Freddy D (00:01:27) – Oh, well, it’s.
Melanie Herschorn (00:01:28) – Not linear, right?
Freddy D (00:01:29) – No, that’s a complete left hand turn.
Melanie Herschorn (00:01:32) – It was. And yet it wasn’t at the same time, because I’ve always been so interested in fashion and I didn’t feel confident like I could ever do haute couture. But I could help new moms with finding something functional and fashionable to wear. So I designed and manufactured clothes for about seven years, and my last year of business, I hired somebody to help me with my marketing, and it was a very toxic relationship. She was very condescending and just mean and really belittled me to the point where I couldn’t even open my office door anymore. And it was my home office.
Melanie Herschorn (00:02:12) – Wow. So I shortly thereafter closed the business, sold off what I had, and said, okay, what now? And I realized that marketing was something that I’d been doing consistently throughout my career as a publicist, as a journalist, as a designer of clothes. I was always marketing stuff, and I realized that I could help other people do their marketing in a supportive way, in a way that would not make them feel like they were an inch tall. And so I said, all right, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to try it. And when authors started calling me, I went, oh, okay, I’m on to something here because there are, well, first of all, the boundaries, that there are none to publish. Now, you can have an idea, write a book, publish it to Amazon KDP tomorrow. And guess what? You’re a published author. It’s not like in the in the yester year when you had to find somebody, an agent, you had to get a publishing company to, to back you.
Melanie Herschorn (00:03:17) – And now they’re there are no barriers to entry anymore. And what happens is people have these incredible ideas and they put them in books and then they don’t do anything with them. They think, okay, well, it’s all about the launch. And then the launch comes and it goes, and then no more books are selling and they don’t know why. And instead of doing something about it, they just throw their hands up and say, well, I tried and they move on. And so it was sort of a natural thing for me to say, no, no, you can make an impact with your book, and I’m going to show you how you can write it effectively. And publish it, and then market it so that you can have all these, all this beautiful success, like speaking on stages where they require a book oftentimes, and improving or increasing your consulting fees and all the great things, the credibility, the awareness that come along with having a book.
Freddy D (00:04:20) – Yeah. When I wrote my book, it was a culmination of years of sales and marketing experience on a global scale.
Freddy D (00:04:27) – And I did do the book launch and everything else. And you got that spike. And then I did some Amazon marketing. But when you and I got together, it really took it for a whole different turn. I’ve redid some things to improve the messaging of the book, and I’m putting and I’m still working on the things that we’ve talked about. But now the podcast is actually a reality. My community is a reality. I’ve been posting things on social media and got some tools that help me do that. And I’m getting sales every month. Am I making tons of sales? No. But every month I see a steady amount of sales where before it was very sporadic. Now I count on X amount of books being sold on a monthly basis. So you’re exactly correct on what helping. You’ve helped me get a better direction on promoting my book Creating Business superfans.
Melanie Herschorn (00:05:27) – Well, that is such an honor and I appreciate you telling me that I it’s it’s amazing what can happen when you’re really saying the right things to the right people.
Melanie Herschorn (00:05:39) – And so much of this is in your book. It’s almost it’s a little meta to talk about it, but and it’s also something I think important to mention that. We don’t get rich on book sales. It’s really. It’s a vehicle. It’s the vehicle. It’s how we leverage it. So for you people picking up your book and saying, wow, these are really great strategies and tools to to for client retention for new clients or customers. And then they might call you up and say, hey Freddie, can you be a consultant for our company? We really need help. And then you’re not talking about a few dollars, you’re talking several thousand dollars as a return on your investment from this book. And that’s the magic of it, really?
Freddy D (00:06:28) – Well, funny you bring that up because that actually took place this morning. So I had a 830 meeting with somebody that I’ve been doing some marketing consulting with a side of my other opportunity that I handle, and they’re now looking to go on a bigger scale and they’re looking to we talked about partnership and and because of the fact that the things I wrote in the book that gave credibility to my sales and marketing knowledge, and that’s the area that they need, is they need help in sales, marketing and some of the technologies to put it together, to get things to flow for them, because they’re doing things too much manually so they can’t grow their stock.
