Dale: Hi! I’m Dale Beaumont and welcome to the Get Published TV. This is the only dedicated show on the internet to help you to write pubish and market your own bestselling book. Now, as you can see, we’re on the blue couch today and that means its time to chat to another fellow author and publisher. Her name is Gina Lednyak and she’s from New York and she’s here today to talk to us about her books and which is coming out. So Gina, thanks for joining us.
Gina: Thank you.
Dale: Now, tell us a bit about your background and what brings you to be in Sydney coming from New York originally.
Gina: Well, I was born in Russia and ended up moving to New York when I was about 6 years old. I grew up in the city and then during university, did a semester here in Sydney and just head over heels fell in love with it. I went back to New York, got a corporate job that lasted 4 months and came back here.
Dale: Okay, great. So now you're here and you're working on some books as well. We’re going to talk about those. But what you inspired you to actually write your first book and that was back in New York, tell us a bit about that book and how it came together.
Gina: Well, I have been looking to write a book at that time and this is one of those things where I know I really, really wanted to write a book and its what I had always to do.
Dale: What inspired you to do that because not everyone out there wants to write a book? What was that inside of you that made you decide to write yours?
Gina: It was actually one book that I read when I had first moved from Russia to New York and that one book, reading that when I was about 8 years still speaks out of my mind, it’s the most important book I’ve ever read, it was called “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.” Just something about reading that made me realize that that’s what I want to do for other people. I want to be able to inspire them with words and move them to feel better.
Dale: Because books can be a really powerful thing because you'll never know where they're going to end up and who they're gong to touch and clearly a book touches you and now you want to share that with others which is great. So you have that seed planted in your mind and then an opportunity came along, tell us what it was and what you did?
Gina: When I met a business coach named Brian Whitman in New York and he was actually looking to have someone help him write his book and I at that time was looking to write a book. So it’s a really good partnership that he gave me materials to create a book out of and a great opportunity for me because I was able to try out writing my first book now completely now completely on my own.
Dale: And that’s a really great strategy, one of the different ways I recommend people to get published is to team up with somebody that maybe has some elements that you don’t have. So if you're a great writer then find somebody else that has a really interesting topic and maybe has an in-built audience and then you can join forces and tap into that. Or if you're someone that has an audience and has a message and you're not a good writer then find somebody else you can team up with. So, it can work in reverse as well. So, you partnered up and you are basically then sent to work to put the whole book together, is that right?
Gina: Exactly, yeah.
Dale: Okay. And how did you go about doing that and tell us the title of the book and tell us about, did it involve a number of different people in the book as well and introduced?
Gina: Basically it was compiling research for a bunch of business coaches. The name of the book is Coaching Blueprint.
Dale: Coaching Blueprint, okay.
Gina: Yeah! And the idea of it was to teach other people how to create coaching businesses.
Dale: Right, okay.
Gina: It’s a really interesting book to put together and one of the most interesting things I found was the idea of putting a book together when your self don’t really have any background material on it. So it was almost a complete use of writing skills and interview and really putting it together that way and getting other people expertise in order to make it a great book.
Dale: Now, when an opportunity comes up for a lot of people, they say, “Well, I know nothing about that particular subject.” And can I ask you did you know a lot about setting up a successful coaching business before writing this book?
Gina: I knew nothing at all.
Dale: So what did that process teach you?
Gina: One thing that I really, really discovered was that to be a good writer you don’t need to be an expert. And probably most of the time, the experts are the amazing writers. So, I think your goal as a writer is to be a really good communicator and be able to spread that expertise amongst other people.
Dale: And to really be adaptable I suppose.
Gina: Exactly.
Dale: It’s the taking of new of ideas and new information. So instead of researching you are then compiled that information and turned it into a book. How long did that whole process take you?
Gina: It was a very rush process. I joined the team pretty late on in the game and we had about 4 months to get the whole book ready to be sold.
Dale: Right. And it was quite a substantial book, I’m guessing was of a couple of hundred pages.
Gina: Yeah! It was about 150 pages.
