Valerie’s First Podcast Interview
In today’s episode we are recapping the great news Valerie has had since reaching out to other podcasts and using some of Tim’s tactics in going after guest spots and promotion. From there we jump into the next things on Valerie’s to do list, which are to get more referrals from the podcasts she visits to build momentum and explore her idea of a monthly book club to review similar novels and produce content for her audience. Tim and Valerie discuss some of the fears of rejection and other roadblocks standing in the way of Valery taking the steps that she has been planning. Tim offers feedback and reflection on Valerie’s initial idea and suggests some ways in which she can further use it to her advantage. For all this and more, join us on the Book Launch Show today!
Key Points From This Episode:
Staying on the faith march until the pay off.
Valerie’s good news about last week’s podcast homework.
What’s next on Valerie’s list?
The fly wheel of referral momentum.
The hurdles blocking authors from having these small successes.
Ambiguities and the lack of control involved in outreach.
Practice and overcoming fears of rejections.
The basic idea behind Valerie’s Book Club!
The major advantages and possibilities offered by this kind of book club
And much more!
[0:00:00.3] TG: Hello and welcome to the Book Launch Show. This is Tim Grahl and this week, we open with just some good news from Valerie. I suffer from the same problem that so many of us suffer from which is you know, we feel confident about what we write, we feel confident about maybe the advice that we give but then there’s always this little voice of like does it really actually work?
We have some – we start off with some really good news from Valerie and she started her outreach efforts and it was just a reminder to me that you know, so many times, the hard part is just knowing what to do and actually doing it. A lot of times, we have to do something for long enough that we start seeing results.
I was talking to an author a couple of months ago, we had dinner and his book has sold, I think he’s broken 1.5 million copies, it’s well over one million copies of this book. It’s been out for a while now, very popular book and we’re talking about the fact that it often takes a year to really see a book start getting traction.
You know, most books do not come out, most even really popular books do not come out and immediately hit big, it takes a little while. He was talking about how he had this big platform, his coauthor had this big platform and they did this big launch for the book and they sold a good amount of books and then for the next year, every month, he just kept seeing those sales go down and down.
He’s like, “Tim, I was out there doing everything I could, I was like going on podcasts, I was traveling, I was speaking, I was shaking every bush I could to get book sales and I just kept seeing those book sales go down.” He’s like, “It was right at the one year mark where all of a sudden, it flipped and the book sales started going up and it just never slowed down.”
You see this a lot with everything in book marketing. You just have to keep doing it and it’s kind of this faith march, right? If I just keep going in this direction, that things will work out for me, things will start making a difference.
The advice that I’m trying to give on this show is the advice that will pay off over a long period of time. A lot of times, when you’re stuck doing this, you know, you don’t know, what I’m doing actually ever going to work, right? They keep saying, “I want to stick with it, I want to give up but you know, what if I’m doing the wrong thing?”
That’s the whole reason this podcast exist is to give you the tools that I’ve seen work over and over. So that you can do them trusting that they will eventually pay off and that awful middle part where you’re working with no rewards or working as you see things go the wrong direction. Know that when you’re following my advice, you’re following advice based on somebody that’s been doing this for over a decade and seen what works and what doesn’t work.
I also wanted to mention here, I’m currently taking applications for my next business of books mastermind. This is for authors that are really wanting to take what they’re doing to the next level. Maybe you’ve had some book sales but you want to really increase, you have a platform, you want to make it bigger, you have a business but you want to make it more profitable and it’s around your books.
This is the experience that I’ve had working with so many different authors. You know, I’ve worked with authors for over a decade, gotten to work in behind the scenes on a lot of author based businesses. Seen how they work, seen what doesn’t work. If you are wanting to work together with me, in a small group of people, this is a really good fit for you. You can go to booklaunch.com/mastermind, there’s an application there that you can fill out.