Freddy D (00:07:13) – And so that’s so yes, exactly what you said. It does manifest itself.
Melanie Herschorn (00:07:19) – And it happened today. And that’s the best thing ever. Yeah. And that’s oh my gosh. Let’s take a moment I love that I and I wish I could say that never happens. But it really happens all the time.
Freddy D (00:07:30) – It really happened. Yeah. This is I’ve been working with this individual for two years and handling some of their digital marketing stuff on a side, and it’s not been a big thing. It’s a side gig for me because I still have customers that I’ve been dealing with for over ten years and doing some of their online marketing things, and how many people can say that they’ve got customers for over a decade still working with them? Because I practice the things that are in the book, and they say they reached out all last week while I was on vacation, and we got we set it up for early this morning, this morning to to talk about possibilities. So yeah, absolutely. So let me ask a question here is how do you encourage authors to engage with their readers.
Melanie Herschorn (00:08:15) – So there are so many ways to do that. One of the biggest mistakes is to just post on social media and walk away. Right. You have to reach out to your readers using social media, and you can do that if they leave a comment, reply to their comment. If they like a post, send them a direct message and say thanks for liking my post and always ask a question because then they feel compelled to keep this conversation going. You can do all sorts of things. You can reach out through summits like online summits. You can invite your audience over your email if you have an email marketing platform that you use. And anytime you’re out anywhere in the world, remember that as an author, you are your best marketer. So it’s silly, but I carry a copy of my new book with me everywhere I go, and it’s a conversation starter. It’s. And then people say, oh, what do you do? Well, I here’s a copy of my book. And then it’s an instant credibility boost.
Melanie Herschorn (00:09:26) – But in terms of getting more audience members to engage, more ideal readers to engage, really think it comes down to other than all the strategies we talked about, I really think it comes down to what you say, what you’re saying, is it resonating with them? Are you speaking about using like jargon that isn’t really going to land with the people you want to reach? Are you saying, let’s lose £5 when the people that you want to reach are saying, I just want to tone my arms? Those sound like they’re the same thing, but they’re actually very different. So I think market research can really help with that.
Freddy D (00:10:08) – Figuring creating an avatar, creating a customer avatar to where you can identify the specific person or entity that would resonate with what you wrote about.
Melanie Herschorn (00:10:22) – Exactly. And then you can use ChatGPT to figure out what would be the right thing to say. Right? Or you can there.
Freddy D (00:10:30) – You can also go to the Business superfans.com website and pick up the avatar workbook that we created, which is second to none.
Freddy D (00:10:40) – And it not only helps you create the avatar, but also your elevator pitch and a multitude of other things.
Melanie Herschorn (00:10:49) – That’s a great resource. Yes.
Freddy D (00:10:52) – The other thing that I’ve done in my case is you say carrying the book. I’ve done mine someplace here. I’ve carried it at the networking events, and I’ve sold it on the spot, and I’ve had to go back out to the car and grab another one. What I’ve done, though, is I’ve followed up those people that bought it at those events to see what their thoughts were and etc. and that’s the way that I’ve stayed in contact with the people that picked up my book. If they saw it online and they bought it online, they bought it from Amazon. You don’t know who bought it, except if they do comment or give you a review. That’s about the extent of it, as far as I know.
Melanie Herschorn (00:11:31) – Yeah, there’s no way Amazon’s going to give up their customer information. So I love that you’re doing that because when you are continuing that conversation, that’s where the magic happens.
Melanie Herschorn (00:11:45) – That’s where the consulting opportunities come in. It. It’s again it’s about creating that engagement and sticking with it. And I know you mentioned that in your book. I mentioned that in my book. It’s really about developing relationships. Marketing is about creating relationships. It’s not about putting up a billboard and just hoping that it works for you, because not everybody’s going to be interested in what’s on your billboard, right?
Freddy D (00:12:15) – So how can authors to want to create superfans of their book and get those superfans to promote the book for the author?
