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What's the best way to promote your book if you are a guest on a podcast.

Speaking the show about effective speaking in public to the media, at work and in life. Speaking with TJ Walker.

This question comes from Mika, one of my online students from the platform of Udemy writes in dj. I've got a novel coming out. When it comes to podcast interviews, I don't have any media appearances or experience yet, but I'd like to what specifically do you recommend doing when preparing for podcast interviews? What issues or what concerns come up the most? Well, the biggest concern frankly is you do the interview and nobody remembers anything you said. Nobody buys your book. That's the worst case scenario. And in that case it's kind of a wasted opportunity, a waste of time. I want to give you some tips on how to make the most out of podcast opportunities, whether you're a fiction or a nonfiction author. Now, full disclosure, I have worked with fiction authors. The vast, vast majority of my experience is with nonfiction authors. I do it is a lot harder dealing with fiction, especially self published fiction. With nonfiction you have so many different revenue sources you're more likely to get speaking gigs, consulting training. So as in the case of many consultants, myself included, you can do a book, maybe not sell more than a few hundred copies, but you give away a few thousand. You've maybe spent 10,000 on the process, but it perhaps generates 100,000 in business. So all in all a profitable venture. That's kind of the model for most nonfiction writers is it's a loss leader. It's a marketing tool that you can use to sell other higher end, higher value, more expensive services and products. Fiction isn't like that. Obviously if you sell millions of copies of your books and you sell the book to Hollywood, you can become rich and famous. But that is far and few between. So I will give you some general tips in a moment on how to make the most of any podcast appearance. Number one. Number two, I'll then break it down to the specifics of fiction versus Nonfiction in a moment.

