How to Get Your Book Ready for Launch with Julie Broad

Julie: If you really wanna write a book to build your business, grow your brand, get a message out there that’s gonna have an impact, then you really have to be thinking marketing before you even start writing. You have to have a very clear idea of who your reader is and what this book is going to do for them in their lives.

Introduction: Welcome to the Become a Writer Today Podcast with Bryan Collins. Here, you’ll find practical advice and interviews for all kinds of writers.

Bryan: What steps should you take to get your book ready for launch? 

Hi, there. My name is Bryan Collins and welcome to the Become a Writer Today Podcast. I’ve been thinking a lot about book launches lately, probably because I’m getting my new parenting book ready to launch. I found out a couple of different strategies for book launches over the years, including gathering a series of beta or ARC readers and asking them to leave a review on launch day, running lots of ads using Amazon ads or Facebook ads, and also letting members of my email list know it’s live.

These days, I’m more interested in the long tail of a book. In other words, I’m not too concerned that the book becomes a bestseller on day one or even week one, what I like to see is the book generating sales from readers over time.

One of the books that I wrote, The Power of Creativity, I wrote this book, I’d say, maybe seven years ago at this point and it still generates a couple of hundred sales each week. And that’s fantastic to me because people go on to read other books in the series and I still get emails from readers about that particular book.

So, for me, I like to think of a book launch as not a one-off event but something that you do continually over time. So, for example, when I get an email from a reader about The Power of Creativity, I often ask them if they’d consider leaving a review on Amazon or if they’d share the book with perhaps a friend so more people can find that book. 

Now, that said, for my new book, it’s gonna be interesting to see how I can sell the book because it’s outside of my niche. It’s a memoir about my experiences as a young dad, which isn’t really relevant to the topics that I really publish books about, like writing or creativity or even productivity.

I’ll let you know when the book is out, but, in the meantime, I wanted to speak to somebody who is an expert on book launches to see if there’s anything that I missed or what I can learn to sell more copies of this book over time.

Her name is Julie Broad. She’s the author of Self-Publish & Succeed and she also has a fantastic YouTube channel which I recommend you check out, Book Launchers, where she offers practical advice about how to launch your book on Amazon, get reviews, and how you can sell more books.

If you enjoy this week’s interview with Julie, please consider leaving a short review on the iTunes Store or simply share the show with a friend or another writer. If you really enjoy the show, you can also become a Patreon supporter for a couple of dollars a month and I’ll give you discounts on my writing courses, software, and books. And if you want a copy of my parenting book to review, let me know. Just email bryan@becomeawritertoday.com. And, of course, if you’ve got feedback about this week’s episode or you simply have suggestions for future guests, I’m on Twitter, it’s @bryanjcollins. I’d love to hear from you.

Now, let’s go over to this week’s interview with Julie of Book Launchers.

Bryan: So you’ve lots of practical insights about self-publishing and how to find success, but before we get into that, could you introduce yourself and talk a little bit about how you came to set up your business?

Julie: Yeah, for sure. So, it’s always a funny one because my training, if you wanna call it that, is a real estate investor and I did an MBA in business — or an MBA in finance, I should say, and an undergrad in business so I definitely am not a typical publishing person in this space. But that’s also kind of, I think, what allows me to bring a unique spin into self-publishing and into publishing because I came into it really, ultimately, I was in the real estate space and I started to build a platform so a newsletter list and an audience and publishers, I was introduced to a couple of publishers and I thought I was gonna be getting a book deal. In fact, Wiley, one of the major, major publishing houses, gave me a book idea and we worked on a proposal together for three months. 

And so, to me, it was like they gave me the idea and we worked on the proposal so I thought I was getting a book deal, but they ended up turning me down, saying that I didn’t have a strong enough platform to sell books. 

And so I ended up kind of, well, devastated, first of all, because I’ve gotten all my dreams alive of this book deal, but, ultimately, it was the greatest thing that could have ever happened because it was kind of a reset and I went back and I had had a book idea that they had told me they weren’t interested in but it was nagging me and so I ended up kinda going back to that book idea and I decided to self-publish, ultimately, because there was no other choice now.
 
