Self Publishing, Book Marketing, Ghostwriting and LinkedIn Marketing with The Writing King Richard Lowe
Marketer of the Day with Robert Plank
Robert Plank • June 14, 2017
Richard Lowe, Jr. is the writing king. He’s created a number of guest blog posts, books of his own, ghostwritten books for others and written countless LinkedIn profiles for clients. If you’re curious about the secrets of super-productive and ultra-popular writers, then you’ll want to hear about Richard’s writing methods as well as his techniques for marketing books once they’re published.
Resources
- Richard Lowe: The Writing King (official site)
- Fiction Master Class (Fiction Writing Training)
- Richard’s Amazon Author Page (CoolAuthor.com)
- Make a Living as a Professional Self-Published Author (book)
- How to Operate a Freelance Writing Business and How To Be a Ghostwriter (book)
From: The Robert Plank Show
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Robert Plank Interview Transcription
[Start: 00:00:00]
Host: Robert Plank Show Episode 332 self-publishing, book marketing, ghost writing and LinkedIn marketing with The Writing King, Richard Lowe Jr.
[Music]
Host: Hey everyone and welcome back to the show. We’re talking right now with Richard Lowe Jr and he’s a bestselling author who has published 63 books, ghost-written 12 books and produced several hundred articles for blogs and publications. He is the owner and senior writer of The Writing King which provides services such as ghost-writing, book coaching, Word Press implementation, blogging and copyrighting. Richard is also a senior LinkedIn branding specialist and has written over 150 LinkedIn profile. So, Mr Rich, welcome to the show.
Richard: Thank you. I’m glad to be here.
Host: Awesome. I’m glad that you’re here and so we heard a little bit about you and so you know having read or heard that, what are you up to these days, what has you excited?
Richard: Well, I just finished a book coaching project with a man in France. He’s the senior vice president of a major Fortune 50 company and he’s releasing a book in a couple of weeks called “Digitize or Die” and it’s about the Internet of Things and the effect that it’s having on companies. You’re seeing the effect right now with companies like Sears and Kmart going down the tubes and this book explains why, if you don’t want to have the same fate happen to you and you’re a big company, you’d better read it and find out what’s going on. So, I coached him through as a writing coach, I’m writing the book and he, of course, was the technical guy and that was very exciting. And I’m working on a lot of blogging projects, just published a book on human rights, a coloring book for children. That was a fun project and, you know, the usual, writing blogs and stuff that people pay me to do and things like that.
Host: Awesome, so it sounds like firing on all cylinders and having lots of fun projects. So, you say that you were a writing coach for this guy’s book for the ‘Digitize or Die’ and so, I mean, what does that mean exactly, like what’s your role in that sort of project as a writing coach?
Richard: Well, I work with him to provide the writing expertise. First of all, he’s French, he’s not a Native American speaker. So, it’s kind of French/American and I helped with the language itself and proofreading and stuff and then putting together the structure of the chapters and how the book was supposed to read and then reviewing it over and over and over again to get it right and then coaching him on how to cite the various sources that you actually have to cite sources and checking for things like that. I had to look up things on the Internet. It’s basically a long, involved process. It’s a little bit easier than ghost writing. With ghost writing, I take it all myself and write it myself. He did most of the writing himself and I just helped him with it.
Host: OK.
Richard: Did that make sense?
Host: Yeah, it does and so as far as, like, how your time is split up, so is it safe to say that it’s sort of split up between, like, there are times where you ghost-write, sometimes where you do the writing for yourself and then there’s other times when you’re just sort of the coach and sort of moving them along? Is that about, like, accurate as far as how things are split up?
Richard: More or less. More or less. I do a lot of guest blogging, which is where I write blogs for other…articles for other blogs and websites. So I do have some time there. I do a lot of promotion. I do a lot of promotion on a cite called Haro, which is Help A Reporter Out because that gives quotes and links to my site and creates backlinks and then I do the ghost-writing, copywriting and the LinkedIn profiles is a big part of what I do, help people with their LinkedIn and get it working right so that it actually gets them leads that are qualified.
Host: Well, cool. So, sort all these things, so there’s the guest blogging, there’s the book stuff, there’s a LinkedIn profiles and all that fun stuff and so sort of, what’s your schedule laid out like? Like, you say well I’m going to do each thing an hour day or is it like one things on Monday, one things on Tuesday or is it just, like, wherever it falls or what sort of that schedule like?
