The Best Resources For a New Author

Unknown Speaker  0:00  
So this podcast is part of the power of podcasting network, find it at power of podcasting.com. Today on more podcast money, I've often said that one of the best ways to make money with your podcast is to promote your own product. And for many people, that first product is a book. And today, we have one of the top book marketers on the planet, giving you the details of launching your first book who could use some more money.

Unknown Speaker  0:30  
Maybe you didn't start your podcast looking to make money, but you hear about others who are making some cash. And hey, you'd like to join that club? Well, you're in the right place. I've been podcasting since 2005. And I can tell you what is and is not working. Our website is more podcast money.com, where you can see our blog, join our newsletter and purchase the book, more podcast money. I'm your host, Dave Jackson, Now, who wants to make some more money.

Unknown Speaker  0:57  
As I'm getting ready to seclude myself and pound out the new version of more podcast money. You know, I've been interviewing people about new strategies, and new tools that are available. But I'm also doing some research on how book marketing has changed. And I got the top guy when it comes to book marketing. Let me explain a couple quick things. I love his show, because he interviews somebody, and then he'll he'll talk about like a strategy, like strategy A is blah, blah, blah. And then he'll interview somebody who's doing that strategy, and explaining how it works. That's really cool. His website is phenomenal. He's using a thing called Beaver Builder, I kind of looked into this, and I'll have links to this out in the show notes. Just go to more podcast money.com/fourteen. Because there are a lot of links that we talked about today. And his website has a really cool Start Here button. It's just clean. And you'll hear when he answers a question. He's always answering, like, if I say, Well, what about this, he goes, Oh, you know what, we've got a link for that on the website. And this is kind of what you want your podcast, your book, whatever your product is that you're making. You want it to solve a problem for your potential customer, and Dave Chesson, thanks for coming on the show. Well, thank you for having me, it's really cool to be here. I've always told people, one of the more profitable ways of making money with a podcast is to have your own product, I think most people think they might have a book in them. And so what we're kind of looking for is, in general, if somebody wants to start a book project, what are some of the things that they need to know just to get started in terms of how much money and time and things like that? Well, you know, books are definitely a project. But one of the biggest things that we need to do is we need to define where the finish line is. Most of the time, when I talked to a lot of people who you know, they're either running their their podcast or their website, the book is like the thing that they kind of keep putting off that they want to do. And the truth is, the best way that you're gonna accomplish this is to sit down and say, You know what, I'm going to write this book, I'm going to spend from five to 7am, every morning, just, that's my book time, nothing else, I'm going to cut out Facebook, I'm going to do it. And when you do that, you're actually you're not only going to create a great book, but you're also going to create one that is consolidated and together and a better product in the end. And the reason why I say that is because there are books that we start, and we start working on it. And then we take like a couple months break. And then we start again and the book ends up feeling a little conjoint discontented. So in the end, my biggest recommendation is that if you decide to start a book, give a certain amount of time, every day, or at least every week, and stick with that and you will write a great book, and you'll have it there ready for your audience when you're ready for it. What can somebody expect in terms of you know, I'm assuming we need to hire an editor because that would be a good thing. I think that would be a mistake not to especially in my case, then you need a book cover. What are the what's that going to run us and what else would we maybe need? Well, I'm going to pretend that we're on a very tight budget, I mean, otherwise, I would say hey, put 90% of your budget in the cover because the cover is really that important. But one of the tactics I love using to get a legit good book cover but for cheap is that when you're on Amazon you're shopping you see any book that kind of sticks out in your mind doesn't have to be on your subject but when you see a book cover you like go ahead and screen capture it and then put in a little file on your on your desktop. And then over time as you start to build it you'll have a collection of these book covers that really impressed you sit down one day there really think about what it is you like about this book covers, maybe really like the way this one title was designed in the same say romance. I mean, let's say we're doing nonfiction here, but say the romance title look kind of good. Alright, cool. Next element, hey, I really liked the simplicity of this and you just keep collecting notes. Once you have that sort of information, you can then go to like Fiverr and a lot of people are going to screw me when I say this, but you can go to fiverr you can find a legitimate artist for me.

