Tom Corson-Knowles Speaking Your Way to Publishing Success

Speaking with TJ Walker, the show where we dissect how and what world class leaders communicate. If you are a public speaker, an expert, a consultant, an authority figure, a politician, someone trying to influence a public debate, I already know something about you that you haven't told me. And what I know is chances are you want to be a best selling author. The respect, the position in society that a best selling author has is substantial. It has been for decades. Vine can come and go, 5 second videos can come and go. Snapchat may be the new thing for some. But being an author that is read and admired and respected and by thousands, hundreds of thousands of millions, that's meaningful any decade for the last several hundred years. And that's why I'm very happy to have on a special guest today who truly knows the ins and outs of publishing folks. I'm constantly bombarded by emails by people who claim to be self publishing experts, Kindle experts. And then you go to their book on Amazon and it turns out they have three reviews and their sales rank is number 2 million 222. And you realize they don't know what they're talking about. Our guest today is not like that. He really does know the ins and outs of Kindle Publishing. His book the Kindle Publishing Bible has hundreds and hundreds of reviews. He's going to talk to you about why reviews are so significant. But here's the interesting twist that I'd never heard of. He's going to tell you what sort of reviews you don't want to have. He's going to tell you why you don't want your family and your friends and your Aunt Susie who thinks you're the greatest, reviewing your book on Amazon, how it'll actually hurt you. I didn't know this. Our special guest today is Tom Corson Knowles. He is an author of dozens of books. I'm talking about more than 26 books I've read not all those books, but I've read some of them and they are insightful. They give you the practical how to knowledge you need if you're going to try to navigate the waters of Kindle and Amazon. He is a host of the Publishing Prophets podcast show and he's just one of these guys. He's everywhere. The old axiom you want to be successful, be everywhere to everyone you care about. He embodies. You see him on Twitter, Facebook, stand up on the stage at conferences, conventions about publishing and expertise. He's on webinars. He is someone who by his own admission you'll Find out in the interview. Spends as much time speaking as he does writing. Join me now for my conversation with Tom Corson Knowles. Tom, thanks for joining me today.

Thanks for having me, T.J. it's great to be here.

Now, I've read many of your, not all of your books, but I've read many of your books, I've taken your courses and still you and I are a little bit on polar, opposite sides of things. You're an evangelist for writing books. My first advice to a lot of people who are experts, consultants, speakers, aspiring speakers is don't write a book. Focus first and foremost on building an audience, whether it's through YouTube, whether it is Facebook, fans, an email list. But you've, you seem to have cracked the nut on actually building an audience through books. How do you do it?

Yeah, so that's a great question. I think the key is with anything, when you're an expert, when you're a consultant, when you're a thought leader, you're right, you have to build your audience. Okay. But the way that you build an audience, you have to provide value to your audience. Right? And so if all you're doing is like Twitter and posting, you know, short 140 character essays on the importance of, you know, whatever field you're an expert in, it's really hard to build a following who falls in love with you and loves everything you do and wants to buy from you. Right. Because you're not providing a lot of value in very short snippets. Right. And so that's one of the reasons why having a book can be such a great way to build an audience, because you can provide so much value in a book. How many times have you heard T.J. oh, this book changed my life. This book changed my marriage, changed my relationships, changed my health, changed my business. Books have the power to change people's lives. Especially, you know, nonfiction, self help, how to kinds of books because you can teach people life changing skills, ideas, principles and strategies in a book that they can read in an afternoon.

But how do you get them to find the book if you're not already famous? I mean, I'm old enough to remember seeing Dr. Wayne Dyer, who's now passed away on places like the Tonight Show. This is back when I was 10 years old, early 70s, and there was a time when you could basically be a nobody, publish a book, go on the Tonight Show, Good Morning America and be an overnight success, get on the bestseller list and a career is made. These days I don't really see that happening to People, the people I see on the bestseller list are people like Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, people who are already famous. Whereas every day in my capacity as former president of the National Speakers Association, New York chapter, I come across people, all the written books, and they sell about 10 copies or 10 PDFs a year. And something faltered massively. Even some of them who wrote good books.

