Are you looking for THE edge you need to stand out from the crowd? In this episode of The Growth Pod, Becky Warrak shares the nitty-gritty of why writing a book could be the competitive edge that you've been looking for.

Specifically, Becky shares:

• Why writing a book can be game-changing for your marketing strategy
• How to make writing EASY by leveraging content you've already created
• Common pitfalls to avoid when writing a book
• How much it costs to publish a book using the three most common publishing methods

Mentioned in This Episode:

• Becky's Book: Self-Publish Your Book Like a Pro
• Blog Post: Should I Self-Publish My Book?

About Becky:

Becky is the owner of Raven Crest Books, a publisher for business owners and entrepreneurs in the online coaching space. She also mentors online coaches to write and publish their own work in order to grow their authority and build their businesses.

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About Angela

Angela Frank is a fractional CMO with a decade-long track record of generating multimillion-dollar marketing revenue for clients. She is the founder of The Growth Directive, a marketing consultancy helping brands create sustainable marketing programs.

Her new book Your Marketing Ecosystem: How Brands Can Market Less and Sell More helps business owners, founders, and corporate leaders create straightforward and profitable marketing strategies.

Angela is the host of The Growth Pod podcast, where she shares actionable tips to help you build a profitable brand you love.

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Welcome to The Growth Pod.

Today on the podcast, we have Becky Warrak, who is the owner of Ravencrest Books, a publisher for business owners and entrepreneurs in the online coaching space. She also mentors online coaches to write and publish their own work in order to grow their authority and build their businesses.

Becky, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

I am very excited for our chat. Today you're going to share why writing a book is the ultimate marketing strategy. And I am so excited to learn more.

But before we get started, can you share a little bit more about why you think writing a book is so important for business owners?

Okay, so there's so many reasons, but I think first and foremost, the reason that writing a book can be so beneficial for business is because it makes you stand out from the crowd. Especially in an online coaching world that is so much competition. Everyone is a coach these days, is the thing to be.

And the big question is, when it comes to marketing, how do you stand out above your peers?

And writing a book to become a published author is the perfect way to stand out above your peers, to raise your own personal credibility, to raise your brand's authority and credibility, and just to boost your overall reputation. Obviously, there's other ways that you can. You can stand out from the crowd by doing more qualifications.

The length of time that you have been in your business and serving clients for all those things can add to the business's status and your own personal status that you have.

But if somebody is scrolling through trying to find a coach and they come across in the bio, published author, online coach, published author, boom, that's the one they're going to click on because it stands out when they're scrolling through and it stops them from scrolling any further and they're going to take a look at your profile.

I love that.

So publishing a book can really be a way to differentiate yourself as expert in your business, especially if you are a coach and you're looking to gain that competitive edge.

So it sounds like publishing a book is definitely something that will improve your marketing strategy, but I bet there's a lot involved in self publishing a book. Can you share an overview of the steps that it takes from deciding to write a book all the way through to actually getting it live?

Of course. Yeah.

And I think it's also really important to demystify the whole process because when you think about publishing a book, people mainly don't have a clue.

And the main method of publishing that's going to come to mind when people hear about and talk about publishing a book is that in a traditional sense where your book gets signed by a publishing house and they basically give you an author payout and do all the work for you. That's kind of how everyone thinks and puts on a pedestal as a bit of a holy grail of publishing.

But self publishing has become such so accessible now with modern technology and Amazon's KDP that it's easier than ever to publish a book. Which is the reason really why wouldn't you publish a book? Especially if you have that knowledge within you.

So the kind of steps that you would take to decide to publish it is do I want to add an extra string to my marketing strategy bow and do I have enough knowledge to fill a book? The next kind of stages that follow on from that are obviously the writing of the book. It then needs to be edited.

You need to get the book cover designed, you need to. And contrary to many people's opinion, the marketing can really start while you're still writing the book.

