Super Sales For Self-Publishers And Other Author Success Tips With Julie Broad

Looking for useful tips as self-publishing author? Today’s guest can help you out! Julie Broad is the President of Book Launchers and a successful self-published author with her latest work, Self-Publish & Succeed: The No Boring Books Way to Writing a Non-Fiction Book that Sells. She joins host Robin Colucci to share practical tips for authors looking to find success as they pursue self-publishing. Julie offers insight in marketing, promotions, and setting expectations. Join in on their chat to get more author success tips you can use on before your next launch!

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Super Sales For Self-Publishers And Other Author Success Tips With Julie Broad

TAC Julie | Self Publishers — Self-Publish & Succeed: The No Boring Books Way to Writing a Non-Fiction Book that Sells

One of the reasons I invited our guest is that this woman has accomplished something very rare, especially for a self-published author. This lady wrote and promoted a number one bestselling self-published book on all of Amazon. There’s a lot more to this woman who is the great Julie Broad. Julie knows what it takes to be a self-published author.

Through Book Launchers and her popular YouTube channel, BookLaunchers.tv, she helps subject-matter experts write, publish and promote nonfiction books to boost their business. Julie’s titles include More Than Cashflow, which was her number one on all of Amazon bestsellers in 2013. She also has written The New Brand You, winner of the 2016 Beverly Hills Book Award for Best Sales Book. Her book released in 2021, Self-Publish & Succeed, captures her top tactics to write, publish and market a nonfiction book.

Julie is a recognized successful entrepreneur and notable speaker. She has also received the Top 20 Under 40 Award for her business and community contributions. Her advice for authors and investors has been featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur.com, Yahoo Business, Medium.com and many local and national TV shows. I hope that you will give Julie your full attention in this episode because she has tremendous wisdom and insight to share from her many successes in the self-publishing arena. Enjoy.

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Julie, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

It’s such a pleasure to have you. You’ve had some great YouTube videos. You’re good at doing that. I could probably learn a few things from you there. One of the main reasons I wanted to have you on is to talk about self-publishing because I love your attitude towards self-publishing. A lot of people view self-publishing as the consolation prize or the red-headed stepchild of publishing when that’s not true.

I always tell people that the decision of your publishing routes should always be a strategic one. Sometimes the best strategy is in fact to self-publish. I would love it if you could kick us off by sharing with us a little bit of your story and how you landed in this self-publishing arena because it’s fascinating.

It’s funny because I was one of those people. I didn’t think self-publishing was like, “It wouldn’t make you a legitimate author.” It’s essentially how I felt. I had friends that had gotten book deals and were getting published. Through a variety of things, I ended up getting introduced to a couple of different editors at some traditional publishers.

At that time, I was in real estate. I had a real estate training and education company. I did YouTube back then. Before, there was a lot of fancy editing. You had a flip camera. You shot it on this flip camera and the USB uploads it straight to YouTube. I’ve been doing YouTube for a long time, and I love it. This was a real estate conversation.

I was excited because when I started talking to these editors, I was like, “I’ve got a book idea. This is going to be a great book.” The different people I talked to all said, “That sounds like a general real estate book. I don’t think it’s going to sell.” I had read 70-odd real estate books at that time and I was like, “Nobody has written this but okay, you’re the experts.” It went down the line that they rejected my idea, but Wiley stopped and said, “We’re interested in working with you. We don’t like that idea, but we have a book idea that we’ve been thinking we’d like somebody to write.”

They were giving me a book idea. We built the book proposal together, which is rare. Most people have to have an agent and a proposal before you’re ever talking to the publisher. We spent three months building this book proposal together. It never occurred to me that I wasn’t getting a book deal. That might seem egotistical, but the way it went, it didn’t occur to me that there was not a book deal at the end of this. Spoiler alert, there wasn’t. I got an email from them.

