How to Get Your First Clients With a Book

 

In this episode, Dr. Angela shares ways to get clients before you write your book, while you’re writing your book, and after your book is done. It’s never too late to use your book as a tool to build your business.

 

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Learn how to make $10k with your book at PageUpPodcast.com

 

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In this episode you will learn:

• 4:08  -How do you decide what to write about?
• 4:54  -How do I know if my book will sell?
• 7:26  -How do I make money from my book before I write it?
• 10:47 -What if I’m not an expert?
• 14:13 -What if I’m already writing my book, have I lost my chance?
• 18:26 -How do I generate leads while writing?
• 22:21 -Is my book a lead magnet?
• 24:59 -Is a launch a good way to get leads?
• 27:39 -Can my book generate leads after it’s published?

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Full Episode Transcript:

Hey everybody, so excited to talk to you about a really important topic, which is how to get your first paying clients with a book. There are lots of reasons to write a book. And some of them are, frankly, just the personal satisfaction of having written a book. But the truth is for you to prioritize writing a book as a business owner, you’ve got to have a plan or a strategy to take that book and turn it into revenue. And there are lots of indirect paths to this. But I think the best way to write a book is to be strategic about using that book to get paying clients. So in today’s episode, I’m going to dive in on how to get paying clients before you write your book. When you You’re writing your book, as you launch your book. And after your book is launched, we’re going to talk about these four distinct areas, and how to write your book. Now in our last episode, I talked about how to make 10 k from your book before you write it. So hopefully you watch that. I’m going to recap that a little here. And then we’ll dig deeper into other ways to get paying clients with your book. A lot of people come to me and their book is already written, and they want to know how do I get a paying client for my book when it’s written? We’ll talk about that in this episode.

 

01:38
A lot of people are thinking about writing a book, but they haven’t quite made enough money to invest in having a book coach or an editor or a team like the Author Incubator to help them so they need to raise some money in order to support their book project. We’re going to talk about that. There are a lot of Different ways to get paying clients with a book. But they really come down to one formula that I want to share with you just to kick us off. And then we’ll dig deeper into some specific ways you can get clients depending on where you are in your book process. But just know, this overarching formula I’m about to teach applies across the board before you’ve written your book while you’ve written it at your launch. After your launch with a book you already have the book you’re thinking of writing. If you understand this macro concept, you’ll be able to apply it in your own way as you go. So really important you understand what I’m doing, and then I can give you some examples of how to do it. So if that sounds good, we’ll get rolling and I will explain this concept of a path to revenue with a book. What most people picture the path is is this, I sit in my room, I write a book. I publish it. It goes on Amazon, people magically find it. They read it. They love it. They reach out to me and they say, How can I buy something for you? And together, you craft an offer for them. This is kind of what people are imagining. Now most people don’t think it through. But if you actually ask them to outline it, they think the first thing I focus on is writing the book, then I will market the book, then people will read the book, and then people will buy something from me. And they think I’m going to focus right now on writing it. And then when it’s done being written, I’m going to focus on marketing it and then once it’s marketed, I’m going to focus on what to tell all these people reading it about working with me. This, my friends is not how it works. I want to flip the script on how you think the path to book revenue works, here is how the path actually works.

First of all, you need to write a book where you test the market and make sure you can find readers for this book. So you want to make sure that you get that market validation before you even start. If you’ve got that market validation, then step one is finding audiences to share your message with just putting your book up on Amazon is not going to lead to clients. So we have to know where you can share your message.

I’ll dig into this more later.

But are you going to share your message with groups of moms with groups of teachers with groups Real Estate Agents, how can you get in front of groups now step two is you get in front of those groups, and they will guide the way in writing your book. So step two after you have identified where you can market your book is then to write it. Now, once your book is written, you’ll want to get in front of those groups and give your book away or something away, give it chapter away, give a class away. That’s how you get leads. And once you have leads, you can nurture those leads or develop a relationship with them until they become prospects. A prospect is someone who wants to get on the phone with you, or get on zoom with you and discuss working together. And then you need a product or a program or a service to sell to them. Once you get up. Call with them. So the way you make money from a book is not post book. If you build it, they will come. Post book people find you buy the book, then they ask you to buy from them. That doesn’t happen. The way you write a book is you speak to groups, you give something away. you nurture your relationship with the people you’ve given something away to, and you sell them a flagship program, which we’re going to talk about in a minute. Because your first paying clients are going to be the ones who help you shape that flagship program. The entire way you’ve been thinking about making money from a book is probably flipped 180 degrees. That’s the bad news. It’s hard for your head to catch up. The good news is you can start making a lot of money right away. If you listen to the last episode, you heard about making 10 k Before you even write a book, when we come back from this short break, I’m going to recap that lesson and give you a couple other ways to think about making money from a book before you write it.

