You Forgot to Put This in Your Book!
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Every day Chris helps authors get published through Amazon. In doing so, he’s seen that there is one key page most writers FORGET to put in their books! In this episode of the Writing Momentum podcast, Chris goes over the essential sections books have–and why there’s a one you should include FOR SURE.
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Episode 42 Transcription:
[00:00:17].960] - Chris Hello. Welcome to the Writing Momentum podcast. I'm Christopher Maselli and my wife Gena is missing today. She's out. So it's just me and I'm sorry that you're just going to have to have me today. But you know what? You get me all to yourself or maybe I get you all to myself. I'm not sure how that works. But anyway, I'm so glad that you're listening to the podcast today because we're going to talk about something really interesting and I called this episode, "You Forgot to Put This in Your Book" because I've been working with authors for a while now and helping authors format their books. We'll format books for Amazon so that they can self publish on Amazon and I help them do the interior, make it look really good and really strong. And I'll often help with the covers also. And in doing all that formatting, I've gotten to see people's raw material, of course, as they send it before it's formatted. And I have to break it out by sections. Here's the "About the Author" section and I have to create a section for that, put their picture on it, that sort of thing. [00:01:22].090] - Chris And here's the dedication. I'll put that in there and there's things like that. I've noticed that most people don't forget to do. They don't forget to have a dedication, they don't forget to have an "About the Author". Sometimes they do, but usually not often. They almost always remember to have an acknowledgments page, right. People who help them with the book and they like putting that in there. And then of course, they've always got their main body of the text. Sometimes they'll have a forward by someone. But what most people forget is to put in any kind of marketing material. And after all, as a self-published individual, you know you're going to be doing all your own marketing. So you don't want to forget to put in your marketing material. And I have seen this happen from everyone, from someone who just is doing this on their own. They don't have a big following. They're just creating this book and hoping it makes a little bit of a splash when they put it out there all the way to people who have television shows. Some of my clients have television shows and they'll sell a few thousand books when they let people know about it on air. [00:02:29].890] - Chris And yet both groups tend to forget the marketing material. And I think that's maybe just because we get so focused on the goodness that is the message of our book and the theme of our book, that we just happen to leave out that one thing that maybe we're not focused on when we're writing, which is the marketing. Now, if you've been listening to this podcast for any length of time. You've heard Gena and I say, you've got to start building your audience right away, right? Even if you're still working on your book, start building your audience. Go ahead and get out there on social media. Gena and I love to use Social Bee, which you can get at writing.fyi/socialbee. That's a social media scheduler that helps you put social media out on all the networks. And we love that because it helps you build your platform with just very little effort. But anyway, so people will go ahead and not be building their audience. And that's so important. You've got to do that. But even though you're going to be marketing that book after it's printed in the print itself, you want to be including some very important pieces. [00:03:40].590] - Chris And that's what I want to talk about here today. First of all, I recommend that at the front of your book, you have a short section of maybe just one to two pages of endorsements, okay? This can be usually when I format, I like to call it like, "Praise for Rod's Book", right? Or "Praise for Rod Butler", who's written a book. You want to go ahead and put in praise for the author or praise for the subject that the author's teaching, which is your subject. Because often when people go on Amazon, they'll look inside the book. You've done that, right, where you go to Amazon.com and you click look inside. And when you do that, it's going to show you the first few pages. And in those first few pages, why not have some recommendations where people are saying, hey, this person is awesome. This subject is awesome. It kind of gives you a social proof, right, that let people know that, hey, this is a good book. So, one, be sure to put in the praise for the book. Second, at the back, go ahead and advertise your other material. I can't tell you how many authors forget to do this. [00:04:59].280] - Chris I've had authors that have six, seven, eight books out, and they'll give me the manuscript, and it has nothing in it at the end that mentions other books that they have. And if someone likes your book, they're very likely to go ahead and purchase another one. And so you've got to let them know that I like doing it at the end of the book, because that way, first of all, you don't want to have it in front of the front material because then it just seems like an advertising piece. So you put it at the end. But then when people have that good feeling when they finished your book, and if they like what you've said, they can see that, oh, you've written other stuff, too. And so if you've written other books, you can put your other books in there. If you don't have other books, still, go ahead and put things like maybe an advertisement for your YouTube channel, right? Whatever it is that you've got that people can go ahead and consume, maybe