Derek sold more than 75 thousand copies of his book, how did it all start for him?
Strategies on how to improve book listing on Amazon vary a lot and wasting your time on strategies that no longer work doesn't benefit you. You need to know how to invest your time in promoting your books.
Amazon will push your book rankings when they see it doing well, Derek says. Not to say that Amazon SEO doesn't work or that it's not important, but you should write for people not the algorithm.
This is the way of how to stand out in the sea of similar books and authors.
Discovering about yourself, then you're discovering about your audience. This is where you should research to see what you're looking for and what is it that people want.
So, the question is how to get your book really stand out and offer different content than your competitors. To find out more listen to today's episode of Serve No Master podcast.
▶️▶️▶️▶️
Resources mentioned:
Leave some feedback. We would love to hear from you!
Connect with Jonathan Green and Serve No Master:
The post SNM177: How to use Amazon algorithm to your selling advantage with Derek Doepker appeared first on Serve No Master: Be Your Own Boss - Live Free
Connect with Jonathan Green
Derek sold more than 75 thousand copies of his book, how did it all start for him?
Strategies on how to improve book listing on Amazon vary a lot and wasting your time on strategies that no longer work doesn't benefit you. You need to know how to invest your time in promoting your books.
Amazon will push your book rankings when they see it doing well, Derek says. Not to say that Amazon SEO doesn't work or that it's not important, but you should write for people not the algorithm.
This is the way of how to stand out in the sea of similar books and authors.
Discovering about yourself, then you're discovering about your audience. This is where you should research to see what you're looking for and what is it that people want.
So, the question is how to get your book really stand out and offer different content than your competitors. To find out more listen to today's episode of Serve No Master podcast.
▶️▶️▶️▶️
Resources mentioned:
Leave some feedback. We would love to hear from you!
Connect with Jonathan Green and Serve No Master:
The post SNM177: How to use Amazon algorithm to your selling advantage with Derek Doepker appeared first on Serve No Master: Be Your Own Boss - Live Free
Connect with Jonathan Green
Strategies to promote your book in 2020 and beyond with special guests, Derek Doepker, on today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by blue host. Choosing the right hosting for your online business is critical. Bluehost has reliable servers and beginner-friendly onboarding waiting for you at dot com front slash. Blue are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now. Then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast where you learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical Island in the South Pacific by bestselling author, Jonathan Green. Now here's your host guys who have been amazing guests. Today. I'm so excited to spend some time with Derek. He's someone that we've been on each other's radars. I've interviewed him for this podcast a long time ago, and the first hundred 61 episodes, they're only about two or three interviews, and he was one of them because he was the first course that really taught me loads about how to start running Amazon ads. That's how I began my Amazon as process was going through his course as a customer. And he also teaches amazing content about audio books and today, and this amazing interview is going to talk about strategies that work in now no longer works. You know what to invest your time in to promote your books. The steps you need to take if you want to build a business around your book is to share his experiences and mistakes or show examples of what worked for him and what could work for you too. This is an amazing interview and thank you guys are going to love it. So let's see what he has to say right now. There are doctor is a rock. Guitars turned seven times number one bestselling author who discovered a proven process that turned him from a struggling author to silly over 70. 5,000 copies of his books and now he shares this process through with thousands and thousands of authors just like us through workshops, courses, and even live retreats where he empowers them to turn their passion for writing to thrive in business. Derek, we're so excited to have you here. Thank you for being here today. Yeah, I'm glad to be here, Jonathan. Thank you. So I'm curious, always want to talk to authors like you who, you know, went through the same journey I have where it's, you know, we all think that first book is going to knock it out of the park with no effort. It's going to be magical. But before that, what inspired you to write that very first book? How did you, how did it all start? