023: Become a Published Author This Week Using Kindle and CreateSpace

Robert Plank 0:01 Robert Plank Show, Episode 23 how to become a published author this week, using Kindle and create space. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to this exciting, action packed thrill ride of the Robert Plank show. We're gonna be talking about how to create a book, a physical print book that you can hold in your hand, you can give out as a business card anyone else and hold it in their hand, and you can have it done in an hour and have it online and selling and able to purchase this week sounds crazy. Sounds like a huge promise, but that is the reality. And I'm sorry if that upsets you or angers you, but there is a system that actually exists out there. But I created plantro, my business partner also created. It's called makeup product.com and I'm gonna be telling you all about that today. So here's the thing is, you know, over the last couple of episodes of this podcast, and also, you know, just the last few weeks in my, you know, internet career, personally, I've been thinking a lot about, you know, this whole idea of legitimacy and of being someone who, who doesn't get passed over, who's seen as, you know, the expert in a certain subject. And, you know, in my case, where we sell membership courses, we sell WordPress plugins, I'm always just thinking about, well, how do I just have that slight edge compared to most of my competitors? And if I just think about it for a second, well, you know, I look at, you know, like the backup plugin we have, or the sales that are plugged in we have, or the membership course that we have. Well, I just think for a second I say, Well, you know, here's this other, you know, maybe even more widely known, a more household name of a plugin. Well, do they have a blog? Or can you think of the name of that, that products created right off the bat, and do they have a blog? Do they have a podcast? They have a book? And most of the time, the answer is no, and that's why, when you look a year or two in the future, that competitor is gone, and now a lot of the times, the competitor leaves and someone else comes up in their place. But I'm just thinking, as far as you know, in my case and in your case, how can we set something up and that whole cliche of do the work once, have a payoff over and over for years to come. Well, how can we do this once and keep our legitimacy and not have to keep fighting for it the way that all of our competitors do in the big answer that is a book, especially because not everyone has a book. Why? Because it's tough, because it used to be tough, and because a lot of people take, you know, a year or longer if the book even gets completed. So what if, in just one hour, in just 60 minutes, you know, whatever the time is right now, in just one hour from now, if you had a book that you could, you know, put out there, and you have to wait for it to get approved, takes maybe a few hours or a couple of days, and then, boom, it's online, it's ready to go. That would be pretty darn powerful. And I mean, I've done all kinds of crazy stuff with books. I've gone to offline events with a box of my books and just handed them out as business cards. I have put things in my email follow up sequence so that if someone was new to hearing about me, and if someone was getting my emails for the first time, we've talked in previous episodes about this whole idea of an opt in page, a free gift page. Maybe you filled some of these outward. You go to someone's website, and you go to a web page, and there's not really anything to buy quite yet, but there is, they're offering a free gift and they say, well, here's this short report, here's the software plug in, or here's this video. All I'm asking in return is your email address, that way I can send it to you, and we can keep up to date about what's going on. And so when people fill that in, and you might do things like solo ads, giveaway events, you know, run Pay Per Click ads, you know, get affiliates to mail a few things like that, and you might get, you know, hundreds or 1000s of your subscribers. But some of those subscribers are just never going to purchase anything that's just a fact. And other subscribers, a very, very tiny amount, are going to buy things without much effort at all. But then there's that, that big middle gap, and that that middle class, basically, they might buy from you, but they need a little bit more encouragement. And I found that one of the best ways to get people to listen to me, listen to my emails, is to get them to reply and talk to me. And I mean, so few people do that. So someone comes to your website, they fill in this free gift page, this often page, the squeeze page, and then they get on your list. And what usually happens is, well, people, you know, start sending emails out, or they stop for a few months and but even if emails are sent out, it's pretty much one way. But if you send out emails asking about their business, asking about you know what's going on for them specifically. So if you teach weight loss, you can ask about how things have been for them. With weight loss, you teach option trading, how things have been going with them on the stock market, and just getting a response and what. Because I found it even more fun, is saying, Well, I've got a print book, and I want to physically send you a copy of this book in the mail so you can hold it in your hands. And, you know, most people won't reply to that, just because, I mean, the way that this numbers game works is that of very few people actually take you up on anything. And you know, it's kind of encouraging or discouraging in a way, because out of all the people who buy from you, a huge chunk aren't even going to go through that your training. I mean, that's just a fact. A huge, huge chunk of people who opt into your email list are not going to read your emails. That's just a fact. But those that do are those that participate. Those are your red hot leads. So if you can get people to reply to you, and you can say, just reply to me with your physical mailing address, and I'll send you a book in the mail from me for free. And don't ask me pay for five bucks shipping or anything like that. Just say, you know, all eat the cost of making the book, of shipping the book. Just give me your address. And so, you know, every now and then I do this, and I have about, you know, two or 300 books to send out, and have to go in there and spend, you know, an hour or so manually entering them into this site called Create space. But if, I mean, if you put your mailbox and you got a book in your hand, and some of you have from Robert Plank, I mean, you're not just gonna throw that away. You're not just gonna throw away a book. And, I mean, some of you might have my book on your bookshelf, and you know, I'm not going to go away at that point. On that point, I've got that edge over so many of my competitors, and that's what I want for you, is no matter what industry niche or product that you have, I want you to have a book in order to promote you. So I mean, this conversation keeps coming up over and over again. Lance and I had a discussion a few months ago with someone who does Search Engine Optimization SEO Services. He goes into businesses and says, you know, I can rank you number one for Turlock dentist, or, what do we say Modesto divorce lawyer in a past episode. So this person ranks businesses highly in the search engines. Now, what might trip him up? Well, if, and I think a big one, is just the lack of knowledge, not really understanding how important this internet thing is, not really. I mean, a lot of people, you'd be surprised, don't even get the idea of search engine ranking. They don't even give a second thought to when they search something in Google that you have some kind of control over who gets ranked number one, and that if I'm looking for I mean thinking back, like every time I've looked for any one new lawyer, dentist, Doctor, I looked on Google first, and more often than not, I didn't click past page one, And