Absolutely.

So what are you doing? What are you doing differently? Because you're definitely a promotional dynamo and I see you everywhere. What is the missing ingredient beyond writing a good book? Certainly, if you write a bad book, okay, you deserve no sales. But for people who've written good books, how do they make this work?

So you, you have to just constantly be providing value to your audience, right? You have to, you have to be the person that people say, oh, TJ Walker, he's so awesome. I just want to learn more from him. I want to buy his books, I want to take his courses, I want to go to his events, I want anything that he does, I want to create. Right? There's this great article out there called 1000 True Fans, and we can link to that in the show notes. But it's the basic idea that if you're an artist, if you're a creative person, if you write books or do art or poetry or, you know, whatever you do, if you're an artist and essentially what you are, if you're a speaker, if you're a thought leader, you're an artist in your field, you're translating science or strategy or real world principles into a communication form that people can understand and use in their own lives, right? And that's an art, right? There's obviously science behind that, but it's really an art. And if you have a thousand fans who love you and love what you do, they will buy everything you put out. And so when I think about marketing, it's all about adding value to my audience. Helping people with the problems that they're having, helping them overcome those problems. And it's really just about education. All great marketing is education. So if you have a great book, a great keynote speech, a great training course, seminar, workshop, whatever product you have, if you have something great of value to your audience, you don't need to sell it. What you need to do is market it. And the way you do that is through education. If people know enough about your book, about your product, about your service, if they know enough about it, it's going to be a no brainer for them to buy it. If it's a great Product if it's a great book. Right. So obviously step one is you create that great product, you create that great book. And step two is you simply educate people.

Well, let me step back for one second. And it's the old what comes first, chicken or egg question. You say step one is create the book. But you also talked about having the thousand fans. Is that really the first step and is that the missing step for people not having 1,000 fans who really love their work?

I mean, I don't want to say that the book has to be the first step for everyone. What I'm saying is if you want to sell lots of books, that's like a sufficient, but not. It's essential. But not sufficient. Right. It's essential that you have a great book. It's not sufficient to guarantee your success. Right.

What was, what was first for you? Was the book the first thing you did?

It was. No, it wasn't. So I had a blog. I was in blogging for years, but I had very little success as a blogger. So even though I had tons of traffic on my website, like one site was getting 100,000 visitors a month, I was making very little money because I didn't know how to monetize it. I wasn't building an email list. This was like eight, eight, nine years ago. So I had a little bit of an audience when I launched my books, but my audience was on topics that were very different. My blogging audience was about health and wellness, and my books were on personal development and marketing and business. So it was very different. So I had an audience, but it really didn't make a big impact on my sales. Right. At the time, what made a big impact on my sales was having my books on Amazon, going to different book promotion sites, going to different bloggers who were experts and had big followings in the areas that I was writing about on Amazon and having them promote it. That's what made the big difference. So, you know, it is like the chicken and the egg thing, you know, do you have to market first and build the fans or build the product first? I think you're always doing both. You're always building an audience and you're always creating great products. And that's just kind of the model you have to use. And a great product can be anything from a book to a seminar to a blog post or an interview. It doesn't have to be, you know, this massive undertaking, this massive project. But I think every day, if you can think of one thing you can do to improve your products and Services and offerings. And then one thing you can do to build your audience and platform, you're going to be on the right track to really building the business.

So, Tom, really, what's more important, is it having the initial thousand followers or is it just focusing on the book?

Well, here's the thing. You can't just have 1,000 followers, right? A lot of people in business, you think, oh, I need a million dollars. I need a thousand followers. I need 100,000 visitors on my blog. And these are just results, right? You can't do results. You can't wake up tomorrow and get 1,000 followers. You can't wake up tomorrow and get a million dollars. You have to do something in order to earn those results. And usually that takes time, right? So the question is, I get it. At the same time, it's kind of a distraction when people say, well, how do I make a million dollars? How do I get a thousand fans? How do I. How do I write a great book? Because the distraction is that you get focused on the results of having status, of having money, of having followers, rather than focusing on what are the step by step things you can do right now to move in the right direction. And that's what people really need to focus on, is what can you do right now, today to improve your situation, to move in the right direction, to start writing that book, to start getting more followers, to start getting more fans, to start creating a better product or a better service or a better speech. That's what people really need to focus on, and that's how you create those results. So if you look at someone who's got a thousand true fans and say, oh, I want what they have, well, then you have to do what they did, which is build up that business day in, day out over time.

