Episode 121: How to Launch Your Book and Amplify Your Story with Camille Adams

 

In this empowering episode of The Small Business PR Podcast, I sit down with Camille Adams, a renowned book coach and launch strategist, to explore the transformative journey of writing and launching a book. Whether you're a small business owner, an aspiring author, or someone with a story burning inside, this conversation is packed with actionable insights to bring your writings to life. From the nuances of book publishing to leveraging podcasts for visibility, Camille shares her expert strategies for authors to achieve sustainable success and make an impact with their stories.

Key Takeaways:

  • Understanding Book Publishing: Camille breaks down the essentials of book launching and publishing, offering clarity on the paths of self-publishing, hybrid publishing, and traditional publishing. Learn the pros and cons of each to choose the best route for your book.

  • Building Your Audience: Discover why growing your audience is crucial long before your book launch and how it can significantly influence your publishing options and book sales.

  • The Power of Podcast Tours: Dive into the strategy behind successful podcast tours, including how to pitch your story with relevance and engage listeners without hard-selling your book.

  • Innovative Marketing Strategies: Beyond podcasts, explore various marketing tactics such as influencer collaborations, virtual book launch parties, and leveraging social media to boost your book's visibility and sales.

  • Launching for Success: Camille emphasizes the importance of a strategic launch plan, including pre-selling, building a launch team, and continuously promoting your book post-launch for lasting impact.

Bonus: Camille offers access to her free resource, "Start Writing," a guide for those hesitant to embrace their identity as writers. This tool is designed to kickstart your writing journey and frame your book for success.

Whether you're in the early stages of writing or ready to launch your book, this episode is filled with invaluable advice to navigate the publishing world and share your story with a broader audience. Tune in to transform your book dream into reality and leverage your story for greater impact.

Listen now to step into your power as an author and change lives with your story!

Remember to subscribe to The Small Business PR Podcast for more insights on growing your business and elevating your voice. Follow us on social media @GloriaChouPR and join our community of change-makers.


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Transcript

[00:00:00] What's up? Small business heroes. Welcome back to the show. I am so excited for today's guest because so often I get asked, Gloria, I want to write a book. I have all this writing all the story inside of me and I want to bring it to the world. So today we have Camille Adams. She is a book coach. She's a long strategist and we're going to talk all about how to bring your writings to life so that you can share your story to more people.

Welcome to the show. Hi, Gloria. I'm so excited to be here. So can you tell me what exactly you do? Because book launch strategist, what does that mean? What does that mean? So I started off as a book coach. I help people write nonfiction books specifically. And then I noticed that a lot of writers, they struggle with marketing.

They struggle with the visibility. A lot of them are introverts. They don't always feel comfortable in front of the camera. And so I started migrating a little bit into the marketing and media side of things. And so I founded way media and marketing specifically to help authors gain more visibility and launch their books with ease.

And so what I do is I help authors build their platforms. One of our current clients had literally [00:01:00] zero audience. She just had her friends and family. She had a private account. She had nothing. And so we help them build their platform. We help them create their author brand so that they're not just writing a book, but they're actually building a brand, which is way more powerful than a book alone.

And then we help them launch it. So we sit down with authors and we put together a launch plan because there are a lot of different moving parts. To this and having a successful launch is critical to really book sales and to just the overall impact that you're going to have. Yeah, because what is the impact if no one hears about it?

Right. And I think that's why I wanted to have you on the show is because we do something very similar. We're very aligned in our ethos is that we believe we all have stories to share and it's our duty to share that story. And if we don't, we can't impact people. So let's get to the basics for people who are not in the book world, you know, with the age of Amazon and the traditional publishers, can you just break down book launching and book publishing one on one?

so that people understand all the different routes that they can take. Absolutely. So after you have written your book, which is a very challenging fee, that is only really 5 [00:02:00] percent of the process. Then you have to really identify, how am I going to publish this? Is that scary when I say that? Cause I saw your eyes.

5 percent of the process is just the writing of the book. It's a lot. It's a lot, but that is really where it starts because once you write the book, you need to figure out how you're going to actually publish it. How you're going to market it, how you're going to sell it, and how you're going to continue to leverage it and continue to sell it over time.

