Selling a book is usually a low-cost product. But if you know how to make a powerful pitch, you can garner the attention of many. Juliet Clark sits down with Ron Story Jr. who developed PitchDB, an AI-powered platform-building tool that helps authors level up their pitches. He explains how their innovative approach allows users to identify and connect with their target audience and further refine their work based on people’s feedback. Roy also presents the many benefits authors can gain from securing speaking gigs and media appearances – even in outlets you disagree with.

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The Pitching Powerhouse: Unleash Your Charisma And Command Attention With Every Pitch

I’m super excited about our guest. He has a newer platform that is fantastic for finding speaking gigs, podcasts, and even conferences and events for you to speak at. It’s a little different than what we’ve highlighted in the past, and I think you guys will be excited about this. I also want to remind you to go over and grab your free subscription at Breakthrough Author Magazine. You can find that at www.BreakthroughAuthorMagazine.com. If you’re looking for ways to build your platform, this is an excellent magazine. We have speaking experts, publishing experts, platform-building experts, AI, and content experts. We’ve got everything over there, and we know that the platform building can be a very slow process.

If you’re writing a book, you need to have that platform. You need to start at least a year in advance because it is a slow build, and this is where you’re testing and validating. Are your ideas good? Is that audience going to follow you? Are you speaking to them correctly? I wanted to remind you to go over and grab this free resource. It drops into your inbox on the first of every month and could be helpful for you in laying out the plan to build.

Before we get started, I want to tell you about our sponsor. Our sponsor is Life Wave, and you can find them at Calendly.com/TheFoolishCouple/Superbrand. I don’t know how much you know about their X39 product, but I am super holistic. I can’t even tell you. I don’t take anything that is not either organic or good for you. No pharmaceuticals, nothing like that that pours chemicals into my body. That’s what I love about X39.

When I have aches and pains, it’s a patch that I put on for 12 hours. It is a fabulous patch. As athletic as I am, I see results pretty much overnight if I wear it overnight. If you want to check out, find out more about this Life Wave patch that is amazing. Go over to Calendly.com/TheFoolishCouple/Superbrand and check it out. I can guarantee you it is well worth the money, and it’s keeping me in my old age out there and athletic, and feeling good.

Let’s stay tuned for our guest, Ron Story. Ron Story Jr. is an entrepreneur and the founder of a podcast service called PitchDB with a long history of self-made business ventures. Starting from a young age, he began his entrepreneurial journey by collecting and recycling aluminum cans to afford the toys he wanted. That’s my story too. Only I cleaned houses.

This early experience sparked his drive to solve problems and achieve his goals, which has continued into his adult life. Ron Story Jr. has been involved in the creation, development, and leadership of over 30 companies, demonstrating a strong commitment to entrepreneurship and innovation. I think you guys are going to love this platform. It’s my new go-to as well. Stay tuned for Ron.

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Ron, it’s great to have you here today.

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it, Juliet.

PitchDB

I am excited about PitchDB because authors need this badly, not only for the platform building but after their book is released as well. Can you tell us a little bit about what PitchDB is and why you built it?

Back in 2012, I started to set sales meetings for private equity firms using what we call cold email or email outreach. One of my friends came to me, and she knew I had been doing this successfully. She says, “Can you get me some speaking gigs using this technique?” I’m like, “I don’t know if I can get you the gig, but I can get you the meeting with the person who books the gigs.” That’s how we got started. COVID-19 happened or whatever. We had to get away from speaking gigs because there were no speaking gigs. The next logical step was to look at podcasts. When we first started, we started with a few thousand podcasts, and now we have 3.4 million podcasts in our database that we’ve built over time.

It came from taking a skill that I had and trying to solve a problem for a friend who was an author. She had written four books. She had a new book coming out, and she was like, “I would love to go and do some speaking opportunities, and then they’ll let me sell my book in the back of the room, or I can include it with the speaking fee. That’s a good way for me to get a booking.” That’s how we got started.

That’s amazing. That’s how we got started too. I started this company for my own books, and then as they were selling, I had one book that sold over 25,000 copies, people started coming to me saying, “I want that.” Isn’t that funny how we develop something for ourselves and our friends, and then it turns into our pretty much lifelong passion? What I love about your platform is that there are others out there. We know that there’s one that’s like a dating service that matches you. There’s another that just gives you a list. Yours takes the information that people put in the system and pitches for them using AI. Is that correct?