After everything was done, it was submitted and I was waiting for the offer, I ended up getting an email that said, “The marketing department doesn’t feel you have a strong enough platform to sell books.” I was devastated because at that point, I felt like there was no option. I was like, “None of these publishers like my idea. Wiley liked me, but even with their great book idea, which they thought was great, looking back, I didn’t even want to write that book but I was wooed by the whole process.”

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They said I didn’t have enough juice to sell books. I was like, “Nobody is going to want me after this.” I was pretty devastated, but my husband said, “We had friends that had self-published and they had sold thousands of books. It had done tremendous things for their real estate business. We can self-publish.” I was like, “That’s not real. That’s not publishing.” Lots of things happen and eventually, I thought, “That book I wanted to write. It was important enough that I felt like I had to write it no matter what.”

I dove into self-publishing, but I dove into it a little bit differently than a lot of people do going, “If I’m not going to get a traditional book deal, I’m going to do it better than if I had.” I wanted to know everything traditional publishers did and wanted to do it a little bit better. I threw myself into as much the book as I did into publishing and learned everything I could.

I ended up taking the book idea that nobody thought was good by the person who couldn’t sell books. I took it to number one on Amazon in print books. A niche, self-published nonfiction book going to number one ahead of Dan Brown and A Game of Thrones, I’m selling thousands and thousands of copies. That felt good.

That blew my mind because you hear so many people talk about, “I’m a number one Amazon bestseller.” They don’t mean number one on Amazon. They mean number one in a tiny category usually. It’s so often an obscure category on Amazon. Let’s open that up a little bit. How on earth did you hit number one on all of Amazon as a self-published author? It’s so far above the average. It’s not even in view of the average. It’s like trying to look at the average from the moon.

It’s not like I can give you my seven-step formula so you could do it too. It’s one of those things where luck was on my side in a lot of ways, but I did do a lot of things right. By the time my book came out, I had been in real estate for twelve years, but I had been networking hard for probably 5 or 6. I had some strong relationships.

If anybody ever goes to my YouTube channel, I give a ton of value to a lot of people. It’s in my heart to give, serve and help as much as I possibly can. With that kind of mindset, I built some strong relationships where people were stepping forward without me even asking and saying like, “How can I help you? What can I do for you with this book launch?”

I had a few people do some cool things that made this book launch tremendously successful. One of them was I had a colleague. He was a former mentor of ours in the real estate space who was exiting completely from real estate. He had a $300 course that he was pulling off the market. He wasn’t even going to sell it anymore. He gave it to us to give away for free as an incentive to anybody who bought three books or more during the launch week.

It was a perfect tie-in to the book. That was tremendous value. We had a lot of people, real estate investors, real estate investing groups, mortgage brokers and realtors that had newsletters. They all promoted the book during launch week because not only were they going to get the book, but they were going to get this phenomenal course that everybody investing in real estate could benefit from both of these things. That was all it was.

I had an email newsletter list of 10,000 people. This was in 2013. I’ve never been particularly exceptional at social media, but I didn’t have much of a social media following. I did have a YouTube channel but it had a few thousand people. The network that I had built had their own audiences and it was a perfect message-market match. There was the bonus incentive of this $300 course that not only was legitimately $300 but it was no longer available on the market.

I look back on it and thought, “This was better than if I had gotten a traditional book deal because I put my heart and soul into it.” People got behind me in a way that they probably wouldn’t have if Wiley was the publisher because they liked the fact that I had been shut down and was doing it anyways. That was why people were going like, “How can I help you with this?”

In that circle, people knew all the people that were getting book deals. They didn’t understand why I wasn’t getting a book deal because I had just as much to bring to the table as a lot of the people who did get book deals. There was that part of it. I made so much more money when I had gotten a book deal and I had the rights.

A nugget that I’m getting out of what you’re sharing is that if you had not shared about your experience and been vulnerable to share your experience, that wouldn’t have happened. I want to point that out for our readers because some people might have been like, “I’m so embarrassed. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want anybody to know about it. I don’t want to think about it again.” I’m curious. Did you share about this with individuals? Did you send an email to your network and say, “This happened?” I want to deep-dive a little bit deeper into that because there’s something valuable there.