I would say one of the biggest mistakes I see authors make is launching their book once and never launching it again. This is something, just like a course or a program, you're going to want to continue to launch. And so, before you even get to the place where you're selling it, selling your book, you need to understand how to publish it.

Like what is the best publishing route for you? And there are three main ones. The first being self publishing, which we all know really, really well with the rise of Amazon, it's made publishing your book so much easier and accessible to everyone. So self publishing is a really affordable way to get your book out into the world, low barrier to entry.

Anybody can do it, but that also means that [00:03:00] it doesn't come with as much credibility, perhaps, unless you work with a hybrid publisher. Which is self publishing, but they might have a distributor like Simon Schuster. Essentially what you're doing is you're paying them to publish your book. They take care of the entire process for you, which by the way, typically publishing a book, if you do it the right way, and I don't want to scare you because you can do it very economically, but if you do it the right way, you're going to spend on average 30, 000 for a publishing process.

It actually costs the publisher quite a bit of money between editors and cover design artists and book formatters and all the things to actually get your book published. So if a hybrid publisher is charging you something like 10, they're probably going to be taking a decent percentage of the royalties.

So with self publishing, you don't have to give anybody any royalties. With hybrid, you can keep more of the royalties, but a percentage of those royalties will go to the hybrid publisher. Now, the final one, and the one that most people had to do in the past, [00:04:00] right, like years ago, if you wanted to be a published author, You had to traditionally publish.

It was just the only way to be published. Hybrid and self wasn't really an option. And so with traditional publishing, really you give up all of your creative rights. Yes, it gives you credibility to say, Hey, I was published by Simon and Schuster. I was published by Hay House. There is an instant credibility that comes with that, but you are giving up.

So much of your creative rights when you do that because they will tell you what kind of book cover you have to have the title. They will make you change the contents of the book a lot of times if it doesn't align with what they want. And in the end they will give you a like a signing bonus. But unless you're like a really big name, it's usually not a lot of money.

It might be a couple thousand, 10, 000. It's not a lot and not enough to say, Hey, I made X amount off of the book signing and I don't have to worry about royalties anymore. And so essentially what you're doing is you're giving up the creative rights and all of the royalties. You get very, very, very small amount of money back from any sale of your [00:05:00] book.

Now that might be less of an issue for someone like Jenna Kutcher because, you know, she's really selling books. to sell offers. And that's great. I think most of your audience is probably doing the same thing. And I will say, no matter which path you take between self hybrid and traditional, you are not really going to make a lot of the money on the sale of the book itself.

You're going to make money on what it is that you're offering speaking gigs, more of those paid opportunities, and then any courses and things of that nature, maybe one on one coaching that you have. I don't know if that, if I missed anything, if that makes it a little clear. I mean, it's good to know there's a lot of different avenues.

One thing I want to touch on is a lot of people think, well, I don't want to really do the work, so I'm just going to go that traditional route. But I think that there's a certain threshold or a level of visibility and audience you need to have before they approve you right before they sign you. So that just goes back to kind of my whole thing, which is the best time to start PR was yesterday because you really need to start to build up that audience.

So let's talk about book launching as it relates to visibility. Now, my [00:06:00] audience is mostly small. Business entrepreneurs, women of color, incredible stories, but they don't know anyone at the big publishing group. So what would you tell them in terms of not making it, you know, a pipe dream that they can actually make it happen?

What are some of the things that they need to start doing so that they can prepare themselves to get that book out into the world? Okay. So I just want to touch on one thing that you said about it being easier to be traditionally published. To your point, you need a large audience. So one, you already have a higher barrier to entry because a lot of traditional publishers won't even look at you with that a hundred thousand cumulative following.

So you need, you know, maybe you can get a smaller publisher to sign you for 50, 000, but really you need like a hundred thousand plus audience collectively for them to even entertain what you're doing. So to your point, you want to start doing that the sooner, the better. And I always encourage writers to start building their audience and their credibility before they even finish the book.

So we can talk about different ways to do that, but in a. Addition to that, in order to get a traditional publishing deal, you have to do three big things. You have to [00:07:00] write a book proposal, which is like an entire marketing plan for your book. You have to have some of your book written already. In some cases, they want the entire book written, and then you have to query agents.

