Writing and Publishing a Book

Episode 939: Writing and Publishing a Book, with Melanie Johnson

Writing and publishing a book soon? Join Melanie Johnson in this podcast about the power of writing and publishing a book.

Melanie Johnson is the CEO of Elite Online Publishing. She is passionate about sharing people’s stories that educate, motivate, and inspire. She and her team market and promote nonfiction books for business owners and athletes to create expert authority status for marketing impact and influence. She is honored to work one-on-one with their authors to create the best strategies in writing and publishing a book as well as the marketing and social media aspects. Melanie is a five-time best-selling author.

Melanie graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in communications and was the first girl to receive a varsity letter in a boy’s sport in the state of Michigan. She lives in Houston Texas and is originally from Michigan, where she earned the title of Miss Michigan. She is enjoying raising her two sons, who keep her motivated and young. She loves the beach, traveling, and spending time with her family.

What you will learn from this episode about writing and publishing a book:

• How Melanie’s varied career moved from working as a model and actress to broadcasting, to real estate, and then to the world of publishing
• How working in communications awakened Melanie to the power of writing and publishing a book
• How the Amazon author page can be a powerful marketing resource, including adding blog posts and a bio, putting the power of Amazon to work for you for free
• What obstacles and challenges business owners often get stuck on when considering writing and publishing a book, and how Melanie and her team help overcome these roadblocks
• What diverse tools and resources are available to help potential authors take down their thoughts and develop a book
• How Melanie and her team’s “ten-by-ten-by-three” formula can help you quickly generate great content relating to the most important questions your audience might ask
• Why calls to action throughout your book are important, and how to integrate your website into your book and encourage readers to opt in to more content
• How giving away free copies of your book can be a great way to forge new relationships and create business opportunities
• Why a book has incredible longevity and can help keep you top-of-mind with your prospects and potential business relationships
• Why publishing a book has many benefits that other forms of marketing tools lack, and why it can be sliced, diced and repurposed in many different ways

Resources:

• Contact Elite Online Publishing for inquiries about publishing your own book here: https://eliteonlinepublishing.com/author-submissions/
• Website: https://eliteonlinepublishing.com/
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/melaniejohnson-eop/
• Twitter: @BookWriting1
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/eliteonlinepublishing
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/eliteonlinepublishing
• Start your journey on writing and publishing a book by buying the Book Writing Fast Pass

Additional Resources:

• Sell With Authority by Drew McLellan and Stephen Woessner: https://amzn.to/39y7x13
• Predictive ROI Free Resource Library: https://predictiveroi.com/resources/
• Stephen Woessner’s LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stephenwoessner/
• Learn more about writing and publishing a book with our guest, Henry DeVries

 

 

Writing and Publishing a Book: Full Episode Transcript

 

Get ready to find your recipe for success from America’s top business owners here at Onward Nation with your host, Stephen Westerner.

 

Good morning. I am Stephen Westerner, CEO of predictive ROI and your host for Onward Nation, where I interview today’s top business owners so we can learn their recipe for success, how they built and how they scaled their business. In fact, my team, I know that you’ve been hearing me talk about this now for the last several months, but it’s because we’ve made that huge investment in doubling down over the last 18 months where we have really rebuilt and expanded our free resources section on PredictiveROI.com.

 

So you can now download a series of brand new e-books. I think there’s 12 or 13 different ebooks. Checklist guides, other insight briefings. All of that is there for you. Everything from search engine optimization to how to use LinkedIn to generate leads. Everything that we’ve compiled from the brilliant insights shared by our very generous guests. So just go to PredictiveROI.com/Resources, and whatever your request, we’ll send it right to your inbox.

 

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Writing and Publishing a Book: Melanie Johnson’s Introduction

 

Before we welcome today’s very special guest, Melanie Johnson.

