 Hi everyone and welcome to how to craft a book that sells with Nina Amir. My name is Taryn Edwards and I am one of the librarians here at the Mechanics Institute of San Francisco. And this event was produced in collaboration with the San Francisco Writers Conference. Together we strive to provide learning experiences for writers at a low cost or free. Most of our events are free. And I just want to thank those of you who chose to support this event by paying what you could. And let me just say it really does help us do more, especially in these challenging times. So thank you. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Mechanics, we are an independent membership organization that houses a wonderful library. The oldest designed to serve the public, the general public in California. We're also a cultural event center and a world renowned chess club that is the oldest in the nation. Right now due to the pandemic, most of our all of our events are virtual, but I encourage you to consider becoming a member with us. We hope to fully reopen soon with face to face events. But membership is only $120 a year. And with that you help support our contribution to the literary and cultural world of the San Francisco Bay Area. So our speaker today is Nina Amir, who is a regular both at Mechanics Institute and the Writers Conference. She is a certified high performance coach who specializes in helping writers with their journey to successful authorship and personal development. She's written three traditionally published books for aspiring authors, including how to blog a book, the author training manual and creative visualization for writers. Her books are at the Mechanics Institute's library. She also has published a host of self published books and e books, including the right nonfiction now series of guides. Nina has devoted her career to supporting writers and with that aim she founded the nonfiction writers university, the right nonfiction in November challenge and the author of change transformational programs. And recently she opened the doors to the inspired inspired creative inspired inspired creator community, which provides nonfiction writers with group author coaching personal and spiritual growth coaching and ongoing writing and publishing resources. Meanwhile, she finds time to work on two books, one of which is about writing for change. For more information, please visit her website, which is Nina Amir calm and I will put that in the chat space. While Nina gets talking. And the way it's going to work today is she is going to present her knowledge to us, and then we'll take questions. So please post these in the chat space. And when she's finished. We'll take every effort to pose these questions to Nina, and hopefully we'll find some answers for you. So thank you very much Nina for coming out on this beautiful day and happy Friday everyone. Thanks so much, and let's get started. As always, thank you Taren and I'm honored to be here presenting again, and thrilled to talk about this topic which I think is so so important so for everybody I'm going to do a presentation first. So I will actually be sharing my screen with you. And Taren will be watching for questions you can raise your hand or just type questions in the chat, and we will get to them all if there's something super pressing Taren will will call it out for me, you know as I'm talking. Okay, so welcome, and thanks for being here and let me go ahead and share my screen. Okay, so this is our topic today had a craft a book that sells. I can get it moving. There we go. All right, so what I see most often is that most writers get an idea. They get very excited about that idea for a book or an article or blog post but let's just stick with books today. So they get the idea the light bulb goes on and they have this idea. And the first thing they do is they run to their computer to begin writing the book. They produce a manuscript, and then they expect for it to be a bestseller. But more often than not they get disappointed because that isn't the best process. The problem is that most aspiring authors don't know how to produce a book that readers want to buy. So they spend a lot of time writing this book, you know they had this great idea and they spend all this time writing the book. But in fact, it's not saleable to write a book that actually sells you have to craft a marketable book idea marketable book ideas one that will sell. So what does that mean. Okay, what is a marketable book idea. This is our main premise here is we need to create a book idea that is is marketable. And when I say create a book idea yes you got the idea for a book but the process that I'm going to talk about here today is how you take that idea that moment when the light bulb goes on and you craft it into something that really can sell. A marketable book idea is obviously going to be a bestseller because bestsellers sell an above average number of books. That means that somebody's buying them and reading them and that's why they become bestsellers. So a marketable book idea is going to be a book idea with a high probability of selling an above average number of copies. Okay, the average book today sells about 250 copies a year 3000 and it's lifetime which is a very, very sad number, but it's the truth. You have to do better than that which doesn't sound hard right I can sell more than 250 copies of my book, but you'd be surprised how difficult can be especially if your book idea is not marketable. A marketable book ideas also one that your ideal reader needs and wants you have to really have a handle on who your ideal reader is. Excuse me and what they actually do need and want what you think they want may not be what they want and what they want may not. They may not know what they need they may think they want something and actually it's something very different that they need. A marketable book idea is also a book idea that's unique and necessary in its sales category. So every book gets placed in a bisect category or an Amazon category, like body mind spirit or business or science, something like that. And you want to know that your book is going to stand out there. So it not only needs to be necessary for your readers, it needs to be a necessary addition to the category itself. Okay, something that hasn't been written before that that is different, and that's going to fill as we say a hole in the bookstore shelf. It's also going to be a book with a with a large market. Now I say that because the larger your market the more potential you have for the book to sell right there are more people to buy it. But there are some niches that are small, and you can write for these smaller niches and actually sell a lot of copies and have a best seller and do really well. Another thing is if the market's too large you need to narrow it down a little bit like you don't want to just write for women, but you could write for women who are entrepreneurs. That would work because you've you've now taken a segment of the very large women's market and and hone to down a little bit narrowed your angle, but still have a really large market. And produce a marketable book that's the question right that we're here to answer today. So the first answer I have for you are actually the answer with many parts to it is that you need a business plan for your book. Okay, you need a business plan so us creatives have to put on the business hat and actually create a plan a business plan. The book proposal is what the publishing industry uses for as a business plan for a book. If you're writing