BOOK MARKETING: How to Use Simple Effective Book Marketing for Results Interview with Barbara Grassey Welcome to Book Marketing Mentors, the weekly podcast where you learn proven strategies, tools, ideas, and tips from the masters. Every week, I introduce you to a marketing master who will share their expertise to help you market and sell more books. Today, my special guest is a recognized marketing authority. Known as the guru's secret weapon, Barbara Grassey is an in-demand ghostwriter, editor, and marketing consultant, specializing in material for speakers and entrepreneurs. Over the past 10 years, she's written over 50 books, manuals, and home-study courses. She's a leading authority in leveraging books as the ultimate marketing tool. And that's exactly why I've invited her to be this week's guest expert and mentor. Plus, I'm going to let you into a little secret, she's my personal weapon. Barbara, what an honor it is to welcome you to the show. Thank you, Susan, for that great introduction. I could listen to you speak all day long, it's that all American thing listening to a British accent. I'm going to keep it, because people pay me to talk like this, so I might as well keep it. It's a trick, don't fall for it. That's right. So, Barbara, let's start off by discussing this whole concept of marketing your business with a book, versus just marketing your book. Oh, I love talking about this because to me, a book is the Swiss Army knife of marketing tools. It can be used in so many different ways, and one of the things I see, when people come to me and they say, "I've written a book and I want to sell copies of my book," well for people in business, I specialize in the business books. If you're in business and you just want to make money from the royalties of your book, it's an uphill battle. I think if your typical royalty is $7 a book on a print book, in order to make $100 thousand, you need to sell close to 15 thousand copies. Page 1
And that's hard to do. Susan, you're the one who gave me the number of the average lifetime sales of a book is 250 copies. Exactly. Hard to make back your money on royalties unless you have a huge platform, and we'll probably talk about platforms in a bit. But the real trick is to use your book to bring people to your business. So in that way, the first way you can use a book is to use it as a lead generator, and that is to bring them in at the top of your funnel. A book is an expensive, if they're buying the print version, it's usually 15 to $20. If they're buying an E-book version, it's less than 10 normally. So you get to reach more people at a low price point, and your book is an introduction to you and the way you do business. So what you're doing every time you sell a book is you just handed them a 150 page infomercial on you if you do it right. The other thing that I always put into books when I'm working with business people is I always link back to the website so people can get more information. If you look at Tim Ferriss's books, it seems like he's sending you to his website for something cool every three pages, and that's not an accident. So you can use your book in that way, which is to send them to your website, to let them know what you do and how you do it, because the people who don't like what you have to say, they're not going to resonate with you, they're never going to hire you anyway. But the people who do, now they've got a better feel of, as Barbara says, they know, like, and trust you better because now you've put all this effort into a book to help them, and now they feel like they know you. They've been listening to your voice for 170, 200 pages. It's a sneaky way into somebody's mind, and I like that a lot. Do you want to just go through some of the other ways you can use books? Absolutely, whatever you want to give us. We're open to all your wisdom, Barbara. You've got me cackling already. Oh, gosh. The other way, I mean you don't have to sell books. I just did a blog post on this. If, for instance, a lot of people print up copies of their books and they give them away. And a lot of people are saying, "Oh my God, how can you afford to do that?" And some people can afford that and some people can't. But when you have books printed up, say you've got a 200 page book that you have printed by a print on demand publisher, Lulu or Amazon or Page 2
Ingram Spark, you can buy copies of your book for like $3 a copy basically. So if you go and you're going to do a talk, and you know there's going to be 50 people in the room, you would order up 50 copies of your book, and you can either sell it in the back of the room, and so you're making a profit right there. You can sell it for 15 or $20. Or you can give it away to everybody in the room, and have them come back and you'll autograph the copy for them. You don't have to pre-sign them. And that way, you get to interact with each person and find the people that I might want to work with and who might want to work with you. So it's a forced interaction. By giving them your book and having them come to you to sign it, first of all, the people who aren't interested in you won't come get it signed. They're not going to wait around. But the person who waits till the very end