 Once again, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls and children of all ages. This is the host, this is the host, the Prince of Investments hosting the Prince of Investment Lab all the way here from Honolulu, Hawaii via Denver, Colorado. As always, don't forget to hit that like, subscribe, comment, and share button and drop some comments if you got comments or questions below and I don't have a lot of time. And I definitely, you guys and girls don't have a lot of time so we're gonna jump straight into it. So as you can see in the description box, you see that we're going to be talking about how to publish your first book, how to publish your first book. So I'm gonna give you guys a little bit of background about myself if you don't know. I have published two books and my third book publishes this summer is completely being written, but we're going to talk about some ways to get your book published and we're going to give you some tips, all the other great stuff, so stay tuned. So the first thing is you have an idea of a book, obviously if you're watching this episode and you're thinking about this episode or whatever the case may be. Now, back in the day, 20, 30 years ago, to publish a book, you had to have a publisher. Just like back in the day, you had to have a, to put out music, you had to have a huge record label, but nowadays, due to technology and due to pretty much mostly technology and ingenuity of the time, now anybody can make their own music and publish their own music. Same thing with books. Books are the same way where you can publish your own books. Now, you still can go through the traditional publisher way, or you still could go to the traditional publisher way, or you can go independent and publish yourself. We're going to talk about both of those. We're going to talk about a little bit of marketing and we're going to talk about a little bit of the afterwards after you publish a book. Now, the first thing is with marketing. Before, I like to put this as an ingredient. The first ingredients on every box of cookies or every box of cookies, frosted flakes or whatever, it always tell you rule number one, preheat the oven. Preheat the oven. It says put the oven on 350, 400, whatever the case may be while you're making the cookies. Why? Because you don't want to put cookies into a cold oven. It's the same thing with a lot of new authors. You don't want to market yourself or put yourself or put your product into a cold oven. What do you mean? You're talking about cookies, we're talking about Fuzzy. This is the problem. Well, I've seen some very close friend of mine's faces, or they're just an average everyday person. They got a great idea. They got a great whatever the case may be, and they want to put a book. They want to write a book. They want to put it in a book. Or they may, you know, they may, somebody may have given them an idea, whatever the case may be. So what they do is, they get their book and they write the book, right? They write the book, then they go to publish it. And when they go to publish it, nobody knows them. Nobody follows them. They have no way to reach your audience. They're trying to find customers. And you're taking your cookies and you're putting your cookies into a cold oven, right? So that's a no-no. You don't want to do that. You want to put your cookies into a hot oven. Now, how do you preheat your oven? Now, if you know you're going to be writing books about relationship, you prep the crowd for yourself to be a relationships expert. How do you prep the crowd? One of the cheapest and easiest ways is via social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Because right now, everybody has a brand. Whether you know it or not, somebody has you in a box. Somebody has given you a brand. Your brand could be the goofy guy, the funny guy, the smart guy, the outgoing person, the co-worker I can't stand, the co-worker I love, whatever you're very attractive, very unattractive, very charismatic, you know, whatever, right? You have a brand already, but what you want to do is you want to shape your brand. If you know if I knew I was going to write a book about relationships, what I would start doing is start talking more about relationships, let people know that I'm knowledgeable about relationships. Once you become knowledgeable about relationships, if you kind of ran in yourself, you got a little following, you got people interested in what you're doing, maybe create a YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, a Pinterest account, or whatever. And as you start to brand yourself and put yourself out there and start to talk about, oh, I am, you know, I am giving out three ways of love to start a podcast. Maybe you can be a co-host on a radio show. Maybe you can see, can you get on television? Do anything you can to become an expert in that field to warm up the audience to, my name is Chris Dykes, the love expert, whatever my name was. Chris Dykes the love expert, you want everybody up to it. You may take a couple classes, you may try to get a couple speaking engagements, whatever you can do to get in front of people, get yourself out there to be known as the relationship expert. Now, once you have warmed people up, people see you, they associate you with relationships. Man, these guys are always talking about relationships because whether you know it or not, social media is your virtual resume. Now, when people are following you for the relationship advice and the relationship expertise that you have, you have now started to preheat the oven. People are open to what you're doing. Maybe you drop one episode a week every Wednesday, you drop an episode, you do a YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, you do a blog talking about love and relationships or whatnot. You are preheating the oven. So now, when you decide to write your book and you put your book out, guess what happened? Boom. When you decide to write your book and you put your book out, what ought to happen? You are now an expert and now you have created a warm audience to where people are open to what