Having a book may lead you to the new opportunities. It helps with marketing your workshops, courses, get speaking gigs and market your main business as well.
When you plan to publish the book the marketing plan starts from the beginning. It includes focusing on the audience, building relationships with media, getting ready for the launch and market the brand boosting book and your business at the same time after that.
In this episode, Julie Broad shares how to get your business noticed with a brand boosting book.
Julie is an Amazon Overall #1 Best Selling Author, an International Book Award Winner, and recipient of the Beverly Hills Book Award for the Best Sales book.
As an entrepreneur and successful real estate investor she was also awarded the Top 20 under 40 Award. Her latest venture, Book Launchers, helps entrepreneurs and professionals build their brand and boost their business by writing, publishing, and selling a top quality book.
In this episode, we will cover:
- [00:22] About the episode and Julie Broad
- [02:02] Julie grew up in the entrepreneurial family. After the college, she started investing in real estate and got a tough time during the financial crisis in 2008
- [04:41] Julie’s challenges in the real estate business that she wanted to share in a book
- [06:23] The publisher didn’t believe in her idea and rejected her as they didn’t believe that she can sell a book
- [07:10] Julie decided to self-publish her brand boosting book
- [08:03] Her book became #1 bestseller on Amazon and it turned out that she opened a book publishing company
- [09:54] The difference between brand boosting book and the regular book
- [11:10] To focus on the target audience helped Julie to become a bestselling author
- [11:51] The key components of the brand boosting book
- [13:30] Why you should self-publish a book instead of going to the traditional publisher
- [14:54] The authorship of the book if you get to the traditional publisher or self-publish it
- [16:06] How to market your brand boosting book
- [17:48] Things to keep in mind when you start reaching people and promote your book
- [19:49] The different ways to increase your income after you published your book
- [22:34] How to get booked for more workshops and speaking opportunities
- [24:18] How media noticed Julie after publishing her brand boosting book
- [25:37] How to market yourself and your business with the brand boosting book
- [27:03] How to pitch the media right after your book came out and it’s not popular yet
- [28:09] What to do if you already wrote a book, but it didn’t work as well as you expected
- [29:43] What to do if you are an ordinary entrepreneur who has no authority yet, but you want to publish your book
- [33:07] Where to find Julie online
- [33:57] For the show notes go to marinabarayeva.com and subscribe to the Marketing for Creatives show
3 Steps to Have a Success with Your Brand Boosting Book
- Step 1: Be clear with your audience
- Step 2: Have the marketable hook at the beginning
- Step 3: Find where your audience hangs out and put your book in front of them
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Resources from this interview:
- Learn more about Julie Board on BookLaunches.com
- Follow Julie on YouTube, Twitter, Instagram
Connect with Marina Barayeva:
- marinabarayeva.com
- Follow Marina on Instagram
- Follow Marina on Twitter
The Power of Getting Your Business Noticed with a Brand Boosting Book – Interview Transcription
Marina Barayeva:
Julie, please share with us your entrepreneurial story.
Julie Broad:
I love that. Because it’s kind of funny cause an entrepreneurial story is like where do you begin? (Laughter)
Marina Barayeva:
Yeah. The long story. (Laughter)
Julie Broad:
(Laughter) For me, I’ve kind of always been interested in. My parents ran and operated a 20-room motel when I was a kid. I grew up around small business owners and people who didn’t work for other people. I think that entrepreneurial story really began there then.
But I did go the traditional route. I went to university, took a job out of university, but that was really when I started to think as fun as that job was I kept thinking it’s going to be a really long life of working for somebody else.
That’s really when I was 21, 22, I really started thinking about “OK, what else can I do?” I ended up starting to invest in real estate, which was… I kept my job but I invested in the military on the side to kind of create that plan B, so I didn’t always have to work for somebody else.
That was 2001 when I started investing in real estate. I was quite young but took the little savings that I had in my bank account to purchase my first couple of investment properties, partnering with my boyfriend at the time who thankfully became my husband later because that would’ve been messy otherwise.