 

And just a quick thank you to my good friend and accountability partner, Chris Prefontaine, for making this introduction so that Melanie and I can have this awesome conversation and Onward Nation really buckle in here, because this is going to be one of those conversations about thought leadership building your platform. Melanie is an expert. Her and her team help business owners conquer that.

 

What feels like an unconquerable or unconquerable mountain? I want to have a book, but I have absolutely no idea how I’m going to be able to climb this huge mountain. Piece by piece. Sure, I think conceptually or intellectually. Most business owners say, yeah, I would love to have my own book, but when it actually comes down to writing a book, it feels like this huge boulder.

 

How in the world am I going to get it done? And then let’s say I do get it done. Then what? I mean, what’s the strategy behind it? What’s the business strategy behind it? Do I have to go out there and sell, you know, 10,000 copies? Do it. How’s that going to help me get on stage? Is it going to help me attract new clients?

 

Like, how do I do that? Well, that’s exactly what Melanie and her team do with expertise. With excellence. So we’re going to take it behind the curtain here. This view on how to use a book to build your business and also how to get it done candidly. So this is going to be one of those conversations you want to buckle in, take a whole bunch of notes because Melanie is coming here to really deliver the steps.

 

So with that said Melanie, welcome to Onward Nation.

 

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Writing and Publishing a Book: Melanie’s Career Journey

 

Hey, thanks so much. I’m just so honored to be here. Well, I am honored to have you here. And so you run an incredible company and we’ll talk about that in just a second. But an awesome bio. You work with many, many business owners, but take us behind the curtain here because that’s really only a portion of the story.

 

Tell us more about you, your path, your journey. And then we’ll dive in. Sure. And people ask me like, how did you end up in publishing? So I started out actually, I was an auto show model way back when, when I got out of college, I had, became this Michigan, became an auto show model, became a commercial actress in Detroit where I did industrial films.

 

I worked with Tim Allen, and had a great industrial film with him and then I decided I really wanted to get into broadcasting. So, I took that, the experience that I had and got a job at a TV station in Detroit. So, when I started out as a newscaster there and then got the opportunity to do PR, I created children’s programs, had a whole series of children’s programs, really learned the whole ins and outs of the business.

 

And I met my husband there who had been in broadcasting for a long time, and he had filed for a TV station down here in Houston. And next thing I knew, I moved from Michigan. Didn’t think I’d ever do that. And I was down here in Houston, Texas, and I realized that Houston’s like the land of entrepreneurial shit, especially, in the 90s years, that wildcatters mentality just got done.

 

And, man, when you’re building a business from scratch, it’s way different than you buy one. That’s already running. So we had to get a tower or a tower. We had to have antennas. We had to build all the infrastructure, all the electronic infrastructure to build a TV station. And we started out as all new, so we’re building new sets.

 

And I was in charge of a lot of the news division. So, I learned a lot about production. And then you’re selling advertising. That’s how we make money. We sell air. So you’re marketing yourself. So we sold advertising, and then we were marketing ourselves. So you learned a lot about how to market, grow a new business from scratch and let people know who you are.

 

And how do you do that? And then we bought another TV station in Dallas. And as times changed and, my marriage ended and the economy kind of ended for a nanosecond there, 2008 and, everything went upside down. So here I was being bought out of $100 million businesses that he filed for bankruptcy and, and didn’t have a plan to get them out of bankruptcy.

 

So I had to be really creative. I took two large homes that we had. I guess you consider mansions. One was 25,000ft and the other was 13,000ft. Those are big. That’s pretty big. And, Vrbo had just started, there was no Airbnb and took a shot and put the homes up there where realtors were really just renting homes at the time.

 

One realtor rented my summer home for one weekend or one week out of the whole summer. And from the website and doing the Vrbo, I booked 12 weeks and sold out the entire summer and started making revenue. That’s how I survived, because like I tell people, you know this pen here, I couldn’t sell it because half of it was in bankruptcy.

