Speaking Your Way to a Publishing Empire - Pamela Fagan Hutchins

Speaking with TJ Walker, dissecting the communication skills and practices of world class leaders. She's been called a modern day Isaac Asimov of the romantic mystery series. Our special guest today is a wildly, and I mean wildly prolific author. Her book Saving Grace has sold more than a million copies and is perhaps coming to a Hollywood screen near you soon. Her latest book, hell to Pay. Welcome our special guest, Pamela Fagan Hutchins. Pamela, welcome to the program.

TJ Good morning. Thanks for coming.

Thanks for being here. Confession to the audience. I'm embarrassed to say this. You and I had a phone conversation about four and a half years ago, and because we've known each other from previous careers and so DJ I'm thinking of starting a publishing business. I want to write a book, but I want to do like five different books and five different topics. And my first thought was, oh, the poor dear. I've seen this before. Every single time I've seen someone get wildly ambitious and try to do seven different books and start a publishing company, they end up with a garage full of a couple thousand books. They sold five. Three of those they gave away to family members and the whole thing was a $25,000 disaster to nowhere. Boy, was I wrong with you. You took the concept, you ran with it. You are more successful than not 99% of authors, probably 99.99% of authors you have been a part of. You've either written or co written nearly 20 books. You have put together a publishing empire, your own publishing company, Skipjack Publishing. You probably will finish three more novels before this interview is over. And our audience has to know, how do you do it?

Wow. Well, million dollar question, right? And some days I wonder myself. But I think the biggest thing, TJ is that I'm extremely, extremely, fiercely determined. And I started writing many years ago. Back when you and I first met each other, I was writing books. I just wasn't telling anybody that I was writing books yet. So by the time I got to being ready to click publish, if you will, I already had a backlog of products. And you know, that sounds crass for an author to call their books products, but when you sell something, it becomes a product. I had a shelf of those products ready to go. So I wasn't going to go out with just one book. I very rarely see authors that are financially successful with just one book.

Other than what, J.D. salinger? Pretty much nobody is successful with one book.

Exactly, exactly. We barely heard of J.K. rowling until she burst on the scene with six completed books that her publisher was enthusiastic, and rightly so, about. But even more these days, where the field is open to any author that can throw up, for better or for worse, a bundle of words onto the Internet. The competition is fierce and you need to be poised for readers that like your work or that for readers who need your work to satisfy that need or that want with additional books before they go on to somebody else and forget all about you.

And so people know a little more about you. And when you and I met, you were a very successful corporate attorney. You have your own training company, you'd published in nonfiction training arenas, you have expertise in human resources and other industries. And you were frankly a fantastic speaker and communicator ever since I've known you. Still, I gotta tell you, I have worked with hundreds, maybe close to a thousand authors over my career as a media trainer for the last 32 years. And most of them are nonfiction writers. But the ones who are fiction, I almost dread working with them because I see them, for the most part, always fail. First of all, it's much harder to get onto news programs and onto CNN and Fox and MSNBC if you don't have that hard news hook of something nonfiction. And the market seems to have been increasingly focused towards big names. And you know, Stephen King sells 10 billion books a minute, but unknown authors who aren't with big publishers often sell literally five copies or fewer in a year. And yet somehow you came up with, I don't want to sound trite like it was easy, but at some level you came up with a formula. A lot of our listeners, a lot of our listeners are either authors or aspiring authors. And many of them are dissuaded because they hear these statistics. You know, the average book on Amazon sells less than 100 copies. How do you. A lot of people say writing is easy, although good writing is not easy, selling is hard. How did you come up with a platform to sell books?

Well, and you nailed it. About how few books most authors really sell. And I'm not even talking about just authors that are doing it independently all by themselves. I'm talking about authors with big name publishing companies. The average author makes somewhere around $8,000 a year from their writing career. That's not walk away money from their day job. So as far as coming up with a formula, I wish I could say that it's easy, but it's not. First and foremost, you've got to write books that will keep people coming back to you, whether they're nonfiction and you're satisfying a need or Whether they're fiction and you create a world that people want to enter and not leave. But what I find is that most authors are incredibly poor judges of whether their writing is any good, their mom tells them it's awesome, or their significant other. And they're not the most unbiased source. And so the first part of the formula is to get unbiased assistance in creating the absolutely best product that you can between the covers and on the covers. Because people really do judge a book by its covers. And most people under invest in that piece of it because it's so easy to put a book out now that, I mean, honestly, you can practically vomit a book up onto the Internet. And the problem is that nobody wants to buy that. Right? And so that's where people under invest and they focus all their energy and tell me how to sell your book. And I've got lots to say on how to sell books, but they truly, they truly miss the boat and put out something that's really not ready for someone to invest their time or money in.

And I'm looking at a website that has half a dozen of your books and they look to me to be like something from Random House or Simon and Schuster. They don't have that. And I'm not a graphic arts expert, but they don't have that. Oh, let me find someone on Fiverr to do this for $5 and self publish it. Because I went to a weekend seminar on how to publish a book in a weekend.

