Ep. 7: How to Stand Out In a Saturated Book Market

Welcome to the Pub Date Podcast, the show where two book broads discuss what should happen before, during, and after your book publication date. Brought to you by Broad Book Group with your host Vanessa Campos and Jen Dorsey.

Welcome back, everyone. Try number 3. Today's episode of the Pub Day Podcast, we have a very special guest. Her name is Michelle Culp. Michelle is a book launch expert, publishing specialist, and a 10-time number 1 bestselling author. Since 2012, she has been teaching entrepreneurs, consultants, coaches, and thought leaders how to elevate their expertise attract their ideal clients, and increase their income and opportunities with a bestselling book. And that's really the goal here. To date, Michelle has launched over 250 books for clients through her program. Welcome, Michelle.

Hi, thank you, Vanessa. And hi, Jen. Nice to meet you. Hi, how are you?

Welcome.

Thank you.

So Michelle, tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get into publishing? I always like knowing what people's journey is here. Myself and Jen, we're not— we didn't start our careers in publishing. I'm curious to hear a little bit more about you.

Yeah, I have a very eclectic background. When I was 17 years old— now I'm 57— but when I was 17, I sat in a business law class and I said, that's what I want to do the rest of my life. I'm going to be an attorney. I love the law. I love the justice system. And so I went into the legal field for 17 years, and I loved it until I hated it. Do you know what I'm saying? Like, there's something called career creep. And career creep is when, like, you have this, like, passion for what you're doing, but slowly they kind of change, like, the tasks that you do every day. So for a long time, 75% of what I did was things I loved, and probably 25% was, you know, whatever. And then it slowly over time changed until I was doing 75% of the things I hated in this job and 25%, you know, was things I loved. And I woke up every day going, I hate my job. I wanna quit, but I can't quit 'cause I'm a single mom with 3 young kids. What am I gonna do? I called in sick all the time. I came in late. I took 2-hour lunches. I mean, you know, eventually they fired me 'cause I didn't wanna be there, but I didn't really know what else I wanted to do. And I was very fortunate to, a couple things that really changed the trajectory of my life. And that was meeting Billy Ray Cyrus in 1992 when his song "Achy Breaky Heart" came out. Um, I— he was playing on my birthday at the Patriot Center in Fairfax, Virginia, and the thought came in my head, I'm gonna meet Billy Ray and he has something important to tell me. My friends thought I lost my mind. I was under a lot of stress, having gotten, um, going through a divorce, getting fired from the law firm, 3 young kids to support, living paycheck to paycheck, and my older brother was diagnosed with AIDS and was dying. So I had a lot of stress. I was 29 years old. But I just thought Billy Ray is going to change my life. I have no idea why I thought this. I didn't even listen to country music. I grew up on like '80s rock and roll music. So anyways, I went to the concert, chased him down, got kicked out of the Patriot Center 4 times, ended up stalking, following his limousine to the Hilton Hotel, got in the elevator, got to talk to him, got some autographs, then got kicked out by the bodyguard along with like 100 other women. Then got rid of the competition, went back in the hotel, found my way up to the floor where he was staying at, got on a house phone, called the number of the room I thought he was in, and he answered the phone. And the whole story is in my book and on my website, so I won't go into the details because it's quite a long story and I'm making it short for this podcast. But what happened was I got to spend about 3 hours with Billy Ray when Achy Breaky Heart came out and he sold 17 million copies. And he said to me they're calling me an overnight success. He said, I've been playing music my whole life. Music is my passion. Music is my life. And even if all the fame and all the money and all this craziness that's going on right now— because he literally went from like nobody knew him to like all of a sudden he's touring, you know, these huge concert halls. He said, even if all this goes away, because I don't care. I'm still playing music. It's my passion. It's my heart. I'll go back to playing in bars. I don't care. And so he asked me what my dreams were. Now, this was still when I was working at the law firm. Really hating it, really struggling. And I said, I don't have any dreams. My life's about survival. And he said, no, everybody has a dream. And I said, but, you know, I don't know what it is. He said, well, promise me that you will go out and find this dream and that once you do, that you'll never, ever, ever give up on your dream. And I took Billy Ray's advice. And it took me another year from that meeting. That was October 23rd, my birthday, 1992. It took me another year to figure out what my dream was. And Interestingly enough, it was in a little book called How to Find Your Mission in Life by Richard Bowles, who also wrote What Color Is Your Parachute? A lot of people know that book. So I found this little book called How to Find Your Mission in Life, and in it he said, what do you love to do where you lose all sense of time? And when I heard that question, the only thing I could think of is literally when I was a kid, I liked to write poetry and short stories and essays. Like, you know, the teacher said write an essay, I got excited. Write a report. You know, all that writing stuff. And I thought, oh my God, writing must be my passion. I finally figured it out. Even— and even when I was in the legal field, my two favorite subjects in college were legal writing and legal research. I really didn't like all the other stuff, but those are my two favorite things to do. And, um, and so that's kind of like how I found my, my passion of wanting to write books. Um, that's sort of the backstory of, um— and, and so I became a newspaper reporter for a while. I left the legal field. I became became a newspaper reporter. It didn't pay very well. And I was like, I gotta make more money than this. This is not working for me, even though it was fun. I had a lot of fun. I did it for about 3 years. And then I found outside sales. I had never sold anything my whole life. I was in law, so I didn't know about, you know, selling. But I thought, well, you know, there's an opportunity to make 6 figures. So within 18 months of taking this outside sales job— by the way, I sold hot tubs. I went from law to hot tubs. It was a, it was an in-home company. I went in home, I sat with people at their kitchen table, and I became one of the top 10% income earners in the company. I had no background in sales. It was all male-dominated company. And so I learned a lot about, you know, just connecting with people and talking to people and selling. So I did that for 10 years. And on the side, I started my online business. And that is what sort of has evolved into my Selling Author Program because I love books. And I love helping authors and I love writing books too. So everything books, that's what I'm about.