because they really want to talk to you, that's probably a good prospect for you. When people say, "I book is a business card," it's one of those little things that makes... It raises my hackles just a little bit, but you can really give away your book to get more people in. And in that regard, a free book is a business card. It's an introduction to you and what you do. When somebody comes to you and you're talking about books and marketing them and selling them, and they say, "Barbara, this book is going to be a bestseller." What's your response to that? Well, if we're face to face, I try very hard to keep a straight face. If we're not face to face, I hit mute and snicker. That's wrong, isn't it, Susan? That's just the wrong thing to say. Oh, now you've got me on bestseller. I can make any book an Amazon bestseller. Okay, because it's very, very simple to game the Amazon system. And if you choose your categories correctly, and if you've got a big enough launch with enough people, and you can actually pay people to buy your book and blah, blah, blah, blah. It's very, very easy to become an Amazon bestseller. A little harder to get it across categories or in the bigger categories, so if they say, "This book is going to be a bestseller," and they're not coming from the mindset of, "I know how to game the Amazon system," but, "I think I'm going to put out a book and Oprah's going to call me up and put me on her show," then that's the type of thing that is great if it happens, but it doesn't happen all that often. So to have a bestseller on what I consider the real bestseller lists, like the of course New York Times bestseller, or Wall street Journal, those are harder to game. They can be gamed, but that's not the way you get your book onto the bestseller list. You have to really have a platform to Page 3
launch from. You have to have a launch plan, you have to have marketing dollars. You need somebody to shepherd your book all the way through the process. You need people to help you JV your launch to get the word out there. And you need a little bit of luck as far as New York Times because you need to have distribution in brick and mortar stores. And New York Times has an algorithm that really only counts sales from brick and mortar. So you need to have usually a traditional publisher that will get you into those stores, and then push your book. And then, you have to do your own marketing push, because traditional publishers only get you so far. The bulk of the marketing for any book, whether you're self-publishing or have a traditional publisher is that you have to go out there and flog your book. And there's a reason why all the celebrities are getting up at 4:00 o'clock in the morning to be on Good Morning America and the Today Show when they have a book coming out. It's their job to flog their book, and even though they're famous, they still have to get the word out. So it doesn't matter if you're famous or not, you're still going to have to work to market your book and make it a bestseller. Yeah, that's interesting because I know that now, when traditional publishers want to, or are considering you, the first thing they want to know is all about your platform, which is a great segue, by the way, into the whole idea and concept of a platform. So first of all, so that we're all on the same page, Barbara, what exactly is a platform? What are you talking about when you say platform? Okay. We're going to go back to Jane Friedman, who's an awardwinning blogger. She's been in the publishing industry for years and both Susan and I just love her stuff. She defined an author's platform as this. It's an ability to sell books because of who you are or who you can reach. And I think that's about the best definition of a platform I've ever seen. A platform is all about your ability to sell books. When a publisher comes to you and says, "How many people are in your mailing list? How many people follow you on social media? How many people download your podcast?" They're looking at your platform, and they're really looking to see whether or not you can sell books, because publishers no longer really sell books. They distribute, they do a little bit of marketing, but they don't do the marketing pushes that they used to do. So then I think we've answered this, but the fact is... Or, you've answered it is better. Why do we need a platform? Page 4
To sell books. That seems so simple, yes. Even as a business person, you need a platform too, because I do a lot of marketing plans, both for books and for small businesses, and people come to me and they have no outreach in place. They start a business,s or they write a book, and they haven't planned on how they're going to reach people. So, the most important thing that you could possibly have as far as your platform, and I've been studying online marketing for years, I've been in business since the... Oh, ouch. Like 1980. That's how old I am. I was just going to say that makes you really old. I had my first corporation when I was 23. And it was a marketing and sales corporation, so I did start young. But not all that young. So yeah, 1980. The most important thing you can have as a marketer, whether it's for your business or for your book is