nonfiction and planning to traditionally publish you probably have figured this out that you need a book proposal. Right, but every book that's accepted by a traditional publisher, the acquisitions editor and the team there they produce a business plan. What they do is they take a lot of the information that's been provided in the book proposal by the author. They put that in their business plan, because it's a necessity to know the market and to know the competition and on all of these things. So this is where you start. If you're going to self publish you probably don't don't go sign out of our webinar today because if you're going to self publish you need a business plan for your book to because you are the publisher, you are the acquisitions editor. You are the person making all the decisions, and you're the one investing your time and energy and many into producing your book so you want a business plan to so don't think this is just for traditionally published authors. The presentation is for all of you no matter how you plan to publish. The reason that everyone needs this book proposal, or we're just going to call it a business plan. Okay, I will tell you the parts of a book proposal as we go forward, but we're really focused on just a business plan this is an informal document for you. And what it does is going to help you determine the market ability of your idea, whether your book idea can actually sell. When you use this business plan correctly, it's going to help you evaluate your idea to see if it will be marketable, if it's a marketable idea if it will sell, and to actually craft a book that will sell, because built into this business plan, and this process of creating the business plan are all the keys to actually writing your book, writing it effectively and making sure it actually does sell. And yes, this is pertinent to all types of books I don't care what you're writing fiction nonfiction memoir children's books. Doesn't matter, you need a business plan for your book and that's going to help you ensure that your book has a higher likelihood of selling. You can't just be a good writer, you have to be a good person business person and it starts at the idea phase. So let's go into nine steps to create your business plan. Step one is actually not a step that you were going to find in a book proposal, or are really in anything but your own planning process. Okay, and it is to develop an author attitude and a plan for success. Again, you get the idea, what then, first place you start is with you with yourself and you're going to evaluate yourself, especially if you're a first time aspiring author. I want you to take some time to figure out what success means for you, because for you, you may not want success may not mean being a best seller. It may not mean the New York Times best seller list or the Amazon top 100 list that may not be important to you. You might be writing a book online disease, and only be concerned about reaching, you know, a handful, well probably more than a handful with that example but you might have several thousand people you want to, to, to reach. Maybe it's just lime doctor, you know, lime experts, right and so if you reach those people, those experts and they then are able to treat their patients more successfully, that might be success for you. You might just want to leave a legacy of some sort for your family, and that's what success is for you. But if you have a movement that you're trying to start. Right, and you want to reach millions of people, you need to know that that do you have to really get clear on when will you succeed. How do you know you've succeeded so take some time to define success. Once you know what success means for you, you can actually set goals, you know you want to have your book published by a certain date you wanted to sell a certain number of copies you wanted to have X impact, you know you want it to, you know if you're reducing the number of school shootings, you know maybe that's your goal is to reduce the number of school shootings by 10% or something. Okay, but have goals, these are goals for you goals for your book. Then you really have to think about what you're willing to do to become a successful author. Okay, this is super important because what happens is people write the manuscript. And then they discover that they need an author platform and that they need to spend a lot of money on an editing, you know an editor, or a book proposal editor or any of these things, and they have to market, and they say, Well, I'm not willing to do that. Okay, so what will you do to succeed as an author super important for you to determine. When you look at all the things that are necessary to become an author which we're going to talk about today. Are you willing to change to help yourself succeed. It's a huge question here, very important because if you are a technophobe, and yet you don't have the money to hire somebody to create your website or do your social media marketing for you, you're going to need to change into somebody who's not a technophobe. Okay, you're going to have to be more willing and open to learning technology in order to help yourself succeed. If you are afraid of speaking, and for you speaking would actually be one of the best ways to promote your book to market it. You might have to change into being a speaker. So super important step here. I'll just for another minute. Oops, I'm sorry, let me go back. I had one more there that I left out. I got all excited. Okay, this last one is important for all of you who want to be indie publishers meaning self publish. Are you cut out to be a publisher. I get asked quite often and we can go into this and more depth and the Q&A if you want, you know which is the better way to go self published or traditionally published. And what I just want to say here is that if you want to self publish that's awesome but you have to know if you're cut out to be a publisher because traditional publishing a publisher purchases your book, and you work with them. Right, but when you self publish you are the publisher and you have to do everything. You can hire a team, but you have to be willing then to manage a team and you need to have the money for the team and all of those things. So you have to ask yourself if you are a project manager, and if you are pay attention to detail, and if you want to have this new role of publisher beyond being a writer. Alright, now here we are. Part of all of the self evaluation comes down to what I call having an author attitude and developing that, if you don't already have it. So, I call this woot. And the four aspects of author attitude or willingness, optimism, objectivity and tenacity so let me just briefly mention something about each or explain each so willingness I've already touched on. When you discover all the things that are necessary to be a successful author, which go way beyond just writing a good manuscript a marketable manuscript, you have to be willing to do those things. Or willing to hire someone or willing to learn it or willing to change. So if you're not willing you're going to struggle. Okay, and it's going to be very hard for you to succeed because your unwillingness is going to hold you back. And that is all about mindset you know my high performance coach this is where, you know my high performance hat comes on because it's mindset you are in your own way what's going on in your head is stopping you from moving forward. And that brings us to optimism. Optimists are more likely to succeed than pessimists and the reason for that is because