Dale: So it’s very detailed. So, you’ve got it all together and then what was process of then getting it published? Did you look after that area or was it in the hands of the other party?
Gina: We kind of split that so while I did a lot of formatting and making it look like a really nice product. Brian took care of the actual selling of the book and marketing of the book which I think is great if you already have it built and if you already have kind of a shampoo sauna then you could sell it that way.
Dale: So you’ve really got a -- you know, used each others resources to their maximum advantage and if they have a name then you can obviously play to that name or if they already database or a website, you kind of got to use the best of each others strengths.
Gina: Yeah!
Dale: Right. So you did that and what was the result or what then happened once that book was released? How did it affect you or the business?
Gina: It was great. I think it’s really inspiring once you’ve realized that you could write and I think that’s probably the first step in becoming a writer knowing that, “Oh! I could do this.” So its just a nice feeling being able to show that to people and being able to say, “Now, I’m officially a writer.”
Dale: Yeah! And that’s one of the -- probably a great tip for people watching is that, you know, get that first book done and however you get it done, it doesn’t really matter if its an e-book or if its maybe something you sell through print-on-demand or if you co-author with another person as well. You then can say, “I’m a published author.” It just gives you the confidence then to move forward and do other things and other projects. And the first one you can do is always going to be the hardest but its going to be much easier from then on. So that then gave you the confidence to say, “Hey you know what I can do this and I can do it myself as well.” So what was the next step and what's next for you?
Gina: Well next, I’m actually writing a book with my partner in New York, Jane Norman, called the Limbo Years. And what gave us the inspiration to write that was that there's so many resources out there for people on their twenties but the majority of them aren’t very positive so what we wanted to do was to compile a resource for people in their twenties that’s really going to be inspiring and inspire people to write books, start companies and do really, really amazing things with their lives.
Dale: And the title I find very interesting, the Limbo Years.
Gina: Yeah!
Dale: It’s something that’s very intriguing and it’s short and punchy but I’m guessing that there's going to be some type of subtitle in that as well. So what's the subtitle and why the Limbo Years?
Gina: Well, the reason, the Limbo Years, we actually fiddled around a lot with the title which I saw in your other videos we decided on the Limbo Years because you're just in the middle and you're neither here nor there and one side of the road is telling you --
Dale: You don’t really fell like -- you're not a teenager anymore but you don’t feel like an adult.
Gina: And it tells you how you'd have fun and enjoy yourself but on the other hand it’s also that time to get serious and start to take action and really turn into an adult and it puts people in this weird of state of “Who am I? What am I suppose to be doing?”
Dale: Exactly. So, you got the title for Limbo Years and there are stories in this book as well so do you want to tell us about those stories and what's going to be your format for the book?
Gina: Well, one thing that I learned from writing Coaching Blueprint was that it’s a lot better to have people that are experts, help you and I think the main thing is just asking and once you people, are more than welcome to come on board and everyone loves helping out.
Dale: Yeah!
Gina: So, our idea was to get stories from people that have achieved success in their twenties because -- well we have some interesting stories. I think the important thing is getting everyone’s most interesting story.
Dale: Yeah! So you're finding people that had success in their twenties. They don’t have to still be on their twenties, they could be in their 30s, 40s, and 50s.
Gina: Because at times, it takes a bit of time until you could really accurately reflect back on what you have achieved.
Dale: Sure, definitely. And so those people will contribute, are you talking about a chapter reach or --
Gina: A chapter, yeah.
Dale: A chapter, okay.
Gina: It’s actually going to be -- twenty stories for people in their 20s.
Dale: Twenty stories for people who are in their 20s. So that’s going to be a part of the subtitle, I’m guessing.
Gina: Yeah! That’s the subtitle.
Dale: Great, fantastic. And with this book as well, have you -- where are you up to, are you starting to approach people right now or are you submitting to a publisher, what's going to be your approach?
Gina: We’re putting together the book proposal right now and we’re also approaching contributors, for example chapter. So we’re going through the whole process, we’re researching publishing houses and getting kind of the best work proposals together that we possibly could.