That was kind of the start. Then by 2008, I was done. I didn’t want to work for somebody else anymore. Picked a terrible year for anybody who knows what was going on in North America. The bank crisis and real estate markets were just doing terrible. And that’s when I decided to quit my job and focus on real estate full time.
Marina Barayeva:
No bad.
Julie Broad:
Yeah. In many regards, it was terrible timing. But in other regards it was great. Because when you start your business in the worst possible market, it forces you to really be creative with what you’re doing and get really good really fast. For some people start on an upswing.
I think that when the markdown market comes. It really, really hurts. So, I think in some ways it was a gift and in other ways, it made it extremely difficult.
My husband was a mortgage broker at the time, so a lot of people go “Yeah, sure you could quit your job, but you were married. He took care of you.” But he was a mortgage broker or working on a hundred percent commission at that time when there wasn’t a single bank loaning money on commercial deals, which is where he was.
He was making absolutely no money. It was actually my salary that we’d been living on. We had to do what every newlywed couple wants to do and that is moved back in with my parents.
So that’s the start of my entrepreneurial story. (Laughter)
Marina Barayeva:
How did you start your book company?
Julie Broad:
That was 2008 with the real estate. At that time, I’d already been investing in real estate for seven years. But then we went fully into it 2008. By 2010 we were buying a house every single month and raising millions of dollars to fund all of these deals that we were doing. Because a lot of them we were buying the house and then renovating to add a suite or just to make it a better quality home to add value to it.
We have a lot of crazy stories because we tried to do a lot of deals creatively. Anything that we could do to get a deal done without a bank or without us having to have a bunch of money because we just didn’t have that kind of funding to do those kinds of deals.
We created a lot of great crazy stories. Not fun to live through, but fun to tell like a property manager who gets charged with manslaughter because he punched a tenant in an altercation. The tenant actually fell to the ground, hit his head, and later died in the hospital, which was horrible.
It caused our property this spiral down because he was the only guy who would manage it. It wasn’t a very rough neighborhood. Our property ended up becoming a known crack house in the area.
It’s a long story made for a great book, which is how I got into my first book. We had some stories like that. We had another tenant pool, another pull a knife on another tenant, some crazy stuff. And what I kept saying was nobody’s telling anybody these stories that happen.
A lot of our real estate investor friends had crazy stories too and nobody was talking about it. All everybody was writing about was how to make all this money in real estate. And I’m like, yeah, there’s money to be made, but you might not want to live through this stuff that we’ve had to live through that most real estate investors lived through.
So I wanted to write a book with the real stories in it. That was kind of where I went. I was going back and forth with a publisher. But the publisher said, “You know, that book’s not going to sell. Here’s another idea.”
We went back and forth on that idea, which I actually didn’t even want to write, but I kept thinking “Hey, a book deal.” But in the end, they turned me down. They said we don’t think you have a strong enough marketing platform to sell books. So they rejected me.
This book deal that I worked three months on, I was pretty sure I was getting, it wasn’t actually happening. So it really kicked my ego because it wasn’t that they were turning this idea down. They basically said, “You know what, the marketing departments decided you can’t sell books and so they don’t want to invest in doing a book with you.”
It was really hard because it was a big… My husband kept saying, “Well, now you can self-publish a book and actually write the one that you really want it to be written and that you thought should be written.”
But I just kept thinking, “Well, what’s it going to matter? Because nobody’s going to read it. Nobody’s going to care.”
Because I just got kicked by this major publishing house saying “You won’t be able to sell books.”
It took me about a year and a half before I kind of nursed my ego back and said, “You know what? Forget it. I need to write this book. I’m going to write it.” And I wrote it.
I wrote the book that I thought should be written with the stories that people needed to hear so they can make better decisions. Maybe they don’t even want to get into real estate at all if they hear this. So that’s the book I wrote.
And people really responded well to it. I had a lot of realtor and mortgage broker friends and real estate clubs and associations that were like, “Yes. These are stories people need to hear.”
When I launched, everybody kind of got behind it and supported this book and spread the word. This book from the author that was said “You wouldn’t be able to sell books in Canada,” went all the way to number one overall on Amazon.