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of different places I could start on my journey, but I'll say that it really was, I was living in Nashville, Tennessee. I got my degree in music. And so I never expected to be a writer or an entrepreneur. I'm like, I'm just going to become a rock star. That was my dream. It was the only thing I had in mind, and I was just thinking recently a part of my story, I don't share as much as I was working at a hotel as a five star hotels, have valet parking and doing the night shift and stuff, and while I was working there. I was broke. Uh, and then I was also seeing as five star hotels. So like wealthy people would come in and at first I was like, I don't really get this whole like rich lifestyle. That's not for me. You know, I just want to make music and I'm a creative artist. The thing, like I started to see it more and more and I'm like, you know, it'd be kind of nice if I had a little bit of money, like if I wasn't, uh, just barely scraping by each month. And so that got me into this whole thing about, uh, studying online marketing because I'm working a night shift. I have free time, but I can get on my computer and that immersed me into this world of blogging and internet marketing and creating videos and things like that. It would be a couple of years later after I moved to LA. That I, I actually won a Kindle eReader. And at this point I had already been blogging for a little bit and I thought, well, maybe I can take my writing and turn it into a book. So I published my first Kindle book called excuse proof fitness, and this was middle of 2012 launch. It. And it sells about three copies and that first month or two. And then I'm like, okay, well I didn't really put in the marketing effort. So I wrote my second book and this time, like from start to finish, I'm studying courses, I'm going through books. I'm like, okay, I'm going to do this. Everything a to Z. Perfect. And then this thing is going to take off while I launched the my second book, how to stick to a diet. And, uh, it makes about. It does a little better, makes about $70 and that first month. Now keep in mind, I'd spent months working on this. I don't know how many, like probably over a hundred hours, so I'm like, okay, let's see. A less than a dollar per hour worth of war. That's not really the best use of my time, but it was cool. The nice thing, you know, if you've ever had you ever make one sale online. He ever, you know, whether that's a book or something else, like that first sale to a stranger, like, you know, who's not in my case, like my first book, maybe I sold to my mom a copy and you know, a couple of people who knew me but to sell to a stranger and then get a review from someone that I had never met before, who read the book and said, how, you know, mentioned this book helped me. It was great. That gave me some early inspiration and. Then a few months later, I wrote my third book. Your first book, you sold like three copies. The second book was like $70 but of course, then you look at how many months of work you put in. You're like, that's less than a dollar an hour. So how did you move forward from there? Did you keep writing or did you realize I need to focus more on the marketing part? So I w I really just wanted to. Move past the whole Kindle thing. I kind of like, Oh, that doesn't really work. I'm studying courses. I did what they said, uh, this stuff doesn't, doesn't work, or is it going to work for me? And what got me to actually keep going I attended a seminar and it was like November of 2012 and at this seminar, I learned about influence. I learned about relationships, and I was so inspired by what I learned. I go, okay, I'm just going to publish the third book. They eat up. It sells well. Great. I want it to obviously, but if it doesn't, this is a kind of book I just, I want my family and friends to have. I want to almost kind of a legacy type of thing. Like I just get something out into the world. This would be the book and it was called 50 fitness tips. You wish you knew. I went from. Blank page to taking all the stuff that I had written before repurposed it. Got the book published within a few weeks, and by the end of the month, by the end of December, 2012 it hit the number one bestseller and weight loss made almost $6,000 in royalties and 11 days and. I remember logging in, showing my parents, and I go, this is it. I said, well, I've been working on for years. It's finally happened. I finally had my breakthrough, and I also looked at that and I go. You know, it wasn't quite how some of the gurus told me. I was kind of breaking some of the rules that they told me and doing things my own way. And I go, I need to share this with other authors. And I knew I even had set the intention beforehand. I go, if I figure this thing out or when I figure this thing out, this whole online business thing, I am going to share with others what I learned. And then, so within a few months, I launched my first training course for authors. And since then I've had multiple training courses. But more importantly, I've. I proved the process works by having now seven books that have hit number one bestseller and then help thousands of authors. And so I go, okay, is this a fluke or is this repeatable and transferable to others? And so I approve that. Yes, I can repeat it for not only myself, but I can teach it to others and then they can take and apply it to sell more of their books. So one of your first innovations when you started doing things differently than what the groups were teaching? Yeah, so one of the things I remember doing differently was there's a big emphasis, this was back in 2012, uh, going into 2013. It was like very much. Uh, just write like a keyword-rich title and the way to sell books. You know, you, you rank for keywords. And so I was really focused on that and it was that useful. Absolutely. I mean, if you can get keywords in your title, especially a nonfiction book, that will help of my, I shifted my focus from writing less for Amazon. Which is where my focus was with keywords and writing more for human beings and thinking about copywriting and persuasion and influence and what's really going to hook someone in with a title, with a subtitle, with the description, and then, yeah, if I can sprinkle on some keywords, great. But when I've put my focus on human beings and connecting with