Melanie Herschorn (00:12:26) – I like giveaways and incentives to get that to happen. So, for example, I would say getting think of like a Starbucks gift card and do a giveaway and say, hey, anybody who wants to get a book for themselves and get a book for their friend will be entered to win the Starbucks gift card. So any kind of incentivized giveaway or contest is really going to allow people to say, oh, I want to be part of this because people want to belong to things, right? They want to be part of something.
Melanie Herschorn (00:13:02) – So they want to be a superfan, for example. So they’re going to join because it makes them feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves, right.
Freddy D (00:13:10) – Okay. So a little bit about how you work with an author that’s either in a process of writing the book or they’ve written a book, like in my case, how you and I connect it up and then kind of marketing it, but sort of hop along until they get some direction and it transforms their outlook and outcome of book sales.
Melanie Herschorn (00:13:35) – Sometimes authors come to me and they are just about to publish, or they have already published and they haven’t gotten traction. And so what we do is we start from the beginning. You have to build your marketing foundation, and that includes everything that you put out on the internet. It needs to be cohesive and coherent, and then you can move into the more glamorous pieces of pitching yourself to podcasts, pitching yourself to the media, being on stages. So we go through all those in a very sort of, well, it’s linear, and it’s also never overwhelming because marketing as a whole can just people can be like a deer in headlights.
Melanie Herschorn (00:14:21) – They just it’s so overwhelming. So what I do is I break it down step by step so that authors always know what’s next. And then when you take a look back and you go, wow, I’ve come so far in six months, and now I’m getting PR opportunities, and I’m speaking on a stage next month that I wouldn’t have been able to if I hadn’t started marketing myself. And also, we are now helping people who are not yet authors. So, so professionals, business owners who say, I want to write a book, I should write a book. I’ve been telling myself that I should write a book, and everybody I know tells me I should write a book, but I just don’t know where to start. We have a 12 month program that takes you from writing the book, editing the book, self-publishing under your own imprint, and then marketing the book as well so that you get all the benefits of the increased consultant fees and the speaking fees and the visibility and awareness. One thing that is that I find and we can talk about this if you’d be open to it, the difference between traditional publishing and hybrid publishing and self-publishing.
Melanie Herschorn (00:15:34) – Yeah, I feel like that’s something that people get confused about. What was the way that you published your book? Now I’m turning the tables on you and asking you questions. I apologize, it’s all good.
Freddy D (00:15:43) – I self-published.
Melanie Herschorn (00:15:44) – Okay.
Freddy D (00:15:45) – So did I.
Melanie Herschorn (00:15:46) – And I wouldn’t have done it any other. Away.
Freddy D (00:15:49) – Now, I agree it was a much better experience. I’m in control and I keep the majority of the revenue and I can make tweaks, I can create the version two, etc. so it’s have maintained the control of the book is everything in my mind.
Melanie Herschorn (00:16:09) – I feel the same way. I had a client once who she was adamant that she traditionally publish, and she wrote. It’s like a 35 page proposal that you have to to shop around to agents and publishers that are the traditional publishers. And she got an advance. It was a very significant advance. And then she had to wait 14 months until they published her book. And I know for me, if I’d had to wait another 14 months, I don’t know that I would have been able to.
Melanie Herschorn (00:16:44) – I mean, it’s like you have this drive, you want it out there and so as a self publisher, you just have so much more control. Yes, it can cost money as opposed to not costing money, but the marketing is never covered anyway no matter how you publish. So you’re paying to get marketing advice or to have it done for you, right?
Freddy D (00:17:08) – And yeah, that window is a lot of wasted time. I mean, it’s a lack of a better way of wording it. It’s a lot a waste of time because a lot can happen in 14 months. You could have been building up the book sales. You could have been building up your brand. You could have landed some consulting opportunities. You could have landed a multitude of different things. And in 14 months, you’re sitting there twiddling your thumbs, not knowing what direction to go because you’re no longer in control. Yes.
