by Ray Brehm

Listen to this amazing podcast episode hosted by Paul G. Brodie in which I talk about how to use Bookbub to advertise your book !

Paul: Hello. I am Paul Brodie and thank you for joining us for another episode of the Get Published Podcast where we help authors get published with a proven system that works today. We’re being joined by Ray Brehm, author of Author Inc. and many other books. Ray, welcome to the show.

Ray: Thanks Paul. Glad to be here.

Paul: Well Ray, it’s a pleasure to have you. Are you ready to begin?

Ray: I’m ready to begin. I am sitting from the left to the right on your radio dial. That’s what they used to say in the old days with the football when I listened to the Cleveland Browns, they’d say the Browns are going left to right on your radio dial just to give you a visual image.

Paul: Nice. All right. Right. Question number one, what is the one piece of advice that you would give to a first time author who is currently writing a book?

Ray: All right, well if they are currently, if you are currently writing your book, I’m going to just steal a quote from Rachel Hollis that I heard at a Brendon Burchard event that has stuck with me ever since. And it’s something that I struggled with in the beginning and it is: “Don’t compare your beginning to someone else’s middle”. And you know, you and I were off the air a few seconds ago or a few minutes ago and you said something and I’m like, I just felt this wave of intimidation come over me just because of the, your prolific podcasting expertise. And I’m like thinking: Oh my God! I’ll never get there myself! And that I was doing the exact same thing that I’m telling you not to do now. Is hey, I’m not 462 podcasts in! That’s okay. I’m starting where I am and you know, I’m a whatever podcast in.

And that’s probably the most important thing I, you know, I think you can do with anything is you can’t compare yourself to the people that are, have been doing it longer. And if you’re looking at, so this can happen if you’re writing a book you go out and you’re looking at other books and you’re like, Oh my gosh, they’ve got 800 reviews. Or look at all the celebs that wrote editorial reviews on the book. Don’t worry about any of that. You start where you are and you keep moving and get that first book done and don’t worry about anything else cause you’ll get there too.

Paul: Absolutely. And I remember we were talking about it and I said, Hey, you’re going to be episode 462 and you were like: four sixty what? I’m like, Hey, it’s, we’ve been doing this a year and a half. Everyone’s got a process. It’s just things tend to evolve. We started doing an episode a week and it just snowballed from that point. And that’s what I tell everyone. You can’t compare yourself to anyone but you because if you start comparing yourself to this person or that person, then you really just lose the focus of what you want to accomplish.

Ray: Oh my God! You did all that in a year and a half! Now I’m intimidated again!

Paul: No, as I say, it took a life of itself. So as I say, we, we’ve tapered that down now that’s, we’re still releasing one episode a week. Oh, I’m sorry, one episode a month, every day, Monday through Friday. But you know, we have a tapered down things a little bit just because it did take a little bit of a life of itself. Well, Ray, what do you feel is the hardest parts about getting published?

Ray: I, think, you know, it kind of relates to question number one. It’s the confidence piece. I didn’t actually start writing my first book until I read something that convinced me that I could become a bestseller on Amazon. And it’s wherever you can find that confidence, take it and use it and realize that you’ve just got to take that first step.

And a lot of times it’s just a little bit of, you know, something I read gave me the confidence that, hey! like the way they explain how to get bestseller. I know I can do that. And I’m here to tell you, and you probably are too, Paul, that anybody listening to this right now is able to become a bestselling author on Amazon. And if you know that, it’s a lot easier to let the creativity flow because you’re not worried about what happens next, logically you just can stay in your creative mind and not worry about that.

Paul: Absolutely. Well, let’s talk a little bit about market and a little, a little deeper into this. So please share a marketig strategy that you have used in your book launch or book launches that has worked well.

Ray: Well, we’re living in a time where we can perform highly targeted marketing of people. And one of the things that I’ve been doing for a few years now, but when I discovered it, it was just a game changer was the ability to target specific people for your book. So for instance, in what I’m specifically talking about is in my case, the game changer for me was realizing when BookBub came out. That’s bookbub.com they came out in their author platform with, -they used to do these feature deals, or they still do and you had to apply for them and barely any, you know, it was very hard to get selected. I know a lot of famous people that still haven’t gotten been selected-, but then they came out with their, their basically their paper click and pay per impression platform.

And that was a game changer because it’s, you know, you can run ads on Facebook, but there’s, you know, a lot of different ads going on. Bookbub is a platform of people that are looking for good deals on good books and they do some things that Amazon doesn’t even do. And they’d let you target by specific genre for one, which doesn’t work quite as well, but by specific author as well.