Dale: Now many people watching this, they're probably in exactly the same position that you are right now, maybe they’ve done one or two books before in the past, they're ready to take that step forward to play a sort of a bigger level they're going to be pitching to either a literary agent or pitching to a publisher and putting together these synopsis and their query letter and their sample chapter and all the rest of that.
Gina: Yeah, the whole picture.
Dale: Now you're probably maybe about two or three months ahead in the fact that you’ve been researching about this topic. So what advice can you give people watching that maybe when you were a couple of months before about where they should go to next, what's the best approach?
Gina: Well, one thing I realized was no matter your form of publishing is, whether you're going to be doing an e-book or a book to help your business, whether you're a publisher or not, I think the most important thing to do is to put proposal together and to make sure that you have a really nice set of a sample chapters as well as chapter outlines.
Dale: So with the book proposal, this is -- we’re not sort of taking the path in this case of self-publishing which was spoken a lot about before on Get Published TV, we’re going through the main, mainstream publishing channel and you could either pitch a literary agent which will then submit to a publisher on your behalf and represent you or you can then send a proposal to the publishers directly. But either way you still need to have a book proposal.
Gina: Exactly and the better the book proposal, the better the agent that you'll get the better the better the publishing company that you'll get, the better you know, advance that you'll get and the better you’ll be able to market your book then.
Dale: Okay. So it all comes back to having a great proposal.
Gina: Exactly.
Dale: So, what are some of the key elements from what you have learned that go into a great proposal? What are those things?
Gina: I think the query letter is definitely really important.
Dale: So the people out there that know nothing, what is a query letter?
Gina: Well, the query letter is the thing that you first send to the literary agent or the publisher so it’s kind of that one chance that you have to really grab their attention.
Dale: So it’s not a manuscript, it’s not a 300 page door step, you aren’t even sending them a big 20 page proposal. At this stage, you're sending them a one or two page letter that is going to their interest to say, “I want to know more.”
Gina: Yeah, exactly.
Dale: So, and what would go into that query letter? What are sort of the things?
Gina: You want to start it off with a really good punchy explanation of what your book is about and then you want to go into who is going to buy your book.
Dale: So, who’s the market?
Gina: Yeah! And basically anything that you could do to sell it so maybe a short paragraph about yourself and why are you the right person to write this book.
Dale: Great! And if you have a certain following already or if you're a speaker, then there would be knowing things like, well, what is the book about, who is the market and are people going to be buying this book or is it, you know too saturated already. And they want to know who you are because they're not just looking for great books these days. They're looking for great people behind those books that’ll then follow it up with television interviews, or go into a radio or newspaper. They're looking for personalities to go with books. So, that’s the query letter. And then is it sent as a letter, as a fax, as an email, what do you is the best way?
Gina: I honestly, I think that the letter is coming back and I think that people sending things as email is getting over saturated so its really hard to catch attention with an email. I think if you put a letter together, you reach them on a personal level, everything from physically holding it to the type of paper that you used really brings across your personality.
Dale: Good idea. So going back to physical mails, probably a snail mail as we sometimes call it is probably the best way to go. I’m sure that you could put it in a lovely looking envelope or even a package. And I have even heard people do like a message in a bottle type scenario where they get a plastic container and they’ll put it in a bottle. So there's also some fun stuff that you can --
Gina: Anything just to be picked out.
Dale: Yeah! To make it stand out. Some people may send it a bit cheesy and corny. Other people might say that they like it but ultimately it’s up to you. So once you’ve then written that query letter as we have called it. Then either of one of two things is going to happen right, they're going to call back and say, “I’m interested, tell me more” or “No, I’m not.” Is that the case?
Gina: Yeah, exactly.
Dale: Okay! So if they say, “Yes, I’m interested.” Then what is the next step, what do you do next?
Gina: So then you would send over your book proposal.
Dale: Right, okay. Now, what have you learned about writing a book proposal because you're in the process right now and you're putting it together. So, tell us about this book that you’ve got here and what you’ve learned from it?
