How To Use Your Book As A Marketing Tool To Attract More Sales Revenues To Your Bank Account

Your book is not just intended to be read by your target audience. You can also push its purpose to the limit by using it as a marketing tool. Juliet Clark is joined by Patrick Snow, an international best-selling author and book marketing coach, who explains why giving away your book is one of the most effective marketing strategies every author should know about. He breaks down different ways to create a world-class book (not just a bestselling one!), three award-winning book title formulas, and three different options for publishing. Patrick also talks about the importance of having a hardcover, how books can help secure speaking gigs, and why you must own the online domain name for your book title.

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How To Use Your Book As A Marketing Tool To Attract More Sales Revenues To Your Bank Account

Welcome to the show. I am super excited today to have the guy that I use for book development. I try to send clients to him all the time because we get absolutely the best books from him. I have to thank my clients, Kerry Cassell and Samantha Kua, for those introductions to him because he truly does a great job.

By the way, you guys all missed it before, his editor and the editor that I use, Tyler Tichelaar, is on here today too. There is a really great team there for getting your book out. Patrick Snow is an international bestselling author, a professional keynote speaker, and a publishing, speaking, and book marketing coach. He first discovered his gift for speaking at age seventeen while giving the pregame speeches to his high school football team.

Since then, Patrick has electrified more than 3,500 audiences on four continents to achieve their individual and organizational destinies. As a publishing coach, he has mentored more than 1,200 clients throughout the world to successfully publish their books. Many of these clients have gone on to become speakers, coaches, and consultants as well. If you guys know anything about his packages, that is actually part of it.

While the book is being edited, he coaches you on how to get those gigs. Patrick is the author of many books, including his international bestseller, Creating Your Own Destiny, which has sold upwards of one million copies in five languages and 108 countries worldwide since 2001. Patrick, please take it away.

Thank you very much, Juliet. I see some people on here that I recognize. Glenn Alex, so good to see you. Of course, Tyler Tischler, your best editor in the Milky Way Galaxy. I am thrilled to have you on as well. Thank you for joining us. Juliet, thank you for your leadership. Thank you for putting this together. I am thrilled to be a part of this and support you and your amazing publishing business, however I can. The rest of you, I am thrilled to have you here.

I am going to go about 35 minutes, just give you an overview of what I do, how it works, and how it can all benefit you. I want to stay on as long as we can to answer as many questions as you have. As I am moving forward here, feel free to jot down any questions that you have on anything that I share. A lot of what I share, you might have heard before. It might be called something different, but we are going to just go from there and have fun with this today.

I am going to just speak from the hip, tell you the whole story, and see what I can do to add value to your life. Zig Ziglar taught me as a very young man. He said, “You can have everything in your life that you want, as long as you help enough other people get what they want.” What I do as a writing coach, a publishing coach, a book marketing coach, and a professional speaking coach is ask my clients, “What are your goals for your book? What are your goals for your speaking? What are your goals for your consulting?”

How To Create A World-Class Book

What are your goals? Once I know what that is, then I can help you customize something that specifically goes towards that. I guess the first thing that I want to do is give you a couple of quotes, and then I want to talk about what a book is. The first quote comes from Abraham Lincoln. He said, “The only way the dead can teach the yet unborn is through the written page.” Think about that.

The only way the dead can teach the yet unborn is through the written page. A second anonymous quote comes from an unknown source. Tyler could probably help me figure out who said this, but he says this, “There are only two things you can leave behind on this earth. One is your children and the other is your art.” Think about your book as a masterpiece, as a piece of art, as a tool, or as a resource to give away to your family, to your children, and to your grandchildren.

In 300 years from now, your great, great, great grandchildren will be looking at your book and your message and think, “Look at what this person did. Look at what that person did. Look at how they set us all up.” With that being the case, I look at a book as a lead generation tool. I look at the book as a platform from which we stand. I look at the book as a physical website. I look at the book as the world’s greatest marketing secret in the history of our business.

There is so much noise out there on the internet today. One of the biggest challenges that we have is how to distinguish ourselves from everyone else. How do we get other people’s attention? I firmly believe that people do not believe advertisements. We see ads, infomercials, and billboards all day long, and we are not stopping on the freeway to write down phone numbers of billboards that we see. As we are channel surfing, we are not recording every single TV commercial so that we can call them up and go to their website.

We are just not doing that because we are overwhelmed with that. When someone sends you a signed copy of their book, you are probably just not going to toss that book to the side. You are going to hold that book on your bedside stand or on your desk. You are going to look through that and spend some time doing that. I firmly believe that a book is the world’s greatest marketing secret in the history of our business. If we are going to do a book, we should do it right.

To me, I think a world-class book would be 250 to 350 pages. That is 50,000 words to 70,000 words. Everybody says, “Nope, I am not going to read it. Nobody is going to read that book. It is too thick. Nobody is going to read a thick book.” I tell people all the time, “Look, I do not care if you read my book. I just want you to book me as the keynote speaker. I do not care if you are going to read my book. I just want you to hire me as a coach or use me as a consultant.”

The problem that we have seen with Amazon, and I am a big fan of the Amazon KDP, and that is one of the methods that we use for printing, but not all of them, is that for years and years and years, Amazon has not been able to print a hardcover book. What a lot of people have done is go to the internet, and they published a softcover book on Amazon KDP, and it looks like this. The cover curls up and points to the sky.

This becomes the book that they use. You look at it, and it is like, “It is only 72 pages.” Really, it is more of a booklet, and a booklet is not going to get you the 5, 10, 15, 20,000 dollar keynote fee. I believe you want the book to be the width of your thumb. When your book is the width of your thumb, as a result of that book being the width of your thumb, there is going to be marketing copy that will be able to be clearly read on here.