they are a little unrealistic, and they, they don't take things personally. So they, you know they get rejected by a literary agent, or they get bad, you know, they get some bad feedback from the editor on their book. They just say well I can change and I can change the book, and doesn't matter that this person rejected me there's someone else who will accept the work. So they stay very positive and so they keep moving forward whereas pessimists get stuck. They are very realistic. And so rejection means the book, you know the book or they are not able to be an author or not cut out for it bad, you know, bad feedback or negative feedback from the editor sends them into a tailspin of I'm not a good writer, I should just give it up. Right, so they get very stuck and they take everything very personally. So we want to be optimistic if we are to succeed. Objectivity. Well this is about putting yourself in the shoes of someone other than you specifically to put yourself in the shoes of someone who is a publishing professional because you need to see yourself and your book project through objective eyes of somebody who is an expert on publishing. And the reason for that is because those people can, they know whether a book is marketable or not. They know whether your manuscript needs needs or another revision. And so you need to be objective enough, willing to hear their feedback and then objective enough to say okay, they know what they're talking about and maybe I need to change something maybe I need to do another revision. You know, maybe I need to see things through their perspective so we want to be objective. And last is tenacity because this process, you know you could get like chicken soup for the soul, something like 125 rejections before they got an acceptance from a publisher. So you have to have tenacity endurance and the willingness to keep going no matter what that is what's going to get you to success. So for all of you, you need to have or develop an author attitude. All right, so let's dive into step number two now we're really into the business plan and step number two is to know what your book is about and why someone would read it which means buy it. Okay, they have to buy it first, before they read it. So if you are traditionally publishing this is the overview section or of the book proposal. Okay, but for a business plan we're just, you know it's the same basic information just in one case it's informal and the other it's formal. But we're going to start with informal no matter what. So the first thing you want to figure out is what's your book about do you know. Now a lot of people say of course I know what my books about but if you can't if someone said to me if you can't write what your book is about on the back of a business card you don't know. So for the sake of your business plan if you can't talk about your book proposal, or your book idea in 100 words or less. If you really have a problem you should be able to do it probably in 75 or 50 words. So you really need clarity on what your book is about. That brings us to your pitch pitch is a wonderful tool for honing your idea. The San Francisco writers conference. When I first started going. There was a pitch contest and we could only have a 50 word pitch. So what I always say is start with 200 words and keep honing it down until you have one really great sentence that says what your book is about. That's your pitch. And that is going to be used by you in many many ways in your business plan on the back of your book maybe when you get asked by somebody at the checkout counter at the grocery store store what your book is about wherever. Okay, also you would use it to pitch an agent. You also need to know your books benefits. Every book has benefits even novels look at the at the descriptions of novels and you'll see that there's always something that for instance the main character is learning during the course of the book or learns by the end of the book. That's a benefit and when you read it you get that benefit to so a memoir novel children's book nonfiction for sure they have benefits so you're going to make a list of benefits so you write the pitch. You write make a list of benefits okay this is just the basics of your business plans overview. Then you need to really think about whether you can provide a compelling reason for someone to read your book. So what's the why, like, when somebody says to you what's your book about they don't really want to know. They want to hear the pitch but only if it tells them what's in it for them. That's all they care about is why they should read this book what are they going to get out of it that goes to the benefits. Right. But beyond that think about what is it your readers need and what are they struggling with what are their pain points and how is this book going to help them. Now if you're writing a novel you're probably thinking well that doesn't make any sense to me, but it does because somebody who picks up your book is going to want your novel may want to read something about somebody who is going through a similar and comes out the other side the same with a memoir or it might they might want to be inspired. So that's a compelling reason to be inspired or they might want to be transported to another country or another planet. These are compelling reasons. Okay, step number three is to analyze how many people really might buy your book. This is your market analysis and I can tell you now for those of you who write novels and even memoir but mostly novels. The fiction writers fail to do a market analysis because there's so many novels out there but it's so important for you to understand who your readers are. I think that because there are so many people who read novels that doesn't matter, you know, and oh I'm writing, you know, chiclet or sci fi and I know the, you know, I know that the, that the people out, you know, the people reading that they're there are my market. Okay, and that's great, but you might want to get a little more detailed about who exactly might want to read your book. The question here is do you know who your readers are and if a market exists for the book idea. So if it's sci fi okay great. There's a big market for sci fi we know by how many of the books sell right, but what is your book really about, do you know, and if you know do you know whether the readers of sci fi are going to be interested in your topic. So, you know, really drill down. And what is the size of the market so you could start if we're going to stick with sci fi you know with what is the side you know how many sci fi books sell every year that gives you an indication of the market size. And for nonfiction, you know, you might be looking at how many. If you're writing a book on camping, let's say, you know, you can see how many books there are out there how many campsites there are how many people go to campsites, you know, how many people are subscribing to camping magazines. This is really all about numbers, because a traditional publisher wants to know how many people might buy the book. That's what they're looking for. Okay, if you're self publishing you want to know the same thing, how many people might buy your book. And you really have to get clear on who your ideal readers are you can talk call this your avatar if you like. But, you know, who is it who would read this book, if you picture in front of you a reader your ideal reader who is it. A man or a woman or could it be both, could it, you know, is a, what's their age group what's, you know, so the demographics who is your ideal