That is wild.

Wow. I did not have Billy Ray Cyrus on my bingo card for your origin story.

Oh my God. I, I should go grab the picture now. Wow. I should have had it sitting here. It's on my website. But yeah, Billy Ray changed my life.

Yeah.

It was, it was like literally like the whole trajectory of my life changed because of what he said to me. And also because I chased him down at a concert and got in his hotel room and all that stuff.

That too. Right. Well, it also speaks to persistence.

Persistence. And I think that, you know, when you're a book author, persistence is key. Just writing the book and getting it published, however you decide to do it— self-published, traditional, etc.— you have to be persistent. It's not a one-and-done thing. And, you know, one of the things that really I wanted to talk to you about, Michelle, and one of the things that we thought was really interesting about you was, one, was you wrote 28 books.

200K.

So the title of your book is intriguing in itself, and it's great marketing, it's great SEO. But in thinking about the number of books that are out there, you know, I was looking at, um, Bowker's report that in 2018, 1.7 million books were self-published that year alone. That's an average about—

you're right, 1.7—

1.7 million self-published books. That makes it about an average of 4,600 books released each day. That doesn't even include the traditionally published press books. So that paired alongside with your sales skills, paired alongside with persistence, I want to learn from you, what are the strategies and tactics that, A, you know, you were able to, I guess this is two tracks here, editorially, how do you get yourself to write one book a month? Because I mean, sometimes I have a hard time with captions on social media. But two, how do you write a book and consistently make sure that it gets found? Like with 4,600 books every day, that's a lot. How do you, how do you get your books to stand out in the crowd to go from like, I have a book, I have two books, I have three books, and I'm, I'm making six figures?

