Hi, you're listening to gift biz on rapt episode 93,
Just virtue of having the book.
It sets you apart from the competition.
It sets you apart from everyone.
Hi, this is John Lee,
Dumas of entrepreneur on fire,
and you're listening to the gift of biz unwrap.
And now it's time to light it up.
Welcome to gift bears on wrapped your source for industry specific
insights and advice to develop and grow your business.
And now here's your host,
Sue Mona height.
Before we get into the show,
I have a question for you.
Do you know that you should be out networking,
but you just can't get yourself to do it because it's
scary. Are you afraid that you might walk into the room
and not know anybody or that you're going to freeze?
When you get up to do that infamous elevator speech,
where you talk about yourself and your business?
Well, I'm here to tell you that it doesn't need to
be scary.
If you know what to do,
help you with this,
I would like to offer you a coffee chat for the
price of buying me a cup of coffee.
We can sit down and I'll tell you everything that I
know about networking and how I have personally built two multi-six
figure businesses,
primarily through networking to learn more about this opportunity.
Just go over to Bitly forward slash network Ninja.
That's B I T dot L Y network Ninja.
And now let's move on to the show.
Hi, there it's Sue and welcome to the gift biz unwrapped
podcast, whether you own a brick and mortar shop sell online
or are just getting started,
you'll discover new insight to gain traction and to grow your
business. And today I have joining us,
Tom Corson,
Knowles of TCK publishing.
Tom is a serial entrepreneur blogger international bestselling author.
He started his first business at age 13,
manufacturing, sad lamps out of his father's garage.
By the time he graduated from Indiana university Kelley school of
business, he was earning a full-time income from his first successful
business, which he had started out of his dorm room.
Tom then decided to share the keys to becoming a financially
independent entrepreneur through his books,
videos, and seminars.
And today he teaches a new and established authors and writers
how to achieve incredible success by writing and selling eBooks on
Amazon Kindle.
Welcome to the show,
Tom, Thanks for your time.
And she was great to be here.
I Like to start out by having you describe an ideal
motivational candle.
It just gives our listeners a little bit of a different
insight into who you are.
So if you were to describe your ideal motivational candle,
what color would it be and what would be the quote
on the candle?
So it would be blue because that's my favorite color.
And the quote,
be just take the next step.
I think that's the crucial thing in life.
It's like be present in the moment.
And I see so many people,
for example,
like with writing a book and you feel like a big
project. So they'll think about,
you know,
what about step 97?
What about after I get my book published and after I
get publicity and after all this and write their thinking so
far ahead in the future that they forget to just take
that next step and to focus their full attention in the
present moment to get the best results possible with what they're
working on.
Right. I would almost combine that with also just taking action
because so many people just like you were saying,
we're looking at those steps that are so far down the
road, and it seems like such a distant goal.
If you just look and take action in the immediate moment,
like you're saying it's all those little steps that build up
to something great.
Absolutely true.
All right.
So as we were talking a little bit in our pre
chat, we've had a couple of our listeners already write books,
but I think a lot of people don't really see in
our area of gifting,
baking, crafting,
making how publishing could apply to them.
So I'd really like to start there.
What do you see as the value of writing a book
for an artistic crafty type business?
Yeah, that's a great question.
So, I mean,
there's so much value there.
I think really it comes down to understanding your business,
understanding your customer and understanding how are you going to grow
your business,
right? So for example,
if you're a jewelry maker,
anyone in the jewelry business knows that there's a big difference
between a diamond necklace and a diamond necklace with a story
behind it.
The one with the story about,
you know,
where the diamond was found and how it was cut just
right for the certain shape of that stone and who wore
it before.
And three,
any kind of story around that piece is going to dramatically
increase the value for it.
And sometimes the pieces going to sell for tens of millions
of dollars,
largely because of the story that same principle applies to you,
to you as the entrepreneur,
to you as the creative spirit and to your business.
When you have a business with a story around it,
when you have an artist with a story around it,
it becomes much more valuable in the marketplace because it becomes
much more unique.
People share stories.
And the number one marketing tool in the world is word
of mouth.
And any business word of mouth is most likely going to
be your biggest long-term source of sales and source of revenue
for your business.
And so by having a great story,
by having a book around what you do,
it helps make it easier for your audience to share your
message with other people.
When a customer comes in to your bakery and buys the
cupcake every day in the same customer who buys cookies everyday,
and then they read your book and they love it so
much and they love your story.
So once they start to share your book and hand it
out to other people that is a great form of marketing
for your business.
So that's just one of the ways that having a book
can dramatically increase the reach of your business and your growth.
So what I'm hearing,
cause that's taking it actually a whole different angle than I
was initially thinking,
because you're saying almost an autobiography about why you as an
artist, let's on with the jewelry idea as an artist got
into and the passion for what their art is,
be a jewelry making or whatever it is,
right versus,
and I guess this could be another topic for a book
versus how do you actually start a business if you're a
jewelry designer.