 

So, you just have to be innovative. And then I started doing real estate development. The market started booming a little bit more. Houston oil was going up to $100 a barrel, so started doing urban redevelopment. And then I always thought instead of diving back into TV, I wanted to dive more into the internet. Just thought, that’s the future.

 

I think TV is becoming a dinosaur. Where you see now my kids never watch live TV. They just consume everything over YouTube, Amazon, Hulu, Netflix. They just don’t watch TV. So, I started putting my energy towards that. And part of my search. I had learned how to publish books and the power of a book. and I met another woman there, Jen Foster, and she had been to the couple of seminars that I was at, and I have a vacation rental that I use down in the Dominican.

 

I have a villa down there that I do donate for non-profits that anyone wants a nonprofit, needs an auction item. I did that, but we decided to go down there, to make some money and do a book writing retreat. I just thought it would be fun. And so we did. Came home, started doing publicity, and the books that we were publishing.

 

And next thing I knew, people were saying, oh my gosh, I didn’t realize that you weren’t publishing. Can you publish my book? So then Elite Online Publishing was born, and I kept telling her, hey, that’s kind of my side hustle, because I’m really doing what is fun. But, you know, it started to take more time and then and then oil tanked, right?

 

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Writing and Publishing a Book: Hiring Amazon to Work and Promote for You

 

So I started liquidating it before I could see it was starting to go down. I started liquidating all my properties. And, next thing I knew, I was really doing publishing full time and just loved it. And I found being, in advertising, owning a TV station, being so entrenched in that, and buying advertising, selling airtime, really realized the power of a book that it lasts forever.

 

A TV spot comes and goes, it’s gone. You know, magazine articles, magazine ads, billboards are all gone or radio spots are gone. So all the traditional ways of advertising are like in a vacuum, they go away and you’re just hoping that someone thought during that time you’ve got YouTube where they can see you over and over again, and they’re targeting, which is a little better.

 

But a book is always there. And the thing that I think people don’t realize is when you get a book, you’ve now hired Amazon to work for you for free. So Amazon now is promoting you, promoting your book. There’s a thing called an Amazon Author page. You and I took a look at yours earlier and I showed you mine.

 

And we have to do it. And for every author that page populates, usually in the first 3 to 5 things on the first page. So it’s either going to be number anywhere from number one to number five. It’s going to show up. So if you really use that to the best of its capability you can have eight videos there, eight photographs there.

 

We put all our links that you can find for our products or services. Go on there. So if people click on that it’s there right away. If you’re going to be a guest on a podcast like this, I just had someone I was doing a podcast with just before that. She says, hey, can you send me your headshot?

 

Can you send me your social media links? Can you send me your bio? Well, I just sent her the link to my Amazon author page. Everything is right there. Make it easy for them. So Amazon starts to work for you and people can follow you on that page and Stephen’s great. He has his blog post linked to his page, which you can do so anytime he opens up a new, he has RSS feed, enters a new blog post.

 

Then anyone who’s following you, it alerts them. So it’s just a great way. You’ve now hired Amazon to work for you and are promoting you forever, right? For I don’t think Amazon’s going away anytime soon. 

 

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Writing and Publishing a Book: Making Sure Your Book Has Great Content

 

That’s a cool way to think about it that you’ve hired Amazon for free. I’ve never heard that perspective before. And I think that’s really on point.

 

Yeah, I mean, I think the SEO that Amazon has, right. You know, we’ve had people who are Lee Steinberg, he’s, famous sports agent, Tom Cruise did a movie about him. And so we were invited to his private Super Bowl party. So we decided, and he’s an author. So we decided, let’s search for him. We’re on our phones before we go to the party.

 

Let’s see what pops up about him. Now, his agency is called the Lee Steinberg Sports Agency. Right. The first thing that came up on our phones was his author page. So just go to show you. Right. It’s a valuable piece of real estate that most business owners or authors, I should say, don’t pay enough attention to.