Yeah, it has not been an easy journey. And so I just did a Facebook Live today in my, I have a Facebook group called 28 Books to $100K. And the title of it was the The obstacle is the way, and it's not all rainbows and butterflies. And so I talked to them about all the obstacles I faced last year writing a book a month. Amazon blocked 3 of my books, my top-selling books. So that was one obstacle and one hurdle I had to overcome. No reason. I mean, the reason they gave me was I used a government organization in my book. I said in my book, Digital Retirement, I say replace your Social Security income with your writing income. And they blocked my book. And I'm like, well, I put money into Social Security, it's a public organization, why can't I say, you know? Well, it turns out my, my editor and formatter said that I was talking to a robot and that all I had to say was, I own the copyright, I own the copyright. And so I kept replying to these automated emails and saying, I own the copyright, and they finally unblocked my books. It did take a while, but I will tell you, when I didn't know I was talking to a robot and I thought I was talking to a person, I was very frustrated and I wanted to quit and I wanted to give up because I had 3 of my top-selling books blocked. All of a sudden, 28 Books to $100K was one of them. They blocked this book for— I mean, there's no reason to block that book. I did it, um, a box set called Wealthy Writers Series. They blocked that. And I did Six Figure Author Series. They blocked that one. There's a lot of hurdles, and you have to be in it for the long game. This is not— you're not going to make six figures. In fact, I just want to give you a little background about the title. So The title came to me when I read an article on Written Word Media, which is a blog, and they said the average author who makes 6 figures has 28 books in their catalog. And so I thought— this was 2019— I thought, well, I'll write a book a month and test this theory. I mean, I just was gonna do an experiment. I didn't even— I wasn't even really gonna like publicize it. I was just like, oh, all right, I just need 28 books and I'll have 6 figures in royalties. I already figured out how to make 6 figures on the back end, but I wanted to to know, how do you make 6 figures in royalties? Because my books at that point, you know, were making like, you know, $50 a month or $100 a month. They were old, older books. But so I started writing a book a month. And in the beginning, it was slow. It was like, okay, you do the launch, make $200 a month. And then the next month it went up to $400 a month and then $600 a month. The end of the first year, I was at $3,300 a month in passive income. So I had 12 new books. Forget the old books. But the 12 new books, $3,300 a month, that did exceed— I don't have Social Security right now, retirement, but it did exceed what I should be getting, $3,300 a month. And now I'm close to $5,000 a month with my books. And I wish I could tell everyone listening that I have a crystal ball and that I know what books were going to do really well, but I don't. And that's why I love the whole write a book a month, because now 3 of my books make 80% of my income. And you know the 80 80/20 rule, right? It's like, right, you know, 80% of the results you get are from 20% of, you know, the things that you do. So it's just— I think it's the same in the book world. And musicians say this too. They don't know what, what songs are going to resonate with people and take off, but you got to put like your heart and soul into it. You got to do the best job you can in the most professional way, like get the book out there, have it edited, a great cover. Great book description. You got to know the keywords. You got to know what people are searching for. You have to understand the, how Amazon works and how to do a proper book launch. Because if you don't do a book launch and you just hit publish, when I did that and I did, before I would do a launch, nothing happened to my book. It was like you said, 1.7 million self-published books in a year. I went into the abyss. And until I did a launch and got on some bestseller lists and start getting some visibility on Amazon, you're just, you're buried on Amazon's platform. So it's good and it's bad. Like this whole self-publishing thing, it's like, yeah, it's great. Push a button. You can actually publish an 11-page book. They have something called ShortRead. So you can publish whatever, but actually making sales and, and getting the book to take off. So what I found is, yes, I did a proper book launch. I used Amazon ads. I do podcast interviews. But at the end of the day, it's like the market decides what they like and what they like. My top-selling books are How to Find Your Passion Quit Your Job and Follow Your Dreams, which has the Billy Ray story in it. There was a little bit more to the Billy Ray story. We did have a kiss. It was my birthday after all. So I shared that in the book. But, and then 28 Books to $100K in Digital Retirement. But I wouldn't have known what books were going to take off if I hadn't written the 12 books, right? And Seth Godin talks about that too. They're like, oh, well, some of your blog posts go viral. And he's like, yeah, but I don't know which ones. I just, I just write them, you know what I mean? Write what you're passionate about, write what's in your heart, write what you know, but do your keyword research and understand the market. Because if you're writing to a, to a dead market, you're not going to make any money with the book. The best story I have was a client who came to me and they wanted to write a book about English cottage gardens. And I thought, oh, that sounds cool. Let me do the keyword research. A week later I went back to them and I said, nobody's buying books on English cottage gardens right now. There's no top-selling books.

There's nothing.

I said, but you know what I found is there's books on container, container gardening and raised bed gardening, and they are making $25,000 a month and up. And this is a hot thing right now because the food supply and the food chain, people want their own gardens, they have small spaces, whatever. They hired me, they became one of my clients and wrote a book, a fabulous book. They now have an Amazon gardening store, they have a gardening website, she does gardening coaching, and she has a best-selling book that's that's actually making her money, all because we balanced what she wanted to write, cottage, English cottage gardens, with what the market was looking for. And she was a gardening expert, so she could have written on anything.