you need a mailing list. And this goes back to Kevin Kelly's, it was a rather famous article, came out back in 2008 that said to be successful as a musician I think is where he was going, but as a musician, as an artist, as an author, you need one thousand true fans. And that's always been the number in people's head's because he put it there. I like the fact that somebody publishes a blog post and a number gets set in people's heads. I just love that. That's a platform, by the way, if you can do that. He said a true fan is somebody that will support you, every time you put out a new CD, or every time you put out a new book, or every time you give a seminar, these are the people who will sign up, no questions asked. They'll follow you. Dead Heads will follow you around the country and be at your concerts. They don't go to one Grateful Dead concert, they go to every Grateful Dead concert. Jimmy Buffet's Parrot Heads, they don't go see Jimmy Buffet once in their lifetime, they're going everywhere to see Jimmy Buffet, then they're hanging out at bars where he might show up. Those are true fans. And so the premise is that if you have one thousand true fans, and you launch a CD a year, and maybe you make $20 with a CD, you're going to sell at least a thousand of those, that's $20 thousand, which is not enough for me to stay in scotch, but it's a nice baseline income. So if you launch two CDs a year, that's 40 thousand, now you're looking at, "Okay, I might be able to get by," if you don't have kids. So the idea of Page 5
having a thousand true fans is the idea of creating an almost automatic income for yourself on a yearly basis. So for an author, if you're selling copies of books, and you're counting on the royalties to make a living, you might only need one thousand true fans, but you might need to put out six or seven or eight books a year, which is a little bit tough. If you have two thousand true fans, and you're making $7 a book, that's $14 thousand a book, you can count on those people to go buy your book. That's great. So $14 thousand, you put out two, three, four books a year, you start making enough money to live on. So the number of true fans depends on how much your offer is, and that's what we talk about is the product to market fit. For instance, if I was doing consulting at $15 thousand for 6 months of consulting, how many people would I need over 6 months to make $100 thousand? Well that's what? Seven people? So you look at your offer and you look at what you're charging, and that's how you decide how big your platform needs to be. For a lot of small business people, they might have a boutique business. They might be consultants. They might be coaches. And depending on their price point, they don't need a whole lot of clients. When I was doing strictly ghostwriting, I only needed about half a dozen clients a year to make a good living. I'm kind of cheap to keep except for the chocolate and the scotch. I'm not jetting off to Paris for the weekend and I'm not buying Ferragamo shoes. I'm barefoot most of the time. However, if you have an offer, for instance, my sister sells cannolis at farmers markets. They're darn good cannolis by the way. But she sells I think it's 3 for $5. So when she goes out, she's got to sell a lot of cannolis to make a thousand dollars. Whereas I don't have to do that. Like that's a blink of an eye for me, but for her, it's a lot of cannoli filling. So it depends on what you're offering. If you're selling a book, you need to sell more if you want to live off the royalties. If you have a book that introduces people to your business and the average sale in your business is $5 thousand, now you only need to get 20 clients to make that hundred grand that seems to be the magic number for everybody on a yearly basis. And you just do the math from there. If you want to make $250 thousand a year, how many clients do you need at 5 thousand to do that? And do you have the time and the bandwidth to do that? It's just math at that point. So I'm going to backtrack you a little bit because there's a starting point, and so we're talking about a platform and obviously the need to have one. But then how do we actually begin to build it? You're talking about Page 6
already having one. What if I don't have one? How do I even get started building it? Oh, you're talking my language now. There's any number of ways to do it. And some are faster and some are slower. It's probably the most obvious one that has been around the internet for ages is to have a free opt-in on your website. You give people something of value, whether it's a checklist or an E-book, or I have a three video training course for free on one of my sites. And people sign up for that, and their name and email address go onto your list. And I was surprised, because we've been in this business for so long, Susan, we forget people don't know what an auto-responder is or how they work. And so I'll say to a coaching client, "Okay, so what's your opt-in freebie and what auto-responder platform are you using?" And they just give me a blank look. And I'm like, "Oh, okay, back up Barb." So if you are brand new to the business, you're going to look for what's called an auto-responder platform, and that's