{"id":581,"date":"2025-04-03T09:30:10","date_gmt":"2025-04-03T09:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hudsonpcrepair.com\/?p=581"},"modified":"2025-04-05T16:19:09","modified_gmt":"2025-04-05T16:19:09","slug":"your-book-launch-needs-a-marketing-plan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.hudsonpcrepair.com\/index.php\/2025\/04\/03\/your-book-launch-needs-a-marketing-plan\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Book Launch Needs a Marketing Plan"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/ducttapemarketing.com\/book-launch-marketing-plan\/\">Your Book Launch Needs a Marketing Plan<\/a> written by <a href=\"https:\/\/ducttapemarketing.com\/author\/jarretr\/\">Jarret Redding<\/a> read more at <a href=\"https:\/\/ducttapemarketing.com\">Duct Tape Marketing<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<h3><a href=\"https:\/\/pdst.fm\/e\/traffic.megaphone.fm\/ETTTE3471558045.mp3?updated=1743664529\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with <strong>Alex Strathdee<\/strong><\/strong><\/a><\/h3>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-82541 size-medium alignleft lazyload\" src=\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" data-src=\"http:\/\/www.hudsonpcrepair.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/New-DTM-Podcast-Graphics-1-300x300-1.jpg\">In this episode of the <em data-start=\"75\" data-end=\"104\">Duct Tape Marketing Podcast<\/em>, I interviewed Alex Strathdee, CEO of Shelf Life and author of <em data-start=\"347\" data-end=\"370\">Before the Bestseller<\/em>. Alex is an expert in book marketing, having helped over 1,000 authors across 50+ niches get real results. His insights challenge the traditional belief that publishers will promote your book and reveal the essential strategies every author must use to drive their own success.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\" data-start=\"654\" data-end=\"1101\">During our conversation, Alex shared powerful and practical advice on how to sell books, create a compelling book launch plan, and avoid the most common book marketing mistakes. From free reader seeding to building an author email list, Alex outlines a repeatable book sales strategy that empowers authors to treat their book like a business asset\u2014whether you\u2019re self publishing or working with a traditional publisher.<\/p>\n<p data-start=\"654\" data-end=\"1101\">Alex\u2019s approach to nonfiction book marketing is data-driven, entrepreneurial, and deeply practical. Whether you\u2019re a seasoned business owner or just starting out, the insights from this episode can help you avoid wasted effort\u2014and get real ROI from your book.<\/p>\n<h3 style=\"text-align: left\">Key Takeaways:<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li data-start=\"1143\" data-end=\"1247\"><strong data-start=\"1143\" data-end=\"1181\">Publishers won\u2019t market your book.<\/strong> Authors must take ownership of their <strong data-start=\"1219\" data-end=\"1237\">book promotion<\/strong> strategy.<\/li>\n<li data-start=\"1250\" data-end=\"1379\"><strong data-start=\"1250\" data-end=\"1288\">Think of your book like a product.<\/strong> If it\u2019s good (and light, as Alex says), it needs only wind\u2014<strong data-start=\"1348\" data-end=\"1379\">your marketing\u2014to take off.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li data-start=\"1382\" data-end=\"1495\"><strong data-start=\"1382\" data-end=\"1404\">Pick a sales goal.<\/strong> Whether it\u2019s 1,000 or 20,000 copies, defining a target helps guide every marketing tactic.<\/li>\n<li data-start=\"1498\" data-end=\"1604\"><strong data-start=\"1498\" data-end=\"1526\">Use free reader seeding.<\/strong> Get your book into the hands of people who can talk about it and create buzz.<\/li>\n<li data-start=\"1607\" data-end=\"1742\"><strong data-start=\"1607\" data-end=\"1652\">Break down your sales goal into channels.<\/strong> Consider email, <strong data-start=\"1669\" data-end=\"1693\">podcasts, Amazon ads<\/strong>, or <strong data-start=\"1698\" data-end=\"1712\">lumpy mail<\/strong> to move copies strategically.<\/li>\n<li data-start=\"1745\" data-end=\"1856\"><strong data-start=\"1745\" data-end=\"1773\">Your email list is gold.<\/strong> Start small with 100 engaged readers and build from there\u2014this is traffic you own.<\/li>\n<li data-start=\"1859\" data-end=\"1962\"><strong data-start=\"1859\" data-end=\"1891\">Use VA support for outreach.<\/strong> Outsourcing <strong data-start=\"1904\" data-end=\"1928\">book promotion tasks<\/strong> helps you scale more efficiently.<\/li>\n<li data-start=\"1965\" data-end=\"2076\"><strong data-start=\"1965\" data-end=\"2002\">Don\u2019t overlook physical presence.<\/strong> Alex shares how one book sold millions after being spotted in a car wash!<\/li>\n<li data-start=\"2079\" data-end=\"2196\"><strong data-start=\"2079\" data-end=\"2104\">Design a book funnel.<\/strong> Use your book as a <strong data-start=\"2124\" data-end=\"2139\">lead magnet<\/strong> for higher-ticket services like <strong data-start=\"2172\" data-end=\"2195\">courses or coaching<\/strong>.