So it could take on many facets.
There's so many different ways you can write a book and
so many different types of books you can write,
but it doesn't really matter so much.
So the sad truth is that most people who buy books,
don't actually read them to the end.
So that's just the truth of the world.
But If I start,
I have to finish.
Yeah. I love reading.
So I read a ton of books,
but most people,
you know,
over 50%,
won't finish the book and that's okay.
That's just the numbers,
right? Business is a numbers game.
But by just virtue of having the book,
it sets you apart from the competition,
it sets you apart from everyone else.
Think of,
you know,
like in the baking business,
right? Think of the people who you think are the best
bakers, the ones with the most publicity,
the ones where the biggest businesses,
the ones that everyone knows who are those people and what
are they done?
And you look at them and I would say probably every
single one of them has a book published or a recipe
book or something like that,
or an autobiography just by virtue of having a book,
regardless of whether it's an autobiography or a cookbook or how
to start a jewelry business.
It doesn't really matter what the book is about so much.
It's just the fact that they have the book that sets
them apart dramatically.
Okay. Yeah.
That makes a lot of sense.
And we talk often about people who are bakers or in
jewelry or whatever,
how are you making yourself different from another person who is
in the same field?
And a lot of it is the design,
the quality of the product,
and obviously who you are,
because that goes to your topic about having a book about
your story.
And then now you're also talking about a level of credibility.
You're setting yourself apart,
almost bringing yourself to another tier of professionalism,
if you will,
because you're published now in your industry.
Absolutely. Yeah.
You're not just another local mom and pop shop with nothing
special, right?
Like once you have that book out,
you become,
Oh my gosh,
you're, you know,
you're this local business with this book about you and what
you do in your business.
Like, that's so amazing.
It's so unique.
And it gives people that story to share.
You talked about like by reality in the internet age,
what makes something viral?
Well, what makes something,
if I was a good story,
right? And so when you'd go through that process of writing
your book,
regardless of what kind of book it is,
you're creating a story and you're,
you're sharing information and you're honing your ideas and you're getting
crystal clear on who you are and what you offer and
the value offer and what makes you unique.
And just by going through that process,
even if you never had a book published at end of
the day to sell just by going through that process of
writing it and creating it helps you get crystal clear on
who you are and what you stand for,
what your values are.
And that too can give you the confidence to go out
there and grow the business and make more sales and share
your story more.
Well, that's an interesting point,
even if you're just going through the actions and you don't
actually publish it,
you're being more clear within yourself.
However, I like to hear people taking full action.
And if you've written a book,
you might as well publish it,
right. I'm thinking of a,
my audience right now.
And they're saying,
well, this sounds a little daunting.
Like how in the world would I publish a book?
Talk to us a little bit about people that you've worked
with in terms of,
are there personalities that you need to have to write a
book? Or what do you do if,
if, if we've convinced people now that they should consider it,
let's sell them on the fact that they actually personally themselves
could do this.
Anyone can write a book.
You know,
I've taught over 40,000
people how to write,
publish, and market their books and my online courses.
And I've had students ranging from 12 years old to,
in their nineties.
And one of my students has been very,
very successful as he's 17 years old today,
he started publishing his first book when he was 14 and
he outsells Donald Trump on Amazon,
no way he's selling a ton of books every single month.
So it's not about how old you are or how experienced
you are.
It's really like with anything in life.
Like if you want to get a result,
you have to take the action to get that result.
If you want to open a bakery,
there are certain steps you have to take,
you have to find a location,
you have to sign a lease,
you have to do these basic things.
And so I think it's the same thing with a book.
And so,
you know,
it's the problem is that it feels daunting when you go
into, I remember like before I wrote my first book,
I thought it was just,
I would never be an author.
There's no way I could ever write a book.
I mean,
for me,
like writing a paper and high school or in college,
that seemed like a huge task.
And like,
there was no ever going to write a book,
but the truth is,
if you just set your side 15 minutes a day,
30 minutes a day to work on it,
most people can get that book done in 90 days.
Oh, that is one of my questions.
So you're thinking this can be a three month project.
Absolutely. But the thing is you have to commit to it
every day.
And even if it's just five to 10,
15 minutes a day,
because in my experience,
the kind of thing where if you start and you work
on it for a month and then you take a week
off or two weeks off when you come back to it
and you've forgotten most of what you were working on and
all the great ideas you had and all the next steps
you had.
And so what happens is kind of like having one foot
on the brake and one foot on the gas,
that's when you have this project that people will say,
you know,
it took me three years or five years or 10 years
to write the book.
It's not really true.
Right. It probably took them about 90 days to write the
book. They just spent the other several years procrastinating and putting
it off and having to backpedal because they forgot what they
were working on before and so on.
Right. If you're starting a book,
my guess is the first thing you have to do is
know what you're going to write about,
but there's other layers to a tooth there's writing and then
there's getting it out there and then there's marketing.
