S. 3 Ep. 34 – The Strategy For Successfully Launching & Promoting Your Book

Intro: You know those moments when you’re doing what you love in your business, maybe it’s standing onstage or creating content, whatever it is, you’re totally immersed, and time just seems to slip by? This is called The Flow State. At Speaker Flow, we’re obsessed with how to get you there more often. Each week we’re joined by a new expert where we share stories, strategies, and systems to help craft a business you love. Welcome to Technically Speaking.

Taylorr: And we are live. Linda, welcome to the show, it is awesome to have you here today. Thanks for joining us.

Linda: Oh, thank you for having me. It’s wonderful to be here.

Taylorr: Yeah, for sure.

Austin: Yeah, we’re super excited for you to join us. This is one of the areas that Taylorr and I both have lots of interest in and very little expertise, and so we’re always happy when we can talk to somebody that really knows what they’re doing here. We feel like we level up, I know our audience does too. Thanks for sharing your time.

Linda: Happy to be here

Taylorr: For sure. So, we always like to do a little bit of research, kind of dig in before we kind of kick off into the meat of the show. And this actually came from a previous conversation that I think you and I had, but if I recall, you had a moment in time where prior to doing the marketing and the book writing and everything, where you were actually a part of Silicon Valley. Is that right?

Linda: Oh, I am still part of Silicon Valley. I’m sitting right here in Silicon Valley.

Taylorr: Oh, still, to this day?

Linda: Yeah.

Taylorr: Oh, so you’re, I didn’t even know that.

Linda: Yeah, I’m in Redwood City, so I’m between; let’s see, between Oracle and Facebook. How’s that for location?

Taylorr: Wow.

Linda: Yeah,

Taylorr: Sure.

Austin: Oh, yeah, you’re in Silicon Valley then.

Taylorr: Right. For sure. So, did you work with clients in Silicon Valley back in the day as well then?

Linda: I did. I started out on the corporate side, I worked on Microsystems for a number of years, and then left to go into my own business and worked with everybody from Cisco and App and SAP and I’m just trying to think who else. Just a lot of larger companies and a lot of startups as well, smaller companies too.

Taylorr: Wow.

Austin: Wow.

Linda: Yeah.

Taylorr: How’d you get into all of that?

Linda: How’d I get into that? I started working for Sun on the east coast many moons ago and then moved out here with them because the interesting stuff was out here and did all kinds of marketing for Sun. And then decided I’d had enough of that, left and started my own consulting firm and started working for a lot of Silicon Valley companies. And now I work for both tech companies, but life sciences and small companies and coaches and entrepreneurs and you name it; authors and speakers and whatever, so I’ve expanded, but my roots are kind of in the Silicon Valley tech world.

Austin: Wow. Man, that’s so cool. That is a busy and fun and exciting type of world to be in, so I’m sure you got lots of good stories from that.

Linda: These days with things coming and going and layoffs and things, but it’ll settle down, it’s called the business cycle for a reason. And it’ll cycle and will come back up and everything will be fine.

Austin: Yeah, that’s for sure true. So, tell us how this segued into the expertise now. It seems like the main focus at this point is this authorship marketing, maybe sort of lane. So, can you sort of unpack how that background translated?

Linda: So, I’ve always been a writer, that’s kind of my core competency. Even back when I was in high school and I was editing my high school newspaper and those types of things. And a lot of what I did over the years and for corporate clients was writing and creating content. And I did other things too, branding and product launches and corporate partnerships and all of that kind of stuff. But what I started to realize was that so many people needed good content, and I did that for corporate clients and I created content and then I started to do other things; I wrote my own book and people would come to me and they’d say, could you edit this for me? Could you write something for us? Could you edit for us? 

So, it started out just as a one or two thing, and then somebody told somebody else who told somebody else, and then it got into do more and more. So, I started doing writing and then editing and then it was like, well, you’ve edited, can you produce it so it looks like a book? Yeah, I know people, we can do that. Can we do any book? Yeah. Can we do an audiobook? Sure. Can you help me market it? Yeah. And then on the other end people said, I want to write a book, but I can’t write or I don’t want to write, or I don’t have the time to write, I don’t know what to do. I said, can you talk me through it? Well, yeah. 