And we’re back. All right, I want to start off by talking about how to make money from a book. Before you write it. I think this is critical. I honestly think everyone who writes a book should make $10,000 from that book before they write it. It is the perfect market validation. It’s a perfect way to give yourself your own book advance, but it’s also the perfect way to make sure the book is going to be successful to make sure you’re not wasting your time writing this book, so There are lots of ways to do this. But if you understand the concept at macro concept, I’m going to give you one specific way to apply that macro concept to writing to making money from a book. Before you write it, it goes like this. First, you identify who you can get in front of with a book. So remember, the ideas I’ve shared with you are ready or something like teachers, nurses, real estate agents, moms, we want to identify a group that we can get in front of. Now, it’s going to be much easier to get in front of that group when you have a book. But it is not impossible to get in front of a group before you have the book and it goes like this. Let’s say you wanted to work with teachers. What you would do is you would call up schools in this case, I would start with Private schools. I might start with daycares. I might start with the school your kid goes to. And I would reach out to a leader in that group, someone who can bring a speaker in. And I would say, Hey, I’m thinking about writing a book about how teachers can be more effective in the classroom. And I wanted to test out some of the concepts with actual teachers. I love to do a training, it’ll be about an hour long, I won’t charge for it. While I normally charge people to work with me. I want to offer this to your teachers, staff members. However, you would describe that the teachers in your school I want to offer for free in exchange for feedback from them that I will potentially use to shape my book. How does this sound now if you Ask 10 schools or 10 brokers or 10. hospitals, if you can make a presentation to their nurses, their teachers, their real estate agents, I promise you at least one will say yes. If you ask with clarity and confidence about how this training will help them help their members, the people in their group, you’ll probably even get more than one out of 10 to say yes. But if you’re a total mess, and you ask 10 people, I bet you can still get one to say yes or no, when you make that presentation. You want to go into that with humility and vulnerability.

You don’t have to act like you have it figured out. You just have to be a normal, regular human right where you are. I’ve been thinking a lot about how nurses deal with burnout and cultural differences between patients and staff members, I’ve been thinking a lot about how real estate agents never get nights or weekends free and how it puts a lot of strain on their families. I’ve been thinking a lot about teachers and how they end up having to do so much behavior control in the classroom. They don’t get to teach. And I wanted to share some of those thoughts with you today. And based on your feedback that I will ask for at the end of this training that I’m doing today,

I may include some or maybe all of this in a book that I’m going to be writing in the next couple months. So you just share the truth. I haven’t written the book, I’m looking for your feedback. Now, you’ll teach a class and that class will have a lot of the content that’s going to go in your book and I say giveaway the best stuff you got and then have a survey ready You could teach this through zoom. You could teach it online in any way you could teach it over the phone. You could teach it in person in some cases. But the important thing is before the event is over to have a survey about people’s experience, and you’ll want to ask questions like this. What was the best thing you learned from this training? What did I teach? That was boring. That didn’t help you? What was the least helpful thing I included? What would you like to see more of? And would you like my help solving some of these problems in your hospital school brokerage? Would you like my help solving these problems before my book comes out? The little yes or no checkbox. Now, if you make this presentation, it will stirrup for people in the audience this problem, they will want to solve it, and you will be a likely person to help them. So while not everyone will check that box. Certainly a few people will, I would expect, depending on how good your targeting is somewhere between 25 and 50% of people to check that box.

All you need to do then is follow up with them by having a phone call spending most of that phone call listening, less talking more listening. And if you can help them solve that problem offer to help them solve it all without putting a single word to the page.

Got it?

All right. When we come back, I want to talk about how to make money and get paid clients from your book while you’re writing. So if you’re in the middle of writing, I’m going to tell you how to use that writing time to turn it into cash.

A lot of people will say to me, oh my god, I’m too late. That was such a good idea to make money from a book before you write it, but I’m already writing it’s too late for me. No, it’s not. The process of making money from a book is always the same. I taught you that at the micro level, find the audience, give something away, get their email address, develop a relationship, have a conversation about what their problem is, and if you can help them with that problem, offer to help them because that’s what good people do. They offer to help someone who has a problem they know how to solve. This same is true while you’re writing your book. I’m going to tell you a fun story here.