So, Tom, a lot of people look at you and say, wow, this guy's written dozens of books. He's making five figures each month from book sales. He's got his own mini publishing empire. He's not having to play the games with the New York publishers and take them out to dinner and sit around and wait for rejection slips. I want to be Tom. I mean, people say that because they glamorize the life of the intellectual lone writer. But you are actually speaking a lot. I mean, I see you speaking on udemy courses and videos, webinars, keynotes. You're a guest on podcasts like this. What proportion of your time would you say you spend writing, creating written content versus actually speaking about it? Whether it's live keynote speeches, workshops, webinars, YouTube videos.

For me, it's probably about half and half, but the reason is. So when I'm working with an author and putting together their marketing plan. Remember earlier I talked about marketing is just education, right? It's simply about educating your audience. And so for me, one of my strengths is speaking. Like, I love to speak. I might not be the best speaker in the world, but I really enjoy it and have a lot of fun. So doing interviews like this, doing webinars, public speaking, keynote speeches, workshops, seminars, for me, it's not work, it's just fun. I just love to do it. And so whenever I'm working with a client, I'm creating their marketing plan for their book or their business. It's all about focusing on what are your strengths? What do you love to do when it comes to marketing to educate your audience that you can do day in, day out, year after year after year. Because if someone has to wake you up every single day and say, hey, tj, you need to go and tweet the next thing to build your audience because you don't enjoy doing it, you need that accountability from someone external to you. That's probably not your strength and it's probably not something you love to do. And so you're not going to keep doing it and keep doing it. When you keep doing it, when you're consistent with your marketing, that's when you produce major, major results. So for me, that's why I speak is because I love it. It doesn't feel like work for me. And I know I can do it today and tomorrow and the next day and five years from now, and I'll still love it and I'm still going to get results from it.

And when I do think of the best authors, some of the most successful authors of all time, they are speaker. People forget that Mark Twain actually made the vast majority of his income as a speaker, not as a writer. Think of earlier, in my own lifetime, some of the literary lions like Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal. We knew them primarily from their appearances on TV talk show the Tonight Show Firing Line. For many people, it was more about their TV appearances speaking than it was what they wrote. Although they were great writers too. How do you figure out what the right balance you say about 50, 50 speaking versus writing. How do you figure out what is the right balance?

There again, it just comes down to what are your strengths? Because if you're not a good speaker, then you shouldn't be speaking. Vice versa, if you're not a good writer, you probably shouldn't be writing. Right. And what I mean, good is not just your skill level, it's really your commitment level. Right. Again, because if someone has to wake you up in the morning to make you go to work to do the work, you're not going to be successful long term. And so finding the right balance really comes down to, first of all, what are your strengths? How do you maximize the use of your strengths? Like, how do you be more productive as a writer? How do you be more productive as a speaker? Right. Rather than going to gigs where maybe there's 10 people in the audience, see if you can go to 100 or 1,000 or 10,000. Right. It's like leveling up your game. But in order to get there, you have to do the work. Right? So maybe you go to a ton of events where there's only 10 people in the audience and you're not really selling a lot, you're not really doing a lot, but you're getting that good practice. Right? And that's, I think, what is essential. It's the same thing with writing. Maybe you start writing guest articles for tiny blogs with 1000 readers a month. Then you get up to bigger and bigger and bigger websites. So I think that's really the key, is just start where you are, start where the opportunities are available for you right now, and then level up constantly. Be thinking of, how can I take this skill set and make my next article, my next speech, my next thing, be 10x more productive with a 10x bigger audience?