you're doing. So, number one, don't put your book into a cold oven. Put it into a hot oven or at least a warm oven. Get people ready for what's to come. So, for prime example, you guys out there who know me and follow me, who really follow me, you know that I'm an author, you know I've written two books and if you know I've written two books, you're probably going to know what my third book is going to be about. You're going to probably got a pretty good clue, right? So, that's the first thing. Number two, are books a dying breed? This is a question I asked a couple of people. I said, why haven't books died off? You know, remember the days of A-tracks? I wasn't around during that time, but they had A-tracks. Then they had cassettes. Then they had, we had vinyl for a minute. Vinyl was still kind of around, but we had vinyl. We had VHSs, we had VCR, I'm not VCR, but we had VHSs, DVD, Blu-ray, and they all kind of, time just kind of, CDs, they all just kind of died now. You know, it's hard to find a CD player nowadays. The set players are gone. The set players, CD players, VCRs are gone to play VHSs. DVD players are kind of becoming hard to find. All these multi ways that we consume media just kind of died off. And the reason why they died off was because of technology. You know, now people can just get on the internet and just play Netflix. They don't need to go down to the blockbuster and rent a big case and take it home and put it into a DVD player or a set player or whatever it used to be. So books, books have been around since the beginning of time and they're still around. Even though we have the internet, we have e-books. We have audio books. We have blogs, you know, websites, so many ways but something about a raw book that just people just love. I don't know what's the touch, the energy, the feeling, the emotion. People just love books. They haven't died. And I don't think they ever go anywhere. So that's why I think you should write one. That's what, and it will make you the expert in your field. They haven't died. The second thing is two ways to promote, there's two ways to get your book out. There's two ways to publish. Independent that I spoke about earlier. Independent are going to get a traditional publisher. Now on the traditional route of getting a traditional publisher, my friends I know that have traditional publishers. They either, they know somebody and somebody kind of liked them. They do the right people. Number two, they had an audience and the audience kind of helped them grow. Number three, they have had a audience. They've had someone help them grow. They had someone help them do certain things. That's what happened. So that's how I've seen people grow independently. Or you just have a good product, get a book agent. There are book agents out there that you can shop your main strips around. And most of them they want to know, is this plain and simple? Do they think this can sell? Will I make my money back? Because what a publisher's going to do, they're going to put the money up for you to put your book out. So they may pay five, 10,000, whatever type of publishing deal you give. They want to know, will this sell? If you have a following, if you have sales that you have already, you can show what sales have came in. You have a following, then you run a strong possibility of your book coming in, you know? So I mean, so you have a strong possibility of getting published. You like the title, you like the main strip. They like you, you knew somebody. You got sales already. You can hire a book agent to go find you a booker or you can have a publisher. A lot of it is networking. You go to these authors' conventions and find someone in your genre that you can look up to. If the hottest book market, you're the best of my knowledge is children's books. So you find someone who is doing great. You find a book that's getting a lot of publicity and you find out who their publisher is. Find out who their publisher is and you reach out to them and see what you can do. One thing, simple, right? So that's the two ways. The thing about it is the independent route, you are the publisher. You, so like I heard one guy kind of explain it. He said, Prince, do you have time to promote it or if you don't have time? If you've got time to promote it, you go out there and promote it. If you do have time to promote it, or if you don't have time to promote it, hire a publisher. So the publisher's job is to get your product in front of people, market it, all this other great stuff. So I heard publisher nightmares, I heard independent nightmares. The independent way, you have to pay the money. You have all these third party companies out there like Amazon, Create Space, Lulu, all type of the list just goes on an independent publisher. Plenty of names I've heard of. So what they do is you pay them, pay them a couple, the brain's going from $1,000 to $5,000, $10,000, what the case would be, you pay them, they're the ones that take your book from your being written on a Word document all the way to being published, right? They're the ones that take you from A to Z. They're the ones that take you from this little infant to being a full grown child, purchase and being available to be purchased around the country. And I think about it, once they do that, that's the end. Their job is to get it on some different platforms and to get it out there for people to buy. And that's it, the rest of it is on you. You have to market, you have to be the one that calls the radio station, call the television station, call your friends, your buddies, use social media, run ads, all that type of stuff to promote yourself, promote your book, promote everything, right? So that's one of the big things between publishing and independent publishing. Money, money, right? You're independent, you're the one who set the price. You can set your own price and you get a nicer piece of the pie. The publisher, they may put up some money, but you only get a certain, whatever your deal is, you may get 30%, 40%, 50, 60, whatever the deal may be, right? So when they give you that piece of