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The first big tip for any author, fiction or nonfiction is be a great guest on any show you do. Be interesting, be likable, be easy to work with. One of the great powers of the media is people feel like they know you. If you're on often enough, they trust you, they like you, and they want to buy your stuff. Quite often, if you look at some of the most successful authors of all time, certainly since the, the advent of television, there are people who are also good on tv. Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Wildly successful writers, respected in the literary community, but also great talk show guests. They said interesting, provocative things to say. They weighed in on the issues of their day, not just talking about the fictional characters of their novel. Isaac Asimov, the most prolific writer perhaps ever. He wrote 500 books. One of his strengths was he was always happy to be a guest. He lived right across the street from, I forget if it's ABC or cbs. I believe it was abc, the network in Manhattan. And he was such a good guest, they kept him on speed dial. So anytime a big name guest dropped out at the last minute or couldn't fly in, in New York, they'd call up Asimov and say, hey, can you be over in five minutes? And he'd run over, promote his book. And he always had a latest book because he had a new book out basically every month, sometimes every week. He was that prolific. So yeah, he was a good writer. Yeah, he wrote a lot, but he did a whole lot of talk shows and he was always an interesting guest. He wasn't just saying, he wasn't just doing one of these things where he's holding up a book, hey, buy my book, buy my book. It's on Amazon. That's not what he was doing. He was saying interesting things, provocative things, and being a good guest. So whether you're selling and Isimoff is a good example, he sold fiction and nonfiction, wrote and published fiction and nonfiction. Didn't matter. He was in the media a lot now. He didn't travel. He was someone who hated to travel, abhorred flying, was fearful of flying, but would certainly do media in New York City. And if you can't fly and you're an author, New York City is the best place to be because so many TV networks and stations. But that's the first big hurdle. Make yourself like, we'll have something interesting. Now, the next big tip. And this applies to fiction writers as well as nonfiction writers, have something you can give to people that is zero risk. And by that I mean a free chapter in your book, a free tips list. You know, if it's a weight loss book, if we need any more of those, then it's, you know, seven quick tips. To somehow have fewer cravings at midnight, something really, really specific that someone would perceive as valuable to get them to come to your website or send you an email. Because what you want is to build your list. You want to build a list of people who like something about you, want to hear more from you, and are at least open to hearing a pitch in the future. Because if all they ever do is hear you on one podcast one time, well, let me just ask you this. How many times do you ever remember hearing somebody in a podcast you'd never heard of them before? They're not famous. They're not, they are not with a huge major publisher where you're going to see their book jumping out the second you walk into a bookstore. If you still go to bookstores, how often have you just heard somebody once and then instantly bought their book? Perhaps it's happened. But when I ask authors all over the world that question, typically their response is, gee, tj, I've never done that. Well, my question to you is, why do you expect anyone else to do that for you? If your book is, let's say it's a hardback book and it's a substantive book, it's 25 bucks. That's not $1,000, but it's not 99 cents either. It's unlikely people are going to pay that unless you really, really intrigued them in some powerful way. So that's why it's important to get their email. You've got to give. To get, you've got to give them something of value. Free chapter in a book, free backstory. Maybe you give them two books or an old book for free if they give you your email to learn about the new one. But then you have a way to communicate with them. It doesn't mean you spam them 10 times a day to buy your book and nothing else, but it means you can give them interesting, relevant information. So if your genre is fantasy, maybe once a month you have a new short story that you write and you give it out to people on your list for free. And at the very bottom of that email, after you've given them a lot of value, then and only then, you give a pitch to how to buy your book. It's about forming relationships, long term relationships, whether it's fiction or nonfiction. Stephen King, you may love him, you may hate him, but he has a whole lot of fans. And if he wants to self publish something, he can and he has. If he wants to work with a big publisher and guarantee a huge advance, he can tell that publisher I'm going to bring hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people to the website the first day when I announce it through my own social media contacts and email list. If you want to be a successful author, you need a following. It doesn't have to be millions. Let's switch over to the nonfiction. You're much better off as a nonfiction writer if you can find 1,000 people who really, really, really believe in you, love you, are a fan of your work, and are willing to buy anything you put out. I'd much rather have a list of a thousand people who open every single email. Buy what I recommend. Then to have a list of 2 million Twitter followers, for example. And yet they're all just spam or robots or people who click back to anyone who clicks on them. You need to find an audience of people you care about. Now, the next big tip for both fiction and nonfiction writers is you can't tell people everything that's in your book. You simply don't have the luxury of doing that. A talk show, even an hour long podcast seems like a long time. But even with an hour long podcast, you've got the intro, the outro, an insert, an ad or two for Audible. You've got the host saying other things, talking about the next show. The host is asking questions you've got. You're very unlikely to get more than about 25 minutes of talking. Well, if you transcribe 25 minutes of talking, that's really far, far less than a chapter. It's really only a few pages of content because you can speak at 140, 160 words a minute. So don't be greedy. If you're talking about fiction, you've got to tell them the plot. That's going to really excite them and make them want to learn more and make them realize this is something you already like. Science fiction writers like science fiction. Romance readers like to know it's about romance and what's different about it. If you are selling nonfiction, you need to really make sure that you've given people not everything you know, but certainly your top three ideas, your top three messages, and one main idea. Something where people can hear it, understand it and say, yeah, that's useful, that's valuable, that's interesting. I need to learn more from this guy or this woman. And unless you are already really famous, unless you have such high credibility or your book is in the window of every bookstore and every airport, I would not recommend going for the sale. And the podcast instead whet people's appetite, make them convinced you're the expert, give them really interesting information. Of course you can mention the book is available at Amazon or Barnes and Noble if you want to. But the most important thing is you want to get that name and that email. You want to give them a chapter, another book, something. Don't say sign up for my newsletter. No one wants a newsletter. But if you give them something of value for their email, you can now communicate with them. And maybe they don't buy your book today, tomorrow, or next week. But as I've had the situation before, you get someone from a talk show on your list, it's maybe two years before they buy the book, but then maybe five years later they hire you for a speech, a workshop, a seminar, and boom, you actually made more money than 99% of the writers in the world because of that one customer. But it took five years. So go for the long view, the long play, and you'll be in good shape. Also, just make yourself easy to deal with with these producers, these podcast producers. Let them know you're happy to do the show, you're happy to come back, you want to promote their show. The more you promote the show in your own social media network, the more likely the producer of the show will promote it and want to have you back. The real key to success with being a guest on podcast, promoting your books as well as promoting in any other media, is you want to build relationships with the reporters, the producers, the hosts, the assignment editors. So you get back again and again and again. With modern fragmentation of media, no. 1 media interview, like 10 years ago an Oprah would do, no. 1 media interview is going to generate a lot of sales. It's about repeat recurring interview presence, media presence in the outlets that your audience cares about. Do that and you will succeed. Thanks for writing in with your question, Mika. Good luck with your book. I'm TJ Walker. May all of your presentations in life and all your podcasts in life be a huge success.

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