What exactly is a blurb? On the episode today we hash out the meaning of a blurb: is it the commentary from another author about your book or the advertising copy for the back cover? Either way, we discuss the value of a blurb and size up the actual role it plays in book sales, and then we dive into what it should ideally look like. Getting serious about asking for a write-up, we talk about what you would more than likely have to do to get a “yes” from a well-known author, pointing out the many years of building relationships and helping out that often precedes the much-desired “yes” response. Of course you might get a positive answer from doing a random, cold ask, but let’s face it, the odds aren’t great. It is so crucial for us authors to keep networking, so tune in today to find out the what, the why and the how of leveraging your connections for blurb gains.
Key Points From This Episode:
- The different approaches to writing a blurb for fiction versus non-fiction books.
- What a fiction blurb should and should not be and what the main objective is.
- Why it’s so difficult for authors to write blurbs about their own books.
- How to avoid giving spoilers when writing blurbs for a series.
- Testing reader response to sales pages and why it’s not really a worthwhile endeavor.
- How blurbs and write-ups from reputable sources can indirectly benefit you.
- The advantage of traditional publishing and the privileged access it automatically gains you.
- Creating and leveraging key connections who can later be approached for a blurb.
- Advice about asking an author to write a testimonial of your book.
- The importance of building relationships in the publishing industry.
- What it takes for influencers to respond to an ask and perhaps agree to it.
- The need for writers to be purposeful about networking and embracing these opportunities.
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
Tim Grahl — https://booklaunch.com/
Tim on Twitter — https://twitter.com/timgrahl
Valerie Francis — https://valeriefrancis.ca/
Valerie on Twitter — https://twitter.com/valerie_francis
The Story Grid Editor Roundtable Podcast — https://valeriefrancis.ca/podcast/
Running Down a Dream — https://www.amazon.com/Running-Down-Dream-Winning-Creative/dp/1936891557
Masquerade Series —
Steven Pressfield — https://stevenpressfield.com/
Ryan Holiday — https://ryanholiday.net/
Shawn Coyne — https://storygrid.com/about/
The Punisher — https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5675620/
Seth Godin — https://www.sethgodin.com/
Ramit Sethi — https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/
Barbara Corcoran — http://www.barbaracorcoran.com/
Shark Tank — https://abc.go.com/shows/shark-tank/about-the-show
Zig Ziglar — https://www.ziglar.com/
Michael Hyatt — https://michaelhyatt.com/
Craft + Commerce — https://conference.convertkit.com/
Nathan Barry on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanbarry
[0:00:00.5] TG: Hello and welcome to the Book Launch Show. My name is Tim Grahl and this week Valerie and I start looking at, well actually it was a little confusing at first. This may be is a, maybe it’s something, lots of writers called different things or maybe it’s a Canadian–American thing, but I thought we were talking about the quotes the other authors give you to put it on the cover of your book. I call those blurbs. Valerie was talking about the advertisement copy for like the back cover or Amazon, which that’s what she calls blurbs.
So anyway, we ended up talking about both things after the confusion was fixed, but I mean it’s an interesting topic. It’s something that we all have to deal with. It’s one of those things that whenever your book’s being published and especially when you’re self-publishing and all of this is 100% up to you, you’ve got to write this marketing copy for your book and it’s really hard because one is if you’re writing fiction, it’s just a little harder, I think to write straight marketing copy for fiction than nonfiction.
The other is, you’re writing about your own book and you’re trying to encapsulate into just, you know, a few paragraphs why people should read your book and catching their interest enough. And then on the other hand, if you’re talking about getting other authors to give he quotes for the cover of your book, that’s a whole other animal that you’ve got to go after and figure out on your own as well. So we ended up talking about both of these. Both of these things are those, like when you’re publishing your book, it’s like a checkmark item. It’s not the biggest deal. It’s one of many things you have to do to publish your book.
But then at the same time, both of them can be overwhelming in their own rights. So we spend this episode talking about those things and working through them and helping Valerie and hopefully by extension you understand how to think through these things and accomplished them.