Right, right. And when you want a cover that looks whether you like my covers or not. Right. I mean, if someone goes out to my website and they say, well, I personally don't like your covers, they are still professional looking and they match what I want to say with the books that doesn't come free, whether you barter for it with skills that you can trade for a really good book cover artist, more than just a graphic artist, but somebody that knows how to design for thumbnail size. Because think about it, when someone goes out to Amazon and pulls up a list of books and there are 20 books per page, what they're seeing is at most a 200 by 300 pixel image of your book cover. And so you've got to sell them based upon that cover alone compared to all the other best sellers within your genre. So it's a real skill.

Now for our listeners who want to see these covers. Pamela, you've been nice enough to put together a special page for our listeners where they can not only see your books, get some free chapters, free Samples. What do you have for them?

Absolutely. I put a post up on my website that right now is on the home page, but it's called Jamming on the Speaking with TJ Walker podcast and it's speaking especially for your listeners. And what it does is it links to everything I can possibly think of to give them free. It gives them, for authors, an exclusive copy of my book launch promotion ebook for people interested in learning how to sell books, my online course, how to Sell a Ton of Books in five Simple Steps, and even some of my fiction and my creative nonfiction free as well. So it's like, it's like a hot fudge sundae with a cherry on top. As far as all the things in this post for you guys and timeout.

Listeners, let's just make a note of this. This is a media training learning moment. Pamela came on my show. She didn't grill me for two hours and have assistants say, well, prove to me how many downloads you have, tj, number one, she just said yes when I asked her to appear on the show. Number two, she took the extra effort of creating a special page for my listeners for all of you. And that took some time. She then sent it to me to let me know in advance. Number three, number four, she mentioned in her social media channels that she was looking forward to being on this show. So all of these things have a cumulative effect, a positive psychological effect on the host to then want to promote her more, to get things more distributed. Number five, I didn't have to sort of track her down five minutes after the appointed hour. Where is she? Are we going to start on time? No. She actually initiated a call with me through Skype for the interview five minutes before the allotted time to make my life easy. All of these things are little things. Cumulatively, they add up to build better relationships with talk show host, with producers to get you invited back again and again and again. And Pamela, I'm ashamed to say I'm too lazy to do. I'll just be honest. I'm too lazy to create a special page for shows that I'm going to be a guest on. But you're doing it exactly right. And it works at many levels. Most of all, probably because no one else or very, very few people are willing to do. Strikes me that, and I don't know all the ins and outs of your publishing empire, but it's that sort of attention to detail that you've already demonstrated here in just a few minutes for things that are unrelated to publishing that are probably why your publishing Empire is working.

We pay attention. Thank you. First, thank you. And thank you, by the way, for excellent training on presentation and media skills, oh, so many years ago, because I still pull from that knowledge.

And that was probably 15 years ago or so.

Oh, yeah, it was a while back when you and I are both like 13 and 14 years old, I'm sure. But when I think about my interactions with or opportunities to reach readers, when someone gives me that opportunity, for instance, you with this podcast, I need to do an exceptional job of making myself the best guest you'll ever have, the easiest guest you'll ever have, so that you, like you said, will want to promote me. And I take that approach with every single element. But a few years ago, well, for several years, my husband, my kids and I have all collaborated and I have five adult kids on book tours. And when we do book tours, we take this kind of approach with every single event, with every single media appearance. And I think that's why we keep getting invited back. The way I look at it is if I'm getting access to your audience, you're giving me the opportunity to potentially connect with a reader. That is something I should be extraordinarily grateful for and not take for granted because I don't have access to your audience without that generous offer by you. So I know some authors don't look at it that way. It's an annoyance or this should be something that they're given. But honestly, it's not news that somebody writes a novel that's not worth being on a show. You mentioned that earlier. And I'll tell you, I make all my money off my novels. I get all my media appearances off my nonfiction, my little modest nonfiction books. And so it is not news to write a book. And I find so many people that think they're going to get invited to do book events, they're going to get invited to do speeches, they're going to get articles written about them in the paper when they write their first novel. And I, and I just, I just am very blunt with them and say that's not new.

Speaking of book signings, I remember, I think when my first book came out 15 years ago or so, had a great big full page article in Charlotte, North Carolina, newspaper, went to the bookstore for the book signing and I think I had one person show up. It's not like you see in the movies where everybody is just all lined up. You're listening to Speaking with TJ Walker. This is the program where we speak to world class leaders on how they Communicate, we dissect what it is they do differently. How do they prepare for speeches, media events? How do they do everything a little differently and better when it comes to their own communication? Our special guest today is Pamela Fagan Hutchins. She is a wildly successful writer in the genre of romantic mystery. If you haven't read her books, maybe you just don't read, maybe you don't read fiction. But she's also written a lot of nonfiction books too. Saving Grace is one of her top selling books. It's a best seller on almost every kind of list imaginable. Hell to Pay is her most recent book. But Pamela, I gotta ask you the million dollar million sales question. How in the world did you sell a million copies of Saving Grace? Because you and I both know probably thousands of people who've written novels. They spend a lot of time, effort, slave on it, weekends, evenings, holidays. They perhaps go to create space or some other service. They put it out, they post it on Facebook, they tell their friends, maybe they have a newsletter, maybe they hire a publicist for three months for $900 a month. They're all excited. They write to their local bookstores and three months later they have sold exactly nine copies of their book. You did something profoundly different.