That's really interesting. And I want to go back to that idea of how you determine what is a viable idea. And it also, if we have time, like to circle back to what you think a proper book launch looks like. So, but first talk about doing that research, because I don't know that every author knows where to go and how to do that. What are some tips that you would recommend for really digging in to see what you think will sell?

So I have 3 pieces of software that I use. I would recommend them because that's where I get a lot of data. I also worked with a business coach for 4 years and he helped me run Facebook ads to an automated webinar. And, and then I would sell my done-for-you high-ticket program. And I remember what he said one time I was running Facebook ads and we had to test 3 things on a Facebook ad. You have to test your image, your call to action, and the headline to get a winning ad. And I remember I would find like this cool image and I'd go, Jason, oh my God, I got the best image. This is it. He goes, I don't care if you like it. I don't care what the image is. The data will tell us what people like, cause they'll click on it. And then we will know. And guess what always won? Sunflower fields and beaches. Um, it didn't have anything to do with books. That's what people liked. And I said, Jason, why do people click on ads? And he goes, because it makes them feel good. They like sunflowers and they like beaches. So he used to run ads for my bestselling author program with sunflower fields and beaches, and it got clicks. So I guess it's the same way with Amazon. It's like you can like a topic— like that lady loved English Cottage Garden. She was in love with that. And I thought it was a cool idea too. But when I looked at the numbers, they were underwhelming. So one of the things I use is something called Kindle Spy. And Kindle Spy is just like a little extension on Chrome and it lets you look at the sales of a book. So you can go to an individual book, you can go to a whole author's page, you can go to a category and see, um, how much each of the books are making. So I love it because I get to spy on books and I'm like, you know, like sometimes you're like, oh my God, this book is making $100,000 a month, you know, or sometimes you're like, wow, I thought this book was doing better than it was. So I use Kindle Spy to sort of assess the market. Then I use Publisher Rocket. That gives you the keywords you need and to see what people are searching for on Amazon. And then I use another program called Best Seller Ranking Pro. Um, Tom Kors— I forget his name— Tom Kors Knowles or something. He came up with that, and it helps me look at categories. I know this is like very like I don't know, it's very numbers-based. I wish it wasn't, but it's really like the data. It's like, are people searching for it? Are there books making money on it? What— I mean, can you write a book that's different or unique and somehow on this topic that'll do well? That's the first thing is you got to do this research and you got to really, um, you can have a passion for something, but there might not be a market for it.

Absolutely. Absolutely. So speaking of passion, how do you, how do you pour that passion into a book launch? What do you think really works and resonates and makes a book launch successful? How do you translate that passion into that power?

So when a new movie is coming out, what do they start doing? They start running ads on TV and they start doing like all these promotions and they, you know, they've got all this media attention, right? Because they want to have all these like box office numbers and all this stuff. Well, it's the same with a book launch. If you literally just write a book, you could spend a year writing a book and hit publish, nothing's going to happen. No one's going to find it. Nothing's going to happen. You probably didn't put it in the the right categories. You probably don't know the right keywords. So you've got to do the most amount of marketing in the shortest amount of time to hit a bestsellers list. So we just— I do have an email list because I've had an online business since 2005. So I have my email list, I have my social media, and it's not like huge numbers, you know, like social media. Um, still, I mean, these are people that are connected to me. And then I hire book promoters. A lot of people know like BookBub. BookBub is one of the biggest promoters, but they also reject 90% of the authors, so you're probably not going to get a BookBub deal. But there are other good promoters out there that can help get the word out about your book. And I, I hire like 5 to 10 promoters, and I use my email list, and I use my social media, and I pick 2 days. I'm gonna market my book for 2 days I'm going to discount the ebook to 99 cents. I'm going to try to get on as many bestseller lists as I can, and then I'm going to run Amazon ads and start doing podcast interviews as a follow-up. And that's, that's what I've done for all my books and for my clients' books. I did recently launch a book and we got to the USA Today bestsellers list. We did that last month.