Give me a little bit of information, I want to make sure everybody that comes in is a good fit with me and the rest of the group but if this is something you may be interested in, highly recommend you go to booklauunch.com/mastermind. It’s a very limited number of spots because I try to give as much one on one connection as I can.
You can go there and fill that out and then also, as always, my book Running Down the Dream is out, it’s been out for a while now, I continue to see new reviews come on amazon, continue to see how it’s changing people’s lives and I want that for you as well. It’s available in print and digital of course. The audio book is up on audible, all of that is also available at blackirishbooks.com. Make sure you go pick up a copy there. But for now, let’s go ahead and jump in to this week’s episode.
This podcast is all about marketing, launching your book. But if you’re an author and you have a book, book coming out, book already out, you’re doing something special, you’re doing something that most people are afraid to do in my opinion. They’re actually going after that thing that they want. Everybody says they want to write a book, you’ve actually done it, you’re actually doing it, what that means is that you have a dream that you’re trying to accomplish.
You have this idea, the kind of writer you want to be, the kind of life you want to live, the kind of artist you want to be. I wrote my book Running Down a Dream: Your Roadmap to Winning Creative Battles for people just like you. Based on my last decade of overcoming my creative battles of being stuck in the mud, stuck feeling like I’m always going to be a failure, stuff feeling like this thing that I want is stupid and never going to happen.
I wrote this book to share the true journey of what this looks like, a lot of self-help books, a lot of books about creativity, they kind of share, “Ah, what was really hard and then look at all the awesome stuff I learned.” This book is different. It will walk you through what I think the real story of running down a dream really looks like. I put everything in there and on top of that, I put the tools I learned along the way. If you know anything about me and my work, you know I can’t help but be practical.
I took that story of running down my dream, of chasing what I wanted in life of overcoming creative battles and I broke it down into really practical tools that you can apply to overcome your own creative demons. Running Down a Dream is out now to Amazon and all the other different places that you can buy books. It’s available on audiobook, ebook and paperback.
Check it out, buy a copy, share it with a friend and it’s a great way to support this show, thanks.
[INTRO]
[0:06:45.9] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the Book Launch Podcast, helping authors launch and market their books.
[EPISODE]
[0:06:51.7] VF: Hey Tim, how are you today?
[0:06:53.0] TG: Doing fine, yourself?
[0:06:55.4] VF: I’m very well, I’m feeling a little bit like the bee’s knees.
[0:06:58.4] TG: All right.
[0:06:59.1] VF: I emailed — I have to tell you, I’ve been waiting all week to tell you this. I emailed four podcast and I have four interviews booked.
[0:07:06.8] TG: Hey, that’s a pretty good percentage.
[0:07:08.4] VF: I know, right? I told you I’m feeling very pleased with myself.
[0:07:13.9] TG: That’s great. Yeah, walk me through who they are, how you reached out, how’d you find them, you know, were they cold, were they warm intros, you had – talk through it.
[0:07:25.0] VF: A couple of them were warm, one of them was totally cold. Which was the one that I think really get nervous sending out the emails but if I did feel nervous, it was the cold call that made me a little twitchy.
I was going through the list of podcast that I had created in that spreadsheet. I like the ones that I have chosen but they require a lot of research because if I’m going to tailor my pitch per every show, I really need to know what they’re all about so that I can show them how I’m a good fit, rather than trying to require them to somehow figure it out.
I’m still working through that list but I thought, you know, why don’t I reach out to the people I already know and ask them what their favorite podcast are, because they know me very well. Get them to help me find the crossover in a little Venn diagram. That’s what I did, three of them, I have a booking date and the fourth one I’m waiting to hear back on when I would be on the show.
Yeah, basically, when they gave me their – the podcast that they thought I would be a good fit for, I went and researched those half dozen and did all the steps that you told me to do, I wrote my email, pretty much I listened back to the podcast, I wrote the email based on the steps that you gave me.
I told them how I would be a good fit and ask them to let me know if they needed more information. Four of them came back and said sounds great. Now, I think I might have a bit of an advantage because people are familiar with my name through story grid, right?