What was it when Saving Grace first came out? We've been analyzing and I say we, you're going to think I'm talking about me and my multiple personality disorder self, but I'm not. My husband and I strategize together and he works with me in the publishing business. So when I say we, that's what I'm talking about. We had put our heads together and really strategized about where were the opportunities that were open for people to sell novels of the type of novel I was selling. Something romantic, something mysterious, amateur sleuth, not a hardcore, you know, forensic type of thing, but an escape book. And we decided that we were going to focus all of our efforts or attention for sales on ebooks. We would do print books and use them as if you will, almost like business cards, you know, something to put in people's hands that were catchy, that they could pass along. But we would not put any of our hopes for money in the paperback. And we do hardback as well. But we would put our efforts into the ebooks because all the statistics were showing that people purchasing patterns were largely online. It was a first novel. We went with Amazon's Kindle Direct publishing exclusively since it was a first novel. And we put money into promoting that book as a free Book for five days. Amazon KDP select allows you to make your book free for a period of time. And honestly, tj, this hurt me to spend money promoting something that was free because I didn't yet understand the value of it. But Amazon lets you have this opportunity and we spent money promoting it. And it took off like a rocket during its period where it was free. What happened was it found readers. And what I discovered at that point was that what was most important was finding readers. It wasn't sales. And I really focus on the five R's. If I get reviews, ratings, rankings, and gosh, and I sit here and I'm on a live podcast and I immediately forget the 5R of my own training program. That's preparation for you right there. What that is is being 50 years old. But if I focus on those five Rs, the fifth one is readers. And it falls into place. If I focus on sales, I don't sell any books. If I get on Facebook and I say buy my book, people unfriend me, they hide me from their feed, they don't want to hear it. But if instead I focus on the things that lead to sales, that's what gets me there. And last thing I'll add about this, because it was completely critical, is we then discovered something that we'd been reading. It wasn't new information, but we'd been reading it, but rediscovered it for ourselves. That the critical mass seems to occur when you have four to six books complementary on big quotes, big air quotes around my head, either the virtual or the pine shelf. So I needed four mysteries in my series before my first one would really get traction. It actually.

So the mythical, often overused term synergy is a reality you find in book publishing.

I find it to be completely a reality. And for us, it happened on number three, that it really took off. And with each additional book in the series, it took off more. And what would happen is it would sell that first book as much as it would sell the new book. People would start at the beginning of the series. So it gets the most, the most reads, but it sells all the books in the series. It's extremely important if you're thinking about entering the field of publishing, to think about whether or not success to you is just getting the book out there, having it available, making a few copies for your family to have, or whether you want to make money. And if you want to make money, I just don't think that 99.9999% of us should expect it to be because we write one book and I see a lot of heartbreak occur with people that burn out right there on the first book, spend a lot of money, a lot of time on it, and they're not working on the next book. And it's all about the next book.

And of course, most successful writers throughout history don't see themselves as a person who writes a book. They see themselves as writers. Stephen King wrote what, six novels before he got the first one published?

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And keeps writing. I mean, he's incredibly prolific. Writers write. And so I think of people that have written only one book. And I think, man, put that pen back to the paper and be a writer. Keep going. It doesn't even have to be good. It doesn't even have to be a book. Write letters, write blog posts, write something, but keep yourself sharp until that day comes that the next book comes to you. And so you're there and you're ready and you've captured it. In fact, from a writing practice perspective, putting your behind in the chair and doing it every day is absolutely essential to the process. Even if you're not writing that next book, writing or good writing happens because you're in the chair for it to happen. It doesn't happen because you're out thinking about that. You don't have any ideas to write about.

Well, let me follow up on something you just said. You say it doesn't have to be good, doesn't even have to be a book. On the one hand, I know what you mean. On the other hand, there is this huge cottage industry of people who are selling the idea of being a publisher. They sell these $10,000 weekends, how to write a best selling book in a weekend. And there's an explosion of books out there in. When you and I were in high school in the 70s and 80s, early 80s, there were maybe 40,000 books published a year. These days, there are a million books or more published a year. How do people who are authors keep from just being swallowed up in all the dreck and all the Kindle freebies and the 99 cent books and the things that are really just corporate brochures in many cases.