Richard: Well, at the beginning of each week, I try and map out a schedule for the whole week. Of course that lasts until the beginning of the first day, you know. All plans are good until they start being executed. That was an old military thing, I guess. And then I work from there. So, each morning I get up and I plan the day. So, OK, I got these things to get done today, these are my deadlines or these need to get done this week. So, I block out four hours or eight hours or two hours or whatever I think it’s going to take and I leave a little slack in there because, you know, things always take a little longer, sometimes, than they’re expected to and I use a method where I write for 15 minutes and then get up out of my chair for, excuse me, I write for 45 minutes and then get up out of my chair for 15 because writers spend all day on their butt. That’s pretty normal and you have to get up or you get back problems and things like that and do a little physical work, walk around the block or go look at the birds or something like that.
Host: Great and I kind of do a similar sort of thing like if I do, like, a lot of, like, either like blogging or videos or programming or whatever it is. I kind of, like, I used to tell myself I didn’t need that break or I’d go from like the computer to go and watch T.V. and come back and didn’t really feel refreshing and recharged and definitely, like, going outside and getting that fresh air and hearing the birds tweeting, all that fun stuff, I can definitely relate to that and so when you’re, you know, doing all this writing stuff and you’re blocking out your time, do you ever have those times when you just kind of can’t get started? You kind of can’t get past the writer’s block in the blank page and all that fun stuff?
Richard: It happens. It doesn’t happen as often as it used to and it doesn’t happen as often as it does with other writers. One of the reasons is I have so many projects or if I feel blocked on one, I just go work on something else and I’ve got such a varied background that that works very well and then if I’m just blocked from writing, it usually means I need to get up and get outside for an hour, walk around because I get what I call square eyes staring at the computer screen and it just, that alone causes the mind to block. The other thing that can cause writer’s block is somebody might make a covertly negative comment about something and that can just stick in the back of the mind. It has to be covert. If it’s overt, you see it but if it’s covert, then you don’t see it and it kind of gets in the way and you kind of have to think for a minute and go, “Oh yeah, yeah, that person said that, OK” and that clears up the writer’s block right away.
Host: So, could you sort of give me an example of what you were just talking about so we can understand?
Richard: Yeah. If you’re talking to somebody about the writing, they might have read the book as a beta reader, that’s where you read through before it’s published and they didn’t return any comments at all or their comment was, “Oh, it was OK” or you ask him a question about the book and, a deep sigh, “Well, you know, I like most of it except for this part”, you know. Where the comment comes across more or less as seemingly lukewarm positive but really it’s like, I guess you could call it a backhanded compliment where it seems like a compliment but it really isn’t. The book is great except for this character or but it’s not helpful. It’s very general. That’s the problem with…I wrote a book on how to make a living as a self-published author. It’s one of my newest books and it goes into this a lot where criticism and critique are different. Criticism is this particular character is not poorly constructed and here’s why and here’s what you can do to fix it. Whereas criticism, that’s critique, whereas criticism is your characters all suck and it’s very general and there’s nothing you can do about it. You don’t have anything to pin it on. So, it kind of just drops you down to, kind of, despair because you don’t know what’s wrong and that’s where the covertness comes in. It’s not specific but it is intended to be malicious. Sometimes on Amazon, I’ll get a good review that just says the book sucked and a one star review. It’s like, well, what sucked about it, you know. I mean, no book, virtually no book is worth a one star review. That means, you know, it’s not even worth the paper it’s printed on and all authors get that and what’s that mean? Why don’t you like it?
Host: Right, it’s like if they’re that vague about, it’s like there’s no specific thing that you can go back and improve. It’s just, like, it’s just this is, like, kind of hurtful, almost insult that sort of sits with you and I can definitely relate to that. Like if someone says, well this isn’t even worth the 99 cents and I’m thinking like, you couldn’t find one thing in there or like when they get the book for free, when we’re doing a promotion or something like that or when they, like, pick out, like, one page out of the whole book and they say, well I didn’t like this topic and this topic and I’m thinking, well all those things they listed were all on, like, page 15. They ignored the rest of the book and just focused on, like, all the things they didn’t like on that one page and so I can definitely relate to a lot of that sort of hurtful stuff and so, I mean, is there a solution to that other than just, like, thinking your way out of it? 9:30
Richard: Well, the solution is kind of what my dad used to tell me when the kids would pick on me at school. It’s, like, grow up, you know. It happens. There are people who are malicious out there in the world and that’s malicious because it’s not useful, that kind of review is not useful to the reader and it’s not useful to the writer. It’s not useful to anyone. It’s just somebody who just vented and you just got to ignore malicious people. They have no value. Not they have no value, their comments have no value and they’re…the problem is spotting it, that it had an effect on you, oh yeah OK that was a negative comment. The review that they left was this book is suitable for charcoal. That was the comment that caused me to think that I’m not a good writer and that’s what caused me to stop today and not be able to write for an hour OK I got it and then I’m fine.