So let’s jump in and go ahead and get started.
[INTRO]
[0:02:04.0] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the Book Launch Podcast, helping authors launch and market their books.
[EPISODE]
[0:02:04.0] VF: Hey, Tim. How are you today?
[0:02:12.0] TG: Doing fine, Valerie. Yourself?
[0:02:14.0] VF: I’m good, I’m good. Spring has sprung in my part of the world. It makes me very happy. Does that mean it’s gotten above freezing? It was 20 degrees the other day, Celsius, which is a beautiful, beautiful spring day.
[0:02:27.0] TG: Oh, I see it now I have to like Google.
[0:02:30.0] VF: I don’t know what that is in Fahrenheit. No clue.
[0:02:34.0] TG: Well that’s 68 that’s, that’s what it is here in Nashville.
[0:02:37.0] VF: Oh no, it’s, you know, freezing today. But it was warm the other day. I’ll take it. Okay. Before we talk about anything else, we’ve got to talk about back cover blurbs.
[0:02:53.0] TG: You’ve been threatening me with this for a couple of weeks.
[0:02:56.0] VF: I know, and we never seem to get to it. So we’re not going to about homework or any of that kind of stuff until we get into it because otherwise we’re gonna lose another half hour.
[0:03:04.0] TG: No, that’s fine.
[0:03:05.0] VF: So here’s the problem I’m having, or here’s the situation I have. We’ll just deal with Masquerade. So it’s this a novel in 12 parts and I started the series with a series overview and that’s the one I have on my website that sort of, it tells people basically what the story is about. But because it’s in 12 parts, that means that there are 12 different items on say, Amazon, 12 different books and right now they all have the same description, which is not helpful. Right, but it’s a great series overview, but what I need is essentially a back cover blurb for each of the 12 and I really struggle with this and I know a lot of writers do because when I was writing my kids’ books, I must have written those back cover blurbs easily, a dozen times easily, and they, I’m sure it could still be better.
[0:04:02.0] TG: Hold on, when you use the word blurb, I hear getting a like another author, famous person to give a testimonial for the back cover of your book, that does not sound like what you’re talking about?
[0:04:14.0] VF: No. You know when you’re in a bookstore and you flip over or you look at the inside flap, if it’s a hardcover, when you look at the back of the book and you want to try and grab the reader into the book, the book description.
[0:04:28.0] TG: Yeah. What do you call the, the little testimonials from other authors on books, author testimonials. Oh, those are called blurbs. That’s what I’ve always heard them called. I don’t, well I don’t want to get into it. I just, that’s weird. I’ve never heard it. I’ve always heard blurbs are like, like on my book I had a blurb from Steve Pressfield, Ryan Holiday, those.
[0:04:50.0] VF: Right. It’s Canadian English and American English.
[0:04:54.0] TG: Yeah, I was like, I thought for weeks, okay, she just wants to know how to get famous people to give her a blurb for a book.
[0:05:01.0] VF: No, but if you have advice, well, we can talk about that too because that would also be great.
[0:05:07.0] TG: Yeah. Okay. So write the book description for the back of the book, go, I’m ready.
[0:05:14.0] VF: All right. How do I do it? There’s my question.
[0:05:21.0] TG: So this is interesting. I don’t know that I’ve ever written one of these. Most of the books I worked with, their publisher did it and then the self-published authors did it themselves. And then I’ve always gotten other people to write mind after reading it. So like Shawn Coyne wrote the one for Running Down a Dream. And I just edited it. So you know, you’re going to take a different approach, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, right?
So nonfiction would be very much, you know, here’s what your, here’s the problem, here’s what you’re going to learn. It’s basically a shortened sales letter for the book. And the way that I’ve always heard people talk about and of the ones I’ve seen that are useful, they almost read like movie trailers, right? So it’s like setting up the story, setting up the story, setting up the setting, and then just trying to make it as compelling as possible.
