Discover How To Get A Book Published and Other Helpful Tips
Podcast Version
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Topics Discussed:
01:27 – One of the biggest take aways of being a published author
01:55 – The first thing you need to do before you even start
02:44 – What to be aware of when approached by publishers
03:30 – How to protect yourself and your work when negotiating with publishers
04:54 – Book deal to book shelf in 3 months: 8 Steps to delivering under aggressive deadlines
05:23 – How to discipline yourself on a tight deadline
06:57 – The process to complete your deadline
08:12 – The Steven King method of writing
09:31 – The right time to start marketing your book is…
10:22 – The difference between writing for a blog and writing for a book
11:59 – Your brand and writing multiple books
13:21 – The driving force behind a brand with multiple interests
14:00 – Content marketing principles and marketing your book
14:28 – Why not to turn blog posts into kindle and paperback books
17:26 – Taking the lead on marketing your book even when you have a publisher
19:54 – [Offline Marketing Tactic] – The huge benefit of being an author
21:49 – How to receive a BONUS from me when you buy The Healthy Juicers Bible
How To Get A Book Published Resources:
Farnoosh’s website: Prolific Living
The Healthy Juicers Bible on Amazon.com
Tony Teegarden Facebook Fanpage: Benefits of Juicing Video Interview
Online Marketing Mentor Program
How To Get A Book Published Transcript:
Tony: All right. Hello, this is Tony Teegarden with TonyTeegarden.com, and I am here with the always fabulous, exciting, and energetic, brand new author that I get to introduce Farnoosh Brock.
Farnoosh: Hi.
Tony: Farnoosh welcome to the interview.
Farnoosh: Hi Tony, my friend. How are you?
Tony: Hey, doing fantastic. I am so excited to be able to add, we’ve got speaker, we’ve got internet entrepreneur, founder and creator of Prolific Living, and now brand new author of “The Healthy Juicer’s Bible.”
Farnoosh: Thank you.
Tony: This is really cool. Okay. I just have to tell you it’s really cool. I remember when you . . . what was this you got the notification to start doing this what, some time in November?
Farnoosh: November.
Tony: November it was.
Farnoosh: November, yes.
Tony: And what I want to do, just for the person that’s watching this, I’m going to provide a link to the Tony Teegarden Facebook Fanpage where I’m posting. We’re just talking about straight up health and juicing and all that good stuff.
Farnoosh: Yeah.
Tony: But this interview I want to talk about marketing, something I’m very excited about.
Farnoosh: Let’s do it.
Tony: Yeah. I want to talk about the marketing and how this book came to be, some of your lessons because, and I’m going to talk about one reason here, in just a minute, why it’s so important to be an author still, because a lot of people are going “Eh, is it that important?”
Farnoosh: Oh yeah.
Tony: So talk to me, number one, what was some of your biggest takeaways from this? From being now a published author, what’s one of your biggest takeaways from this?
Farnoosh: Yeah. And this is one of my favorite topics to talk about now because I learned so much along the way Tony. I was one of the people that thought writing a book, you know, what’s the big deal about that? But I started self-publishing my books, as you know, about two years ago, and the way that these traditional publishers came to us is because of my first juice book, which I self-published, and because I got my work out there. So my first advice to you is get your work out there, whether you self-publish or traditionally publish. But . . .
Tony: Let me ask you real quick. When you say “self-publish,” are we talking about like CreateSpace through Amazon?
Farnoosh: I did not do any print books on my own. I didn’t.
Tony: Okay, got it.
Farnoosh: But I think that depending, on what you’re purpose is, if you’re a speaker, you need print books so that you can sell them at the back of the room, whatever. I did just Kindle and also ePub versions. But my point is get your work out there.
Tony: Yeah.
Farnoosh: Because I was self-published, that’s how the traditional publisher found me. I wasn’t looking. They found us. Initially what they wanted to do was take my original book and un-publish it, buy the rights to it, and re-publish it as a print book. I actually turned them down. I said I am selling enough on that. I don’t want to give up the rights, and I’m not interested. We spent another week or so. Do you want me to go into that process of what happened next?
Tony: Yeah I would love to. Yeah, a person who is looking to launch a book I mean this is important.