Gina: Well, actually, I got this from an idea from an article written by Tim Ferris because I’m a huge fan of modeling, whatever people have done to become successful and what he said was that he basically based whole book proposal on this. Just because it gives you exact concrete examples.
Dale: Right! So, I’m just going to hold it up there, its called write the perfect book proposal. This is the book right there, you can search for it on Amazon.com and this is what Tim Ferris, the author of the 4-Hour Workweek used and that’s been a New York Times Bestseller for the last 12 or 18 months or so. So it’s a very, very successful book. And this is what he gives, so it can, you know, copying or modeling of successful people is certainly the way to go. So you’ve gone through this book, you’ve studied it and that’s what you're going to be using to put together your proposal.
Gina: Exactly, yup.
Dale: And you're saying that this book gives a lot of concrete examples, right, that people can actually to example from.
Gina: Because I think a lot of times where people get stuck is in the formatting of it.
Dale: Right.
Gina: So, well you have all the content in your head and you have this amazing brilliant idea but you need to find a way to get that across to someone and get someone else that’s a complete stranger and doesn’t know your background and knows nothing about you to see why you should be doing this and why this for me, their money and why this will make you money and why are you just the perfect person for the job?
Dale: Great! So, I’m just flicking through this book right now and I can see there's a lot of examples in here for fiction writers and also nonfiction writers as well because I’m imagining there's going to be some differences in the proposal based on the genre or the style of book that you're actually producing. And the other thing which I’m saying it does is well, as it goes through and tells you about, you know, when to send it, how to send it, how to format it and also then how to actually follow up to make sure that its being received and that’s it viewed in the best possible line. Any other -- we obviously can’t go through this book in more detail, maybe in a future episode of Get Published TV, I’ll go through this book and I’ll study their plot, some of the good points and share them with you but have you got a couple of tips right now, things that you remember from this book that could help people out there that are putting together their book proposal.
Gina: Well, one thing that I got out of it was the importance of having a really, really good sample chapter.
Dale: Right, okay.
Gina: Because that’s really what's going to sell a publisher, a literary agent onto your work. Because it’s the only chance that they’ll get to see exactly a little sneak-peek of what your book will be.
Dale: So, what are the other elements that are in that proposal? You’ve got the sample chapter, are there any other things that you need to have?
Gina: There's also the promotional section, there's the competition which -- I find the competition really useful because it really forces you into researching your competition and what else is out there which I think if you're doing self-publishing or publishing any book, you sometimes missed out on that wherein it’s not foreseen or researched in time.
Dale: Yeah! And there's a lot of people that -- they said to me, they came up with a topic, there's nothing out there like this because they’ve been to their local bookshop that has like maybe 50 books on the shelf but if you go into Amazon.com and there is like 300 books on that same particular subject so you might think that your book is totally special, entirely unique or perhaps you maybe need to cast it a little bit wider because there maybe a lot of books out there. Now saying that, that’s not necessarily a bad thing because if there's a lot books already in a particular category, what is says is there's already a demand for those type of books. So, don’t look on competition as a negative thinking, “Oh! There's no more room for me.” That’s actually a great thing because if you can follow up to say, his three examples of books that have sold over, about 30,000 copies or whatever, then I did very well. And this is where my book fits into that picture, it’s like them but is different in his way that they can go, “Oh! We can see how we can pitch it.”
Gina: Yeah! And that’s simply used for writing because if you could find that little missing gap between all these books then you're proving that this huge market already exist for your book.
Dale: So you mentioned competition, you mention the sample chapter and what else, any other things that pile up a proposal?
Gina: Promotional is very important. So I think its important to think about how you're going to promote your book and whether you're going to use social media or book signings or bookstores, its important to identify those things for yourself and for the publisher to have confidence that, you know, they're not going to be on their own trying to sell your book for you.