reader. And then you have to do the analysis do you have a viable market. Do you need to increase the size of the market or decrease the size of the market so I talked about the women's market. It's huge, most women, you know, women are the largest market for book, you know, book, they're the book buyers, they are the largest segment of book buyers, but you would want to write for women entrepreneurs or women, you know, stay at home moms or whatever it is right so you hone it down, and you make it a little narrower. You can also do it, you know, say, women entrepreneurs between 20 and 40. Right now you're getting a little, little slimmer, but it's still a big market, but you might also have to go bigger. So I had a book that was, I was marketing long, long time ago that was a book on the Jewish Sabbath. I had one publisher say could you expand it to talk about every religion that has a Sabbath. You know, I had somebody else say, can you narrow it to women. You know, instead of, you know, just Judy Jews, could you say narrow it to Jewish women. So these are all ways to to work with your market to make sure that it's viable. Step number four is to compare the competition and discover if your ideas unique and necessary. And here's where I often find that the novelists fall down on the job because they there are as I said so many novels, and, you know, they decide their book idea is is unique, and you know they just plow into it without stopping to see what else is out there, or even to look at the trends. They want to stop and see what other books have been written that somebody might buy instead of yours. So I'm awful also often asked, what's the difference between a competitive title and a complimentary title. So a competitive title is a book so like if you have two books on how to write a book proposal. Those are in competition because they both are about how to write a book proposal. If you then take a book about how to find an agent, that would be a complimentary book. Okay, my book the author training manual might be a complimentary book. Although my competition was only really the books that were about writing book proposals, because it went through the process we're talking about here how to actually craft a marketable book by going through the process of a business plan for a project, which is based on a proposal so you really could use it as a complimentary book or a competitive book but the main idea here is, if you have two books and they're about the same topic, and somebody would buy one and not the other. That's competition. If somebody would buy this book here, and then by this other book here because it, it enhances one of the topics it goes further into one of the areas that's complimentary. So we're just talking right now about competitions you need to do a competitive analysis to see what other books are out there and make sure your idea is different, and that it's necessary. So, first you have to determine which books represent competition you're going to go to a bookstore or to Amazon.com and you're going to look in the category where you think your book would be placed so if it was a mind body spirit book you're going to go there and maybe you're going to go down to books about about crystals, and so you're going to, you're going to look at all the books about crystals and see which one is similar to yours, or which, you know, five or 10 of them are similar enough to yours to be actual competition somebody would buy them instead of yours. So then you're going to study these books. Okay, you want books that have been produced in the last five years. If you're self publishing you can look at the self published books if you're traditionally publishing, publishing publishers don't care about the books, I'm sorry to say, but you want to look at the books that are the top maybe five or 10 that you feel are competition and you want to see how your book is different or the same. Okay, so basically you're looking for how your book is going to stand out, you want it to stand out. And then compare yourself to the other authors because if you're looking at all the books on one topic and all of them are written. It's a nonfiction book and they're all written by scholars. You might be saying, I can't, you know, I can't fit into this marketplace because or into this category because I'm not a scholar, but actually it could be that a book on that topic written by a lay person is exactly what people think because it's unique and there's nothing like it in the category. So you want to be looking for how can you be unique and fill that hole on the bookstore shelf. Okay, and part of that could be who you are as an author and your experience, or it could be the topic. So again we're looking for that hole on the shelf that we can fill that's Maya Angelou said write the book that you want to read I think I might have totally butchered her that quote, but or the book you've been looking for. Okay, that's what you want to do. You want to fill that hole on the shelf where where people are looking for a book and not finding it and you're going to provide it. Okay, step number five is to examine the structure of your book. This is your table of contents. Okay. So your table of contents is the backbone for your book it is the structure. Once your book have a sound structure, you want to sit down and write out a table of contents if you're doing fiction you can still, you know, just have one line that says what each chapter is about or whatever and make sure it works the same for memoir for nonfiction it's going to be very simple to see, you know, or easy to see whether you have a good structure for your book whether each chapter is is building on the next logically. So the other thing I like to do is to see whether the table of contents offers a bird's eye view of what's in the book because my belief is that people look at the front cover of a book, when they're deciding whether to buy. They look at the front cover, then they flip it over and they read the back cover, and if they're still not convinced, they open to the table of contents this is especially true for nonfiction. You want them to be able to see what they're getting. If you're writing fiction, then you know if you're, you want to see if the transformational arc is apparent in in the chapters. If you are giving your chapters titles, rather than just chapter one chapter two, then, you know, it can they see what the story is about. Okay, and, and you want to look at when you do whatever kind of outline you're doing for your novel, or your memoir does that story arc really makes sense. All right, step number six is to decide if your books content matches your initial vision of the book. And this is that we're going to create chapter summaries or, or just a synopsis but I really, I highly recommend that everyone, no matter what type of book you write you write chapter summaries. Okay, it's great to have a synopsis of a novel or memoir but the chapter summaries tell you what's happening in every chapter and it's going to be your writing guide with your table of contents and your chapter summaries you have a writing guide. And just you briefly describe each chapter. Okay, so you can see that in a novel as a little mini synopsis of the chapter. It's the same for nonfiction or memoir you're just saying what's what's happening in that chapter, or what content will be there. And then you're going to once you have that you have this unique opportunity to see if now the kind that you did your market analysis and your competitive analysis and you know you you've