What we do is we did the hard part. We went and got all the data. We provide that data to you, and you get to send the email from your personal email address. They don’t know we exist. A bunch of people aren’t getting emails from PitchDB. They’ll get an email from Juliet Clark, Ron Story, James Brown, or whomever. It comes from your personal email account. What we saw was that certain people were building the legs of the elephant and the ears of the elephant in the trunk. We decided, why don’t we just put the whole elephant together instead of them having to go get the data, make sure the data is valid, put it into ChatGPT for them to write the email, make sure it’s the right podcast or speaking gig that fits for them. Just a whole bunch of stuff.

How can we get this done and have the person ready to click send in under a minute? You can hop in. Our AI will match you to the right podcast based on your profile. Once you approve that podcast, it will write the email for you. You just click send that you approve it.

Speaking Gigs

That is amazing and still little work. What I love about it is you’re not limited to podcasts. Let’s back up a little. If you’re a potential author or an upcoming author, you should be out there on Ron’s site a good year before your book ever comes out, getting matched, having a landing page, driving traffic to that landing page, either about an upcoming book or list building in general. You also go into speaking gigs where you can sell your book and conferences, which I don’t think there’s another platform out there that does all of that. Can you talk about the speaking gig? Is that a separate part from the podcast? How does that all work?

We tried to solve three problems. We call it the three P’s. We want you to get booked on podcasts, public speaking, and press. We have 3.4 million podcasts. We have about 19,000 speaking gigs, whether there are conferences or local associations that do meetings and quarterly meetings. We have about 37,000 press contacts.

Those numbers are where they are currently, but they constantly go up because we find new data every month and new contacts every month. That’s what we are right now. If someone wants to get booked on podcasts to build that momentum and then get some press about their launch, that’s always a good thing. Imagine being in a national or international magazine at launch and then being able to go out and promote doing a road tour via speaking gigs. You can do all of that within PitchDB.

Pitch: It is never a bad thing if someone wants to get booked on podcasts to build momentum.

What’s great, you guys is when you build your media page. Imagine somebody hearing about your book, and you’ve already been on this for a good year or a year and a half. You’ve got all this media on your site that people are looking at, and then your books coming out, and they’re going, “I need to contact her.” Instead of you being the outreach all the time. People are seeking you out now as well. Tell us a little bit about the people that are using it. You said you have a lot of authors that are using it. How do you see them benefiting from what they’re doing? Some of the techniques you’ve seen because you said you have over 900 authors on the site.

What happens is that selling a book is usually a low-cost product to sell. You may get $20 for it, or you may give it away for free on Kindle Unlimited. The marketing budget for someone who’s self-published usually isn’t as high as for someone that Simon & Schuster or some big company like that. You have to find what we call growth hacks as a way to build momentum for what you’re doing, whether that’s building your email list beforehand or doing things of that sort.

A lot of authors will do a podcast tour. They will try to go on one to two podcasts every week for at least six months before the launch of the book because they’re list-building. They’re building up their list of people who are interested in the topic, they’re getting new information, and strengthening some of their ideas before they go into the final edit. All of these different things are being tested out on the podcast. What happens is you go on a podcast, you have a good idea, and you’re like, “Wait a minute, I left that part out of the book. This was something I was riffing about on the topic. Let me go and put that in this chapter on this topic because I didn’t realize that was important.”

You can use the podcast to get live feedback on some of the content creation and things that you may have missed in your original drafts. That’s one of the most innovative things I think people have done is that they’ve done live curation because we know that the more we talk about something, we get new ideas as we add more context to it after several conversations. I think that that’s one of the biggest things that I’ve seen is those who have done a lot of shows. I’ve learned after talking with them that the book has changed a little bit as it’s gone.

I think I mentioned that in the intro. That’s where this validation comes in from your author platform building. You have an idea, you throw it out there, you think you know who your audience is, and then you notice that the audience isn’t responding. That’s a change. It’s either a change of audience or a change of content. This is why we tell you to get on a site like this so far in advance. You’re going to want to validate that audience and refine not only your avatar but your content and everything you’re putting out there. Ron, you don’t know this, but we have a book coming out in April that they brought to me in March of last year. I said to the author, “I have no idea who this book is for.”