 

Right. So that’s one of the first advantages is now Amazon is working for you promoting you, sharing you, sharing your book, sharing it to people that you may never even reach out to or think to reach out to you because they have such strong algorithms that they’re going to promote it to people that like that type of material that you would never reach out to.

 

Right? Right. You want to make sure your book has strategy in it, that it has great content that talks about your product, your services, your journey, that they can consume more of that will lead them down the road to want to work with you. So that’s, for someone who has a product or service, if you’re a speaker, we say your speeches, your book is your speech.

 

The owner of Whole Foods, I just saw him speak in his speech was, conscious capitalism. And that’s what his speech was all about, was all about capitalism. And that’s what his book was about. So, that’s kind of what you want to think about. So there’s a variety of ways, once you have your book to make your book work for you, besides just selling books on Amazon or all the other distributors.

 

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Writing and Publishing a Book: Biggest Obstacles in Writing a Book

 

So let’s start diving into some of the strategy behind the book, or excuse me, let’s start diving into the strategy as it relates to business owners. Once they have a book. But before we get to that, based on your experience, I know you’ve worked with many, many business owners in the trenches to get this done for them.

 

Like what are some of the biggest obstacles that you think business owners get stuck on first, like at the beginning of this process? Usually it’s the writing. So it’s like, how do I take the time to write a book? And what do I write about? What is the actual service? Because most businesses have multiple services.

 

Maybe it’s not just one product. So first it’s honing in. We do a thing called a VIP day where they spend a day with us and, before they come to us, we hone in on what the message should be, what they’re going to want to be talking about, what is the biggest, return on investment for their book of their products and services.

 

So once we decide that, then you walk through and, we create the chapters one by one, the stories that go into it and the content that goes into each chapter. But we talked about earlier, the easiest way for someone to create content to get over that hurdle, like, oh my gosh, I get to spend all this time.

 

Are you kidding me? Well, usually your book sometimes is written for you already, so we love repurposing content. Take a look at what you already have. Look at Stephen has all these blogs. It’d be interesting to go through his blogs and see what could be curated and turned into another book. I saw you already have three books out.

 

You may have a fourth or fifth, but just from your blog post there are these guys that they took their blog posts, they curated their blog post, they turned it into a book, and then the book became a movie. It was called The Minimalist, but it all started with a blog post. So you can curate your content. You may have newsletters, you may have videos that you’ve done.

 

You may have speeches that you’ve done. There’s a great app called otter.uh.com Otter app that you can use and that will transcribe in real time. So another great way is business owners a lot of times are more talkers and they are sit down and writers. I know myself, when I sit down to write, I want to keep re-editing and editing over the same few sentences and I feel like I’m getting nowhere.

 

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Writing and Publishing a Book: Getting Your Content Done

 

Will you be better off? I said this way versus if I said it that way, and then it starts the whole process. But if you can just, talk it out so you could either have someone interview you like this, like Stephen’s interviewing me and talk about the topics you want in your book, or you could interview somebody else and talk about that.

 

You can interview experts in the field and curate that all into a book. And again, you could use Otter and have it transcribed for you very easily. I’ve done it where I’ve been in my car. I’m thinking about my book. I’m stuck in Houston traffic, and I like, oh man, you know, I should really include this in the book.

 

And I’m going through my head. What I want to say. And so I’ll just turn Otter on and it transcribes for me and I’m talking it out. And next thing I know, I have a chapter on what’s done while I was stuck in traffic for 20 minutes. So there’s a lot of different ways that you can accomplish that.

 

You can hire a ghostwriter, have a couple meetings with him, and then they write the whole book for you. But you want to be careful, make sure that they keep your voice in the book. That’s the most important thing. So I say that the biggest obstacle is like, I just don’t have the time. How do I get this done?

 

But when you think about the time you’re going to spend in meetings, doing artwork, approving things and doing other types of marketing, that doesn’t last, that little bit of time that you’re going to spend here to have something that lasts forever and brand you forever and hires Amazon for you is well worth the investment Onward Nation. This is really, really smart advice from Melanie.