It was in a lot of conversations. I probably was communicating this through my newsletter list to a point. I’m very transparent and open about things. There are two reasons why nobody wants to learn from somebody where everything is going right. In the training and education space, if you’re always talking about all the great things that are happening, eventually, you’re going to irritate people or they’re going to not believe you. If everything is going right, it’s like, “I can’t relate to you because things go wrong oftentimes.” Part of it is I’ve never believed too much that you have to hide.

The interesting thing about my book was I did tell some of the stories that I hadn’t told before because I believe people needed to understand where I was coming from with my advice. We had hidden some of them because we were real estate investors that took other people’s money for investment purposes. They invested in the properties that we were buying. We didn’t want people to necessarily know some of these ugly mistakes we’d made when they gave us their money, but at the same time, we knew we had to.

The more I’ve shared over the years, the more I’ve learned that there’s power in sharing. Any dark day is a phenomenal chapter and a dark year makes a phenomenal book. You have to be far enough past it that you have the insight and lessons to share for the reader because it’s not just about sharing how things are ugly. It’s like, “This is what you can learn so you don’t have to go through what I went through.”

You hit number one on all of Amazon. Continue, please.

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It was largely because of all of that network. At that point, I had not spent any money on marketing. It wasn’t until about five months later that I hired somebody to do PR. I had gotten some PR already, but I felt like, “This was big and good enough. I should be on TV. I should be doing more.” I have had a lot of speaking engagements already. The book tripled the size of that speaking engagement calendar.

I got a PR person who started booking TV in all the cities I was speaking in. It was doubling down on that. I spent money on that, but it was not about selling books at that point, which was good because it turns out TV doesn’t sell books. I didn’t know that at that time, but we’ve seen that. We’ve gotten our authors on a lot of TV shows. Good Morning America and 20/20 sold some books. None of the other TV stations sold some books.

Another thing about self-publishing is you can see because you can check your sales dashboard every day. When you’re traditionally published, you’re lucky if you’re getting a quarterly sales report. You have no idea what moved the needle on your book sales, but with self-publishing, you can get a sense because you can see, “There’s a spike today. I was on TV. There’s a correlation.”

I wrote an article for Forbes.com about the things that cause book sales and the things that don’t. PR raises awareness which can lead to book sales but it’s not a true cause of book sales like speaking is.

We’ve seen upticks from a couple of major shows, but typically there’s almost no change. Newspaper is interesting and it does have, especially if you get an article that gets syndicated across a lot of platforms. You can see a blip and it’s one of those blips that’s high and then it drops. You can see a 3 or 4-day blip after that. I suspect that’s even going to start to fade. I used to read two papers a day and I don’t read any newspapers anymore. I don’t want to see any of that.

That’s an interesting correlation because if you’re subscribing to a newspaper, you’re a reader. Readers buy books. I hadn’t thought of that. That’s an interesting insight that you got better results with the print media.

A lot of people read their newspapers online too. Your link at the end of it gets clicked on versus you hear it, they have to try to remember it or if they see it. Usually, they’re watching the morning news. Our clients and I always get morning news. When they talk to authors in the morning, people usually watch it while they’re getting ready and their brain is on their day, not on what you’re saying.

You had tremendous success as a self-publisher. How did you get from real estate to helping people with books?

It’s a fun little journey that’s never a straight line. That’s pretty much how anybody’s life is. I never thought I would get into this. My background was real estate, finance and all those things. As a little girl, though, I did think I would be a writer but then somebody told me writers didn’t make money and I like money so I went to business school.

What happened was my book did so well in the real estate space. I ended up having a lot of people coming to our real estate coaching who wanted to write a book, who had written a book and were wondering why it wasn’t selling. I ended up content editing, co-writing and writing chapters for some of the books that did get deals with Wiley because the authors knew me. They wanted my input and game on their book to go figure. I ended up doing a lot in the book space and I loved it.

