E35 -The Solopreneur’s Guide to Book Publishing with Donna Amos

E35 – The Solopreneur’s Guide to Book Publishing with Donna Amos

In this episode, Gary chats with Donna Amos, founder of Solopreneur Solutions and author of ‘Best Damn Marketing Tool Ever: Writing a Nonfiction Book to Grow Your Business’

They discuss Donna’s journey from launching her digital marketing agency in 2008 to helping clients publish their books. Donna shares practical advice on brainstorming, outlining, writing, and the entire publishing process. She details the benefits of using a book as a marketing tool and highlights the distinctions between traditional publishing, self-publishing, and hybrid publishing. Donna also elaborates on how she assists clients through coaching programs to ensure they complete their manuscripts.

Discover:

00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:48 Donna’s Background and Journey
01:55 Starting the Book Writing Process
04:37 Publishing Your Book
09:02 Using Your Book as a Marketing Tool
16:53 Pitfalls to be Aware of
18:11 Coaching and Support for Aspiring Authors
21:41 Traditional vs. Hybrid Publishing
23:49 Conclusion and Contact Information

Listeners interested in writing a book can visit inspiredpresspublisher.com for more details on Donna’s services.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Gary Ruplinger:

Hello and welcome everybody to another episode of the Pipelineology podcast. And today I am excited to have Donna Amos on the show. She is the founder of Solopreneur Solutions and the author of Best Damn Marketing Tool Ever: Writing a Nonfiction Book to Grow Your Business. Donna, welcome to the show.

[00:00:22] Donna Amos:

Thank you for having me, Gary. I’m glad to be here.

[00:00:25] Gary Ruplinger:

Yeah, I’m actually excited for this one ’cause I would, I, thought, you know, I’d had people kind of talk about, you know, the, the authorship and, book writing experience on before, and I was looking through some of my last po- or my last episodes and I said no, we’ve never actually had that conversation, so you are the first person to bring on to talk about it, and I’m excited to have that conversation with you today.

[00:00:46] Donna Amos:

Awesome. Thank you. I am too.

[00:00:48] Gary Ruplinger:

So, for anybody who’s not, familiar with you, or your book or Solopreneur Solutions, can you just give a little bit of background about you, the kind of the 30, 30,000 foot view and, some of that?

[00:01:01] Donna Amos:

Yeah. So, I launched the Our Digital Marketing Agency in 2008. In 2013, a client came to me and said, my daughter, who was like 13 years old at the time, has written a book and she wants to get it published. Do you know how to do that? And I said, no, but we’ll figure it out. So we did. We figured it out. And she got published. When she went to college, when she went to her college visits, she took copies of her book with her and to tell the admissions people, whoever was interviewing her, that she knew how to follow through on things. And she used it as a tool to get into the school she wanted.

[00:01:45] Gary Ruplinger:

Well, that’s neat. That is a cool story.

[00:01:49] Donna Amos:

Yeah. So, you know, it’s been uphill ever since.

[00:01:55] Gary Ruplinger:

Well, that’s awesome. So when it comes to actually, like if somebody says, comes to you and says, hey, Donna, I’m interested in writing a book. What’s next?
What do you, tell them? Like, somebody’s like, I got all these ideas and they probably are talking a million miles a minute. Where, does somebody actually go when they say, yeah, I’ve, got these ideas. I know I’ve got a book in me now. Now what? I don’t know what to do.

[00:02:19] Donna Amos:

Okay. So there’s a couple things they could do, and in my book I actually define how they can start doing that brainstorming. But we also have a document that they can download that will walk them through that process. You know, what are they gonna focus on? Most of the time people try to cover too much in one book, so it’s really about creating that outline.
Once they get the outline created, they should go walk away from it for about three days, then come back, review it again, and make any adjustments that they, you know, because their brain’s been working on it, whether they have or not. So make any of those adjustments in the outline and then. Pick a chapter and start writing.
Most of the time it’s overthought, but the start writing process initially is fun and they get excited about it, but in the long run, it’s the hardest part to keep. Writing, you know, every day, or once a week, whatever they’ve determined their timing is, they typically will lose their self-talk, will get in the way.
I don’t know enough people are gonna question me, you know, I’m not good enough. And that will stop them from continuing.

[00:03:54] Gary Ruplinger:

I like the, less is more type of idea when I’m working with clients and we’re talking about, we do a lot of LinkedIn events with people, and when we’re kind of talking about topics with them, I emphasize the same thing.
I say, let’s solve small problems today. We don’t need to tackle the whole thing. We only have 30 to 60 minutes. We can cover a little sliver of something so we can cover something. Well, something small, well. Or a whole bunch of stuff that we barely touch on. So, I like the idea that a book doesn’t have to be the encyclopedia.