Farnoosh: Yeah. So my first advice to you is don’t just jump at anything that comes to you. You have to check with your priorities. I wanted to keep that book as it was. But we kept talking, and the publisher was very persuasive, and they wanted a juice book. So we came to an agreement that we’re going to leave that juice book alone, we’re going to leave the rest of my juicing business alone, but I’m going to write a brand new book, and it’s going to be on an expanded topic. It’s not just going to be green juicing. It’s going to be the whole world of juicing and building it as a habit. Then they are going, of course, have the rights to it. But we’re going to have a hardcover, all that good stuff. So then the next thing you need to do is hire a publishing lawyer, which I really didn’t want to do because they eat into your advance and they are expensive.
Tony: Sure.
Farnoosh: But you have got to have due diligence because this is your business you’re talking about, and these contracts that you sign, this is permanent. So three or four years down the road, if you don’t read and you don’t understand legalese unless you are lawyer. So find somebody . . .
Tony: There’s a price and there’s a cost, right? The price of the attorney is far less than the cost of not incorporating them and covering your butt.
Farnoosh: Absolutely. Absolutely, and I did a lot of research on whether I should even do this, and the answers came back that you absolutely should. My cousin is a publisher. She has a publishing house. So anyway, we hired a lawyer, and this takes maybe two to three hours of the lawyer’s time to review the contract. You can engage them in any kind of negotiation, which we did, if you want to negotiate some of the terms. So that takes about one to two weeks, right? And it’s okay, but not if your publisher is under such an aggressive deadline, which mine were. So every day that we’re working on the contract, I still agreed to turn in the manuscript to them five weeks from now. So we agreed, and then it was time to get into the book. So I’m going to let you lead us into the marketing aspect and just wherever you want to go with this.
Tony: Yeah. I remember, and again I am going to post a link, you did phenomenal post around your timeline of this process. Book deal to book shelf in 3 months.
Farnoosh: Yes.
Tony: And so we’re going to link to that here below the video because I just thought that that was so profound. I was like, “Oh my gosh, I’m going to talk to you about this.”
Farnoosh: Okay.
Tony: Just the overall pressure that I know you were under, because you were traveling at the same time, weren’t you?
Farnoosh: Oh my gosh, I was, and I was speaking, and it was the holidays. It was Christmas holidays and it was intense.
Tony: yeah.
Farnoosh: Okay. So go ahead and tell me . . .
Tony: So talk to me about discipline. Talk to me about discipline.
Farnoosh: Yeah.
Tony: Come on. I mean, everybody else would have been like, “I can’t. This is Christmas. I’ve got this.” But you did it, and not only did you do it, but you did it in amazing fashion.
Farnoosh: Thank you. Thank you. So you have to have your own standards for your work, right? The publishers actually gave me a lower word count. They were okay if I took content back from my old book. But I had this standard that I wanted to write a brand new book, because many times I have read books by authors, a second book which is 80% the same as the first book Tony, and it drives crazy. So I didn’t want anyone who buys this book to really have anything in common with the first book. So it was going to be brand new. It was going to be longer. It was going to have certain sections.
As far as discipline, let me tell you, once you sign a contract, you are bound to that contract, otherwise you lose the deal, you ose the money, everything is over, and you’re just not going to feel good about it. So once I committed, it was a matter of just scheduling everything in advance. So my husband was my accountability partner. You absolutely need an accountability partner even if you are super disciplined. So hire someone or just sign someone up, a good friend like Tony for instance. I would have come to you if he wasn’t going to do it.
Then you need the outline. That’s the first thing you need to do, and you need to stick to the outline, because as writers we love to write and write and get creative. If you don’t stick to that outline, you’re going to run out of time, and it’s not going to work out well.
So what you do is you look at the deadline. I had five weeks, five weeks and one of it was doing the whole contract. I think it was less than five weeks. I had all this travel, and I had speaking engagements and the holidays. So I set aside one to two days for coming up with the outline, and you have to do it very quickly, very aggressively. Decide what you’re going to cover in your book. You have a pretty good idea. This is your topic, your expertise.
Then you work backwards and you calculate roughly how many words per chapter. You want to stick to that, and then also how often you have to turn around and have a chapter, basically how much you have to write per day to produce that. At the end of the time frame, you have to set aside a week for when everything can and may go wrong. Have you heard of Murphy’s Law?
Tony: Of course, yeah.
Farnoosh: It does, no matter how well you plan. So you have to set that aside. And this person that’s your accountability partner should also be the person that can actually verify your work, because you’re too close to it and you’re in a hurry. You can just make mistakes and what have you. So what we did is after the outline, I had one day to do introduction, two days to do chapter one, so on and so forth. At the very end, I was going to do my photos, my layout, my index, and then the editing.