Melanie Herschorn (00:17:39) – And I would not have wanted to wait that kind of time. And in the end, she’s doing well.
Melanie Herschorn (00:17:46) – It’s the book is doing well. But I was even thinking, what if the information in your book has changed so drastically in 14 months? Yeah, maybe you talk about somebody who was alive. They’re not alive anymore. Or someone like Elon Musk buys Twitter and changes the name, and it’s not Twitter anymore. I mean, those things happen changes.
Freddy D (00:18:11) – You recommend products and they change. That’s one of things in my book, is that I had initially listed all these tools that I recommended. And then I realized, you know, that, wow, they’re going to be locked in that book. And so now I modified it. And if you recall, I just have a page that tells you go to this website and this link and get the latest and greatest recommendations because they change. So absolutely. So share a story Melanie. And on somebody that you helped besides this guy getting them direction and and getting them results where before they were a boat in a boat with only one war and going around in a circle.
Freddy D (00:18:55) – It’s a great.
Melanie Herschorn (00:18:56) – Visual. So what? For those of you just listening, I was pretending to paddle. I have a couple in mind, but I’m going to start with my client, Mike, who had written a book for financial advisors. He himself is a financial advisor, and he wrote a book for financial advisors, and he was not posting on LinkedIn. He was on it every day, but he was just lurking. And so when we developed a LinkedIn strategy, his connections started reaching out to him and saying, hey, we’d like for you to come speak at our event. We’re going to pay you, and we’d like to buy 200 of your books. And that continued because he was leveraging the power of that social media and then also the power of relationship marketing, which is something that we teach because it’s not enough to just post on LinkedIn. You have to do other things. And then I have a client named Lynn who is a children’s book author, and she just published another book, and she had 800 pre-sales, 800 books in pre-sale because she’s utilizing all the tools that she has as an author marketer.
Melanie Herschorn (00:20:14) – To get book sales to get she’s getting PR coverage. And so, I mean, all those pieces are possible when you have a book. I was talking to a woman yesterday and she said, oh, I really should write a book. And I said, oh, okay. She said, yeah, I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. She said, I’ve actually been turned down from speaking events because I didn’t have a book, and they wanted me to be able to sell it at the back of the room. And that’s just one humongous door that can fly right open for you when you publish a new market.
Freddy D (00:20:55) – Yeah, it’s one thing to have it and it’s another thing to everybody know about it and want it. Yeah, because if nobody knows and you got the greatest gizmo in the world and nobody knows about it, it’s irrelevant.
Melanie Herschorn (00:21:09) – Absolutely. And I think that’s kind of so the publishing industry as a whole, I love being part of it, but there is a lot of predatory crap happening.
Melanie Herschorn (00:21:19) – Can I say crap on your podcast? Okay. There’s a lot of predatory stuff happening and you will find, I’m sure you experienced this just like I did. As soon as I put the word author on my social media profiles, I started getting all these unsolicited emails from people promising to make me a star with my book through podcasts. And this. All you need to do is pay us thousands of dollars. And I went, whoa, what is this? This is not okay. And so one of the things that I like to do is just explaining that this is not how it has to be. You do not have to pay somebody or like a bot, basically a whole lot of money to get your book out there. You have the power within you to learn how and then to leverage what you already have, right?
Freddy D (00:22:10) – Yep.
Freddy D (00:22:10) – No, you’re absolutely right. Because I did once I people, I had a podcast and author and speaker to my profile. You know, as you and I had talked, I got solicitations of, well, we can you know, for several thousand bucks, we’ll get you on podcast shows.
Freddy D (00:22:27) – Well, there’s a platform that I use that I pay $39 a month, and I’ve been interviewed on it ten times so far. And so there’s a multitude of things that I’ve had people reach out to me on LinkedIn and invite me on their shows. So yes, there are predatory stuff out there. Unfortunately, it is unfortunate.
