How To Make $2001 Publishing Your FIRST Ever Book! With Gregory Diehl

Launching Brand Identity, with Gregory Diehl. This is one of my favorite authors and one of my FAVORITE books. Holding true to the "Digital Nomad" existance, I interview Gregory Diehl in Morrocco.

With the evening prayer blaring in the background from some UNKNOWN source in the highest (the Atlas mountains) mountains of North Africa, you can't help but imagine Humphry and Bacall, or Tim Ferris on the wing in some exotic land!

Excerpts from the interview:

How big was your existing audience?

On a professional level, very small. I had a lot of clients I had worked with a lot of clients before in various aspects of sales and branding, so I reached out to them to help me refine the book and spread the word. They are the ones who ended up as case studies in the book. I also had a fairly large network of personal connections who didn’t necessarily care about the business subject matter of the book, but liked way of thinking and my take on things. They became some of my beta readers and early reviewers.

How did you build your audience before launch?

My strength has always been cold outreach and direct conversation. I spent a lot of time on forums and in book groups on Facebook just reaching out to let people know what I was planning on doing with the book, which contributed to a lot of 99-cent presales and initial buzz when it launched. It was really encouraging to see the early readers start chiming in of their own accord to say glowing things about the book to back up my own claims.

What are the steps you used to launch?

I understood two very important things:

1. The book needed to be good
   
2. I needed to generate immediate social proof that it was good.
   

I tried to accomplish both of these things at the same time by working with as many beta readers as possible to help me refine the rough draft, and most of them agreed to download the book on the day of launch when it was free and leave a “verified purchase” review. In addition, I used some services that allow you to reach out to potential reviewers and send them advance copies of your book in exchange for an honest review. As of now, about 2.5 months after launch. I have 84 reviews, with an average 4.8-star rating.

You used the pre-sale method - did that hurt or help you on launch day?

It’s hard to say, since I have not tried the alternative, but my book did hit the #1 spot in Public Relations even in the preorder stage. I think having it up there for months before actual launch probably helped gain a lot of exposure from Amazon’s regular browsers. I plan to do the same again, but maybe only a month of preorder this time with the travel book.

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