something like Aweber or Get Response or Mail Chimp. That's a free one which is great. If you don't have a list yet, you get up to two thousand people on your list for free before they start charging you. And what these companies do is they allow you to have people put in their name and email address on your website and they will automatically send out a letter or a series of letters for you so that you automatically have that marketing in place. You're keeping in touch with people without having to separately do each person who signs up on your site. And you can also send out individual broadcast messages to your list. So if you have 100 people on your list, and you want everybody to know you're doing a webinar next week, you just send out one letter, it goes to all 100. So that's basic basic. And that is to start a mailing list from your website using an autoresponder and a free opt-in. I love Convert Kit, for instance that s my provider of choice. But yes, you're right. I mean, to get started, Mail Chimp offers a free opportunity for you to just build up to 2 thousand, as you say, subscribers. So yeah. When do you think's a good time to actually start marketing your book? Before you write it. I knew you'd say that. But I had to test you just to see. I know. It was like you just pitched that one in low and slow, didn't you? Page 7
Yeah. And here's why I say that. Because a lot of people write books that nobody wants to read. I get at least once a week somebody messages me and says, "I want to write a memoir." And I'm thinking, "Well, you're not famous." And usually they know me and I'm thinking, "You haven't really done anything out of the ordinary." And 9 times out of 10 it's somebody who's just broken up with their significant other and they want to tell their side of the story. So I'm always like, "Just go get a pint of Hagen-Daz and some wine and you'll be fine." Because really, for people who write memoirs, they're not autobiographies for starters. It's about a certain time in your life. You really need to be namedropping. If I'm going to write a memoir, it's going to be for the few brief months I worked with say, Harry Reems, who was a porn star, and who was doing porn at the time and neither was I, by the way. Really not cut out for that. But if you're going to write a memoir, you have to have something memorable to talk about. So the first thing is before you even start writing your book is find out if there's a market for it. Find out what people want and need. And that, again, is market research. If you have a topic in mind, or you're a consultant and say you do sales coaching. Go on to Amazon and type in sales coaching and see what comes up for book and see how many books there are for that. And go onto Google and see how many people are searching on sales coaching or need help making sales. And do your research on the things that people are actually asking for. Another great way to decide what to put into your book is to go onto those ask sites like Ask.com and Quora and see what people are asking about that subject. Because maybe you have a very broad subject, and you find out that there are tons of people asking about one particular segment of what you do. That's probably a good topic for a book. Fabulous. Let's talk about mistakes. Our listeners always love to listen to mistakes people make about our authors. We run [crosstalk 00:19:29] Or mine. Give us two or three mistakes that you find authors make inevitably with regard to marketing. Well one, they don't start early enough. I always get the call like right as their book is coming out. It's like, "My book is coming out. I need to market it." And that's when I find out they don't have a website, they don't have a list, they don't have a social media following. They're not running a group, they're not speaking. There's so many things you can Page 8
start doing before your book comes out to really build up the number of people who will buy your book. First of all, they just don't start early enough. They don't think down the line of how they're going to market this book. And along those lines, I will add in when you're writing your book, send people to your website to get free downloads because you want to capture those emails, those names and emails. When somebody buys your book on Amazon or Barnes and Noble, or they go into a store and buy your book, you don't get their contact information. But if they're buying your book, you really want that contact information because when you write your next book, ha, ha, ha, you're going to want to contact them. So you need to send them to your website so you can get that information. And you do that by building things into your book to say, "Hey, if you'd like to see a mind map of this, click over here." And then they go to the page with the mind map, it says, "Enter your name and email address and I'll send you to my fabulous mind map that shows you exactly what you need to do to be rich and famous and date supermodels." And that seems to work really well. Those exact words actually, be rich, famous, and date supermodels, is I think key. That'll get you a lot of attention. It does get you a lot of attention. [inaudible 00:21:06] Another mistake I see authors