So you actually have to find an agent. So you have to write the book proposal and you have to find an agent that will pitch you to traditional publishers and shop you around. They have the relationships and they will take a percentage, just like any agent, right? Like a sports agent will take like a 5 percent cut of your signing bonus.

So it's the same idea. So to say that it's easier to traditionally publish, I would actually say it's harder to traditionally publish. And I know that that is a misconception. Some people think that, and I've had people come up to me and say, Oh, it's just going to be easier to have the traditional publisher do it.

Well, it's actually not just trying to get an agent to sign you and represent you is a big job in and of itself with a book proposal and people just. FYI, like people will pay a coach or a ghostwriter to write them a proposal and it's like 10 grand. So that alone is a very, very big investment. But then going back to the audience building, you need to start building up your audience [00:08:00] beforehand, regardless of whether you want to self publish hybrid or traditional publishing, you need fans to sell your book to.

And there are ways to get more book sales, but if you're not getting people into your world and they don't know who you are. You're not really going to sell many books. I kind of let you ask me a follow up question because I think we can go way more into detail on some of these specifically how to launch your book for success.

But yeah, that that's just a really big one. I mean, visibility is the thing that keeps everything going. So Transcribed You know, we can talk about visibility very broadly, but I'm sure there are some specifics when you're thinking about the success of a book. So what are some things that if I'm trying to build my audience, what are some things that maybe I need to know that's maybe a different strategy than if I was an e commerce seller or if I'm just someone who is a one to one service provider?

Ooh, that's a really good question. So we do a lot of influencer marketing and that's actually really big for e commerce and everyone. So we leverage a lot of the influencer partnerships. Podcasting is really a big deal to like we like to have authors go on podcast tours, getting on TV and radio. But what I think that's really [00:09:00] unique about authors is that you're a writer.

If you're an author, you're a writer, so you can start writing for bits like entrepreneur and some of these other websites. You can actually start putting guest blogs out there on other people's blogs. If you've noticed, there's a lot of blogs that allow guest blogging. That's a really great fit for authors to specifically write about their topic, whatever the theme is, because a lot of times your book is going to have like a universal theme.

So writing a lot of these things specific to the universal theme of your book is going to be a really powerful thing to do. Yeah. I love that. It's all about your thought leadership. So we talked a lot about podcasts. That's one of the things I always encourage everyone to do because it's just such higher ROI leverage in a way that's in one hour, you have 20 pieces of social media content and you have SEO.

So let's talk about podcasts as it relates to getting visibility for your book. What do you have to say on this topic? Oh my gosh. Okay. So I just love podcasts for authors specifically, especially when you don't have an audience already. Absolutely. Absolutely. And you're trying to leverage other people's audiences.

So two really [00:10:00] incredible examples of people who've launched their book to incredible success on a podcast tour ever before the book launched. Like this was all before the launch of the book was Tony Robbins, which we know Tony Robbins is huge, but he promotes all of his books through a podcast tour.

And if Tony Robbins is doing that, then, you know, you should be doing that. Right. And then how Elrod, how Elrod. had the miracle morning, which I'm sure a lot of people are aware of. He specifically went on like a hundred podcasts. He had set a goal to go on a hundred podcasts to promote his book in a year.

And he got millions. Like his book is a huge, huge bestseller. And to the point where he self published that book and a traditional publisher came in and said, we want to buy the rights of this book and then traditionally publish it. He did that. And then he immediately regretted it because he never made the same amount of money off of the sale.

Because most people aren't going to make tons of money off the sale of the book. But if you're selling a million books, you're making a lot of money, especially on Amazon, because those royalties are going straight to you. So for him, he's like, I lost [00:11:00] money. They gave me a signing bonus, right? An advance is what you call it.

They gave me an advance. For the book, but I actually made a lot less money and I was capped at what I could earn because I had such a small royalty that I was receiving. So for him, he ended up going back to the self publishing route and he continues to promote his book through podcasts. I mean, he's huge.

Now, a lot of people just don't look at it as having being like the thing that you should absolutely do. And I would say that that's like the crux of what I teach is go get on as many podcasts as you can because it's very, very valuable. Yeah. So let's talk about that. I know there's other strategies too.