people, I notice that's where a lot of the sales came from. And plus. You know, Amazon did help a little bit, but it wasn't so much through the keywords. It was through the fact that when people started buying it, Amazon starts promoting your book once they see it doing well. And there's a lot of other ways to get exposure for your book besides, besides keywords. So again, it's not to say that that's not important. It's a mindset shift. Uh, where do you put your emphasis? And I find so many authors, even to this day, are sometimes looking for these hacks or these tricks for the algorithm. Uh, and that's a piece, but the core piece is remembering at the end of the day, you're writing this for human beings. What's going to compel them to actually want to take out their wallet and pay for your book. Okay. And how would you define your process or your method from idea to writing the book to the marketing process? So in the early stages, the. Uh, the first phase I call discover. So it's really about discovering, first of all, something I call your author archetype, and I'll give the three basic author architects for nonfiction authors. So the first one is the role model archetype. So have you lived through this experience? Are you sharing from your own experience? You know, for me as an author, I can say, I know what it's like to be a broke author to a bestselling author, and so I've gone through that journey. I'm sharing from firsthand experience. So if you have firsthand experience and you can be the role model. If we go fitness and someone was out of shape and then they got fit, they can talk about their own, their own journey. That's one type of archetype. Another one would be like the. Uh, you might think of it as the more traditional expert or the, um, the practitioner, that's what I call it. So this would be like, let's go with fitness. Again, a personal trainer, maybe the personal trainer was, wasn't out of shape, but they know a lot about their topic and they've helped. Maybe hundreds of thousands of people get in shape. This could be the psychiatrist who might teach about addiction recovery. Maybe they weren't a heroin addict themselves, but they've helped a lot of people overcome it, so they can clearly talk about that. So that's the practitioner archetype. And then there is the researcher archetype. So this is actually, I think of. Malcolm Gladwell does a lot of research. I think, you know, Cialdini who wrote the books on influence and wrote the book influence. You know, he wasn't like a salesperson who wrote a book on influence. He went out and studied salespeople and studied influential people and put together what they taught. Tim Ferris also is a little bit of the. The research archetype. He studies a lot of people and distilled and takes knowledge from different sources and puts it in his book. And plus he's also kind of a role model in that he, he applies things to himself. So again, you could be the role model, you could be the practitioner, you could be the researcher, and also some combination of these three. And when you realize what your core emphasis is, that helps you identify the next step of the discovery, which is understanding who you can serve the most. And then how you're even going to position your book to sell a, so I can keep going without, or we could dive in a little deeper into the, um, into that if you want. No, this is really good. So once someone chooses which of their, our prototype is, how do they move forward to the three year process through your bathroom? Yep. So the next part is you, so you're discovering about yourself, then you're discovering about your audience. So this is where doing the research, or as I like to look at it as treasure hunting, a phase comes in where you're looking for what is it that people want. And again, this is a nonfiction bias that I'm coming at. And also a lot of these on a principle based level, still apply to fiction. As well, and I've worked with fiction authors and I'm still covering the same principles. So the research, it could be looking at other reviews of books in your genre, you know, studying who are the other top authors, what are the other top books? How are they positioned? What's working, what's not working in the marketplace? What do people rave about these other books and the five star reviews. What do people complain about? Well, the one star reviews and yeah, you want to take some of that with a grain of salt, but sometimes you can find some useful. Information about what's missing in these reviews. And even in the three star reviews, you sometimes get a get a bit more of an evenhanded, like, here's what I liked, here's what I didn't like, and he can take all of that and understand, okay, what can I provide in my book that's different? Okay. And that's one of the key questions. Now, if you're in a market that there's not a lot of other competing books, then. The book itself will probably be different, right? Like I saw someone how to raise kids on a raw food diet. Okay. There's not a ton of other books out there on that, so that can be a pretty straightforward book. But if you're in something like business or relationships or fitness, there are. Countless thousands, maybe millions. I don't know. If you consider all the different self published books and blogs and videos and things out there, there's so many things that people could go to for information. What's going to make yours stand out and be different? And that's going to come from doing that treasure hunting and sometimes even interviewing people who might be your ideal client and asking them. You know, what are their challenges? What are their aspirations