Right? So there's all of this.
And I don't know if those are the only three buckets.
Am I missing anything with those three buckets?
Yeah. I mean,
I think that the make funds are the writing publishing and
marketing. Those are the main business components,
right? And so if you're going to be successful as an
author, in terms of sales and royalties and revenue,
you have to either be yourself or have a team who
can master those three areas of writing,
publishing and marketing.
Okay. So this starts to give us a little bit of
structure around the concept.
So if gift business owners you are considering,
or we've put the idea in your head of possibly writing
a book,
so there's three things there's writing,
there's publishing and there's marketing,
which helps us break this down a little bit.
So the first thing obviously is writing it,
how do you start writing?
Do you just take a piece of paper and a pen,
or what do you do?
So I'll walk you through my creative process and that I
teach and it's worked for a lot of people.
So first thing I do is just brainstorm.
It's like total right-brain creativities.
The whole process is kind of this swing between the right
brain creativity and the left brain analytical thinking.
So it all starts with creativity.
So what I do is I just take a pen and
paper, a notebook,
and just jot down every single book idea I could possibly
have. So I'll ask myself questions like,
you know,
what am I an expert in what stories do I have
to share?
What expertise do I have to share with the world?
What information or ideas that I'd love to leave behind,
to leave as a legacy.
And so you ask these ideas and that'll help you come
up with all these different ideas for books.
And most people get 20,
30, 40 different book ideas when they do this.
Once you have that list of ideas,
that's when you want to go and switch afterwards to the
left brain,
analytical thinking and think about,
okay, I have all these great book ideas you have.
What is the number one idea you really want to focus
on right now?
You know,
if you only had 90 days left to live and you
had to leave one book behind is your legacy,
what would that be?
And so when you found that book that you're so passionate
about, you're excited about then one you really want to work
on and get it done and get it out there to
the world.
That's when you go through and you have to start brainstorming,
what's going to be in that book.
So that's when you take your idea.
So let's say you're going to do a cupcake cookbook.
So then you can take your ideas.
Okay. What are all the great recipes you have?
What are all the great ideas you have?
What is going to be the first chapter,
second chapter and so on.
And you start to just come up with all the different
ideas you want to include in your book.
And then once you've got to that right brain creative process,
but again,
you're gonna switch to the left brain and start analyzing that
and thinking,
okay, but what is the best structure?
How would I want to organize these ideas to make it
flow the best way for the reader?
And so the whole idea here is you're not trying to
get it.
Perfect. SU you're just trying to get enough of a plan
in place that when you actually sit down at your computer
to write,
you know,
exactly what you're going into every single day.
So you're never staring at a blank string,
wondering, what am I doing here?
People talk about writer's block.
It's really because they haven't prepared and they don't know what
they're going to be writing about.
So as soon as you have that outline done,
then you can sit down at a computer every single day
and you would know exactly what the next thing you're going
to write about is Got it.
So your first step was brainstorming what the topic should be.
And I do have a question for you here.
You were really talking internally.
What are you passionate about?
What are the different types of topics that you want to
present out to the world?
Do you also look at who would be reading this book
and what are their needs?
Do you look from that standpoint too,
to make sure that you're writing to fulfill a need or
as an author,
are you just writing to get your voice out to the
world? Absolutely.
Yes. So Margaret research is actually a huge process of what
we do actually have a whole software suite of tools for
authors to help them with that.
So it's actually what I would do normally after that first
brainstorming process.
So once you have the 40 ideas and you boiled it
down to one or two or three that you're really passionate
about, and that's when I would normally go and do the
market to find out,
is there a market for this?
How big is it?
And where are the opportunities?
So some great tips on market research.
You can just go to amazon.com.
That's a place to do it,
and just type in keywords related to what you're working on.
So if you're doing,
you know,
jewelry, design book,
you can type in jewelry design,
and you want to find the best selling books in that
topic on Amazon.
And then you want to check them out.
So you want to look at things like what are their
title and subtitle,
and then jot down like the key words and key phrases
that they're using.
That really clarify the brand of that book that really make
their message stick out to you and make it memorable.
So write down the keywords and key ideas they have and
read their book descriptions again,
looking for what are the key ideas,
key words that they're sharing that really resonate with their audience
or resonate with you.
And you can take a look at their book,
cover designs to you.
So you can model the successful elements of the book cover
types. So if you like a certain font or you like
a certain color or a certain feeling of the cover,
jot those down as examples again,
to send to your book cover designer when you get that
point. And then the other thing you can do is look
at all the reviews and read all the reviews,
every single review,
positive reviews and negative reviews for the selling books in your
market, and have a notebook with you and jot down all
the common themes readers say that they love about those books,
whether they hate about those books and what that will do,
as soon as it gives you a crystal clear picture of
who your audience is,
what they appreciate in books in your market and the best
selling books and what they don't like about the bestselling books
in your market,
what they don't like.