Now, nobody's born being a natural writer. People go to school every day and get writing instruction. First grade, second, third through high school, college, sometimes graduate school. People buy into the idea of getting a lot of formalized instruction on how to write. And yet most people get zero instruction on how to speak, how to speak on a podcast, how to give a speech, a keynote. How did you learn? Because presumably you had a lot of instruction on writing. But I have to imagine, like most people, you didn't have a lot of formal instruction on how to present, speak, give lectures, webinars and podcasts.

Podcast, yes. So how did I learn speaking or how did I learn writing?

How did you learn? I think I know how you learned writing. Going to first grade, second grade. How did you learn how to speak, and what was it like before you felt like you were great on a podcast or on the floor in front of a stage or on a stage in front of people at a convention?

Yeah. So I remember going to an event when. When I was about 19 years old, I was in a network marketing company. I had just signed up and I saw this speaker who had earned like $100 billion in commissions. And he started out as a broke waiter. He just had this amazing story of going from broke and living in his car to being incredibly wealthy, incredibly successful, incredibly connected, and just really kind, loving person. And I remember just sitting in that audience and just crying. I was just bawling tears in my eyes. I was so touched by his story of how he had changed his life and how that impacted not just his own life, but his family and his friends and all the people he'd worked with and coached and mentored along the way. And everyone in the audience was very affected by it. It was very inspirational and very moving. And I just remember sitting there thinking, man, that's so cool. I want to be able to do that someday, to share my story with someone else and have it change their life, to have it inspire them, to have them decide to take their life in a new direction and, and get new results and create their dreams. And so that was really my motivation for becoming both a speaker and a writer was to really just share that message that there's more possible for you in your life. And if you're willing to open up those possibilities and willing to take action, you can achieve your dreams. And so that was like my why that was my purpose, that was my passion. And so when I basically just started speaking at little tiny events and I went to Toastmasters meetings and I read books on speaking and I hired a couple voice coaches, you know, I just started taking the next step. And the next step, like I said before, that's all you can really do, right? You can't get from horrible speaker to top level professional in a day. Right? You have to put the time, effort, the energy into it. And so that's what I did. I remember I spoke for so many events for free. You know, I would go speak anywhere, anyone, anywhere. Someone would invite me to speak, I would go because I just wanted the practice. Right?

That's a great attitude to have. You mentioned network marketing and full disclosure, I've had clients before in network marketing, so I don't want to sound like I'm some snob and say, oh, I'm better than that. I'm not a fan of the business model. But if you ever have an opportunity to go to a network marketing event, do so, if for no other reason, to learn from the speakers. Because most network marketing events have great speakers, especially if it's a national convention, because They've got to motivate people to work without any upfront money. And that's one of the hardest things in the world to do. And that's why they typically have great speakers, because they really do have to motivate an audience to do something that they don't want to do. Great attitude you have of just speaking anywhere, everywhere, no matter how small the event. Two questions. What's the first time you really feel like. Felt like, wow, I nailed it. I really connected with that audience. They loved me. But I also want to know what was the worst speech you gave? What happened that made you really feel like, oh, that was a huge dud.

So nothing really comes to mind with the success one. I mean, you know, a couple weeks ago I gave a presentation and we did over $10,000 in sales and then, you know, an hour long presentation. So that was, you know, really cool. But I never really felt unsuccessful in my speeches. And I think one of the reasons is because I never went into it thinking that I was professional. I never went to speak to an event thinking I'm the best person here. I have the best information, the best knowledge, whatever. I was always just trying to share from my heart and just share the message, share the ideas that I thought mattered. And so maybe, you know, I have a gift. And I've had a lot of people in my audience say, oh, you just have a natural gift for speaking. But for me, it's not about the presentation, it's about the ideas, it's about the knowledge. Right. And for me, that's what I focus on. And I think that's why I've had the success I've had, is because I don't care if I say a lot. I don't care about fillers. And I've seen all kinds of coaches on this and I've worked on it and improved somewhat. But one of my favorite speakers is Dr. John Demartini, and he is one of the most successful speakers in the world. He's done hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in sales from speaking. And he's a very. He's very expensive if you want him to speak at your event.

I'm not familiar with him. What is his niche?