<\/li>\n<li data-start=\"2199\" data-end=\"2355\"><strong data-start=\"2199\" data-end=\"2224\">Presentation matters.<\/strong> From soft t-shirts to custom editions, packaging your book with care can spark word-of-mouth and long-term <strong data-start=\"2332\" data-end=\"2354\">publishing success<\/strong>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>Chapters:<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>[00:09] Introduction to Alex Strathdee<\/li>\n<li>[01:03] Do Publishers Promote Books?<\/li>\n<li>[02:45] Mistakes in Book Marketing<\/li>\n<li>[06:54] How is AI Affecting Book Marketing?<\/li>\n<li>[08:30] What is the Goal of your Book?<\/li>\n<li>[09:39] Seeding Readers with no Audience<\/li>\n<li>[13:34] Team and Tools to Help You with Your Book<\/li>\n<li>[16:03] Positioning Yourself to get Lucky<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>More About<strong> Alex Strathdee:\u00a0<\/strong><\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Check out Alex Strathdee\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.getshelflife.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Website<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Connect with Alex Strathdee on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/alexander-strathdee\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">LinkedIn<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Read <a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/4iXgUen\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Before The Bestseller: Your Proven Path to Book Sales Without Wasting Time &amp; Money<\/a> by Alex Strathdee<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<div id=\"fbxt-wrap\">\n<div id=\"fbxt-wrap--inner\" class=\"fbxt-extra-class\">\n<div class=\"fbxt-header\">\n<div class=\"fbxt-header--logo\">\n<p>\t\t\t\t<span class=\"fbxt-header-text\">Duct Tape Transcript<\/span>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n<div class=\"fbxt-header--nav\">\n\t\t\t\t<a class=\"fbxt-header--nav-item fbxt-nav-email\" href=\"#\"><\/p>\n<p>\t\t\t\t\t<span class=\"fbxt-nav-text\">Email<\/span><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t<\/a><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t<a class=\"fbxt-header--nav-item fbxt-nav-download\" href=\"#\"><\/p>\n<p>\t\t\t\t\t<span class=\"fbxt-nav-text\">Download<\/span><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t<\/a><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t<a class=\"fbxt-header--nav-item fbxt-nav-new_tab\" href=\"#\"><\/p>\n<p>\t\t\t\t\t<span class=\"fbxt-nav-text\">New Tab<\/span><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div class=\"fbxt-content\">\n<div class=\"fbxt-content--inner\">\n<p>John Jantsch (00:00.951)<\/p>\n<p>Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Alex Strathdee. He is the CEO of Shelf Life, where he helps authors market books. After working with over 1,000 books and 50 plus niches, he wanted to know what advice to give authors whose books weren&#8217;t selling. Clients include Mike McCallewitz, Alan Dibbs, Michael Bungastanier, Tony Fidel, Reid Hoffman. He hosts.<\/p>\n<p>his own podcast, Before the Best Seller with authors who have sold over 10,000 copies, which include Dan Pink, Kim Scott, and others. But we&#8217;re going talk about his book today, Before the Best Seller, your proven path to book sales without wasting time and money. So Alex, welcome to the show.<\/p>\n<p>Alex Strathdee (00:47.864)<\/p>\n<p>John, it&#8217;s a dream come true being here growing up with you as one of the marketing greats to get to have a chat with you is pretty cool.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (00:55.227)<\/p>\n<p>I appreciate that. So I know the answer to this, but I&#8217;m just going to let you let you hit it out of the park. When I write a book, doesn&#8217;t the publisher promote my book?<\/p>\n<p>Alex Strathdee (01:09.422)<\/p>\n<p>You would think that is why we exist is because Seth Godin, I know, has a good statistic that, you know, authors spend 90 % on or they make revenue from 90 % of the 90 % of the revenue is from their backlist and they only spend 2 % of their their budget on actually launching new books, which is a statistic that every author should be listening to and thinking, oh, so I can&#8217;t expect my publisher to actually market.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (01:10.627)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (01:24.835)<\/p>\n<p>Huh.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (01:36.725)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, I&#8217;ve actually published, let&#8217;s say I self-published one book, six books have been with major publishers. And I can say that not only do they not promote your book, they don&#8217;t know how, quite frankly. I mean, they&#8217;re pretty rooted in some ancient approaches.