Give me some of the biggest insights for you,
because then you can see where the gaps are in the
marketplace. So to give you an example,
I've got a customer wrote a book called unlimited memory,
and we've sold 40,000
plus copies of the book.
In the past two years,
it's been a runaway bestseller.
It's been number one on Amazon for over a year and
a half now.
And the reason is when you look at the reviews of
all the top memory books on Amazon,
they were like 300,
400, 500 pages non-fiction books.
And there was a little bit of how to,
but it was mostly like stories and pros and so forth.
And so he came in,
my client,
came in with 150 page short book straight to the point,
how to action step every single step of the way,
but he's a world memory experts,
and he has a credibility as well.
And so it just blown every other book out there on
Amazon, out of the water.
The reason is because it filled a gap in the marketplace.
What you want to do is find where's that gap in
your market,
and you can come in and share your unique messaging,
your unique voice,
and a unique way.
It's really going to resonate with your ideal customer.
And that's what you do through the Amazon research right after
you've brainstormed a little bit.
I haven't ever looked at Amazon in this way.
Is there a way to see how popular a book has
been number of purchases or downloads or anything like that,
or you're just guessing?
Absolutely. So,
okay. So if you go to Amazon,
there's going to be,
what's called an Amazon sales ranking.
Any book paid on Amazon for you books or print books.
So if you scroll down the page to product details,
it will tell you the Amazon best sellers rank book I'm
looking at now is 28,647
free in the Kindle store.
You want to look at the books that have paid ranking.
So should say like 28,000
paid and Kindle store or 28,000
paid and Kindle books.
And that ranking will tell exactly what the sales are.
If you actually use a tool,
I created a calculator that converts Amazon sales,
breaking into the exact amount of sales that that book is
getting each month.
The link for that is just TCK publishing.com/calculator
TCK publishing.com.
So I've talked to,
it's a totally free tool you can use to find out
exactly how many sales,
any book on Amazon is getting for eBooks or for print
books. Oh,
that's super,
really great information,
Tom, thank you so much.
I appreciate all of this.
And so as someone's getting started,
and I think really for the sake of this interview,
the only thing we're going to be really focusing on is
the writing,
because clearly there's a lot more,
and I know you'll be able to share how we can
get more information from you on the publishing and then the
marketing standpoint.
So someone goes through and they do their research.
And I will ask you this question.
If someone has an idea for a book and they see
that other people have done something similar,
would that dissuade you from doing the book at all?
No, absolutely not.
You know,
there are millions and millions of books out there.
And so I think what you want to do is you
want to make sure that your book is unique and there's
lots of ways for a book to be unique.
It doesn't have to be better.
It just has to be different.
That's a key element of it.
It has to be different than what's out there and it
has to speak to your audience in a different way.
And so there's lots of ways to do that.
So for one way,
you know,
for like a lot of folks,
you know,
you think of like top chef kind of people they're celebrities.
And so their books are unique because they're unique.
It's not that their books are necessarily the greatest works of
art ever created.
It's just that,
that celebrity,
that brand that they've created,
it makes their book unique.
It makes it a little bit different than everyone else out
there. So if you're not famous yet,
and you don't have that kind of celebrity cache in your
marketplace, what do you want to look at is what are
the other things you can do with your book to make
us stand out?
And so one of the best ways to do that again,
is just go to Amazon and read the reviews and see
where the gaps are in the marketplace.
For example,
like the cookbook market,
there's so many things going on in that market.
There's so many different types of cookbooks.
I don't know if you've ever gone to the library or
a bookstore and brass and cookbooks,
but there are cookbooks with like zero pictures.
And then there's other kinds of cookbooks with 10 pictures per
recipe with like full color and huge pages.
And there's not much text at all.
It says mostly pictures.
There's all different kinds of ways.
You can do a simple cookbook.
And what you want to do is once you figure it
out where the gaps are in the marketplace,
you want to create a brand around you and what you
do. So what is your brand?
What is your business,
Stanford? What is your message?
What are your values and how do you take all of
that, that embodiment of your art and your work and create
a brand around that.
And then once you have that clear idea of,
okay, what is your brand going to be?
What is your message going to be?
Then you create the book from there.
So everything you do comes from that main idea,
which is what is your brand,
what is your message?
And so that's going to determine your book,
title, your cover design,
how you write the book,
how you structure the book,
that's all going to come from,
what is your brand?
What is your message that you want to leave with people?
And so that's going to determine what kind of book you
end up actually creating That's wonderful information.
And I agree with you.
I was thinking that as you were talking through and was
great visualization also of especially cookbooks,
because there are millions out there.
I have many of them,
but in terms of imagery of the book,
and you know,
some people have lots of images,
but they're hand drawn.
They're not necessarily the actual photos.
I also comes to mind Rachel Ray with her first books
when she was just coming up the ranks and getting in
the social eye,
if you will,
her 30 minute meals.