So you might think that you kind of get everything done and then start marketing it, but you need to start the marketing for your book really, really early. So whilst you're using your book as a marketing strategy, you also do need to do book marketing as well. So marketing, editing, cover design.

The earlier you get your cover design completed, the earlier you can start pinging out visual images of your book into the world. So it goes from becoming an idea into look, you can see a mock up of my book.

I am going to be a published author and get everyone excited and everyone talking about it.

Once you've got your cover, your cover design sorted, you need to get the formatting done, you need to get the proofreading done to spot any errors and mistakes that are in your book. And finally, and this is just a real simple like run through.

If you're self publishing your book, more than likely you're going to be using a print on demand platform like kdp. There are many others. And you need to upload your book to the online platform ready to be printed out and sold in many marketplaces.

That's the overall just a quick summary of what goes on behind self publishing a book.

I think it was so important what you were saying about making sure that you're marketing your book before it actually comes out and how if you get the COVID designed really early now, you can have those promotional materials showing your book and talking about how you will be a published author. But I also want to go back to something you said and that was you know, do you have the knowledge within you to create a book?

Something that you talk a lot about is using your existing content, like blog posts or different types of content that you've already written online to write a book. So can you share a little bit more about how that looks?

Yeah.

So if you're an online coach, if you're providing some kind of service to people who need it, you are going to have some kind of background or knowledge. So for me, I usually put them into two brackets of coaches. So you've either got the coaches who have studied really hard.

It's their topic of interest, they know everything about it. They're an expert in that topic because they have studied it. And then there's the people who have been through the experience.

So there's people, for example, hormone coaches, somebody who has struggled with their hormones for a really long time. They've been through the struggles, they've managed to work out how to, how to heal themselves and make their life better.

And then they become a hormone coach. So those are the two kind of people that usually are coaches.

And both of those people have so much content already written to already provide the services that they provide.

So either they have a blog, most business owners have a blog now because it's the way that you can increase your SEO by having a blog that is so much content. In blog posts, there's email marketing. Any kind of emails that you've sent out, they're usually pretty bulky for content as well.

Captions from Instagram posts or Facebook posts or LinkedIn articles.

If you're an experienced coach, then you're going to have all that experience and it's probably going to turn your book will probably turn more into kind of a memoir, slash, non. Non fiction book, slash memoir.

Because you're reliving the experiences that you've been through to create a relatable image of yourself so that people can read your book and say, oh my God, that's exactly what I've been through. I can't believe she's been through the same. She knows how to cure herself. I'm going to sign up to this person.

So there's so much content that you would have already written if you're.

Even if you're one or two years down the line into your coaching business, there you will surprise yourself with how much content you've already written. So you need to utilize it. I'll be honest, when I wrote my book, I wrote it in under 90 days and probably about 13,000 words of it.

It was 45,000 words. Altogether, 13,000 words of it was from. From content that I'd already written.

Obviously it needs to be tweaked, but I guarantee that most online coaches are going to be able to add like 10,000 words to their book straight away by just copying and pasting their previous content into a document, a Google document, a Word document. It's such an easy way to go from having a blank piece of paper to, oh, okay, I've got like 10,000 words in my book.

And then all of a sudden the writing process doesn't seem quite so scary anymore.

I love that.

I think if you're listening to this episode and you're thinking about writing a book, but you're struggling to find that motivation to get started, repurposing your content that you've already written is a great way to remove those barriers and just kind of start getting the juices flowing. So you've talked a lot about the benefit of writing a book, how to do it, and then also a great way to get started. Started.

But let's talk a little bit about publishing. There is two in, in my experience, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, there are two ways to publish your book.

One is through a traditional publisher. But then the other one is this more accessible form of self publishing that you've touched on.

Can you talk about some of the benefits of going the self publishing route versus a traditional route?

Yeah, there's. There's also a third option called hybrid publishing which is kind of bang in the middle of the two. There are benefits to using this one as well.

And basically you will pay upfront a fee and the publisher takes. Takes the service fee. They publish their book, your book for you.