<\/p>\n<p>Alex Strathdee (01:56.43)<\/p>\n<p>And that&#8217;s how I came into this industry was actually getting like pretty much scammed by someone who was like, oh, here&#8217;s what book marketing really is. And I was like, oh, wait, I&#8217;m going to be our famous rich, you know, author tomorrow. Wow, that&#8217;s fantastic. All I have to do is become an Amazon bestseller. Cool. And then you quickly find out that&#8217;s that&#8217;s not how you become an author.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (02:11.458)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (02:16.035)<\/p>\n<p>Well, and the other thing of course, and I&#8217;m sure you&#8217;re experiencing this, my first book came out in 2007. There weren&#8217;t a lot of nonfiction books, quite frankly, particularly from marketers. Now there&#8217;s probably been five titles that have come out since we started this show. I mean, it&#8217;s crazy.<\/p>\n<p>Alex Strathdee (02:32.942)<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a marketing book for every niche now. There was one book that I was marketing that is, Kroll Space Repair. It&#8217;s insane, the niches that you find these days. But I love niches. I think niches are some of the best places to market.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (02:47.285)<\/p>\n<p>So where do you find, we&#8217;ll start with the mistakes. Where do you find people making a mistake? I know the biggest one is they write a book and go, okay, now what? Probably, but what are some of the other common mistakes?<\/p>\n<p>Alex Strathdee (02:56.77)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, the first. I&#8217;ll first start with a piece of education and it&#8217;s how to think about your book, and it&#8217;s a analogy that I actually stole from Ricardo Fayette of Reidsy, and it&#8217;s it&#8217;s the book is a ship analogy where essentially your book is a ship and how good your book is is how and how, you know, the word of mouth will spread for that book is how light the material of that ship is made of. So if you have a really, really good book, you have a really young.<\/p>\n<p>think I was reading your Wikipedia before this as well. You like your woodworking, so we&#8217;ll use a nice wood reference here. You know, if you have a really good book, then it&#8217;s a light piece of wood, right? So, you know, then your book, all that that ship needs is some wind in the sails and it starts to cruise along. If your book is made of lead, meaning it&#8217;s a terrible book and people don&#8217;t want to share it, then yeah, you can strap rockets to the side. But the second you turn off those rockets, it&#8217;s going to sink to the bottom of ocean. So the first thing is to think about your book as a ship.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (03:46.563)<\/p>\n<p>You<\/p>\n<p>Alex Strathdee (03:54.72)<\/p>\n<p>And so the next question you get is, well, how do I know what my book is made of? And the answer to that is by product testing it. So it&#8217;s by committing to. this is, your question was, where do people actually start with their marketing? The starting point is picking a number. So that is the Bill Gladstone, who&#8217;s the late former literary agent to people like Eckhart Tolle, Marie Kondo, Jack Canfield. His whole thing is that in order for a book to be commercially successful, you need to see 20,000 copies into the wild.<\/p>\n<p>Now, if your book is about crawl space repair, the odds of you seeding 20,000 copies is pretty low, right? So you get to realize that there&#8217;s some nuance in here, depending on the industry that you&#8217;re a part of. Rob Fitzpatrick says that number only needs to be 1000. He&#8217;s a author of right. You saw books. He focuses more on like writing really, really good nonfiction books. And the truth is the numbers somewhere between 1000 and 20,000. And it&#8217;s up to the author to figure out what that number is.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (04:29.559)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, yeah.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (04:43.478)<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a book.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (04:51.053)<\/p>\n<p>So.<\/p>\n<p>I mean, again, I&#8217;m trying to process that comment. if I&#8217;ve published a book or self-published a book or I&#8217;m thinking about putting a book out, am I now then one of my first tasks is I need to get a thousand people who I think would be interested in this and send them a copy?<\/p>\n<p>Alex Strathdee (04:58.094)<\/p>\n<p>Yes. Yeah.<\/p>\n<p>Alex Strathdee (05:12.46)<\/p>\n<p>That is one of the ways. we call that free reader seating and the the but yeah, essentially once you have your number, what that is, is that&#8217;s empowering because where most authors start in their book marketing is just talking to, you know, like marketing salespeople of, you need this program, you need this program, you don&#8217;t really know what you&#8217;re trying to achieve. You just kind of think that like, well, if I make the New York Times bestseller list, then my book did what it&#8217;s supposed to do, right?<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (05:13.709)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah.<\/p>\n<p>Alex Strathdee (05:36.814)<\/p>\n<p>And so just having an understanding of what you&#8217;re actually trying to achieve with your book is that will solve half of your marketing issues. Because once you have your number, you break that down into, OK, I&#8217;m going to move 200 copies through podcasting. I&#8217;m to 100 copies through my email list. I&#8217;m going to move 200 copies through Amazon ads. Right. And then you actually break that seeding number down into many goals. And those are the different tools of book marketing that I talk about with him.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (06:02.263)<\/p>\n<p>So we&#8217;ve probably all encountered a book that you&#8217;re like, this is really bad. Why is it selling so many copies?<\/p>\n<p>Alex Strathdee (06:11.852)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, yeah. The one of my one of my shocking things, it&#8217;s kind of like, you know, Febreeze didn&#8217;t sell until a marketer figured out how to make it sell right. Like until someone was like, it shouldn&#8217;t have no smell. It should have a smell because that indicates to people that the room is clean. Right. So, you know, at the end of the day, I think you can have a pretty mediocre book. And if you have a really good marketing strategy behind it, it&#8217;s going to do a whole lot better than a book that has no marketing and is, you know, the best book in the world. And<\/p>\n<p>You know, so that&#8217;s one of the things I tell authors is like, you know, I know we have a fellow friend, Mike McCallewitz, you he and get different, you know, are you like, you have a responsibility to market if your thing is the best thing on the market. You know, you&#8217;re being selfish by actually not having a marketing plan behind that book. And there&#8217;s a lot of authors would be bestselling authors that get stopped because they&#8217;re, think that marketing their book is beneath them.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (07:05.763)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah. So we&#8217;re, always make a joke of this. We&#8217;re seven minutes in the show. I&#8217;m going to mention AI for the first time. so how is, how is AI affecting in your view, both the written word as well as the, marketing component of, of marketing.<\/p>\n<p>Alex Strathdee (07:14.542)<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s do it.<\/p>\n<p>Alex Strathdee (07:28.844)<\/p>\n<p>I think what it comes down to is brand at the end of the day, you know, there&#8217;s, that&#8217;s one of the big issues on Amazon right now is there&#8217;s a lot of people selling courses for like make a million dollars writing AI created books or whatever have you. Yeah. And it&#8217;s like, you can put those books up there, but you&#8217;re still going to have the same issue that the regular author has, which is to market those books. Like, so I think that<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (07:40.023)<\/p>\n<p>Right, 10 books a day, right, yeah.<\/p>\n<p>Alex Strathdee (07:52.518)<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not afraid of, you know, I think it comes back to your marketing, right? Like if you have a really good marketer who&#8217;s empowered by AI, then maybe they&#8217;ll start moving some AI books, but we&#8217;re starting to look into using tools like make.com to automate like social media creation and posting based on like best practices in the industry. So think make.com is a great low code platform for some people who are a little more tech savvy to start looking at. But I mean, there&#8217;s, lots of ways, you know, like we use chat GPT to write our job descriptions.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (08:14.765)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, yeah.<\/p>\n<p>Alex Strathdee (08:20.44)<\/p>\n<p>You know, like you have someone on your team that takes half a day to write a job description, just ask ChatGPT to ask you for a meta ads expert and hire them in the Philippines, right? So I think there&#8217;s a lot of things that like from on the surface level, ChatGPT can start to really help authors with, you know, where they don&#8217;t have to know how to write a full on job description. They can have ChatGPT do that for them. And then on a deeper level, you can start using platforms like make.com to create workflows and go a little bit deeper with the tools.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (08:20.76)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (08:26.573)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah. Yeah.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (08:48.675)<\/p>\n<p>important do you think it is, particularly I&#8217;m talking about non-fiction books, so business authors, how important do you believe that it is that most authors should also have a course and maybe a certification or a coaching program or something like that that actually comes from the book?