if I couldn't find a legitimate website, legitimate reviews, I didn't click over. I'm looking for a new restaurant to go to. I go to Google. I'm looking for an address, a picture of the outside of the inside. And so few people know about this. So if, in that person's case, and this person wrote a 20 page book, which I know I just said a couple scary things there, right? Writing, oh my gosh, I've got to write stuff. I can't even write a sentence, and then 20 pages. Are you nuts? That's like a college thesis. Well, there's going to be answers to all those things and more. But if you could just, I mean, here's the thing, if you were that person, and you talked on the phone for one hour, which sounds like a lot, but I mean, maybe 1020, minutes, a few times, and explained what it is that you do. And if you're in the right line of work, right, if you're if you're doing what your passion is, then it's hard to shut you up. And if there's persons niche was search engine rankings, and they had a 20 page book, and let's not worry too much yet about what kind of effort it takes to make that book. But just they had a 20 page, you know, six inch by nine inch kind of books, not really like a pocket book, but also not a full sized just like a regular books or bookstore sized book. So they had a book about talking about search engine rankings and about the different things that they do. Like, well, you know, if you're this kind of business, well, you can do these things like, you know, put out articles, YouTube videos, do on page, SEO and optimize your keywords and your meta tags, and get back links. And you can, you know, add good reviews and remove bad reviews. And you can get listed on Yelp, Google Places, Facebook, places, Yellow Pages,

Robert Plank 9:33 different kind of strategies, like, you know, encouraging your customers to go there and rewarding them for leaving even reviews things like how you can build a mailing list by having a landing page or an opt in page on your own local businesses website. So a book basically educating people about the possibilities, and then the punch line, the pitch at the end of the book, and hopefully throughout the book, is to hide. Hire this guy. So what ends up happening is, if he's going out looking for a new business, well, then he can just go into a place with a copy of his book. And you know, if they, if you know they need to get back to him, or they're not sure, or they just can't meet with him, instead of leaving a business card or a contact information, you leave a book. And I mean, I don't know if you've heard about these people who talk about, you know, becoming an expert, becoming an authority. If you're the person who wrote the book on the subject, you're automatically the author, all this other stuff and and that's all good. But the problem that I see with people who are teaching, and it's not everyone, it's a very small number of people, but a lot of people who teach, you know, becoming an author, writing a book, publishing a book, there's a few problems there. One is that, well, these people who teach writing a book, they don't really have a product of their own. I look up their book and their last book was published two or three years ago. Sometimes I had a print sometimes I can't even find a book that they've put out. And even then, the book that they've put out has a very, very low sales ranking on Amazon. So I can tell that they don't really, you know, sell that many copies. Or they'll talk about things like, you know, getting your book published in bookstores. And then I go to the bookstore and I can't find their book. So I see some amount of hypocrisy and and so here's, I don't know, here's just the way I see things like book publishing is that, let's say, pre 2010 it was really competitive, really tough to get your book and bookstores and then post 2010 It's still tough, but it's easier than ever to get listed on the site called amazon.com which is where most of us get our books anyway. So what a lot of people don't know is that Amazon has a site, one of their sub companies called createspace.com and you can go to the site, and you can upload a Word document, just like a normal word processor kind of document, and you can have a book that Amazon prints and sells. And you can do this for free, and they take a cut. And it really depends on, you know, how how big your book is, on how much of a cut they take. But I mean, generally, I mean it costs them, let's just say, you know, for a good sized book, maybe between four to $8 for, you know, a soft cover book between 50 and 400 pages. I think I have, I think I have a really thin book, like a 30 page book that maybe costs $2 for them to print, and then, you know, $4 or something for them to ship it out the door. And then I have a 400 page book that it sells for 10 bucks, but only making $1 per books, which ironically, is what you end up getting for the traditional publisher. And I mean, also going back to what a lot a lot of what they tell you about as far as book publishing, is that no matter who you publish with, whether self publish or someone else, they always depend on you to do the marketing. So, you know, everyone always thinks that, oh, I just gotta get post. I just gotta have a book. I'll be a millionaire, you know, I'll be just like these people who are on the New York Times bestseller list, and it's like, Well, you probably won't get there. And it's not just a free ride. And a lot of people don't realize that. Well, the book being finished and published, that's just the beginning. Now you have to get your name out there, and if you don't have an upsell in the book, if you don't, if you're not a little bit more strategic about the book, well then good luck to you. So I mean all that aside, I mean, I'm not trying to claim that I'm some big, knowledgeable book publisher. Time are recording this. I have six books out, you know, all in print and also on the Kindle store. So an Amazon, they have a physical place for books called Create space, and then they have a digital bookstore called Kindle. And, you know, Kindle is like the Amazon sells like a book reader. An actual device is kind of like a tablet, like an iPad, you can buy it, and people can then, you know, digitally buy books and read them on their digital reader. But what also a lot of people don't know is that there's a sub company called Kindle Direct Publishing, I think, and once again, you can upload that same Word document that you use for create space on the Kindle. And now if someone wants to get a physical copy of your book, they can, and if they want to download a digital copy of your book they can so I mean, there's all kinds of places we could go, as far as book publishing, but what I want to focus on today is how to get your book done, how to get it finished in an hour. And I mean, I don't want you to spend the year making a book. I don't want you to spend six months making a book. I don't want you to spend one month making the book. I want it done this week. And if we just limit ourselves to a very thin business card, kind of book, well, then I think that we can, we can all have a lot of fun there, especially if you already have something for sale, if you already have a service, if you already have a software product, if you already have a membership site, then you can just make a book kind of. Life, not really as an extended sales letter, but a book that educates the mass market, educates the newbies to what they need to know about your weight loss course. And the real punchline, the real goodies is the software. Is the system inside your membership site. You just teach everything but that. So, for example, I have a book, one of my short ones, called set up a point and click website, and it's on Amazon. If you search my name, Robert Plank on amazon.com you'll find the book. And this book, it's very short. It's very simple. It talks about how to grab a domain name web hosting, how to set up a WordPress website, and then how to use our backup creator plugin to save a backup and then make a clone, make a copy