Dr. John Demartini. Inspiration, personal development. Yeah, he talks a lot about values. He's very, very amazing person. He's got all kinds. He's got, like, if you go to his website, he's got literally hundreds and hundreds of audio programs and workshops and seminars that are recorded from everything from finances and wealth management to all kinds of other topics. But one of the things I love about John is he's very similar to me. So that. And I kind of modeled him, right. Because again, I don't have that technical expertise to not say and not have fillers and have my words be just crystal clear and professional. But what I have is I have a message. I have inspiration. And that's what John has. And so he says all the time and he makes all these mistakes, but he's still one of the top speakers in the world. Right? And so that's what I try to focus on is what is the message I'm going to share, what's really important here. Because at the end of the day, no one's going to remember if you had, you know, the perfect sentence structure, right? They're going to remember how you made them feel, the ideas that you've given them to improve their life. That's what they're going to remember. And so that's what I try to focus on. Now when it comes to failure, I've.

Definitely, by the way, by the way, you don't say um or ah at all. I just have to point that out. In my experience as a presentation coach, the people who often worry about saying never do. The ones who think they're great often have the most uhs and ums. But you sound great to me and our audience, there's no doubt about it.

Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

Who else do you really admire as a speaker, but someone who writes books and uses their platform to, to sell their books? I mean, there's, there's definitely a lot of them. And you know, Jack Canfield has certainly sold a lot of books. And he came from speaking. Yeah, he was a speaker before he was ever a chicken Soup of the Soul guy. Who do you particularly respect?

So, I mean, definitely Jack Canfield. I love Success Principles, the book and also his speech on Success Principles. Mark Victor Hanson has some great stuff. Brian Tracy was a big mentor of mine. Not one on one mentor, but just I just learned from his books and his speeches. Robert Kiyosaki as well, his book Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I've actually not seen him speak, but I know that he does lots and lots of speaking. So, you know, there's a lot of just great people out there. These guys really inspired me. Seth Godin was another big one. So, yeah, there's a lot of people out there that really inspired me. And you know, when I saw my books up there on the bestseller list with like Seth Godin and Robert Kiyosaki and Brian Tracy. I was just, like, blown away. Like, how is this possible? I'm just some, you know, some kid in Indiana who wrote a couple books and put them on Amazon. But, yeah, those are the people that really inspired me.

And we should point out that as mentioned in the intro, the Kindle publishing bible is a huge bestseller. I've read it. Extremely helpful if you're considering self publishing and publishing on Kindle. But Tom has written dozens, literally dozens of other books, too. Tom, you mentioned a moment ago one of your best speeches just recently, where you got that instant feedback of five figures in sales. Now, a lot of our audience members, they may work for government agencies, UN agencies, big companies. They're not making a direct sale necessarily, but still, that is a very specific form of feedback from an audience. And I can tell you, as somebody who speaks frequently and occasionally tries to sell stuff, there's a huge difference between giving a speech and having people say, oh, great job. Interesting. Well done. Five stars on a review versus people actually opening their wallet and giving you their cash or their credit card. Again, not that that's the be all and end all of everything, but it does show you really connected with somebody if they are willing to pay for more of whatever it is you're selling. How did you make that adjustment? Because I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume the first couple times you spoke, you weren't racking up $10,000 in sales. How did you build that ability to actually close a sale from the platform?

Yeah, that's a great question. So when I, you know, a couple years into my speaking career, I started to look around and see, okay, I wasn't really making money, right, because I was doing all these free speaking gigs, and I get paid here and there, but I wasn't really making much money. And I looked around and said, okay, there's other people who are speaking who make tons of money, like, what are they doing? And I started studying them. I started looking at their webinars and their online presentations that were on YouTube and so forth, and started really seeing, okay, here's what they're doing. And they're doing things in a certain way. There's a certain structure out there that people have been using for years and years and years to sell products to an audience. And so I just started studying their presentations and I would. I kind of started to break it down. Okay, so they're gonna spend, you know, 10 minutes here about the introduction and telling their life story and their life history, and then you know, they're gonna spend two or three minutes talking about the problem their audience is having and the solution, they found that problem. And then they're gonna talk for, you know, 10 minutes about the first solution, the problem, the second solution, and so forth. So I just kind of started to break it down like that and then modeled my presentation, my content with that very similar format and just started testing and tweaking from there. And it worked. I mean, right away it worked when I just modeled that format. I started to go from, you know, one or two sales at an event to, you know, 5x more sales and then started tweaking from there.