Let's talk about specifically the podcast tour. What is it and how do you do it correctly? Because let's be honest, me as a podcast host, I'm not trying to just promote your book. So how can people pitch effectively so that the other person doesn't feel like they're just using that person's platform to sell a book?

Yes. That's so interesting that you're bringing that up because I've had other people say this to me, that they hate being pitched by authors because they think it's just going to be a constant plug for their book. So just like TV or just like radio, [00:12:00] you're not going to go to the producer and say, Hey, I want to come on your TV show and talk about my book.

Like nobody's going to say, yeah, come on, let's talk about your book. What you're going to do is you're going to pitch the specific lesson, like what are the three things, right, that people can learn about this experience. Like, for example, I'll give you Marsha as an example, because her book is the one that we're helping launch now and it's coming out in February.

She wrote a memoir and memoir is actually a really hard book to try to market and sell. sell, especially to TV, radio and podcast because it's such a personal story. It's not like a business book with actionable steps. Here are the seven steps that I take to launch a book. Like that's a very clear message that's around a book, but with a memoir, it's about specifically hers.

It was about losing her mother during COVID and it had a lot of stories of her mother's life. And so like, how do you turn that around? So what we did is we were pitching her to radio and TV for lessons from a caregiver. Ways to actually help others. Caregiving is like [00:13:00] a really big issue in this country.

A lot of people don't realize how many people are caregivers and what a burden and toll it takes on you to take care of your aging parents. I actually personally went through this experience with my dad. My dad passed away in July, and I took care of him quite a bit. And I spent a lot of hours working in the hospital because my mom would like be back and forth between Miami and Tampa.

Like I know what it's like to care for someone and that sounds much more a topic that's relevant, right? It's just relevant. And it's something that people are dealing with in general at a much greater level than you would even imagine. So then pitching the host, we're doing like a lot of grief podcasts for Marsha.

How to overcome grief. We're going to just talk about her experience overcoming grief. And then she's just going to say, yeah, I tell this in the book. I talk about this in the book. I share the story in the book, but it's not a hard pitch. You don't want to do a hard pitch, like go buy my book. Nobody wants that.

They just want to hear your personal story, share it with their audience. That might be going through the same experience right now and how you've been able to maneuver it, how you've been able to overcome it. [00:14:00] And maybe your audience can glean something from that experience is the hope. Yeah. Thank you for sharing your story.

I'm sorry to hear about your father. Oh, thank you. Yeah, of course. I love what you said about relevance. That is one of the keys to my pitching method, the CPR pitching method, credibility, point of view, and relevance. I heard on a podcast somebody said it's not about you telling your story. It's about you telling it in a way that people see themselves in your story.

So it's not about you, but what are the bigger themes that you can tie it to? So I love what you said that it's It's not so much about one person's experience losing a parent to COVID, but it's about what it's like to be a caretaker or what is it like to have grief of any kind? Because grief is a shared experience.

Would you say it's almost like widening that circle of conversation so that you can bring more people in? Do you have any other pitching do's and don'ts to get an author who maybe is listening and they're on a draft of their book for them to start thinking about how they can make their book relevant to a primetime TV show?

Mm hmm. Yeah. So really, one of the things that I encourage all authors to do from the very [00:15:00] beginning is look at their messaging. What is the angle? What are the main themes in your book? I mean, you're not going to want to pitch about your very, very specific story and what exactly you went through, but more how can you be an expert?

Maybe you're not an expert because like Marsha is not a psychologist, She can't come in and talk about therapy and grief, but how can you be an expert through your lived experience? And we are all experts in things that we've personally experienced And so I would say that that's like the biggest takeaway is figure out your messaging early on in the process Even as you're writing the book It's never too early and then you also have to think about how doing that in the beginning will help Shape the book because like even now i'm actually in the middle of writing a memoir myself self.

And I'm spending so much time looking at what are the themes, what are the universal themes, what are the beats that I have to hit? Because the book is not about me. It's about how, like you're saying, and I love that you said that. What is it that the reader can glean from this story? How can they empathize?

And how can they see [00:16:00] themselves through my experience? But if I just sit here and start telling you this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened, nobody's gonna care. And I say that to a lot of authors, and it sounds harsh, but it's like, you have to really write the book for the reader.