Melanie Herschorn (00:22:46) – And so I feel sometimes like I’m a one woman. I’m on a one woman mission to try to say, you have so much more power than publishers sometimes are willing to offer, like publishers in general don’t offer marketing. And what they the way they sell to a customer. A client is your book is going to do all these things, but they don’t explain the how they say it’s just by virtue of the fact that you have a book. I feel like it’s incumbent upon me to say, well, that’s not exactly how it works. Because just like you said, if a tree falls in the forest and no one’s there to hear it. So the bottom line is that publishing a book is not the end of it.
Melanie Herschorn (00:23:33) – And I think that there’s a lot of misinformation out there that all you need to do is publish. No. Not exactly. All you need to do is publish and let people know that you’ve published and continue that. I always call the consistency and marketing the granny panties of book marketing because it’s not sexy. It does what it’s supposed to do.
Freddy D (00:23:59) – Yep. And going back to.
Freddy D (00:24:00) – The earlier about creating superfans I’ve experienced, this is I’ve had people read my book and in my case, it’s a business book. I’ve got a couple of business coaches that have picked up the book, or in some cases, one of them bought ten copies of the book and then has passed it out to clients. They’ve become my superfan, saying that you need to read the book. I got a guy in Michigan. He’s 85 years old. He used to have his own his own radio show, and he called me last night and taught looking about the ways of how we can work together and everything else. And he’s my superfan because he wants to be promoting my book at some of the rock clubs, and he just joined some other club and he’s 85, is still going.
Freddy D (00:24:46) – He’s invited me to be on his radio show again. So yeah, the book opens up opportunities provided people know about it, because if nobody knows about it, like I said before, the gizmo. But here we’re talking about books. If nobody knows about your book and it could be the best book ever written, but it goes nowhere.
Melanie Herschorn (00:25:07) – It goes nowhere. It can’t make a difference. It can’t make the impact that you had initially envisioned for it.
Freddy D (00:25:13) – So let’s explore another.
Freddy D (00:25:16) – Story that you perhaps can share of where someone was floundering and you turn that around. They were discouraged because of the fact that they were floundering, and now they have a whole different outlook and everything. I mean.
Melanie Herschorn (00:25:31) – That’s a lot of people. They’re ready. So I’m going to have to pick one. But actually there’s one that I think would be a really good story. So I had a client who wrote a book and it was basically a pandemic memoir. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t ever want to talk about the pandemic again.
Melanie Herschorn (00:25:50) – No. So this was already post-pandemic. So he said, what do I do? How do I market something? I wrote it, I based on my blogs, I want to make a big deal out of this. And so I think he was discouraged because he realized that people, once they were out in the world again, he didn’t want to go back. Right? So even in a book. So when I read the book and I, we work together, I looked at it and I thought, okay, this is not the pandemic memoir, but it’s also the story of a father realizing that he has a child who is neurodivergent, how that came to be, and what lessons you learned from that and how you can show other parents. Here’s what we did, here’s what work, here’s what didn’t. And so when we reframed it, he felt more inspired. And he actually got his book to be sold at a very prominent bookstore in Colorado, based on the pitch that we created together.
Melanie Herschorn (00:26:59) – So so again, that was more spring in his step because he realized it could make a difference and it wasn’t stuck in 2020.
Freddy D (00:27:07) – Very cool.
Freddy D (00:27:08) – Good story, good story. So as we’re wrapping up here, how can people find you?
Melanie Herschorn (00:27:14) – Well, I’m everywhere on the internet, but also I can be specific. If you would like to read a copy of my new book, you can go to VIP bookmarked com and it will take you right through to Amazon. Um, you can also get freebies, a lot of freebies on my website, including the Ultimate Book Marketing checklist. And I’m on LinkedIn. I’m on Instagram and Facebook. And yeah, I’m generally here to answer and to support.
Freddy D (00:27:48) – Okay, excellent. Thank you very much for being a guest on a Business Super Fan podcast show. Very much appreciate the information.
Freddy D (00:27:55) – You share.
Freddy D (00:27:56) – And we look to have you on another show down the road.
Melanie Herschorn (00:28:00) – Thanks so much for the opportunity.
Freddy D (00:28:02) – All right, Melanie, thank you.