 

So not not only how to get the book done but also think about this and we covered some of this back in episode 889, in that solar cast, which was all about like nine examples of slicing and dicing. So let’s say that you take this blueprint that Melanie so generously just shared with you. Take that blueprint and use that to create the book.

 

Well, then you can go backwards and cut up the book into hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pieces of whether that’s social content, blogs, long form LinkedIn posts, videos. So, you know, she just gave you some excellent advice. I mean, she literally gave you the roadmap of how to be able to get the book done. And then you can reverse the process and slice and dice it.

 

So now not only do you have this incredible piece of cornerstone content, the book, but then you also have all of the little info snacks, as Jay Baer likes to say, so that every time your audience turns around, there you are being helpful, right? Melanie? So I gave you a good general. So now I’m going to give you the secret ninja, okay?

 

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Writing and Publishing a Book: Thinking Hard on the Questions

 

Lay it on us. Like, oh man, I almost forgot to tell him that, you know, one of the fastest ways to create content. you get the same questions, ask you over and over again about your product and services. So we call this a ten by ten by three formula, ten by ten by three. Okay. So and so we say for your listeners, when you get done with this podcast, take five minutes and jot down the ten or more.

 

We’re, I’m not going to let you limit you to ten, do as many frequently asked questions as you can think of that you get in your business all the time. What are those questions? Okay, then think of the questions that they should be asking. If they knew what you knew. Okay, so because you’re the expert and they’re going to be thinking about something totally different than that, so think of the question, then what I want you to do is for the answer.

 

For each of those questions, think of three stories that illustrate the answer. So these stories can be personal stories. They can be stories that happened in your business. They can be stories that you read about. They can be stories from a mentor. They can be something you heard on the radio, could be something you heard from a podcast.

 

It doesn’t have to be your story. So I want to be clear that it could be a story of a celebrity, which is great. You could use their celebrity brand in your book. So I always equate it to a minister. Most of us have been to church at one point or another in our lives. They start out with the scripture from the Bible, right?

 

Which is maybe we’ll equate that to the most frequently asked question. And then they start to give you illustrations of what that really means and how you can apply it to your life. Okay. So you’re going to give those illustrations. And then at the end they wrap it up to the moment of now how does this what does this mean for you.

 

How can you use this? How can this change your business or your life? So you want to have the question, the answer to the question, but you want to have the answer wrapped around starting out with a transformational story, the answer to the question. And then 1 or 2 more stories that continue and support that and support the answer.

 

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Writing and Publishing a Book: Cutting Down the Big Pieces and Curate Them

 

I love that recipe. it’s interesting, when you mentioned the Bible, I thought, okay, the Bible, let’s talk about the New Testament. Right. And Jesus, certainly the greatest storyteller of all time and when you slice apart the New Testament, you share 31 parables and those parables follow the exact recipe that you’re talking about and, and created so many moments, it was easily digestible and like, oh, now I get the meaning.

 

And so what you’re talking about from a business perspective, you know, we know that that recipe works, right? So why not apply that to your own thought leadership, right. Exactly, exactly. And then like you say, you’ve got all these bite sized things. Now you’ve created the frequently asked questions which you may have been doing in your business anyways.

 

You can make short little videos, report those, then have them transcribed. So it just all adds up. So now you’ve created all these videos that you have, and then you turn the videos into your book, right. And think it’s great because what you’re really illustrating here is how small pieces can be curated. It becomes a big piece, or how a big piece can be cut up into small pieces.

 

But all of that is the whole reason for doing that is being helpful to your audience. But then there’s also a business strategy behind it, too, whether that’s your clients getting on stage. So let’s talk about that as well, because I know that your clients have been very successful in taking out this book and then building a business behind it.

 

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Writing and Publishing a Book: Have a Call-To-Action

 

So, tell us about how you see or why you see that is a key piece to building a business. So we start with the content. When someone comes to us, even if their book is already written, we want to start to make sure they have calls to action in their book. So when you go on Amazon, you can see those first 3 or 4 pages in the review.