and dreams? What have they not been able to, um, get that you might be able to provide for them? How can you package your book in a different way? And any one of these questions we could go for an hour on, you know, a deep dive. So this is really more of the 50,000 foot overview of understanding this And once you understand yourself in your market, then it's about going, okay, what kind of book can I create that's going to both fit in to the market, but also stand out a little bit at least to be different in how people go, Oh, that's why I need your book. As opposed to, or at least in addition to some of these other books that are in the marketplace. Okay. So. Once you've found your place and you see, Oh, this is my unique selling point, or this is what I have to say, that's different. This is why someone should buy my book too. How do you then get people to notice you? You write the book, you put it out. How do you get that attention? Because the book can be amazing, but if no one buys it, it doesn't matter. Exactly. Yeah. So even before I, I write the book, I'll oftentimes come up with a title and subtitle and even the description. Right? So I'm thinking you think about. The end in mind. Stephen Covey talks about this, you know, begin with the end in mind. NASA works backwards, or military strategy. You work backwards from, what's the final thing we need to do? So sell the book and there's steps beyond that, but let's just say sell the book. Let's work backwards from that. Okay? In order to amazon ranking, amazon seo, sell the book, they're not buying it based off the contents. They're buying it based off title, subtitle, cover, description, reviews. So how are you going to make your book. Compelling in that way. So if we go title, subtitle, and description, a simple formula that I give is ABCD. The ABCD irresistible hook formula. A stands for attention grabbing. So how are you going to get attention with it? Be has to be a believable promise. So if I say how to make a million dollars overnight, right? If that's the book title or promise, people are just going to be skeptical. They're not even going to take it seriously most of the time. See, it's something that they care about. So you really got to understand it by say, how to sell more books. You know, to authors, that's an okay promise. But. How many books in what timeframe? You know, if I go, uh, you know, the, the, the, uh, how to sell more, you know, how to sell a thousand books in the next 30 days. That's more specific by say, how to sell a thousand books without spending a dime on advertising. That's more specific. If I say how to sell more books, uh, even if you're dead broke and have no following, that's more specific. So you think about what's the specific promise that they care about. And B, it comes back to different, well, it's gonna make it. Different. So you figure all of this out ahead of time and you might finalize your title after you started to write the book, and maybe ideas will come from the books manuscript and I at least recommend having a working title and a working description. And the process, this is my copywriter, marketer, brain goes, I want to craft a title and a description that is so compelling. People would say they buy it. Even before I started to write the book. So think about how would you pre-sell this book? What's the pitch you would give to someone where they would pay you to go, I'm going to pay you three months, six months in advance for this book, and now go write it. So you create that hook and then you go write the book. So that's all about the positioning of the book. And then of course, once you have it published, you go, great. You have a compelling book. If people see it, they would want to buy it. Assuming that your ideal audience. Well, now, how are you going to get people to see it? And then that's where you go into what I call the aspire method. And this is the, the top six ways, um, you know, a S, P. I. R. E, that's an acronym for six ways to promote your book. And so we can dive deeper into this, but I'll just give the brief rundown a is for through advertising. Amazon ads are great. There's different book advertising websites that are out there at BookBub, for instance. But as for as S is for social media, which I actually don't do that much of, but certainly it can work for certain authors, you know, Facebook and Instagram and so on and so forth. So ASP is for podcasts and publications. You guys also summarize this as platforms. Now, what are other people's platforms? Can you speak on someone's stage? Can you be able to, you know, a summit or an interview just like we're doing right now? Can you get to in front of someone else's audience by going on their, their platform? Uh, ASPI is for influencers. So also what we're doing right now is a bit of an influencer, you know, connecting with other people or influencers, other authors, other bloggers. And that's how I sold a lot of my books early on. Right? Because I didn't have a big audience, but other people did, and when they were willing to email about, um, they're willing to email about your book to their audience of thousands, then it only takes one relationship to get in front of thousands. And there are ways to do that, even if you're just starting out. So ASP I R is readers. How can you incentivize your readers to share your book. Right. A lot. I mean, just to think about your own experience. I mean, do you ever buy a book because someone else recommended it? And I, I look at my Amazon purchase history and I'm like probably 80% of books I bought because someone else who had read that book said, Oh, this is a great book. You should