And certainly learning from the masters is the best way of becoming good at any skill. I mean, you know, Tim Ferriss talks about if you want to be a judo champion, study what the best ones do. Tony Robbins talks about that. So certainly it's, it is great advice that a lot of people give. How do you differentiate yourself? There's a lot of people out there, Mark, Victor Hanson, Jack Canfield, who talk about success through publishing. You mentioned a lot of other people, Seth Godin, somebody I have a lot of respect for. How do you differentiate yourself? What is the story you tell that makes people think, ah, okay, this isn't exactly like Les Brown. This isn't exactly like Tony Robbins in the 400 square foot Bachelor pad washing dishes in his tub. What's your keynote or what is your signature story?

So basically I started out writing my first book in college and I tried to get traditionally published for six years and completely failed. No one wanted to take a chance on a broke college student with this idea for a self help book. And so I pretty much gave up on my dream of becoming an author. Until a couple years ago someone mentioned, why don't you just self publish on Kindle? So I did all my research, figured out everything I could do to actually publish my book on Kindle, and I did it. But I was so embarrassed that I had to self publish my book and I couldn't get a traditional book deal. I didn't tell anyone what I had done. And so a month later I logged into my account off Amazon. I saw I had sold 11 copies and I was jumping up and down, I was hooting, hollowing. I was like so excited. I was like out of my mind ecstatic because I immediately realized, look, if I can sell 11 copies of my book in a month without telling anyone what I had done, imagine what I could do if I treated this like a business, right? And so I went on from there. Ten months later, I had my first $12,000 a month from ebook sales and I never looked back. Right. So that's kind of the story condensed in as short as format as I can.

Well, that is impressive because I gotta tell you, I know so many people, myself included, who spent a lot of time and effort on publishing books with nowhere near that sort of success. To what extent is it that you found the right formula with publishing versus you're just tenacious, you learn from everyone. And maybe you would have been just as successful if you'd started off consulting or just being a speaker first or being a podcaster with an ad. Ad base.

Well, I think there's a lot of luck involved, right? And I think a lot of people and business in general, and especially the publishing business, they don't like to talk about luck because they want to say I'm responsible, like I'm the one who made it happen, right? But I don't feel that way at all. I got lucky. I was in the right place at the right time. And, you know, early 2011, it was just easy to make money on Amazon if you had a basic understanding of marketing and had good content because of the way it was set up. So back then, you know, you could do these free book promotions and you could go and pay maybe $100. So have all these other book promotion sites promote your book for free on Amazon. And then when your book went to paid, you could do thousands of dollars in royalties in a day right after your promotion ended and you could have tens of thousands of people downloading your book for free. So it's just this easy way to really quickly get not only tons of readers, like 30,000 downloads, but also lots of paid readers and thousands of dollars in royalties. So, you know, that's part of it. I was just in the right place at the right time. But I worked really hard. I mean, I was getting up every day at 5:30am to write my next book, to work on marketing, and I was staying up late to, you know, to work because I saw the opportunity. And I think there, there's times in business where the opportunities will come that there's only a short window of time when you can really take advantage of it to the maximum. Right? And so that's what I did.

So that begs the question, has the time passed for Kindle? Because I've seen in the last year so many garbage titles out there, typos, they're 14 pages long. And it just seems like the whole concept of a book has been wildly Devalued. Because now it's no longer a plus to have a, a book about your business. It's considered almost like a business card. You don't get any points for having a business card, but you get points against you if you don't have one. So many people have taken that attitude with books. And you see all these seminars, write a best selling book in one weekend as if it were just the snap of a finger. And you have all these other services out there. Just send us your old podcast and we'll have somebody in Indonesia type on an abacus and turn that into a book. Are we, have we reached a point where there's just too much of a glut out there with Kindle?