Dave Chesson  4:59  
Your 20, 50 bucks. But the key is, is that on Fiverr, you're paying that person, not for their designer capability or their creativity, you're paying them to do X, Y, and Z. And all of that research you just did, will be perfect. You then go to that Fiverr designer, you say, look, I want you to use, you know, to create this title, look, but it says, The man down the street, whatever your title is, okay, here is a picture, I found that I want you to have center. Now I want to, you know, basically, you've laid it out, just do X, Y, and Z, and you did a good job. So that way you will get the cover you want, it will be much more professional, and it was cheaper. When we pay like 1000s of dollars for a cover designer. We're basically handing them the money and being like, you know what, you're the bomb, and you are the professional at this. Now you go do it. So that's one great way to be able to decrease your cost, but still not decrease your quality, nice to editors. Yeah, that one's kind of important. If you use the fiber tactic we just talked about that will save you a lot of money that you can then apply towards your editor. Nothing will kill your authority or credibility than a book that is just riddled with mistakes and is discontented. Okay, where it sounds like you just sat down and you were just just rolling off information. All right, you got to impress me. Because if we're if we're using this to our audience, there's nothing that's going to be worse than when they finally pay money, you know, pay you for the book, and they get it and they invest the time to read what you have to say. And they're just not impressed. If you type into like Google Book editors, our article should come up number one in Google. And there's a whole list of legitimate book editors there that focus on a certain niche or a certain genre, and go ahead and select them. Right there kind of make it easier for you. With regards to formatting, I'm not gonna lie, I'm pretty darn lazy, I hate formatting. Because it's kind of painful, you could get like software or all this other template stuff, right. But I would just say go to Upwork, there's some great people that would be able to put together a book for you. And you know, for like 25 bucks. So right there, we got the three biggest things. And I would say that you could create a legitimate book, and under maybe five $600 be really attentive to some of the stuff that other people have created. Like for example, if you do hire a book editor, make sure you get some references, and go ahead and look at the Amazon sales page of the books they've edited. If you see reviews that say all this editing socks or their grammar, you know, or they're complaining, and believe me, if you got mistakes, they will complain, and maybe leave that editor alone.

Unknown Speaker  7:45  
Now, the other thing I know with podcasting, a lot of people think if I can just get into iTunes, money will fall from heaven. And I'm sure there are many people that think if I can just get an Amazon, let's say, money will fall from heaven. So are there any kind of stats on like, what the average book sells are? What are what can they expect? Well, with people who have a podcast, you've got something above normal book publishers, okay, Self Publishers, you have an audience, you have people who are already listening to what you have to say, because they either enjoy your content, or they enjoy the subject matter that you are speaking about. Being able to turn that audience towards your book will give you a lot more, shall we say, momentum in Amazon, and you will start to get more Amazon sales as well. So you'll get new customers, where people usually struggle is they don't have a website or email list or followers or podcasts or any of that stuff. And they decided to write a book, just throw it up there and hope that Amazon sends people to it, that's usually doesn't work. One of the things that I'll say to those authors is that you really want to do some research, and try to find out what it is people are searching for on Amazon. Okay, what books are people looking for? And then specifically, what are they not getting? There's a great article on my website called if you just Google kindle keywords, you'll find it. And that article will lay out all the steps, you need to be able to be able to figure out what people type in Amazon, how much money those books are making, and whether or not the competition is too great. So any listeners out there, if you have a book idea, and you're kind of curious to see whether or not people are willing to pay for it on Amazon, highly recommend checking out that article. And you'll know how to do that research and make sure that you have a better chance of success on the Amazon before you even start writing the book. But coupled that with the momentum you can create for your podcast. You've got a leg up on the competition out there. So I'd say you have a much better chance of success. Yeah, talk about the calculator you have on your website. What's really cool about Amazon is that they have this rank and it's called the Amazon Best Seller Rank. Okay. And so if you go to any book on Amazon, you look at it scroll down to where it starts talking about the categories and you'll see this rank, okay? That rank is a number from one to

Dave Chesson  10:00  
Like five plus million, with number one being the number one best selling book in all of Amazon, and five point, whatever it is million being the worst selling book and all of Amazon. Now before this calculator that we created on Kindlepreneur, nobody had an idea of what that really meant. All right. So if you're the 72,421 book in the rank, are you selling well is that is that good? Is 2 million good. So we actually compiled a an incredible amount of information to create this free calculator, where all you have to do is take the Amazon bestseller rank of a book, put it in there, and it will tell you how many books that day are sold. So just using this, you can go and look at, say, your competitors books, or anybody's books for that matter, and see how much money they made in just today. And that's a great part of validating your book idea. If say, for example, you're podcasting about, we'll say, the keto diet, right?