You're not just writing the book for yourself. Because, unfortunately, nobody cares to read your story. And it's the same thing, pitching yourself to TV and radio. They don't care about your story. They care about how it relates to them. Yeah, and even if the book is about you, that's not how you pitch it to get more people interested, right?

So, you know, as you're saying this, I'm thinking about, okay, maybe a person who is writing a book should immediately think about the five larger topics that they can talk about. So, like you said, the beats, so things like. Healthcare, if we're talking about caregiving, we can talk about the lack of support, both economically, politically, and socially, maybe the kind of governance around that and the policies.

So think about what maybe three to five different bigger topics that your story can relate to, whether it's relationships or generational stuff or communication, that's, that's really good. Do you have any other tips about pitching a book, [00:17:00] any do's and don'ts when it comes to pitching, you know, anything from timing, followups, attachments, I love to get to the specifics of what's really worked for your clients.

So with Marsha, what we did is we put together a media kit for her that has everything really easy and accessible for the podcast host. We also have email swipes that they can use when actually, um, sending their emails to promote the podcast. We give them the opportunity to be, you know, an influencer and somebody that wants to share the book specifically, but it's not required.

Like, you're not going to say, Hey. I want to make sure that you pitch my book to your audience. You can ask them, but really typically when you're reaching out to an influencer or a podcaster, you're going to do one ask. And the one ask specifically for podcasters is to just get airtime to their audience.

So you're going to be very careful with how much you plug the book. There are horror stories of people who literally would just keep coming back to the book, keep coming back to the book, keep coming back to the book, and they won't give any actionable advice. Like if you keep asking me [00:18:00] this question about specifics, and I just said, Go read the book.

That would be a huge no. Like you're, you definitely don't want to do that. You do want to be open with your content. And when you share openly, people are still going to want to go read the book. They're not just going to want to, you know, you're not really giving everything away just by sharing some important action steps that they can take that are really helpful.

If anything, they're going to see how helpful you are and they're going to want to run and go buy the book and learn more from you. So that's big. And then as far as timing goes, We start pitching them super early, believe it or not. We start researching podcasters like six months out from the actual launch date.

And then we start pitching them usually like three to four months out because we do a very long pre launch runway. It's 90 days, about three months of pre selling and pre selling is. So critical to the success of your book. A lot of people will literally like, Oh, it's my launch day. Go buy my book. That is not going to get you the success that you deserve and that you're capable of.

And so if you start pre selling your book [00:19:00] three months out, you can almost guarantee bestseller status if you do it the right way. And when I say bestseller, I really mean Amazon, but even potentially some of these other bestseller lists. There's always the chance that you can. So three months out is really important.

Start getting on those podcasts the sooner, the better. Like Tony Robbins. right? How Elrod, they did it a year out. So it's never too early as long as you're confident that that book is going to be published. I don't want you going out there and sharing about a book that you haven't finished and then you just never finish it because that won't look good for you and that will affect your credibility.

So make sure that if this book is in the works and you know it's going to get published and you already have an idea for the launch date, then you can start pitching as soon as possible. I mean, a year out, it's not too soon, but then we also want to continue doing podcast tours way beyond the launch of the book.

So for Marsha, we're going to continue to push podcasts throughout the end of 2024. And the more you do it, the more success you'll have. Yeah, I love that. It's a, it's, it's a compounding thing. And I think unlike social media or pay to play ads, it really compounds, right? You have to [00:20:00] start early. Let's talk about some of the other strategies to get a self published book sold.

Can we talk about whether it's social media or relationships or collaborations in real life events, book signings, what other strategies have been proven to work other than podcasting? So it really depends. And this is where the strategy is going to be really unique to the author based on what they like to do, what they feel comfortable doing.

but also just like the kind of audience that they have. What I've seen work really well is actually doing some virtual book launch parties. And this is not for everybody, but for example, so Rachel Rogers, she launched her book during COVID. And so what she did, and actually you'll love this because she works with marginalized communities and minorities in general.

So what she did is she wanted to encourage sales. in the bookstores. And so she was traditionally published. It's a little bit different than maybe self publishing, but you can still do this. You can have the bookstores order the books and sell them specifically for you at like a little bit of a markup, or [00:21:00] you can get them author priced books.