And I went into it wanting to self-publish better than if I had gotten a book deal. And that whole kind of feeling and inspiration and motivation and, ultimately, fear that nobody was ever gonna read my book if I didn’t do this the best that I possibly could, it ended up kind of inspiring the book to go to number one on Amazon. So not number one in the category, which is what a lot of people talk about. Number one is a print book. And it opened my eyes to the power of self-publishing and, ultimately, the gaps and the challenges for authors who do self-publish, which led me to starting Book Launchers, but nothing is a straight path.

Bryan: Could you give listeners a flavor for what year this took place in or when this happened?

Julie: Yeah, that was 2013. That was More Than Cashflow was my first book and it hit number one in 2013.

Bryan: You’ve written several books since then, including The New Brand You and your guide to self-publishing.

Julie: Yeah, the Self-Publish & Succeed is the one that came out this year and that’s really our guide to writing what we call the #NoBoringBooksProcessToWriteANonfictionBookThatSells.

Bryan: So, what does it take to succeed with self-publishing a book today?

Julie: Yeah, I think the first thing is that you really have to be thinking about marketing before you even start writing. A lot of people — so there’s kinda two camps for self-publishing, in my mind. There is the camp that writes the book for therapy and that is totally fine. 

Like books are great therapy but your book that you’ve written that’s great therapy for you is not one that’s really gonna sell. Very, very, very rarely will that sell. If you really wanna write a book to build your business, grow your brand, get a message out there that’s gonna have an impact, then you really have to be thinking marketing before you even start writing. 

You have to have a very clear idea of who your reader is and what this book is going to do for them in their lives. And, you know, to give you an example of how most authors have to dig deeper, I’ll just pick a topic. So, if you were to write a book that you think is gonna be inspirational, for example, what are they gonna be inspired to do? What are they gonna be inspired to change? 

What — inspiration is way too wide of a subject, you have to have something that’s actually gonna sell, because if they want inspiration, they’re gonna read the celebrity memoir that just came out. If you want them to solve — if you want them to buy your book over that celebrity book, you have to give them something that you’re solving a very specific problem for them so you gotta get really granular on your reader. And I think most self-published authors are really scared to do that because they think that that will narrow them down too much but, in fact, that’s the very thing that positions your book from the beginning to be set up to actually have a marketing plan and sell.

Bryan: So, it sounds like the riches are in the niches or, as you say in the US, niches. 

Julie: Exactly, that’s the phrase.

Bryan: You’re describing non-fiction, I presume, rather than fiction.

Julie: Yeah, I don’t have any experience in fiction except for having read a lot in my younger years, in particular, but, yeah, everything we do is non-fiction but I also think that a non-fiction book done well should be a page turner, you know? Our books are books that we want people to start reading and finish reading.

Bryan: So, non-fiction books tend to be quite boring, perhaps because self-publishing turned into a goldmine and a lot of people just published any old type of book without getting help or writing something that was captivating, but why do you think there are so many boring self-published non-fiction books?

Julie: So, I mean, I don’t even think it’s self-published because I’ve read — well, once upon a time, I had read almost every real estate book that was on the market and I can tell you, they were all traditionally published at the time, because self-publishing was really just emerging, and the majority of them were boring and they were boring because they all had the same information, they didn’t share stories, they didn’t go into personal stories, or if they did, they were those superficial case studies that tell you how you’re gonna get rich in real estate. They just weren’t real, right?

And what makes a book great, what makes people connect to that author are showing the warts, talking about the problems that you had and that’s one of the reasons my book, More Than Cashflow, went to number one is I talked about how we ended up charged with fire code violations. We had a property manager charged with manslaughter. 

He punched a tenant in an altercation and the tenant fell, hit his head, and later died in the hospital. We had a property that was in the newspaper as a known crack house. Now, these might sound like really — and they are dramatic stories. However, they’re not that uncommon in the real estate investing space but if you’re writing a book in real estate, probably you’re trying to raise capital or sell courses, you probably don’t want people to know that stuff but that’s the very thing that made my book go to number one because everybody was like, “Oh, my goodness, you have to read this. You need to know what can go wrong.”

Bryan: Yeah, I guess something like that is such an authentic and personal story that it’s unlike content you would see in other non-fiction books. You mentioned that your book went to number one. What does it take for a book to succeed today on Amazon to reach the top 10 or become a bestseller?