People are listening to the round table podcast and my picture and my name is on those story grid website and stuff so I suspect that helped, especially with the cold call but yeah, that was kind of it.
[0:09:22.0] TG: That’s great. Yeah, I think that’s good because I feel like you know, I feel like I rarely run into somebody who has zero advantage in some way, right? Somebody knows somebody or you’ve done work before or you’ve done sales before so you feel super comfortable. Everybody’s got like something that gives them their version of an edge.
Have you watched that show, The Marvelous Mrs Maisel yet?
[0:09:55.8] VF: I haven’t yet, no, it’s on my list.
[0:09:58.1] TG: It’s so good. But there is this one little scene where this girl is saying like, her dad’s super famous and she’s like, “I’m going to use a different name so I can make it on my own.” And like, the other woman was like, “Are you crazy? Use it.”
Anyway. Yeah, that’s good. It’s funny because when we first started talking about doing this podcast, I did have, I have my own imposter syndrome. Maybe this stuff doesn’t actually work.
[0:10:35.7] VF: Well, it does.
[0:10:37.0] TG: Yeah, it’s good to hear you say that it’s working.
[0:10:40.3] VF: Well, I think, you know, my connection with Story Grid is the wedge that’s opening doors for me which is fine. I will use it. It’s like, I’m a writer with benefits, you know? They’ll have me on as a writer but the thing that makes me different than their other guest is I’m also a Story Grid editor, right? I’m bringing a different lens to the craft of storytelling. I’m not above using that.
[0:11:09.2] TG: As you shouldn’t be. Cool. When are they scheduled for?
[0:11:15.7] VF: My first one is tomorrow, in fact. Well, as we record this, I’m about to head to Nashville for the Story Grid certified editor training. The other three are when I come back from that.
[0:11:28.3] TG: Okay, cool. How are you feeling about doing – I mean, you’ve done a couple of these before.
[0:11:34.0] VF: Yeah, in fact, she sent me her standard questions in advance so I know what she’s going to ask me so I can prepare. I’m feeling good. I have my key messages, things that I want to make sure that I say and of course the last question is, you know, where can people find you and what book do you want to promote and that sort of stuff. I’m feeling good about it.
[0:11:57.0] TG: Yeah, now you have like a very clear message. What are you going to say when they ask you those questions, what do you want to promote? Where can people find you? That kind of thing.
[0:12:09.8] VF: Well, I’ll direct everyone back to my website, valeriefrancis.ca, an author of love stories for busy women. The host of the podcast is also a romance writer herself and a thriller writer. It’s a really good fit.
[0:12:20.7] TG: Okay. Good.
[0:12:25.3] VF: I’m very pleased. I’ll let them know they can get the first book, they can download the first book for free from my site and that sort of stuff.
[0:12:34.4] TG: Great, all right. Contacting podcasts has been a win.
[0:12:39.8] VF: Yes.
[0:12:42.0] TG: What’s next?
[0:12:43.4] VF: Well, I’m going to keep researching my podcasts. My list of podcasts because I’m trying to implement another one of your pieces of advice, which is to do a little bit of marketing every day. I have this little mantra that I tell myself. When I wake up, I get up, when I get up, I write. There’s no hitting the snooze button. I just come down, I start writing. I’m tacking my marketing on to the end of my writing session.
[0:13:10.5] TG: Great.
[0:13:11.5] VF: Because those are the priorities for my day, right? I get those things done, my goal is to contact two podcasts a week and get that moving.
[0:13:21.2] TG: Good. Then, are you – you’re just kind of working down your list?
[0:13:25.7] VF: Yeah. When I finish the podcast tomorrow, I will contact the host and say, “Do you know of other podcasts that I might be able to contact?” I’ll start branching out.
[0:13:38.5] TG: Yeah.
