Melanie Booher 12:45
I did. So I have six now. So I have a solo, and then six collective books all week, they’re all nonfiction. They’re all based on business. So we’re not writing about, you know, werewolves or romance or anything like that. But the intent is really just how do we help you use this to make your business better. It’s not about number of books, sales, it’s, if I write this and I can, it will help me open doors to get a speaking engagement, it will help me open doors to get on a podcast or maybe to land a client, you know, you can land one client, and it’s or get a gig speaking gig. And it’s, it’s already paid itself back. And it’s investment.
John Corcoran 13:23
Yeah. And so talk a little bit more about that. Like, once you have the book out there, how do you do send it proactively out to everyone under the sun? Are you more strategic about it? Do you bring a stack every time you go to a networking event? Or conference? Yeah,
Melanie Booher 13:36
I mean, we encourage people to do different things, you know, again, different people write for different reasons. Some want it for speaking gigs, you’ll have someone say, Well, I can’t get I don’t have to be a paid speaker. It’s something that you can use to foster that. So someone might say, well, I can’t pay you to speak and you say, Well, can you buy 100 books for the audience? Yeah, we can do that. And then automate, you know, you’re making money. So you’re kind of adding it in. We have some people that want to use them for book clubs, or they want you know, there’s different things that people are using them for. Most of the time, it’s just the credibility and visibility, getting their name out there. Making things happen. We do sell them on Amazon, but we really encourage our authors to go out and sell them to their markets without us. So when we sell those on Amazon, they’re coming back to influence network media, unless you have an external collective. So let me describe that real quick. If we’re the leaders of it, I nm so if I’m corralling all the cats and I bring in the authors, then we own the royalties, you know, whatever. And that’s some people love right. I pick a theme like culture, and I bring in people and they’re excited. They don’t really care about the royalties. They just want to write a book. Yeah, but then we have some leaders that have a, they’re passionate about something. They want to write about leadership, they want to write about one person that said, I want to write about financial knowledge and how we aren’t taught the right things as kids and then here we get older and she’s like kind of that a little So we’re financial acumen but right for kids, we don’t have an actual knowledge for kids. Yeah. She said, so I want to pull in different people. And so maybe it’s a little bit retirement. It’s a little bit. Teachers, you know, who is it that could write in this book with me? So when she’s the collective leader, so that’s an external leader, she gets all the royalties, she gets all that, you know, so we’re not setting it up where we’re trying to take all the profit. We’re trying to share and get people
John Corcoran 15:25
doing that. Yeah. So you can be the one who’s just collecting people together and bringing them and then a company like yours will help with all the back end. All those different pieces?
Melanie Booher 15:34
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.
John Corcoran 15:37
What are some interesting people love to talk about marketing strategy? So what are some interesting guerilla marketing strategies or things like that, that you’ve seen people use in order to get more attention for their book? Yeah,
Melanie Booher 15:48
I mean, we probably see a lot of traditional stuff, and we’re definitely blowing up the LinkedIn and social medias. Everyone has a different expertise, you’ll see some people more into making videos and tic TOCs. You know what I mean? So we see that kind of happening across the board, trying to think of anything that’s really untraditional. We’ve had people It depends what their job is. And we’ve had professors at universities, they’re like, hey, all of a sudden they’ve got a new book in their curriculum that’s required to be read. Reach out, talking with people. I don’t know if there’s anything too crazy. It I think, again, it goes back to you aren’t pushing as hard, because everyone has this group of people that are willing to get the book out for you.
John Corcoran 16:35
Yeah, so it doesn’t require the crazy marketing guerilla marketing strategies that you might need if you if you don’t have other teammates who are which kind of goes back to your roots. Because I know you’re a big fan of networking. You’re you were head of a BNI chapter, you have another business that that you launched, that’s around networking, so it totally makes sense that this is kind of your superpower. And you’d combine it with the idea of this medium.
Melanie Booher 17:03
Absolutely. Well, that’s what powerhouses so that book powerhouse was the name of our chapter. And everyone in there is was a business, it was the b2b people. So you know, we had our IT financial advisor, the marketing person, even the person who did credit card, credit card processing. He said, You know, I could never write a whole book about this. Right? I said, but could you write an amazing chapter anyway? Yeah, I sure could. So, so we do that with power house was actually a, it’s been a really cool thing. We’re now we’re all experts. Of course, I wrote the HR chapter and culture chapter. And we got to do that together. We did a book signing event and happy hour, maybe that’s unconventional, that’d be that’s one of the ways that we share stuff. We hate to bring up drinking again. But we do like to have happy hours. But I love that idea. So if you are networking, and you have a group of people who you love, and you already pass business with, they’re in your life, no interest, when you want to see their names on a book cover with you. And we’re starting to see that growing right now, where people are like, Yeah, I I actually do I want to, I want to make that happen. Now,
John Corcoran 18:10
what about different mediums? So do you recommend always putting in into a paper copy? Or do you just do Kindle? Do you always recommend doing an audio book version? And audio books in themselves have been evolving a little bit because you see kind of a confluence between podcasts and audiobooks, there’s some content that’s coming out that kind of seemed like a hybrid between the two.