This is the most recent book that I did, The Last Undefeated Season, with my coach, who just passed. He coached me in football and baseball for nine years. Again, look at the width of the book, which is the width of the thumb. There is the comedian on our team, Pat Carmody. I put him on the cover because he was like the glue that held us together. I always tell people all the time, “The fatter the book, the fatter the paycheck.”

When you understand that it is about perceived value, because if you are a speaker, a coach, or a consultant, and you send the meeting planner something like this with a cover curled up, they are going to assume that you are a $500 speaker. They are going to assume that you are a public speaker. Never use the phrase public speaker ever.

Public speaker is the worst phrase in the world because as a public speaker, you are going to get free breakfast and free lunch and free dinner, free pens and free food and free parking and all the freebies, but you are not going to get paid. The words that you need to use are, I am a professional speaker. Professional speakers have books that are 250 to 300 pages. You put this on the desk of the meeting planner, and you plunk that down, and they go, “I do not know if we can afford the speaker.

Again, it is okay if they do not read the book. Remember, you do not care if they read your book or not. You care that they hire you as a speaker, coach, or consultant. Once you get the gig booked, this is the most important question that you need to ask, other than your keynote speaking fee. The keynote speaking fee is one fee, but there is also a question that you have to ask.

This question is the most important question, and that is, do you have a gifting budget or do you have an educational materials budget? A lot of times, the meeting planners will say, “Patrick, we cannot afford a $25,000 keynote speaking fee on your website. We have only got $10,000 on your budget.” My answer is great. I will offer you that on a prepaid discount.

Instead of doing 50% down now and the other 50% due two weeks before the event, they might send me $10,000 eleven months in advance. The question is, what is your gifting budget? What is your education materials budget? They ask what are you talking about. My answer is, how would you like to include a copy of the printed book in everybody’s registration conference bag?

When they show up to the conference, they are handed a bag with bumper stickers, hats, t-shirts, pens, markers, and all these other little trinkets. There is a signed copy of your book in that amenity bag. The meeting planner is like, “Is that possible?” Of course, it is possible. They might pay you another $5,000 or another $10,000 as a gifting budget, as an educational materials budget.

Now, as a result of that happening, you might make $10,000 on the keynote fee, and you might make another $10,000 on the book. That way, you do not have to try to sell books in the back of the room because everybody has that. I am going to say about 25% of the time they will do that. The other 75%, you have to ask for a back-of-the-room marketing display table in case anybody wants to come pick up a copy of the book.

This is another reason why you do not want to do the 72-page booklet and why you want to do the book that is thick enough. It is the width of the thumb. Always do hardcover. Softcover books can be destroyed in one cross-country vacation trip in a backpack. You go to and from Vegas for the weekend, you want something to read on the plane, you throw it in the backpack. By the time you get home from Vegas, the book is destroyed. It has fallen apart. The covers are bent.

When you have a hardcover book, it can last upwards of 50 to 100 years. The perceived value of a hardcover book is that it is not a public speaker. That is a professional speaker. That is a high-end consultant. Now, Amazon KDP, as of about two years ago, is doing hardcover books. I cannot believe this. This book right here is $9.11 on Amazon. It is 300 pages.

It is $9.11 for me to buy this, and it is hardcover. Of course, they do not do dust jackets. Typically, what we do with our clients, we have two services that we provide. We do a high-end book. On that high-end book, we use this technology called image wrap or litho wrap technology. Here is the dust jacket. You take the dust jacket off, and then the actual book dust jacket is printed on the board of the book.

As a result of that, some people damage the dust jacket, or they throw it away, but then they still have the book. We use the ultra-bright white paper. This is called litho wrap or image wrap technology. A lot of times, we will do a dull matte finish. The reason why you want a dull matte finish on the board is that it does not hold fingerprints. We might do a shiny gloss on the dust jacket so it looks nice and shiny.

Using Your Book To Secure Speaking Gigs

A book is, as I mentioned before, the world’s greatest marketing secret in the history of all business. It is a hook. It is a magnet. It is a physical website. It is the single greatest sales resource that you can have to give to your prospects. I have been a professional speaker for over 30 years, and I want to share with you how I got my first $5,000 paid speaking gig. I was in Seattle, and maybe the first few years of my speaking career, I was driving to all my gigs, $2,500 here, $1,000 there, $500 there, driving and driving.

I found a speaking engagement in Florida, in Key Largo, Florida, for ASA tire software. I really wanted that gig. What I did was take my book. On the inside flap of the book, on the inside page, I said, “I would be honored and thrilled to be considered as your speaker for your next event. If selected, I am confident that your audience will benefit and be pleased with the results. Dream, plan, execute, soar, Patrick Snow signed, and I sent it off to the meeting planner. I followed up because fortune is made in the follow-up.

Napoleon Hill says on average, it takes seven bits of communication between buyer and seller for a sale to transpire. Most sales professionals, according to Fortune magazine, give up on their sales prospects after three bits of communication. I will drip on somebody once every 7 to 10 days until they hire me as a speaker. If they do not hire me, I will start calling back next year. I called them up, and they said, “Yes, Patrick, we would like to book you as our speaker. We can only pay you $5,000.” I was thrilled. That was huge money back in 2001.

They said, “We are going to get you a round-trip airline ticket. We are going to get you a two-night hotel.” It was ASA tire software. They had about 2,500 people in their audience. I mailed the book. I went and did the engagement. I did what my mentor taught me. Show up early, like a politician, wait at the door, and shake everyone’s hand. I went around to all the tables, and I interviewed people at breakfast. I said, “I want to be your speaker, so please laugh at my jokes.”