of the website. So the punchline of that book is to go out there and buy backup create. Now, this book costs $2.15 to create. So if I want to get 100 copies coffee, 200 bucks plus shipping, but they ship it all, you know, in the same giant box to me, and then I can just hand out copies of this book. So that's the first thing I want to get to with the one hour book. Is that you need to think bigger. Most of our most of us have this problem where we just solve one tiny problem, or we just think about, well, I'm going to write a book about Microsoft Word, about Microsoft Office, or about Microsoft Excel after be my book. And the problem is that, well, there's already books written about Microsoft Excel. A lot of them are really boring. How are you different? How are you unique? How are you breath of fresh air, a brand new, unique twist on the subject. And so why doing that? You need to think bigger. You know, I don't want to call it any individual person out, but accountants, right? There's all these different subjects, even in things like accounting. And this one particular accountant had an idea for product, about how to run payroll in your small business. And it's like, well, is that? Is that a problem that needs solving? Well, possibly, but if you can just think a little bit bigger and say, you know, and make your book like a complete guide on on how to, how to manage your finances without an accountant, or like the I don't know, like the one hour accountant, or the the three hour accountant, or things like that. Well, then and that included a piece on payroll, a piece on I don't know, petty cash, you know, a piece on bookkeeping, a piece on taxes. Well, then that is something that feels more well rounded, and you can it just it feels more complete. And then what you pitch throughout the book is in your course on how you can see it all in action, how you can get all my tools and templates and forms and things like that. So the one hour book, all right, talking for a whole hour sounds really crazy, sounds really scary, but what you end up with, and I don't have the exact math here, but if you talk for an hour, you end up with about 9000 or 10,000 words, which end up to be about 30 pages for a book. So one hour is is a good length, because it doesn't take you all day, and it is kind of a short book, but if you want to go back and double the size of that book later on, you can go back and just carve out an hour somewhere in your day, speak out another part of the book, and then now you have a 60 page book. And I mean, I don't know about you, but I really like the idea of getting something out there, getting paid for it, making it better, getting paid again, making it better, getting paid again, as opposed to what I see so many people do, where they get an idea, they make it better, make it better, make it better, make it better, make it better to maybe get paid way, way, way down the road, or maybe not. At least this way, we can try some things out, and if it's a hot seller, we can just do more of that. So an hour sounds scary until I tell you about our system, which, once again, is inside the members area of make product.com and there's no time to get into all the exact minor, minute details of that, but we pretty much have you outlined. We have a system for figuring out the seven best chapters in your book. So we think of all right, well, if I got one hour to talk, I've got seven chapters, they only, only give you about eight minutes to talk about each subject. So if you had eight minutes, if you were an accountant, you have eight minutes to talk about how to run payroll. Well, I mean, you would have to hustle just to get that eight minutes fit in there. If

Robert Plank 19:23 I'm making a product about how to set up a point click website, and I only have eight minutes to explain how to get a domain name and web hosting, well, I better hurry. If I only have eight minutes to explain how to set up a WordPress site, then I better hurry. If I only have eight minutes to explain how to create content for that site, I better hurry. So are you starting to realize that if we put ourselves a little bit under the gun, a little bit under pressure, then we just make this book eight minutes at a time. We just sit down for exactly one hour. We just go make the chapter. Make chapter. Make chapter. I'm done. We speak it out, get it transcribed later. Then that is a book that we can come up with in about one hour. So you have this idea for a book, you say, Well, I don't know if this is something people want, or I need to flesh out a few ideas, or I'm worried that I might leave a few things out of the book. Well, this is where we come into play, this thing called role modeling. And we can also call it spying on our competitors. So what you do is, and I'll just go do it with you. You go to amazon.com, all right, this is the biggest bookstore in the world, and we just search, and we try to find maybe the top three competitors in our niche. So here's the other thing. Is that if you can't describe your niche, what you do your book in 30 seconds, and you're in trouble. All right, I teach people how to set up a point and click Website. That's my, my one sentence, I guess, elevator speech, when people they can't even explain me what it is they do, or I say, Well, can you, can you name me a book that's similar to what it is that you do? You know? Like, if you could tell me that your your book was like, Good to Great meets for work week, or if you're like, E Myth meets Chicken Soup for the Soul, well, now we're talking but if you say this is something that came and be described, well then I'm not interested. So let's just say that we're going to search Amazon, and I'm going to type in on the front page accounting, and then once that comes up, I'm going to limit my search to just books. Okay, so the accountant comes up when I see things like accounting made simple accounting explained in 100 pages or less. I'm seeing accounting for Dummies, a step by step guide to understanding and creating financial reports. So I'm just gonna open up a couple of those in a new tab, and we're gonna look at a few things, and we're gonna see, first of all, what is in the table of contents. So the good thing about Amazon is that if you click on the cover of each book, you can usually spy in on the table of contents. And out of the three I just picked, looks like two of them. Oh no, all three. I can click over and get to the table of contents. And then we don't want to, you know, take a lot of notes. We just kind of see what keeps popping up in our face over and over. And I'm seeing things like reporting cash flows, managing profit lenders and investors, financial reports. Honestly, I don't know what most of the stuff means, but that's okay, you know, if this is your niche than you do. I'm seeing and then the other book, 12 basic principles, balance sheet income statement, cash flow statement, seeing another on the other book, accounting equation. Balance sheet income statement, save and retain earnings, cash flow statement, financial ratios. So you see that even looking at the top three books, they all pretty much I mean, they'd probably be very similar if you knew what you were looking at, so we can see, okay, well, they whatever income statement and the cash flow statement is, you know, these are all things that we need to make sure that we include in our accounting book. Let me just do something that I'm a little more familiar with, WordPress. I search for WordPress books. I see WordPress for beginners, WordPress to go WordPress, the missing manual. I'm going to click on each one, and I'm going to go to the table of contents for each one. It looks like they're all available. And, I mean, we don't want to even bother with reading the book because, I mean, hopefully we already know about this subject. And I don't want to, I don't want to get their ideas in my head and and end up ripping them off. I just want to make sure that, you know, I'm covering all the stuff that's important and that. And you know, if the top three books always cover these same topics, that's something that you know we definitely should look into. So WordPress for beginners talks about owning your own site, domain names, installing WordPress, cleaning out stuff, updates, settings, Appearance, Plugins, comments, categories, writing posts. WordPress to go talks about registering domain install. WordPress how to log in, how to add content, posts, images, video, home page, search engine optimization. Wordpress, the missing manual says how to sign up, how to install, creating posts, theme pages, menus, comments, plugins, video and music and collaborating with authors, traffic and then advanced topics. So we know and and I know that when I created my book on WordPress, I didn't even think about