Melanie Booher 18:34
Yeah, so we always do the ebook. And we encourage that first, because that’s the way that we, in part of our creative marketing, if you will, is right, we dropped the ebook price for the launch day. So for $1.99, right, would you support me launching my book? And the answer is, yes, most people will pay $2 to support you. The next week, we launched the paperback so we always do those two. And the reason why there’s that delay, right, is to get people to support you with the book. Yeah. And then we aren’t again, we’re not pushing the paperback sales, because I want to get those in our author’s hands and let them sell them for profit, not for my company. We’ve had people ask about audible, we know that that’s of interest, it’s just another expense. So for an added, right, you know, for an added price. Sure. You know, we can do audibles. When it’s a collective, it’s a little more challenging, right, you need all the authors to agree to turn it to an audible. We’ve even said, hey, if everybody reads their chapter, and we could put them together, but you and I know not everyone has the proper space, right? Whether that’s yeah, the microphone, whatever, the dogs in the background. Yeah. So we’re trying to figure out exactly how to make that with a group. And we do have voiceover people or people that are willing to record the whole thing. But again, you need them the whole group to say yes, we all want to do it, you know, we would like to and just depends on the return right? You know, it can be pricey to go through that do all the editing. Right now. I think we have audible creation. Well, I don’t want to I want to get into pricing. It’s on our website you know, if there is an added cost to do I just
John Corcoran 20:01
gonna I was gonna mention around to the books themselves as I’m looking at your books, your books are the physical book, the paperback is, you know, $20 it’s not inexpensive. But I actually think that that conveys some authority. You know, when I see a physical book a paperback book that an expert has, and it’s 299. I’m thinking like, why is that so cheap? And it kind of to me, it devalues. So is there? Is there some deliberation around that?
Melanie Booher 20:32
I mean, there’s some a little bit of method to the madness, you know, Amazon will we do all of our publishing through Amazon, they have a print on demand functionality. And they will tell you how much it costs to print per book, right. And that includes getting it all set up that you can do, what your cover design, getting that all in there. It’s the printing and getting it to use or shipping, right, so there’s an author price for that. And then you can turn around and charge and you do want to make a little bit of money back, right? They set their own audible prices. So like we have no control over. So that’s another kind of gamble with Audible and ebook prices. You know, that’s, that’s hard. One, two, right? People can read the ebook, they can get it out and do it easily for their launch day. But there’s some weird things that happen with eBooks too, like, Amazon doesn’t give you full credit for selling it if the people don’t actually read it. So hey, that’s a tip. Go read your ebooks click to the end like I make sure now I always click through, I always mark them as read because I’m like, I think the author should get more credit. And Amazon didn’t even know
John Corcoran 21:33
that was a thing. I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever marked any my eBooks read.
Melanie Booher 21:37
Hopefully now everyone will do it. Because I’m urging you not to like why does that mean Amazon literally just they don’t have to? I don’t know why they do that, I guess because they don’t want to make sure that it’s false book sales, right? Like if my mom and answered all my family members bought it, but no one ever read it? Well, it’s not a top seller, right? Yeah. So they want to know, people are reading the books.
John Corcoran 21:55
Got it. So you got to be sure to communicate that to your supporters, they’re gonna be out there buying it. And in the early few weeks, any other ideas or thoughts around before we wrap things up around using a book specifically in the business context to you know, support and grow your business? Get clients, referral partners, that sort of thing?
Melanie Booher 22:15
Yeah, I mean, I do think a book is kind of a really creative and new way, kind of like a business card business card on steroids. And it has been something that has been so helpful to my business, building instant credibility, visibility, getting it out there. We’ve, we’ve seen some great things, even from our authors, where they’ve said, Hey, I was able to connect people with I’m a marketing person, but I don’t do sales funnels. So I was able to connect a client who needed that. And we already had business before the book even came out, because we did something like this, right? So just learning people’s expertise a little bit more. And coming from a place of abundance, right? Like, just because I’m in marketing doesn’t mean I do everything, or just because I’m an HR, right, or I don’t, I love to have those connections, who I can hand off work to and pull them in to do great stuff.
John Corcoran 23:07
Yeah. Well, Melanie, this has been great. I love to wrap up with my gratitude question. I’m a big fan of gratitude. And you know, as you look around it at peers and contemporaries, business partners, mentors, others in your industry, however you wanted to find that? Who would you want to just shout out? Who would you want to acknowledge and thank them for helping you in your journey.
Melanie Booher 23:29
I love that question, John. So, Jodi Brandstetter. Jodi is my business partner and influence network media. But for her, I never would have thought we would be helping people do this. And she is the Yin, I am the sales and marketing fun. You know, she is a great businesswoman. Attention to detail. She’s pushes me out of my comfort zone all the time, which I need. And I just really appreciate all that she’s done to kind of help, you know, keep pushing things forward thinking of new things, being creative and encouraging me to be on this new path.
John Corcoran 24:01
That’s awesome. Melanie. Thanks so much. Where can people go to learn more about what you guys do?
Melanie Booher 24:07
Yes, we’d love for people to check out INMauthor.com INMauthor.com you can actually get a free chapter which will tell you all the different ways that you can use a book to market your business.
John Corcoran 24:21
Excellent. Thanks so much.
Melanie Booher 24:22
Thank you.
Outro 24:23
Thank you for listening to the Smart Business Revolution podcast with John Corcoran. Find out more at smartbusinessrevolution.com. And while you’re there, sign up for our email list and join the revolution. And be listening for the next episode of the Smart Business Revolution podcast.