I was ahead of Dan Brown and the Game of Thrones series hanging out at the top as a print book. And I sat in the top 100 books overall on Amazon for 45 days.
It’s really because there was a message that was unique that wasn’t already in the market that a lot of people saw as valuable.
That’s how my first book came out. And because it did so well, I started to get contacted by lots of friends and colleagues, even those that got book deals asking for help and support on their books. So kind of on the side, I was helping all these people with the books and truthfully having a lot of fun with it.
I didn’t mind spending extra time when I was already working 50 hours a week. I would spend another 10 helping people with their books.
But I kept thinking, I kept finding all these gaps and holes and issues with the market, whether they were getting traditionally published and had no marketing support. Or they were self-publishing but had to hire all the people to do all the pieces so they could have a good book at the end.
I just kept thinking I should just have a company that can do all this for them. It would make it so much easier and then these people could just focus on creating a great book and then we could do the rest.
When I started to look for something new to do that’s how I created Book Launchers.
Marina Barayeva:
Ok. Here we are. Long story. Today we talk about these brand boosting books. Can you tell us please, what’s the difference between the brand boosting book and any simple books or e-books that we can write as entrepreneurs? Because you got your book the first time, you get rejected and then you still made it out.
Julie Broad:
A brand boosting book really focuses on what’s in it for the reader and who that specific reader is. A lot of people write a book because they think they have a message to share or a cool story, but they haven’t actually really thought through who are they going to be marketing the book too. Who’s that ideal reader? Then also what do you need to achieve from this book?
A lot of people will say, “Oh, I want to be a best seller.” But the bigger question is Why? What is best seller going to do for you? Because that will change how you’re going to market your book.
Just one really quick example, we’re working with a client right now who’s written a pretty solid book, but our book marketing specialists on my team, she looked at it and she was, “Well, are we going to be targeting, fortune 500 or mid-level businesses or just like solopreneurs, entrepreneurs for this book. She said, “It’s not clear.”
So we’re going back to the drawing board with that author because to market it properly you need to know exactly who you’re targeting and what they’re going to get out of it right from the start. And then you have a brand boosting book.
Marina Barayeva:
When you wrote your first book who was your target market?
Julie Broad:
The people who thought about investing in real estate or they bought one or two properties but it wasn’t quite going so well and they felt like they were alone or that they were making mistakes. It was really for that kind of a person.
Marina Barayeva:
Did it work in the end? Because sometimes you write something or you started a business and you think about one audience, but in the end, another audience buys your product.
Julie Broad:
In that case, yes. It was very much for the new or aspiring real estate investor and I wrote it very clearly for that person and that’s who the book really resonated with.
Marina Barayeva:
That’s great. So you focused completely on this market. What are the key components of the brand boosting book? Should it be the paper book? Should it be an eBook? Or what should we include there?
Julie Broad:
The first component is that it has to have a great hook. That’s a couple of sentences that explain clearly what’s in it for the reader.
We always kind of joke that people only care about stuff that’s going to make them look prettier, skinnier, richer, or look smart to their friends. It’s not quite that simple, but we’re always kind of just joking about that. But that’s really what a hook is. You have to have that for your book. That’s first and foremost.
In terms of the format of the book, non-fiction books, which is what we specialize in non-fiction books, they’re still selling… more than 70 percent are still selling in print. You really should have a soft cover. The eBook is not enough. Plus, a lot of the value in your book actually comes when you give it to people or sell it in the print format.
If you want to book speaking engagements, having an actual physical book is really important because you want to have something to sell at the back of the room versus an e-book that you encourage people to go download, which they’ll forget and they won’t do.
I think in multiple formats though is something to think about because a huge chunk of your sales is going to happen online on Amazon. And because you’re self-publishing you kind of have to work even harder to look like a professionally published book.
I don’t even think it’s about traditional and self-published anymore. I think it’s about professionally done and not professionally done.
One of the things that really make a book look professional is having multiple formats: audio, softcover, e-version and even a hardcover. You don’t have to have all four, but you should strive to have three formats and that makes you stand out from the crowd too.