So, for instance, if you’re writing a self help book and you know, you know, or you think you know that readers of Tony Robbins would be interested in your book, you can target specifically people that either like Tony Robbins or bought Tony Robbins books on BookBub’s platform and I call it “author look alike”. So I go out there and then, so if I know that I can run some tests on that for very inexpensive and see what the click through rate will be and get people over to Amazon.

So you run it on their platform book post platform, but you’re giving them the Amazon link or, or you know, you can go see other retailers, I look Barnes and Noble and so forth. And this gives you a highly targeted idea of who likes your book. And then, if I have success with that, I can go on Amazon and look at Tony’s author page and see the top 12 other authors that people buy in addition to Tony. So if somebody buys Tony’s book, they also like buying from a Napoleon Hill for instance. And I can now go and pull that person, test that out. And so I go and just pull authors and most people know, like the top five authors that they want to emulate. Well those are the people you want to target the readers of as well. And it’s very, very powerful to target those specific readers.

And in fact, a year ago I released a book called Snowball Book Launch and I was doing this and what you think isn’t always the case, I thought, okay, it’s going to be other self-publishing gurus. Readers want to read my Snowball Book Launch book turns out the number one click through rate I got was for readers of Gary Vaynerchuck’s books and I would’ve never guessed it, but I went through this process where I was finding lookalikes and then testing in, you know, Gary popped up under somebody, maybe a couple levels down and I was like, okay, let’s try Gary and his people clicked through more than anyone else.

So you never know and it’s a great way to test. And also, and then you can actually use data from BookBub and and put it into keywords in your Amazon ads and so forth.

Paul: So are there any particular strategies that you recommend for authors out there that once he utilized their book with BookBub to promote it on there?

Ray: Well, I would, so if you have to have an a book published, so it’s either in preorder, or book published and then you can create an author account on BookBub and the strategies I would use they, they give you the option of pay per click or pay per impression. I found that when I’m trying to generate for one test data and actual lots of clicks, paper impression works better faster and the paper click rate is still the same per impression means you pay, like you might bid $8 dollars to get a thousand impressions in people’s email boxes.

And that usually ends up being about the same even sometimes better than if you chose the paper click option, which would take a lot longer. And when we’re trying to test or we’re trying to drive sales for bestseller, we want as many clicks as possible as soon as possible.

So I use the paper impression and I target only readers of particular authors and I’ll go through 20 or 30 in the beginning to kind of test it out. And then the successful ones, I’ll start pulling their look alike lists from the Amazon author pages and put them into the BookBub in separate. I leave them in separate ads so I can see the results per author. And you’ll see amazing results if you do that.

Paul: Now you mentioned “look alike lists”. So tell us a little bit more about how that works.

Ray: Yeah, so, if you ever heard of the a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, I think it’s so, so I mean that’s what I call, in fact, I call my chapter that in the soul book launch. But the idea is that it, you know, the six degrees of Kevin bacon is this urban folklore, although I think it’s kind of true. I don’t know, but that any actor in Hollywood can be connected via least six movies to Kevin bacon. So if, you know, Tom cruise was in a movie with Val Kilmer who was in a movie with blah, blah, blah, blah. And then within six movies you get to Kevin Bacon, like, cause he was in all these movies.

Well, the same theory is here is how do we get these, this list of authors to target. And generally what I do with like people that I’m working with, I’ll say, okay, give me five or 10 people that you want to emulate. And we, we write down those authors and then each one of those authors, we go look at their author page in Amazon and right below their picture it’ll say people also bought from these authors. So, for instance, like I said, Tony Robbins is there and you look below and the also boughts and it says, okay, Napoleon Hill, Brian Tracy, you know, whoever else, now we’ve got a list of 12 more authors we can target.

Ray: And I do. So the 5 or 10 that they gave us to me originally, we create 12 from each of those five or 10 and sometimes you get duplicates. But now with those, let’s say there’s 10 we’ve just created a list within 5 minutes of 120 authors that we can target in BookBub. And then if you take it another level down, it’s, you know, whatever that, you know, a thousand or 1200 or whatever, but just doing that, that first degree and then into the second grade, we can get 120 authors that we should try to target in BookBub.

And so I call that lookalike authors. So it’s like who, who else, what other authors are like this author, the readers like this off these other authors. Who are those people? And, and let’s test them and target them. And a lot of this we do during preorder when we’re launching a book because then I already know before the book even releases what type of readers are interested in this book.