They were laughing at the fact that I was asking them to laugh at my jokes. They thought that was fun, but I was doing that to break up the monotony. They told me this, and they told me that, and they told me all these things. Of course, my mentor taught me to always stay until the very last person in the room leaves, even if it is an hour or an hour and a half after, because many of your referrals will come in that hour or hour and a half after your speech, after everybody leaves.

I get a standing ovation most times. In the industry, you do not get a standing ovation. Brian Tracy taught me a method on how to do that, and now it works about 60% to 70% of the time. It does not work for postal service workers. I want you to know that I tried it in San Antonio, Texas, at the postal services conference, and I cannot get them to stand up. I cannot get them to laugh at my jokes.

In this case, I did get a standing ovation. I went to the meeting planner afterwards, and I said, “Please enlighten me.” I did not tell her this was my first get on a plane, flying across country, first $5,000 speech. I did not want her to think that I was a rookie. It was 26 or 27 years ago. I said, “Please tell me, there had to have been other speakers that you were interested in booking. Why is it that you booked me?”

My life completely changed in that moment. She said, “Patrick, yes, we had 27 speakers from all over North America, 27. Every single one of them sent us an email and had an embedded highlight video in that email. We watched about ten of the videos, and they were all given by great speakers. You, Mr. Snow, you are the only one of the 27 that actually mailed the signed copy of the book.”

I was like, “Really? The only one?” She said, “You write this big, long inscription. Sometimes in the past, we have gotten books with a Sharpie marker, and we cannot even read the name of the author. We like yours in blue ink, a whole nice page.” I said, “Great. Well, what do you think of the book?” She started backtracking. “Just so you know, we had seven of us on the speaker selection committee, and we were all so busy putting this conference together that not a single one of us actually read your book.”

“Not a single one of us, but we liked the title. We liked the title, Creating Your Own Destiny. We thought this was a nice cover, a nice title. This caught our attention. We saw the cover of the book and the title of the book. We knew we had to book you.” My jaw just dropped. The entire trajectory of my professional speaking, my professional coaching, and my book marketing strategy completely changed that day.

I went home to Seattle, Washington, where I lived in the early 2000s, and I changed everything. Over the next twenty years, I have sent out about 5,000 copies of my book, estimated as free books, over the course of the last 26 years, to bloggers, podcasters, journalists, radio, TV, newspaper, and magazine, meeting planners, coaching prospects, and consulting prospects. Everybody says, “Patrick, I want to do what you did. I want to sell upwards of a million books. How did you do it?” Five languages, 108 countries.

I said, “I just went to the post office every single day for twenty-some odd years. I gave away one or two or three books every single day.” If you are willing to do that, you are going to get the book sales. Most people are not willing to do that. Through that experience, what I learned is that the number one book marketing strategy is to strategically give your books away to the people who can hire you for speaking, coaching, and consulting.

If you are walking or driving down the street and you see a homeless person, give them a bottle of water, get a granola bar, or give them food, but do not give them a book. You only want to give books to the people with big mouths. Bloggers, podcasters, meeting planners, and people with big spheres of influence. Allow your book to be like Halloween candy on October 31st. These kids come to your door, and they want the big candy bar.

They come to my door because I buy the big candy bars from Costco. Do not give them the little candy bars. They do not want that. They want the big candy bars. Your book is the big candy bar. You are going to give that away to every single prospect that you can find strategically for the rest of your life. You are going to follow up because the fortune is made in the follow-up. That is what you are going to do.

Once you understand that concept, that your book is not your product, your book is your marketing plan. Your book is your advertising campaign. Your book is the hook to attract people to your message. Amazing things will happen. Your speaking, coaching, consulting business will just go gangbusters. By the way, a lot of times you do not make a lot of money in the book.

I sold 40,000 copies of my book to Amway in the first 30 days the book came off the press because they had a book of the month program. 40,000. I made $6,000. I am like, “That is like almost nothing. It is $0.25 a book. I sold $15,000 to another networking company and another $20,000 to another company. I did a bunch of foreign language rights deals. I sold the English language rights in Africa, the English language rights in Southeast Asia, in India, the Russian language rights, the Arabic language rights, and a couple of others.

Indonesia and England, and a lot of these companies are called sandbaggers. What I mean by that is they sell books all over the world and do not tell you the truth. I actually sold my rights to a major New York publisher. Because we are being recorded, I am not going to mention the name of that company. If you text me, I will tell you the name later. They promised me radio, TV, newspaper, and magazine. They promised me everything under the sun.

They sent me royalty statements for a year, all with zeros. I kept looking at all these testimonials that came in via email. I asked them, “Did you buy the New York published version or the self-published?” “I bought the New York published version.” I realized that even in this country, the biggest publishers in the world sandbag and lie because they do not want to let you know how many books they sold. Certainly, I am not going to spend a quarter of a million dollars suing my publisher because they are not paying me a royalty. I have not seen a royalty statement from them in twelve years.

I sold the deal to them thirteen years ago. That takes us to a couple of other things. We are going to talk about your three publishing options in a minute. Before I do that, everybody is like, “Patrick, I want to be a bestseller.” My whole system is called BecomingABestsellingAuthor.com. That is the whole program. I work with Juliet Clark, and she does some amazing things on the technology side that I do not do. We are a very, very good fit.

Speak On Your Book

To me, if you are going to write and publish a book, let us be a bestseller. Everybody says, how do you do it? Number one. Five ways to become a bestseller. Number one, you need to speak about your book. When you speak, business happens because your voice is your moneymaker. Speak as a podcast guest. Do teleseminars, do Facebook lives, speak on other people’s conferences, on other people’s podcasts. I can tell you I have done maybe 500 or 1,000 of these.