 

So we want to make sure that there is something if you’re going to give something away in the in the book or if you haven’t given something away, we encourage you to to have that free opt in, just like you said on your page, hey, go here and you can get all these free ebooks. So have something there.

 

So even if they decide not to buy your book for some reason, they may go and check out and get some of your free material. And now you’ve gotten their contact information and they’re now in your system. So anywhere that they can contact you should also be there to write in that beginning a part of the book.

 

So we always include that. Then we say it’s great to have other places where they can opt in throughout the book for more information. Like, you just may not have had time to tell the whole story, or you’ve got ten stories that illustrate that, but you’re not going to tell all ten in the book because you can have your book be 500 pages long.

 

So have places where you can put other videos, PDFs, that they all go somewhere on your website that they can opt in and get access to all of that. Because when they buy your book from Amazon, Amazon does not share their contact information with you. So sadly, they have your book. But you don’t know who they are. So you want to have places where they can find out who you are, and you can be connected to the people who are buying your book.

 

So that’s number one. We start with the content. Then number two comes down to what is your business and your goal with your book. So whether it’s being a speaker, we have authors that are running for office, mayor, Congress, we have authors that are our consultants, we have authors that have membership sites. We have authors that are wanting to get that big ticket client.

 

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Writing and Publishing a Book: Send Your Book

 

So let’s start with that. So let’s think about you’re a consultant and you’re trying to get your foot in the door into some of these big corporations. And you just they’re not return your calls. They’re not looking at your emails. It’s just that black hole or oh yeah, thank you. But we’re not interested in that kind of thing. So you can’t get your message to them.

 

So one of our also secret ninja tips is to send your book, you can send it through Amazon, or you can choose to send it yourself. But think about it, the gatekeeper is not going to open a package, whether it’s from Amazon or it’s a nice package sent directly, it’s going to go on their desk. So right now your book is sitting on their desk and they’re going to open it, and they’re going to be now holding your book in their hands, where before you couldn’t even get them on the phone or to look at your email.

 

And you can put a message on Amazon. They limit you to a certain number of characters, but you can still have a message there and you can say, I just, you know, love your company. I really think this, my book will be helpful. Check out page 39. There’s something that’s going to increase your revenue or change, you know, whatever the transformation is for their company.

 

So we have found that there is 95% that they open the book, and they look where you tell them to go. Holy bananas. That’s a lot. Right. So they’re opening it up and they’re looking. Now this is just from the people that work with us. But they open it up and they’re looking at it and then they get in contact. You know wow that’s right.

 

That makes sense. I would like to do that. And then they’re looking through their book. And usually you’re going to open a book. You’re not going to throw it in the trash typically. Right. There’s a lot of value to the book. If you get a flier or a little piece of mail, boom, it’s going to go in there.

 

But a book, it’s going to sit there. So you’ve got this that you’ve gotten in there. Now if you send it, without Amazon, then you don’t have the character limitation. You can say whatever you want. And we suggest that you also put a personal message from a video on there. And I’ve sent you a personal message. Here’s the link to the video.

 

That’s a private message to you, that I sent you, you know, a little message so you can say something on there. Hey, it was great. I love your business that I love. This is what I’m doing that I think will help you. And again, look out. Look at this, look at that. So you can direct them and you can put little stickies on the book so they don’t have to thumb through.

 

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Writing and Publishing a Book: Maximum To One of Your Top Prospects

 

You can have the little things that are where you want them to go in the book. That’s interesting that somebody did that to me actually, specifically Jesse Cole, who’s the owner of the Savannah Bananas. I’m a big baseball fan. And, you know, he sent me an email with a link to a video that he recorded and talked about how Onward Nation is helpful to him and his wife as they started the team and so forth.