your blog, right? Want to stay up to date with the latest stories by Kerry Jones? Go ahead and read this, my blog. [00:05:56].970] - Chris It's right here, right? So you do that kind of thing and people will be drawn to more things that you're selling. So don't forget those two things. Now, that said, if your book got published and it didn't have those two things, I'd say I think you're leaving some important things on the table. But I wouldn't say that you completely forgot the most important thing, and that is because there is one thing you got to put in there. And if you have listened to the show for some time, you're not going to be surprised at what I'm about to say. We talked about it for the full episode 35. And that is you've got to put your lead magnet in the book, right? Your lead magnet is a small, quickly consumable, something that people will exchange their email address in order to receive. So, for instance, it might be a checklist of things that you should wear for your Western wardrobe. If your books about Western wardrobes, a friend of mine does a lot of recipes. It might be a recipe, right? The greatest seasonable recipes. Right? A friend of mine, Tony Chisholm. She wrote the book never meet the devil naked. [00:07:15].280] - Chris It's about putting on your spiritual armor. Right here is her lead magnet. It is a study guide for that book. Now, I think that's a really good lead magnet because if you're going to get her book, then most likely you'd like every chance to consume it as best you can. And one of the best ways to do that is through a study guide that accompanies it. And she puts that advertisement for it right at the front of her book. Let me read it to you here. When you get into about page six or seven, it says, "Hello, warrior. You've purchased, "Never Meet the Devil Naked". Now, enjoy this free PDF study guide, normally $20 as my gift to you. It's filled with interactive questions, reflections, and more, all designed to help you develop your warrior spirit. To download your free PDF study guide, simply go to this URL." And she's got the address right in there. Now, here's what's great about that. First of all, as I said, you get the book, you're excited about learning it. You see that at the beginning. More than likely, you're going to go and put your email address at that URL to get that study guide. [00:08:32].820] - Chris Now, Tony is excited about that because she knows that if you read her book, she's going to be with you for about a week. But if you get on her email list, she can build a relationship with you and you guys could be together for years and you can really help, help someone if you're doing like a self help book or the spiritual book like she's doing. But there's another aspect to this that I think is really interesting. By putting the lead magnet way at the front of the book about on page seven, it's going to be seen on the Amazon. Look inside. Did you get that? When you go to Amazon and you look at her book and you click look inside, you will see that advertisement for her lead magnet. And if you go to the URL, you can download it. Now you might say, wait a second, I don't want them to have a lead magnet if they haven't purchased the book. Why not? Why not? Like I said, the book, it's $5. $10. That's all you're making on it. And someone's just with you for a week. But if you can get them on your email list, you can build a relationship and they could be with you for years. [00:09:49].150] - Chris They could be buying books from you for years. That email list you have is far more important than the book itself. And I know that's a hard thing to stomach because we work so hard on our books. But those newsletters, that interaction with your audience, it's super important. We really discovered this over the last couple of years. And we talked in earlier episode about newsletters and so check those episodes out if you haven't listened to those. But we have discovered how building a relationship with our audience over our newsletter just creates a really good relationship. Because that's what marketing is today, right? It's a relationship, building a relationship to one another. And we've gotten to know people that we wouldn't have otherwise gotten to know. And that's one of the great things about this new economy that we're in, is that we're not just selling widgets to faceless people, right? We're actually able to build relationships with people as authors. How cool is that? I think that is just so awesome. So anyway, and just as a recap, authors don't forget to put a lot of things in their books. But they do usually forget the marketing material. [00:11:06].630] - Chris Like the praise at the front, right? Like the other books they have for sale at the back. And most importantly, their lead magnet, the quickly consumed piece of material that they will exchange for their email address. And they'll give you their email address. Again. If you want to learn more about lead magnets, we talked about that in episode 35. It's a good one and I think it'll help you figure out what should your lead magnet be. Alright, that's all I've got this week. Next week, Gena should be back. And until then, I hope that you will rate, review, subscribe, and share this podcast with another writer we're really trying to get the message that this podcast is available out there because there's some writing podcasts. There's not a lot, I think especially the focus on marketing and just really down to earth stuff, which is hopefully what we're doing. And so we'd like to let more people know about it. If you can go ahead and write a review or share it with a friend, that would really help. And of course subscribe so that you never miss an episode. Alright, that's all I got for this week. [00:12:12].340] - Chris Until next week, don't forget that together we have Writing Momentum. Bye writer.
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