Paul: Excellent. Well speaking of books, I’d like to know what is your favorite book and what was the number one thing that you learned from it?

Ray: Well, I will say this. My favorite book is always the one I’m reading right now. And right now I am reading Flip the Script by Oren Klaff and it is about sales and it’s about basically it’s the anti pushy salesperson way of talking to people relating to people. And you know you and I were talking about this offline but it’s, it’s one of the best way, you know, every author should be from the beginning putting together a plan, putting together a Dream 100 which a Dream 100 is like who are the hundred most influential people that you would love to be friends with and partner with and affiliate with and cross promote with no matter how high up they are.

Ray: And that’s your Dream 100 list. And you should be working on connecting with those people, whether, you know, and it might take a year or two, but some people it might take a lot less time. And the way to do that is to offer them some something, you know, value, like getting on a anthology book with you or so forth. And so getting to the concept here of the Flip the Script book, he talks about this status alignment. And it’s, it’s how to get people that don’t know you or even skeptics to give you the time of day to give you the respect you deserve. And that’s by aligning your status. And so we talked about like whatever your expertise is in, you’re letting them know that in the beginning of the conversation.

So if you, you know, if I came to you and we didn’t know each other and I said, Hey Paul, I’m putting together an anthology book and I want to put you on it. And you know, you might be like, yeah, okay, whatever. But if I, if I’m talking, if I talk to you about, Hey, you know, that we can never have too many leads, we can never have too many exposure, too much exposure, we can never have too many books in our library as authors on, you know, on your book library and Amazon or whatever. Yeah, I’ve got a solution to add another book in and handle and add to each of those things for you. And the fact that I know that and I know that that’s always something that you’d be interested in or other self-publishing people or entrepreneurs that helps build the status alignment when we start talking.

And so that’s one of the things that I think people get caught up in is I’m publishing a book. I don’t know much about publishing yet, but you know what your topic of your book is. You know, the expertise. You can reach out to people like that. And those are the people that whose audiences you want to talk to you anyway, and they, they want to talk to your audience. So work on the status, you know, figure out what your status alignment is and don’t be afraid to start.

Paul: And for a final question, what is your favorite quote and why?

Ray: This goes with the book thing is, it’s whatever is in the top of my head at the time. I’ve got a lot of favorite quotes. I’m going to go back to Rachel Hollis. I mean this is, you know, what’s amazing about her is she’s kind of like, she’s got a mom blog right when she spoke at this event. And I’m like, she, I was just writing quotes down from her the entire time and look, one of the things, probably the biggest fear of all of us when we’re publishing and there isn’t necessarily a cure for it, but this quote will help is the fear that we’re going to get bad reviews or attacked or the trolls and, and and that’s sometimes stops us on the tracks. You know, I sat for a day, my first book launch. That Snowball Book launch.

There was four people waiting for that thing to release and they went out and wrote these scathing reviews and they couldn’t possibly read it cause it came out within an hour. And I’m like, Oh my gosh!, maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. And then the real reviews came in and we all are going to have trolls. You put yourself out there, you’re going to have people trying to bring you down because they don’t want to try.

Which brings me to the quote, which is another Rachel Hollis quotes and it’s: “Don’t let people in the cheap seats take an expensive view of your life”. And that sticks with me because there’s always trolls. Never once if I had somebody that was, that I looked up to, I haven’t seen, and maybe you could tell me if I’m wrong, Paul, but I haven’t seen anybody that I look up to ever write anything bad about anybody. Nope. They just don’t do it. So the people that are out there waiting to write something bad rather than help people are there in the cheap seats. Do not let them take an expensive view and your life.

Paul: Exactly. Haters gonna hate that. That’s right.

Well, Ray, I want to thank you for being a guest on the show. What is the best way for people to find you online?

Ray: I would say the best way is to go check out bookflix.tv You can find my information there and you know, we’ve created a platform where people are just getting started. It’s a comfortable place. You get coaching and coaching in the group. It’s very nominal to get involved and learn a lot of the stuff that’s going to give you confidence and in your path to publishing bestseller, monetizing it’ll give you, even give you confidence to work with people like you, Paul, they got 462 million podcasts out there that’ll give you confidence. And so, but just go take that next step, get the book done. It’ll change your life.

Paul: Right. Thank you once again for being on the show, and I wish you all the best in your author journey yet.

Ray: Thanks, Paul. Thanks for being. Thanks for having me on.

Paul: Thanks again for joining us today to learn more about how you can be featured in our brand new get published business book, go to get published podcast.com