As I was finishing my chapters, I was turning them over to my husband to read, and I was not looking back at the work I had done. This is something Stephen King talks about too, where you do the work, you set it aside; you don’t want to look at it. Then at the end of the four weeks, when I had been writing chapter after chapter and he was reviewing them, I wasn’t looking at the work. Then it had been some time since I had looked at the first set of writing. Then I go back and I look at the writing, and that distance helps you look at your work more objectively and then go through the revisions that let’s say your accountability partner has done for you and incorporate them. Then you do all the revisions. You read one time for editing. Then when you finish, you have to read and maybe re-read just for flow and for coherence and all of that good stuff.
The last thing we did was we were incorporating pictures. That’s really important because you want your work to be beautiful and inspiring.
Tony: That’s one of the great things about this by the way. There are some just some absolutely amazing pictures.
Farnoosh: You like those?
Tony: Yeah, absolutely.
Farnoosh: Yeah. Then the cover layout, you have to do the cover, put alot of thoughts into the cover because the covers do sell the book. My publisher had already picked a title. So “The Healthy Juicer’s Bible” that was it. But then there is work for the jacket, all the bio, all the work. But at the same time, as I was doing all of this, I had to set aside about one to two days during that really aggressive deadline to still get the word out. So it is never, and you would probably agree with this, never too early to market.
Tony: No.
Farnoosh: So even though I wasn’t focusing on marketing, I was telling people that I’m going to be coming to them and asking them to review the book or look at it or talk to their people about it. So I had set aside some time for that, and then of course some time in the end because you are going to run out of the deadline and things are going to go wrong, which they just do.
Tony: It just happens.
Farnoosh: Yeah, exactly. Okay. So I’m going to turn it over to you and see if that helps.
Tony: Yeah. It does. No, it’s just immensely helpful for anyone who is looking. Now let me ask you this. You touched on something. We get a lot of bloggers. Obviously, you’ve been a successful blogger for quite some time now. You’ve been featured in lots of authority sites, I mean, I could go on with third party validation.
Farnoosh: Thank you.
Tony: How different is it writing for a blog as opposed to writing for a book, like a physical book?
Farnoosh: So different. So different. Yeah. So a book is a self-contained, a gift. It is something that carries your thoughts. It’s completely self-contained. A book is, of course, longer obviously, but you think of it differently. I mean the outline in itself gives it the tone. You have to be prepared to do a big commitment. This is a big commitment. A blog post is not a big commitment. Writing a book, even under aggressive deadlines, is a huge commitment, and you’re going to feel like you want to give up. You’re going to feel like you don’t want to work as hard to keep the quality, so you start to maybe compromise. If you’re working on a hard deadline, you have to really be vigilant about all that. If you can’t do it, your accountability partner has to do it.
It’s a lot of work. The editing is not fun for a writer. You want to create. You don’t want to edit your work. Sometimes you get sensitive about the editing that comes to you from the publisher, or from your accountability partner. You can’t be sensitive because people are looking at it and giving you feedback. You have the final say, but writing a book is a huge project. It’s a huge commitment, and you have to be in love with the idea, with wanting to do it. You have to be committed. So it’s a lot of emotional investment into the work, but it pays off. It really pays off.
Tony: Yeah. You’re giving birth to this. It’s just no different than Prolific Living, which is again, going back and looking at your brand, because me as a marketer and strategist, I look at your brand, you’ve branched off. You’ve done what a lot of people aren’t capable of doing, and I believe it’s because you’re committed to this overall. Again, your Prolific Living, just the brand itself is so encompassing of relationships and health.
Farnoosh: Lifestyle and career.
Tony: Lifestyle and career, all of that is about living prolifically. So you’ve really encompassed that brand very, very well and allowed yourself the room to breathe life into each one of these segments that you do, and you do so very well.
Farnoosh: Thank you.
Tony: I think it’s something that a lot of people could look at, because we’re always told to niche down and niche down and niche down.
Farnoosh: I know.
Tony: That might be appropriate in some places.
Farnoosh: Yes. You know what? This book is a very niche book.
Tony: yes.
Farnoosh: So every project that you take on can be a niche. But why limit yourself if you want to do more than one, right?
Tony: Yeah, right.