So, we get on a Zoom call and I’d hit record and say, okay, let’s talk about your book. And we would outline the book. So, it’s a lot of coaching and helping people through that. So, I do the whole range of things now from, you have an idea for a book, but you don’t know where to go. To people who say, I have a commercial publisher who’s ready to publish me, but my work isn’t ready to give to them, can you just give it a review? To; okay, let’s produce the whole book. So, it’s kind of, basically I meet clients where they are and if they want just a little bit of something. That’s great. If they need more, we have people, we can do that.

Austin: Wow.

Taylorr: Very cool.

Austin: You know what really resonates with me about that? Is that to some extent, writing is a technical skill. You have to know how to put things together in a way that’s simple and conveys the message and captures the person’s attention, and it’s as much of an art as it is a science. And there are a lot of people out there that can do that, but you also have this extra element of helping people probably know what they don’t already know or get the ideas out that are really challenging. That’s a dual skillset, you know? And I think, ultimately that’s what people want; that whole thing, I don’t know what I don’t know. 

That exists because there are a lot of technical people that can do specific tasks if the tasks are outlined clearly, but not everybody even knows what that should look like. And so, sounds to me like you’re sort of filling both slots there where you’re helping people unpack the vision and then also execute on it.

Linda: Yeah, exactly. And what I tell people is there is not a selfie stick long enough to get enough perspective on your own work. So, you could be a great writer and you’re a great editor, you can’t look at your own stuff, I can’t edit my own work either. So, you need someone to come in with a fresh perspective. And what I do, because I’ve been in business, because I also; I run an association for consultants, Society for Management Consulting. I’ve been around the Silicon Valley world; I’ve been around business for a while. I know what the audience is. So, you tell me who your audience is, and I look at your work from that perspective. 

So, I don’t just edit and here it is and throw it over the wall. But I look at it and I say, okay, if I’m your target audience, I have a question about chapter four. I got one, two, and three, five is okay, but chapter four seems to be floating in there, what’s going on here? So, I bring a sense of understanding the work, which you are not going to get if you go for the cheapest possible resource offshore, which by the way, a lot of those offshore resources I get brought in to re-edit after they’ve done not such a good job because English is not their first language. And American English is not their first language in a lot of cases. And therefore you’re reading this, you’re going, that’s not quite right. 

So, you get what you pay for, you want to go cheap, you can do that. You want to get someone who can add a little value; you can work with someone like me.

Taylorr: Yeah, for sure. Well, I think this segue ways nicely into a question that we had lined up for you. But after some conversations and obviously hearing this, you really tend to take this holistic approach to understanding the client’s businesses to then incorporate that into the editing. What made you realize that, that was an important component of the editing process and why stick to it, rather than just focusing on the book itself, let’s say?

Linda: Well, because I think for the most part, and I hate to break anybody’s bubble here, but 99% of us in the business world are not going to either pay our mortgages or put our kids through college or go on vacation with the proceeds of our books. We’re not going to be, Dan Pink and we’re not going to be Malcolm Gladwell, we’re certainly not going to be JK Rowling, right? So, we’re not here to make millions of dollars selling books, we’re here for something else. And it’s usually to build your business. And if you’re going to build your business, you need to have a book that’s going to tie-in and relate and adjust to what someone’s doing. 

I had a potential client call me yesterday, actually; and she had an opportunity to do an e-book and she wanted to do this, and I just could not. We talked for about a half hour, I could not figure out how this tied into her business. And I finally said to her, I don’t think this is the right thing for you to do right now. Because you want to write this book that would be interesting, but the audience for that book is very different than the people who hire you. And I don’t see a crossover; you’re going to put a lot of time and money in this, which is lovely if that’s what you want to do, but understand it’s not to do with your business. 

So I think I successfully kind of deterred her from writing a book that she would’ve put time and money into and not gotten much out of. So, sometimes I do that, I tell people don’t do it. And sometimes they listen, sometimes they don’t, but my goal is to make sure to help you. And I only take on projects that I have an interest in and on topics that I feel I can add value. So, it’s business topics, social, kind of things going on in the world from a social perspective; in the news, what we call self-help, which is really not self-help if you have a book, but memoir things like that. I’m not doing anything academic, nothing about the history of western civilization or anything of that nature. Someone else can do those things. Because I want to be able to add the value where I can come in and help you understand how this relates to your business.