This is a topic I have a lot of passion about because I, you know, I don't want to bite the hand that feeds me. And honestly, so many of us as authors make most of our money through Amazon, Amazon's Kindle, Amazon's Createspace, Amazon's Audio Book Creation Exchange, which is, you know, Audible, the company Audible. So, you know, on the one hand, I make Most of my money through Amazon. On the other hand, I look at services like, let's just take for a second movies like a Netflix, and I look at how many of the movies and TV shows on Netflix are cruddy that I turn off and I go on to the next one. I get some incredibly wonderful things that I can binge, but I also get a lot of dreck. Like you were saying, that you have to learn to skip over. The same thing I think happens when you apply that concept to the unlimited reading of Kindle Unlimited. And there are not only books there that readers download and then discard, but there are some where people are just flat out taking advantage of the system and they are consciously putting dreck out there because they can make money through this system just by having books that people download whether or not they're any good or not. And that's so destructive to us as authors. It's horrible for readers who, you know, who wants to open a book and find half the pages blank or with a few words per page or big graphics, and they say nothing. And it's a real problem for readers. The way to differentiate a book that is good versus not good. Readers say these days that the way they identify their books as good or not is by what other readers are saying about that book. Now, that can be what your best friend says or your sister, your brother, or what someone says on Facebook. But it's also those reviews that are left on the various sales sites, Ibooks, Barnes and Noble's Nook Kobo, Amazon, where people are doing their online purchasing. And so I really encourage people that what you look at is a, does this book have a professional cover with a description that's written without errors that sounds interesting and like what I'd want to read, and then scroll down. What are other readers saying about this? What's their experience with this book? Because you can really get your time wasted, if not your money too, by the proliferation this, like you said, this cottage industry. I put out a book in 48 hours and it's just. It's just terrible. Makes me mad.

You're listening to Speaking with TJ Walker, and I will be honest with you, I have kind of put on the back my priority list of publishing books because I found there's a lot less competition with online courses. I can publish courses faster, easier, much more profitably on my own site, on sites like UdeM, than I can on Amazon. I can put up a course on media training or public speaking on Udemy or other sites, and maybe I have two or three competitors. If I publish a book on public speaking on Amazon, I have 11,000 competitors and I have to charge less there. And I get an even smaller slice of the pie than if I'm putting a course on my own site and charging 297 bucks as I do for most of them. You also have online courses for authors. And full disclosure, I have a course for authors that's not how to be rich and famous as an author, but how to promote your books once you are in the media more effectively. But tell us about your online courses because there's so many courses out there on how to be an author, how to be a best selling authority, how to write a number one best selling author in five minutes on a Sunday morning. What's the gist of your courses?

Well, they all go back to my print book, what kind of loser indy publishes? And how can I be one too and take and expand upon those topics in the book that so often I'll go and do as the speaker for a conference and people will say I really wish that you'd had more time to expand on X or Y or Z topic. And so I'm slowly but surely creating this library of courses that expand upon those things from the book. And by the way, when I talk about indie publishing, what I'm talking about is outside the world of big publishing of the Random House and the Penguins. If you're going to be be outside of that, how do you make a success of it instead of just waste time and money? So my courses are on teachable and they are. I've got courses on drawing in readers with rock star book events. You mentioned something earlier, tj about that. I just said yes when you asked me to do this podcast. I made a commitment to myself when I first got into the game of publishing than in the first five years. And it's been, let's see, it's 2016, so it's been nearly four. So in the first five years that I would say yes to everything that I was going to go all in when it came to opportunities to find new readers. And so I've done hundreds literally of book events in the last few years. So one of the classes is how to draw in readers with rock star book events. Another is authors will know this terminology, how to score a bookbub and send your book to the top. BookBub is kind of the king of all online promotion venues for authors. And it's a very very, not only hard promotion to get selected for, but it's a career maker. It really launches you. I have one on how to get book reviews that you know, is part of my five Rs. The whole reviews, rankings, ratings, recommendations lead to readers.

Wait a minute, I thought, I mean, the only thing I've heard for the last 10 years is there's no such thing as book reviewers anymore. That all the major newspapers have fired their reviewers, that the only thing that matters is the actual customer on Amazon. You're telling me there are still people who review books.

The people that review books are the customers. But the problem is that most customers don't review books. So how do you get those all important readers weighing in? For instance, if you go to Amazon and you look at most books, they'll have a handful of reviews. And when I say handful, I mean less than 5. When you look at books that are really selling, they have, you know, 100, 1,000, 10,000. And so what's the difference? How are they besides just volume of readers, how are they getting people to leave those reviews and go out there and do it? I mean, I leave reviews because I know the value of them. I leave reviews on all sorts of products, but most of my friends don't. And so you need to be able to convert people from reader that closes the book and says, that was nice, I think I'll go buy another to that was nice, I'm going to go leave a review and then I'll go buy another. It's really critical because most readers report that those reviews, those online reviews, whether they be on Amazon or whether they're what somebody says on Facebook, which is a form of reviewing a book, are what lead them to make purchasing decisions.