Julie: Yeah, I mean, even top 10, it’s something that we don’t — at Book Launchers, we’re like, you know, lightning strikes and you get a little lucky but, for me, in my particular case, I had a whole bunch of people who kind of really rallied behind me. 

There was a bunch of realtors, mortgage brokers, a real estate magazine, and there was a really solid group of people because, again, when I wrote this book, nobody was talking about this kind of side of real estate investing so it was very unique and a lot of people in the service space who were serving those real estate investors wanted people to understand how, you know, this decision can lead to this problem because they’d seen it over and over. 

So, I was very fortunate to have a lot of support of people who rallied behind it. So, if you have a great network, that can be the very thing that creates massive success for your book, because that’s what drove my book to number one. Once we broke the top 100 in Canada, there was a couple of people who were like, “We’re getting it to number one,” and they just emailed their list. It was their mission. But for other authors, you know, I mean, network is number one, I really believe that anybody who has your reader in their audience is a tremendous opportunity for you to do something together. 

The other thing is, of course, your own platform, your own audience, you know, and having that hook of a book, like having that unique angle on the book that people are going to want you to come and talk to their audience or write an article for their audience. If you’re solving problems, there’s always people that are looking to help their audience solve that same problem.

Bryan: The clients that you work with, do they tend to have a business around their book, or do they just come to you with an idea for a book?

Julie: It’s a little bit of both. Now, typically, we’re looking at the bigger picture of a book so if somebody is writing the book and the book is gonna be their only source of income, in the non-fiction space, that is tough. I mean, you might sell 500 to 1,000 books in a year, maybe even in two years. 

That’s a tough ROI if you’re only gonna be making money from your book. So, typically, we’re looking at the bigger picture. Do they wanna be a speaker? Do they wanna be a consultant? Do they have a product? You know, is there something else or courses? But we’re lovers of story so we definitely have taken on some projects that are really, really story-based with no bigger picture outcome in mind.

Bryan: It’s a tough ROI if you’re running a business but it’s also difficult to finish writing a book if it’s just one part of something you have to do every day. Are there any other reasons why you find first-time authors can’t finish their books?

Julie: Yeah, there’s a few. So, I mean, first of all, the biggest is what I call the monsters in your closet and your monsters in your closet tend to be, you know, I’ve named the four of them that I see most commonly.

You’ve got your fear of failure, you’ve got your fear of success, you’ve got your imposter syndrome, and then you also have your fear of judgment. And everybody has these monsters, some are bigger than others, and what happens is, as they start writing, most authors go through this journey of, “Oh, my goodness, this book’s gonna make me famous,” all the way down to, “Nobody’s gonna care about this book,” and all those feelings bring those monsters out and the monsters bring in doubt and they can create obstacles.

Steven Pressfield wrote a beautiful book about The War of Art, which talks about resistance and how resistance shows up as your kid being sick or your parents needing your help, like legitimate things that seem like they’re stopping you but it’s really just the resistance keeping you. But I think it’s those monsters in the closet coming out that causes all of that. That’s one thing. The other thing is not having clarity. So, when you start writing your book, if you’ve got clarity of who you’re impacting and what life’s gonna be like for them if you don’t get this book done and what your life isn’t going to have in it if you don’t get this book done, then that can be a powerful motivator to just get that half an hour a day done. And that’s all it takes, right?
 
To get a book done. If you can commit to 30 to 45 minutes, five days a week, your book will be done in a year. It might even be done a lot faster.

Bryan: So, are you coaching your clients how to finish their book or are you more helping them with the marketing side?

Julie: We do everything because, and that’s one of the reasons I started Book Launchers, is because I found that there’s some really great companies that will write a good book and there’s some decent companies that will do some marketing, there’s some editors in between and some cover designers that are good, but if you really wanna set your book up for marketing, you need to do what the traditional publishing houses do and that is, from day one, they’ve done their market research, they know who the market is and they’re positioning this book in every way to be set up to sell to that reader. 

So, you have to have it all under one roof. So, our marketing team who pitches people for podcasts and for newsletters and live appearances and speaking engagements, they’re involved in the whole process from the beginning. The writing, you know, we have a team meeting where everybody talks about every single project. It’s long and painful but it’s very important for our clients to have that holistic approach so that marketing is injected into the idea of the book, the title of the book, the table of contents of the book, cover, and so on, because that sets you up for a much better chance of success

Bryan: When you’re getting ready to launch a book with a client, what particular strategies work quite well at the moment?