written that pitch and all these things. See if your content lines up with that overview, right, with that pitch and the benefits that you said you would provide. Does the content you just planned out, actually line up with it does it align. Also, is the content you have just produced, not the manuscript but the summaries and the synopsis. So does that actually target your market. Right, is that what you've said your market needs him once because if not it's time to do some revision. Okay, so this is an opportunity to do some revision and you might have to go back to the overview, and redo the or you might decide that you have to change up your market. Okay, I had a somebody who had to totally change his angle on his book because he got to this point and found that things were different. So make sure that your manuscript that this or it's not your manuscript the manuscript you're going to write that your summaries are providing benefit that you are going to when you sit down to write create a unique and necessary book. And then you decide should I write this manuscript. Now if you are self publishing at this point you're ready to go. If you've revised anything that needs to be revised reangled whatever you're ready to go. If you're traditionally publishing, and you're writing a novel or memoir you also are going to be ready to write at this point, nonfiction. If you want to traditionally publish, you only need a few chapters for your book proposal and you're going to actually fine tune what the information that you've come up with so far. Okay, step number seven is to discover ways to brand yourself and earn more money. And remember you start thinking about spin offs and sequels and series because the more books you write the more books you sell and traditional publishers are not looking for one book wonders they're looking for people who have actually produced, you know, are going to be writing books. So, your author brand can be built with books, one book after another that that let people know who you are so if they're you're writing on a specific topic or specific theme, you can actually build brand with more than one book. It's not important to take to think about whether you can write in more than one genre. So, you know you might be writing fiction but what would happen if you took whatever your expertise is, and pop that over into a nonfiction book and what if your fiction books related. You actually would then have a way to go out and be speaking and marketing related to your area of expertise, which actually helps you market your novels. Are you going to build a business around your book. So the nonfiction writers this is a huge thing you know to have a book or two on a specific topic, and then create courses or membership sites this is definitely what I have done in my career. So books don't tend to you know unless you become a New York Times bestseller books don't tend to. Well, that's not the only case. I'll just qualify that but for most authors books aren't you we don't get enough income from them to pay our mortgages. So we build businesses around our books so is that something you want to do. Have you created a career plan. So good thing to do, especially if you're just starting out to say hey, you know what books am I going to write and how will I monetize and how will I brand and how am I going to create an actual career out of this. All right, step number eight is to weigh whether you are the best person to write this book now. Notice the word now. Okay, of course you're the best person to write the book because it's your idea. But are you ready to do it right now. This is your about the author section, where you in a book proposal would create a bio, a platform analysis, a mission statement, things like that, but it's where we're evaluating you. So whether you're not whether you're the best person to write this book or not depends a little bit if you're nonfiction on your expertise but your life experience might be enough. But if you're an expert or not or an authority or influencer then of course you know this is your book to write. But it's also about platform building, and that's how you help your, your book succeed so platform is a built in audience in your target market for your book that you create with social media speaking writing articles blogging whatever it is right. So if you haven't created this built in audience for your book then when you go to market the book there's nobody listening. So you have to do that long before the book comes out and I'm talking years so you need to start working on that as soon as you have a book idea. And by doing that, you then make yourself the right person to write the book and to publish it because there are people waiting for your book they know who you are you have an audience that's already built in. So you need to have your author platform okay so you need to have that in place you need to be willing and ready to do everything necessary to market and build platform, all of that. And then I mentioned you know how you compare it to the other authors and your category, right so you want to look at that this is a time to go back to that analysis and say you know is there anything that I need to do. So I write and publish this book in order to make sure I stand out from the other authors. And then last you feel compelled to write this book. So, most people write because they feel compelled to write right they get inspired. But you might want to ask yourself you have a mission, like do you want to create a movement or do you want to, you know, even with your novel do you want to show mothers that they can that they that's okay to make mistakes with their kids or whatever it is so is there a mission, a purpose behind your work. Okay, and you want that to come through. And that if you have a mission and a purpose and you feel compelled you're more likely to do what it takes to help your book succeed. And the last step is number nine to gauge if you make a good publishing partner or indie publisher. This is your promotion plan or some people call it a marketing plan. And this is where you're going to take some time to determine how you can help sell your book. Okay, it's basically a bulleted list of just everything you're going to do or you can number it or whatever you want this is just your business plan, but all the ways in which you can help sell your book. So, you know, you know how to actually target your market you have a target market but how do you target them. How do you actually get your book in front of them. Do you have a promotion plan. How can you put your author platform to use with your marketing plan, because that's why you built it is to help you sell your book right. So, do you know how to put it to use if you built a Facebook group what are you going to do in that Facebook group. What are you using it on in a Facebook page, you know, how are you going to run ads what are you going to do. So you built this platform how will you use it. Alright, so what now you put all these and you've done these nine steps you've created a business plan for your book it's probably not polished up and in a book proposal yet or it shouldn't be at this point should be informal no matter how you're going to publish. Now what do you do with all the information, you're going to get creative, and you're going to craft the best possible book one that's going to sell. So let's look at that you craft a marketable book by potentially changing the books angle maybe you discovered that the book needs to be angled differently. Right. Maybe after we