So it can be around a special way.
You prepare sticking with the cooking theme.
So really good information and just making sure you're branding it
as your own and gift his listeners.
Again, I wanted Tom to talk to this point,
I was hoping you were going to say exactly what you
said, because just because someone out there might have already done
a book similar to what you're thinking of,
you can make it totally different,
unique and your own.
Absolutely. The other thing about it too,
Sue, is that as a local business owner,
when people come into your shop,
they don't care if your cookbook is similar to something else
out there,
like, cause it's unique to you that you're the local artist,
you're the local author.
And so pretty much any kind of book that you create
as long as it's a good quality,
they're going to be really excited about it.
Because again,
it's got that unique story around it.
Someone in LA,
on the other coast is not going to get the same
kind of reception with your customers as you are because you're
there, you're there with them.
And that creates a new story around it.
Right? And I would suggest that this getting back to the
whole business intent behind a book too,
it's not just getting revenue from a book,
which is what you're so good at Tom,
but it's also heightening the image of your whole brand.
If you're a store,
if you're a designer where craft shows,
even if you have a book you're looked at in a
different way,
definitely one final thing.
Now just on the writing,
then we'll go out a little bit into the future of
what someone could expect.
But is there anything,
if someone started writing any direction,
you would give them,
is there a special tool they should be using?
Is there a special format they should be writing in,
you know,
more of the technical type thing?
Is there any advice there?
Well, I mean,
for technical,
you can use any kind of word processor.
So I use Microsoft word.
It's the most basic,
simple software tool.
Pretty much every computer has it.
You can use anything because there's free tools out there.
You can use it.
It really doesn't matter what you write the book in,
just use whatever tool,
you know?
So if you,
if you're familiar with a certain tool,
use that if you're not familiar with any tool and just
open up any kind of word processor,
you can get your hands on and just learn it,
learning how to use the tools and what's going to help
you be most successful.
So for example,
the find and replace feature,
if every single one of your commas is got an extra
space behind it or something like that,
you can just find and replace the extra spaces and replace
them instead of going through and hand typing in all the
edits and your manuscripts.
So understanding how to use your tool will save you a
massive amount of time.
It's not really what tool you pick.
Okay. And then,
so you don't really need to be worried about formatting or
anything right now it would just be getting the content on
paper in an organized way,
following the outline as you've suggested earlier.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean formatting important,
but it doesn't have to be done until after the book
is written.
However, I do have some free formatting tools like templates from
accept word.
I recommend because by having the template in there,
I call it pre-writing.
So when you fill out the template,
you're going to have like 800 to 2000 words already written
in your book from the title page and the copyright notice
and the table of contents and each of the chapter headings
in your author,
bio and everything in that book already created.
So there's no content in the book,
but the shell is there and the pages are there.
I find having that helps a lot and really helps motivate
you because you look at the word and you've already got
a thousand words done and you haven't started writing the book
yet. It's kind of a nice feeling.
So you can check out and download this free templates@ebookpublishingschool.com,
Giving us a lot of goodies here.
I wasn't expecting that this is awesome.
In terms of length of a book,
what are you suggesting there?
What, like what's the smallest you could possibly do to be
officially a book?
That's a good question.
So it really varies from every different field.
So, I mean,
we've published books as low as like 40 pages,
like 7,000
words to a hundred thousand plus words size.
Isn't really a big deal.
I mean,
for printing,
like you can,
like the minimum is 24 pages.
So it has to be at least 24 pages,
but you have to realize too that there's going to be
the front matter in the back matter of the book,
the title page and the blank pages for offset printing and
all that stuff.
But 24 page book would only be like 10 pages of
actual content in the book.
I think everyone's kind of write a book bigger than that.
You're going to have more information than that,
for sure.
So it's not really about how big the book has to
be. It's just about how much content do you have and
what is the appropriate amount of content for what you're creating.
Again, back to that brainstorming process,
when you're brainstorming all the content that's going to be in
your book,
make sure you're clear on the brand of the book and
what is the promise you're delivering.
So if you're writing a nonfiction book people,
and a lot of cases,
they're gonna be buying that book because they want certain Results,
right? So if they're buying your cupcake cookbook,
it's because they want to make great cupcakes.
And so you want to make sure that your book delivers
on its promise and that everything inside of that book delivers
on your promise to your reader,
to your customer.
And so don't include fluff,
don't include extra stuff that doesn't actually deliver on your brand
promise to your reader.
Okay. Perfect.
Does it fall in line kind of with online courses,
I've heard a lot lately that pricing online courses,
isn't the length just because you make something longer in time
to go through a course doesn't mean it should be more
expensive. It has to do with the value of the result
at the end.
Is that the same thing with writing a book?
I would say somewhat,
but it's a big difference.
I mean,
for online courses like prices range from free to a hundred
thousand dollars,
right? With books,
prices range from free to in most cases,
$30. I know there's,
some books are 60 and 90,
$150, like,
you know,
textbooks and also certain kinds of business books like financial and
tax stuff and legal stuff.
