to the next level.

Right?

Yeah.

And my biggest. Speaking from experience, I'm the exact same way. I need systems in my business, but I'm not the one to build them.

I may just do them naturally, but if you ask me to document them, I've got too much add. I definitely say, don't do them yourself. Hire somebody to come in and just document your processes. And there's a lot of folks out there who are really good at this. A lot of people from corporate. A lot of people have written SOP books like you can. If you search like, elances, et cetera. And folks who have.

A lot of people aren't going to say, hey, I'm a systems guy who's going to do all this. But you can search for people who have skills in writing standard operating procedures and doing all. All this other stuff, who are out of work, need help.

And just have them. Hire them to come in and just document the things you're doing. I know one of my clients, I told him to do that. It made a tremendous difference in his business because once those systems were documented, he just kind of keeps that person on retainer whenever he comes up with something new.

But yeah, it's. Systems are one of the biggest keys to getting it to the next level. Especially after, you know, you get everything done just with brute force and late hours. So we don't know what that's like.

I love how much you're hustling right now, Brad, because I get your email updates on, like, Saturday afternoon, Sunday morning, like podcast dropping and stuff. And it's funny because I'm hustling at the same time and those are kind of. So, like, I think we're totally on the same page with that. But brute force, you know, it's like, it'll get you somewhere, but it's like, that's where I'm at. It's like, all right, my brute force. I got to systematize that.

Sometimes you gotta. Exactly. So, man, this has been great. I really like the stuff you've shared. There's, you know, some of the big. My big takeaways from this. Well, a. It was a reminder. I kind of knew this and I'd never personally done this. I told a couple clients to do it. They really didn't do it. But I love the that fact whole get people involved in helping to design the COVID to design the name, to design, you know, to ask them questions and get them, you know, get your.

Most hyper responders. The ones give them a vested interest in getting this book because they're the ones who they'll go out and tell people because they've had a part of that that's huge. Everybody has a circle of friends and followers and other folks.

Hey Brad, juicy tip. I think your people are going to really like this. So on that note, if you have a celebrity or if you have a following like my brother plays in rock and roll band, need to breathe and have a pretty good following. For one of our book launches we surveyed them and had them apply to become part of our launch team. We formed a hundred person launch team of volunteers that we managed in a Facebook group and these were all people who just loved him, loved what we were doing. And they were like a hundred just action takers. They were getting this on the radio and the newspaper like all over podcasts and blogs and everything. And we just managed them in a Facebook group and gave them a weekly assignment and they blew up that book. So if you have any sort of following, that's like the low hanging fruit that you can really use to maximize your. I agree.

And you know there's. People love to be a part of a movement. They love to be part of something else. People's lives for the most part are boring as hell and if you want them to be something part of it, like, oh man, they'll gravitate towards that. So that's an awesome point. You know the other.

Stuff that I really like, the 32nd thank yous. Just going the extra mile, guerrilla style, asking people for the review for their support for sharing. I do that with my listeners here. I'm going to plead to you, if you're still listening, share this episode on your Facebook machine and your Twitter machine and all of that, the Google machine, if you use that, share it with other people. Like I'm enlisting you guys. You guys are part of my tribe so you're doing the exact same thing. When people share it. When they review your book, send them extra. Thank you. That's so powerful for people to do, man. I appreciate your time on here and I encourage every single one of you guys out there to go get the book. Book launch. I'm going to give you guys a link so you can go get it. It'll be in the show notes if you're Watching it on itunes and if it's going to be the blog post, if you're listening to it there, if you are, if you're interested in learning how to do this for yourself or like I said for other people, you can also learn this. It's a tremendous skill to have. It's only getting easier and more lucrative and you never know what door it's going to open. If you have any questions, how do people get ahold of you? You want to give it an email or contact information?

Yeah. So they can reach me@chandlerheproductive person.com or I'm launching a Sick Just 4 video training series that's totally free. Teaches a lot of expands on a lot of the stuff that we were talking about today. And that's self publishingschool.com I love it.

I love it. And once more links will be in the show notes. If you are listening on itunes, hit that subscribe button. If this is the first time you're you're listening to this because you will get all of the other juicy episodles. Other people have episodes here at Bacon Wrap Business. It's an epic sizzle because I'm crazy and I want you to, you know, I want you to go over to my website. You'll get a link. If you want a second opinion on your marketing strategy, your ideas, I'm going to tell you they're crazy or they're awesome and give you some ideas on how to do this, you can ask for a second opinion. I'm more than happy to hook you up on that. Maybe there's a chance for us to work together. Maybe I can introduce you to somebody. If you want to email me your questions, thoughts, ideas or other recommendations for topics, you can always reach me at askbradaconrappedbusiness.com Chandler, man, I really appreciate your time today. You really delivered the sizzle and I look forward to seeing you. You're here in San Diego, right?

Yes, sir.

Well, we gotta hang out sometime soon and I'm sure we will see each other around, talk some more book marketing and other topics. Till next time everybody. If you got a problem, wrap that thing in bacon. She'll be okay. Chandler, thanks again. I appreciate you.

Thanks, Brad. Thanks for having me, man.

Absolutely.