Julie: I mean, I wish there was magical, like, “Hey, this is the one that’s selling a ton of books right now.” We have four — we have a menu basically of four different kinda launch strategies and, ultimately, it comes back to your resources and the investments that you’re going to make in the launch. 

If you don’t have a network and you don’t have a platform right now, then you don’t have a lot of choice in what kind of launch you’re gonna have. We have a momentum-building launch and that’s basically where you’re at. You’re gonna be hustling to get reviews in the early days, we’re gonna be pitching you, and it’s gonna be a launch that if you have 100 books sold at launch, that’s great, and now you’re gonna be hustling every day to build momentum and grow that audience. 

It’s very different if you already have that audience and you’ve got that network, then your launch is probably gonna be kinda one of those that goes for a bestseller. Now, what kind of a bestseller? That’s gonna depend on the size of your audience and the amount of time and money that you wanna invest in this launch and the goals of what you want to come from it. So, we tailor it based on that but I think a lot of people are under the impression that you choose a launch based on the outcome but you really have to choose a launch based on what you’ve got to work with.

Bryan: You don’t believe in just selling on Amazon. Where are the other places that you recommend your clients consider selling their books?

Julie: Yeah. So I mean, I think Amazon is a powerful place for independent authors and I’m not an Amazon hater, by any means, because I think they’ve opened up opportunity to us. That said, I don’t like to give too much power to any one organization, and they have a tremendous amount of power. 

So, I’m a huge advocate for selling wide, which is selling other places than Amazon. That includes libraries, that includes, you know, like other bookstores, and it also includes, you know, even retail shops like, you know, we’ve had a chiropractor that had a book on CBD and he sold that in other chiropractor offices. You know, if you’ve got a book that can fit other places, you should be selling it wherever you can get books in there. So, it’s really getting creative and finding outlets but we set you up to be as wide as possible so we can — your book can be found anywhere your readers are hanging out.

Bryan: Are there any other tactics that you present to clients that will help them sell their book? Like, for example, sales pages or anything similar on their personal sites.

Julie: Yeah. I mean, one of the things that will sell your book that a lot of people don’t spend enough time on is your table of contents. And, again, we’re talking non-fiction in particular, I don’t know if this is quite the same for fiction, but with non-fiction, a lot of people, I mean, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen the chapter title, “Finding Your Why,” “Introduction,” and “Conclusion.” I’m serious and I see it all the time.

And if you have a chapter title somebody has seen before, they’re gonna feel like they’ve read your book before. So you have to spend some time making that a little bit more creative. But also, podcasters, media, and speaking event, like people who book speaking events, they all look at your chapter titles and they will, and I have had this happen for me and for clients, they’ll book you for speaking engagements based on the chapter title.

They’ll call you up and they’ll go, “Hey, can you create a workshop around this chapter title?” I had one in The New Brand You, pretty much the only reason I even sold that book, honestly, I was pregnant and I didn’t care about it anymore. I just started Book Launchers and I was sick and it was just — yeah. So I didn’t really do a lot of marketing with The New Brand You, but I had a chapter title called “You Are Who Google Says You Are” and that sold almost all the books that I sold for that one because people called me up and they said, “I want you to come into my organization and do a talk and I’m gonna buy books for everybody in the room,” and that chapter titles sold books. 

And we see that with media as well. People will get a copy of the book and they’ll go, “I need your author to come in and talk about this chapter.” So, make sure your chapter titles create a benefit or create curiosity or sell a benefit, or even do both. And if they do that or you can even see it as a workshop or a talk title, you’ve got a strong enough chapter title, but “Introduction,” “Conclusion,” and “Finding Your Why,” don’t do it.

Bryan: Avoid those. Interesting. I’ve always considered table of contents from the point of view of the structure of the book but never from the point of view of somebody scanning through the book and it could lead to something else. So, when you describe clients found you or your — was it because they downloaded the sample and looked at the table of contents or they were browsing on Amazon?

Julie: A little bit of all of it. I mean, that’s the thing with books, right? Is they have a tremendous life and they — people get a copy of the book from someone or they buy a copy and then they pass it to somebody. I mean, books are tremendous, especially from a business perspective, because, you know, it’s kind of monetized marketing and it’s something people won’t throw out. 