About a cruise my husband and I took our moms on. We took our mom’s on a river cruise and it went from Vienna in Austria, to Belgrade in Serbia. And as we went on the Danube do we go down or up you probably know better than me. But as we traveled along the Danube River at each stop along the way, I wrote a chapter. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever done a river cruise before, but this is a sleepy time vacation. It was not a high moving action packed adventure. Each day we would get off the ship at for a few hours, like about three hours. And the rest of the time we were on the boat and there’s not much to do on a river cruise boat. It’s really just a floating hotel. So I had tons of time to write my book. I was in mourning mode I think because of the time difference So I got up every day at 5am. I had finished writing a chapter by 8am. Then I took a shower at nine o’clock, we went off to see some new site. And when we came back to the boat, we would have lunch. And then usually I’d take a nap in the afternoon and then we’d have dinner, cruise to our next location. And same thing, we would go see a town from nine to 12. So every morning, I woke up and I wrote a free chapter now, there was great Wi Fi on the boat. So I’d write a chapter. And I would then post a little bit about that chapter. I would post on Facebook, Instagram, I sent an email to my list anywhere I could think of to share what this chapter was about. And in that post I shared a picture of Our last stop where we went in what was going on. So it’s sort of like a travel blog with an offer. And each day of the trip,

I wrote my story about the day before, and what that chapter was about. And I offered people, that free chapter. Now I had something important in this process, which is urgency. The urgency was, if you want the chapter that I just wrote for free, you must message me in the next three hours. I’m on this vacation. I’m gonna put my phone down and enjoy whatever museum whatever we were touring to see. When I get back. I have a couple of free hours after lunch. So you must message me By noon, which was noon European time, but by this particular time, everyone who messages me, I’ll send you a chapter I’m on vacation. So I don’t have great Wi Fi access. And I don’t I can’t spend all day online because I’m with my mom and my husband and his mom. But I will have a little window where I can send you this chapter.

So each day, I would write a chapter, I would post that what that chapter was about and a little of my travels, and I would go off and see Croatia, Budapest, Romania, all the sights of the Danube River. And when I come home, there would be 10 2030 4050 leads waiting for me. In exchange, I would send them that chapter I’d written in the morning and I said, Hey, listen, this is raw. To unedited i’d love your thoughts, how does it sound? I sent them that free chapter. And I created a log of all the people that asked for free chapter. Every day, I got a lot of the same leads, but every day I would get 10 to 50 leads. And by the end of that week, I have 300 leads, people that were interested in the problems my book was solving. I was able to generate 300 leads and 10 clients by offering free rough draft chapters of my book. Those 10 clients represented well over $100,000 in revenue from my book over the lifetime of my relationship with them before Before I had finished writing the book by including people with vulnerability and a little bit of urgency, in my writing process, so how do you make money from a book? How do you get your first clients from your book, if you’re in the middle of writing, give away your draft chapters.

Once you give away those drafts, and you can say they’re a hot mess, that’s cool. People who have the problem your book solves will engage in a relationship with you. And you turn that relationship into offers, when they have a problem that you can help themselves.

So, quick recap. If you are in the middle of writing a book, you must find people to give away draft chapters to, it’ll make your book better. You’ll get feedback on writing, and it’s good To make you a better marketer, because if you can’t give away a free chapter to at least 10 people, how are you going to sell this book? Find people to give draft chapters of your book away to get their feedback, nurture those relationships. And if they have a problem that you can help them solve, make an offer to help them solve it. All right. When we come back, I’m going to talk about what most people want to talk about, which is a book launch, how to make money and get clients from your book launch. Stay tuned, we’ll be back.

Most people think about making money and getting their first clients from a book by doing a launch and launches are a great way to make money I’m not gonna take that away. But it’s only one way. So I want you to think about your book, not as a business card, which is how some people describe it. But as a lead magnet, a magnet attracts things to it.

And a lead is a person who may someday give you money in exchange for you helping them solve a problem. Okay? The purpose of your book is to attract potential clients. How do you get your first clients from a book, you use that book, to get people who have the problem you help people solve, to raise their hand. And a launch is just one way to do it. You can do it beforehand by saying I’m thinking about writing this book, raise your hand if you’d be interested. You can do it while you’re writing your book by saying, Hey, I’m writing a book I just wrote a chapter Are you interested? Raise your hand. And you can do it with a launch by creating excitement around that event. Again, the key piece here is the urgency. There’s only one launch. There’s only one first day that you put the book out on the market.