[0:13:39.2] VF: I’m going to focus on the podcasts for now until I get that rolling, till I get that humming and then I’ll worry about the next step.
[0:13:49.7] TG: Yeah, probably just form these four, you’ll get enough names that you – I think you will. If you say you completely stopped on your list and just focussed on this four, ask them for referrals, do those, you’ll never run out now. I mean, that’ the thing that if you do it right, it becomes this fly wheel very quickly because you just keep getting referrals to the next one.
It gets much easier moving forward, as long as you follow up with the request for referrals and I always either do it on the phone. Because a lot of times, you’ll finish recording, they’ll be like, that was so great, is there anything I can do for you? Then that’s when you just say, “Hey, you know, I’d like to do some more of these, you know, are there anybody else?”
Usually they’ll give you names and sometimes they’ll say, “I can just shoot over an introduction,” and then you’re like, “Yeah, go ahead,” you know? It should get pretty straight forward from here on.
[0:14:52.9] VF: I’m looking forward to that. Now, I noticed something though, and I don’t know why this wasn’t obvious to me before I started doing my research. I’m seeing the same guests reoccurring on podcast. You know when you hear about movie stars or whatever and they do the night show circuit and they go on Jimmy Fallon, they go to – well, it’s the same thing, you can see the same few names, doing the circuit.
Yeah, okay, all right, of course, that makes complete sense. I guess my name will be one of them.
[0:15:23.3] TG: Yeah, I mean, that’s what you want to do for sure.
[0:15:27.1] VF: That’s exciting. That’s my win for the week, I’m very pleased.
[0:15:30.8] TG: That’s great.
[0:15:31.7] VF: Now, I’m curious, because, as an extrovert, it didn’t really bother me that much to write an email and send it out to someone I didn’t know. Although, I had a little twinge of this is a bit scary and as I did that, I thought, well, if it’s scary for me as an extrovert, who did this type of thing in my – the day job I had for 25 years before I became a writer. How scary must this be for someone who is introverted and/or shy and/or inexperienced in this kind of thing.
When you have been working with other clients who are maybe more introverted and just not used to doing this, how have they handled it? Has it been like a hard thing for them to do?
[0:16:20.4] TG: Well, as I’ve dug in to this with people, and as I’ve looked at my own resistance on things and tried to figure out why I resist doing certain things. My belief has become that there is a part of like true fear of rejection. But a big part of this is not knowing what to do. I’m trying to think of a good example or a good metaphor or something.
It’s like, when I say, if I say to somebody, “Well, you need to do outreach,” and they’re like, “Okay, what is that or how do I do that?” You just need to reach out to podcasts and get them to have you on the show.
Well, as you figured out, that involves about 43 different steps to do it, right? You’ve got to do the research, you’ve got to write the email, it’s all this stuff. And so, at each point in that process, you might have a question of well, what kind of podcast am I looking for? What should I put in the email or how should I put the pitch, how long should the email be, how short should the email be?
What if it’s not the podcast isn’t exactly about – I mean, all the stuff that we’ve talked about on this show. I feel like a big part of what makes it easier for people to move forward is just having a clear to do list. First I do this, second I do this, third, I do this, fourth I do this. I try to turn it into something where your job is to follow the steps and not worry about what will happen after the steps are done.
You just follow the steps. Because, if I can get somebody to focus on, “Just do this so I could do this, so I could do this so that I can hit send on this email.” Then there’s less time to worry about what’s going to happen after I send the email. So I found that is helpful on one side. The other side is, I just try to talk them through. I mean part of this is you just got to do it. It is ripping the Band-Aid off. It is the, Elizabeth Gilbert calls it the shit sandwiches, it’s just part of the process and I always ensure people gets easier.
It gets easier because we have talked about once you get going, it gets easier because you are getting lots of yeses and referral but it gets easier too of just like you just start doing it and you realize it is not that big a deal even if people say no, they are really nice about it. I have never gotten a hateful email in response, you know what I mean? Most people if they don’t want to, they just ignore the email. So I try to talk people through like there’s lots of different aspects.