So like you get like special pricing as an author when you self publish. So you can then sell it to them for a little bit more and then they can sell it for the regular price. So it's still something that you can do self publish, but it's a little bit. There's a couple workarounds there, obviously, that you wouldn't have with traditional publishing.

But she did these really cool virtual launches with partners. So she found some really cool people, hosted events virtually from the bookstore, and promoted sales for that small independent bookshop owner. Which was really cool because her whole mission is about helping minorities, helping Marginalized communities.

And all of a sudden you were getting hundreds of book sales per store, probably thousands in some cases, because she has a very large following for these little bookstores that would have never gotten that kind of exposure. And then it also increased the exposure for them. So it was like a really cool, mutually beneficial thing, probably more for the bookstore than for her.

But it allowed her to do something really unique and different. So that's something that I've seen work, but it has to be for the [00:22:00] right person. And then we do a lot, like I told you, a lot of the influencer marketing stuff is really big. So the collaborations, it depends obviously on if you have an offer, if you don't have an offer, but just connecting with other people that have an audience that is.

right for the book and just doing giveaways, doing some fun stuff that's beneficial for their audience. Sometimes what we've done is we've given away signed copies of the book. If they just mentioned the book and then it's just, it's like a really cool thing for them to give to their audience, right?

Because content creators, if you're not specifically a coach or you don't specifically have courses, they're just creating content and fun content that gets their audience engaged. So finding a couple of people like that, that want to just get a freebie, get a cool gift basket. We put together a 600.

William Sonoma gift basket for Marsha that was like incredible. People were dying over this thing. And if they pre ordered the book, they would get entered to win. So that was really fun. Giveaways tend to work really well as well. Ooh, I love me a giveaway. [00:23:00] Gamify it, baby. Gamify. People love games. And so, you know, you don't have to just go to the people that have like the, Oh, it's perfect for entrepreneurs.

Get creative. You never know who out there just want to share what it is that you're sharing and telling like your message with their audience. There's a lot of people out there. It's just like we talk about with TV, these producers, like they need content, right? They need content. So help them help them with content.

That's really what you have to do as an author. Yeah, I mean, you just gave me so many ideas for, I mean, this could work with social media. This could work on TikTok. This could work as a live. This could work on YouTube. Uh, you know, it could work, um, in real life even, you know, where you could, where you could do a giveaway.

Are there any really creative out of the box ideas on a low budget for someone wanting to get their books out there into the world? So social media is really strong. I mean, I definitely prefer TV and radio. I think that it's the better reach, but just start, you know, reels have fun with it. You don't have to run as I know that you're big on not spending money.

You really don't have to. If you don't [00:24:00] have a big budget, just grow your social media following. And there's a lot of good ways that you can do that just by partnering with other people. The reels are going viral. There's so many people out there that are teaching different tactics. I'm, I haven't gotten big into the reels.

I'm really trying to, but I've seen them go viral. So like, there's just so many different ways that you can grow your audience and really from nothing, like Marsha had literally like 700 people and she's getting so many book sales. So there's just a lot that you can do out there. Podcasting. So as far as like free podcasting is really honest.

The biggest bang for your buck for something that's low budget. Yeah. Is there something that people should stay away from so that they don't get scammed or that they don't, you know, waste valuable time, money, resources? Ooh. So there are some book promotion sites that you have to be careful with. Most of them are pretty good.

But you don't really have to spend money on them. Like we've done some review sites, which are pretty helpful, but you just never know if they're gonna work. So getting advanced readers, getting [00:25:00] people to actually leave reviews for you is really, really helpful for credibility and to bolster the book sales.

So make sure that you're getting some advanced readers. Make sure that you have people that are joining your launch team and actually wanting to help you promote the book. These can be people that you know. These can be people like a lot of these influencers will be part of your launch team as well.

But there are some sites out there that you can use that are pay to play, but there's a lot of free stuff out there too. So you don't have to spend a ton of money on those. Yeah. Okay, just to recap, we talked about a lot, but basically start building your audience yesterday so that when you launch, you can only get on the radar of a publisher, but also to have an audience to buy your book, which is the ultimate measure of whether or not that book is successful.