[00:04:28] Donna Amos:

If it provides value and depth, that’s more important than covering every tiny thing you can think of.

[00:04:37] Gary Ruplinger:

So is the publishing process really complicated? In terms of, of doing it? ’cause I’m, trying to think through like, how would I go about publishing a book and, you know what, I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that. So I guess that’s why you are here.

[00:04:53] Donna Amos:

Exactly. Okay, so is it complicated? Not really. You just have to know the process that you need to follow. So of course the first piece is to get all the words on paper, or digitally so that you’ve got the manuscript. But while you’re doing the writing, there are some other things that you can be doing. So as long as you nail down your title.
And you have the description that you would put on the back cover of your book. You can start getting the other pieces pulled together. So you need to get an ISBN number and then put all, you know, put all the information we just said, oh, you also will need the image cover, but you can go back and do that.
So you get your ISBN number, then you go to the Library of Congress. And you get the Library of Congress number. Now you’ve got the two numbers you need to put in on inside the, the book, on your title page. So those two parts are important. Then you need to have a designer unless you’re talented in that respect and get your cover designed, and it’s kind of helpful to put it out there in the public before you’re ready.
And get feedback, like, here’s three options. You know, tell me what you like best and get some feedback from the market. You, there’s also some tools you can do use to do research about that, because that cover has to be really powerful because it’s standing up to, I don’t know how many millions of books are actually published, but.
You know, in your genre there’s probably millions. So you want it to stand out, then you have to get an editor. And I have had clients tell me they don’t need their book edited, and I only agreed to not edit it one time because when they then got the finished product, they had all these people go through it and then tell them all the mistakes in it.
And then we had to go back and make all those corrections. Like you’ve got to hire an editor that knows what they’re doing. So once you’ve got it edited, you’ve got your cover, then the easiest thing to do is to go to KDP through Amazon, upload all your information and they approve it and you’ll be live in about 48 hours.

[00:07:46] Gary Ruplinger:

That seems pretty cool. What was the, what’s the tool on Amazon called? You said K, is it kdp?

[00:07:53] Donna Amos:

Yeah, it’s kdp.amazon.com. That’s their publishing arm. And you can order a, oh, I can’t think of what they call it. You can order a copy so that you can look at it before you, you know.
Start promoting it, make certain, certain everything lines up. And then you can purchase, author copies for about $2.75 a piece. So you can order as few or as many as you want. And if you have it on Amazon, then they take care of all the printing, they do the delivery, and you don’t have to do any of that.
You do have to remember that you have to send a copy of your book to the Library of Congress so that it’s in their records.

[00:08:47] Gary Ruplinger:

Okay. And this is, this is a physical copy of a book, right? It’s an actual, yes.

[00:08:51] Donna Amos:

Yeah. They actually put it in the library.

[00:08:58] Gary Ruplinger:

Well that’s that. That’s cool. So I know when we were kind of talking, right before we push the record button, you had mentioned that if you have a book, you don’t need to carry business cards anymore.

[00:09:10] Donna Amos:

Yeah, it is. It is the best marketing tool you could have. So, you start using that book as your business card.
You give it to anybody that you have a, certainly a face-to-face meeting. Even people that you meet with on Zoom, if it only cost you, you know, a couple bucks, you send them a copy of your book where you’ve signed it. Then you go to AI, you upload your manuscript and you ask it to give you your social media post.
Yeah, and you ask it to create emails from it, and you ask it to give you, I don’t know, any other marketing collateral that you need based on your knowledge that you’ve put in the book. So it really does become a marketing tool. And then of course, you can use it to do things like this, like get interviewed on podcasts.
Or to get invited on stage at events, and then you use that book as you know, that’s why they brought you on is because you appear to have that knowledge.

[00:10:26] Gary Ruplinger:

So really, if I never sold a copy of the book, this would still be worthwhile to do.

[00:10:33] Donna Amos:

Yeah. I tell all of our clients, you’re not writing a book to make money. It takes a lot of effort to make a living on a book or even a couple books, but it will bring in clients for you, and that’s probably more important than the $6 you would make in royalties on the cup or the cost of the book.
So use it to really set yourself apart from the competition, and it gives you authority and credibility.

[00:11:15] Gary Ruplinger:

Yeah. It’s interesting how if you’ve written something down and put it, you know, put it into a bound piece of paper that all of a sudden now it carries more weight to, to like, oh, I read that in a book. It’s one of those things you tell people and they say. Oh yeah. It must be true. It was in a book.