Tuesday night free master class teleseminar, and I’m promoting it all over social media. There have been about 6 or 7 times nobody joined the call. I am on the call at 7:00, and I hear the free conference call music just chiming along. 7:05 nobody dials in. 7:10 nobody does. 7:15 by 7:20, I hang up. I feel like I am a miserable failure because I had zero people on my call. The next day, I get 2 or 3 messages, “Patrick, I am so sorry. I missed it.” “Sorry. I had my kids’ baseball game and my daughter’s Girl Scout meeting. Is it too late? Can I still work with you? By the way, how was your teleseminar last night?” My answer is “It was spectacular. You missed it.”

I do not need to tattle-tale on myself and let the world know that nobody joined in. The point of it is that when you hold these master classes and these teleseminars, you do all the social media marketing for that, and anybody who does not attend is going to assume they had 100 attendees. You do the teleseminars for the perception on social media that you have all these people showing up. I have had lots of times where 15, 18, 20, 30 people joined in, but a lot of times nobody shows up.

When you speak, business happens. What I teach my clients is every single Tuesday night for the rest of your life, I want you to do a master class, free teleseminar on Facebook live, or on a free conference call, or on a Zoom every Tuesday night, 7:00 to 8:30, the rest of your life. Every Thursday night, I want you to go to a coffee shop, a community center, or a bookstore somewhere where you get a small meeting room for free.

The restaurant will give you their back-of-the-room meeting place for free when you bring in 15 to 18 people, and they all buy food from the restaurant or the coffee shop, and you get the free room. Do a one-hour speech with a Q&A. Of course, everybody gets to introduce themselves for a minute, and everybody gets to promote their business for a minute. That is why they show up for the networking. You do that every Tuesday night for the rest of your life, every Thursday night for the rest of your life, and watch your book sales explode.

The problem is that everybody thinks, “Oprah Winfrey did not call. Dr. Phil did not call. I did my 90-day book marketing campaign, and the podcasters are not calling.” I have got news for you. The news is that a book marketing campaign needs to be a rest of your life book marketing campaign for 15 to 20 minutes every single weekday, Monday through Friday. You wake up, “Who can I give a book away to today? Who can I send a book to today? How can I spend my 15 or 20 minutes every single weekday, Monday through Friday, getting my message out there?”

By the way, I want you to take your book and create a PDF/ebook, not a real eBook. Of course, you can do that too, but have your designer take the cover of your book, make that be PDF page number one, the back cover of the book be PDF page the last page of your book, and then email that book out. I am trying to give away a million copies of my Creating Your Own Destiny eBook. People say, “Why would you do that?”

If I can successfully give away one million PDF files by email for free, maybe 10% of those people will actually read them. Now you’ve got 100,000 people who read the email that I sent. Of those 10%, maybe 10% more say, “I like this book so much that I want to add it to my library collection.” You send out a million in your lifetime, and you get a hundred thousand that read it, and then you get 10,000. That is 1% of a million. 10,000 people read it at 30 bucks a piece.

You just made $300,000 by giving away your eBook. People say, “What if somebody starts printing your book in China? What if somebody does that?” I am like, “That would be fantastic. I so want somebody to pirate my book. I so want them to blast it all over Asia, all over the world. That would be wonderful.”

A lot of people get their book, and they hoard it. You need to understand that you have to take your inventory of books and put them into two piles. If you get 500 books, 50% of your books, 250, is your giveaway pile. The other 50% is in your sell pile. You give away the 250 books strategically to the right people who will sell the other 250. You will order another 500 books. Giveaway 250, which sells the other 500.

Create A World-Class Book Cover

Five ways to become a best-selling author. Number one is to speak. When you speak, business happens. Number two, you need to have a world-class book cover. If you look at the leadership gurus of the world, they do circles, rectangles, triangles, and squares. Those books are boring. Circles, rectangles, triangles, and squares. I love John Maxwell, I love Zig Ziglar, and I love Brian Tracy. They are all my favorite mentors from the world, and I met most of them years and years ago. I love them.

Most of the leadership books are circles, rectangles, triangles, and squares. I call them graphics books. That does not really appeal to anybody. What I like are books with a real image in the actual book. This guy fell into an ice moat in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. You can see right about right there. In that saddle, that is where he fell. This is an image cover. This guy is the number one ukulele artist in the world, Derrick Sebastian.

He tried to create the endless summer 1950s Hawaii image with the palm trees. This is an image cover. “These are my children’s footprints in the sand of Oahu from 30 years ago. They are now 35 and 32, but when they were kids, I took their photos. I took this picture myself.” Image cover. This is from 1981, our junior high football team, the St. Paul Blue Waves. I am right here, this little guy here. I tell my clients, “Never put your photo on the cover of a book.” In this case, it is all about the images.

Not circles, triangles, rectangles, and squares. This guy has got a shooting star. He has written a spirituality book, a shooting star on the cover. Make your cover pop. A lot of people say, “I am going to save money. I am going to do my own cover. I am going to go to Amazon or have AI do my cover.” The AI covers are the worst-looking covers I have ever seen in my entire life. Do not waste your time. If you want to do a couple of mock-ups with AI and then send them to a professional, you can do that.

Come Up With A Compelling Book Title

There are lots of ways you can cut corners on your book, but I will tell you that cover design is not one of them. You want a world-class cover design because people will have 3 to 5 seconds where they look at your cover. They decide yay or nay. It is that quick. Number two is to have a world-class cover design. Number three way to have a best-selling author, to become a best-selling author, is you need to have a compelling title in which you own the dot-com of your book title.