And I'm sure you've seen this before because I do all the time. People will write some new book about how to write a best selling book, how to promote your book. First thing I do is I go to their Amazon page and I look to see how many reviews they have. And typically it's a grand total of four. One of the things I did before this interview is I went to your Amazon page, one of your books and it had thousands of reviews just for one of your books. Is it specifically asking people? Is it calling them up and begging? How do you get that many reviews?

There are several things that I think are important. One is the concept of asking and knowing how to ask and knowing when to ask. I ask at the end of my books. There's actually at the very end, you get to the end, you know, the end. By Pamela Pagan Hutchins and then it says, I hope you enjoyed this book. Whether you did or not, the favor of an honest review helps other readers make their next decision about the book they spend their time on. I would be so honored if you would weigh in on this book and give them a link to go do it. Because that's the other stumbling block that a lot of people have is where do I go to do it? Where exactly do I go? Okay, well, I got to your book page, but that's not really where I leave the review. I make it like leading the horse to water. I can't make him drink, but I'm going to get them right there to the water and make it super easy for them. That has been tremendously successful for me. Another thing is that if I really want reviews, what I really need is readers. And so I'll do these ginormous promotions. I mentioned Bookbub earlier. Bookbubbokbu b.com getting those promotions is extremely difficult. They're all so expensive. It's $1,200 to run a promotion for a book that I'm going to put on discount just to get them to do it. So I'm not going to make a ton of money per book, but they've got millions and millions and millions of very serious readers, readers with a history of reading and reviewing, readers that welcome daily emails from BookBub into their inbox, which is critical. I find that the promotions, where it's banner on some website or we're going to send out a million tweets, get no traction whatsoever for the sales of my novels. But services that go into people's inbox where they're waiting and eager for that email to come, those do me some good. So when I can get one of those promotions, and even if I'm not, you know, making bazillions of dollars off of it, I'm getting access to those readers gives me a plethora of reviews. Just a landslide of reviews, a landslide of readers which lead to paid sales. Paid sales at full price. So I had to wrap my mind around the concept of sometimes I spend money to break even. Sometimes I spend money. In the short run, that doesn't make money because I'm looking at the long run. I'm looking at these five Rs. Reviews, ratings, rankings, recommendations leading to readers. If I focus on those, I sell books and I get thousands of reviews.

And you got all five R's. You're not Rick Perry, even though you're talking with us today from Texas. So excellent, excellent. Recall. For our listeners who want more information on your online courses, we're going to link to those or they are linked in the show notes below. You can also you might not care anything about publishing and you just want to read her book. So go to pamelafaganhutchens.com and you can get great summaries, free chapters, samples, other things. Check out that site. Pamela in so much of popular culture, movies, TV shows, there's this mystique of the the author slash priest who's away from society and just immersed in the art, the JD Salingers, the reclusives. But when I look in my own lifetime at the authors who seem to sell the most, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, what I think of them is people who speak all the time. They're going on talk shows, they're getting in fights on William F. Buckley's Firing Line or Good Morning America. They are attending debates at universities, they're giving speeches. You mentioned you have a course just on how to put together an event where you speak. Walk us through all the various ways that you actually speak about your book, whether it's to customers, the media venues where you're trying to get them to promote you. Walk us through that, please.

Absolutely. As I mentioned earlier, I say yes to just about every opportunity to meet new readers. Because my theory is that even at a bad book event, whether it's a speech or a signing or a reading or it's a Q and A, a multi author Q and A, or some kind of book festival where you get a lot of authors there and people cycling through to meet all of them, no matter what type of event it is, something good is going to come of it. At a minimum, I've got something to promote on social media. Nobody else is going to know whether I sold a book or whether anyone stopped at my table, if there's a nice picture of me in the room looking like I'm having a good time that I can put on Facebook. By the way, people love those kind of posts and they hate the posts that say buy my book. So as an author, it gives you something to talk about, something to put on your blog, something to tweet, something to put on Instagram or Pinterest or whatever it is you do. The other thing that it gives you is the appearance of success. You mentioned your first book event. I think we've all had those where you've had a ton of great publicity. But when it comes right down to it, people have a million choices of what to do with their time and they decide, I may go back, buy your book, but I'm not going to come to your event because I had something else right then that I was going to do. But they know that you had it. And unless you go online and say it was a horrible experience and only one person came to my speech and nobody listened. Unless you say that, you have the appearance of success without anyone knowing the details of exactly what happened at it. So I love book events. I also find that I've never had a book event that I did not get a lead to something else that led to something else that led to something else. Let me give you an example of the type of thing I say yes to that's done. This last December, nearly a year ago now. It feels like a lifetime ago. I said yes to a little teeny community event. I live in Seattle. I split my time between a town of 300 in Texas and a town of 300 in Wyoming. These are not bursting population centers of readers. A friend asked me to come to an event at her store. I said yes. I prepared myself for no book sales, pasting a big smile on my face and doing something with my community. What happened is that a woman walked in, whose sister was a librarian in another town, bought a book and asked me to sign it. And I said, dear lady Librarian. I actually used her name. I love libraries and I love doing events. And she gave me a call, and I ended up doing book clubs in their town and a speech for a women's group where 100 people came and sold books at both venues. And so saying yes to one thing, on its surface, may look like little, you know, po dunk, rinky dink thing, but leads to others as well. So I do speeches. I speak to. I love to speak to women's groups because I look at the demographics of who buys books, and that's largely women over 40. They buy 75% of the book in the US even if they're buying it for somebody else. So I went in front of those women. I love these groups of women that are retired or they're mature in their careers, and they get together for events for charity or for luncheons or whatever. They love to support people that come to their events. And I find that sometimes I'll go to these events and sell 100 books. You know, just being how specific.