Farnoosh: So for everything that I focus on, if I write a blog post, it’s about a specific topic. It has a specific purpose. It’s probably for a specific audience. Or if I write an email newsletter, but overall there is still something that pulls it all together. I think that the mission for Prolific Living is I want to help people create freedom in their health and in their career. But those are two separate pillars, and I want to create things that support those two separate pillars. So I think look at what you really want to do. Start with one and be very specific and focused and intentional about what that is. But you don’t have to limit. If you want to branch out after that, I really believe you can.
Tony: Yeah. I believe, as looking at you over the last couple of years, everything that you have done has been set with a certain intention. I am the co-founder of the Online Marketing Mentor Program.
Farnoosh: Yes.
Tony: Inside that program I talk about the whole point of doing blog posts or content marketing, or videos like this one, I’m always thinking two or three steps down the road of where I want to serve and how I want to serve my customer by walking them deeper into the process if and so fact they desire that outcome.
Farnoosh: Right, exactly.
Tony: But this is something that you’ve done wonderfully in your marketing and certainly with this book. You’ve done a phenomenal job. As I’m reading through it, you’re setting up certain things throughout the book that just blend very nicely.
Farnoosh: Thank you.
Tony: One other thing I want to ask you is you chose not to take, and this is something you and I have both have seen before. The book is still out, so to speak, for me. But people taking their blog post content and turning those into Kindle books and e-books and things like that. What is your perspective on that? I have my opinion. But I’m just curious like someone who takes blog posts that they’ve been doing for the last four years, and obviously they clean it up and everything, but they dump it into a physical book.
Farnoosh: Sure. Right.
Tony: What’s your thought about that?
Farnoosh: I think that if you really believe this is a way to reach a bigger audience with your message, which hopefully you believe in, and maybe the Kindle platform will give you a larger scale, then that’s fine. But you have to remember you put your name on that book, and if it’s just a bunch of blog posts that are maybe loosely related to each other, if your purpose is just to get a book out there and just to start making money, well I just think you could have a deeper purpose. There is nothing wrong with that, but you could have a deeper purpose. It can be more fulfilling, and if you really put some thought into creating a book, it can have so much more long-term benefits. I think that doing it quickly, without forethought and planning, doing it under an aggressive deadline is something different, but doing it quickly to just get the content together, I think it depends. You just have to look to see what your intention is.
I don’t care to do that. I do like to provide my content in different forms. So, for instance, I believe if you have a podcast, I have a podcast right, I sometimes think about providing transcripts to people who prefer to read. But I don’t think about going back and stringing blog posts together. I just haven’t, because I just think if I am going to write a book, maybe I’m going to look at some of the reference material I wrote in the past, but I’m going to still write the book from scratch, and that’s really my radical viewpoint. You don’t have to agree with it.
Tony: No. Hey, you’re a bit of a purist, and that’s one of the things I appreciate about you because I see you as an artist.
Farnoosh: Oh, well, thank you. I love that.
Tony: I mean let’s face it. But seriously you’re an artist. You’re a lot like myself over the past year or so. Now I only use my own photography on my website as opposed to a long time ago, you know you and I are big photography nuts.
Farnoosh: Right.
Tony: The T4i is on my soon to be bought list.
Farnoosh: Good for you.
Tony: Exactly, nice. But you’re a bit of a purist, and I can appreciate that about you and how it shines in your marketing, and how it shines in your brand.
Farnoosh: Thank you.
Tony: There’s a certain amount of integrity, I think is the word I’m looking for, that you’re an example of.
Farnoosh: Yes. And you can have that. I mean, everybody can have that. We decide what we stand for period. So it’s that simple really.
Tony: It really is. So, listen Farnoosh, I want to encourage everyone that is watching this video, you gave some really good content as far as some of the beginning parts of getting that book and getting it published and some of the things you’re going to go through. Is there anything that’s left out that you want to cover before we wrap up.
Farnoosh: You know, one other thing that I did is that I took the lead in marketing, and I made it very clear to my publishers that I was going to partner with them. I was going to collaborate with them. I was going to be really their ally in getting this book out. So I think that attitude, if you have the opportunity to work with a publisher, is huge. They appreciate that. You can’t imagine how much they appreciate that because most authors they’re like, “Oh the publisher isn’t doing anything for me.They’re not marketing it.” You don’t want that attitude.