<\/p>\n<p>Alex Strathdee (09:06.102)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, and that&#8217;s an interesting, you know, because even fiction and nonfiction have entirely different business models that you&#8217;re working with. Right. And so like one of our first steps with authors is always to figure out what is it you&#8217;re actually trying to achieve with this book? Because, know, someone who has a this is also like something you have to realize when you&#8217;re bidding against people on a lot of the ad platforms like, you know, Amazon.<\/p>\n<p>is oftentimes, especially in the nonfiction niche, you&#8217;re bidding against people who aren&#8217;t trying to make money on book royalties. They&#8217;re trying to sell a twenty thousand hundred thousand dollar course on the back end. So the days of making money through Amazon ads, one of the questions we get a lot. The days of making passive income with Amazon ads is over. They like very few books do that nowadays and very few traditional or self published authors. And I&#8217;m talking about self published to get full royalties are actually at that point in their, you know, in their book journey.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (09:34.967)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, right, Right, right, right, right.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (09:59.181)<\/p>\n<p>So how does somebody who, like in my particular case, by the time I put my first book out, I had a huge email list. I had actually been publishing other stuff online, a blog and all podcasts and all that kind of stuff. So I had a decent live audience. How does somebody who, and let&#8217;s jump to fiction maybe, has no audience and is actually not known for writing Western literature, romance novels, all of sudden writes one. mean, how does that person<\/p>\n<p>Seed some readers.<\/p>\n<p>Alex Strathdee (10:30.466)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, that&#8217;s that&#8217;s a really great question and to to which does mean that it&#8217;s it&#8217;s more challenging. So let me let me try to make this as concise as possible because I could ramble for the next how much time you got, John. So when it comes to starting, I mean, you mentioned the number one thing and the most important thing is always to have a newsletter list. That&#8217;s the one traffic you control. You&#8217;ve had plenty of episodes talking about the importance of that. Right. So.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (10:34.039)<\/p>\n<p>Which means it&#8217;s a hard question.<\/p>\n<p>Alex Strathdee (10:56.654)<\/p>\n<p>When it comes to your email list, one of the best ways and I stand on the shoulders of great marketers, know, so like Tim Grahl, who wrote your first 1000 copies, you know, he has a great way to start your Facebook, you know, your email list through Facebook, just reaching out to your friends and family one by one and saying, hey, I&#8217;m going to start, you know, writing about this topic.<\/p>\n<p>you would you like to come along for the journey? And like, you know, if you&#8217;re running ads, do you know, to your webpage, you might get a conversion rate of like, well, like 3 % on your web on your website. As if you&#8217;re messaging people one by one on Facebook, like start with finding a hundred people to put on your email list, start sending out like a new valuable newsletter each week and happy to dive into that if you want. But you know, I just start with like who the people, you know, and ask them, Hey, here&#8217;s what I&#8217;m going to do. It&#8217;s kind of an experiment. Would you like to join and make that your first 100?<\/p>\n<p>So that&#8217;s the first step. Any questions about like the email list side? I&#8217;m sure you probably were already already on top of that one. And the other way is I&#8217;ll actually use an example of a fictional author, John Strelecki. He&#8217;s the author of a cafe on the edge of the world. He&#8217;s now sold over 8 million books and he, kid you not, just went to chamber of commerce meetings and it hits a, his book is somewhat of a fable.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (11:50.007)<\/p>\n<p>No, no, no, I think, yeah, yeah, we have definitely.<\/p>\n<p>Alex Strathdee (12:11.48)<\/p>\n<p>capable if you haven&#8217;t heard of it&#8217;s kind of like the go giver sort of that situation that has like a deeper meaning to it that&#8217;s easy to pick up on short read. And he went to Chamber of Commerce meetings having one on one conversations with people until he had personally handed out 10,000 copies of his book. He has now sold over 8 million copies of his book. Clearly that worked. And so a genuine conversation you like finding a local group that you can go to and know, hand copies out one by one with a genuine conversation. Now.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (12:14.018)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, yeah.<\/p>\n<p>Alex Strathdee (12:38.286)<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a way you can do this the wrong way and there&#8217;s a way you can do this the right way. And I&#8217;ll use an example, you know, I&#8217;m out here in San Diego, if you couldn&#8217;t tell by the mustache and the long hair. we have namaste yoga, cliff side here on the ocean. You know, can picture it, beautiful blue sky, you know, right? You hear the waves breaking and, you know, a nice way to relax on a Saturday and Sunday morning. And this woman was walking by.