Marina Barayeva:
Would you recommend first to self-publish a book or go to the traditional publisher?
Julie Broad:
For most non-fiction authors, I would never recommend you go to a traditional publisher because they keep 85 percent of the profits put 100 percent of the marketing requirements on you and they keep all the rights to the books.
And in this day and age, one of the big issues that come up is traditional publishers aren’t signing authors unless they give the audio rights to the traditional publisher. But in a lot of cases, the traditional publisher is deciding not to produce the audio.
That’s a big problem because the audio is the fastest growing market. But you as the author will then be stuck and not able to have an audiobook because the traditional publisher owns the rights to it.
The bigger issue to me is that as a non-fiction author, you’re pouring your heart and soul into this traditionally published book, and now they own it.
What happened to one of my friends kind of illustrates this the best, he wrote a real estate book. A couple years later, left the real estate industry. When he left the publisher said, “Oh, you’re not going to be marketing it anymore.” And they put someone else’s name on the cover. It’s other than a new introduction, it is a word for word my friend’s book, but they own the book, not my friend.
They are completely within their rights to take all your expertise, all your stories and attribute them to somebody else. For that reason, besides all the money that they keep for you to do all the work, I think you should self-publish all day long as a non-fiction author.
Marina Barayeva:
Oh, wow. Are there the ways to keep your authorship when you go to a traditional publisher?
Julie Broad:
For the average person no. You have to be a celebrity to have any sort of negotiating clout with a traditional publisher. And again, the piece that I think a lot of people don’t realize is you’re, you have to market this book.
Marketing is 100% on you. They allocate for their top six percent of their authors, which are the celebrities. They’re going to have a marketing budget for them.
But the rest of you maybe 10 percent or top 10 percent, but the rest of us who aren’t that celebrity with a million followers already, they’re not putting marketing behind it is a hundred percent on you.
You’re gonna make about 80 cents per book sold and you have to do 100% of the marketing and spend the money to market it. They’re going to make $4 or $5 per book sold for you to do all the work. It’s not fair.
Marina Barayeva:
Yeah. That’s not fair. This is the big problem, I think it’s more easy to write the books than market it. When you write it, how to get more people to know that you have it? How to market it later?
Julie Broad:
I think, writing definitely is painful. Even we have different ways of helping people, we have writing coaches and ghostwriters, but no matter what, it’s a little painful because it requires hard thinking and focus thinking, which a lot of us aren’t very good at anymore.
But that’s part one is to really think about how you’re gonna market it before you even start writing. Because one of the hardest parts is to market a book after the fact because you haven’t thought through from the beginning.
Little things, like even the titles of your table of contents, each chapter that has to create curiosity and have a hook and a lot of people just kind of create a generic table of contents which won’t sell your book. So a lot of the marketing really starts before you even write your book.
When it comes time to launch your book, some of the best ways to market it is to find people. Just like I said realtors and mortgage brokers sold my book. They told their clients and their audiences about my book because it was going to help their audience. They had the same ideal audience as I did.
They had people who were considering investing in real estate or had bought one or two properties and we’re curious about doing more. So they had the exact audience.
You’ve got to start with thinking who else has your ideal audience in their market and ideally isn’t a competitor. Other realtors probably would not have supported my book if I was a realtor that I was a real estate investor, so we had the same person that we were targeting, but for different reasons.
Marina Barayeva:
When you started to market it what were your first things? You got your book and then you just reached out to them, “sell my book?” Or how did it work for you?
Julie Broad:
There’s the whole bunch of things that have to happen. First of all, you have to have a great title, a great cover and have some really good copy written around your book before you reach out to people. Because most people aren’t going to support a book that’s just a concept.
They’re going to want to see that book cover and know what the title is. So you gotta have those things done. In many cases, you want to have a solid draft of the book to share with them too.
While you want to tell people, this is kind of thing and be building relationships as early as possible in the process. You really can’t dig in and really start getting support until you have something to show them.
Because they want to look good to their people, right? They don’t want to be sharing something that’s garbage, so they need to kind of have some proof that this is a great concept, that it looks good, that it’s going to be something they can stand behind. So you need to have it to that point.
