- Do you wanna make sure your book is a bestseller?
Or maybe you want guaranteed media placement
or the certainty of winning an award.
If you're heading down the path of becoming an author
and these ideas appeal to you,
this video is absolutely, positively for you.
(upbeat rock music)
Hey there, I'm Julie the Book Broad.
I'm an Amazon overall number one bestselling author
and the founder of a fabulous company called Book Launchers.
Our superpower is caring more about you
and your book than anybody else as we help you
write, publish, and sell a nonfiction book
that will boost your brand and make you money.
As part of what we do at Book Launchers,
we help authors sell their books by helping them
create a highly marketable book to begin with.
Then we plan out the launch,
figuring out what influencers can be contacted
and guiding the author to build their book army,
helping them get early book reviews,
and once the book has launched,
we pitch media, bookstore and library distribution,
live appearances, speaking engagements when they're a fit,
and corporate partnerships.
There's a whole bunch of things we do
and the author does to make their book a success.
One of the things I get emailed all the time saying is
what will you do to sell my books
or how many books will you guarantee I'll sell?
Or my favorite one,
how many of your launches have reached bestseller status?
If that's what you're focused on,
then you might find yourself falling victim
to a company with fancy marketing, but lackluster results.
(laughs)
My book marketing manager was at an event where
she met some folks who were about to become
authors working with a company that
guarantees your book will be a bestseller.
The company brags that they've published 500 bestsellers,
so it makes you feel good working with them because
you feel like you know you're going to be a bestseller.
But here is how the guarantee is fulfilled.
You, when you work with them,
you're put in a group with other authors
and everyone discounts their book to 99 cents,
and then, on a designated day,
you buy each other's books all at the same time.
If there's, say, 20 people in the group,
you can easily get to number one
in most lower-level Amazon categories.
Yep, it takes a whopping 15 to 20 book sales
in an hour or so to boost your
book to number one in most categories.
Sometimes it can happen if those sales happen in a day.
So you do that, you buy each other's books,
and voila, congratulations,
you're an Amazon number one bestseller in your category.
That Amazon number one bestseller flag can be posted
on social media and your website and ta-da,
the promise of being a bestseller has been fulfilled.
Are you excited yet?
You shouldn't be because here is what you're not
being told about that kind of a gimmick.
You've messed up the algorithms on Amazon,
and Amazon's not going to know who to show your book to now
because your buyers are buying
all kinds of oddly mixed subjects.
A friend of mind with a real estate book did this
and one year later the "also boughts" on Amazon
were still showing divorce books, law of attraction,
and other woo-woo type subjects that really had
absolutely nothing to do with real estate.
Pretty sure that was doing his sales no favors
because he was complaining to me that
no books had sold in several months. (laughs)
A gimmick like this also doesn't
really do anything that creates momentum.
Amazon actually prefers you to have
continuous sales versus a blip,
and you're also not selling books to your ideal reader,
which is what you truly want.
So none of those buyers are gonna read your book
or probably tell others about it.
All you really achieved is that quick hit of dopamine
as people congratulate you on social media,
and now you've given another book to that company
to say they published another bestseller.
But what do you do after that?
It's the same if you pay to get an award.
I talked about that in this video.
Let's be real, book marketing is hard,
and if we could make guarantees at Book Launchers we would.
But really, all we can guarantee is that we will
pitch a certain number of pitches every month
directed in a way that you're most
likely to get where you wanna go.
But I have to tell you something.
Some months we don't land anything for a client.
There are no guarantees, and it can be frustrating for us,
as well as for our clients because
we have to try different angles,
especially if you're pursuing media
attention or speaking engagements.
Sometimes we'll get a ton of stuff all at once.
One of our clients we landed five podcast
interviews for her in a single week.
It just felt like everything we pitched for her hit.
Another one of our clients got a selection of TV interviews,
a magazine article, and a book signing event
at Barnes & Noble off one round of pitches.
So we landed her a lot of stuff,
but in the previous two months we'd struggled to get
her more than a few odds and ends of interviews.
So it just takes trying different things,
and there are no guarantees.
For speaking engagements we pitch it can actually
take months and months to get those things booked.
We'll often get an expression of interest,
and then, we send the book and a physical copy
of the speaker's one sheet with a speaker's reel,
and then, a few months later we might hear back.
Now, speaking engagements are often worth waiting for
'cause they can be huge wins if
the buyer buys books and pays the author,
but sometimes they don't do either,
and the author just has to give a good talk
and hope people will buy their book afterwards
or hire them for other services.
I've said it before,
but there's no magic button that produces book sales.
The closest thing to a magic button
is having a great author platform,
a ready-made audience of people who are hungry
for your book and they wanna support you.
Many authors don't have an author platform,
so they have to work every day to sell books.
It takes consistent effort, a strategic plan,
a book that connects with your ideal readers,
and trial and error and persistence.
It's never one thing that gets results.
I mean, sometimes it can be one
thing that gets a lot of results,
but you won't know what that one thing is until you try 20.
What you have to do is just keep
throwing things at the wall. (laughs)
You have to keep throwing things
at the wall to see what will stick.
Or maybe if you don't like that analogy,
maybe you like popcorn.
Put a cup of kernels in a popcorn popper
and some kernels never pop, some partially pop,
and then, others pop into perfect kernels.
If you only threw in a couple of kernels into the popper,
those might never ever pop. (laughs)
So you can pursue guarantees that
really require buying results, or gimmicks,
or you can create a plan, hire help if you can afford it,
and get to work doing something
every single day to promote your book.
Have you signed up for a company that made big guarantees?
Were you happy with it and the results?
Let's chat about it in the comments below,
and when you comment the day a video is released
you'll be entered to win some sweet #noboringbooks swag
like this #noboringbooks mug where I've been told
coffee, tea, and hot chocolate taste better in it.
(slurp)
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comments when the videos come out every Tuesday and Friday.
Now, do you know the difference
between book marketing and book sales?
It's an important distinction,
so this is a video worth checking out.
And if you've got that handled,
maybe this oldie but goodie on self-publishing scams
to watch out for is a good one for you.
(upbeat rock music)