Host: Ok, so it sounds like the answer is sort of to put that in the correct box, right. Like, categorized, like, the helpful versus the unhelpful stuff and I can definitely relate to that in a lot of ways. It’s sort of, like, you know, if you’re driving your car down the street and someone cuts you off in traffic. Are you really going to let that ruin your day? Are you going to say, like, oh well this is related, this is part of my life’s destiny or are you going to day just a fact of life, it happens or random thing and move on, it sounds like.
Richard: Right, right. On the other hand, sometimes I get negative reviews that are actually very useful. They go into detail about how this character was poorly constructed or this was bad and so forth. One review out of 40, I look at that review and go, oh, this was actually, you know, I hate the review, of course, you know, but it was useful for the next book and those…and they tell the reader something, you know. You may not like this book because this character is, say an anti-hero and anti-hero’s tend to be a downer as an example. That’s good. That’s what a review should be, even a negative review. It should tell you why they’re giving the negative review and give the reader some option or some data to make a decision as to whether or not to buy the book. So, that’s always important when looking at reviews. [Inaudible 11:44] of books is what does it tell…is it being helpful or is it just being hurtful?
Host: ok, that makes a lot of sense and I’m definitely kind of been in that situation where someone said something bad and i went and corrected it and, you know, reupload the book and then reply to the comment and I’ve seen some other authors do that. I don’t write any fiction but I’ve seen fiction authors do that where, like, if somebody discovered a plot hole of some kind, if it was like something that’s easily corrected, I’ve seen fiction authors go in and fix the book, reupload it, reply to that comment on Amazon and say, “Hey thanks for noticing that plot hole. We fixed it.” and I just…that’s sort of amazing to me that, like, it’s this whole other, like, way of publishing stuff. You always think about, you know, like, if, like, Stephen King or James Patterson or whoever puts out a book it’s like that’s printed in stone but it sounds like with all the sort of Amazon stuff and the user feedback and the back and forth we can kind of, like he said, like there’s the course correction for the next book but there’s also like fixing the current book. Is that correct?
Richard: Yes. I do that a lot and usually I’ll contact, if I can, the reviewer, privately and sometimes publicly because I don’t have a way to contact them and ask them if they can, you know, I fix the book can you update your review with saying, “yeah he fixed it I reread it” or publicly like you say. Yeah, it’s a great model for publishing, you know. It’s a little more interactive and every once in a while somebody will run across a grammar error that slips through. That always happens and, you know, you feel embarrassed and then you re-upload it, like twenty minutes later he fixed it and you could do that before, not with a yearlong publication cycle in the traditional publishing houses and they’re printed. You’ve got 50,000 of them in a warehouse. You can’t reprint them.
Host: Right and then that sort of thing reminds me of, like, back with my college textbooks. They would be like, you know, blah blah blah textbook for biology 8th edition and then the whole, like, first section would be like, oh here’s all the the errors we made last edition. We’re going to correct them and then it’s like you’re never quite error free of that book and so it’s great how that sort of thing can sort of become a thing of the past. They can fix an error real quick, put it back up eventually and it’s all good and so and you mentioned you have this sort of this latest book of yours, “How to Make a Living by being an Author”. So, can you kind of tell us, like, where to find the book and what that book’s all about?