No, we haven't. So, so here's the thing that happens, like when these opportunities come out. So, so what happens with ebooks on Amazon is they went from $0 in sales in 2009 to over $4 billion in sales in five years, right? And when you go from 0 to 4 billion in five years, everyone, like, you know, all kinds of people are gonna rush into that market and say, hey, I want, I want my free money. I want to come into this giant market and just get, you know, publish crappy books and pay people $20 in the Philippines to write them and publish them and make, you know, earn back their investment a little bit more, right? And so that's happened.

Gimme, gimme, gimme.

So there are millions of just garbage books on Kindle and Amazon's removing tons and tons of them. But you know, it doesn't change the fact that there's still, now it's like a $6 billion plus market, right, just in the US for ebooks on Amazon. So it's a huge market still. And the thing is, in any market, there's always going to be people with the best products and services who do really, really well. And so that's why quality matters so much. But you also have to understand the marketing behind it and how to build your audience so that you can build the business, right? So it's easy to take that as an excuse to say, oh, there's so many bad books out there. And you know, sometimes self publishing has a bad reputation and use that as an excuse not to do it. But it's like, so what? Like, if you have a great book that adds value to your audience, why wouldn't you do it? Like, why wouldn't you offer that to your audience? You're doing a disservice by not offering that to Your audience. Right. So yeah, I mean, you shouldn't jump into the market writing a terrible book and expect to get rich at the same time. You shouldn't neglect to do it because you think that the market's flooded because there's never competition, especially for books like no one reads Harry Potter and then says, oh, I've read Harry Potter, I don't need to read Hunger Games. Right. No one's read Rich Dad, Poor dad and says, I don't need to read, Think and Grow Rich now because I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Right. So if it's a great book, if it's unique, if it's got value, people are gonna buy it. And readers are, you know, most readers are like avid readers. So they're not just gonna read one self help book. They'll read dozens. Or like me, they'll read thousands.

The big major publishers in New York are for the most part clueless on Kindle and on Amazon, they're still fighting the old battles of how do I get my expense check paid for my lunch at Michael's or the Four Seasons, even though the Four Seasons is now closed and they don't really know how to do the pricing. And you'll go from free to 299 to 599 on Kindle. There's a whole new crop of publishers, publishing experts, self publishing gurus. The ones I talked to informally have told me that it seems as though Amazon changes the algorithms every day and what worked six months ago doesn't work now. And it is getting harder to. And I don't want to sound like a naysayer, I'm a big believer in books. I read books. I've written not as many as you, but a half a dozen books. But I have noticed, like for myself, I belong to the Kindle Unlimited program because when I was interested in a topic like podcasting, I would just quickly read 100 books on the subject. And if a bunch of them were not very good, it didn't matter if I picked up one idea, it was worth it. And I would just quickly, 10 at a time, go through 100 books. I actually unsubscribe from my Kindle Unlimited program because I just found I'd rather purchase. I'd rather pay the 15 bucks for a book that I really thought was high quality and new and from a name writer, rather than continue to waste time on stuff that has a better than even chance of being sort of garbagey. So I'm wondering, how are you navigating the constant change of kindle algorithm. One minute you can have books everywhere, the next minute you can't be on itunes and Google. If you're in Amazon Kindle. One minute it can be this link. Now it's got to be another. You can be free now. But then if it's not on two, there's just a lot of complexity to it. How do you master that and how do you stay on top of it?