Robert Plank 24:17 talking about a domain name or getting a website set up. And I realized, well, duh, because let's think about this too. We don't know who's finding our book. How they're finding our book. They might just be someone with a casual passing interest in setting up a website. They might not know about WordPress. So we need to make sure that we're getting everyone up to speed as fast as possible. So I want you to do that, and I want you to just look at your top three books in your industry, and obviously we're not going to copy we're not going to everybody went off. We're going to have our own unique spin and twist on it. We want to see what's already out there so that we can do a little bit better than that. So we do this thing called role modeling, and we look at what they all are doing in the table. Look. Contents, and then for a little bit later, we also look at the covers. And we say, we try to figure out, what are the covers have in common? What do they have? What don't they have? Do they will have similar colors? So do they all have, like, an orange cover or a blue cover? Or do they all have giant print or, you know, do that is the picture on the cover, like a solid color or two colors, or a drawing or cartoon or a an actual photograph. What are those covers all have in common? So those are things that are going to be very important to flesh out our seven chapters. And once again, in makeup product, we have a really cool, unique way of you, basically piling on all this stuff and then drilling down to the most important things, and then structuring each of those chapters so that eight minutes is no problem for you to speak it out. And the other thing too is that talking to nothing, talking to the wall, talking to your computer, is so awkward at first, but there's this thing, like, I keep trying to figure out what to call it, but let's just call it the speaking muscle. Okay, so if you're at a practice and you're not used to recording audios, podcasts, you know, speaking from stage, doing webinars, things like that, well, if you're not in in good form, if you haven't done it in a month, it's gonna be awkward at first, but you do it on a regular basis, do it a couple times a month, even for 1020 minutes, and then it's no problem Just talking about what it is you're gonna be talking about. So you get the speaking muscle figured out so that whatever you want to say, you just say it. And then your book is just it's written the same way you talk. And it's written just, you just said it right the first time, instead of having to go and find the best Turner phrase and the most cutesy way of putting things, now you just speak it out. And now you're talking in very simple language. So here's what you do. You speak out your one hour audio. You don't go back, you don't start over, you don't edit, you don't take out the Gump. You just talk for one hour. And then we give you a template and make a product for someone to type up that audio to transcribe it. You get that and if it needs a little cleaning up. Then we also give you a template to hire an editor to go and proofread and make it better. We show you where to go to get a cover designs, because when you put out a book, you need two things the interior, like the word document and the cup. It costs $5 to get your cover made. We show you where to do that. Then, now that you're done, you upload your Word document and your cover to Kindle, so you have digital copy the Word document and the cover to create space so there's the physical copy. And once those are approved, you just promote the heck out of it. You send your email subscribers to it, you post on your fan page, you run ads, you do these things called free promotions. You do everything that you can to get as many eyeballs looking at your book as possible and get as many sales. And then the idea there is that your book climbs on the rankings. You can leverage that to promote your book more. And then many of those people will end up on your list going to your websites or buying your course. And I know whenever I talk about doing things fast or doing things leverage in that way, like speaking on a book, I get a lot of flack. People saying, Well, you have to suffer, you have to spend a year, and you have to be careful about every single word that ends up in your book. Well, no, you don't. You just need to say the things that'll solve people's problems. We're not trying to be William Shakespeare here. We're talking about non fiction. We're not talking about fiction. We're talking about well, if people have this kind of problem, they don't know how to do basic accounting, they don't know how to set up a WordPress blog, and they can't lose weight, they don't know how to trade stocks. And you make your book talking about that with the ulterior motive that they will then seek you out, because now you know what you're talking about. When I got started as a programmer, it was hard to find a work. But then as soon as as I put out a digital book, I had my own products. Well, then people were finding me, and I had to start turning people away. So it's easy now to get a print book made. So if you have that 20 page written document, you might as well get a physical version made. And even with CreateSpace, there's an option, an upsell for what's called expanded distribution, for, I think, 25 bucks, where technically bookstores and universities can then order copies of your book. It shows up in this catalog. It doesn't mean that, you know, magically, your book will show up in every bookstore, but they will be able to order your book if people request it. So let's switch gears a little bit, and let's figure out what kind of book that you want to create. Because, I mean, you see a lot of books out there, and I mean, the one that that's really easy to do, but kind of scary is this thing called an interview book. So what I did at one point was, you know, when my early attempts are, I don't say 10. So one of my early books, you know, I just wanted to make something that was really fast and easy, where I didn't have to do a lot of work. So what you can do is find 10 experts in your niche. Okay, so, you know, 10 accountants, 10 a. Wordpress geeks, 10 graphic designers, 10 people who I don't know, work at freelance sites from home, 10 realtors, think, 10 people who built their business, 10 college dropouts, you know, 10 people. And what you do is you just tell them that you want to, you interview them, put them in a book, and then you'd be surprised at how many people say that they want to do it. And my book was, is called secret conversations with internet millionaires. Once again, you can go to amazon.com, search me, Robert Plank, and find this book. And you know, out of all those early couple of books that I created. And people told me that that one, that interview book, was the the most of a page turner, the one where they started reading it and just couldn't put it down, just because, you know, even if it was, even if it was talking about something they didn't really like, well, then in a couple of pages, well, then now it's on some other topic. And I interviewed people about copywriting, people about running offline events, people about building a list. So you, I mean, that's the job, is that you yourself don't have to be an expert in all these