Austin: Yeah, well, the specificity of the services that we provide are the most important thing; in fact, Taylorr and I say all of the time, that you can tell the most seasoned experts because they have the most specific thing that they’ve defined that they’re really good at. And there are lots of reasons for why that’s useful, but I love that you’re clear about that because you have the background where you could just say, I could help anybody with anything and there’s probably some warranted background to support that, but you’ve been clear about who you best serve. And it just so happens that that’s our audience, so audience listen up because this is Linda’s specialty.

Taylorr: Serendipity.

Linda: Yeah.

Austin: I have kind of a pointed question for you here. This is just a thought that’s bounced around in my head. And so, I did some Googling about this just to confirm whether or not my assumption or intuition about it was correct. But it sounds like overall over the last 10 years, and definitely if you go back 20 years, the number of people that are actually reading, especially in the non-fiction world, isn’t going up, it’s been going down according to a lot of polls. I don’t think the change is monumentous, it’s 7%, I think or something over the last 10 years according to some .gov site that I was looking at. 

So, if that’s the case, and certainly I think it’s easy to look out into the market today and see that there are other mediums that are picking up dramatically, hence the TikTok phenomenon, for example. Why do you think that a book is relevant in the world moving forward?

Linda: It’s interesting. I hadn’t seen that statistic, but I can understand it makes sense. And there’s another statistic which says, more books are being published now than ever in the history of the world. So, people may be reading less, but we’re publishing more. And interestingly enough, even though eBooks have taken off to a certain degree, printed books have not gone away. There were all of these predictions that printed books were going to die and we’re all going to run around with a Kindle or something. And we may have our Kindle or our app on our phone and whatever, but then people go and they buy the printed book. 

So, I think what that says is more books are out there, less people are reading, therefore you have to be even better about standing out. And people do want books because they want credibility. They want to have something that they can show either a client or a prospect. They want to have something they can give out that shows their expertise. So, lots of good reasons for having a book and it does establish you as a thought leader and an expert. But a book by itself, it’s not if you build it, they will come. If you publish it, they will come. Not necessarily. 

So, one of the things that people have to understand, is I tell people when you launch a book, you’re not done. If NASA launches a rocket, they don’t say, hey, we launched it, let’s all go home. They say, now our work beacons, we need to make sure it orbits and it lands safely, right? So, the launch is just the beginning. And whether you are publishing a book by yourself, with a hybrid publisher, or you’re going to the old commercial publisher route, there are only a limited amount of things that a publisher will do for you. If you want your book to be successful, you’re going to have to get out there and market it yourself. 

So, it can’t be this, Hey, I wrote the book, I’m done with it and I’m gone. So, before you put the time and energy into writing a book, think about something that you want to spend a lot of time with, that you have expertise in, that you can say something new. There must be 10,000 books on leadership out there and more being published every day. If you are going to be the 10001st book on leadership, say something different, take a different perspective because otherwise I don’t want to read it. 

So, you need to have something fresh to say, you need to be passionate about it. I’m going to presume if you’re listening to this, that you are an expert in your field, so you are good at what you do, so that’s kind of an assumption to start with. And there needs to be a market, there needs to be people that are willing to say, I want to find out about that. So, if you have something about some esoteric topic that you have an interest in, that’s great. Maybe you self-publish and you publish a few hundred copies and that’s it. But if you really want to do a book for your business, make sure it fits all of those criteria.

Taylorr: Yeah. Really sounds like there are two components here. First we have to write something that sticks out and then we have to put the effort in after it’s launched to actually get it into the hands of the right people so that it kind of performs for us.

Linda: Absolutely.

Taylorr: And this was in a previous conversation that you and I had, but there’s an analogy I’d like you to share that you shared with me that I thought was really valuable, it kind of changed my perspective. But you have this kind of cocktail party analogy as it relates to kind of cutting through the noise. Would you mind sharing that for the audience?