And the benefit of hybrid publishing is that it's a lot quicker than traditional publishing and you get a much higher rate of royalties. So for example, with traditional publishing, you going to get around 5 to 10% of royalties.

You might get a big payout at the beginning, but then when the royalties come in, it's going to be really, really low.

With hybrid publishing, yes, you've paid that fee upfront, but because of that, because of that investment that you've made, you're going to get between like 70 and 90% royalties, which is much higher. Obviously with self publishing, you get 100% of the royalties. You kind of. And I'm really, I bang on about book goals a lot.

Before you decide which publishing route is best for you, you really need to work out what your book goals are. So are you writing your book to use as a lead magnet. Are you writing your book because you want to become rich and famous as an author?

Are you writing your book because you want to get access and use your book as to open doors, to speak at events and gigs that you might not have got if you weren't a published author?

But because you're now an expert in your field, because you're a published author, people are more likely to take you on board for these speaker conferences. Each method will bring its own benefits. For example, if you're wanting stardom from becoming an author, traditional is probably the way to go.

But it's not going to be a quick process. It can take years to even get accepted. And then once you get accepted, it can take even longer to actually get your book published.

If you want it really quick, then hybrid or self publishing is the way to go. If you want to take all the, all the royalties yourself, then self publishing, there's just, there's, there's so many pros and cons.

I can, I can drop the link for a blog post that I've written that that goes through literally all the pros and cons of all of them. You need to think about your book goals and that will also have a knock on effect with the kind of marketing that you do for your book as well.

I love that. I think it's so important what you said about beginning with your end goal in mind and then choosing the publishing route that best supports that.

You mentioned the one of the biggest differences between those three methods is the amount of royalties you receive. But I'd imagine that there are some other costs as well.

You mentioned in hybrid you pay an upfront fee to the publisher in exchange for the higher royalties.

What are the other costs in the hybrid and the self publishing model that maybe you're not thinking about as you're writing your book and they maybe will surprise you once you're trying to go the more self or hybrid route.

So this is a topic I enjoy talking about because people, when they hear about self publishing, they think, okay, self publishing is free. It's free. Like this whole process is going to be free. It is not free. It is not free to self publish. Technically speaking, it can be free.

But if you're going to do a good job and you want your book to be successful, which is kind of the whole point of writing a book in the first place, because you want to use it to reach another goal, you need to produce your book to a high level, which is not free.

So I actually, I write about in my book, I go through the wholesale publishing process and there are parts of it that you can do on your own, such as the formatting, such as the proofreading.

Although with the proofreading, when I say on your own, you can do it for free, but I would always recommend have other eyes come in and do the proofreading for you because you're not going to spot your own mistakes. So there are aspects of it that are going to be free.

If you're a graphic design genius, then of course you can design your book cover for free as well. But if you're not, it's so important to recognize where your skills are lacking and outsource that job.

Please outsource that job if you know you can't do that. The editing is the most, for me, it's the most important part of publishing your book.

And it's one of those ones where self publishing authors tend to skip over because it's so expensive. But it's. They shouldn't, you shouldn't skip the editing far because you don't know how good your book can be until you've had it edited.

That's going to be the most expensive bit of your, of your self publishing journey.

And if you're thinking, oh my God, that's a lot, think about all the other avenues of your, of your current marketing strategy and what you're currently spending on your marketing strategy. So things like Facebook ads, Instagram ads, ads anywhere. Think about whether you're hiring social media managers to.

You haven't got time to do that part. All of that stuff is part of your marketing strategy. And if you're willing to spend money on those things like Facebook ads, they add up.

Then this is just another part of your marketing strategy that you need to invest in if you want to reach those goals that you wanted to reach.

Yeah, I love that there's two things that you mentioned there. The one is where you're already spending your marketing dollars.

So I'm actually coming out with a book in July and something that I've shared in a recent episode is that I am capacity with my clients currently. And so it made more sense to stop running ads for now and invest in the book while I'm working on getting that published.