So think of it as the best partnership and take the lead. I leveraged all my relationships because I knew people who are fascinated and interested in juicing. So I approached them. I arranged all this with my publicist, and I think I can tell you that now I have an amazing relationship with my publisher, and this can be a long-term relationship. If you have the opportunity, I really want you to take the lead on marketing, challenge yourself, and offer to help your publisher as much as possible in the process. It will come back and reward you.
Tony: Absolutely. Great point. So where can they get this book, by the way, because I am going to tell you if you want the energy that this young lady is exuding right now, which is never-ending by the way. When we get off this, she’s going to be just like this going 100 miles an hour. I don’t care when I . . .
Farnoosh: How do you know?
Tony: I’ve talked to her on the phone. She’s just a hundred miles an hour. If you want this kind of energy, number one, I’m going to tell you to go get this book, because it is soup to nuts, pardon I guess the analogy. But soup to nuts, it is absolutely an amazing and impressive.
Farnoosh: Thank you Tony
Tony: Again, we’re going to link. Click on the link to learn about kind of like the health benefits and everything else of juicing. But certainly I want to encourage you to get this book. Where can they get it from? If they want to . . .
Farnoosh: The best price right now, and I want you to get it for the best price, is on Amazon.com. They’re doing a discount because the book just launched March 7th. But you can also pick it up on your local Costco’s and Barnes & Noble. Those are carrying it.
Also just any online store, they’re carrying it in many different online locations barnesandnoble.com, Indie Books, and several other links. But I think your best bet is Amazon.com, fast delivery, and I just hope that you can at least explore the world of juicing. You may just be amazed, because you don’t know what you don’t know, and I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and
Tony can probably attest to that. We are just amazed at what it has done for us. So I just hope it can do the same for you.
Tony: So let me do two things. I am going to share one huge benefit of being an author that a lot of people that we can tie into our online businesses, and I’ve shared this little tidbit with a couple of folks. When you are a published author, there are lots of magazines out there that will require, lots of them don’t, but I’m a big fan of getting people who are subscribers at a very high interest rate as opposed to a low level interest rate or interest level. So what I suggest is to take some of your content, and not just you, but I’m telling the people that are watching, take some of your blog content, your real good quality content that’s got lots of social proof and comments on there and submit that as an article, because you can do this online to many, many magazines and publications.
Farnoosh: Great idea.
Tony: Now what this is going to do is these are people that have already bought the magazine or have a subscription to the magazine. So they’re already at a higher interest level than per se someone who shows up to your site and provides you their email.
Farnoosh: Right.
Tony: So not only are you going to get the expertise or just that fact that people go, “Oh my gosh, wow this person is in the magazine.” So that obviously is going to show a lot of authority.
Farnoosh: Credibility yeah.
Tony: Credibility and then not only that, but then generally these high end magazines are going to have a website, which has a very high PR. They’re going to link to your website, and of course you’re going to get much more qualified traffic to your site, which is a really cool thing. But here’s the thing, there are lots of higher end magazines that require you to be a published author to do so.
Farnoosh: Yes.
Tony: So right now, I already know your head is probably buzzing with 50 magazines, high quality magazines, I’m talking about very mainstream magazines that others won’t be able to take that tip and run with, but you can. So that would be a huge benefit of becoming an author.
Farnoosh: Excellent tip Tony, thank you.
Tony: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things I want to offer to anybody, probably about two years ago I did a report. It’s no longer available, but it’s “How to Change the Quality of Your Life in15 Minutes,” and it’s an amazing little report. Actually, I talk about juicing and how it only takes me about 15 minutes a day. I do it every day.
Farnoosh: That’s it.
Tony: It takes me 15 minutes to knock it out, from cleaning it to drinking it and everything. Anyone who buys “The Healthy Juicers Bible,” send me an email with proof of purchase. I’ll send you the report. You don’t necessarily have to send me a receipt, although that would be nice to make sure you did.
Farnoosh: We believe them. We believe them.
Tony: I believe in the honor system. I believe people are truly good, truly good.
Farnoosh: Yes, absolutely.
Tony: But if you buy this book because of this interview, please email me. I’ll send you that report for free. It’s “How You Can Change the
Quality of Your Life in 15 Minutes.” It’s amazing.
Farnoosh: Thank you.
Tony: I’ve gotten a lot of really great feedback from it. Farnoosh, always a pleasure. Thank you so much for sharing with us.
Farnoosh: Thank you so much Tony. You rock. Awesome. Thank you so much.
Tony: Thank you. Absolutely. You’re my friend. Bye-bye.
Farnoosh: Bye.