things. And in fact, you can seek people out who filled those knowledge gaps that you yourself haven't filled. And I mean, honestly, if you want to interview me for a book, just send me an email at Roberts, at Robert plank.com, and I can't guarantee all agree, but I mean, we all love to get that extra exposure, to get our name out there. And that's the reason these people did it, is because I, you know, put their picture on there, put their name on there, put their website on there, and at the end of the interview, asked them, you know, where people could find them, you know, I went in there knowing about the four questions I was gonna ask. We basically just had a 20 minute conversation talking about what it is that they did. So you do the math, 20 minutes times 10 interviewees, that's three hours of content. That's a very healthy sized book. So that's a good, you know, first book to have. The only problem with that is it does take a while to get enough guesses to follow up with people, get them scheduled, show up and record it. But it is, I think everyone in any niche should have an interview book, just because you can get yourself associated with the other names. And when people search the names of those other people who are in your interview book, they will find your book as well. So if you do an interview book, The other kind of book that I tried is what Lance and I call a bathroom book. So this is those books where there is, you know, 70 ways of doing this, 100 ways doing that. And I actually wanted to create a book called 100 time savers, 100 ways to save time. So the idea here was that, well, I'm going to list 100 things, and even if they only save you one minutes per day, and you only use 10 of those things out of the 100, you save yourself 10 minutes a day. What does that add up to over the course of a week, a year, your entire life. So what I did there was I, I sat down and I thought of, I tried to think of 100 tips on my own, kind of ran out of gas, did a Google search, found a couple more. Emailed my list, found a few more. And then, you know, sifted through these and just figured out, well, out of these 100 Can I categorize them into 10 categories to make them more bite sized? And then that was pretty much each chapter. So 10 chapters, and if I'm can think correctly, 100 time savers had had a section on how to save time before work, how to save time after work, how to save time at the office, how to save time at night, how to save time. Email wise, how to save time, technology wise. So I used a program called free mind. That's f, R, E, E, M, I, N, D, and that's, you know, you can search that. It's a free tool where you can just create thought bubbles and then drag and drop and rearrange them and categorize them. So you take 100 things, categorizing the 10 categories, and then, boom, now you have 100 tips. And even if you only talked about each tip for half a page, easily, now a 50 page book. So that's kind of getting there. But, I mean, does 100 tips help people? Maybe, kinda, but it's not like a It's not like a best seller, quality type of book. So we kind of mentioned an interview book that's okay, but not the best, a bathroom book that's okay, but not the best, a business card book, where we already talked about that one, where it's just talks about your skills. So if you are an SEO consultant, then you can think about where are your top few skills, and then write a book about that and just explain everything it is that you do, because it's one thing for someone to know how to do something quite know to do it right. Like, I mean, you might know how to dig a ditch, but would you rather dig the ditch? Even if you're super strong or super skilled or just pay someone else to dig the ditch, you might know. How to build a house. But wouldn't be better just to say, Here you go. Can you build the house for me? So a huge chunk of your buyers, especially if you have a proprietary course or a service, they're going to hire you based on your book or based on your training. They're going to see if you know what it is you're talking about. If you know, in my case, you know how to increase conversions on a sales letter, how to make a membership site and then just hire you to set it up for them. So types of books, interview book, bathroom book, business card book, showing your skills. But you know, I don't want to give you like, 20 types of books. These are the top four, and we just talked about three. Now, what's the one you should do? What's the best one? Well, it is basically a disguised sales letter for your product or for your course. So this makes it really simple. If you have a course on webinars, you write a book about webinars, and the book basically just talks about, it's like the newbie level material, but it doesn't reveal, you know, any of the exact systems. It gets close. It doesn't give away the exact software. It doesn't show things in video, because we can't, because we're limited by the book. But we we give away so much stuff and so many things that other people leave out that were the best book on that subject. So we wanted the sky sales letter for your product, for your course. So if I have a course about video, well, then I have a book that explains the best way a book can about this with video or this technique, or this camera or this software. But you know, and we go into as much detail as a book will allow us, so this is a good time for us to open up on this thing called a hook, which is what a lot of people leave out when they're talking about creating any kind of content or creating a book. And if you know this one idea, then I guarantee this will change the way that you create everything from now on. Before we get to that, I want to name a couple of names. Give a couple of shout outs people who have liked the Robert Plank show by going to Robert Plank show.com and clicking the like button on Facebook, just like Jimmy Davis of italiano Estrella Sam Hamilton, Adrian, Ashley Marco, Ochoa, Dirks, Moran Berg, Tony felicidario, Orlando, Mannix Andy Bernhard, George Shara lamp kiss, Mark Stewart, Jerome Kennon wazewski, Abdullah Kamal, George gills, Holly had George Andrea Felder, Earl Reiser, Jim Yarborough, Edgar Leon Mansour Ahmed Stu builder, Mike Taylor, Rob mamore, John Blanton, Edward ogekon, Dr Amit PARIKH Fukuda, a showy Muhammad Ali Wow, guanon, Juran Jura, Michael mustakus and Caleb schleichan, sorry if I butchered your name, I sound like I butchered about half People on there, but nevertheless, like us on Facebook, and we will mention you in a future episode of the Robert Plank show, just like we did just now. So hook. You might have heard this term thrown around, and this is basically where, if you're talking about WordPress, webinars, real estate Excel, that's boring. We want to focus on what, not just what people get. I mean, if you've heard about, well, you should not talk about features. You can talk about benefits. That's almost there. But we want to focus on the part that really excites people, the part that gets people to buy your book, to read it, and you don't always know what that is. And so, I mean, for example, with our our plugin called backup creator, people get excited not just about the backups, but about the cloning part of it. And WordPress, people get excited not just about all the things you can do, but just that you can click around and make a site from scratch without having to edit code. So this is where the spying comes in, and this is where you already having a product comes in. Because if you know the thing that gets people to just jump out of their chair and buy from you, then that's what you can focus on. And that's why we look at our competitors and try to figure out, you know what, what it is they talked about. And even if we go back to WordPress, I searched WordPress, looked at my top three competitors. I'm going to list out the titles of each one because they didn't have just the title, but they had a colon and a subtitle as well. The first one is called WordPress for beginners, a visual step by step guide to creating