We got into what we call gold marketing, which is our own language system. He brought the book back two months ago. It’s rewritten into the language of that audience because he didn’t have one. He didn’t know. That book is a nurturing tool. If your nurture tool isn’t working, and you’re supposed to get your ROI from the publishing package from the nurture tool, and the ROI comes from that bigger program, you’re not going to be able to take them from point B to point C without that validation in, we’ll call it, point A. I love this too.

Media Outlets

 As far as organizations and things like that, what kinds of organizations when you have them in there for media? Is it media that is looking for people when you talk about the press, or how exactly does that work? I know there are things out there like Harrow too.

We’re a little bit different than Harrow because we’ll give you the local radio station in your town. We’ll give you a local television station in your town, have a lot of financial advisors who will reach out to the local television station to be on the morning news, to get a regular segment on the morning news to be their financial answer man. If you have offers that are in nonfiction areas, local television, and local radio are where you can develop local expertise. That becomes part of your media reel when you want to go a bit broader.

In our media package, we go local to international. There’s Forbes magazine, and then there’s KTVI television station in St. Louis. It’s that localized. We have radio stations, newspapers, magazine editors, and a journalist. Those journalists are different from the editors because the editor only works for that one magazine. A journalist may write for 80 different magazines. You may be able to pitch them a story that you may not even know where it fits, but they have an idea of where they can place that story. It may be in work in women’s magazine, it may be in the mom’s journal, it may be in parenting, it may be in whatever, it may be in Forbes Women.

Pitch: Journalists are different from editors. An editor only works for one publication, while journalists may be writing for various publications.

They will decide where they think they can place that article based on the topic of your book, so forth, and so on. We give you access to all of that inside of PitchDB and it writes a personalized pitch. That’s the part I think people struggle with. Even though these are authors, we still get in the way sometimes of how to personalize this so that this person understands what I’m doing. Our AI does a good job of not embarrassing you.

That’s a good thing, though, because to get your foot in the door with the journalist, it has to be relevant. We always tell our authors, it’s part of our Build Your Author Avatar program, that you may be hooked into one media outlet style, a CNN and an MSNBC, and you don’t look at a Fox or a Newsmax. The truth is if you can figure out the relevance, if you go over to Fox, even though you don’t like it, and you listen, you might hear, “There’s a spot for my book.” If you don’t do that, you’re cutting out half of the audience that you could potentially have for everything you do. That’s what I love about AI. It’s going to pick up those relevant pieces to probably make it where your relevant is with the media outlets, which is needed.

I think the great thing about authors is that they wrote the book because they have a different perspective. I’ve found that authors that have been the most effective, like the books that I buy all the time, and that’s how I judge effectiveness, is if I bought the book. They’re usually not going on a show that they agree with. It’s usually the person that’s asking them the tough questions. When they’re able to defend their point of view, I’m like, “I never thought about that. This is an interesting point of view. Let me check out their YouTube videos or something else, or maybe even buy the book on Audible so that I can get more of their perspective.” I don’t usually suggest people only go on shows with people that they agree with.

You don’t know what you believe until you have to defend it. It’s better to go in a fair environment where it’s you and the podcast host having this healthy debate versus you trying to fight people in the comments or on a YouTube channel, or on a video that gets put out. The people are arguing with you in the comments, and they’re just trolling you. It’s better to get this out and to be able to defend your point and be able to share a different perspective. You’ll find that confrontation doesn’t always have to be hostile. You can win a lot of friends or win a lot of followers out of respect versus just being a hug and kiss fest.

Here’s the other thing why you guys should take a look at this. I think I’ve mentioned before that Lesley Michaels wrote a book on women’s lib, which is super popular on CNN, the more liberal channel. Here was the thing. Every time the media consultant tried to place her there, she was up against big names.

There was one gig that Maureen Dowd got over her, and of course, she did because everybody knows who Maureen Dowd is. Now, on the other side of the spectrum, she kept turning down the Newsmax and the Fox News. They were interested in talking to her, probably would have been a little bit more contentious debate, but she would have gotten the exposure. You can’t always rely on that audience you have in common either because you may not be a big name in that audience yet.

Different Perspectives

I think one of the things that I’ve learned in life is I can always learn something from other people too. Even though, like now, I’m on your show, and you’re asking for my perspective. I guarantee you that when this is over, I’ll have a list of notes of things that I’ve learned that you talked about. I think you can learn something from everybody. If you keep that open mind that your job is to serve the people and to get the message out, it’s not to go and pick fights.