Real estate was never supposed to be my thing. I started investing in 2001 because I was like, “I need to get my money working for me. Thank you, Rich Dad.” It was there when I decided to quit my job. I had a dozen properties and it seemed like the natural fit. As the books came through, I also started to see a lot of the garbage with these ten-chapter business card books. They were horrible. People were so sad because they felt like they were paying for a real book and then it was terrible. Their friends read it and nobody buys it.

That was prominent too in 2015 and 2016. I kept looking around going, “There’s got to be a better way.” I also knew the hundreds of hours I had put into research to do a book as good as a traditionally published book. Hiring people when you don’t even know what you’re looking for, you get a range. You start getting quotes and you’re like, “$8,000 for this edit all the way down to $300. What’s the difference?” I kept looking at all of that stuff and going, “There needs to be a marketing focus because that’s what traditional publishers do. They focus on, ‘Are you going to sell me books?'”

A marketing-focused company that has everything under one roof, especially for business people who are busy running a business but they know they want a book, takes them through the entire process including the marketing at the end so that everything they’re doing is set up to focus towards that marketing. The book is as good or better than a traditionally published book.

That was where my passions kept going. I started to dream up what that company would look like, took all the things I didn’t like, found a way around those and tried to bring in all the things I did like. I decided one day. I sent an email out to all my real estate people and said, “I’m opening a publishing company. Does anybody want to be a beta author?” I had ten clients.

That is something that even in the traditional world, which most of our clients, we help them get agents and book deals. We’re on the other side. The thing that happens to most self-published authors and traditionally published authors is that when the book is out, they feel like they’ve been dropped into this chasm of oblivion. The publisher does some things but certainly not enough to drive a number one Amazon bestseller, for example.

As a self-publisher, if you’re going with one of these hybrid presses, forget about it. A vanity press or a so-called hybrid publisher, most of them aren’t hybrid publishers. They’re not going to do anything for you. This is a great unique aspect of your process where they not only get a book in their hands but then there’s more to help them go forward. How do you find your authors’ outcomes comparatively? How are they doing with that side of it? What is their experience?

It varies widely author-to-author. The thing I always tell people too is, “There are two things I can promise you and that is I have no idea how your book launch is going to do. That’s pretty much a guarantee. I don’t know for sure because there are book launches I’ve thought we’re going to crush that were fizzle. It didn’t do much.” There are others where I think, “I’m not sure about that one,” then it’s sailing and it keeps getting higher.

Typically, if somebody has an audience already, that’s what traditional publishers look for. If they already have an audience, they are likely to have a very strong launch. Depending on where their audience is, they’re going to sell a fairly predictable number of books based on their audience as long as the book is a fit for that audience because some people try to go way out in the left field. It has nothing to do with the people that follow and listen to them.

I usually recommend something for their journal or for friends and family but not for your audience.

A lot of our clients fall into the category of people with very small audiences. They’ve had success and they’re emerging going, “I want other people to know about either how I succeeded or even to know my name in this space as someone who has had success.” Those people don’t have an audience. We typically do what is called a phased momentum launch. What happens is you’re leveraging whatever you’ve got to launch, but then you’re building momentum over time. Every month, you’re doing things that layer on to the previous month so that over time, your book sales are increasing.

This works well for people who are willing to keep going. What I mean by that is you have 100 sales in month 1 and 102 in month 2 and you’re still able to go, “I’m going to keep going.” It’s a hard mental thing to keep doing the things, but we have had some great stories. Robert Belle is my favorite. He had that trajectory like a small to medium-sized launch for a self-published author and it has built momentum.

Through doing the podcast, interviews and all those things, he developed a powerful message that ended up getting him on TED Global Ideas. His video was over 1.5 million views. It was featured on TED’s homepage. His life is crazy exciting with lots of cool opportunities. That’s one of those things. He started with a book that he was passionate about. We had to build momentum and he stuck with it month after month.

The biggest mistake that authors make is they stop promoting their book too soon or never promote it. If they do promote it, they stop within the first three months and that is guaranteed. Don’t even promote it if you’re going to stop in the first three months because you’re not going to capture that momentum that you’re talking about.