And you want to invite everyone you know, to be a part of that launch. You want to leverage friends, family, past clients, communities, you’re in groups you’re a part of, and you want to make it juicy and exciting to be there. You’re using the book, but it’s the launch itself, that is the lead magnet. So before you write the book, the lead magnet is a free class that you Offer to get feedback on what’s going in the book. When you’re writing the book, the lead magnet is each separate chapter right? When you launch the book, the lead magnet is some sort of virtual launch event. Now you may include the book, you may also give people the book, but the lead magnet is this event. So in order to get your first clients from a book launch, you must have a juicy, sexy event, what’s going to make an event and probably a virtual event sexy? Well, for sure having you speak and maybe share something from the book, do a book reading tell your story of writing your book, everyone wants to know how you got it done. Those are great ways to have an event. But can you have a celebrity emcee? Can you do a contest or a giveaway?

Can you include technology that will make it fun for people to participate, polls and voting and things like that, that increase the engagement. How can you get the maximum number of people to register for this launch? That’s the question you want to ask yourself. Now, when people are at the launch, you want to make sure you’ve gotten their email address or their contact information, for registering for the launch. And at the launch, you’ll tell them that you will follow up and it’s in the follow up from that launch, that you will get your first paying clients. Here’s my super top secret. Reach out personally to everyone who attended.

You can do it. You’ve got time to make a personal video or audio file with that person’s name, thanking them for registering for the launch. If you have a personal relationship with them, talk about that make sure it’s very clear that you’ve customized this message just for them. Even if you do it in writing instead of video or audio, make it really clear that you value the fact they gave you their time to be a part of the launch event. And here’s the key.

Ask them if they know someone with this problem that you could get a free copy of your book to ask for information, ask for referrals and introductions. That’s the key to making a launch event super successful is not just going straight to that sale, but to building deep and lasting relationships with everyone who attended. The little counterintuitive, it might take a little longer, but I promise it’ll pay off in the long run.

We have had a great discussion today about how to get your first paying clients from a book. We’ve talked about how to use the concept that you’re writing a book to get leads. We’ve talked about how to use the chapters and the drafts and the mistakes that come up when you’re writing a book to get leads. And we’ve talked about how to use a launch to get leads. And these are all awesome ways to make money. Each of those paths have generated 10s if not hundreds of thousands of dollars for me and my clients. But the skill you really want to focus on is regular, repeatable, ongoing business for Your book after your book is out, using your book in an ongoing way to have a steady flow of leads. 50 leads a week 200 leads a month that will create a million dollar business. If you can in a regular and repeatable way. Use your book to get in front of other people’s audiences. This is why writing the book in the right way is so important. This is why if you write a book that’s for a group, we can identify like moms or nurses or teachers, we can get in front of that group consistently because there’s always a way to reach that audience. But if you write a generic book about happiness or your life struggles, it’s very hard To find groups to get in front of. So we want to write a book that aligns really nicely with an audience. One of my millionaire authors, wrote a book for people who are cyber security experts. There will always be cybersecurity experts we can get in front of there’s only so many of them, so we might repeat it, but we know how to find them.

I’ve had authors write books on how to have a better dental practice.Bita Saleh, the profitable dentists. And we can always find dentists dentists want to be found. We can every single week get beaten in front of another dentist. So what I challenge you to do is to write a book that it’s gonna be easy for you to get in front of other people’s audiences consistently. If you can do that week after week, automated, hired out to other people, consistent, repeatable doesn’t burn you out. Your book can become the most powerful lead magnet in the world. Your book can become the engine or the generator for your business so that clients are consistently coming to you. Look before you write a book, the limited amount of time while you’re writing limited amount of time when you launch limited amount of time. But once your book comes out, now we can go on a calm and sane evergreen system that’s consistently getting your book into other people’s hands. That might be a good lead for you. When you get their contact information, you nurture that relationship, then you get them on the phone, and a percentage of your readers and we generally find that 2.5% of your readers will become clients. The key is what I call awareness, consistently getting your book in front of other people’s audiences, through podcasts, through speaking through writing, through emails, through introductions, referrals. If we can find a network to spread the word about your book, we will get some of those readers, one to 3% of those readers begging to be your client. How cool is that? When you use your book, as an engine to drive a sane, stable, repeatable, profitable business, that’s where you really get to use your influence. Your wealth, your passion, and your expertise to make the difference you were born to make. So when we talk here at the Author Incubator about being an incubated author, or the path to being a transformational author, this is what we are talking about having an engine for your machine to change the world, because that’s what we do here at the author, incubator and why I’m so excited to press page up on your book, because together we’re changing the world, one book at a time. See you next week.