Well, I think it's, it's like anything. I mean, it looks complex from the outside and then you get into it and you know, there's only a handful of things you really have to know, right? And there's a lot of things that you're just gonna, once you've been in the business for a while, you just, you forget. Like, you just know it. It's just kind of who you are. It's like the air you breathe, right? So there are some basic fundamentals how Amazon works that's never gonna change, right? So Amazon uses data science to recommend books to readers. So what they're doing is every day they're looking at every customer on Amazon and seeing what they buy and comparing customers who buy this book might also buy that book. So if you've looked on any book on Amazon, you scroll down the page a little bit, the first thing you're gonna see is customers who bought this, also bought, right? And that's one of the biggest ways people are gonna discover your book on Amazon. And so a big mistake a lot of authors make is that, you know, they'll launch their book on Amazon and they'll be, you know, they'll ask all their friends and all their family and people who have no interest in their topic whatsoever to buy their book. And so maybe they'll get 50 sales from friends and family. And then you scroll down, you see the customers who bought this item also bought, and next to your self help book is a romance novel, number one, right? And it's like it doesn't make sense, it doesn't match up. And so the key is that when you're launching a book now, you have to really understand this and you have to get targeted readers. You have to focus on getting targeted readers, right? So it's much better to have 10 readers who are all avid self help readers buy your self help book than to have 100 random friends and family buy your book. Because what's going to happen is if you start having the wrong readers buy your book, Amazon thinks that your book is related to these other books that are irrelevant to it. And they start recommending your book to people who read romance novels. And guess what? They do. They don't buy your book. And so what happens is your clicks to conversions ratio goes down on Amazon. So that means instead of having 10 people who click on your book out of 100 buy it, maybe you only have two. And so when your ratio goes down, Amazon stops recommending your book. And that's when your book kind of gets this, like, death, this death knell on Amazon, right, Where you just don't get any sales anymore. And that's one of the biggest reasons that that's happening nowadays is because people get the wrong people buying their book and they don't train Amazon who your audience is. So the best thing you can do when you're releasing a book on Amazon is to only promote it to people who are your ideal readers. And once you do that, Amazon kind of takes over the ball from there. And so that's kind of the whole philosophy in a nutshell, because Amazon, their entire purpose is to simply maximize sales to maximize revenue.

So the good news is, if I am Tom's cousin or uncle and we're sitting around at Thanksgiving dinner, I don't have to listen to Tom begging me to go to Amazon between dessert and the game to buy his book because I'm not the targeted reader.

You don't want him to buy your book, especially right away after you have thousands of sales, no problem, he can buy your book. Right. It's not going to affect the algorithm much, but you don't want your friends and family to be the first people to buy your book.

So I'm on Amazon right now. I'm looking at your book, the Kindle Publishing Bible, and I'm looking at the customer reviews, and you have hundreds. You have 225. And quite often I'll see somebody I think of as a really, really famous author, someone who's on TV constantly, and they'll have seven reviews. How did you get 225? And again, I know you don't believe in goosing things or artificial spammy stuff, but certainly there have to be some targeted marketing techniques at the beginning to get things going with reviews. How do you do that?

Yeah, so really reviews are just a result of sales, right? So on average, if you get 250 to 500 sales, you're gonna get one review on average. Okay. So if you see a book with like a thousand reviews, that means they probably sold at least 250,000 copies. Now, for my book, for that particular book, I did do a review targeting campaign. So what we did is there's actually software out there that will take the emails from the top reviewers on Amazon who've reviewed books similar to yours. So essentially you can do like a search on Amazon's API and find all the books about depression. And you can take all the books on depression and it'll go through all the reviewer profiles and the people who have their email and their profile. We'll kind of put that into an Excel spreadsheet. And then we basically email those people and say, hey, you know, I see you reviewed this book on self publishing. You know, you might love my new book, the Kindle Publishing Bible. I'm happy to offer you a free review copy if you would like. Just let me know. And I'm happy to just email it over. Just a really simple, basic email like that. And I had for the Kindle Publishing Bible, I think I had like 150 people respond and got maybe 50 reviews on Amazon from that.

Tom, great insights. Fantastic. If you'd like to thank Tom for giving us all this great advice today, go to Twitter and thank him. His Twitter handle, it's in the show notes. It's. You can check out all of his books. We've linked to them in the show notes on his author page. You can check them all out. If you're even thinking of publishing a book, don't just hire a writer in the Philippines today and throw up a cover that's just basic text and call it a day. Do it right. Do your research. And you should start with the Kindle Publishing Bible. Tom, thanks so much for being our guest today.

Thank you so much, tj. I really appreciate it.

Thanks for listening to Spirit speaking with TJ Walker.