If you do not own the dot-com of your book title, you are wasting your time. I purchased Creating Your Own Destiny about 30 years ago. Since then, there are now 2 or 3 other people in the world who have written a book titled Creating Your Own Destiny. Everybody asks me, “Are you going to sue them? Are you going to send them a cease and desist letter? Are you upset?” My answer is, “No, I am thrilled.” “Why are you thrilled that somebody else has written your book cover?”

My answer is “It’s because I own the dot-com. I own the brand. They are going to spend the rest of their life promoting their book. In doing so, they are actually working for me because now they are promoting my website. We all know that we copyright the content of the book, but we cannot copyright the title of the book. All of us on this phone call, we could go out and write a book titled Chicken Soup for the Soul. Of course, we would have Tyler edit it because he is the best editor in the world.

Even though we wrote the book Chicken Soup for the Soul, we would be wasting our time because we are promoting Mark and Jack’s work. See how that works? The number three thing is you must own the dot-com of your book title. Not the dot-biz, not the dot-org, not the dot-this or the dot-that. That is why these one-word book titles do not work anymore because most of those dot-coms are taken. Next, there are three award-winning book title formulas.

I spent over $3,000 30 to 35 years ago learning the three award-winning book title formulas. We do not have time to give you all three. I am just going to give you the number one best book writing formula. Is that okay? Can we do that for the book title? I will just give you the number one. It is the ING action verb. The ING action verb or gerund number title is you take a verb and add an ING to it to make it an action verb, such as creating your own destiny, daydreaming with purpose, or staying on guard.

Let me just see here, here is another one, a client in Christchurch, New Zealand. This one is fun. His book is titled Avoiding Propeller Blades. Propeller blades are alcoholism, pornography, gambling, and unfaithfulness to your spouse. Those are all the propeller blades that, if you get too careful, you can get your nose chopped off.

He is a comedian, but I love this title, Avoiding Propeller Blades. That is probably good advice. We should probably do that. If you are looking for a great book title, see if you can get the ING action verb. That title is so powerful. By the way, the number one book title using the ING that I have ever worked with about twenty years ago was by a woman by the name of Kris Blatty out of Los Angeles. She wrote a book, and I am going to tell you the title of the book.

When I tell you the title of the book, I want you to ask yourself, “Can you figure out what the book is about?” Are you guys ready? This is a test. I am going to give you the title, and you have got to figure out what it is. The book is titled Beating Ovarian Cancer. I want you to raise your hands if you know what that book is about. This is what is powerful about the ING rule. Creating Your Own Destiny, can you figure out what that book is about?

The point of it is I love the ING action verb, gerund, title formulas as the number one title formula in the world, but you have got to own the dot-com. This title formula is so powerful that every one of your chapters should also begin with an ING action verb. Instead of having a chapter that says, “Don’t give up,” because when you say “Don’t give up,” you are preaching and you are teaching, and nobody wants to be talked down to.

If you had a chapter title that says, “Refusing to Give Up,” “Believing in Yourself,” “Paying Yourself First,” “Balancing Family and Work,” “Investing in Your Children,” “Overcoming Adversity,” or “Beating Your Addiction,” every one of the chapters in your book should be an ING action verb. That makes the book a journey, a process. I want to follow Peter. I want to follow Mitch, Dorothy, Cheryl, Terry, Sandra, and Glenn. I want to follow them because this is a journey, and they are not barking out commands and demands of what I need to do in life.

A Good Combination Of Good Editing And Good Narrative

They are welcoming me on a journey with these ING action verbs. That is the number three thing to becoming a best-selling author. Number four. You need to have good writing with good editing. We are blessed to have Dr. Tyler Tischler, and I will sing his praises. He and I have been running together for about eighteen years now, maybe twenty years. He is the number one editor in the world who does a deep, thorough copy edit and content edit, helps you write the inside flap copy, writes a two-page book review, and blasts it all over the internet.

I have never found anybody in our world who provides the value that he does. He has a PhD in literature, a master’s in creative writing, an undergraduate in English, and is a former college professor and novelist, with twenty-plus books himself. That is what you want. Make certain that your book is professionally edited. Everybody says, “I am just going to go to ChatGPT. I am going to just go to AI and have them edit the book.”

Now, I do not know if you know this, but when you upload your book to Amazon, Amazon asks you if your book is AI. If your answer is yes, they will not accept it. There were people within the last several months trying to upload 300 and 400 books a month on Amazon, and Amazon put an end to it. No more AI books. There is no way that any person can write 400 books in a month, the old school way.

Three Different Options For Publishing

There are resources out there that you can use, but you still need a very good copy editor and content editor to do that. Certainly, Tyler is that person. The fourth thing is that you need to have a good story. You need to have a good narrative, a good book. If you do all of those things, you are going to be a bestselling author. I want to share quickly three options for publishing. Three options.

Option number one is the traditional New York route. I was rejected for sixteen years before this major New York publisher did a two-book deal with me. They finally bought the rights, and they promised radio, TV, newspaper, and magazine. I cannot even sell my own books in my speaking engagements anymore. Everything they promised me, they lied and failed on all of them. This is the number one publisher in the world. It was the biggest mistake of my life.

Number two option is the hybrid internet publishing route. If you just type in publishing on the internet, the first thousand companies that pop up, most of them are not maybe the best way to go. The reason is that they might charge you $25 to print the book, and then they turn around and print your book at $10 a piece. There is that markup in between, but if they can provide value, and there are some great companies out there that provide massive value, then that could be a really good option for you.