Linda: Sure. My whole thing is about; you have to get above the noise. And if you think about the market out there as being a cocktail party, pre-covid; where there are hundreds and thousands of people, everybody’s talking at once. So, you want to get heard, you could try talking louder and slower and screaming and you might be able to do that for a few minutes, but you’re going to get hoarse and nobody’s going to want to listen to you. You can go away quietly and say, I’m not going to do this, in which case no one will hear you. Or you can kind of figure out how to get heard above the noise. 

And you do that by zigging where everybody else is zagging and kind of figuring out where do I need to be? Do I need to be in a smaller cocktail party where there are less people there? Do I need to do something that makes me stand out and look different? So, that’s really what you have to focus on because the competition, and again, you mentioned TikTok, that there’s TikTok and there’s Twitter and there’s Facebook and there’s LinkedIn and there are all kinds of other; every day there’s a new social media platform or whatever. But depending on where your audience is, you need to be on those places too. Standing out. 

If you’re talking to Gen Zs, you probably don’t want to be on Facebook. If you’re talking to business people, you probably want to be on LinkedIn, so it depends on where you are. But you need to be thinking about how am I going to be different? Because you can be the best in the world at what you do, but if people aren’t finding you and talking about you and making the assumptions, hey, you ought to go check out what she’s saying or what he’s saying. It doesn’t matter how good you are, you have to stand out above the noise.

Austin: Yeah, that analogy is amazing. So, I have this visualization in my head of being in a giant cocktail party, right? And I’m trying to get a message out there, it seems to me that the approach that I would take is you start talking to people one-on-one and build a relationship, see what they’re all about, see if we can make them laugh, do the things to become likable, right? And I think that intuition is accurate because, ultimately relationships are the name of the game in this space. However, I also think that it’s slow, you know? 

And so, for somebody that is maybe considering going down this path and might be thinking about what would need to happen for them to actually make their book launch successful, would you suggest to them that the way that they go about that would start with the one-on-one interactions with people and then you start building a crowd? Or do you know of ways that you can immediately attract a group’s attention and the clap in a busy room of people and see if everybody starts clapping with you, sort of trick in a live event? Is there an ancillary to that in the book world?

Linda: That’s a great question. I think you have to do both. You have to start by building relationships and you get people to talk about you, but not relationships with everybody. You’re at the cocktail party, you don’t want to just go down the line and look at everybody, you want to look at who the key people are. If there are 500 people in a room, you don’t want to talk to 500 people; maybe there are 10 or 20 you want to talk to. And those are the influencers, if you’re in business, they might be contacts and they might be clients or prospective clients or referrers or people who can connect you with people. 

So, you look for who the important people are and identify them and start to build the relationships. And if you’re doing it on a marketing platform, you do it online as well, you start following them on whatever social media is appropriate, you start interacting with them, you start building a base. And there’s something called social proof, which is that you show up in the right places at the right time. So, you’re at the right party and you may not want to be at that huge party, you may decide at the real place you want to be is across the street where there are significantly less people, but they’re more interesting people from your perspective. 

So, your goal; we’ve all seen this where people say, oh, I’m going to go out and network and their goal is to capture, in the old days, capture as many business cards as they could. Then what are you going to do with it, right? But you’re better off meeting five really interesting people who can help you, and maybe they have a podcast, maybe they have a blog, maybe they’ve written a book, maybe they can get you speaking opportunities. You’re better off with that than getting a hundred names that are, who knows who they are. So, you do that.

But you want to build your platform whether you’re publishing by yourself, if you’re going to publish with a commercial publisher, they will insist you have a platform. So, where are you speaking, where are you publishing, in terms of where are you posting things, where are you connected? Who do you know? That kind of thing. So, you want to start doing that kind of in conjunction with creating a book. And so, when the book comes out, it’s not like, oops, here we are, let’s just unveil everything it wants. And you also want to tell people, a book, whether you do it yourself or you do it with a commercial publisher, it doesn’t happen overnight. 