So you don’t want to describe the story, you know, this is a story set in such and such time was such and such, whatever. Like it needs to leave again, like a movie trailer where it gives you something of the book while just leaving you wanting more. That doesn’t feel very helpful as I said that though.
[0:06:42.0] VF: Here’s why I think they’re so hard for authors to write them for themselves. And this is just a theory I have. It’s because we’re so close to our own story that it’s really hard to boil it down. One, it’s hard to boil it down to the essentials two, it’s really a sales tool isn’t it?
[0:07:00] TG: It is. It’s a sales tool. But I think the first reason is why it’s harder, right? So I could sell you on reading Jurassic Park, you know what I mean? Like it’s this awesome story that combines science and dinosaurs in a way. And it’s like a thriller. Like I could probably write the, you know, within an hour write good back cover copy for it because it’s not my book and I love the book. But yeah, for your own, you’re so close to it.
The parts that are interesting to you are not usually the parts that are interesting to the reader. One of the things, especially with the current novel I’m working on and then Running Down a Dream, is there were so many different drafts that are all in my head. I don’t think I’ll ever really understand what the final book is. So I don’t know. I mean, and then you have the interesting problem of 12 different ones, which I don’t think you necessarily, cause I’m trying to think like is this a series where you could drop in on book six and be just fine?
[0:08:06.0] VF: No, no, it’s one story but in 12 parts. So you have to start with part one and go all the way through to the end.
[0:08:13.0] TG: So why can’t you just have the basic, the basic like basically the same copy on the back of each one?
[0:08:19.0] VF: Well, I can have that. That’s what I have right now.
[0:08:22.0] TG: Why is that a problem?
[0:08:24.0] VF: Well, I think it’s useful, but to a point. I think I need to have in addition to that private, maybe not instead of it, but in addition to it, talk a little bit about what happens in that particular part as a way of compelling the reader to keep moving through the story without giving away any spoilers. Of course. Because with the 12 parts, you can go on Amazon and see all 12 parts you don’t want, you know, part number 12 to give away the end. Right?
The summary of the, the book summary did give away the, the whole story, but it just looks weird to have 12 books with exactly the same copy with nothing there to give us a sense of how the story is moving or what happens in that particular book or what the, the crisis is or the what the, you know, if the stakes are getting higher or what, it just looks weird. And I think, I’m thinking it’s a missed opportunity.
[0:09:20.0] TG: So what you could do is have, I’m trying to think of things I’ve seen before. So like at the top you could say this is probably horrible for your particular book, but you’ll get the gist, the thrilling story of such and such character continues and part five of the Masquerade series. And then it’s like, and I don’t think you need to, you know, we’ve talked about this, the show The Punisher and I was always really careful when I, when I was binge watching it not to even look at the little screenshots of future episodes because that would tell me if some somebody was going to survive until that episode. Right?
Like, I think it’s okay that you say now that our, you know, now that the character has reached this point, they now face this challenge. And like that’s the description of the book is like here’s what happened in last episode, here’s what’s coming in this one. And not worry too much about spoilers because at the same time, like if somebody is looking at books six to me, most people looking at book six or looking at it because they just read book five. So I think it’s fine to, to put something that might be a spoiler.
If somebody that hasn’t read book one comes across or something where it basically is like selling this. It’s almost like selling the episode, right? So continuing the saga of such and such character, now that the character has done X, they now face the next challenge. They now face Y are now, you know, Z has come along and they have to overcome this. I don’t really know what each book is about, but that’s kind of, but as you can see, I have very little experience doing this kind of stuff. So I’m struggling a little bit to give specific advice.
[0:11:15.0] VF: Okay. Maybe what I’ll do is, I mean cause I don’t want to take away what I have because that is if someone happens to come across say book six, the little summary of what the whole story is about is great. Right? Like it like when I combine all 12 and a print book or I bundle all 12 as a one digital eBook, which I plan to do. I’m only going to use that blurb that I have currently because it’s a really nice setup for the whole story.