Richard: Well the title is “How to make a Living as a Professional Self-published Author. It’s on Amazon. If you go to mybook.to/selfpubauthor, you’ll go straight there, s-e-l-f-p-u-b-author and it’s about 250 pages long. It’s the first in a series of three and it goes into all of the details that you need to know from idea to publishing the book and the beginnings of promotion of the book and it’s my experience in publishing all of these books and what works and what doesn’t work and things like you need to brand yourself as an author, you need to create a blog or website, how to create a mailing list and get people on it, something and all the things that authors typically, many authors I found, typically don’t do because a lot of us are authors because we’re introverts. I include myself in that. I tended to be an introvert in the past. I’m really not anymore. And then the second volume which is coming will be on how to promote your book on the third volume is what to do when your book isn’t selling, how do you fix that and I’m still researching that. I’ve got a couple of books that, you know, out of 63 books, there’s obviously going to be a few that don’t sell. Well how do you fix that? Will you fix the cover, you fix this, you fix that, you do this and eventually, you know, you’d finally decide, you know, this thing’ never going to sell.
Host: And that’s sort of a interesting…yeah, yeah and that’s an interesting idea of, like, kind of going back and doing a little bit of that debugging and saying like is there a way we can sort of bring this book back from the dead or is it a lost cause and it sounds like a really great sort of resources, especially if that kind of thing is step by step. So, I’m really curious about your writing process and…because I’m looking a little bit in the table of contents of that “How to Make a Living by being an Author”. I’m kind of looking at the table of contents and so is this book…am I right in assuming that this book covers, like, any sort of genre, like, fiction, nonfiction, how to stuff, like any sort of book anyone is looking to write? 16:00
Richard: It applies to any book. I’m mostly a nonfiction author. I’ve just gone into the fictional world recently. So, most of the concepts are based on my experience as a nonfiction author but probably 90% of what’s there would apply to a fiction author as well with some minor variations because it’s a different genre and has different audience and things like that but I go into things like how to brand yourself as an author. That would apply, definitely, to a fiction authors well. How to create a website, of course, I don’t go into the specifics of how to use WordPress. There’s tons of books on that. So, I will refer you to books and courses on how to do that. The idea is to give you more or less an overview, which is all you can do in 250 pages of the whole process of being a writer and making a living at it which is something I’ve been able to do and I wanted to show that with other people because I see a lot of authors struggling and they struggle because they write a book and they expect it to sell. That ain’t gonna happen. It just doesn’t happen unless they’re extremely lucky or know somebody like Stephen King who they can ride on the coattails, they’re not going to…their books not going to sell and certainly not going to make them a living but if you follow the steps in this book and do take some courses and take the time, you can make your book sell but you have to do the work and that’s kind of what was annoying me about a lot of the online courses and other books and things. You know, you can make a book in 90 days and you’ll make a $1,000 a week. No, you’re not going to, sorry. It’s not going to happen. You have to actually…go ahead.
Host: Yeah, you have to actually, like, follow through and do the other things and I’ve seen that sort of thing as well and I’ve seen a lot of that from like other writers and authors, like, especially if it’s their first book. I’ll see people sort of like spend years and years just making the book thinking that the finish line is the books done, it sent off and I’m thinking yeah but once the books done, like, aren’t you going to, you know, send traffic? Aren’t you going to do some like media publicity, like, why is the the end, you know, why is the end for you the book’s finished when I’m thinking like isn’t that more like step 1 of 10, the books finished?
Richard: It’s probably, like, more like step 1 of 100, actually, you know. There’s a lot of steps in getting a book out there especially when you consider that the last statistic I heard was over 6,000 books are published every single day on Kindle alone and you think your book’s going to get to the top when there’s probably a hundred other books on the same subject published in this, just this week and in popular categories without any promotion, without any marketing, without people knowing who you are, without any influencers helping promote you ecetera, ecetera? It ain’t going to happen. It’s just not going to happen. And if you follow all of the big writers, all of the big books that became movies and things, a lot of them got on the coattails of influencers and a lot of them did a lot of the grunt work to get…to become those millionaire authors . They had to pay their dues and that’s basically like any job. If you were going to become a doctor, you wouldn’t expect to go to one course on being a doctor and suddenly you can make the $100,000 salary. That’s not going to happen to a doctor. Well, why would you think it’s going to happen to a writer?
Host: Right and also sort of going with that doctor analogy, like, the other thing about that is it’s like there’s a lot of, not just like, work in being a doctor but there’s a lot of like trial and error right? Like you’ve got to pass all your tests, you’ve got to not screw up, you’ve got to know your stuff, you’ve got to work your way up and I mean, I think that I’ve seen this, and I’m assuming you’ve seen this too, where a lot of people they think that either because they, like, put in the hours or did the steps that there’s, like, a guarantee that it’s going to work out and I’m thinking, like, well, no. You’ve got to, like, sort of try some stuff and see what’s working and, like, you might have some good luck and some bad luck and so like as far as, like, people getting their books out there, do you have like a checklist or is there, like, some sort of, like, you know, quick stuff or low hanging fruit or, like, favorite things that you like to do as far as promoting books and stuff like that?