focus your content on a new market, like I said, you know, I was had a book idea that you know it was suggested that I focus on women. I had a client who he wrote a book that was for single parents and the more we discussed it the more it turned out that some of the parents were or maybe it was single mothers. They had had spouses who existed just weren't involved husbands who worked and traveled and weren't involved in parenting and they felt like single parents. Right or or wives who did the same whatever it was. So he had to change both the angle and the content for the market so that he could actually be talking to a much broader market. Can you target your current current market in a different way. Is there something else you could do what a podcast help with YouTube videos help. You could put special features in your book, which could be you know a workbook element or meditations or I don't know any number of things. You want to develop some themes. So maybe you want to have a theme that's running through all your books so that helps you brand yourself, or maybe you want to develop themes that draw on your expertise. You want to develop new ways to promote always be thinking of new ways to get in front of your readers because the more you get in front of the readers the more books you sell and we're talking about crafting a marketable book but now we're at that point where you know you have to once the books out, you have to be getting it in front of people all the time. You might want to consider whether you want need a different publishing option. Maybe you thought you'd be a self published author and now you're thinking maybe I should be a traditionally published author maybe that would help my book more. I have a big enough market and a big enough platform that maybe traditional publishing would be a better route for me than self publishing or vice versa. Find new ways and places to build platform, create strategies to brand and monetize your book, all of these things are things you can do once you've done your book, your business plan. So I'm going to leave you with a challenge. Anyone who knows me I always end with a challenge and that is to develop that business plan for your book I know you don't want to do it I know you're creative and you just want to write your book, but develop a business plan for your book, so that you craft a book that sells. So that is it for our presentation I'm ready for questions I'm going to leave this up for a few minutes this I actually will put this up again but this is how you contact me. These are the programs I have and if you're looking for my books you can get them at books by Nina amir.com. And now I will let Taryn take over and take us to Q&A. And I don't know if we can leave this up Taryn for a little bit or we can. Am I on the screen right now. I see you yes, you see me but I don't see myself. That's weird. I see you in a little like a little box. Okay, that's fine. Now it just says mechanics Institute. And I'll take this off in a minute I'll just leave this up for a minute and then I'll take it down. Okay. Yes, thank you so much that was so much information that I'm a little bit behind here. So the first question that I see here is from Chris and he asks if you could point the audience to accessible resources for undertaking market analysis, and I, I just typed in the chat space. You know, which is klytics.com and publishers weekly, but I wonder if you have any more in mind. No, you know what I teach what I teach my people in my programs is to go. If you're doing market analysis. This is really a research project on Google. So I go to Google and I look for census, you know here in the US Census Bureau information. You know how many if you're doing a book on spiritual, you know on religion how many people attend Sunday services or you know some kind of religious service every week. So how many publications are there that are you know related to your topic. What are their, what are their demographics and what are the number of subscribers, these are things you can find. Right, so I just do tons of queries in Google and see what I find, and that's my mark that's where I come up with numbers. You can research how many books have sold or how much money and industry made. All statistics that are going to help you with market analysis because market analysis is all about numbers. Okay, it's not about not the competitive analysis where you're looking at the books. Yeah, I just want to refer people to the census is website which is census dot gov, and you can browse by topic which is like, right when you hit census dot gov you'll see some tabs at the top. And if you browse by topic you can, you can find data by topic pretty easily so including business and economic data population housing. So, so that's a great resource. Another question is from Deborah. She says that you didn't make a mention of audience or population numbers. The word is you must have a following in order to get signed I presume with a publisher. So what you're asked is she asking for numbers like how many how big your audience needs to be to get a traditional publishing deal. I presume so. Okay, so I hear people all the time, you know that people come to me and they're so discouraged because they've been told that if they don't have six figures of something or more that they won't land a traditional publishing deal. And I don't think that's true. I'm a three time traditionally published author and my platform has never been six figures. And yet let's say that. And there are small publishers, medium sized publishers independence publishers and large publishers, the large publishers for sure are looking for larger platforms, but I'm not going to give you a number because you never know. But now my books exist with Penguin Random House, you know, the largest publishers in the world, and I had conversations with them about another book. You know it was my published by writers digest books but they were purchased by Penguin Random House. And I thought there was no way that I could approach Penguin Random House, but yes my have books with them but they were willing to entertain another book with me. And you just don't know. And so I always say, build platform build build build for the moment that you decide you want to be an author or you have an idea build platform, and, and do as much as you can to increase your numbers. But don't just assume that because your numbers aren't big enough that you won't get get a deal or an agent. And that kind of builds upon Louise's question. First of all she said thanks you and says your knowledge is priceless, and she has a question about how to build an audience and how you do that before your book is published. I mean that's a class itself but yeah so that's all about platform. And so I can tell you what I did I started blogging. When social media became a big thing I began sharing all my blog posts on on social media, which you know this is. I talk about this a lot I call it the I don't know Taryn you've probably heard me teach on this but it's the, the station and satellite method. So your station is your website. And your blog, that is your main state like radio station right it's your main station. And everything that you do there like a blog post or a video or whatever is then shared elsewhere. Like on YouTube or on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or wherever. You can also be building platform with the idea of that is that you share your blog posts or whatever on social media to drive people back to your website where you want to be