Even from the minute that you say, Hey, I’m done writing it. There’s a production time and time to get it out there. That’s not sit back and put your feet up. That’s where you say, I need to do some work. I need to tell people the book is coming. I need to get the cover of the book and say, Hey, here’s the book cover and I’m the author of the forthcoming book. So, you need to own the fact that you’re the author and start telling people and start building all of that buzz long before the book gets out there and it’s physically available.

Taylorr: Yeah, that’s great advice. I’m curious, once the book is launched, from your own marketing background, what do you see the most successful people do? Let’s take an assumption that this is the first book somebody has written, maybe they don’t have any at-bats prior to this to kind of bolster their launch of another book. So, let’s say somebody’s starting from ground zero and they have a book now and they want to start marketing it, getting it out there. What are some of the things you’ve seen that go really well for people when it’s time to start promoting it?

Linda: I have seen some people who’ve done some incredible work in what they call building launch teams. Where it’s friends and family and colleagues and friends of friends, et cetera. And they let people know in advance, I’m going to be launching this book, I want you to be part of my team. Obviously, they have to be people who have an interest in the topic. Yeah, you get your mother and your grandmother, but beyond that, you want to have people that say, oh, yeah, I’d like to learn about such and such a topic. 

And they start kind of nurturing this group before the book is out and saying, Hey, we’re going to have a launch party, we’re going to have this happening. I have bonus content and I’m going to give it only to my team. Or I’m going to do a webinar just for you and in return I’d like to have a review. I’d like you to pass this on to other people. Here are some social media posts that you can use. Or, I guess they say the percentage or the likelihood of someone actually posting something about you goes up dramatically if they don’t have to think about it themselves. If you can say, here’s a post for LinkedIn, here’s a post for Facebook, here’s a short audio clip or a video clip you can put on Instagram. 

So, if you do those types of things and you make it easy and then you kind of keep nurturing this community and offering them value, those books have done really well. And some of them are in crowded spaces. So, that’s how the authors stood out, was by continuing to do that. If you’re going to put your book on Amazon, which is really where every, it’s the Google of of books, right? It’s the directory for books. You want to be getting reviews. That’s kind of the currency of the realm in Amazon.

And you want to have at least 50 reviews. Amazon doesn’t pay attention to you unless you’re 50, a hundred starts to get you another level above that, it’s great if you can get more. To get 50 reviews, you probably have to reach out to two or 300 people at least. Because even with people the best of intentions say, Hey, I’m going to write a short review on the book, something happens, they’re busy, they forget, they can’t think about what to write. 

So, if you can help kind of nurture that process, that helps you to stand out and again, just saying you’re an Amazon bestseller for a day or something, yeah, that’s a nice ego thing. But it’s not that so much as it helps to build credibility for the book, so when people go, they look and they find it and they see you and they see the reviews and they don’t all have to be five star reviews, getting a four or three star is actually not bad because it makes people say, Hey, that was an honest review. But you want to get the reviews out there, you want to get people talking about the book and building buzz, and so that’s all extremely important.

Austin: Yeah. Do you feel it’s even possible to have a successful book launch and thereafter book sales without Amazon, at this point?

Linda: Only if you are in a very specific niche area and you don’t really care about commercial sales. So, for example, if you were creating a medical textbook that you were going to put through universities and medical schools or something related to academics like that, you probably would be okay not to do it. But at this point, Amazon, it’s like saying, could we have a search engine and not have Google? You should be there. And whether or not you ever sell dozens or hundreds or thousands of copies, it’s a credibility booster and that’s where people go for books. Do they go to Barnes and Noble? Maybe a little bit. Do they go to some independent stores? Yes. So, you can be in those places as well, but Amazon is really the big gorilla in the room.

Taylorr: Yeah, that makes sense.

Austin: I don’t think I’ve bought a book from anywhere other than Amazon in a long time, so that logically makes sense to me. Anecdotally, that makes sense to me. So, I think, honestly, this leads me to maybe the biggest question that I have for you, Linda. And that’s setting people’s expectations when they write a book. Because I think there are these grandiose ideas sometimes that happen, where the publish it and they will come sort of mentality, to some degree. And maybe the average would be helpful, but even from the perspective, if somebody was working with you and did everything right as it related to the book launch and did all of the work that they possibly could, what should somebody’s realistic expectations be on the outset of that?