The massive value that I am talking about is technology, placement, SEO, and all kinds of things. I would say that you want to partner with the correct internet hybrid company if you are going to go that route, because a lot of companies do not offer that value. The third option is self-publishing, where you do everything yourself. There are limitations to that, where you do not get the technology at the end.

You do not get that search engine optimization. Maybe you do not know what you are doing. Self-publishing is where you pay whatever the printers are paying. Each of them has their options. As a publishing coach, I have benefited from having my publisher with a New York publisher. I know lots of people have a lot of success with the internet publishing route because their internet publisher is way better than the New York publishers, and they actually do things with the book. That can be a really good option for you.

Option three is self-publishing, but option three is you have got to be good at doing a lot of the things that maybe you are not good at. You have to work with the right people to decide which are the best. Everybody’s dream is to go the New York route. The problem with that is now that I have seen the last three or four publishing deals that have come out of New York, they are offering to take on the book for free, and they pay zero royalties.

You have got to pay, literally out of pocket, you have got to buy $100,000 worth of your books at $10 a piece. In the contract, it says you are buying 10,000 books at $10 a piece. You are paying $100, 000. The whole point of it is, who has got $100, 000 to buy their own books? Those are your three publishing options. The last route would be maybe Amazon. Amazon, it is important to know, is not a printer. Amazon KDP is a print broker. As a print broker, they submit their books to different printers that print. I’m going to say half of the books that I get from there are good.

The other half, they’re still warped or bent or damaged or whatever else, and I cannot get a live person to save my life. I spent an hour one time trying to get a phone number to Amazon, and I finally found a phone number, and then I took like hours to get a real person on the phone. Just know that there are times when the New York publishing route is the best way to go. There are times when internet publishing is the best way to go. There are times when self-publishing is the best way to go.

The biggest thing that I want to share with you, if you are like me and you lack technology skills, you need to partner with somebody who knows what they are doing. That is why Juliet Clark and Superbrand Publishing is such a great option for all of you because of the fact that she is among the most advanced technology whiz bang person that I know. She is going to do things with your book that you cannot. You need somebody like her on your side.

Are You A Bestseller Or A Best Giver?

You want to make certain that whoever you are partnering with knows what they are doing. Certainly, Juliet is world-class in that area. A couple of things before we finish up. Everybody wants to do the best seller campaign. This is an Amazon bestseller. This book right here. I have sold about 75 books. I am an Amazon bestseller, but I think I am like the 37,000th Amazon bestseller. I am not going to tell people that I am the 37,000th Amazon bestseller.

You have a New York Times bestseller, you have every newspaper with a bestseller. All these newspapers have bestsellers. There are a lot of companies out there that will charge $10,000 or $15,000 or $20,000 to have you be an Amazon bestseller. The whole shtick is that they have you give away your eBook on a certain day. You push your 50 best friends to go to Amazon to get your free eBook on that certain day. That company will charge you $10,000 to do that.

I always ask them, “Are you a best seller or are you a best giver? The reason why I ask whether you are you a best giver is that I actually was given the book on the day that you did. Did you sell it or did you give it?” There is a little bit of misleading there. I had a client once who said that he was number one in England. He was the number one bestseller in England. I just played devil’s advocate, and I said, “Was it the print book or the eBook?” He said it was the eBook.

I said, “Did you sell them or did you give them away?” “I gave them away.” I said, “How many did you do?” He said, “I cannot tell you these numbers.” I said, “You are all over social media telling everybody that you are the number one bestseller in all of the United Kingdom. That is misleading.” What I am saying all of this for is that the Amazon bestseller status does not really mean anything anymore because everybody is an Amazon bestseller. Even if you are like me and this book just came off the press a few months ago, and I sold 72 copies, maybe I am at 84, I have not even checked.

The point of it is, who cares about Amazon bestsellers? Nobody cares. Everybody wants to be a New York Times bestseller. Here is how you do that. You must be a top twenty seller on Amazon in your genre in any one given week. I am going to pick on Glenn because Glenn and I go back a few years. Let us say Glenn writes a book on mindfulness and positive mental attitude, or whatever else. Let us say she sells 7,000 books in one given week on Amazon in the genre of mindfulness.

Let us just say health and wellness. That is better. Health, wellness, nutrition. She sells 7,000 books in a week on Amazon. I have a book on entrepreneurship, and let’s say I sell 70,000 copies of my book on Amazon. I might be the number 21 Amazon bestseller that week, having sold 70,000 books. She might be number 20 at 7,000. She is reported to the New York Times as having only sold 7,000 books in a week. Now she is a number 20 New York Times bestseller. Because she is a brilliant marketer, she is going to remove the number 20 label.

Now she is just a New York Times bestseller. I sold ten times more books than she did, 70,000. I finished number 21 on the list. I am not a New York Times bestseller. My point is, it is very difficult to do. You do not know who else is buying and selling their books the same week that you are. Even if you become a New York Times bestseller, I have had New York Times bestsellers say, “I am not getting paid. They are doing the sandbagging. Not getting paid my royalties. I cannot pay my mortgage payments. I cannot pay this. I cannot do this. I cannot do that. I am a New York Times bestseller.”

My point of it is, remember to look at your book as nothing more than a lead generation tool to give to your clients, and know that the big money is made in the speaking, the coaching, and the consulting. That is where the big money is made. Little money is made in book sales. You can make $25,000 a year, $50,000 a year in book sales, but you probably are not going to be able to provide a living to your family only doing $25,000 a year in book sales.