<\/p>\n<p>handing out post-it notes that just had nice messages on them. Like, you you&#8217;re pretty or like, you know, you&#8217;re smart or whatever. And on the back of those post-it notes was, you know, a Lincoln invite to grab her book. But like she was starting with value. was like, would you like a positive note? And of course, like, you know, it&#8217;s also her, her audience, right? Like an audience of yogis on a cliffside on a, on a Saturday morning at 10 a.m. is, is her demographic. And you compare that against, I was hosting a barbecue for a friend, you know, here at my, my apartment complex.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (13:20.472)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, yeah.<\/p>\n<p>Right. Yeah.<\/p>\n<p>Alex Strathdee (13:33.534)<\/p>\n<p>And this man, I guess, saw a gathering of us down by the grill and walked down and began telling people about his AI book that we should all go by and read. like most of the people were like service workers, like baristas, no interest in learning about AI. And he&#8217;s like forcing AI on everyone. It was the most uncomfortable situation. So like when you&#8217;re having these conversations, be the first, not the second.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (13:48.653)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (13:57.995)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, that&#8217;s awesome. What would, so if somebody&#8217;s, I know there&#8217;s wide ranges and variances on all kinds of, depends, but if somebody&#8217;s getting started with a nonfiction book, they&#8217;ve got a business as well. They&#8217;re doing a couple of things. What&#8217;s the team, the system, you know, the approach that kind of like they need to be doing this, this, this, this kind of thing.<\/p>\n<p>Alex Strathdee (14:21.646)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, yeah. And I&#8217;m all for systems like one of my favorite marketers, Alan Dibb, know, random acts of marketing don&#8217;t work. That&#8217;s like I will sing that from, you know, the mountaintops until the day I die. And so, you know, having VA&#8217;s is great. You know, I have a whole section. I talk a lot about VA&#8217;s and I know you&#8217;ve covered a lot about VA&#8217;s as well. But the system is start with your high number, break down into the littler numbers, pick out the tools that you&#8217;re you&#8217;re you know, whether it&#8217;s and I&#8217;ve got, you know, a few of the tools that<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (14:37.933)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah.<\/p>\n<p>Alex Strathdee (14:50.114)<\/p>\n<p>you know, we&#8217;ve seen great success with is like free reader seatings, like finding people on LinkedIn. And so having a team member who is actually finding your ideal person on LinkedIn, on Instagram and messaging them one-on-one saying, Hey, we&#8217;ve got this free book. Would you like, you know, a copy of it for free? And most of it&#8217;s like a free gift. Like, yeah, people are all for, you know, I know you&#8217;re a fan of lumpy mail. Like I love lumpy mail. And so, you know, that&#8217;s, that&#8217;s something that works really well. We&#8217;re doing that with like Dan Heath right now that he just launched reset.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (15:09.795)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah. Right.<\/p>\n<p>Alex Strathdee (15:18.586)<\/p>\n<p>And so for him, like that&#8217;s already led to two additional, like one lady wrote back and was like, wow, I&#8217;m going to make this my book for the book, my book club of like 80 people. Right. It&#8217;s like putting yourself a lot of the seating number that you, you pick is putting yourself in a position to get lucky. But like, I find that when it comes down to systems, a lot of the research is, can be outsourced. So like finding those people on LinkedIn, messaging those people on LinkedIn, like you don&#8217;t have the time to be there messaging these people one-on-one. and the great thing is, you know, like you mentioned, these people have businesses.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (15:26.381)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah. Yeah.<\/p>\n<p>Alex Strathdee (15:48.48)<\/p>\n<p>If they have, know, like you&#8217;re essentially sending them like your business card at the same time, like your, your guess, you know, you, it&#8217;s a, yeah, you got to pay for shipping and handling or whatever. even traditionally published authors will oftentimes be able to get a deal with their publisher for like six bucks. Always look at your, author, author copy price if you&#8217;re a traditionally published author, but, yeah.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (15:53.272)<\/p>\n<p>Yes.