your own WordPress site in record time, starting from zero. The next one is WordPress to go how to build a WordPress website on your own domain from scratch, even if you are a complete beginner. And then the other one is called WordPress. The Missing manual, but you can kind of get what's going on here is that they don't just call the book WordPress. They might have say, how to build a website, get visitors and make money. They might say, customize your site to increase readership, automate. Social media and reach your writing potential 30 minutes to your WordPress website, the ultimate step by step guide for beginners to create a website with WordPress in as little as 30 minutes. So these best books, these best sellers, aren't just saying WordPress. They're focusing on, well, most of us focusing on either the ease of use or the speed or the control of it being on your own site. So those are all things that we need to pay attention to. Is what is the marketing hook that everyone is using? Because, I mean, copywriting is not something that's separate. We don't just make the book and then try to sell it. We should be selling everywhere that we are. So when we are titling the book, we're trying to sell copies of the book. When we're writing the book, we're trying to get people to keep reading the book, and we're trying to get them to click on whatever offer we have inside that book. And we're trying to sell the book. We want to sex up and make it, you know, make the book fun. We want to have. Basically, it comes down to a few things. But the biggest thing about a hook is a big promise. So if you can think, instead of, I'm going to teach you accounting, what's the big promise? Is the big promise that now you don't have to hire an accountant, or that you can figure this out all in 30 minutes, or they can save X amount of dollars on your taxes, or that, you know, you can manage things without with it taking, you know, 10 minutes a month, not 10 hours a month. But what is the big promise? What is the light at the end of the tunnel? And can it be something that takes on a life of its own and excites people? Okay, so, you know, WordPress? Well, great, who cares. But if you can have a website that's in your name in a few minutes, well, then that's really cool, or even today's call how to get a one hour book created. Well, that's really cool. And that's something where, you know, there's like, there's the training, there's what you teach, and then once people use it, well then that's something that's just been created out of thin air. The next part about the hook is point A to point B, thinking. So what is this book building to? You know, are we just lecturing people about social media, or is the book all about, well, how to get 10,000 followers from scratch? Now that would be really cool. And let me actually do a search here. So if I search books for social media, let me just see what comes up.

Robert Plank 42:20 We've got how to delay your customers, create irresistible brand and be generally amazing on Facebook. We've got 500 social media marketing tips, so that's more of a bathroom book. We've got how to increase your follower count and gain exposure on Twitter. So they're all talking about what it is that we're trying to to accomplish in this book. What do you have once you're at the end of this book, or even halfway, or even two chapters in, and that, since we're on Amazon, I'm going to click over onto best sellers, and then I guess, let's just go to business and investing. So get the non fiction kind of stuff. So scrolling through you've got stuff like Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, How to Win Friends and Influence People, the art of public speaking, negotiating agreement without giving in good to great. Why Some Companies Make the Leap and others don't getting things done. The art of stress free productivity for work week, escape nine to five, live anywhere and join the new rich. So we see all these books with promises, and yes, some of them might have some cutesy phrases, but it's all about that promise, that point A to point B, the idea that's bigger than you. So we've got this hook, and it might take a little bit of fleshing out. Might take, may have to, just like, skim through or look at a couple of these other books and see how they're marketed so you can do a better job than they than they do. So then, when you're thinking about what goes in the book, once again, make a product will help you flush it all better, but it's just something for you to get the gears turning on. This call is, well, do you have a couple of stories that you can throw in. And it doesn't even matter what kind of story, if it's a story that's directly related to accounting or real estate, or if it's like a childhood anecdote, or just like some kind of quirky facts then, and I mean, look at some of these bestseller books, where they'll have chapters that start off with some kind of story about when I was 10 years old, you know, this and this happened, and I and I, you know, totally made this big screw up, and I realized that it taught me this lesson, and that transitions quickly into whatever this chapter is. That's, that's a really, just cool way to keep the book moving forward. So you're not just talking about all this drab stuff. You're putting some of your heart and soul into it, basically. I know this is gonna sound like homework, but if you can, if you can just read some stuff regularly. I'm not saying read a book a day or a book a week, but if you happen to have an iPad, or you happen to have a Kindle, or did you know that you can even read Kindle books on your computer, just, I mean, buy stuff every now and then, go to that Amazon Best at our list. And if something jumps out at you, whether it's fiction or non fiction, just have something where, you know, maybe, maybe every day, read a couple of pages at the very least, but just read stuff regularly, just to kind of get that, that goodness inside of you, just so you can, I guess, get that, those good ideas rolling around in your brain, so you can get, I guess, a taste of what good writing and bad writing is, so that you can make these connections and a C, well, here's what all these best sellers have in common is you know, all these different items, if your if your book itself talks about like your before and after, or your journey or starts off, or it even if each chapter had some Huge action events or something emotional, or some kind of a story with a punch line. That's a great way to just get each section of your book started off. So I'm thinking about, there's this copywriter named Joe Sugarman who has a book called triggers, and it's just 30 stories, and the book is just about these emotional triggers that get people to buy, to participate, things like exclusivity, or things like, you know, take away selling our commitment and consistency. And each chapter just starts off with, well, here's a story about how when I was getting ice cream Bethel ice cream parlor, or when I was on a plane and the plane was delayed, and he tells him a quick story, and then transition it into, well, here is a lesson I was trying to teach, and then goes on to the next story. So if you can work in some kind of a story or some kind of lists. So if I said, Well, we're making a WordPress site. You make a WordPress site by doing this, this, this, this, and this, and then that. Now becomes your own system, or your own technology, your own kind of phrases and words there. So I know we're talking a lot about this idea of a hook, but it comes down to Abraham Lincoln, who said, If I had seven hours of chop down a tree, I'd spend four hours sharpening my ax. And, I mean, I mentioned this on all kinds of, you know, sales letters and blog posts and pitch webinars that you know, if you look at someone who makes 1000 bucks a month and someone else who makes $100,000 a month, well, what's the big difference? Is there really much of a difference. Is the person makes 100,000 Are they 100 times smarter? Do they put in 100 times the work or the efforts?