[00:11:31] Donna Amos: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:11:37] Gary Ruplinger:

So I, I remember it was interesting when you kind of mentioned the using AI to kind of help. You know, pull the best parts out and key insights in there. ’cause I’ve noticed that with it as well.
I’m not a huge, AI will replace everything and do all, everything for us person. But I’ve certainly noticed that if I give it some examples or things that have worked well for us, it can kind help rework that and use it in a different place and it’s still, it still kind of retains that, that origin, that was given to it.
It’s terrible at original thought like things right? Or very generic anyway, so far in my right now, in my opinion. But if you give it, you know, here’s an example and here’s some extra information. It does a pretty good job. So if you can feed it.

[00:12:22] Donna Amos:

Yeah. The information you get back is actually in your voice. Bec ause you’ve actually trained it. Yeah.

[00:12:30] Gary Ruplinger:

Well, very, very cool. What, what else should somebody know if they’re thinking about doing this? Like, how else can you, how else do you use it? Like, I love the idea of sending a copy of a book after a meeting. I’m like, this, this might actually be the motivation I need to, to get a book written. Right, I think, all right, how am I going to use this as a tool?

[00:12:50] Donna Amos:

Yeah. So, you know, there are plenty of like podcast. Directory, so to speak. So if like there’s one that’s fairly new, it’s called talks.co, and you can create your profile there and other podcast owners then can see that you have a book and that you know the topic that you cover.
And you can get invited on podcast almost automatically without, you know, having to do a lot of the hard work. So getting on podcasts can be a great way to expand your, audience because you’re using somebody else’s audience, basically, like I am using yours. But then, using it to get speaking gigs is also important.
Oh, I have a client that, she is an executive coach. She wrote her book, about eight months ago now, and she set it up so that employers could order enough copies for their whole leadership team to help them learn how to become coaches and not bosses. And so that has worked really well for her because they get the books, they read them, and then she’s been invited in to actually help them through the process.
That’s nice. Yeah. Yes, it’s working well for her. And then of course there’s the audio version as well. So Amazon has, It’s called a CX and you can hire a person that, you know, that’s what they do. They read the the manuscripts and make it sound well without all of the ums and ahs that I would do. And then you’ve got that audio that you can use as giveaways. You know, you can, so when you put it on their, their platform, which goes to Audible by the way, you get coupons from Audible that you can actually allow people to download it at no cost. So that’s another way to bring value to your audience. So, if I didn’t mail a physical copy, I might ship them, you know, give them the link and a coupon code to download the audio, which some people prefer.

[00:15:50] Gary Ruplinger:

Yeah, I know I’m more of an audio book guy myself ’cause I, it’s, in my car time for my commute. I like, I’ll listen to, you know, a po- a podcast or a narrated article or something like that.

[00:16:00] Donna Amos:

Yeah.

[00:16:01] Gary Ruplinger:

I find I don’t get as much time to actually sit down and read as I would like to. But, I will listen to, I can listen to, you know, a couple books a month just in my short commute time, so.

[00:16:11] Donna Amos:

Yeah, exactly. And then, you know, I find that if I really, um, when I’m listening to a book, if I really like it. I often will order the paper back so that I can go back in and, you know, highlight what I wanted to remember or, you know, that kind of thing.

[00:16:27] Gary Ruplinger:

I’m, I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s done that.
I’m like, is it, this is wasteful, right? I don’t, I don’t need another cut, but no, I don’t have the paper. I wanna, a couple things I liked, I wanna. Scribble in it and make some highlights. Yes, exactly. But only if it’s really good. Right. If it wasn’t, it was like, okay, this was fine.

[00:16:48] Donna Amos:

Yeah.

[00:16:48] Gary Ruplinger:

It just sits in my digital library forever.

[00:16:51] Donna Amos:

Exactly.

[00:16:53] Gary Ruplinger:

So what, what kind of pitfalls should somebody kind of be aware of or be prepared for? Like what, where I, I assume it’s, you can get in your own way for, for something like this.

[00:17:06] Donna Amos:

Yeah. So. The, I think the biggest challenge people have is just staying focused and continuing to write. So I encourage clients to write five days a week, 500 words.
It, you can write 500 words in your sleep almost, and don’t edit it. Just put it down on paper. If you did that in 90 days, you would have your manuscript complete. I had a client take three years to finish his manuscript. I’d almost forgotten he existed because it took so long. But, so that’s the biggest challenge.
And so that’s one of the things that we offer is coaching to help stay accountable and, you know, continue to, continue to write and move forward in the process.

[00:18:04] Gary Ruplinger:

Can you tell me more about that? ’cause I, I think there’s probably some people listening who are thinking, gosh, this sounds good. I’ve been meaning to write a book, but I need, I need some help.
Because I know if I had to, if it’s left to me in my own devices, it is never gonna get done. I’m gonna be 80 years old thinking I could have wrote a book.

