Hi! I’m Dale Beaumont and welcome to GetPublishedTV. This is the only dedicated show on the internet to help authors and aspiring authors to write, publish and market their own bestselling book in eight minutes a day or less except on Fridays and you'll find out why a little bit later.
Well, I’m really excited today because this is the first ever, first ever episode of GetPublishedTV. Now, you kind of maybe wondering, well, what is this show all about? And if this is the first time you’ve ever seen a video of me, maybe wondering more, who is Dale Beaumont? Now, what we’ve actually done is -- on GetPublishedTV.com, we’ve actually got a section which is called FAQs which stands for Frequently Asked Questions and they're -- I’ve actually gone through and answered in video format the common questions that people have asked. So, I think you should probably go there and check that out. That will give you a bit of a sense of who I am. What we’re really trying to achieve and how you can get the most amount of value from this particular program. Now, what I want to do is -- I already want to get into the first topic area for today because I was thinking about this, so I’ve actually, you know, roughly planned out about a hundred different shows and there's a lot of information that I’ve got, that I actually want to share with you. So, I was thinking, what are we going to do for number one? Its got to be something which is really important and really especial and so I’ve gone through and I’ve picked the topic and you may not at the beginning really understand why I’ve chosen this one but hopefully at the end, you will know exactly why and you’ll actually continue with one of the exercises that will be recommending that you actually do.
So, here is the thing. When you actually write and publish or market a book, with that, you do it yourself as what's called a self-published author and I’ll talk more about -- publishing a lot in the future or when you go through a mainstream publisher and I’ll be talking about that as well, in the future. You're going to need to make a number of different decisions along the way. Now, if we had to list them all, this probably well over 40, maybe even 50 different decisions that you are going to have to make. Now, if we just look at this book here, decisions that we have to make. We have to go with what's the title. We have to go with what's on the cover. What's not on the cover, what topic colors that we are going to use? What's going to be on the back of the book, you’ve got to decide what type of paper stock that we’re going to use for the front cover, is it going to be embossed. Is it going to have a matter of gloss finish? What type of stock is it going to be used on the inside that lay out the design? A whole bunch of stuff, what's going to be at the beginning, what's going to be the end and that’s just about the book.
You’ve got to make a lot of decisions when it comes to the writing process and then again, you're talking about thousands of other decisions when it comes to promotion and marketing. So therefore, you need to know why you're actually publishing the book and because that will make, either will help you to make better decisions when it comes -- time to make all of those decisions. Because at the beginning, when I actually wrote my first book called the “The World at your Feet.” I didn’t actually have -- I never got clear with what specifically is my reason for doing this and therefore, I’m telling you honestly I made a number of mistakes. There was things if I had my time over again, I would’ve done very, very differently however, hindsight is a wonderful thing but if I’d taken the time to do the exercise that I’m suggesting that you do, you would have actually -- it would have helped me dramatically and I know that it’s going to help you too.
So let me just get into it right now. It’s getting clear on what your reason is. What you’re actually going for. Why are you doing it? And I really want you to kind of think this through on a -- not just a superficial level but on a much deeper level. And let me give you a few critical things I think should be in your reason or in your outcome. And what I want to do -- I’ve broken them up into different -- it’s kind of topic areas and I’m kind of -- I want you to imagine outside the line in this -- sort, two ends to that line, two inch of the spectrum so to speak.
So, let me just go through that list now and this will make much more sense as I get continue. So first of all, the thing you’ve got your side fundamentally is, do you want to get a lot of exposure from your book? Or do you actually want to make money? Now, you might say, I want to make both and that’s great. But lets just -- I’ll explain it in a different way because sometimes people said to me, look, I just want to get exposure. They are like who doesn’t want to make money. I don’t want to make any money, I just want to have lots of exposure to the book. Now, when people say that to me, I say, “Great, then go out, pay for all the expenses, print 10,000 copies and then stand on this street corner, in your nearest capital city and give them all out to people for free.” And normally at the point they start to mingle, “Whoa! I can’t do that?” And I’m like, you just told me, we don’t want to make any money, you just want to help people get exposure. And they're like, “Yeah!” But they normally say, wanting to make some money. I’m like, great. Now, we’re actually talking because he actually wants to make money and that’s fine. You should make money as an author but it means you can’t give away your book to everyone for free. Why? Because people need to pay for your information, right.
So therefore, you're actually going away from this side and more close towards this side. So you go to that side, how far along that line you want to be right to the point whereby if you want to make, solely make money from the book, then not only do you have to spend a lot more time on marketing and promotion but can’t afford to give your books away for free because there's no money in giving books away for free. So you need to actually think differently depending on where along that line that you actually want to be. So, I think that’s an important decision and -- actually set some goals. How much money do you make? Some people just say, “Well, I just want to cover all my cost” and that’s great. But then what happens after that. You’ve given out all the books. You’ve covered you cost. Who’s going to actually fund and pay for your next print run because that’s kind of -- that’s going to cost you depending on how many books your printing, more money so therefore you don’t need to make -- you need to make enough money not just to cover the existing print run but also your future print run as well. So you have to make more profit and then reinvest that profit and continue that whole process. So therefore, you go to the side where you want to be. That’s the first fundamental thing you have to think about is how much money do you actually want to make? Do you want to get a lot of exposure or do you want to make money? Think that through.
The next one that we’ll go through is, do you want to actually get your book into bookstores or do you -- you don’t really care or your fast or maybe your market isn’t in bookshops so it’s not that important to you. Because if you want to get your book into bookshops, you have to make very different decisions and this is where I see so many people go wrong. They don’t do their proper research. They haven’t actually asked a lot of people not just, you know, friends and family, but actually people that have already become successful authors and have sold thousands of copies of their book in bookstores. They’ve never asked them so therefore they do it themselves. They come out with this end product and they're just going to grab any random book here and they're like, “Okay, now I want to get this book into the bookstores.” And it doesn’t really work that way because to have a book that goes into bookstores, it needs to have a number of critical elements and I’m going to talk more about that later on in our future videos but for starters, the title needs to grab people off the shelf. It’s got to be printed on a quality paper stock. It can’t be laid out word or some other type of -- very basic program, it has got to look professional. It has got to look like the other books on the shelf. So, therefore if you want to actually publish, have your book in bookstores, you're actually going to make very different decisions. You're going to print it on different stall paper, you're going to spend -- have a different attention to detail when it comes to the actual design, etcetera. So that is really important and critical. But if you don’t want to have your book in bookshops, then, “Hey, you know what? It’s not that important.” So I’ve covered of the actual things to think about when it comes to your outcome. But it -- guest, really important, I’m actually going to continue this again tomorrow because I actually want to talk about one, two, three, four other different kind of scales kind of put the pieces together. So that’s part one. Part two is coming tomorrow. Please come back and tune in again and you’ll be able to get the end of today’s video.
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