Linda: So, I think one of the things I do is I start asking authors, why are you, why are you writing the book? And if it’s like, well, I want to write a book because I think it’s a good thing to do. Okay fine, but give me a little bit more. Well, I really want to write a book and sell a lot of copies. Then we go back and say, is this realistic? If you’re writing the book because you want credibility, because you have an expertise you want to share, because you want to build your business, you want to have something to give to clients and prospects. Okay. Then we say, what does success look like? 

And success to me, yeah, we can run some promotions that will get you to the top of Amazon in a very specific category for a day or two and you can say Amazon bestseller, new book, whatever. And so, that’s an ego thing. But that’s not going to change your business. Really, what is success? Success might be that you are now getting opportunities to speak, right? You work a lot with speakers, now people are saying you’ve written the book, we want to have you as a speaker. And whether that’s paid speaking gigs or it’s speaking for marketing; that might be a successful outcome that you can look for. 

Success might be that you’re getting existing clients calling you again and saying, wow, I just saw you wrote the book. Let’s have a discussion. Or they call you and say, I saw your book and I sent it to so-and-so, you should contact them because they could use you. So, it might be the number of new leads you get. It could be that your social media mentions or follows or whatever go up. But that’s kind of an empty metric. If you’re getting a million followers and they’re in India and they’re not real people, and the tree falls in the forest doesn’t make a sound, right?

So, I am less concerned with you getting millions and millions of followers that are liking something, then you’re getting the right people. So, again, if we think about the cocktail party with a thousand people, but across the street is a cocktail party with a hundred executives or 50 executives and they all are people who you should know and they should know you. Walk out of the big party and go to the smaller one and be the big fish in the small room and also do what you need to do to make sure that you are getting their attention, following up with them. So, I like to set success that you may sell some copies, you may not, depending on what your topic is and where we are in the world, et cetera, but it’s not about number of copies sold, it’s about what the book does for you and your business moving you forward.

Taylorr: Heck, yeah, those are brilliant expectations. Kind of on that note, I think this is a nice segue into one of our other questions. We talked a little bit about marketing the book, having a launch party, getting it out to your list, going to different cocktail parties as it were, to play on that analogy. And I think this next question also ties back to a point you made earlier, and this is why the book is so important to be integral to your business, rather than an offshoot of it, otherwise it can act as a distraction when you’re selling other things. You kind of want it to be a bundle of sorts, right? 

If you’re already a speaker, you publish a book; you don’t want the book to be so off topic from your speaking that you can’t ever mention it again. And so, as it relates to somebody’s sales process, let’s say, and the continuing conversation of the book, let’s assume, I don’t know, we’re six months after the launch and it’s up there. How do you find people continue making it a part of the conversation and their sales process?

Linda: That’s a great question. So, I think one of the things you have to do is understand that you kind of have these cycles where you’ll get some attention and it’ll drop and then you have to start with something new. I have one client who’s written a couple of books, I’ve worked with him on two, and he comes back every so often and says, here’s something that’s going on in the news and that relates to my prior book, which talked about such and such, you ought to go check this out. 

So, you need to kind of tie-in to what’s going on, whether it’s in your market, whether it’s something in the news, something that’s happening right now and kind of let things go for a while, then say, hey, just a reminder. This presumes that you have books that are evergreen. If you wrote a book about the 2020 election, it’s going to have a certain life cycle. And if you write a book about COVID, it’s going to have a certain life cycle, but if you’re writing about leadership or team building or organizational development or IT, or the future of climate change or whatever, those books have a long shelf life and you just have to tie back into what’s happening. 

So, you don’t want to do it continuously and burn people out, but you want to kind of maybe give it a little bit of a lull and start back up again and say, Hey, I haven’t talked to you in a while, just want to let you know. This is basically the gist of what you’re saying. This is happening in the world right now and it ties exactly what I said in my previous book. So, there are ways to kind of keep things fresh, but you have to look for that, it’s not going to come to you. So, you have to kind of go out and look and say, where can we insert ourselves here and be part of the discussion.