[0:11:45] TG: So I don’t, on the back of each one you put, in kind of big letters at the top, the story of whatever the character’s name is, continues in book six. And then off short like two to three sentence description of that book, the crisis in that book and then below that a section that’s like about the masquerade series and then you have the description of the whole series.
Okay. I mean that sounds right to me, but again you’re asking me a question I would never in a million years claim to be an expert on.
[0:12:25.0] VF: All right. So I will go with that and we’ll see what happens, if it works or not. I mean that’s the only way we’re going to find out. Right? Just to test it and see what happens.
[0:12:35] TG: Well what do you mean works? How will you know if it works? See that’s the problem.
[0:12:39.0] VF: Oh God, I hate it when you ask me questions like this.
[0:12:44.0] TG: Okay, well I want to catch, I want to catch assumptions. Assumptions is that there was some way to test this. So I mean this is the constant issue with like books, is really, it would be a really nice, I wish there was like a bookstore somewhere that would allow you to pay a fee to put your book out with four different covers and like figure out which one sold more copies at the end of the week. Right?
But a publisher would never allow that. But that’s the way that you would pick a cover because there’s no other way to actually real world test a cover. And I would say the same thing about book blurbs is you’re also dealing with such a small segment, right? So you’re dealing with like, okay, here’s you know, a group of people that have heard of the Masquerade series or here’s a group of people that are searching Amazon and finds the Masquerade series kind of randomly not knowing who you are.
Now, here’s a much smaller group of people that landed on some other book other than the first one. And then here’s an even smaller group of those people that took the time to intricately read the description of the book. You know what I mean? So like my point is not so much like you got to test it and see, cause when you say tested it’s like, well there’s really no way to test it other than like write four different versions and try to set up a scenario where you’re selling four different versions of the book to enough people that you get a statistically a, what is it called? It’s like where the, you’ve tested it with enough people that the stats actually matter. I forgot what that’s called. Statistically significant. Maybe.
Anyway, and the what you’re testing for is so small, it’s not worth it. Cause even if you get it perfect is going to increase your conversion rate by 0.03%. So my thing on this stuff is usually just write something that feels right and then put it out there and move on with your life.
[0:14:53.0] VF: Because the only way, I’m just thinking about what you’re saying here now, the only way for me to test something like this would be with the focus group, which is the old way of doing marketing.
[0:15:05.0] TG: Yeah. Focus groups aren’t real, right? Right. The only way to cleanly test, like a sales page would be to take you know, thousand people and show half of them one sales page and half of them the other and figure out what converts more and using sales pages as an example, you’ll see these arguments between people whether or not green buttons convert better than red buttons. But the issue is that most of us are not, you know, we’re not Amazon where a slot, you know, a tick up of 0.05% is legitimate money. Right.
You know, if I do something that converts at 0.05% more, that probably actually doesn’t make me any more money. Right? So I could conceive of a way to test the back cover copy to see if it converts to sales better, but it would be expensive, long and annoying and not worth the return on that investment. Does that make sense?
[0:16:09.0] VF: So I’m focusing on something that doesn’t need to be focused on?
[0:16:13.0] TG: Right, I don’t think it’s bad to look at it and say, look, I think I could do this better. But the important thing is to like, okay, we’ve got a plan. You know, it’s going to be like what we said with like a header, short description and then series description. I’m going to do that, I’m going to put it on the back of the books and then I’m going to forget about it because getting on three more podcasts, we’ll sell more books than tweaking and tweaking and tweaking and tweaking the back cover copy.
[0:16:42.0] VF: Okay. So then how do I get people to Blurb my book?
[0:16:47.0] TG: Okay, now you’re using the word correctly. So, yeah, that’s what I was, I was thinking you were asking which, and I would, I would actually put book blurbs. There’s a, it’s so funny cause inside of publishing, cause I’ve been in all these meetings, there’s always dislike overemphasis. It seems like people fall into one or two camps. They think getting great blurbs is the most important thing in the world or they think it’s completely useless.