capturing email addresses. But you're also doing it in order to get people to follow you because people will share your work right share your blog post or your video with other people, and that will get more people to like your pages or sign up for email. You can also be podcasting, you could be doing some kind of an email, you know newsletter, you could be having a YouTube station, you could be doing something, you know, having a weekly clubhouse show, which I don't know that much about but you know so there's so much you could be doing. And you have to decide what you like to do or what you are willing to do, and where what your audience is looking for like are they listening to podcasts or are they on Clubhouse, and then find things to do and to share that are related to your content. And that goes for novelists to best if you can share things related to content. Well, these thoughts of yours relate to Catherine's question which is, you know which comes first your brand, your book, your website, or should you develop these all at the same time, or one before the other sounds as if they kind of organically grow together. Once you have a book concept, you start to build your brand while you're writing your book. And at the same time you're building your website so you can put all these ideas into a form that your potential readers and your audience can start to enjoy before you finish your book. Yeah, that's one way to do it. I mean the other is especially for nonfiction, well really for anyone I was going to say only for nonfiction but for almost any author you can sit down and plan out your career. And say, how do I want to be known, see that's branding is how do I want to be known I want to determine how I want to be known as an author. And then you could plan out your books from there. Right, and, and you could plan out your website and all that now for most of us it changes over time like if anybody has known me for a long time, and you've been to my website recently it looks nothing like it did right a year ago. And the message on it is totally different. Now if you go to write nonfiction now calm it still looks the same and how to blog about I have three sites. So those look pretty much the same but my main site Nina mirror calm has changed because I've changed. And actually I set out to write books that were about personal and spiritual growth. And then I got sidetracked writing and publishing about writing and publishing and blogging. So, my, now that I'm like, okay, I'm going to I need to show back up as you know who I set out to be as a writer, my website change so branding can change there are people like Michael Hyatt, who changed their branding. I know he's changed it probably five times since I've known him. So, I think things evolve, but the way I usually suggest to do it is to get a website up. Okay, so the website should cut you soon as you decide you're going to be an author you should have a website, you can revamp it and whatever as you go, or you can plan things out and, and, and create it that way. Branding is going to come out of that branding also comes out of the books like I said so for me I'd like to see somebody's but you know how many books are you going to write like what do you think you're going to write and how can we tie them all together like what's the thread that is running through them all. That's your brand. That's who you are as a writer, whatever that theme is or thread that's running through everything. So, it can happen organically. You can be a planner and do it all in the beginning or you can do it as you start to write, but it all needs to get going and I and I really think that it's a mistake to wait for the last minute to have a website and a brand and all of that. Right and you cover that really nicely in the author training manual. Yes. I don't have it here is great hold on. Yes, this is my kind of thumbnail book version version. But yeah and today's whole presentation was based on this book. It really is required reading for anyone thinking about starting a writer journey, writer's journey I think. So, related to that Tom has a question about how you manage your, your, your platforms, your, your brands, how do you keep them from overlapping and diluting the other audience or, you know personally I think they kind of all meld together. And do you have any tips on keeping parts of your life separate. I don't keep, well, I mean, I keep a little of my life separate, but I just don't share what I don't want to share, like what I don't want public I don't share, but the rest I make public because I've tried lots of different things and you know if you're talking about tools for managing it all. I mean I actually use buffer for my social media, and I have some plugins on my website that are sharing content, all the time from my blogs, but I try to be branded across all my websites right now I'm not super well branded because of the changes in my, in my main site Nina Amir.com, but I'm just having new banners made. So basically what I, what I've always had up until now is that all the, the headshots, all the banners on all the social media are all branded so that you know it's me like it all they all look similar. So in another couple weeks that'll be the same again because I'm having them done so I, I have, you know, I once heard guy Kawasaki, who wrote the book ape about publishing. I can't remember the full name of it. But I'll look at it. What's up. I said I'll look that up. I heard him speak one time. And I think blog world or something anyway and he said that he, he likes to have an approach that the word for it is not coming to my head but an approach with social media where you're everywhere. But you aren't like active, you have content everywhere so no matter where your audience might be they're going to find you. You can choose the social media sites that you like the most, or where your audience is the most. And that's where you're most active. So like, so for me, I'm on Instagram and I'm on Facebook. I share on Twitter all the time. There's, like I said I have a plugin that's got content flowing on Twitter, but I don't spend a lot of time there. So, I'm on in on LinkedIn, and I spend a little time there but not a lot. Probably I should be more but so you pick and choose but I like that idea of be everywhere so people can find you, but pick and choose where you really spend your time. Great. Let's see what else there is here. I didn't answer a question pop something in the chat again and I'll, I'll elaborate if I, if you have a follow up. I think we have answered all the questions I don't see anything up here's one. Oh, no just people saying they have to pop off. So, I just want to thank you. Yeah, can I just, I just want to add something to Tom's question because I'm looking at it. Okay. I'm overlapping or competing. So I just want to be clear that your social media platforms don't compete. They can and should overlap like if you share something on one platform you should be sharing it on the other, although on Facebook you have, you know you could have your profile and have that be private and not have anyone there at all and have a page that's professional so you could differentiate there. So I just want to absolute the audience. As a matter of fact, some of your audience is going to go from one like my Facebook audience goes to Instagram. And I have Twitter audience that have followed me to Facebook or LinkedIn. Sorry, Karen, I just was reading that and thought I could probably add a little more. No, that's fine. CK also has a question. How do