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (16:06.307)<\/p>\n<p>Well, would also tell you those books cost them nothing. I always negotiated a thousand bucks that they gave me.<\/p>\n<p>Alex Strathdee (16:12.053)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah. Good. That&#8217;s great. Yeah. That&#8217;s I&#8217;m going to start using that. That&#8217;s really smart. I didn&#8217;t know you could, you could get away with that. But, yeah, having people who are doing the researching and the messaging, I think like anytime you&#8217;re doing cold researching or cold messaging, like that&#8217;s a great opportunity to start bringing in an assistant for that stuff.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (16:31.245)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, and that kind of thing can be had, you know, fairly inexpensively. I want to go back something you just touched on a little bit, putting yourself in a position to get lucky. I know you spent a lot of time in the book on that. You&#8217;ve even got a couple examples in the book. You want to share any Oprah moments?<\/p>\n<p>Alex Strathdee (16:48.21)<\/p>\n<p>One of my favorite stories and a lot of people don&#8217;t know this is Robert Kiyosaki. Everyone&#8217;s heard of Rich Dad Poor Dad, right? So what a lot of people don&#8217;t know is that is how that book became the best selling personal finance book of all time. And the way it was done was Robert called up his buddy who owned a car wash and he said, hey, do you mind if I sell some copies of Rich Dad Poor Dad in your car wash? And his buddy was like, sure, whatever.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (16:54.147)<\/p>\n<p>Sure. Yeah.<\/p>\n<p>Alex Strathdee (17:14.026)<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s he is a bookstore of one at that point. There is no you know, like customers are looking over at you know, at air fresheners to buy while they&#8217;re waiting for their car to get washed or they&#8217;re using the unusable bathrooms that you know at car washes and Then they walk, know to the over the cashier and wow, it&#8217;s this personal finance book. Let me pick that up I have a little time. Let me read it and So one of the people who happened to walk through that car wash was one of the founders of Amway<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (17:17.315)<\/p>\n<p>You<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (17:34.477)<\/p>\n<p>Right.<\/p>\n<p>Alex Strathdee (17:40.534)<\/p>\n<p>Now not talking about, whether Amway is a good company or what you think about, you know, rich divorce or anything, but the person picked this book up and loved it so much that he then took it to the other executives. And he&#8217;s like, this is a powerful tool for us to educate and empower our people. so Amway started to fly Robert Kiyosaki all around the country to speak at events. And that book quickly became their Bible. And he found his micro community, a lot of<\/p>\n<p>Authors will find their micro community early on. Like Mike McAuliffe did this with Profit First. He was speaking on college campuses and kids were taking home those books on spring break and moms were picking up those books and reading and fixing their company&#8217;s finances or the company business or the family business. And that was his following. And he never meant for the book to find its way to those people. yeah, mean, putting yourself in a position to get lucky is what a lot of that picking your number to begin with is doing.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (18:33.911)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah. And really the seating probably, I mean, you have no idea who it&#8217;s going to, I mean, maybe you targeted somebody, but you have no idea who, what their circle of influence is. And I think that&#8217;s, just becomes a numbers game at that point as you&#8217;re, as you&#8217;re kind of stressing, isn&#8217;t it?<\/p>\n<p>Alex Strathdee (18:49.41)<\/p>\n<p>And that&#8217;s why people will be like, give away my book for free. it&#8217;s like, well, first of all, a lot of people will put their book up for expensive on launch. And it&#8217;s like, yeah, their mom buys it, their cousin buys it, their son buys it. But at end of the day, are you actually solving for any of those people? that&#8217;s a big part. Are you actually solving the problem of any of those people? And so that&#8217;s a big part of it is your number has to consist of people whose problem you&#8217;re actually solving for. Because if you&#8217;re not, then no one&#8217;s going to get excited about your book.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (18:53.111)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (19:18.979)<\/p>\n<p>It was a book that I actually had the author on here. He has since passed away, but called Giftology by John Ruhlman. And he did what I thought was a really interesting thing. His book was published by a publisher, but he talked to publisher into letting him create a special edition of the book. It was hard bound, like kind of leather, you know, had, you know, gold lettering on it. And, you know, he sent out like 4,000 of those.