One is just work this system and don’t worry about the results. If you work the system, the results will take care of themselves. So don’t worry about that part. The other is it’s just the job. You got to do it, you know? You’ve signed up to be an author, you want to do promotion, this is part of that job so you just got to suck it up and do it and so I find that helps with some people of just like just go do it, you know? You have to do it then go do it and we’re going to talk next week.
That’s like okay, you know? Because I know a big part of what was probably driving you to finally do this was you had to report back, right?
[0:19:54.8] VF: Absolutely.
[0:19:55.9] TG: Right, so that is helpful. So having some kind of accountability or something like that and I find — like you’re an extrovert. I am more of an introvert but all of this stuff is behind a computer. You are not looking at somebody in the eye and hoping they’ll say no or hoping they say yes or no, you know? So it is hard. I still believe that the hardest part of outreach is the ambiguity of it because I can show you how to set up an email list.
I can show you how to get your first 100 subscribers, we can talk about blogging. We can talk about podcasting and all of that is like 98.8% the same for everybody, right? But when it comes to outreach, it’s one the hardest to do because it relies on somebody else saying yes, where everything else is in your control. It also is the most ambiguous because it is so specific to you, your book, your platform, who you’re trying to reach out to.
So I find if I can just talk through a lot of that, a lot of the fear starts to calm down and then you just have to start doing it and it is just like anything else where it gets easier after a while. It is like when I used to — my first online course videos, it would take me like an hour to work up the nerve to hit the record button and it was just doing the screencast and talking to a microphone.
And then when I started sitting in front of the microphone and actually filming myself, it would take me an hour to work up the nerve to hit the record button and I messed up and now I can sit down, hit record talk for 15 minutes straight barely make any mistakes in the recording and I am done and it gets easier, even though I still don’t love it, it’s just part of the job.
[0:21:43.5] VF: So practice makes perfect.
[0:21:45.0] TG: Yeah and practice makes – you start realizing like there is nothing here to be afraid of. You know the worst case scenario is somebody will just say no to you in a very polite way, you know? It’s like there is just nothing to be afraid of, there is nothing here. It is just like once you start doing it, it is like when you are a kid and you thought there is a monster and then you turn on the light and it is just the coat hanging over the door.
Once you start doing it and especially once you get your first couple of rejections and you’re like, “Oh it’s nothing, there is nothing here. Why was I ever afraid of this?” So yeah. I just encourage people — like give them a very step by step task because it gets really scary if you get stuck and you’re like, “I don’t know what to do. What do I do?” And then they stop. So if I can give somebody a clear step by step system and then just say, “Look, you have to do this just go.” It tends to get the job done.
[0:22:51.1] VF: Okay so the other thing I was thinking about again was something that we talked about a few episodes ago when we were talking about should authors have a blog strategy and how often should I be contacting the people I am in mailing list and so forth. And we talked at that time about two emails a month. Say the first and third Tuesday of the month for arguments sake and the first email would be a book review or something like that and the second email would be an author update.
You and I have talked about this a couple of times and that by this, I mean the idea of a book club. Because in the podcast that we recorded a few weeks ago, you mentioned book reviews and I like that idea but in the back of my mind I was thinking, “Yeah, but what can we do, what can I do to make it a book review people will anticipate and will actually open the email when it comes into their inbox.”
And I have been toying with the idea of a book club for a couple of years now without any real idea of how to make it work and I think I finally have cracked that nut. So what I did, I wrote a little marketing strategy and this is again, something that I learned when I did the marketing seminar with Seth Godin probably two years ago now and basically, it is not really a marketing strategy. What it is, is a list of questions to consider to test your idea to see if it works or not and I have done it with a few things now and the ideas that I’ve done it with and have moved forward with have worked.