make is assuming because they have a large social media following they're going to sell a lot of books. I watched a young man build up a following of about 16 or 18 thousand people on Facebook, and he was launching a book, and he was actually doing well as far as, "Hey, I'm working on my book. Hey, my book's coming out. Hey, I've got this cover. What do you think of this cover?" He was doing well to build up the anticipation of the book. But he really expected everybody on his Facebook friends list to buy his book. He really thought he was a shoe in to be a bestselling author. And I always tell people that Facebook likes do not equal Facebook sales. So don't count on your social media following to buy your books. Yes, maybe 1% will, but most of them won't. They just click like on a page. It doesn't mean they really like you. I'm sorry to tell you that. I feel so sad that I have to tell people that. Page 9
But it's the truth. It's the truth. I mean, I'm the same. I get people when I ask them how are they going to market the book is the first thing is they're going to put it on Amazon and then they've got all this following on social media, and so they think that's all that needs to happen, and somehow the book's going to magically sell itself. And it just doesn't. And the think about social media, and when I do marketing plans, I explain to people all you want your social media to do is to drive people to your website, to get their name and email address, because until you've got that email address, they're just clicking a like. They don't really like you. You need them to step up and say, "Yes, I'm interested in what you have to offer." And that's how they do it. They give you their name and email address on your website. So everything you do on social media is not for sales there, it's to drive them to your email list so you can sell them from that point. A third mistake, and it was in my head, and of course I didn't write it down. So we're going to have to come back to that one. No worries. In the mean time, something I hope you do know is how do people get in touch with you if they want to know more about your services, Barbara? I'm much better on email. Just BarbaraGrassey.com or Barbara@BarbaraGrassey.com will get them there. And I did remember that third mistake that I see all the time. Perfect. Go for it. Ah ha, I knew I would. People write books for themselves when they really need to write books for the person reading the book. So you have to really think about, "What does this person want and need from me?" And look at it from their viewpoint, because I'll talk all day just to hear myself talk, but that might not be of any value to you and you won't pay money to hear me just ramble on about stuff I want to talk about. If I'm doing a podcast, if I'm doing a talk for people, if I'm running a meet up group, if I'm writing a book, I sit there and I think to myself, "What do people want to know? And what do they need to know?" Because sometimes they're two different things. And a lot of times, you have to give them what they want to know. It's like sneaking vegetables in, right? For kids, you've got to sneak the vegetables in. And that is give them what they want to know, and you sell on what they want to know. That's your big headline. "Hey, do this." But really, you're giving them Page 10
the information necessary to make what they want actually happen. And when you work from the idea of you're really trying to serve your audience, you're going to do a whole lot better as an author and as a business person. That's fantastic. Barbara, if you were to leave our listeners with a golden nugget, what would that be? I would say whether you're writing a book for your business or writing a book for your own personal satisfaction, understand that it's not easy. It takes organization. But it's not that hard either. And the second part of that is you'll never be satisfied with your book. It's never going to be as good as it is in your head. And you have to be okay with that. Because what happens is people will write their book and then they'll mess with it, and they'll mess with it, and they'll mess with it, and they'll never put it out there. The best writing advice I ever saw was the worst thing you can do with your manuscript is leave it in the drawer. You have to get it out to the public, because it's not going to be as good as you want, but your next one will be better. And the one after that even better. And you just have to be brave enough to hit that publish button. That hits home so hard. It's like, "Oh my goodness. I've got this book that's on the computer and I'm waiting for it to be perfect." And that's never going to happen. It's never going to happen. I mean, look at Stephen King rewrote what? The Stand or something? I mean, authors will go back and rewrite their books. So yeah, even incredibly accomplished people want to go back and have a do over. You can always have a do over. Heck yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. And thank you all for taking time out of your precious day to listen to this interview, and I sincerely hope that it sparked some ideas you can use to sell more books. Here's wishing you much book marketing success. Page 11