Robert Plank 47:08 Or have they, have they've sacrificed 100 times as much? Or have they put in 100 times the hours? Usually, not usually, it's just that the person making more money is making smarter choices. And I mean, you could easily be someone who only makes 1000 bucks a month and puts in 100 hour weeks just doing things that don't help. So what I want you to do is put a little bit of thought into what your what you're all about. Okay, what kinds of things are you passionate about, and what kind of things do you see happening over and over again? So that way you're solving real problems and not just lecturing, not just being the encyclopedia, not just making things up. So if you're actually someone who sets up websites, if you're actually someone who flips houses for a living, well then whether you know it or not, if you do it on any kind of regular basis, you yourself have a system, and isn't it true that other people are doing it the wrong way, or slightly the wrong way, and there is a better way, even if it's a little bit faster, better, easier, simpler, whatever that is. So we think about this hook, and you know what this book is going to be about, what it's leading to, and that tells us what's going to be in it, and even more importantly, what we're leaving out, and because we don't want to have a book about everything, because we'll lose the hook if we have a book about everything, there is possibly to know about making a website. And you can talk about WordPress, Joomla, doing it by hands, getting it hosted by blogger.com, well then now, who's it really going to appeal to? On the other hand, we're talking about set up a point click website with WordPress in 30 minutes. Now that's something that's exciting. It's simple, but we know exactly who's going to want it. And then, you know, people buy from us, they'll know if they want it or not as well they get the book. And then most people who get that book will be a perfect fit for whatever coaching services, or course, that we have to sell inside that book. So you now you know what the book's all about, and then it's just a matter of filling up with content. So in Mega product, we show you how to speak out one hour audio and have a thin little book. And the other thing too is that many of you already have content created. And I'm going to go back to our very good friend Lance thomashiro, who has a book out there called income machine. So Lance and I have a product called income machine. We showed you how to get up your whole web presence figured out, including your your blogs. Part of it, there's your blog sales that are often page follow up, sequence, membership, site traffic, just the whole making money system. We have a site called income machine. We also wanted to make a book about that. So it's the book version of it, where it's not as detailed, and it kind of goes into more like strategic, big picture kind of stuff, more newbie stuff. So someone might, someone might just be thinking about making an online business, or just thinking about making a website, and you want to give them all, all. The high level overview stuff in that book, and then if they like that, they join our course to get the videos, tools, templates, plug in software, all checklists, all that good stuff. So when? And the other thing too is that Lance is, like most people, where he doesn't like to write. So I just said, All right, I'll be your book editor. I'll put together a book for you. But I didn't want to just write a book because it would sound like something I'd written. It wouldn't sound the way that Lance, you know, thinks and talks and speaks. And the other thing too about that is that Lance and I wanted to have books to make it easier for us to get speaking gigs, so that we could hand out our book at events, and, you know, open up all these new doors and opportunities just by having some words on a page. So I figured out, you know, and we structured what the book was going to be about, what it was going to lead to. And then I just looked at, basically the pool of content that Lance already had. So some of us have more content than others, but if you've ever posted on a message board, then go back and look at the advice you've given. If you ever posted on a blog, then go back and look at those blog posts. If you've ever sent emails to your list, go look at that. So I mean, I took Lance's emails, blog posts. He also has a podcast called The lance thomashiro show, and we grab the transcript from that. He, like me, runs webinars on a regular basis, and we'll do these webinars where we'll start off and we'll get people in a mindset shift, or we'll solve people's problems in the first 20 minutes or so, and the next 20 minutes or so we will demonstrate something, and then the final 20 minutes, we'll offer a product for sale. So with that, first 20 minutes or so is all good stuff for a book, because it's real, like, you know, general stuff that solve people's problems. So look at some of those. And then I think he dictated maybe a chapter or two for the beginning, so he knew what was going to be in the book. So then I just took this tool called free mind, and what I did was, I said, Okay, well, our, our course called income machine has these eight modules, this, this, this, this, and this starts our for the website and domain name goes to an often page, follow up sequence, blog, membership, site, sales, letter, traffic. So I figured that out, and then trying to match as best I could that chapter, that section, with something he'd spoken on a podcast or at an offline event that we recorded or on a webinar, and just piece it all together so that at least I'd have the pieces in place, and then I just did a quick pass and just made sure that it all kind of fit together. Or maybe if, if he mentioned something in passing in chapter two that was going to be covered in chapter 10. I'd say, well, we'll get more into that on chapter 10 and things like that. But I just, you know, pieced together and assembled this book. And I think that's a much better way of going about it, assembling a book, as opposed to saying, I've got 100 pages left. I got 90 pages left. I get 80 pages left. I mean, just, if you can just do me a favor right now and just throw this idea of perfectionism out the window like you're not gonna have that solid gold book with 400 pages. Let's just get you to have a 30 page, 20 page book, just for now, book version one. Get something on a page, get something on a cover, and you know what else is? Whoever said that longer is better. So here's the thing. We're talking about, a book on WordPress. Let's say I put two books in front of you, and one book is 30 pages long, one book is 300 pages