check it out. So that's kind of the combination of influencers and readers, people who will recommend your book and how can you motivate and inspire people to share your book, especially your readers. And then he has email. So email marketing. Probably my go to way for, I mean, most of my business, and it's what I say for most authors, the core of your business is your email list. All roads lead back to build your email list and then from your email, assess how you sell your books as well as other products and services. So we can dive deeper in any of those. But that's, I like to keep things simple. I don't want to think of a 10,001 different marketing strategies. I want to think of six things and go deep on those and even maybe only pick, you know, one to three of those to really focus on, to begin with and then build from there. Um, what are the first steps someone should take when they write a book or decide to build a business around being an author? So the first steps I would start, um, really connecting with people in your ideal readership, and this can be. Um, for me, a lot of times I want to interview people. When I was first writing in health and fitness, I was interviewing family. I was interviewing friends. I was talking to them in order to understand them. There's no intention at this point to sell them anything. It's really about getting to know your audience, your ability to market, your ability to write your ability. To them to influence them, to compel them, persuade them. All of this is based on how well you know them. So that's the first thing. The other thing, I would start right early on, building the relationships with influencers, with other people in your genre, because the idea is not to reach out to them as soon as he got to have a book done and be like, Hey, I got this book. Will you share it with your list? Right? What's in it for them? Why would they do that? Especially if they don't even know you, right? So if you're building the relationship, you do that early on. Now say build a relationship, you go, great, well how do I do that? What does that even look like? And again, we could go two hours on that and I'll give a few quick pointers. One is. Think about what you can do for them. One thing that almost every influencer person in the world appreciates is a sincere compliment. So one way to connect with them is to reach out and tell them what you admire and what you appreciate about them in their work. Uh, another more specific way to benefit them as you can even offer them a testimonial, uh, written or video testimonial. And this again, is you're giving value to them without asking for anything in return. You could also within your book. This is more nonfiction, but you can do this with fiction too, like at the end, have recommended resources and recommend their book and their content. And so the book of mine, that first book that took off the Jeep fitness tips, you wish you knew throughout the book, I was sprinkling in recommendations of people that I really liked. I'm like, this person has a great blog, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So now what happens when I reach out to them, I'm not coming in saying, Hey, I got this book. Share it with your audience. I'm letting them know, Hey, you know, I mean, I really love your work, actually mentioned you in my upcoming book, right? So notice is positioned as I'm constantly thinking about how I can help them, and it's coming. Without an expectation. I'm not expecting anything in return. I'm doing it from a place of gratitude. I appreciate them. I appreciate the work. I'm going to talk about them and share them with my audience regardless of whether or not they ever do anything for me. And when you start cultivating those relationships, when it does come time for you to share your book, there'll be much more receptive, especially when they see the benefit that. Hey, if I share this author's book, it's actually gonna help me because more people are gonna learn about me. Cause they mentioned me in the book. Right. So now that's the, what's in it for me from the influencer's perspective. Okay. So those are a couple of specific strategies, but it's not to say you have to do amazon ranking, amazon seo, those exact strategies. It's really about this mindset of constantly going, how can I help this person achieve their goals? What do they value? How can I help them further than their own mission and through them. Zig Ziglar says, and you know, the more you help others get what they want, the more you get what you want. So that's the mindset going in. And that's how you can start cultivating those relationships before you ever even begin writing a single word. So it's thinking about how you can help other people before just thinking, rather than just thinking about how to help yourself, which is awesome. Because so often we don't know how to reach out to people that we do in their own way. We burn that bridge. But what are some of the other possible obstacles? A new author, a new writer, might face it. Um, they can start to prepare for now. What should they be paying attention to as they get started in this process? Well, it's funny when he first brought that up, I mean, my, my instincts are to go to strategy and marketing and sales and I feel like that's what a lot of people want to hear about. And at the same time, I also notice what really stops people, uh, when they write a book is more of the emotional journey of actually getting the book done and being willing to put themselves out there. Right. The feeling for me. Early on is who's going to want to listen to me? Who's going to want to buy my book? So many