How specific is your demo? I mean, you hear this in marketing all the time. You've got to know your avatar. I mean, do you know that your reader. Do you have this image when you're Writing of the reader, if it's a 49 year old white woman whose income is $53,000 a year, who has a cat and two kids, I mean, do you have that kind of a specific demographic in mind?

Yes.

Okay, who is it?

Well, we call them the Cat Ladies. And the reason we call them the cat ladies is because we're able to watch the buying patterns. And they may not have cats, but I'm convinced they have a cat or a dog. I'm convinced that their children are high school age or older. I'm convinced that they have had some career and are either in the waning years of it or retired from it. And the reason that I'm so sure of this, besides watching when people buy books, because while we can't see where they are for online sales, we can watch the surges in buying patterns and we find that we sell a whole lot of books on Sunday night. And it's about the time people get into bed with their E reader. It starts at about 10 o' clock on the east coast and it goes through about midnight on the west coast on Sunday nights. And we have this mental image of these women with a cat or a dog or a partner, but somebody snuggled up in bed with them with their e reader downloading just one more book. Just one more book. They are avid readers that read at least a book a month, if not a book a week, and some of them a book a day. And some of them, again, we watch this from buying patterns are such avid readers and that they not only have the book on their E reader, but they download Audio Companion and switch back and forth between audio and ebook. We know this because we see the audio companion sales occurring in conjunction in lockstep with the E book sales. So we're.

Doing your own audio or do you farm that out to another service?

I farm it out, but I do. I'm very, very involved in picking the person that does the performance. Honestly, tj, I flirted with the idea of doing my own audio because I'm, you know, you mentioned earlier, I'm a speaker, I'm a presenter, I'm a ham, I'm most likely to sing karaoke. You know, it's not a shyness issue I have, but I found that I make more money if I keep writing books. And so as much as I want to cut my own audio, I don't. But I have just had wonderful success in the audio realm and to do.

It right is a real skill. Even though, I mean, you do have a great voice. I'M sure you could do a fine job, but it's time consuming and it's also one of those skills that has become somewhat of a commodity and therefore relatively inexpensive I found with other clients of mine too. I have to contradict you or at least challenge you on one thing. You mentioned something good has to come from a book signing event. I just had this flashback. I had completely forgotten about it. It was more than 20 years ago. I was doing a book sign at a political book at the time. Someone came and started screaming at me that I was, I think he said I was a communist or something. And he was, he was a, he had been a listener from a talk radio show and he was a guy who called in who was a self avowed Nazi. Oh, I know what he said. He was screaming at me. Says you, T.J. walker. You look like Jerry Seinfeld. You're one of these liberal New York Jews, aren't you? At this point I had, you know, grew up in North Carolina, had been brought up a Baptist and was about as far away from. Anyway, it was just, I don't remember any, I don't remember anything good coming out of that particular book signing. Although it's giving us a vignette to talk about 20 years later. So perhaps your theory is right and not mine.

There you go. I have some, well, some probably aren't appropriate for listeners experience with book signings where people do the dang dis things. I someday I'm just going to write a collection of stories from crazy people at book events because I'm convinced that you stand behind that table and you're just a sitting duck. Which is why I love to do speeches now. I do. You mentioned earlier that my past life I was a lawyer in hr. I'll do now keynote speeches for HR conferences, for legal conferences where I'll go as an author, a force lawyer, a former HR executive. And I'll talk about and relate things from my book tours and the funny stories from my book tours to what they do, you know, and slices of life and the interplay and how they, how they are so much similar instead of so much different. And so that's another way, just because you asked me about it earlier, that I've learned to capitalize on the past career, the current career, the predilection for speaking and that constant thing I'm doing of going out and trying to find new people to connect with that potentially are readers.

How does an author who doesn't have an extensive previous career even get invited to give a Speech in front of more than two people.

You have to start with those speeches for two people, right? I mean, you have to be willing to build your resume and get a few people to say TJ was delightful. But I literally, I pitched to my assistant, just finished doing our pitches for 2017 to writers groups. Writers groups love to hear from other writers and it's a great place to hone your skills as a speaker and writers read, so it's a good place to find readers. Although writers are also often very cheap. Another thing that I do is I pitch groups that are always looking for speakers and you should look very, very, I think you look very, very local at first as well, where you're a bigger fish because you're in this pond where people want to promote locally. So chamber events, rotary events, anything to build that speaker resume and get referred to your next great speech.