But the vast majority of books are going to be between
free and $30.
So you don't have that wide of a range to choose
from. So,
I mean,
the pricing is really it's based on your market.
It's based on your brand,
it's based on your distribution.
It's based on a whole bunch of different factors.
And when I look at pricing,
I'm always thinking of how do we get the most sales
and the most profits and especially for your business.
Because again,
like if you're,
let's say you're a business that's getting leads from your book.
Like maybe a,
I don't know,
like an accountant or attorney or people who,
you know,
like the main purpose for their book is not just to
get rotated in the book,
but actually get new customers for their business,
new clients.
But then they don't really care about how much royalties they
make because every client can earn them thousands and thousands of
dollars. And so what they're trying to do is maximize the
backend sales from their book.
And so you have to figure out,
you know,
what are your business goals?
And then how do you want to price your book based
on your business school?
Agreed. So in the very beginning,
why you starting to write this book in the first place?
What are you trying to achieve?
And then you run down this path and hammering home.
Again, it doesn't have to be a long book to be
$30 and a long book might only be worth $7.
So that,
isn't the point.
It's the content and the quality of the content in the
book. Tom,
let's move forward just a little bit.
And I know we can't get into a lot of detail
here, but let's move on.
So you've written the book,
just give us a little bit of an overview of the
publishing and then the marketing sections.
What types of activities occur in both of those phases?
Yeah, I mean,
so for publishing,
you've got the choice between traditional publishing,
which is you go out,
you find a literary agent and they try to pitch your
book through a traditional publisher.
And it's this long drawn out miserable process for most authors
and less than less than one in a thousand authors ever
actually get a traditional book deal.
So I'm just going to assume that the vast majority of
people, 99.9%
listening will never get that deal.
And it's not probably,
they're probably not the route you want to go.
I mean,
my experience,
you earn a lot more money,
self publishing or working with an independent publisher because instead of
getting 8% royalties or 15% royalties from a traditional publisher,
you can get 70% royalties.
When you self publish your books,
you're going to get a dollar or two for selling a
$25 hard cover book.
You can earn $2 and 60 cents for selling a $2
nine, 9 cent ebook.
And so since the price is 10 times less,
you're going to have to sell a lot more volume and
earn a lot more royalties.
So I think self publishing is the way to go.
If you look at the shifts in the industry,
it just makes more and more sense every single day.
And so in the self publishing process,
there's a lot that goes into,
we don't really have time to cover everything,
but I think the key is you want your book to
be as professional as a traditionally published book would be.
You don't want the reader to think this is obviously self-published
because it's got a bad cover or got typos in it
or something like that.
Like you want to create a professional quality book and you
can do that.
I mean,
it's so easy today.
You can go on sites like upwork.com
and you can find literally thousands of editors there who have
been trained at that shoot in New York publishing companies,
you can find cover designers.
Who've worked for huge publishing firms before you can find proofreaders.
You've worked for a huge publishing companies before.
So you can find massively experienced people out there at really
reasonable prices to do the work for you to create a
professional book at the end of the day.
So I think that's really the key.
And then the other key with self publishing is you have
to get the distribution.
You have to sure your book is available to customers in
the right place where your customers are actually going to be.
And so the number one distribution platform is probably know this,
but amazon.com
and the us Amazon sells over 70% of all the eBooks
and in the UK is over 80% of all the eBooks
are sold on Amazon and eBooks are really aware that there's
the most growth in the market right now.
In fact,
physical books are declining like $10 billion globally over the next
several years.
And so eBooks is where the growth is and eBooks is
where you're going to make most of your profits most of
the time for most self-published authors.
And so I really learned as much as you possibly can
about how to get better distribution for eBooks.
And how do you market your eBooks online?
Can you do both?
We were talking before about having a book in your shop
that you've published.
Can you have it as an ebook and then also hard
copy? Yeah.
So I'd recommend for most folks,
if you're serious about your book and you really want to
get it out to as many people as possible,
depending on the type of book it is.
I mean,
you want to do an ebook for sure,
like an ebook in every case,
except there's certain things you can't do any of it for
like a journal where you have,
where readers have to like type in or write in content.
You can't do eBooks for that,
but other books,
you would always do an ebook for it because it's the
cheapest. And you're generally going to get the most sales.
And then second would be the print book.
So you can definitely have one of those in your store
and your local libraries and other local shops.
And then if it makes sense for your book to do
an audio book as well,
digital audio books are booming and sales right now.
And that can be another great opportunity,
but, you know,
for something like a cookbook,
it wouldn't make sense to do an audio book,
but other books,
when it makes sense to do it can be a great
tool as well.
Yeah. And that can be an extension.
All you have to do is record it.
And it's already written,
and I love audio books when it's your own voice,
the author's voice,
because they know how they meant to say the words and
read the words and all of that.