other books out there. What if people think it socks? I get one star review. It's a lot of this stuff and you know, this internal resistance. And so that's actually one of the bigger challenges, uh, both when it comes to getting a book done. And then when it comes to boldl marketing yourself and promoting yourself. Uh, so I'll share two things. One is the. Uh, overcoming some of the internal resistance. I give one strategy, like one strategy, one life tip, before I die for anything. Anything that you're doing, it would be the three magic words, technique, and the three magic words technique you can use to overcome fear, procrastination, perfectionism, just about anything that holds a person back. And the way it works is start with these three words. Can I just, and then you insert a micro commitment. So BJ Fogg, Stanford researcher talks about this idea of tiny habits. The idea is, can I just, I don't feel like writing, I just want to serve Facebook. Can I just write one sentence. Then I can stop. So you gave yourself the smallest possible target that you're going to say yes to. Okay. Maybe one sentence is too much. Kind of just open up my word processor and write one word in it, and you make it so tiny. It's almost hard to say no to that. That's the idea. And once you do that one tiny action, you take it one step further. Okay. Can I just do a little more, can I write a second sentence? And Tim Ferriss talks about this idea. His commitment, which is a little more than a micro commitment, but it's still the same idea was can I write two crappy pages a day? Right? So you lower the standard, and it's counterintuitive, especially if you're a high achiever, lower the bar. Lower your standard of quality. And I come from a fitness background, so I look at it like you don't just wake up first thing in the morning and then try to run like a full, full bore sprint as fast as you get you warm up first. You don't just go to the gym and load up the heaviest. You've ever bench press or squatted and try to lift that first go. You warm up, right? So this is the warmup process. And once you get into momentum, the momentum generates motivation. The motion generates momentum. The momentum generates motivation. So you give yourself small little targets to shoot for. And it's how I, if I want to clean my apartment, I look at my whole apartment cause I don't feel like cleaning my whole apartment now. And then I'd procrastinate. But if I go. Can I just clean off my desk here? It'll take me a minute and then I can quit if I want. It's those little mind game where I clean it. I see, Oh, that's clean. That's kind of, Oh, well, now that I'm up and doing it, I might as well clean off this desk. I might as well do this. Next thing you know, I'm doing it effortlessly. how to improve book listing on Amazon, Cleaning the whole apartment effortlessly. It's the same thing with writing. You know, writing one sentence leads to two leads to a paragraph leads to more. Okay, so that's the technique for getting yourself into action. If you're facing internal resistance, um. And, I mean, I guess there's other things you'd go on, but that's, that's the main thing that I'm going to share. And if you get nothing else out of this interview, I would say apply that to your life, whether it's in your writing or author career or anything else. And that is the ultimate productivity tool that I could give anyone. Okay. That's really good. Starting small and building consistent action. I love that thought because that definitely works for me. One of the things I'm thinking about is some of the people here, they've already written their first book. They published it, and then the results were lackluster. Now what? They were expecting so many people, at least who talk me go, I'm going to write a book and I'm going to become a millionaire. They launched the book and it doesn't happen, and they start to get discouraged and they lose that excitement. How can they turn that around? Yeah, so first of all, there's. Essentially four reasons why something doesn't work, and it's important to understand what these four reasons are. Otherwise, it could be misinterpreted, right? A person could launch a book and go, it didn't sell. Therefore, that means, and what they put in that meaning it could be. Disempowering or empowering it. That means I just suck. I'm not cut out for this. I'm a terrible author. I'm a horrible person. Why not even try? Like, it's not a, probably the best interpretation of, of that. That's almost always going to be false. Right. So one reason why it didn't work could be the strategy itself that you learned just didn't ORC. Okay. It's not an effective strategy. Uh, and that's how most people, I think, default to it. Like, Oh, I tried email marketing and it didn't work, but then I would ask the question, well, has email marketing ever worked for anyone in the history of the world? Yeah. So it's not about email marketing. Maybe it's about this next thing, which is, uh, how it was applied. Right? Was it not done well? Was it not appropriate for your situation? Something like that might've been the reason why it didn't work. Okay. Or it could have been that it did work, but you were missing something else. Okay. So you're applying these strategies, and you might have four out of five pieces in place, but you're missing that fifth piece. So imagine you have a plant and it's in good soil. You get it sunshine, and then it dies. Where y'all don't, plants need sun. Don't they need good soil? I was doing what I was supposed to do. Yeah. But they also need water. Okay, so you can't have two out of the three pieces and expect it to do well. You got