Well, many of our listeners are not cheap, but they do like a bargain. That's why I think they're going to enjoy the better word. They're going to enjoy the bargain and the nice tasting samplers you have for them. You've been nice enough to create a page just for the listeners of speaking with TJ Walker that's linked to in the show notes. What are they going to get if they make that click?

They're going to get a link that will take them to a completely free course called how to Sell a Ton of books in five Simple Steps and they'll also get if they choose a different click instead. Or in addition to I have an ebook called Book Launch Promotion that they can get if they sign up for my publishing blog. I have a currently and I should add this to my list of how do you sell a ton of books? In answer to your earlier question, I found that always having something to give away, like giving candy to kids to lure them in, is really useful when you've got more than one book and you can give part or all of one away to say, hey, come on in, the water's fine, let's read the rest of these together. That you get a lot of people that will come along for the ride with all the other books. So I've always got one that I'm giving away at any point in time and so they have access to that book through this link as well.

With the age of Amazon, Amazon does a lot of nice things, but they don't give you the data of who your customers are. How do you form direct bonds with your customers if quite often you don't know who's Bought it. How do you get their emails and their names?

You know, building an email subscription list of readers is absolutely, positively my most important 2016, 2017 promotion goal. And so that's another million dollar question here. The way that I get them is first and foremost, I've done hundreds of book events in the last few years of people that are interested enough to come and see me. And I make sure that all of them know that by giving me their email, they're going to hear from me a couple of times a year, maybe once a month, and what they'll get from that. So I get tons of subscription that way. In addition, at the end of my books, when I ask for that review, I also say, and if you'd like to have X or Y or Z, whatever I'm currently giving away free, then sign up for my new release list. And I get big surges of subscription there if I can get them to read all the way through the book. Those are probably my two best. My third is from people that just happen to visit my website anyway. And I prominently have links to subscribe to my newsletter. The newsletter to me is a way for me to bypass Amazon ibooks nooks and communicate directly with that customer. Because you're right, I may sell 100,000 books on Amazon, but they don't. They know who those customers are and I don't. So I'm constantly trying to find a way to get them to take that extra step and welcome hearing from me as well, so that I can directly reach out and say, hey, I've got a new book.

Now, Pamela, don't. This isn't a strong criticism, but I'm wondering, and I think some of our listeners are wondering, maybe this Pamela character is someone like Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary Vaynerchuk is a wildly successful author. He's had several books atop the New York Times bestseller list. He's everywhere. He has a video and audio podcast that is downloaded by millions. He rose to fame with his TV wine library. And now he is a prominent angel investor and has one of the largest interactive agencies in the world. But when I listen to him, so much of it is it seems like he sleeps two hours a day. He's talking about, I'm in the chat room and I'm answering somebody's question about Facebook or Instagram at 2am because I love to work hard and I'm up at 5 and my schedule meeting's till 8pm and a lot of our listeners and I find he's motivational in A sense, but it's not something you can duplicate. I get the sense that you are not just talented and bright and extremely hard working, but also someone who is extraordinarily well organized and someone who can just go on all cylinders for many more hours a day than most. First of all, is that true? Second of all, how can that be transferable to other people who are normal people?

It is partially true. I do it in bursts and I can't sustain it all the time. And I think there may be some people that can and hats off to them, but there's a lot of other things I enjoy. I've got five kids. I've got horses and goats and dogs, and I live a full life with all those things. I did reach a point where I was able to hire people to work for me with the publishing. So I've got two assistants doing a lot of what I do. But back in the beginning, which wasn't all that long ago, but back in the beginning I just worked harder. I also looked myself in the mirror and said, just for today you're going to do whatever it takes. Tomorrow you may make a different decision, but just for today you're going to keep doing whatever it takes. And there were days I'd look in the mirror and say, today you get the day off, Pamela. But there were other days where I'd say, you're not going to go out to coffee with friend today. You're going to buckle down and finish that book. So here's what I found out, T.J. and that is, I learned that in order to make that time count for me, that I had to be, like you said, super organized and that I had to plan what I was going to do and I had to learn to write faster. Which is a whole art in and of itself is learning to write faster. And then learning to focus my activities on the things that made a difference instead of things that were nice but didn't get me where I wanted to go. I started focusing on the five Rs. I became very clear about what got me there and what didn't. And I set myself really tight timelines on the writing. And sometimes I didn't make them. You know, a lot of times I didn't make them, but I just said it.