Richard: Well, that’s going to be the subject of the second volume of the book and I’m still researching it but the basic is first of all create your author brand. People have to trust you before they’re going to buy a book from you, under normal conditions. Unless they are your mom or your best friend or something that you beg to buy the book and pay them back for it later because they don’t have any money. But some authors do. You have to build your brand. You have to let people know who you are and why they should trust you. I wrote another book. It’s actually one…I just published it a couple months ago, “Network your Business for Prosperity”, and it goes into how to network and that’s what you need to do is build a network of interested people who know, like and trust you and when they know, like and trust you, that means that when you publish a book, they’re going to go I want to buy this because it’s by Richard or it’s by Robert and that just means it’s good and that means if it’s on a subject I like I’m going to buy it and you’re famous science fiction authors, Stephen King. I mean, if there’s a Stephen King book, all of his fans are going to go buy it. Why? Because they know, like and trust Stephen King. They know if it’s by him it’s going to be quality and it’s going to be something they like. Same with the, I forget her name, the guy…the girl who did the wizard. The books that became movies.
Host: Oh, like J.K. Rowling.
Richard: That’s…yeah, I mean, people know that a book by her is going to be good and they trust her to do a good books. They’re going to buy her book. They’re going to watch her movies just because of her and her characters and things. So, that’s the first step. Before you even begin writing your book, you start building that brand, start building that trust line. start putting out chapters and things and start putting out feelers and get to know reporters and influencers and other people who can help you and mentors and coaches. That’s the most important step of all and I’m kind of in the middle of that fight right now because I’m partially an influencer and I’m becoming even a bigger influence and I’m helping other people and then other people are helping me by being even higher level influencers. Like one of the things I’m planning to do, I’m hoping to do, this time next year is do a TED talk and that’s a major step and you know, it’s a big confront because you’re talking to the whole world then and that puts you on stage as an influencer. You’re somebody of influence, you know, you talk to the world and I’m doing a lot of public speaking which is another thing authors should do. Start speaking at your library, start speaking at the local Kiwanis and Rotary Clubs, Toastmasters and things and get out there and let people know you. Once they know you, they’ll buy your books, unless, you know, you can’t write.
Host: But then if you can’t write, then what the heck are you doing in this line of work right and so people should be like public speaking and reaching out to people and like, what does that sort of look like online. Like I assume that means, like, you know, having like a blog but does that also mean like having, like, an email lists, a Facebook page and a Facebook group and all that?
Richard: Yeah, create a LinkedIn profile and make it good. Anybody can hire me to make their profile. I do that for a living. Do a Facebook page, a business page, make a blog and publish at least once a week and publish short articles daily, if you can. Post on Facebook and keep in mind these are not sales posts. This is extremely important. These are not buy my book posts or I’ve got a great book coming out post. Those tend to be tuned out. These are help for nonfiction. I’ll start from there. These are helpful tips. I’m writing a book on how to be a self-published author so I start posting things to Facebook that are tips about being an author. Little two paragraph tips or little graphics or things like that and people see that and I’m not pushing my book. I have my url, my links to my website but that’s it. My blogs tend to be…I have one blog that’s how to do SEOs as an author. It’s six thousand words long. It’s huge. It’s free. It’s out there on the Internet. It doesn’t sell anything and the idea is is that it gave people helpful information and they start to trust me and then they start to know me and then they want to buy my books to find out more. So, it’s a it’s kind of…it’s almost counterintuitive. You can’t be a salesman. You have to be a marketer and you certainly know the difference between sales and marketing and promotion and public relations, are all different. You have to market yourself, not sell yourself. Market yourself means making yourself known to people that you’re somebody who they can trust and like and whose opinion they respect and probably respect is the keyword there. They have to respect you. It works the same way in fiction. I’ve got a lot of authors that I’ll…if they publish a book, I’ll go buy it, I’ll go buy it. Mike Resnick, if he publishes a book, an author, publishes a book, I’ll buy it. I know it’s going to be something I like. It’s kind of space opera, you know, Westerns in outer space. I’ve got a hundred of his books. I’ll buy them because I know he’s going to have a tale that entertains me for a few days and that’s just the way it works.