Well, if I wrote a book on that, are there people paying money for that kind of diet specifically, maybe you're like millennial, you know, keto diet or something like that. You could go to Amazon. And if you see a book that's targeting that market, you can use this calculator and look and see whether or not they're making money. And if all the books that are about this subject are not making any money, it's usually a good indication that people aren't searching for or wanting it on Amazon. And that might save you some trouble. That might save you 500 bucks. Yeah, and a lot of times, yeah, exactly. Your website, again, is kindlepreneur.com. Did you always have a podcast? Or was the website first in the podcast? Second? No, the website was first. So I've always been kind of a writing nerd, not gonna lie. And I enjoyed kind of building out the blog, I've kind of got a technical frame of mind, which is really different for authors, I like to break down the numbers, I used to be a nuclear engineer for the for the Navy. And for me, it was all about just kind of giving step by step processes for marketing and to look at the numbers. Well, over time, though, I kept having people say, like, man, it's great, but you got like 3000 Plus words on this article, I don't have time to read that. And that's when I was like, you know, that's a really good point. Let's go ahead and create sort of the equivalent for a podcast. And so the Book Marketing Show podcast was created, just for those those traveling warriors that need to hear the information and learn but they don't have the time to read it. Now, you have some really cool products over there. I'm definitely interested in the KDP Rocket in your Kindle spy and all these other great things. Is was there a significant or no difference? Going from just a blog to now a blog and a podcast? Like did the podcast Do you think increase your sales at all? I do. You know, it was funny, I met with Spencer Hawes a couple of years, he's the creator of niche pursuits.com. And he created a software called longtail Pro. And we were sitting there and talking about it. And he said, you know, he was like, Dave, I don't really have the numbers to tell you. But I know for sure that my podcast, totally sold more longtail Pro. And he said, because it put a personality behind the product, usually in the software world. And in his case, it was SEO, search engine optimization and keywords. We're used to a world where there is no person in front of a software, oh, you just go there and buy it. And that's it. Like we're the humans by humanizing himself. And by proving that he really does focus on SEO, he believes that it had a major effect on his sales, he just give the exact number. The funny thing is, is that it's a million dollar company, his website gets over 300 plus 1000 visitors per month to it. And you know, and then he's got the podcast, he was like, Yeah, I'll go to this conference or whatever. And nine times out of 10, the person will run up to me and say, Man, I really love your podcast. And that's it. Like, you don't hear about the blog or the software. But that's the thing that they really enjoy, or the thing that connects them to him. And so that was something that I took into account when I was looking at, you know, whether or not we should create a podcast and and yeah, I think that the truth is, is that if you come to can opener and you read the blog, you just see words, you don't see me you don't see anything about me, you might find a Star Wars quote or two because I'm kind of a sci fi nerd. But that's it, you move on you leave. But if you're listening to me, there's probably a much deeper connection and you're hearing the hopefully the passion in the subject matter. And that kind of makes you want to follow more and I think that's had a very dramatic effect on my business going forward. You know, one of my favorite episodes so far and I've only made it through about half was you took the KDP Rocket and more or less did a demo of it. You said hey, we're gonna look this up and this and that, and here are the categories and if you do this, and I was just like, without being salesy at all, it was just like hey, I'm cuz all of a sudden I'm like, where's he getting all this data from? And

Unknown Speaker  14:59  
All of a sudden you're like, I got this out of the KDP Rocket and I was like, well that is I'm so buying that as soon as I'm ready to, you know, launch this thing. So I thought that was just a great idea of a great example of here's how you show off your product without being a slimy you know, hey, buy well now only 97 year or what we 57.77 get the 30 Plus, Order now and get you know, a set of Ginsu knives, you know how it goes, all the slimy sales pitches, not pitchy at all. It definitely works. 