As close to the finished draft as you possibly can get, I think is ideal. Then you want to have the copy created around your Amazon page, there are some key pages you want to have, good reads, BookBub, all of those kinds of things as you start your outreach.
That you can be referring people to these things and kind of showing them what’s in place and allowing them to kind of check you out on their own.
When you start outreach, what I would recommend is reached out to the people that you have a relationship with first and really start planning for that launch week and talking to them about how they could support you.
One of the best things you could do is put together a great bonus package. Something that’s going to be a value. Something that your ideal reader would otherwise pay for. It’s so valuable and it fits perfectly with something they would need.
You put together a bit of a bonus package for the people who buy in that first week because then when you ask people to support your book, they’re also letting people know about this really cool offer and it makes them look good and makes them feel good because their audiences now going to get something of tremendous value as a result of supporting you.
There are lots of things in there. We could unpack it in more detail, but I don’t want to go on and on. I just want to give you some nuggets. (Laughter)
Marina Barayeva:
When you get your book and start marketing it, what do you think is the main goal? Because it doesn’t seem that you get a lot of money out of the book, but it helps you market your business. What should we focus on or what did you focus on in your time?
Julie Broad:
Actually, you can make decent money from books. For the vast majority of authors, we’re not retiring.
Marina Barayeva:
You were talking about a few sentences out of the book.
Julie Broad:
Oh, that’s if you went with a traditional publisher. I make $6 per copy sold. It’s not bad.
You’re not getting rich, but I broke even on the cost. It cost me $7,000 to get my book published and I broke even on the first day. (Laughter)
It was good and made money every day since that book came out five years ago. The cool part is its passive income.
If you get a great launch and your book and Amazon for example, just keeps showing your book to other people, you’re going to be putting money in the bank for years to come. That’s pretty cool.
You don’t have to be marketing your book after a while and it’s still going to sell at least a little bit if you’ve done a good job at the beginning.
But if you want a 10x, or 20x, or 100x your investment in a book, both your time and the money that you put into it, you really want to be looking at things like I’m selling courses, speaking engagements, selling books at events that you go to if you have the opportunity to sell them at the back of a room if you speak.
Using your book as currency. I actually traded… can’t remember the exact number of books, I traded maybe 250 copies of my book or 100 copies in exchange for about $48,000 in magazine advertising and space because they needed a giveaway to give to people if they subscribed to their magazine for three years or more.
I gave them my books in exchange for six months of half page ads in their magazine and some prominent space at some of their events, their national trade show events.
That was a great exchange. It’s something that you can’t do unless you have a physical product because the book, the physical book offered something of value.
One other thing is that if people don’t have a speaking budget, sometimes they have like an education budget, so they might be able to bring you in as a speaker and then buy a book for every person in the audience.
If you’ve got 100 people in the audience and you can sell them a book for $6 or $7 profit per head you can still bring in a little bit of money from the people in the room for that speaking engagement.
Plus, your book, which should be positioned to sell you and your business or your product and service really well is now in the hands of a hundred people who are potentially your ideal client.
Marina Barayeva:
That’s not bad. And you were talking about your workshops, speaking. How did you get there with your brand boosting book?
Julie Broad:
Once my book came out, I started to get all kinds of media attention. Media had no interest in me before. But once my book came out and people started talking about it, when I pitched the media, they brought me in and then they’d bring me back again and again.
That combined with people who just booked events finding out about my book, hearing about my book from people in their audience, they started to call me and book me for speaking engagements.
So the combination of the credibility boost from being on a lot of stages and on tv across the country, that really boosted my profile, boosted our credibility. And it just made it easy when I said, “Hey, we’re running a course,” or “Hey, we’ve got a workshop.”
People filled it. It filled faster than ever. We were selling out most of our workshops and most of our courses, have a minimum of a month in advance after my book came out.
I think it’s a lot of things. It’s not just any one thing that we did because we actually didn’t really change our marketing. But I think it was just because our profile was so elevated. People wanted me on their stages and they put me on their shows.