And so, and of course nobody’s actually done a study, you know, to me this is what a publisher should be doing. A big five publisher could take one of their big books of the year, publish a version with blurbs and publish a version without blurbs. Just have two ISBNs. And they could easily tell whether or not they matter. And it would be a pain in the ass for that one book. But then they would know for all the rest of the books that they publish, whether or not actually convert sales or not.
Because you will hear anecdotal stuff. Like, I’ve picked up a book and looked at it and given it a shot because I saw Seth Godin blurbed it, you know what I mean? So I kind of look at blurbs from the author’s standpoint from a couple different standpoints or a couple of different views.
The first is I am hoping that I can align myself with authors that, um, people, you know, for Running Down a Dream, it was like, you know, people that likes Steve Pressfield would probably like my book. So his is the blurb I put on the cover of the book, the front cover of the book, because I’m hoping people will give my book a shot if they like Steve Pressfield. So that’s one standpoint is like, okay, I want to get somebody who aligns with my book in some way. Right? So I worked with an author who had written a book about Afghanistan and she got a general from Afghanistan to write a blurb, right?
So it was like this nice kind of, this person understands Afghanistan, therefore you should trust him when he says, you should read my book. So in your case, I would try to get as big of a name of as possible in the women’s fiction world. But the other side of getting blurbs that I think people overlook that I know can be helpful is that it opens up doors for you. So Ryan Holiday blurred my last book. So I have gone out to people that have reviewed Ryan Holiday’s books and said, Hey Ryan Blurbed my book. You might like it; can I send you a copy? And they respond. So I learned this trick years ago.
My friend Ramit Sethi, he worked for a company called PB Wiki. This was probably over a decade ago, and he was their marketing director and he worked really, really hard, you know, worked all of his contacts and blah blah blah and got their company covered in The New York Times. And he, the day that it happened, he was so excited and they saw no real uptick in traffic to their website from a New York Times article. But then a few weeks later he realized if he went back to all those outlets, all those media outlets that wouldn’t interview him or talk about their product and said, hey, we were just written up in The New York Times, they were much more likely to say yes to covering the product now.
So I’ve found blurbs can be really helpful from that standpoint where you can use the association with the person to open up doors that you can open up because nobody knows who you are. So that makes sense?
[0:20:40.0] VF: Yes. But I’m wondering how to get that first blurb.
[0:21:45.0] TG: Yeah, so the biggest thing that I’ve found to do is, just ask, this is just like we’ve talked about with some of the outreach stuff, it’s usually just best to ask. And so there’s different ways to go about this. When you’re, a lot of times, you know, I’ll talk to authors and they’re like, how did that, you know, there’s this author that came out, it’s their first book, nobody’s heard of them, and they got Stephen King to, to blurb their book. How did that happen?
Well, I would almost guarantee that if you looked, they either had the same editor, were published by the same publisher or had the same agent, right? So this is one of the few upsides to having a traditional publisher is it puts you in the mix with people where you can get stuff like that to happen because you’re working with the editor who also edited whoever or you’re at the same publishing house is this other author. And it is kind of understood that the publishers that if you’re a big time all through with a publisher, you’re going to blurb x number of books of theirs throughout the year.
So that’s one way, but if you’re self-published, that’s not super helpful. The second way, um, is to work contacts. And this is where what you’re doing with your book club makes a lot of sense. Where, let’s say we talked about you’re doing the book club, you review a book, you’ve reached out to an author, let them know that you pick their book for your book club. You have a couple emails about that. And then six months later you come back and say, hey, you know, I’ve got a book, you know that I’m working on. I’m almost done with, I’m looking to do author testimonials or blurbs. Would you be interested? Would you mind if I sent you a copy of the book? Would you be okay with doing a blurb? I totally understand if you don’t have time, but they’re at least going to respond to you at that point.