So audio is a great option as well.
And then of course,
finally marketing people have to know about your book.
How does that work A lot to it?
I think the key that we work with with our clients
is marketing is a long-term game.
It's a lot,
people talk about like a book launch,
you know,
and you market your book really heavily for three months or
six months.
And then I forget about it,
smarter strategy.
If you're in a business to be long-term successful is to
focus on long-term marketing.
And so to do that,
you have to really focus on marketing that you enjoy doing,
that you love doing.
And then you are either really good at,
or you will get good at it by guessing because you
love it so much.
You're gonna keep practicing it.
And so that all comes down to what are your strengths?
And so if your strength is for example,
speaking, so maybe you want to do podcast shows like this.
Maybe you can do public speaking.
You can speak at your local chamber of commerce.
You can speak at events and conferences and so forth and
do webinars and radio and TV is your strength and use
your skills to get the message out there consistently.
And if you do that year after year after year,
you're going to be successful with your marketing.
You look at companies like Coca-Cola,
they're still advertising after a hundred years.
Like why are they still running ads after a hundred years?
Because they know it works.
If you're going to be successful with marketing,
you have to do it consistently year after year after year.
And in my experience,
if you don't love what you're doing,
it's going to be hard to do it year after year
after year.
So for authors who are saying,
I hate Twitter,
I can't stand it.
If you hate Twitter and you can't stand it,
then that should probably not be a part of your marketing
because you're not going to be consistent with it unless you
outsource it and hire a team members to do it.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
But in terms of what you,
as the creator should do for marketing,
it's really focusing on what are your strengths and how do
you leverage your strengths to maximum effect to get the most
exposure and reach for what you're doing.
Perfect. All right.
One further question here.
And I don't think marketing obviously would be very open-ended I'm
getting to the point about investment.
How much does it really cost to create a book?
So not talking about the marketing again,
because depending on your plan,
that range could vary so much,
but in terms of just writing it and getting it up
in published form and possibly some physical,
I don't know if you want to address the costs to
that as well,
but what are we looking at in terms of a range
of prices?
Well, I will tell you,
you know,
my first ebook I published for $5,
no kidding.
I didn't,
I didn't have a lot of money at the time.
So I went the budget route.
So I got a book cover design from fiverr.com.
This is a few good designers on fiverr.com,
but I think you have to go through about 60 or
70 folks on there to find a really good designer there.
So if you have the time you can do that,
you can hire someone more upscale if you've got the budget
for that.
So it can be done really cheaply.
That's what I'm trying to say.
Here's the,
is anybody.
Then you can do this.
I would say on average,
if you want an ebook,
if you want a print book and you want an audio
book and want all three of those things done,
and you want a professional editor,
I would say on average three to $5,000
is a good budget to have to get everything done on
a really professional level.
But you know,
again, it's going to vary from book to book,
project to project based on your skills and your strengths and
your team and so forth.
So it really varies.
But I would say if you budgeted more than $5,000
to get it published,
you're probably overspending in a couple of different areas.
And so what I would recommend is I've got a rule
in business.
I call it the rule of three.
So anytime I'm going to hire someone to do work over
a certain number of threshold and for you,
it might be a hundred dollars or a thousand dollars,
or what have you.
I'm always going to get a minimum of three quotes because
the biggest mistake I see folks making financially as authors is
their friends,
neighbors, niece says they're a cover designer and they can do
a book cover for you.
And you'd say,
Oh, that's amazing.
That'd be great.
And then,
so they do the cover design for you and they send
you a bill for $5,000
and you pay it because you think that's just normal.
And you're basically just getting ripped off.
And there's a lot of folks like that.
Who would you just hire the first person you hear about?
And you don't really do your research into what should the
actual pricing be for a project like this and what is
the actual skill set and how was this person trained?
For example,
like hiring an editor,
I would never hire an editor unless they were trained at
a traditional publishing company or a medium-sized publisher,
or maybe in journalism.
They weren't really well-trained by an editor and staff for years.
You don't want to hire them as an editor because anyone
can fix typos and grammatical mistakes,
but there's a lot more to editing than just fixing typos.
There's a whole lot more to it.
And they wouldn't have learned those skills and those nuances of
the English language,
unless they were really well-trained by professional.
Is there,
when you say that,
what is more to editing?
Is it structure or Well,
so like usage is one of the things which is like,
you know,
how, what words are you using to display your point?
There's so many nuances in that is the market awareness.
So it's understanding who is your reader and is what's in
your book actually coming across of the ideas.
You thought you were communicating your book,
the ones you're actually communicating on paper is the structure of
your book.
Does it make sense?
Is it a structure of your sentences,
your words,
your paragraphs of the chapters,
does that all make sense?
Is it all line up?
Does it carry the reader along in this process where they
get lost in the book?
Or are there places in there where the reader is going
to get confused or lose entrance?