I got newspaper coverage, I got all kinds of media attention. I was the same person before my book. I could have said the exact same message before I wrote my book is after I wrote my book. The difference was they saw me as an expert that they wanted to put in front of their audience because I had that book.
Then once I was in front of those audiences, people really trusted and wanted to sign up and work with us.
Marina Barayeva:
How did you get to that expert level? You said that nobody knew you before the book. How did you pitch those media and then it turned out that they started seeing you as an expert?
Julie Broad:
It’s not that nobody knew me. I had a profile across Canada, which is why I was talking about it. But the difference is the book.
When you make a pitch to the media, the media didn’t pay attention to me before. We tried pitching the media, but when you can say “She is the overall Amazon number one best seller selling author of XYZ book, which details exactly how to do XYZ, and she wants to come on your show because this just happened. She could tell your audience how to handle it.” right?
It still has to be irrelevant pitch, but now you just add that simple little thing. Here’s the thing, like 36% of the US population has a post-secondary degree saying that you have a degree in real estate doesn’t mean anything. So many people have a degree.
But saying that you wrote the book on how to invest in single-family homes, now somebody was like, “Oh, she’s an expert.” Do you see the difference?
Marina Barayeva:
Mhmm. (Agreement)
Julie Broad:
And that’s all it is. It’s taking that piece of expertise, that credibility and then having an angle for your pitch and pitching every single media outlet that way.
Marina Barayeva:
When you get your brand boosting book, how to market yourself then, your business and the book? What would you focus on?
Julie Broad:
There are so many ways to tackle this. I’ll just give you guys a few little ideas.
Inside of the book, especially online, Amazon has this feature called Look Inside so readers can look at the first few pages of your book, you should be promoting your business, your services, things like that. Rate in those first few pages with a URL some sort of an offer so that people will come and download something. They’ll check out your course. I’m
Pat Flynn has a book out called Will It Fly? He has a great example of this on the first page is like, “Thank you for buying my book. Now, I’d like to invite you into this free course to teach you how to do XYZ.”
That kind of thing on the first page that really helps boost your business from people who are just browsing as well as the people who buy your book.
The other thing is, of course, to make sure that you have a very targeted message for your books so that you have something to pitch to people and to market to people.
If your book is too generic, it doesn’t have enough of a hook, doesn’t have enough of an angle, you won’t have anything to pitch to people.
Marina Barayeva:
When you pitch the media and they don’t really know you as well as an expert, how would you pitch them? What would you write them? Like “I became a number one Amazon bestseller?” That’s a good thing, but before we get there, you still got to several media, I guess.
Julie Broad:
All the media attention happened after my book came out. But the big thing is every media has to be pitched with an angle that’s relevant to them. So you can’t lead with the book. That’s the secondary.
The lead-in is something that’s relevant and topical. You want to look at what’s trending, what’s just happened in the real estate space because that was where my book was.
We would look at if a big housing report had just come out, if an interest rate change had happened, if, like I said, it’s something that’s trending and topical. Because that’s what they’re going to care about. They’re going to want somebody to come in and talk about this recent housing report, or this recent rental market activity or law change or something like that.
You gotta be up on what’s happening and have, be able to say, “OK, I am the expert on real estate, the author of XYZ book.”
But you lead in with that local angle for their media and say, “OK, you know, you want somebody to come in and talk about interest rates. So here we go. One thing people haven’t thought about is the upside of an interest rate increase if you’re a real estate investor. If you want to learn more and bring in Julie Broad author of a book, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah”
Marina Barayeva:
What if people already have one book but it didn’t work as well as they want and now they want to change it to another one. They wanted to write the new book. What would you recommend them to do?
Julie Broad:
It depends. If their first book is a complete crap, like they want to move into a different space or their book just really had nothing to do with their current business, then you just write the new book. Just make sure you are very clear on who the book is for and what you’re trying to achieve with the book.
But in some cases, your book may have a lot of elements that you would still use in a republished book. So you just relaunch.
You would sit down, go to the drawing board and start over with coming up with your hook, your goals, your ideal audience, and see what parts of your previous book would work in the new one and do a relaunch.