Jack Canfield talks about this. One of the bestselling books of all time is Chicken Soup for the Soul. He and Mark Victor Hansen promoted that book every day for fourteen months before it hit the New York Times Best Sellers list for the first time. It remained there for I don’t even know how many decades it seems. That wouldn’t have ever happened if they stopped even in month twelve. How many people might say, “I’m going to promote it for a year?”

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It’s very rare.

I’ve seen it over and over again. It takes a solid two years. If you want your book to get legs, you’ve got to promote it consistently for two years. That’s what I’ve seen anyway.

We have one client whose book came out in 2018 and he is still with us because of the way we’re set up. As long as you’re still with us, you’re still a member. We keep marketing your book. He has been with us since 2017, but his book launched in 2018. We do monthly marketing reports for all our clients with total sales. His book sold the most out of all of our clients that month. That’s three and a half years post-launch. That’s the Amazon and Barnes & Noble sales. That’s not bulk that he might be doing because he does a lot of conferences, events and things like that too.

It was exciting and we were like, “This is proof of what you’re saying too.” You got to keep at it, keep marketing and talking about it. If you get bored of that one, write another book. You’ve got two to promote because you’ve got something new to talk about. Some people feel like, “I’ve said this 1,000 times.” You probably have, but the people listening to you haven’t heard it 1,000 times.

That can be a challenge when you feel like, “How could anybody still be interested in this?” For them, it’s not still. It’s the first time. That’s such great insight and important to remember. We know how you got here and a little bit more about what you do. I want to recap that help on the backend with the promotion is key. What are some other things that you do with your authors in terms of helping them promote their books?

We get a lot of people who come to us with their book finished and they’re like, “Here, go market my book,” with rare exceptions, which are typically traditionally published authors who have realized they’re getting no marketing from their publisher or little marketing. They are looking for more and the book is well done to the level that we know we can help them.

Typically, if you’re self-publishing and you’re coming to us at that point, we’re going to turn you away because a lot of what we do marketing-wise comes in early. There are so many important layers that need to go into this. You know this well because if you’re working on proposals and getting agents, all these pieces have to be thought through before the book even gets written.

A lot of what we do is keyword, category pricing and competition research while you’re in editing to make sure that there are no red flags and we’ve got keywords built into that title and subtitle. Online discoverability has never been more vital. We need to make sure your title, which is the highest value keyword place, that you’ve got those keywords in there. That’s some of the things we do.

We’re also looking at table of contents because I believe every chapter title is a little salesperson for your book. If you’ve got great chapter titles that create curiosity and add value, you’re going to get speaking gigs and media attention. People are going to buy your book because they look at it and go, “This is interesting. I haven’t read anything like this before.” That’s stuff that you can’t fix after the book is done. Some of the marketing we’re doing is early.

It’s like traditionally published books too. The pre-sale period is important. It’s the time from when you can start sending out ARC copies and get reviewers, endorsements and influencers to read it. Book reviewers largely want the book eight weeks at least before it’s going to be launched. You got to get it out there and start driving that early momentum. If you’re expecting a big launch, that is vital.

For our readers, ARC is an Advance Review Copy. It means exactly what it sounds like. You send it to reviewers or potential endorsers. It’s nice to get it before your book has been laid out officially because then all those endorsements can go in the book’s early pages. I’m sure a lot of our readers have seen where there are a couple of endorsements on the back, but then there are pages and pages of endorsements. That came from those Advance Review Copy.

I briefly worked as an acquisitions editor for a small independent press. I can relate to what you’re saying because I would get people sending us manuscripts who were real experts. There was good quality information in there, but the positioning was completely off. They were focused on what was interesting to them. They weren’t focused at all on what would be interesting to a potential reader.

I would be crushed for this person because I would look at this and say, “I can see there’s value here.” I even remember I got on the phone with some of them and I was like, “If you repositioned it this way.” I realized they didn’t know how to execute on that. They weren’t able to take my advice and do anything with it.