Dave Chesson  14:59  
And the big thing is, is that software is a is just software, but it doesn't become a tool until people really know how to use it. Say for example, you own an In and Out Burger Joint, which, Lord I love in and out, no business in the world, whatever, just say, plot, there it goes, right? Now they're going to do their market research, they're going to figure out, alright, what location? Should we put it in? Okay, this city, alright, we're in the city, should we put it? Where's the most traffic going by? And let's look at how much it would cost to get it there. Alright, now that we know this, how much competition is out there? Now, those are common things that just about any industry out there would do whether you're Walmart, McDonald's, you know, a bookstore, right? They take that into account when they choose to put their product somewhere. authors don't do that. Typically, a lot of authors say, you know, I'm gonna sit down and just write and throw it up there. And if it's good, it'll do it. No, not really. Now, the crazy part is those numbers do exist, we as authors can pull back the curtain of, of Amazon and see the wizard behind pulling the levers and we really know what's going on. So to talk about certain genres, or to talk about how an author was able to use a certain thing in order to gain a benefit. The numbers come in. And that was one of the cool things about creating KDP Rocket was it allowed us to finally have the numbers so we don't have to guess. And yeah, it's just kind of a natural fit. If you're really going to talk about a marketing effort. How can you not use numbers? Right? Absolutely. Well, I know you mentioned on your show, you have a free course. Yes, yeah. So we created a course you can find at AMS course.com. And it teaches authors how to sell their books on Amazon's marketing service. It's like their pay per click advertising. Love it, because for the first time, we get to sell our books, in a place where people have already decided they want to buy book, I'm not trying to convince people to stop looking at cat pictures and come over and check out my book. They're they're trying to figure out what their next fix, I just get it, I get to get my book right there in front of them. The cool thing is, we were able to make this for you. Because we know we created an AMS keyword feature on KDP Rocket. So the more educated people are on it, the more the software becomes more of a tool, see. And so granted, you can take that course and never use KDP Rocket, we show people how to do it manually. But if you're going to do it, let's do it more effectively and efficiently. And so it was it was really awesome to be able to create it, it was it was a long course it's it's really detailed, and we really wanted to go full tilt on it. But again, like I said, software is software until they know how to use it, then it becomes a tool. So let's help you also have one of the coolest start here pages, like ever. I kind of get me one of those. That's a cool idea. So I had so many people send me emails saying hey, marketing, like book marketing, there's so much I don't know where to start. And it happened all the time. I was like, alright, good call, guys. Let's go ahead and put a Start Here page and let me list everything you know, in the different phases and where to go and where you're at in your book writing. Go here, do this all the way through. So awesome. I'm not gonna lie. It was kind of a timesaver.

Unknown Speaker  18:47  
respond and

Unknown Speaker  18:48  
start here. 

David Jackson  18:49  
Well, if you want to see all this stuff, the website again kindlepreneur.com. And that's genius in itself, because I'm thinking, you're probably not fighting a lot on Google for that phrase. I think you kind of own that. And you've got the brand even have the cool light in the background. Nobody can see this because it's audio. But that's awesome. But Dave, thanks for coming on the show. 

Dave Chesson  19:09  
Yeah. Hey, thank you so much for having me. Thanks again to Dave find at kindlepreneur.com. Again, all the links to everything we mentioned out of more podcast money.com/fourteen. I'll be back again in the future with a new episode of more podcast money as I continue to investigate and interview people if you'd like a copy of the current version of the book. And of course, it's a Kindle book. So when it updates, it'll update on your Kindle. Just go out to the website more podcast money.com So who found that useful?

Dave Jackson 19:42  
I want to thank you so much for listening today. I hope you found today's episode useful. If you're interested in starting a podcast come visit me over at school of podcasting.com If you're not new to podcasting will then come by the book, more podcast money at our website, more podcast money.com Or just do a search at amazon for more podcast money this is Dave Jackson from the school of podcasting asking you who could use some more money