 

And he asked, hey, can I be a guest on your show? And I’m like, yes, that sounds awesome. You know, one, we get to talk. Baseball was a great business story, but I’m like, wow. Like he took the time to record a video at the ballpark. Yeah. And was talking about Onward Nation and the impact. And of course, that made me feel good and special, and that’s lovely.

 

But I’m like, oh my gosh, we totally want to share that story with our audience. I mean, that’s a story about Onward Nation, but about his story and how they built the business. That is cool. It cuts through every piece of clutter. Exactly. And then another great strategy is, if it’s a smaller office for a small amount of your book, generally is going to cost about anywhere from $2 to $2.50, you know, 200 page book or so, and then plus shipping.

 

So maybe three bucks. So, think about if you sent a book to everyone in the office on the same day, right? So there’s 20 people, 50 people, and everyone’s got your book on their desk. Do you think they’re going to be talking about your book? Well, and for $3 apiece plus shipping and okay, let’s say all in, it’s $10, right?

 

Yeah. Right. And let’s say there’s 20 people there for $200. You’re getting maximum exposure to one of your top prospects, you know, a client that you really want to do business with. Come on. That is a very inexpensive entry into developing what will hopefully be a long term relationship. And then think about that. Like we said, longevity.

 

So you can do that year after year after year. and the cool thing about a book is you feel like, oh, well, you know, the information needs to be updated. Well, you can go in and update it, read, load the book anytime, right? Yeah. Create a second edition of the book, update it, maybe feature a few, clients and so forth.

 

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Writing and Publishing a Book: Being Strategic About the Launching of The Book

 

So let me then ask you this with respect to copies sold because I’m sure you get this question a lot from business owners. Geez, Melanie, like how many copies am I going to sell? Is selling copies? Is that like a relevant number? Is that the vital metric? You know, like, how am I going to make my money back on the book if I don’t sell 10,000 copies?

 

So help us with that, because my guess is my sense is from this conversation that is not about book sales, that it’s actually much more strategic than that. Is that right? Yeah. And people get all wound up in the book sales like, oh, you know, but I want to sell so many books and blah blah blah. And how many books did I sell today?

 

And we’ll think about it. So we’ve been talking to someone recently. They have their book out. We’re going to relaunch their book, and they had no plan with their book again, how to do it. So what do you mean by relaunching it? Meaning it was published by somebody else and now they brought it over to you. Right. Interesting. Okay. So it’s not it hasn’t been a bestseller.

 

We make all our offers a bestseller. We’re very strategic about the categories, the timing, the push, the whole. We have a whole system that we do. Okay. And so they’re going to relaunch their book. And he went down, he goes yeah. But you know it hasn’t really been selling. Now this guy is in the financial sales market. It’s so I said, well, tell me about your clients.

 

What are you charging when a client walks in the door? Well, when we do the group thing, it’s like 6 to $10,000. And then when we do the one on one, which is what we really do, and we do the most, that’s 50 to 100,000. So why do they care about book sales? Holy bananas. Yeah. So I’m like, all right, well, let’s think about, you know, because we charge for our services, we self-publish for people, but they get all the royalties and keep all the copyrights and all that stuff, and they pay us to make their book wonderful and teach them how to use their book.

 

So I said, so, like I wanted to say, dude, but like, dude, it’s like, dude, if you get one client even on the lower end, right? Hey. And that’s what is one client worth to you for the lifetime of the client? How many people refer to you? Are they going to come back and repeat their services with you?

 

So you have to keep your eye on that big prize of where you’re going. One of our authors I love to brag about, Joshua Evans. So he was in a sales job, and he wanted to transition to be a speaker. So he took the first step of that was to get the book. So he got his book.

 

He started out speaking for free when he first did it, but now he’s getting $12,000 a gig to speak. And when you ask him, well, how does the book play into that? He said, well, being a number one bestseller just validates what I do, that enough people thought, enough of me enough this book to make it a number one bestseller.