And this is why starting up constantly starting up new relationships with other authors puts you in that situation where you have enough people that you’ve connected to that some of them are going to be willing to blurb your book. So that’s another way is to use connections that you’ve created. And then from there I you can just cold ask people. And my thing is to do it in a very similar way to outreach, which is keep it short and be extremely clear about why you’re asking them. So the email should only be a few, you know, four or five sentences long. “Hi, my name is Valerie. I’m the author of the Masquerade series. I’m a big fan of your work. I loved insert whatever the last book was, you know, and because of that, I’m wondering if you’d be open to riding a testament or writing a cover blurb for my book. I’m happy to send you a copy in whatever format makes the most sense to you. Please let me know if you have any questions.
Valerie.”
I think a lot of people write really long verbose emails cause they feel bad asking. And I think if you just directly ask and give a reason why you’re picking them over, just the fact that they’re like a well-known author, that’s your most direct way. But a large majority of them will probably ignore you or say no, but that’s okay. If you reach out to 15 different ones, you know somebody will be open to it.
[0:24:23.0] VF So we’re circling back again to the same, the same theme and we’ve talked about this quite a bit, and I suspect we will continue to talk about it quite a bit more. And that is writing and publishing, being a long tail business and doing things now that will pay off in maybe a year’s time, maybe a couple of years’ time, or maybe you don’t really know when they’ll pay off or if they’ll pay off, but it’s about developing relationships with people in the industry, with your peers, other writers or other people in the industry.
Getting to know them, being relentlessly helpful, developing that relationship and then over time creating a rapport whereby you kind of have a leg to stand on when you reach out and say, “Hey, could you help me with, would you, would you be interested in writing a blurb?”
[0:25:13.0] TG: Yeah, I mean a lot of it comes, yeah, a lot of it comes down to exactly that. Like one of my blurbs was from Barbara Corcoran and that’s because I did a lot of work for her and helped her out a lot. It’s coming up on 10 years ago, but I knew that I never asked her for a favor and I knew that she still had good feelings about me and so I just asked and I honestly, she was the one on the list and I’m like, she’ll probably say no, because I worked for right before she became like super famous with the Shark Tank.
So I was like, she’ll probably say no, she’s too busy and that’s totally fine, but hell, I’m just going to ask. And um, and she said yes. And that’s because she’s like one of the sweetest, most amazing people on the planet anyway. But I think like, but that’s the thing is I called in favors, um, every single person that blurbed my book I had interacted with and done something to help them in the past. And so, yeah, it’s a long, right.
So, Barbara, I sat on that favor for years, and I wasn’t thinking like, okay, I got one favor, I got to use it. It was just like, it was just really like, okay, I know she likes me. I know she’s really famous, so if I ever asked for anything, it’s gotta be meaningful to me. And maybe she’ll say no, and that’s totally fine. It’s her right to do. But, you know, I called on it.
So I think, you know, making sure, you know, it’s that whole thing of like, you do it methodically and with a plan, but never crossing over into the territory where you think somebody owes you something, right?
So you never get into this space where you’re like, you’re like, Whoa, why would they say no to me after everything I’ve done for them? You know, or something. You just never get into that territory. But if you help enough, you know, I always come back to the Zig Ziglar quote, which is if you help enough people get what they want out of life, you’ll get what you want out of life too.
And so, yeah, I think that’s why, I mean, we’ve talked about it, but building connections with other authors and other influencers is one of the most powerful things that you can do. It just opens up so many doors. And so when you’ve been actively helping other authors promote their stuff for two or three years, you now have a long list of people that you know, we’ll answer your email when you email them.
[0:27:48.0] VF: Right and you’re reaching out to help and you’re reaching out to develop the relationship because you want to help, not because you want to get something.
[0:27:57.0] TG: Yeah, it’s really, it’s hard, like it’s always hard to talk about because I don’t reach out to like random people to try to help them. Like I specifically reach out to people that I think would be helpful for me to know. So there is like a game to it, but I don’t have like a secret list of things people I’ve helped, you know, and how much of a favor they owe me.