Host: Awesome stuff. So, it sounds like there are these things that a lot of, sort of, struggling authors don’t do as far as like getting their name out there and like you said, like, getting known and getting respect and it sounds like as far as putting up these helpful tips is just like, you know, giving people things they can actually use and giving people helpful things and just being known to the point where they’ll start to buy your stuff just based on your name and so when we kind of started talking here, at first I was like well this is sort of weird. He’s a ghost-writer. He’s a writer. He does LinkedIn stuff but now things are starting to make sense as far as the way things connect and, you know, we don’t have that much time left. I don’t want to keep you forever but I definitely want to move into this LinkedIn stuff because now this is super interesting because now I’m thinking OK, a lot of people they’re stuck because they’re working on a book or they finished a book and they need to build a sort of this platform, this online presence in all these different ways and it sounds like a LinkedIn profile is a really great way to do that. So, can you sort of walk us through that side of things like, what is LinkedIn exactly and what do authors need to do and more importantly what are authors missing on LinkedIn these days?
Richard: Well, the thing about LinkedIn is it’s a professional network. Facebook is a personal social network. It’s where you talk about your family, your kids, etc. On LinkedIn, you talk about your business and you talk about your profession. So, on LinkedIn, an author would set up a LinkedIn profile, which is what you do. I set up a company page for me as an author. So, I have a company that’s Richard Lowe author and on their I have, I announce my publications, my books, what’s going on and on my LinkedIn, I announce my books, put in helpful tips and things like that and it’s very professional and this is because I’m a nonfiction author. So, a lot of the things has to do with people I’m connected to on LinkedIn. So, you find people you’re connected to, excuse me, find people to connect to who are your audience and connect to them on LinkedIn and then give them articles and links and graphics and videos and other things that would be helpful to them. Note, that would be helpful to them is important, not necessarily something they’re going to buy but something that will help them and I have found, and I go into this in my networking book a lot, the more you give, it kind of creates a vacuum, meaning you give, give, give, give and then suddenly the universe has to give back to you. It’s karma, I guess. It creates this weird effect where things just start coming back and if you’re not giving, it doesn’t happen but if you’re giving it starts coming back. It doesn’t come back necessarily from the people you’re giving to. It’s just like the universe goes, oh I’ve got to throw something back here because I’ve got a gap here I need to fill and I have that happen all the time. I’ll be sitting there on my laurels doing nothing for two weeks, as far as giving is concerned, nothing happens and then I’ll start to give to some other authors, help them out, give them a little free consulting, free book coaching and stuff like that and suddenly I’ll have people crawling all over the place, out of the network offering me jobs and to publish me and stuff like. That’s really weird but that’s the way it works.
Host: It’s funny how this is sort of counterintuitive and I think that I’ve experienced similar things to that and I’ve heard a lot of that, as far as, like, you know, us self-employed entrepreneurs. It seems like when we work our tails off, there’s not a lot of result and then later on we’re not working our tails off, those things that we did earlier on sort of pay off and it’s almost like, oh no, like, why was it when I was really doing all this stuff it was like I feel like I was getting nowhere but then once I finally, all these things added up over time when I finally took a second to take a break, then I got, you know, all these amazing things happening. So, I can definitely sort of relate to…especially, like that the writing part and the content marketing part and the marketing part. Just like doing all these things that, at the time don’t seem like they’re a lot but then added up over, who knows, how many days, weeks, months, years. Then it kind of pays off and so, as far as like LinkedIn, it’s one of those sites that, like, I keep going back to maybe like once or twice a month and, you know, I’m definitely aware of, like, the profiles and the groups and the connecting and all of that and one thing that I noticed a few weeks ago was this whole ability to have your own sort of blog, to publish your own sort of articles on LinkedIn and I was sort of surprised because, like, I hadn’t even noticed this as a thing and I noticed that a lot of people had sort of, like, you know, 300, 500 posts on LinkedIn and it almost seemed to me like it’s sort of like the the new, like, easing articles and I’m not really sure about that though. So, can you sort of set me straight on that? Like these LinkedIn blogs, like, is this the thing that you do and is that worth doing? 30:32
Richard: I’ve done it in the past. I haven’t done it lately but the…yes and I’m going to start it up again. It is very, very, very worth doing because LinkedIn will promote those if they match certain keywords. For example, I wrote a 300 word article posted on LinkedIn about resumes because I used to be a director of operations, computer operations at Trader Joe’s and I used to have a lot of resumes and the next day, I have 10,000 views on the thing. 10,000 views, you know, my posts at that time only got, like, 50, 60 views. 10,000 views, how the heck did that happen? Well, turns out that resumes, at the time, was a big keyword for LinkedIn and I posted it to all of the H.R. groups. I got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of comments. Most of were negative because they said I was full of junk because, you know, I didn’t know anything about resumes but I didn’t care. I got all these views and a lot of the people who liked it, I got several hundred connections and have, you know, made friends from all of that, just from one article. I think I got over 50,000 views by the time it settled down. And you just…you find the right keywords in there and LinkedIn will publicize it to their own network and you can get a lot of traffic very fast and that’s what it’s good for. It’s much better than just posting a link.