Like for example, I did this exercise for this podcast before I contacted you about doing this podcast together and I also did it for that daily blog that I was doing to develop my editor business and people loved that. In fact people still contact me and say they’re sorry to see it go although they understand why I stopped.
So I did this marketing strategy which is three and a half pages, which is this level of detail is not your favorite thing I know but I love it. So do you want me to give you the highlights?
[0:24:58.6] TG: Yeah, well I think just yeah, give me the highlights. I mean I am looking at the document. I have not read all of it but yeah, talk about what it is and what you are trying to accomplish with it.
[0:25:08.9] VF: Okay, so Valerie’s book club, it would be a review of a novel a month and I would start with novels that are very much like Masquerade because they have come to me because they like Masquerade and they like that type of book. And it would start with an email a month.
Now rather than just sort of a bland review of the book, what I would do is review the book not only as a writer but also as an editor as someone with an expertise in story. And I would really talk about what it is I liked about the book. Whether it was a particular character or the development of the character or it was just laugh out loud funny and how hard comedy is to write, that kind of stuff.
And I think that because I am also a literary editor that right away it will set me apart from other similar types of book clubs because I mean there are a few right? You’ve got a few book clubs that specifically focus on women’s fiction. The big one right now is Reese Witherspoon’s book club and that is a funny one. Are you familiar with it at all?
[0:26:21.1] TG: No.
[0:26:21.6] VF: Okay, well anyone who has heard Reese Witherspoon’s stand up and speak about her production company and the movie Wild they did and she is working on Big Little Lies with Nicole Kidman, that’s the Liane Moriarty novel. She is a very articulate passionate business woman which I really loved.
When you go onto her book club, she does a video review of the book each month. Now I didn’t look at all of them but I did look at maybe six or eight. Basically her reviews are very high level, they are very generic, she talks about what a beautiful moving emotional story it is.
It is so generic that I started to wonder if she had read the books but more than that, as she is doing the video tape she is playing with the filters on her phone. So she is saying these things with puppy dog ears or a kitten nose or something and it is really weird. Like it’s so different from that articulate passionate woman that you hear speak about the importance of women’s stories and film and media that it really threw me for a loop.
Now I am sure the books are good, I have read some of them. I haven’t read all of them but it feels more to me like the books are in that club because they are being promoted by the publisher and there is nothing wrong with that. That is a business model that is tried and true but my book club would be completely impartial and it would need to get say three out of five stars before I would recommend it.
I could also talk about not just the book but I can listen to at least a sample of the audiobook to say whether I would recommend the audiobook. If there is a film as well about the story, I could check out the film and talk about how true it is or isn’t to the story, that kind of thing.
What do you think about that idea?
[0:28:11.0] TG: So I am looking at it purely from a marketing standpoint first and I think it works because you are trying. The people that will sign up for this are people that could potentially be interested in your books and that is what I think is the most important thing that a lot of people miss especially a lot of fiction writers miss, is they start trying to build an audience that is not necessarily for their books, right? So the most common one would be building an audience about how to write.
So they build a list of a bunch of writers who are not people that will actually buy their fiction. So I think that definitely solves that and then as far as the execution, I feel like whatever I don’t really think it matters as long as it is something you care about and I don’t know how to put this because of course it matters how you do it because it needs to be done well and all of that kind of stuff but I feel like the way – if you are thinking, I’ve got my personas of the women I am trying to attract.
And now everything that I do is going to be speaking to those personas, then however you do that is probably fine, right?
[0:29:31.0] VF: Okay.
[0:29:32.3] TG: So as far as the structure of it, I don’t really care. I don’t think that to me, giving you advice on that would be getting outside of my expertise right? The idea that I could tell you how to run a women’s fiction book group is weird like you know what I mean? So I think okay, I have never looked at Reese Witherspoon’s book club. I have never followed Oprah’s book club. I have never followed any of these things closely.