 

It gives me that credibility. And his speech and everything he teaches to companies is all about his book. It’s called Enthusiastic You. So his platform is how to bring enthusiasm, enthusiasm into the workplace and into corporations to customer service. So again, your book needs to be about the services that you’re applying for. So he speaks to companies and he speaks on big stages.

 

Again, another good illustration. Well, great illustration really behind the curtain, which I’m so glad that you shared. Is that to sell a bunch of copies of your book from a distribution perspective, is that great? Sure. Of course. You know, getting your book into more hands and more business owners, you know, people who you want to be in front of.

 

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Writing and Publishing a Book: Use Your Book to Help Your Ideal Prospects

 

That’s always a good thing. Sure. But I think what Melanie is really shining a light on is the most vital metric, and that is how you can use your book to specifically be helpful to your ideal prospects and to open the door. Use it as like a Trojan horse of sales to be able to open a door, start a relationship, start being helpful and in sharing your thought leadership, your smarts.

 

In a non kind of, self-aggrandizing way, in a helpful way. and then and then shifting the conversation, which I think is what she so brilliantly tapped into. It’s a way from book sales where you make a couple of dollars in switching that over to, wait a minute, what is the lifetime value of a new client?

 

Is a 6000, 10,000, maybe $100,000. And if so, why have this stuck in your brain about book copies sold, when ultimately that doesn’t matter when you can actually use it for new client acquisition, getting on stage and that kind of stuff. Right? Melanie. Absolutely. That’s exactly what it’s for. It’s a leveraging marketing advertising tool. So you get credibility.

 

You can get media attention with it. You can open doors for you. It just does something that no other marketing tool that I found does. I mean, it checks all the boxes. I can’t think of a box that it doesn’t check. Yeah, it absolutely does. And that’s what I mean. That’s what I love about writing a book, is that not only is it an opportunity to be helpful to your audience, great.

 

But it’s such a huge piece of cornerstone content. You can slice and dice across many different channels. So you’re not a one trick pony. You’re being helpful across many, many channels. And it’s such a great door opening tool. It’s just phenomenal at that. And then adding the bestseller status, which you guys do, you know, with, with just excellence, being able to have that sort of I don’t know, what’s the word I’m looking for like cachet, I guess.

 

I mean, it’s awesome. It’s awesome. So that is really, really great. Molly, I know that we’re compressed and we’re quickly running out of time, and I want to be respectful to your schedule. This was so, so good. I know we covered a lot, but before we go, before we close out and say goodbye, any final advice?

 

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Writing and Publishing a Book: How to Connect with Melanie

 

Anything you think we might have missed? And then? And then please tell us the best way to connect with you. Sure. I would say go to a book. It’s the cornerstone of your business if you have one. and use it. So make sure you put it on your list. If you’re doing your planning for your fourth quarter for 2000, 2020, then I think you just really need to put that on your list and you’ll be so happy that you did.

 

You can reach us at EliteOnlinePublishing.com. There’s a submission form there. We have a podcast called Elite Expert Insider. So, please join us and we’d love to hear from you. Leave us a comment. Give us a phone call or leave us an email. thanks for that. And Onward Nation, no matter how many notes you took and I took a bunch or how often you go back and relisten to Melanie’s expertise and words of wisdom, which I sure hope that you do.

 

The key is you need to take this blueprint, I mean, this recipe that she laid out for you in full transparency. You need to take it, apply it into your business right away and accelerate your results. And Melanie, we all have the same 86,400 seconds in a day. And again, I’m so grateful that Chris Prefontaine thought to introduce us so that we could have this great conversation.

 

Thank you for saying yes to coming on to the show and being our mentor and guide, and helping us move our businesses onward to that next level. Thank you so much, my friend. Appreciate you so much. So grateful to be here. Everyone. Have a fantastic week. 

 

This episode is complete, so head over to OnwardNation.com for show notes and more food to fuel your ambition. Continue to find your recipe for success here at Onward Nation.

 

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