A brochure, people toss the second they don’t think they need it anymore. But a book will sit on the shelf and remind them of you, they’ll pass it on to somebody. Even if they give it to a used bookstore, it’s still got more longevity. And so that’s — people find books in all kinds of ways. 

Also, I mean, we’ve had producers at events, it’s really funny because when we do events, we don’t do a lot, but we do like Podcast Movement and a couple others, we put up a display of books and people just gravitate to them and you find that all kinds of people are gravitating to them for different reasons, right? “Oh, I’ve got an event coming up and I’m looking for a very particular speaker.” “Oh, I’m a producer and I’m looking for TV show ideas,” you know? The gamut of why people will pick up a book or search for different books is huge so that’s why it’s so important to have everything positioned so well.

Bryan: It’s quite hard to get all of it right. I guess that’s where an editor helps. What services do you recommend clients use for finding an editor?

Julie: Yeah, so I mean, that’s — the one thing I’ll mention here is because I find the thing that breaks my heart the most is people who come to us with books and they say it’s edited and you read it and it’s not good. It’s grammatically correct but it’s not good. And so what’s happened is they’ve hired a copyeditor and they’ve spent a lot of money because copyeditors are quite expensive, they’re one of the most expensive professionals in the whole process, but the book gets rule-based better but it hasn’t been structurally improved. So what you need to do is hire a developmental editor or a content editor first. So a developmental or content editor first and they look at it from a 30,000-foot view. Do you have credibility? Can I tell what this book is about? 

Who’s this for? They kind of sniff out anything that doesn’t quite seem true. Is there more needed here? You know, if you’ve repeated yourself. So that’s the developmental edit and that’s what actually makes a book good. So that’s step one. And then step two is that copyeditor who goes through it and he’s like, “Is this the best word for this? Is this the best sentence — the best way to structure this sentence?” You know? And they go through the rule-based process of improving the book, which takes it from like a B+ to that A kind of manuscript.
 
And so those are the things and then I still recommend having a proofreader, because there’s still gonna be typos. Even if you have that copyeditor go through a couple of times, there’s still going to be typos. The proofreader goes through and really refines everything and makes sure there’s consistency in formatting and things like that.

Bryan: Some developmental editors are also copyeditors. It sounds like you think it’s a better idea to have two different people perform those tasks.

Julie: Yes, absolutely, and I’m glad you brought that up. So, what we have — so there’s two different mindsets, right? And that’s the thing, like there are some that are both but, generally speaking, it’s really two different minds and so, to give you a sense of what are typical exceptionally great developmental editors, they’re typically journalists or former journalists. They are able to hook readers in. 

They can see storylines. They are very good at making suggestions and spotting things that are false. And, you know, really just making things better. A copyeditor is a rule follower. They’re not story based, they’re not thinking about what’s gonna hook a reader, they’re thinking about is this grammatically correct, and those are two very different minds and there are the odd, and by odd I don’t mean strange, but there are the odd person that can do both and do it well, but I really find that the people who are exceptional at creating great stories, creating great books that people wanna read are very different than the people who are great at copyediting.

Bryan: Somebody’s listening to this and they’re working on a draft of their book, how far along should they take that draft before they hire a developmental editor?

Julie: I would finish it so — and you may want a writing coach so if you’re struggling, like there’s a different kind of, you know, our team, we have a story expert who helps structure the book for the beginning and then we have writing coaches and writers to help people get that first draft, but a developmental editor is, again, that 30,000-foot view and if you’re giving them part of the manuscript, you’re not giving them the whole picture and so they can’t really do a great job. 

You can’t piecemeal a developmental edit and get it done well. Copyedit, in theory, you can break the book up. I don’t recommend you do that either because you can have draft confusion because, inevitably, this is what will happen: You’ll be editing some of the work that your editor did and you’ll go, “Oh, I gotta add that story,” and you’ll go ahead and jump ahead and add it and then the editor’s editing that place where you just did that and everything becomes a mess.

Bryan: Yeah, yeah, I’ve had that experience. So, do you help your clients find those editors or do you recommend places that they can go and look?