If someone wants to fight, just say, “I agree with you, but I see it differently.” They get confused by this, like, “How do you agree with me and see it differently?” It’s completely possible. I’ll give you an example of this. If someone only had the perspective of looking at this from this perspective, if it was just a shadow, they would say, “That’s just a black line. It’s about 5 inches wide.” The person who sees it from this side will say, “That’s just a black line and it’s 3 inches wide.”

The person who sees it this way says, “That’s a square. That’s not a line at all.” All three of them are right. All three of them are wrong at the same time because it’s three-dimensional. You can agree with someone and still have a different perspective. I think that the best interviews are those where you respect the interviewer, but you still are confident in what you believe too, and that’s okay.

I gave a talk at a high school AP class many years ago, right after an incident had happened on TV. It was illuminating because there were these three women all over TV saying different things. You look at the event, and you start to understand why is that woman out there grabbing her child. That’s her experience with the police in that community. Why is this woman battering that woman for that grab? That’s her experience in that community. There can be all those differing ways that we see things that we can learn from each other. I think we all got into this I have to fight mode from X and Facebook, and because I’ve gotten off of all those platforms because I think they’re the most toxic places you can be.

I’ll give you a platform that’s been around for several thousand years, and you don’t have to be religious to understand this. I think there’s a reason why it’s done. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the first four books of the New Testament have four different perspectives of their experiences with the same guy. Some of them have the same stories. Some of them don’t have the same stories. They’re talking about the same things from different perspectives in their different vantage points. It’s okay. They needed four different vantage points to explain this dude.

Why can’t you go somewhere else and have your vantage point, too, and still be able to help the people who may see part of what you’re saying? I don’t agree with everything everybody I listen to says. It’s healthy to have someone else come on and say, “I like his point over here, but I like this person over here.” To not beat a dead horse about going on different platforms, I think all press is good press. All coverage is good coverage. If you are confident in what you believe, I think you should share it with as many people as possible.

Do you love that? He used the Bible as a marketing tool. That was awesome.

I didn’t even have to mention the guy.

We all know who the guy is.

See how easy that is? I could not offend the people who don’t want to hear Jesus, but I can be relevant to the people who understand what I’m talking about. It works.

Getting Into PitchDB

It does. How do we get on your platform, and are there some best practices that we should use once we get there?

Yes. The easiest way is to use the link in the bio of the show notes of what we’re doing. That link will get you a free trial and a discount. You’ll get a free trial of the software that’s extended beyond the normal trial, which is a good thing. PitchDB starts at $27 a month. That’s for our podcast plan. That’ll get you on three to four podcasts a month for $27. If you want to add speaking gigs and access to the press, it can go up a little higher, $89, and $147. The basis is to go in and try it. I think trying it out is the best place to start because then there’s no excuse.

With the trial, you can go in and see how it works. You can use all the AI features. You can see which podcast we matched you with, which press opportunities we matched you with, and see if you get some results. That’s where I would start. Here’s what we offer to everyone. If you use our system for a year and you send the pitches and you’re not happy, we’ll give you three times your money back at the end of the 12 months.

We’re that confident. We work with over 300 people and we do it for them. We’ve never had anyone say, “We don’t want to use this because it doesn’t work.” They’ve never asked for their money back. We’re very confident in our service and the data that we provide you. I would go to PitchDB.com, but use the link in the bio. That’ll get you a special deal that you won’t get if you just go directly to the website. I think that’s the best way to go.

Closing Words

This is great. Ron, thank you so much for being on today. This was fantastic. When we turn this recording off, I have a question for you, but we’re going to be using this platform, and hopefully, we’ll be sending most of our clients over there as well because they all need it.

I would love to have them as clients. Any friend of yours is a friend of ours. We would love to have them.

Thank you.

Important Links

• www.BreakthroughAuthorMagazine.com
• Life Wave
• Calendly.com/TheFoolishCouple/Superbrand
• Ron Storey Jr.
• PitchDB.com

About Ron Story Jr.

Ron Story Jr. is an entrepreneur and founder of a podcast service called PitchDB, with a long history of self-made business ventures. Starting from a young age, he began his entrepreneurial journey by collecting and recycling aluminum cans to afford the toys he wanted. This early experience sparked his drive to solve problems and achieve his goals, which has continued into his adult life. Ron Story Jr. has been involved in the creation, development, and leadership of over 30 companies, demonstrating a strong commitment to entrepreneurship and innovation.

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