[00:18:26] Donna Amos:

So what we do, we offer a full coaching program to help you. Get complete. So the first probably few weeks, you’re not actually writing, you’re doing the work so that you’re prepared to do the writing. So we’ll walk you through all that. We’ll help you narrow your topic. We’ll help you look at what other people. Here’s a trick, go to Amazon and look up other books in your genre. Then there’s always a way that you can look inside and you can look at the chapters that are written in that book. Now, I don’t want you to take anybody’s information, but you can often see gaps like what they didn’t cover, and then you can use that to build out your content so that you’re, you know, it’s not the same as what everybody else does.
So we will help walk you through all of those. Little things that you can do to make your work even better. And then we’ll hold you accountable every week. So we’ll get on a coaching call, we’ll answer any questions that have come up for you during the week, and then we’ll get you to commit to your writing for the next week.
And you’ll go on and you’ll actually do the work because you have to come back next week and tell me that you did the work.

[00:19:59] Gary Ruplinger:

Do you, do you kind of help people with the, the steps with the, like getting the cover images created and the publishing steps on Amazon and kind of all those ones where there might be a, a little bit of a hurdle to somebody for their, when it’s their first time trying to do it?

[00:20:19] Donna Amos:

So we do offer a complete publishing package, and we’re a hybrid publisher, which means that the author retains all rights to their work.
We don’t take any commissions on sales, nothing like that. But you are gonna pay for the work that we do. So we will do all of that legwork. Your ISBN number. Did I say that right? Your Library of Congress. Our designers will give you three covers to select from. we will take your manuscript when you’re complete and do all of the editing work.
Then we’ll format it, you know, once you’ve approved the final edits, we format that manuscript so that it’s ready for print and for digital. And then once that is all done, we will go into your KDP account, upload everything there. We’ll do the research to see what categories you should go into what your genre should be, all of that.
We do that for you, and then we’ll upload your content and let you know that it’s ready to go.

[00:21:34] Gary Ruplinger:

Nice. How does that compare to, say, like a traditional publisher, let’s say tomorrow I’m, I call up Random House. I’m like, I got a, I got a book idea, like a thousand other people. But let’s say they for some reason say yes.
How does, how does this compare it to something like that?

[00:21:49] Donna Amos:

Yeah, so you know, I said you could have your manuscript done in 90 days. It’ll take a little longer for all those other pieces to get done, but you can have the writing done in 90 days. When you go, if, when you finish your manuscript and go to a traditional publisher, let’s say they agreed to publish you, they’re just waiting on your manuscript.
When you hand in that manuscript, it’ll be two years before you hit the bookshelves

[00:22:13] Gary Ruplinger: That long?

[00:22:14] Donna Amos:

That long. It does. They don’t like, I don’t know if they just don’t have a sense of urgency or they have too many things in the pipeline, and so you get, you know, pushed off until they’re ready to put you out there.
So, and you should know that traditional publishers, unless you, have a really big name. They’re not gonna pay you for your manuscript most of the time. Now, you might get a small amount, but they also are not going to market the book after you are published. That’s up to you. So many people think that, well, if I go to a traditional publisher, they’ll put it out there and they’ll, you know, promote it.
Well, they really don’t do that anymore. Again, unless you’re a big name and you know, they can, they know they’re gonna make lots of money off of you. So that’s how traditional is different. And then of course there’s self-publishing as well. You have to learn all the parts and put it all together. The thing with the hybrid, with like, what we do is we actually have a publishing company inspired press publisher.
So you can, you know, your book will show that you’re published with a publisher. Did that make sense? I think it did.

[00:23:42] Gary Ruplinger:

Well, very cool. If somebody is interested in kind of learning more about this process with you, where’s the best place to send them? Is there a website we should go to or?

[00:23:50] Donna Amos:

Yeah, so if they go to inspired press publisher.com, they can get on my calendar there. They can look around, see some of the other books that we’ve published. Yeah.

[00:24:05] Gary Ruplinger:

All right. And you said InspiredPressPublisher.com

[00:24:08] Donna Amos: Uhhuh.

[00:24:09] Gary Ruplinger:

Alright, so go check out Inspired Press Publisher if you’re interested in learning a little bit more. Get some ideas, some inspirations, see some of the other work they’ve done and if you need it, a little bit of extra help getting, getting, this, this book that’s probably, if you’re anything like me, for like 10 years you’ve been thinking I should write a book. That can help you get this across the finish line so that next year you can say, I wrote a book.

[00:24:36] Donna Amos:

Exactly.

[00:24:38] Gary Ruplinger:

Well, very cool. Well, Donna, thank you so much for coming on today. Thanks for kinda sharing some of these, these tips and ideas. I know this is one of those, like I said, one of those topics I’ve been meaning to cover on the show for a while, and I’m glad you were able to come on and kind of share some of the, the ways to actually make this, this book publishing a reality for people.

[00:24:55] Donna Amos:

 Awesome. Thank you so much.