you recommend get start getting started as a speaker when you're not confident and have no experience. Yes, Toastmasters is great. And what I did, I just did a class on this for another group. What I did was I actually, I thought speaking before the book was like the chicken before the egg. And I remember Mike Larson telling me go out and speak go out and speak and I was like, Yeah, but I don't have a book like who's going to want me to come speak. So what I did was I created what are called booklets, you know, saddle stitched books and you'll often get them from like in the mail you'll get an envelope that says free book inside. When you open it up is a little to the tiny book you know that's been stapled saddle stitched. And so I took my bigger book ideas. Many of which still need to be written. And I consolidated it into a little booklet and I said on the author of this book and I actually would get them printed and bring them with me. And I went to small venues and the first place I spoke was a church, not about an hour and 20 minutes from here from where I live. It was a new thought church, and they had a theme every month and they would bring me in about once a quarter. Excuse me. And I had to show up and speak on their topic. And I would prepare but I would show up with, with three by five cards, sometimes bigger. I can't remember the size by eight or something. They had bulleted notes. Well, first it was like a lot more content there were a lot of them and then I began to whittle it down and whittle it down and. I was so comfortable and I went from that where there would be maybe anywhere from five to 15 people to a group of 25 and then from that to, you know, a group of 50 I remember the first time that I spoke at the opening session of the San Writers Conference and it was everybody, you know, like I can't remember 400 people or something. And I had two minutes to say what I had to say. And I remember my knees just knocking. Right now so nervous. But you just do it you just have to start to find someone willing to let you speak for free or for pay I used to get 50 bucks for going to that church. You just start and you just keep doing it and do it and practice practice at home. And you can always try the Toastmasters that's a great way to get used to expounding upon a topic and speaking in front of people. And they provide, you know, nice feedback as well. Kathleen has a question. What if you write different genres. You know, speak to different audiences. How do you keep from making those two different aspects of your knowledge overlap or dilute. So my recommendation, I sit down with writers and I say okay so you're writing fiction. If you write nonfiction, what would you write or okay you have ideas in both. Let's look at all those ideas. So for you, Kathleen, write down your novels write down your nonfiction books, and look at them and see if there's any way to create a thread that runs through them. So if your nonfiction is about gardening. If it were me. Okay, if it were me and I was writing fiction or nonfiction about gardening. My main character and my novels would be someone who gardens, because then gardening is my theme gardening is my brand. It could be. I, you know, you want a tagline on your website. So really your branding as an author. I just don't want your website to just say, Joe Schmo author. I was like, Okay, big deal. Right. Somebody gets to a website you have six seconds to get them to stick around. And if they go away they go away for good. So I want you to have a tagline. When they get there they know what you do for them. So, you know, you could say writing books that plant seeds that grow in your mind. I whatever, but you get the idea that you can begin to brand around gardening in some way that you're planting seeds or you're, you know, helping people grow through stories or whatever it is so that's, that's how I bring it together and, and I remember telling a marketing story about one time that I always recommend that people who write fiction write nonfiction at least one book that's in some way related to their novels, because that opens the door for you to go speak, because novelists have much fewer chances or opportunities to go out But someone who's an expert on something like gardening can go speak at gardening groups and garden expos and whatever all over the country, and sell your novels in the, at the same time, in the back of the room. Right. Right. So, yeah, so I love to have you tie it all together in a nice pre package, and then your website everything your social media everything flows together. Fantastic. Well, I think maybe we have answered all of our quit. No, as soon as I say that. D suggests that even if there's no through through line you could always use a pen name and even if that pen name was just your nickname. I see it's really more of a comment than a question. Great. Well, thank you for that comment. I understand what they're saying so I'm not a big fan of pen names because you can't promote under a pen name. Like, you're gonna somebody's gonna, you're going to show up somewhere to speak to promote your book or on social media, and like Facebook is going to tag you knowing who you are by your picture, or somebody's going to figure it out. So, I think pen names are fine if you're being honest about it and saying I write children's books over here and I write erotica over there. Right. And ever the two will meet because I have two different names but it's all me. And then you might want to have two websites and different social media, whatever, but hopefully you're not that far off base from one to the other. And I think people, you know, look at me blogging, nonfiction of all, you know, every aspect of it, personal growth, spiritual growth including all the woo woo metaphysical stuff. And I have a site for boys who dance which I haven't written on in a very long time, but it all makes up me. And I've had to, I struggled with all this for a long time and my main site Nina Amir.com. Now I feel is a reflection of me in with everything I do. And that's what you want to look at is how can you be because you want to be hiding all the time and be uncomfortable you want to be comfortable out there promoting and confident. Great advice. Well Nina I want to thank you for coming and sharing your knowledge and I just want to tell the audience that I will, I hope to have the video up tomorrow and I will include the links that we've added in the chat space so that you can follow through with some of these recommendations. So that will come out to you. All our registrants tomorrow. So putting in the, in the chat, where to get the books. What he wants to click on the link is there. Yeah, my websites. I see that there. And I'll include that all in the email I send out as well. Okay. So my websites are there now. Anybody wants to contact me just reach out if you have questions or whatever feel free to find me on social media or to go to my one of my sites and send me an email. Yeah, and you're super generous with that. So I appreciate it. I've availed myself of your services before. Yes, and I do if you go to my writing sites. You can get 15 minutes with me so if you have a quick question you want answered or you want to know more about the resources I offer, feel free to sign up for a 15 minute session is totally free. Yes. All right well thank you and thank you all and I hope you have a great and healthy weekend. And we'll see you around in this virtual space again I hope. Yes, thank you so much Karen and thank you everybody who attended. All right, bye bye.