Wow, congrats. That's awesome.

Thank you.

I love that formula, and I think it's really smart to dedicate a window of time where you're just really going all in so that it doesn't feel like it's too much of a long tail experiment where you're just kind of throwing spaghetti on the wall to see if it sticks, right?

Yes, exactly. And you, you know, there's a lot of pre-work, you know, coming up to a launch. It's, it's really not that complicated. Like if you do a book a month, you will get so good. Like I now have an online course and a coaching program and a book about writing a book a month cuz all these people wanted to do it. And I said, y'all are crazy cuz like writing a book a month isn't easy, but it will, you will learn a whole lot. It's like, It's like, I don't know, like almost like laser, you know, laser learning launches. And so once you do a couple, you'll be a pro. You don't need to hire anybody, you can do it yourself.

Yeah, and I really do appreciate you kind of breaking it down into the keywords and what the numbers look like, because coming from a traditional publishing background, that's exactly what happens. That's pretty much what it is. You nailed it on the head. I love that you shared the tools that are outside what we would normally use like BookScan and Edelweiss, etc. And it really does bring those tactics into a more of a democratic way of publishing a book. So I mean, I learned something new from you, from you today. That's wonderful. Another really great plugin extension if you are interested in is Bibliomatic, and I just discovered that one. And what you do is, and it's a Chrome extension, you'll add it in, and anytime you see an ISBN number, it'll have a little ball on it, and you click on it, and it'll it'll give you all of the keywords that that publisher has put up on there.

So it's another little spy tool. Oh, more spy tactics.

I love it.

I love it. That's great. Thank you. I wrote it down.

Absolutely. Go for it. And it does include BISAC categories and all of that. So it allows you to also see, like you were talking about, what other people are doing. And that's really the key way of, you know, the whole SWOT analysis in marketing. So before we let you go, and thank you so much for taking the time today, we have a question for you.

Okay.

I'd like to know what the last book you bought was and why you bought it.

I am a bookaholic, okay? Like I have a drinking problem with books. I, I buy so many books. So I have a lot of books on Kindle and I have a lot of books, um, that I am reading here. And I'm trying to think of the, like, the very last book that I bought. I think it was— because I probably buy like a book a day, so I'm trying to remember what the last book I bought was. Do you know who Gary Keller is?

Yes, Gary Keller.

He wrote a book called The One Thing. I love that book. I also bought The Obstacle Is the Way and read that by Ryan Holiday, and I love Deep Work by Cal Newport, and I have now bought all of his books. Because he talks about getting rid of email and doing deep work in a very distracted environment. And like, write a book a month was really, really challenging. And so I am now studying, like, it's like, how do you run a business and then be disconnected from technology? I'm trying to figure it out. So I love those, those, those books are what I'm reading. Absolutely agree.

I think I have all of those books on my bookshelf right now.

Awesome.

We should start a book club.

That's right.

Yes, I would love it.

The Bookaholic Book Club.

Oh, I'm into it.

Oh my God, let's do it.

Yes.

I also run a retreat, um, a couple times a year called oceanwriting.com where I have a small group of writers get together and we do guided writing exercises on the beach. And it's just a way for writers to hang out and have fun. I've had people come all the way from Australia to attend my ocean writing retreat. So we're getting, getting ready to, um, schedule the next one. So I have a website, oceanwriting.com. That will be doing that soon.

And where else can people find you?

Bestsellingauthorprogram.com, and they can get my quick start kit on there for authors.

Perfect. Yes, definitely go onto the website, learn more from her because she's done the work. Thank you so much again, Michelle, for joining us. You're welcome.

Thank you.

And for the amazing story on how you got to publishing.

I'm glad you asked though because I probably wouldn't have brought it up. Thanks.

Absolutely.

Well, thank you to everyone who is listening. Thank you, Jen, for joining. And thank you to our producer Paul Roberts of OC Talk Radio, our executive producer Emily Carpenter-Polskamp of Little Red Communications. And we'll see you guys next time in the books. See ya. Bye.

We hope that you gained some valuable insights into the world of book publishing. Head over to broadbookgroup.com to learn more about us and all our services. And be sure to check out all our social media @BroadBookGroup. Until then, keep publishing!