Host: Cool. That’s super encouraging and all those comments and all that traffic just from a 300 word article. So, that sounds like that’s definitely a thing that we should all be pursuing and sort of, you know, as we’re winding down today Mr. Richard in all your sort of travels with, like, yourself and your clients and seeing other authors, have you noticed, like, a number one universal mistake that all these authors make?
Richard: You know, we’ve already talked about it. They basically write a book and then they expect to sell and they don’t take the time to create…first of all, they don’t take the time to get trained on the promotional and marketing side of things, they don’t hook up with an influencer or several influencers or coaches or mentors or whatever you want to call them and they don’t create that brand for themselves and what that means is they don’t sell their books.
Host: So sad stuff. So, instead of being another statistic and just sort of hoping that things will come to you, we need to be in the driver’s seat, it sounds like. So, everyone out there you have your book, hook up with influencers, do that marketing and you can do all that sort of cool stuff with Richard’s book. So, you mentioned mybook.to/selfpubwealth and are there any, I mean, I assume that you have, like, a home base or author page for people to check out what you’re up to in your books. So, any place like that, any place that people should go after listening to our talk today?
Richard: There are two places they can go to. Number one is thewritingking.com. So t-h-e-writingking.com and then the second one is coolauthor.com. And coolauthor goes directly to my Amazon page which has all my books listed and you’ll find the self-published…how to be a self-published author there, the networking book. I also wrote a bestseller on LinkedIn, “How to focus on LinkedIn”, that sells pretty darn well right now. Making a good living off of that one and how to sell on eBay.
Host: Awesome and so the LinkedIn book in the eBay book. So, if people…if I’m hearing you right, if people go to coolauthor.com, they’ll see all your books and will they be able to easily find the LinkedIn and the eBay book if they’re interested?
Richard: It’ll be right there on the first or second page of Amazon. That’s my Amazon author link. So, that will go straight to where all my books are listed.
Host: Alright.
Richard: Easy to remember.
Host: Great stuff. Right, I mean, coolauthor. I’d rather read books from a cool author than an uncool author. So, great branding there. Yeah, so everyone right now, go to coolauthor.com, that’s c-o-o-l-a-u-t-h-o-r.com to go to Richard’s Amazon page and see his books. He’s a very prolific author. He has books on all kinds of fun topics. So, whatever your difficulty right now is if it’s getting the book out there, marketing the book, LinkedIn, eBay, whatever it is, Richard has the solution for you. So, go to coolauthor.com to check out his books and then go to thewritingking.com to go to his website and I think you’ll have a lot of fun and you’ll get some of that inspiration and motivation and get some of those problems solved when it comes to either coming up with good ideas, writing your book, content marketing, promotion, whatever it is, Mr Richard has the solution for you. So, I want to thank you so much Mr Richard Lowe Jr, for stopping by the show and sharing some of your personal stories and sharing some helpful solutions and just telling us what we need to know as far as LinkedIn and book publishing and all that fun stuff. So, I appreciate it, I appreciate you and thank you very much.
Richard: You’re welcome. It was my pleasure to be here.
Host: Subscribe to us right now while it’s still fresh on your mind at robertplank.com/itunes or just search Robert Plank in your iTunes App.
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Richard is the Owner and Senior Writer for The Writing King, a bestselling author, and ghostwriter. He’s written and published 63 books, ghostwritten 40+ books, as well as hundreds of blog articles.