<\/p>\n<p>And it was in this really incredible package and it just, people couldn&#8217;t not talk about it. And it just really launched his book because he just got so much word of mouth before anybody had really read it just by the presentation.<\/p>\n<p>Alex Strathdee (19:59.598)<\/p>\n<p>Packages can be a really fun way to do it. Brian Johnson, who recently really released art and actually sent giftology funny enough, like two weeks ago, I had a partnership and I was like this, like do this. So it&#8217;s funny that you bring that up. the yeah, and he sent if you&#8217;re going to send this is a little like, you know, people love these small little things. If if you&#8217;re going to do T-shirts, John, make them the softest, most comfortable T-shirt you&#8217;ve you&#8217;ve ever worn so that people actually wear it. I have so.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (20:03.094)<\/p>\n<p>Eh.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (20:08.738)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, yeah, yeah.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (20:21.091)<\/p>\n<p>Right.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (20:26.049)<\/p>\n<p>Yep.<\/p>\n<p>Alex Strathdee (20:27.096)<\/p>\n<p>Bryan Johnson sent me two of the literally softest shirts I own and they&#8217;ve become my travel shirts. So I have walked through about like 30 airports wearing these shirts and been a walking billboard for this guy. So that&#8217;s like, if you&#8217;re going to do like shirts for your book, make sure the title is on there and make them the softest that you could possibly make them.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (20:32.523)<\/p>\n<p>You<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (20:46.403)<\/p>\n<p>Love it. Love it. Well, Alex, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Where would you invite people to connect with you and find out more about before the bestseller?<\/p>\n<p>Alex Strathdee (20:56.204)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, I&#8217;m always up for a conversation. know, we pride ourselves in like just having very honest conversations with authors and kind of like where they&#8217;re at. We prefer to work with authors for years. So if we don&#8217;t think like an engagement is going to work out for more than like a small period of time, then like we&#8217;ll tell you that. Yeah, reach out to us. Our website is get shelf life dot com. Feel free to shoot me an email if you have a question about book marketing. Alex at get shelf life dot com.<\/p>\n<p>And yeah, check out our book before the best seller on Amazon now.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (21:27.267)<\/p>\n<p>Well, again, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by. Hopefully we&#8217;ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.<\/p>\n<p>Alex Strathdee (21:32.952)<\/p>\n<p>This is a bucket list item, John. Thanks for having me on.<\/p>\n<p>John Jantsch (21:35.395)<\/p>\n<p>You<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"fbxt-content--footer\">\n\t\t\t\t<a href=\"#\"><\/p>\n<p>\t\t\t\t\t<span class=\"fbxt-nav-text\">Scroll back to top<\/span><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n<div class=\"fbxt-modal fbxt-email-signup\">\n<h4>\n\t\t\t\t\tSign up to receive email updates<br \/>\n\t\t\t\t<\/h4>\n<p>\n\t\t\t\t\tEnter your name and email address below and I&#8217;ll send you periodic updates about the podcast.\n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<div class=\"fbxt-email-response-text\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"fbxt-name-fields\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"fbxt-signup-fields\"><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div class=\"fbxt-credits\">\n\t\t<span>powered by<\/span><br \/>\n\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/fusebox.fm\"><\/p>\n<p>\t\t<\/a>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Your Book Launch Needs a Marketing Plan written by Jarret Redding read more at Duct&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":583,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-podcast"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hudsonpcrepair.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hudsonpcrepair.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hudsonpcrepair.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hudsonpcrepair.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hudsonpcrepair.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=581"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.hudsonpcrepair.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":584,"href":"http:\/\/www.hudsonpcrepair.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581\/revisions\/584"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hudsonpcrepair.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hudsonpcrepair.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hudsonpcrepair.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hudsonpcrepair.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}