Julie: We have everybody. So we — everybody is under our care and our roof for the exact reason that I mentioned is that marketing mindset and that marketing approach, we oversee all of that and we’ve trained our people on the book-conscious way which is thinking marketing and flagging things that are potential marketing problems and really building it in.
 
So, for our team, we have the whole — I don’t know, there’s at least 12 different professionals that will work on each book that comes through our door. If you aren’t working with a company like Book Launchers, I would recommend looking at a service called Reedsy. They have some really high-quality editors. I’ve been very impressed on — when we need a very specific type of editor, like we had a World War Two memoir that needed somebody who knew the language from that era, we hired them on Reedsy and we’re very, very impressed with the quality of people there. You’re gonna pay for it, you know? That’s not a cheap place to go find an editor but it’s where you can find great editors

Bryan: To switch gears for a moment, you also use a YouTube channel, booklaunchers.tv, to promote your business. Do you find that’s a good way of connecting with other writers?

Julie: Yeah. I mean, it’s been a phenomenal business building tool and a way to support people who wanna do this themselves, right? Not everybody wants to hire a full-service company like Book Launchers and they’re just looking for tips and so, for me, YouTube was a passion and in my real estate business, YouTube was a tremendous business builder and I found it fun and so it was the very first thing I did when I decided to start Book Launchers was I started shooting YouTube videos, partly because I love it, partly because I know it builds community and I know it’s a tremendous way to help kind of everybody. It’s been fun and we have tons of tips and people are like, “How do you always have new tips?” I’m like, “There’s always questions.”

Bryan: Yeah, yeah, it’s the same for writing articles as well about writing. Do any of your clients use YouTube to promote their books?

Julie: Yeah, a little bit. We’ve had a few clients have really good success. One of the best stories is one of our clients recently, Robert Belle, he was doing YouTube, he was kind of doing all the things to build the platform that we were coaching him through so he was doing a lot of podcast interviews and he was doing YouTube and just through that whole process, he ended up getting, you know, presenting an idea to TED Global Ideas and he was on TED Global Ideas recently and I haven’t checked but at the two-week mark, he had like almost 900,000 views of his TED Talk —

Bryan: Wow.

Julie: — and it just kinda was like, as he said, he, you know, it wasn’t a straight line, kind of like how I started Book Launchers, it wasn’t like write book, become TED Global Ideas like international speaker, it was more like write book, build platform, do the things you need to do to become that author, that known author brand, and through that process, the door is opened and the opportunity was in front of him and he was ready for it. It is just extraordinary. So, yeah, so he’s done a lot of YouTube and it’s paid off.

Bryan: So you published Self-Publish & Succeed earlier this year. Do you have any plans to write future books?

Julie: Yeah, there’s one more book that — I mean, I think I’ll always write books. I’m definitely — it’s just in me, but I need to write a marketing book and when I sat down to start Self-Publish & Succeed, the first outline was a book from start to finish, kind of like our whole process, but as I got into it, I realized in order to do the writing part justice and explain the self-publishing process, it was already a full book so I cut it kind of at the, okay, your book’s launched and now, the next book, we’ll go back and explain all these launch strategies and talk about really, you know, how you can get your book out there in the pre-launch and in the post launch and, you know, a year later, two years later, because if you stop marketing your book, your book stops selling.

Bryan: Yeah, makes sense. Makes sense. So, Julie, where can people find more information about your services or read your books?

Julie: Yeah, for sure. So the best thing to do is go to booklaunchers.com/7steps, that gets you a download on the 7 steps to write a book that will be set up to sell, kind of our whole marketing process and that also gets you my email address. So, you can hit reply to that and ask any questions and it also will send you a link to our website so you can check us out.

Bryan: Yeah, and booklaunchers.tv is worth checking out as well. So, thanks for your time, Julie. It was great to talk to you today.

Julie: Thank you. Thanks for having me. 

Bryan: I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode. If you did, please consider leaving a short review on the iTunes Store or sharing the show on Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you’re listening. More reviews, more ratings, and more shares will help more people find the Become a Writer Today Podcast. And did you know, for just a couple of dollars a month, you could become a Patreon for the show? Visit patreon.com/becomeawritertoday or look for the Support button in the show notes. Your support will help me record, produce, and publish more episodes each month. And if you become a Patreon, I’ll give you my writing books and discounts on writing software and on my writing courses