[0:28:25.0] VF This is why I like Twitter to be honest. I mean that’s just what I use Twitter for. There are people in the industry who I admire and I like the types of things that they’re doing and I would like to get to know them just because I, what they’re doing and the philosophy they have and the way they approach their business is very much in line with the way I think about the business.
And so I just want to get to know them. There isn’t any ulterior motive there at all. But then hopefully over time I may get to meet them, get to know them, maybe even get to work with them.
[0:29:00.0] TG: Yeah. And if you kind of, if you just keep approaching it like that, wrapping it in some sort of um, method or system where you’re making sure that you’re trying to connect with a couple authors a month, you know, in some way, like we’ve talked about so that you have, you have helped enough people, then it works out. And again, I mean this all intermingles because this is why I like doing so many podcasts because you are now friends with all the podcasts hosts, right? Right. So it all intermingles and this is why people can get really good blurbs for their books because they had been being a helpful person for long enough that they can reach out for favors.
[0:29:47.0] VF: And this isn’t really any different than any other business to be honest. You know, if I think about the career I had before I became a writer, it took me 10 years in the business before I knew everybody that I needed to know, where I could just pick up the phone and, and call, you know, the executive of XYZ company and ask for some advice or ask if he could help me out or keynote speak at an event or whatever. You know, it took that long.
[0:30:12.0] TG Yeah. I mean there’s two, there’s two things I would say that are different. One’s good, one’s not so good. The first one is, um, everybody’s in the book business because they love books. It’s a rare person who’s doing this because they think it’s going like make them rich or famous or something. Right? Yeah. So most of the people that you interact with are doing it because they love it, which is really fun.
I used to be in the bike industry and it was the same way of like, everybody’s in the bike industry because they love bikes. You know, not everybody’s in the insurance business because they’re passionate about insurance. So I really like it because the percentage of passionate people is really high, which means somebody told me that, you know Michael Hyatt is a well-known author and self-help guy here in Franklin and he said he’s never worked in an industry that was so a collaborative where everybody’s just willing to help everybody else. And I would say that’s true. So that’s the good thing.
The downside is when you had that job, it was kind of your responsibility to show up X numbers a week to do your job, to connect with other, like it was kind of built into your job to meet people. Where as a writer it’s really easy to just sit in your hole and never network.
[0:31:38.0] VF: That’s right. That is the hardest part about this job for me because I’m an extrovert and going out and meeting people and networking was really the only thing I liked about my other job.
[0:31:50.0] TG: Yeah, see, I’m the opposite, I will literally sit in my office and never leave unless like, like I get, you know, I’ll get invited to things. I’m like, I don’t know. That would mean I’d have to like leave. So, my thing is I go to conferences because then I’m kinda like forced, like we talked about a few weeks ago, it kind of forces me into this networking mentality for a few days.
So like I’m going to two conferences in June and yeah, but doing a keynote presentation at ConvertKit’s, Craft + Commerce. And the reason I got that is because long before he was successful and well known, I was buddies with Nathan Barry and we helped each out do it stuff and now he owns ConvertKit and, and it’s like, that’s the thing is you also have to hang around long enough so all your friends become successful, you know, and they trust you because you liked them when they weren’t successful.
Yeah. So it’s like, yeah. And again, like I can’t stress enough. Like it’s mostly just fun. Like even for an introvert, like getting to meet people that are doing the same thing as you, passionate about the same thing you are. That only turns into good things.
[0:33:17.0] VF: All right. An excuse for me to go out and meet more people. Awesome. All right, well I better get back to writing though.
[0:33:26.0] TG: All right, sounds good.
[0:33:28.0] VF: I will see you next week. Bye.
[0:33:29.0] TG: Yup. Sounds good. Bye.
[END OF EPISODE]
[0:33:32.6] TG: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Book Launch Show. For all the past episodes, the show notes, or to connect with me, you can go to booklaunchshow.com. I have dozens of free book marketing resources and articles that you can access at my website booklaunch.com. Lastly, if you like to support the show, you can do that by telling another author about the show and by visiting us on Apple Podcast and leaving a rating and review.
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