Some Helpful Resources To Check Out

You want to gift the book so that you can ultimately position yourself to succeed in this space. I have some resources that I want to share with you that I want to give away. I am also going to finish up with this quote from Steven Pressfield in a few minutes, and then we are going to do a Q&A. If any of this has benefited you, here is what I am going to give you. You can basically send me a text, and in your text, send me your email.

My cell phone number is (206) 310-1200. These are my freebies that I am giving away. Number one, I am going to give you 21 mistakes to avoid when publishing and promoting your book. Number two, twelve tips to triple your coaching income. I teach the business, the process, and the conversion of coaching, so twelve tips to triple your coaching income. Number three, I am going to give away a special report on five ways to become a best-selling author. Number four, I am going to gift you my book, Creating Your Own Destiny.

The last thing that I am going to give away is that if you are interested, ask me about that. If you are interested, I would be thrilled and honored to offer you a complimentary 30 to 60-minute writing, publishing, book marketing, professional speaking, coaching, or consulting consultation. Anything in this information empire industry I work with, and I do that. If you need help, if your book is already done, I will give you a book marketing consultation.

If you are in the writing process, I will give you a writing consultation. If your book has been out for 5 or 10 years and you want to do speaking and coaching, we will do that. I do a lot of fix-and-flips. My clients send me their 100-page book with a poor cover and a poor title. Just like real estate investors, they might buy a three-bedroom, bath, and put on a new front door. They might do some landscaping, get rid of the shag carpet and the wood paneling, brighten it up with some hardwood floors, and then they sell the house.

A lot of times, my clients send me their book, and within 3 or 4 months, we will republish the book, maybe with the same title, maybe a new title. We probably will go to hardcover, maybe with a better cover design. We will add a chapter on leadership in the book and a chapter on change, empowerment, and transformation. The reason why the number one most booked speaking topic on planet earth is leadership or self-leadership. If you want to be a speaker, you need to have a chapter in your book on leadership or self-leadership.

Do you want to be a coach? The number one coaching topic on planet Earth is empowerment, transformation, or change. You need to have that chapter in your book. A lot of times, they send me the book. We do a new title, a new cover. We added the empowerment chapter. We add the leadership chapter. In the back of the book, you should have a page that says about the author, and then about Peter Boland coaching, and then about Glenn Alex consulting, and then about Sandra Doyle workshops or retreats.

You need to have these back-page inserts in the book that tell the reader what you do. I cannot even tell you how many times people have sent me their books, saying they cannot get a speaking engagement to save my life. What did I do wrong? They sent me their book, and I read their bio, and it does not even mention that they are a professional speaker.

The most important page in the book should say, “Book Terry Modica to speak at your next event.” That is the most important page. We do a lot of fix-and-flips on books. I would be honored and thrilled to gift any of you a complimentary 30 to 60-minute writing, publishing, book marketing, speaking, coaching, or consultation by phone, by FaceTime, or by Zoom. Send me a text on my private cell phone number (206) 310-1200.

Let me know that you want the freebies. In your text, let me know your email address so I can get you the 21 mistakes to writing and publishing your book, 12 tips to triple your coaching income, five ways to become a bestselling author, and then the Creating Your Destiny free book that I am going to give you. If you want the consultation as well, let me know that you would like a session with me. I will schedule that, and we will make that happen.

If you want to learn more about my system, my whole coaching is BecomingABestSellingAuthor.com. I want to finish with this quote about publishing. This comes from Steven Pressfield, author of The War of Art. Steven Pressfield says this, “Are you a born writer, an author, a speaker, a coach? Were you put on this earth to be a painter, a scientist, or an apostle of peace? In the end, the question can only be answered by action. Either do it or not, write the book or do not.”

“It may help to think of it this way. If you were meant to cure cancer, write a symphony, or crack cold fusion, if you do not do it, you not only hurt yourself, you even destroy yourself. You hurt your children, you hurt me, you hurt the planet. You shame the angels that watch over you, you shame the Almighty God who created you. Only with your unique gifts and for the sole purpose of nudging the human race one millimeter further back along its path back to God.”

“Creative work such as writing a book is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It is a gift to the world and every being inside of it. Do not cheat us out of your contribution. Give us what you got. Publish your book today.” Steven Pressfield, Author of The War of Art. In conclusion, I challenge you to dream, plan, execute, and soar. I challenge you, if not you, then who?

If not this, then what? If not now, then when? If not here, then where? I challenge you, as you look at your book, to think it, ink it, believe it, and achieve it. Think about your storyline, your narrative. Ink it into your computer. Believe in yourself, and you too can become a best-selling author. You need to spend the rest of your life fifteen minutes every single day, strategically giving away your books to the right people. When you do that, great things will happen.

By the way, the number one book marketing strategy in the world today is to give your book away to podcasters. By giving your book away to podcasters, try to position yourself to be a podcast guest every single day, once a day, Monday through Friday. Sometimes you are only going to have seven people listening. Other times, you are going to have 70. Some are going to have 70,000 people listening. Imagine being a podcast guest in front of 70,000 people, and then 480 people go to your website and buy your book. That is the power of podcasters.

Get your book in their hands and market yourself as a guest. You can certainly do your own podcast, but then you have to spend 10 or 15 years building your audience. It is a whole lot easier to do for others. Again, my name is Patrick Snow. Thank you very much for your time. I know I went a little bit long. I am sorry about that, Juliet. I am here for a Q&A, and it is only 5:55 AM here in Maui, Hawaii. I do not have my next call for three hours. We can do Q&A as long as you want. Juliet, back to you.

Thank you, Pat. I want to add some comments to what he just said. Amazon has changed its algorithms. In the month of May, because this is going to be out on April 28th, the podcasts are all about how you can match those algorithms. That best seller campaign he was talking about, the new algorithms do not honor those spikes. They want to see steady sales.