to have every piece. So another reason it was missing a, a particular piece that you needed. Okay. Uh, and then another reason it could be is it might work, but it's just not appropriate for you or your situation or your goals or what you want to do. So that's why you notice you could have a thousand authors that became successful and they took a thousand different paths to get there. They all found their own way. There's commonalities, but for everyone who says, X worked for me, maybe it's free promotions, or someone who said that that's not my strategy, and they do something totally different. Okay? So all of this breaks down. And understanding that. And if you're sitting there going, okay, cool, but how do I know what my situ, how do I know why it's not working for me? Like I get that again, I get something's not working, but this doesn't help me. So the answer, the number one way to find why something isn't working for you, especially when you're first starting out, is you need outside feedback. Okay. Uh, there's a quote, a paraphrase. It doesn't matter how hard you're rowing your boat, if you're rolling in the wrong direction. Well, if this is the first time you're publishing a book, how are you possibly going to know what's working and what's not working. Right? And this is where, and you know, I might be biased because I'm a coach and a how to improve book listing on Amazon, publishing coach, and I'm like, I'm biased because I have coaches, I hire coaches, and I know how valuable their feedback is. So I see this with authors a lot of times. They're like, I've been trying all this stuff. It's not working. I take one look at their Amazon page, and immediately I go. Oh, something when the cover or, Oh yeah, it's the description of what you did there. Or I go, okay, the book page looks good, but I remember having this back and forth conversation with an author and we really boiled down. She's like, you know, I'm going through these courses. I'm doing all these things. I've been told. I look at her page or page looked good. Look at our website, our website looks great. She has a good lead magnet offer, and I'm like, I'm sitting there and I'm kinda like, yeah, she's got a lot of the right things in place and you know, she's studying the courses and I wonder why it's not doing as well through conversation. It's like, well, what are you actively doing to promote the book right now? It's like, Oh, I used to run as I used to do this. Okay. Oh, like right now. What are you doing? Well, once a month I send an email that promotes my books. Like, I don't want to be too annoying to my list and blah, blah. I'm like, okay, so you're promoting your books one time a month to your email list. And you're wondering why it's not selling as many copies as you want. Hmm. That might be it, but it took babies on outside asking the right questions or at least looking at things sometimes actually saying, don't spend more time on this aspect. It's actually good. Right? You're actually good when it comes to, you don't have to keep tweaking your website color scheme. You don't have to keep tweaking your book description. It's fine. Focus on this other area that's really deficient and you're just not going to know, especially when you're starting out, unless you have an outsider. And even as an experienced marketer, you look at the world's top marketers, they have their coaches, they have their mentors, they have their masterminds, whatever it is that they need to get feedback. So I'm just so boggled when someone who, if the most experienced people and the world's top athletes and CEOs and authors and business people have people that offer them feedback. What makes someone who's a beginner, who doesn't know all these things, think that they can get by without feedback of some kind. It doesn't make sense. So that's the answer. You'll get feedback. It can be in part reader feedback. It can be, um. Critiques from coaches or mentors or something. You just gotta have that, uh, that outside feedback in order to see your blind spots and determine through test surveys and feedback, what's not working. That was so much information, just all about a tie. So thank you so much for being here and I really do appreciate it and I can't wait to get the feedback on this presentation. I know everyone learned a lot. I know. I didn't hope everyone has been taking notes, so thank you so much for being here. Yeah, appreciate it, Jonathan. Thank you. Hey guys, I hope you appreciate it and enjoyed what Derek had to say as much as I did. I stayed up in the middle of the night because I wanted to get that amazing content from him. And as you probably know by now, my internet only works between midnight and 7:00 AM so I have to record in the dark of the dark. So, I'm excited that he shared so much for him. And you can find out more about Derek. Derek ducker.com that's D, E R E K D O E P K E r.com. And of course there's going to be a link in the show notes. And I can't wait for you guys to see what else Derek has to share with you and we'll see you again for our next interview is part of the authorship series. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of serve know master. Make sure you subscribe so you never miss another episode. We'll be back next Tuesday with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race. Head over to serve no master.com forward slash podcast now for your chance to win a free copy of Jonathan's bestseller. Serve no master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you Tuesday. When you turn your book into a bestseller. Find out what other authors don't want you to know at servicemaster.com/secrets.