How long does it take you to write a book? I remember I was at a the National Speakers association meeting maybe 20 years ago in a seminar put on by Greg Godeck, who wrote the book 1001 Ways to Be Romantic. And I very distinctly remember him saying he Wrote. He spent two weeks writing the book and an entire year promoting the book before things really panned out and he got it to the bestseller list. Some writers will slave a lay for seven years. Others like Isaac Asimov, where I only halfway facetiously compared you to Isaac asimov. He wrote 500 books. I mean, he would do everything 14 hours a day, seven days a week, and he would sometimes write entire books in one week and never editing, never revising. It just, it came out of his brain, from his fingertips onto the typewriter and that was the final draft. What is your process and how long does it take you to write a book?

My process now is very different from my process when I started. When I started, it took me, you know, several years to get a book to a point where it was ready to be rewritten. But now I take six months per book. I'm on a schedule of two books per year. These are full length novels, you know, three to 400 page book. What I do is I write a first draft without allowing myself ever to go back and edit the page before so that I constantly keep moving forward. The biggest killer of time in the drafting process is that cycling, cycling, cycling, cycling, trying to perfect something that you're probably going to delete anyway when you rewrite the book. Because the big push for me when the story really takes flight is when I go back and completely rewrite it. Now this is only partially the story, let's take Hell to Pay, for example, and the two books that came before it. I thought about those books for two years. I chatted with my husband, who's my brainstorming partner, about them for two years before I ever sat down and wrote them. So I already knew the characters, I already had thought about it, I already had planned it out. And I do outline, I do plan, but when I sit down and write, I assume I have all that preparation done and then I'm going to push through until I can get to the end. And my book may be terrible, but I've got something that I can rewrite that I can edit. And if I just recycle on that first page or that first chapter for two years, I don't have anything to rewrite, writer, edit. So I really have a discipline towards get a first draft done and then worry about having a good book. And that works for me.

Best selling author Malcolm Gladwell has famously said that writing is easy. It's the thinking that's hard. Thinking of interesting ideas that takes months and months, if not years. I'm not going to ask you the stereotypical question of where do you get your idea? But I do want to know what's the environment of where you find good ideas flowing best? Is it for a long walk in the woods, do you need to be outside or is it just sitting in front of your computer?

It's being outside. I'm an outdoors person and I'm hiking or I'm riding a bike or I'm riding a horse, or I'm doing something where I am clearing my head. And then once the ideas start to come, I also find that I unblock the ideas if I talk them out. I think brainstorming partners or groups for fiction writers especially are really important because we get isolated in our own ideas and don't see all the possibilities. I find a lot of times what brainstorming partners do is get me to think of the ideas that I wanted. It's not that they come up with them, although sometimes they do, but they send me to places that I wouldn't have gone to to without expressing verbally what's going on. I agree. It's all in the thinking about the writing. It's all in knowing before you ever sit down what it is you want to do. I've done a whole series on my website of posts on the story behind the story that talks about the process of coming up with ideas, what shaped a certain story, why I do things a certain way. And I almost started the series in a self indulgent way because I think about these things all the time. My husband and I talk about them all the time, other writers and I talk about them and I enjoy the topic. But I found they've been incredibly popular with readers who were interested in it and with writers who are always looking for something that might help them come up with ideas more easily or better that translate better to the page who.

And we're almost out of time. But I am interested in role models you had either currently or growing up who is an author you really admire and you admire the way this person promotes, whether on talk shows, speeches, C span, book talk, things like that.

I absolutely love the recently departed Pat Conroy. I loved the emotion in his books and the way that he took a place of a setting and made it larger than life, made it a character in the books so much more than just the place where something happened. And I love how he did book events, he connected with readers. And if you go and you look at the interaction that he had with people that he met at events, it was genuine, it was long lasting and that kind of authenticity you can't fake. And people see it and they gravitate toward it and it comes out in what you write as well. So I think that it's no surprise to me that someone that can write such an emotionally accessible fiction would also be a really emotionally accessible human being. So I'm a huge fan of him. I love what a master marketer that Janet Ivanovich is. And by the way, she works with her family, which I also love because I work with family members as well. But she does these wonderful interviews with characters on her website and things that keep her. Her characters are alive for people between her books and that keeps them from going on and falling in love with a different author and a different character. And instead they stay with Janet and they wait for Stephanie Plum, her character, because she, she brings them. She gives them reasons to stay. So I think those are some of the things that I really admire.

All right, folks, if you have an interest in romantic mystery, or you have zero interest in romantic mystery, but you want to figure out how to sell a book, I would urge you to check out the link below to Pamela's website. She's put together some freebies and some introductory morsels for you. You can go to her website anytime. Pamelafaganhutchins.com and you can also say hello to her and thank her for being a guest today on Skype. Her Twitter handle is Pamela. It's Pamela T H Pamelot P A.

M E L O T H. So it's a weird one, I know, but.

It'S my nickname, Pamellot with an H. And we'll link to that in the show notes as well. I'm TJ Walker. Pamela, thanks for being our guest today. Thanks for listening to Speaking with TJ Walker, where the communication skills and practices of world class leaders are dissected.