the pie, when you have that piece of the pie, the thing is, the publishers are paying so much money out, they're gonna take a big piece of your pie, right? So I won't say a big piece, but they'll take a nice piece because they're in the business to make money. The nightmares that I've seen people have, they go through traditional publisher, the publisher puts the book out, then once the book is out, the publisher does a little marketing and that's it. So they find themselves doing most of their own marketing and promoting and every time they generate a sale, they're paying the publisher as well. So they're like, well, why am I paying this publisher? Oh, I had a horrible deal. That's the downside I've heard. The good side I've heard is you get a good publisher, that places you, that gives you shelf space and marketing and PR, a very well networked publisher. It's the same thing as a record label. You wouldn't, if you was a country artist, you probably wouldn't sign a deal with the R&B label. You'll probably want to go to a place that's specialized in what you're doing. If you're writing a novel, or if you're writing a children's book, if you're writing whatever the case can be, you may want to go to a publisher that specializes in that because it may have some connections that you may not have to get you into some doors and get you some marketing that you probably wouldn't have before. So that's the second thing. Now, we spoke about marketing, we spoke about a woman that oven, we spoke about the two ways of publishing a book. Now we're gonna, when we spoke about the money, how you make money, you set your own price. Depending on the platform, you can make anywhere between, some authors make someone between five bucks a book to 10 bucks a book. Some make as little as one or two bucks a book. The most profitable books are e-books. So, because it's pretty much an e-book, it's pretty much just a PDF, right? It's a PDF and you just sell that same PDF over and over and over. That's so you make, it's a high profit margin versus a hardcover or a paperback they're already expensive to make, they gotta be mailed, they gotta be shipped, all that other great stuff. So, one of the ways you can do it, so that's something to think about. You can create audio books, like I have audio books, e-books, paperbacks and hardcover. And it's kind of like to feel the whole market that someone likes to stream it, they can stream it on a title and stuff like that, or they can download it off of Audible, all that other great stuff. So, those are the things you can do. Those are the things you gotta think of, right? So, warming up, get the money that you're gonna earn, control your own profits. The only downside is, nobody's gonna hear about your book, you're gonna be the only one that's gonna be pushing it, or you're gonna have to go pay somebody to market it, or you market it yourself, whatever the case may be. Independent, independent ground, selling the CDs out of the trunk. That's the type of deal. And what some people do, they get big deals with, they get sponsorship deals from Bangsore, they get sponsorship deals with a hospital, let's say if I wrote a children's health book, I may can partner with a big hospital, a children's hospital, and they may like what I'm doing, they may sponsor some of your books to help you out as an author or whatever. Those are ones I see have the most success. Not the people on social media, think about it. If you had 500 pictures of people posting your book, and that looks like a million on social media, 500 people, that looks like everybody has your book. But if you made $2 per book, you only made $1,000, right? But in real life, if you made one meeting with a library or a school or whatever, with one handshake, boom, you could sell 500 books like that, 200, 300, whatever. So I would say look for the corporate deals, those are ways, but that's to his own. I'm not a marketer, I say, hey, this is how you market whatever the case may be. So now the process is usually goes where you find a publisher that you like, you write the particular book, they take the book, it probably takes someone between, from the time you take the publisher to the time it comes out, it can go as quick as I probably maybe know it's probably like two to three months, but it takes some time. No, you just don't write up an idea and just put it out tomorrow. It takes time to develop. If it's a children's book, I think children's books are the hardest to write because you've got to have all these illustrations. Where's any adult book, you just need to picture yourself, draw the cover, the end. So that's the way to think about it. Marketing, what you want to do, the two ways to market the money, and you got to deal with them. If you're doing it very well, you're doing it right, you're going to attract a certain amount of fame. And if you attract a certain amount of fame, you can bet your bottom dollar, somebody's out that's going to be pissed off and they're going to come after you. So have your legal ready. Cause any time you make a move, somebody, everybody's not happy that you are making particular moves. So be ready for people that don't like what you're doing. But I'm going to go ahead and wrap this up. I think I helped you guys out. We talked about marketing. We talked about warming up. We talked about the two ways to publish a book. We talked about the money that's earned. And we talked about the things that come along with publishing a book with fame. Once you bring along fame, then you're going to bring along enemies. But it's a give and take. You're going to bring along some people who love you, who love your product, who's going to be waiting on book number two, number three, or whatever. But anyway, that's enough of my voice. Go ahead, write the darn book, get it out there. But as always, don't forget to hit the like, subscribe, comment, and share button. This is The Prince of Investing. That's how to publish your own book. Until the next video, podcast, cartoon, whatever else you see me do crazy around the globe. Please be safe, I'm out, and thank you.