If you confuse your reader or you lose their interest,
they're going to put the book down,
they're going to stop reading.
So you want to create something that's really going to be
compelling. You want to create the kind of book that people
are going to say,
wow, that was an amazing book.
And that's something a great editor can help you create that.
Any experienced editors,
they really don't get that stuff.
And you know,
I've heard so many horror stories of folks hiring editors who
weren't well-trained and really did a really poor job.
I would have never thought about that now,
because you can just put together a book and self-published and
could do it all yourself.
I understand much better now about editing,
what should be happening.
Cause you want those positive reviews on Amazon.
You're putting in the time,
you might as well make sure that your end product is
as professional and as connected with your potential audience as it
possibly could be.
Definitely. Yeah.
So just to give you kind of a visual,
see, when we get a manuscript back for one of my
books or a client's book from a really good editor,
we use Microsoft word and we just track changes in Microsoft
word. And so you can see all the comments and read
almost every single page has more comments than actually fit on
that page.
Like Microsoft word came and display all the comments and edits
in that first pass.
And then,
so you have to open up a tab on the left
side of the page to see all the different comments and
edits in there.
That's how much it should be,
right? It should be a lot.
And it doesn't mean you have to accept everything that the
editor says,
but it means like their job is to be focusing on
the minutia.
I focus on the really tiny details,
catch every little mistake and it takes a really well-trained freshman
to be able to do that.
Wonderful. So interesting.
I love everything we've talked about here,
Tom, cause we've talked about the value of the book for
a business.
The step you have,
the overall three things,
writing, publishing and marketing.
And then we really took a deep dive into writing to
really give us a good feel for what it takes to
actually put together a book.
Now I know you've written how many books,
what's your number at this point 27,
you've written 27.
What is your favorite book that you've written A favorite book?
I wrote it's called secrets of the six-figure author.
And it's all about what is the mindset and the strategies
that you need to use to really be successful as an
author. And I love that book because I've gotten so many
emails from readers just saying it,
it changed their life.
It changed their perspective,
not just as an author,
but in their personal life as well,
and really getting their mindset straight.
Oh, interesting.
And did you record this on audible?
It is an audio book,
but I didn't actually do the audio recording.
I don't really enjoy doing that much of the audio recording.
So I just,
So you hired someone else to do it.
Wonderful. We'll give busy listeners just as you're listening to the
podcast today,
you can also listen to Tom's book and other audio books
with ease.
I've teamed up with audible for you to be able to
get an audio book for free on me if you haven't
done so already,
all you need to do is go to gift biz,
book.com and make a selection.
That's gift biz,
book.com. Okay.
Winding down here,
Tom, I want to offer you to dare to dream.
I'd like to present you with a virtual gift.
It's a magical box containing unlimited possibilities for your future.
So this is your dream or your goal of almost unreachable
Heights that you would wish to obtain.
Please accept this gift and open it in our presence.
What's inside your box.
That's great.
I love it for me.
It's making the world a better place.
You know,
I think the reason I'm so passionate about books and literature
and writing and ideas is because I think good ideas are
what help us as human beings make good decisions.
And it's our decisions that are gonna shape the future of
our lives and future generations and the future of the planet.
And so I just loved the idea,
sharing, great ideas are going to help people make the world
a better place and impact future generations Beautifully said,
and it gets any passions that you have out into the
world. And they'll continue on.
I know you have a lot of resources,
so take it away.
Let us know other things that you have available that we
can investigate other services,
you know,
your course,
all that type of thing.
Give us a little bit of PR on you,
Tom. Yeah,
definitely. So I mean,
if you're excited about everything,
we shared data,
you're ready to write your first book and get it published.
I'd say check out the free video training course@ebookpublishingschool.com.
I'll walk you through the process step by step from getting
your book formatted and published on Amazon and launching your first
book. And there's also at the annual here about the advanced
training course.
If you want detailed step-by-step action guides and everything from writing
your book to getting it published and beyond that's all available
there. The other thing is you can check out the publishing
company and our blog@tckpublishing.com.
There are tons of amazing checklists and resources there for you
for free@tckpublishing.com.
And the other thing is have a podcast show.
So every single week we interview a best-selling author to find
out what's working right now in their business to grow their
income and increase their fan base.
And that's at publishing profits,
podcast.com Give biz listeners.
We have now presented you with yet another way for you
to develop and grow your business.
And probably one that you hadn't thought about before.
I'm a,
mostly when you're in the artist creative world,
you're thinking of selling your products at craft shows and having
them displayed in retail shops or online,
whatever it is,
but here is a brand new way and really unique approach.
And just as Tom is talking about,
this is a great way for you to separate yourself from
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artist stand out.
So I really want you to think about this,
Tom, this is great information that you've shared today.
And again,
something that a lot of people in our industry would not
have thought of.
I really appreciate you joining us here today,
Tom, and may your candle Always burn bright,
thanks so much.
Where are you in your business building journey,
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