So you probably at this point have way more experience than me in book clubs. So my question from the marketing side is, is it something that your personas would be interested in. Is it speaking directly to them, right? Are those Venn diagrams heavily on top of each other? If so, then go for it, because then I love the idea of a book club, I love the idea of you going deep. It gives you some really great content. I could see you not that you need more stuff to do but like spinning up even a podcast around this, right?
Where like you send out the monthly email at the same time you post maybe just a monthly podcast about it, you know? Something like that like there’s all kinds of fun things you could do around this. You could even like if it is a self-published author, you could probably get a discount on the books for everybody that is in your book club. There’s all kinds of things you could do as you grow it which are all fine and good and you have tons of ideas and you know whatever.
I think you will do it great, it does what I say it needs to do which is attract the right group of people. So I think it’s a great idea and what makes it better is that you are excited about it and when you say things like, “I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, I have been trying to crack this for a long time.” The fact it has been stuck in your head for a while is also good because then you’ll stick with it, you know? So I think it is a great idea. Yeah, it is a great idea.
It gives you that thing you need which is regular content to send out to your audience. It is attracting the right group of people, it’s something that you could talk about on all of these podcasts is this book group that you run. I think it hits all the markers for sure.
[0:31:57.4] VF: Yeah that was one of the things that when I was doing my key messages for the interviews, yes go to the website and download a sample of my work to see if it is for you but by signing up, you’re joining a book club. So that encourages them – that is two reasons for them to come to the website and sign up. But it also gives them a reason to hang around for a little while to see if this is for them.
It also gives me an opportunity to grow. Like you said with maybe doing a podcast or creating some, I don’t know, Facebook Group or some way for the people in my book club to talk to one another and it also allows me to expand the type of books that I review. So right away, there will be books very similar to Masquerade. You know write down that path. But as I grow like my thriller is also – it is books by women for women about women, right? Because my thriller is like that too.
So as I grow over the years and publish in different genres, I have the opportunity if I want to also grow the book club. So that it is incorporating female writers in, maybe there is a great female mystery writer I want to talk about.
[0:33:18.6] TG: Right.
[0:33:19.5] VF: Right? Something like that.
[0:33:21.4] TG: Yeah and what I really like about it is the next time you come out with a new novel that is the book of the month, right? So you could –
[0:33:29.6] VF: Oh I never thought about that.
[0:33:31.0] TG: Oh yeah, well that is the first thing I thought of is like, “Oh well then your book fits right in there.” So then it’s like since you do self-publish, you could run a special of like, “Hey, for everybody in my book club, I put the book up early. You could go get it here for $2.99.” Or $4.99 or whatever the discount is and that’s the book of the month that month That is your book.
Because the whole – when I talked about reviewing books on a blog, the whole idea would be like I wrote – let us say I wrote a fantasy novel and so this month, I am writing my review of The Hobbit or whatever and then on the side bar of my blog it says, “Hey do you love The Hobbit? Here is another book you might like and it is my book,” right?
So it is attracting the audience and immediately giving them a reason to buy your book and so with this, you know every month you review a new book until you come out with a new book and then that’s that month. That’s the book.
[0:34:38.0] VF: All right, so this sounds like I am having a good week, Tim.
[0:34:42.3] TG: That’s great.
[0:34:43.1] VF: I’m on a high, I should go buy a lottery ticket now while I am hot. Okay, so I’ve got my idea for my book club and this is just another excuse to read books.
[0:34:56.8] TG: Hey, we all need those.
[0:34:58.4] VF: Right? I am actually working. This is very important and serious work. So that is good, I’ll go forward with this book club idea. I will keep going with my podcast idea and next week, I am going to see you in Nashville.
[0:35:12.8] TG: Yeah. I am looking forward to it.
[0:35:14.6] VF: All right sounds like a plan.
[0:35:16.4] TG: See you then.
[0:35:17.2] VF: Thank you Tim. Bye.
[0:35:18.4] TG: Bye.
[END OF EPISODE]
[0:35:19.1] 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.
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[END]
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