That’s when I realized that I needed to not be an acquisitions editor anymore and I needed to go into book coaching. That was what pushed me in because I knew somebody needs to get to these people before they go to a publisher or an agent because they’re never going to break through this. They’re going to make the mistake of thinking they had a bad idea when they didn’t frame it right.

You hit one of my hot buttons, which is you’re writing this book for your reader. It might be about you or your entire life story, but it’s not for you. It’s for your reader. If you’re too focused on yourself, it’s so boring. One of my litmus tests is when I look at a book is I see how many chapters start with I. If you’ve got more than one chapter in your book and paragraphs starting with I, you’ve probably got a problem.

This is also true for speaking. I’m not going to name names. I have a very good friend who is a coach for speakers. We went to an event that’s a well-attended event for speakers. We would sit in the back of the room and count how many eyes and knees we heard. It was frightening. It’s for the reader. I’m thinking of an example of a fellow who came to me who had done something extraordinary. He had, from the ground up, built a direct marketing company that they sold for $35 million ten years after they built it. It’s not bad.

Initially, he had a 40,000-word manuscript plus it’s ARC. It was all about like, “Here’s how I did it and how my brother and my team did it.” I was like, “Nobody cares because you’re not Lee Iacocca or Phil Knight. Nobody cares how you did it. We need to figure out where this message meets the market.” We ended up figuring out he had a whole different relationship to risk than most business people. We ended up reframing and calling it The Risk Advantage: Embracing the Entrepreneur’s Unexpected Edge. It was a long time ago.

The idea is it’s there usually. That’s the thing. It’s important to have someone in your life, someone like you for self-published authors, who can help a person see where they can take all these. He got to tell all his favorite stories in that book. Not one of his favorite stories was missing from that book, but he did it in a way that the readers could see themselves in the book. That’s the key. The reader has to not just be included, but they’ve got to be able to see themselves in the stories you’re telling about yourself.

They have to quickly see why you’re telling them the story too so that they can see the relevance. It’s like speakers. They’ve got a great story but 3 to 5 minutes in, you’re like, “Why are you telling me this?” Sometimes if you do have a longer story, you need to lead in with what the outcome is or what the lesson is going to be and then tell the story because people have to know why you’re telling them this personal story, even if it’s a great story because we’re very selfish and focused human beings.

Not telling them where it’s going, I call that the white van approach, “Get in. It will be fun. I promise you it’s good.” “I don’t think so. I think I’ll wait here for the bus with the label on it.”

The only people that can get away with that are comedians when you’ve paid to go to a comedy bar because you trust that there’s going to be a payoff at the end of this. Sometimes there isn’t, but you still trust that there’s going to be, so you’ll sit through a five-minute story.

The better they are, the longer they can string you along. They’re spinning a yarn.

Going back to the manuscript example, you’re right. We get a lot of manuscripts that the spark of what is awesome about them and their story and what is going to be valuable to other people is there. It’s hard for authors to see it themselves. A lot of times, that outside perspective makes all the difference in turning it around. We had one similar example: the client came to us and his friend had good advice, but she said, “There’s no saving this. It should go in the bin.” He brought it to us and he was like, “Is she right? It’s okay. You can tell me if she is right.” We read it and we were like, “No, this is cool.”

He had written the book The Empathy Formula. It was all about how being empathetic in business was a better approach, but it was the packaging. It was like, “Nobody is going to buy empathy and cares about being more empathetic.” Through a process, we ended up coming up with this concept with him called Mean People Suck.

It’s the opposite of empathy, but many people think they have to be mean in business to get profits to get all this work out of their team. His perspective was completely the opposite. Mean People Suck was born and it was how empathy can lead to better profits and life. The spark was there. The Empathy Formula is still alive and well inside of the book. It’s just called Mean People Suck and that’s the theme.

The key is in that subtitle, which should always answer that question, “Why should I read this book? What’s in this book for me?” It’s how empathy can help you boost profits and have a better life. “I want those two things. You have my attention.” Julie, what should I have asked you that I haven’t touched upon or that you wish I would ask you so you would have a chance to talk about it?