What they are looking at is that it is all algorithmic now. How many times are people looking at your book? How many people are buying? They do not want to see those spikes anymore. The other part of that is they changed them to reward content creators. They have had so much cheating over the years, and you cannot fake being a content creator. You either are, or you are not. It is not only about podcast guesting, but also about getting your own podcast started.

They can see every link that drives traffic into your book. If they are coming from creators, like a podcast guest, it is a plus. Have a LinkedIn newsletter, have a Substack, have a podcast of your own. Do things that show them you are a creator. One of the big things they are also looking at that signals you are a creator is to fill out your A-plus content, because that is another avenue that they can see more about you and your book.

Why You Must Own The Domain Name For Your Book

I have not done a best seller campaign since probably September of last year because we knew that this was happening, and as Pat said, you are giving your book away. You are not becoming a best seller. You are becoming the best giver in that sense. If you do not have those things set up, talk to us about it. I know Pat jumped in when I was telling Sandra about what she needs to do because she just started one, but make sure you are your content creator. For years, authors have skipped the step of building their author platform. They are forcing you to build it now with these new algorithms. Be sure and do that. Do you guys have questions for Pat before we go?

Yeah, I do. I have one.

Go ahead, Sandra.

Explain a little bit more about owning this dot-com for your book.

About 30 years ago, I tried to purchase CreatingYourOwnDestiny.com. I cannot get CreatingYourOwnDestiny.com because somebody else owns it. I cannot buy the dot-com of Creating Your Destiny. I was creative, and I searched for Creating Your Own Destiny and that dot-com was available. Once I purchased CreatingYourOwnDestiny.com, then that is what I titled my book. A lot of times, people own the book, or they have copyrighted the book, but they do not actually own the actual domain.

In that case, I would coach you in your next printing or your next edition of the book to stop promoting somebody else’s website and start promoting your own website. That might mean that you need to change the title of your book from what it is currently to what it needs to be in the future. People change their titles all the time. Zig Ziglar’s first book was titled Fleas, Chicken Biscuits, and Pump Handles.

From Yazoo City, Mississippi, Fleas, Chicken Biscuits, and Pump Handles. He and the redhead were his wife. It was a miserable failure. He spent a whole year selling that book at all the speaking engagements. He could hardly sell anybody because nobody wanted to pick up a book and own a book titled Fleas, Chicken Biscuits, and Pump Handles.

After the book was in print, he updated it into a second edition, and he retitled the exact same book, See You at the Top. That book went on to sell tens of millions of copies. If you own the dot-com of your book right now, you are in great shape. If you do not own the dot com of your book right now, when you go to reprint the book in its next printing, I think it would be a good idea to either try to go to whoever owns that title and buy that from them.

A lot of squatters might sell you your book title for 500 or 1,000, maybe 2,500. If somebody has a whole company already built using your title, they are not going to sell it. All you need to do is revise your title, just like Zig Ziglar did. Find a title on GoDaddy, Register, or wherever you buy the domains that you can buy and own, and then take that as your platform that you are going to market and promote the rest of your life. Does that answer your question, Sandra?

Yes. Can you change your title and have the same content?

That is what everybody does. You can do that. I will tell you that the book purists of the world will tell you every single year that you re-release the book in a second edition, third edition, fourth edition, or fifth edition. Every year that you re-release that, you need to get a new ISBN number. I never did. I used the same ISBN for every single year and never got in trouble for it.

You can see this is the first edition of Creating Your Own Destiny. This is like a second or third edition. This is like a tenth edition of Creating Your Own Destiny. I sold the book to a publisher in New York, and they butchered it. They put the ugly puke green yellow mustard. They even put the Illuminati sign on here. It absolutely infuriated me.

On the next book that I did with them, I fought to get the cover that I wanted. This was the two-book deal that I did with the New York publisher. This was what their design group did, which is horrid. This is what I did. Just know that over eleven years, there have been four different covers and subtitles on this. Your book is a tree. It never stops growing. You nourish it and fertilize it and water it every year the rest of your life. When you do that, great things happen.

Thank you so much. That answered two or three questions for me.

Important Links

• Patrick Snow
• Patrick Snow on LinkedIn
• Creating Your Own Destiny
• Becoming A Best Selling Author
• The Last Undefeated Season
• The War of Art
• Fleas, Chicken Biscuits, and Pump Handles
• See You at the Top

About Patrick Snow

Patrick Snow is an international best-selling author, professional keynote speaker, publishing, speaking and book marketing coach. He first discovered his gift for speaking at the age of 17 while giving the pre-game speeches to his high school football team. Since then, Patrick has electrified more than 3,500 audiences on four continents to achieve their individual and organizational destinies.

As a publishing coach, he has mentored more than 1,200 clients throughout the world to successfully publish their books. Many of these clients have also gone on to become speakers, coaches and consultants as well.

Patrick’s “DESTINY” message has been widely recognized in the media including, The New York Times and Forbes Magazine. His book, story and family photo was also featured as a cover story in a 2002, issue of USA TODAY.

Patrick is the author of many books including the international bestseller, Creating Your Own Destiny, which has sold upwards of one million copies in five languages and 108 countries worldwide since 2001. This book and his second book, The Affluent Entrepreneur, have both been purchased by John Wiley & Sons in New York and published under their imprint.

Originally from Michigan, Patrick graduated from the University of Montana in 1991. He lived in the Seattle area for more than 20 years until 2013, when he achieved his lifelong dream and moved to beautiful island of Maui, Hawaii.

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