long. Which is better? Well, you don't know, you don't have enough information. And you might look at and say, one's real thin, one's real thick and heavy. I'm going to go with it thick and heavy. But what if I then told you that both books have the same information, exact same thing. It's just that one has to your little one doesn't well. Now this pamphlet, this small book, is better, and the 300 page one just means more work for you reading it. You might not even finish reading it. And then if I say, Okay, well, let's just say that 30 page book is $10 and a 300 page book is $100 well, now which is better, or what if it was vice versa? Well, now you don't know. So that's kind of what we're going for. Is more of a well, who cares how long it is? Who cares how much the book costs? All about what it is that you get. Okay? So then the last part, and content wise, as a bonus, and it's if you can, if you can, kind of then look at your book and figure out if you're having trouble getting it from point A to point B or moving them along. Is Where is like the breakthrough. And if you make the breakthrough within the first 10 or 20 pages of your book, it's even better. But what we want to do is make ourselves look different. And so if I'm talking about Lynn, let's just go back to WordPress. Okay, WordPress? Well, if I'm a newbie and I hear about WordPress, well, why the heck's WordPress so great? Well, maybe in that first chapter or two, I can talk about, well maybe, in general, how to make a website. So first of all, we introduce the idea of a website, knowing that we're then going to introduce WordPress, and then introduce how. Set it up. But if we talk about a website, then we can, kind of in passing, disqualify the alternatives. And I mean, if you can figure out how to do this casually and seamlessly in your books and your sales letters, you're doing great. So if we can figure out what are the four, or what are the four possibilities, and you're number four, but the other three are the bad alternatives. So in WordPress, we can list out, and we use this thing called w, w, h, w, and what we're doing is we're going to list in 1234, terms, we're going to list, first of all, what happens if they don't have any kind of solution. What happens if they use the solution that's too simple? What happens if they use the solution that's too complex, and then what happens if they use your solution? So we're talking about WordPress. Now, what happens if they don't have a website? Well, they're missing out on this, this, this and this. What happens if they try to just code a website, if they try to get a site hosted with someone else? Well, now someone else owns your company. Now you don't have your own domain name. You don't have your own presence, that's a problem. Now, what if they go too complex and they try to code their own site or hire a web developer? Well, it'll cost all this money. It'll take all this time. But now my answer is WordPress. So we, and we, we've kind of handled these objections and maybe even called ourselves out a tiny bit and disarmed people by saying, I know you're thinking about not having a site. I know you're thinking about having someone else make a site. No, you're thinking about coding it by hand. But now here's my answer. So I mean, I think that that's kind of the biggest takeaway of today's call is if you can set things up in the beginning of your book by saying, Here's what happens if there's no solution. Here's the two simple solution, here's the two complex solution, and now here's me. It's kind of like Goldilocks. This doesn't work. This one's too hot. This one's too cold. Now here's mine.

Robert Plank 56:52 So you figure out that car, you figure out the hook, figure out where the content fits together. You get that cover made, and you look at what are the other covers look like? The font, the colors, how it's arranged in make a product we show you, we give you a template on you. Just give this same information to someone to make the cover for you. And then now you have your content. Now you have your cover, upload it to Kindle, upload the Create space, and then you just promote the book. So Amazon Kindle will allow you to list your book for free for five days every 90 days. So you can get people to to get the book for free, which increases your ranking. Then they can review the book, and then when the book goes back to paid now you have a sales ranking. Now you have reviews. You can order through create space a big stack of your books, or give them away one at a time, and they'll ship it right there. You can, you know, give out free copies of your books as some kind of reward for a contest or a bonus for buying and, I mean, just promote it repeatedly. Mail to your list, talk about it on your blog, put it on your fan page, and then something I've been doing is updating it yearly. So I'll put out the 2013 edition of 100 times savers, the 2014 edition, the 2015 edition, just, you know, updating it every year, just changing a couple of things, and now it's a brand new book. Because I don't know about you, but I can't stand it when it was find someone and I see their book, and it was published in 2012 or 2010 I'm thinking, that's years ago. That's probably not going to be up to date, but now you just make a couple of adjustments, and now you're putting out the 2015, edition of your book. So a lot of stuff today, that was how to become a published author this week using Kindle and create space. You speak it out in an hour, get it transcribed, get it edited, put it out there with the cover, and then if you have anything else you want to add to it, the great thing about Kindle and create space, other than you don't have to wait a year to get published. You can get published this week is that if you go back and run spell check or change a few things around, you just update the most recent copy of it, whether that's a new cover or new things on the interior of the book. And then now you have a brand new digital book that'll update on everyone who has the book, and anyone new who buys the physical book will get your latest and greatest, updated version. So join us inside of make a product.com. That's M, a, k, E, A, P, R, O, D, U, C, t.com. To get your own book in just one hour using our simple system and our simple templates. That's all for me, the Robert Plank show that was episode 23 how to become a published author this week, using Kindle and create space. Join us next time for episode 24 how to backup, clone and protect your WordPress sites using backup creator. I'm so excited for that one. I can't wait. I hope you can't wait to I'll see you inside. Make a product. This is Robert Plank saying thanks and have a great day. The.