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Since we did talk about my book going to number one, a lot of people have unrealistic expectations of what their launch is going to be. We’ve touched on this, so I feel like it’s a relevant topic to wrap everything up. We have a launch strategy menu for authors and a lot of people think the menu is based on a restaurant like what you feel like eating. The menu is not based on what you feel like having for your launch. You don’t go, “I want The Wall Street Journal Bestseller launch this time.” It’s based on your resources that you have and that you’re bringing to the table.

There’s a little bit of like, “How far do you want to push yourself?” If you have no audience and you’re not willing to invest $100,000, The Wall Street Journal is not on the menu. You have to look at your resources. Resources are your audience, the network you have, their audience, and how much you can count on that network. There are a lot of people who will get support from their network that entails a post on social media. I mean no disrespect to that, but that does nothing. You are going to see almost no change with the exception of a big influencer tweeting and posting.

An example is one of our clients gets regularly retweeted and tweeted by Tom Peters. In the sales space, that’s a pretty big name. It doesn’t hurt her book sales by any stretch, but it doesn’t make or break the bookshelves. It’s looking at all those resources. Money can fill a lot of gaps. You can do a lot of things with money. You could technically buy your way onto these bestseller lists. It’s not something I ever endorse or recommend in that category of resources. We won’t go down that hole, but it’s one of those things where you can, but I don’t recommend it.

Most people aren’t coming to the table with the resources that get them the launch that they have in their head. That’s that gap that people have to reconcile early on. It doesn’t mean your book won’t do phenomenal things, won’t sell and have an impact but your launch might look different. A launch date doesn’t define the success or failure of a book.

I want to add to what you said because there’s also another myth out there that’s like, “If you write a book, then that will give you the resources. It will provide a business or clients for you.” It doesn’t work that way. What I found is that for an author to succeed with their book, you have to have enough resources to do something to promote it. You can’t be looking at writing a book and selling books as a solution to any kind of financial shortfall.

You will lose money on that aspect of it pretty much the whole way because the revenue, benefit and ROI for having the book come out of what you can do with the book once you have it. That’s such an important distinction. You need resources of some kind. You need to spend some money to get that book off the ground and give it legs. There are a lot of low-cost ways that you can do, but you’ve got to have something available to do that.

Above all, you need time. If you don’t have time, then you better have a whole lot of the other resources.

The more time you have, the less money you need to do it, which is a nice trade-off. This has been amazing and helpful. I’ve learned some great stuff too. Thank you so much for sharing with us, being generous and sharing your wisdom.

Thanks for having me.

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About Julie Broad

Julie Broad, founder of self-publishing services firm Book Launchers and Amazon Overall #1 Best Selling Author, knows what it takes to be a successful self-published author. Through Book Launchers and her popular YouTube channel, BookLaunchers.TV, she helps subject matter experts write, publish, and promote nonfiction books that will boost their business. Julie’s titles include More than Cashflow, which topped Amazon, and The New Brand You, winner of the Beverly Hills Book Award for Best Sales book.

Her latest book, Self-Publish & Succeed captures her leading tactics to write, publish and market a nonfiction book. A recognized real estate investor, successful entrepreneur, and notable speaker, Julie also received the Top 20 under 40 Award for her business and community contributions.

She’s been speaking on stages across Canada and the US since 2009, sharing her strategies to write a book that builds your business and have more impact and influence with your brand. An expert on writing a book with marketing in mind, Julie teaches the best approaches to get results, make an impact, and ultimately, make more money.

Julie always leaves people inspired, excited, and with clear steps to take action immediately. Her advice for authors and investors has been featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur.com, Yahoo! Business, CTV, the Toronto Sun, Medium.com and many local and national TV shows.

Born and raised in Canada, Julie currently resides in Los Angeles with her husband and son. When she’s not busy with Book Launchers or her family, you’ll find her at CrossFit or playing poker.

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