Marina Barayeva:
Would you use it like the new book or would you copy a part from the previous book? Or both are ok?
Julie Broad:
It’s a hard question to answer generically because every situation would be different. There’s no right or wrong way to do it. It just depends on your goals, what your previous book was and what your new book is going to be.
Marina Barayeva:
Well, Julie, imagine that you are now an ordinary entrepreneur, nobody knows you yet, you’re not so famous and if you would release your first brand boosting book these days, what would be your steps to get more business opportunities?
Julie Broad:
I’ve kind of hit on this already. It really comes down to making sure you have that marketable hook at the beginning, you’re clear on who your audience is, and then you figure out where that audience is hanging out.
Who already has your ideal reader in their audience? If you sell a product or you recommend a product in your book, maybe they’re customers are a great fit for your book. You could reach out to that company and try to partner.
But I think the big thing, and it’s overlooked, a lot of people think it’s just uploaded it to Amazon and it’s going to sell, but I think the real opportunity for you to build your business is to find where your customers are already hanging out and put your book in front of them.
That might be through associations. That might be through companies that have the same client as you, but you don’t compete with. Find ways to partner. Build your network, connect with these people and reach out.
And just keep reaching out and keep asking. Because that’s really, really, truly the best way. And you might find people who will buy your book and volume. You might find people who will promote your book to their audience. And you may find people who will even say, “Hey, we should partner in a business.” You just don’t know where that will lead.
Marina Barayeva:
And what would you focus on in marketing? Like you just launched what do you focus first on media than, booking workshops, then selling your service and product? What do you think is the best strategy here?
Julie Broad:
We need to have your business in place. I think at least having something to draw people in. So building your database, for example, subscriptions.
From there it really depends on your business goals. It’s a hard question to answer without understanding a specific scenario.
If I was going to say “I wanted to grow my speaking business, I wanted to become a paid public speaker,” I would focus on the initial launch of the book: to get reviews, to get it in front of, again, people with the ideal audience. Then, my next task is to start pitching the different people who book speakers and really focus on the targeted conferences, targeted events, targeted companies that way.
Media would be something I would do parallel potentially to that. And I might even hire a PR specialist for that because pitching media is hard work.
You have to do a lot of research. You have to dig in. You have to know what kind of angles each media outlet looks for and likes. So it’s a hard one to answer because every goal has a different approach.
I would do it slightly differently if I was trying to attract clients and I do it slightly differently if I was trying to attract courses.
But first and foremost, you have to have a strong launch. You need good reviews because if people check you out online and look at your book online, they have to see something that is getting a good strong response.
Marina Barayeva:
Basically, you launch your book and then the marketing strategy depends on your goal for your business? Either you want to have more sales of your service or product, or you want to have more speaking, or you want to just make money out of the book. Right?
Julie Broad:
Exactly. And it also depends on your resources. Because, if you have a lot of resources then you can have people doing all this for you at the same time. Which is the ideal.
Marina Barayeva:
Thank you so much, Julie. Please share with us how can we find more about you and know more about you. It was so interesting to have you on the show.
Julie Broad:
Thank you. BookLaunches.com is the best place to connect. And if you want a game plan to help you sell a thousand books for under $100, which is really all the methods that I used to get my book to number one and that we use with a lot of our clients, it’s a booklaunchers.com/SellBooks.
Marina Barayeva:
Where are you on social media?
Julie Broad:
All over. (Laughter) Pretty much. Instagram and YouTube are kind of the two places I really spend time on. YouTube is Book Launchers TV. If you’ve got questions or comments, that’s really the best place to ask because that’s where I hang out the most.
And on Instagram, I don’t really answer a lot of questions on Instagram, but I definitely an active in posting there.
Marina Barayeva:
Fantastic, Julie. It was so much pleasure to have you on the show today.
Julie Broad:
Great. Thanks so much.
Marina Barayeva is an international speaker and coach who helps women entrepreneurs become recognized experts and confidently sell their services. She is also a TEDx speaker, has presented to audiences in Asia and North America, and has been featured in such media as ArtPeople, CCTV, China Radio International, and others.
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