And then later, as maybe I have more capacity or I bring on more team members, I can go ahead and scale those ads back up. Facebook isn't going anywhere, Google's not going anywhere. They'll always be happy to take my money.

And so for me, it made more sense to allocate it to the launch of my new book. But the other thing you mentioned was the importance of editing. And I just want to echo that.

I have a lot of people on the podcast who have written their own book book and self published it. And for me, I always try to get that book that the guest has written beforehand and read it.

And it's really evident when somebody has made the investment versus when they have not. And the people who make the investment sound a lot more smart, intelligent, their ideas come across a lot cleaner.

And those people are, if you're listening at home, those are the people where I'm talking about their books a lot and mentioning them.

And then the other people, I maybe talk about the books a little bit less or in passing just because, you know, their ideas don't come across as cleanly.

Yeah, that's so important. You've hit the nail on the head with the how your ideas come across.

Because if you've written the book, then obviously the ideas, they come across fine to you because you've written it and you've written it in context and you know exactly what you're talking about.

It happens a lot when I, when I read clients manuscripts and I say to them, I do that before the editing process to make sure that they're not wasting money on the editor. Like I can iron out a few things before it goes to that stage. And I'll say, what does that mean? Or like what is the context there?

And they're like, oh my God, I didn't even think like that. That didn't make sense to somebody else. So you just won't notice those things until it's been to an editor.

And when you talk about things like book covers, it's so obvious who has invested in a designer and who hasn't. If you just scroll through Amazon, you will see who is invested and who hasn't. Because some of the covers out there are awful.

It just, you're selling yourself short. Right. When you're not investing in the COVID it's the first impression that somebody is going to get when they see your book.

And even though the ideas inside the book might be really solid, if you're not taking the time to make sure that the COVID looks good and appealing, you're kind of shooting yourself in the foot or making yourself seem less credible from the get go.

Whereas if you make that investment and everything looks good, you look credible, your ideas in the book are great because you had an editor and then that makes you look like a better authority on the topic as well.

Yeah, exactly. You've got to remember if you're going to go for the, if you're going to go through the self publishing journey, your book directly reflects you.

So if you're, like you said, if your book looks rubbish, you look rubbish. So that's just one thing to keep in mind for the whole process.

I love that.

Becky, I really enjoyed our conversation today and I want to know what's next for you, what have you been working on and what's coming up in the near future?

Okay, so can I show my book Shameless Plug?

Yes, of course.

Here's my book. So this is, and this just to point out as well, this like looks like a good size book, I think. And this is only 40,000 words.

So if you're thinking it doesn't sound like that much and you're thinking, oh, it's going to look like a pamphlet or a leaflet when I print it. This is only 40,000 words. It depends how you format it. So this is my book. If you're thinking about writing your own book, this is for you.

So it literally takes you through the whole process of self publishing. There's two chapters on marketing in there as well. The chapter on how to hire a freelancer without getting scammed, which is pretty huge.

There's how to create your publishing timeline and most importantly, self publishing isn't free. And to help you to understand your own goals and why you're writing your book.

And that's just to really launch off the book in a positive way and to get you on the right track so that we can really publish a book to a high, high standard. So that was out. That came out on June 1st. You can buy this on Amazon.

Congratulations on launching your book. I do want to clarify to the listeners that I did not talk about your book during this episode.

Not because it's not good, but because it just came out and I have not had a chance to read it yet. So I feel like I put my foot in my mouth there by saying like, I don't talk about certain books. That is not the case here.

I just haven't had a chance to get my hands on it. But the link to everything that you just mentioned will give you notes. Thanks.

So the book will be there if you're interested in self publishing your own book, or even if you're just interested in learning more about it. Becky, I really appreciated you coming on today and sharing everything that you know about self publishing.

I think our audience got a lot out of it and I really appreciate your time.

Thank you so much for having me.

If you enjoyed this episode of the Growth Pod, please leave us a review. Thank you so much for listening and I look forward to seeing you in the next one.