I love how you talked about podcast tours and getting onto podcasts even up to a year early just Scheduling dozens, if not hundreds of them, get out there. And even if you're pitching to radio and TV, don't make it about your book, make it about the bigger story or the theme. So we also talked about working with influencers and social media, using a giveaway that you can do for a gift basket or maybe like a [00:26:00] meeting in real life.

I love that as well. And advanced readers. Is there anything else that we haven't covered? Obviously this is a huge topic, but this is so exciting. Like I feel like I want to write a book now. Yeah. So I touched on the advanced readers. They're really big. Don't underestimate. the importance of getting advanced readers, get a lot of reviews and testimonials for your book.

That really, really helps with getting more sales. The launch team is really big and that's why the influencers will come into play as part of your launch team. But your launch team could be people that you know, you don't have to have people promoting your book that are famous or that have huge followings.

If I read a book and I like it and I tell five people about it, then those five people might tell another five people. So don't underestimate. Estimate the importance of reaching out to people that you know and having them just share the book too. It could really make a big impact, but we really covered the majority of what goes into the launch.

We do a lot of the influencer marketing, we do a lot of podcast pitching. We manage the ARC team, the launch team, and then, you know, TV and radio and guest blogging are always [00:27:00] really, really important to do if you are willing, willing to put yourself out there like that. And you don't need to have a big following to get on TV and radio.

I know that for my audience, people who are getting featured in Vogue and, you know, CNBC. These are just everyday people with incredible stories. Of course, exactly. Marsha doesn't have a huge following and she's getting on. She's going to do five TV hits actually six. Eight radio and then there's going to be syndicated articles across 300 plus outlets and she really is a nobody like she raised five children.

She's focused on raising 15 grandbabies and she's doing all of this. It's hard for her because she's scared of the visibility piece, right? Like if you're not. Someone who's been doing it for a while. It's a little nerve wracking, but if you're willing to put yourself out there, you'll, you know, it'll pay off in spades.

And so I highly encourage anyone with any audience size to put themselves out there and just do it because the more you do it, the easier it gets. Yes. Let the art live through us, right? This is, we're just a vessel and it's our job to get it out into the universe. So. Thank you so [00:28:00] much for being here. I know that writing a book is, wow, it is such an achievement.

But then to say that that's only the beginning of the journey and that we have to get it out there, it's a little intimidating, but I have to admit, after our discussion, you've given us some really tangible tips on how anyone could get started, even if they don't have an audience, how can people find you?

How can people get to know you more if they want to find out more about book launching and all the different phases of it? Of course. And so you can follow me on Instagram at. at Campins Adams. I also have a Facebook group called Ink to Impact and I tend to go live there every week and just talk about all different topics from writing to marketing to growing your author brand and launching.

So they can definitely connect with me there. And I have a freebie. If If you want that, I can give your audience and we can drop it in the show notes. It's called your writer start writing and it's just for anyone who's thinking about writing a book, but they're like scared to call themselves a writer and it's just that framework for a book.

com forward slash join. Ah, I love it so much. Thank you so much for being on here. [00:29:00] And we hope that all, especially women, the marginalized women, that the mold breakers, the first. If you will, they are the ones that need to be writing the books and being told, we need to rewrite the landscape of the stories that are being told so we can get representation.

So thank you for being a part of that. Thank you for being on the show and I look forward to connecting. Thanks, Gloria. Hey, small business hero. Did you know that you can get featured for free on outlets like Forbes? The New York Times, Marie Claire, PopSugar, and so many more, even if you are not yet launched or if you don't have any connection.

That's right. That's why I invite you to watch my PR Secrets Masterclass, where I reveal the exact methods thousands of bootstrapping small businesses use to hack their own PR and go from unknown to being a credible and sought after industry expert. Now if you wanna land your first press feature, get on a podcast, secure a VIP speaking gig, or just reach out to that very intimidating editor.

This class will show you exactly how to do it. Register now@gloriachowpr.com slash [00:30:00] masterclass. That's gloria chow, CH oou pr.com/masterclass so you can get featured in 30 days without spending a penny on ads or agencies. Best of all, this is completely free, so get in there and let's get you featured.

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