Dale: Yeah! And that’s what I was saying before that publishers today are looking for people that are going to push their book just as hard as the publisher is as well. Because the publishers aren’t going to do all the work for you especially if you're a first time author, you really need go out there and hustle and you got to prove to them what are you going to do in order to help, to promote those sales as well. So they're looking for you to take responsibility and also to have a bit of a game plan as well. But if you just say, I’m just going to sit back and wait for the money to roll in, then they’ll you to go fly a kite because they're looking for people that are going to put in the same amount of effort that they are in order to make the book a success. Any other points or tips that go into a great proposal?
Gina: I think it’s also a lot about the organization of it. So you have to make sure that it’s structured really, really clearly and that it just looks very physically appealing. Because if somebody receives a really ugly proposal then I think that’s something that just gets chopped right away it shows your lack of organization as an author which is just starting up in a completely --
Dale: And they're suppose to know intention to detail and obviously the start is important and the books are highly visual so you need to make sure that you use nice fonts and that things are formatted correctly. If you can’t, its going to show the basics of those type of skills, then how can call yourself someone’s that a real book lover and someone that say, I’m going to create a quality product. So, if you want more information and I’m guessing you could check out this book here, The Perfect book Proposal, I’m sure it’s available in Amazon.com. Otherwise, we’re going to be going this topic in a lot more detail in future episodes of Get Published TV but I think you'd agree with a little laugh from Gina and it has been very, very informative. So before we wrap up, is there anything else that you want to say, tell us a bit about your website and where people can get involved if they want to find out more about this book.
Gina: Yup. Well, we’re currently running a website called thelimboyears.com and what we’re doing before we get into the writing is we’re pitching stories from interesting and successful people. And basically all the kind of struggles that people would be going through in their 20s, anything from work versus play and choosing whether you want to travel or get a job right away. See a lot of interesting stuff up on there now, and its nice to read through it before the book comes out.
Dale: So the website is thelimboyears.com.
Gina: Yup, thelimboyears.com.
Dale: And definitely go check it out because I want you to see the example of what's being done here is that the book is still process, it’s in the proposal stage but already there's a domain named registered, there's a website, you're already looking for stories, you're already creating your -- what they would call platform or your audience prior to your book even coming out and that is so essential because if a publisher can see that you’ve already taken these steps, then they're thinking into themselves, “Well, we’ve got someone that is actually going to be really proactive and someone that is already creating an audience that we can actually sell this book too.” So I think what you’ve done is very, very smart. So go there and check it out. Anything else you want to add?
Gina: The other thing is, I think it’s really important to do something like that. Try out your book on a small scale just to test the popularity of it because you don’t want to spend half year or a year working on something that just has no grounds of being successful.
Dale: Absolutely. And once you’ve got that group of people that are on board and supportive to your project, I’m guessing that there's so many way in which you could use those hundred, 500 or thousand people to test and measure things. You could send them a sample chapter and say, “Guys, what do you think?” You could send them different book titles. You could send them different book titles. You could send them cover designs. You could do so many different things to test, you know, we’ve spoken about the importance of the actual copy on the back of the book as well and you know, there's maybe bullet points or testimonials, you might send them a list of 25 testimonial and say, “We can put only three on the back cover, what do you think are the best ones? Which ones grab you the most as well.” So you can be using those people and --
Gina: Exactly and it’s such a nice way to connect them in a personal level.
Dale: Exactly. So the idea is that if you’ve got an idea in your head for a book right now, and you’ve already started to work on it, you should be thinking of marketing not when you finish the book but right back at the very beginning when you're starting and laying that foundation early and not leaving it all to the last minute. It has been an absolute pleasure, thank you so much for coming onto the show. We’d love you to leave your comments in the section below on getpublishedtv.com. and I’m sure there's a lot people out there that have either been through this process or that are going through this process so we want to hear your thoughts. If you’ve got some ideas about what you’ve done, what has worked for you and what you’ve learned through the process, please leave them in the comment section and lets keep this whole conversation going and they’ll be more episodes talking about this topics so stay tuned and thanks for watching Get Published TV. Thanks again Gina.
Gina: Thank you.
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